This panel addresses the complex relationship between state and subject in twentieth-century Palestine, examining policing and internment in British Mandate Palestine, as well as the relationship between the young Israeli state and Palestinian prisoners of war (POWs) in the Mandate’s immediate aftermath. It connects various aspects of coercive power and state policy, such as surveillance, internment, and political inclusion and exclusion. The British Mandate and the early Israeli state had different designs for Palestinians, but each sought to impose a political reality that defied their wishes. Both states also had to reckon with Palestinians’ refusal to acquiesce or act as predicted.
A key coercive institution, the Palestine Police, comprised indigenous Palestinians and Jewish immigrants under British command. One paper looks at how Palestine’s Arabic press portrayed Palestinians serving in the police from the beginning of the Mandate to 1936, before the outbreak of the 1936–1939 Revolt. It notes a shift in coverage in the wake of widespread demonstrations and riots in 1929. A second paper examines the ambiguous position of Palestinian policemen during the Revolt, from the perspectives of British authorities and Palestinian communities. Palestine’s British administration was torn between the desire to employ Palestinian policemen in their efforts to quash the rebellion and the fear that these policemen’s true loyalties laid with the Revolt. By 1942, having effectively put down the Revolt, the police’s Criminal Investigation Department (CID), sought to reengineer power structures within the Palestinian political elite in order to prevent another revolt and ensure a partnership with a future independent Palestine. A third paper explores how the CID collected copious information on thousands of Palestinian and Syrian internees and used this intelligence in the process of releasing some of these and offering them civil service jobs. A final paper examines Israeli postal censorship of the correspondence of Palestinian POWs held during the 1948 War. The state monitored letters in an attempt to determine these prisoners’ plans upon their release, and to make sure they did not include resettling within Israel.
Papers in this panel do not merely examine state institutions of control, however, but also the agency of individual policemen, rebels, and POWs, and the way they understood and negotiated the powers to which they were subject. Taking into consideration regional, national, local, and family dynamics, as well as opportunism, these papers also shed light on the limits of state power in Palestine during this period.
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Prof. Yoav Alon
Local police forces throughout the British Empire were staffed with indigenous populations and commanded by British officers. They enforced the law and upheld colonial authority, often being “the colonial state’s first line of contact with the majority of the populace” (Anderson and Killingray, 1991:2). This practice was dictated by the need to inexpensively maintain an Empire, and was underpinned by the philosophy of indirect colonial rule, which dominated British colonial thinking between the two world wars. The Palestine Police Force -- a relatively understudied historical topic -- was no different in this regard from other colonial police forces. Moreover, it became the main mechanism of the Empire's control after the withdrawal of British troops in 1921 and remained so until the Arab Revolt in 1936. As such, perceptions of the police can reveal the local society's attitudes towards the mandatory government.
This paper explores how police and policemen were perceived by the Palestinian Arab press, as a prism to understand local attitudes regarding the mechanisms of colonial control between 1921 and 1936. Was the police seen as an alien force serving the state, as in many colonial settings, or did it enjoy support from subjects assisted by it? Were Arab policemen seen as respectable members of their communities or marginalised as collaborators? In the early 1920s, there were few references to the police, a clear indication that the force was not high on the Arabic press’ agenda. Only during the latter part of the decade did newspapers cover in earnest the police and express editorial views towards its functioning, especially since the 1929 Wailing Wall riots.
This paper demonstrates the Arab population's ambivalence towards the government, its rules and regulations, as well as the press' gradual change in the way they viewed the police. Until the mid-1920s the police was seen as a neutral mechanism of the British government whose task was to maintain law and order, however later reports stressed the police "betrayal" due to its disregard for government law. In the 1930s it was already considered as another arena in which the communal conflict played out. The police was seen as a mechanism intended to protect and promote the Jewish national home. Newspapers increasingly reported about discrimination of Arab policemen within the force and discrimination of the Arab population by the police, particularly by Jewish servicemen.
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This paper will discuss the 1936–1939 Revolt in Palestine, with a specific focus on the role and perceptions of Palestinian policemen during this period. The overarching narrative of the Revolt is one of anti-colonial struggle, but its character in specific locations was often shaped by the more obscure and less easily discerned currents of village, family, and personal politics that churned beneath the tide of rebellion. The police as an institution touched, and was a touchstone for, the various levels on which the Revolt played out. Some policemen were identified as traitors and targeted for assassination, while others were hailed as heroes for their willingness to abandon their posts, steal weapons, train rebels, or provide information to the rebel leadership. Meanwhile, policemen and rebels enjoyed greater opportunity to exploit their power to further personal, family, or other kinds of local interests. Although scholars have explored how the British employed a discourse of criminality to delegitimize the political aims of the Revolt, this paper will try to show how political discourse also infused and confused crime and policing on a local level during this period. Departing from the standard narrative of Palestinian policemen during the Great Revolt—in which Palestinian policemen were regarded by British authorities as ineffective or untrustworthy, and by Palestinians as collaborators—this paper uses police documents, memoirs, and court records to demonstrate the complexity of policing during an anti-colonial rebellion. It will thus address the British colonial administration’s multifaceted view of this group, as a potential fifth column, a vulnerable sector of state employees, and a possible resource in their attempts to quash the rebellion. Further, assessing the different choices made by Palestinian policemen will illuminate and emphasize the fluidity and liminality of their positions. The complex interplay of national, local, and family politics, as well as the opportunism, reflected in Palestinian policemen’s experience of the Revolt will thus shed light on often-overlooked aspects of the Revolt itself, in particular some of the divisions within Palestinian Arab society and their role in the ultimate failure of the Revolt.
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Dr. Steven Wagner
Records of the Palestine Police recently made available at the Haganah Archives in Tel Aviv reveal a previously unknown story of the Palestine revolt of 1936. This paper argues that the revolt, while retaining local territorial characteristics, also was part of a general pan-Arab effort to limit British and French colonial control. This effort began in the early 1930s and did not truly end until 1942 when Britain reoccupied the entire region. The pan-Arab movement’s anti-colonial efforts reached violent heights in Palestine between 1936 and 1941, as well as in Iraq and Syria in 1941. The British army did battle with irregular Arab forces, and police forces captured thousands of prisoners in the process. In Palestine, it was up to the police’s Criminal Investigation Department (CID) to keep interrogation and other intelligence records of these prisoners. Between 1941 and 1944, the Police and government worked together to determine who would be released from internment. Many internees continued to serve British intelligence, perhaps even as part of the war effort. Others became eligible to join the civil service. After the war, the Palestine government and Colonial Office discussed the eligibility to return home for colonial “renegades” – Palestinian leaders who had been expelled to Seychelles, Rhodesia, Australia and elsewhere. The process of releasing prisoners during 1942-45 and bringing back exiles during 1945-46 demonstrates that Britain aimed to rebuild the Palestinian political elite through access to the civil service. Britain believed that a “jobocracy” would provide leverage over nationalist politics, while meeting the Palestine Mandate’s aim of nurturing the country’s ability to govern itself Initially successful, the 1946 reintroduction of Jamal al-Husseini, cousin and confidant to the notorious ex-Mufti of Jerusalem, Hajj Amin, undermined the authority of the opposition parties which had gained strength since 1939 and set the Palestinian community on a collision course with the Yishuv. Britain’s wartime plans to reshape the region in its image collapsed its interests and those of the various Palestinian and Syrian factions collided.
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This paper explores correspondence between Palestinian prisoners of war (POWs) in Israeli camps and their family members, many of whom fled Palestine or were expelled by the Jewish armed forces. Thousands of Palestinians were interned in Israeli camps during the 1948 War, and as a recent article by Salman Abu Sitta and Terry Rempel suggests, most of these were noncombatants who were exploited for labor. The letters they sent their families via the Red Cross, and the letters family members sent back, were intercepted by the Israeli postal censorship, and were obtained by the author after years of petitioning the Israeli archives for their declassification. The correspondence captures the devastating conditions in the improvised refugee encampments that that sprung up in Transjordan, Syria, Lebanon and in Gaza during the war, and the attempts of the families’ breadwinners, locked in Israel, to locate their spouses and children who went missing. Another major concerns for letter writers were the houses and fields left behind, and whether they could locate other Palestinians who would safe keep those, for them, until their release. The paper chronicles not only the vignettes of life and hardship of Palestinians in the immediate aftermath of the Nakba, but also the work of the Israeli postal censorship, a relic of the British colonial rule in Palestine. By examining the topics that were the primary interest of censors, the paper shows that Israeli officials were deeply concerned about the unwavering demands of families to reunite with their loved ones and return to their villages, even if these villages had become part of the State of Israel.
