The Arab Higher Committee

Palestine under the British Mandate was governed as a country whose Arab majority had no representative institution. The Mandate’s own text obliged Britain to facilitate a Jewish national home and to recognise a “Jewish Agency” as a public body advising the administration; it recognised no equivalent for the roughly nine-tenths of the population who were Arabs. What existed instead were parties organised around the great Jerusalem and Nablus houses — the Palestine Arab Party of the Husaynis, the National Defence Party of the Nashashibis, Awni Abd al-Hadi’s Istiqlal, the Reform Party of Husayn al-Khalidi, the National Bloc, the Youth Congress — competing over petitions, municipal seats, and access to the High Commissioner. Jewish immigration had risen from about 9,500 in 1932 to about 62,000 in 1935 as European Jews fled the Nazi seizure of power; land sales to the Zionist institutions were accelerating; and in November 1935 the killing of Izz ad-Din al-Qassam had shown the country’s youth what the alternative to petitioning looked like.

The general strike began on 19 April 1936 from below — from local national committees in Nablus, Jaffa, Haifa and elsewhere — and the parties followed it. On 25 April 1936 the six main parties met in Jerusalem and constituted the Arab Higher Committee, with Hajj Amin al-Husayni, the Mufti of Jerusalem, as president, Raghib al-Nashashibi and eight others as members. It was the first body since 1918 that could claim to speak for Arab Palestine as a whole, and it was a coalition of rivals: the Husayni and Nashashibi camps had spent a decade fighting each other. Its demands were three and did not change: an end to Jewish immigration, a ban on the transfer of Arab land, and the establishment of a national government responsible to a representative council. The strike it endorsed ran 175 days.

In July 1937 the Peel Commission recommended partitioning Palestine and transferring the Arab population out of the area allotted to the Jewish state; the Committee rejected it. In September the British District Commissioner for the Galilee, Lewis Andrews, was assassinated in Nazareth. Britain’s response was to outlaw the Arab Higher Committee and the national committees on 1 October 1937, depose and deport the members it could seize — Husayn Fakhri al-Khalidi and four others were sent to the Seychelles — and strip the Mufti of his offices; he escaped to Lebanon disguised, and thence to Iraq. The revolt continued in the hills for two more years without a political leadership at liberty inside the country. By its suppression in 1939 the British had killed several thousand Palestinians, hanged more than a hundred, and detained tens of thousands. The Palestinian leadership was decapitated, exiled or dead at the moment the country most needed it — and it was that broken polity, not an organised one, that faced the war of 1947–49.

A reconstituted Committee, sponsored by the Arab League, reappeared in 1946 under the Mufti’s chairmanship, and it was in that capacity that Palestinian representatives put their case to the United Nations Special Committee on Palestine in 1947 and rejected the partition resolution of 29 November 1947. In September 1948 the Committee proclaimed the All-Palestine Government in Gaza under Ahmad Hilmi Abd al-Baqi, with the Mufti as president of a Palestinian National Council. It never controlled territory it could defend; Egypt administered Gaza, Jordan annexed the West Bank in 1950, and the All-Palestine Government withered into a Cairo office, formally dissolved by Nasser in 1959. When the PLO was founded in 1964 it was, among other things, the replacement of a leadership of notables that had failed.

The Committee is easy to judge harshly and easier to judge lazily. It was a coalition of landed families with clients, feuds and, in several cases, private accommodations with the British and the Zionist institutions. It also produced the first sustained mass mobilisation in Palestinian history, articulated the three demands that every subsequent Palestinian programme has restated in some form, and paid for it with exile and prison. The generation that founded Fatah and the Arab Nationalist Movement was raised in the wreckage and drew the conclusion that no Palestinian leadership should ever again depend on Arab governments or on the goodwill of a colonial power — a conclusion the Committee’s own history entirely justified.

Sources

• Arab Higher Committee — Wikipedia
• Arab Higher Committee members — Interactive Encyclopedia of the Palestine Question (palquest)
• 1936–1939 Arab revolt in Palestine — Wikipedia
• Peel Commission — Wikipedia
• All-Palestine Government — Wikipedia