The Great Arab Revolt

In April 1936, Palestinians launched a general strike that lasted roughly six months — one of the longest in colonial history — demanding an end to British support for Zionist immigration, a halt to land transfers, and the establishment of a representative national government. When negotiations failed, the strike grew into an armed revolt that spread across the countryside and, at its height in 1938, briefly displaced British authority from parts of Palestine, including the Old City of Jerusalem.

Britain responded with emergency regulations, mass arrests, home demolitions, deportations, and the deployment of tens of thousands of troops. By 1939 the revolt had been suppressed at the cost of thousands of Palestinian lives, and much of the Palestinian political and military leadership had been killed, imprisoned, or exiled — a decapitation that left society severely weakened a decade later, in 1948.

The British Peel Commission of 1937, convened in response to the uprising, became the first official body to propose partitioning Palestine into two states. Britain’s 1939 White Paper then reversed course, restricting Jewish immigration and land purchase — a shift the Zionist movement rejected.