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Turbulent Stasis: ComparativeReflections upon IntercommunalViolence and Territoriality in the Israel/Palestine ConflictTimothy Wilson aa University of St. AndrewsPublished online: 25 Feb 2013.

To cite this article: Timothy Wilson (2013) Turbulent Stasis: Comparative Reflections uponIntercommunal Violence and Territoriality in the Israel/Palestine Conflict, Nationalism and EthnicPolitics, 19:1, 58-79, DOI: 10.1080/13537113.2013.761899

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Nationalism and Ethnic Politics, 19:58–79, 2013Copyright © Taylor & Francis Group, LLCISSN: 1353-7113 print / 1557-2986 onlineDOI: 10.1080/13537113.2013.761899

Turbulent Stasis: Comparative Reflections uponIntercommunal Violence and Territoriality

in the Israel/Palestine Conflict

TIMOTHY WILSONUniversity of St. Andrews

From (at least) the Balfour Declaration of 1917 right down to thepresent day, the Zionist-Palestinian conflict has been sculpted byexternal forces. But never entirely so: grassroots patterns of con-frontation have also been vital. This article therefore adopts a“bottom-up” approach to the evolution of the conflict since the earlytwentieth century.

INTRODUCTION

In 1990, the Israeli political scientist Meron Benvenisti asserted that “theIsraeli-Arab conflict” had downsized radically from a “region-wide, inter-state conflict. . . to its original core, namely Israeli-Palestinian inter-communalstrife.”1 Benvenisti boldly claimed it was now becoming clearer that

the dynamic of the Israeli-Palestinian communal strife is similar tothat of inter-communal strife everywhere—from Beirut to Belfast. Itis waged in an endless cycle of violence, enforcement, domination,containment—fights over every piece of land, every tree.2

Like these other notorious trouble spots, Israel/Palestine is fated to exist ina state of turbulent stasis: “violence simmers just below the surface. It is anendemic condition, lacking a durable, ultimate solution.”3

This article picks up Benvenisti’s comparativist challenge. As a thoughtexercise, it attempts to isolate “an inter-communal core” of the conflict andtrace it through the vicissitudes of state building from the end of the GreatWar into the early twenty-first century. Its focus is upon political violencebetween communities rather than their politics: I leave it to others to high-light just how much nonviolent mobilization there has been.4 My approach,

Address correspondence to Timothy Wilson, School of International Relations, Universityof St. Andrews, Library Park, The Scores, St. Andrews, KY6 9AX, United Kingdom. E-mail:tkw2@st-andrews.ac.uk

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however, keeps the focus on political violence from below—and mostly,though not exclusively, on intercommunal violence directed by nonstate ac-tors. Rioters and gunmen are thus the primary subject here (and not policeforces or military units). Overall, it seeks to do two things. First, and mostimportantly, the bulk of the chapter is dedicated to analyzing the develop-ment of “grassroots” or “‘communal” violence within the general evolution ofthe Zionist-Palestinian conflict in the first half of the twentieth century. Sec-ondly, and much more briefly, it explores the significance of intercommunalviolence within the territory of ex-Mandate Palestine since the foundation ofIsrael in 1948.

In homing in on internal, grassroots dynamics, I do not intend to down-play the extent to which this conflict—perhaps more than any other—hasbeen sculpted by external intervention: From the Balfour Declaration tothe Oslo years and beyond, “the vertical, or grandiose, element is one of themost fundamental characteristics of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.”5 Likewise,even if my focus is on nonstate actors, it is (unsurprisingly) the State that hasremained the most devastating employer of violence. This has been a near-constant reality: only one brief transitional moment in the spring of 1948 sawa total disappearance of state capacity. Lastly, a focus on political violencedoes not displace the political importance of full-blown war in the evolutionof the conflict: of course, 1948 and 1967 remain the key turning points.

And yet, when all due caveats have been duly entered, it remains strik-ing just how few serious attempts have been made to analyze patterns ofgrassroots intercommunal violence in the Israel/Palestine conflict compara-tively. In a rare attempt to chart continuity and change between the 1929and 1990 disorders around Jerusalem’s Temple Mount, Roger Friedland andRichard Hecht observed how often such outbreaks of violence are seen asaberrational.6 But any analysis of the grassroots morphology of political vio-lence makes most sense when connected up to communal attitudes: Whenviolence is seen, in other words, as related to wider expectations and/or pro-hibitions about how these things ought to be done or were actually done lasttime around. Previous cycles or campaigns of violence typically function astemplates for communal mobilization or terroristic inspiration. And here per-haps the least discussed feature of political violence in the Zionist-Palestinianconflict is its (only relative) immaturity. Sustained grassroots patterns of vi-olent confrontation are hard to trace back meaningfully before British rule(that is, 1917–18). As with so much else to do with the politics of the con-flict, the Great War proved to be the “Big Bang” moment for the evolutionof political violence in Palestine. To understand this better, we need to lookmore closely at the emergence of disorder in the 1920s.

ETHNIC RIOTS, 1920–1929

Gershon Shafir detects a notable quickening of Zionist-Palestinian conflictjust before the First World War: “In the twenty-seven years between 1882 and

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1908, thirteen Jews were killed by Arabs under varying circumstances[including robberies, but] . . . between 1909 and 1913 twelve Jewish guardslost their lives.”7 These figures for fatalities from the Jewish community(Yishuv) seem quite small. And hence overall casualties also probably stayedstrikingly low: not least because the Jewish guards of the Hashomer move-ment proved reluctant to translate their vaunted macho posturing (or “Ju-daism of the muscles”) into any actual lethal violence.8 For Norman Rose, “atthis stage any talk of an inevitable conflict between the developing Yishuvand the Palestinian Arabs would have been premature.”9 Only hindsight al-lows us to see pre-1914 Zionist-Palestinian violence as more pregnant withmenace than the other fertile sources of disorder prevalent in Ottoman Pales-tine at the time: the banditry, the feuding, and the recurrent sectarian riot-ing.10

This point bears some emphasizing. Disorder followed sharply uponthe advent of British rule in Palestine in 1920–21 (and again in 1929). Giventhe new realities of mass Jewish immigration under the aegis of the totemicBalfour Declaration, some energetic resistance from Palestinian Arabs, andresultant unrest, might have been expected—even, that is, by British of-ficialdom whose Olympian tradition it was “to be always unprepared for,always surprised by civil violence.”11 But, then as now, it is the speed ofescalation that remains very striking: nine were killed in the 1920 riots, but95 died in 1921 (and no less than 249 in 1929).12 All the same, these aggre-gate death tolls still remained relatively modest by the standards of post-1918Europe and the Middle East: After all, at this time, c. 700 were dying in Ul-ster, c. 900 in Catalonia, c. 3,000 in Upper Silesia, and no less than 5,000in Mesopotamia.13 Unlike these trouble spots, violence in Palestine initiallytook only sporadic expression.

At a macrolevel, the conflict in Palestine clearly emerged very directlyout of the First World War. It is worth asking, then, whether the microlevelconflict did so as well. In other words, to what extent did the legacy of theFirst World War contribute to the intensity and patterning of its early vio-lence? Several historians have advanced the notion of Eastern Europe after1918 as constituting a zone of “brutalization.”14 By analogy, can we likewisetalk of “brutalization” in ex-Ottoman Palestine? Did the Zionist-Palestinianconflict acquire some of its early brutality as part of the backwash of “totalwar”? The thesis is at least superficially attractive. In general terms, Pales-tine in 1917–18 was clearly a mess.15 Conditions of disease and starvationwere rampant—rumors of cannibalism flourished.16 The Guardian news-paper reported that “the women and young girls have been carried off asslaves” (by the Turks): likewise, the British army’s “liberation” of Tel Avivwas accompanied by widespread raping.17 Even as late as 1929, the ex-HighCommissioner, Sir Herbert Samuel thought Palestine still “disturbed by thegroundswell that followed storms of war.”18 More specifically, in the meansof violence, there were also direct continuities between the world war andits aftermath. Guns, ammunition, and explosives from the world war kept

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turning up in Palestine for years to come.19 Veterans of the Jewish Legion(that had been raised by the British) took an active role in the defence of Jew-ish areas from the start: The gunmen who shot up the Grand Mufti’s housein Jerusalem on 9 April 1920 were wearing the uniform of the Royal Fusiliers(1st Judeans).20 The mainstream Haganah (Hebrew Defence Organisation)eventually emerged out of this paramilitary subculture in June 1920.21

Yet, in the final analysis, “brutalization” remains a rather problematicand impressionistic explanation for fully accounting for the violent esca-lation of the conflict immediately after the world war. In general, Zionistparamilitarism forms a weak fit with contemporary movements acrossEurope: neither the (left-wing) Haganah nor the later (right-wing) Betarmovement can truly be seen as a Jewish Freikorps. On the Palestinian side,it was only much later—during the 1936–39 Revolt—that the disseminationof military skills across the general population began to make itself felt. Weneed to bear in mind that the violence of the 1920s riots was very intimate:The knife was much more commonly used than the gun. One hundred andfifty-five nonlethal casualties occurred at Jaffa in 1921; only 30 were causedby bomb or bullet.22

The key point here remains that intercommunal violence in 1920sPalestine remained strikingly lop-sided. Palestinian Arab crowds attackedJewish communities; the bulk of their own casualties came not from Jewishresistance (which remained sporadic, though still occasionally lethal) butfrom the belated reaction of British state forces. Disturbances in 1920–21 and1929 thus fit into the ethnic riot paradigm outlined by Donald Horowitz: “anintense, sudden, though not necessarily wholly unplanned, lethal attack bycivilian members of one ethnic group on civilian members of another ethnicgroup.”23 Such episodes are characterized by an intense build-up of tensionand rumor; an acute sense by the perpetrators-to-be that they are the oneswho are threatened; and, finally, a resolution of tension through violencethat is overwhelming: usually 85%–95% of deaths are on one side.24 Theethnic riot is a moral holiday and its violence typically takes ludic forms—looting, desecration, mutilation, and rape are enthusiastically performed. Inthe aftermath, there is a notable absence of remorse amongst perpetratorsfor what they continue to see as thoroughly justified action: for them, writesHorowitz, the deadly ethnic riot remains “moral mass murder.”25 No wonderthat some Jews watched the clouds of feathers rising from the ripped-uppillows and thought of Russia: they knew a pogrom when they saw one.26

By contemporary standards, the ethnic riots in 1920s Palestine werequite destructive. In 1919, 35 Jews were murdered at Lida (Lithuania); theVilna pogrom of the same year took 50 lives.27 In 1934, 24 Jews were killedin Constantine (Algeria).28 For comparison: 38 Jews were killed in Jaffa (in1921) and 67 in Hebron (in 1929).29 Yet, not just aggregate death tolls butthe form of atrocity matters. Desecrations of individual dignity (such as rapeand mutilation) are also worth giving analytical attention since these are de-liberately outrageous acts. Such practices represent a potent driving force for

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future conflict escalation. So it is worth emphasizing that sexual assault andmutilation featured prominently in all these disturbances.30 True, controversyhas indeed swirled around whether many of those killed at Hebron in1929 were also mutilated.31 But contemporary Jewish allegations of castratedcorpses are unusually detailed and specific here; they mesh also with onesurvivor’s suggestive description of a (male) neighbor found with his trousersdown and “blood spurting from his guts.”32 We also have a credible eyewit-ness account of a child’s head being cut off and one British official’s descrip-tion of having seen “tongues cut out, breasts hacked off, every imaginablehorror perpetrated.”33 So, on balance, skepticism here seems a little naive.

Given that there were no recent local precedents before 1920, theseintercommunal detonations appear all the more spectacular. Arriving inJerusalem on 4 April 1920, one journalist found that “a hush seemed tobe over everything; immediately we saw signals being flashed from the sta-tion to a point in the city, as in wartime. Few carriages met the train andnone would go near the Old City. To our query ‘What has happened?’ theylooked at us blankly and hurried off.”34 Eight years later it was the samestory: during the outbreak, Jerusalem was reported to have been “a city ofthe dead”—“everywhere it is deadly quiet, and everyone is very nervous.”35

Riots, in short, were locally electrifying. But conflict was not yet obviouslya “total system.” In practice, there remained limits. Spatially, the diffusion oftrouble was highly uneven: Horowitz usefully observes that “the 1921 riotsin Palestine spread from Jaffa up and down the coastal plain but not inlandto Jerusalem, whereas those in 1929 spread from Jerusalem south to Hebronand north to Sefad [sic] but not to the coast.”36

Participation also remained uneven. Rioting on this scale and of thisintensity is hard to explain without presuming strong communal support (orat least permissiveness) on the part of Palestinian Arab society. “My fathermassacred them [in Hebron] and brought back stuff” recalled one 92-yearold Palestinian woman simply in 2011.37 Yet, this still is a very long wayindeed from assuming universal support, let alone enthusiasm, for butchery.It often was noted with a hint of surprise that many Jews were saved byArab neighbors.38 But here the real surprise lies surely not in the mere exis-tence of compassion but in the scale of its (relative) triumphs. On the Arabside, people of goodwill often found the inner confidence in August 1929to stand up directly to the massacring crowd: according to AharonBernzweig’s account of how he survived at Hebron, “all the while the wildmurderers kept screaming at the Arabs who were standing guard to handover the Jews.”39 It is instructive here to jump ahead nearly 20 years to offer acomparative snapshot. In December 1947, the people of goodwill were alsostill in evidence. But their options for resisting polarization had effectivelydisappeared. When Samy Aboussouan wished to protect his Jewish friends’shops from looting, he could only think of painting them with crosses tosignify—falsely—that these were (Christian) Arab businesses.40 It is not toimpugn Aboussouan’s courage to point out that this was not a rejection of

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the logic of communal polarization. Instead, it was an act that re-entrenchedthe assumptions of that very polarization process (albeit to a tiny degreeand with the most admirable of motives). By the dawn of 1948, then, theconflict had long shifted from a pattern of “limited outbursts” from Arabsociety evident in 1920–21 towards becoming a totalizing system; a circleof atrocity that enmeshed even the least committed and most tolerant in itsimplications.41 It is to this shift that I now wish to turn.

THE EMERGENCE OF RECIPROCAL INTERCOMMUNALVIOLENCE, C. 1929–48

The year 1929 was clearly the key moment here. Unrest on this scale both“exceeded the level of containable violence” and “confirmed the potentialungovernability of Palestine.”42 Massacre had not been prevented, of course.But Jewish efforts at communal defense had been notably vigorous, tak-ing perhaps six Arab lives.43 Here, the longer term “upshot of August 1929was that Zionists were persuaded of the need for a powerful militia.”44 Onthe Palestinian Arab side, alienation with the British government was deep-ened (and further entrenched by the police gunning down 26 demonstratorsat Jaffa in October 1933). As the rise of European fascism prompted in-creased Jewish immigration, the intercommunal politics of Mandate Palestinewas further destabilized. Against these developments, the “Al-Buraq Rising”of 1929 appeared to offer to some Palestinians a partial template for fu-ture action: as one Haifa notable ominously put it, successful opposition toZionism would be achieved “by doing what we did in 1929, but using moreefficient methods.”45 More efficient (or at least more paramilitarized) meth-ods were indeed to be enthusiastically explored by all sides between 1936and 1939. Here the short-lived guerrilla movement of Sheikh Al-Qassam in1935 showed the shape of things to come.

The violence of the Great Revolt (or thawra) of 1936–39 has long defiedsimple categorization: in Charles Townshend’s formulation, “the sporadic,acephalous nature of Arab violence, the bitter internecine terrorism of thePalestinian factions, their primitive resentments and unsophisticated politicalformulations seemed (and can still seem) to place the revolt in an unclas-sifiable limbo between anarchy and bewegung.”46 Scholarly attention hastended to focus (1) upon the guerrilla insurgency (between Arab rebels andthe British state) and (2) upon the emergence of an intracommunal strug-gle (within Arab society).47 In general, it is accepted that insurgency waseventually undermined by intracommunal violence. Indeed, the political sci-entist Stathis Kalyvas cites the 1936–39 Revolt in Palestine as a paradigmaticillustration of his thesis that patterns of violence in civil wars can best be ex-plained by accepting the primacy of interpersonal politics over the nationalor ethnic.48

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But the third major strand to the Revolt has remained relatively neglectedby scholars; intercommunal violence. Such violence has tended to be treatedas either peripheral to the “real” struggle between Arab insurgents and thestate. Or it is treated as essentially epiphenomenal; the apparent assumptionbeing that, like insurgency, the intercommunal conflict was undercut by in-tracommunal violence.49 The analytical neglect of intercommunal violenceis striking. After all, the Revolt erupted in April 1936 out of the killing andmutilation of Jewish passengers taken off a bus near Nablus; an attack byQassamite remnants, “which probably had as its purpose the intensificationof tension and the instigation of inter-communal riots between Arabs andJews.”50 And—without denying the central significance of British politicaland military initiatives (or Arab infighting) to the course of events—it is ar-guably important to keep the phenomenon of intercommunal disturbancesat the very center of analysis. After all, it was this intercommunal strugglethat provided the detailed template for future turmoil. When civil war brokeout on 30 November 1947, it began in the pattern of 1936–39 with a busambush.51 In short, the intercommunal violence deserves rather closer atten-tion than it has tended to receive.

THE EMERGENCE OF INTERCOMMUNAL VIOLENCE AS A SYSTEM

Samy Aboussouan’s microintervention in the conflict invites reflection abouthow target selection in this kind of violence worked. As early as July 1920,the practice had apparently emerged of daubing a cross on Arab shop-frontsas a sign to deflect looters.52 This pattern recurred in August 1929.53 InAugust 1938, it was reported from Jerusalem that “there has been a markedincrease in the last day or two in the designation of Arab premises withthe cross-and-crescent sign on their door or shutters, in all the mixed areasalong Jaffa Road, Allenby Street, the German Colony and other quarters.”54 Itwas the same story in Haifa: “an order, signed by the District Commissioner,has been promulgated prohibiting the emplacement of any sign or mark onany shop, factory, business premises, house or any other building, withinthe municipal area of Haifa (except for schools, hospitals or places of wor-ship) which indicate the race or religion of the owners and occupants.”55

Regardless of piety or even belief, religiously ascribed definitions of an indi-vidual’s communal identity were simply too convenient a short-hand not tobe employed by those looking to define communal boundaries sharply.

Religious daubing thus powerfully supplemented all the other strategiesof “telling”—the series of observational practices that individuals performto locate a stranger in one identity category or another.55 Christians andMoslems could be “fixed” as Arabs, others as Jews. Of course, there wereother telling strategies in operation, dress codes being particularly important(in the simple summary of one Arab policeman from 1920: “I can tell a

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Zionist. I am a native of the place. They wear European clothes”). Somepossibilities for confusion (or even tactical miscuing) did exist. Even underthe Mandate 20% of the Jews in the Yishuv were of Mizrahi origin: Oneimagines that they could pass more easily for Arabs if they wished. Butthey did not serve as any fundamental go-between community to the ArabChristian/Moslem population: they remained firmly Jews, even if they wereones who spoke Arabic.

Why were the authorities in Haifa so desperate to outlaw this practiceof marking shop-fronts with religious symbols? My suggestion is that theyintuitively understood the explosive implications of this kind of instant iden-tification. It meant that strangers could be categorized as representatives ofone community or the other. The best analysis of how violence that is basedon this kind of representative targeting works in practice has been offeredby Frank Wright:

If anyone of a great number of people can be “punished” for somethingdone by the community they come from, and if the communities aresufficiently clearly defined, there is a risk that anyone attacking a memberof the other community can set in motion an endless chain of violence.Even if few aspects of representative violence enjoy widespread supportof the kind that could be established by opinion polls, it is only necessaryfor people to understand what is happening for it to create a generaliseddanger.57

In effect, then, unpredictable targeting within strictly predictable identitycategories creates a universalized fear—“Everyone now walks about with atarget on their back.”58

The shift towards a more reciprocal pattern of tit-for-tat attacks betweenJews and Arabs in the 1930s had totalizing implications. With the exception ofthe slaughter of 19 Jews at Tiberias on 2 October 1938, “ethnic riot” massacresdisappeared.59 Yet, a general level of threat now became systematic. Thiswas new. Riots can only ever be local. But the drive-by shooting can beanywhere and everywhere.60 “Conditions here are definitely growing worse,and are even now in some ways more difficult than in times of actual rioting,for with the present campaigns of murder . . . no one feels safe” observedWinifred Coate in December 1937.61 The Chief Secretary to the Governmentof Palestine, Sir William Battershill, thought he would never get used to “thisloathsome assassination”: “a perfectly innocent Jew shot dead while sittingin a motor bus, and an equally innocent Arab shot dead at close range in themiddle of a residential part of Jerusalem at 10 in the morning.”62 “Palestinehas spent an apprehensive weekend,” reported the Times, “not lacking insigns that Arabs are trying to get their own back in the inter-communal gameof tit-for-tat. Shooting, bomb-throwing, stoning and stabbing incidents haveresulted in injury to 31 Jews.”63

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As in the north of Ireland, this emerging pattern of confrontation waspredicated upon an absolute clarity of division between rival communities.Residential segregation both affected, and was further entrenched by, theprocesses of violent confrontation. The Jewish Agency’s own statistics forviolent incidents between April and October 1936 portray the shift away fromthe ethnic riot or pogromic model of confrontation that had involved intimateassaults on Jews in their own homes. Face-to-face violence had certainly notdisappeared: There had been 324 attacks on Jews by “individuals” or “mobs.”But these assaults were in turn vastly outnumbered by the 1,668 attacks by“snipers” and “armed bands.”64 Jews were clearly safest in the midst of theirown: Excluding Tel Aviv, there had been 26 assaults on Jews in “JewishQuarters within Town[s]” but 143 in “Mixed Quarters.” In rural areas, only 11assaults had taken place in Jewish settlements but three times that number(33) on the outskirts of those settlements. Moving around between Jewishareas of settlement was also risky: There had been 128 assaults on roads andrailways.65 There was a clear premonition here of the “War of the Roads” oflate 1947–early 1948.

Of course, the Jewish Agency’s figures give us a snapshot of only onehalf of this intercommunal conflict. Both under the loose auspices of sanc-tioned militias, such as the Settlement Police, and unofficially, Jewish mil-itants were drawn into cycles of retaliation.66 Integrated communities alsoseparated out early; by late April 1936, it was reported that “queues of peo-ple have been waiting outside the Tel Aviv police station to obtain escortsso as to enable them to remove their household effects and clothing fromthe ‘mixed’ boundary quarters.”67 Boundary lines between Arab and Jewishneighborhoods became flashpoints and the scenes for prolonged exchangesof sniping and bomb-throwing.68 Buses became a favorite target for militantson each side. Exactly the same confrontations re-emerged in exactly thesame places in late 1947.69 By that stage, indeed, travelling between Araband Jewish quarters of Jerusalem had become “like crossing between twoforeign countries.”70

Dynamics of intercommunal conflict in (urban) Palestine in 1936–39had thus begun closely to resemble those of Belfast in 1920–22 (or, indeed,1969–72).71 In his comparative analysis of Northern Ireland, Frank Wrighthas argued the drift towards segregation tends both to entrench, but also torestrain, intercommunal violence: “the fewer and more impregnable the in-terfaces the less are the possibilities for small groups to detonate hostilities.”72

For my own part, I have argued elsewhere that intercommunal violence inNorthern Ireland has tended to be constrained by tacitly accepted prohibi-tions on “transgressive” violence: the targeting of women or children, sexualviolence, or the careful mutilation of the dead.73 Destabilizing provocationshave thus tended to remain exceptional.

How close, then, was intercommunal violence in Mandate Palestine everto developing along more self-regulating “Northern Irish” lines? Certainly

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there is some evidence of restraint. The Jewish Agency’s figures suggesta pronounced skewing of Arab violence in accordance with “chivalric”conventions: 355 Jewish men had been wounded between April and Oc-tober 1936, as opposed to 50 women.74 Only 21 children aged under 10had been injured.75 And as an impressionistic assessment only, practices ofintercommunal rape and mutilation do seem to have been a less prominentfeature of the violence than in the previous decade, though both still oc-curred.76 Against this evidence of potential restraint, however, there wereother forces pushing for dramatic escalation. And while tit-for-tat attackstended to be roughly mimetic in scale—a couple of people shot on eachside here, an exchange of hand grenades there—the discovery of bombsplanted on a Tel Aviv beach to catch Jewish sunbathers suggested the possi-bility of much more creative initiatives in atrocity.77 These were not long incoming, being most comprehensively developed by a Zionist splinter group,the Irgun Tsvai Leumi (IZL), from 1937 onwards.

Seen in a comparative context, the early Irgun appears deeply enig-matic. No one else in terrorism was doing what they were doing in the late1930s. For instance, although scholars have tended to take at face value theIrgun’s claims to have been inspired by Irish Republicanism, the praxis ofthe Irgun was nothing like that of the IRA (for whom five civilian deathswas a publicity disaster in 1939).78 By contrast, the Irgun’s embrace of terrorin the summer of 1938 was both enthusiastic and wholehearted: somebodytook the trouble to pack their bombs with three-quarter-inch rivets.79 Whilethe exact death toll of any individual bombing attack will naturally dependupon all sorts of circumstantial vagaries, the Irgun’s general intention tocause maximum carnage is unmistakeable. To cite just the most spectacu-lar instances: 21 were killed in an attack on the melon market at Haifa (6July 1938); another 39 in a second bomb at Haifa (25 July); and 24 at Jaffa(26 August). These death tolls from single bomb attacks had no obviouscontemporary parallels. Indeed, they are very much on a par with the mostnotorious of later twentieth-century terrorist atrocities: the bombings at Birm-ingham in 1974 (21); the Hamas bus bombing in 1996 (26) or at Omagh in1998 (28).80 The dramatic bulge Irgun caused in overall Arab casualty ratespersisted nearly to the end of the revolt. Thus, in February 1939, 93 Arabcasualties were caused by “murder/attempted murder”; of these no less than61 had resulted from a bomb in Haifa on 27th.81 Likewise in June 1939, 42out of 68 such Arab casualties were caused by a bomb, again in Haifa (on19th). “When the Arabs make a bomb,” Arab peasants at Bir Zeit observedat the time, “it kills perhaps half a dozen people. If the Jews make one itwill kill sixty.” This was scarcely an exaggeration.82 Irgun’s own celebratoryattitude to terror clearly owed much to older eastern European revolutionarytraditions, but the ease with which it embraced mass-casualty attacks stilldefies easy explanation. Resonance of attacks on this scale was long-lasting:

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indeed, the Irgun had provided a ready-made template for the spectacularmutual car-bomb exchanges of 1947–48.83

But the phenomenon of the summer 1938 bombing campaign begsdeeper questions about the overall structure of the conflict as well. TheIrgun, of course, emerged out of a militant Revisionist subculture that waslargely repudiated by mainstream Zionism. Tensions were deep, were occa-sionally violent and contained only with difficulty. Divisions in Arab societywent even deeper and were highly explosive; as is well recognized, underthe pressure of British military and divisive political initiatives, the Revolteventually spawned a welter of factional infighting. In effect, the Revoltevolved into an internal Palestinian civil war. But the wider point here isthat inter- and intracommunal divisions in 1936–39 Palestine do not seemto have cancelled each other out. This is, to say the least, counterintuitive.One might expect intercommunal conflict to have overwhelmed intracom-munal divisions: a group rallies in the face of the common enemy. Or onemight expect the prevalence of intracommunal violence to have depressedthe potential for intercommunal violence, essentially, the Kalyvas-ian modelwhere innumerable microconflicts fragment any larger group solidarity.84

Yet, in Palestine, neither of these scenarios prevailed. Instead, inter- and in-tracommunal violence appear to have been (at least roughly) synchronized.Both, indeed, rose sharply in 1937–38 and continued at high levels into1939.85

How can we explain this problem? My argument would be that inter-and intracommunal violence can be more complementary forces than theymay first appear. The key point here is that internal fragmentation of com-munal authority frees up militants to commit atrocities for which their wholecommunity can then be held accountable, further fuelling macrocycles of rep-resentative violence. In effect, each side risks becoming hostage to its ownmost aggressive elements. As the British authorities put it with remarkabledetachment, “hotheads among both communities had caused regrettable in-cidents.”86 The Arab mayor of Lydda similarly informed a local Jewish leaderin the tense days of January 1947: “We want peace with you and haveannounced it in the town and its environs. But you know that there arepeople without sense and responsibility who might do silly things off theirown bat.”87 Like a see-saw, this was a situation in which all the capacity forchange lay at the extremes.

My basic contention here is that intercommunal and intracommunal vi-olence work in different ways and they have different effects. At its mostintense, intercommunal or representative violence approaches becoming a“closed system”: it creates a generalized fear because there appears to beno escape from it. Hilda Wilson, who was teaching at Bir Zeit in the hillsoutside Jerusalem thought that “town terrorism . . . always seemed so muchworse than our troops-and-rebel affairs out in the country.”88 Intracommunalviolence is not likely to be so all-embracing in the sense of threat that it

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projects—since it occurs within the confines of one community, and indeedwill often run through families, mediators (and the plain uncommitted) standa better chance of preventing polarization from becoming a self-sustaining“total system.” Wilson was thus surprised to find gunmen from the rivalHusseini and Nashashibi factions easily socializing with each other in early1939.89 Conversely, though, intracommunal conflict often tends towards frat-ricidal toxicity. Wilson vividly depicts the aftermath of a visit by a rebel bandto Bir Zeit:

[A]ll that evening an atmosphere of terror brooded like a thick cloud overthe place, in school as well as in the village. Not without reason. If [British]soldiers did come, nothing on earth would ever make the rebels believewe had not telephoned, and they would have their revenge sooner orlater.90

It may certainly be methodologically challenging to try to identify and cate-gorize different types, and effects, of fearful atmosphere. But it is also vital.Arguably, the weakness here of Kalyvas’ (otherwise impressive) work on vi-olence is its profound indifference to questions of resonance. Different typesof threat have different ripple effects, but, on occasion, they can overlap andreinforce each other. That, I argue, is what happened in Palestine in 1937–39.Nor was this a transitory episode. Over 90 years or so, indeed, the Zionist-Palestinian conflict has been characterized by the reinforcement of sharpdivision between national communities by massive centrifugal heterogeneitywithin them: a recipe for acute intractability.

ESCALATION: FROM REPRESENTATIVE VIOLENCE TO ETHNICCLEANSING, 1940–48

Compared to intercommunal hostilities in 1936–39, the striking feature of theconflict that erupted at the end of 1947 was, first, how similarly it began,and then, how differently it ended. “Though everyone in the Yishuv ex-pected conflict at some point in the future, and violence indeed erupted onNovember 30, within hours of the [United Nations] General Assembly vote,no one was certain that this was the start of a ‘war.’”91 Escalation turned outto be bewilderingly fast and driven, primarily, by external forces. Six yearsof “total war,” the revelation of the Nazi genocide of the European Jewsand Jewish insurgency in Palestine (1944–47) sharply converged to promptBritain’s spectacular abdication of all moral and practical responsibility forPalestine in early 1948. Unsurprisingly, the resultant statist vacuum acted asa pressure cooker for intercommunal tensions.

By this juncture neither mutual fear (deterrence) nor mutual decency (allthose who cried in bewilderment, “are we not neighbors?”) stood any chance

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of reversing the escalation cycle.92 The erosion of restraints was graphicallyillustrated by the abrupt re-emergence of large-scale close-quarter massacreson the ethnic riot model. Randall Collins’ notion of the “forward panic” as arelease from an atmosphere of chronic threat is useful here:

[A] forward panic is violence that for the time being is unstoppable. It isoverkill, the overuse of force far beyond what would have been neededto bring about the victory. Persons who have fallen off the point oftension into a forward panic situation have gone down into a tunnel andcannot stop their momentum.93

This seems to fit well with events at Haifa oil refinery on 30 December1947: after an Irgun bomb attack had killed six, Arab workers sponta-neously butchered 39 Jews.94 Perhaps it also covers the notorious Deir Yassinmassacre of 9 April 1947, if, that is, one accepts that Irgun/Lehi atrocitiesthere were a reaction to encountering resistance that was much strongerthan they had anticipated.95 What was different from the 1920s, however,was that the balance of aggression had shifted dramatically: now Zionist mil-itants made most of the running. Indeed, Benny Morris estimates that Jewishforces conducted perhaps “two dozen pre-state massacres.”96 By contrast,Arab massacres were often the culmination of successful ambushes alongthe roads. But the conflict also manifested significant escalatory innovationsas well. Here, indeed, the “brutalization” effect of the Second World Warwas more evident than that of the First World War had been: bomb-makingcapacity leapt on both sides as a result of military training.97 The exchangeof car bombs that flared between January and March 1948 was “brief butfurious.”98 It arguably came closer than almost any other terrorist campaignto achieving what terrorism is “meant” to achieve—the utter demoralizationof entire communities.

In the event, though, the displacement of much of Arab society inPalestine was achieved through more paramilitary means. What is strikinghere is how conventional restraints—the relatively low 1930s levels of in-tercommunal rape and mutilations—were overwhelmed as hostilities esca-lated into civil war in the spring of 1948. Mutilation was often portrayed byBritish and Jewish commentators as overwhelmingly Palestinian (“a partic-ularly revolting Arab custom”).99 But it is hard to be definitive here aboutrelative frequency: certainly, mutilation could also be an Irgun speciality.100

Rape, however, thrived on both sides; in late March 1947, Burton recordsthe leaders of the Arab Liberation Army boasting of the Jewish mistressesthey were going to take (three each, apparently), but, in the event, it wasthe Jewish forces, being more often on the offensive, that had significantlygreater opportunity.101 Perhaps a key point to note here is chronology: atroc-ity allegations cluster from the point in the spring of 1948 when hostilitiesbecame increasingly militarized and, ultimately indeed, internationalized.102

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Indeed, Ilan Pappe’s discussion of Jewish rape of Arab women draws onlyon examples after the British withdrawal.103 This takes us into the periodof Israeli state formation and conventional war. But one point has emergedvery clearly out of the historiographical controversies of the last 25 years:demonstrative atrocity was central to the ethnic cleansing of Palestine in1948.104

EPILOGUE: INTERCOMMUNAL VIOLENCE IN ISRAEL SINCE 1948 . . .

In May 1948, the withdrawal of the British, the collapse of Arab society inPalestine, and the successful creation of the Israeli state combined to “tilt”the Zionist-Palestinian conflict from a “horizontal” to a “vertical” axis. For theshattered remnant of Arab society that remained within the borders of thenew Israeli state, the very scale of their defeat invited quiescence. Abher Co-hen’s key 1965 study Arab Border-Villages in Israel paints a vivid portrait ofa village community that turns in on itself culturally as it is inexorably drawninto the orbit of the Israeli economy and state: “on the individual level, theuncertainties attending the Arab-Jewish dispute led villagers to organize forsecurity and also to adopt a policy of ‘wait and see.’”105 But what is clearis that the hegemony of the Israeli state over this population was enduring.Indeed, Ian Lustick dedicated his classic 1980 study Arabs in the Jewish Stateto explaining the absence of intercommunal or antistate conflict in Israel.106

The potential for violence was not absent, but it took the “top-down” formof vigorous state repression to cow a thoroughly subaltern community.Thus, the massacre at Kafr Qassem in 1956 killed dozens. By contrast, “only”six were shot dead during protests against land expropriation in 1976.107

Another 13 were killed during pro-Intifada demonstrations in 2000.108

All this looks like a very different pattern of confrontation from the in-tercommunal hostilities of Mandate days: it appears to represent the decisiveshattering of the “representative violence” paradigm of 1936–39 or, indeed,late 1947 to early 1948. My argument here is that there may be rather morepotential for this violence to re-emerge than has commonly been thought.At least since 1967, the fate of the Palestinian populations in the OccupiedTerritories has served as something of a cautionary tale for the PalestinianArab minority in Israel of how their fate could be worse. Any change inthe status of the Occupation of the West Bank may well have destabilizingeffects for intercommunal violence within Israel as well.109

What perhaps is most intriguing here is the persistence of old templatesof mobilization. Where riots have assumed a more intercommunal character,rioters have tended to do very much the same things as they would havedone in, say, 1936. The first target is the roads: these are blocked and passingJewish traffic stoned.110 And, despite the scale of population flight in 1947–48,we might also note the striking reappearance of some very old flashpoints.

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The village of Umm el-Fahm was a center of militancy in 1936–39, but ithas also seen rioting since in 1958, 1976, 1987, 2000, and 2010 (as wellas developing as a focal point for Islamic Movement demonstrations).111

Likewise, the “seam” boundary between Tel Aviv and Jaffa that was so ofteninflamed in 1920–21, 1936–39, and 1947–48 also saw sustained rioting in2000.112

Although falling well short of Mandate levels of intercommunal violence,the four nights of rioting between Jewish and Arab crowds in Akko (Acre)in October 2008 were still spectacular enough. Most striking of all was thebewilderment of residents struggling to comprehend a process of polariza-tion that threatened to overwhelm the resources of individual decency andgoodwill. As one activist for intercommunal cooperation put it, “The tensionis very high here, things are on a knife-edge.”113 One Jewish woman, SylvieVaknin, was reported as saying after her house was stoned that “I havemany Arab friends, my doctor is an Arab but the bottom line now is that Idon’t feel secure.” In the assessment of one Israeli-Arab fruit-juice seller: “InAcre, Arab and Jew have always lived in harmony—those who did this arethe extremist minority from either side.” Representative violence reinforcescommunal boundaries whether individuals wish that or not. Mrs. Vakninsaid an Israeli-Arab friend had visited to apologize for the events: “He saidhe was so embarrassed and ashamed.”114 And mixed communities beganto fragment with alarming speed: “Many neighbourhood residents have fledtheir homes since the rioting erupted.”115 Even if overshadowed by morespectacular violence elsewhere in the Territories, sustained intercommunalriots in Israel’s “mixed cities” are an ominous precedent: “Akko was a warn-ing. Cities of mixed Jewish-Arab populations are the pressure cookers ofIsrael and the question is not whether there will be more clashes, but whenand where they will occur.”116 In the words of the Prime Minister, EhudOlmert, Akko residents had become “hostages of small zealots from bothsides.”117

. . . AND THE OCCUPIED TERRITORIES

In a 1990 article, Kenneth Stein pointed out some of the striking paral-lels and contrasts between the 1936–1939 Revolt and the First Intifada thenraging in Palestine.118 Yet, intercommunal violence was not foregroundedin Stein’s account. Stein claimed that the “Palestinian intifada participantsaimed at the Israeli occupation as their central target, rather than attackingIsraelis or physical symbols of the occupation, such as Jewish settlementsand British strategic objectives as was the case in the 1936–9 uprising.”119

This contrast seems a little too neat: after all, a low level war of stone-throwing and settler shootings has accompanied the Intifada. Once morea (minor) “war of the roads” emerged. And whilst there was indeed an

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even closer alliance between the Israeli government and its settlers in theOccupied Territories in the 1980s than there had been between the Britishgovernment and the Yishuv in the 1930s, there still left ample space forsettler vigilantism to flourish. As one settler leader put it, during a road pa-trol to deter stone-throwers, “we are not obligated in the same way as theArmy, who are under orders not to shoot. We may do whatever is correctin order to enforce security.”120 Indeed, in the first two years of the FirstIntifada alone, Israeli settlers killed at least 34 Palestinians, almost all adultmales.121

Of course, the main axis of confrontation continued along the verti-cal lines established by the Occupation, and the main killer remained theIsraeli state. No less than 1,376 Palestinians were killed in the OccupiedTerritories by Israeli state forces between the outbreaks of the First and Sec-ond Intifadas. But, at a lower level of carnage, settler-Palestinian violencestill represented a rather dubious portent for coexistence during the coming“Peace Process” years: between 9 December 1987 and 28 September 2000,Palestinians killed 94 Israeli citizens in the Occupied Territories (includingEast Jerusalem); another 177 were killed within Israel proper. In the sameperiod, 115 Palestinians were killed by Israeli civilians.122 More ominous, still,was the development of Hamas suicide attacks into Israel proper: buses andmarkets were favorite targets, just as they had been way back in the 1930s.Here, Hamas proved themselves worthy descendants of the Irgun traditionof carnage making, although their individual attacks struggled to exceed thevictim totals set back in 1938–39.

Since the outbreak of the Second Intifada, within the Occupied Territo-ries settler-Palestinian violence has been predictably eclipsed by Israeli stateviolence. Between 29 September 2000 and 31 July 2012, Israeli forces havekilled 6,492 Palestinians. Seven hundred and fifty-four Israeli civilians (bothin Israel and the Territories) have been killed by Palestinian action. Israelicivilians (that is, settlers) have killed 50 Palestinians within the Territories.In addition, intracommunal fighting between Hamas-Fatah has accountedfor 671 Palestinian lives.123 One comparative reading of these two periodsof 1987–2000 and 2000–2012 would be that, while fatal attacks by settlerson Palestinians have indeed declined, this may simply reflect more effectiverepression of Palestinians by the Israeli state. As the “price-tag” policy of theHilltop Youth movement has indicated with admirable clarity, any literal ormetaphorical retreat by the Israeli state from the Territories is likely to beaccompanied by a compensatory spike in settler violence: “for every outpostdemolished by the Israeli military, they will target Palestinians in revenge.”124

Objectively, minor acts of graffiti and arson by the price-tag movement havemassive resonance because they hint so clearly at the possibility of futureescalation towards intercommunal civil war. The net outcome here is that theIsraeli state has not so much transcended intercommunal conflict as muchas been imprisoned by its implications.

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CONCLUSION

In this article, I have attempted to trace the evolution of the Zionist-Palestinian conflict “from the bottom-up.” In doing so, I certainly do notmean to belittle the importance of the high politics or the external interven-tions. But I have deliberately attempted to refocus attention on the grassrootsforces as (at least partially) autonomous in their own right. In the aftermathof the Balfour Declaration, violent conflict tended to take the sporadic, butspectacular, form of the largely one-sided ethnic riot. The year 1929 wasa watershed here. After this point, Jewish self-defense became better orga-nized. The mid-1930s saw the emergence of representative violence, a formof intercommunal violence, that I have argued is particularly effective inspreading a generalized atmosphere of fear. We might also note in passingthat it was in the very nature of the Zionist project to undercut deterrencepossibilities. Such truces function best when communities are most cleanlyseparated into homogenous territorial blocs, but Zionist leaders worked hardto resist the natural tendency of Jewish populations to huddle defensively andto retreat from exposed peripheries.125 Condemned to be expansionist—forit could not abdicate its claim to settle the land without imploding—Zionismendlessly multiplied awkward enclaves and friction points for the future.The roads between them thus became the obvious lightning conductors forintercommunal tension.

What was striking about the conflict system that emerged at this pointin Palestine was its dangerous combination of a clear central cleavage withextreme communal fragmentation on each side. This was better disguisedand controlled in the Yishuv, but even here a high degree of internal cen-trifugalism was still present. Any stability premised on deterrence was par-ticularly threatened by aggressive splinter groups, amongst which the mostnotable was the Irgun. Whilst other deeply divided societies eventually maysettle down into what Frank Wright called “tranquillity” (that is, a sort ofintercommunal Cold War), in Palestine, such truces have proved especiallyfragile. British withdrawal and collapse into civil war in 1947–48 precludedany possibility of the conflict reaching a state of equilibrium, however un-stable. Deterrence arrangements—local nonaggression pacts, restraints on“transgressive” violence—were simply swept away.

The 1948 war thus transformed the conflict and appeared—for a longwhile—to have banished the prospect of representative violence for good.Nonetheless, recent disturbances within Israel proper once again bear arather striking pattern to 1930s and 1940s precedents. While maintaining theoccupation of the post-1967 territories has necessitated the full weight ofthe Israeli state, settler vigilantism lurks in the background as an ominousreminder that any meaningful withdrawal of the Israeli state from its ownOccupation is likely to reignite intercommunal violence at levels last seenin the first half of the twentieth century. Not even the subcontraction ofthe Occupation in the West Bank to the Palestinian Authority since 1993

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has succeeded in hiding that reality completely. Recent disturbances withinIsrael proper (2000, 2008) are also a major cause for concern. Representativeviolence lurked in the background of the Zionist/Palestinian conflict formuch of the twentieth century. Yet, its re-emergence at moments when stateauthority has receded (1948) or attempted to liberalize (intermittently in the1990s and after) have been dramatically destabilizing.

If Benvenisti’s 1990 vision was accurate that “the greater Israel thatemerged from the 1967 war had become by the 1980s a deeply dividedsociety and not, as some still saw it, two societies within one territory,”then any projected political settlement will have to contend with the like-lihood of profound shocks at the level of grassroots relations betweencommunities—whether in one state or two.126 Any retreat of Israeli statehegemony, any significant weakening in the main center of power, is likelyto be followed by destabilizing surges in “representative violence” from be-low. And here the political rise of the rioting teenager on both sides—firstportended in the First Intifada, but more recently in the Akko disturbancesand Hilltop Youth as well—may very well serve as the harbinger of futurecrises to come.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I am deeply indebted to my two anonymous reviewers for their incisivecriticisms. I also wish to acknowledge the invaluable financial assistance ofthe Council for British Research in the Levant (CBRL) in funding research inJerusalem. Debbie Usher, the archivist at the Middle East Centre Archive atSt. Antony’s, Oxford, also deserves a grateful mention.

NOTES

1. M. Benvenisti, “The Peace Process and Intercommunal Strife,” in H. Giliomee and J. Gagiano,eds., The Elusive Search for Peace: South Africa, Israel and Northern Ireland (Oxford: Oxford UniversityPress, 1990), 118. It should be noted that my primary interest is on the existence of a fundamentalnational/communal cleavage in Israel/Palestine rather than on national identity itself. Thus, I use termssuch as “Arab,” “Palestinian,” “Palestinian Arab” without meaning to imply that these different emphaseshave remained constant or static.

2. Ibid., 124.3. Ibid., 124.4. M. Z. Qumsiyeh, Popular Resistance in Palestine: A History of Hope and Empowerment

(London: Pluto Press, 2011).5. A. Oliver and P. Steinberg, The Road to Martyrs’ Square: A Journey into the World of the

Suicide Bomber (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), xx.6. P. Brass, ed., Riots and Pogroms (New York: New York University Press, 1996), 147.7. G. Sharif, Land, Labor and the Origins of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, 1882–1914 (Cam-

bridge: Cambridge University Press), 203.8. A. Shapira, Land and Power: The Zionist Resort to Force, 1881–1948 (Oxford: Oxford Uni-

versity Press, 1992) 48, 69–71.9. N. Rose, “A Senseless, Squalid War”: Voices from Palestine 1890s–1948 (London: Pimlico,

2009), 10. Rose does add of this juncture that “the pattern for future discord can already be discerned.”10. “Fatal riots at Jerusalem,” Manchester Guardian, 27 Feb. 1909.

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11. C. Townshend, “The Defence of Palestine: Insurrection and Public Security, 1936–1939,” TheEnglish Historical Review 103(409): 949 (1988).

12. E. Horne, A Job Well Done: A History of the Palestine Police Force 1920–1948 (Lewes: TheBook Guild, 1982, 2003), 35–64, 121–58.

13. T. K. Wilson, Frontiers of Violence: Conflict and Identity in Ulster and Upper Silesia,1918–1922 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 5 [for Ulster and Upper Silesia]; M. Davis, Buda’sWagon: A Brief History of the Car Bomb (London: Verso, 2007), 14 [for Catalonia]; C. Townshend, WhenGod Made Hell: The British Invasion of Mesopotamia and the Creation of Iraq, 1914–1921 (London: Faber,2010), 476.

14. P. Wrobel, “The Seeds of Violence: The Brutalization of an East European Region, 1917–1921,”Journal of Modern European History 1: 125–49 (2003). For general discussion of “brutalization,” N.Ferguson, The Pity of War (London: Penguin, 1999), 388–94; R. Gerwarth and J. Horne, “Vectors ofViolence: Paramilitarism in Europe after the Great War, 1917–1923,” The Journal of Modern History 83(3):489–512 (2011).

15. A. Cohen, Arab Border Villages in Israel: A Study of Continuity and Change in Social Orga-nization (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1965), 43; R. Storrs, Orientations (London: Nicholsonand Watson, 1945), 287, 294; A. Marcus, Jerusalem 1913: The Origins of the Arab-Israeli Conflict (NewYork: Viking, 2007), 144–49.

16. T. Segev, One Palestine, Complete: Jews and Arabs under the British Mandate (New York:Owl Books, 1999, 2000), 22. For a graphic overview of conditions in the disintegrating Ottoman Empire,see H. Ozdemir, The Ottoman Army 1914–1918: Disease and Death on the Battlefield (Salt Lake City:University of Utah Press, 2008).

17. “The Condition of the Holy Land: Hunger, Disease and Turkish Pillage,” ManchesterGuardian, 9 July 1917; Segev, One Palestine, 24.

18. Quoted in T. Bowden, The Breakdown of Public Security: The Case of Ireland 1916–1921and Palestine 1936–1939 (London: Sage Publications, 1977), 149.

19. See, for example, Rhodes House (RH), Oxford: Blackburne Papers, Box 3, “Diary of Dis-turbances,” 1–275; also see H. Simpson, British Rule in Palestine and the Arab Rebellion of 1936–1937(Salisbury: Documentary Publications, 1938, 1977), 250.

20. M. Watts, The Jewish Legion in the First World War (Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 2004),236; see also J. Patterson, With the Judaeans in the Palestine Campaign (London: Hutchinson, 1922).

21. Y. Bauer, “From Cooperation to Resistance: The Haganah 1938–1946,” Middle Eastern Studies2(3): 182 (1966).

22. [British] National Archives (NA), CO 733/3, page 239. For a similar observation see C. Town-shend, Britain’s Civil Wars (London: Faber, 1986), 90. For weapons in 1920 including a three-foot sword:Middle East Centre Archive [MEC], St. Anthony’s, Oxford, Adamson Papers, GB 165-0001, “The Holy Riotsin Jerusalem, Easter 1920.” For use of sticks and handheld weapons in 1921: CZA, L4/825, L4/827.

23. D. Horowitz, The Deadly Ethnic Riot (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 1.24. R. Collins, Violence: A Microsociological Theory (Princeton: Princeton University Press,

2008), 119.25. Horowitz, Deadly Ethnic Riot, 366.26. Segev, One Palestine, 177. For pogroms, J. Klier and S. Lambroza, eds., Pogroms: Anti-Jewish

Violence in Modern Russian History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992).27. W. Hagen, “Murder in the East: German-Jewish Liberal Reactions to Anti-Jewish Violence in

Poland and Other East European Lands, 1918–1920,” Central European History 34: 14 (2001).28. Palestine Post, 3 Sept. 1934.29. [British] NA, CO 733/3, p. 240.30. For 1920, 1921, 1929, respectively: Segev, One Palestine, 127–44, 173–201, 314–27. For 1921:

Central Zionist Archive (CZA), Jerusalem, L4/825. For 1929: Manchester Guardian, 31 Aug. 1929.31. For more skeptical assessments: B. Wasserstein, The British in Palestine: The Mandatory

Government and the Arab-Jewish Conflict 1917–1929 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1978, 1991), 237.32. Chancellor Papers, Box Vol. 12; Hebron Diary, 9 July 1999 reproducing a Haaretz article

from 1929.33. Humphrey Bowman quoted in C. Townshend, “Going to the Wall: The Failure of British Rule

in Palestine, 1928–31,” The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 30(2): 34–35 (2002).34. M. Gilbert, Jerusalem in the Twentieth Century (London: Chatto and Windus, 1996), 83.35. Reuters Telegram preserved in the Chancellor Papers, Box Vol. 12.

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36. Horowitz, Deadly Ethnic Riot, 400. Presumably “Safad” is meant.37. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T64JIgs5C6k&feature=player_detailpage (accessed 27

Jan. 2013): “92 Year Old Palestinian Woman: Palestinians Should Massacre Jews Like We MassacredThem in Hebron.”

38. N. Shepherd, Ploughing Sand: British Rule in Palestine (London: John Murray, 1999), 181.39. “The Hebron Massacre of 1929: A Recently Revealed Letter of a Survivor”: http://hebron1929.

info/Hebronletter.html (accessed 27 Jan. 2013).40. L. Collins and D. Lapierre, O Jerusalem! (London: Grafton Books, 1982, 1990), 46.41. Ilan Pappe, A History of Modern Palestine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004),

92.42. Pappe, A History, 92; Townshend, Britain’s Civil Wars, 102.43. Horne, A Job, 149.44. B. Morris, Righteous Victims: A History of the Zionist-Arab Conflict, 1881–2001 (New York:

Vintage, 1999, 2001), 120–21.45. Quoted in S. Lachman, “Arab Rebellion and Terrorism in Palestine 1929–39: The Case of

Sheikh Izz Al-Din Al-Qassam and his Movement,” in E. Kedourie and S. Haim, eds., Zionism and Arabismin Palestine and Israel (London: Frank Cass, 1982), 53.

46. Townshend, “Defence of Palestine,” 918.47. Bowden, Breakdown; M. Hughes, “The Banality of Brutality: British Armed Forces and the

Repression of the Arab Revolt in Palestine 1936–39,” English Historical Review, CXXIV(507): 313–354(2009); M. Hughes, “From Law and Order to Pacification: Britain’s Suppression of the Arab Revolt inPalestine, 1936–39,” Journal of Palestine Studies 39(2): 6–22 (2010); Y. Porath, The Palestinian ArabNational Movement: From Riots to Rebellion: 1929–1939 (London: Frank Cass, 1977), Volume 2; T.Swedenburg, Memories of Revolt: The 1936–1939 Rebellion and the Palestinian National Past (Fayettville:The University of Arkansas Press, 2003); Townshend, “Defence of Palestine,” 917–49.

48. S. Kalyvas, The Logic of Violence in Civil War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006),4–5.

49. Porath, From Riots, 233–94.50. Lachman, “Arab Rebellion,” 78. See also Porath, From Riots, 162.51. Morris, Righteous Victims, 190.52. Segev, One Palestine, 140.53. Ibid., 330.54. Palestine Post, 1 Aug. 1938.55. Palestine Post, 1 August 1938.56. The concept of “telling” is borrowed from Northern Irish anthropology: F. Burton, The Politics

of Legitimacy: Struggles in a Belfast Community (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978).57. F. Wright, Northern Ireland: A Comparative Analysis (Dublin: Gill and MacMillan, 1987), 11,

emphasis added.58. I owe this striking formulation of the effect of representative violence to one of my

St. Andrews’ students.59. M. Abbasi, “The End of Arab Tiberias: The Arabs of Tiberias and the Battle for the City in

1948,” Journal of Palestine Studies 37(3): 10 (2008). See comment also here: Swedenburg, Memories ofRevolt, 220.

60. For drive-by shootings and bombings: Times, 18 March 1937; Palestine Post, 6 Feb. 1948;Manchester Guardian, 30 Dec. 1947.

61. A. Sherman, Mandate Days: British Lives in Palestine 1918–1948 (London: Thames andHudson, 1997), 108.

62. RH, Battershill Papers, Box 4, File 2, 31 Aug. 1937.63. Times, 10 July 1938.64. Jewish Agency for Palestine, Palestine: The Disturbances of 1936: Statistical Tables (Jerusalem:

Jewish Agency for Palestine, 1936), 13. There is a copy of this illuminating (but apparently unknown)publication in the British Library, London.

65. Jewish Agency, The Disturbances of 1936 , 8.66. For a sample of small-scale “tit-for-tat” exchanges: Times, 27 July 1936, 26 Aug. 1936, 29 Aug.

1936, 18 March 1937, 1 Sept. 1937, 10 July 1938; also: Palestine Post, 16 June 1939.67. Palestine Post, 21 April 1936, 30 April 1936, 8 July 1938, 1 Aug. 1938, 15 Aug. 1938. See also:

Porath, From Riots, 218–20.

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78 T. Wilson

68. Times, 25 June 1938; Palestine Post, 30 April, 30 June 1936, 11 Sept. 1938, 13 June 1939.69. Manchester Guardian, 30 Dec. 1947. See also: Morris, The Birth, 67, 100, 109–110.70. Collins and Lapierre, O Jerusalem, 86.71. Wilson Frontiers of Violence 178–81.72. Wright, Northern Ireland, 288.73. Wilson, Frontiers of Violence, 216.74. Jewish Agency, The Disturbances of 1936 , 10.75. Ibid., 10.76. For the dismemberment of five Jews (and the rape of one) in the spring of 1938, see J. Bowyer

Bell, Terror Out of Zion: The Violent and Deadly Shock Troops of Israeli Independence, 1929–1949 (NewYork: St. Martin’s Press, 1977), 39. This spurred Irgun attempts at retaliation. See also: “Mutilated Body ofa Jew Found,” Palestine Post, 9 Sept. 1937.

77. Palestine Post, 19 July and 16 August 1937.78. For the IRA’s badly-timed bomb at Coventry: Times, 26 Aug. 1939. For supposed Irish influ-

ence on the Irgun and Lehi movements: Bowyer Bell, Terror Out of Zion, 40; J. Spyer, “The Birth of theIdea of Revolt: The Irish Example and the Irgun Tzvai Leumi,” in R. Miller, ed., Ireland and the MiddleEast: Trade, Society and Peace (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2007), 43–55.

79. Times, 26 July 1938. See also: Morris, Righteous Victims, 117.80. Regrettably, the Irgun’s late 1930s bombing campaign often is overlooked by analysts. See for

instance: C. Quillen, “A Historical Analysis of Mass Casualty Bombers,” Studies in Conflict and Terrorism25(5): 279–92 (2002).

81. War Office statistics, reproduced in Bowman, The Breakdown, 251.82. Middle East Centre Archive [MEC], St. Anthony’s, Oxford: Miss H.M. Wilson Papers, GB

165-0302, p. 68.83. Davis, Buda’s Wagon, 19.84. S. Kalyvas and M. Kocher, “Ethnic Cleavages and Irregular War: Iraq and Vietnam,” Politics

and Society 35(2): 183–223 (2007).85. Morris, Righteous Victims, 122–60.86. Palestine Post, 31 July 1936.87. B. Morris, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited (Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, 1988, 2004), 92.88. MEC, Wilson papers, p. 55.89. Ibid., 76.90. Ibid., 51.91. Morris, Righteous Victims, 189.92. Collins and Lapierre, O Jerusalem, 90.93. Collins, Violence, 94.94. Morris, Righteous Victims, 198.95. Y. Gelber “Appendix II. Propaganda as History: What Happened at Deir Yassin?”

(2006). http://www.ee.bgu.ac.il/∼censor/katz-directory/05-12-14gelber-palestine-1948-appendix-II-what-happened-in-deir-yassin-english.pdf (accessed 27 Jan. 2013).

96. J. Beinin, “Review,” Middle East Report 230: 38 (2004).97. Bauer, “From Cooperation,” 192; Collins and Lapierre, O Jerusalem, 159–61.98. Davis, Buda’s Wagon, 28.99. P. Bruton, A Captain’s Mandate: Palestine 1946–1948 (London: Pen and Sword Books,

1996), 117.100. Morris, The Birth, 216.101. Burton, A Captain’s Mandate, 130. There is a rather symmetrical recollection of Jews prepar-

ing to assault an Arab village (in April 1948) and looking forward to “a rendezvous with the daughter ofthe Mukhtar [village headman]”: U. Avnery, 1948: A Soldier’s Tale (Oxford: One World, 1948, 2008), 35.

102. For Arab mutilations: Palestine Post, 12 Jan. 1947, 23 Jan. 1947, 28 Jan 1947, 12 March 1947,13 April 1947. For Arab (intercommunal) rapes: Palestine Post, 11 May 1947; Collins and Lapierre, OJerusalem!, 368. As in 1936–1939, Arab forces also raped Arab women: Morris, The Birth, 173, 216.For Jewish mutilations and rape/sexual abuse, see A. Sa’di and L. Abu-Lughod, Nakba: Palestine, 1948,and the Claims of Memory (New York: Columbia Press, 2007), 31, 35, 211–12. Also: Morris, The Birth,220, 238, 257–58; J. Beinin, “Review,” Middle East Report 230: 38 (2004); Y. Gelber “Appendix II: Pro-paganda as History: What Happened at Deir Yassin?” (2006); Anonymous, Jewish Atrocities in the Holy

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Turbulent Stasis 79

Land (Cairo: The Arab League Information Bureau, 1949), 8, 14–15. Jewish paramilitaries were reportedas mutilating (perhaps castrating?) an Arab man who had raped Jewish girls: Palestine Post, 25 April1947.

103. I. Pappe, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (Oxford: One World, 2006), 208–11.104. Fear of rape was clearly a particularly powerful catalyst for population flight: F. Hasso,

“Modernity and Gender in Arab Accounts of the 1948 and 1967 Defeats,” International Journal of MiddleEast Studies 32(4): 496 (2000); A. Sa’di and L. Abu-Lughod, Nakba: Palestine, 1948, and the Claims ofMemory (New York: Columbia Press, 2007), 31, 35, 211–12.

105. A. Cohen, Arab Border-Villages in Israel: A Study of Continuity and Change in Social Orga-nization (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1965), 177. I am deeply indebted to my anonymousreviewers for bringing this key work to my attention.

106. I. Lustick, Arabs in the Jewish State: Israel’s Control of a National Minority (Austin: Universityof Texas, 1980), 3–8.

107. O. Stendel, The Arabs in Israel (Brighton: Sussex Academic Press, 1996), 188; L. Louer, To bean Arab in Israel (London: Hurst and Co., 2003), 34; Lustick, Arabs in the Jewish State, 237, 246.

108. Louer, To be an Arab in Israel, 201.109. Lustick, Arabs in the Jewish State, 267.110. O. Stendel, The Arabs in Israel (Brighton: Sussex Academic Press, 1996), 178–79. There is a

useful record of the stone-throwing and barricading in the Appendix of O. Abu, “Does Civic EngagementWork?: Explaining Sub-National Variation in Arab-Jewish Violence within Israel,” Conference Paper for25th Annual Conference of the Association for Israel Studies, 1–3 June 2009.

111. Porath, Beyond Riots, 237; “Arab Unrest Spreads as 3 Die,” Guardian, 22 Dec. 1987; Stendel,The Arabs, 97; “Israel Slides into State of War,” Guardian, 3 Oct. 2000; “Riot Police Called in as Arabs andExtremists Face Off in Israel,” The Australian News, 28 Oct. 2010, http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/breaking-news/riot-police-called-in-as-arabs-and-extremists-face-off-in-israel/story-fn3dxix6–1225944654504 (accessed 27 Jan. 2013). For Islamic Movement: “30,000 Attend Prophet Protest in Umm al-Fahm,”Ynetnews.com, 22 Sept. 2012, http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4284596,00.html (accessed 27Jan. 2013).

112. A. LeBor, City of Oranges: Arabs and Jews in Jaffa (London: Bloomsbury, 2006, 2007), 33,276–77.

113. “Arabs Stone Jewish Baby in Akko, Hamas Calls for Solidarity,” Israel National News, 11Oct. 2008.

114. BBC News, “Jewish-Arab Riots Shock Israeli City,” 10 Oct. 2008.115. Haaretz, 12 Oct. 2008.116. Nathan Jeffay, Jewish Chronicle, 13 Nov. 2008.117. M. Levertov, “Akko Riots: Arab-Jewish Tensions Flare,” Jewish Chronicle, 17 Oct. 2008.118. K. Stein, “The Intifada and the 1936–9 Uprising: A Comparison,” Journal of Palestine Studies

19(4): 64–85 (1990).119. Ibid., 73.120. Times, 29 July 1988.121. R. R. Stockton, “Intifada Deaths,” Journal of Palestine Studies 19(4): 86–95 (1990).122. B’Tselem figures, “Fatalities in the First Intifada.”123. http://www.btselem.org/statistics/first_intifada_tables124. “Israel Cracks down on Radical ‘Hilltop Youth,’“ National Public Radio, 9 Jan. 2012, http://

www.npr.org/2012/01/09/144918870/israel-cracks-down-on-radical-hilltop-youth (accessed 27 Jan. 2013).See also Jerusalem Post, 9 May 2011, http://www.jpost.com/DiplomacyAndPolitics/Article.aspx?id=236737

125. Collins and Lapierre, O Jerusalem, 90–91.126. This phrase is Adrian Guelke’s summary of Benvenisti’s argument. See A. Guelke, Politics in

Deeply Divided Societies (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2012), 109.

Timothy Wilson is a Lecturer at the Centre for the Study of Political Violenceand Terrorism (CSTPV) at the University of St. Andrews. He has written on thegrassroots dynamics of violence in intercommunal conflicts. He is the author ofFrontiers of Violence: Conflict and Identity in Ulster and Upper Silesia, 1918–1922(Oxford University Press, 2010).

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