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Nationalism and Ethnic Politics

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Turbulent Stasis: Comparative

Reflections upon Intercommunal
Violence and Territoriality in the Israel/
Palestine Conflict
Timothy Wilson

University of St. Andrews

Published online: 25 Feb 2013.

To cite this article: Timothy Wilson (2013) Turbulent Stasis: Comparative Reflections upon
Intercommunal Violence and Territoriality in the Israel/Palestine Conflict, Nationalism and Ethnic
Politics, 19:1, 58-79, DOI: 10.1080/13537113.2013.761899
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13537113.2013.761899

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Nationalism and Ethnic Politics, 19:5879, 2013

Copyright Taylor & Francis Group, LLC
ISSN: 1353-7113 print / 1557-2986 online
DOI: 10.1080/13537113.2013.761899

Turbulent Stasis: Comparative Reflections upon

Intercommunal Violence and Territoriality
in the Israel/Palestine Conflict
TIMOTHY WILSON
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University of St. Andrews

From (at least) the Balfour Declaration of 1917 right down to the
present day, the Zionist-Palestinian conflict has been sculpted by
external forces. But never entirely so: grassroots patterns of confrontation have also been vital. This article therefore adopts a
bottom-up approach to the evolution of the conflict since the early
twentieth century.

INTRODUCTION
In 1990, the Israeli political scientist Meron Benvenisti asserted that the
Israeli-Arab conflict had downsized radically from a region-wide, interstate conflict. . . to its original core, namely Israeli-Palestinian inter-communal
strife.1 Benvenisti boldly claimed it was now becoming clearer that
the dynamic of the Israeli-Palestinian communal strife is similar to
that of inter-communal strife everywherefrom Beirut to Belfast. It
is waged in an endless cycle of violence, enforcement, domination,
containmentfights over every piece of land, every tree.2

Like these other notorious trouble spots, Israel/Palestine is fated to exist in

a state of turbulent stasis: violence simmers just below the surface. It is an
endemic condition, lacking a durable, ultimate solution.3
This article picks up Benvenistis comparativist challenge. As a thought
exercise, it attempts to isolate an inter-communal core of the conflict and
trace it through the vicissitudes of state building from the end of the Great
War into the early twenty-first century. Its focus is upon political violence
between communities rather than their politics: I leave it to others to highlight just how much nonviolent mobilization there has been.4 My approach,

Address correspondence to Timothy Wilson, School of International Relations, University

of St. Andrews, Library Park, The Scores, St. Andrews, KY6 9AX, United Kingdom. E-mail:
tkw2@st-andrews.ac.uk
58

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59

however, keeps the focus on political violence from belowand mostly,

though not exclusively, on intercommunal violence directed by nonstate actors. Rioters and gunmen are thus the primary subject here (and not police
forces or military units). Overall, it seeks to do two things. First, and most
importantly, the bulk of the chapter is dedicated to analyzing the development of grassroots or communal violence within the general evolution of
the Zionist-Palestinian conflict in the first half of the twentieth century. Secondly, and much more briefly, it explores the significance of intercommunal
violence within the territory of ex-Mandate Palestine since the foundation of
Israel in 1948.
In homing in on internal, grassroots dynamics, I do not intend to downplay the extent to which this conflictperhaps more than any otherhas
been sculpted by external intervention: From the Balfour Declaration to
the Oslo years and beyond, the vertical, or grandiose, element is one of the
most fundamental characteristics of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.5 Likewise,
even if my focus is on nonstate actors, it is (unsurprisingly) the State that has
remained the most devastating employer of violence. This has been a nearconstant reality: only one brief transitional moment in the spring of 1948 saw
a total disappearance of state capacity. Lastly, a focus on political violence
does not displace the political importance of full-blown war in the evolution
of the conflict: of course, 1948 and 1967 remain the key turning points.
And yet, when all due caveats have been duly entered, it remains striking just how few serious attempts have been made to analyze patterns of
grassroots intercommunal violence in the Israel/Palestine conflict comparatively. In a rare attempt to chart continuity and change between the 1929
and 1990 disorders around Jerusalems Temple Mount, Roger Friedland and
Richard Hecht observed how often such outbreaks of violence are seen as
aberrational.6 But any analysis of the grassroots morphology of political violence makes most sense when connected up to communal attitudes: When
violence is seen, in other words, as related to wider expectations and/or prohibitions about how these things ought to be done or were actually done last
time around. Previous cycles or campaigns of violence typically function as
templates for communal mobilization or terroristic inspiration. And here perhaps the least discussed feature of political violence in the Zionist-Palestinian
conflict is its (only relative) immaturity. Sustained grassroots patterns of violent confrontation are hard to trace back meaningfully before British rule
(that is, 191718). As with so much else to do with the politics of the conflict, the Great War proved to be the Big Bang moment for the evolution
of political violence in Palestine. To understand this better, we need to look
more closely at the emergence of disorder in the 1920s.

ETHNIC RIOTS, 19201929

Gershon Shafir detects a notable quickening of Zionist-Palestinian conflict
just 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 guards
lost their lives.7 These figures for fatalities from the Jewish community
(Yishuv) seem quite small. And hence overall casualties also probably stayed
strikingly low: not least because the Jewish guards of the Hashomer movement proved reluctant to translate their vaunted macho posturing (or Judaism of the muscles) into any actual lethal violence.8 For Norman Rose, at
this stage any talk of an inevitable conflict between the developing Yishuv
and the Palestinian Arabs would have been premature.9 Only hindsight allows us to see pre-1914 Zionist-Palestinian violence as more pregnant with
menace than the other fertile sources of disorder prevalent in Ottoman Palestine at the time: the banditry, the feuding, and the recurrent sectarian rioting.10
This point bears some emphasizing. Disorder followed sharply upon
the advent of British rule in Palestine in 192021 (and again in 1929). Given
the new realities of mass Jewish immigration under the aegis of the totemic
Balfour Declaration, some energetic resistance from Palestinian Arabs, and
resultant unrest, might have been expectedeven, that is, by British officialdom whose Olympian tradition it was to be always unprepared for,
always surprised by civil violence.11 But, then as now, it is the speed of
escalation that remains very striking: nine were killed in the 1920 riots, but
95 died in 1921 (and no less than 249 in 1929).12 All the same, these aggregate death tolls still remained relatively modest by the standards of post-1918
Europe and the Middle East: After all, at this time, c. 700 were dying in Ulster, c. 900 in Catalonia, c. 3,000 in Upper Silesia, and no less than 5,000
in Mesopotamia.13 Unlike these trouble spots, violence in Palestine initially
took only sporadic expression.
At a macrolevel, the conflict in Palestine clearly emerged very directly
out of the First World War. It is worth asking, then, whether the microlevel
conflict did so as well. In other words, to what extent did the legacy of the
First World War contribute to the intensity and patterning of its early violence? Several historians have advanced the notion of Eastern Europe after
1918 as constituting a zone of brutalization.14 By analogy, can we likewise
talk of brutalization in ex-Ottoman Palestine? Did the Zionist-Palestinian
conflict acquire some of its early brutality as part of the backwash of total
war? The thesis is at least superficially attractive. In general terms, Palestine in 191718 was clearly a mess.15 Conditions of disease and starvation
were rampantrumors of cannibalism flourished.16 The Guardian newspaper reported that the women and young girls have been carried off as
slaves (by the Turks): likewise, the British armys liberation of Tel Aviv
was accompanied by widespread raping.17 Even as late as 1929, the ex-High
Commissioner, Sir Herbert Samuel thought Palestine still disturbed by the
groundswell that followed storms of war.18 More specifically, in the means
of violence, there were also direct continuities between the world war and
its aftermath. Guns, ammunition, and explosives from the world war kept

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61

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 Jewish areas from the start: The gunmen who shot up the Grand Muftis house
in 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 problematic
and impressionistic explanation for fully accounting for the violent escalation of the conflict immediately after the world war. In general, Zionist
paramilitarism forms a weak fit with contemporary movements across
Europe: neither the (left-wing) Haganah nor the later (right-wing) Betar
movement can truly be seen as a Jewish Freikorps. On the Palestinian side,
it was only much laterduring the 193639 Revoltthat the dissemination
of military skills across the general population began to make itself felt. We
need 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 and
fifty-five nonlethal casualties occurred at Jaffa in 1921; only 30 were caused
by bomb or bullet.22
The key point here remains that intercommunal violence in 1920s
Palestine remained strikingly lop-sided. Palestinian Arab crowds attacked
Jewish communities; the bulk of their own casualties came not from Jewish
resistance (which remained sporadic, though still occasionally lethal) but
from the belated reaction of British state forces. Disturbances in 192021 and
1929 thus fit into the ethnic riot paradigm outlined by Donald Horowitz: an
intense, sudden, though not necessarily wholly unplanned, lethal attack by
civilian members of one ethnic group on civilian members of another ethnic
group.23 Such episodes are characterized by an intense build-up of tension
and rumor; an acute sense by the perpetrators-to-be that they are the ones
who are threatened; and, finally, a resolution of tension through violence
that is overwhelming: usually 85%95% of deaths are on one side.24 The
ethnic riot is a moral holiday and its violence typically takes ludic forms
looting, desecration, mutilation, and rape are enthusiastically performed. In
the aftermath, there is a notable absence of remorse amongst perpetrators
for what they continue to see as thoroughly justified action: for them, writes
Horowitz, the deadly ethnic riot remains moral mass murder.25 No wonder
that some Jews watched the clouds of feathers rising from the ripped-up
pillows and thought of Russia: they knew a pogrom when they saw one.26
By contemporary standards, the ethnic riots in 1920s Palestine were
quite destructive. In 1919, 35 Jews were murdered at Lida (Lithuania); the
Vilna pogrom of the same year took 50 lives.27 In 1934, 24 Jews were killed
in Constantine (Algeria).28 For comparison: 38 Jews were killed in Jaffa (in
1921) and 67 in Hebron (in 1929).29 Yet, not just aggregate death tolls but
the form of atrocity matters. Desecrations of individual dignity (such as rape
and mutilation) are also worth giving analytical attention since these are deliberately 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 and

mutilation featured prominently in all these disturbances.30 True, controversy
has indeed swirled around whether many of those killed at Hebron in
1929 were also mutilated.31 But contemporary Jewish allegations of castrated
corpses are unusually detailed and specific here; they mesh also with one
survivors suggestive description of a (male) neighbor found with his trousers
down and blood spurting from his guts.32 We also have a credible eyewitness account of a childs head being cut off and one British officials description of having seen tongues cut out, breasts hacked off, every imaginable
horror perpetrated.33 So, on balance, skepticism here seems a little naive.
Given that there were no recent local precedents before 1920, these
intercommunal detonations appear all the more spectacular. Arriving in
Jerusalem on 4 April 1920, one journalist found that a hush seemed to
be over everything; immediately we saw signals being flashed from the station to a point in the city, as in wartime. Few carriages met the train and
none would go near the Old City. To our query What has happened? they
looked at us blankly and hurried off.34 Eight years later it was the same
story: during the outbreak, Jerusalem was reported to have been a city of
the deadeverywhere it is deadly quiet, and everyone is very nervous.35
Riots, in short, were locally electrifying. But conflict was not yet obviously
a total system. In practice, there remained limits. Spatially, the diffusion of
trouble was highly uneven: Horowitz usefully observes that the 1921 riots
in Palestine spread from Jaffa up and down the coastal plain but not inland
to Jerusalem, whereas those in 1929 spread from Jerusalem south to Hebron
and north to Sefad [sic] but not to the coast.36
Participation also remained uneven. Rioting on this scale and of this
intensity is hard to explain without presuming strong communal support (or
at least permissiveness) on the part of Palestinian Arab society. My father
massacred them [in Hebron] and brought back stuff recalled one 92-year
old Palestinian woman simply in 2011.37 Yet, this still is a very long way
indeed from assuming universal support, let alone enthusiasm, for butchery.
It often was noted with a hint of surprise that many Jews were saved by
Arab neighbors.38 But here the real surprise lies surely not in the mere existence of compassion but in the scale of its (relative) triumphs. On the Arab
side, people of goodwill often found the inner confidence in August 1929
to stand up directly to the massacring crowd: according to Aharon
Bernzweigs account of how he survived at Hebron, all the while the wild
murderers kept screaming at the Arabs who were standing guard to hand
over the Jews.39 It is instructive here to jump ahead nearly 20 years to offer a
comparative snapshot. In December 1947, the people of goodwill were also
still in evidence. But their options for resisting polarization had effectively
disappeared. When Samy Aboussouan wished to protect his Jewish friends
shops from looting, he could only think of painting them with crosses to
signifyfalselythat these were (Christian) Arab businesses.40 It is not to
impugn Aboussouans courage to point out that this was not a rejection of

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63

the logic of communal polarization. Instead, it was an act that re-entrenched

the assumptions of that very polarization process (albeit to a tiny degree
and with the most admirable of motives). By the dawn of 1948, then, the
conflict had long shifted from a pattern of limited outbursts from Arab
society evident in 192021 towards becoming a totalizing system; a circle
of atrocity that enmeshed even the least committed and most tolerant in its
implications.41 It is to this shift that I now wish to turn.

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THE EMERGENCE OF RECIPROCAL INTERCOMMUNAL

VIOLENCE, C. 192948
The year 1929 was clearly the key moment here. Unrest on this scale both
exceeded the level of containable violence and confirmed the potential
ungovernability of Palestine.42 Massacre had not been prevented, of course.
But Jewish efforts at communal defense had been notably vigorous, taking perhaps six Arab lives.43 Here, the longer term upshot of August 1929
was that Zionists were persuaded of the need for a powerful militia.44 On
the Palestinian Arab side, alienation with the British government was deepened (and further entrenched by the police gunning down 26 demonstrators
at Jaffa in October 1933). As the rise of European fascism prompted increased Jewish immigration, the intercommunal politics of Mandate Palestine
was further destabilized. Against these developments, the Al-Buraq Rising
of 1929 appeared to offer to some Palestinians a partial template for future action: as one Haifa notable ominously put it, successful opposition to
Zionism would be achieved by doing what we did in 1929, but using more
efficient methods.45 More efficient (or at least more paramilitarized) methods were indeed to be enthusiastically explored by all sides between 1936
and 1939. Here the short-lived guerrilla movement of Sheikh Al-Qassam in
1935 showed the shape of things to come.
The violence of the Great Revolt (or thawra) of 193639 has long defied
simple categorization: in Charles Townshends formulation, the sporadic,
acephalous nature of Arab violence, the bitter internecine terrorism of the
Palestinian factions, their primitive resentments and unsophisticated political
formulations seemed (and can still seem) to place the revolt in an unclassifiable limbo between anarchy and bewegung.46 Scholarly attention has
tended to focus (1) upon the guerrilla insurgency (between Arab rebels and
the British state) and (2) upon the emergence of an intracommunal struggle (within Arab society).47 In general, it is accepted that insurgency was
eventually undermined by intracommunal violence. Indeed, the political scientist Stathis Kalyvas cites the 193639 Revolt in Palestine as a paradigmatic
illustration of his thesis that patterns of violence in civil wars can best be explained by accepting the primacy of interpersonal politics over the national
or ethnic.48

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But the third major strand to the Revolt has remained relatively neglected
by scholars; intercommunal violence. Such violence has tended to be treated
as either peripheral to the real struggle between Arab insurgents and the
state. Or it is treated as essentially epiphenomenal; the apparent assumption
being that, like insurgency, the intercommunal conflict was undercut by intracommunal violence.49 The analytical neglect of intercommunal violence
is striking. After all, the Revolt erupted in April 1936 out of the killing and
mutilation of Jewish passengers taken off a bus near Nablus; an attack by
Qassamite remnants, which probably had as its purpose the intensification
of tension and the instigation of inter-communal riots between Arabs and
Jews.50 Andwithout denying the central significance of British political
and military initiatives (or Arab infighting) to the course of eventsit is arguably important to keep the phenomenon of intercommunal disturbances
at the very center of analysis. After all, it was this intercommunal struggle
that provided the detailed template for future turmoil. When civil war broke
out on 30 November 1947, it began in the pattern of 193639 with a bus
ambush.51 In short, the intercommunal violence deserves rather closer attention than it has tended to receive.

THE EMERGENCE OF INTERCOMMUNAL VIOLENCE AS A SYSTEM

Samy Aboussouans microintervention in the conflict invites reflection about
how 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-fronts
as a sign to deflect looters.52 This pattern recurred in August 1929.53 In
August 1938, it was reported from Jerusalem that there has been a marked
increase in the last day or two in the designation of Arab premises with
the cross-and-crescent sign on their door or shutters, in all the mixed areas
along Jaffa Road, Allenby Street, the German Colony and other quarters.54 It
was the same story in Haifa: an order, signed by the District Commissioner,
has been promulgated prohibiting the emplacement of any sign or mark on
any shop, factory, business premises, house or any other building, within
the municipal area of Haifa (except for schools, hospitals or places of worship) which indicate the race or religion of the owners and occupants.55
Regardless of piety or even belief, religiously ascribed definitions of an individuals communal identity were simply too convenient a short-hand not to
be employed by those looking to define communal boundaries sharply.
Religious daubing thus powerfully supplemented all the other strategies
of tellingthe series of observational practices that individuals perform
to locate a stranger in one identity category or another.55 Christians and
Moslems could be fixed as Arabs, others as Jews. Of course, there were
other 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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65

Zionist. I am a native of the place. They wear European clothes). Some

possibilities for confusion (or even tactical miscuing) did exist. Even under
the Mandate 20% of the Jews in the Yishuv were of Mizrahi origin: One
imagines that they could pass more easily for Arabs if they wished. But
they did not serve as any fundamental go-between community to the Arab
Christian/Moslem population: they remained firmly Jews, even if they were
ones who spoke Arabic.
Why were the authorities in Haifa so desperate to outlaw this practice
of marking shop-fronts with religious symbols? My suggestion is that they
intuitively understood the explosive implications of this kind of instant identification. It meant that strangers could be categorized as representatives of
one community or the other. The best analysis of how violence that is based
on this kind of representative targeting works in practice has been offered
by Frank Wright:
If anyone of a great number of people can be punished for something
done by the community they come from, and if the communities are
sufficiently clearly defined, there is a risk that anyone attacking a member
of the other community can set in motion an endless chain of violence.
Even if few aspects of representative violence enjoy widespread support
of the kind that could be established by opinion polls, it is only necessary
for people to understand what is happening for it to create a generalised
danger.57

In effect, then, unpredictable targeting within strictly predictable identity

categories creates a universalized fearEveryone now walks about with a
target on their back.58
The shift towards a more reciprocal pattern of tit-for-tat attacks between
Jews and Arabs in the 1930s had totalizing implications. With the exception of
the slaughter of 19 Jews at Tiberias on 2 October 1938, ethnic riot massacres
disappeared.59 Yet, a general level of threat now became systematic. This
was new. Riots can only ever be local. But the drive-by shooting can be
anywhere 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 observed
Winifred Coate in December 1937.61 The Chief Secretary to the Government
of Palestine, Sir William Battershill, thought he would never get used to this
loathsome assassination: a perfectly innocent Jew shot dead while sitting
in a motor bus, and an equally innocent Arab shot dead at close range in the
middle of a residential part of Jerusalem at 10 in the morning.62 Palestine
has spent an apprehensive weekend, reported the Times, not lacking in
signs that Arabs are trying to get their own back in the inter-communal game
of tit-for-tat. Shooting, bomb-throwing, stoning and stabbing incidents have
resulted in injury to 31 Jews.63

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As in the north of Ireland, this emerging pattern of confrontation was

predicated upon an absolute clarity of division between rival communities.
Residential segregation both affected, and was further entrenched by, the
processes of violent confrontation. The Jewish Agencys own statistics for
violent incidents between April and October 1936 portray the shift away from
the ethnic riot or pogromic model of confrontation that had involved intimate
assaults on Jews in their own homes. Face-to-face violence had certainly not
disappeared: 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 their
own: Excluding Tel Aviv, there had been 26 assaults on Jews in Jewish
Quarters within Town[s] but 143 in Mixed Quarters. In rural areas, only 11
assaults had taken place in Jewish settlements but three times that number
(33) on the outskirts of those settlements. Moving around between Jewish
areas of settlement was also risky: There had been 128 assaults on roads and
railways.65 There was a clear premonition here of the War of the Roads of
late 1947early 1948.
Of course, the Jewish Agencys figures give us a snapshot of only one
half of this intercommunal conflict. Both under the loose auspices of sanctioned militias, such as the Settlement Police, and unofficially, Jewish militants were drawn into cycles of retaliation.66 Integrated communities also
separated out early; by late April 1936, it was reported that queues of people have been waiting outside the Tel Aviv police station to obtain escorts
so as to enable them to remove their household effects and clothing from
the mixed boundary quarters.67 Boundary lines between Arab and Jewish
neighborhoods became flashpoints and the scenes for prolonged exchanges
of sniping and bomb-throwing.68 Buses became a favorite target for militants
on each side. Exactly the same confrontations re-emerged in exactly the
same places in late 1947.69 By that stage, indeed, travelling between Arab
and Jewish quarters of Jerusalem had become like crossing between two
foreign countries.70
Dynamics of intercommunal conflict in (urban) Palestine in 193639
had thus begun closely to resemble those of Belfast in 192022 (or, indeed,
196972).71 In his comparative analysis of Northern Ireland, Frank Wright
has argued the drift towards segregation tends both to entrench, but also to
restrain, intercommunal violence: the fewer and more impregnable the interfaces the less are the possibilities for small groups to detonate hostilities.72
For my own part, I have argued elsewhere that intercommunal violence in
Northern Ireland has tended to be constrained by tacitly accepted prohibitions on transgressive violence: the targeting of women or children, sexual
violence, or the careful mutilation of the dead.73 Destabilizing provocations
have thus tended to remain exceptional.
How close, then, was intercommunal violence in Mandate Palestine ever
to developing along more self-regulating Northern Irish lines? Certainly

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there is some evidence of restraint. The Jewish Agencys figures suggest

a pronounced skewing of Arab violence in accordance with chivalric
conventions: 355 Jewish men had been wounded between April and October 1936, as opposed to 50 women.74 Only 21 children aged under 10
had been injured.75 And as an impressionistic assessment only, practices of
intercommunal rape and mutilation do seem to have been a less prominent
feature of the violence than in the previous decade, though both still occurred.76 Against this evidence of potential restraint, however, there were
other forces pushing for dramatic escalation. And while tit-for-tat attacks
tended to be roughly mimetic in scalea couple of people shot on each
side here, an exchange of hand grenades therethe discovery of bombs
planted on a Tel Aviv beach to catch Jewish sunbathers suggested the possibility of much more creative initiatives in atrocity.77 These were not long in
coming, 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 enigmatic. No one else in terrorism was doing what they were doing in the late
1930s. For instance, although scholars have tended to take at face value the
Irguns claims to have been inspired by Irish Republicanism, the praxis of
the Irgun was nothing like that of the IRA (for whom five civilian deaths
was a publicity disaster in 1939).78 By contrast, the Irguns embrace of terror
in the summer of 1938 was both enthusiastic and wholehearted: somebody
took the trouble to pack their bombs with three-quarter-inch rivets.79 While
the exact death toll of any individual bombing attack will naturally depend
upon all sorts of circumstantial vagaries, the Irguns general intention to
cause maximum carnage is unmistakeable. To cite just the most spectacular instances: 21 were killed in an attack on the melon market at Haifa (6
July 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 obvious
contemporary parallels. Indeed, they are very much on a par with the most
notorious of later twentieth-century terrorist atrocities: the bombings at Birmingham in 1974 (21); the Hamas bus bombing in 1996 (26) or at Omagh in
1998 (28).80 The dramatic bulge Irgun caused in overall Arab casualty rates
persisted nearly to the end of the revolt. Thus, in February 1939, 93 Arab
casualties were caused by murder/attempted murder; of these no less than
61 had resulted from a bomb in Haifa on 27th.81 Likewise in June 1939, 42
out of 68 such Arab casualties were caused by a bomb, again in Haifa (on
19th). When the Arabs make a bomb, Arab peasants at Bir Zeit observed
at the time, it kills perhaps half a dozen people. If the Jews make one it
will kill sixty. This was scarcely an exaggeration.82 Irguns own celebratory
attitude to terror clearly owed much to older eastern European revolutionary
traditions, but the ease with which it embraced mass-casualty attacks still
defies 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 spectacular
mutual car-bomb exchanges of 194748.83
But the phenomenon of the summer 1938 bombing campaign begs
deeper questions about the overall structure of the conflict as well. The
Irgun, of course, emerged out of a militant Revisionist subculture that was
largely repudiated by mainstream Zionism. Tensions were deep, were occasionally violent and contained only with difficulty. Divisions in Arab society
went even deeper and were highly explosive; as is well recognized, under
the pressure of British military and divisive political initiatives, the Revolt
eventually spawned a welter of factional infighting. In effect, the Revolt
evolved into an internal Palestinian civil war. But the wider point here is
that inter- and intracommunal divisions in 193639 Palestine do not seem
to have cancelled each other out. This is, to say the least, counterintuitive.
One might expect intercommunal conflict to have overwhelmed intracommunal divisions: a group rallies in the face of the common enemy. Or one
might expect the prevalence of intracommunal violence to have depressed
the potential for intercommunal violence, essentially, the Kalyvas-ian model
where innumerable microconflicts fragment any larger group solidarity.84
Yet, in Palestine, neither of these scenarios prevailed. Instead, inter- and intracommunal violence appear to have been (at least roughly) synchronized.
Both, indeed, rose sharply in 193738 and continued at high levels into
1939.85
How can we explain this problem? My argument would be that interand intracommunal violence can be more complementary forces than they
may first appear. The key point here is that internal fragmentation of communal authority frees up militants to commit atrocities for which their whole
community can then be held accountable, further fuelling macrocycles of representative violence. In effect, each side risks becoming hostage to its own
most aggressive elements. As the British authorities put it with remarkable
detachment, hotheads among both communities had caused regrettable incidents.86 The Arab mayor of Lydda similarly informed a local Jewish leader
in the tense days of January 1947: We want peace with you and have
announced it in the town and its environs. But you know that there are
people without sense and responsibility who might do silly things off their
own bat.87 Like a see-saw, this was a situation in which all the capacity for
change lay at the extremes.
My basic contention here is that intercommunal and intracommunal violence work in different ways and they have different effects. At its most
intense, intercommunal or representative violence approaches becoming a
closed system: it creates a generalized fear because there appears to be
no escape from it. Hilda Wilson, who was teaching at Bir Zeit in the hills
outside Jerusalem thought that town terrorism . . . always seemed so much
worse than our troops-and-rebel affairs out in the country.88 Intracommunal
violence is not likely to be so all-embracing in the sense of threat that it

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projectssince it occurs within the confines of one community, and indeed

will often run through families, mediators (and the plain uncommitted) stand
a better chance of preventing polarization from becoming a self-sustaining
total system. Wilson was thus surprised to find gunmen from the rival
Husseini and Nashashibi factions easily socializing with each other in early
1939.89 Conversely, though, intracommunal conflict often tends towards fratricidal toxicity. Wilson vividly depicts the aftermath of a visit by a rebel band
to Bir Zeit:
[A]ll that evening an atmosphere of terror brooded like a thick cloud over
the 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 believe
we had not telephoned, and they would have their revenge sooner or
later.90

It may certainly be methodologically challenging to try to identify and categorize different types, and effects, of fearful atmosphere. But it is also vital.
Arguably, the weakness here of Kalyvas (otherwise impressive) work on violence is its profound indifference to questions of resonance. Different types
of threat have different ripple effects, but, on occasion, they can overlap and
reinforce each other. That, I argue, is what happened in Palestine in 193739.
Nor was this a transitory episode. Over 90 years or so, indeed, the ZionistPalestinian conflict has been characterized by the reinforcement of sharp
division between national communities by massive centrifugal heterogeneity
within them: a recipe for acute intractability.

ESCALATION: FROM REPRESENTATIVE VIOLENCE TO ETHNIC

CLEANSING, 194048
Compared to intercommunal hostilities in 193639, the striking feature of the
conflict that erupted at the end of 1947 was, first, how similarly it began,
and then, how differently it ended. Though everyone in the Yishuv expected conflict at some point in the future, and violence indeed erupted on
November 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 out
to be bewilderingly fast and driven, primarily, by external forces. Six years
of total war, the revelation of the Nazi genocide of the European Jews
and Jewish insurgency in Palestine (194447) sharply converged to prompt
Britains spectacular abdication of all moral and practical responsibility for
Palestine in early 1948. Unsurprisingly, the resultant statist vacuum acted as
a pressure cooker for intercommunal tensions.
By this juncture neither mutual fear (deterrence) nor mutual decency (all
those 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 graphically

illustrated by the abrupt re-emergence of large-scale close-quarter massacres
on the ethnic riot model. Randall Collins notion of the forward panic as a
release from an atmosphere of chronic threat is useful here:

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[A] forward panic is violence that for the time being is unstoppable. It is
overkill, the overuse of force far beyond what would have been needed
to bring about the victory. Persons who have fallen off the point of
tension into a forward panic situation have gone down into a tunnel and
cannot stop their momentum.93

This seems to fit well with events at Haifa oil refinery on 30 December
1947: after an Irgun bomb attack had killed six, Arab workers spontaneously butchered 39 Jews.94 Perhaps it also covers the notorious Deir Yassin
massacre of 9 April 1947, if, that is, one accepts that Irgun/Lehi atrocities
there were a reaction to encountering resistance that was much stronger
than they had anticipated.95 What was different from the 1920s, however,
was that the balance of aggression had shifted dramatically: now Zionist militants made most of the running. Indeed, Benny Morris estimates that Jewish
forces conducted perhaps two dozen pre-state massacres.96 By contrast,
Arab massacres were often the culmination of successful ambushes along
the roads. But the conflict also manifested significant escalatory innovations
as well. Here, indeed, the brutalization effect of the Second World War
was more evident than that of the First World War had been: bomb-making
capacity leapt on both sides as a result of military training.97 The exchange
of car bombs that flared between January and March 1948 was brief but
furious.98 It arguably came closer than almost any other terrorist campaign
to achieving what terrorism is meant to achievethe utter demoralization
of entire communities.
In the event, though, the displacement of much of Arab society in
Palestine was achieved through more paramilitary means. What is striking
here is how conventional restraintsthe relatively low 1930s levels of intercommunal rape and mutilationswere overwhelmed as hostilities escalated into civil war in the spring of 1948. Mutilation was often portrayed by
British and Jewish commentators as overwhelmingly Palestinian (a particularly revolting Arab custom).99 But it is hard to be definitive here about
relative frequency: certainly, mutilation could also be an Irgun speciality.100
Rape, however, thrived on both sides; in late March 1947, Burton records
the leaders of the Arab Liberation Army boasting of the Jewish mistresses
they were going to take (three each, apparently), but, in the event, it was
the Jewish forces, being more often on the offensive, that had significantly
greater opportunity.101 Perhaps a key point to note here is chronology: atrocity allegations cluster from the point in the spring of 1948 when hostilities
became increasingly militarized and, ultimately indeed, internationalized.102

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Indeed, Ilan Pappes discussion of Jewish rape of Arab women draws only
on examples after the British withdrawal.103 This takes us into the period
of Israeli state formation and conventional war. But one point has emerged
very clearly out of the historiographical controversies of the last 25 years:
demonstrative atrocity was central to the ethnic cleansing of Palestine in
1948.104

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EPILOGUE: INTERCOMMUNAL VIOLENCE IN ISRAEL SINCE 1948 . . .

In May 1948, the withdrawal of the British, the collapse of Arab society in
Palestine, and the successful creation of the Israeli state combined to tilt
the Zionist-Palestinian conflict from a horizontal to a vertical axis. For the
shattered remnant of Arab society that remained within the borders of the
new Israeli state, the very scale of their defeat invited quiescence. Abher Cohens key 1965 study Arab Border-Villages in Israel paints a vivid portrait of
a village community that turns in on itself culturally as it is inexorably drawn
into the orbit of the Israeli economy and state: on the individual level, the
uncertainties attending the Arab-Jewish dispute led villagers to organize for
security and also to adopt a policy of wait and see.105 But what is clear
is that the hegemony of the Israeli state over this population was enduring.
Indeed, Ian Lustick dedicated his classic 1980 study Arabs in the Jewish State
to explaining the absence of intercommunal or antistate conflict in Israel.106
The potential for violence was not absent, but it took the top-down form
of 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 intercommunal hostilities of Mandate days: it appears to represent the decisive
shattering of the representative violence paradigm of 193639 or, indeed,
late 1947 to early 1948. My argument here is that there may be rather more
potential for this violence to re-emerge than has commonly been thought.
At least since 1967, the fate of the Palestinian populations in the Occupied
Territories has served as something of a cautionary tale for the Palestinian
Arab minority in Israel of how their fate could be worse. Any change in
the status of the Occupation of the West Bank may well have destabilizing
effects for intercommunal violence within Israel as well.109
What perhaps is most intriguing here is the persistence of old templates
of mobilization. Where riots have assumed a more intercommunal character,
rioters have tended to do very much the same things as they would have
done in, say, 1936. The first target is the roads: these are blocked and passing
Jewish traffic stoned.110 And, despite the scale of population flight in 194748,
we might also note the striking reappearance of some very old flashpoints.

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T. Wilson

The village of Umm el-Fahm was a center of militancy in 193639, but it

has also seen rioting since in 1958, 1976, 1987, 2000, and 2010 (as well
as developing as a focal point for Islamic Movement demonstrations).111
Likewise, the seam boundary between Tel Aviv and Jaffa that was so often
inflamed in 192021, 193639, and 194748 also saw sustained rioting in
2000.112
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 the
bewilderment of residents struggling to comprehend a process of polarization that threatened to overwhelm the resources of individual decency and
goodwill. As one activist for intercommunal cooperation put it, The tension
is very high here, things are on a knife-edge.113 One Jewish woman, Sylvie
Vaknin, was reported as saying after her house was stoned that I have
many Arab friends, my doctor is an Arab but the bottom line now is that I
dont feel secure. In the assessment of one Israeli-Arab fruit-juice seller: In
Acre, Arab and Jew have always lived in harmonythose who did this are
the extremist minority from either side. Representative violence reinforces
communal boundaries whether individuals wish that or not. Mrs. Vaknin
said an Israeli-Arab friend had visited to apologize for the events: He said
he was so embarrassed and ashamed.114 And mixed communities began
to fragment with alarming speed: Many neighbourhood residents have fled
their homes since the rioting erupted.115 Even if overshadowed by more
spectacular violence elsewhere in the Territories, sustained intercommunal
riots in Israels mixed cities are an ominous precedent: Akko was a warning. Cities of mixed Jewish-Arab populations are the pressure cookers of
Israel and the question is not whether there will be more clashes, but when
and where they will occur.116 In the words of the Prime Minister, Ehud
Olmert, Akko residents had become hostages of small zealots from both
sides.117

. . . AND THE OCCUPIED TERRITORIES

In a 1990 article, Kenneth Stein pointed out some of the striking parallels and contrasts between the 19361939 Revolt and the First Intifada then
raging in Palestine.118 Yet, intercommunal violence was not foregrounded
in Steins account. Stein claimed that the Palestinian intifada participants
aimed at the Israeli occupation as their central target, rather than attacking
Israelis or physical symbols of the occupation, such as Jewish settlements
and British strategic objectives as was the case in the 19369 uprising.119
This contrast seems a little too neat: after all, a low level war of stonethrowing and settler shootings has accompanied the Intifada. Once more
a (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 the
Occupied Territories in the 1980s than there had been between the British
government and the Yishuv in the 1930s, there still left ample space for
settler vigilantism to flourish. As one settler leader put it, during a road patrol to deter stone-throwers, we are not obligated in the same way as the
Army, who are under orders not to shoot. We may do whatever is correct
in order to enforce security.120 Indeed, in the first two years of the First
Intifada alone, Israeli settlers killed at least 34 Palestinians, almost all adult
males.121
Of course, the main axis of confrontation continued along the vertical lines established by the Occupation, and the main killer remained the
Israeli state. No less than 1,376 Palestinians were killed in the Occupied
Territories by Israeli state forces between the outbreaks of the First and Second Intifadas. But, at a lower level of carnage, settler-Palestinian violence
still 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 (including
East Jerusalem); another 177 were killed within Israel proper. In the same
period, 115 Palestinians were killed by Israeli civilians.122 More ominous, still,
was the development of Hamas suicide attacks into Israel proper: buses and
markets were favorite targets, just as they had been way back in the 1930s.
Here, Hamas proved themselves worthy descendants of the Irgun tradition
of carnage making, although their individual attacks struggled to exceed the
victim totals set back in 193839.
Since the outbreak of the Second Intifada, within the Occupied Territories settler-Palestinian violence has been predictably eclipsed by Israeli state
violence. Between 29 September 2000 and 31 July 2012, Israeli forces have
killed 6,492 Palestinians. Seven hundred and fifty-four Israeli civilians (both
in Israel and the Territories) have been killed by Palestinian action. Israeli
civilians (that is, settlers) have killed 50 Palestinians within the Territories.
In addition, intracommunal fighting between Hamas-Fatah has accounted
for 671 Palestinian lives.123 One comparative reading of these two periods
of 19872000 and 20002012 would be that, while fatal attacks by settlers
on Palestinians have indeed declined, this may simply reflect more effective
repression of Palestinians by the Israeli state. As the price-tag policy of the
Hilltop Youth movement has indicated with admirable clarity, any literal or
metaphorical retreat by the Israeli state from the Territories is likely to be
accompanied by a compensatory spike in settler violence: for every outpost
demolished by the Israeli military, they will target Palestinians in revenge.124
Objectively, minor acts of graffiti and arson by the price-tag movement have
massive resonance because they hint so clearly at the possibility of future
escalation towards intercommunal civil war. The net outcome here is that the
Israeli state has not so much transcended intercommunal conflict as much
as been imprisoned by its implications.

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CONCLUSION
In this article, I have attempted to trace the evolution of the ZionistPalestinian conflict from the bottom-up. In doing so, I certainly do not
mean to belittle the importance of the high politics or the external interventions. But I have deliberately attempted to refocus attention on the grassroots
forces as (at least partially) autonomous in their own right. In the aftermath
of the Balfour Declaration, violent conflict tended to take the sporadic, but
spectacular, form of the largely one-sided ethnic riot. The year 1929 was
a watershed here. After this point, Jewish self-defense became better organized. The mid-1930s saw the emergence of representative violence, a form
of intercommunal violence, that I have argued is particularly effective in
spreading a generalized atmosphere of fear. We might also note in passing
that it was in the very nature of the Zionist project to undercut deterrence
possibilities. Such truces function best when communities are most cleanly
separated into homogenous territorial blocs, but Zionist leaders worked hard
to resist the natural tendency of Jewish populations to huddle defensively and
to retreat from exposed peripheries.125 Condemned to be expansionistfor
it could not abdicate its claim to settle the land without implodingZionism
endlessly multiplied awkward enclaves and friction points for the future.
The roads between them thus became the obvious lightning conductors for
intercommunal tension.
What was striking about the conflict system that emerged at this point
in Palestine was its dangerous combination of a clear central cleavage with
extreme communal fragmentation on each side. This was better disguised
and controlled in the Yishuv, but even here a high degree of internal centrifugalism was still present. Any stability premised on deterrence was particularly threatened by aggressive splinter groups, amongst which the most
notable was the Irgun. Whilst other deeply divided societies eventually may
settle down into what Frank Wright called tranquillity (that is, a sort of
intercommunal Cold War), in Palestine, such truces have proved especially
fragile. British withdrawal and collapse into civil war in 194748 precluded
any possibility of the conflict reaching a state of equilibrium, however unstable. Deterrence arrangementslocal nonaggression pacts, restraints on
transgressive violencewere simply swept away.
The 1948 war thus transformed the conflict and appearedfor a long
whileto have banished the prospect of representative violence for good.
Nonetheless, recent disturbances within Israel proper once again bear a
rather striking pattern to 1930s and 1940s precedents. While maintaining the
occupation of the post-1967 territories has necessitated the full weight of
the Israeli state, settler vigilantism lurks in the background as an ominous
reminder that any meaningful withdrawal of the Israeli state from its own
Occupation is likely to reignite intercommunal violence at levels last seen
in the first half of the twentieth century. Not even the subcontraction of
the Occupation in the West Bank to the Palestinian Authority since 1993

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has succeeded in hiding that reality completely. Recent disturbances within

Israel proper (2000, 2008) are also a major cause for concern. Representative
violence lurked in the background of the Zionist/Palestinian conflict for
much of the twentieth century. Yet, its re-emergence at moments when state
authority has receded (1948) or attempted to liberalize (intermittently in the
1990s and after) have been dramatically destabilizing.
If Benvenistis 1990 vision was accurate that the greater Israel that
emerged from the 1967 war had become by the 1980s a deeply divided
society and not, as some still saw it, two societies within one territory,
then any projected political settlement will have to contend with the likelihood of profound shocks at the level of grassroots relations between
communitieswhether in one state or two.126 Any retreat of Israeli state
hegemony, any significant weakening in the main center of power, is likely
to be followed by destabilizing surges in representative violence from below. And here the political rise of the rioting teenager on both sidesfirst
portended in the First Intifada, but more recently in the Akko disturbances
and Hilltop Youth as wellmay very well serve as the harbinger of future
crises to come.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I am deeply indebted to my two anonymous reviewers for their incisive
criticisms. I also wish to acknowledge the invaluable financial assistance of
the Council for British Research in the Levant (CBRL) in funding research in
Jerusalem. Debbie Usher, the archivist at the Middle East Centre Archive at
St. Antonys, 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 University
Press, 1990), 118. It should be noted that my primary interest is on the existence of a fundamental
national/communal cleavage in Israel/Palestine rather than on national identity itself. Thus, I use terms
such as Arab, Palestinian, Palestinian Arab without meaning to imply that these different emphases
have 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, 18821914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 203.
8. A. Shapira, Land and Power: The Zionist Resort to Force, 18811948 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992) 48, 6971.
9. N. Rose, A Senseless, Squalid War: Voices from Palestine 1890s1948 (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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T. Wilson

11. C. Townshend, The Defence of Palestine: Insurrection and Public Security, 19361939, The
English Historical Review 103(409): 949 (1988).
12. E. Horne, A Job Well Done: A History of the Palestine Police Force 19201948 (Lewes: The
Book Guild, 1982, 2003), 3564, 12158.
13. T. K. Wilson, Frontiers of Violence: Conflict and Identity in Ulster and Upper Silesia,
19181922 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 5 [for Ulster and Upper Silesia]; M. Davis, Budas
Wagon: A Brief History of the Car Bomb (London: Verso, 2007), 14 [for Catalonia]; C. Townshend, When
God Made Hell: The British Invasion of Mesopotamia and the Creation of Iraq, 19141921 (London: Faber,
2010), 476.

14. P. Wrobel,
The Seeds of Violence: The Brutalization of an East European Region, 19171921,
Journal of Modern European History 1: 12549 (2003). For general discussion of brutalization, N.
Ferguson, The Pity of War (London: Penguin, 1999), 38894; R. Gerwarth and J. Horne, Vectors of
Violence: Paramilitarism in Europe after the Great War, 19171923, The Journal of Modern History 83(3):
489512 (2011).
15. A. Cohen, Arab Border Villages in Israel: A Study of Continuity and Change in Social Organization (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1965), 43; R. Storrs, Orientations (London: Nicholson
and Watson, 1945), 287, 294; A. Marcus, Jerusalem 1913: The Origins of the Arab-Israeli Conflict (New
York: Viking, 2007), 14449.
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 19141918: 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, Manchester
Guardian, 9 July 1917; Segev, One Palestine, 24.
18. Quoted in T. Bowden, The Breakdown of Public Security: The Case of Ireland 19161921
and Palestine 19361939 (London: Sage Publications, 1977), 149.
19. See, for example, Rhodes House (RH), Oxford: Blackburne Papers, Box 3, Diary of Disturbances, 1275; also see H. Simpson, British Rule in Palestine and the Arab Rebellion of 19361937
(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 19381946, Middle Eastern Studies
2(3): 182 (1966).
22. [British] National Archives (NA), CO 733/3, page 239. For a similar observation see C. Townshend, Britains Civil Wars (London: Faber, 1986), 90. For weapons in 1920 including a three-foot sword:
Middle East Centre Archive [MEC], St. Anthonys, Oxford, Adamson Papers, GB 165-0001, The Holy Riots
in 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, 19181920, 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, 12744, 173201, 31427. 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 19171929 (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, 192831, The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 30(2): 3435 (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 Massacred
Them 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, Britains Civil Wars, 102.
43. Horne, A Job, 149.
44. B. Morris, Righteous Victims: A History of the Zionist-Arab Conflict, 18812001 (New York:
Vintage, 1999, 2001), 12021.
45. Quoted in S. Lachman, Arab Rebellion and Terrorism in Palestine 192939: The Case of
Sheikh Izz Al-Din Al-Qassam and his Movement, in E. Kedourie and S. Haim, eds., Zionism and Arabism
in 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 193639, English Historical Review, CXXIV(507): 313354
(2009); M. Hughes, From Law and Order to Pacification: Britains Suppression of the Arab Revolt in
Palestine, 193639, Journal of Palestine Studies 39(2): 622 (2010); Y. Porath, The Palestinian Arab
National Movement: From Riots to Rebellion: 19291939 (London: Frank Cass, 1977), Volume 2; T.
Swedenburg, Memories of Revolt: The 19361939 Rebellion and the Palestinian National Past (Fayettville:
The University of Arkansas Press, 2003); Townshend, Defence of Palestine, 91749.
48. S. Kalyvas, The Logic of Violence in Civil War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006),
45.
49. Porath, From Riots, 23394.
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 of
Revolt, 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 19181948 (London: Thames and
Hudson, 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, 21820.

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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, 109110.
70. Collins and Lapierre, O Jerusalem, 86.
71. Wilson Frontiers of Violence 17881.
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, 19291949 (New
York: St. Martins Press, 1977), 39. This spurred Irgun attempts at retaliation. See also: Mutilated Body of
a Jew Found, Palestine Post, 9 Sept. 1937.
77. Palestine Post, 19 July and 16 August 1937.
78. For the IRAs badly-timed bomb at Coventry: Times, 26 Aug. 1939. For supposed Irish influence on the Irgun and Lehi movements: Bowyer Bell, Terror Out of Zion, 40; J. Spyer, The Birth of the
Idea of Revolt: The Irish Example and the Irgun Tzvai Leumi, in R. Miller, ed., Ireland and the Middle
East: Trade, Society and Peace (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2007), 4355.
79. Times, 26 July 1938. See also: Morris, Righteous Victims, 117.
80. Regrettably, the Irguns 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 Terrorism
25(5): 27992 (2002).
81. War Office statistics, reproduced in Bowman, The Breakdown, 251.
82. Middle East Centre Archive [MEC], St. Anthonys, Oxford: Miss H.M. Wilson Papers, GB
165-0302, p. 68.
83. Davis, Budas Wagon, 19.
84. S. Kalyvas and M. Kocher, Ethnic Cleavages and Irregular War: Iraq and Vietnam, Politics
and Society 35(2): 183223 (2007).
85. Morris, Righteous Victims, 12260.
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-whathappened-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, 15961.
98. Davis, Budas Wagon, 28.
99. P. Bruton, A Captains Mandate: Palestine 19461948 (London: Pen and Sword Books,
1996), 117.
100. Morris, The Birth, 216.
101. Burton, A Captains Mandate, 130. There is a rather symmetrical recollection of Jews preparing to assault an Arab village (in April 1948) and looking forward to a rendezvous with the daughter of
the Mukhtar [village headman]: U. Avnery, 1948: A Soldiers 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, O
Jerusalem!, 368. As in 19361939, Arab forces also raped Arab women: Morris, The Birth, 173, 216.
For Jewish mutilations and rape/sexual abuse, see A. Sadi and L. Abu-Lughod, Nakba: Palestine, 1948,
and the Claims of Memory (New York: Columbia Press, 2007), 31, 35, 21112. Also: Morris, The Birth,
220, 238, 25758; J. Beinin, Review, Middle East Report 230: 38 (2004); Y. Gelber Appendix II: Propaganda as History: What Happened at Deir Yassin? (2006); Anonymous, Jewish Atrocities in the Holy

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Land (Cairo: The Arab League Information Bureau, 1949), 8, 1415. Jewish paramilitaries were reported
as mutilating (perhaps castrating?) an Arab man who had raped Jewish girls: Palestine Post, 25 April
1947.
103. I. Pappe, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (Oxford: One World, 2006), 20811.
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 Middle
East Studies 32(4): 496 (2000); A. Sadi and L. Abu-Lughod, Nakba: Palestine, 1948, and the Claims of
Memory (New York: Columbia Press, 2007), 31, 35, 21112.
105. A. Cohen, Arab Border-Villages in Israel: A Study of Continuity and Change in Social Organization (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1965), 177. I am deeply indebted to my anonymous
reviewers for bringing this key work to my attention.
106. I. Lustick, Arabs in the Jewish State: Israels Control of a National Minority (Austin: University
of Texas, 1980), 38.
107. O. Stendel, The Arabs in Israel (Brighton: Sussex Academic Press, 1996), 188; L. Louer, To be
an 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), 17879. There is a
useful record of the stone-throwing and barricading in the Appendix of O. Abu, Does Civic Engagement
Work?: Explaining Sub-National Variation in Arab-Jewish Violence within Israel, Conference Paper for
25th Annual Conference of the Association for Israel Studies, 13 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 and
Extremists 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-fn3dxix61225944654
504 (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 27
Jan. 2013).
112. A. LeBor, City of Oranges: Arabs and Jews in Jaffa (London: Bloomsbury, 2006, 2007), 33,
27677.
113. Arabs Stone Jewish Baby in Akko, Hamas Calls for Solidarity, Israel National News, 11
Oct. 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 19369 Uprising: A Comparison, Journal of Palestine Studies
19(4): 6485 (1990).
119. Ibid., 73.
120. Times, 29 July 1988.
121. R. R. Stockton, Intifada Deaths, Journal of Palestine Studies 19(4): 8695 (1990).
122. BTselem figures, Fatalities in the First Intifada.
123. http://www.btselem.org/statistics/first_intifada_tables
124. 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, 9091.
126. This phrase is Adrian Guelkes summary of Benvenistis 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 Violence
and Terrorism (CSTPV) at the University of St. Andrews. He has written on the
grassroots dynamics of violence in intercommunal conflicts. He is the author of
Frontiers of Violence: Conflict and Identity in Ulster and Upper Silesia, 19181922
(Oxford University Press, 2010).