A popular uprising by Palestinian Arabs in Mandatory Palestine against the British administration, known as the Great Revolt, and later the Great Palestinian Revolt or the Palestinian Revolution, lasted from 1936 until 1939. The movement sought independence from British colonial rule and the end of British support for Zionism, including Jewish immigration and land sales to Jews.

The uprising occurred during a peak in the influx of European Jewish immigrants, and with the growing plight of the rural fellahin rendered landless, who as they moved to metropolitan centres to escape their abject poverty found themselves socially marginalized. Since the Battle of Tel Hai in 1920, Jews and Arabs had been involved in a cycle of attacks and counter-attacks, and the immediate spark for the uprising was the murder of two Jews by a Qassamite band, and the retaliatory killing by Jewish gunmen of two Arab labourers, incidents which triggered a flare-up of violence across Palestine. A month into the disturbances, Amin al-Husseini, president of the Arab Higher Committee and Mufti of Jerusalem, declared 16 May 1936 as “Palestine Day” and called for a general strike. David Ben-Gurion, leader of the Yishuv, described Arab causes as fear of growing Jewish economic power, opposition to mass Jewish immigration and fear of the British identification with Zionism.

The general strike lasted from April to October 1936. The revolt is often analysed in terms of two distinct phases. The first phase began as spontaneous popular resistance, which was seized on by the urban bourgeois Arab Higher Committee, giving the movement an organized shape that was focused mainly on strikes and other forms of political protest, in order to secure a political result. By October 1936, this phase had been defeated by the British civil administration using a combination of political concessions, international diplomacy (involving the rulers of Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Transjordan and Yemen) and the threat of martial law. The second phase, which began late in 1937, was a peasant-led resistance movement provoked by British repression in 1936 in which increasingly British forces were targeted as the army itself increasingly targeted the villages it thought supportive of the revolt. During this phase, the rebellion was brutally suppressed by the British Army and the Palestine Police Force using repressive measures that were intended to intimidate the whole population and undermine popular support for the revolt. A more dominant role on the Arab side was taken by the Nashashibi clan, whose NDP party quickly withdrew from the rebel Arab Higher Committee, led by the radical faction of Amin al-Husseini, and instead sided with the British – dispatching “Fasail al-Salam” (the “Peace Bands”) in coordination with the British Army against nationalist and Jihadist Arab “Fasail” units (literally “bands”).

According to official British figures covering the whole revolt, the army and police killed more than 2,000 Arabs in combat, 108 were hanged, and 961 died because of what they described as “gang and terrorist activities”. In an analysis of the British statistics, Walid Khalidi estimates 19,792 casualties for the Arabs, with 5,032 dead: 3,832 killed by the British and 1,200 dead due to intracommunal terrorism, and 14,760 wounded. By one estimate, ten percent of the adult male Palestinian Arab population between 20 and 60 was killed, wounded, imprisoned or exiled. Estimates of the number of Palestinian Jews killed are up to several hundred.

The road to the 1936 revolt https://palmuseum.org/en/museum-from-home/stories-from-palestine/road-1936-revolt

THE 1936-39 REVOLT IN PALESTINE, GHASSAN KANAFANI https://pflp-documents.org/documents/PFLP-Kanafani3639.pdf

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  • sodium_nitride [she/her, any]@hexbear.netEnglish
    10·
    4 days ago

    I don’t want to seperate the art from the artist! Art is a conversation and the most meaningful artistic products I come across are the ones where I get to learn more about the author. Their viewpoint is made clear and open to challenge or interpretation.

    I know this is a fairly basic idea, but I want to emphasise it.

    • hello_hello [undecided, comrade/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
      9·
      4 days ago

      Separating art from the artist is always seem to be the excuse for shitty behavior anyway or to present a narrative of the artist somehow going through a downfall socially. It’s paradoxical as the separation of the artist from the art which is inherently valuing the artist anyways!!! shrug-outta-hecks

      • Blockocheese [any]@hexbear.netEnglish
        7·
        4 days ago

        People are so obvious when they really mean “you shouldn’t criticize someone who made something I like” like I think works created by shitty people are good but I dont lie to myself and others and say that them being a bad person is completely irrelevant to the art, and I also dont say that automatically makes the art inherently bad either

        • hello_hello [undecided, comrade/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
          3·
          4 days ago

          The liberal analysis of art and society are entirely devoid of any dialectical materialist analysis in service of the perpetuation of capital whether intentional or unintentional. It’s idealist to completely divorce the artist from the art produced as well as to attribute to the art the full responsibility of the artist.

          Any critique of art and the artist have done very little to actually change the art world in a capitalist society (nobody actually gets “cancelled”) so no wonder why this binary framing exists.