My Promised Land: The Triumph and Tragedy of Israel

The violence began in April 1936, when armed and masked Arab men began murdering Jews. Jews retaliated and began an escalating tit-for-tat of violence between Jews and Arabs in Palestine. By its end in 1939 approximately 415 Jews and over 5,000 Arabs had been killed. Both Arabs and Jews bore responsibility for the continuing escalation of revenge-based violence, but Jewish violence backed by British military might was more lethal than Arab violence. Short, sporadic bursts of Jewish-Arab violence had occurred before, but never to this scale, and the Arab Palestinian community had never had anything that could be described as a collective nationalist uprising before this point. The violence between 1936 and 1939 changed Zionism from blissfully utopian to dystopian conflict. Jews could no longer ignore or peacefully coexist with Arab Palestinians, who demanded Jewish-Palestinian immigration be halted.

A Royal Enquiry Commission arrived in Palestine from Britain amid the conflict and concluded the situation intolerable. In July 1937, the commission recommended to the British government that Palestine be partitioned into two nation-states: one Jewish and one Arab. This report introduced the idea of transferring the Arab Palestinian population. Zionist reality quickly became “us or them, life or death” (75).