Britain’s Pacification of Palestine I Matthew Hughes I October 2022

We are joined by Professor Hughes in the third event of our series of events to mark the centenary of the British Mandate in Palestine (1922-48). Professor Hughes will use material from his recent book on Britain’s repression of the Arab revolt in the 1930s to detail Britain’s devastatingly effective methods against colonial rebellion. The British army had a long tradition of pacification that it drew upon to support operations against Palestinian rebels in 1936. An Emergency State of repressive colonial legislation underpinned and combined with military action to crush the Arab revolt. The British had established in the 1920s in Palestine a civil government that ruled by proclamation and it codified in law norms of collective punishment that British soldiers used in 1936. This was ‘lawfare’. It ground out the rebellion with legally bounded curfews, demolition, fining, detention, punitive searches, shootings, and reprisals. Such repressive legislation facilitated soldiers’ violent actions. Rebels were disorganised and unable to withstand such pacification measure, and so they lost. About the speaker: Matthew Hughes is Professor of History at Brunel University London. His 2019 Cambridge University Press book on Britain’s pacification of Palestine during the Arab revolt has been translated into Arabic by the Center for Arab Unity Studies. He is currently working on a book examining the British colonial state and British soldiers’ actions on Borneo in the 1960s during the Confrontation with Indonesia.