Books

Caricaturing colonialism in British Mandate Palestine

2 years ago

In 1930s Jerusalem, a young boy walks to school through the narrow, stone paved streets of the Old City. Every morning, as he reaches Damascus Gate, he passes a group of men gathered at a local coffee shop to listen to the latest news.

His name is Hazem Nusseibeh, and over eighty years later, he describes the scene to us from his home in Amman. “Big groups would come in from the villages near Jerusalem,” he says. “Their faces would be pink from all the walking and they would be carrying baskets of grapes and figs.”

He describes how men from the villages would bring their harvest into the Old City to sell it at market, then go to a coffee shop where a man would read the newspaper to them. During the 1930s, only around one in five Palestinian-Arabs could read and write, so it was common to read newspapers aloud and show the pictures and cartoons to those who were illiterate. Through these gatherings, illustrated newspapers spread their message to a wide audience, shaping the political awareness of both literate and illiterate Palestinian Arabs.

Drawing the Headlines

Gatherings like these were so widespread that after the 1929 Buraq Uprising, the British officials who had been sent to investigate the conflict reported back to His Majesty’s Government that “In almost every village there is someone who reads from the papers to the gatherings of those villagers who are illiterate. The Arab fallahin [smallholding farmers] and villagers are therefore probably more politically-minded than many of the people in Europe.”

Political cartoons always appeared on the front page of these newspapers, providing sharp critiques of political negotiations, tactics and economic developments.Yet the woman who drew the most widely read cartoons in 1930s Palestine remains shrouded in mystery. All we know is that she was a Christian from Eastern Europe, and that the owner of the newspaper Falastin, ‘Isa Daud al-‘Isa, would think up the ideas for the cartoons and ask her to draw them. Her story was told over sixty years later, in an email from ‘Isa’s son to the American academic, Sandy Sufian, just a few years before the son passed away. Had it not been for this email, this mysterious woman would have disappeared from history entirely.

Sneaking Past The Censors

At first glance, there is also something mysterious about the cartoons themselves: the way they suddenly became popular, then just as suddenly faded back into obscurity. Before and after the 1936 Great Arab Revolt, political cartoons rarely appeared in Palestinian newspapers and as the conﬂict intensiﬁed, they became more frequent.

It is no coincidence that as tensions in Palestine rose, British censorship of newspapers increased. Journalists were jailed, the publication of certain types of information was banned and daily newspapers were closed down for publishing “dangerous” articles. More than once, the British suspended all four Arabic dailies at the same time for what they considered to be provocative articles. During the early phase of the revolt, Arabic newspapers were suspended thirty-four times, while the Jewish press was suspended thirteen.

In this repressive atmosphere, political cartoons were useful because subversive messages could be shifted from the text to the image, where they were more likely to pass censorship regulations.

Though they may seem simple and direct, some of these cartoons contained multiple layers of symbolism.

The June 1936 Falastin cartoon titled The Zionist Crocodile to Palestine Arabs tells a multifaceted story about the colonization of Palestine.

The bug-eyed crocodile salivates as he prepares to devour Arab fallahin and their citrus groves, his tail emerging from the sea like a ship’s ramp. He embodies two key strategies of early Zionism: gaping jaws representing the colonization of indigenous land through Zionist land acquisition, and scaly tail alluding to the arrival of tens of thousands of European settler colonists to Palestine by ship.

In the drawing, a tall British policeman in white uniform smokes a pipe. His face resembles a bulldog, in allusion to John Bull, a fictional character often used to symbolize Great Britain in cartoons at the time. The scholar Sandy Sufian remarks that “The ofﬁcer is smiling, but this is not an innocent smile; it is more the sneer of a sly, criminal man. He is wearing heavy, cleated boots that match the black scales and claws of the Zionist crocodile, indicating congruence between the Zionists and the British.”

In the 1930s, the displacement of fallahin through Zionist land purchases was a pressing economic issue. Fallahin debt and default on credit reached critical levels, made worse by the fact that British had started to tax many previously untaxed pieces of agricultural land. The fallahin resisted by joining trade unions and political organizations, and engaging in civil protest and cultivation disputes directed at the British, Zionists and the Palestinian upper class.

Worth A Thousand Words

At a library in Beirut, a middle-aged man puts on a set of rubber gloves, takes a small reel out of the archive and attaches it to the microfilm reader. The reader is a clunky grey machine that looks something like a PC from the 1980s. The Beirut-based library of the Institute of Palestinian Studies is one of the few places where these caricatures have been preserved, but sadly much else from this period has been lost forever.

Caught up in the fervor of revolt and faced with harsh British repression, it seems Palestinian revolutionaries and their supporters had little time to document their stories and preserve their history. Much of what had existed was lost a decade later in the Nakba, as Palestinians fled their homes in the face of danger from Zionist militias. In these rare drawings, we see some of the few remaining images that tell the story of an anti-colonial consciousness awakening in British Mandate Palestine.

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

Nusseibeh, Hazem. Interview by Thoraya El Rayyes & Ibrahim Tarawneh, Amman (2015), sound recording.
Ibid.
Khalidi, Rashid. The Iron Cage: The Story of the Palestinian Struggle for Statehood. Beacon Press, 2007.
Shaw, Sir Walter Sidney. Report of the Commission on the Palestine Disturbances of August, 1929: Evidence Heard During the 1st [-47th] Sittings, HM Stationery Office, 1930.
Sufian, Sandy. “Anatomy of the 1936–39 Revolt: Images of the Body in Political Cartoons of Mandatory Palestine”, Journal of Palestine Studies 37, No.2 (2008).
Shaw. Report of the Commission on the Palestine Disturbances.
Sufian, Sandy. “Anatomy of the 1936–39 Revolt: Images of the Body in Political Cartoons of Mandatory Palestine”, Journal of Palestine Studies 37, No.2 (2008), p. 25.
Ibid.
Ibid, p. 27.
Ibid.
Ibid, p. 30.
Ibid.
Tamari, Salim, and Issam Nassar. The Storyteller of Jerusalem: the Life and Times Wasif Jawhariyyeh, 1904-1948, Olive Branch Press: 2013.
Sufian. “Anatomy of the 1936–39 Revolt,” p. 30.
Azoulay, Ariella. “Photographic Conditions: Looting, Archives, and the Figure of the” Infiltrator”, Jerusalem Quarterly, No. 61 (2015): 6

Acre's Fall Source: Institute for Palestine Studies, Photograph Collection

Politics

The Poisoning of Acre

2 years ago

The massacres did not only take place against human beings, but also against its homes, trees, and animals, who were not beyond murder and abuse.

After the fall of Haifa on April 22, 1948, thousands of refugees flooded from Haifa to Acre. The city, still under British control, began to crowd. Zionist forces surrounded the city in the first week of May and fired at it with a barrage of mortar bombs.

At the time, drinking water used to reach the city from a canal that would run from the northern village near al-Kabri, 10 kilometers from Acre. The canal is also known as the al-Basha canal. En route to Acre, the canal would pass through several Zionist colonies. At one of those points, the Zionists infected the water with typhoid, and soon enough typhoid fever spread among British soldiers and residents. In a report, Red Cross doctor, Dr. Domiron, says: “The situation is serious, and the outbreak of the disease has included civilians, military personnel and police.” Moreover, the Brigadier, Bafardaj, who was the director of military services, said that “this is the first time that this pandemic happens in Palestine,” despite the displacement and panic of residents across Palestine at the time. The greater fear was the spread of the plague with the refugees heading to Lebanon.

Preliminary surveys show the number of those infected to be 70 civilians and 55 British people. However, many others were afraid to report their illness out of fear of being detained. It is enough to say that the number of Acre’s residents during that period decreased from 25 thousand to 8 thousand people, due to displacement. As with the case of the other villages where massacres took place, the goal was the same: to expel people either through displacement or murder.

The mayor of Acre was absent at the time, which weakened the efforts to contain the epidemic. Despite the insistence of the ICRC, the municipality was not able to rehabilitate the water canal, “the source of the epidemic.” It doubled the emigration of residents and prevented them from returning to their homes out of fear of getting ill. The main objective of the epidemic was to “prevent residents from returning home.” At the time, as a continuation of the attack, the Haganah intensified its attacks on the city with mortar bombs and artillery. Moreover, Israeli vehicles would circle and call out via loudspeakers: “your choice is to surrender or commit suicide. We will exterminate you until the last man.”

When a number of the city’s dignitaries signed a peace treaty, Acre fell. With its fall, Zionist terrorism began to take over the city. Every young man and sheikh was arrested, all considered prisoners of war despite being civilians. Looting operations spread across the city and the women and children were cast out, with neither food nor shelter.

Lieutenant Petit, who monitored the truce, stated in a detailed report upon visiting the city after its fall: “a systematic operation of looting homes occurred to prevent the residents from returning. A massacre was committed, resulting in the death of 100 civilians, especially from the new city’s residents that refused to decamp to the old city based on Israeli orders.” This testimony brings to mind the story of Mohammad Fayez Sufi, one of the residents that refused to move. Mohammad had miraculously survived while three of his colleagues died after being forced to drink cyanide poison, and had their bodies thrown into the sea.

Acre was not the only city to fall, and poison was not the only weapon used to empty the land of its inhabitants. Those who have read the work of historians and eyewitness accounts of the Nakba massacres will know the role of many cases of rape in instigating Palestinian flight. For rape was also used as an instrument to spread terror among residents to force them to abandon their lands. Meanwhile, approximately 50 thousand men and women were forced to leave Lydda and Ramla in what became known as the March of Death. They were forced to walk for several consecutive days in the most torrid areas, many dying on the road from thirst and exhaustion.

This is how the land was emptied of its inhabitants and how the story of exile, diaspora, and the Nakba began. Palestinians kept their country, their homes, their villages, and their memories in their hearts forever.