Rabbi Abe’s Book Review: “Palestine 1936” by Oren Kessler

Palestine 1936: The Great Revolt and the Roots of the Middle East Conflict
Oren Kessler
Rowman & Littlefield, 2023

Reading Oren Kessler’s Palestine 1936 was an enlightening and sometimes surreal experience: I was already familiar with much of the period he covers, at least in the broad strokes, and yet Kessler’s meticulous retelling weaves a unified narrative that allowed me to see Israel’s pre-history in a new light. 

Palestine 1936 focuses on the Arab “Great Revolt” that launched a century of intermittent violence in the land of Israel. Kessler offers rich portrayals of the key figures on all sides – Jewish, Arab, and British – sympathetic to their perspectives and blended identities without excusing their oversights, failures, and outright wrongdoing. Throughout the story we see into the complicated lives in Ottoman and Mandate-era Palestine: David Ben-Gurion’s university education in Turkey; Musa Alami’s generational family friendships with Jews of the Old Yishuv; Empires whose larger agendas led them to alternately obsess over and neglect Jerusalem’s holy sites; shifting geopolitical tides that pushed Jews to ally with the British in both World Wars and enticed Arab leaders to sympathize with the Third Reich. While it’s hard to see the story as anything but a tragedy, there are some distinctly light-hearted moments – as when British intelligence officer Orde Wingate fails to secure a set of rams’ horns because his lieutenants can’t understand his request for “chauffeurs.” Overall, Kessler tells a profoundly human story, reminding us of the individual lives behind the ideologies and movements.

I grew up in the wake of the Oslo Accords, when “two-state solution” seemed like magic words and any discussion of “population transfer” was regarded as a nightmare scenario only an extremist could consider. From that perspective, I was astonished to find that both proposals – dividing the contested land into two states, one Arab and one Jewish, and compelling minorities to move from one territory to the other – originated not with Jews or Arabs but with England’s Peel Commission. Throughout the book I was surprised at how many aspects of the modern conflict in Israel have their roots in the British Mandate: not only the broad strokes, but even in the practical details of how a government reacts to resistance, unrest, and street violence. 

Perhaps most fascinating of all, Palestine 1936 goes much deeper into the intricacies of British political and colonial administration than other histories I have read. While a surprising number of British officials hold favorable attitudes toward Jews and a few are avowed Zionists, most end up caught in the tension between deeply ingrained anti-Semitism and fundamentally racist views of their Arab subjects. It often seemed like British policies were determined less by design or forethought than by which of their prejudices got the upper hand, and with each personnel change in Jerusalem or London the winds would shift again. The book’s closing chapters also see the emergence of American diplomatic power, foreshadowing the shift that would come to define the 20th century. Despite Israel’s political and military autonomy, the political, religious, and social attitudes toward Jews and Arabs that developed in England and America during the 1930s continue to impact the course of events in Israel to this day. Kessler has done the English-speaking world an immense service by offering such a comprehensive and engaging survey of a decade that, perhaps more than any other, continues to reverberate in the present. 

If you are interested in Israel and the modern Middle East, I highly recommend reading Palestine 1936. I’m thrilled that BZBI will host Oren Kessler on April 24, and hope you can join us for a fascinating and eye-opening evening.