Irgun Terrorism in Palestine

Palestine's Jewish population has increased from one hundred and seventy thousand or seventeen percent of the population in 1929, the year of the Wailing Wall disturbances, to four hundred thousand, or approximately thirty-one percent of the total, in 1936, the initial year of the Arab Revolt in Palestine.

The immigration of thousands of German Jews has accelerated the pace of industrialization and made the concept of a Jewish state in Palestine a more formidable reality.

The Irgun, which becomes in 1936 an instrument of the Revisionist Party, commits acts of terrorism and assassination against the British, whom it regards as illegal occupiers, and it is also violently anti-Arab.

National Committees are established in all Palestinian towns and large villages.

The AHC calls for a general strike, nonpayment of taxes, and the shutting down of municipal governments, although government employees are allowed to stay at work, and demands cessation of Jewish immigration, an end to all further land sales to the Jews, and the establishment of an Arab national government.

..Jaffa, where the largest confrontations occur during April 16-18.

The Palestinian rebellion, the first sustained violent uprising of Palestinian Arabs for more than a century, begins with spontaneous acts of violence committed by the religiously and nationalistically motivated followers of Sheikh 'Izz ad-Din al-Qassam, who had been killed by the British the previous year.

The murder of two Jews in April 1936 leads to escalating violence, and Qassamite groups initiate a general strike in Nablus and ...

A conference of all National Committees, meeting in Jerusalem, agrees with AHC's call for no taxation without representation, and a general strike begins on May 8.

Simultaneously with the strike, Arab rebels, joined by volunteers from neighboring Arab countries, take to the hills, attacking Jewish settlements and British installations in the northern part of the country.

The Palestine Rebellion has assumed the dimensions of a national revolt by year's end, the mainstay of which is the Arab peasantry.

Thousands of Arabs from all classes are mobilized, and nationalistic sentiment is fanned in the Arabic press, schools, and literary circles.

Neither the Egyptian public nor the politicians had shown much interest in Arab affairs generally until the postwar period; Egyptian nationalism has developed as an indigenous response to local conditions.

After 1936, however, Egypt becomes involved in the Palestine problem.

The British, taken aback by the extent and intensity of the revolt, ship more than twenty thousand troops into Palestine.

The British work with their regional Arab allies—Amir Abdullah of Transjordan, King Ghazi of Iraq, and King Abdulaziz ibn Saud of Saudi Arabia—to mediate an end to the revolt with the AHC in 1937.

Moshe Galili, a member of the Betar Youth organization who is studying in Italy, succeeds in landing a small boat of German immigrants in Palestine on April 13, 1937.