The Rise and Fall of the Palestinian-Arab Middle Class Under the British Mandate,1920–39

Thanks God, we have become like those rich people who travel all the time. Without noticing, we have started to travel lately … our son studies in the most prestigious schools in America, and lives there with millionaires' sons while we spend our holiday in the districts of Lebanon…

(Khalil al-Sakakini, Suq al-Gharb, Lebanon, August 1933) ¹

The research on the Palestinian-Arab middle class under the British Mandate began mainly recently, focusing mainly on the consumption patterns. ² The Palestinian-Arab middle class under the Mandate may be characterized as bourgeois and educated, similarly to bourgeois classes that have developed in the West in the Modern era. ³ The bourgeois characteristics of the Palestinian-Arab middle class, and their influence on its historical trajectory during the Mandate era, have not been studied in depth yet.

Middle classes in the Middle East during the colonial period, as with other non-western middle classes, have attracted so far only scant research, both theoretically and empirically. Keith David Watenpaugh has defined – in his formative book on modernity in the Middle East at this period – the aforementioned stratum, along the Eastern Mediterranean in the late Ottoman and inter-bellum periods, as a ‘middle class’. According to him, the conceptualization of this stratum as a middle class:

builds upon a consensus that that ‘middle class’ is more than a neutral economic category, but rather constitutes an intellectual, social, and cultural construct linked to a set of historical and material circumstances; class is more than just one's relationship to the means of production or the accumulation of wealth. ⁴

Watenpaugh reflects on the middle class in the Eastern Mediterranean in that period as modern, westernized or similar to the West, and claims that (unlike the West) its appearance was not a by-product of industrialization, but should be seen in the context of technological changes in the means of communication, transportation, and urban life, as a part of a social and cultural change. ⁵ This encounter and merger of cultures under colonial rule, such as the one prevalent in Mandate Palestine, were defined by Homi K. Bhabha as ‘intercultural hybridity’. ⁶

This article aims to focus on a local aspect of the rise of the middle class in the region in that period: the rise of the Palestinian-Arab middle class under the Mandate, until the Palestinian-Arab Revolt (1936–9). The main hypothesis is that particular bourgeois social and cultural characteristics prevented the middle class's full incorporation into the Palestinian-Arab National Movement, and even led to estrangement between the middle class and the national leadership, as well as members of lower strata, especially the villagers. Members of the middle class, mostly Christians but Muslims as well, espoused in their daily life modern habits, ideas, and customs, as a means to distinguish between themselves and other classes, similarly to their parallels in the West, and like their contemporaries elsewhere in the Eastern Mediterranean, as Watenpaugh has demonstrated. Those gaps reached their climax during the years of revolt, which was a kind of prelude to the cataclysmic events of 1948 that marked the end of the Mandate era. ⁷

As a researcher in Social-Cultural History, this research is based mainly on primary sources such as diaries, letters, and memoirs. In this domain the preeminent, among the Palestinian-Arabs under the Mandate, were the al-Sakakini family. The educator and author Khalil al-Sakakini (1878–1953), son of a Jerusalem Christian carpenter who worked as a teacher from the age of 16, and who had undergone periods of scarcity in his youth, is a typical example of the rise of the Palestinian-Arab bourgeois middle class under the Mandate. He embodies also the cultural and national awakening of the Palestinian-Arabs in this period. Sakakini wrote for many years a diary in Arabic that was not, probably, written only for personal reasons, but in the knowledge that it would be published in the future. The diary was indeed published in an edited and abridged version in 1955, two years following its author's death, and in a full version recently. Khalil was succeeded by his daughter Hala al-Sakakini (1924–2002), a teacher and an author who edited and abridged his diaries, and later published her own memoirs, which draw on her diary. The Sakakini diaries are a treasure trove and a unique primary source of the Palestinian-Arab social history under the Mandate. Within this rather small and intimate society, the Sakakini diaries change the way we see this history as a whole, and particularly the rise and fall of the Palestinian-Arab middle class under the Mandate. ⁸

The Palestinian Arab upper middle class first appeared during the late Ottoman period. Beginning in the mid-nineteenth century, Ottoman administrative reforms and the influence of the European powers set in motion economic and social changes and rapid development in the coastal cities of Palestine, which experienced an increase in economic activity and saw the growth of educational institutions. The same happened in Jerusalem. An educated middle class began to emerge. Many of its members were migrants from villages into the cities who owed their wealth to trade and to government and municipal jobs. The middle class was composed disproportionately of Christians. Christians played a central role in commerce, some of them Arabs and others members of Eastern communities, such as Armenians and Greeks. The growth of the cities widened the longstanding fissure that separated the urban and rural populations, which began to take the form of a divide between the more modern and secular coastal region and the conservative and traditional mountain country. ⁹

The rise of the middle class had accelerated during the British Palestine Mandate that began in 1920, following a military conquest in 1917–18. The Christians were largely an urban community, and many of them gained knowledge and skills via the European education they received in church missionary schools. They thus provided a qualified pool of candidates for government service and played central roles in the newly formed Mandate civil administration. In 1921 about two-thirds of government positions were filled by Christians, who made up about a tenth of the Arab population of Palestine. By 1938 the proportion had declined, but still half of government officials were Christians. They also dominated the white-collar professions – doctors, lawyers, engineers, architects, journalists, and educators – who provided services to the civil service, to merchants, to landowners, and to the wealthy. In 1931, more than half the Arabs in the professions and nearly half in the financial professions were Christians. ¹⁰ At that time, the settled population of Palestine numbered, according to the 1931 British census, 966,761 people, out of whom 693,147 (72 per cent) were Muslims, 174,600 (18 per cent) were Jews, while only 88,907 (9 per cent) were Christians. (10,101 were recorded as ‘others’, mainly Druze, while according to estimations there were in addition about 70,000 Bedouin nomads, all Muslims.) ¹¹

The upper middle class built new neighborhoods and even entire quarters in the three large cities, places such as the ‘Abbas neighborhood in Haifa; ¹² the ‘Ajami, Nuzha, and North Jabaliyya neighborhoods in Jaffa; and Jerusalem's southern neighborhoods of Talbiyya, Baq‘a, and Qatamon. The concentration of government offices in Jerusalem, the city's large Christian population, and its proximity to other Christian centers in Bethlehem and Ramallah made the city a magnet for educated Christians and Muslims and home to the largest upper middle class population in the Mandate period. In the same time the Arab middle class neighborhoods in Jerusalem were also the favorite lodging place for British Army officers and Government officials, often renting apartments or houses with their families, as well as some Jewish well-to-do families, mainly of Middle European origin. ¹³ The predominance of government officials in the ranks of the new bourgeoisie was evident mainly in Jerusalem, while in the coastal towns such as Haifa and Jaffa the backbone of the middle class tended to rely more on entrepreneurship. ¹⁴

The aforementioned Khalil al-Sakakini was one of the landlords in these neighborhoods. Having initially resigned from the government service following the appointment of Jewish (and Zionist) High Commissioner Herbert Samuel, Sakakini finally re-joined the government in the late 1920s as chief inspector of Arabic Language studies in the department of education. He soon became well-to-do, not only thanks to his appointment, but also due to revenues from his innovative elementary school reading textbooks, not only in Palestine but throughout the Arab world. Following his retirement from the public service in 1938 he opened a private high school (that fostered both liberal and national values) which became an important centre for the dissemination of Arab culture and nationalism. Sakakini introduced numerous innovations in his school, such as eliminating examinations and grading, forgoing religious studies, and creating an atmosphere of camaraderie and equality between students and teachers. He also endeavoured to implement the same principles of equality and openness in his family. His economic success reached its zenith, perhaps, in 1937, when he finished building a private home at the affluent, bourgeois Qatamon neighborhood of Jerusalem. ¹⁵

In a letter to his son, Sari (who was a student in the USA), Sakakini described the building process, his pedantic observation over each detail and his sources of inspiration, as well as the influence on his socio-economic status:

I do not wonder why the people are marveling how I built a house, me, the poorest beggar. Until today, each time I wore a new tarbush everybody noticed and used to greet and congratulate me, so how come I built now a house? And moreover, I spent without any calculations: the builders, the carpenter, the locksmith, the floorer, the whitewasher, and the painter are the best … our locksmith is George Qreytem, who manufactured the gates of the High Commissioner's palace [Government House], and he seems to have been thinking, while manufacturing for me the iron gates, that he is doing that for the High Commissioner. Would you know how much the front gate had cost? ¹⁶

Four days after moving into their new house, Sakakini described how the new home, built in western bourgeois style room division, influenced the life of his family and their surroundings:

It is amazing how within four days we became totally new people: our health is better, the looking – each one of us feels that he was born yesterday, we are a source of wonder to all who meet us: what are these plentiful youth, what is this marvelous beauty … we guide all the visitors from room to room, this is a bedroom, this is a library, this is a leaving room, so I decided to hang at home a map, in which I will design each room [and its function] … we are talking only on the house … and stranger than that: all the people are talking only on our house … ¹⁷

The main two architectural styles in the bourgeois neighborhoods were the eclectic and international styles, both European. The eclectic architecture was characterized by monumental and historical elements, such as grand staircases, arched terraces over classical Greek columns, styled parapets, and so forth. The 1930s international style, characterized by right angled lines with curved wings or balconies, was widespread mainly in the two or three storey apartment houses that were built in those neighborhoods. Another element in those buildings was a vertical, split window along the staircase that was often described as ‘thermometer’. The bourgeois residents' individualism was significant, beyond the general planning, in designed elements that were meant to represent personal traits, such as bars in the form of musical notes that reflected the landlord's fondness of music. ¹⁸

In her memoirs, Hala al-Sakakini describes the high quality of the construction in simple, modern style, with meticulous details such as matching stone colors (beige, gray, or pink) with the iron curtains (cream, dark green, or black, accordingly). Personal taste was demonstrated everywhere, in the mason craft, roof-tiles that many houses had, bars, and parapets. The residents were highly conscious of both the external appearance and the interior of their houses, and used to cultivate them assiduously along with the courtyards and gardens. ¹⁹ The affluent and fashionable Arab neighborhoods in Southern Jerusalem, from Abu Thor in the east to Qatamon in the west, and from Talbiyya to Upper Baq‘a, consisting largely of private family homes, constituted a ‘garden suburb’ of Jerusalem. Bourgeois neighborhoods such as ‘Ajami and Northern Jabaliyya in Jaffa, ‘Abbas in Haifa, the resort mountainous towns of Ramallah and Bayt Jala, and even the al-Rimal neighborhood in Gaza, or the more affluent parts of coastal towns such as Lydda and Ramla, did their best not to remain behind. In Jerusalem, the low population density in the Southern neighborhoods gave rise to a pastoral feeling of living close to nature and to the agricultural cycle of the surrounding villages, such as al-Maliha and Bayt Safafa, whose farmlands adjoined the new neighborhoods. The proximity to the villages encouraged the purchase of fresh farm produce, which the villagers supplied daily, door to door. ²⁰

In such a pastoral atmosphere, and against the backdrop of the events of the 1948 War, recollections of former residents of the area often tend towards idealization. Hala al-Sakakini described the daily ride to school, in a bus run by a private company that plied a route between Qatamon and the city center at the walled Old City's Jaffa Gate, as an idyllic social experience with passengers vying to pay the fare, while ‘the conductor in the meantime would wait patiently for the outcome of that argument’. According to Sakakini, each passenger used to greet the driver and his fellow passengers, regardless of whether or not he knew them, and was answered accordingly. Passengers about to get off used to invite their fellow passengers for a coffee, and were turned down courteously. She continued: ‘When an old woman was getting off, the driver would tell her in a kind voice, “Ala Mahlek, Khalti” (Take your time, Aunt), and in gratitude she would answer ‘Allah yirda ‘aleik’ (God bless you)’. ²¹

Hala al-Sakakini went on to describe the life in pre-1948 bourgeois Arab Jerusalem neighborhoods, also in idyllic terms:

Houses had no numbers and streets no names, and yet it was so easy to reach a person by post or in person. People living in the same quarter were like one large family. Everyone knew everyone else. If you happened to come from another town or another quarter and did not know exactly where a person lived in that quarter you only had to ask about him, and of course you were told how to get to his house. Sometimes a passer-by would volunteer to walk with you to the house. ²²

However, it is clear that social harmony indeed prevailed in these bourgeois neighborhoods, owing to the overall uniformity of the residents' cultural and socio-economic background. It was a cohesive, mutually supportive community for which, as is characteristic in bourgeois middle classes, the education of the young generations was held in first priority. ²³

Typically for a bourgeois society, the middle class families had attributed great importance to the education of both males and females, who were usually educated separately. They were not usually sent to government schools, but attended private prestigious (and expensive) schools, mostly run by western Christian missions. In many schools English was the primary teaching language, such as the St. George Anglican School on the Nablus road, north of the Old City, the ‘Bishop Gobat’ boys' school on Mount Zion, just off the Old City wall, the Girls English College in the Jewish neighborhood of Rehavia, and the nearby Terra Sancta College. At the Collège des Frères, off the Old City New Gate, and the school at Saint Joseph Convent the predominant language was French, at the Templar School in the German Colony – German (until it was closed at the Second World War), and at Salesian Brothers School on the Prophets Street – Italian. Among the private Arab schools, where Arabic was the primary language, was ‘al-Nahda’ (The Revival) School in Baq‘a, at the Hebron Road, founded by its headmaster, Khalil al-Sakakini. Multi-lingual education had contributed to the cosmopolitan atmosphere, while many houses spoke several languages, but Arabic was the common tongue. ²⁴ The sisters Hala and Dumya al-Sakakini, for example, spoke fluent German since their childhood in the German colony neighborhood, near Baq‘a in Southern Jerusalem, and until the Second World War, when the Germans were evicted by the British, attended a German school. They received their lessons in English conversation and pronunciation from a British resident of the area, Clarissa Graves (the sister of the author Robert Graves). The Christian sisters were also taught private lessons of the Quran, meant for their general knowledge of classic and contemporary Arabic. Upon graduating school in Jerusalem they were sent to college in Beirut – quite a rare phenomenon among young Palestinian Arab women. Hala graduated as a teacher of English, and Dumya as a teacher of science. Both could have expected to continue their career until marriage – which might be one of the reasons why they remained unmarried. However, young men going to academic studies abroad were more common, numbering in their hundreds throughout the period. The closest universities abroad were the American universities in Beirut and Cairo, and those who could afford it travelled to universities in Europe, and some even to the USA. Their knowledge and cultural influence added to the cosmopolitan atmosphere in the bourgeois areas. ²⁵

Western education, gained under British rule, had a profound impact on social and cultural life. Students used to read the classical works of English literature by authors such as Charlotte Brontë and Charles Dickens, found both at public and school libraries, as well as in private collections. European music was also practiced: thus, for example, the Sakakini sisters took piano lessons from Frau Rohrer, a teacher at the German Colony, and their elder brother Sari purchased an expensive state-of-the art Blüthner grand piano. The Sakakinis enjoyed listening to him playing, especially Rachmaninoff and Beethoven, whose ‘Moonlight Sonata’ was the mother Sultana's favorite. ²⁶ In addition to concerts at the music hall of the YMCA club, the common playground of the middle class, the Sakakini siblings also frequented the Palestine philharmonic orchestra, playing at the Jerusalem ‘Edison’ theatre, in a Jewish neighborhood. They remained sitting while the orchestra was playing for debut Hatikva, the Zionist (and later Israeli) national anthem, despite the scornful looks of the rest of the audience, who rose in respect. During their visits to their family friend George Khamis, another member of the middle class, the Sakakinis enjoyed listening to classical works from his record collection, such as Puccini's ‘Madama Butterfly’, or operatic arias by the Russian bass Chaliapin. ²⁷

Sports, another characteristic of the bourgeois lifestyle, were present as well. Like many of their friends and neighbors, the Sakakini sisters took gymnastics and swimming classes at the YMCA club (on St. Julian street, now King David street, still active today), which functioned as a cultural, social, and leisurely hub for the bourgeoisie. In the same place they used to watch their brother Sari playing tennis against Robert Mushabbek, another member of their social circle. The YMCA was the meeting place for Arabs, Greeks, Armenians and Jews. The tennis and squash courts, the swimming pool, youth clubs, library, concert hall, and the cafeteria served them all in a typical British colonial atmosphere. Another sports and social hub was the Arab sports club in Baq‘a. Hiking and biking were also popular, as Hala recorded, who used to bike together with her neighbor Jean Zaphyriades, a Palestinian Greek. ²⁸

Leisure habits included hanging out in European style garden cafes in the resort town Bayt Jala, south of Jerusalem and near Bethlehem, as well as Ramallah to the north of the city, and sometimes even vacationing in Lebanon, Syria, and Egypt, while the most affluent traveled to Europe. ²⁹ The Christian Arab amateur musician Wasif Jawhariyya, who first got a job as a clerk under the British military regime (1917–20), and then moved to the civil Jerusalem district commissioner's office, traveled for the first time in his life to Syria and Lebanon in summer 1922, ‘When I reached economic prowess – thank God – and could implement this plan’. Jawhariyya and his brother Khalil traveled by car through Haifa, in northern Palestine, to Beirut, where they stayed in a state-of-the-art hotel, and from there ‘we traveled from village to village [resorts in the Lebanon Mountains], in ‘Aley, Bahamdun, and Sofar. I felt as a Bedouin in New York [sic]’. Jawhariyya admired not only the Lebanese vistas, but also the sophisticated reception and service they encountered at the resorts at the hotels, restaurants, and cafes, which they obviously were not used to in Ottoman Jerusalem, where they grew up. ³⁰

The thrust towards modernity was apparent in consumer products as well. Some of the bourgeois residents held in their possession, as early as the 1930s and 1940s, electric appliances such as refrigerators, cooking ovens, gas stoves, and radios. Some of the most affluent even had their own cars – a rare luxury in the ‘Old World’ prior to the 1950s. ³¹ The symbol of the new modernity was the telephone. In 1937 there were in Jerusalem, for example, about 350 telephone lines owned by Arabs, including private homes, institutes, companies, or businesses (out of 2300 private telephone lines, mostly owned by Jews or Britons). About 160 lines were owned by Christians (Arabs, Armenians, and Greeks), among them many white-collar professionals, and importers of foreign goods, such as automobiles. More than 120 phone lines were owned by Muslim members of the middle class, while only 50 were owned by members of the veteran notable families, the old elite of Jerusalem. ³²

Among the Muslim phone owners who did not belong to the notable stratum merchants from the Hebron area, internal immigrants, were prominent; the importance of this group began to rise in Jerusalem at this period. ³³

Khalil al-Sakakini, who acquired a telephone in his new residence for the first time in his life in June 1937, described enthusiastically in a letter to his son in America the influence of the new device on his and his family's lives, as a real revolution in their lives:

Perhaps I forgot to let you know that we had acquired a telephone. The meaning of the telephone, sir, is that we are now connected to the world, first, and to each other, then. One of us would sit in front of the phone with his notebook open, and ask [from the operator] number after number, whether we know its owner, or not. If we know him we exchange greetings, and if not we say ‘wrong number’ and apologize … I go in the morning to my work, and as soon as I arrive I pick up the phone and ask [from the operator] my home number. ‘Hello, My darling [sic], I just arrived and start working’. Later, when I am feeling tired or bored, or troubled, I immediately rush to the phone, exchange greetings with my lady, and draw from her energy and strength for my mind and my body. The telephone, the telephone! I don't know how people could live without a telephone! ³⁴

The telephone, however, was not the only signifier of socio-cultural gaps between the bourgeoisie and the other, subaltern segments of society, as manifested by their consumption patterns. Food products such as European patisseries or American food brands such as Heinz Ketchup or Kellogg's Cornflakes that were deemed as supposedly prestigious were also among the bourgeois trademarks. ³⁵

Many middle class members purchased commodities, such as imported garments and furniture, at the Spinney's chain of department stores. They donned European attire, the women dresses and shoes according to the latest fashion in Europe, and the men suits and ties. The Tarbush (Fez) was the only Middle-Eastern characteristic that some of the men used to wear. Spinney's shops also offered food departments and even meat butcheries in western style, while the more conservative preferred the traditional butcher shops in the Old City markets. Intercultural hybridity was well manifested in food consumption: alongside the department stores and grocery shops, there was also daily distribution of vegetables, fruit, and live chickens brought to the doors by women from the neighboring villages, adjusting their merchandise on baskets carried over their heads, carefully balanced. Fresh bread was delivered on a cart, and fresh milk on a mule. Peddlers sold a variety of goods, from linen to ice cream. Wood for heating was delivered on camels, and kerosene on horse-drawn carts. Craftsmen, such as shoemakers and knife sharpeners, offered their services on the streets, as well as in the Old City markets. ³⁶

Despite the thrust towards modernity, traditional Arab and Middle Eastern cultural characteristics were preserved, mainly among the older generations. Young women discussed in social saloons topics, besides politics, fashion, and ‘the ideal home’, such as ‘the meaning of being civilized’, ‘our society and the old maid’, and ‘outdated attitudes among our elders’. ³⁷

The elders, such as ‘Isa al- Toubbeh (1882–1973), the Mukhtar (traditional community leader) of the Christian Orthodox community in Jerusalem, who resided also in Qatamon, donned a Tarbush, a Middle Eastern urban symbol, roughly equivalent to the hat in the West. They preferred to smoke a Narghileh (hookah, a Middle Eastern waterpipe). Like many of his older community members, who belonged also to the middle class, Toubbeh was fluent in Greek and in Ottoman Turkish, but did not speak western languages. Like many members of the middle class, young and old, he used to read the Arabic dailies, both Palestinian and Egyptian. His younger son, Jamil Toubbeh, performed in his mission school, Terra Sancta, Mawawil (traditional Arab vocal music) of the Egyptian singer Muhammad ‘Abd al-Wahhab. He later accredited him as the ‘Frank Sinatra of the Arab World’. ³⁸ This proclamation seems to encapsulate the intercultural hybridity of the Palestinian-Arab middle class under the British Mandate.

Just before the outbreak of the Arab Revolt in 1936, about 50,000 Arabs lived in the bourgeois neighborhoods of the three large cities. Of these, 35,000–40,000 were Christians. (In fact, a few thousand of the Christians were not Arabs but rather Greeks, Armenians, Germans, and members of other ethnic groups. However, the Greeks and Armenians for the most part assimilated gradually into the Christian Arab population, and were extensively involved in the social life of the larger Palestinian Arab middle class.) The Muslims who lived in these neighborhoods were influenced by the values of their neighbors and maintained social ties with them. However, they tended to be more traditional, especially with regard to the status of women. But by and large their lifestyle was very much like those of the Christian members of the middle class. ³⁹ However, the very same Muslims did tend to complain about the overrepresentation of Christians in government institutions. Such grievances were voiced throughout the Mandate period. The British made some efforts to recruit more Muslims into their service, but Christians continued to dominate. The identification of the Christians specifically, and of the upper middle class as a whole, with the Mandate administration opened them up to charges of dual loyalty. ⁴⁰

From its inception, the Palestinian Arab national movement sought to bridge the old Christian–Muslim divide. But, despite the establishment of Muslim–Christian Associations and Christian participation in the Palestinian congresses of the 1920s, the Christian bourgeoisie remained a marginal player in the national movement, especially following the establishment of the Supreme Muslim Council in January 1922. The Christians active in the movement generally served as spokesmen or aides to Muslim leaders affiliated with the notable families. Both Muslims and Christians opposed the Balfour Declaration and the Zionist movement and viewed them as threats to their communities. Christian anti-Zionism was also influenced by a religious anti-Jewish tradition and their traditional economic rivalry with Jews under the Ottomans, which continued during the Mandate period in the framework of government service. Their involvement in anti-Zionist activity, if only in declarative form, was also intended to counter the pro-British label that was frequently attached to them. In fact, the Christians had trouble identifying enthusiastically with one of the two flags that the national movement raised: that of opposition to the British. The other flag, anti-Zionism, was as much theirs as the Muslims', but they maintained social ties with the British and only a few of them could wholeheartedly support the Muslim opposition to the West. They found themselves in a dilemma in the face of Muslim resistance to the Christian Mandatory regime. Many of them seem to have feared the prospect of an independent Palestinian Arab state dominated by Muslims; their preference was probably for a British Mandate unencumbered by the Balfour Declaration. ⁴¹

The Palestinian Arab leadership's declared policy of cooperating with the Christians in the national movement did not preclude calls for the Christians to convert to Islam – some of which came from Christians themselves. The Christians recognized, or were compelled to acknowledge, the Muslim component in Arab history and culture. They often found themselves taking an apologetic stance to justify their separate existence as Christians. ⁴²  

Khalil al-Sakakini was one of the most prominent Christians active in the national movement in the 1920s. Later, he seems to have had second thoughts. By 1935, when he was offered an appointment as the first director of the Arab Department of the Mandate administration's broadcasting authority, he turned down the position, explaining that it would be better to appoint a Muslim to the post. This offer was delivered to Sakakini by the historian and government official George Antonius, himself a Christian. Antonius answered on that, ‘My opinion is alike [yours that a Muslim should be appointed], but where would we find a Muslim qualified for this job?’ Sakakini did not record his response to this remark that reflects an arrogant and patronizing attitude, not only towards Muslims but probably also in regard to the less educated strata in society, as a member of the middle class. Finally, a Muslim talented candidate was appointed: Ibrahim Touqan, who became later known as the Palestinian national poet. ⁴³

In a letter he sent in 1932 to his son Sari, which the latter translated and read to his college friends in the United States of America, Sakakini voiced his frustration, anger, and fear of the Muslim majority:

No matter how high my standing may be in science and literature, no matter how sincere my patriotism is, no matter how much I do to revive this nation, even if I burn my fingers before its sight, as long as I am not a Moslem [sic] I am naught.

If I enjoy any position in this land, if the people love me and respect me, it is because they think I am nearer to Islam than to Christianity, because I am wealthy in the Arabic language, because they fancy that I am a conservative and will not depart from Oriental customs under any circumstances. But if I were to struggle with a Moslem who is less founded in knowledge and heritage than I, I would not doubt that they would prefer him to survive. ⁴⁴

In the same letter to his son he addressed the gap in values between the Christian middle class and the rest of Palestinian Arab society:

What would you say would happen if I donned a hat, if I said that Beethoven is the summit of music preferring him to Abd al-Wahab [sic] or Um Kulthum, if I said that [Christian Arab poet] Khalil Mutran is more poetical than [Muslim Ahmad] Shawqi, or if I said that the Greek or Latin or German or English languages are superior to the Arabic, richer and more beautiful than it …? Still what would you think would happen if I advocated that women should not be veiled, that we should acquire western modes of living; if I said a pipe is better than a nargil [water pipe] and that the association of young men and women [sic] causes best the elevation of both? Might you not think that if I said such things they would shout, ‘He blasphemed; then stone him’? ⁴⁵

It should be noted that Sakakini, a great proponent of Arab culture, was actually a devout smoker of the narghile, even terming it ‘my second brain’. ⁴⁶ But his major concern was his profound apprehension about what the future held in store for his children, for the education and way of life he had sought to provide for them. He seems to have understood that the Mandate government would not last forever. It is also interesting that Sakakini, a political supporter of Hajj Amin al-Husayni, Grand Mufti of Palestine and head of the Supreme Muslim Council, whom he knew well personally, alongside the al-Husayni family, did not refrain from allegedly criticizing the Husaynis (and their socio-religious politics):

I tell you that whenever I think of you and your sisters’ future, I am alarmed for you. Do you suppose they consent to our sending you to America? How they would have preferred that I had sent you at the beginning of your school days to ‘The Garden of Knowledge’ [Rawdat al-Ma‘arif, a national school in Jerusalem affiliated with the Husayni circle, rather than to a church mission school], or to have entrusted your training to Sheik Saleh [Islamic teacher], or that I had sent you to al-Azhar or had persuaded you to study pre-Islamic poetry .… I esteem ourselves [sic] higher than to confirm their ideas and to take up conservatism to please everyone. So walk in your path and be a man. ⁴⁷

In these terms, Sakakini was an authentic representative of the anxiety felt by the Christians and by the middle class generally as its members watched the conservatives and the Supreme Muslim Council grow in power. Yet, paradoxically, in the national and social discourse, the middle class took a hard nationalist line and called (largely through the press, a large part of which was Christian) for solidarity among Palestinian Arabs of all religions. ⁴⁸

This dualism between national interests on the one hand and personal and regional or sectarian ones on the other was a constant in Palestinian Arab society during the Mandate period (the Yishuv sometimes confronted similar dilemmas). Historian Yosef Vashitz parsed it as ‘civil society versus political society’. He maintained that one could not doubt the integrity of so many people; the contradictions arose from the fact that the Palestinian Arab lived simultaneously in both societies, and each made different demands on him. ⁴⁹

But it looks as if this was simply the natural tendency of both Christian and Muslim members of the middle class to accept the British Mandate regime in order to protect their own economic interests. This coexisted with members’ emotional and political identification with the national movement's opposition to Zionism. The government provided the middle class with vital services – water, electricity, mail, telephone, education, health, and sanitation. Its police force and armed forces guaranteed the security and social order that underpinned the middle class's economic position, and ensured its safety and economic status. As a result, very few middle class Christians and Muslims took part in anti-government demonstrations throughout the period of British rule. Nearly all of them sat out the disturbances of the 1920s, whether because of their class and social interests, or because they – the Christians in particular – feared that the violence might turn against them, and were careful not to endanger their recently acquired economic privileges. Sometimes their resentment was even actively expressed. Thus, for example, when villagers, members of the ‘Green Hand’ band, were brought to trial in Haifa in September 1929 for looting Jewish property in Safed and Acre, the local Arab lawyers refused to defend them. ⁵⁰

When the Palestinian-Arab Revolt broke out in 1936, the middle class remained passive. Some Christian journalists who were in contact with Zionist institutions, during the strike offered to assist in restoring the peace. But cooperation between Christians and the Zionist movement was nevertheless uncommon. ⁵¹ Most simply kept quiet and carried on their middle class lives, raising the hackles of the nationalists. In one instance, al-Liwa’, the Husayni newspaper, taunted the inhabitants of Qatamon and Upper Baq‘a, ‘especially the [government] officials among them’, that is, the members of the upper middle class. These residents, the newspaper scoffed, continued to ride on Jewish buses ‘because their atrophied bodies cannot stand up to walking’. Thus it both criticized their lack of national loyalty, and ridiculed their bourgeois lifestyle, by drawing a line between them, as stemming out of each other. ⁵²

Active participation in the strike did not mesh with the bourgeois way of life, which was dependent on the colonial regime. The middle class, in particular the Christian middle class – which included both supporters of the Husaynis and of the opposition – took part in the Revolt only in a marginal way. The historian Yehoshua Porath was able to identify only four Christians among 282 people about whom he assembled information, who played an active role as commanders and organizers in the Rebellion. ⁵³ At most they voiced sympathy for the Revolt, its cause, its leaders and activists, and even this was largely limited to the uprising's first stage. Khalil al-Sakakini, for example, wrote to his son of his admiration for Sami al-Ansari, a young Muslim teacher wounded in an assassination attempt on a British police officer who later died of his injuries. Sakakini wrote: ‘Another hero has fallen on the field of honor. Indeed, he is the greatest hero Palestine has known’. While al-Ansari himself might have been seen as an urban member of the middle class, his participation in the revolt was an exception, since the vast majority of active rebels were villagers. ⁵⁴

It did not take long, however, for the bourgeoisie to begin to view the rural rebels as a threat to their status, and to yearn for an end to the Revolt. ⁵⁵ As early as December 1936 the rebels issued a virulently anti-Christian leaflet, accusing the members of that community of a series of crimes against the national cause. The Higher Arab Committee, alarmed at this development and fearing a break in its ranks, condemned the leaflet. But during the Revolt's second stage rural Arabs and urban laborers again routinely voiced their resentment of the bourgeoisie by dictating anti-bourgeois and anti-Christian norms. They compelled women to wear veils and prevented men from wearing short pants, which are forbidden by Islam. Men were prohibited from wearing the tarbush and were forced to don the kufiyya and ‘iqal, the traditional headdress of the rural and Bedouin Arabs. The rebels also banned working on Fridays and resting on Sundays. Furthermore, they banned the use of electricity from the ‘Jewish’ electric company (most of the Arab clients of which were from the middle class – villages, even those close to the cities were not connected to the grid). ⁵⁶ Khalil Totah, headmaster of the prestigious ‘Friends’ Quaker School in Ramallah, described the ban on the tarbush and the enforcement of the Kufiyya, in the summer of 1938:

In about one week the whole Arab population changed its headwear from tarbush and hal into iqals [sic]. That was the rebels order. It was to protect rebels from suspicion of government. The transformation was like magic. All professional classes including supreme court judges are now wearing the [peasantry's] iqal. ⁵⁷

The Christian poet Iskander al-Khuri al-Baytjali, who served as a judge at the Haifa magistrate court, recorded in his memoirs a journey in his private car during the revolt from Haifa to his residence in Jerusalem, at the Qatamon neighborhood. On the road from Haifa to Nablus he encountered an improvised roadblock, built of stones across the road. Khuri, who donned a rural kufiyya and ‘iqal, as ordered by the rebels, got out of his car and started to wave the kufiyya, hoping that the rebels who probably lay in ambush would come to his aid and also perhaps out of fear of being mistaken for a Briton. Finally he had to remove the stones on his own, but after passing in his car the roadblock, ‘I stopped and returned the stones to their place, out of fear of the rebels who built the roadblock, had I driven away without returning the stones as they were.’ ⁵⁸

In one of the most absurd cases, an Armenian man was brought before a revolutionary court in Jerusalem for refusing to wear the Arab headdress. The rebels had ordered that even non-Arab Christians do so, a demand that was understandably resisted by the Armenians and Greeks. In another incident, on 18 September 1938, a group of Arab attorneys from Jerusalem gathered in the home of one of the most senior of their colleagues, Adv. Mughannam Mughannam, in the Talbiyya neighborhood. They resolved to submit a request to the chief justice that he allow them to appear in court wearing the kufiyya and ‘iqal. All this came on top of the robbery and blackmail that had begun during the strike, when government and local officials were required to pay 10 per cent of their wages to the rebels in order to be exempted from the strike. ⁵⁹

Many members of the middle class, both Muslim and Christian, became victims of harassment and violence. Those who supported the opposition became targets of the terror campaign that swept the country. The rebels were harsher on Christians, who were automatically considered traitors because they were assumed to have connections with the regime. Christian victims were treated with exceptional cruelty. Among other things, after they were murdered the rebels mutilated their bodies and forbade their burial. However, middle class and other Muslims also received such treatment. When the rebels took control of Jerusalem's Old City in the summer of 1938, they planned reprisals against the Christians, whom they accused of serving as guides for the British army. The relatively high number of Christian Arab policemen and officers were treated more severely by the rebels than were their Muslim colleagues. Christians were especially prominent among the Arab officers who served in the CID, the Palestine Police's Criminal Investigations Division (actually the colonial ‘secret police’). But middle class Christians and Muslims did not actively resist the rebels as other groups, such as the Druze and the prominent families affiliated with the opposition, did. The Christians in particular avoided fighting, and at most, in response to rebel attacks, passed on information, usually to the British, but not to Jewish intelligence units. ⁶⁰

Khalil Totah went on, in his diary, to describe a growing alienation between the middle class, mainly the Christians, and the revolt. Many of the anti-government measures taken by the rebels, such as harming the transportation, the postal services, the telephone and the electricity lines, had harmed the middle class and prevented them from carrying on their bourgeois lifestyle. ⁶¹ In many cases the rebels demanded money from the middle class, who showed less willingness to finance the rebels, as the revolt was drawing to an end and British military pressure on the rebels intensified. In March 1939 the British army even supplied 16 rifles to the residents of Ramallah to defend themselves from such harassments and even worse threats from the rebellious villagers. Totah deemed it ‘insufficient’. ⁶² The social proximity to British officials sometimes carried on awkward conversations, such as one that Totah recorded with Prie-Gordon, the Assistant District Commissioner in charge of Ramallah, following a general strike proclaimed in mourning of ‘Abd al-Rahim al-Hajj Muhammad, the general commander of the rebellion whom the British killed in Battle: ‘His idea was that the Christians should not have struck … I explained that the Christians could not do otherwise’. ⁶³

The middle class members' attitude to the villagers was rather ambivalent. On one hand there was idealization of the village and its inhabitants that used to see them as the emblem of nationalism and patriotism, similar to other national movements, and typical to the Palestinian national movement in decades to come. ⁶⁴ On the other hand they were often treated arrogantly, sometimes even with scorn. Urban bourgeois people used to be photographed dressed in mock-village attire, supposedly as a token of authenticity and attraction to the idyllic country style of life and at the same time mocked the very same villagers. Ghada Karmi mentioned her father Hasan, an inspector of Arabic at the department of education, a Muslim born in the rural town Tulkarm who became later a well-known linguist and Arabic–English dictionary author, ridiculing an educated member of their social circle for his rural origin:

‘So-and-so may call himself a university lecturer, but mark my words, the man is a peasant’, he would say. ‘How do you know?’ ‘Just look at his trousers’, he would answer. ‘They're round’. As peasants traditionally wore a type of loose trousers, they were unaccustomed to wearing city [European] clothes and hence, according to my father, when they adopted city wear they did not know how to iron their trousers properly [i.e. with a crease in their midst, a-la-bourgeois]. ⁶⁵

The Karmi family was politically alienated to the Hajj Amin al-Husayni and his faction. As such, when the latter began to depose his rivals violently, during the second phase of the revolt, starting in 1937, Hasan Karmi was threatened by a gunman, working on orders from Hajj Amin, and on December 1939 his older brother Mahmud Karmi, a teacher and a journalist, was shot dead in Beirut. His assassin confessed to the Lebanese being sent by Hajj Amin. ⁶⁶ Like other Palestinian-Arab middle class and elite members, Mahmud Karmi had tried to find refuge in a neighboring capital city, where he was finally reached by his enemies. Alongside Cairo, Beirut and well-known resorts such as ‘Aley and Suq al-Gharb in the Lebanon Mountains were a favorite shelter, during the revolt, for the Palestinian-Arab middle class. Among its members who escaped to Lebanon were, besides Karmi, the Jaffa journalist ‘Isa al-‘Isa, founding editor of Falastin, the leading Arabic daily of the period in Palestine, as well as other prominent members of the middle class. ⁶⁷

Travelling, and then finding shelter abroad, was yet another phenomenon typical of the middle class that became a privilege, distinguishing them from the lower strata of society, especially the rural. Frantz Fanon had portrayed the rift between villagers and urbanites under colonial rule:

The country people are suspicious of the townsman. The latter dresses as a European; he speaks the European's language, works with him, sometimes even lives in the same district; so he is considered by the peasants as a turncoat who has betrayed everything that goes to make up the national heritage. The townspeople are ‘traitors and knaves’ who seem to get on well with the occupying powers, and do their best to get on within the framework of the colonial system. This is why you often hear the country people say of town dwellers that they have no morals. Here, we are not dealing [only] with the old antagonism between town and country; it is the antagonism which exists between the native who is excluded from the advantages of colonialism and his counterpart who manages to turn colonial exploitation to his account. ⁶⁸

Fanon's account corresponds much with the rift between Palestinian-Arab villagers and the middle class that reached its zenith during the Revolt and was revealed again in 1948. Indeed, Fanon's thought had inspired Palestinian activists since the 1960s, amongst which the way in which they perceived the middle class and its role in the Palestinian-Arab National Movement under the Mandate. ⁶⁹

In summary, the actions taken by villagers against the middle class, Christians in particular, during the Mandate, especially during the Revolt, were motivated by social, cultural, economic, and class factors. The middle class's reluctance to take part in violent resistance, especially during the Revolt, had the same origin. Another way the bourgeoisie coped with the attacks on them was to move to neighboring countries until the situation improved. ⁷⁰ This practice, which appeared again in late 1947 and early 1948, along with the passivity of the Christian and Muslim middle class, would later typify the beginning of the Palestinian-Arab Nakba (catastrophe: the common Palestinian term for the events of 1948). ⁷¹ The middle classes have historically played central roles in national movements, often constituting their central support. The failure of the Palestinian-Arab national leadership to incorporate the bourgeoisie into their movement and to induce them to participate in the armed struggle seems to have been one of the principal reasons for the defeat of the Palestinian-Arab national movement during the Mandate, during the Arab Revolt and, later, during the 1948 Arab–Israeli War. ⁷²