A general strike and then armed revolt against British rule, Jewish immigration and land sales began in Palestine in April 1936, lapsed after the strike ended in October, and resumed as a full rural insurgency from 1937 to 1939. Britain deployed some 20,000-25,000 troops, imposed collective fines, curfews and administrative detention, demolished houses on a large scale - most conspicuously the dynamiting of a swathe of the old city of Jaffa in June 1936, presented as urban improvement and challenged unsuccessfully in the Mandate courts - and used punitive village searches and 'human shield' practices documented by Matthew Hughes from British military records. The Palestinian leadership was arrested or driven into exile, the Arab Higher Committee outlawed, and the revolt also produced substantial internal Palestinian violence against suspected collaborators. Estimates of the dead vary: around 5,000 Palestinian Arabs, several hundred Jews and around 260 British on standard reckonings, with Walid Khalidi and Hughes arguing for higher Arab figures. The Peel Commission of 1937 recommended partition with a compulsory transfer of population, the first official proposal of its kind, and the 1939 White Paper restricted Jewish immigration and land purchase. The suppression left Palestinian Arab political and military capacity severely weakened on the eve of the 1947-49 war.
British Mandate forces suppressed a Palestinian Arab revolt with collective punishment, house demolitions and mass detention, amid communal violence between Arabs and Jews
The 1931 mandate census counted 858,708 Arabs, Muslim and Christian, and government estimates for 1936 give about 950,000-980,000. The Jewish population at the same date was roughly 380,000, having risen sharply with the immigration of 1933-36 that helped trigger the revolt.
The lower figure follows British Mandate returns of Arab dead, which recorded around 3,000-5,000 killed by security forces and in intercommunal and intra-Palestinian violence, plus roughly 500 Jewish and 260 British dead. The higher figure comes from Walid Khalidi's and Matthew Hughes's assessments, which count deaths under-recorded by the Mandate administration, particularly in rural punitive operations.
Matthew Hughes's research in British military and colonial archives, and contemporary Mandate court proceedings over the Jaffa demolitions, documented punitive house destruction, mass administrative detention, beatings in custody and summary killings during village searches.
Israel