The Arab elites of Palestine were eloquent, but talk was cheap. For all their fiery nationalist rhetoric and repeated negotiations with the British authorities, Zionist immigration continued apace, and the British showed no signs of granting independence to the Palestinian Arabs. Following the Passfield White Paper, between 1929 and 1931 Zionist immigration had slowed to 5,000–6,000 each year. However, the MacDonald letter of 1931 reversed British policy, and with the Nazi seizure of power in Germany, a massive new influx of Jewish immigrants began to flood into Palestine. In 1932 nearly 10,000 Jewish immigrants entered Palestine, in 1933 over 30,000, in 1934 over 42,000. The peak of immigration came in 1935, when nearly 62,000 Jews entered the country. Between 1922 and 1935 the Jewish population of Palestine had increased from 9 percent to nearly 27 percent of the total population.³⁹ Jewish land purchases had begun to displace significant numbers of Palestinian agricultural workers—already a concern addressed in the Passfield White Paper, when the Jewish population of Palestine was half its 1935 size. The failings of the Palestinian leadership, composed exclusively of urban elites, were falling squarely on the shoulders of the rural poor. In 1935 one man decided to channel the anger of the rural communities into armed rebellion. In the process, he provided the spark that revealed Palestine for the powder keg it had become. Izz al-Din al-Qassam, a native of Syria, had fled the French mandate in the 1920s to take refuge in Palestine. He was a Muslim cleric who had become a preacher in the popular Istiqlal [“independence”] mosque in the northern port of Haifa. He also headed the Young Men’s Muslim Association, a nationalist and anti-Zionist youth group. Shayhk al-Qassam used the pulpit to rouse opposition to both the British and Zionism. His popularity quickly grew among those poorer Palestinians most directly affected by Jewish immigration, who looked to al-Qassam rather than the fractious and ineffectual urban notables for leadership. In the aftermath of the 1931 MacDonald Black Letter, al-Qassam began to promote the idea of an armed struggle against the British and the Zionists. His appeal met with an enthusiastic response from the congregants at his mosque. A number of men volunteered to fight, and others contributed funds for guns and ammunition. Then, without warning, al-Qassam suddenly disappeared in the autumn of 1935. His supporters were concerned. Some feared he had come to grief; others suspected him of running off with their money. In November 1935, a journalist named Akram Zuaytir was discussing al-Qassam’s mysterious disappearance with a mason who was friends with the shaykh. Zuaytir said it was shameful for people to make such accusations against al-Qassam. ?I agree, brother,? the builder replied, ?but why then has he gone into hiding like this??⁴⁰ Their conversation was interrupted when a man ran up to tell them that there had been a major engagement between an Arab gang and British forces in the hills above Jenin. The bodies of the rebels and the policemen they had killed were being taken to the British fort in Jenin. The young Zuaytir recognized a scoop and called the head of the Arab press bureau in Jerusalem to alert him. The bureau chief set out immediately for Jenin, leaving Zuaytir to watch over the office and to notify the Palestinian newspapers that a big story was brewing. The shocked bureau chief returned from Jenin three hours later, his speech reduced to headlines. “Important events,” he gasped breathlessly. “Very dangerous news. Shaykh Izz al-Din al-Qassam and four of his brethren in the gang were martyred.” In the Jenin police station, the bureau chief had interviewed a wounded survivor of al-Qassam’s band. Though the man was in great pain, he managed to give a concise account of al-Qassam’s movement. Al-Qassam had created his armed band in 1933, the wounded man explained. He only recruited devout Muslims prepared to die for their country. They collected funds to buy rifles and ammunition and began to prepare for an armed struggle “to kill the English and the Jews because they were occupying our nation.” In October 1935, al-Qassam and his men left Haifa in secret—prompting the rumors Zuaytir and the mason had been discussing earlier in the day. Al-Qassam’s armed band ran into a police patrol in the plain of Baysan and killed a Jewish sergeant. The British scoured the hills and surprised one of al-Qassam’s men on the roads between Nablus and Jenin. They exchanged fire, and the Arab insurgent was killed. “We learned of his martyrdom,” the survivor of al-Qassam’s band explained, “and decided to attack the police the following morning.” The insurgents found themselves outnumbered by a joint force of British police and soldiers and took refuge in the caves near the village of Ya’bad, close to Jenin. While a Royal Air Force plane circled overhead, the British engaged the Arabs in a two-hour gunfight in which Izz al-Din al-Qassam and three other men were killed. Four survivors were taken prisoner. One British soldier was killed and two others wounded. Though he was shocked by these events, Zuaytir’s first thoughts were of the funeral. In accordance with Islamic practice, al-Qassam and his men would normally be buried before sundown. However, the bodies of the “martyrs” were still in police custody. Zuaytir called one of his colleagues in Haifa to enter into negotiations with the British for the bodies to be delivered to their families, who would need to make arrangements for their funerals. The British agreed to cooperate, on two conditions: the funeral was to be held at ten o’clock the following morning, and the funeral cortege had to proceed directly from al-Qassam’s home eastward to the cemetery, without entering Haifa?s city center. The British were all too aware of the volatility of the situation and wanted to avoid any outbreak of violence. Zuaytir, in contrast, wanted to ensure that the funeral would be a political event, to galvanize Palestinian opposition to the mandate. At the end of the day, he filed an article in an Islamic newspaper, al-Jami’a al-Islamiyya (“Islamic Society”), which called on all Palestinians to converge on Haifa to march in the funeral procession. He posted the challenge directly to the nationalist leadership: “Will the leaders of Palestine march with its young men in the cortege of a great religious scholar, accompanied by the faithful?”⁴¹ Zuaytir awoke early the next morning to check the coverage in the Arabic press and to prepare for his trip to Haifa. “When I read the newspapers and the descriptions of the battle, and saw my call to march in the funeral procession, I thought today would be a day of great historic importance in Haifa,” he wrote. “It is the martyrs’ day.” He was right—thousands had flocked to Haifa to share in a day of national mourning. Contrary to British wishes, the funeral was held in the central mosque of Haifa and the funeral procession passed through the city center. “With great effort the martyrs were carried through the crowd from the mosque to the great square outside. Here the pen falters in describing the scene. Thousands accompanied the procession, with the bodies carried at shoulder height, shouting Allahu akbar, Allahu akbar [God is great], while the women ululated from the roof tops and the windows.” The mourners sung fiery songs of resistance. “Then, while the bodies were raised, a voice cried out: Revenge! Revenge! The thousands responded with one voice like a roar of thunder: Revenge! Revenge!” The enraged crowd stormed the Haifa police station, stoning the building and destroying police cars parked outside. They set upon every British soldier and policeman they found along the way, though the British withdrew to avoid casualties on either side. The crowd also attacked the railway station as another symbol of hated British rule. The whole of the procession took three and one-half hours, at which point al-Qassam and his men were laid to rest. “Imagine the impact on the masses who witnessed the heroic martyrs buried in their blood-stained clothes of jihad,” Zuaytir reflected. He also noted how all the towns and cities of northern Palestine were represented at the funeral—Acre, Jenin, Baysan, Tulkarm, Nablus, Haifa—“but I did not see the heads of the [nationalist] parties, for which they must be reviled.”⁴² The short-lived revolt of Shaykh ’Izz al-Din al-Qassam changed Palestinian politics forever. The urban notables who had led the nationalist movement had lost the confidence of the population at large. They had negotiated with the British for fifteen years and had nothing to show for their efforts. The Palestinians were no closer to independence or self-rule, the British were still firmly in control, and the Jewish population was growing at a rate that would soon bring them to parity with the Arab population. The Palestinians wanted men of action who would confront the British and Zionist threats directly. The result was three years of revolt that devastated the towns and countryside of Palestine.