The British Awakening to the Military Nature of the Rebellion, August–October 1936

This chapter discusses the divergence, in the latter weeks of the rebellion, between the British public and private portrayals of the revolt. British public statements finally fully converged with the Zionist portrayal of the rebellion (the strong crimino-national claim). Yet, under the influence of military intelligence, British private assessments of the rebel movement proved subtler. They suggested that rather than being mere bandits, the rebels were something closer to "soldier-bandits," a sort of hybrid criminal-nationalist. The chapter discusses the discursive logic of this divergence, arguing that London's pro-nationalist pretensions in its Middle Eastern mandates hamstrung its capacity to characterize the rebellion as a large-scale outbreak of crime and forced it to pin the criminal charge upon a cabal of pseudo-national criminals (the Arab Higher Committee). The chapter goes on to detail a crisis within the British government over whether to declare martial law in Palestine and the logic of the eventual British decision against declaring martial law.