title: Tongva

text: Two of the groups, the hyphen and the slash group, were founded after a hostile split over the question of building an Indian casino. In 1994, the state of California recognized the Gabrielino "as the aboriginal tribe of the Los Angeles Basin." No organized group representing the Tongva has attained recognition as a tribe by the federal government.


title: Tongva

text: In 2008, more than 1,700 people identified as Tongva or claimed partial ancestry. In 2013, it was reported that the four Tongva groups that have applied for federal recognition had more than 3,900 members in total.


title: Tongva

text: Tongva territories border those of numerous other tribes in the region. The historical Tongva lands made up what is now called "the coastal region of Los Angeles County, the northwest portion of Orange County and off-lying islands.” In 1962 Curator Bernice Johnson, of Southwest Museum, asserted that the northern bound was somewhere between Topanga and Malibu (perhaps the vicinity of Malibu Creek) and the southern bound was Orange County’s Aliso Creek.


title: Tongva

text: The word "Tongva" was coined by C. Hart Merriam in 1905 from numerous informants. These included Mrs. James Rosemyre (née Narcisa Higuera) (Gabrileño), who lived around Fort Tejon, near Bakersfield. Merriam's orthography makes it clear that the endonym would be pronounced , .


title: Tongva

text: An earlier and more historically accurate name for the indigenous population of the Los Angeles/Orange County basin is the Kizh; this was well documented by records of the Smithsonian Institution, Congress, the Catholic Church, the San Gabriel Mission, and other historical scholars.


title: Tongva

text: The Spanish referred to the indigenous peoples surrounding Mission San Gabriel as the "Gabrieleño". This was not their autonym, or their name for themselves. Because of historical uses, the term is part of every official tribe's name in this area, spelled either as "Gabrieleño" or "Gabrielino."


title: Tongva

text: Because tribal groups have disagreed about appropriate use of the term "Tongva", they have adopted "Gabrieleño" as a mediating term. For example, when Debra Martin, a city council member from Pomona, led a project in 2017 to dedicate wooden statues in local Ganesha Park to the Indigenous people of the area, they disagreed over which name, "Tongva" or "Kizh", should be used on the dedication plaque. Tribal officials tentatively agreed to use the term "Gabrieleño."


title: Tongva

text: The Act of September 21, 1968, introduced this concept of the affiliation of an applicant’s ancestors in order to exclude certain individuals from receiving a share of the award to the “Indians of California” who chose to receive a share of any awards to certain tribes in California that had splintered off from the generic group. The members or ancestors of the petitioning group were not affected by the exclusion in the Act. Individuals with lineal or collateral descent from an Indian tribe who resided in California in 1852, would, if not excluded by the provisions of the Act of 1968, remain on the list of the “Indians of California.” To comply with the Act, the Secretary of Interior would have to collect information about the group affiliation of an applicant’s Indian ancestors. That information would be used to identify applicants who could share in another award. The group affiliation of an applicant’s ancestors was thus a basis for exclusion from, but not a requirement for inclusion on, the judgment roll. The act of 1968 stated that the Secretary of the Interior would distribute an equal share of the award to the individuals on the judgment roll “regardless of group affiliation.”


title: Tongva

text: Many lines of evidence suggest that the Tongva are descended from Uto-Aztecan-speaking peoples who originated in what is now Nevada, and moved southwest into coastal Southern California 3,500 years ago. According to a model proposed by archaeologist Mark Q. Sutton, these migrants either absorbed or pushed out the earlier Hokan-speaking inhabitants. By 500 AD, one source estimates the Tongva may have come to occupy all the lands now associated with them, although this is unclear and contested among scholars.


title: Tongva

text: In 1811, the priests of Mission San Gabriel recorded at least four languages; Kokomcar, Guiguitamcar, Corbonamga, and Sibanga. During the same time, three languages were recorded in Mission San Fernando.


title: Tongva

text: Prior to Russian and Spanish colonization in what is now referred to California, the Tongva primarily identified by their associated villages (Topanga, Cahuenga, Tujunga, Cucamonga, etc.) For example, individuals from Yaanga were known as "Yaangavit" among the people (in mission records, they were recorded as "Yabit"). The Tongva lived in as many as one hundred villages. One or two clans would usually constitute a village, which was the center of Tongva life.


title: Tongva

text: The Tongva spoke a language of the Uto-Aztecan family (the remote ancestors of the Tongva probably coalesced as a people in the Sonoran Desert, between perhaps 3,000 and 5,000 years ago). The diversity within the Takic group is "moderately deep"; rough estimates by comparative linguists place the breakup of common Takic into the Luiseño-Juaneño on one hand, and the Tongva-Serrano on the other, at about 2,000 years ago. (This is comparable to the differentiation of the Romance languages of Europe). The division of the Tongva/Serrano group into the separate Tongva and Serrano peoples is more recent, and may have been influenced by Spanish missionary activity.


title: Tongva

text: The majority of Tongva territory was located in what has been referred to as the Sonoran life zone, with rich ecological resources of acorn, pine nut, small game, and deer. On the coast, shellfish, sea mammals, and fish were available. Prior to Christianization, the prevailing Tongva worldview was that humans were not the apex of creation, but were rather one strand in the web of life. Humans, along with plants, animals, and the land were in a reciprocal relationship of mutual respect and care, which is evident in their creation stories. The Tongva understand time as nonlinear and there is constant communication with ancestors.


title: Tongva

text: On October 7, 1542, an exploratory expedition led by Spanish explorer Juan Cabrillo reached Santa Catalina in the Channel Islands, where his ships were greeted by Tongva in a canoe. The following day, Cabrillo and his men, the first Europeans known to have interacted with the Gabrieleño people, entered a large bay on the mainland, which they named "Baya de los Fumos" ("Bay of Smokes") on account of the many smoke fires they saw there. This is commonly believed to be San Pedro Bay, near present-day San Pedro.


title: Tongva

text: The Gaspar de Portola expedition in 1769 was the first contact by land to reach Tongva territory, marking the beginning of Spanish colonization. Franciscan padre Junipero Serra accompanied Portola. Within two years of the expedition, Serra had founded four missions, including Mission San Gabriel, founded in 1771 and rebuilt in 1774, and Mission San Fernando, founded in 1797. The people enslaved at San Gabriel were referred to as "Gabrieleños", while those enslaved at San Fernando were referred to as "Fernandeños". Although their language idioms were distinguishable, they did not diverge greatly, and it is possible there were as many as half a dozen dialects rather than the two which the existence of the missions has lent the appearance of being standard. The demarcation of the Fernandeño and the Gabrieleño territories is mostly conjectural and there is no known point in which the two groups differed markedly in customs. The wider Gabrieleño group occupied what is now Los Angeles County south of the Sierra Madre and half of Orange County, as well as the islands of Santa Catalina and San Clemente.


title: Tongva

text: The Spanish oversaw the construction of Mission San Gabriel in 1771. The Spanish colonizers used slave labor from local villages to construct the Missions. Following the destruction of the original mission, probably due to El Nino flooding, the Spanish ordered the mission relocated five miles north in 1774 and began referring to the Tongva as "Gabrieleno." At the Gabrieleño settlement of Yaanga along the Los Angeles River, missionaries and Indian neophytes, or baptized converts, built the first town of Los Angeles in 1781. It was called "El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de los Ángeles de Porciúncula" (The Village of Our Lady, the Queen of the Angels of Porziuncola). In 1784, a sister mission, the "Nuestra Señora Reina de los Angeles Asistencia", was founded at Yaanga as well.


title: Tongva

text: Entire villages were baptized and indoctrinated into the mission system with devastating results. For example, from 1788 to 1815, natives of the village of Guaspet were baptized at San Gabriel. Proximity to the missions created mass tension for Native Californians, which initiated "forced transformations in all aspects of daily life, including manners of speaking, eating, working, and connecting with the supernatural." As stated by scholars John Dietler, Heather Gibson, and Benjamin Vargas, "Catholic enterprises of proselytization, acceptance into a mission as a convert, in theory, required abandoning most, if not all, traditional lifeways." Various strategies of control were implemented to retain control, such as use of violence, segregation by age and gender, and using new converts as instruments of control over others. For example, Mission San Gabriel's Father Zalvidea punished suspected shamans "with frequent flogging and by chaining traditional religious practitioners together in pairs and sentencing them to hard labor in the sawmill." A missionary during this period reported that three out of four children died at Mission San Gabriel before reaching the age of 2. Nearly 6,000 Tongva lie buried in the grounds of the San Gabriel Mission. Carey McWilliams characterized it as follows: "the Franciscan padres eliminated Indians with the effectiveness of Nazis operating concentration camps..."


title: Tongva

text: There is much evidence of Tongva resistance to the mission system. Many individuals returned to their village at time of death. Many converts retained their traditional practices in both domestic and spiritual contexts, despite the attempts by the padres and missionaries to control them. Traditional foods were incorporated into the mission diet and lithic and shell bead production and use persisted. More overt strategies of resistance such as refusal to enter the system, work slowdowns, abortion and infanticide of children resulting from rape, and fugitivism were also prevalent. Five major uprisings were recorded at Mission San Gabriel alone. Two late-eighteenth century rebellions against the mission system were led by Nicolás José, who was an early convert who had two social identities: "publicly participating in Catholic sacraments at the mission but privately committed to traditional dances, celebrations, and rituals." He participated in a failed attempt to kill the mission's priests in 1779 and organized eight foothill villages in a revolt in October 1785 with Toypurina, who further organized the villages, which "demonstrated a previously undocumented level of regional political unification both within and well beyond the mission." However, divided loyalties among the natives contributed to the failure of the 1785 attempt as well as mission soldiers being alerted of the attempt by converts or neophytes.


title: Tongva

text: Toypurina, José and two other leaders of the rebellion, Chief Tomasajaquichi of Juvit village and a man named Alijivit, from nearby village of Jajamovit, were put on trial for the 1785 rebellion. At his trial, José stated that he participated because the ban at the mission on dances and ceremony instituted by the missionaries, and enforced by the governor of California in 1782, was intolerable as they prevented their mourning ceremonies. When questioned about the attack, Toypurina is famously quoted in as saying that she participated in the instigation because “[she hated] the padres and all of you, for living here on my native soil, for trespassing upon the land of my forefathers and despoiling our tribal domains. … I came [to the mission] to inspire the dirty cowards to fight, and not to quail at the sight of Spanish sticks that spit fire and death, nor [to] retch at the evil smell of gunsmoke—and be done with you white invaders!’ This quote, from Thomas Workman Temple II's article “Toypurina the Witch and the Indian Uprising at San Gabriel” is arguably a mistranslation and embellishment of her actual testimony. According to the soldier who recorded her words, she stated simply that she ‘‘was angry with the Padres and the others of the Mission, because they had come to live and establish themselves in her land.’’ In June 1788, nearly three years later, their sentences arrived from Mexico City: Nicolás José was banned from San Gabriel and sentenced to six years of hard labor in irons at the most distant penitentiary in the region. Toypurina was banished from Mission San Gabriel and sent to the most distant Spanish mission.


title: Tongva

text: Resistance to Spanish rule demonstrated how the Spanish Crown's claims to California were both insecure and contested. By the 1800s, San Gabriel was the richest in the entire colonial mission system, supplying cattle, sheep, goats, hogs, horses, mules, and other supplies for settlers and settlements throughout Alta California.


title: Tongva

text: The mission functioned as a slave plantation. Latter-day ethnologist Hugo Reid reported, “Indian children were taken from their parents to be raised behind bars at the mission. They were allowed outside the locked dormitories only to attend to church business and their assigned chores. When they were old enough, boys and girls were put to work in the vast vineyards and orchards owned by the missions. Soldiers watched, ready to hunt down any who tried to escape.” Writing in 1852, Reid said he knew of Tongva who “had an ear lopped off or were branded on the lip for trying to get away.”


title: Tongva

text: In 1810, the "Gabrieleño" labor population at the mission was recorded to be 1,201. It jumped to 1,636 in 1820 and then declined to 1,320 in 1830. Resistance to this system of forced labor continued into the early 19th century. In 1817, the San Gabriel Mission recorded that there were "473 Indian fugitives." In 1828, a German immigrant purchased the land on which the village of Yang-Na stood and evicted the entire community with the help of Mexican officials.


title: Tongva

text: The mission period ended in 1834 with secularization under Mexican rule. Some "Gabrieleño" absorbed into Mexican society as a result of secularization, which emancipated the neophytes. Tongva and other California Natives largely became workers while former Spanish elites were granted huge land grants. Land was systemically denied to California Natives by "Californio" land owning men. In the Los Angeles basin area, only 20 former neophytes from San Gabriel Mission received any land from secularization. What they received were relatively small plots of land. A "Gabrieleño" by the name of Prospero Elias Dominguez was granted a 22-acre plot near the mission while Mexican authorities granted the remainder of the mission land, approximately 1.5 million acres, to a few colonist families. In 1846, it was noted by researcher Kelly Lytle Hernández that 140 Gabrieleños signed a petition demanding access to mission lands and that "Californio" authorities rejected their petition.


title: Tongva

text: Emancipated from enslavement in the missions yet barred from their own land, most Tongva became landless refugees during this period. Entire villages fled inland to escape the invaders and continued devastation. Others moved to Los Angeles, a city which saw an increase in the Native population from 200 in 1820 to 553 in 1836 (out of a total population of 1,088). As stated by scholar Ralph Armbruster-Sandoval, "while they should have been owners, the Tongva became workers, performing strenuous, back-breaking labor just as they had done ever since settler colonialism emerged in Southern California." As described by researcher Heather Valdez Singleton, Los Angeles was heavily dependent on Native labor and "grew slowly on the back of the Gabrieleño laborers." Some of the people became "vaqueros" on the ranches, highly skilled horsemen or cowboys, herding and caring for the cattle. There was little land available to the Tongva to use for food outside of the ranches. Some crops such as corn and beans were planted on ranchos to sustain the workers.


title: Tongva

text: Several Gabrieleño families stayed within the San Gabriel township, which became "the cultural and geographic center of the Gabrieleño community." Yaanga also diversified and increased in size, with peoples of various Native backgrounds coming to live together shortly following secularization. However, the government had instituted a system dependent on Native labor and servitude and increasingly eliminated any alternatives within the Los Angeles area. As explained by Kelly Lytle Hernández, "there was no place for Natives living but not working in Mexican Los Angeles. In turn, the "ayuntamiunto" (city council) passed new laws to compel Natives to work or be arrested." In January 1836, the council directed "Californios" to sweep across Los Angeles to arrest "all drunken Indians." As recorded by Hernández, "Tongva men and women, along with an increasingly diverse set of their Native neighbors, filled the jail and convict labor crews in Mexican Los Angeles." By 1844, most Natives in Los Angeles worked as servants in a perpetual system of servitude, tending to the land and serving settlers, invaders, and colonizers.


title: Tongva

text: The "ayuntamiunto" forced the Native settlement of Yaanga to move farther away from town. By the mid-1840s, the settlement was forcibly moved eastward across the Los Angeles River, placing a divide between Mexican Los Angeles and the nearest Native community. However, "Native men, women, and children continued to live (not just work) in the city. On Saturday Nights, they even held parties, danced, and gambled at the removed Yaanga village and also at the plaza at the center of town." In response, the "Californios" continued to attempt to control Native lives, issuing Alta California governor Pio Pico a petition in 1846 stating: "We ask that the Indians be placed under strict police surveillance or the persons for whom the Indians work give [the Indians] quarter at the employer's rancho." In 1847, a law was passed that prohibited Gabrielenos from entering the city without proof of employment. A part of the proclamation read:Indians who have no masters but are self-sustaining, shall be lodged outside of the City limits in localities widely separated... All vagrant Indians of either sex who have not tried to secure a situation within four days and are found unemployed, shall be put to work on public works or sent to the house of correction.In 1848, Los Angeles formally became a town of the United States following the Mexican-American War.


title: Tongva

text: Landless and unrecognized, the people faced continued violence, subjugation, and enslavement (through convict labor) under American occupation. Some of the people were displaced to small Mexican and Native communities in the Eagle Rock and Highland Park districts of Los Angeles as well as Pauma, Pala, Temecula, Pechanga, and San Jacinto. Imprisonment of Natives in Los Angeles was a symbol of establishing the new "rule of law." The city's vigilante community would routinely "invade" the jail and hang the accused in the streets. Once congress granted statehood to California in 1850, many of the first laws passed targeted Natives for arrest, imprisonment, and convict labor. The 1850 Act for the Government and Protection of Indians "targeted Native peoples for easy arrest by stipulating that they could be arrested on vagrancy charges based 'on the complaint of any reasonable citizen'" and Gabrieleños faced the brunt of this policy. Section 14 of the act stated:When an Indian is convicted of any offence before a Justice of the Peace punishable by fine, any white person may, by consent of the Justice, give bond for said Indian, conditioned for the payment of said fine and costs, and in such case the Indian shall be compelled to work for the person so bailing, until he has discharged or cancelled the fine assessed against him.Native men were disproportionately criminalized and swept into this legalized system of indentured servitude. As was recorded by Anglo-American settlers, "'White men, whom the Marshal is too discreet to arrest' ... spilled out of the town's many saloons, streets, and brothels, but the aggressive and targeted enforcement of state and local vagrancy and drunk codes filled the Los Angeles County Jail with Natives, most of whom were men." Most spent their days working on the county chain gang, which was largely involved with keeping the city streets clean in the 1850s and 1860s but increasingly included road construction projects as well.


title: Tongva

text: Although federal officials reported that there were an estimated 16,930 California Indians and 1,050 at Mission San Gabriel, "the federal agents ignored them and those living in Los Angeles" because they were viewed as "friendly to the whites," as revealed in the personal diaries of Commissioner Geroge W. Barbour. In 1852, superintendent of Indian affairs Edward Fitzgerald Beale echoed this sentiment, reporting that "because these Indians were Christians, with many holding ranch jobs and having interacted with whites," that "they are not much to be dreaded." Although a California Senate Bill of 2008 asserted that the US government signed treaties with the Gabrieleño, promising of land for reservations, and that these treaties were never ratified, a paper published in 1972 by Robert Heizer of the University of California at Berkeley, shows that the eighteen treaties made between April 29, 1851, and August 22, 1852, were negotiated with persons who did not represent the Tongva people and that none of these persons had authority to cede lands that belonged to the people.


title: Tongva

text: An 1852 editorial in the "Los Angeles Star" revealed the public's anger towards any possibility of the Gabrieleño receiving recognition and exercising sovereignty:To place upon our most fertile soil the most degraded race of aborigines upon the North American Continent, to invest them with the rights of sovereignty, and to teach them that they are to be treated as powerful and independent nations, is planting the seeds of future disaster and ruin... We hope that the general government will let us alone—that it will neither undertake to feed, settle or remove the Indians amongst whome we in the South reside, and that they leave everything just as it now exists, except affording us the protection which two or three cavalry companies would give.In 1852, Hugo Reid wrote a series of letters for the "Los Angeles Star" from the center of the Gabrieleño community in San Gabriel township, describing Gabrieleño life and culture. Reid himself was married to a Gabrieleño woman by the name of Bartolomea Cumicrabit, who he renamed "Victoria." Reid wrote the following: "Their chiefs still exist. In San Gabriel remain only four, and those young... They have no jurisdiction more than to appoint times for holding of Feasts and regulating affairs connected with the church [traditional structure made of brush]." There is some speculation that Reid was campaigning for the position of Indian agent in Southern California, but died before he could be appointed. Instead, in 1852, Benjamin D. Wilson was appointed, who maintained the status quo. The letters of Hugo Reid revealed the names of 28 Gabrielino villages.


title: Tongva

text: In 1855, the Gabrieleño were reported by the superintendent of Indian affairs Thomas J. Henley to be in "a miserable and degraded condition." However, Henley admitted that moving them to a reservation, potentially at Sebastian Reserve in Tejon Pass, would be opposed by the citizens because "in the vineyards, especially during the grape season, their labor is made useful and is obtained at a cheap rate." A few Gabrieleño were in fact at Sebastian Reserve and maintained contact with the people living in San Gabriel during this time.


title: Tongva

text: In 1859, amidst increasing criminalization and absorption into the city's burgeoning convict labor system, the county grand jury declared "stringent vagrant laws should be enacted and enforced compelling such persons ['Indians'] to obtain an honest livelihood or seek their old homes in the mountains." This declaration ignored Reid's research, which stated that most Tongva villages, including Yaanga, "were located in the basin, along its rivers and on its shoreline, stretching from the deserts and to the sea." Only a few villages led by "tomyaars" (chiefs) were "in the mountains, where Chengiichngech's avengers, serpents, and bears lived," as described by historian Kelly Lytle Hernández. However, "the grand jury dismissed the depths of Indigenous claims to life, land, and sovereignty in the region and, instead, chose to frame Indigenous peoples as drunks and vagrants loitering in Los Angeles... disavowing a long history of Indigenous belonging in the basin."


title: Tongva

text: While in 1848, Los Angeles had been a small town largely of Mexicans and Natives, by 1880 it was home to an Anglo-American majority following waves of white migration in the 1870s from the completion of the transcontinental railroad. As stated by research Heather Valdez Singleton, newcomers "took advantage of the fact that many Gabrieleño families, who had cultivated and lived on the same land for generations, did not hold legal title to the land, and used the law to evict Indian families." The Gabrieleño became vocal about this and notified former Indian agent J. Q. Stanley, who referred to them as "half-civilized" yet lobbied to protect the Gabrieleño "against the lawless whites living amongst them," arguing that they would become "vagabonds" otherwise. However, active Indian agent Augustus P. Greene's recommendation took precedent, arguing that "Mission Indians in southern California were slowing the settlement of this portion of the country for non-Indians and suggested that the Indians be completely assimilated," as summarized by Singleton.


title: Tongva

text: In 1882, Helen Hunt Jackson was sent by the federal government to document the condition of the Mission Indians in southern California. She reported that there were a considerable number of people "in the colonies in the San Gabriel Valley, where they live like gypsies in brush huts, here today, gone tomorrow, eking out a miserable existence by days' work." However, even though Jackson's report would become the impetus for the Mission Indian Relief Act of 1891, the Gabrieleño were "overlooked by the commission charged with setting aside lands for Mission Indians." It is speculated that this may have been attributed to what was perceived as their compliance with the government, which caused them to be neglected, as noted earlier by Indian agent J. Q. Stanley.


title: Tongva

text: By the early twentieth century, Gabrieleño identity had suffered greatly under American occupation. Most Gabrieleño publicly identified as Mexican, learned Spanish, and adopted Catholicism while keeping their identity a secret. In schools, students were punished for mentioning that they were "Indian" and many of the people assimilated into Mexican-American or Chicano culture. Further attempts to establish a reservation for the Gabrieleño in 1907 failed. Soon it began to be perpetuated in the local press that the Gabrieleño were extinct. In February 1921, the "Los Angeles Times" declared that the death of Jose de los Santos Juncos, an Indigenous man who lived at Mission San Gabriel and was 106 years old at his time of passing, "marked the passing of a vanished race." In 1925, Alfred Kroeber declared that the Gabrieleño culture was extinct, stating "they have melted away so completely that we know more of the finer facts of the culture of ruder tribes." Scholars have noted that this extinction myth has proven to be "remarkably resilient," yet is untrue.


title: Tongva

text: Despite being declared extinct, Gabrieleño children were still being assimilated by federal agents who encouraged enrollment at Sherman Indian School in Riverside, California. Between 1890 and 1920, at least 50 Gabrieleño children were recorded at the school. Between 1910 and 1920, the establishment of the Mission Indian Federation, of which the Gabrieleño joined, led to the 1928 California Indians Jurisdictional Act, which created official enrollment records for those who could prove ancestry from a California Indian living in the state in 1852. Over 150 people self-identified as Gabrieleño on this roll. A Gabrieleño woman at Tejon Reservation provided the names and addresses of several Gabrieleño living in San Gabriel, showing that contact between the group at Tejon Reservation and the group at San Gabriel township, which are more than 70 miles apart, was being maintained into the 1920s and 1930s.


title: Tongva

text: In 1971, Bernice Johnston, former curator of the Southwest Museum and author of "California’s Gabrieleno Indians" (1962), spoke to the "Los Angeles Times": “After spending much of her life trying to trace the Indians, she believes she almost came in contact with some Gabrielenos a few years ago…She relates that on a Sunday, while giving a tour of the museum, ‘I saw these shy, dark people looking around. They were asking questions about the Gabrieleno Indians. I asked why they wanted to know, and nearly fell over when they told me they were Gabrielenos and wanted to know something about themselves. I was busy with the tour, we were crowded. I rushed back to them as soon as I could but they were gone. I didn’t even get their names.”


title: Tongva

text: The continued denigration and denial of Gabrieleño identity perpetuated by Anglo-American institutions such as schools and museums has presented numerous obstacles for the people throughout the 20th and 21st centuries. Contemporary members have cited being denied the legitimacy of their identity. Tribal identity is also heavily hindered by a lack of federal recognition and having no land base.


title: Tongva

text: The Tongva lived in the main part of the most fertile lowland of southern California, including a stretch of sheltered coast with a pleasant climate and abundant food resources, and the most habitable of the Santa Barbara Islands. They have been referred to as the most culturally 'advanced' group south of the Tehachapi, and the wealthiest of the Uto-Aztecan speakers in California, dominating other native groups culturally wherever contacts occurred. Many of the cultural developments of the surrounding southern peoples had their origin with the Gabrieleño. The Tongva territory was the center of a flourishing trade network that extended from the Channel Islands in the west to the Colorado River in the east, allowing the people to maintain trade relations with the Cahuilla, Serrano, Luiseño, Chumash, and Mohave.


title: Tongva

text: Like all Indigenous peoples, they utilized and existed in an interconnected relationship with the flora and fauna of their familial territory. Villages were located throughout four major ecological zones, as noted by biologist Matthew Teutimez: interior mountains and foothills, grassland/oak woodland, sheltered coastal canyons, and the exposed coast. Therefore, resources such as plants, animals, and earth minerals were diverse and used for various purposes, including for food and materials. Prominent flora included oak ("Quercus agrifolia") and willow ("Salix spp.") trees, chia ("Salvia columbariae"), cattail ("Typha spp."), datura or jimsonweed ("Datura innoxia"), white sage ("Salvia apiana"), "Juncus spp.", Mexican Elderberry ("Sambucus"), wild tobacco ("Nicotiana spp."), and yucca ("Hesperoyucca whipplei"). Prominent fauna included mule deer, pronghorn, black bear, grizzly bear, black-tailed jackrabbit, cottontail, bald eagle, red-tailed hawk, dolphin, and gray whale.


title: Tongva

text: The Tongva had a concentrated population along the coast. They fished and hunted in the estuary of the Los Angeles River, and like the Chumash, their neighbors to the north and west along the Pacific coast, the Gabrieleño built seaworthy plank canoes, called "te'aat", from driftwood. To build them, they used planks of driftwood pine that were sewn together with vegetable fiber cord, edge to edge, and then glued with the tar that was available either from the La Brea Tar Pits, or as asphalt that had washed up on shore from offshore oil seeps. The finished vessel was caulked with plant fibers and tar, stained with red ochre, and sealed with pine pitch. The "te'aat", as noted by the Sebastián Vizcaíno expedition, could hold up to 20 people as well as their gear and trade goods. These canoes allowed the development of trade between the mainland villages and the offshore islands, and were important to the region's economy and social organization, with trade in food and manufactured goods being carried on between the people on the mainland coast and people in the interior as well. The Gabrieleño regularly paddled their canoes to Catalina Island, where they gathered abalone, which they pried off the rocks with implements made of fragments of whale ribs or other strong bones.


title: Tongva

text: In the Tongva economic system, food resources were managed by the village chief, who was given a portion of the yield of each day's hunting, fishing, or gathering to add to the communal food reserves. Individual families stored some food to be used in times of scarcity. Villages were located in places with accessible drinking water, protection from the elements, and productive areas where different ecological niches on the land intersected. Situating their villages at these resource islands enabled the Tongva to gather the plant products of two or more zones in close proximity.


title: Tongva

text: Households consisted of a main house ("kiiy") and temporary camp shelters used during food gathering excursions. In the summer, families who lived near grasslands collected roots, seeds, flowers, fruit, and leafy greens, and in the winter families who lived near chaparral shrubland collected nuts and acorns, yucca, and hunted deer. The group used “wooden tongs” to collect prickly pear fruits.


title: Tongva

text: Some prairie communities moved to the coast in the winter to fish, hunt whales and elephant seals, and harvest shellfish. Those villages located on the coast during the summer went on food collecting trips inland during the winter rainy season to gather roots, tubers, corms, and bulbs of plants including cattails, lilies, and wild onions.


title: Tongva

text: The Tongva did not practice horticulture or agriculture, as their well-developed hunter-gatherer and trade economy provided adequate food resources. Bread was made from the yellow pollen of cattail heads, and the underground rhizomes were dried and ground into a starchy meal. The young shoots were eaten raw. The seeds of chia, a herbaceous plant of the sage family, were gathered in large quantities when they were ripe. The flower heads were beaten with a paddle over a tightly woven basket to collect the seeds. These were dried or roasted and ground into a flour called "pinole," which was often mixed with the flour of other ground seeds or grains. Water was added to make a cooling drink; mixing with less water yielded a kind of porridge that could be baked into cakes.


title: Tongva

text: Acorn mush was a staple food as it was of all the Indigenous peoples who were forcibly relocated to missions in Southern California. Acorns were gathered in October; this was a communal effort with the men climbing the trees and shaking them while the women and children collected the nuts. The acorns were stored in large wicker granaries supported by wooden stakes well above the ground. Preparing them for food took about a week. Acorns were placed, one at a time, on end in the slight hollow of a rock and their shells broken by a light blow from a small hammerstone; then the membrane, or skin, covering the acorn meat was removed. Following this process the acorn meats were dried for days, after which the kernels were pounded into meal with a pestle. This was done in a stone mortar or in a mortar hole in a boulder. Large bedrock outcroppings near oak stands often display evidence of the community mills where the women labored.


title: Tongva

text: The pounded acorn meal was put into baskets and the bitter tannic acid it contained was leached out to make the meal more palatable and digestible. The prepared meal was cooked by boiling in water in a watertight grass-woven basket or in a soapstone bowl into which heated stones were dropped. Soapstone casseroles were used directly over the fire. Various foods of meat, seeds, or roots were cooked by the same method. The mush thus prepared was eaten cold or nearly so, as was all their food. Another favored Tongva food was the seed kernel of a species of plum ("prunus ilicifolia", aka holly-leaf cherry) they called "islay", which was ground into meal and made into gruel.


title: Tongva

text: Men performed most of the heavy, short-duration labor; they hunted, fished, helped with some food-gathering, and carried on trade with other cultural groups. Large game animals were hunted with bow and arrows, and small game was taken with deadfall traps, snares, and bows made of buckeye wood. John P. Harrington recorded that rattlesnake venom was used as an arrow poison. Burrowing animals were driven from their burrows with smoke and clubbed; communal rabbit drives were made during the seasonal controlled burning of chaparral on the prairie, the rabbits being killed with nets, bow and arrows, and throwing sticks.


title: Tongva

text: Harpoons, spear-throwers, and clubs were used to hunt marine mammals and "te'aat" used to access them. Fishing was done from shorelines or along rivers, streams, and creeks with hook and line, nets, basketry traps, spears, bow and arrows, and poisons made from plants. Reciprocity and sharing of resources were important values in Tongva culture. Hugo Reid reported that the hoarding of food supplies was so stigmatized by the Tongva moral code that hunters would give away large portions of coveted foods such as fresh meat, and under some circumstances, were prohibited from eating their own kill or fishermen from eating their own catch.


title: Tongva

text: Women collected and prepared plant and some animal food resources and made baskets, pots, and clothing. In their old age, they and the old men cared for the young and taught them Tongva lifeways.


title: Tongva

text: Tongva material culture and technology reflected a sophisticated knowledge of the working properties of natural materials and a highly developed artisanship, shown in many articles of everyday utility decorated with shell inlay, carving, and painting. Most of these items, including baskets, shell tools, and wooden weapons, were extremely perishable. Soapstone from quarries on Catalina Island was used to make cooking implements, animal carvings, pipes, ritual objects, and ornaments.


title: Tongva

text: Using the stems of rushes ("Juncus" sp .), grass ("Muhlenbergia rigens"), and squawbush ("Rhus trilobata"), women fabricated coiled and twined basketry in a three-color pattern for household use, seed collecting, and ceremonial containers to hold grave offerings. They sealed some baskets, such as water bottles, with asphalt to make watertight containers for holding liquids.


title: Tongva

text: The Tongva used the leaves of tule reeds as well as those of cattails to weave mats and thatch their shelters.


title: Tongva

text: Living in the mild climate of southern California, the men and children usually went nude, and women wore only a two-piece skirt, the back part being made from the flexible inner bark of cottonwood or willow, or occasionally deerskin. The front apron was made of cords of twisted dog bane or milkweed. People went barefoot except in rough areas where they wore crude sandals made of yucca fiber. In cold weather, they wore robes or capes made from twisted strips of rabbit fur, deer skins, or bird skins with the feathers still attached. Also used as blankets at night, these were made of sea otter skins along the coast and on the islands. “Women were tattooed from cheek to shoulder blade, from elbow to shoulder,” with cactus thorns used as needles and charcoal dust rubbed into the wounds as “ink,” leaving a blue-gray mark under the skin after the wounds healed.


title: Tongva

text: According to Father Gerónimo Boscana, relations between the Chumash, Gabrieleños, Luiseños, and Diegueños, as he called them, were generally peaceful but “when there was a war it was ferocious…no quarter was given, and no prisoners were taken except the wounded.”


title: Tongva

text: The earliest ethnological surveys of the Christianized population of the San Gabriel area, who were then known by the Spanish as "Gabrielino", were conducted in the mid-19th century. By this time, their pre-Christian religious beliefs and mythology were already fading. The Gabrieleño language was on the brink of extinction by 1900, so only fragmentary records of the indigenous language and culture of the Gabrieleño have been preserved. Gabrieleño was one of the Cupan languages in the Takic language group, which is part of the Uto-Aztecan family of languages. It may be considered a dialect with Fernandeño, but it has not been a language of everyday conversation since the 1940s. The Gabrieleño people now speak English but a few are attempting to revive their language by using it in everyday conversation and ceremonial contexts. Presently, Gabrieleño is also being used in language revitalization classes and in some public discussion regarding religious and environmental issues.


title: Tongva

text: The library of Loyola Marymount University, located in Los Angeles (Westchester), has an extensive collection of archival materials related to the Tongva and their history.


title: Tongva

text: In the 21st century, an estimated 1,700 people self-identify as members of the Tongva or Gabrieleño tribe. In 1994, the state of California recognized the "Gabrielino-Tongva Tribe" () and the "Fernandino-Tongva Tribe" (), but neither has gained federal recognition. In 2013, it was reported that the four Tongva groups that have applied for federal recognition had over 3,900 members collectively.


title: Tongva

text: The Gabrieleño/Tongva people do not accept one organization or government as representing them. They have had strong internal disagreements about governance and their future, largely related to plans supported by some members to open a gaming casino on land that would be considered part of the Gabrieleño/Tongva's homeland. Gaming casinos have generated great revenues for many Native American tribes, but not all Tongva people believe the benefits outweigh negative aspects. The Gabrielino/Tongva Tribe (sometimes called the "slash" group) and Gabrielino-Tongva Tribe (sometimes called the "hyphen" group) are the two primary factions advocating a casino for the Tongva nation, with sharing of revenues by all the people. The Gabrielino Tribal Council of San Gabriel, now known as the Kizh Nation (Gabrieleño Band of Mission Indians), claims that it does not support gaming. The Gabrieleno Tongva San Gabriel Band of Mission Indians also does not support gambling and has been operating and meeting in the city of San Gabriel for over a hundred years. None of these organizations is recognized as a tribe by the federal government.


title: Tongva

text: In 1990, the Gabrielino/Tongva of San Gabriel filed for federal recognition. Other Gabrieleño groups have done the same. The Gabrielino/Tongva of California Tribal Council and the Coastal Gabrielino-Diegueno Band of Mission Indians filed federal petitions in 1997. These applications for federal recognition remain pending.


title: Tongva

text: The San Gabriel group gained acknowledgement of its nonprofit status by the state of California in 1994. In 2001, the San Gabriel council divided over concessions given to the developers of Playa Vista and a proposal to build an Indian casino in Compton, California. A Santa Monica faction formed that advocated gaming for the tribe, which the San Gabriel faction opposed.


title: Tongva

text: The San Gabriel council and Santa Monica faction sued each other over allegations that the San Gabriel faction expelled some members in order to increase gaming shares for other members. There were allegations that the Santa Monica faction stole tribal records in order to support its case for federal recognition.


title: Tongva

text: In September 2006, the Santa Monica faction divided into the "slash" and "hyphen" groups: the Gabrielino/Tongva Tribe and Gabrielino-Tongva Tribe. Tribal secretary Sam Dunlap and tribal attorney Jonathan Stein confronted each other over various alleged fiscal improprieties and derogatory comments made to each other. Since that time, the slash group has hired former state senator Richard Polanco as its chief executive officer. The hyphen group has allied with Stein and issued warrants for the arrest of Polanco and members of the slash group.


title: Tongva

text: Stein's group (hyphen), the Gabrielino-Tongva Tribe, is based in Santa Monica. It has proposed a casino to be built in Garden Grove, California, approximately two miles south of Disneyland. In September 2007, the city council of Garden Grove unanimously rejected the casino proposal, instead choosing to build a water park on the land.


title: Tongva

text: Controversies have arisen in contemporary California related to land-use issues and Native American rights, including those of the Tongva. Since the late twentieth century, both the state and the United States governments have improved respect of indigenous rights and tribal sovereignty. The Tongva have challenged local development plans in the courts in order to protect and preserve some of their sacred grounds. Given the long indigenous history in the area, not all archeological sites have been identified.


title: Tongva

text: Sometimes land developers have inadvertently disturbed Tongva burial grounds. The tribe denounced archeologists breaking bones of ancestral remains found during an excavation of a site at Playa Vista. An important resolution was finally honored at the Playa Vista project site against the 'Westchester Bluffs' near the Ballona Wetlands estuary and by the historic natural course of Ballona Creek.


title: Tongva

text: In the 1990s, the Gabrielino/Tongva Springs Foundation revived use of the Kuruvungna Springs for sacred ceremonies. The natural springs are located on the site of a former Tongva village, now developed as the campus of University High School in West Los Angeles. The Tongva consider the springs, which flow at 22,000 gallons per day, to be one of their last remaining sacred sites and they regularly make them the centerpiece of ceremonial events.


title: Tongva

text: The Tongva have another sacred area known as "Puvungna." They have believed it is the birthplace of the Tongva prophet Chingishnish, and many believe it to be the place of creation. The site contains an active spring and the area was formerly inhabited by a Tongva village. It has been developed as part of the grounds of California State University, Long Beach. A portion of Puvungna, a Tongva burial ground on the western edge of the campus, is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. In October 2019, following the dumping of soil, along with concrete, rebar and other debris, on "land that holds archeological artifacts actively used by local Tribal groups for ceremonies" from a nearby construction site, the Juaneño Band of Mission Indians, Acjachemen Nation–Belardes, and the California Cultural Resource Preservation Alliance (CCRPA) filed a lawsuit against the university. In November 2019, the university agreed to stop dumping materials onto the site, and as of 2020 the lawsuit between these parties is still ongoing.


title: Tongva

text: Tongva/Gabrieleño/Fernandeño oral literature is relatively little known, due to their early Christianization in the 1770s by Spanish missions in California. The available evidence suggests strong cultural links with the group's linguistic kin and neighbors to the south and east, the Luiseño and the Cahuilla.


title: Tongva

text: According to Kroeber (1925), the pre-Christian Tongva had a "mythic-ritual-social six-god pantheon". The principal deity was Chinigchinix, also known as Quaoar. Another important figure is Weywot, the god of the sky, who was created by Quaoar. Weywot ruled over the Tongva, but he was very cruel, and he was finally killed by his own sons. When the Tongva assembled to decide what to do next, they had a vision of a ghostly being who called himself Quaoar, who said he had come to restore order and to give laws to the people. After he had given instructions as to which groups would have political and spiritual leadership, he began to dance and slowly ascended into heaven.


title: Tongva

text: After consulting with the Tongva, astronomers Michael E. Brown and Chad Trujillo used the name of Quaoar to name a large object in the Kuiper belt that they had discovered, 50000 Quaoar (2002). When Brown later found a satellite of Quaoar, he left the choice of name up to the Tongva, who selected Weywot (2009).


title: Tongva

text: From the Spanish colonial period, Tongva place names have been absorbed into general use in Southern California. Examples include Pacoima, Tujunga, Topanga, Rancho Cucamonga, Azusa (Azucsagna), and Cahuenga Pass.


title: Tongva

text: Sacred sites that have not been totally demolished, destroyed, or built over include Puvunga, Kuruvungna Springs, and Eagle Rock.


title: Tongva

text: In other cases, toponyms or places have been recently named to honor the indigenous peoples. The Gabrielino Trail is a 28-mile path through the Angeles National Forest, created and named in 1970.


title: Tongva

text: A 2,656-foot summit in the Verdugo Mountains, in Glendale, was named Tongva Peak in 2002, following a proposal by Richard Toyon.


title: Tongva

text: Tongva Park is a 6.2-acre park in Santa Monica, California. The park is located just south of Colorado Avenue, between Ocean Avenue and Main Street. The park includes an amphitheater, playground, garden, fountains, picnic areas, and restrooms. The park was dedicated on October 13, 2013.


title: 1936–1939 Arab revolt in Palestine

text: The 1936–1939 Arab revolt in Palestine, later known as The Great Revolt ("al-Thawra al- Kubra") or The Great Palestinian Revolt ("Thawrat Filastin al-Kubra"), was a popular nationalist uprising by Palestinian Arabs in Mandatory Palestine against the British administration of the Palestine Mandate, demanding Arab independence and the end of the policy of open-ended Jewish immigration and land purchases with the stated goal of establishing a "Jewish National Home". The uprising coincided with a peak in the influx of immigrant Jews, some 60,000 that year –the Jewish population having grown under British auspices from 57,000 to 320,000 in 1935 – and with the growing plight of the rural fellahin rendered landless, who as they moved to metropolitan centers to escape their abject poverty found themselves socially marginalized. Since 1920 Jews and Arabs had been involved in a cycle of attacks and counter-attacks, and the immediate spark for the uprising was the murder of two Jews by a Qassamite band, and the retaliatory killing by Jewish gunmen of two Arab laborers, incidents which triggered a flare-up of violence across Palestine. A month into the disturbances Amin al-Husseini, president of the Arab Higher Committee and Mufti of Jerusalem, declared 16 May 1936 as 'Palestine Day' and called for a General Strike. The revolt was branded by many in the Jewish Yishuv as "immoral and terroristic", often compared to fascism and Nazism. Ben Gurion, however, described Arab causes as fear of growing Jewish economic power, opposition to mass Jewish immigration and fear of the English identification with Zionism.


title: 1936–1939 Arab revolt in Palestine

text: The general strike lasted from April to October 1936. The revolt is often analysed in terms of two distinct phases. The first phase was one of spontaneous popular resistance which was only, in a second moment, seized on by the urban and elitist Arab Higher Comittee, which gave the movement an organized shape and was focused mainly on strikes and other forms of political protest, in order to secure a political result. By October 1936, this phase had been defeated by the British civil administration using a combination of political concessions, international diplomacy (involving the rulers of Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Transjordan and Yemen) and the threat of martial law. The second phase, which began late in 1937, was a peasant-led resistance movement provoked by British repression in 1936 in which increasingly British forces were targeted as the army itself increasingly targeted the villages it thought supportive of the revolt. During this phase, the rebellion was brutally suppressed by the British Army and the Palestine Police Force using repressive measures that were intended to intimidate the whole population and undermine popular support for the revolt. A more dominant role on the Arab side was taken by the Nashashibi clan, whose NDP party quickly withdrew from the rebel Arab Higher Committee, led by the radical faction of Amin al-Husseini, and instead sided with the British – dispatching "Fasail al-Salam" (the "Peace Bands") in coordination with the British Army against nationalist and Jihadist Arab "Fasail" units (literally "bands").


title: 1936–1939 Arab revolt in Palestine

text: According to official British figures covering the whole revolt, the army and police killed more than 2,000 Arabs in combat, 108 were hanged, and 961 died because of what they described as "gang and terrorist activities". In an analysis of the British statistics, Walid Khalidi estimates 19,792 casualties for the Arabs, with 5,032 dead: 3,832 killed by the British and 1,200 dead due to intracommunal terrorism, and 14,760 wounded. By one estimate, ten percent of the adult male Palestinian Arab population between 20 and 60 was killed, wounded, imprisoned or exiled. Estimates of the number of Palestinian Jews killed are up to several hundred.


title: 1936–1939 Arab revolt in Palestine

text: The Arab revolt in Mandatory Palestine was unsuccessful, and its consequences affected the outcome of the 1948 Palestine war. It caused the British Mandate to give crucial support to pre-state Zionist militias like the Haganah, whereas on the Palestinian Arab side, the revolt forced the flight into exile of the main Palestinian Arab leader of the period, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem Haj Amin al-Husseini.


title: 1936–1939 Arab revolt in Palestine

text: World War I left Palestine, especially the countryside, deeply impoverished. The Ottoman and then the Mandate authorities levied high taxes on farming and agricultural produce and during the 1920s and 1930s this together with a fall in prices, cheap imports, natural disasters and paltry harvests all contributed to the increasing indebtedness of the fellahin. The rents paid by tenant fellah increased sharply, owing to increased population density, and growing transfer of land from Arabs to the Jewish settlement agencies, such as the Jewish National Fund, increased the number of fellahin evicted while also removing the land as a future source of livelihood. By 1931 the 106,400 dunums of low-lying Category A farming land in Arab possession supported a farming population of 590,000 whereas the 102,000 dunums of such land in Jewish possession supported a farming population of only 50,000. The late 1920s witnessed poor harvests, and the consequent immiseration grew even harsher with the onset of the Great Depression and the collapse of commodity prices. The Shaw Commission in 1930 had identified the existence of a class of 'embittered landless people' as a contributory factor to the preceding 1929 disturbances, and the problem of these 'landless' Arabs grew particularly grave after 1931, causing High Commissioner Wauchope to warn that this 'social peril ... would serve as a focus of discontent and might even result in serious disorders.'


title: 1936–1939 Arab revolt in Palestine

text: Economic factors played a major role in the outbreak of the Arab revolt. Palestine's fellahin, the country's peasant farmers, made up over two-thirds of the indigenous Arab population and from the 1920s onwards they were pushed off the land in increasingly large numbers into urban environments where they often encountered only poverty and social marginalisation. Many were crowded into shanty towns in Jaffa and Haifa where some found succour and encouragement in the teachings of the charismatic preacher Izz ad-Din al-Qassam who worked among the poor in Haifa. The revolt was thus a popular uprising that produced its own leaders and developed into a national revolt.


title: 1936–1939 Arab revolt in Palestine

text: Although the Mandatory government introduced measures to limit the transfer of land from Arabs to Jews, these were easily circumvented by willing buyers and sellers. The failure of the authorities to invest in economic growth and healthcare for the general Palestinian public and the Zionist policy of ensuring that their investments were directed only to facilitate expansion exclusively of the Yishuv further compounded matters. The government did, however, set the minimum wage for Arab workers below that for Jewish workers, which meant that those making capital investments in the Yishuv's economic infrastructure, such as Haifa's electricity plant, the Shemen oil and soap factory, the Grands Moulins flour mills and the Nesher cement factory, could take advantage of cheap Arab labour pouring in from the countryside. After 1935 the slump in the construction boom and further concentration by the Yishuv on an exclusivist Hebrew labour programme removed most of the sources of employment for rural migrants. By 1935 only 12,000 Arabs (5% of the workforce) worked in the Jewish sector, half of these in agriculture, whereas 32,000 worked for the Mandate authorities and 211,000 were either self-employed or worked for Arab employers.


title: 1936–1939 Arab revolt in Palestine

text: The ongoing disruption of agrarian life in Palestine, which had been continuing since Ottoman times, thus created a large population of landless peasant farmers who subsequently became mobile wage workers who were increasingly marginalised and impoverished; these became willing participants in nationalist rebellion. At the same time, Jewish immigration peaked in 1935, just months before Palestinian Arabs began their full-scale, nationwide revolt. Over the four years between 1933 and 1936 more than 164,000 Jewish immigrants arrived in Palestine, and between 1931 and 1936 the Jewish population more than doubled from 175,000 to 370,000 people, increasing the Jewish population share from 17% to 27%, and bringing about a significant deterioration in relations between Palestinian Arabs and Jews.


title: 1936–1939 Arab revolt in Palestine

text: The advent of Zionism and British colonial administration crystallised Palestinian nationalism and the desire to defend indigenous traditions and institutions. Palestinian society was largely clan-based ("hamula"), with an urban land-holding elite lacking a centralized leadership. Traditional feasts such as Nebi Musa began to acquire a political and nationalist dimension and new national memorial days were introduced or gained new significance; among them Balfour Day (2 November, marking the Balfour Declaration of 1917), the anniversary of the Battle of Hattin (4 July), and beginning in 1930 May 16 was celebrated as Palestine Day.The expansion of education, the development of civil society and of transportation, communications, and especially of broadcasting and other media, all facilitated notable changes. The Yishuv itself, at the same time, was steadily building the structures for its own state-building with public organizations like the Jewish Agency and the covert creation and consolidation of a paramilitary arm with the Haganah and Irgun.


title: 1936–1939 Arab revolt in Palestine

text: In 1930 Sheikh Izz ad-Din al-Qassam organized and established the Black Hand, a small anti-Zionist and anti-British militia. He recruited and arranged military training for impoverished but pious peasants but also for ex-criminals he had persuaded to take Islam seriously and they engaged in a campaign of vandalizing tree plantations and British-constructed rail lines, destroying phone lines and disrupting transportation. Three minor mujāhīdūn and jihadist groups had also been formed that advocated armed struggle; these were the Green Hand ("al-Kaff al-Khaḍrā") -active in the area of Acre-Safed-Nazareth from 1929 until 1930 when they were dispersed; the Organization for Holy Struggle ("al-Jihād al-Muqaddas"), led by Abd al-Qadir al-Husayni and operative in the areas of Jerusalem (1931–1934); and the Rebel Youth ("al-Shabāb al-Thā'ir"), active in the Tulkarm and Qalqilyah area from 1935, and composed mainly of local boy scouts.)


title: 1936–1939 Arab revolt in Palestine

text: The pressures of the 1930s wrought several changes, giving rise to new political organizations and a broader activism that spurred a far wider cross-section of the population in rural areas, strongly nationalist, to join actively in the Palestinian cause. Among new political parties formed in this period were the Independence Party which called for an Indian Congress Party-style boycott of the British, the pro-Nashashibi National Defence Party, the pro-Husayni Palestinian Arab Party the pro-Khalidi Arab-Palestinian Reform Party, and the National Bloc, based mainly around Nablus.


title: 1936–1939 Arab revolt in Palestine

text: Youth organisations emerged like Young Men's Muslim Association and the Youth Congress Party, the former anti-Zionist, the latter pan-Arab. The Palestinian Boy Scout Movement, founded early in 1936, became active in the general strike. Women's organisations, which had been active in social matters, became politically involved from the end of the 1920s, with an Arab Women's Congress held in Jerusalem in 1929 attracting 200 participants, and an Arab Women's Association (later Arab Women's Union) being established at the same time, both organised by feminist Tarab Abdul Hadi. Myriads of rural women would play an important role in response to "faz'a" alarm calls for intervillage help by rallying in defence of the rebellion.


title: 1936–1939 Arab revolt in Palestine

text: On 16 October 1935 a large arms shipment camouflaged in cement bins, comprising 25 Lewis guns and their bipods, 800 rifles and 400,000 rounds of ammunition destined for the Haganah, was discovered during unloading at the port of Jaffa. The news sparked Arab fears of a Jewish military takeover of Palestine, A little over two weeks later, on November 2 1935, al-Qassam gave a speech in the port of Haifa denouncing the Balfour declaration on its 18th anniversary. In a proclamation to that effect, together with Jamal al-Husayni, he alluded to the Haganah weapons smuggling operation. Questioned at the time by a confidant about his preparations, he stated that he had 15 men, each furnished with a rifle and one cartridge. Soon after, perhaps fearing a pending preemptive arrest, he disappeared with his group into the hills, not to start a revolution, premature at that point, but to impress upon people that he was man ready to do what he said should be done. Some weeks later, a Jewish policeman was shot dead in a citrus grove while investigating the theft of grapefruit, after he happened to come close to the Qassamites' encampment. Following the incident, the Palestine police launched a massive manhunt and surrounded al-Qassam in a cave just north of Ya'bad. In the ensuing battle, on 20 November, al-Qassam was killed.


title: 1936–1939 Arab revolt in Palestine

text: The death of al-Qassam generated widespread outrage among Palestinian Arabs, galvanizing public sentiments with an impact similar to the effect on the Yishuv of news of the death of Joseph Trumpeldor in 1920 at the Tel Hai settlement. Huge crowds gathered for the occasion of his obsequies in Haifa and later burial in Balad al-Shaykh.


title: 1936–1939 Arab revolt in Palestine

text: The actual uprising was triggered some five months later, on 15 April 1936, by the Anabta shooting where remnants of a Qassamite band stopped a convoy on the road from Nablus to Tulkarm, robbed its passengers and, stating that they were acting to revenge al-Qassam's death, shot 3 Jewish passengers, two fatally, after ascertaining their identity. One of the three, Israel Chazan, was from Thessaloniki. The Salonican community’s request that permission be granted to allow them to conduct a solemn funeral for Chasan was turned down by the district commissioner, who had allowed al-Qassam a ceremonial burial some months earlier. The refusal sparked an demonstration by 30,000 Jews in Tel Aviv who overcame the police and maltreated Arab labourers and damaged property in Jaffa. The following day, two Arab workers sleeping in a hut in a banana plantation beside the highway between Petah Tikva and Yarkona were assassinated in retaliation by members of the Haganah-Bet.


title: 1936–1939 Arab revolt in Palestine

text: Jews and Palestinians attacked each other in and around Tel Aviv. Palestinians in Jaffa rampaged through a Jewish residential area, resulting in several Jewish deaths. After four days, by 19 April, the deteriorating situation erupted into a set of countrywide disturbances. An Arab general strike and revolt ensued that lasted until October 1936.


title: 1936–1939 Arab revolt in Palestine

text: General strikes had been used in neighbouring Arab countries to place political pressures on Western colonial powers. In Iraq a general strike in July 1931, accompanied by organised demonstrations in the streets, led to independence for the former British mandate territory under Prime Minister Nuri as-Said, and full membership of the League of Nations in October 1932.The Syrian national movement had used a general strike from 20 January to 6 March in 1936 which, despite harsh reprisals, brought about negotiations in Paris that led to a Franco-Syrian Treaty of Independence. This showed that determined economic and political pressure could challenge a fragile imperial administration.


title: 1936–1939 Arab revolt in Palestine

text: The strike began on 19 April in Nablus, where an Arab National Committee was formed, and by the end of the month National Committees had been formed in all of the towns and some of the larger villages. On the same day, the High Commissioner Wauchope issued Emergency Regulations that laid the legal basis for suppressing the insurgency. On 21 April the leaders of the five main parties accepted the decision at Nablus and called for a general strike of all Arabs engaged in labour, transport and shopkeeping for the following day.


title: 1936–1939 Arab revolt in Palestine

text: While the strike was initially organised by workers and local committees, under pressure from below, political leaders became involved to help with co-ordination. This led to the formation on 25 April 1936 of the Arab Higher Committee (AHC). The Committee resolved "to continue the general strike until the British Government changes its present policy in a fundamental manner"; the demands were threefold: (1) the prohibition of Jewish immigration; (2) the prohibition of the transfer of Arab land to Jews; (3) the establishment of a National Government responsible to a representative council.


title: 1936–1939 Arab revolt in Palestine

text: About one month after the general strike started, the leadership group declared a general non-payment of taxes in explicit opposition to Jewish immigration.


title: 1936–1939 Arab revolt in Palestine

text: In the countryside, armed insurrection started sporadically, becoming more organized over time. One particular target of the rebels was the Mosul–Haifa oil pipeline of the Iraq Petroleum Company constructed only a few years earlier to Haifa from a point on the Jordan River south of Lake Tiberias. This was repeatedly bombed at various points along its length. Other attacks were on railways (including trains) and on civilian targets such as Jewish settlements, secluded Jewish neighbourhoods in the mixed cities, and Jews, both individually and in groups.During the summer of that year, thousands of Jewish-farmed acres and orchards were destroyed, Jewish civilians were attacked and murdered, and some Jewish communities, such as those in Beisan and Acre, fled to safer areas.


title: 1936–1939 Arab revolt in Palestine

text: The measures taken against the strike were harsh from the outset and grew harsher as the revolt deepened. Unable to contain the protests with the two battalions already stationed in the country, Britain inundated Palestine with soldiers from regiments all over the empire, including its Egyptian garrison. The drastic measures taken included house searches without warrants, night raids, preventive detention, caning, flogging, deportation, confiscation of property, and torture. As early as May 1936 the British formed armed Jewish units equipped with armoured vehicles to serve as auxiliary police.


title: 1936–1939 Arab revolt in Palestine

text: The British government in Palestine was convinced that the strike had the full support of the Palestinian Arabs and they could see "no weakening in the will and spirit of the Arab people." Air Vice-Marshall Richard Peirse, commander of British forces in Palestine and Transjordan from 1933 to 1936, reported that because the rebel armed bands were supported by villagers,


title: 1936–1939 Arab revolt in Palestine

text: It was quickly evident that the only way to regain the initiative from the rebels was by initiating measures against the villagers from which the rebels and saboteurs came ... I therefore initiated, in co-operation with the Inspector-General of Police R. G. B. Spicer, village searches. Ostensibly, these searches were undertaken to find arms and wanted persons, actually the measures adopted by the Police on the lines of similar Turkish methods, were punitive and effective.


title: 1936–1939 Arab revolt in Palestine

text: In reality the measures created a sense of solidarity between the villagers and the rebels. The pro-Government Mayor of Nablus complained to the High Commissioner that, "During the last searches effected in villages properties were destroyed, jewels stolen, and the Holy Qur'an torn, and this has increased the excitement of the fellahin." However, Moshe Shertok of the Jewish Agency even suggested that all villages in the area of an incident should be punished.


title: 1936–1939 Arab revolt in Palestine

text: On 2 June, an attempt by rebels to derail a train bringing the 2nd Battalion Bedfordshire and Hertfordshire Regiment from Egypt led to the railways being put under guard, placing a great strain on the security forces. On 4 June, in response to this situation, the government rounded up a large number of Palestinian leaders and sent them to a detention camp at Auja al-Hafir in the Negev desert.


title: 1936–1939 Arab revolt in Palestine

text: The Battle of Nur Shams on 21 June marked an escalation with the largest engagement of British troops against Arab militants so far in this Revolt.


title: 1936–1939 Arab revolt in Palestine

text: During July, Arab volunteers from Syria and Transjordan, led by Fawzi al-Qawukji, helped the rebels to divide their formations into four fronts, each led by a District Commander who had armed platoons of 150–200 fighters, each commanded by a platoon leader.


title: 1936–1939 Arab revolt in Palestine

text: A Statement of Policy issued by the Colonial Office in London on 7 September declared the situation a: "direct challenge to the authority of the British Government in Palestine" and announced the appointment of Lieutenant-General John Dill as supreme military commander. By the end of September British troops in Palestine were deployed to "round up Arab bands".


title: 1936–1939 Arab revolt in Palestine

text: In June 1936 the British involved their clients in Transjordan, Iraq, Saudi Arabia and Egypt in an attempt to pacify the Palestinian Arabs and on 9 October the rulers made an appeal for the strike to be ended.A more pressing concern may have been the approaching citrus harvest and the soaring prices that were available because of the disruption caused to the Spanish citrus harvest by the Spanish Civil War.


title: 1936–1939 Arab revolt in Palestine

text: The strike was called off on 11 October 1936 and the violence abated for about a year while the Peel Commission deliberated. The Royal Commission was announced on 18 May 1936 and its members were appointed on 29 July, but the Commission did not arrive in Palestine until 11 November.In the early 1920s the first High Commissioner of Palestine, Herbert Samuel, had failed to create a unified political structure embracing both Palestinian Arabs and Palestinian Jews in constitutional government with joint political institutions. This failure facilitated internal institutional partition in which the Jewish Agency exercised a degree of autonomous control over the Jewish settlement and the Supreme Muslim Council performed a comparable role for Muslims. Thus, well before Lord Peel arrived in Palestine on 11 November 1936, the groundwork for territorial partition as proposed by the Royal Commission in its report on 7 July 1937 had already been done.


title: 1936–1939 Arab revolt in Palestine

text: Peel's main recommendation was for partition of Palestine into a small Jewish state (based on current Jewish land ownership population and incorporating the country's most productive agricultural land), a residual Mandatory area, and a larger Arab state linked to Transjordan. A second and more radical proposal was for transfer of 225,000 Palestinian Arabs from the proposed Jewish state to a future Arab state and Transjordan. It is likely that Zionist leaders played a role in persuading Peel to accept the notion of transfer, which had been a strand of Zionist ideology from its inception.


title: 1936–1939 Arab revolt in Palestine

text: The commission, which concluded that 1,000 Arab rebels had been killed during the six month strike, later described the disturbances as "an open rebellion of the Palestinian Arabs, assisted by fellow-Arabs from other countries, against Mandatory rule" and noted two unprecedented features of the revolt: the support of all senior Arab officials in the political and technical departments in the Palestine administration (including all of the Arab judges) and the "interest and sympathy of the neighbouring Arab peoples", which had resulted in support for the rebellion in the form of volunteers from Syria and Iraq.


title: 1936–1939 Arab revolt in Palestine

text: The Arab Higher Committee rejected the recommendations immediately, as did the Jewish Revisionists. Initially, the religious Zionists, some of the General Zionists, and sections of the Labour Zionist movement also opposed the recommendations. Ben-Gurion was delighted by the Peel Commission's support for transfer, which he viewed as the foundation of "national consolidation in a free homeland." Subsequently, the 2 main Jewish leaders, Chaim Weizmann and Ben Gurion had convinced the Zionist Congress to approve equivocally the Peel recommendations as a basis for further negotiation, and to negotiate a modified Peel proposal with the British.


title: 1936–1939 Arab revolt in Palestine

text: The British government initially accepted the Peel report in principle. However, with war clouds looming over Europe, they realized that to attempt to implement it against the will of the Palestinian Arab majority would rouse up the entire Arab world against Britain. The Woodhead Commission considered three different plans, one of which was based on the Peel plan. Reporting in 1938, the Commission rejected the Peel plan primarily on the grounds that it could not be implemented without a massive forced transfer of Arabs (an option that the British government had already ruled out). With dissent from some of its members, the Commission instead recommended a plan that would leave the Galilee under British mandate, but emphasised serious problems with it that included a lack of financial self-sufficiency of the proposed Arab State. The British Government accompanied the publication of the Woodhead Report by a statement of policy rejecting partition as impracticable due to "political, administrative and financial difficulties".


title: 1936–1939 Arab revolt in Palestine

text: With the failure of the Peel Commission's proposals the revolt resumed during the autumn of 1937 marked by the assassination on 26 September of Acting District Commissioner of the Galilee Lewis Andrews by Quassemite gunmen in Nazareth. Andrews was widely hated by Palestinians for supporting Jewish settlement in the Galilee, and he openly advised Jews to create their own defense force. On 30 September, regulations were issued allowing the Government to detain political deportees in any part of the British Empire, and authorizing the High Commissioner to outlaw associations whose objectives he regarded as contrary to public policy. Haj Amin al-Husseini was removed from the leadership of the Supreme Moslem Council and the General Waqf Committee, the local National Committees and the Arab Higher Committee were disbanded; five Arab leaders were arrested and deported to the Seychelles; and in fear of arrest Jamal el-Husseini fled to Syria and Haj Amin el-Husseini to Lebanon;< all frontiers with Palestine were closed, telephone connections to neighbouring countries were withdrawn, press censorship was introduced and a special concentration camp was opened near Acre.


title: 1936–1939 Arab revolt in Palestine

text: In November 1937, the Irgun formally rejected the policy of Havlagah and embarked on a series of indiscriminate attacks against Arab civilians as a form of what the group called "active defense" against Arab attacks on Jewish civilians. The British authorities set up military courts, which were established for the trial of offenses connected with the carrying and discharge of firearms, sabotage and intimidation. Despite this, however, the Arab campaign of murder and sabotage continued and Arab gangs in the hills took on the appearance of organized guerrilla fighters.


title: 1936–1939 Arab revolt in Palestine

text: Violence continued throughout 1938. In July 1938, when the Palestine Government seemed to have largely lost control of the situation, the garrison was strengthened from Egypt, and in September it was further reinforced from England. The police were placed under the operational control of the army commander, and military officials superseded the civil authorities in the enforcement of order. In October the Old City of Jerusalem, which had become a rebel stronghold, was reoccupied by the troops. By the end of the year a semblance of order had been restored in the towns, but terrorism continued in rural areas until the outbreak of the Second World War.


title: 1936–1939 Arab revolt in Palestine

text: Despite cooperation of the Yishuv with the British to quell the revolt, some incidents towards the end of the conflict indicated a coming change in relations. On 12 June 1939, A British explosives expert was killed trying to defuse an Irgun bomb near a Jerusalem post office. On 26 August, two British police officers, Inspector Ronald Barker and Inspector Ralph Cairns, commander of the Jewish Department of the C.I.D., were killed by an Irgun mine in Jerusalem.


title: 1936–1939 Arab revolt in Palestine

text: In the final fifteen months of the revolt alone there were 936 murders and 351 attempted murders; 2,125 incidents of sniping; 472 bombs thrown and detonated; 364 cases of armed robbery; 1,453 cases of sabotage against government and commercial property; 323 people abducted; 72 cases of intimidation; 236 Jews killed by Arabs and 435 Arabs killed by Jews; 1,200 rebels killed by the police and military and 535 wounded.


title: 1936–1939 Arab revolt in Palestine

text: Military law allowed swift prison sentences to be passed. Thousands of Arabs were held in administrative detention, without trial, and without proper sanitation, in overcrowded prison camps.


title: 1936–1939 Arab revolt in Palestine

text: The British had already formalised the principle of collective punishment in Palestine in the 1924–1925 Collective Responsibility and Punishment Ordinances and updated these ordinances in 1936 with the Collective Fines Ordinance. These collective fines (amounting to £1,000,000 over the revolt) eventually became a heavy burden for poor Palestinian villagers, especially when the army also confiscated livestock, destroyed properties, imposed long curfews and established police posts, demolished houses and detained some or all of the Arab men in distant detention camps.


title: 1936–1939 Arab revolt in Palestine

text: Full martial law was not introduced but in a series of Orders in Council and Emergency Regulations, 1936–37 'statutory' martial law, a stage between semi-military rule under civil powers and full martial law under military powers, and one in which the army and not the civil High Commissioner was pre-eminent was put in place. Following the Arab capture of the Old City of Jerusalem in October 1938, the army effectively took over Jerusalem and then all of Palestine.


title: 1936–1939 Arab revolt in Palestine

text: The main form of collective punishment employed by the British forces was destruction of property. Sometimes entire villages were reduced to rubble, as happened to Mi'ar in October 1938; more often several prominent houses were blown up and others were trashed inside. The biggest single act of destruction occurred in Jaffa on 16 June 1936, when large gelignite charges were used to cut long pathways through the old city, destroying 220–240 buildings and rendering up to 6,000 Arabs homeless.Scathing criticism for this action from Palestine Chief Justice Sir Michael McDonnell was not well received by the administration and the judge was soon removed from the country. Villages were also frequently punished by fines and confiscation of livestock. The British even used sea mines from the battleship HMS "Malaya" to destroy houses.


title: 1936–1939 Arab revolt in Palestine

text: In addition to actions against property, a large amount of brutality by the British forces occurred, including beatings, torture and extrajudicial killings. A surprisingly large number of prisoners were "shot while trying to escape".Several incidents involved serious atrocities, such as massacres at al-Bassa and Halhul. Desmond Woods, an officer of the Royal Ulster Rifles, described the massacre at al-Bassa:


title: 1936–1939 Arab revolt in Palestine

text: Now I will never forget this incident ... We were at al-Malikiyya, the other frontier base and word came through about 6 o'clock in the morning that one of our patrols had been blown up and Millie Law [the dead officer] had been killed. Now Gerald Whitfeld [Lieutenant-Colonel G.H.P. Whitfeld, the battalion commander] had told these mukhtars that if any of this sort of thing happened he would take punitive measures against the nearest village to the scene of the mine. Well the nearest village to the scene of the mine was a place called al-Bassa and our Company C were ordered to take part in punitive measures. And I will never forget arriving at al-Bassa and seeing the Rolls Royce armoured cars of the 11th Hussars peppering Bassa with machine gun fire and this went on for about 20 minutes and then we went in and I remembered we had lighted braziers and we set the houses on fire and we burnt the village to the ground ... Monty had him [the battalion commander] up and he asked him all about it and Gerald Whitfeld explained to him. He said "Sir, I have warned the mukhtars in these villages that if this happened to any of my officers or men, I would take punitive measures against them and I did this and I would've lost control of the frontier if I hadn't." Monty said "All right but just go a wee bit easier in the future."


title: 1936–1939 Arab revolt in Palestine

text: As well as destroying the village the RUR and men from the Royal Engineers collected around fifty men from al-Bassa and blew some of them up with explosion under a bus. Harry Arrigonie, a policeman who was present said that about twenty men were put onto a bus; those who tried to escape were shot and then the driver of the bus was forced to drive over a powerful land mine buried by the soldiers which completely destroyed the bus, scattering the mutilated bodies of the prisoners everywhere. The other villagers were then forced to bury the bodies in a pit.


title: 1936–1939 Arab revolt in Palestine

text: Despite these measures Lieutenant-General Haining, the General Officer Commanding, reported secretly to the Cabinet on 1 December 1938 that "practically every village in the country harbours and supports the rebels and will assist in concealing their identity from the Government Forces." Haining reported the method for searching villages:


title: 1936–1939 Arab revolt in Palestine

text: A cordon round the area to be searched is first established either by troops or aircraft and the inhabitants are warned that anybody trying to break through the cordon is likely to be shot. As literally hundreds of villages have been searched, in some cases more than once, during the past six months this procedure is well-known and it can be safely assumed that cordon-breakers have good reasons for wishing to avoid the troops. A number of such cordon-breakers have been shot during searches and it is probable that such cases form the basis of the propaganda that Arab prisoners are shot in cold blood and reported as "killed while trying to escape". After the cordon is established the troops enter the village and all male inhabitants are collected for identification and interrogation.


title: 1936–1939 Arab revolt in Palestine

text: The report was issued in response to growing concern at the severity of the military measures amongst the general public in Great Britain, among members of the British Government, and among governments in countries neighbouring Palestine.


title: 1936–1939 Arab revolt in Palestine

text: In addition to actions against villages the British Army also conducted punitive actions in the cities. In Nablus in August 1938 almost 5,000 men were held in a cage for two days and interrogated one after another. During their detention the city was searched and then each of the detainees was marked with a rubber stamp on his release. At one point a night curfew was imposed on most of the cities.


title: 1936–1939 Arab revolt in Palestine

text: It was common British army practice to make local Arabs ride with military convoys to prevent mine attacks and sniping incidents: soldiers would tie the hostages to the bonnets of lorries, or put them on small flatbeds on the front of trains. The army told the hostages that any of them who tried to run away would be shot. On the lorries, some soldiers would brake hard at the end of a journey and then casually drive over the hostage, killing or maiming him, as Arthur Lane, a Manchester Regiment private recalled:


title: 1936–1939 Arab revolt in Palestine

text: ... when you'd finished your duty you would come away nothing had happened no bombs or anything and the driver would switch his wheel back and to make the truck waver and the poor wog on the front would roll off into the deck. Well if he was lucky he'd get away with a broken leg but if he was unlucky the truck behind coming up behind would hit him. But nobody bothered to pick up the bits they were left. You know we were there we were the masters we were the bosses and whatever we did was right ... Well you know you don't want him any more. He's fulfilled his job. And that's when Bill Usher [the commanding officer] said that it had to stop because before long they'd be running out of bloody rebels to sit on the bonnet.


title: 1936–1939 Arab revolt in Palestine

text: British troops also left Arab wounded on the battlefield to die and maltreated Arab fighters taken in battle, so much so that the rebels tried to remove their wounded or dead from the field of battle. Sometimes, soldiers would occupy villages, expel all of the inhabitants and remain for months. The Army even burned the bodies of "terrorists" to prevent their funerals becoming the focus of protests.


title: 1936–1939 Arab revolt in Palestine

text: Nevertheless, it has been argued that British behaviour overall was good compared to most other examples where a foreign army suppressed a popular insurgency.


title: 1936–1939 Arab revolt in Palestine

text: Sir Charles Tegart was a senior police officer brought into Palestine from the colonial force of British India on 21 October 1937.


title: 1936–1939 Arab revolt in Palestine

text: Tegart and his deputy David Petrie (later head of MI5) advised a greater emphasis on foreign intelligence gathering and closure of Palestine's borders. Like many of those enrolled in the Palestinian gendarmerie, Tegart had served in Great Britain's repression of the Irish War of Independence, and the security proposals he introduced exceeded measures adopted down to this time elsewhere in the British Empire. 70 fortresses were erected throughout the country at strategic choke points and near Palestinian villages which, if assessed as "bad", were subjected to collective punishment. Accordingly, from 1938 Gilbert Mackereth, the British Consul in Damascus, corresponded with Syrian and Transjordan authorities regarding border control and security to counteract arms smuggling and "terrorist" infiltration and produced a report for Tegart on the activities of the Palestine Defence Committee in Damascus. Tegart recommended the construction of a frontier road with a barbed wire fence, which became known as Tegart's wall, along the borders with Lebanon and Syria to help prevent the flow of insurgents, goods and weapons. Tegart encouraged close co-operation with the Jewish Agency. It was built by the Histadrut construction company Solel Boneh. The total cost was £2 million. The Army forced the fellahin to work on the roads without pay.


title: 1936–1939 Arab revolt in Palestine

text: Tegart introduced Arab Investigation Centres where prisoners were subjected to beatings, foot whipping, electric shocks, denailing and what is now known as "waterboarding". Tegart also imported Doberman Pinschers from South Africa and set up a special centre in Jerusalem to train interrogators in torture.


title: 1936–1939 Arab revolt in Palestine

text: The Royal Air Force developed close air support into its then most refined form during the Arab Revolt. Air patrols had been found effective in keeping convoys and trains free from attack, but this did not help to expose insurgents to battle conditions likely to cause their defeat. From the middle of June 1936 wireless vehicles accompanied all convoys and patrols. During rebel attacks these vehicles could issue emergency "XX calls" (XX with a coded location), which were given priority over all other radio traffic, to summon aerial reinforcements. Bombers, which were usually airborne within five minutes, could then either attack insurgents directly or "fix" their position for infantry troops. Forty-seven such XX calls were issued during the revolt, causing heavy losses to the rebels. In the June 1936 Battle of Nur Shams British planes attacked Arab irregulars with machine gun fire.


title: 1936–1939 Arab revolt in Palestine

text: In 1936 an Air Staff Officer in Middle East Command based in the Kingdom of Egypt, Arthur Harris, known as an advocate of "air policing", commented on the revolt saying that "one 250 lb. or 500 lb. bomb in each village that speaks out of turn" would satisfactorily solve the problem. In 1937 Harris was promoted to Air Commodore and in 1938 he was posted to Palestine and Trans-Jordan as Air Officer Commanding the RAF contingent in the region until September 1939. "Limited" bombing attacks on Arab villages were carried out by the RAF, although at times this involved razing whole villages. Harris described the system by which recalcitrant villages were kept under control by aerial bombardment as "Air-Pin".


title: 1936–1939 Arab revolt in Palestine

text: Aircraft of the RAF were also used to drop propaganda leaflets over Palestinian towns and villages telling the fellahin that they were the main sufferers of the rebellion and threatening an increase in taxes.


title: 1936–1939 Arab revolt in Palestine

text: Low flying RAF squadrons were able to produce detailed intelligence on the location of road blocks, sabotaged bridges, railways and pipelines. RAF aerial photographs were also used to build up a detailed map of Arab population distribution.


title: 1936–1939 Arab revolt in Palestine

text: Although the British Army was responsible for setting up the Arab counter-insurgent forces (known as the peace bands) and supplying them with arms and money these were operated by RAF Intelligence, commanded by Patrick Domville.


title: 1936–1939 Arab revolt in Palestine

text: At the beginning of the revolt RAF assets in the region comprised a bomber flight at RAF Ramleh, an RAF armoured car flight at Ramleh, fourteen bomber squadrons at RAF Amman, and a RAF armoured car company at Ma'an.


title: 1936–1939 Arab revolt in Palestine

text: At the beginning of the Revolt crew from the Haifa Naval Force's two cruisers were used to carry out tasks ashore, manning two howitzers and naval lorries equipped with QF 2 pounder naval guns and searchlights used to disperse Arab snipers. From the end of June two destroyers were used to patrol the coast of Palestine in a bid to prevent gun running. These searched as many as 150 vessels per week and were an effective preventive measure. At the request of the Army additional naval platoons landed in July to help protect Haifa and Jewish settlements in the surrounding countryside. The Navy also relieved the Army of duties in Haifa by using nine naval platoons to form the "Haifa Town Force" and in August three naval platoons were landed to support the police.


title: 1936–1939 Arab revolt in Palestine

text: Following publication of the Peel Commission's report in July 1937 HMS "Repulse" sailed to Haifa where landing parties were put ashore to maintain calm. Various other naval vessels continued with this role until the end of the revolt.


title: 1936–1939 Arab revolt in Palestine

text: Following the Irgun's detonation of a large bomb in a market in Haifa on 6 July 1938 the High Commissioner signalled the Commander-in-Chief of the Mediterranean Fleet, Admiral Sir Dudley Pound, requesting the assistance of naval vessels capable of providing landing parties. Pound dispatched HMS "Repulse" and diverted HMS "Emerald" to Haifa, which arrived the same day and landed five platoons, one to each police district. HMS "Repulse" relieved HMS "Emerald" the following day and after another bomb was detonated on 10 July five platoons from the ship, made up of sailors and Royal Marines, dispersed mobs and patrolled the city.


title: 1936–1939 Arab revolt in Palestine

text: On 11 July provision of three platoons from "Repulse" released men of the West Kent Regiment for a punitive mission against Arabs who had attacked a Jewish colony near Haifa. By 17 July the "Repulse" established a Company Headquarters where seamen and Royal Marines manned a 3.7-inch howitzer. Sailors, Royal Marines, and men of the Suffolk Regiment, who had embarked on the "Repulse", accompanied foot patrols of the Palestine Police Force.


title: 1936–1939 Arab revolt in Palestine

text: The "Repulse", and HMS "Warspite" provided howitzer crews which were sent ashore to combat gun running near the border with Lebanon. Detained Arabs were used to build emplacements and the howitzers were moved quickly between these positions by day and night to confuse bandits as to the likely direction of fire. Periodically, the guns were used to fire warning rounds close to the vicinity of villages believed to have rebel sympathies.


title: 1936–1939 Arab revolt in Palestine

text: Britain had completed the modern deep-sea port in Haifa in 1933 and finished laying a pipeline from the Iraqi oilfields to Haifa in 1935, shortly before the outbreak of the revolt. A refinery for processing oil from the pipeline was completed by Consolidated Refineries Ltd, a company jointly owned by British Petroleum and Royal Dutch Shell, in December 1939.


title: 1936–1939 Arab revolt in Palestine

text: These facilities enhanced the strategic importance of Palestine and of Haifa in particular in Britain's control of the eastern Mediterranean. The threat to British control of the region posed by the Italian invasion of Abyssinia in October 1935 and the deteriorating situation in Europe toward the end of the 1930s probably made British policy makers more willing to make concessions to Arab governments on the Palestine issue following the furore over the recommendations of the Peel Commission.


title: 1936–1939 Arab revolt in Palestine

text: The Arab Revolt was the last major test of Britain's security services in the Middle East before World War II. The development and deployment of intelligence-led counterinsurgency strategies was integral to the restoration of British imperial control in Palestine as the revolt had demonstrated to the British authorities how a popular rebellion could undermine intelligence gathering operations and thereby impair their ability to predict and respond to inter-communal disorder. The rebellion had brought together urban nationalism and peasant economic grievances arising from rural poverty and landlessness, which was blamed on British misrule. Accordingly, the Palestinian revolt targeted the political and economic apparatus of the British colonial state, including the communications network, pipelines, police stations, army outposts and British personnel. It was this aspect of the revolt, rather than attacks on Jews or violence between rivals for leadership of the national movement, that most concerned the high commissioner. The mandate authorities were further disturbed by the unity of purpose displayed during the six-month general strike and by the resurgence of pan-Arab nationalism as evidenced by the rise of the Istiqlal Party.