The Great Revolt: How Ben-Gurion turned adversity into advantage on the road to Jewish statehood

In spring 1936, the Holy Land erupted in a rebellion targeting both the local Jewish community and the British Mandate authorities. The Great Arab Revolt would last three years, cost thousands of lives and cast the trajectory for the Middle East conflict ever since.

The revolt was the crucible in which Palestinian identity coalesced, uniting virtually all strands of Arab Palestine in a single struggle for independence. Yet the rebellion would ultimately turn on itself, shredding the social fabric and sidelining pragmatists in favor of extremists. The revolt to end Zionism had instead crushed the Arabs themselves.

To the Jews, the insurgency would leave a very different legacy. It was then that Zionist leaders began to face the unnerving prospect that fulfilling their dream of sovereignty might mean forever clinging to the sword. The revolt saw thousands of Jews trained and armed by Britain, turning their ramshackle guard units into the seed of a Jewish army. And it was then that words like “partition” and “Jewish state” first appeared on the international agenda. The rebellion was Arab, but the Zionist counter-rebellion—the Jews’ military, economic, and psychological transformation—is a vital, overlooked element in the story of how Palestine became Israel.

This is the story of two national movements and the first sustained clash between them. For Israelis as much as Palestinians, the revolt rages on.