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Five hundred Palestinian Arab rebels entrenched in the mountains and waging guerrilla warfare cannot be overcome by anything less than a fully armed British division.

Hitler, the leader of Nazi Germany, greatly admired the struggle of the Arabs of Palestine and their valor, which so impressed him that he expressed this admiration to Sayyid Khalid Abu al-Walid al-Qurashi, adviser to the late King Abd al-Aziz Al Saud, may God forgive him, during an official audience with him in 1938. He—that is, Hitler—also addressed the Germans in the Sudetenland, who in 1938 were trying to free themselves from Czechoslovak rule and join Germany, in words to this effect: “Germans of the Sudetenland! Take the Arabs of Palestine as your example. They are fighting England, the greatest empire in the world, and world Jewry together with extraordinary valor, and they have no supporter or helper. As for you, I supply you with money and arms, and all Germany stands behind you.”

The British authorities went to extremes in using repression and terror to suppress the revolt. They successively massed four army divisions in Palestine, equivalent to fifty thousand British soldiers, reinforced them with air and artillery forces, and recruited some ten thousand additional Arab and Jewish policemen alongside the existing police forces in Palestine. The total forces mobilized to suppress the revolt thus reached about seventy thousand, excluding the frontier forces and the Transjordan force under the command of the Englishman “Glubb.” They committed acts of terror, cruelty and torture against the inhabitants of towns and villages that one can scarcely believe a civilian government would commit. During 1938–1939 the number of martyrs exceeded six thousand, apart from one hundred and fifty whom British courts sentenced to death by hanging. Many of them were hanged during Ramadan while fasting, such as the martyr Shaykh Farhan al-Saadi, aged seventy-five, and the martyr Khalil Abu Laban. The wounded numbered in the tens of thousands, and about fifty thousand people were detained for longer or shorter periods. The authorities blew up entire neighborhoods in some major cities, such as Jaffa and Jenin, and in many villages, destroyed provisions, and looted money and belongings. Many of those imprisoned suffered the most brutal forms of torture, such as burning with red-hot irons, pulling out fingernails, confinement in refrigerators, hanging prisoners by their feet, filling their stomachs with water, and flogging them until their bodies burst with blood, and other methods of cruelty for which the English were notorious.

During the revolts that lasted from 1936 to 1939, Britain’s most famous military commanders successively commanded the British forces in Palestine, including Generals Dill, Wavell and Haining