9 - Carrying Out the Mandate

Summary

This final chapter moves its focus to the British daily experience of Palestine's human and geographical landscape. It will explore the testimony of agents of the occupying power in the last days of the British Mandate. These testimonies provide a rather different viewpoint from those of the occupied population. Both the police and the people they supposedly served lived through this violent period together. They have a common history, but different narratives of that history. The picture that emerges from the policemen's human voices is both complementary and similar to that which transpires through the maps discussed earlier in the book. Michel de Certeau tells us that people create urban maps by traversing the city (1984:93, 97). British policemen developed their own tactics, in de Certeau's terms, in order to make the space habitable. The policemen's experiences and interpretations, both urban and rural, enable us to see how they perceived the actual task of governing Palestine.

In the situation in which the British Mandatory power found itself in 1945, there were two overlapping but separate conflicts going on at the same time. On the one hand, there was a vertical axis of authority and conflict, moving from the constituted legal power down to the population it controlled. At different times between 1936 and 1948 groups of Arabs and Jews revolted against the same authority.