No Stupid Questions

No, they weren't the same thing. Zionist Land Purchases were unlike anything prior, leading to the forced expulsion of over hundreds thousand Palestinians under the British Mandate. This, along with the Zionist leadership being very open about the Concept of Transfer since the 1880s, stocked Palestinian fears of being violently forced out of their homes by these new arrivals. There is a lot of context that gets ignored during these events, and it's not easy to summarize. I'll include a few paragraphs but if you want more context I suggest you read the whole chapter.

The Concept of Transfer 1882-1948

Transfer Committee and the JNF led to Forced Displacement of 100,000 Palestinians throughout the mandate.

The fear over control of the Temple Mount and a failure by leadership on both sides to quell the fears (and instead, incite them) sparked the terrible pogroms of Jewish Settlements.

In 1928, this meant simultaneously calling for the defence of Jerusalem and discouraging direct action on the ground. But the Palestinian masses found this kind of co-opted nationalism impossible. They lived near the holy places and saw Jews praying there in unprecedented numbers, which they saw as part of a larger scheme to ‘de-Islamize’ Palestine. A minor incident concerning prayer arrangements near the Wailing Wall, the western wall of the Haram, sparked violence that soon swept through Palestine as a whole in 1929. In all, 300 Jews and a similar number of Palestinians were killed.

The spillover of anger from Jerusalem into the countryside and other towns was not a co-ordinated plan by the leadership. Rather, it started with uprooted Palestinians who had lost their agricultural base for various reasons, including the capitalization of crops and the Jewish purchase of land. These former peasants lived on the urban margins, from where they participated in what to them was their first ever political, and violent, action. Their dismal conditions were not the fault of Zionism, but it was easy to connect Zionist activity in Jerusalem with the purchase of land or with an aggressive segregationist policy in the labour market.

The British army was slow to respond to the unrest. The 1920s had been quiet, apart from limited outbursts of violence in Jerusalem in 1920 and Jaffa in 1921. These had seemed inevitable in a mixed community, and quite normal in the vast British Empire. But the events of 1929 exceeded the level of containable violence, and the British government decided in 1930 to appoint a commission of inquiry, the Shaw Commission. After touring the country, its members pointed out the deterioration in the peasants’ living conditions and reported the growing frustration among a large number of Palestinians with British pro-Zionist policy.

• Ilan Pappe - A History of Modern Palestine Pg 138

1929 Riots: Forward and 972Mag

Shaw Commission

Peel Commission Report

The 1936-39 revolt began as a protest against the British Mandate and Zionist Expansion, and escalated in violence as the protests were met with lethal force.

One of the problems was the leadership vacuum in rural Palestine, and the failure of most attempts to fill it. One of these attempts was that of Izz al-Din al-Qassam, a Syrian preacher who settled in Haifa in the mid 1920s. Many history books assert that Izz al-Din al-Qassam ignited the 1936 revolt by fusing Islamic dogmas with national ideology. But his recipe for revolution was welcomed only among a particular segment of the population. This was the poor of the cities and the unfortunate inhabitants of harat al-tanc, the shanty neighbourhoods that surrounded towns such as Haifa. In 1933, Izz al-Din al-Qassam initiated a guerrilla war in the north, recruiting fighters from around Haifa and leading them to the surrounding hills, attacking any Jews or British soldiers they encountered on the way. In 1935, al-Din al-Qassam was killed by the British army, but this was enough to make him a martyr and provide an example of a new kind of resistance.

While the expansion of Zionist settlement gave the nationalist notables a chance to reach a wider audience, there was still no genuine solidarity with the peasants, apart from rare displays of unity and firmness of purpose. Such a moment took place in March 1933 in Jaffa, where leaders of all the political factions joined in a united call for a concrete campaign of sustained pressure on the British government to change its policy. Five hundred representatives of the Palestinian elite, in a rare show of resolve, declared their intention of boycotting British and Zionist commodities, and for the first time ever rejected the legitimacy of the Mandate in the land of Palestine.

In May 1936, the Arab Higher Committee declared a general strike and organized nationwide demonstrations, the principal one held in Jerusalem, where about 2,000 demonstrators gathered inside the walls of the Old City. The demonstrations became more violent three weeks later, when British police opened fire on demonstrators in Jaffa.

At first the magnitude and nature of the protests impressed the British. They appointed a commission of inquiry, headed by Lord Peel, who visited Palestine in 1937 before making his recommendations. His commission recommended the annexation of most of Palestine to Transjordan, and urged the maintenance of a direct British presence in vital strategic positions such as Haifa and the newly built airport in Lydda, as well as in the Negev. A small portion of the land was designated as a future Jewish state. This plan was rejected, not of course by Prince Abdullah in Transjordan; but in a way it was endorsed by Ben-Gurion, who had the foresight to understand that you take what you are given when the balance of power is not yet in your favour. For Ben-Gurion, the proposal was a basis for negotiations, not a final map, hence his willingness to be content with such a small portion of Palestine.

• Ilan Pappe - A History of Modern Palestine Pg 156-159

1936-1939 Revolt: JVL, Britannica, MEE

The Jewish exodus from the Muslim world was also not the same