Yes, the British government should be blamed

British and collective punishment

During the 1936 to 1939 Arab rebellion in Palestine the British imposed harsh collective punishments on the inhabitants of Arab villages and towns that they believed to be associated with terrorists or a terrorist act. These punishments were inflicted upon innocent people who may have had no connection at all with the rebels.

Collective punishment was permitted under the Ordinances and Orders in Council introduced in Palestine by the Mandate authorities in 1922. After September 1936, the British army in Palestine established military courts and regulations that were separate from the ordinary civil courts, and harsh judgements, such as the death penalty for possession of a firearm, could not be challenged. 

British troops organised search operations of villages suspected of harbouring rebels or hiding weapons. Men and women would be separated and held in cages, sometimes for days on end. In the village of Halhoul near Hebron in May 1939 10 men died after being kept in a cage for 7 days without food or water. Women were made to bare their breasts to soldiers to prove they were not rebels in disguise. Houses were roughly searched; sometimes food stores were deliberately destroyed by soldiers.

If a village was considered to be sympathetic to the rebellion, the inhabitants could be subjected to heavy collective fines and forced labour. Some villages would be entirely demolished, as happened to the village of Mi‘ar, north of Acre in October 1938.

The actions of British troops during the period of the rebellion are still remembered and talked of by Palestinians today.

 Press release from the Jewish Telegraphic Agency on the killing of Moffatt, Jenin, 1938.

Jewish Telegraphic Agency

August 26 1938

Walter S.S. Moffatt, Acting District Commissioner in Jenin, today succumbed to gunshot wounds received yesterday, while an Arab identified as his assailant was killed in attempting to escape from a military camp.

The 45-year-old Government official, who had served in Palestine continuously since 1925, died in the Government hospital in Haifa after a blood transfusion and emergency operation. He was the most important British official to die at the hands of Arab terrorists since the murder of Lewis Y. Andrews, District Commissioner for the Galilee, in Nazareth last September.

Troops and police, throwing a cordon around Jenin, captured an Arab who answered the description of the assailant given by Mr. Moffatt on his deathbed. Identified by eye witnesses to the attack, the Arab was imprisoned in a military camp. He was shot while attempting to escape and later died.

As Mr. Moffatt was buried this afternoon in Haifa, female inhabitants of Jenin were taken to the mosque and males to the police courtyard to be searched. Houses and shops were searched and a quantity of arms and ammunition was discovered. This morning inhabitants were evacuated to one kilometer of the town and a number of houses were marked to be dynamited. Major-General Robert H. Haining, General Officer commanding British forces in Palestine, proceeded to Jenin to direct operations.

The Government censor today prohibited the local press from publishing any references to or comments on activities of police, military forces and rebels, except as contained in official communiques.'

https://www.jta.org/archive/palestine-official-dies-murder-suspect-slain-trying-to-escape

Extract from Kings Own journal describing the use of human shields as 'mine sweepers'

‘Palestine Retrospective’ by Sir N.M. Ritchie, King’s Own Royal Regiment Museum, Lancaster.

The King’s Own Regiment was one of over 20 British regiments sent to Palestine in September 1938 to help put down the Arab Uprising.

 'Despite these activities, the "Oozles" (the British nickname for Arab rebels) continue laying land mines on the track which, when passed over by pilot trolleys, explode causing damage to trolley and track, casualties to personnel and delay to traffic. To overcome this an arrangement was made whereby certain villages were held responsible for the line and each provided from its leading families "hostages" to travel on the front of the pilot trolleys within its particular sector. This proved a complete success, probabably because on the very first day this scheme was inaugurated the trolley piloting the first uptrain struck a land mine – quite the biggest up to then encountered – which most unfortunately resulted in the hostages being killed. There was never another land mine on the track...'

Letter from Miss Rathbone to Mr McDonald 30 November 1938

TNA CO 733/371/2

‘We were greatly shocked to hear in the Press this week about the barbaric way a party of Jews were received by Black Guards at Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp. They were made to run the gauntlet between two lines of guards who beat them mercilessly.

I was even more amazed to see a photograph last night sent home by a British soldier showing an Arab apparently running the gauntlet between two lines of British soldiers who were using big sticks and the butts of rifles…The soldier who sent it had written on the back ‘This is how we made the ‘Wog’ talk. Wouldn’t the Berlin boys make a shout about this if they saw it?’ One British soldier has his stick up in the air and the Arab is jumping to escape the blow.’

Extract from 'Atrocities in the Holy Land'

Publications of the Arab National Bureau Damascus (1938/39?)

'In Fackooah (Jenin district)

The troops gathered the men of the village in the village square. After beating and torturing them, they led all the capable ones among them to forced labour on the roads and to be placed in front of the military trucks and lorries as a target in the event of an attack made upon the troops by the rebels. Two of the soldiers had amused themselves by shooting at the village asses grazing in its vicinity and killed five of them. In the process of this entertainment, the boy Mohammad Al Saleh Abbas who was leading the herd, was dangerously wounded. He is now being treated in Nablkus hospital....'

Eltaher Collection (Library of Congress)

https://tile.loc.gov/storage-services/service/amed/amedeltaher/2017498667/2017498667.pdf

Extracts from 'Searchlight on Palestine: fair-play or terrorist methods? : some personal investigations' by Frances E. Newton, published by The Arab Centre, London, 1938. 

'What I saw in Igzim

I visited this village on Tuesday, February 22nd, 1938, three days after it had been searched by the troops and the police. The village presented an unbelievable scene of havoc....

The troops and police arrived early in the morning of the 19th February. After collecting the sheep and goats and driving them off, they proceeded to blow up two stone-built houses at the entrance of the village. ... I entered many of the houses and can only say that the havoc which has been wrought was indescrible, and unless seen with one's own eyes, unbelievable. In one newly built house, the good strong door, not yet painted, and the shutters had been bashed in. In others, the furniture – such as cupboards, etc., - was utterly wrecked. A large mirror on the wall had its glass smashed, a stained cupboard was overturned, and the mirrors in the panels of  its doors lay like bits of ice about the floor. The same scene met me in various houses.....Clothing, bedding, etc., were all soaked with olive oil. Cereals of all sorts – corn, pulse, lentils, etc- were all mixed up and scattered about the floor with broken glass. China, crockery, kitchen utensils, lay like a snowstorm everywhere. A huge vat of olive oil was split open and its contents, worth some £6 - £7, had soaked into the mud floor. I was given a Koran to bring away which had been torn from its cover and of which the leaves were all loose and soaked with olive oil.....

Many of the families have fled the village....The reason given for the flight of the villagers was that the Government had imposed a punitive police post on the village for three months at the expense of the inhabitants....The people, knowing that if the money were not paid the Government would seize and sell their possessions, decided to take them away with them, and so left in a body. Some of them have come into Haifa, some have gone into near-by villages, and some are living in shelters of rush mats or sacking, etc, under the olive trees....

The police post has been withdrawn, yet the villagers tell me they are held responsible for three month's wages. They are asking to have this order withdrawn, failing which they will desert the village for good....'

Eltaher Collection (Library of Congress)

https://www.loc.gov/item/2017498683/

Notes:

Igzim is a village near Haifa. British RAF Squadron Leader R E Alderson was killed by Arab terrorists in February 1938. Police and troops believed that the murderer was from the village of Igzim and so they took punitive action against the village. Later it emerged from other evidence that the bandit had no association with the village.

Frances Emily Newton (4 November 1871 – 11 June 1955) was an English missionary who lived and worked in Palestine from 1889 until 1938. She became a strong supporter of the Arab cause; following the publication of 'Searchlight on Palestine,' she was deported from Palestine by the British authorities. 

Soldiers' accounts of incidents in Palestine, from oral history interviews held by the Imperial War Museum Sound Archive

Colonel J. S. S. Gratton, then a subaltern with the Hampshire Regiment, instructed by his superior that the unit’s search of Safad was a punitive raid, meaning that (in Gratton’s words) they could “knock the place about”:

'And it’s very alien to a chap like you or me to go in and break the chair and kick chatty in with all the oil in and mixed it in with the bedclothes and break all the windows and everything. You don’t feel like doing it. And I remember the adjutant coming in and saying, “You are not doing your stuff. They’re perfectly intact all those houses you’ve just searched. This is what you’ve got to do.” And he picked up a pick helve and sort of burst everything. I said, “Right OK,” so I got hold of the soldiers and said, “this is what you’ve got to do,” you know. And I don’t think they liked it much but once they’d started on it you couldn’t stop them. And you’d never seen such devastation.'

J. S. S. Gratton, 4506, pp. 14–15, IWMSA

Arthur Lane, a Manchester Regiment private, described the practice of forcing a villager to sit on the bonnet of a military truck as a human sheild:

'[W]hen 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 anymore. 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.'

Arthur Lane, 10295, p. 18, IWMSA.

Quoted in, "From Law and Order to Pacification: Britain’s Suppression of the Arab Revolt in Palestine, 1936–39" Matthew Hughes. Journal of Palestine Studies 39, no. 2 (Winter 2010): 6–22.

Atrocities in the Holy Land - Publications of the Arab National Bureau Damascus