The nakba narratives, according to Hillel Cohen, tend to ignore the open resistance to al-Husseini by many influential Palestinians. A member of the Darwish family on expressing dissent with Husseini's war objective in favour of negotiation was told by the mufti: "idha takalam al-seif, uskut ya kalam"—'when the sword talks, there is no place for talking. Many recalled his policy of assassinating mukhtars in the Revolt of 1936–39 and viewed Husseini and his kind as 'an assembly of traitors'. The opposition of a relevant percentage of the Palestinian society to al-Husseini goes back to an earlier period and was also connected to the British way of dealing with the local majority: 'The present administration of Palestine', lamented for example the representatives of the Palestine Arab Delegation in a letter to British public opinion in 1930, 'is appointed by His Majesty's Government and governs the country through an autocratic system in which the population has no say'.