Anonymous Soldiers

by Bruce Hoffman

  The second part, chapters 7 through 10, focuses on wartime Palestine: the split that produced rival Jewish terrorist factions; their relations with the mainstream, official Zionist movement; and the growing polarization of the Jewish community from the British government that led in turn to the escalation of Jewish terrorism, now directed solely against the British government.

  The final part, chapters 11 through 19, chronicles the war that Britain fought in Palestine following World War II. It was during this time that a concatenation of powerful forces, including Jewish terrorism, combined to render Britain’s continued rule of Palestine untenable. These chapters, accordingly, focus on terrorism’s role in the momentous events that led to Britain’s decision to abandon the mandate. An epilogue assesses the lessons of this struggle in the context of both terrorism’s subsequent trajectory and the challenges faced by governments in countering this menace.

  Neither this book nor its author makes any pretension to providing a definitive history of the Zionist struggle against British rule or the entire spectrum of factors that led to the creation of the State of Israel. Rather, as might be expected from someone who has spent his entire career studying terrorism and counterterrorism, this book considers those specific dimensions of this story in light of the broader question raised at the beginning of this preface: how terrorism affects government policy and decision making and whether terrorism is an effective weapon with which to achieve fundamental political change. Anonymous Soldiers thus recounts the history of this struggle mostly through the eyes of the British statesmen, soldiers, officials, policemen, and others variously charged with administering the mandate, policing it, and crafting policies for, or making decisions about, it.

  Bruce Hoffman

  Washington, D.C.

  May 2014

  CHAPTER 1

  To Die for Our Nation

  On May 14, 1948, at 8:00 a.m. sharp, General Sir Alan Gordon Cunningham, the high commissioner for Palestine and Trans-Jordan, emerged from his residence at Government House in Jerusalem to inspect an honor guard of the Highland Light Infantry. On the balcony above, a solitary bagpiper played a mournful lament. The sound of gunshots could be heard in the distance as Jewish and Arab snipers traded fire: the first Arab-Israeli war had already started. A bugle then sounded, and the honor guard came to attention. The Union Jack was lowered, and three decades of British rule in Palestine ended.1

  The night before, in a farewell address over the Palestine Broadcasting Service, Cunningham had struggled to strike an optimistic note. “I have never believed, and do not believe now,” he said, “that the seed of agreement between Jew and Arab does not exist, even though in all our efforts we have failed to find the soil in which it would germinate.” He took one last walk around the beautiful gardens that ringed the building that had been both his residence and his office for the past two and a half years. Situated on the infelicitously named Jabal el Muqabbar, the biblical Hill of Evil Counsel, Government House was justly renowned for its spectacularly panoramic views—overlooking the new city to the west, the walled Old City and Mount Scopus to the north, the Mount of Olives to the east, and the Judaean desert and Dead Sea beyond. Soldiers, statesmen, diplomats, and the country’s Arab and Jewish elites had once mingled there. On this melancholy morning it would not have escaped Cunningham’s notice that no representative from either community had come to bid him farewell.2

  A black four-ton, bulletproof, armor-plated Daimler limousine awaited Cunningham out front in the compound’s majestic driveway. The vehicle had been specially built during the London Blitz for King George VI to tour the city’s bombed-out neighborhoods. The prime minister, Clement Attlee, had sent it to Jerusalem for Cunningham’s use. Until today, he had refused to ride in it, but British army intelligence believed that there were plots by Jewish and Arab extremists alike to assassinate him. The five-mile route to Qalandia airstrip, accordingly, was lined with troops and tanks, while Spitfire fighter aircraft and Lancaster heavy bombers flew overhead. The high commissioner inspected another honor guard before boarding a Royal Air Force (RAF) Dakota for the short flight to Haifa. Within an hour of landing, Cunningham had been whisked to the Haifa docks, again amid tight security, and piped aboard HMS Euryalus. At midnight, the Royal Navy battle cruiser set sail, and, as Cunningham had said in his last broadcast the previous night, “the final page of the history of the British Mandate in Palestine … turned.”3

  It had all begun so differently thirty-one years earlier, when another British general found success and fame in Palestine. But General Sir Edmund Allenby’s victorious march to Jerusalem had in fact begun with a defeat half a world away. In April 1917, as World War I ground to an uncertain conclusion, General Allenby held command of the British Third Army during the Arras offensive. Allenby “clumsily” attempted, and failed, to break through German lines. For his unimaginative tactics, and for the heavy loss of life that resulted from them, Allenby was stripped of his command and transferred from the Western Front to the Middle East.4

  Allenby was inconsolable, regarding his reassignment to a “peripheral war theatre” as a “demotion and punishment for failing in France.” He was now in charge of the British-led Egyptian Expeditionary Force (EEF), which was locked in battle with the German-led Ottoman Turkish army. Allenby’s predecessor had already been repelled twice at Gaza in April 1917 by Ottoman forces; Allenby was now working to an impossible timetable to take Jerusalem by Christmas.5

  Three months after he arrived in the region, Allenby initiated the third, and final, battle for Gaza. In a stunning coup de main, he divided his force, sending mounted and infantry divisions to strike at the enemy’s weaker, eastern flank. Thundering across the desert, his Australian, New Zealand, and British cavalry swept into Beersheba, cutting off the reinforced Turkish garrison in Gaza. Five weeks later, Jerusalem fell to Allenby’s troops. Indeed, whatever his failings were in the static warfare of the Western Front, as a cavalryman himself Allenby was clearly in his element in the desert.6

  Allenby entered Jerusalem on December 11, 1917. The weather, he wrote to his wife, was perfect for the occasion: “iced sunshine, with no wind.” Postcards from the time show men of his Sixtieth Division lining the route down Jaffa Road and a contingent of Australian cavalrymen gathered in front of Jaffa Gate, the southwest entrance to Jerusalem’s Old City, forming the honor guard that greeted Allenby as he rode by. Perhaps the most iconic photograph depicts Allenby making his official entry through Jaffa Gate on foot, an event that was carefully stage-managed and choreographed for its maximum symbolic value. Weeks earlier, Field Marshal William Robertson, the Chief of the Imperial General Staff (CIGS), Britain’s most senior military officer, had sent the following instructions to Allenby:

  In the event of JERUSALEM being occupied, it would be of considerable political importance if you, on officially entering the city, dismount at the city gate and enter on foot. German emperor rode in and the saying went round “a better man than he walked.”

  Advantage of contrast in conduct will be obvious.7

  Accompanied by his staff officers, representatives of Britain’s French and Italian allies, and Major T. E. Lawrence, the famed Lawrence of Arabia, Allenby walked the short distance to David’s Citadel, where he read a proclamation placing Jerusalem under military administration. Interpreters then translated it into Arabic, Hebrew, French, Italian, Greek, and Russian for the crowd of Jerusalemites who had come to witness this historic moment. “The people of the city assembled in some considerable numbers and appeared to be pleased at our arrival,” Allenby wrote the following day to the Reverend Rennie MacInnes, the Anglican bishop of Jerusalem. Seventy-five years later, Anna Grace Lind, who as a twelve-year-old had watched the procession from a balcony near Jaffa Gate, recalled how “we were all so excited to see the British coming in.”8

  Short of men, it was not for another ten months that Allenby was able to resume his offensive. But on October 30, 1918, after a few weeks of fighting near M
egiddo, the biblical site of Armageddon, the Turks surrendered. Palestine, that “peripheral war theatre,” was the crowning achievement of Allenby’s career. He was promoted to field marshal a year later, awarded a viscountcy, appointed high commissioner of Egypt, and voted £50,000 (roughly the equivalent of $3.4 million today) by Parliament in appreciation.9

  Allenby’s conquest of Palestine ended four centuries of rule by Turkey’s Ottoman Empire. The country had suffered terribly during the four years of war. In addition to the fighting that had ravaged Palestine’s landscape and economy, famine, locusts, and military requisitioning had depleted livestock and denuded crops and forests alike. Palestine’s population had shrunk by perhaps as many as 100,000 people from its prewar level of roughly 700,000 inhabitants, the result of death from both warfare and disease, forced conscription, and cruel civilian deportation.10

  The problems facing Allenby and his army in administering Palestine were thus formidable. Accordingly, in April 1918 responsibility for the country’s governance passed from the chief political officer attached to the EEF to a more formal, but still provisional, entity called the Occupied Enemy Territory Administration (OETA), pending the country’s ultimate disposition.11

  But Britain’s rule of Palestine, however glorious its beginnings, was undermined from the start by two separate commitments that it had made to two peoples who both considered that country historically their own—the Arabs and the Jews. During the war, just weeks before Allenby marched into Jerusalem, the British government had issued the Balfour Declaration. That statement of British policy was in fact a letter sent on November 2, 1917, by the foreign secretary, Arthur Balfour, on behalf of the British government, to Lord Rothschild, a president of the English Zionist Federation. “I have much pleasure in conveying to you, on behalf of His Majesty’s Government, the following declaration of sympathy with Jewish Zionist aspirations which has been submitted to, and approved by, the Cabinet,” Balfour had written. “His Majesty’s Government view with favour, the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.” The hard strategic realities of a war that had dragged on with no clear resolution loomed behind the declaration’s benevolent prose and altruistic intent. Prominent among these was the hope of favorably influencing Jewish opinion in the United States so that America would enter the war and in Russia in hopes that country would not conclude a separate peace with Germany. In addition, Palestine’s strategic location both as adjacent to Egypt and the Suez Canal and as a land bridge across the Middle East to Britain’s empire in India and the Far East had always figured prominently in British geopolitical calculations about the region.12

  Throughout the process of seizing Palestine from the Ottomans and garnering Jewish support for the larger war effort, however, the cabinet had not bothered to consult with its Arab allies, anticipating little or no negative reaction to these portentous decisions. As events would shortly demonstrate, this was a grave omission.13

  Although the Balfour Declaration pledged Britain to safeguard the civil and religious rights of Palestine’s majority Arab population, this qualification failed to allay Arab fears that the Jews, with Britain’s assistance, would eventually turn Palestine into a Jewish state. Critically, nothing had been said about the Arabs’ political and economic rights. In addition, this new statement of policy contradicted a previous British commitment to support the Arabs’ self-determination in return for their military assistance against Turkey. Between July 1915 and March 1916 a series of ten letters between Sir A. Henry McMahon, the high commissioner of Egypt, and Sharif Hussein of Mecca, who would lead the Arab Revolt and become Britain’s most important ally in the region, had spelled out this commitment, even though the correspondence did not constitute a formal treaty. The British government subsequently argued that the McMahon-Hussein agreement had not been meant to apply to Palestine in any case. Accordingly, Palestine’s Arabs came to fear that they would be cheated not only of Britain’s promises of self-determination but of their homeland as well.14

  The delicacy of navigating between two peoples’ historical, cultural, religious, and political claims to the same land was beyond the capacity of many British officials in OETA. Not only were they generally unsympathetic to Zionism, but their predisposition favoring the Arab claim poisoned relations with Palestine’s Jewish community. The anti-Semitism common to the British upper and officer classes of the time likely played a role as well. This antipathy toward the Jews and Zionism became so obvious that, following a visit to Palestine in 1920, the director of military intelligence reported to his superiors in London that OETA’s military and civilian officials were “unanimous in expressing their dislike of any policy favoring the Jews, and [harbor] serious fears of the consequences of such a policy.”15

  Meanwhile, Arab political discontent in Palestine was contributing to an increase of attacks on isolated, rural Jewish agricultural settlements. The problem was not new and indeed had become so serious before the war that in 1907 a group of neighboring Jewish settlements in the Galilee had founded an illegal, and therefore by necessity clandestine, “watchman’s guild.” They named the group Bar Giora, in reference to the Hebrew warrior who had led the first Jewish revolt against ancient Israel’s Roman occupiers. Bar Giora successfully defended the handful of settlements under its aegis, and two years later it was reorganized into a countrywide security force and renamed Ha-Shomer (the Watchman). During the war, however, the Ottomans began to more actively suppress these illegal activities and forcibly conscripted many of Ha-Shomer’s members into the Turkish army. The group, consequently, disintegrated.16

  The self-defense issue had lain dormant since then, until a series of Arab raids on Jewish settlements in the upper Galilee region of northern Palestine between late 1919 and early 1920 prompted renewed concern. The Yishuv (Hebrew for “settlement,” but the word used since the 1880s to refer to the Jewish community in Palestine) was further unnerved by growing reports of Arab threats to urban Jews as well.17

  One of the first people to publicly articulate this concern was Vladimir “Ze’ev” Jabotinsky. Acclaimed as a brilliant orator, essayist, ideologue, and poet, Jabotinsky emerged as among the most vociferous and militant of the Zionist leaders and thinkers during the period between the two wars. Born in Odessa in 1880, he subsequently studied in Switzerland and for a longer period in Italy, where he became enamored with the writings of leading figures of the Risorgimento—the strident nationalist movement that achieved Italy’s unification in the late nineteenth century.18

  The pogroms that convulsed Russian Jewry from 1903 to 1905 both awakened and account for Jabotinsky’s fervent Zionism. He hurriedly organized makeshift Jewish self-defense units for his native city, collecting money, raising recruits, and obtaining weapons. Although his efforts likely blunted anti-Semitic violence in Odessa, the infamous pogrom in Kishniev, then the capital of Bessarabia (now Moldova), galvanized Jabotinsky, who was henceforth transformed into “a professional Zionist [and] a travelling agitator.” As a journalist in Egypt covering World War I, Jabotinsky learned that Ottoman authorities had forcibly deported hundreds of young Jewish men from Palestine. Seized with the idea of creating a Jewish legion that would both help British forces liberate Palestine and endow Zionism with needed political capital, Jabotinsky lobbied tirelessly in London for its creation. His efforts resulted in the formation of the Zion Mule Corps, which participated in the ill-fated invasion of Turkey at Gallipoli in 1915, and three Jewish battalions of Royal Fusiliers that served under Allenby in the EEF. Their modest contribution to the war effort, however, was overshadowed in Zionist eyes by their symbolic value as uniquely Jewish military units.19

  Jabotinsky believed that a properly armed and
organized Jewish self-defense force was now required to replace the more informal and, in his view, archaic Ha-Shomer. He further argued that this new force should be not a clandestine body but an official paramilitary force enjoying the full recognition, and cooperation, of the British. An Arab attack on the northern village of Tel Hai in March 1920, in which six Jews were killed, infused the self-defense issue with new urgency. Among the dead was Captain Joseph Trumpeldor, a Jewish war hero who had once trained to become a dentist but had gone on to co-found the Zion Mule Corps with Jabotinsky. Wounded at Gallipoli, Trumpeldor had previously lost his left arm fighting in the 1904–5 Russo-Japanese War, and his valiant defense of Tel Hai against a large force of Bedouin brigands became a source of both anxiety and inspiration for the Yishuv. The anxiety was caused by renewed concerns over British assurances of protection, and the inspiration was a result of Trumpeldor’s reported last words, “It is good to die for one’s country.”20

  Meanwhile, a group of demobilized Jewish legionnaires and members of various youth sports groups in Jerusalem became impatient and formed their own secret paramilitary unit that they called the Haganah (Defense) and asked Jabotinsky to serve as their commander. He agreed, provided that the group allowed him to obtain permission from the authorities for its establishment. Senior OETA officials, however, feared that such an organization would further incite the already restless Arab population and therefore rejected Jabotinsky’s request. Nonetheless, the group continued to drill and train every evening, supplemented by weekend hikes where Haganah ex-servicemen instructed their units in both field craft and the use of hand grenades. Arms, meanwhile, were procured at high cost from an Armenian gunrunner in the Old City. Jabotinsky was emphatic that any provocation of the Arabs was to be avoided. However, in keeping with his muscular, aggressive Zionist ideology, he counseled, “If an Arab walks up to you and insults you, do not answer; never strike first; but if he hits you once, hit back twice as hard.”21