Anonymous Soldiers
Page 28
The Irgun was now reeling from the combined blows rained down upon it from both the police and the Saison. Its officers and rank and file alike pressed Begin to strike back at the Jewish Agency and the Haganah. From the very outset of the Saison, however, Begin unequivocally forbade it. “Do not raise a hand and do not use a weapon,” an Irgun order issued on November 13, 1944, had read. “They [the Saison operatives] are not guilty. They are our brothers … there will not be a civil war, but [we] will approach the big day, in which the nation will rise up—despite the will of those obstructing the way—as one fighting camp.” This point was driven home repeatedly in subsequent directives. As Begin later reflected, the Irgun
decided to strike out along a road which no underground had ever chosen in similar circumstances. We decided not to suspend, nor promise to suspend, our struggle against British rule; yet at the same time we declined to retaliate for the kidnappings, the denunciations and the handing-over of our men …
This dreadful situation continued for many months. We said there would be no civil war but, in fact, throughout the whole country a one sided civil war raged.26
The Saison, just as Begin anticipated, sowed the seeds of its own destruction. It was not long before new cracks surfaced in the relationship between the authorities and the Jewish Agency and the Haganah. Repeated government complaints of agency foot-dragging were rebuffed with countercharges of unwarranted interference in, and willful hindrance of, Saison operations. By the middle of January 1945 the focus and tone of Jewish Agency public pronouncements about the counterterrorism program had also changed dramatically. No longer were the dissidents assailed for their transgressions. Instead, the government and the police were harangued respectively for pursuing policies that needlessly antagonized the Yishuv and for an incompetence that had allowed the terrorist organizations to flourish in the first place.27
In this vein, the Jewish Agency took full credit for the cessation of terrorism in Palestine. Its officials boasted that information they had supplied to the police accounted for 95 percent of all terrorist arrests, including that of Meridor. American intelligence analysts thought such claims wildly exaggerated, but with respect to the only metric that really mattered, British intelligence was forced to concede that since the Saison operation had commenced the previous November, there had not been a single terrorist incident.28
In late January the British suddenly realized that they had created a monster. The first intelligence reports had begun to trickle in that in addition to hunting down terrorists, the Jewish Agency was using the Saison to settle old scores and sideline political rivals, thereby eliminating any challenge to its authority. OSS analysts were reporting the same development. They noted that of seven persons recently arrested by Saison operatives, none had any connection whatsoever to the Irgun. Indeed, the police now confirmed that the Jewish Agency was routinely violating the terms of the November 1944 cooperation agreement. Suspected terrorists swept up in the Saison dragnet were no longer being handed over to the police and instead were being held in secret Haganah detention facilities. The Palestine administration attempted to intervene. Its demand that the agency surrender immediately to the police all people in its custody was ignored, and the kidnappings and detentions continued.29
Ironically, previous British complaints about Jewish Agency foot-dragging were now superseded by protests of overzealousness and even ruthlessness. Gort and Shaw met twice in February with Weizmann and Shertok, respectively, to reiterate the government’s profound “disapprobation of these methods and … [its] determination to put a stop to them.” These remonstrations proved no more successful than previous entreaties either in halting the kidnappings or in obtaining the detainees’ release.30
Meanwhile, pressure had already been mounting within the Yishuv for the agency to abandon the Saison. At the end of January, the first accusations had appeared in the Jewish press of “illegal prisons” and “torture chambers” in which the Saison detainees were subjected to “Gestapo methods.” The right-wing-leaning Jewish daily Ha-Boker (The morning) decried the counterterrorist campaign as a thinly veiled effort to “eliminate once and for all anyone who could interfere with the absolute domination of the Left over the Yishuv.” The Palestine Post went so far as to call for the creation of citizens’ self-defense units to resist the kidnapping squads. Finally, the Chief Rabbinate of Palestine issued a strongly worded condemnation of what it termed “this hateful and cruel action.”31
Discontent over the Saison was also welling within the Haganah’s ranks. Moshe Dayan, a future major general and chief of staff of the Israeli army and subsequently minister of defense and minister of foreign affairs, was then a young Haganah intelligence officer stationed in Tel Aviv who was tasked with the counterterrorist campaign’s implementation. He accepted the logic behind it, saluted smartly, and followed orders but did so without enthusiasm. Others were less pliant and openly resented being cast in the role of common police informants and collaborators. Their disillusionment produced disdainful songs and jingles that circulated among the Haganah rank and file.32
By March 1945, the Saison had basically run out of steam, and the kidnappings, detentions, interrogations, and cooperation with the police halted. Not only had it failed in its principal mission to destroy the Irgun, but the Saison by some accounts had almost the opposite effect, earning the dissidents newfound respect and support. In any event, whatever lingering ardor remained for the campaign’s continuance was overwhelmed by the news emerging from liberated Europe as the Soviet, British, and American militaries drove unrelentingly toward Berlin. The Yishuv was now consumed with helping its surviving brethren and getting them to Palestine and not with fighting fratricidal battles on Britain’s behalf. Unable and unwilling to sustain the Saison, the Jewish Agency finally announced its disbandment in May 1945. The internal war against the terrorists was over.33
In retrospect, this time was a turning point in the history of British rule over Palestine and the establishment of the State of Israel. Among the hundreds of terrorist incidents both before and after the assassination of Lord Moyne, few can compare with that act in terms of significance, impact, and sheer drama. It swept away the possibility of an early solution to the Palestine problem, immersing Britain in an intractable struggle with the Yishuv that was not to be resolved until the State of Israel arose four years later. Its implications for internal Zionist politics were equally profound, propelling the Yishuv to the brink of civil war. The assassination’s repercussions, moreover, were felt not only in Jerusalem and London but across the Middle East, intertwining the maintenance of order in Palestine with preserving British prestige in the Arab world—which some officials argued should take precedence over even the prosecution of the war in Europe.
In this respect, the most consequential repercussion of Hakim and Bet-Zuri’s deed was to extinguish the prospect of resolving the Palestine problem before the war ended. The death of Moyne, a dear friend and steadfast political ally of Churchill’s, had a profound and lasting effect on the prime minister’s determination to press ahead with partition and overturn the hated white paper. The progress patiently achieved in this direction over the previous eighteen months under his quiet tutelage ground to an abrupt and irrevocable halt. Only days earlier, as we have seen, the cabinet secretary had placed discussion of the ministerial committee’s report recommending partition on the war cabinet’s agenda. It was dropped from the schedule when news of Moyne’s murder broke—and never considered.34
It is impossible, of course, to determine whether Churchill’s endeavors to establish a Jewish state in Palestine through partition with the British government’s forthright endorsement would have succeeded. Given the formidable opposition from the Foreign Office, the Chiefs of Staff, and members of Churchill’s own party, there can be no certainty that the war cabinet would in fact have approved the partition proposal plan. But at the same time it is clear that on the eve of Moyne’s assassination the war cabinet had come
to the threshold of a major redefinition of Britain’s policy for Palestine. Hence, the Yishuv suffered a far greater penalty because of the assassination than its leaders had feared: the loss of what was likely to be an immediate and favorable decision on the mandate’s future. Isaiah Berlin, the Oxford don then serving in the British embassy in Washington, thus rightly describes the killing as “a critical turning point” in the Jews’ journey to statehood—alas, an ideal opportunity that was cruelly squandered. As Weizmann himself observed in his autobiography five years later, “The harm done our cause by the assassination of Lord Moyne, and by the whole terror—this apart from the profound moral deterioration involved—was not in changing the intentions of the British Government, but rather in providing our enemies with a convenient excuse, and in helping to justify their course before the bar of public opinion.”35
Perhaps the most climacteric effect of the murder was that when Churchill arrived at the Big Three conference with Stalin and Roosevelt in Yalta in February 1945, he brought with him no British plan for Palestine’s future. And throughout the discussions he remained conspicuously silent whenever the matter was raised by his Russian and American counterparts. Ironically, just days before Moyne’s assassination, Churchill had discussed with Roosevelt the possibility of holding the meeting in Jerusalem. The prime minister had just finished lunching with Weizmann when he raised the idea. In Jerusalem, he had enthused, “there are first-class hotels, Government houses, etc. and every means can be taken to ensure security.”36
No less profound were the consequences of the failed counterterrorist campaign on Anglo-Zionist relations and internal Zionist politics. In the wake of the assassination, the Jewish Agency embraced the Saison as a means both to head off the threatened government reprisals and to eliminate a long-standing threat to its own power. Although the agency succeeded in sparing the Yishuv from punishment—and, not incidentally, also saved its arms caches from seizure and preserved the monthly immigration quota, thus enabling fifteen hundred European Jews to enter Palestine legally—it failed to destroy the Irgun or please the British. So far as the Palestine government was concerned, the agency’s prosecution of the Saison was either inadequate or overzealous.37
The Saison also imposed a moral dilemma on the Yishuv that further estranged the population from the government, arguably undercut the Jewish Agency’s authority, and inadvertently generated sympathy for precisely the underground organization that it was meant to eliminate. As much as the Jewish community might have abhorred the terrorists’ methods, it remained reluctant to betray individual members of either the Irgun or Lehi to the authorities—regardless of the agency’s repeated entreaties. Moreover, the Irgun won newfound sympathy and support from the community that it might otherwise have never obtained by refusing to retaliate against either the Haganah or the Jewish Agency. Finally, the collapse of the Saison ended forever the prospects of further cooperation with the government against the terrorists. To the contrary, it laid the foundations for the alliance that would be concluded between the official Zionist institutions and both terrorist organizations less than six months later.38
“What kind of man was Lord Moyne?” the Jewish-American author Leo Budovsky, writing under the pseudonym Leo Benjamin, asked in his 1952 book, Martyrs in Cairo. “To the people of Israel this English nobleman was like some horrible, blood-drinking monster, a wretch vile and depraved. He was the scourge and bane of their nation … He was an implacable enemy of the Jewish nation. He knew that they yearned for freedom in their homeland. But they must never live to see it. They must forever be serfs, abject and groveling, of imperial England.” In an interview two decades later, Yezernitzky (Shamir) similarly explained that Moyne “was an anti-Semite” and “there were good reasons for him being shot.” The former Lehi commander justified the assassination not only because of the office Moyne held and the government he represented but also because “we had known about his hostile attitude towards Zionism, towards the idea of [the] ingathering of the Jewish people here. He was against any Jewish aliyah, any Jewish immigration. He didn’t believe that there exists such a thing like a Jewish nation, or a Jewish people … and therefore, we decided to make this operation.”39
These were the same arguments that Lehi used to justify and explain its killing of Moyne to the Yishuv. Ten days after the assassination, posters addressed to “Jews in the Homeland” appeared throughout Palestine. Moyne was described as “an arch enemy of the freedom aspirations of the Jewish people in their country.” Although some of the accusations pertaining to what Lehi termed his “brutality, foulness, cynicism and humiliation” of the Jews were familiar from the October 13, 1944, issue of He-Hazit, many others were new. On top of all his other crimes, Moyne was assailed for interfering with debates in the U.S. Congress over Palestine, deliberately plunging the Yishuv into economic crisis and thereby taking “away the bread from the mouths of Jewish workers,” and being “an ardent follower of the Nazi racial legislation” by seeking to deprive Jews of their historical claim to Palestine. Yet Churchill had fulsomely praised Moyne on the floor of the House of Commons as the Jews’ best and best-informed friend. What can explain these two seemingly irreconcilable claims?40
It is indeed true that as colonial secretary, Moyne had been at the vortex of several crucial decisions that had not gone in the Yishuv’s favor. In this capacity he of course was beholden to enforce the government’s policy of not establishing a separate Jewish army on the ostensible grounds that Jews were able and welcome to enlist in HM Forces as private individuals, thus obviating the need for a special unit of their own. By denying the Jews an army, the government of course was intent on avoiding either needlessly antagonizing the Arabs or providing the Yishuv with a pretext that could later be contrived into justifying the establishment of a Jewish state. It is also accurate that Moyne was profoundly skeptical of Palestine’s ability to absorb large numbers of new Jewish immigrants and on one occasion had told two Zionist leaders that “Palestine could not solve the whole Jewish problem.” Moreover, it was his intervention in 1942 that consigned the doomed passengers on board the Struma to their horrific fate. But despite repeated claims to the contrary, Moyne was not in fact a racist with Nazi-like beliefs of racial purity. As a serious anthropologist and ethnographer, he made the point about “the Jewish race [having] been much mixed with Gentiles since the beginning of the Diaspora” during the same House of Lords debate cited above not to disparage or demean the Jews but to state the obvious: that all modern peoples are to an extent racially mixed.41
In fact, Moyne might have been more balanced on the question of the Jews and Palestine than Lehi maintained. His secretary, Dorothy Osmond, for instance, recalled in a letter to Moyne’s son and heir to his title the story of a dinner party that Moyne was planning in Cairo just weeks before his death to honor Gort, who was then en route to Palestine to take up his post as high commissioner. According to the British author and biographer Christopher Sykes, who was given access to the letter, Moyne had instructed her to remove Brigadier Clayton from the guest list, explaining that he did not want Clayton’s strong pro-Arab biases to unduly influence the new high commissioner. As Sykes explains, “Lord Moyne was not the sort of administrator whom Zionists could in the normal course of things regard as ideal. He had a typically British compromising mind, devoted to fairness as the supreme virtue which could cure every ill in the world … [but] fairness was of little avail in the affairs of post-Balfour Palestine.”42
Perhaps the most searing indictment against Moyne is the long-standing canard that he callously blocked the entrance to Palestine of one million Hungarian Jews whose freedom the Nazis had offered in exchange for trucks, coffee, tea, cocoa, and soap. Moyne’s alleged role in this scheme originated in an “as told to” biography written about Joel Brand, an emissary from the Hungarian Jewish community who in March 1944 had communicated this proposition to the British government. More than a decade after the event, the book relates a confused accou
nt of a conversation that Brand remembers having in the garden of Cairo’s British-Egyptian Club with an unidentified British official who happened to be sitting next to Brand and his host, a British military officer. When asked by this official, who had not introduced himself or given his name, how many Jews Adolf Eichmann actually proposed to free in exchange for the trucks and other goods, Brand replied a million. According to Brand’s recollection, this official then exclaimed, “A million! What on earth are you thinking of, Mr. Brand? What should we do with a million Jews? Where would we put them?” As Brand rose from his seat and left the club in disgust, his host caught up with him and asked, “Do you know whom you were speaking to? That was our Minister of State Lord Moyne.” However, in the very next sentence of the book, Brand explains that his interlocutor was not Lord Moyne.
I afterwards heard that the man with whom I spoke was not, in fact, Lord Moyne, but another British statesman …
I later learnt that Lord Moyne had often deplored the tragic fate of the Jews. The policy which he had to follow, however, was one dictated by a cold and impersonal administration in London. It may be that he paid with his life for the guilt of others.