Anonymous Soldiers

by Bruce Hoffman

  Although it was easy for the administration to dismiss such threats as bluster given the weakened condition of the Palestinian Arab polity, the familiar fear that Britain could again be confronted simultaneously with violence from both communities was quickly rekindled. Indeed, a succession of communications from Cunningham depicted a seething Arab population. The high commissioner described how large crowds had attended the funerals of the King David’s Arab victims, hailing them as martyrs and pledging revenge. Contemporaneous U.S. intelligence reports similarly noted the potential for renewed Arab unrest, as did Dempsey in his general overview and assessment of trends in the region.57

  The morale of the security forces was another consideration prominent in the thoughts of everyone involved in formulating a response to the bombing. “There is no necessity for me to tell you what the soldiers feel about this business,” Dempsey had already apprised Montgomery on July 24. “They will accept being murdered in cold blood up to a point. I repeat up to a point. They will want to use their strength and weapons and so will I.” That the situation in Palestine was one that prized guile over firepower had not yet occurred to officers and men whose formative combat experiences had been on the conventional battlefields of Europe and North Africa. Hence, the cordon-and-search operation had become the default option upon which the army depended when some dramatic show of force was required. The problem was that it was also a singularly blunt instrument, driven by catharsis more than intelligence and thus calculated to further alienate the same population whose assistance was so ardently sought and urgently required.58

  The experience of one Jerusalem resident shows how, far from being intelligence-driven, such operations were coercive exercises designed to upend daily life and, through inconvenience and discomfort, compel cooperation. Chronicling his experiences in a letter to the editor of The Palestine Post, the writer explained how he had been among the four hundred people detained when the army descended on the city’s Rehavia neighborhood early one morning the previous January. “The first intimation one has of these things,” he wrote, “are loud bangs with rifle-butts on one’s door … From then and until your happy return from detention you had best forget that the English language boasts such expressions as ‘please,’ ‘thank you,’ ‘sorry,’ ‘if you don’t mind.’ ” Thus awoken, all males—regardless of health or infirmity—were escorted outside by troops who hustled them aboard waiting military vehicles. They were then taken to a local military detention facility and placed in a large basement area with barbed-wire windows. There, “chairs, benches, boxes or other articles which might be used as seating facilities are conspicuous by their absence.” Hours passed. Finally, at 1:00 p.m., groups of five were summoned for interrogation. Exhausted and stiff from having been made to stand for five hours, the younger men were separated from those over age forty and taken elsewhere for questioning under the supervision of a plainclothes police officer—presumably a CID detective. A major then appeared who seemingly at random ordered some of the men to produce their identity papers, asked others what their occupation was, and mostly ignored everyone else. After another forty-five minutes, he announced that they were free to go—without explanation or apology.59

  “If it is accepted that the problem of defeating the enemy consists very largely of finding him,” General Sir Frank Kitson, arguably Britain’s preeminent expert on counterterrorism and counterinsurgency, has written, “it is easy to recognize the paramount importance of good information.” Such intelligence, as the above vignette illustrates, was in woefully short supply in Palestine. For example, although as recently as May the CID had warned of an Irgun plot to blow up the secretariat, the vagueness of the information, coupled with the fact that since December 1945 several other such threats had failed to materialize, led to the threats’ repeated dismissal not only by Shaw, as Rymer-Jones repeatedly complained, but also by Cunningham and Barker. Accordingly, the lack of more specific intelligence, the repeated false alarms about impending attacks, and the widespread belief that the Irgun would never undertake an operation that risked harming Jews all led to tragedy.60

  Moreover, in the days preceding the bombing, British intelligence might have been the victim of a colossally successful Irgun deception operation. On July 9, H. A. R. “Kim” Philby, a senior officer in the Secret Intelligence Service who would later be unmasked as a Soviet spy, had written to the Foreign Office with information about an Irgun plot to attack British diplomatic personnel and facilities in Beirut. British intelligence was already aware of the existence of Irgun operatives in that city. Accordingly, the threat was judged sufficiently serious to warrant sending both Isham, the DSO, and Giles, the head of the CID, to Lebanon. The threatened attacks never materialized, and nothing more was ever heard of the alleged plot. Isham was convinced that it was a deliberate Irgun ploy to ensure that the country’s two most senior intelligence officers would not be present in Palestine when the attack on the King David occurred.61

  In the bombing’s aftermath it was bad intelligence again—that the attackers had come from Tel Aviv—which accounted for the decision to undertake the massive cordon-and-search operation, code-named Shark, in that city rather than in Jerusalem, where the assault unit in fact was based. Military intelligence had identified Tel Aviv as the attack’s origin based on the fact that one of the vehicles used in the bombing had been stolen in Tel Aviv, hence the conclusion that the “inhabitants of Tel Aviv were involved.”62

  Operation Shark began shortly before dawn on July 30. It involved four infantry and parachute brigades, three independent battalions, and three cavalry regiments drawn from the Sixth Airborne and the First Infantry Division—amounting to fifteen thousand troops. Together with additional uniformed police and CID personnel, these units cordoned off and searched the entirety of Tel Aviv. “At last the Lion was roused,” Dare Wilson approvingly wrote in his official history of the Sixth Airborne’s time in Palestine.63

  The city’s 170,000 inhabitants were placed under curfew and allowed to leave their homes for only two hours each day to obtain food and medicine. According to the official history prepared by army headquarters in Jerusalem, “Every house, attic and cellar in TEL AVIV was thoroughly searched and every inhabitant old or young, healthy or infirm, was screened by the Police.” A total of 102,000 people—including every male between the ages of fifteen and fifty and female between fifteen and thirty years of age (excluding those who were pregnant or with small children)—passed through a basic screening process carried out by each company. Approximately one in ten of this number were detained and passed to brigade headquarters for more intensive screening by teams of CID officers. Employing special, top secret directories complete with photographs and descriptions of known terrorists, along with their own intimate familiarity with the two organizations and their members, the detectives meticulously examined every suspect paraded before them. To keep track of everyone screened, the police painted a different-color dye on the foreheads of those selected for additional investigation from that used on those either awaiting questioning or who had been cleared for release.64

  Although the Irgun boasted that Begin himself was screened but escaped detection because of the quality of his false papers, Lehi’s operations chief, Yezernitzky, was not as fortunate. In his usual disguise as a learned rabbi, with long black coat and hat, full beard, and false eyeglasses, he had nearly escaped detection until an alert detective sergeant named Thomas Martin first noticed his recent beard growth and then, upon closer scrutiny, the distinctive kink in one of Yezernitzky’s eyebrows. As Yezernitzky left the screening queue, Martin called out to him, “Shalom, Yitzhak.” As soon as Yezernitzky turned around, Martin knew that he had his man.65

  The Lehi leader was brought to Jerusalem for in-depth interrogation at the Russian Compound’s central prison. Following several weeks of solitary confinement, Yezernitzky was taken from his cell, manacled, and driven to an RAF base. There, he was placed aboard a British Halifax bomber and flown to ex
ile at the prison camp in Asmara, Eritrea, where some 250 other Jewish terrorists were confined. Two months later Martin was gunned down by a Lehi hit team, disguised as tennis players, in retaliation. When interviewed by Bethell thirty years later, Yezernitzky—now Yitzhak Shamir and Speaker of the Knesset—denied that he had been consulted about the murder but said that he nonetheless applauded it. “Martin was one of the most active men of the CID, emotionally involved in the fight against us,” the former Lehi leader explained. “It was even published in the newspapers that Martin had recognized me. So it was like a challenge. It was very important from the morale point of view for us to do something about it, to make a demonstration to the Jewish people. You could say he signed his own death warrant.”66

  Operation Shark concluded on August 3. Lauded by its commander, Cassels, as “more ambitious than any similar operation ever staged” and “one of the most difficult” that he personally had ever undertaken, it was judged an unequivocal success. The army had shown itself capable of mounting at very short notice a large, complicated operation with especially complex logistical requirements—such as assuring the cordoned-off city’s population access to food, water, and medical attention. Nearly eight hundred people had been detained and five major arms dumps discovered, including one that was found in Tel Aviv’s Great Synagogue. Some two hundred rifles, twenty-three mortars, four machine guns, over 100,000 rounds of ammunition, and a large quantity of explosives were seized.67

  In trumpeting its prowess, the army did not conceal that the operation had been undertaken mostly to assuage Arab criticism and attendant accusations of British “weakness, leniency and unpreparedness” in the face of Jewish terrorism. If that was indeed the case, the impossibility of achieving that result had already been acknowledged. The day before Shark commenced, Cunningham had advised the cabinet that by itself the operation “would not … be enough to reduce tension among the Arabs.” Further, given the faulty intelligence that underpinned the entire exercise, it is not surprising that an internal CID report on the investigation of the King David bombing groused that after five months “not one of the criminals” responsible for the attack had been apprehended.68

  Meanwhile, Jerusalem’s Jewish neighborhoods were subjected to a dusk-to-dawn curfew that lasted sixteen days. When it was finally lifted on August 7, the city’s residents found the downtown municipal district completely transformed. Army engineers had driven six-foot-long iron posts into the roads and sidewalks bounding the Russian Compound to which they attached two layers of steel fencing. Three concentric rings of barbed-wire coils radiated outward from the fence, encircling the police headquarters, the law courts, the government hospital, and the central prison as well as all the buildings to the east along Jaffa Road—including the Assicurazioni Generali Insurance Building, the General Post Office, the Anglo-Palestine Company building (now the Bank Leumi’s main office), and all shops, business offices, and residential apartments as far as the historic Barclays Bank building on Allenby Square, at the end of Jaffa Road, facing the Old City. An identical security zone encircled the area surrounding the King David Hotel, the YMCA, and the other government and municipal buildings on Mamillah Road and Julian’s Way. The authorities promised to find alternative accommodation for the evicted residents and businesses in vacated government facilities that had been relocated inside the security ring.69

  Even the world-renowned German-Jewish physician Julius Kleeberg, who had counted King George V and Churchill, among other leading British personalities, as his patients, was forced to move out of his own home because it abutted the villa occupied by Barker. “Probably never in the history of this old city has there been constructed so much that looks like war preparations,” an OSS informant observed. “Since the King David episode, both Indian and British troops are feverishly, as it were, preparing for a siege, and even to a novice a sort of system of much disconcerting activity seems to be emerging.”70

  The city’s Jewish populace derisively called these special security zones “Bevingrads”—in reference to the besieged Russian cities of Leningrad and Stalingrad during World War II. They were similarly derided by the Arabs, and even the British in Palestine mourned the city’s ugly transformation. “Jerusalem never forgot it,” Richard Gale recalled, “and this beautiful city from now on knew barbed wire, protective dispositions and military patrols.”71

  The new security measures had been implemented partly in response to the grave concerns expressed by the association representing British civil servants in Palestine over their continued vulnerability following the King David bombing. But the main reason behind the “Bevingrads” was the government’s own fears about the Yishuv’s likely reaction to the new policy adopted on July 30 governing the disposition of illegal Jewish arrivals to Palestine—and the increased violence that it would cause. From the start of the cabinet’s consideration of the government’s response to the bombing, Cunningham had been quick to fasten on the immigration issue as a potential trump card to obtain the Yishuv’s renewed cooperation against terrorism. Although the cabinet had rebuffed his proposal to suspend the legal quota, the high commissioner rightly sensed that a proposal to intensify existing efforts to stanch the rising influx of illegal immigrants might be greeted more favorably. This issue had already emerged as a flash point in Anglo-Arab relations, and Cunningham now worried that as a result of the bombing’s Arab victims, any further arrivals might provoke widespread antigovernment violence.72

  The recent pogrom in Kielce, Poland, where some forty Jews were set upon by mobs and brutally murdered, could not have been far from the high commissioner’s thoughts. It had been front-page news in Palestine for five days and the subject of multiple dispatches from British legations across Europe predicting increased Jewish emigration as a result. The probability that this development would also produce a new surge of illegal immigrants seeking to reach Palestine thus figured prominently in the cabinet’s deliberations concerning Palestine’s security. Further, information gleaned from Palmach documents seized at Kibbutz Yagur during Operation Agatha revealed that all three Jewish underground organizations were giving seasoned guerrilla fighters and former anti-Nazi partisans from Europe priority for passage to Palestine. They were regarded as having already strengthened the attack capabilities of both the Irgun and Lehi. One such group of men, for example, had been quickly pressed into service for Lehi’s assault on the Haifa railway workshops the previous month—even though none of them could yet speak or understand Hebrew.73

  Shaw was invited to brief the cabinet at its meeting on July 30. The situation in Palestine, he reported, was dire. The Arabs were in a state of acute agitation and the Yishuv mostly uncooperative. “It was therefore of vital importance,” he argued, “to prevent any more illegal immigrants arriving in Palestine.” The current legal quota provided for the admission of only 350 immigrants per month. Yet several thousand illegal immigrants were already detained at Athlit camp, and nearly 3,000 more had arrived in Palestine over the previous forty-eight hours. Accordingly, the current practice of deducting their number from the legal monthly quota would consume all the available certificates through at least November. The Chiefs of Staff also favored taking decisive action to end this traffic. Indeed, the previous day they had prepared a detailed assessment proposing that illegal arrivals in Palestine be henceforth brought to Haifa and then transshipped to specially prepared camps on Cyprus.74

  Although Cunningham had taken a hard line on stopping illegal immigration, he began to have second thoughts about the transshipment solution that the chiefs proposed. He felt so drastic a move would completely alienate the Yishuv, prompt even more widespread disturbances, and thereby undermine the prospects of achieving a lasting political settlement through continued negotiations with the Zionists. But having flagged this concern for the cabinet’s attention, the high commissioner then waffled, stating that he did not oppose the deportation option outright. Montgomery was furious. In a sharply worded rejoinder address
ed to Attlee, the CIGS conceded that there would “undoubtedly be strong Jewish reaction.” But he assured the prime minister, this “can and will be dealt with; the necessary forces are available and I will ensure that at all times we keep one step ahead of the Haganah and other Jewish illegal armed forces.” The cabinet was persuaded, and it approved the chiefs’ proposal on August 7. The army in turn undertook arrangements to accommodate the detained illegal immigrants under armed guard in barbed-wire encampments.75

  But Montgomery would not let the matter rest. Seizing on this opportunity to further tarnish Cunningham’s reputation, he wrote to Dempsey, instructing the commander in chief to “see that CUNNINGHAM does not begin to wobble or try to sit on the fence. Once we begin the business it must be got on with firmly and with great energy and there must be NO repeat NO question of looking over our shoulder.” The CIGS asked to be informed immediately if Cunningham or anyone else in the Palestine administration “shows any signs of not wanting to face up to its responsibilities or to shirk the issue.”76

  Montgomery then telephoned Hall with the intention, his diary records, of telling the colonial secretary that “Cunningham was useless and that he should be sacked.” Unable to reach Hall over the August bank holiday weekend, the CIGS instead vented his spleen to the colonial secretary’s private secretary. He followed up this telephone conversation the next day in a letter to Hall. Montgomery wrote that Cunningham “is NOT the right man to govern Palestine at the present time. We require there a man who has a firm and robust mentality, who knows what he wants, who will stand no nonsense, and who has the character to inspire confidence in others. Cunningham has none of these qualities.” The CIGS then inquired whether Hall was aware that Cunningham had been removed from command of the Eighth Army “in the middle of a battle because he was quite unable to make up his mind what to do. That is not the sort of man we want in Palestine today.” The CIGS thought that a “good civilian” would be much better as high commissioner—but, of course, Montgomery hastened to add, “that is not my business.”77