While British intelligence struggled to contain the spread of Jewish terrorism beyond Palestine, the army was dealing with a sharp escalation of attacks inside the country. The heady optimism that had attended Operation Agatha back in June, a month when a record twenty-four significant terrorist incidents had taken place, seemed to have been validated by the precipitous decline in activity during July and August, when a total of just three attacks occurred. But this new surge in confidence was short-lived as nearly as many terrorist incidents were recorded in October as in June and six times the number for July and August combined.50
There had admittedly been some good news at the end of October when, acting on a tip, police thwarted an Irgun plot to bomb Jerusalem’s central train station. One terrorist was killed and five others captured—although a police officer died while removing an explosives-filled suitcase left behind by the attackers. But by November the upward spiral of attacks was raising new doubts about the army’s ability, despite its overwhelming numerical superiority and firepower, to sustain the momentum from Operation Agatha, much less effectively counter the threat presented by two small terrorist organizations. This was also adversely impacting morale, fostering an impression across the ranks of an army cast on the defensive—reacting and responding to an opponent who had brazenly seized the initiative. The government, however, had yet to propose a clear policy for Palestine—with little progress evident since Labour’s accession to power and every prospect for the existent stasis to continue.51
The London Conference had indeed proven to be a frustratingly inchoate exercise, adjourning the day after it had begun—undermined by the fact that neither of the two key parties to the negotiations would attend. The entire effort had been rescued from oblivion only by the government’s face-saving announcement promising a resumption of the talks following the conclusion of the Zionist Congress and the United Nations General Assembly session, both slated for December.52
The new colonial secretary, Creech Jones, recognized that an essential step in divining that plan entailed persuading the Zionists to join the next round of talks. He also knew that the ineluctable quid pro quo to obtain their participation required the release of the seven remaining Jewish Agency leaders detained at Latrun since June (116 other persons detained during Operation Agatha remained imprisoned along with 423 suspected members of the Irgun, Lehi, and the Palmach). Despite Cunningham’s grave reservations, the colonial secretary was prepared to make this concession. In fact, the Labour government was so desperate for a breakthrough that as a further sign of good faith it agreed to transfer Barker from Palestine. Accordingly, on October 22 the War Office announced that because of the unexpected early retirement of General Sir Oliver Leese, the GOC, Eastern Command in England, Barker was being promoted to full general and appointed Leese’s successor. The Jewish Agency immediately issued a statement applauding Barker’s reassignment, terming it “a step in the right direction.” And the Inner Zionist Council, the senior most executive body within the World Zionist Organization, quickly followed suit by issuing a declaration denouncing terrorism and calling upon the Yishuv to deny all assistance and support to the terrorist organizations. The Arab community unsurprisingly decried Barker’s transfer as a craven British surrender to “America, Truman and the Jews.”53
Creech Jones made no secret either to his colleagues in the cabinet or to the high commissioner that the declaration was not “as satisfactory as could have been wished.” But, putting the best face on the situation, he argued that “in this particular resolution the Council had taken a courageous stand against terrorism which had been reinforced in public speeches subsequently by senior members of the Jewish Agency. There were signs that representative Jewish institutions in Palestine were now anxious to re-educate the Jewish Community towards a disavowal of violence.” The continued detention of the leaders without trial, he explained to Cunningham, would in any event “be quite unacceptable to large sections of public opinion” both at home and abroad. Accordingly, the Inner Zionist Council statement presented an ideal opportunity to resolve that dilemma before it became still more acute. The high commissioner remained unconvinced. Two Irgun attacks earlier that morning, including the attempt to blow up the Jerusalem train station, had only affirmed Cunningham’s misgivings. A policeman and two British soldiers lay dead with another thirteen persons injured, among them six Arabs. Coming less than twenty-four hours after the Inner Zionist Council’s resolution, the incidents further underscored its irrelevance to the reality of Palestine’s deteriorating security.54
Both the army general staff in London and British military intelligence in Palestine shared Cunningham’s skepticism. The general staff’s assessment was that the resolution would indeed have no effect on either the Irgun or Lehi and moreover would anger the Arabs while further undermining troop morale. The Sixth Airborne Division’s intelligence officer similarly dismissed the resolution as meaningless given the plethora of caveats that ensured the Yishuv’s new measures would fall far short of the kind of active cooperation and offensive action that had been undertaken during the Saison campaign. The Irgun, he noted, remained as defiant as it was unrepentant, not only pledging to continue to fight against the British, but also declaring that it was prepared to take on the Arabs as well as the Jewish Agency and the Haganah, if necessary.55
All these developments greatly perturbed Harold Beeley, Bevin’s principal adviser on Palestine in the Foreign Office, who saw dark, increasingly malevolent forces at play. “Zionism has become more and more nationalistic and has, by a strange irony, inherited much of the panoply of the original persecutors of the Jews, the Nazis,” he wrote in a memorandum to the foreign secretary. “The Jewish subversive organizations,” to Beeley’s mind, “have much in common with the Nazi S.S. and S.A.”56
But the Jews were not the only restive community in Palestine that the government had to worry about. It had hoped to mute the inevitable chorus of Arab complaint about the Jewish leaders’ release by simultaneously announcing that five Palestinian Arab leaders who had been exiled to the Seychelles during the Arab Rebellion would also be freed and allowed to return to Palestine. But even this concession could not overcome the profound sense of umbrage and injustice felt by a people still traumatized by the large number of their brethren killed and wounded when the Irgun had bombed the King David Hotel. The group’s attempted robbery of the Arab Bank’s Jaffa branch in September had prompted anew fears within the Arab community that it would not be long before the violence was directed against them as well. “The release of the Jewish leaders has, of course, been received with bitterness by the Arabs and the fact that their own exiles have been allowed to return does little to console them,” army intelligence reported. “They contrast the ten years’ detention endured by the Arabs with the four months of the Jews, and feel that it is another concession on the part of H.M.G. to Zionist pressure.”57
The perception among Palestinian Arabs was that the government could put a stop to Jewish terrorism if it wished but instead was so completely under the Zionists’ influence that it was unwilling or unable to do so. An alternative explanation that was then also gaining currency held that the government was deliberately encouraging the violence as an excuse to prolong British rule in Palestine. Whichever the case, British officials in Palestine were plainly alarmed by the hardening of Arab opinion against the government and concerned about a powerful Zionist lobby that now seemed to have London as well as Washington firmly under its omnipotent thumb.58
The Irgun’s all-out assault on Palestine’s railway system, which had commenced with the attack on the Jerusalem station and continued throughout November, appeared to vindicate the pessimistic assessments by British military intelligence and senior administration officials in response to the Inner Zionist Council’s antiterrorism declaration. Seven incidents in as many days were enough to prompt Dempsey to make an unscheduled visit to Palestine on November 7 to meet with Cassels, the Sixth Airborne commander. No s
ooner had he returned to Cairo, however, than the Palestine Railways authority announced that because of the security forces’ inability to guarantee the safety of nighttime travel, all passenger services from dusk to dawn had been indefinitely suspended. The weekend brought still more bad news when three police officers, acting on a tip about a hidden Irgun arms cache, were lured into an abandoned house in Jerusalem and killed by a remote-control-detonated bomb.59
Cunningham flew to London to consult with Creech Jones. Little, however, came of their discussions. The perennial default option of countrywide arms searches was once again raised, only to be dismissed for fear of creating a worse security problem that would necessitate the transfer of still more forces to Palestine to cope with the anticipated unrest. Accordingly, the only palliative that either the colonial secretary or the high commissioner could identify was the equally familiar desideratum of bringing the chronically undermanned police force up to strength as soon as possible.60
Meanwhile, as London dithered, the Irgun offensive continued, targeting rails and rail beds, engines and rolling stock, and stations and signal boxes. By the middle of November, it had also claimed the lives of thirteen soldiers and policemen and resulted in injuries to sixty others. In addition, at least £30,000 in damages had been caused—against terrorist losses of only one death and ten injuries. The single worst night of violence to date occurred on November 13, when widespread road and rail mining killed six policemen, injured ten others, and wounded a dozen troops. Then, two nights later, three more soldiers were injured, two seriously, when an Irgun mine exploded beneath an army trolley patrolling the railway line near Benyamina.61
This was the last straw for Dempsey. The following afternoon he sent an urgent, top secret cable to Montgomery. “The situation in Palestine is steadily getting worse,” he explained. “There are murders and acts of sabotage each day and not a terrorist is caught.” Security conditions had deteriorated to the point where “all trains have stopped running at night and there are no passenger trains at all between Lydda and Jerusalem.” Although the Yishuv was to blame for its noncooperation, it was the Palestine government’s “policy of appeasement” toward the community, Dempsey believed, that accounted for the escalating violence. He accused Creech Jones and Cunningham of conniving to release the remaining Jewish Agency detainees and barring the army from conducting arms searches without obtaining any kind of quid pro quo “that Terrorism would be fought.” According to the Middle East commander in chief, the government had two means at its disposal to ensure the Yishuv’s compliance: political pressure and coercive physical measures. Implicit in Dempsey’s analysis was that the political approach had utterly failed. Therefore physical coercion was the only option. The seventy-three casualties sustained by British security forces over the preceding six weeks, he argued, “surely gives us the right” to execute the long debated—and delayed—massive arms search operations. “We soldiers had the initiative in Palestine in July and August and things were satisfactory,” Dempsey concluded. “Then we stopped and handed over to the Civil Government. We are getting mighty near now to the time when the soldier takes over again.”62
Before Montgomery could respond, the situation in Palestine took yet another turn for the worse. On November 17 an Irgun mine derailed a freight train traveling between Lydda and Gaza. Then, a few hours later, a police vehicle struck another mine planted on the Sarona–Tel Aviv Road. Three policemen and an RAF sergeant were killed and four other police constables and two airmen wounded. Incensed by the mounting casualty toll inflicted on their comrades, a group of about fifteen British police descended on Tel Aviv’s Hayarkon Street. There, they vandalized three cafés—wrecking the premises and beating patrons. They also stole six cars, all of which were later found burned out or damaged. The following day brought another round of railway sabotage. An army sapper died while attempting to defuse an explosive device left on the tracks, and four others were injured. Once again, British police ran amok in Tel Aviv, attacking Jewish passersby and damaging Jewish-owned property. More than fifty cases of vandalism were reported along with thirty-two instances of assault, requiring the hospitalization of five Jewish citizens. Although Dempsey told Montgomery there was no indication that any troops were involved, The Palestine Post carried an eyewitness account the next day of soldiers cruising around Tel Aviv who had opened fire on a passing Jewish police patrol. None of the police were injured.63
Dempsey returned to Palestine on November 19—this time to confer with Barker. The breakdown of discipline that had produced the violent outbursts in Tel Aviv was clearly on his mind, as was the prospect of vigilantism spreading from the police to the army. He had come in search of answers, and the day of meetings and briefings had convinced him that the problem lay in the Palestine administration’s policy of restraining the army while appeasing the Jewish Agency in the vain hope that it would revive the moribund Saison campaign. Dempsey thought this was as wrong as it was forlorn. Like Montgomery, he made no distinction between the Haganah and the Irgun or Lehi. They were all illegal organizations that had to be stamped out. Later that day he again wrote to Montgomery. “Since my last signal we have lost in killed and wounded nine British soldiers and seven British police,” the commander in chief reported.
We have caught no terrorists.
The time has now come when we must take action. Mere defensive tactics such as increasing guards on railways are purely negative and can always be outwitted by our cunning adversary.
We must make the people of the country realise that their tacit acceptance of terrorism does not pay. I see no better way of doing this than finding and thoroughly searching for arms and explosives in the locality of each outrage directly [after] it occurs.64
Montgomery presented Dempsey’s views to the cabinet’s Defence Committee the next day. The progress attained against terrorism with Operations Agatha and Shark, he explained, had been reversed by the restrictions that the Palestine administration had since placed on army operations. Morale had suffered—not least because of the growing burden imposed on the military by the persistent shortage of British police. The British section was 50 percent below strength and required at least three thousand recruits to erase this shortfall. “The whole situation was rapidly deteriorating,” the CIGS continued, “and it would be impossible for the Army to play an effective part unless authority could be given to use the Army fully as an aid to the civil power for the purposes of maintaining law and order in Palestine. The only means of stamping out this type of warfare,” he claimed, “was to allow the Army to take the offensive against it.” Although Creech Jones agreed with Montgomery’s bleak assessment, he could not accept that either he or Cunningham was responsible as neither had ever interfered or otherwise inhibited any military operation. To the contrary, the colonial secretary understood that the “recent cessation of searches for arms had been agreed by the High Commissioner and the G.O.C. as being unlikely to produce any further material results.” Attlee then intervened. Had not Montgomery only recently assured the cabinet that Operation Agatha had “seriously crippled” the illegal Jewish organizations? Yet the CIGS’s depiction of the current situation now belied that claim. Accordingly, the prime minister directed both Creech Jones and Montgomery to provide him with a detailed explanation in the form of a report concerning the use of the armed forces in Palestine to be prepared by the Colonial Office in consultation with the military. Both the colonial secretary and the CIGS hastened to contact their respective subordinates in Jerusalem and Cairo to obtain this information.65
Montgomery received Dempsey’s reply less than twenty-four hours later. The news from Palestine, meanwhile, was again bad. The previous day the Irgun had blown up the Income Tax Office in Jerusalem. A Jewish police officer had been killed and a British army officer and a police sergeant seriously injured. The army was now suffering casualties at a rate of two per day. In addition, all rail traffic in the country had come to a halt because of renewed terrorist attacks.
The Irgun’s offensive had resulted in an estimated £325,000 in damages to the railway and daily revenue losses of some £3,000. Half of the citrus crop earmarked for export now had to be trucked to ports at an additional cost of £10,000. If this continued, the agriculture industry faced paying up to £100,000 more in transit fees than usual. Oil transport by rail had been reduced by a third and potash by 75 percent. As a consequence, twelve battalions of troops—over eight thousand men—had been permanently diverted to static railway guard duties. Henceforth, the railway authority announced, every train would be preceded by soldiers traveling in armored trolley cars. Sentry posts were also being established at one-kilometer intervals along the entire line. And the PPF command had decided that it was no longer safe for unarmored police vehicles to operate at night and had therefore removed them from patrol duties during hours of darkness—with the army expected to compensate for this additional diminution of police operations as well.66
These developments perhaps explain why Dempsey now emphasized to Montgomery the inherent challenges of fighting an enigmatic enemy who wore no uniform nor displayed any distinctive badge or identifying insignia. “They are of the people, and the people will give us no clue as to who they are,” he lamented. Unless caught in flagrante, the terrorists simply vanished into the surrounding community, blending in with, and indistinguishable from, ordinary folk. The only solution, the Middle East commander in chief believed, was to come down hard on the Yishuv. “We must therefore comb the homes of the people in the hope that we may find the terrorists or at any rate their weapons and explosives,” Dempsey argued. “And by doing so we must try to bring home to the people their responsibility for these murders and outrages.” But the Palestine administration, he explained, prohibited such operations. No action could be undertaken without the high commissioner’s express authorization, and even then the army had to be “one hundred percent sure” that there was a direct connection between the locality where the attack occurred and the surrounding populace. Moreover, Cunningham routinely vetoed any operation that could in any way be interpreted as retaliatory or punitive. Accordingly, unlike with the Arab Rebellion, the army was barred from imposing monetary fines on communities deemed responsible for facilitating terrorist attacks. “It is a matter of deciding how much longer we wait for Jewish Agency to take action against terrorism,” Dempsey grumbled. “Meanwhile our casualties continue to mount.”67
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