Anonymous Soldiers
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No sooner had the announcement to lift martial law been issued than Cunningham became aware of pressure in London to extend it throughout the entire country. He immediately wrote to Creech Jones both to defend his decision and to preempt the arguments favoring its expanded reimposition. “Beneath the suggestion presumably lies the implication, which seems to die hard, that the administration or myself in some way hamper the military in their operations against terrorists, and that if martial law were imposed [throughout the country] the Army would be more successful in its campaign against them.” Apart from the practical impediments, whereby the Arab community would be impacted as much as the Jews, there were simply too few troops in Palestine to guard the railway network, let alone enforce martial law over the entire country. Moreover, because only one-fifth of the Yishuv lived in the countryside, extending martial law beyond Palestine’s urban centers made no sense. For all these reasons, Cunningham continued, “the Army themselves tell me that the imposition of martial law throughout the country is the last thing they want.” As for his decision to suspend martial law, Cunningham emphasized that the recommendation to do so had come from Barker’s replacement as GOC, Lieutenant General Gordon Holmes Alexander MacMillan, in consultation with his senior commanders, and had Dempsey’s blessing, and not from pressure emanating from either himself or the Palestine administration.27
The cabinet reviewed the situation at its meeting on March 20. There was broad agreement that martial law had produced mixed results, and the consensus was that this was because Cunningham had lifted it too soon. The cabinet further concluded that martial law’s hasty removal had imparted an “impression of weakness and must have encouraged the Jewish community and the terrorists to think that they had successfully resisted it.” Discussion then focused on the possibility of imposing martial law over the entirety of Palestine—but without some of the more severe restrictions that had proven difficult for the army to enforce during its most recent iteration. In a remarkable admission, the minutes go on to record that “the Cabinet considered that a more definite plan should have been made for handling the situation in Palestine during the next few months” to maintain order in the country until the UN session in September. Accordingly, the Chiefs of Staff were belatedly instructed to prepare such an assessment, and both Cunningham and MacMillan were recalled to London for consultation.28
The idea of applying martial law throughout Palestine appears to have originated some weeks earlier with the Conservative politician Viscount Cranborne. Addressing the House of Lords on March 3, he had wondered how its selective geographic application to a handful of urban locales would prevent terrorist attacks elsewhere—which is exactly what happened. With precious few security options left that had not already been tried, the cabinet understandably fastened on some new variant of martial law as one of the few remaining viable measures with which to restore order in Palestine. It was doubtless encouraged by the enthusiastic assessments offered by the defense minister, Albert Victor Alexander, and Vice Chief of the Imperial General Staff General Sir Frank “Simbo” Simpson (substituting for Montgomery), who had both extolled martial law’s virtues at the March 20 meeting. They maintained that the greater “freedom of action” granted to the army not only had produced an unprecedented number of terrorist arrests but had “shocked” the Yishuv into providing the information that made this possible. Although both assertions were baseless, neither was challenged by wearied government ministers desperate to find a solution to Palestine’s deteriorating security.29
Arab opinion both in Palestine and across the region must also have played a part in the cabinet’s continued faith in martial law despite evidence to the contrary. Reporting the reaction in the Middle East to news of martial law’s suspension, Sir Ronald Campbell, Britain’s ambassador to Egypt, warned of “wide spread feeling that the British Empire is going downhill.” Accordingly, he advised that Britain “should as far as possible abstain from concessions [to the Yishuv] which might tend to confirm … that we are unable to offer unswerving resistance to violence.”30
But if there was a novel military answer to Palestine’s continued slide into lawlessness, the War Office didn’t have it. Tasked by the chiefs to prepare an assessment of security options, including countrywide martial law, all that the Joint Planning Staff could come up with was a recommendation to maintain the status quo:
(a) The continuance of civil government, including the wide exercise of the powers already held by the High Commissioner.
(b) The application of intensified continuous military pressure against terrorists throughout the country.
(c) The re-imposition for limited period, when and where necessary, of statutory martial law in appropriate areas.
The only new idea they proffered involved the establishment of special summary military tribunals to deal more speedily and efficiently with terrorist offenses than the current system of courts-martial. Under the proposed scheme, individuals convicted of capital crimes under the Emergency Regulations would face far more limited rights of appeal, thus ensuring the swift execution of sentences. The chiefs endorsed the report virtually without amendment and sent it to the cabinet on March 26.31
The cabinet accepted the Chiefs of Staff recommendations without demurral, including the creation of summary courts empowered to impose the death penalty. The issue of imposing martial law throughout Palestine was momentarily laid to rest. The meeting, however, was more interesting for what was left unsaid. The Chiefs of Staff’s verbatim incorporation of the Joint Planning Staff’s report had contained a remarkably revealing assessment of the success of Begin’s strategy. “The Irgun and Stern are still violently anti-British and will always be so,” both reports explained. “They wish to force us to employ sterner measures which can be represented as punitive against [the] community, thereby swinging moderate opinion against us and obtaining more recruits for themselves.” The chiefs’ conclusion that British military strategy in Palestine was playing right into the terrorists’ hands was by itself an astonishing admission. That it prompted no further reaction from either the chiefs or the cabinet and that neither apparently did anything about it border on the incomprehensible.32
The failure of martial law weighed especially heavily on those charged with either administering Palestine or maintaining order there. Having been unanimously heralded as the ultimate trump card with which to wrest the Yishuv’s active assistance against terrorism, it had now been played to a nugatory result. For civil servant and soldier alike, the game no longer seemed worth the candle. Rex Keating, the assistant director of the Palestine Broadcasting Service, and his colleagues somewhat contemptuously referred to their enforced domicile, which was surrounded by coils upon coils of barbed wire and guarded night and day, as the “British Concentration Camp.” “Never before, surely, has a group of Englishmen been placed in such a degrading position,” Keating complained. Even Cunningham was completely disheartened. Other than lifting the restrictions on Jewish immigration, he had warned Creech Jones on March 13, “there is little prospect of stopping terrorism by any military or other action short of war with the Jews.”33
Renewed fears for one’s safety now compounded these officials’ accreting despondency. The week after martial law ended, the Haifa chapter of the Palestine Civil Servants’ Association petitioned the chief secretary to provide armed police escorts when curfews were in effect and at other times of acute “disturbances or unrest.” The request was denied on the grounds that no police could be spared from more essential duties. Even in Jerusalem, the country’s administrative capital, there were apparently insufficient armored vehicles and security personnel to accommodate the transportation needs of senior officials. Many, accordingly, resorted to a 1940s variant of telecommuting, managing their offices around the country by telephone rather than in person. “Under such conditions life assumes an unreality that is better imagined than experienced,” Keating observed. It is no wonder that the administration was finding it incr
easingly difficult to fill vacancies and recruit new officers. “Apart from the considerations of continual loss of life and property caused by terrorist activities,” Cunningham advised Creech Jones, “it is a matter of constant concern to me as to how long it will be possible to keep the civil administration in being under conditions which security demands have imposed on the civilian element in this country.”34
Although troop morale and discipline in Palestine were widely reported to have remained high throughout March, when Abba Eban, now the Jewish Agency’s political information officer based in London, addressed the Imperial Defence College that same month, he found that senior officers were seriously concerned about how long it could be maintained. An anonymous brigadier expressed the prevailing view when he asked, “What vision could be set before [the troops] as a worthy object of their sacrifice and hardship?” That the façade of British imperturbability was already crumbling may be inferred by the increase in the number of unprovoked assaults by soldiers on Jewish passersby.35
The Irgun of course sought to exploit these frustrations in order to further erode troop morale and sow doubt and dissension within the ranks. Although its propagandists had been crafting specific messages to British soldiers and police since 1939, their efforts appear to have intensified immediately following martial law. One poster that appeared on walls and lampposts was addressed from “The Soldiers of the Underground to the Soldiers of the Occupation Army.” It asked Britons to imagine how they would react if their homeland had been invaded and inquired whether it was “worth dying for … Bevin’s stupidity? Oil? Their Lordship’s income?” Another was titled “It’s Worth Thinking About” and explained how doing one’s duty and obediently following orders were “the best way for you to stay in this country forever … Risk your life every day so that the Government may have ten more years to make up its mind: to clear out of Palestine.”36
Creech Jones could argue in Parliament that martial law was never intended “in and of itself to put an end to terrorism,” but it was a claim that fell mostly on deaf ears. Admittedly, the pace of terrorist attacks had slackened noticeably in the weeks that followed, but whatever optimism this might have encouraged was shattered in the early morning hours of March 31 when Lehi bombed the Shell Oil refinery in Haifa. A series of explosions destroyed a third of the site’s seventeen storage tanks, causing the loss of sixteen thousand tons of oil and £400,000 in damages. The entire city briefly lost power as a result of the attack, and the following day visibility was almost completely obscured by smoke and flames that at times shot a hundred feet in the air. Fuel distribution and sales throughout the country were also affected.37
With security expenditure now nearly double the 1945 figure of £4.5 million and thus consuming a third of the Palestine government’s budget—for a projected net deficit of some half a million pounds sterling that fiscal year—the administration announced the following day that the costs of the attack would again have to be borne by the Palestinian taxpayer. Precisely how these funds would be raised, however, was left unsaid—mainly because London had apparently not yet been consulted. In the weeks that followed, Cunningham scrambled to construct an equitable taxation scheme that, in the words of one Treasury official, would “soak the Jews” but somehow blunt the impact on the country’s Arab population. The idea that eventually emerged involved a very modest surcharge of a few pennies added to commercial sales of benzene and heating fuel. A sum equivalent to the estimated expenditure by Arabs on both items was, however, to be earmarked for the development and improvement of particularly impoverished Arab communities that would otherwise receive no such financial assistance. Cunningham also resurrected a proposal dating from the King David Hotel bombing’s aftermath the previous July to sequester the sum of some £5 million from the assets of the Jewish Agency and various other Zionist philanthropic entities. With this money, he proposed to create a fund that would both pay compensation to business in Palestine for losses caused by terrorism and cover the costs of transshipping and accommodating the 14,500 illegal immigrants then being kept in the detention camps on Cyprus. Although the cabinet subsequently rejected the sequestration proposal, the fuel surcharge was enacted and took effect on July 1, 1947. It underscored the dire financial straits that the Palestine administration was facing given the rising security expenditure and mounting revenue losses caused by Jewish terrorism.38
Perhaps more significant was the growing unease felt by some Colonial Office officials over the harsh policy choices being forced upon the government as a result of the escalating violence. “For my part, I dislike this proposal intensely,” Trafford Smith, a young assistant secretary, had commented about the sequestration proposal on April 25 before going on to explain,
Under the present defence regulation regime under which any person may be imprisoned without trial more or less indefinitely on suspicion only, the liberty of the subject has been almost completely withdrawn in Palestine. It is now proposed to complete this odious process by taking power to seize the assets of any individual or organization—again on suspicion only—in a purely arbitrary manner. All this is quite wrong in principle, and is a measure of the extent to which we have sunk in Palestine in adopting the pernicious doctrine that the end justifies the means, the justification being, of course, that since the terrorists have adopted these methods, the only way the Government can counter them is in kind.39
This was not the first time that Smith had raised ethical questions about British counterterrorism policy in Palestine. Four months earlier his had been the lone voice of protest about the casual dispensation of habeas corpus and secretive removal of Jewish terrorists to indefinite detention in Eritrea. The response at that time had been a sharp rebuke from his superior, Assistant Undersecretary Sir John Martin, but by the spring of 1947 such misgivings were no longer confined to idealistic junior officers. “Quite frankly, I share Mr. Trafford Smith’s dislike of the High Commissioner’s proposal” to sequester Jewish funds, Sir Thomas Lloyd, the permanent undersecretary, wrote in a minute intended for Creech Jones’s attention.40
Yet three years of nearly unremitting violence had left both London and Jerusalem bereft of any new ideas or novel thoughts on how best to restore order to Palestine. Martial law’s meager results and pitiable impact on the terrorists nonetheless demanded that something be done to reassert British authority and check the country’s continued slide into lawlessness, especially in the run-up to the UN session in September. Almost by default, attention returned to what appeared to be one of the only viable options left: the hangman’s noose.41
A curious feature of the final decade of British rule over Palestine was, as we have seen, the infrequency with which Jews convicted of terrorist offenses were actually put to death. Although the three-man military tribunals that sat in judgment of violations arising from the amended Emergency Regulations were remarkably efficient in securing convictions—only 2 of the 127 Jewish terrorists tried between January 1, 1946, and March 8, 1947, were acquitted—to date none of the 25 defendants convicted of a capital crime had been executed. And of this group, the sentences of all but 4 had been commuted to life imprisonment. By comparison, 108 Arabs convicted of the same terrorist crimes were duly hanged between 1938 and 1939—without any of the delay or demurral that seemed to attend the Jewish cases. Although the British historian David French suggests that this was because of a tacit policy whereby the government actively discouraged awarding the death penalty to Jewish terrorists in hopes of avoiding “international embarrassments”—and perhaps further inflaming anti-British sentiment in the United States—such considerations were now swept aside by the more pressing exigency of curbing the escalating terrorist violence.42
Shortly after the withdrawal of martial law, an Army Council Secretariat memorandum declared, “Death sentences should be carried out irrespective of the possible repercussions from the Jews. Failure to do so would only encourage more terrorism, adversely affect troop morale, and further alienate th
e Arabs.” Montgomery had in effect been making the same arguments since at least the previous November. The cabinet’s decision on March 27 to accord military tribunals the authority to impose capital punishment and thereby reduce the opportunities for delay and postponement of execution thus sought to achieve through juridical fiat what the army and the Palestine administration had manifestly failed to accomplish with martial law.43
In April 1947, four Irgun fighters awaited execution. They were Dov Gruner, whose sentence Barker had confirmed in January, Yehiel Drezner (a.k.a. Dov Rosenbaum), Eliezer Kashani, and Mordechai Alkachi (a.k.a. Alkoshi). The last three were arrested on the night of December 29, 1946, after they tried to shoot their way past a military roadblock. Found in possession of two rawhide whips on the same evening that other Irgun units had kidnapped and flogged British soldiers, they had been condemned to death by a military court in Jerusalem on February 10. Two days later, in one of his final acts as GOC, Barker had confirmed their sentences. However, they remained on death row in Jerusalem’s central prison, forlornly awaiting what was hoped would be the Privy Council’s precedent-setting commutation of Gruner’s sentence.44