Anonymous Soldiers

by Bruce Hoffman

  These developments, along with reports that the Haganah had wrecked another Irgun plot—this time to blow up a section of railway track between Haifa and Acre—and had also taken to beating up teenage members of the Irgun in Tel Aviv and Haifa in hopes of intimidating them to leave the organization, accorded perfectly with the recurrent fantasies of senior British military commanders that a decisive corner had been turned in the three months since martial law. When Montgomery dined with Gale during his brief visit in late June, for instance, the CIGS was treated to an ebullient disquisition about the vast improvement of security conditions in Palestine. Kidnapping, the First Infantry Division commander confidently asserted, was now “out of favour.” The Yishuv, moreover, was “fed up with terrorism and … heartily in favor of the restoration of law and order.” Informants, accordingly, were coming forward to a greater extent than at any time in recent memory. And the estimated £2 million in economic losses that the Jews had suffered as a result of martial law, Gale opined, meant that the threat of its reimposition “was undoubtedly a very fine weapon for putting the heat” on them again should the need arise. His optimism had clearly infected the otherwise dour Montgomery, who gushed in a letter to Frederick John Bellenger, the war secretary, “There seems to be no doubt that the hanging of Dov Gruner had a very salutary effect all round; equally, it is generally accepted now that a big mistake was made in reprieving those Jews whose death sentences had been confirmed.”78

  Such rosy assessments, however, were completely divorced from reality—as Montgomery would likely have been among the first to concede. The CIGS’s running diary for February–June 1947, for example, directly contradicts his comments to Bellenger. Summing up events in Palestine during that same time period, Montgomery observed that although it “might have been expected that the referring of the [Palestine] case to the United Nations Organisation would have brought about at least a temporary lull in terrorist activities … this has not been the case. Hardly a day goes by without some further incident causing loss of life and injury to British soldiers and civilians, Jews and Arabs alike.” Similarly, in his overview of the final year of British rule, MacMillan commented how both the Irgun and Lehi had actually “intensified their attacks on British persons and British interests” throughout that spring.79

  By July, in fact, the Little Saison was losing momentum. Undaunted by Irgun threats of retaliation, the Haganah had initially persevered, thwarting a Lehi attempt to assassinate MacMillan on June 30, an attack on the Jerusalem–Tel Aviv road a few days later, and a planned Irgun assault on a British military base at Rehovot. But these were the new counterterrorist campaign’s final accomplishments. Thereafter it degenerated into a disorganized series of kidnappings and beatings of one another’s members that apparently never enjoyed any significant popular support.80

  Hence, a more accurate portrayal of the Yishuv’s continued hostility to the government may be found in the text of a radio address made by the Eighth Infantry Brigade commander to Jerusalem’s Jewish populace pleading for better relations. The commander had specifically asked the community to keep in mind that many of his soldiers were now young conscripts completing their national service who “have no concern with politics” and are simply doing their duty. A letter sent by the intelligence staff officer at army headquarters in Jerusalem to a Jewish Agency official in late June, concerning a traffic accident that involved an army vehicle, depicts even more starkly the mutual antipathy that was now commonplace. A soldier had been killed in the collision and horribly burned and mutilated. Jewish passersby had acted gleefully, the officer recounted, evidently “pleased such a thing had happened to a British soldier.” Some had also laughed when the “odd pieces of the soldier’s body” were being extricated from the wreck. “I don’t much like sending you the enclosed report,” he apologized, “because I know that there are plenty of Jews in Palestine who do not regard the Army as the successors to the Nazis, but it does explain the occasional anti-semitic attitude of some of our troops.”81

  Coincidentally, only a few days later Barker had written a letter to Antonius in which he had expressed bewilderment over precisely what Britain had done to bring “all this anti-British feeling upon us.” Surely, the existence of secret prisons in Africa where people were detained indefinitely without trial, simply on suspicion of terrorism, and even more so the fact that a sixteen-year-old boy had been abducted, cruelly tortured, and brutally executed, with evidence of the deed willfully destroyed by those same police officers and subsequent investigations into his disappearance deliberately stymied, accounted if only in part for the rise of “anti-British feeling” that senior officers like Barker, the Jerusalem brigade commander, and the intelligence staff officer seemed so utterly incapable of understanding. Barker’s remark to Antonius some months later—“I am very pleased that Farran got off, though I never thought it could be otherwise”—perhaps best epitomized the hauteur and insensitivity that the Yishuv believed had come to dominate Anglo-Zionist relations following World War II.82

  For the moment, however, the Palestine administration had more pressing problems to contend with. News of the Rubowitz abduction, Farran’s involvement in it, and his unexplained sojourn to Syria, as we have seen, were all over the papers in June 1947. “There could scarcely be a worse time to disclose this murder (as it appears to be),” Cunningham had complained to Creech Jones, “but I am afraid it must come to light very shortly”—and it would just as the UN special committee’s visit to Palestine was about to begin.83

  CHAPTER 19

  Drunk with the Hangman’s Blood

  Any illusion that Britain was still in control of Palestine was shattered as soon as UNSCOP arrived in Jerusalem. The “armed camp” that Bartley Crum had observed fifteen months earlier, when he had visited the city with the Anglo-American Committee, was now even more pervasive and forbidding than it had been in March 1946. “As we came nearer the center of town,” the Guatemalan member of the delegation, Jorge García-Granados, recalled, “we had our first glimpse of armored cars and barbed wire. The barbed wire, in tremendous confusion of huge coils higher than a man, was thrown about entire blocks of buildings.” Ralph Bunche, the UN secretary-general’s representative to the committee, was similarly unnerved by the intense security. The “British are everywhere and they all carry guns,” he reported to New York. “As you go [through] the streets you’re constantly stopped by sentries and control centers and required to show your pass. Buildings are surrounded by barbed wire, [and] pillboxes and roadblocks are abundant.”1

  UNSCOP was the twenty-second such committee or commission convened to study the Palestine problem since Britain was awarded the mandate a quarter of a century earlier. The UN General Assembly had charged UNSCOP with preparing a report and making recommendations in advance of the September session, when the assembly would decide Palestine’s future. It was the first truly international group impaneled to look into the Palestine problem, with its members hailing from Australia, Canada, Czechoslovakia, Guatemala, India, Iran, the Netherlands, Peru, Sweden, Uruguay, and Yugoslavia. Judge Emil Sandström, the Swedish representative, was chosen chairman.2

  Its first formal day of hearings had begun inauspiciously on the afternoon of June 16. Only a few hours before, a military court in Jerusalem had sentenced the three Irgun terrorists responsible for the Acre prison raid to hang. The prospect of another round of executions, coupled with the Irgun’s inevitable response, thus fed an already combustible atmosphere. In addition, the Higher Arab Committee had declared a fifteen-hour strike to protest the committee’s arrival. And even before the committee members had taken their seats in the ornate auditorium of the YMCA building, just opposite the King David Hotel, a dispute had broken out between UNSCOP and the Palestine administration. Citing security concerns, the administration had insisted that its officials would only testify in camera. This sudden imposition of secrecy threatened the committee’s commitment to holding an open, public inquiry. It also provoked t
he ire and suspicion of some committee members. A compromise was reached whereby UNSCOP reaffirmed its intention to hold as many open sessions as possible but agreed to respect the wishes of, and in this instance grant an exception to, the Palestine administration. With the impasse resolved, the hearings commenced. The first witness was Gurney.3

  García-Granados found the chief secretary evasive and uncommunicative—despite having been granted permission to testify in secret. His Indian counterpart, Sir Abdur Rahman, quickly became exasperated and resorted to interrogating Gurney as if he were a hostile witness rather than a servant of the crown freely and frankly providing evidence in a closed setting to a distinguished international body. The Guatemalan diplomat was able to elicit from the chief secretary the admission that the Palestine government was spending nearly $30 million a year on the police alone. Upon learning this, García-Granados thought to himself, “Could anyone deny that this was a police state?”4

  Proudly embracing the mantle of “the Latin American revolutionary tradition,” García-Granados quickly revealed himself to be the committee’s sternest critic of Britain’s Palestine policy. It was he who took the greatest umbrage at the timing of the military court’s verdict, regarding it as a deliberate insult both to the committee and to the fledgling UN. García-Granados also actively championed the case of the families of the three Irgun men after they beseeched the committee to intervene with the Palestine government on their condemned relations’ behalf. “Some of you say these men are criminals,” he had lobbied his fellow delegates. “I don’t know. Only history can pass judgment on the Palestine underground. History alone will state the last word on the French, the Dutch, the Polish, the German, the Yugoslav, and the British underground. These men fought Hitler in defense of their country and their principles. We applauded them because we thought they were right. These men are fighting now for similar beliefs. How, then, can you condemn what they are doing?”5

  García-Granados was instrumental in UNSCOP’s issuing an appeal to spare the lives of the three Irgun fighters, which was delivered to the British government via Trygve Lie, the UN secretary-general. The Palestine administration’s reaction, he recalled, was “swift and sharp,” consisting of a stern rebuke conveyed by Gurney. Not only had UNSCOP overstepped its remit, the chief secretary scolded the committee, but its appeal was irrelevant because the cases of Habib, Nakar, and Weiss were still sub judice given that the GOC had not yet confirmed the sentences. The government’s message, García-Granados writes, was clear: no interference in this matter would be tolerated.6

  The impression Gurney helped perpetuate of an omniscient, seigneurial administration presiding over a country desperate for its freedom profoundly colored García-Granados’s thinking about the mandate. Reflecting on the nature of British rule, following dinner with Cunningham on the committee’s final evening in Palestine, the Guatemalan had emphasized to the high commissioner that he was not anti-British. Indeed, García-Granados profoundly admired Britain for its culture and courage and steadfastness when it had stood alone during World War II. He was also an enthusiastic supporter of the Labour government’s ambitious postwar social welfare program. But García-Granados had now come to realize that the British “really have no conception of their own rigidity and cruelty in the Palestine matter … One might say that the British are really cursed by their possession of the world’s largest empire; in their desire to keep it intact they apply methods which their ethical principles certainly would prohibit them from using in private dealings.”7

  This was in essence the message that Begin also sought to impart to UNSCOP at the two meetings he had with some of its members. The first took place in late June and was facilitated by the Associated Press correspondent in Palestine. It was held in secret at the Tel Aviv home of the Hebrew poet Ya’acov Cohen, whose wife was an Irgun operative. The Irgun leader described his group’s core aims as “the liberation of the country from the foreign yoke, the attainment of freedom for the Jewish people and the restoration of Jewish rule in Eretz Israel.” Precisely what this entailed, he explained, could be summarized as follows:

  1. The Irgun considers that Eretz Israel (Land of Israel) is the homeland of the Jewish people.

  2. Eretz Israel means both East and West of the Jordan, including Trans-Jordan …

  3. Immediate repatriation of all Jews wishing to be repatriated to Palestine … The right of option should be given to all Jews who wish to return to Palestine. Their return is prevented only by British illegal rule and by British armed force, which should be removed …

  4. We reject any statement made by the Labour Party as to the transfer of any Arabs from the country. There is enough room in Palestine for all, both Jews and Arabs.

  5. Since Britain has decided to keep the country under her own control by force of arms there is no other way to accomplish our aims than to meet force with force.8

  Sandström naturally pressed Begin especially hard about his claims regarding Jewish coexistence with the Arabs, to which the Irgun leader fatuously replied that there was no such “phenomenon as independent Arab opposition to Jewish repatriation.” It was all a plot manufactured by Britain to divide Palestine’s inhabitants and thereby perpetuate its rule, he explained, a theme that the group had consistently peddled—predictably, without any success—since the resumption of its revolt in 1944. Lehi coincidentally had recently stepped up its own appeals to the Arabs using these same arguments, and this might have figured in Begin’s own propagation of these fantastical claims. “To our brothers the Arabs,” a Lehi pamphlet found in Nazareth the previous month had proclaimed, “we are fighting for your liberation and for your and our independence.” It also invited the Arabs to join the Jewish fight against British rule as part of a united, anticolonial war of national liberation.9

  The second meeting was also held in secret. It took place toward the end of July, just before the committee left Palestine, in the house of the fictional potato merchant from the Citrus House operation. Both García-Granados’s and Begin’s accounts describe the session as a meeting of kindred spirits. Accordingly, their discussions were less forced and more informal than the June meeting had been. “We too believe that the Mandate should come to an end,” the Guatemalan diplomat had assured Begin. “I don’t know if all our colleagues will support that thesis but I think we can obtain a clear majority on it.” The Irgun leader and Enrico Fabregat, the Uruguayan delegate who had accompanied García-Granados, warmly embraced as they parted. “We are brothers in arms,” Begin stammered, his voice choked with emotion. “All the world’s fighters for freedom are one family.”10

  UNSCOP spent a total of five weeks in Palestine, before visiting Lebanon, Syria, and Trans-Jordan as well as touring displaced-persons camps in Germany and Austria. It held thirteen public hearings in which thirty-seven persons representing six Arab states and seventeen Jewish organizations testified in addition to four private hearings and thirty-nine private meetings. The Jewish Agency and the Haganah both provided evidence, and the Irgun and Lehi each submitted formal memorandums. The absence of any substantive input from Palestine’s Arabs was palpable, as they had refused to meet with or testify before the committee. “The leaders of the Jewish Agency presented their case skilfully and indefatigably,” William Roger Louis writes, “while the case of the Arabs went mainly by default.”11

  Meanwhile, the summer of 1947 brought Britain no respite from its economic travails. Abrupt global price increases for food and raw materials had drained the country’s dollar reserves and deepened its balance-of-payments deficit. On June 30, Hugh Dalton announced in the House of Commons a series of austerity measures that one Tory backbencher described as “the most depressing piece of news given to the British public for several years.” Substantial reductions in the import of tobacco, gasoline, and newsprint would be necessary to close the gap with Britain’s exports. These steps were essential if Britain was to be able to pay for the food it required from overseas markets and thereby avo
id further rationing—a possibility that the Chancellor of the Exchequer told the House he could not rule out.12

  Dalton also cited the imperative of further cuts in defense spending. Accelerating the pace of demobilization figured prominently in these efforts both as a cost-saving measure and as a way to provide the manpower that British industry desperately required. That there were still men in uniform who had been conscripted prior to January 1, 1944, underscores the urgency attached to achieving this particular reduction. The large garrison required in Palestine to maintain security in the face of escalating terrorist attacks had emerged as a liability that Britain could no longer afford. Only a few weeks earlier, Gurney had complained to David Horowitz, the director of the Jewish Agency’s economic department, “Our sterling balances are being reduced by [Zionist] terror. That is the core of the whole matter that we have a tremendous expenditure owing to terror.”13