Anonymous Soldiers

by Bruce Hoffman

  Although the dramatic spike in Jewish terrorist incidents throughout July slowed in August, a series of terrorist attacks that month had claimed the lives of an additional twenty-three persons and caused injuries to forty-one others. Moreover, in a harbinger of greater trouble to come, for the first time in nearly a decade some of the operations had been specifically directed against Arab as well as government targets—with Arab civilians accounting for the majority of deaths and nearly a third of casualties.3

  That Jewish terrorism played a salient role in helping to create and foster the sense of hopelessness and despair that Creech Jones refers to—and hence influenced the Labour government’s decision to leave Palestine—is clear. History, however, is rarely mono-causal, and an overwhelming concatenation of other developments—including Britain’s postwar economic travails, the granting of independence to India, the deterioration of relations with the United States over Palestine, the intense pressure of Jewish illegal immigration, the force of international and domestic opinion, the plight of the Holocaust’s survivors and Jewish displaced persons languishing in Europe, and the UNSCOP report recommending the mandate’s termination—all converged to push the Labour government toward this momentous climacteric.

  The role of Jewish terrorism in this process is perhaps best understood in the context of British policy and decision making for Palestine throughout its three-decade-long rule. Britain never really had a firm or consistent policy for Palestine. This, in turn, rendered successive British governments susceptible to terrorist pressure. The impression shared by Arab and Jew alike was that London could be influenced, intimidated, or otherwise persuaded by violence. Shaw specifically cited this lacuna, and the pernicious perception it encouraged, to the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry in March 1946 as the source of Britain’s problems in Palestine. And Gurney, who succeeded Shaw as chief secretary, made exactly the same point to Montgomery two years later.4

  In these circumstances, terrorism thrived. The prevailing belief in Palestine, Cunningham complained to Meyerson, was “that England always gives in to force.” There was abundant evidence to support that claim. The Arab rioting that swept through Palestine in 1921, for instance, produced the restrictions on Jewish immigration and redefinition of British policy based on the new criterion of Palestine’s “economic absorptive capacity.” The 1929 riots in turn resulted in the clawing back of Britain’s commitment to Zionism contained in the 1930 Passfield White Paper, which imposed additional restrictions on Jewish immigration, though these were subsequently overturned by the MacDonald “Black Letter.” Finally, the massive countrywide uprising that erupted six years later with the Arab Rebellion prompted the most drastic reformulation of Britain’s policy for Palestine to date. The 1939 white paper severely curtailed Jewish immigration and, after a five-year transitional period, made it completely dependent upon Arab consent. Similarly draconian limits had also been applied to Jewish land purchase in Palestine the following year.5

  The Jewish terrorists who had initially created the Irgun to counter Arab violence drew their own conclusions from the Arab Rebellion and the reversal of British policy that followed. “Arabs use terror as a means in their political fight—and they are winning,” the Irgun explained in launching its own revolt against British rule in May 1939. But the Irgun’s inchoate uprising was short-lived. Less than three months later, Britain was at war with Germany. Confronted by the prospect of the greater menace of a victorious Nazi Germany, the Irgun declared a truce and announced the suspension of all anti-British operations for the war’s duration. Like the rest of the Jewish community in Palestine, who had pledged to support the British war effort, the Irgun hoped that this loyalty would be rewarded by Britain after the war with the realization of the Zionists’ dream of statehood.6

  The hated white paper, though, remained in force. Accordingly, in 1944, as the terrible fate that had befallen European Jewry became known and the tide of battle turned decisively in Britain and the Allies’ favor, the Irgun—under its new commander, Menachem Begin—decided to resume the struggle against British rule. Three preeminent considerations were behind that historic decision. First and foremost were the continued restrictions on Jewish immigration to Palestine. Reversing or removing this policy had now acquired greater urgency given the news from Nazi-occupied Europe and the impending expiration of the white paper’s five-year immigration quota. Second was the consensus that had emerged within the Irgun that the reasoning behind the self-imposed truce it had declared nearly five years before—of potentially helping Germany by harming Britain—was no longer relevant. And, third, by renewing the revolt, the Irgun hoped to position itself at the vanguard of the active realization of the Jews’ political and nationalist aspirations.

  Begin’s strategy, accordingly, was not to defeat Britain militarily but to use terrorist violence to undermine the government’s prestige and control of Palestine by striking at symbols of British rule. “The very existence of an underground … must in the end undermine the prestige of a colonial regime that lives by the legend of its omnipotence,” he later explained. “Every attack which it fails to prevent is a blow at its standing. Even if the attack does not succeed, it makes a dent in that prestige, and that dent widens into a crack which is extended with every succeeding attack.” Hence, in contrast to previous colonial rebellions that either had sought decisive military victories in actual battle or had relied on a prolonged strategy of attrition, the Irgun adopted a strategy that involved the relentless targeting of those institutions of government that unmistakably represented Britain’s oppressive rule of Palestine. This was why, when the group resumed its revolt in February 1944, Begin selected the Immigration Department’s offices in Palestine’s three major cities for attack. Subsequent Irgun operations targeted the government Land Registry Office, from which the white paper’s provisions restricting Jewish land purchase were administered; the Department of Taxation and Finance, which collected the revenue used to fund the government’s repressive policies; and, of course, the policemen and soldiers responsible for the white paper’s enforcement.7

  There was a dissident faction within the Irgun, however, that had never stopped fighting Britain. In 1940, Abraham Stern and a handful of followers left to found their own terrorist group, which eventually evolved into Lehi. It chose a different means from the Irgun to end British rule over Palestine. Steeped in the Russian revolutionary ethos of “propaganda by the deed,” Lehi—in Yezernitzky’s evocative words—aspired to “change the course of history” by assassinating senior British government officials. But lacking men, arms, and resources, Lehi never posed a serious challenge to British rule until, on November 6, 1944, two of its gunmen murdered Lord Moyne. But the outcome of the policy change for Palestine it sought turned out to be inimical to Zionist interests. Rather than cowing Britain into submission or intimidating the wartime coalition government to acquiesce to Lehi’s fantastical nationalist schemes, Moyne’s assassination effectively scuttled Churchill’s bold plan to partition Palestine and thus achieve an early resolution of the country’s political future before the war ended. Instead, absent a new policy or credible replacement, the white paper remained indefinitely in force. Thereafter, Lehi returned to irrelevance—feared by the British in Palestine as dangerous fanatics but militarily inconsequential and politically incapable of realizing its founding leader’s grandiose ambitions.8

  The Labour government that took power in 1945 thus inherited a policy for Palestine that its own party leadership had long ago repudiated and that had now been rendered obsolete by the war’s end. Inundated with pressing domestic and international problems, the new government was also challenged to invent a new policy for Palestine. Bevin embarked first on a determined but fruitless quest to actively involve the United States in helping to determine Palestine’s future via the Anglo-American Committee and then, after that failed, with Creech Jones on a desperate bid to obtain some kind of negotiated settlement between Arab and Jew at the ill-fa
ted February 1947 London Conference.

  “During the whole of this period when the political future of Palestine was being debated outside of the country itself,” Cunningham recalled, “sabotage and terrorism by Jews was increasing and, so far as the dissident groups were concerned, in ever more violent and brutal forms.” In these difficult circumstances, with Palestine suspended in a state of political limbo, all that he could do was “to try to keep the country quiet.” This was an impossible task, Cunningham apprised Hall in July 1946, when both the Jews and the Arabs were “saying force pays … and interpreting lack of action as weakness … I can do little—[without a] policy.”9

  The vacuum created by the Labour government’s vacillation and indecision therefore deprived the army of the explicitly stated mission and objective that are at the foundation of sound strategy. “The first essential in any counter-insurgency [or counterterrorist] campaign,” the British soldier and author Julian Paget maintains, “is that both the political and military aims should be agreed upon by all concerned from the very start and should be clearly stated in a directive.” Lieutenant General D. B. Lang, a specialist on military training and doctrine who also served in the British army, similarly argues that “the soldier expects to be given and is entitled to demand, a clear political directive, which must include, and in fact be built around, the object which the Civil Government wishes to be attained.”10

  Bereft of this guidance, the British army adopted a strategy that was an inheritance from its successful suppression of the Arab Rebellion a decade before. Senior commanders like Montgomery, who had fought in Palestine during the late 1930s, were convinced that terrorism was best defeated through the naked application of military force alone. Coercion and punishment had worked against the Arabs; hence, he and his subordinates reasoned, both would work equally well against the Jews. But this assumption ignored the fundamental differences between the two uprisings. The Arab Rebellion was essentially a popularly supported rural guerrilla war. Most of the fighting had occurred in the countryside, where the rebel bands moved and often fought in discernible—and at times numerically large—formations, supported and abetted by the local population. Accordingly, the means and methods involved in that insurrection’s suppression were both straightforward and unconstrained. Guerrilla units were harried and harassed by British infantry and armored units and, wherever possible, subjected to aerial and artillery bombardment. The homes of individual Arabs implicated in the violence were punitively blown up, and entire villages judged guilty of assisting the rebels were wantonly bombed or shelled.11

  The army assumed that this strategy would be successful against the Jews as well. But that assumption willfully ignored three key differences between the Arab Rebellion and the Jewish terrorist campaigns. First, unlike the Arab uprising, this was a struggle fought almost entirely in Palestine’s cities. Second, only a small portion of the Yishuv belonged to or actively supported the Irgun and still fewer Lehi. This meant that punishing the guilty by collective fine or by aerial or artillery bombardment was virtually impossible. And, third, the Zionist movement’s ability to mobilize public opinion outside Palestine, especially in the United States, was an advantage that the Arab rebels conspicuously lacked. Accordingly, only once was a Jewish settlement fined—Givat Shaul in 1944 following Lehi’s attempt on MacMichael’s life—and it was not until August 1947 that the army, having exhausted all other countermeasures, sought permission to punitively destroy Jewish-owned dwellings and property. Within a week of having obtained Cunningham’s authorization, army sappers blew up a Jewish house (coincidentally also in Givat Shaul) in which arms and ammunition had been found during a routine search. But, leaving aside whether this tactic would have proven any more effective than those previously tried, it was far too late in the day to have made any difference.12

  In any event, the army already had for the previous two years permission to summon RAF aircraft to bomb so-called terrorist enclaves. But it had proven impossible for the authorities to discern and segregate those “enclaves” from the surrounding civilian populace. Hence, rather than risk killing or injuring innocent people and damaging or destroying their property, the army never utilized this measure. Citing the precedent of the Arab Rebellion, Creech Jones raised it again in August 1947 in hopes of finding some means of exacting retribution on the Yishuv following the hanging of the two sergeants. But, as Cunningham patiently explained, unlike the Arab rebel strongholds dotting the countryside in the 1930s, the Jewish terrorists were dispersed throughout Palestine’s cities. This effectively rendered aerial bombardment not only irrelevant but ineffectual, “unless,” the high commissioner added, “it is intended purely punitively against the whole Jewish population.” As eager as the cabinet was to undertake some signal action in respect to the sergeants’ execution, there was neither the will nor the stomach to brook the international criticism and opprobrium—especially from the United States—that would surely have followed.13

  The army therefore clung to large-scale cordon-and-search operations in the cities and searches of Jewish settlements in the countryside for illegally held arms as its preferred terrorist countermeasures. Both Montgomery and Dempsey persisted in believing that the army’s lack of success was not the result of an anachronistic strategy or failed tactics but the product of the political restraints they claimed had been imposed on military action by Cunningham. The CIGS repeatedly promised that once these restraints were removed and the full weight of the military was brought to bear on the Yishuv, the community’s cooperation would follow. But harsh measures such as the imposition of martial law over Tel Aviv in March 1947 failed to anticipate that the hardship and inconvenience caused would so alienate the Jewish populace that all prospects of obtaining the community’s assistance were lost. It was only very late in the struggle that the army recognized this mistake and began to employ the small-unit tactics better suited to—and more effective in—counterterrorism. But their use was sporadic and uneven and mostly confined to the First Infantry, whose commander, Gale, had been in charge of elite special operations units during the final thrust across Germany during World War II and thus understood the nature of irregular warfare. In fact, of the 177 search operations that the army conducted in Palestine between 1945 and 1947, more than half were battalion size or larger (that is, involving at least seven hundred soldiers). Two operations entailed entire divisions (approximately fourteen thousand men), and thirty-eight others were brigade size or more (that is, deploying some three to five battalions).14

  Opinion across the entire spectrum of British officials responsible for Palestine was that countering terrorism was a police, not a military, matter and that if the government were to defeat the terrorists, the cooperation of the Jewish community was essential. The basic tenet of British doctrine governing imperial internal security had long been that the police would “be a colony’s first line of defense, as well as the providers of law and order.” This principle, derived from Britain’s experience ruling Ireland, had been applied throughout the empire from the late nineteenth century. The problem throughout the British Empire was that these imperial constabularies were underfunded and understaffed. Despite recurrent recruitment campaigns, service in violence-prone territories with harsh climates, in spartan conditions, for extended periods of time far from home, and at pay scales considerably lower than those for constables in Britain, made colonial policing a relatively unappealing vocation with the result that, at times of crisis or grave trouble, the army was called upon to assume responsibilities for which it was untrained and unprepared and that would otherwise have been performed by the police had they sufficient personnel.15

  This was precisely what occurred in Palestine after World War II. When Montgomery arrived on an inspection tour in June 1946, he was appalled to discover that “at a time when the situation was clearly about to boil over,” the police force was nearly 50 percent below strength and considered to be “no more than 25 percent effective.” The army, acc
ordingly, was forced to intervene. As Barker had to explain to his men, “In normal peace times, the police would carry out their duties without assistance from the military. As it is, the situation in the country is not normal and furthermore the Police Force is much below establishment. As a result the police, more often than not, will require help from the military.”16

  In his study of the counterterrorist campaigns conducted by British colonial police forces from the 1930s to the 1950s, David Clark observes, “The arrival of the army to support the police has tended to attract more attention than the less spectacular, but no less essential police role. The arrival of the army seemed to indicate that the police had failed.” This was certainly the case in Palestine. There, an understrength and intelligence-starved police force had continually failed to anticipate and contain, much less defeat, the succession of violent uprisings mounted by the Arabs and then by the Jews.17

  Like other colonial constabularies across the empire, the PPF was always short of personnel. This deficiency was especially critical among its British contingent—the only section of the mixed Arab and Jewish force deemed reliable and trustworthy enough to be assigned to counterterrorism duties. Unsuitable British officers were therefore retained who would otherwise have been dismissed, and recruits were rushed into service through truncated training courses to compensate for the chronic manpower shortage. Rymer-Jones had hoped that the creation of the Police Mobile Force in 1944 would redress these problems and serve as the PPF’s premier counterterrorism strike force. But it too was perpetually below strength and moreover contributed to the damaging “militarization” of the force cited by Wickham in his 1946 report. The effect of stressing the PPF’s paramilitary capabilities at the expense of normal policing duties, this expert on colonial policing concluded, had turned it into neither a proper police force nor an army but an ineffective mixture of the two.