The Sword And The Olive

by van Creveld, Martin

  The lull, however, proved temporary. In September 1937 the British governor of Galilee was murdered. The authorities took the occasion to arrest 300 leading Arabs, including Amin Hussayni (who escaped and was able to leave the country). This signaled renewed troubles. By spring 1938 the number of Arab guerrillas was estimated at 15,000. Of those, perhaps 10 percent moved about in small “strike forces” while the rest remained in their villages and joined the fighting as the occasion called .22 Against them were arrayed British forces complete with armored cars, artillery, and aircraft. The climax came in March 1938, when 2,000 troops commanded by Gen. Archibald Wavell—destined to become British commander in chief of the Middle East—fought a regular battle in the hills around Jenin. From this time on, order was gradually restored as the British systematically hunted down their enemies. After April 1939, when the British succeeded in killing “Supreme Commander” Abd Al Rachim Al Haj Muhamad, the uprising gradually collapsed; individual acts of terrorism were still occurring when World War II broke out in September 1939.

  Contrary to the situation in 1929, these events did not catch Hagana off-guard. Forewarned by its intelligence service, the Tel Aviv branch had acted swiftly, sending members to take up blocking positions to the north of Jaffa all the way from the beach, which was fenced off, to the east. Similar measures were taken in other cities; as a result, only in Jerusalem was it necessary to evacuate the Jewish quarter until the construction of a new police station permitted evacuees to return. Meanwhile in the countryside the preceding seven years had been used to provide the settlements with underground bunkers, barbed-wire fences, searchlights, and internal and external communications in the form of buzzers, signaling lamps, and the like—all paid for by an unofficial taxation system known as kofer ha-yishuv (the Yishuv’s ransom). In 1938 it covered about 70 percent of Hagana’s operating expenses23—this at a time when the Arab High Council was barely able to pay for its telephone bills. As a result, when the attacks came, not one kibbuts, moshav, or moshava had to be evacuated.

  Faced with the common enemy, Hagana and the British authorities drew closer than ever.24 As many as 3,000 Jews, selected from a list of “reliable” personnel submitted by the Jewish Agency, were taken into the newly established Supplementary Police. With their pay of 3 pounds a month provided partly by the government, partly by Hagana, the notrim or gafirim, as they were variously known, were issued arms and uniforms. They were trained by British personnel and dispatched to mount guard wherever needed—including roads, railroads, ports, and airports. Not content with this, the British also sought to make use of the remaining Hagana forces. The country was divided into ten regional commands, each under the authority of an army officer. Supported by a Jewish Agency representative, in an emergency he had the authority to call up the local Hagana members. In time, almost the entire Hagana was incorporated into the so-called Jewish Settlement Police and was thus presented with an invaluable opportunity to carry arms openly and receive professional training.

  The most important innovations between 1936 and 1939 were, however, tactical. In the days of Ha-shomer, Jewish Guards had often engaged in offensive operations, hot pursuit, and the like. In 1919-1921, as in 1929, such operations had been few and far between; but with the British now supporting Hagana or at least prepared to close an eye to Hagana activities, things changed. Already in 1936 the nodedot, now operating openly and in uniform, started mounting patrols in the hills around Jerusalem—no mean feat, given that the standard Jewish reaction to Arab rioting heretofore had been to take shelter. By 1938 the nodedot totaled some 400 men, divided into sixty squads. Many squads came complete with a pickup truck—some even covered by bullet-proof plating—and a light machine gun. According to the fashion of the time, this was immediately translated into the lyrics of a popular song, “the tender [i.e., pickup truck] drives along.”

  In the autumn of 1936 there arrived in Palestine a British officer named Orde Wingate. Wingate at that time was thirty-three years old. The son of an officer who had been known as “the Terror of the Sudan,” he had gained his spurs (and learned Arabic) while serving in that country from 1928 to 1933; in addition he was a student of the Bible and something of a mystic who believed that Zionism had been preordained by God. Quickly earning a reputation for being a friend to the Yishuv, he met with its leaders, including Chayim Weizman, David Ben Gurion, and Eliyahu Golomb. In the autumn of 1937 he persuaded his superiors to allow him to study the modus operandi of the Arab gangs, and in June 1938 he submitted his report, “Ways of Making His Majesty’s Forces Operate at Night with the Objective of Putting an End to the Terror in Northern Palestine.”

  Forty British infantrymen and four trucks were put at Wingate’s disposal. He also received permission to recruit seventy-five Jewish notrim (the list, as usual, was provided by Hagana). He organized both groups into Special Night Squads (SNS). After a short period of organization and training the SNS started operating in July 1938, patrolling the oil pipeline between Iraq and Haifa and launching attacks on Arab villages suspected of harboring terrorists. In the first month alone they allegedly killed sixty terrorists; Wingate himself was wounded, then recovered and went back into action with his men. With interruptions, his activities lasted until May 1939, when his intimacy with the Yishuv’s leaders excited his superiors’ ire and he was transferred out of the country.

  Much later, Wingate’s contribution to the nascent Jewish army was summed up by David Ben Gurion. According to him, “The Hagana’s best officers [including Moshe Dayan] were trained in the Special Night Squads, and Wingate’s doctrines were taken over by the Israel Defense Force.”25 Those doctrines included a preference for night action as best suitable for the belligerent whose firepower was weak; a heavy emphasis on good reconnaissance and intelligence, in turn based on an intimate familiarity with the countryside and the relevant languages; longish approach marches (as much as twenty to thirty miles in a single night) intended to take the enemy by surprise; a variety of tricks, such as raising a ruckus at one point and attacking at another, meant to confuse the enemy and put him off-balance; and finally the short, sharp attack delivered with all the firepower that the available troops could muster.26

  Wingate’s departure did not mark the end of Hagana’s attempts to set up a mobile strike force. In the winter of 1937-1938 it decided to establish the Plugot Sadeh or “Field Companies” (FOSH). Some experience was already available in the form of the nodedot, which were going out on the initiative of local commanders; but now it was a question of fusing them into a unified strike force with a central headquarters and regional branches. The FOSH commander was Yitschak Sadeh. A Russian like the rest, Sadeh, according to his own subsequent and not always consistent accounts, seems to have spent the years 1914-1919 successively fighting for the czar, serving in the St. Petersburg police, and doing hatchet jobs for various White and Red organizations. Later he joined a group that was led by Trumpeldor (like his master he was a ladies’ man and sufficiently handsome to pose as a Greek god) and left for Erets Yisrael, where he arrived in 192 2. There he had joined Hagana as a “candidate” member of its Directing Committee. However, it was only during the events of 1936-1939 that this burly man, who was unable to earn a decent living, began to make his mark.27

  A hopeless administrator, Sadeh was a born leader. He and his fellow organizers were able to assemble around 300 men, divide them into six regionally based companies, and give them a short period of training before going into action in the summer of 1938. Unlike those of the SNS, their operations were semilegal and merely tolerated by the British; tactically, however, they were very similar. Small units—rarely more than a platoon at a time, armed with rifles and grenades and perhaps a light machine gun—set up ambushes and mounted patrols in areas reaching from the Lebanese border in the north to the outskirts of Tel Aviv in the south. Their stated objective was to intercept marauders before they could reach the Jewish settlements; occasionally they also attacked the terrorists’ bases and
places of refuge, a great innovation for those days. To overcome the natural squeamishness of new recruits, care was taken to expose them to enemy dead.28 It did not amount to much, and yet some of the IDF’s most senior future commanders—including, besides Moshe Dayan, Yigael Yadin and Yigal Allon—gained their initial military experience by passing through Sadeh’s organization.

  By the summer of 1939 the uprising was subsiding as attacks by large gangs almost ceased and those by smaller ones became increasingly rare. This was one of the last times when an armed force belonging to a “developed” country booked a real success in what, much later, was to become known as low-intensity conflict (LIC); hence the methods used by the British and their Jewish allies are worth studying in a little more detail. Perhaps the single most important step was the erection of a fence that separated Palestine from Lebanon to the north, thus cutting off reinforcements and the flow of arms. Next, as already mentioned, there were aggressive patrolling and ambushes as well as extensive use of troops to guard sensitive spots. All this required good intelligence, often acquired by unconventional methods—as when Wingate lined up prisoners and executed one out of every ten to make the others talk. From time to time there were also acts of spectacular brutality, as when British troops, seeking to improve access and open up fields of fire, blew up much of the ancient city of Jaffa.29

  In retrospect, nevertheless, one suspects that the real causes behind the demise of the uprising were not so much military as political and psychological. The question as to how the promises contained in the Balfour Declaration could be reconciled with the rights of Palestine’s Arab population had preoccupied the British from the beginning of the mandate. Various schemes had been floated, including one that provided for the partition of the country (the Peel Committee’s Report of 1937). Now, pressed to the wall, they produced the White Paper of May 1939; in it any intent of setting up a Jewish state was flatly denied. Jewish rights to purchase land were limited to 5 percent of the total area, mainly in the Plain of Sharon and around Haifa. Immigration was restricted to 15,000 a year for the next five years, when it would stop. Last but not least, the Palestinian Arab community was promised “evolution toward independence” at the end of ten years.

  With World War II and the Holocaust just around the corner, from the Jewish point of view the White Paper could not have come at a worse time, and indeed they lost no time in denouncing it. Palestinian Arabs, claiming a victory over their Jewish opponents, gave in to exhaustion and laid down their arms for the time being. When war did break out, it was soon followed by the arrival of tens of thousands of British and Commonwealth troops from Australia, New Zealand, India, and South Africa. The military buildup increased the amount of manpower available for security purposes many times over. Perhaps more important, it also ushered in another period of exceptional economic prosperity. As imperial spending increased by a factor of three or four,30 a whole series of new industries was founded to supply the British forces with everything from food to medicines to water bottles. Both Arabs and Jews, but particularly the latter, exploited the situation by alternately working for the British and stealing from them—which they seem to have done on a truly heroic scale.

  Meanwhile FOSH, like Ha-shomer before it, was disbanded. A mantle of secrecy surrounds these events; Hagana headquarters ordered all FOSH papers to be destroyed.31 Possibly the decision was due to the desire of local Hagana commanders to repossess their best men. Possibly, too, Ben Gurion, Golomb, and the rest did not reconcile themselves to the existence of a unified strike force wholly devoted to its charismatic commander, over whom they had no effective control.32 Neither explanation is entirely convincing, the more so since such suspicions as may have existed evidently did not apply to Sadeh himself. As most of his men went home, he was put in charge of a new unit known as POUM (Plugot Meyuchadot or “Special Companies”). Operating covertly and on a much smaller scale than their predecessors, they represented a police organization, an intelligence service, a counterintelligence service, and a special operations command all rolled into one.

  Missions entrusted to the unit and its handful of men—as usual, women, among them Sadeh’s lover, Margot, were given auxiliary tasks such as maintaining communications, smuggling arms, photographing targets, and the like—included hunting down individual Arab terrorists, executing Jewish informers, and attacking British patrol boats that stood in the way of ships carrying illegal immigrants.33 They also coordinated the voyages of those very ships; one of them, Patria, arrived at Haifa only to have Sadeh’s men sabotage it with considerable loss of life in order to prevent the British from sending its passengers to Mauritius.34 Finally, the anti-British character of some of Sadeh’s operations did not prevent him from cooperating with the British in mounting raids against Axis targets throughout the eastern Mediterranean and as far away as Ploesti, Romania. Some of his men went on to build Mossad, Israel’s answer to the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Others took part in the construction of Hagana’s budding arms industry, whereas at least one, Chayim Laskov, rose to become IDF chief of staff.

  In the summer of 1939 a party of forty-three members, including Moshe Dayan,35 was caught under arms while taking part in an exercise at Yavniel, near Tiberias. They were arrested, tried, and sentenced to ten years in prison; more searches, arrests, and trials followed, all resulting in sentences much heavier than those meted out during the previous three years.36 The British were no longer prepared to close an eye to Hagana’s activities; any idea that Zionism could achieve its objectives by peaceful means had to be abandoned, and from this point on it was entertained only by a few academics. The publication of the White Paper hastened the decline of so-called political Zionism, which hoped to achieve those objectives with British aid and was represented principally during the previous two decades by Chayim Weizman. Its place has now been taken by a more “activist” line represented by Ben Gurion as leader of the Yishuv. Not accidentally, his favorite attire was not the evening dress of British aristocrats but plain khaki.

  As to Hagana itself, it had passed out of infancy and into childhood. In 1937 the five-man political caucus that had run the organization was disbanded. Yochanan Ratner, the Haifa architecture professor, was appointed as the first rosh mifkada artsit (chief of country headquarters, his official title). Two years later he was replaced by Moshe Sneh, an urbane physician who was to hold the post until 1946 and who much later became head of Israel’s Communist Party. An ex officio member of the Jewish Agency Executive, the rosh mifkada had under him a rosh mateh klali (chief of the general staff). The latter in turn consisted of a planning division, a training division, a technical division, and an intelligence division.37 The organization was anything but perfect; in particular, a manpower division and a logistics division were still absent. Yet it was light years in advance of anything possessed by the Palestinians, who were still acting exclusively in locally based bands. Funded partly by the Jewish Agency and partly by Histadrut, Hagana now had perhaps 200-300 persons—almost all male—working for it full-time; they included, besides the leadership and Sadeh’s men, technicians who manufactured arms, “quartermasters” in charge of the slikkim, and fund-raising and weapons-purchasing agents in various countries. Membership had grown to 1 5,000. Not counting the arms carried by the notrim, it could boast 6,000 rifles, 1 million rounds of ammunition, 600 light machine guns and submachine guns, 24,000 hand grenades, and 12,000 rifle grenades.38 With or without the authorities’ permission, Hagana had been able to hold regular training courses for thousands of personnel of different kinds, including recruits, squad commanders, sergeants, signal men, and paramedics. Whether in action with SNS or FOSH, some units had now been bloodied in action. Among its field commanders, a few had now reached the point where they were capable of leading a platoon in defensive and offensive operations against the enemy. With his keen eye for personnel, Sadeh in particular had already identified some individuals destined to go on to much greater things. For all that, however,
the story of the IDF had barely begun.

  CHAPTER 4

  TOWARD STATEHOOD

  THE SPRING OF 1940 was a dark period for the British war effort. Beginning on May 10, 1940, the Germans attacked in the west. By the end of the month Dunkirk was being evacuated, and on June 10, Italy, whose Mediterranean possessions at the time reached as far east as the Dodecanese, entered the conflict. In September 1940 the Italian army invaded Egypt from Libya, driving some sixty miles before halting at Sidi Barrani. These events were followed by the British advance to Tripoli in the winter of 1940-1941; the dispatch of a German corps to Libya in February 1941; the launching of a German counterattack that, in May and June, seemed about to drive the British from Egypt; and the abortive Greek campaign that ended with Axis occupation not only of the Greek mainland but of Crete as well. As a result, during late spring 1941 it appeared as if the British position in the Middle East was being threatened by a pincer movement coming from the south and north.

  Thus pressed, the British once again became willing to accept whatever Hagana had to offer—indeed it might almost be said that whenever there was trouble His Majesty’s government in Palestine turned to the Jews, only to bite the hand offered in friendship when the danger had passed. As already mentioned, Sadeh as commander of POUM (the special companies) had been providing the British with personnel—some of whom were German- or Arab-speaking—for carrying out commando raids against Axis targets. The largest of these was launched on May 18, when twenty-three men took to the sea in a boat with the objective of reaching the Vichy French-owned oil refineries in Tripoli, Lebanon, and sabotaging them. This operation was a complete failure as the boat, along with its crew, disappeared without a trace—possibly because some of the training had been carried out around Haifa Harbor, which was swarming with spies.1 Refusing to be discouraged, Sadeh again sent his best men when the British set out to conquer Lebanon and Syria from the French early the next month. Thirty-five Jewish guides went ahead of Australian troops, their mission being to cut telephone wires, occupy bridges, and so on. The best known among them was Moshe Dayan, who along with his comrades had been released from jail and who lost an eye in the operation.2