Anonymous Soldiers

by Bruce Hoffman

  Throughout March 1920 tension rose in Jerusalem as rumors circulated that the Arabs planned to use the forthcoming Muslim Nebi Musa festival as a pretext to attack Jewish targets in Jerusalem. Despite the protests of Jabotinsky and other Jewish leaders, who worried that the predominantly Arab police force was neither properly trained nor sufficiently numerous to handle any unrest, OETA officials maintained that no additional security measures were needed. The 1919 holiday, despite similar Jewish fears, had passed without incident, Sir Ronald Storrs, the military governor of Jerusalem from 1917 to 1920 and its civilian governor until 1926, reasoned. Indeed, he was so confident of this outcome that in keeping with Ottoman traditions, he agreed to provide a military band to accompany the traditional procession.22

  The potential dangers of the 1920 event were clear to Jabotinsky. Fifteen months earlier, he had warned, “Arab impudence is growing daily. Not forty-eight hours pass but some inciting speech is heard … concluding in a call to the ‘Arab sword’ … The Palestine authorities are acting in a manner which clearly tells the Arabs that the [Balfour] Declaration need not be fulfilled.” On March 12, he told Dr. Chaim Weizmann—the Zionist leader who had been instrumental in the Balfour Declaration’s issuance and was then president of the Zionist Organization, the preeminent Jewish political organization created in 1897 by Zionism’s founding father, Theodor Herzl—that “the pogrom is liable to break out here any day.”23

  As April 4, the date of that year’s Nebi Musa celebrations, approached, Jabotinsky and the Haganah senior command put into effect their defensive plan. Jerusalem was divided into four sectors, each with a commander reporting directly to Jabotinsky based at a command headquarters situated on Jaffa Road. Early that morning anonymous Arabic-language notices were circulated in Jerusalem proclaiming, “The Government is with us, Allenby is with us, kill the Jews; there is no punishment for killing Jews.” By mid-morning, a large Arab crowd had gathered just outside Jaffa Gate. Egged on by tendentious speakers who addressed them from the balcony of the nearby Arab Club, the crowd began to chant the rhyming Arabic couplet “Palestine is our land, the Jews are dogs!” Then ’Aref al-’Aref, the nationalist firebrand and newspaper editor, shouted, “If we don’t use force against the Zionists and against the Jews, we will never be rid of them.” The crowd replied, “We will drink the blood of the Jews.” As is often the case when mobs are worked to a frenzy, the accounts of who struck the first blow or provided the initial provocation are confused and contradictory. Frances Newton, an English missionary who lived in Palestine from 1889 until 1938, claims that a Jewish spectator spat at one of the Islamic banners that a celebrant was carrying. Regardless of the precise cause, the mob went wild. Even Newton, who refused to accept that the riots might have been premeditated and unequivocally blamed “Zionist influence” as their cause, admits that “innocent Jews suffered” grievously.24

  Edward Keith-Roach, a young British civil servant, was just leaving Sunday services at the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, located in the center of the Old City, when a nearby crowd caught his attention. There was lots of shouting and “sticks … being brandished. A stone was thrown and hit a Jew. In the twinkling of an eye the street was in a turmoil. Seeing an Arab about to attack another old Jew, I called upon an Arab policeman to help him, but the policeman just faded away and so did the Arab.” At that moment, Storrs was walking out of St. George’s Cathedral, just a few blocks north of the Old City in East Jerusalem, where he had attended Easter Matins service with his parents, who were visiting from England. Storrs’s Arab butler approached and whispered that there had been serious trouble at Jaffa Gate. “It was as though he had thrust a sword into my heart. Even now the mere memory of those dread words brings back the horror of the shock,” Storrs recalled twenty years later.25

  Jabotinsky and Pinchas Rutenberg, a moderate Zionist leader who had also played a pivotal role in the creation of the Jewish Legion during the war, had been desperately searching for the governor. Having finally tracked Storrs down at his office just as he returned from church, they asked permission to deploy armed Haganah paramilitaries to defend the inhabitants of the Old City’s isolated Jewish Quarter, which was situated far from the nearest police station and thus vulnerable. Storrs dismissed the request out of hand and assured both that the police would deal with any trouble. Unbeknownst to him, the Arab police had already abandoned their posts and had joined the attacks on Jews and looting of Jewish property. As the violence spiraled out of control, the British authorities imposed a curfew and ordered British troops onto the streets to restore order. The rioting, however, continued for another four days. In the end, five Jews lay dead and 216 injured. Almost all the Jewish casualties had occurred in the Old City. British troops posted at the entrance had barred the way to the Haganah units that had attempted to come to the Jews’ defense. Four Arabs had also been killed and 23 wounded. “The Easter riots were, alas, only the first eruption of the volcano,” Newton sadly noted.26

  The Nebi Musa disturbances above all confirmed the collision course that British policy for Palestine was on, at least so far as Anglo-Zionist relations over security matters were concerned. The Yishuv and its leaders bitterly criticized OETA for failing to anticipate the violence and for its inadequate response. Officials in OETA reacted by blaming the Jews, whose presence and activities in Palestine, they maintained, had alarmed the Arabs and provoked their wrath. Relations were further strained when police, acting on OETA’s orders, arrested Jabotinsky and nineteen other Haganah members. They were charged with illegal possession of firearms and ammunition and for conspiracy to commit unlawful acts. They were tried, convicted, and sentenced to prison terms of three years each with Jabotinsky receiving a fifteen-year sentence and ordered deported from Palestine upon his release. The Yishuv was shocked, not only because Jabotinsky and the defendants had acted in self-defense, but also because the two Arab leaders convicted of instigating the riot, the aforementioned ’Aref al-’Aref and a colleague, Haj Amin al-Husseini, had received only ten-year prison sentences each. Both men avoided imprisonment by fleeing to Trans-Jordan.27

  The most important effect of the riots on the Yishuv, however, was to marshal support behind the formal establishment of a proper Jewish self-defense force. With Jabotinsky now in prison, there was no one with his stature or credibility to oppose the establishment of a clandestine entity completely independent of government control. Accordingly, the remaining Haganah leaders met on June 12, 1920, to found the Irgun ha-Haganah ha-Ivrith b’Eretz Yisrael (Hebrew Defense Organization in Palestine, known simply as the Haganah). The creation of an independent, armed Jewish underground represented its founders’ belief that only by relying on themselves would the Jewish population of Palestine ever be secure. Among them were Yitzhak Ben-Zvi, who would become Israel’s second president, and Eliahu Golomb, who would oversee the Haganah’s evolution over the following two decades and transform it from a modest self-defense militia into a capable fighting force.28

  The volatile character of Arab discontent, the unreliability of the police, and the marked hostility of the British authorities to unilateral Jewish defensive measures, its founders reasoned, compelled the Yishuv to respond in this manner. Perhaps more important, however, was that they specifically conceived the new defense force as the nucleus of a future Jewish army in a future Jewish state. Apart from the belief that this necessitated it be independent of any foreign control, the Haganah’s creators concluded that like any army in a democracy it should be under elected civilian control. At the time no such representative Zionist entity existed in Palestine, but the establishment in December 1920 of the Histadrut (Ha-Histadrut Ha-Klalit shel Ha-Oudim, General Federation of Jewish Workers; known simply as the Histadrut) redressed this situation, and it therefore was agreed that the Haganah would be supervised by the Histadrut’s elected executive board. That decision, however, only widened the cleavage separating Jabotinsky, given his long-standing opposition to the Histadrut’s ideology. Thus the pro
spect of retaining his support for a fundamentally clandestine Jewish paramilitary force vanished with both the new group’s underground orientation and its close association with the Zionist labor movement.29

  The Nebi Musa disturbances were also a watershed in Britain’s rule of Palestine. Reaction in London was sharply critical of OETA’s performance. Complaints were voiced in the capital’s most influential newspaper, The Times, on April 27, 1920, and by the Foreign Office as well. Lord Curzon, the foreign secretary, told Allenby that with the country under military control the riots “ought never to have happened.” Colonel Richard Meinertzhagen, OETA’s chief political officer, was especially displeased. Going outside the military chain of command, he fired off a long dispatch to Curzon that assailed senior OETA officials for their active hostility to Zionism and for their failure both to anticipate the riots in the first place and to contain the violence once it had started. Curzon showed it to the prime minister, David Lloyd George, and, according to Meinertzhagen, “They acted on my advice within twenty-four hours of its receipt.”30

  Although no formal peace treaty with Turkey had yet been signed and the newly created League of Nations had still not officially recognized Britain’s rule of Palestine, Lloyd George and Curzon agreed that the provisional military regime should be replaced by a properly constituted civilian administration. They selected Sir Herbert Samuel, a prominent British Zionist and former member of the cabinet, as its head and urged him to leave for Palestine as soon as possible.31

  Samuel arrived in Palestine aboard the HMS Centaur on June 30, 1920, and was welcomed with a seventeen-gun salute and RAF ceremonial flypast. A talented parliamentarian who had been elected to Westminster in 1902, Samuel was the first practicing Jew to serve in a British cabinet. A lifelong Liberal Party member, Samuel was instrumental in framing the legislation passed by the Liberal government between 1905 and 1914 that laid the foundation of the modern British welfare state. He also devised the critical compromise formula that kept the cabinet intact on the eve of World War I. It was Samuel, in fact, who a year later had first raised with cabinet members the idea of enlisting Jewish support in the war and then had pushed for the government’s endorsement of Zionist aspirations contained in the Balfour Declaration.32

  Samuel stepped ashore wearing the British proconsul’s official attire of white uniform, plumed helmet, and ceremonial sword. The waiting Jewish crowd was described by his private secretary as “messianic” with adulation. Palestine’s Arabs were more subdued. Indeed, intelligence reports suggested that an attempt might be made on Samuel’s life. Accordingly, he was transported in an armored car to the railhead in Lydda, where Samuel proceeded to Jerusalem aboard a special protected train. Storrs was present at the welcoming ceremonies and accompanied Samuel to Jerusalem. The governor of Jerusalem had taken the extraordinary precaution of arming himself with a cocked and loaded Browning automatic pistol, to be used, he later explained, “in case of emergency.”33

  Samuel assumed office the following day. Because Palestine was to be designated a “mandated territory” by the embryonic League of Nations, Lloyd George decided that Samuel’s title should be “high commissioner” and not “governor,” as was the case with Britain’s colonial possessions. Palestine otherwise was organized exactly along crown colony lines. Hence, by 1921 the Colonial Office had assumed direct responsibility from the Foreign Office for the country’s governance. The post of civil (later, chief) secretary was created, as were a commandant (later, inspector general) of police and prisons and the heads of the various other public service departments: health, education, and agriculture. A new legal system, which incorporated many of the Ottoman statutes, was implemented under the direction of a legal secretary (later, attorney general). Palestine was divided geographically into ten administrative districts (which were later consolidated and reduced to three), each supervised by a district commissioner and an assistant district commissioner. All district commissioners and heads of department were British; their staffs, however, were variously composed of Britons, Arabs, and Jews. The high commissioner’s office and that of his administration were located in the Kaiserin Augusta Victoria Hospice. Like Government House, which would replace it in 1931, the hospice, situated between Mount Scopus and the Mount of Olives, overlooked Jerusalem—but from the northwest.34

  Samuel moved quickly to try to heal the wounds from April’s violence and to prove his impartiality to Palestine’s Arab and Jewish communities. During his first week in office, he pardoned Jabotinsky and his imprisoned comrades as well as al-Husseini and al-’Aref. In September, the new Palestine administration promulgated an immigration ordinance establishing an annual monthly quota of 16,500 certificates for Jewish families seeking to settle in Palestine. In reality, however, the quota went grievously unfilled. A lack of jobs and housing, coupled with the Zionist Organization’s meager funds, discouraged immigration at a critical moment in the Yishuv’s history when the gates were essentially wide open.35

  Despite amounting to only a fraction of the allowable quota, the arrival of these new immigrants quickly stoked Arab unease and undermined Samuel’s good intentions. This was made abundantly clear in December 1920, when the Muslim-Christian Association (MCA), a representative body of Palestinian Arabs, held its Third Palestine Arab Congress in Haifa. Resolutions were passed denouncing the Balfour Declaration as contravening the “Laws of God and Man” and protesting governmental facilitation of its pro-Zionist terms. Although Samuel downplayed the resolutions’ significance as the mere venting of accumulated frustrations, at the same time he was greatly dismayed by War Office plans to further reduce the Palestine garrison from the twenty-five thousand troops in the country at the time of the Nebi Musa disturbances to below even the existing complement of seventy-two hundred men. Indeed, the fact that many of the most senior positions in the Palestine administration were filled by Jews—the high commissioner, the legal secretary (Norman Bentwich), the director of immigration (Albert Hyamson), and the principal assistant secretary (Max Nurock)—did little to mitigate Arab fears and ensured that it would not be long before they again exploded in anti-Jewish violence.36

  A collective sigh of relief was breathed in Jerusalem and London when the next year’s Nebi Musa festivities peacefully concluded. But the country’s crowded urban geography, coupled with its newly volatile political climate, meant that even a small spark could rapidly turn into a major conflagration. In this respect, the new Jewish city of Tel Aviv and the geographically contiguous ancient Arab port city of Jaffa uneasily coexisted beside each other much like the country’s Jewish and Arab populations. Once a modest, though pleasant, coastal enclave known as much for its fragrant orange groves as its busy harbor, Jaffa had already begun to surpass Gaza as the region’s most important—and prosperous—city toward the end of the nineteenth century. For Arabs as well as Jews, Jaffa was a place of uncommon beauty. “The bride of the sea in her sweet fragrance and perfume of blooming oranges and lemons” was how Hana Malak, an expatriate Arab Christian Jaffan, described the place of his birth, while it was “the maritime beauty” of the Mediterranean Sea to the Jewish novelist and later Nobel laureate S. Y. Agnon.37

  A thriving economy and vibrant culture existed there. From 1911, for instance, all three of Palestine’s most important newspapers had their main offices in Jaffa. But to David Ben-Gurion, the preeminent Zionist leader of his time and Israel’s first prime minister, who arrived in Jaffa from his native Poland in 1907, the city had considerably less charm. Jaffa was “not very pretty,” he recalled. “As in any oriental city, the streets are narrow and winding. An awful dust hangs over the marketplace, for there are no paving stones. I saw an uglier exile in Jaffa than in Plonsk [Ben-Gurion’s dreary birthplace],” and he swiftly decamped for a rural settlement seven hours away.38

  A Jewish watchmaker from Jaffa named Akiva Weiss had the idea in 1906 to build “the first Hebrew city” in modern times just up the coast, to the north. Like Ben-Gurion, Weiss despaired o
f living in what he also regarded as Jaffa’s dirty and unsanitary conditions and consequently believed that more Jews would be encouraged to immigrate to Palestine if they had a clean, sanitary, and aesthetically pleasing “Hebrew urban centre” in which to live. Sixty Jewish families formed an association to achieve this goal, and in 1909 construction commenced. Tel Aviv’s population expanded quickly and grew from 550 residents in 1911 to 3,604 in 1920 and by 1921 had nearly quadrupled. Jews, however, still lived in Jaffa, accounting for more than a third of its 42,000 inhabitants that same year. The “confrontation between Jaffa and Tel Aviv,” according to the Middle Eastern historian Mark LeVine, “was a key theme in Arab literature of the period.” In short, Jaffa and neighboring Tel Aviv were a tinderbox waiting to be set alight.39

  Unlike the Nebi Musa disturbances, the precise circumstances that ignited the riots in Jaffa on May 1, 1921, are well known. A small group of Jewish communists defied a government ban and held a noisy May Day parade through the few streets of Tel Aviv calling for the creation of a “Soviet Palestine.” At some point, their procession collided with a larger, legally sanctioned demonstration organized by some Jewish socialists. A scuffle ensued, and the police intervened to disentangle the two groups by pushing the communists into an open space of sand dunes that separated Tel Aviv from Jaffa. As this otherwise minor and easily containable street clash among Jews unfolded, Arabs from Jaffa, armed with sticks, gathered to watch, before themselves deciding to join the melee. The police responded quickly and effectively, forming a cordon to separate the Arabs and the Jewish communists. Not content to go home, with their ardor for violence whetted, the Arab mob turned around and descended back into Jaffa, looting Jewish shops and assaulting Jewish shopkeepers and passersby. The rioters had ample targets.40