Anonymous Soldiers

by Bruce Hoffman

  The Arab police once again joined the rioters or simply abandoned their posts. One senior Arab officer decided that the start of violence was an opportune moment to return home for lunch and clean his belt of some blood that had spattered it. Just as the Old City of Jerusalem’s steep, narrow, and twisting alleyways had abetted the violence there the previous year, Jaffa’s labyrinthine Old Town was well suited to sudden acts of anonymous violence and uncontrolled mayhem. Familiarity with the alleys and knowledge of rooftops afforded the miscreants both easy access to victims and a ready means of escape. The mob thus set upon a building where newly arrived Jewish immigrants were temporarily housed, raping and butchering its residents. The bloodshed continued throughout the day, as some Jews retaliated, attacking Arab targets. With nightfall, the disorders abated, leaving a grim toll of death and destruction. Twenty-seven Jews and three Arabs lay dead, and more than a hundred Jews and thirty-four Arabs were wounded.41

  The new day brought renewed violence. Rioting spread from Jaffa to the suburb of Abu Kabir, where six more Jews were killed, and thence to the surrounding countryside. Both the Palestine government and the Haganah were stunned by the outbreaks and caught equally unprepared. Only days earlier, the Haganah had actually removed weapons from its Jaffa armory to protect the exposed Jewish settlements in the Galilee. Similarly, all the government’s preparations and precautions had been focused on Jerusalem, where trouble had always previously flared. Not until May 3 did Samuel declare martial law. Troops were then rushed to Jaffa to restore order, and the Arab police there were disarmed. In a belated show of force, Royal Navy destroyers from the Suez Canal Zone were dispatched to Jaffa and Haifa. But after three days of carnage, events had gone too far to contain the bloodlust elsewhere. Some twenty-five thousand Muslim pilgrims had gathered in nearby Ramle for a festival at the tomb of Nebi Saleh, a seventh-century companion of the Prophet Muhammad. The following day they attacked the Jewish towns of Petah Tiqva, Rehovot, Hadera, and Kfar Saba, farther north. A lone RAF plane bombed and strafed the marauding Bedouin at Petah Tiqva. British military and police reinforcements together with Jewish settlers repulsed the remaining attacks. On May 7 the violence finally ended. A total of forty-seven Jews had been killed and 146 injured. Arab casualties were forty-eight dead and 73 wounded.42

  Samuel’s policy of studied impartiality, based on the hope that Palestine’s Arabs would reconcile themselves to the concept of a Jewish national home in their country, was yet another victim of the violence. Not for the first time, a high commissioner had learned that goodwill and the best of intentions were completely inadequate in the face of sectarianism and atavistic fears of dispossession. Characteristically, his inclination was to conciliate rather than punish. The mob’s singling out of the immigrant hostel as a target and the unmitigated brutality of the assault upon it convinced Samuel and his advisers that the new immigrants were the crux of the problem. As Keith-Roach later reflected, the Arabs resented and disliked the “ ‘new’ Jews [who] were very different from the ‘old’ ones who had lived quiet lives” and were less politically active and aggressive, less boisterous, and indeed less numerous. Samuel, accordingly, announced a temporary suspension of Jewish immigration. The Yishuv denounced it as craven capitulation both to violence and to the threat of further violence. The colonial secretary, Winston Churchill, though publicly supportive, privately thought it spineless and mistaken. The press in London were equally condemnatory. “The stoppage of Jewish immigration into Palestine after the Jaffa riots is doubtless a temporary measure, but its wisdom is open to serious doubt,” an editorial in The Times opined. Even the Arabs were not sated. Hailing the decision as a victory, they nonetheless continued to boycott Jewish shops in Jaffa. Arab boatmen also refused to bring ashore any travelers from ships docked in the harbor until a doctor examined and certified them not to be Jewish.43

  Undeterred by either criticism or calumny, Samuel persisted in a dual-track strategy designed, on the one hand, to mollify Arab discontent and, on the other, to strengthen the government’s powers to suppress lawlessness and deal more firmly with troublemakers. As subsequent events would show, the latter track proved the more successful of the two. Enacted in July, the Ordinance for the Prevention of Crime empowered the high commissioner to impose collective fines, or decree some other form of collective punishment, on groups of people or entire villages adjudged guilty of participating in, or abetting, civil disorder.44

  With respect to the first track, however, Samuel’s good intentions went tragically awry. As a result of the violence, the high commissioner decided to confirm the appointment of Haj Amin al-Husseini as mufti (Islamic religious leader) of Jerusalem and president of the Supreme Muslim Council. The council was the Muslim administrative entity responsible for community affairs that the Palestine government itself had created as the Arab counterpart to the Zionist Organization to represent Muslim interests much as the Zionist Organization represented the Yishuv’s. The rationale behind putting a known rabble-rouser, one of the two Arab leaders convicted in absentia of fomenting the 1920 Nebi Musa disturbances, in these two key posts is alone questionable. Indeed, according to Keith-Roach, al-Husseini’s “sole qualifications for the post were the pretensions of his family plus shrewd opportunism.” But as Samuel’s mostly laudatory biographer Bernard Wasserstein notes,

  Samuel could not, of course, foresee the Mufti’s later role as the leader of the Palestine Arab revolt between 1936 to 1939, as organizer of an anti-British coup in Iraq in 1941, as broadcaster for the Nazis from Berlin, and as a Pied Piper who led his people into defeat, exile, and misery … Samuel never intended that the Mufti should become the single most powerful figure in Arab Palestine. That aggrandizement occurred gradually, and the plenitude of the Mufti’s power became visible only after Samuel’s departure from Palestine. Nevertheless, Husseini’s earlier record in the 1920 riots might have given Samuel pause for thought.45

  The appointment of the twenty-six-year-old al-Husseini had been championed by Storrs and his adviser on Arab affairs, Ernest Richmond, who would later resign over what he claimed was the administration’s partiality toward the Jews. Storrs doubtless saw advantage in balancing the recent election of a member of the rival Nashashibi family as Jerusalem’s mayor with an al-Husseini as mufti—these being among Arab Palestine’s leading families. Al-Husseini certainly had the family pedigree for such an appointment: his grandfather, father, and elder brother had occupied the same post under the Turks. He also had a pedigree for challenging Zionism. His father had emerged as a vehement critic of Jewish immigration while serving as mufti at the end of the nineteenth century, arguing that all Jews who had arrived after 1891 should be pressed to leave of their own volition or face deportation. Further, in addition to his religious studies as a student at Cairo’s prestigious al-Azhar University in 1912, the younger al-Husseini had organized a Palestinian student society to protest Zionism. In a meeting with Samuel arranged by Storrs, al-Husseini had promised the high commissioner that he would use his family’s influence to ensure that the 1921 Nebi Musa festival remained peaceful. The fact that the festival did pass without incident likely also weighed favorably in Samuel’s decision. Here, too, Samuel appears to have been misled by the articulate and persuasive al-Husseini. A distinguished Israeli historian of the Palestinian nationalist movement, Yehoshua Porath, subsequently unearthed evidence that although al-Husseini might have kept his word so far as Jerusalem was concerned, he was directly connected to the 1921 Jaffa disturbances.46

  In a final sop to the Arabs, on June 3, in honor of the King’s Birthday, the high commissioner sought to clarify the “unhappy misunderstanding” contained in the Balfour Declaration regarding British support for the establishment of a Jewish national home in Palestine. According to Samuel, this had been intended to suggest not that all Jews could immigrate to Palestine but that “some among them, within the limits that are fixed by the numbers and interests of the present population, should come to Palestine in orde
r to help by their resources and efforts to develop the country, to the advantage of all its inhabitants.” In practice, this meant that henceforth the number of Jewish immigrants allowed into Palestine would be determined on the basis of the contribution they would make to the country’s economy. Samuel’s formula was subsequently codified as policy in the white paper that the government issued on June 3, 1922.47

  Named after the colonial secretary, the “Churchill White Paper” incorporated Samuel’s ideas that in fact derived from a Colonial Office memorandum drafted nine months earlier that the high commissioner had mostly reframed and fleshed out. The white paper, however, was thus a critical restatement of British policy for Palestine. It was released only weeks after Churchill had defeated a House of Commons motion that sought to completely repudiate the mandate’s terms and, as such, reverse the commitment contained in the Balfour Declaration. The new policy statement reaffirmed Britain’s commitment to the establishment of a Jewish national home in Palestine and indeed the Jews’ historical connection to the land. However, it also specifically upheld, and clearly highlighted the salience of, Arab rights in Palestine, stating that the government did not intend that the Jewish home should comprise the entire country. But even these concessions masquerading as clarifications failed to satisfy the Arabs. The Fifth Palestine Arab Congress, held in Nablus the following month, rejected the white paper in its entirety. The Jews, relieved that the Balfour commitment had not been completely jettisoned, acceded to the new policy—albeit with some privately voiced reservations.48

  On July 22, 1922, the League of Nations formally granted the mandate for Palestine to Britain. The Arabs protested the mandate’s establishment on the grounds that it violated not only the pledges of independence they had received from Britain in the 1915–16 McMahon-Hussein correspondence but also Article 22 of the League of Nations Covenant promising self-determination to “certain communities formerly belonging to the Turkish Empire.” They particularly objected to the terms of Articles 2 and 6, which committed Britain to both establishing the Jewish national home in Palestine and facilitating Jewish immigration and land purchase.49

  Worse still, Samuel had intended that the new policy not be seen either as blaming the victim by punishing the Yishuv for provoking Arab unrest or as conveying the impression to the Arabs that government policy could be influenced by violence. Instead, he hoped that Arab anxieties might be calmed without seriously harming Jewish immigration. Each community, however, drew its own conclusions. For the Yishuv, it was the beginning of the end of Britain’s commitment to the Balfour Declaration. Even while disagreement continued over exactly how the Yishuv’s defenses should be organized, a consensus was growing that the Jews could no longer rely completely on the British to protect them. The Haganah therefore now commenced in earnest the secret importation of arms to Palestine. A fund for this purpose was organized in London by Moshe Shertok (who later Hebraized his name to Sharett), Israel’s first foreign minister and second prime minister, and David Hacohen, who was later elected to Israel’s Knesset (parliament). For Palestine’s Arabs, the lesson was equally clear. Whatever doubts they might previously have had were erased. The British government, they were now convinced, could indeed be threatened and coerced by violence into granting further political concessions.50

  CHAPTER 2

  The Seeds of Terror

  For the next eight years, violent Arab protest ceased. There had been a flare-up in Jerusalem on November 2, 1921—the Balfour Declaration’s fourth anniversary—when rioting erupted. But, unlike with previous incidents, the police were more effective, and the violence subsided. Even so, four Jews and an Arab died. The Ordinance for the Prevention of Crime—which embodied the military-oriented model of law enforcement derived from Britain’s recent experiences in Ireland—coupled with improved policing, partly accounts for this development. The influx of experienced police officers from the disbanded Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC), and its notorious auxiliary force known as the Black and Tans, greatly strengthened the embryonic Palestine Gendarmerie. Indeed, almost the entire British section of the police consisted of former RIC personnel. In 1926, the Palestine Gendarmerie was reorganized and formally reconstituted as the Palestine Police Force (PPF). The emergence of a professional police force, staffed by men with extensive experience in controlling civil disorder, prompted London to reduce the military presence in Palestine to just one RAF squadron and two companies of armored cars.1

  But the more significant factor accounting for the country’s placidity was the traditional Arab elite’s temporary reassertion of its control over the younger and more violent radicals who were inexorably transforming the Palestinian nationalist movement. Following the government’s tough crackdown on Arab troublemakers in the wake of the 1921 riots, the elder leadership’s counsels of patience and faith in negotiation prevailed over the movement—at least for the time being.2

  These years were arguably the most tranquil the mandate would know. A “period of appeasement and development during which it seemed legitimate to hope that the two communities would settle down side by side” was how a 1946 analysis described it. Within months of the riots, for example, Tel Aviv’s mayor, Meir Dizengoff, had expressed those same sentiments. “It cannot be denied that a kind of state of war exists between the Jews and our Arab neighbors,” he accepted, “but it is, however, a peaceful war, a competition between different ideas and conceptions [and] between different kinds of energy and manners of life and work.”3

  Such expressions of optimism were seemingly validated by the 1927 countrywide municipal elections, which passed without incident, thus giving rise to hopes that an elected parliament representing all Palestine’s peoples might yet be established. The “illusion that all was going well” in Palestine was also sustained by the unprecedented investment, population growth, building construction, and infrastructure development that occurred throughout the first decade of British rule. Nowhere was this more obvious than in the country’s three major metropolitan centers: Jerusalem, Jaffa–Tel Aviv, and Haifa.4

  Jerusalem was the heart of the British enterprise in Palestine. Nearly a century before, in 1839, Britain had been the first Western state to establish a consulate in the holy city, thus beginning a Victorian-era obsession with both Jerusalem and the Holy Land. Societies like the Palestine Exploration Fund (PEF) were established to champion British religious and archaeological interests. The PEF’s activities often overlapped with Britain’s less ethereal geostrategic, military, and imperial interests in the Holy Land, and it thus became a “front for intelligence work” immediately before World War I. The Wilderness of Zin Survey, an archaeological project that a young T. E. Lawrence helped undertake between 1912 and 1914, was, according to one historian, “nothing but a cover” for mapping work done by British military intelligence. The intense interest in the sacred sites aroused by biblical study inevitably led to a concomitant determination to protect and preserve the Old City’s history and beauty.5

  A town planning ordinance provided both for the restoration and renovation of the Old City and its holy properties and for the establishment in the new city of industrial, commercial, and residential zones as well as a “green belt” that encircled Jerusalem and preserved its stunning natural beauty. A modern road network was built, an electric power system was created, street lighting was installed, public gardens were laid out, and for the first time in centuries there was a clean and reliable water supply.6

  In 1926 construction began on one of the city’s most spectacular structures: the YMCA building with its soaring phallic tower. The noted American architect Loomis Harmon, who was simultaneously drawing the plans for New York City’s Empire State Building, had designed it. Five years later another Jerusalem architectural icon opened across the street, which was then called Julian’s Way and is now known as King David Street: the grandly imposing and luxurious King David Hotel. Office buildings, factories, shops, religious institutions, and sports facilities as well
as houses and military installations were all products of the city’s sudden construction boom. The massive Allenby Barracks complex in south Jerusalem, on the Hebron Road, was Jerusalem’s largest military facility, and its garrison underpinned the local economy. Finally, some fifty new neighborhoods—two-thirds of them Jewish—were built.7

  If Jerusalem was the heart of the British enterprise in Palestine, Tel Aviv was the central nervous system of the Jewish one. Described by one contemporary visitor as “the pulse beat of the entire land,” by 1930 Tel Aviv consumed 80 percent of capital invested in Palestine and accounted for 60 percent of all Jewish industry and 70 percent of Jewish productivity. Nearly two-thirds of Jews employed in Palestine worked in Tel Aviv. In his farewell speech upon stepping down as high commissioner in 1925, Samuel paid homage to Tel Aviv’s iconic status, describing it as “Palestine’s city of wonders. One may compare it with the miraculous cities of the tales of the Arabian Nights, which blossom overnight in the desert.” The economic depression that affected Palestine between 1925 and 1928 only seriously impacted Tel Aviv for one year—1926. By that time, the city’s municipal budget had already overtaken Jaffa’s and was the country’s largest. In 1929, one visitor accurately summed up Tel Aviv as that “dream city washed ashore right near Jaffa.”8

  Haifa was different. Like Jerusalem, it was a place where Muslims, Christians, and Jews lived. But unlike that city, Haifa had no shrines of any significance associated with Islam, Christianity, or Judaism. People from each of those communities were thus attracted to the city (in nearly equal proportions, according to the 1928 census) for material, rather than spiritual, or even historical, reasons. Its thriving deepwater harbor, relatively temperate climate, and stunning, mountainous beauty proved a sufficient draw to Arabs, Jews, and Britons alike. Employment opportunities abounded, not only at the port, but with the civil service at the rail yards and surrounding workshops. The building of the oil pipeline from Kirkuk, Iraq, which terminated at Haifa, begun in 1932 and completed two years later, created still more jobs. Not surprisingly perhaps, Haifa’s population underwent a fivefold expansion from 1918 to 1939 (eighteen thousand people to more than a hundred thousand). Where Jews were only a quarter of the population in 1922, nine years later they were a third. New Jewish neighborhoods, accordingly, multiplied between 1920 and 1923 on Mount Carmel and along the shoreline below. New Arab neighborhoods, mostly populated by Christians, were also established in the same areas. For the British, however, Haifa was valued most for geostrategic purposes. It was the first or last port of call linking the Mediterranean Sea by land to Britain’s important imperial and trade interests in Trans-Jordan, Iraq, Iran, and India. Haifa’s excellent naval facilities and proximity to Alexandria and the Suez Canal also gave the Royal Navy additional strategic depth from which to defend the vital waterway to the empire’s outposts farther afield in Africa, South Asia, and the Far East.9