Anonymous Soldiers

by Bruce Hoffman

  The escalating rebellion had also laid bare the insufficient number of British police and military forces in Palestine. Following the 1929 riots, London had decided to permanently station two battalions of infantry and an RAF armored car squadron. This was eventually supplemented by an additional squadron as well as four more armored car sections. But in reality, the number of British troops available for internal security operations—when those deployed on static guard duties and involved in noncombat support and logistics tasks were subtracted—amounted to little more than a thousand men. The effective strength of the PPF was no better, and there were no funds to maintain any kind of proper forces in reserve. Government control over the countryside was therefore illusory at best. “The situation was … like the Wild West in the days when the west was wild and Indians might come rushing out of the wilder wild at any moment,” Brigadier H. J. Simson recalled. “In Palestine the Arabs play the part of Indian still.”35

  Some of these problems might have been substantially mitigated or avoided altogether had the effective police intelligence apparatus that Dowbiggin had envisioned for Palestine following the 1929 riots materialized. Unfortunately, despite the massive overhaul and reforms that he had recommended, the CID once again failed in its mission of providing timely and accurate intelligence that might have either better anticipated the rebellion or enabled the police to respond more effectively once it had begun. Accordingly, nearly a month had passed before Wauchope asked that reinforcements be dispatched to Palestine. Their impact was marginal. The high commissioner asked for more troops on May 22, and within two weeks the number of military forces in the country had doubled to approximately three thousand men. It was, however, too little and too late. As an army assessment astringently noted, “By then, the Arab part of Palestine was in incipient rebellion, bomb throwing ambushes, firing on military camps, incendiarism and cutting of telegraph line being general.”36

  June brought no respite to the spreading lawlessness as larger bands of fifty to seventy Arab marauders, led by their Qassamiyyun commanders, roamed the countryside, attacking at will. Additional reinforcements were rushed from Egypt so that the Palestine garrison was now four times larger than it had been just two months before. Military forces in Palestine now numbered nearly seven thousand men, yet the administration’s initial hesitancy and then its continued vacillation only fanned the flames of insurrection. On June 12, Wauchope was finally persuaded to lift the restrictions he had placed on offensive military action. He also agreed to allow the extraordinary powers previously granted to the government under the Palestine (Defence) Order in Council to be implemented. These gave the government the right to impose collective fines, institute curfews, detain people for an unspecified period of time without charge, censor the press, deport political undesirables, and seize and use buildings and road transport as needed. Later that month the Order in Council was cited to legally sanction the destruction of more than two hundred Arab homes and businesses in Jaffa’s labyrinthine Old City after it had been transformed into a rebel stronghold and no-go area for the security forces. British army sappers used hundreds of pounds of gelignite to cut wide swaths through formerly narrow alleyways. “Goodbye, goodbye, old Jaffa,” the headline in Al-Difa’ lamented. “The army has exploded you.” Nearly six thousand Arabs were made homeless and rendered destitute. But even these extreme measures proved ineffective. Moreover, within weeks the regulations under the Order in Council were no longer being enforced after the Higher Arab Committee had complained of their severity. Instead, new restrictions were placed on the military’s use of deadly force.37

  Meanwhile, the rebels’ targets broadened to include their fellow Arabs as well as Jews and British security forces. Old scores were settled and long-standing vendettas eagerly avenged. Security continued to deteriorate throughout August into September, even though there were now thirteen thousand troops in Palestine—the equivalent of more than an army division. Although Arab gangs had by then killed more than three hundred people (nearly two hundred of whom were their fellow Muslims) and wounded thirteen hundred others, no rebel brought before the Palestine courts had yet been sentenced to death. As Palestine slid deeper into anarchy, Wauchope finally accepted that the time for restraint had passed. On September 7 he authorized new security regulations. These measures in essence amounted to the invocation of martial law but without its actual declaration and full implementation. Their purpose was to serve notice on the Arabs that the security forces would no longer be restrained in their suppression of the uprising. Lest there be any doubt, Wauchope personally delivered this message to the Higher Arab Committee the following week.38

  The Higher Arab Committee was in a bind. The entire First Infantry Division had just been redeployed to Palestine, bringing the total number of troops now to some twenty thousand men and thus ensuring the newly arrived general officer commanding (GOC), Lieutenant General Sir John Dill, the resources he required to crush the rebels and restore order. Continuing the revolt thus risked total defeat. But the Arab leadership had boxed itself into a corner by repeatedly demanding that the government suspend Jewish immigration as a nonnegotiable precondition for ending the strike. Its options were further constrained by the Arabs’ dire economic circumstances. Five months of work disruption and enforced idleness had shattered Palestine’s economy, and with the citrus crop ready for harvest a critical window of opportunity for gainful employment and the recouping of lost wages would disappear if the committee did not act quickly. A timely, face-saving intervention materialized on October 11 in the form of an appeal from the rulers of Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Trans-Jordan, and Yemen calling on their Palestinian brothers to end the strike and “rely on the good intentions of our friend, Great Britain, who has declared that she will do justice.” The following day, the fighting stopped, the country returned to work, and the first phase of the Arab Rebellion ended.39

  No one, however, could derive much satisfaction or comfort from this respite. The Arabs had achieved little despite tremendous exertion and much suffering. Their only solace was that the rebel bands active in the hills remained intact. For the British, there was no pretending that this latest development represented any kind of triumph for the forces of law and order. Even though there were now twelve times as many British troops in Palestine as there had been at the rebellion’s start, Wauchope still refused to authorize either the stern measures or the active operations that would bring the unrest to heel once and for all. “The fact remains that Martial Law never was declared,” Dill complained. “Policy changed and instead of a policy of intensive measures a policy was pursued of helping the Higher Arab Committee to stop resistance to government unconditionally … An opportunity had, in fact, been missed of re-establishing British authority in the country.” Worse still, by brooking the Arab kings’ collective intervention, the British had allowed Palestine to become a genuinely pan-Arab issue, exciting the interest and ensuring the continued meddling and intervention of the surrounding countries in its internal affairs. Blame for this inevitably fell on Wauchope, whose persistent faith in Arab moderation and tireless conciliatory efforts were regarded by Whitehall as having squandered any immediate prospects of defeating the rebellion. Ormsby-Gore would later describe the high commissioner as “a dear little man, admirable while the going is good, but hardly the character to ride out a storm.” The British military establishment’s assessment of Wauchope’s performance was harsher. In a letter to his designated successor as GOC, the future field marshal and penultimate viceroy of India, Archibald Wavell, Dill described the high commissioner as someone who “loves greatly, administers with knowledge and imagination, but … does not rule.” Some junior officers were even more dismissive, deriding Wauchope as a “washout” and as “ga-ga”—slang for someone who has lost his mind through senility.40

  Like a deer in the headlights, the Yishuv, meanwhile, had no idea which way to jump. From the start, Weizmann had correctly grasped the existential threat that the Arab Reb
ellion posed to the Jewish national home. “On one side, the forces of destruction, the forces of the desert, have risen, and on the other stand firm the forces of civilization and building. It is the old war of the desert against civilization, but we will not be stopped,” he had declared on April 23, 1936. But other leading Zionists argued that such fears were not only exaggerated but counterproductive—ascribing to the Arabs an ideological cohesiveness and degree of coordination that did not exist. Berl Katznelson, a lifelong Zionist-socialist, founding father of the Labor Party, and the editor of the leading Hebrew-language daily newspaper Davar, for instance, dismissed any talk of an Arab “rebellion” as nonsense. Katznelson couldn’t discern any distinct nationalist movement orchestrating the disorders. “In all these terrorist manifestations,” he wrote, “one might find evidence of personal dedication to religious fanaticism and xenophobia, but we cannot discern anything else … Can this be described as nationalism? Let’s not believe it for a moment!” This view reflected that of the high commissioner and other British officials as well and indeed many in the Yishuv who were also inclined to downplay both the dimensions and the consequences of the rebellion.41

  Ben-Gurion, however, would have none of it. “There are comrades among us who see only one enemy, the government,” he responded. “In their opinion, there is no uprising or revolt by the Arabs … I have a hard time understanding the astonishing blindness of people like [them].” In a letter to the Labor Party Central Committee in August 1936, Ben-Gurion expressed his bafflement with what he regarded as a willful denial of the facts. “The Arabs fight with arms and strikes, terror and sabotage, mayhem and destruction of property … What more must they do to make their acts merit the name of rebellion and uprising?”42

  Despite the magnitude of this latest threat to the Jewish national home, Ben-Gurion remained firmly convinced that the mainstream Haganah’s long-standing policy of havlaga (restraint) must be adhered to without exception. His view was that the Arabs had discredited themselves and their cause by their resort to indiscriminate violence. This was a grave miscalculation, Ben-Gurion argued, that could be used to Zionism’s advantage—provided that the Yishuv resisted the temptation to retaliate and exact revenge on the Arabs. In a speech delivered in Jerusalem on April 19, Ben-Gurion made no bones about his utter contempt for, and complete rejection of, the anti-Arab violence that had followed the funeral of one of the Jewish victims of the attack on the Nablus–Tulkarm road three days earlier. “What happened in Tel Aviv,” he declared, “beating up shoe-shine boys, breaking into a closed Arab shop, is a violation of that which is holy … I understand and empathize with all the bitterness voiced here … but owing to the very gravity of the situation we must maintain clarity of thought as well as the moral and political principles which guide Zionism and the Yishuv … If attacked we must not exceed the bounds of self-defense.”43

  The “moral and political principles” Ben-Gurion cited were embodied in the code of conduct that attended the Haganah’s policy of havlaga called tohar ha-neshek (purity of arms). This encapsulated the moral conviction that the Haganah’s weapons could be kept “pure” if used for defensive purposes only. In this manner, the Yishuv sought to place its use of force on a higher moral plane than the Arabs’—and, not incidentally, also favorably impress the British. Ben-Gurion made precisely this point to Wauchope in a letter he co-wrote with Moshe Shertok, the head of the Jewish Agency’s political department. It was not fear or weakness that restrained the Yishuv from striking back at the Arabs, they explained, but “solely … a deep moral persuasion.”44

  To the men and women of the Haganah-Bet these debates were nothing more than a rehashing of the fundamental cleavage of opinion that had led to the group’s estrangement from the Haganah in the first place. For them, concepts such as havlaga and tohar ha-neshek had been rendered moot by this new, profound threat to the Jewish national home. Accordingly, they pressed Jabotinsky and Tehomi for permission to retaliate against the Arabs on a more organized and systematic scale. Incidents such as the bomb thrown by Arab terrorists onto the playground of a Jewish school in Jaffa that injured seven children doubtless fed their demands. The fact that Arab shooting at Jewish neighborhoods from the Jaffa–Jerusalem train ceased following a Haganah-Bet reprisal attack that killed one Arab passenger and wounded five others also intensified the militants’ demands for more aggressive operations. Frustrated by Tehomi’s refusal to countenance retaliation, many in the Haganah-Bet began to ask why a separate fighting force was needed if it was going to blindly follow mainstream Haganah policies. Indeed, there had already been a string of unsanctioned reprisal operations during which Haganah-Bet fighters had killed another three Arabs and injured nine more.45

  But both Jabotinsky and Tehomi remained resolutely opposed to any deviation from the policy of havlaga. For more than a decade Jabotinsky had pinned his faith and hopes on establishing an officially sanctioned, aboveground Jewish defense force. The Arab Rebellion, he believed, would finally persuade the British to realize his dream. Accordingly, Jabotinsky argued that taking the fight to the Arabs now risked undermining any opportunity to achieve lasting Anglo-Zionist military cooperation. It was left to Tehomi to ensure that the Haganah-Bet complied with this edict. To that end, special Haganah-Bet “military tribunals” were convened to punish any breaches of discipline.46

  Tehomi’s commitment to havlaga, however, went well beyond the narrow considerations that motivated Jabotinsky. At this time of grave national crisis, the Haganah-Bet commander had actually come to doubt the entire rationale behind the existence of two separate Jewish paramilitary forces performing the same function. Tehomi was convinced that their continued separation not only was illogical but created a dangerously enervating duplication of effort when total national unity was required. The Haganah-Bet leader and some of his commanders therefore decided to approach the Haganah and the Jewish Agency to discuss merging the two groups under a single command. On August 6, 1936, they drafted a unification agreement that provided for the amalgamation of the Haganah-Bet into the Haganah and for the Haganah-Bet’s “unconditional acceptance” of Jewish Agency authority and subservience to a single commander that the Jewish Agency Executive would appoint. The document further stipulated that Haganah-Bet members who either refused to comply with the merger or failed to abide by its terms would be deemed “criminals” and dealt with accordingly.47

  None of this was acceptable to Jabotinsky. Apart from the fact that Tehomi had not consulted him, the Revisionist Zionist leader remained adamant that a unified Jewish self-defense force must represent the Yishuv’s entire political spectrum and not be dominated by, or exclusively at the command of, one party—for example, the Labor Zionists. But Jabotinsky was also conflicted by his fervent belief in the need for unity at this time of profound threat and his belief that only Britain could provide the training and assistance required to transform their rudimentary paramilitary organizations into the bona fide Jewish military force he had long envisioned. His famous treatise, commanding Jewish youths to “learn to shoot” as they had once learned their ABCs, reflected Jabotinsky’s view that this fundamental requirement was not the provenance of one political party or another but a national imperative. “Of all the necessities of national rebirth,” he wrote, “shooting is the most important … We are forced to learn to shoot and it is futile to argue against the compulsion of a historical reality.”48

  A meeting was held between Tehomi and Jabotinsky in Vienna that failed to resolve their differences. They met again in December 1936 in Paris, where, after a marathon six-hour session, Tehomi obtained Jabotinsky’s approval to continue the negotiations to merge the two Haganahs. Jabotinsky, however, insisted that any reconstituted body be truly pluralistic and genuinely representative of “a united Zion and united Yishuv.” He remained concerned that unification should not entail complete subordination to the Jewish Agency. Jabotinsky therefore obtained from Tehomi a signed statement acknowledging that the Haganah-Bet co
mmander served at the pleasure of the president of the Revisionist Party and was therefore beholden to follow Jabotinsky’s guidance and instructions.49

  Tehomi returned to Palestine disconsolate. Although he admittedly had Jabotinsky’s permission to press ahead with the negotiations for merger, he had in fact been given little latitude and no real authority. Of more immediate consequence, however, was the problem of the Haganah-Bet militants who were both unwavering in their disdain for havlaga and opposed to any discussion of unification. As a precaution, Tehomi ordered that eleven local commanders with access to Haganah-Bet armories be reassigned to other duties. He was especially concerned about the loyalty of the Jerusalem detachment’s commander—a twenty-six-year-old former yeshiva student and Hebrew University dropout named David Raziel, who six years earlier had followed Tehomi when he himself had left the Haganah to found the Haganah-Bet.50

  CHAPTER 4

  Terror Against Terror

  On November 11, 1936, the Royal (Peel) Commission arrived in Palestine. The idea behind this latest august governmental body charged with divining a lasting political solution for the country had been Wauchope’s. As the general strike and attendant unrest spread throughout the country, the high commissioner had been desperate to find some way to assuage Arab discontent. Because the Higher Arab Committee refused to send a delegation to London to discuss their grievances, Wauchope came up with the idea of a royal commission to break the impasse. But the Higher Arab Committee had rejected even this gesture and refused to call off the strike until all Jewish immigration to Palestine stopped. Lacking any viable alternative to suppressing the rebellion except through the continued application of military force—which London now feared would adversely impact Anglo-Arab relations across the region—the government of Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin warmly embraced Wauchope’s proposal. The Royal Commission’s terms of reference were quickly agreed to, and Lord Peel, a well-known Tory and past secretary of state for India, was appointed chairman. The commission was directed to ascertain the reasons behind the violence that had erupted in April 1936; determine whether Britain was properly fulfilling its obligations to both Arabs and Jews under the terms of the mandate; assess whether either community had legitimate grievances about how the mandate had been or was being implemented; and, in the event these grievances were justified, “make recommendations for their removal and for the prevention of their recurrence.”1