Anonymous Soldiers

by Bruce Hoffman

  But unlike the Arab Rebellion, the Jewish revolt was predominantly urban. It was fought in the setting that best provided the terrorist with means of concealment and escape. In addition, the Jewish terrorists were organized into small, conspiratorial cells that buried themselves within the surrounding community. They did not fight en masse or in open spaces, but functioned in stealth, in small numbers, and in conditions where guile counted more than firepower. Indistinguishable from the ordinary, law-abiding citizen, these men and women remained anonymous and undetectable in the absence of informants or intelligence from agents who had been able to penetrate the groups, and they were hence beyond the reach of the army and the police. Moreover, only a small portion of the Yishuv actually belonged to or actively supported the Irgun or Lehi. Although a far larger number were involved in Haganah activities, actual membership in that organization was not universal. This meant that punishing Jewish communities either monetarily or with artillery or air bombardment was problematic. Only once was a Jewish settlement or neighborhood penalized: the government had imposed a £500 fine on Givat Shaul the previous year for having served as a staging area and escape venue in Lehi’s attempted assassination of MacMichael. Indeed, despite the granting of the authorization for aerial bombardment, no Jewish settlement or neighborhood was ever bombed or strafed.

  In addition to these key differences, the Arab Rebellion was a particularly poor model on which to base a strategy given that it had never actually been militarily defeated. Rather, communal exhaustion brought on by three years of warfare, unrelenting strikes, and internecine bloodletting, coupled with the dramatic reversal of British policy contained in the 1939 white paper, accounted for the insurrection’s collapse. Regardless, Britain’s most senior military commanders were intent on applying an anachronistic inheritance from a previous conflict to the present one. The Colonial Office appears to have been the only government entity attempting to make any distinction between the Arab Rebellion and the Jewish revolt and draw the appropriate lessons.20

  At this critical juncture in Britain’s rule of Palestine, with Anglo-Zionist relations having reached a nadir, on November 21 the new high commissioner, General Sir Alan Cunningham, arrived in Palestine. This was the first civilian job for the fifty-eight-year-old bachelor, a career soldier. In 1941, he had been among Britain’s most celebrated wartime generals. Taking command of the East African army, Cunningham led seventy-seven thousand Commonwealth troops in a relentless advance from Kenya to Ethiopia. In less than ninety days he had achieved the impossible: vanquishing an enemy force four times larger; restoring the deposed Ethiopian emperor, Haile Selassie, to his throne; and destroying Italy’s African colonial ambitions. Lauded for his military brilliance by a nation desperate for victory after the previous year’s successive reversals in Norway and France, Cunningham was catapulted into command of the legendary Eighth Army in the Western Desert in August 1941.21

  Cunningham, however, was an artillery officer who knew nothing of armored fighting, much less desert warfare. Moreover, he had been ordered to achieve a decisive victory in an impossibly unrealistic, compressed time frame. Arrayed against German and Italian forces commanded by Lieutenant General Erwin Rommel, Cunningham committed a series of tactical blunders that threatened to turn imminent victory into abject defeat, and he was removed from command. He returned to Britain depressed and disconsolate. Churchill was adamant that he never again be employed as a soldier and threatened to make a public example of Cunningham’s alleged loss of nerve and lack of initiative—comparing him to the hapless admiral John Byng, who was shot by firing squad in 1757 for failing “to do his utmost” to engage the enemy. Only the repeated intercession of Cunningham’s influential friend General Alan Brooke, who had recently become CIGS, rescued his military career, although Cunningham thereafter occupied a succession of unimportant command positions in Northern Ireland and England.22

  Palestine thus provided Cunningham with a chance to reclaim a shattered career. Although he hated being out of uniform, like Gort, Cunningham did not dwell on his misfortune. Thomas Scrivenor, the Palestine government’s principal assistant secretary, lived in Government House with Cunningham for five months and recalled the high commissioner as “charming … a delightful host and a very nice man.” Ivan Lloyd Phillips, the district commissioner for Gaza and Beersheba, similarly found Cunningham a “pleasant rational individual … essentially honest, straightforward and direct; an English country gentleman.”23

  “It has always been said that the soldiers were by far the most successful of the British rulers of Palestine,” wrote Professor Edward Ullendorff, who was a student at Hebrew University before the war and briefly afterward a junior civil servant in the Palestine government. This was exactly The Palestine Post’s reaction. “It is noteworthy,” an editorial comment read, “that the Governors who have left behind the kindest memories, and taken with them the greatest measure of goodwill have all been professional soldiers.” They were certainly the most popular with the Yishuv, and Cunningham was no exception. Ben-Gurion described Cunningham as “courteous and friendly”—if somewhat out of his depth. The Jewish community was thus generally pleased by the appointment. “Good—that means fairness and firmness,” a shopkeeper told the London Times’s Palestine correspondent in a comment taken to reflect the prevailing sentiment. In his inaugural address to the country, Cunningham pledged to work impartially with all sides to achieve a just and lasting peace. “I am therefore as certain as I stand here that unless in the future we can cooperate, the one with the other, then this world is doomed indeed,” he said. “I have come here with no preconceived ideas, no sense of partisanship … [and] I will never forget that those problems which are presented to me are human problems and ones to be dealt with in human sympathy and understanding.” True to his word, Cunningham was lauded by the prominent American attorney and member of the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry, Bartley Crum, as “one of the few British officials I met in whom I found a sympathetic understanding of both the Arab and Jewish positions.”24

  These hopeful words of conciliation notwithstanding, the enormity of the task before Cunningham must have seemed overwhelming. Only hours earlier, the curfew imposed on Tel Aviv had been lifted, and the last airborne troops had returned to their barracks. The goodwill and cheering crowds that greeted the new high commissioner along the route he traveled from Lydda Airport to his residence at Government House barely concealed the tensions permeating the country. “Appreciate my job at moment is to keep things as quiet as possible to let [the Anglo-American] Committee get to work,” Cunningham wrote to Bevin shortly after his arrival. “But lid may blow off. Situation seems to have got past swaying by logic … [I]s it the Government’s policy,” the high commissioner asked, “to clean up the situation even if [it] means much bloodshed? i.e., a major military operation?” “If necessary yes” was the foreign secretary’s laconic reply.25

  It is significant that the high commissioner, who in fact reported to the colonial secretary, nonetheless took his instructions from Bevin as well. From the beginning, Cunningham thus found himself in an impossible situation: charged with fulfilling the dictates of two masters and perennially having to navigate between foreign policy priorities and internal governance exigencies. As Ben-Gurion later observed, “Cunningham must often have felt like a fireman sent to quell a blaze, standing with hose in hand while the stop-cock was being operated by the commander back at headquarters; and what the commander was sending through the pipe was not water but petrol.” By “commander,” Ben-Gurion meant Bevin.26

  Cunningham hardly had time to settle in before he was presented with his first crisis less than thirty-six hours after his arrival. Under cover of darkness on November 22, a Greek schooner, the SS Demetrius (rechristened the Berl Katznelson in memory of a recently deceased Labor Zionist leader), lay at anchor off an empty stretch of beach about twelve miles north of Tel Aviv. On board were more than two hundred European refugees who had been transp
orted from Europe by the Haganah as part of its clandestine immigration operation, Bricha (escape or flight). Two rowboats manned by Palmach fighters were methodically bringing the penultimate group of illegal immigrants ashore when a Royal Navy destroyer appeared. A boarding party arrested the remaining twenty refugees, who were transferred to the internment camp at Athlit, as well as the Palmach oarsmen, who were sent to the prison at Latrun. This was the government’s first successful seizure of a ship illegally transporting Jewish survivors. The Haganah decided to retaliate by implementing an existing plan to destroy the lighthouses in the Coast Guard stations at Givat Olga and Sidna Ali—the two posts closest to the spot where the Demetrius was boarded. Two nights later, units of the Palmach’s Fourth Battalion blew up both facilities. Fourteen police were wounded.27

  The next morning, police tracker dogs picked up the trail that the raiders had used to attack the Givat Olga station and followed it to two nearby Jewish settlements. The officer in charge was Raymond Cafferata, the same police superintendent who two years before had overseen the raid at Ramat Ha-Kovesh and had been present in Hebron during the 1929 riots. He ordered the mukhtar (village head) at Givat Hayim to assemble the male inhabitants so that identification checks could be conducted. The mukhtar refused as settlers armed with sticks gathered menacingly at the front gates, forcing the police to withdraw. A siren was sounded inside the compound that could be heard as far away as the city of Netanya, some six miles down the coast. It was a prearranged signal to summon help from surrounding communities. Workers immediately commandeered city buses, instructing the drivers to head straight for Givat Hayim. A roadblock manned by paratroopers stopped them, but trucks coming from different directions were able to cut across the fields and reach the settlement. Additional police and paratroop units now also arrived and by nightfall had cordoned off the area.28

  At daybreak police again attempted to enter Givat Hayim and were once more repulsed. Several baton charges failed to disperse the crowd, which fought back with bricks and clubs. Troops in full battle gear, backed by tanks, were now ordered into the compound. Just as a semblance of calm was returning, a mob of some five hundred people, armed with all manner of clubs and cudgels, was spotted advancing in a line about five hundred yards across toward the settlement. They were residents of Hadera, Pardess Hannah Karkur, and Ein Hahoresh who had come to join the settlers. The paratroopers quickly took up positions to block their path. According to Hall’s statement in the House of Commons, the soldiers came under automatic weapons and rifle fire—a claim vigorously denied in a statement issued by the Vaad Le’umi. Only then had the unit’s commander given the order to open fire. Five Jews were killed and more than fifty wounded before the mob dispersed and order could be restored.29

  Events at Rishpon and Shefayim followed a similar pattern. In addition to multiple baton charges, the police had to use tear gas and the soldiers their rifle butts and bayonets to quell rioting in both locations. After some three thousand people from the surrounding area tried to break the cordon around Rishpon manned by First Infantry troops, RAF Spitfire fighter planes were called in to swoop down low and scatter the crowd. By the time the disturbances finally ended, eleven battalions of troops—approximately eleven thousand men—had been deployed, in addition to the quick-reaction Police Mobile Force and regular uniformed officers. Eight Jews lay dead, seventy-five had suffered injuries of various kinds, and nearly four hundred had been detained for questioning.30

  The country’s major Jewish city and the heartland of its agricultural belt had now been rocked by violence within two weeks of each other. Each had necessitated massive military interventions before order could be restored, thus illustrating both the depth of popular despair and the Yishuv’s intention to forcibly resist any policy line that did not accord with Zionist demands. The British military and the Zionist leadership respectively drew their own lessons. For the military, it was clear that the response to the searches was well planned and well executed: the product of a disciplined organization with formidable command-and-control capabilities. Henceforth, the manpower requirements for security operations that only a few weeks earlier would have been regarded as routine would have to be adjusted significantly upward.31

  For Ben-Gurion, the lesson was as profound as it was depressing. To his mind, the heavy-handed military response was an unmistakable signal that the Foreign Office’s entrenched anti-Zionism had triumphed over the pro-Zionist sensibilities of the British Labour Party. There was little doubt that more serious confrontations would follow. But for the moment Ben-Gurion remained unwilling to precipitate or authorize that clash, rejecting a Palmach plan to ambush British forces returning from search operations.32

  British intelligence thus correctly interpreted these developments as defensive in nature and limited to facilitating illegal immigration. The DSO’s analysis was also correct in dismissing the likelihood of any outright revolt involving both the Haganah and the Palmach. Although the police took the same position, army intelligence was more equivocal. Both the Irish War of Independence and the Arab Rebellion, its analysts argued, had established precedents of how armed struggle had changed British policy—which now figured prominently in the Yishuv’s calculations.33

  Palestine’s civilian administrators were clearly even more pessimistic. Two weeks earlier, the Executive Council, on which all the country’s most senior colonial administrators sat, had authorized the issuance of firearms to its members as well as to all district commissioners, assistant district commissioners, and other senior officers “considered to be in particular danger of attack.” And within days of the dissemination of the above intelligence assessment, these same officials had presented Cunningham with a proposal to impose martial law over the entire country. The high commissioner was genuinely perplexed. The army had not requested such authority, he explained to Shaw, nor had the GOC, Lieutenant General John D’Arcy, expressed any particular concerns. For the moment at least, he saw no reason for so extreme and drastic a measure that would have placed Palestine under complete military control and rendered continued civilian governance irrelevant.34

  But Cunningham was under no illusion about the volatility of the current situation. Ten days earlier, the Irgun had raided the Ras al-Ain RAF base and made off with two truckloads of armaments, including forty machine guns and two cases of hand grenades. “Jewish leaders are intransigent and intractable,” he told Hall on December 4. Nearly half the Yishuv, moreover, is “definitely desirous of offensive armed action against us no matter how foolish or suicidal this policy may seem to be.” Appeals to reason had gone nowhere, the high commissioner continued, because the entire Yishuv was in “a highly emotional and hysterical state.” Cunningham was still hopeful that an outright confrontation could be avoided, but he believed that the best means to achieve this was “by influencing world opinion rather than by anything we can do here.” Specifically, he thought that an aggressive public relations campaign needed to be undertaken in America to counter the increasing stridency of Zionist propaganda efforts there. Although Halifax, the ambassador in Washington, was skeptical, senior MI5 officials in London jumped at the opportunity. In addition to tapping the phone lines and intercepting all mail to and from the Jewish Agency’s London, Jerusalem, and New York offices, they received permission to include its Washington, D.C., facility.35

  As the New Year beckoned, Cunningham’s overriding preoccupation was to quiet the country and thus smooth the way for the Anglo-American Committee’s visit. To this end, he tried to think boldly and broadly, casting about for some modus vivendi with the mainstream Zionist leadership that would address the Yishuv’s most immediate grievances and hopefully isolate the extremists and undermine their influence. The high commissioner outlined his thoughts in a two-page, handwritten letter to Shaw just before Christmas. The problem, Cunningham explained, could be divided into its “humanitarian” and its “political” dimensions. The plight of European Jewry understandably consumed the Yishuv, the h
igh commissioner reasoned. And it was this issue that a minority extremist element had seized upon to further its own hard-line political agenda. The solution was obvious: because those Jews in Palestine with family members remaining in liberated Europe were likely to be the most aggrieved, it was this constituency whose concerns should be addressed first in order to begin to wean popular opinion away from the extremist camp. He therefore proposed that the government consider issuing immigration certificates to “proved destitute close relations” of Jews already resident in Palestine. This measure would have the multiple benefits of reuniting separated families and assuaging a salient source of discontent, calming an explosive situation, and thus permitting the committee to conduct its investigations in a “more rational and less disturbed” atmosphere. Alas, before Cunningham could present his idea to London, Palestine was once again plunged into crisis.36