Anonymous Soldiers

by Bruce Hoffman

  At a loss of what else to do, Cunningham decided to strengthen the existing Defence (Emergency) Regulations in force over the country since September 1945 with additional amendments. These extraordinary legal powers, it will be recalled, had first been promulgated as the Palestine (Defence) Order in Council in 1936 shortly after the start of the Arab Rebellion. Subsequent amendments in 1937 had introduced increasingly severe penalties for people convicted of a variety of violent and seditious acts. Under its core provisions, people convicted of carrying, discharging, or possessing firearms and explosives faced either the death penalty or life imprisonment. With the end of the Arab Rebellion, however, life imprisonment was adopted as the most severe penalty that could be imposed on a person found guilty of these crimes.55

  The Order in Council had been invoked again following the resumption of the Irgun’s revolt in 1944 and then expanded under the Defence (Emergency) Regulations promulgated in September 1945 mostly so that the death penalty could be imposed on people convicted of carrying, discharging, or possessing firearms or explosives. Now, under the 1946 amendments, soldiers were given the right to arrest people without having to produce a warrant or court order and to detain them for up to seven days without having to justify this action before a court of law. Nor were warrants needed to conduct searches of any dwelling or building. Trial by military tribunals was also reinstated with the tribunals rendering summary judgment: that is, no pretrial inquiry was required, nor was there any disclosure requirement, so the prosecution did not have to furnish evidence of its case to the accused. Tribunal members did not require any prior legal training, and although the rules of evidence based on English law governed court proceedings, these could be relaxed at the court’s discretion. Finally, there was no right of appeal: the GOC alone had the authority to confirm, pardon, or overturn convictions. Life imprisonment was mandated for people convicted of wearing uniforms, parts of uniforms, or any police or military insignia or headgear, and five years’ imprisonment was specified for harboring or abetting any person suspected of violating the regulations. Stiff penalties were also imposed on the master, owner, and agent of any vessel transporting illegal immigrants to Palestine, whether knowingly or not. Lastly, the high commissioner was given the right to order the forfeiture of all the property of any person convicted of any offense.56

  The revised regulations had no impact on the worsening security situation. The day after their promulgation, the Irgun brazenly launched the first of three operations to procure arms. Although each of the assaults was thwarted, it was clear that a watershed had been crossed in terms of the logistical sustainability of the Irgun’s violent struggle. Equally obvious were the nugatory prospects of deterring further attacks. Indeed, during January alone nearly a hundred police antiterrorist operations had been mounted—to no tangible effect. “We have enough physical force to prevent Britain ruling Palestine peacefully,” Begin boasted in a clandestine interview given to a reporter from the News Chronicle, a London tabloid. A CID intelligence assessment similarly called attention to the age-old terrorist conceit that one wins against a numerically superior, better-armed, and better-equipped government opponent simply by avoiding losing: “The I.Z.L. leaders are aware that they will never intimidate Britain nor be able to combat British forces in a straight fight, but they believe in the efficiency of their present tactics, for they are convinced—and this is a fundamental tenet of their creed—that violence is the only way of inducing the British Government to give political concessions.” An MI5 report that same month reached an identical conclusion, citing its own well-placed, unnamed informant.57

  Both the police and the Palestine administration increasingly mourned the cessation of Saison operations the previous May and the collapse of antiterrorist cooperation that followed. The consequent impoverishment of police intelligence was thus a further subject of lamentation. Inevitably, the repeated assaults on heavily guarded and well-protected government facilities raised serious concerns among British officials over the security of other key government buildings, particularly the government secretariat offices and military and intelligence headquarters located in the southern wing of Jerusalem’s King David Hotel. At the end of December 1945, the CID’s chief, Giles, had informed Rymer-Jones of a reliable report that the Irgun was planning to blow up the hotel, part of which was still open to the public, by planting a bomb beneath the government offices in La Regence nightclub. Rymer-Jones went to see Shaw, who dismissed the threat. “I have told you that we must retain as far as possible, normal conditions,” he recalled the chief secretary’s reply, “and you can’t take a last place of amusement away from the people.” In hopes of averting what he believed to be certain disaster, Rymer-Jones appealed to Cunningham. Together with Shaw they went to Government House, where the inspector general proposed closing La Regence, positioning a policeman or soldier at every entrance to check identification of anyone wishing to visit, and generally strengthening security both inside and around the perimeter. This was in addition to the platoon of heavily armed troops, manning machine-gun pits and other defensive positions, that had already been deployed to the site since the previous year. Cunningham agreed with Rymer-Jones that the measures currently in force might now have been rendered insufficient and promised to have another security review conducted. In the end, however, the high commissioner concluded that the existing arrangements were adequate and rejected almost all of Rymer-Jones’s suggestions. “We are trying, in between outrages,” Cunningham explained to Hall, “to carry on a normal administration under ‘peace.’ The conditions are however nearer those of war than of peace.”58

  The authorities had now to contend with the threat of Jewish terrorism spreading beyond Palestine’s borders as well. On February 11, Hunloke’s successor as DSO, an aristocratic Oxford University graduate and former Shakespearean and Hollywood actor named Gyles Isham, informed Kellar of a Lehi plot to kill senior government ministers in England. Sources judged reliable by the CID had reported that Lehi members were being trained for this purpose and that at the top of their target list was the foreign secretary. For nearly a year, similar reports had been circulating between Jerusalem, Cairo, and London. The sophisticated operation to assassinate Lord Moyne made it difficult for British intelligence to discount completely this fragmentary information. Moreover, the extent to which Lehi had already successfully penetrated HM Forces in Egypt had given rise to genuine concern that assassins under deep cover as service personnel could travel undetected between the Middle East and England. Information gleaned from one of the central figures in the conspiracy to assassinate Moyne, Raphael Sadovsky, substantiated these fears.59

  These reports all dovetailed with information passed by the Jewish Agency to British intelligence that the Irgun had also already seeded overseas agents among both military personnel and merchant seamen. Irgun pamphlets posted on the doors of government offices on Whitehall during the summer of 1944, criticizing Britain for refusing to create a Jewish army, gave credence to fears that terrorist operatives were already active in London. It was now reported that Lehi was working especially hard to ensure that it had operatives in all three services “in the hope that this will facilitate travel abroad in order to keep an eye on leading English personalities.”60

  By the spring of 1945 the corpus of accumulated information on this subject was sufficiently worrisome that the director general of MI5, Brigadier Sir David Petrie, thought it time to inform the Home Office. Within months, some forty additional terrorist suspects serving with British forces in Egypt had been identified. Military leave policy was amended so that only Anglo-Jewish service personnel would be permitted to travel back to the United Kingdom. Jews from all other countries were prohibited. Jewish merchant seamen drew special attention from the authorities, because they were not subject to normal visa control procedures. Accordingly, a process was initiated whereby the identity of any Jewish seamen at a British port was carefully checked with both SIME (Security Intelligence, Mi
ddle East) in Cairo and the DSO in Jerusalem. Home Office warrants allowing MI5 to intercept mail and tap phone lines were now applied to all the major Zionist organizations with offices in London.61

  With the New Year new reports began to surface about plots to assassinate the foreign secretary. Additional intelligence reports around this same time also claimed that Lehi was intent on killing Cunningham and D’Arcy along with senior CID officers such as John J. O’Sullivan, Richard Catling, and Arthur Giles. Any lingering skepticism of the gravity of these threats was dispelled on February 15 when a Lehi gunman tried to assassinate Superintendent Raymond Cafferata in Haifa. Shortly afterward, Cafferata returned to England. According to British officials cited in the Daily Express, it had become too dangerous for him to remain in Palestine. In view of the continuing reports about possible Lehi operations in Britain, on February 20 Paget ordered that all Jews traveling to the U.K. from any Middle Eastern and North African port of embarkation, including Turkey, be subject to special, enhanced security screening procedures.62

  It had taken only ninety days to disabuse Cunningham of the hopeful optimism that had attended his arrival in Palestine. The only consistent dimension of Jewish Agency policy, the high commissioner complained, was its refusal to cooperate with the authorities. The agency’s position, he continued, had again been made clear in a particularly incendiary speech that Shertok had given to the Vaad Le’umi a few days earlier. In addition to the now-standard denunciation of the 1939 white paper’s continuance, the Jewish leader had delivered a seditious critique of the newly strengthened Emergency Regulations, terming them “murderous and atrocious laws, which threaten the public as a whole.”63

  On March 6 the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry arrived in Palestine. “We left Cairo at 9:30 p.m. by the Palestine high commissioner’s special train, painted white and with an extra car—between the engine and our compartments—on which the terrorists’ mines could blow up,” Richard Crossman, a former Oxford University don and recently elected Labour MP, recalled. It was a needless precaution. Each of the three Jewish underground organizations had pledged to abjure from operations while the committee was in Palestine—a message reinforced in repeated broadcasts by Kol Israel. However, in the hour before the commissioner’s train pulled in to Jerusalem, the Irgun seized the opportunity to launch one more attack on a Sixth Airborne arms dump both to impress the country’s distinguished visitors and to acquire much-needed weaponry. Army intelligence subsequently concluded that the attack had been facilitated by information that Jewish service personnel stationed at Sarafand and other bases had provided to the Irgun, thus again demonstrating the reach and sophistication of the organization’s intelligence capabilities. These same officers also marveled at the preparation and precautions that the Irgun had undertaken. A team of trained Jewish nurses, for instance, had been stationed nearby to provide immediate treatment to any casualties that might be sustained in the operation.64

  Security was thus exceptionally tight as the twelve members of the joint commission alighted at Jerusalem’s incongruously small train station and paused for a group photograph. Armored vehicles and armed guards ringed the station and surrounding roads. The committee members were then quickly whisked away to their accommodations at the King David Hotel—about a quarter of a mile away—in huge, brand-new Ford Mercury sedans. “It was immediately apparent that Jerusalem, at least, was an armed camp,” Bartley Crum observed. “Barbed wire in great coils was everywhere, tanks could be seen at various intersections, special pill boxes had been put above the entrance of the hotel, and on the roofs and on the lawn of the imposing YMCA building across the street, soldiers manning machine guns surveyed all avenues of approach.”65

  These security precautions only heightened the tense atmosphere already gripping the country. Neither the Arabs nor the Jews had welcomed the committee’s creation in the first place, and they had initially vowed to boycott it. The stakes, however, were too great to lose this opportunity to present their respective cases to the world via the AAC. On the one hand, the Arabs hoped to persuade the commissioners that Palestine should be granted its independence as a unitary state with a fixed Jewish minority; on the other hand, the Jews sought a favorable decision on partition that would remove the restrictions on Jewish immigration and result in the establishment of a separate Jewish state. The prevailing opinion was that this latest commission’s chances of resolving the Palestine issue were no better than any of its predecessors’. In a letter to his father, Ivan Lloyd Phillips was unapologetically skeptical. “The prospect is gloomy,” he wrote. “As I see it the attitude of both races is hardening and any chance of a compromise is fast vanishing.”66

  The committee’s hearings commenced the following day in the auditorium at the YMCA, directly across the street from the King David Hotel. A huge, U-shaped mahogany conference table, last used nine years before by the Royal Commission, was brought out of storage and extended by two specially constructed sections to accommodate all the AAC membership.67

  The first government witness to testify was the chief secretary, Shaw. Having twice served in the country over an eight-year time frame that spanned both the Arab Rebellion and the current Jewish uprising, Shaw arguably possessed a depth of experience and knowledge of Palestine shared by few British officials. The crux of the problem in his view was that a firm, consistent policy toward Palestine had never existed. “There have been commissions and commissions,” he explained in a subsequent letter to the committee, “and they have recommended this and that and there have been debates in all the Parliaments of the world and everything else, and it has never been clear where we are heading … [T]he result is that both sides have always been encouraged to feel that by agitation, by terrorism and by propaganda … they can always swing the pendulum over to their side.”68

  Shaw’s bleak assessment was echoed by D’Arcy, the GOC, whose testimony on internal security was heard in camera. He was accompanied by Charteris, the senior army intelligence officer in Palestine, and Isham, his MI5 counterpart. “Since I have been here, since 1944, the whole threat and menace to security has come from one side,” D’Arcy began. “It has come from the Jews. The Arabs have been completely quiescent.” The GOC explained that although he had the equivalent of two and a half divisions of British troops in addition to the PPF, which was operationally under his command, these forces were hard-pressed to maintain order given the size and capabilities of the Jewish underground. Over the previous four months alone, terrorist attacks had claimed the lives of fifteen soldiers and police and injured more than 150 others. “As regards security generally,” D’Arcy continued, “it is my firm opinion that a very large section of the Jewish community in this country is determined to get and to hold this country by force. It is a fact that large illegal Jewish armed organizations exist and it is my opinion that they exist for the purpose I have mentioned and none other.” Of these, the Haganah was the largest. The GOC put its total strength now at some forty thousand people, including a well-equipped and well-trained “field army” of sixteen thousand fighters alongside an additional two thousand full-time members of the Palmach—backed by an additional four thousand trained reservists. Both groups were also well armed—mostly as a result of the extensive stocks of weaponry left behind, scrounged, or stolen from battlefields in both North Africa and Syria. “Sufficient small arms exist to give every combatant member a personal arm, rifle, submachine gun or pistol,” and arms caches could be found in virtually every Jewish settlement throughout the country.69

  D’Arcy described the Irgun as having between three thousand and five thousand members, though lacking arms. Lehi was dismissed as “nothing more than a gang” that used “assassination for the furtherance of political aims” and consisted of no more than two to three hundred members. The most serious threat was still posed by the Haganah. This same point had been made to Crossman in Cairo by a knowledgeable British source who had described the Haganah as “the most powerful military forc
e in the Middle East, apart from the British Army,” and had credited it with having “completely transformed the balance of power.” The Haganah’s arms were so dispersed and well hidden, the GOC declared, that it would never be possible to completely disarm the Yishuv. Even if the British could, it would accomplish nothing given the power and influence that the Jewish Agency leadership exercised over the community. “It would, in fact, be like disarming Germany after the 1914–18 war,” D’Arcy commented, “and leaving the German High Command in its position to organize afresh.” His unambiguous assessment of Jewish martial prowess and preparations would have a powerful influence on the committee’s thinking.70

  The Anglo-American Committee spent a total of three weeks in Palestine. The commissioners visited Jewish kibbutzim and Arab villages, toured factories and inspected farm cooperatives, and either met with or heard testimony from a wide variety of Arab and Jewish notables along with British officials. On March 28 they departed for Lausanne, Switzerland, to write their report. Seeking to capitalize on the humanitarian plight of the Jewish displaced persons that the committee’s investigations and hearings had focused on, the Jewish Agency launched a new propaganda campaign directed at British soldiers. Leaflets titled “Talk it over with your Pals” were distributed only hours after the committee left Palestine. They contained photographs of the mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini, reviewing Croatian Nazi SS troops contrasted with images of soldiers from the Jewish Brigade who had fought in the British army and asked if the troops thought it was “fair or in Britain’s interest to give Palestine to the Arabs.” Additional photographs showed bodies of Jewish children and living survivors of Hitler’s death camps with numbers tattooed on their arms side by side with happy immigrants arriving in Palestine and healthy children working and playing at a kibbutz. “Please soldier,” the fly sheets implored, “don’t let them make Nazis out of you.”71