Anonymous Soldiers

by Bruce Hoffman

  The opening of the Attlee government’s long-awaited conference on Palestine’s political future in early September thus presented Begin with the opportunity to divert the attention focused on the proceedings in London to the Irgun and its struggle in Palestine. The conference had already gotten off to a bad start when the Jewish Agency and Palestine’s Arab leaders had announced that they would boycott the meeting. It would therefore be attended only by representatives of the seven member states in the Arab League and its secretary-general along with senior British officials. Begin was determined to ensure that the news from Palestine would further erode the conference’s chances for success.14

  The Irgun’s offensive commenced just after midnight on September 9 with a series of widespread sabotage attacks across the country, specifically targeting Palestine’s railways and the Shell Oil facility in Haifa. Accordingly, when the London Conference convened that morning, newspaper coverage of the terrorist incidents had superseded commentary on the talks. But that was only the beginning. As the day wore on, the violence escalated. The most serious incident occurred in Tel Aviv when cars transporting at least ten armed Irgun fighters pulled up in front of the Public Information Office. While one team raked the building with submachine-gun fire, killing an Arab constable, another ran across the street, where they placed a large bomb on the ground floor of an apartment block. Above them, Major Desmond Doran was dining with his wife on their balcony. The ensuing explosion collapsed the building, killing Doran and seriously injuring his wife. His death was not coincidental. As the MI6 area security officer for Tel Aviv, Doran was in charge of British intelligence for the city. That alone would have earned him a prominent place on the Irgun’s hit list. But his previous position in the intelligence service’s Cairo-based Inter-services Liaison Department, where he had acquired the reputation as a “skilled interrogator” of captured Jewish terrorists, had singled him out for assassination. There were additional assaults on railway targets as well. Three railway bridges were damaged, and one line was cut in thirty places. Mines buried beneath major thoroughfares with warnings posted at bus stations in Hebrew warning Jews to avoid travel that day also disrupted bus and private vehicular traffic. The final spasm of violence occurred later, when Lehi gunned down the CID detective responsible for Yezernitzky’s arrest the previous month.15

  Within twenty-four hours, security conditions in Palestine had yet again crossed a new threshold. The requisite curfews were thrown over Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, neighboring Ramat Gan, and farther up the coast in the seaside town of Netanya. The predictable panoply of roadblocks and checkpoints were also erected along the country’s major roads. But far more significant were the thousands of additional troops rushed from Egypt to guard the railways and help keep the country quiet while the London Conference continued. With these reinforcements, British military forces in Palestine peaked at a hundred thousand personnel. This meant that government forces now outnumbered the Irgun and Lehi by a ratio of approximately twenty to one. There was now “one armed soldier to each adult male Jew in Palestine”—a staggering numerical advantage for any government seeking to maintain order in a rebellious country and decisively defeat a terrorist challenge to its authority. But, without intelligence, even these numbers could not cope with the threat presented by the Irgun and Lehi, even though the underground’s collective power had been deflated by the collapse of the Hebrew Resistance Movement and the loss of the Haganah and its elite Palmach force as allies.16

  The alliance’s demise had also adversely impacted the Irgun’s finances—having deprived it of the Haganah’s regular subventions. Given that the Irgun paid each of its approximately one thousand members individual stipends of between £30 and £60 per month, the termination of the Haganah’s largesse had forced the Irgun to focus its efforts as much on robbing and blackmailing ordinary Jews as on attacking government targets. But the amount of money gleaned from these activities was as piecemeal as it was unpredictable, varying from as little as £50 to as much as £1,000, and was insufficient to sustain the group’s operations. Therefore, on September 13, the Irgun put into motion an ambitious plan to simultaneously rob three banks in Tel Aviv and Jaffa. The operation, however, went wrong from the start. The police responded far more quickly to the holdups than the Irgun had anticipated, disrupting the robberies in progress at branches of the Ottoman Bank and the Arab Bank in Jaffa. Gun battles ensued at both, resulting in the capture of thirteen Irgunists, the death of one policeman, and injuries to ten others. Only the assault on the Ottoman Bank in Tel Aviv succeeded. But it netted the group less than £5,000, a fraction of what it had hoped to obtain. Nonetheless, on September 20 the Irgun resumed its attacks on Palestine’s railways, blowing up the Haifa station and causing some £23,000 in damage, and three days later its fighters wrecked a train transporting oil between Hadera and Benyamina.17

  The inevitable curfews, roadblocks, searches, and identity checks that followed had by now become a fixture of daily life in Palestine. “After every major incident and after most minor ones,” Trevor observed in her contemporaneous account of the last years of British rule over Palestine, “there would be a curfew, searches, identity-checks and arrests. It is perhaps difficult to know what else the military could have done, but their methods never seemed to prevent further incidents and some—road curfews, for instance—seemed to facilitate them, while they looked as if they were designed for the sole purpose of harassing as many people as possible.” The minutes of the high commissioner’s daily evening conference on September 30 appear to substantiate this claim. They reveal that the army was wont to impose curfews on Jewish neighborhoods not because of any specific intelligence in its possession but rather for vaguely referenced “preventative” reasons.18

  The frequency with which these measures occurred had created an impression both in London and within the Yishuv that the army and not the Palestine administration was now in charge. This view had become so prevalent by September that Cunningham was forced to defend himself and his administration against accusations emanating from Whitehall as well as Palestine. He assured Hall that military action was never undertaken for punitive reasons, was always based on solid intelligence, and was specifically designed to impact the community as little as possible. The high commissioner flatly denied that the army had taken over.19

  The Yishuv saw things differently, as the meeting of Weizmann and other Jewish Agency officials with Hall and Bevin on October 1 evidenced. Weizmann and his colleagues had been invited to the Foreign Office not to discuss security matters or administrative arrangements in Palestine but to address the conditions under which the Jewish Agency might agree to attend the London Conference. This session, billed as the first in a series of “informal talks,” quickly degenerated into an indictment of British security policy in Palestine and General Barker’s role in its implementation. The septuagenarian Zionist leader was still a commanding figure despite being hobbled by an array of maladies, including partial blindness, cardiopulmonary problems, and recurrent, enervating fever. He persisted, despite these myriad health woes, because—as he had told his trusted adviser and confidante Blanche Dugdale—“only his presence has so far restrained ‘rivers of blood,’ for the Army were longing for an excuse to wipe out the Yishuv, and on the Yishuv’s side the hatred and anger against Britain will never be wiped out except by partition and a Jewish State.”20

  After a perfunctory welcome by Bevin, Weizmann laid out the Jewish Agency’s demands. First, the hundred or so agency officials detained since “Black Saturday” must be freed. Second, Palestine’s governance must be readjusted because, Weizmann believed, the “administration was virtually under the Army, which in turn was under the command of a man who had made his feelings clear.” Third, the government must agree that partition represents the only viable, permanent settlement of Palestine’s political future. Rabbi Fishman then spoke, echoing Weizmann. “A man like General Barker,” he contended, “did no honor to the name of Britain. The Jewis
h people had tried for sixty years to convert the desert of Palestine into a paradise; General Barker was now making it a hell for Jews. As long as this situation remained, there could be no peace in Palestine.”21

  Bevin was characteristically blunt in his reply. “The British Government had not taken the initiative in blowing people up,” he told his guests. The foreign secretary described how a year earlier he had warned Weizmann and Shertok that “this terrorism was a dangerous thing to play with.” Britain, he continued, had long been the Jews’ “best friend … and now seemed to be almost their last friend.” Anti-Semitism was growing in Britain because of terrorism in Palestine. Bevin had never known it to be as blatant or rampant as it had become; indeed, the “destruction of the King David Hotel had burned deeply into the heart of the British people.” Bevin then warned that if agreement on Palestine could not be reached through negotiation between Britain and the Arabs and the Jews, it “should be handed back to the United Nations with a confession that we could not solve it.”22

  This was a stunning volte-face for the foreign secretary. Only a few months before, he had taken the opposite position during internal discussions on British strategic priorities in the Mediterranean, North Africa, and the Middle East. Countering Attlee’s suggestion, supported by Hugh Dalton, that these commitments had become financially untenable, Bevin had forcefully argued that Britain’s stature as a great power was inextricably linked to the maintenance of its Middle Eastern strategic and economic interests. The foreign secretary thus had clearly envisioned Britain remaining in Palestine for at least another decade—and retaining military basing rights beyond even that time frame. His position accorded completely with that of the Chiefs of Staff.23

  The meeting with the Zionist leaders ended on a sour note when Bevin commented that Truman’s “repeated insistence” on admitting a hundred thousand Jewish refugees to Palestine had been singularly unhelpful. The foreign secretary was unambiguous that “if the Arabs refused partition he was not prepared to force it on them at the point of British bayonets.” For the moment, however, everyone agreed that the Zionist leaders should meet with Hall to continue their discussions on both security issues and the attendant administrative arrangements in Palestine and, once these were clarified, that discussions with the foreign secretary regarding the Jewish Agency’s attendance at the London Conference would resume.24

  Over tea at the Dorchester hotel later that afternoon, Berl Locker, a political adviser to the Jewish Agency Board in London, briefed Dugdale on the meeting. She was skeptical about everything she heard. “I do not think there is much hope of good coming out of these talks,” Dugdale recorded in her diary. “Bevin is obviously full of good will, but as far as ever from understanding the elements of the Jewish case.” Nonetheless, both she and the Jewish leadership were pleasantly surprised three days later when, in a cabinet shake-up, Attlee replaced Hall with the latter’s deputy, Arthur Creech Jones—a staunch, lifelong pro-Zionist. Still more good news came later that same day when, just before the start of Yom Kippur, President Truman again called on Britain to admit a hundred thousand Jewish immigrants to Palestine immediately. The president also, for the first time, appeared to endorse the Jewish Agency’s demand for partition and the establishment of an independent Jewish state. As the Zionist historian Michael J. Cohen notes, this was the “last straw” for Bevin in his increasingly futile attempt to draw the United States into a common effort to resolve Palestine’s future political status. The foreign secretary now realized that not only were the Zionists unwilling to compromise but they had no reason to, given the influence they were able to exert over both the president and Congress.25

  History would show that the Zionist delegation’s profound concern over Barker’s bias against the Yishuv and, in turn, his ability to act impartially as GOC was well-founded. Indeed, decades after the October 1 meeting evidence has come to light detailing both the depth of Barker’s enmity toward Zionism and his anti-Semitic attitude toward the Jewish people. The evidence is in the form of about a hundred letters written in hand by Barker, on official army stationery, to his paramour, Katy Antonius, the widow of the famed Arab nationalist George Antonius. Of most relevance is Barker’s letter to her of October 11, 1946, where the GOC poetically describes themselves as “only birds of passage” on this earth before venting his frustrations with the Jews. “Balfour has made this uncomfortable bed on which we are all lying,” he wrote, “and my sympathies are with the Arabs who are in no way responsible for it. I often think if I ever become a bachelor I shall return to the Middle East to help fight for their rights.” He reiterates the same desire two weeks later, reflecting, “I would give a lot to be able to contribute in some way to the peace and happiness of the country. To think that a few hundred terrorists force us to react as we do makes me furious. As you know my sympathies are so much with the Arabs and I hate to see their country mucked up by us.”26

  As the conflict with the Jewish terrorist organizations wore on, Barker’s letters to Antonius become increasingly more vitriolic. Echoing his infamous nonfraternization order of the previous year, Barker expressed the view in April 1947 that the Jews “do hate having their pockets touched as I [have] said in my letters.” Later that month he more caustically observed, “Yes I loathe the lot—whether they be Zionists or not. Why should we be afraid of saying we hate them—it’s time this damned race knew what we think of them—loathesome [sic] people.”27

  “It wasn’t so much our actions that I objected to, it was our attitude,” Charteris later told Nicholas Bethell about relations between the army and the Yishuv. John Kenneally, a half-Jewish noncommissioned officer who served with the First Guards Parachute Battalion in Palestine and had previously been awarded the Victoria Cross (Britain’s equivalent of the U.S. Medal of Honor) for valor during World War II, similarly recalled how the British officer corps in Palestine was demonstrably hostile to the Yishuv. Indeed, the Quarterly Historical Reports for units stationed in Palestine during this period describe the nadir to which Anglo-Jewish relations had sunk.28

  The strain imposed on British forces by the Irgun’s renewed offensive had been further exacerbated by Lehi’s resumption of its practice of randomly assassinating individual soldiers and police. On October 7, two enlisted men were shot down on a Jerusalem street; one died, and the other was seriously wounded. A week later a CID inspector was assassinated. Irgun road mines had meanwhile killed two British soldiers and injured five others. Then, seeking once again to distinguish itself from the Irgun, Lehi announced on October 21 that it was adopting a shoot-to-kill policy with respect to British members of the security forces in retaliation for such alleged transgressions as firing on unarmed Jewish demonstrators, using “burning gasses” against Hebrew fighters, “molesting and terrorizing” people during searches, and generally “playing havoc in the streets of our homeland.” Henceforth, Lehi therefore proclaimed, “all British soldiers and policemen … where appearing armed in the streets and on the roads of our country, [are] liable to be hit by a Hebrew fighter.”29

  Tensions were thus already high when the Irgun bombed four checkpoints manned by the First Battalion of the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders to enforce the nighttime curfew that had been in force over Jerusalem for nearly a week. Eleven soldiers were wounded, one fatally. Their commander, Lieutenant Colonel Richard Webb, was a legendary figure in the regiment, a “soldier’s soldier,” whose leadership and heroism during the war inspired respect and awe in equal measure. Enraged by the attack and the casualties inflicted on his men, “the Squire,” as he was called by his men, ordered ten domestic and overseas journalists, who together represented a dozen or so newspapers, press agencies, and broadcast services, to be brought from the scene of one of the bombings to his headquarters at the fortresslike Hospice de Notre-Dame de France, opposite the Old City’s New Gate. Meeting individually with each reporter in succession, Webb told one that “the Jews are a despicable race”—repeating that same phrase three time
s in the span of six sentences. “These bloody Jews—we saved their skins in Alamein and other places and then they do this to us,” he remarked before summoning another journalist into his office. Webb complained to him that the Jewish women he had encountered during searches “bulged all in the wrong places” but then abruptly changed subject, observing that “his boys are pretty hot-tempered” and, by way of explanation, admitting that they “sometimes use the butts of their rifles and do a spot of looting.” Each reporter was harangued in a similar manner. Webb then assembled the reporters and addressed them as a group. He stated that the army’s counterterrorism strategy was indeed to harass the Yishuv. “By making a nuisance of ourselves,” he asserted, “we shall turn the people against the terrorists.” One correspondent, an American, asked, “Isn’t it having the opposite effect? Isn’t it turning them against the British?” Webb had no answer except to inquire rhetorically what that reporter thought the U.S. military would do in the same circumstances. When pressed whether everything he had told them both individually and collectively was for attribution, Webb replied, “Print everything I’ve said. Use my name. I don’t care if I’m out of the Army tomorrow.”30

  Described by one of his admiring subalterns as a “brave officer of the old school” and by another as the “epitome of an Edwardian gentleman: a great soldier, good at games, a great shot, and very knowledgeable about game birds,” Webb was also completely ignorant of the emerging power of mid-twentieth-century communications—and the reach and impact that impulsively uttered, intemperate comments would now have. His words were transmitted to audiences far beyond Palestine, especially in the United States, where Webb’s unsavory views served only to reinforce the pejorative impression of British rule in Palestine that Bergson and his ilk had so tirelessly cultivated.31