The Complete Idiot's Guide to Middle East Conflict

by Mitchell G. Bard, Ph. D.

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  The Jewish immigrants, on the other hand, could usually acquire land through one of the Jewish organizations or join a kibbutz. Moreover, more than 70 percent of the land the Jews purchased was bought from large Arab landowners who were paid exorbitant prices.

  Churchill’s Loss Brings Hope

  Most of the Zionist leadership had maintained faith in the British government’s resolve to support the fulfillment of the Balfour Declaration despite all that had happened in the interim. With the upcoming British elections in 1945, many Jewish leaders saw the possibility of their dream coming true. The reason for their optimism was the likelihood that the Labor Party, which had endorsed the creation of a Jewish National Home in Palestine, would emerge victorious.

  The Labor Party, led by Clement Atlee, easily won the election, leading the Palestinian Jewish newspaper Davar to conclude: “The victory of the Labor Party… is a clear victory for the demands of the Zionists in British public opinion.” The Zionist leaders anxiously awaited the new prime minister’s initiatives.

  It didn’t take long for the Zionists’ optimism to turn sour, however. On August 25, the British Colonial Office told the Zionist leaders that the immigrant quota would remain at 1,500 per month. Making matters worse, on November 13, 1945, foreign secretary Ernest Bevin made a speech in Parliament that undermined Labor’s pro-Jewish platform regarding Palestine, promising only to launch another inquiry into the issue. According to Bevin, England had never countenanced the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine, only a home.

  Brits Again Become Targets

  It became clear to the Jews that the British would have to be forced to accede to Zionist demands. To carry out this objective, leaders of the Haganah, Irgun, and Lehi met and decided to form a united resistance movement, Tenuat Hameri. The alliance agreed to coordinate all actions except the procurement of arms and money.

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  Mysteries of the Desert

  During the Tenaut Hameri’s campaign, many of the British were forced to live more like prisoners than governors, confined to compounds surrounded by fences and barbed wire. The largest of these was in Jerusalem and became known as Bevingrad, after Ernest Bevin, the foreign minister.

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  The alliance engaged in sabotage and bombings, keeping the British off balance and drawing them into a guerilla war of attrition. The British were forced to increase their troop strength in Palestine to 80,000, and thousands more were deployed from the police force and Transjordan’s Arab Legion. The British assigned roughly one soldier or policeman for every Jew in Palestine.

  On October 31, 1944, the Haganah’s elite force, the Palmach, sank two police boats in Haifa and one in Jaffa. The Haganah also bombed railroad tracks throughout Palestine. The Irgun attacked trains at Lydda Station. On December 27, the Irgun and the Lehi blew up the Criminal Investigation Division (CID) headquarters in Jerusalem and Haifa, killing 10 and injuring 12.

  Palestine, a Guerilla War Zone

  By 1946, Palestine had become an armed camp. The land of milk and honey was dotted with military checkpoints, army bases, and concrete fortresses. The British were forced to be on constant alert. Despite all their precautions and the restrictions they placed on the Jews, they couldn’t prevent the guerilla war from escalating. The Haganah continued to engage in sabotage, the Irgun focused on procuring arms, and the Lehi carried out assassinations.

  On April 23, 1946, the Irgun attacked a British police station in Ramat Gan to steal arms. Dov Gruner was captured in the raid and would eventually become the Irgunists’ first martyr. Two days after the Irgun raid, the Lehi’s gunmen attacked the Sixth Airborne parking area and killed seven British soldiers. On June 10, the Irgun attacked trains in Lydda and on the Jerusalem-to-Jaffa route.

  On June 13, two members of the Irgun were convicted of capital offenses. In retaliation, the Irgun kidnapped six British officers. One hostage escaped, and two others were released. To the dismay of the Jewish leadership, however, the Irgun threatened to kill the remaining hostages if their men were hanged by the British.

  The Police Fight Back

  These brutal attacks outraged the British, and the security forces began to turn on the Jewish population, rioting and looting, harassing people, and reacting with increasing severity to the slightest provocation. The British believed that the terrorists could not function if it were not for the complicity of the Jewish community; therefore, they considered all Jews to be equally guilty.

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  Ask the Sphinx

  By the beginning of July 1946, 2,718 Jews had been arrested, 4 killed, and 80 wounded in fighting the British.

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  On June 29, the British launched a major raid throughout Palestine, arresting more than 1,000 people, including the acting chairman of the Jewish Agency. (Ben-Gurion was out of the country.) The British also seized Jewish Agency documents. Most of the leaders of the underground evaded capture, with the exception of one of the Lehi’s leaders. (His captor was eventually slain in retaliation.)

  Unable to locate the kidnapped British soldiers, High Commissioner Cunningham gave in to the Irgun’s demands and commuted the sentences of the Irgunists. The next day, the Irgun released the hostages. The episode demonstrated once again to the Irgun that the British could be forced to capitulate. At the same time, the Irgun tried to show the British they meant what they said. To their own misfortune, the British were still not convinced.

  The King David Bombing

  In the eyes of the Irgun, the British raids confirmed the naiveté of the Jewish leadership. They had believed themselves immune from police retaliation, and now found their headquarters occupied and many of their secret documents in British hands. The Irgun had little trouble deciding on an appropriate response. According to Begin, the Irgun believed the scope of the reprisal should equal the magnitude of the attack. They decided that the proper retaliation for the attack on Jewish headquarters would be an attack on British headquarters.

  The British had set up their headquarters in the southern wing of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem. The hotel served as both the military and civil administrative headquarters and was extremely well guarded and heavily fortified. The Irgun plan was to smuggle bombs into the hotel and set them on a timer that would allow the building to be evacuated. The Irgun wanted to avoid civilian casualties and so placed three telephone calls warning of the attack: one to the hotel, another to the French Consulate, and a third to the Palestine Post, warning that explosives in the King David Hotel would soon be detonated.

  On July 22, 1946, the calls were made. The call to the hotel was apparently received and ignored. One British official who supposedly refused to evacuate the building said, “We don’t take orders from the Jews.” As a result, when the bombs exploded, the casualty toll was high: a total of 91 were killed and 45 were injured. Among the casualties were 15 Jews.

  The bombing attracted the world’s attention. The Jewish leadership issued the usual denunciations, but the British were convinced that the Haganah and Jewish Agency were responsible. The widespread negative publicity naturally cast the entire Jewish community as accomplices to terrorists, convincing the Jewish leaders that it was time to distance themselves from the dissidents. Consequently, the Haganah withdrew from the underground alliance on August 23, 1946.

  Outrage on Both Sides

  The Irgun attacks resumed and intensified soon after the King David bombing. On October 31, 1946, the dissidents bombed the British Embassy in Rome and, for the first time, made their presence felt in London, where the Irgun’s killers were rumored to be stalking potential victims. The British public’s demands for stopping the terrorists became more vociferous, and the British government’s response more brutal.

  In December, two members of the Irgun were arrested during a bank robbery and were sentenced not only to prison but also to be whipped. The Irgun let it be known that they would retaliate in kind if the sentence were carried out. On December 27,
one of the men was given 18 lashes. The Irgun issued another warning: “You will not whip Jews in their homeland. And if British authorities whip them, British officers will be whipped publicly in return.”

  True to their word, the Irgun captured 4 British officers and gave them each 18 lashes before releasing them.

  The Least You Need to Know

  The Jewish population and economy thrived despite British restrictions and Arab opposition.

  An underground movement to bring illegal immigrants to Palestine had mixed success against the British blockade.

  Jewish political leaders alternated between faith in British promises and distrust, and between loathing the dissidents for complicating their diplomacy and tacit approval for their defiance.

  Revisionists advocated a Jewish state in all of historic Palestine, including Transjordan, whereas idealists believed Jews and Arabs could live together in a binational state.

  New British Prime Minister Clement Atlee proved even less sympathetic than Winston Churchill was to the Jewish cause, and violence increased between British security forces and Jewish extremists.

  Chapter 9

  A State of Their Own

  In This Chapter

  The Exodus symbolizes the Jews’ fate

  The Palestine question goes to the UN

  A two-state solution

  Truman sides with the Zionists; Great Britain resists partition

  After World War II ended and the full extent of the Holocaust became known, Zionist leaders grew increasingly uncompromising in their demand for control over Jewish immigration. Meanwhile, the recognition that British policy had effectively condemned thousands of Jews to death in Nazi gas chambers while the Zionist leadership impotently protested led the dissident factions of the Jewish community to the realization that the only way to guarantee the security of the Jewish people would be to force the British out of Palestine and establish an independent Jewish state. The dissidents declared war on the British and intensified the ferocity of their attacks on British personnel and installations.

  Curiously, the Arabs in Palestine showed no signs of nationalistic fervor. They should have been as determined to throw off the British yoke as the Jews, but they did not behave that way. On the contrary, the Arabs remained quiet, momentarily content under British rule, and satisfied with the restrictions placed on the Jews.

  Holocaust Survivors Seek Refuge

  After the war, the British refused to allow the survivors of the Nazi nightmare sanctuary in Palestine. President Truman called on the British government to relieve the suffering of the more than 200,000 Jews confined to displaced persons camps in Europe by immediately accepting 100,000 Jewish immigrants into Palestine. Britain’s foreign secretary, Ernest Bevin, replied sarcastically that the United States wanted displaced Jews to immigrate to Palestine “because they did not want too many of them in New York.”

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  Mysteries of the Desert

  The Anglo-American Committee was formed shortly after World War II. The committee concluded that no country other than Palestine was ready or willing to help find homes for Jews wishing to leave Europe, but Palestine alone couldn’t solve their emigration needs. It therefore recommended that 100,000 certificates for immigration to Palestine be issued immediately and that the United States and Great Britain find more places for the displaced persons. Furthermore, it decided that future immigration to Palestine should be regulated by the mandatory administration, and that the land transfer regulations of 1940, which forbade land sales in certain parts of the country to Jews, should be annulled.

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  The British quota for Jewish immigration into Palestine was only 18,000 per year, so the effort to smuggle people into Palestine was intense. From the end of World War II until the establishment of the state of Israel, 66 immigrant ships, carrying a total of 69,878 Jews, left from European shores, but only a handful managed to penetrate the British blockade and bring their passengers ashore. In August 1946, the authorities began to intern captured illegal immigrants in camps on Cyprus. The British detained 50,000 Jews in camps, and 28,000 were still in those camps when the state of Israel opened its gates to them in 1948.

  Exodus: More Than a Movie

  The most famous illegal immigrant ship was the Exodus. The ship left Sete, France, for Palestine on July 11, 1947, carrying 4,515 refugees, including 655 children. On July 18, the ship had just about reached Gaza when it was intercepted by the British. When British seamen boarded the vessel, a battle ensued that left 2 immigrants and a crewman dead and 30 people wounded.

  Afterward, the British towed the Exodus to Haifa. Rather than deport the passengers to Cyprus as usual, however, Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin decided to employ a new tactic to discourage immigrants—ordering the refugees to return to their original point of departure. In keeping with this policy, the passengers of the Exodus were herded onto three British prison ships on July 20 and sent back to Sete. When the ships arrived on July 29, however, the refugees refused to disembark.

  The Jews remained in the ships’ holds for 24 days despite a heat wave, a shortage of food, and deteriorating sanitary conditions. The French government refused to force them off the ships, and the British sent them on August 22 to Hamburg, then in the British occupation zone, where they landed on September 9. The refugees aboard the Empire Rival disembarked quickly because they had left a bomb in the hold of the ship. The other two shiploads of people tried to remain on the ships, resisting any effort to displace them. Eventually, all three ships were emptied of their human cargo and delivered into the waiting arms of the Germans, who interned them in displaced persons camps.

  The British achieved an empty victory by their heavy-handed treatment of the passengers aboard the Exodus. The attention the plight of the refugees attracted turned international opinion against the British. In the end, most of the Jews who participated in that event succeeded in reaching Palestine, though many had to wait until after the state of Israel was established. The British never returned another ship in this way again.

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  Hieroglyphics

  The FBI defines terrorism as “the unlawful use of force or violence against persons or property to intimidate or coerce a government, the civilian population, or any segment thereof, in furtherance of political or social objectives.”

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  Terrorists Turn Up the Heat

  One reason the British had taken such a hard line with the refugees was that they were becoming increasingly outraged by the actions of the Jewish underground, whom they labeled terrorists.

  On January 26, 1947, the death sentence of Irgunist Dov Gruner was confirmed (see Chapter 8), and the Irgun vowed to hang a British soldier for every Jew who was put to death. To emphasize their threat, they kidnapped two Englishmen—a judge and a retired officer.

  The Jewish Agency decried the act, but was unable to ascertain the whereabouts of the kidnap victims. Agency officials learned that Gruner was granted a stay of execution. When the Irgun received this information, they released their captives unharmed.

  Still, the terrorist campaign continued to escalate. On March 1, the Irgun initiated 16 actions, including the bombing of the officers’ club, which killed 20 and wounded 30. The Lehi was also active. On March 13, they destroyed two oil-transport trains. Two weeks later, the Lehi robbed a Tel Aviv bank, and, on March 30, they set fire to 30,000 tons of oil at the Haifa refinery. April was an equally violent month. On April 16, Dov Gruner and three other Irgunists were hanged in Acre prison, provoking the Irgun to warn that they would have their own trials for any British soldiers or civilian officials they captured. The accused would be charged with illegal entry into Palestine, and illegal possession of arms and their use against civilians, for murder, oppression, and exploitation. The Irgun said it would hang or shoot those it condemned.

  The British had scheduled two members of the Lehi to be hanged on April 21. The Irgun once again tried to kidnap soldiers to use as a threat
but were unsuccessful. Rather than be hanged, however, the two Lehi members committed suicide.

  On April 22, the Lehi fighters attacked an army transport near Rehovot. The following day, the Cairo-Haifa train was ambushed, and 8 Englishmen were killed and 27 wounded. On April 24, the Lehi destroyed the headquarters of the British Mobile Force, and four soldiers were killed in an unrelated incident when their truck hit a mine. A day later, five British policemen were killed by a bomb at a police station in Sarona. The violence continued yet another day as a Haifa CID chief, an inspector, and three other officers were killed in Tel Aviv. These events were a mere prelude, however, to the spectacular attack planned for May. The target: Acre prison.

  The Great Escape

  Acre was a centuries-old fortress that had withstood attacks from some of the world’s most awesome armies, including Napoleon’s. In 1947, the fortress housed a prison holding hundreds of captured underground fighters.

  The assault on the fortress was launched on May 4 and was a spectacular success for the underground. The Jews shot their way in and out of the supposedly impregnable stronghold. All together, 251 inmates escaped—131 Arabs and 120 Jews—in such a spectacular fashion that the world’s attention was again drawn to Palestine.

  The British Give In—Sort Of

  Even before the daring breakout from Acre prison, the British had begun to grow weary of the guerilla war. Despite having 100,000 troops in Palestine, the British were unable to stop the Jewish paramilitary organizations. Moreover, some of the more heinous acts perpetrated by the terrorists had so horrified the British people that increasing pressure was put on the government to withdraw.