Small Wars, Faraway Places: Global Insurrection and the Making of the Modern World, 1945-1965

by Burleigh, Michael

  A murky human traffic had developed between Palestinian Jewish agents and the Nazi paramilitary SS to expatriate Jews down the Danube to Romanian ports and hence out of Europe. These ships were vermin-infested freighters, rusting cattle boats and leaking tankers, into which men, women and children were crammed. When these overloaded hulks appeared off Palestine the British ordered them to turn back, and in one instance opened fire, killing two refugees. Thus began a war of boat propaganda, a tactic Israel’s Turkish and NGO enemies have since turned against it. In November 1940 the British transferred 1,700 refugees from two ships which had arrived at Haifa on to a larger vessel called La Patria, which was destined for Mauritius. Early one morning the ship’s alarm was sounded and the refugees leaped into the sea. Shortly afterwards La Patria blew up and sank. Two hundred and forty refugees drowned or died in the explosion, along with a dozen policemen. The Jewish Agency, founded in 1929 to promote settlement of Palestine, promptly claimed that the refugees had opted to kill themselves rather than go to the hell of Mauritius – in fact one of the most agreeable islands in the world. The true cause of the tragedy was a bungled attempt by the Irgun to cripple the ship’s propulsion. Further incidents included a ship denied entry to Turkish harbours that sank with the loss of 231 lives during a storm, and the Struma, a well-publicized floating hell moored off Istanbul, which sank after another mysterious explosion. Although the fanatical Begin regarded the British as Nazis with better manners, the Irgun respected the call of the mainstream Jewish Agency and its militia army the Haganah to refrain from attacking the British. But the Zionist movement itself was also highly fissiparous, and included extremists as well as moderates. No such restraint inhibited the Lehi, known as the Stern Gang from its charismatic leader Avraham Stern, revered as ‘Yair’ (the Illuminator) by his followers. Stern was killed ‘trying to escape’ from British custody in 1942, but the gang continued to carry out terrorist attacks during the war, murdering at least fifteen men and attacking police stations, official buildings and oil pipelines.31

  Initially, British life in the Mandate had differed little from that of colonists elsewhere, reflecting the way most of the British administrators and soldiers thought about a situation whose complexities generally eluded them – for Palestine was not a colony. There were official receptions at Government House, flower shows and tea parties. The more active could hunt jackals with the Ramle Vale Hunt, or tee off on the Sodom and Gomorrah Golf Course, about which there was much ribald wit. But this was not India or the Sudan; it was more a dead end than a chance to shine as part of an elite, among people too ‘clever’ to be patronized, and one with no real strategic significance until the British had to consider alternatives to a restive Egypt. In a word, Palestine was a boring backwater posting, except perhaps to those of a religious bent.

  Zionist terrorism began in retaliation for Arab atrocities during the 1936–9 Arab Revolt, providing perplexing evidence for the British of peoples’ inability to ‘get along’, as if they were neighbours quarrelling over a suburban hedge or party wall.32 The military response was in line with a simple-minded speech Brigadier Bernard Montgomery had delivered in Haifa in 1937: ‘I do not care whether you are Jews or Gentiles. I care nothing for your political opinions. I am a soldier. My duty is to maintain law and order. I intend to do so.’33 The countenance of the Mandate changed, with official buildings heavily sandbagged behind barriers of barbed wire, and police stations turned into imposing forts constructed from reinforced concrete. In November 1944 the Stern Gang excelled themselves when two of their operatives murdered Resident Minister of State Lord Moyne, Churchill’s friend and his wife Clementine’s exotic travel companion, in Cairo. The reaction among the British governing class was so negative that the Jewish Agency, Haganah and Irgun declared a ‘hunting season’ against Sternist sympathizers. The two young assassins were quickly caught, tried and hanged.

  Although the British in Palestine could rejoice at victory in the war, that mood proved evanescent in the troubled Mandate, where concrete police forts were dubbed ‘Bevingrads’ after Ernest Bevin, the new Labour Foreign Secretary. As the British pulled back their forces in Egypt to the Canal Zone, so Palestine assumed greater importance should they have to beat a strategic retreat from there, with the port of Haifa substituting for the naval facilities at Alexandria. That was why the British concentrated so many troops, at an annual cost of £40 million, in a place where two irreconcilable national identities had long clashed. The 100,000-strong force stationed in Palestine became the object of a campaign in which Jewish children were encouraged to spit on its members while crying ‘English bastards’ or ‘Gestapo’. British airborne troops, in their maroon berets, were dubbed ‘red poppies with black hearts’ when they marched past sullen Jewish onlookers. The emotional atmosphere was further ratcheted up over the well-publicized plight of Jewish Displaced Persons languishing in former Nazi camps.

  As British statesmen were only too aware, Palestine threatened to poison their relations with the US, largely because of the electoral clout of a Jewish lobby that had been bitterly divided before and during the war, but which was now speaking with the enormous moral authority derived from the Holocaust. Disinclined, like his illustrious predecessor, to open America’s doors to them, in August 1945 President Truman requested the admission of 100,000 refugees to Palestine to assuage agitation among Jewish Democrat supporters in New York. Many ordinary Americans, especially the more fundamentalist Christians, supported the Zionists but were ambivalent about America’s own Jews and hated their strong presence in the New York financial district. Truman’s demand thwarted British efforts to decouple the problems of refugees and Palestine, while Washington’s standard combination of opportunism and self-righteousness was bitterly resented in London.

  US policy in the Middle East was almost as subject as the British to competing pressures. In an echo of the Balfour Declaration, Roosevelt had both endorsed the idea of a Jewish state and solemnly promised Saudi Arabia’s King Abd Al-Aziz Ibn Saud that he would not aid the Jews or do anything detrimental to Arab interests. Perspicacious diplomats also noted that there was no point in bolstering the imaginary arch represented by the Northern Tier of Greece, Iran and Turkey if ‘we are going to kick out the pillars’ to the south on which the arch rested. While Arabs had a few advocates like Loy Henderson within the US State Department, they could not match the Zionist organizers, who knew how to mobilize public emotion and had many sympathizers extending to the very top of the administration.

  Truman himself put the main problem succinctly: ‘I do not have hundreds of thousands of Arabs among my constituents.’ Specifically, only once since 1876 had a candidate won the presidency without winning the forty-seven electoral votes of New York, and – though he did in fact lose New York in 1948 – Truman was not going to take that risk. He may have been occasionally exasperated by Zionist lobbyists, but they had the ear of some in his inner circle nonetheless, notably his right-hand man and campaign manager Clark Clifford, who was also to be a highly influential member of the administrations of Presidents Kennedy and Johnson.

  Many of Truman’s advisers were dismissively racist towards the Arabs, while other influential figures were simply naive about the complexity of such conflicts. Loy Henderson, who had been a consul in the Irish Free State as well as chief of mission to Baghdad, was aghast when Eleanor Roosevelt optimistically opined in 1947: ‘Come, come . . . a few years ago Ireland was considered to be a problem that could not be solved. Then the Irish Republic was established and the problem vanished. I’m confident that when a Jewish state is set up, the Arabs will see the light; they will quiet down; and Palestine will no longer be a problem.’34 Not for the last time, Ireland’s idiosyncratic history was wrongly taken to be exemplary. Rather than encouraging Americans to overcome their own aversion to Jewish immigration, US policy-makers expected the Arabs to do so.35

  While some of the British governing class were as reflexively ant
i-Semitic as their US peers, others simply refused to accept that the remnants of the Jewish people had no further destiny in Europe.36 They could not grasp that they were asking the Jews to assimilate into a charnel house. The pro-Zionist Labour politician Richard Crossman accurately described the irresponsible aspects of US moral grandstanding: ‘By shouting for a Jewish state, Americans satisfy many motives. They are attacking the Empire and British imperialism, they are espousing a moral cause, the fulfilment for which they will take no responsibility, and, most important of all, they are diverting attention from the fact that their own immigration laws are one of the causes of the problem.’37

  If Americans felt common cause with rebellious colonial frontiersmen, the British were unused to colonized peoples who were modern, democratic, self-assertive and prone to moralizing about general European guilt for what was not yet called the Holocaust. British anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism (which should not be casually conflated) received powerful impulse from what was too crudely described then, and now, as ‘Jewish terrorism’, a term akin to calling the IRA ‘Catholic terrorists’.

  While the Haganah focused on destroying British coastal radar installations, bridges and railway lines, Irgun and the Stern Gang stepped up their terrorist campaigns. In April 1946 they gunned down seven British soldiers in a car park and stole their weapons. In June Operation Agatha saw the large-scale deployment of British troops to detain leading Zionists, including many ostensibly moderate Jewish Agency figures, and to unearth arms dumps. The primary object of this operation was to prove connections between the Jewish Agency and the Haganah underground, and in that respect it was successful, despite seemingly hysterical women on rural kibbutzim who tore off their sleeves to reveal German concentration-camp tattoos to distract the searchers from weapons dumps.

  Irgun documents seized in such raids found their way to British Criminal Investigation Department offices situated, alongside other Mandate bureaucracies, on various floors of Jerusalem’s King David Hotel.38 Even by British standards it was an act of astonishing casualness to have conflated business and pleasure in one major complex, for the King David Hotel was both an administrative centre and a functioning luxury hotel. On 22 July 1946 fourteen or fifteen Zionist terrorists, dressed as Arabs, drew up in a truck and unloaded milk churns packed with explosives into the basement nightclub called the Régence. These exploded at 12.36 p.m., when the hotel was at its most crowded, and demolished most of its southern wing, killing ninety-one people including British soldiers and Arab and Jewish administrators. A few days after the attack the British launched Operation Shark to round up further Zionist extremists, 800 of whom were detained in Rafah camp. Onerous controls were placed on the general Jewish population through random searches, curfews and roadblocks.39

  The terrorists responded by extending their campaign to British interests in Europe (the British embassy in Rome was bombed in October 1946), as well as to the imperial metropolis itself. In March 1947 the Stern Gang bombed the British Colonial Club off Trafalgar Square, injuring black servicemen and African students. In June the gang despatched the first ever letter bombs, with Churchill, Bevin, Clement Attlee and Eden among the addressees. The Security Service, MI5, kept Zionist sympathizers under close surveillance and successfully frustrated terrorist attacks.40 Unsurprisingly, the British authorities in Palestine responded to Zionist attacks with strongarm methods that many of their policemen had learned fighting Irish republicans in the 1920s, the model of choice too for many Zionist terrorists in the 1940s. The ranks of the undercover police also included such war heroes as SAS Major Roy Farran, whose robust approach to counter-terrorism (which has been normative in Israel itself for the last half-century) was denounced by those indulgent of the malignancy of Zionist terrorism. By the end of 1946 the terrorists had murdered 373 people, the majority civilians.41

  High-level British policy was conflicted between those who believed in the primacy of a political solution and military men who regarded any negotiated settlement as appeasement. The chief advocate of a hard line was the star general, Field Marshal Montgomery, who easily overruled the more political approach of Colonial Secretary Arthur Creech Jones, who had been jailed for pacifism in the First World War. British troops were forbidden to visit such public places as cafés and cinemas, while non-essential family members were repatriated. The British retreated behind more fortifications, in the process ‘transforming the Mandate into a prison, and locking themselves in as well’.42 They also relied upon collective reprisals for terrorist atrocities, something modern Israel practises too. As one British officer noted: ‘when the security forces have to deal with a thoroughly non-cooperative, unscrupulous, dishonest and utterly immoral civilian population such as the Jewish Community in Palestine, who systematically and continually hide and refuse to give up to justice the perpetrators of murderous outrages, reprisals are the only effective weapon to employ, saving time, money and unnecessary bloodshed’.43

  Events in Britain and India compelled a decision in the winter of 1946–7. While the bankrupt British froze in their own homes, in India communal violence forced them to put a date on withdrawal. In the House of Commons on 25 February 1947 Richard Crossman fatuously maintained that a bit of creative conflict might bring resolution, just as a strike might settle a domestic labour dispute after failed negotiation and arbitration.44 Such facile analogies made it easy enough to let Palestine go, a decision arrived at that month when the cabinet acknowledged that there was no obvious political solution. It also declared martial law, although that proved no more help than the abortive quest for a political solution.

  Meanwhile the Zionists continued to utilize what has been called ‘boat propaganda’, which MI6 sought to frustrate with Operation Embarrass, in which they damaged or sank five refugee ships in Italian harbours.45 They did not manage to get at the Exodus 1947, which after being repulsed from Palestine was in turn refused entry to Marseilles, ending up in Hamburg, where British troops and German policemen manhandled the refugees ashore. The captain subsequently recalled that Zionist intelligence agents ‘gave us orders that this ship was to be used as a big demonstration with banners to show how poor and weak and helpless we were, and how cruel the British were’.46

  The Exodus story was played up in an inflammatory way in the US by the Zionist screenwriter Ben Hecht. Any emotional capital the Exodus saga accrued in Britain was immediately dissipated when the Irgun hanged two British sergeants and booby-trapped their bodies in response to the execution of three convicted terrorist killers in Acre jail – and Hecht gloated about it. The outrage caused British troops in Palestine to riot and contributed to anti-Semitic incidents in Britain itself.47

  These incidents took place under the noses of the delegates to the UN Special Committee on Palestine, who arrived in Palestine in mid-June 1947. Three of its members personally witnessed British mismanagement of the Exodus saga in Haifa harbour. UNSCOP eventually recommended partition, by eight votes to three, although under these arrangements the Arab and Jewish areas were to be entwined like two fighting snakes. The British rejected the proposal on the grounds that the US refused to underwrite it with aid or troops. Unable to impose a solution on either Arabs or Jews, in late 1947 the British informed the UN of their intention to withdraw unilaterally, fixing the date at 14 May 1948. The precedent of India lay to hand, except that there they had patched up a settlement of a sort. Although the British claimed to represent law and order, this was notional in a country given over to a civil war between Jews and Arabs. To British surprise, both the US and the Soviet Union backed partition, tacitly uniting under the banner of anti-imperialism.48

  The Soviet attitude was interesting. Stalin always sought to disrupt and divide what was coalescing as a single Western opponent. In this respect Palestine seemed ideally designed to cause trouble between the US and Britain. There was much for the Soviets to like in the incipient Zionist state. Young Zionists like Amos Perlmutter had eagerly charted the
onward march of the Red Army into Germany with maps and pins on their bedroom walls, and Stalin was certainly aware of how rife pro-German sympathies had been in the Arab world, as well as among Muslims in the wartime Soviet Union. Trade unionism had a much stronger purchase among Palestine’s Jews than it did in any surrounding Arab country. Interwar Palestine had the largest Communist Party in the Middle East, dominated by its Jewish members. Unlike Egypt, where most land was in feudal ownership, the Zionist kibbutzim bore a generic resemblance to Soviet collective farms. Stalin could imagine that, should the Arabs emulate these modern features of Zionism, they might then enter into a more revolutionary phase of their own development. No wonder the Soviet Union was the first country to recognize Israel.49

  The Zionists had achieved international recognition for a Jewish state, rather than a ‘national home’, within Palestine, even though with 600,000 Jews to 1.2 million Arabs the Jews were only a large minority in a country where most of the land was owned by absentee urban Arab landlords. There were some obvious weaknesses on the Arab side. They lacked the military experience and European training of Haganah, nor did they have the sophisticated war-surplus German weapons that Haganah was sourcing from Czechoslovakia. Illiterate Arab villagers had a much less visceral sense of nationhood than educated European immigrants who had survived attempts to exterminate them all.50 The internal Palestinian Arab leadership was bitterly divided between rival clans, while the notorious Mufti Hajj Amin was hated by other Arab leaders and damned as a Nazi collaborator in the wider world.