ARAB ISRAELI LECTURE-SEMINAR NUMBER 2 THE BRITISH MANDATE,
1919-1948 So, having done a bit about the early origins of Zionism and Arab
nationalism, we now have to go through how those two ideologies first came into
direct conflict with each other, and how this lead to the first violent
Arab-Jewish conflicts in the region, which actually predated the creation of
Israel by several decades. There was a major third party in all this, which was
the British Empire, because Palestine, having been taken from the Turks on the
final break-up of the Ottoman Empire after the First World War, was
administered, from 1919 to 1947, by the British Colonial Office acting under a
Mandate from the League of Nations, it was garrisoned by the British Army and
the RAF, and was policed by a mainly British police force which also contained
large minorities from both the Jewish and Arab communities. The major
dominating political dispute during the Mandate Period, as it is known to
historians, arose from the Jews and the Arabs both believing that the British,
during the First World War, had promised Palestine to them, and there were extremely
violent guerrilla and terrorist insurgencies against the British from both
groups, culminating in the great Arab uprising of 1936-1939, in which Palestine
was, to all intents and purposes, in a state of open civil war, with Arab
nationalists, and a small number of Islamic fundamentalists, on one side, and
the British, the Jews and moderate Arabs on the other. After this, from 1939
right through to1948, the British were on the receiving end of a Zionist
insurgency making extensive use of terrorism directed against the British –
including assassinating British military personnel in London
– and the Arabs. Now, the British themselves, it has to be said, were in a
pretty impossible position: they were stuck between two utterly uncompromising
ethno-religious nationalisms, each of which saw any attempt at even-handedness
or conciliation as betrayal. So, another thing we need to assess is the British
role in the origins of the Arab-Israeli conflict, and how far they might be
culpable: interestingly enough, this was taken as a given not only by David
Ben-Gurion, but also still is by most of the Palestinian elite, so this issue
still exercises people today.
.Now then, before proceeding, some recap is necessary about
how this situation arose. Sir Henry MacMahon, the British Consul-General in Egypt ,
and Hussein, the Grand Sheriff of Mecca ,
began corresponding in 1917. Hussein was an important figure, as he was head of
the Hashemite clan, descended directly from the Prophet, and was also the
guardian of the two Holy Cities, and therefore had some right to speak for all
Muslim Arabs. MacMahon’s aim was to get him to join the Allied side in the
First World War and rise up against the Ottoman Empire .
This was a success, as it led to a major uprising in the Hejaz
region of western Arabia , led by Hussein’s son, Faisal, with
his other son, Abdullah, also playing a prominent part. The Arabs believed that
MacMahon had promised them independence apart from ‘portions of Syria laying to
the west of Damascus', when, it emerges from documents at the time, the British
had little intention of handing over control of so vast an area to such a new
force. It would appear in retrospect that the wording of MacMahon’s letters was
actually rather vague and lost in translation from English, which tends to be a
very precise language, to Arabic, which tends often to be highly poetic and
allusional, and can take an indirect approach to its objective. What is
interesting is that Hussein knew that the Allies had already drawn up plans for
carving up the Middle East the year before. In May 1916,
Britain , France
and Russia had
secretly signed the Sykes-Picot Agreement, named for Sir Mark Sykes of the
British Foreign and Colonial Office and Francois Picot of the French Foreign
Ministry, who had
largely drawn it up. Under this agreement, France would get
direct control of much of Syria, and would have a zone of influence comprising
Damascus, Aleppo and Mosul, while Britain would rule lower Iraq directly and
would ‘advise’ an Arab government laying between Egypt and eastern Arabia,
which would, therefore, be a British protectorate as the Gulf States had been
for over a hundred years. Hussein had been informed about this by Turkish
agents trying to persuade him to stay neutral, but he also felt that Alliance
with the British was the best means of getting rid of the Ottomans – it was a
start, if you like. This is in stark contrast with the absolutely uncompromising,
all-or-nothing approach adopted by many other Arab leaders since and which, in
some cases, can be show to have hindered the Palestinian cause on a number of
identifiable occasions. As we know, the British had made a third promise. Now,
the road to the creation of Israel
is traced to 1917, and the declaration by the British Foreign Secretary, Arthur
Balfour, to British Zionists that Britain
would ‘use their best endeavors' to assist the creation of a Jewish national
homeland in Palestine , a majority
Arab region. The Declaration was made in pursuit of Allied war aims, and was
shaped more by common suppositions about the power of Jews worldwide than the
reality of the situation in Palestine, where they made up just 10% of the
population in 1917. There was a widespread belief in the early 20th century
that Jews around the world constituted a single, well-organized international
community, and that the leaders of this community - ‘International Jewry'
-Jewish bankers, financiers and businessmen - manipulated the global economy
and through it, global politics. Now, as of 1914, the myth of ‘International
Jewry’ was taken for granted by most of the world’s leaders, and it was
actually being encouraged and used by a number of prominent Zionists to exert
pressure and influence upon them, on a basis of ‘If you can’t beat ‘them, then
join ‘them.’ When war broke out, both sides thought that the support of
‘International Jewry’ would be essential if they were to win. As of 1914, the
two main centers of the international Zionist movement were Berlin
and Vienna , and most politically
active Jews lived in the Central Powers, Germany ,
the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the Ottoman Empire . Now,
these powers were engaged in a war against the Russian Empire, which had been
pursuing openly anti-Semitic social and religious policies of generations and
was the very power which had carried out the pogroms from which the families of
many Western European and American Jews had fled and which had also provoked
the first waves of Jewish emigration to Palestine .
We have records that Rabbis in London told their congregations to remember that
they were in England, not Russia, and that they should support the British war
effort against Germany, and up to 1917, indications from the American press
indicated that most American Jews were sympathetic to Germany, who were not
only fighting the Russians, incidentally, but also had the best-integrated
Jewish community in Europe, its Minister for Armaments, Walther Rathenau, for
instance, being Jewish. Now, it so happens that the Kaiser, Wilhelm II, also
wanted the support of ‘International Jewry’ (and he had also previously
proclaimed himself ‘the Protector of Islam’), but could not become a Zionist
due this military alliance with the Ottomans. From the British point of view,
supporting Zionism made sense. The Prime Minister, David Lloyd George, was a
Christian religious Zionist, and so was open to persuasion to begin with. The
leading British Zionist was a scientist, Dr Chaim Weitzman, President and spokesman
of the World Zionist Organization, who became a very important figure early in
the war when he developed a means of synthesizing acetone, a chemical used in
making explosives and for which Britain had relied previously on imports from Germany .
Weitzman became something of a hero in the British press because of this and
through this, was able to meet with members of the Cabinet
including Lloyd George and Balfour. Weitzman, it must be
said, was a brilliant ‘operator’: he was distinguished, highly charismatic and
charming, and had a gift for knowing what made the people he was talking to
tick. For instance, he did nothing to dispel the myth of the influence of
‘International Jewry', and used it tactically as late as 1929, after which the
apparently unstoppable rise of the Jews' arch enemy, Adolph Hitler, made it
implausible. It was largely through Weitzman's lobbying of the Prime Minister
and Foreign Secretary that the Declaration was made. The Declaration included
the proviso that the ‘civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish
communities' - the Arabs who made up 90% of Palestine 's
population in 1917 - would not be prejudiced by any Jewish presence. It did not
say that Palestine would be turned
into a Jewish state , just a homeland, nor did it, at any point lay out
what the borders of this homeland would be – after all, they had yet to secure Palestine
from the Turks. Nor, most importantly, did it say exactly how the inevitable
tensions between the Jews and the Arabs would be resolved – that would be
decided after the First World War was over. All it committed itself to was
supporting the principle of a Jewish homeland. Now, this principle soon had to
be adapted to conditions on the ground. In November 1918,Palestine
was occupied jointly by a British Expeditionary Force, under General Sir Edmund
Allenby, and a large force of Bedouin under Faisal, the son of Hussein of
Mecca. The British setup a military provisional government, and, in 1922, the
newly formed League of Nations gave Britain an official Mandate to administer
Palestine, which specifically charged them with implementing the Balfour
Declaration – so, the British were obliged under international law to encourage
Jews to immigrate to Palestine and settle there en route to setting up a Jewish
national homeland there; they were also required to set up a Jewish Agency in
Palestine to allow the Jews to administer part of this process themselves, and
this Jewish Agency was to become the unofficial 'government’ of Palestine’s
Jews up to 1947. Now, at the same time, the League seems largely to have gone
along with Sykes-Picot: France
was given League Mandates to administer Syria
and Lebanon ,
and Britain
another Mandate for Iraq .
There was a difference between these Mandates and Sykes Picot and with the
Mandate given the British in Palestine, in that the League specifically laid
out that it was the job of Britain and France to prepare these countries for
independence, which was to be declared within three years, and, indeed, in 1921
the British set up Iraq as an independent Hashemite kingdom with Faisal as its
king. The Palestine Mandate did not mention any kind of state entity, nor did
it have any deadlines. The stance of the Americans over this was ambiguous;
President Wilson was a naive idealist whose aim of ending all wars once and for
all by giving all the peoples of the world ‘national self determination’
rapidly came unstuck when faced with the complication and messiness of real
life – attempts to apply this in Europe were to be a contributing factor in the
path to World War Two; as of 1917, he supported both the idea of a Jewish homeland
in Palestine and the creation of Arab states; between 1918 and 1922, some
moderate Arab leaders hoped that the USA would be given the Palestine Mandate,
but this was dashed when the US Senate rejected American membership of the
League of Nations. Some British politicians were aware of the implications of
the post war settlement. One of these was the Colonial Secretary, Winston
Churchill, who happened to be a Zionist, who disliked Arabs, and a friend of
Weizmann’s. Nevertheless, he was a hard-nosed realist, and in 1922, he issued a
White Paper denying Weizmann’s objective ‘of making Palestine as Jewish as
England is English', and which committed Britain to restricting Jewish
immigration to Palestine’s ‘absorptive capacity’,
which was not too serious, given that Jewish immigration was
minuscule at the time, and, indeed, the British managed to attract 50,000 Arab
immigrants to Palestine in the
1950s. Another thing which apparently violated the terms of the Mandate was the
creation of Transjordan . Transjordan, which consisted of
the two-thirds of Palestine to the east of the River Jordan and, technically,
incorporated into the Mandate, was formed into a separate Hashemite Arab
Emirate, not subject to the Balfour Declaration and ruled by Hussein’s son and
Faisal’s brother, Abdullah, and Abdullah soon set up a separate government with
its capital city in Amman, with a mainly British bureaucracy and a
British-commanded army, the Arab Legion. Consequently, even the Zionists came
to recognize that Transjordan could not form part of any
Jewish homeland, despite previously being part of Palestine .
Subsequently, Palestine , Transjordan
and Iraq took
on vital strategic importance for the Empire, as a buffer zone protecting Egypt
and the Suez Canal , and as an aerial artery between Britain
and India .
Although aware of this, the first British High Commissioner of Palestine, Sir Herbert
Samuel, a prominent British Jew, a member of the Cabinet producing the Balfour
Declaration, and a keen but moderate Zionist, inadvertently set the policy
agenda leading to the uprisings of 1936-39. In 1920, he passed an Immigration
Ordinance removing all restriction upon Jewish immigration to Palestine ,
and created the tripartite system by which Palestine
was to be governed, with the Zionist Executive (later the Jewish Agency) and
the Supreme Muslim Council representing their communities to the High
Commissioner. Samuel's Ordinance resulted in Arab rioting, and to pacify Arab
opinion, Samuel temporarily suspended it and allowed the riots' principal
agitator, the Muslim cleric, Haj Amin al-Husseini, to be elected Grand Mufti of
Jerusalem in 1921 and President of the Supreme Muslim Council a year later,
making him both spiritual and secular leader of Palestine's. Haj Amin was just
28 years old when he was elected as Mufti. He was born in 1893 to a
middle-class Jerusalem Arab family and was educated mainly in Cairo ,
and he served as an officer in the Ottoman Empire in
World War One. As such, he seems to have come to Arab nationalism relatively
late, although he proclaimed that he had always supported the aim of a
Palestinian Arab state. As Mufti, he was the main judge and administrator of
Sharia among Palestine 's
Muslim community, and also appointed Imams, and he used these powers to heavily
politicize the Islamic clergy in Palestine .
The Mufti consequently developed the strategy of using threats of disorder to
pressure the British into curtailing the Jewish ‘incursion' into Palestine, while
always remaining careful to cover any direct links with troublemakers and to
assure the British of his goodwill. At the same time, Samuel encouraged the
Jewish community to form their own permanent institutions. With European organization
and European education, they did this with great efficiency. The Jewish Agency
was set up as a semi-official governing body, representing the Jews to the High
Commissioner. They set up the Histadrut, a kind of economic planning body,
based on socialist principles, which set up factories, food processing plants
and a construction company, Solel Boneh, which did regular construction work
for the British Army throughout the Mandate period. It is often stated that the
British built railways and modern roads in Palestine ,
along with water pipelines, sewage plants and an electricity grid; much of the
work was done by Jewish contractors who used a combination of Arab and Jewish
workers. Probably the most important and controversial body was the Jewish
underground militia, the Haganah. The Haganah was a part-time force which had
been formed in 1920, and in which all Jewish men of military age were expected
to serve; its existence was highly illegal and its units trained in secret,
although its existence was
tolerated, conditionally by Samuel and all the British High
Commissioners who followed him and, indeed, a number of senior British officers
wanted it legalized and placed under British command and training, particularly
as the Arab community apparently became more restive in the 1930s. By1938, it
had fully 50,000 men under arms, commanded by Jewish men who had served in the
Russian, German, Austrian and Ottoman armies, financed by the International
Zionist Organization and with a complete military staff with offices dealing
with strategy, training and intelligence: the head of the intelligence branch,
Reuven Shiloah, was later to found Mossad. It was also very well armed: most of
its weapons were smuggled in, and there was some attempt at creating underground
weapons factories where such smuggled in weapons could be reverse-engineered.
By 1939, it had6,000 rifles, 600 machine guns and 24,000 grenades. So, by the
end of the inter-war period, the Jews in Palestine
had set up most of the institutions of an embryonic state – a government, an
economic infrastructure, an army, even something of an intelligence agency.
Now, compare this with the Arabs. The Arabs were divided throughout this period
by tribal differences, by religious differences and perhaps above all, by the
highly divisive figure of the Mufti, who was, to use a cliché, loved and hated
in equal measure. His authority was severely weakened by a long-standing feud
between his clan, the al-Husseinis, and the powerful an- Nashashibi family,
who, although anti-Zionist, were more openly pro-British. Indeed, the
Palestinians, throughout their history, I think, have been desperately
unfortunate in their political leaders, something we will be looking at in some
detail in some of the following sessions. The Arabs did not develop governing
institutions in Palestine , nor did
they ever have a united nationalist organization. Instead, they were divided
sharply, almost on black and white lines, between those who pursued a
completely obstructionist and oppositional policy towards both the Jews and the
British, which cost them a lot of support abroad, and those who believed in peaceful
co-existence with the British and in some kind of peaceful settlement with the
Jews, such as the an- Nashashibis. Indeed, the Mufti probably threw away his
best chance at major peaceful political influence early: in 1923 the British
offered to set up a Palestine Legislative Council with 22 seats, ten Arab, ten
British and two Jewish. The Arabs, or, more specifically, the Mufti, turned
down this offer on the basis that the Jews and the British were
over-represented in terms of their numbers in Palestine :
this was perfectly true, but agreeing to the Legislative Committee might, at
least, have given the Arabs an official voice, a working compromise, if you
like. Along with this, there was little chance of any effective support from
the rest of the Arab world. Remember, this is at least twenty years before
serious amounts of oil began to flow out of the region: the Gulf Arab states
were, at the time, among the poorest and most backward in the world; Egypt was
firmly under the iron hand of a pro-British king, and Abdullah of Transjordan
was not only a sworn enemy of the Mufti, who had encouraged his flock to
assassinate him in a number of sermons, but, as Avi Shlaimhas shown in his
research, was, from the 1920s onwards, engaged in secret negotiations with the
Jewish Agency over the borders of a future Jewish state. Now, it has to be said
that all this was rather academic, as of the early to mid 1920s. The Jewish
population of Palestine remained at
around 10% of the total and, indeed, over one two-year period,1926 to 1928, it
actually shrank. So, there was relative peace until 1929, mainly because the Jews
remained such a minority in Palestine ,
and a Jewish national homeland, let alone a Jewish state, seemed an unlikely
prospect at any time. However, the mid 1920s saw Europe
begin its greatest spasm of anti-Semitism, beginning in Poland
in 1925 and moving to an unprecedented level with the rise of the Nazis. The USA
had restricted immigration in 1924, so Palestine
now took on the
role Theodore Herzl had envisaged for it, a Jewish national
sanctuary: Jewish immigration to Palestine, encouraged initially by the Nazis
as the best means of getting the Jews out of Europe, rose from 4,000 arrivals
per year in 1931 to over 61,000 in 1935, plus perhaps 5-6000 illegal immigrants
smuggled in per year, and the Jewish population of Jerusalem and Haifa doubled within
five years. The perceived existential threat to the Palestinian Arabs posed by
the sudden rapid upsurge in Jewish immigration produced a violent Arab
nationalist response sharpened by militant Islam. The first clash came in 1929,
with the so-called Wailing Wall Incident. The Wailing Wall, or what the Jews
call the Western Wall, is all that remains of the Second Jewish Temple, which
was destroyed by the Romans after the second Jewish uprising of 135 AD. To
religious Jews, it is of enormous significance, as it symbolizes the hope that
one day the Temple might be rebuilt
and Zion , in its religious sense,
restored. It so happens that the Western Wall forms part of an area also of
enormous importance to Muslims the world over – the Dome of the Rock, from
which the Prophet ascended into Heaven one night, a point marked by the al-Aqsa
Mosque and which to Muslims is the third holy place after Mecca and Medina, and
a focus for pilgrimage. Now, until 1928, Jewish and Muslim pilgrims generally
left each other alone, although there was the occasional minor scuffle between
extremists. However, the Jews then put up a screen at the Western Wall to
separate male from female worshipers; this blocked the path to the al-Aqsa
Mosque, which was also a major thoroughfare used by the local Arab community.
It also violated an unwritten agreement that each community would not interfere
with the religious observances of the other. The Arabs complained to the
British, and the police removed the screens, which provoked a number of violent
Jewish protests in Jerusalem , which
turned into mass brawls between Jews and Arabs in which 133 Jews and 116 Arabs
were killed, most of them by armed British police. Some Arabs turned to
terrorism, leading to the first major terrorist atrocity in Palestine ,
the extermination of most of the Jewish inhabitants of Hebron .
The British did what they usually did, which was setup a Commission of Enquiry,
which produced a report recognizing Arab grievances; after this, the Colonial
Secretary, Lord Passfield, issued a White Paper blaming the Jewish Agency for
the 1929disturbances, which, of course, might not have happened had they been
more sensitive to Islamic religious observances. This had provided a golden
opportunity for the Mufti, who had orchestrated the 1929 rioting with
inflammatory sermons on the threat to the holy places of Islam, and he returned
to this theme repeatedly in the 1930s, while all the time assuring the British
of his peaceful intentions. From then on, religion combined with nationalism to
sharpen the conflict. Now, strip away the veneer and the Mufti emerges, like so
many other so-called ‘Holy Men’ in the Middle East, as an opportunist
politician who used Islam to build a power base for himself and his family and
to head off accusations of corruption, but from the early 1930s, he was pressured
by the emergence of genuine religious militants. The most notable of these was
Sheikh Muhammad Izz al-Din al-Qassam, a Syrian Shi'ite cleric who had been
recruiting for anti-colonial jihads since 1911, and whose followers made their
first attacks on Jewish settlements in mid 1935; al-Qassam was killed in battle
by the British in November 1935, and remained an iconic figure for Palestinian nationalists
into the 1970s. Reacting to Qassam's ‘martyrdom', from early 1936, Muslim
clerics began to demand resistance to any Jewish takeover of Palestine ,
the Mufti exploiting this, rather than steering it. The Islamic nature of the
great revolt of 1936-1939 was stressed in its own literature, one training
pamphlet prepared possibly by its first military leader, Fawzi al Quwuqji,
opening with
‘a religious exhortation to the Mohammedan to encourage him
to fight and die for the cause of God' and going on to state ‘The warrior
fighting for God and his country must be merciful, just and lenient with
the people' an exhortation Arab rebels almost universally ignored. Islam
was more of a factor in shaping British attitudes: the notion that
Palestine may become a source of tension between the Islamic world and the
British Empire, with implications for British interests in the Middle East and
India which the Axis could exploit, shaped the policy of the
Colonial Office and the High Commission in dealing with Palestine in
the 1930s, they advocating compromise and conciliation in opposition to
the British Army's repeated calls for vigorous repression against Arab insurgents.
There were two other aggravating factors which became a lot stronger in
the 1930s, land and the British predicament in the Eastern
Mediterranean in the late 1930s. When it comes to land, Arab
landlords were often keen to sell to Jews, who paid generously, but Arab
tenants were not consulted, and were often evicted forcibly from land
their families had occupied for generations. This was aggravated by the Zionist
politico-military strategy of ‘establishing facts'. What this meant was
that, being aware that any eventual political settlement in Palestine
would depend upon demographics, the Zionists attempted to establish a Jewish
presence in every part of Palestine
by purchasing land in majority Arab areas, preferably near Palestine 's
borders, in the disputed area of Galilee in
particular. Once land was purchased, there followed a set of drills
devised by the Haganah. Haganah volunteers moved in immediately and
erected pre-fabricated quasi-military outposts aimed at preventing Arab farmers
from returning; 55 such settlements were established in1936-39. Although
these were invariably cloaked as ordinary kibbutzim, the British were fully
aware of what was happening: in April 1938, the High Commissioner, Sir
Harold MacMichael, reported to London that ‘establishing facts' stemmed from:
The desire to press on with the establishment of a National Home all over
Palestine and to show the world, in particular the Arab world, that violence
and danger would not be a deterrent....(and) The desire to extend
settlements in...Galilee in general so that the
Jewish "claim" to this district will be more easily established.
ﾐ
The Zionists were greatly encouraged by the Peel Report
of July 1937 (see below) which recommended that Eretz Israel should
include as many of the Jewish Settlements and as much Jewish owned land as
possible. After this, the strategy was escalated, supported by the
'Redemption of Galilee' charity which raised funds in Britain and the USA
to support the settlements ‘Establishing facts' was soon seen as a major
nuisance by the British Colonial Office, which was desperate to pacify Arab
opinion; in November 1938, the District Commissioner for Galilee
reported to MacMichael that ‘Dr Weitzman's fait accompli policy' had resulted
in three new settlements being established in this highly disturbed area,
‘one disguised as a labor camp', and that his queries met with a
‘conspiracy of silence'; MacMichael - generally sympathetic towards the Jews -
was so disturbed by the level of army and police resources redirected to
defending the new settlements that, at his request, an Order in (the Privy)
Council was passed in early 1938 granting him the authority to ban new
settlements unless specifically permitted by himself. This led to
further moral and legal complications, as Lieutenant General Sir
Robert Haining, the British General Officer Commanding (GOC) - later a
“’bete noir“’ for Wingate -confided to Major General Bernard Montgomery,
commanding 8th Division, in northern Palestine,
in April 1939: æ°[The] Point really is, it is [the] Jews'
land, and in law and under the Mandate, they are “’entitled“’ to occupy [it].
Therefore any attempt to dispossess them if they bounce us, is fraught with
difficulty, and far reaching effects.’ To Palestinian Arabs, the settlements
were provocative for more mundane reasons; not only were they resentful over
their landlords selling their land to outsiders, but also of Jewish success in
cultivating that land, which had often been unproductive for generations. What
do we know about Jewish attitudes to all this? Despite Weitzman's aim, stated
in 1919, ‘To make Palestine as
Jewish as England
is English', the Zionist leadership aimed at reaching this goal in organic
manner, via immigration and settlement under British protection. This affected
the initial Jewish reaction to anti-Zionist violence. Weitzman and Ben-Gurion,
chairman of the Jewish Agency and accepted head of Palestine 's
Jewish community, at first advocated Havlagah, or restraint, agreeing that
maintenance of the moral high ground would guarantee the support of the world
community. Yet, by 1939, having had several peace overtures rejected,
Ben-Gurion was expressing in public the view he had long held in private, that
Islam was a ‘violent doctrine', that Arabs were instinctively intolerant and
any peaceful settlement was impossible; ‘We both want Palestine. And that is
the fundamental conflict’ This was already the stance of the most
uncompromising Zionist leader of all - Vladimir Jabotinsky, President of the
New Zionist Organization and originator of the philosophy of the ‘Iron Wall'. This
was first enunciated in an article published in Russia
in 1923 in which Jabotinsky argued that, like all peoples, the Arabs had a
strong sense of national identity, and the natural tendency of people to resist
incursion by another nation meant that Jews and Arabs, two nations competing
for the same territory, could never co-exist peacefully. Arab resistance was
entirely natural, as ‘Every indigenous people will resist alien settlers as
long as they see any hope of ridding themselves of the danger of foreign
settlement.' Moreover, the Arab desire for a pan-Arab federation, including Palestine ,
meant peaceful agreement with the wider Arab world would remain ‘a delusion.' The
Arab world therefore had to be coerced to recognize an Israel
in its biblical borders: Zionist colonization, even the most restricted, must
either be terminated or carried out in defiance of the will of the native
population. This colonization can, therefore, continue and develop only under
the protection of a force independent of the local population - an iron wall
which the native population cannot break through. ﾐ
If Zionism was ‘moral and just', justice had to prevail, leaving Zionists and
their supporters with no choice but to use overwhelming military force to
induce more moderate voices in the Arab world to prevail and a peaceful
settlement to be reached. Jabotinsky knew that this was already becoming
Zionist policy, factions being divided only on who would build the wall: One
prefers an iron wall of Jewish bayonets, the other proposes an iron wall of
British bayonets, the third proposes an agreement with Baghdad, and appears to
be satisfied with Baghdad's bayonets...but we all applaud, day and night, the
iron wall. 'Jabotinsky was an Anglophile, had served in the British army in the
First World War, and his aim apparently was to create the ‘Iron Wall' as an
Anglo-Jewish project, a theme taken up in a memorandum sent to the Colonial
Office in early 1937, wherein he argued for the Haganah to be legalized and
placed under British command and training, and for the British to raise a
Jewish
Legion consisting of three infantry battalions from Palestine
and volunteers from the Diaspora. Ben-Gurion recalled Jabotinsky arguing
consistently that Jewish units in Palestine
should be under British command, in contradiction of the policy of Ben-Gurion's
own Labor (“’Mapai“’)movement. Yet, Jabotinsky remained uncompromising towards
the Arabs, a Jewish state ‘on both banks of the Jordan (i.e. incorporating
Transjordan)' being a stated aim of his Revisionist Party and New Zionist Organization,
and he regarded any attempt at partition as ‘treason'. Moreover, from1936, the
Revisionists maintained their own militia, Irgun Bet, a splinter group from the
Haganah which slowly drifted out of even Jabotinsky's control and became the
most violent Jewish group of all under its new name, Irgun Zvai Leumi and
through the influence of one of its most prominent operators, Menachem Begin.
Now, as I have said, the Mufti often let the situation slip out of his control,
and was then forced to take action to get it back. In 1936, the Arabs finally
began to organize themselves similarly to the Jews, although they had a lot of
catching up to do. In 1936, he was elected chairman of the Arab Higher
Committee, which was a new body intended to represent all of Palestine ’s
Arabs, Christians well as Muslim, to the British. Now, as I have mentioned, in
1935, Qassam’s followers began attacks on Jewish settlements in Galilee .
In April 1936, the Supreme Muslim Council and the Arab Higher Committee called
a general strike of Arab workers, which lasted six months and was accompanied
by rioting, targeting Jewish businesses and residential areas in the big towns,
the murder of British officials and Jewish civilians, and, in the summer, the
forming of large guerrilla units in the countryside. Now, this was the
beginning of the Arab Revolt of 1936-1939, which was, put simply, the first
Arab-Jewish War. I say this for a couple of reasons: to begin with, the British
noticed that these guerrilla units, which called themselves Mujahideen,
consisted largely of volunteers from Iraq and Syria, many of them apparently
with regular army training, and reinforced by local Palestinian Arabs, who
seemed to be a lot less aggressive. Indeed, one phenomenon of the Revolt was that
most of the rural Arab population, the ones with actually the most to lose from
the creation of a Jewish state, remained indifferent to the guerrillas and had
to be coerced or even terrorized into supporting them; indeed, many of them
cooperated actively with the British, up to and including, later on, forming
counter-guerrilla units which cooperated with the British Army. Moreover, the
military direction of the guerrillas was in the hands of a former Colonel in
the Iraqi Army, Fawzi alQuwuqji, who had been enlisted by the Arab Higher
Committee, i.e. the Mufti, to give the guerrillas some direction and command;
this he did, producing a manual for guerrilla warfare a copy of which you can
see in the Public Records Office at Kew. Iraq
itself spoke internationally on behalf of the Arab Higher Committee and
attempted coercive pressure on the British with vague threats of escalating the
crisis in the whole region. So, what we see is not so much an insurgency as an
invasion, using guerrilla methods, in support of an elite of urban agitators
led by the Mufti. Now, the British had just a single weak brigade in Palestine ,
about 6,000 men, not all of them fighting troops, so they could not take the
offensive to deal with the guerrillas. The major British response was to
announce, in August 1936 that they were going to send a Royal Commission, under
Lord Peel, to Palestine, to investigate whether the Mandate was actually
working to the satisfaction of all the communities. However, before it could do
so, law and order had to be restored in Palestine ,
and so they sent two infantry divisions, some 80,000 men, supported by four
squadrons of RAF bombers to Palestine ,
under Lieutenant General John Dill, with orders to crush
the guerrillas. This they did, with some considerable
ruthlessness, backed up by some severe measures from the civilian
administration: the death penalty was introduced for saboteurs and those hiding
firearms, and the British, at one point, were hanging between thirty and fifty
Arabs a month; corporal punishment, the birch or Rotan, was introduced for
juveniles supporting the rebellion and collective punishment of Arab
communities supporting the guerrillas was also authorized, consisting of
collective fines, demolition of suspects’ houses, and the enforcement of curfews.
The Arab Higher Committee called off the strike in October, thanks to a
combination of the British Army's crushing of the guerrilla bands in the
countryside and fear that the citrus crop, which needed to be tended from
October to March and on which most of the rural Arab economy depended, would
suffer if the fighting continued. So, on 10 October, the Mufti issued a joint
statement with King Abdullah of Transjordan , Faisal of
Iraq and Ibn Saud of Saudi Arabia
calling off the revolt, citing the Peel Commission as reason. However, the
Mufti again proceeded to shoot himself in the foot by ordering the Arab Higher
Committee to boycott the Peel Commission until just before it left in January
1937, which meant that the Zionists almost completely dominated proceedings.
When the Peel Commission published its report, later on in 1937, it recommended
partition, the first of several such official reports to do so. Basically, the
Jews would get north and central Palestine
in which to form their own state; this would not have been as much as they
wanted, but it would be a working start, and would allow them to rescue many
more European Jews from the Nazis. The rest of Palestine would to Abdullah;
now, to the Arab Higher Committee, not only would this mean they would actually
lose Palestine, but the Mufti had publicly called for Abdullah to be killed and
so would be in a very sticky situation indeed were he to suddenly become one of
his subjects. In September 1937, the rebellion was resumed. Now, a major
pertinent issue from the following two years was the growth in military
cooperation between the British Army and the Haganah. Now, I touch on this
because a lot of myths have grown up about this in both Britain
and Israel . Many
authors have argued that British soldiers such as TE Lawrence, Harry St John
Philby and John Bagott Glubb established a tradition of romantic pro-Arabism in
the British Army or, more accurately ‘pro-Bedouinism’, based upon a
sentimentalization of the nomadic Bedu ,
who had fought with Lawrence. The Bedu
were seen as a ‘martial race’, brave, honorable and courteous, uncorrupted by
urban living, correctly deferential to white
sahibs , and possessing qualities to which those sahibs aspired. 148 This is supported by the
contemporary testimony of a number of British soldiers: Arabs tended to treat
British soldiers with courtesy, hospitality and at least an impression of
helpfulness. 149 Conversely, British soldiers serving in Palestine often found
orthodox Jews alien beyond comprehension and the Ashkenazim , the European Jews making up the
majority of the new immigrants, superior and aloof. 150 Yet, reviewing contemporary military
documents reveals a more complex. Not only did General Sir John Dill and his
successors as General Officer Commanding Palestine take the Army Council's initial
instruction to ‘crush’ the rebellion very seriously, and argue consistently for
a tougher line against Arab nationalism, but were prepared to enlist Jewish
support. Their principal opponents in this were the High Commission and the
Colonial Office in London , who
wished to enlist the support of the Arab kings to win over the Arab Higher Committee,
and therefore opposed the courting of overt Jewish
support, and use of Jewish military units as unnecessarily
provocative. Measures adopted subsequently, such as military control and the
use of unrestricted armed force to smash the Arab gangs, indicate that the
British authorities were now following the Army’s line of argument rather than
that of the FO and Colonial Office. However, another issue now emerged - arming
the Jews. As of 1936, Jews formed part of the Palestine Police and all of the
irregular Supernumerary Police ( Notrim
in Hebrew), which enlisted3,000 volunteers between April and October 1936. 163
It is unsurprising that the Haganah
pressed its members to join the JSP in order to receive weapons training,
courtesy of the British, and the JSP allowed the Haganah to make use of weapons stored for its
use in Jewish settlements: when Yitzhak Sadeh formed his elite Haganah strike force, FOSH, most of its
members had been trained in the JSP. Nor did the British Army seem to mind:
the Notrim ’s role was confined
initially to protecting Jewish settlements and a section of railway running
through majority Jewish areas but it is evident that Dill not only wanted to
expand their numbers, but use them offensively against the gangs. From March
1937, Notrim were authorized to carry
out ‘hot pursuits’ of fleeing gangs, and in summer that year they were embodied
formally as the uniformed Jewish Settlement Police (JSP) under British Army
command and training. Ben-Gurion recalled that by then, both the Yishuv and the
British Army accepted the Notrim /JSP as
‘legal Haganah ’ and the best available
source of military training for young Jewish men - ‘Jewish bayonets’, courtesy
of the British army. By March 1938, the British Army had, effectively,
destroyed all the large guerrilla gangs in Palestine
once and for all, and this prompted a change in insurgent strategy. The
insurgents switched away from waging guerrilla warfare against the British Army
and the Palestine Police and towards carrying out terror attacks directed at
civilian targets: this involved murdering or kidnapping British officials and
Jewish and Arab civilians, sabotage of British facilities and night-time
attacks on Jewish settlements in the countryside. This was financed by drug
smuggling and gun-running, and by a protection racket extorting money and
concealment from Arab businesses and villages. Because of the diffuse and
unpredictable nature of these activities, by the autumn of 1938 British forces
were badly overstretched, single platoons were often defending villages against
attacks from far larger insurgent forces(35), and the GOC, General Sir Robert
Haining, was communicating to London that he had cancelled all offensive
operations, and that the authorities had, effectively, lost control of large
parts of the country. The Arab population was starting to fall in behind the
insurgents, and, most ominously of all, this included much of the Palestine
Police, there being numerous reported cases of Arab police assisting the theft
of weapons from police stations. It was at this point that perhaps the best
know, and certainly the most controversial Christian Zionist of them all began
to make his mark. This, of course, was Captain Orde Charles Wingate of the Royal
Artillery. Now, Wingate is usually only mentioned in passing in most histories
of the Arab-Israeli conflict, but I think this is unfair, because if you look
at what he actually did, his influence on the subsequent development of the
Arab-Israeli conflicts has been immense. In particular, he provided them with a
military doctrine by which the ‘Iron Wall’ philosophy could be put into
practice, which centered upon aggressively carrying the war into enemy
territory in order to maximize the pain and terror for them, and he also gave
them the confidence in their own military ability to make them put this
philosophy into practice.
Now, it was because of the deteriorating situation that
Haining supported the proposal made to his predecessor, General Sir Archibald
Wavell, by Wingate, who was then a captain working in the intelligence cell of
his HQ, to form special counter-insurgent units to hunt down gangs operating by
night in rural areas. What Wingate was proposing was ‘counter-gang’ operations,
referring explicitly to ‘government gangs’ hunting terrorist gangs on their own
territory and using their own methods against them. In his view, the best way
to deal with infiltrating insurgent gangs was to deploy what he called ‘moving
ambushes’, specially trained patrol units, sweeping known infiltration routes
or, preferably, directed towards incoming gangs, and drilled to deliver an
immediate and effective attack if one was encountered. Wingate had used this
method against shift a bandits while
serving with the Sudan Defense Force ten years earlier. and the deployment of
such forces has been common practice in British Army counter-insurgent
operations for the last 100 years, we have seen it practiced by the SAS in such
operations all over the world over the past fifty years. Wingate was firm
that Notrim /JSP should participate:
units could either be British, with
Notrim and other Jewish supernumeraries acting as guides and
interpreters, or British-trained Notrim
, ‘ideal for this task, as possessing expert local language both of area, and
character and language of Arabs. There is ample evidence of their courage and
they are intensely keen and eager to learn’; the one group that should be
excluded were Arab police, ‘Arab police are useless, being both sympathetic
towards, and in awe of, the gangs....Trust will become appropriate after, and
not before, the Government has scotched the terror.’ 193 As noted previously,
the loyalty of Arab policemen had been patchy since 1936, and their collapse
was a key factor in the crisis that befell the British in autumn 1938, so
Wingate’s view was probably shared by many.
Notrim tactics in defending settlements from night attacks were, for the
period 1936-38, as desultory as those of the British, consisting mainly of
directing rifle fire from behind the settlement’s static defenses at where the
shooting from outside was coming from, while taking steps to summon British
troops to the area. It was as much as they were allowed to do under British
policy. While the digest praised the determination of the Notrim , it was also felt that their poor
level of training made them something of a liability, their indiscriminate
shooting making them a threat to British troops in the area, and their lack of
formal organization made cooperation with them difficult. With Haining’s
backing, Wingate formed his first squads in order to patrol a prime target for terrorist
attacks, the oil pipeline running across northern Galilee
from Iraq to Haifa
which, by spring 1938, was being blown up several times a night. In early June,
the SNS carried out their first operations, ambushing three Arab gangs on the
pipeline, after which attacks ceased for several months. However, the
insurgents then switched to carrying out large numbers of simultaneous sabotage
attacks by small parties – what the Jews called ‘pellets’. Wingate’s response
was twofold: firstly, he acquired some machine guns from his senior commander
and switched to using large numbers of small, static ambushes, which killed
enough insurgents for attacks on the line to cease altogether: secondly, he
instigated nightly patrols of Arab villages in the area in order to impress on
the local Arab population that the British were in the area and they were
watching them. By late June, again with the backing of his superiors, Wingate
escalated from this to carrying out pre-emptive raids on Arab villages known to
be harboring terrorists. The first of these, on the village of Jurdieh,
involved Wingate leading three patrols across the Lebanon border to hit the
village from behind, killing fifteen known insurgents; the
headman of Jurdieh asked Hanita for a truce, which was
upheld. In July, Wingate carried out a larger and more ambitious operation,
involving a force of nearly 100 men attacking the village
of Dabburiya Galilee ,
a disputed area, thereby ‘establishing facts’ with military force. To them, the
SNS was a means of obtaining military training and continuing the
inter-communal struggle under the aegis of the British Army and, indeed, they
saw the SNS as a Haganah unit, Plugot Ha’esh , the Company of Fire. Now, the
final, and most controversial stage of the SNS campaign involved reprisal
attacks. The largest and most controversial such action followed a particularly
nasty Arab atrocity at the town of Tiberius ,
on the Dead Sea . In October, a large Arab gang, most of
them apparently high on hashish, entered the town and murdered 19 Jewish
children in a nursery, who had their throats slit before being set alight.
Hearing about this, Wingate redeployed two squads from another operation and
hit the gang on its way out of Tiberius, killing forty of them. The next day, he
tracked down the rest of the gang to its lair on Mount
Tabor village of Hitin Britain
needed Arab support, or, at least, for the Arab states not to join the Axis.
Indeed, by now, the Mufti had fled to Lebanon
and then to Iraq ,
from where he was quite openly doing the bidding of the German Foreign
Ministry. A conference was called in London
in early 1939 but such was the acrimony between the Arab and Jewish leadership
by this stage
that each side said they would boycott the conference if the
other attended. The British then tried to force the situation with the White
Paper that was presented to the Commons by the Colonial Secretary, Malcolm Mac
Donald, in mid 1939: the MacDonald White Paper announced that the Mandate would
end by 1949, after which Palestine would become fully independent; Jewish
immigration would be restricted to 15,000 per year up to 1944, after which it
would only continue with Arab consent; the sale of Arab land to Jews was
largely banned. The nature of the Nazi regime was all too apparent by now, and
Europe’s Jews needed a sanctuary, yet the immigration policies of most of the
western powers confined them to going to Palestine; it now seemed that door was
closing rapidly as well, thanks to Arab pressure on the British. Yet, the Arabs
also rejected the White Paper on the grounds that it did not stop Jewish
immigration altogether and immediately. Yet, when World War Two did break out,
in September 1939, the bulk of both the Jewish and Arab communities agreed to
support the British in the war against Germany .
250,000 British troops were stationed in Palestine
throughout the war, and 27,000 Jews and 25,000 Arabs joined the British Army;
the Jewish industrial and business sector flourished, due to the absolute
torrent of contracts to do work for the British garrison. The exceptions to
this were the extremists: the Mufti chose the wrong side to back, eventually traveling
to Germany
where he had several meetings with both Hitler and Himmler, and played his part
in recruiting Muslim Albanian and Central Asian volunteers into the Waffen-SS; after
the war, he had to settle in Egypt .
On the other side, the Irgun also opened secret contacts with the Nazis – their
ideology was, effectively a form of Jewish fascism, and their aim was to offer
the Nazis with an opportunity to get all of the Jews out the Reich in return
for the Irgun waging guerrilla war against the British. This they did, at one
point carrying out the assassination of a British minister in Cairo .
Another impact of the war was the growth of American interest in the Middle
East . Like Britain, the USA badly needed Gulf oil to support its
war effort and President Roosevelt adopted a strongly pro-Arab policy, being
particularly keen in winning the lasting friendship of Ibn Saud and pouring money
into Saudi Arabia to keep it stable; in 1947, Harry Truman became the first
serving US President to visit the Middle East, meeting with Ibn Saud on a US
battleship in the Gulf. This ran contrary to public opinion in the US ,
which has traditionally tended to be pro-Jewish. Because of this, Ben-Gurion
visited the USA
in 1944, after which Congress, Roosevelt and Thomas Dewey, the Republican
candidate in the 1944 Presidential election, all endorsed the Biltmore Program,
which offered the USA ’s
broad support to the creation of a Jewish homeland in Palestine .
This was strengthened considerably by the defeat of Nazi Germany, and the
revelation of the full horror of the Holocaust. President Roosevelt, then
President Truman, began to pressure Britain
to lift restrictions on Jewish immigration to Palestine .
The immediate post war period also saw some major changes in the Arab world. In
1945, Egypt organized
the Arab League, which included Egypt ,
Syria , Saudi
Arabia , Transjordan ,
Iraq Lebanon
and Yemen . The
League’s main purpose was to promote cultural, social and economic links between
the Arab peoples, and it stayed away from politics, particularly Pan-Arab
nationalist politics, due to the weakness of its members: only Egypt and Yemen
were independent, and Yemen was one of the poorest countries on the planet,
Saudi Arabia and Transjordan were completely reliant upon American and British
funds respectively, and Lebanon, Syria and Iraq had been occupied by the
British during the war. However, the League did establish a Higher Committee to
lobby western governments against Zionism.
It was a combination of the widespread global sympathy for
the Jews, following the revelation of the Holocaust, and the wartime crippling
of the British economy, which led to the British withdrawal from Palestine
and the creation of Israel .
From 1948 to 1947, British forces in Palestine were subjected to a major
terrorist campaign by the Irgun and the even more extremist Stern Gang, the
worst incident of which was the blowing up of the King David Hotel in
Jerusalem, organized by Begin and carried out by Irgun operators dressed as
Arabs, in which 91 people, mainly British civilians, were killed. At the same
time, up to 40,000 people were entering Palestine illegally per month, and the
British were detaining those they caught in camps in Cyprus; images of Jewish
refugees from post-Nazi Europe being confined in British ‘concentration camps’
were a gift for Zionist propaganda, and Ben Gurion made sure that images of
this were shown in cinemas all over the USA. Britain ’s
Labor government was not only opposed to colonialism on ideological grounds,
but also wanted to get rid of a major strategic, economic and political burden,
while maintaining enough troops and bases in the region to protect the Suez
Canal . After trying to come to a joint solution with the USA ,
they eventually surrendered the problem to the newly formed UN. The UN formed
UNSCOP, the United Nations Special Committee on Palestine ,
which eventually reincarnated the Peel Report, recommending that Palestine
should be divided into separate Arab and Jewish states, with Jerusalem
under the control of a UN Mandate. The Jewish state would be called ‘Israel ’.
UNSCOP’s proposal was passed by the UN General Assembly at the end of 1947,
with Britain and
all the Muslim countries voting against. Nevertheless, Britain
announced it would end the Mandate on 14 May 1948.UNSCOM was the blueprint for
the first Arab-Israeli War, but we will talk about that next time
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