Some uncomfortable truths for the Arabs, the Jews and... the British

We took to Palestine the harsh methods we had used in Ireland between 1918 and 1922
By Andreas Whittam Smith
The Independent Monday, 19 March 2001
Fighting terrorists by punishing civilians, as Israel is doing on the West Bank of the Jordan, has a long history. I recently came across this incident. It took place in an Arab village, Halhoul, near Hebron.

Fighting terrorists by punishing civilians, as Israel is doing on the West Bank of the Jordan, has a long history. I recently came across this incident. It took place in an Arab village, Halhoul, near Hebron.

Halhoul had been identified as a source of terrorist activity. The army was sent in. The villagers were rounded up and put into open-air pens, one for men and one for women. It was May and the sun was fierce. Neither water nor food were provided. In the end, eight people died from heat exhaustion. In explaining away the incident, the authorities said the village was "notoriously bad": 26 rifles and eight revolvers had been found. The eight people had died because of a "combination of unfortunate circumstances... the heat had been abnormally intense and the victims were elderly". Most unfortunate. No one had killed the villagers deliberately. There had been no deed that could be called an "atrocity".

Nobody any longer remembers this because it took place in 1939. However, it concerns us, the British. We then governed Palestine under a mandate from the League of Nations. We were attempting to put down an Arab rebellion. The comments on Halhoul were written by the British High Commissioner, Harold MacMichael.

My account comes from Tom Segev's excellent history of the British Mandate, One Palestine Complete. I shouldn't have been shocked - as I was - when I read it. Occupying powers always get involved in this sort of dirty business. We took to Palestine the harsh methods we had used in Ireland between 1918 and 1922. A Colonial Secretary of the period wrote that the comparison between Ireland and Palestine was "singularly complete". In fact, Mr Segev's book is full of uncomfortable truths for the Arabs and the Jews, as well as for the British.

Take the Arab claim that Jewish settlers dispossessed them of their lands. It turns out that during the Mandate period, Arab landowners were often eager sellers to Jewish immigrants. Among them were - in secret - leaders of the Arab national movement. Never mind that the Arab press at the time was full of articles decrying the transactions. Prices were good. But as the hypocritical vendors well knew, the consequence of the transaction was that Arab tenant farmers would be evicted. Many Arab notables, Muslim and Christian, were involved.
Mr Segev, too, must have been shocked, I imagine, by what he discovered about the attitude of the Zionist movement to Jewish immigrants during the late 1930s, when Jews were being persecuted in Germany, Austria and other Eastern European states. The Jews in Palestine, writes Mr Segev, came to realise that the country could not take all Jews; they ceased to see the state as a means of saving the Jewish people and focused on their own needs instead. They made sure that immigration permits were mainly assigned to unmarried male "pioneers" in their twenties. So much for the grandmothers, great-aunts, parents, uncles, cousins also being hounded from their homes. No room at the inn. Indeed, the Jewish Agency went so far as to stipulate that no retarded children should be permitted to come because it would be difficult to make appropriate arrangements for them in Palestine.

Until now, the Mandate period, 1922-1948, has seemed a historical curiosity. The British governments of the time didn't really want the responsibility; Palestine served no Imperial purpose. Worse still, it cost money. Suppressing the Arab revolt required 25,000 British troops and police under the command of "Monty", later Field Marshal Montgomery.
Mr Segev's book is over 500 pages long, yet almost every paragraph finds echoes in Israel today. In the same way that the Halhoul deaths in 1939 weren't an atrocity in British minds, nor a violation of civil rights, so the measures that the Israeli army takes to combat Palestinian violence are described as merely self-defence. They are the terrorists; we are the defenders. The killing of 90 or so Palestinian children in the past five months, is, well, self-defence.
The new Israeli prime minister, Ariel Sharon, flew to Washington yesterday, partly to make sure that the new president and his team are on side, and partly to reassure a restive public opinion. Collective punishment doesn't play very well. It is based on the principle that everyone is guilty until proved innocent.

In our time, we had the embarrassment that Nazi propaganda was quick to highlight the suffering caused by British policy in Palestine. The British believed that their predecessor as great power in the region, Turkey, had invented the system. Colonial civil servants and army officers reminded themselves that the Turks had frequently arrested entire tribes for unlimited periods and flogged sheikhs and mukhtars.

Those were the days! We were more sophisticated. We erected a security fence along the northern border. We built dozens of police fortresses and concrete guard posts. We imported Dobermann dogs from South Africa. And we trained interrogators in torture. The British police chief in Jerusalem, Douglas Duff, described such methods in his memoir published in 1953. He tells how to apply physical force without leaving marks. We destroyed homes - 2,000 houses between 1936 and 1940 according to one estimate. We engaged in assassination. What did we not do that the Israeli army does today? It is hard to say.

One can trace the inheritance through a single soldier, the brilliant Orde Wingate, posted to Palestine as an intelligence officer in 1936. He became a fervent believer in Zionism. He was once described as a kind of Lawrence of the Jews. He set up Special Night Squads comprising British troops and Jewish volunteers that pursued terrorists by night. Their methods were brutal. Among his men was a future prime minister of Israel, Yitzhak Shamir, and the man who was to be Israel's most famous commander, Moshe Dayan. Churchill later described Wingate as "a man of genius and audacity". An official handbook of the Israeli Ministry of Defence states that the "teaching of Orde Charles Wingate, his character and leadership... and his influence can be seen in the Israel Defense Force's combat doctrine."

I am not saying that this ancient history should still all criticisms. Rather it should remove any notion of moral superiority, a very British fault.

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