Jan 8, 2009 | Eli E. Hertz
This is dedicated to Mr. Tony Blair, the Quartet's envoy to the Middle East , and to Mr. Gordon Brown, the Prime Minister for the United Kingdom
Hypocrisy at its best
By Rafael Medoff, April 22, 2002 , The Jerusalem Post - "Demolishing the homes of Arab civilians ... Shooting handcuffed prisoners... Forcing local Arabs to test areas where mines may have been planted..."
These sound like the sort of accusations made by British and other European officials concerning Israel
The documents were declassified by London
Even after the suspected assassin was captured (and then shot dead while allegedly trying to escape), the British authorities decided that "a large portion of the town should be blown up" as punishment. On August 25 of that year, a British convoy brought 4,200 kilos of explosives to Jenin for that purpose.
In the Jenin operation and on other occasions, local Arabs were forced to drive "mine-sweeping taxis" ahead of British vehicles in areas where Palestinian Arab terrorists were believed to have planted mines, in order "to reduce [British] landmine casualties."
The British authorities frequently used these and similar methods to combat Palestinian Arab terrorism in the late 1930s. BRITISH forces responded to the presence of terrorists in the Arab village of Miar Haifa
"When the troops left, there was little else remaining of the once-busy village except a pile of mangled masonry," The New York Times reported.
The declassified docu-ments refer to an incident in Jaffa
Under Emergency Regulation 19b, the British Mandate government could demolish any house located in a village where terrorists resided, even if that particular house had no direct connection to terrorist activity. Mandate official Hugh Foot later recalled: "When we thought that a village was harboring rebels, we'd go there and mark one of the large houses. Then, if an incident was traced to that village, we'd blow up the house we'd marked."
The High Commissioner for Palestine
MacMichael was furious over what he called the "grossly exaggerated accusations" that England Palestine
The declassified documents also record discussions among officials of the Colonial Office concerning the rightness or wrongness of the anti-terror methods used in Palestine Whitehall
Sir John Shuckburgh defended the tactics on the grounds that the British were confronted "not with a chivalrous opponent playing the game according to the rules, but with gangsters and murderers."
There were many differences between British policy in the 1930s and Israeli policy today, but one stands out - the British, faced with a level of Palestinian Arab terrorism considerably less lethal than that which Israel
EDITOR’S NOTE: It should also be noted that Great Britain Israel Israel
British Mandate era in Palestine Destroying Arab terrorists Village
ReplyDeleteBritish forces drove out the Ottomans in 1917, during World War I, and the British Mandate of Palestine was established in 1920.
In the 1922 British census, Mi'ar an Arab Village had a population of 429, all Muslims.[12] The population increased to 543, still all Muslim, in the 1931 census and the inhabitants lived in a total of 109 houses.[13]
Mi'ar's residents participated in 1936–1939 Arab revolt against British rule, and the village became a center of rebel operations in Galilee.[14] The rebels often opened fired on British troops passing near Mi'ar, damaged roads in the vicinity to render them impassable by the British authorities, cut electrical cables, and planted landmines to hit British vehicles.[14] One of the authorities' controversial methods of suppressing the revolt was the blowing up of houses in a village where there was support for rebels.[14] On 26 October 1938, two British battalions launched a raid against Mi'ar and began dynamiting the large houses of the village.[14] They then demanded Mi'ar's mukhtar (headman) to issue a call to the village's rebels to surrender their rifles or else the dynamiting would continue.[14] No rifles were surrendered and the British resumed their dynamiting of the village's homes.[14] Mi'ar was entirely destroyed for its alleged support of the rebels.[15][16] A New York Times reporter present during the destruction wrote, "When the [British] troops left, there was little else remaining of this once busy village except a pile of mangled masonry."[14]
Arab/Palestinian village of Mi'ar being blown up by the British in 1938.
Posted by YJ Draiman