The Arab Lie Whose Time Has Come-Veteran of the 1948 War dissects the myth of Palestinian innocence
FrontPageMagazine.com ^ | April 21, 2004 | David Gutmann
Posted on 4/21/2004, 5:29:30 AM by SJackson
An Israeli veteran of the 1948 War for Independence dissects the revisionist myth of Palestinian innocence
To back up its demands for full repatriation to Israel of Arab refugees and their descendants, the Palestinian leadership has—for over fifty years—busily spun the story of their "Naqba," their catastrophic flight from Palestine during 1947-48, in all the media available to them. This version of events—replete with Jewish brutality and Arab victimization—is a lie whose time has come, one now almost universally believed by Gentile and Jew alike.
It has become the latest Blood Libel against the People of the Book; and like the others it will never go away. Nevertheless, many Jewish Peaceniks—both Israeli and American—have signed on to the Naqba narrative, and Jewish authors and intellectuals now number among its leading proponents. One such piece of Jewish “Naqba” P.R. is “The Roots of the Palestine Refugee Problem–Revisited” by the Israeli Leftist Benny Morris. In the book, Morris focuses particularly on Operation Hiram, the Israeli campaign undertaken to clear the Galilee of the foreign fighters who had infiltrated the Arab villages there. He claims that these villages were the sites of multiple massacres, expulsions and rapes committed by Jewish forces.
Morris has recently turned somewhat to the Right, in that he justifies the expulsions that he reports: in his current view, the infant Israeli State could not have survived unless it was purged of a hostile Arab population. But realistically, it matters not whether Morris is Left or Right, Hawk or Dove. Whatever his politics, the Palestinian propagandists will cherry pick what they need from his report to substantially bolster their Myth of Naqba and their radical demands for repatriation of all refugees and their descendants into the heart of Israel.
I was a witness to the Naqba times, and am compelled to challenge such Israel-bashing by the Palestinians and their Jewish allies. As a trainee with the Palmach and then with the regular Israeli forces during the Independence War, I had neither military skills nor fluency in Hebrew, and was probably more trouble to my units than I was worth. My real usefulness to Israel may only become evident 53 years later. Because of that youthful service, I can now—when the Palestinian myth is being legislated into hardened truth, even for Jews—bear an elder's witness against the Naqba lie.
Some facts I can swear to:
A. The Palestinians initiated the war that led to their Naqba. Troops from Tel-Aviv eventually conquered Jaffa, but it was Arab fighters in Jaffa who, from the towers of their mosques, first fired into Tel-Aviv, and turned the intercity border areas into a battleground.
B. The first refugees were not Arabs but Yemenite Jews, from the Tel Aviv-Jaffa No-Man's Land that Arab aggression had created. Unlike the Palestinians, theirs was only a temporary refugee status. Instead of packing them away and forgetting them in squalid refugee camps, their Ashkenazi compatriots took them into their own neighborhoods. For the most part the Yemenites camped out in Tel Aviv apartment lobbies, and used the cooking and sanitary facilities of the permanent residents. When Jaffa fell to Irgun soldiers, they went back home.
C. The Palestinians fled for many reasons and from many threats, both real and imaginary, and that thousands upon thousands fled when nobody pushed them. As an example, when my unit occupied the abandoned British police station at Sidn'a Ali in the Sharon Plain, British troops were still stationed in the vicinity, and we had to train and patrol with our few guns (antiquated or homemade) concealed. Nevertheless, the Arabs of Sidn'a Ali were long gone, way before we could have pushed them out, and while the Brits were still in place to protect them from us. Needless to say, in the absence of any Palestinian targets (save for some abandoned camels) we committed no rapes.
I don't know why the Sidn'a Ali people fled, but they did leave a caretaker in place, as a sign that they intended to return once those pesky Jews had been ethnically cleansed. They did not flee because they feared Jewish thugs, but because of a rational and reasonable calculus: the Jews will be exterminated; we will get out of the way while that messy and dangerous business goes forward, and we will return afterwards to reclaim our homes, and to inherit those nice Jewish properties as well.
They guessed wrong; and the Palestinians are still tortured by the residual shame of their flight. Their shame is so great because in their eyes running from Jews was like running from women; and because there were so many Sidn'a Alis. To relieve their shame they stridently and continually demand that their unsavory history be rewritten and reversed.
While I witnessed no Israeli atrocities in the coastal Sharon Plain, Ralph Lowenstein, an American volunteer in '48, and now a professor of Journalism at the University of Florida refutes Morris' claims that Jewish troops, engaged in Operation Hiram, committed massacres and ethnic cleansings in the Galilean Hills. Prof. Lowenstein was a young half-track driver in the 79th Battalion of the 7th Brigade, the formation that spearheaded Operation Hiram. Like myself, he refutes Morris' allegations of Jewish war crimes:
“I never saw anything like this, either while it was allegedly going on or after it had transpired. After the mixed Christian/Muslim town of Jish, the first place we attacked, I did see virtually every Arab village on a line between Safad and Kadesh on the Lebanese border during Operation Hiram, and the pattern was: villages occupied by Christian Arabs unharmed; Muslim villages deserted, long before any Israeli troops got there.
There were rumors at the time that a massacre had occurred in one village, and a week after we had returned from combat a directive in English and Hebrew was distributed to each army post mentioning such rumors and warning of the dire consequences to any enlisted person or officer who could be convicted of engaging in such incidents. There were no rumors of rape or ethnic cleansing, only of one isolated massacre committed in the heat of battle.”
Parenthetically, the Israeli appetite for rape and slaughter that Morris discovers was not matched or fueled in '48 by any racist or demonizing language—none of the “Slap the Jap” stuff that we Americans indulged in during WWII. In fact, I was surprised by the neutrality and impersonality of the terms used to describe the enemy: only “Aravim” (the Hebrew plural of “Arabs”), and the like. The same terse understatement is the Israeli norm today.
Any misdeeds committed by IDF troops during the War for Independence came against the backdrop of the Holocaustic acts and appetites of the Arabs themselves. We were only a few weeks into the first, irregular phase of the war when the slaughters began: the wholesale murder by their Arab fellow workers of some 40 Jewish workers in the Haifa refineries; the massacre of Hebrew university medical faculty and nurses on the road to Mt. Scopus; the killing of many captured Palmach fighters and kibbutzniks in the Etzion Bloc; the decimation of the truck convoys to Jerusalem. And after the killing, the real fun began. The Arab way of war is to quite explicitly “feminize” the enemy. And in '47-'48, the Aravim castrated and mutilated, in ways that I will not describe here, the fallen or captured Jewish soldiers. Incidentally, the “portraits” of their Jewish victims—both boys and girls—were afterwards peddled in Arab Jerusalem.
The above may read like “Huns Rape Nuns” propaganda, and I myself never did see a mutilated Jewish corpse. But I have seen photographs; and I can say that our Palmach officers—men given to understatement rather than hysteria—instructed us, when in action, to always save a bullet or a grenade for ourselves, so as not to fall alive into the hands of Arab irregulars. Capture was not an option. Prof. Lowenstein gives independent confirmation: “All of us knew at the time that if we foreign volunteers were captured, our lives would be worth little. Arab atrocities were expected, as well as committed.”
In short, barely three years after the cessation of the Holocaust, the Palestinian Arabs, led by Hitler's Holocaust consultant, Haj-Amin Al-Husseini, Mufti of Jerusalem, gleefully promised a wholesale genocide—not just population transfer, but genocide—and showed us, quite dramatically, that his followers had the capacity and the appetite to carry it out.
The Jews of Palestine responded as an outnumbered and outgunned people should answer: they “cleansed” the Arab communities that had become—or threatened to become—the instruments of the revived Holocaustic enterprise. Some examples: They drove out the occupants of Tireh, who had the bad habit of shooting up Jewish traffic on the Haifa-Tel Aviv highway, and they drove out the occupants of Kastel and other villages that bloodied the Jerusalem-Tel Aviv road. So as to open up the sea roads to the arms markets and refugee camps of Europe, they took the seaport of Haifa; to free Tel-Aviv from continual gunfire, they took Jaffa; to cut the Palestinians off from their Lebanese and Syrian armorers, they conducted operation Hiram and took the Galilee.
The second great context enfolding Israeli action was of course war itself. In war, the power of the individual conscience is conceded to the state, which requires killing as a moral duty, while the pleasure in killing is reserved for the individual soldier. The upshot: one can slaughter with a clear conscience. That is the human rather than the Jewish recipe for the routine massacres of war. We have seen this scenario before. Thus, as WWII progressed, the RAF wreaked a hell on German cities that far outweighed everything that the Luftwaffe had ever done to London, to Rotterdam, to Coventry, to Warsaw, and to Guernica combined. No complaints though from the Brit population, not even from the Left. No frenzied rallies demanding an end to the fire-bombing of Hamburg, Dresden or Berlin. And why not? Because the war and the practice of terror-bombing had been started by Hitler, and the Bloody Germans were only getting what was coming to them.
By the same logic, the firebombed and atomized Japanese cities were accepted in the U.S. as partial payment for Pearl Harbor. This same grim context also underwrites Israeli “war crimes”: Our Palestinian Cousins started the '48 war, and in so doing released the warlike appetites of a nation of survivors, a people with no place to run, who had repressed their rage for millennia, and had now earned full title to it. Again, Prof. Lowenstein: “Many of our troops were recently Displaced Persons, Holocaust survivors, who had little respect for the niceties of civilization, if not for life itself.”
It was only three years after the Holocaust, and we were still learning the full extent of the horror from the mouths of children coming to us from the DP camps of Europe, the prison camps of Cyprus, and the graves of countless Anne Franks in the Polish sky. Their voices mixed with the chatter of the Palestinians, as they eagerly detailed, with that innocent glee that they bring to the contemplation of slaughter, what they were going to do to this particular pack of Yids. And now, fifty-five years later, all the “noble souls”—the Quakers, the Unitarians, the Society of Friends, B'Tselem—are all so disappointed with the Israelis of '48. Why? Because, as a nation of victims, they didn't “show empathy,” they “didn't feel the Arab's pain.” Damn well right they didn't. The really strange thing is how relatively restrained the Jews actually were.
Finally then, it is not copping a plea to say that the Aravim, who unleashed the war dogs in the first place, bear the ultimate responsibility for the killing on both sides. To ignore these contexts of the Independence War, while only deploring Jewish “war crimes,” is to demonize the Israelis. Absent these imperious contexts, the Israeli killings stand alone. As unique crimes, they dominate the historic landscape. They join the other Blood Libels: the Jew as Christ Killer, the Jew as the baker of bloody matzos, the Jew of the Protocols of Zion (“Heeeere's Shylock! And he's armed!”). But when we restore the contexts of war, what in their absence stand out as exclusively Jewish horrors, new murders of Christ, are reduced in scope, to become part of the generic human landscape, which is in all its parts slippery with blood.
Any people that enters history in an active role will dirty its hands. But the dirtiest hands belong to those Great Souls whose pristine consciences will not allow them to fight even their own murderers. Let them look to their own morality, and not burden the embattled Israelis with their twisted pieties.
TOPICS: Editorial; Foreign Affairs; Israel
KEYWORDS: 1948; palestinians
To: dennisw; Cachelot; Yehuda; Nix 2; veronica; Catspaw; knighthawk; Alouette; Optimist; weikel; ...
If you'd like to be on or off this middle east/political ping list, please FR mail me.For those who are interested, an interesting thread on the thoughts of the Democratic faithful.
Correct Democratic position on Israel/Palestine please.
Correct Democratic position on Israel/Palestine please.
2 posted on 4/21/2004, 5:45:41 AM by SJackson ( Every generation of Jews has to learn its own Aleph Beis. Ours...to learn how to shoot, Abba Kovner)
To: 1bigdictator; 1st-P-In-The-Pod; 2sheep; 7.62 x 51mm; A Jovial Cad; a_witness; adam_az; af_vet_rr; ..
FRmail me to be added or removed from this Judaic/pro-Israel ping list.
WARNING: This is a high volume ping list
WARNING: This is a high volume ping list
3 posted on 4/21/2004, 5:52:16 AM by Alouette (Gaza -- Too small to be a country, too large to be an insane asylum)
To: SJackson
BTTT
4 posted on 4/21/2004, 7:52:19 AM by Fiddlstix (This Tagline for sale. (Presented by TagLines R US))
To: SJackson
Spot on.
This man had put some thought, in addition to experience, into this article.As the saying goes, "War is hell".
The Arabs started it and they refuse, after two times, to admit they have been defeated.
This man had put some thought, in addition to experience, into this article.As the saying goes, "War is hell".
The Arabs started it and they refuse, after two times, to admit they have been defeated.
5 posted on 4/21/2004, 8:03:16 AM by Just another Joe (Warning: FReeping can be addictive and helpful to your mental health)
To: SJackson
btttttttttttt
To: SJackson
Any people that enters history in an active role will dirty its hands. But the dirtiest hands belong to those Great Souls whose pristine consciences will not allow them to fight even their own murderers.This is a gem of a quote.
It is also true, knowing Leftists and Pacifists as I do.
It is also true, knowing Leftists and Pacifists as I do.
To: SJackson
bump for weekend!
8 posted on 4/21/2004, 10:43:24 PM by lainde (Heads up...We're coming and we've got tongue blades!!)
To: Just another Joe
Huh? You said: "The Arabs started it and they refuse, after two times, to admit they have been defeated."
I believe you are incorrect in the number of times the Arabs have been defeated in wars against Israel.
Isn't the correct number SEVEN??
So far?
and they are hardly winning now, nor have the Arabs won a single war in the last hundred years.
That historical trend is not likely to reverse.
I believe you are incorrect in the number of times the Arabs have been defeated in wars against Israel.
Isn't the correct number SEVEN??
So far?
and they are hardly winning now, nor have the Arabs won a single war in the last hundred years.
That historical trend is not likely to reverse.
9 posted on 4/22/2004, 1:09:06 AM by RonHolzwarth
"The Arabs are after our blood"In a recent interview with the liberal Israeli newspaper Haaretz, Morris not only justified the 1948 expulsion of the Palestinians from Israel, but also said that then-Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion failed in his task by not expelling all Arabs from the nascent Jewish state... Morris went on to say that renewed expulsions of the Palestinians -- those in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, and even those who are Israeli citizens -- could be "entirely reasonable" in circumstances that are "liable to be realized in five or 10 years." ...The Arab and Muslim world, in his eyes, consists of barbarians who don't appreciate the value of human life, barbarians knocking on the gates of the civilized West... Like many other Israeli liberals, Morris' optimism about peace, and whether the Palestinians really wanted it, was shaken by the outbreak of the second intifada in 2000 -- after the Oslo peace accords and the Camp David talks had convinced many that a resolution was at hand. With the collapse of the Camp David talks amid mutual acrimony and the escalation of violence, in particular the rise of suicide bombings within Israel, many Israeli peaceniks became disillusioned, feeling that they had found no true "partner for peace" in the Palestinians... "You go to have coffee with your equally liberal friends, you talk peace and human rights and Palestinian independence, and if you are lucky the place blows up only after you leave," says Tom Segev, an Israeli author who like Morris was dubbed a "new historian" for writing books that challenged the traditional Israeli version of history.
by Christopher Farah
Jan. 23, 2004
10 posted on 1/4/2005, 8:47:08 AM by SunkenCiv (the US population in the year 2100 will exceed a billion, perhaps even three billion.)
To: SJackson
Any people that enters history in an active role will dirty its hands. But the dirtiest hands belong to those Great Souls whose pristine consciences will not allow them to fight even their own murderers. Let them look to their own morality, and not burden the embattled Israelis with their twisted pieties.
Very well said.
Very well said.
11 posted on 1/4/2005, 9:23:30 AM by oldbrowser ( A fine is a tax for doing wrong... A tax is a fine for doing well)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]
Thursday October 16, 2014 09:06
by IMEMC News & Agencies 
Fanatic MK Calls For Firing Arab MK Tibi From Knesset
Thursday October 16, 2014 09:06 by IMEMC News & Agencies Israeli Member of Knesset (MK) Miri Regev of the Likud Party of Benjamin Netanyahu called for firing Arab (MK) Dr. Ahmad Tibi from the Knesset, and to strip him from his privileges.
Regev said that MK Tibi, of the Arab Movement for Change, flew to London “to convince British legislators to vote in favor of recognizing a Palestinian State”.
On his Facebook page, Dr. Tibi responded to Regev’s statements in a satirical manner by saying: “I swear to God I asked her to take her meds regularly, three times a day.”
Dr. Tibi added that, unlike the hostile statements of Regev, he would not demand dismissing her from the Knesset, as she represents the true nature of Israel’s extremist right wing polices.
Regev’s statements are not an isolated issue, as many Israeli politicians are known for their extreme ideology against Arabs in the country, and Palestinians in general.
On Monday, Israeli MK of the fundamentalist Israel Our Home Party, Alex Miller, said that MK Tibi is only a “puppet” for the Palestinian Authority (P.A.), adding that the stances of Tibi “would only delay the possibilities of reaching an agreement with the Palestinians."
On July 7, the Israeli MK of the fundamentalist Jewish Home Party called for killing all Palestinian mothers because, according to her ‘logic’, “they give birth to snakes and terrorists”.
She said, “All Palestinian mothers should be killed; their homes should be demolished so that they cannot give birth to any more terrorists,” adding, “all of them are enemies of Israel, including the mothers of dead terrorists; their blood should be on our hands.”
There are various current and former members of Knesset, ministers and officials, who openly call for removing all Arabs and Palestinians from the country.
Israeli Foreign Minister, Avigdor Lieberman, frequently made such statements when he served as a member of the Knesset, and a "Minister of Strategic Affairs", and repeatedly said that Arabs and Palestinians are a strategic threat to Israel, and should be expelled to Arab countries.
His statements referred to all Arab citizens of Israel, and all Palestinians living in the occupied territories.
On his Facebook page, Dr. Tibi responded to Regev’s statements in a satirical manner by saying: “I swear to God I asked her to take her meds regularly, three times a day.”
Dr. Tibi added that, unlike the hostile statements of Regev, he would not demand dismissing her from the Knesset, as she represents the true nature of Israel’s extremist right wing polices.
Regev’s statements are not an isolated issue, as many Israeli politicians are known for their extreme ideology against Arabs in the country, and Palestinians in general.
On Monday, Israeli MK of the fundamentalist Israel Our Home Party, Alex Miller, said that MK Tibi is only a “puppet” for the Palestinian Authority (P.A.), adding that the stances of Tibi “would only delay the possibilities of reaching an agreement with the Palestinians."
On July 7, the Israeli MK of the fundamentalist Jewish Home Party called for killing all Palestinian mothers because, according to her ‘logic’, “they give birth to snakes and terrorists”.
She said, “All Palestinian mothers should be killed; their homes should be demolished so that they cannot give birth to any more terrorists,” adding, “all of them are enemies of Israel, including the mothers of dead terrorists; their blood should be on our hands.”
There are various current and former members of Knesset, ministers and officials, who openly call for removing all Arabs and Palestinians from the country.
Israeli Foreign Minister, Avigdor Lieberman, frequently made such statements when he served as a member of the Knesset, and a "Minister of Strategic Affairs", and repeatedly said that Arabs and Palestinians are a strategic threat to Israel, and should be expelled to Arab countries.
His statements referred to all Arab citizens of Israel, and all Palestinians living in the occupied territories.
Related Link(s): http://www.imemc.org/newswire?topic=palestinianpolitics
The birth of Israel
Long, long road
What successive generations learned about terrorism in the Middle East
Anonymous Soldiers: The Struggle for Israel, 1917-1947. By Bruce Hoffman. Knopf; 618 pages; $35. 5.21.2015
ISRAEL’S creation has many causes, but among the most powerful, argues Bruce Hoffman, is terrorism. For a decade, the anonymous soldiers of the Jewish underground waged a terror campaign to establish a state, targeting first Arabs, then British forces, then Arabs again.
Mr Hoffman has worked for the CIA and American forces in Baghdad, and he established the Handa Centre for the Study of Terrorism and Political Violence at St Andrews University. Although he dismisses some Arab militants of the age as atavistic marauders out to “kill as many Jews as possible”, he maintains a thinly veiled admiration for the Jewish irregulars whose plan to upset Britain’s 25-year rule of Palestine he describes as “unequivocally triumphant” and “brilliant in its simplicity”. “Terrorism,” Mr Hoffman writes, “can, in the right conditions and with the appropriate strategy and tactics, succeed in attaining at least some of its practitioners’ fundamental aims.”
In its infancy, the Jewish Yishuv, or settlement, cheered as Britain assiduously set about fulfilling Lord Balfour’s promise to create a Jewish homeland in Palestine. As the Yishuv’s power grew, however, Britain’s presence became more of a hindrance than a help to its aspirations for statehood. By 1945, its prime military arm, the Haganah (or “Defence”), was a 40,000-strong force—the most powerful in the Middle East after the British army. The Haganah was against using force to end British rule, but two of its offshoots, the Irgun and Lehi, had no such qualms.
Some of the Irgun’s 3,500 men were battle-hardened, having fought together with the British army during the second world war. Others, like its leader, Menachem Begin, were officers with the exiled Polish army. In 1944 they set about fighting Britain’s occupation of Palestine much as they had the Nazi occupation of Europe.
By 1947 they had killed almost 300 people, many of them civilians, invented the letter bomb and used milk churns to blow up Britain’s seat of government in Palestine, the King David Hotel. Over 90 people, many of them civilians, were killed in the attack, which ranked as the world’s bloodiest terrorist atrocity for four decades. The Irgun targeted British symbols to puncture its prestige, while the smaller Lehi targeted its personnel.
The British government, fresh from liberating Jews from Nazi death camps, was stunned to find so many now turning on it, wanting to hasten the collapse of Britain’s Middle East rule. Using declassified documents, Mr Hoffman explains how the Haganah’s crack force, the Palmach, bankrolled the Irgun and seconded 460 men to its ranks. For a time, they formally joined forces in a wider front, bombing railways and approving the attack on the King David Hotel. While Chaim Weizmann, president of the World Zionist Organisation, was entertaining British high commissioners for tea, his nephew and subsequent defence minister, Ezer Weizman, was plotting to blow up Evelyn Barker, commander of Britain’s forces in Palestine.
Exhausted by world war, Britain lacked the stomach, money and will to fight. Its 100,000 troops in Palestine turned downtown Jerusalem into a fortified camp ringed with barbed wire, imposed curfews, checked pass papers and engaged in crass anti-Semitism. But they were hamstrung by America’s support for Zionism. President Roosevelt’s wife, Eleanor, helped fundraise for the Irgun, sponsoring a charity run of a Broadway play. It starred Marlon Brando, who celebrated the “new Jewish language” of bullets not prayers.
Derided by Congress, Britain flinched from the methods it had used on an earlier Arab revolt. The Royal Air Force dropped bombs on Arabs not Jews, and the army set about trying to demolish much of old Arab Jaffa with gelignite, but they spared Jewish houses until a few months shy of ceding Britain’s mandate. (Mr Hoffman says the British did not hit Arabs hard enough, and was too tough on Jews.)
Somewhat oddly, Mr Hoffman stops his account in August 1947, shortly before Begin’s militants went back to bombing Arabs in their cinemas and cafés, and Lehi killed Count Folke Bernadotte, a Swedish diplomat who had saved Jews from Nazi death camps and who, at the time, was the UN’s envoy to Palestine.
Disappointingly, also, the book lacks a concluding chapter analysing the terrorists’ legacy. Mr Hoffman notes that Begin and Lehi’s leader, Yitzhak Yezernitzky (later Shamir), became Israeli prime ministers. And he makes passing reference to the Irgun’s operations chief, whose daughter, Tzipi Livni, became foreign minister. But he is circumspect on what practices as well as personnel survived the passage to statehood. (In 1946, Lehi assassins dressed up as tennis players to kill a British detective, Thomas Martin, a disguise later adopted to kill a Hamas operative in Dubai.)
On the Haganah’s broader influence, Mr Hoffman notes that al-Qaeda’s Afghan library had a copy of Begin’s “The Revolt”, but does not ask why so many Palestinian prisoners take Israeli university courses on how Jews established their state. Much of what they do, including building terror tunnels, bombing transport nodes, lobbing mortars at residential neighbourhoods and burying arms dumps in places of worship, has antecedents in Jewish militancy. Israel knows Palestinian methods and it has an array of anti-terror legislation which, had Britain responded similarly, might have aborted the future state.
British fighting terror
ReplyDeleteHow the British Fought Arab Terror in Jenin and elsewhere in Palestine
"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's recent actions in. In fact, they are descriptions from official British documents concerning the methods used by the British authorities to combat Palestinian Arab terrorism in Palestine and elsewhere in 1938.
The documents were declassified by London in 1989. They provide details of the British Mandatory government's response to the assassination of a British district commissioner by a Palestinian Arab terrorist in Jenin in the summer of 1938. 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] land mine 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, north of Haifa, by blowing up house after house in October 1938. "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 documents refer to an incident in Jaffa in which a handcuffed prisoner was shot by the British police. 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 would go there and mark one of the large houses. Then, if an incident was traced to that village, we would blow up the house we had marked." The High Commissioner for Palestine, Harold MacMichael, defended the practice "The provision is drastic, but the situation has demanded drastic powers."
MacMichael was furious over what he called the "grossly exaggerated accusations" that England's critics were circulating concerning British anti-terror tactics in Palestine. Arab allegations that British soldiers gouged out the eyes of Arab prisoners were quoted prominently in the Nazi German press and elsewhere.
The declassified documents also record discussions among officials of the Colonial Office concerning the anti-terror methods used in Palestine. Lord Dufferin remarked "British lives are being lost and I do not think that we, from the security of Whitehall, can protest squeamishly about measures taken by the men in the frontline." 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 1930's and Israeli policy today, but two stand out. The first is that the British, faced with a level of Palestinian Arab terrorism considerably less lethal than that which Israel faces today, nevertheless utilized anti-terror methods considerably harsher than those used by Israeli forces. The second is that when the situation became unbearable, the British could go home; the Israelis, by contrast, have no other place to go.