The Banality of Brutality British Armed Forces and the Repression of the Arab Revolt in Palestine - Posted by YJ Draiman

The Banality of Brutality British Armed Forces and the Repression of the Arab Revolt in Palestine,

1936ñ39*

MATTHEW HUGHES, Brunel University

Embodied in the documentation by which Britain accepted the League of Nations mandate for Palestine in 1922 were clauses facilitating Jewish immigration to the country and help to re-establish The Jewish National Home in Palestine. The Arab/Palestinians were hostile to Jewish immigration and settlement, resulting in recurring bouts of violence in the 1920’s and early 1930’s as the Arabs attacked Jewish settlers and the British authorities. Jewish immigration peaked in 1936, the year in which the Arab-Palestinians began a full-scale, nation-wide revolt. The spark for the uprising was an attack on 15 April 1936 on a convoy of taxis on the Nablus to Tulkarm road in which the assailants murdered two Jewish passengers.  Portrayed in the press as an act of Arab barbaric banditry, the assault was possibly the result of specific targeting of Jews by Arab Islamic patriots, followers of the late Shaykh Izz al-Din al-Qassam, killed by British police in 1935.2 At the funeral for one of the dead Jews in Tel Aviv, there was rioting; at the same time, gunmen shot two Arab workers sleeping in a hut in a revenge attack. An Arab general strike and revolt ensued that lasted till October 1936 when British diplomatic efforts channeled through the rulers of Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Transjordan and Yemen led to a cease fire during which a Commission headed by Lord Peel came to Palestine to determine the territory’s future. The Arabs rejection of Peel’s conclusion in 1937 that Palestine should be partitioned led to a second phase of the revolt from September 1937 to late 1939: the violence finally petered out with the approaching war in Europe.

For long stretches of the revolt, especially its second phase after 1937, the British lost control of swathes of Palestine, including most major towns and, for about five days in October 1938, the Old City of Jerusalem. The rebels attacked Jewish settlers in Palestine, but as the revolt was an attempt to divert British policy, they also targeted British soldiers, colonial specials, police officers and Palestinians working for the mandate government. To suppress the revolt, the British launched an intense and prolonged imperial policing operation in aid of the civil authority or, as we would say  today, a counter-insurgency campaign, a term that became fashionable after 1945 which involved at its height in 1938 an immense force built around two army divisions numbering some 25,000 servicemen.

How humane were the British authorities in their response to the revolt? Did the British operate within the rule of law, and did servicemen avoid what today would be called human rights abuses? Were the British comparatively enlightened in suppressing the revolt compared to, say, other European powers operating in similar conditions? These are topical questions, not 3 least  as  the  military  history  literature  on  counterinsurgency emphasizes British success in this sphere, the threats and mindset aspect to British counter-insurgency and British exceptionalism in which British armed forces generally more scrupulous than most worked within the rule of  law, avoiding the abuses against non-combatants that supposedly characterized other colonial and post-colonial powers. No country which relies on the law of the land to regulate the lives of its citizens can afford to see that law Touted by its own government, even in an insurgency situation. In other words everything done by a government and its agents in combating insurgency must be legal, was the conclusion of a leading  British  soldier  that expressed the ideal of the British way in counter-insurgency, and  an  issue  discussed  in  Sir  Robert  Thompson’s  inertial Defeating   Communist   Insurgency     (1965). 5   More   recently,

Caroline Elkins in her examination of Britain’s suppression of the 6 Mau Mauí revolt in Kenya in the 1950’s wrote:

Decades had been spent constructing Britain’s imperial image, and that image contrasted sharply with the brutal behavior of other European empires in Africa. King Leopold’s bloody rule in the Congo, the German directed genocide of the Hero in

South-West Africa, and Frances disgrace in Algeria the British reputedly avoided all of these excesses because, simply, it was British to do so.

This was also the view of senior British military commanders in Palestine at the time, one of whom remarked to a colleague. If the Germans were in occupation in Haifa would not have any 7 bloody trouble from the Arabs.

The literature ó in Arabic, 8 English 9 and Hebrew10 on the revolt is exiguous and skates over the issue of the conduct of soldiers  in  the  field,  excepting  some  of  the  Arabic-language volumes, which record contemporaneous accounts of British brutality. While the Arabic material is the most extensive, it is dated, rarely uses British sources and is often printed primary material.  The Hebrew literature focuses either on the internal dynamics within the Arab-Palestinian community or on Zionist military training in this period, as opposed to any abuses committed by British  troops,  Yuval  Arnon-Ohanna  and  Hillel  Cohen’s  books 11 being good examples of examinations of intra-Arab relations.

Simeon Shoul’s recent English-language doctoral thesis on British imperial policing recognized this gap, arguing that there has been to date a general reliance that the British employed minimal force. Where this is gainsaid, and brutality alleged, there are only partial attempts to quantify the force employed. There has been a persistent failure to dig into the experience of many people on the ground an accompanying over-reliance on official sourcesí.12 Shoul is right; the methodological challenge when examining the conduct of British armed forces in Palestine is sending the evidence of abuse by soldiers and officials who were reluctant to leave a record of abuses against non-combatants. For both perpetrator and victim, so often, you don’t want to 13 remember the bad stuff, which is hidden away or forgotten.

What  was  the  legal  system  that  bound  and  directed  British servicemen in Palestine after 1936, underpinning and legitimizing counter-rebel operations? Legally, British soldiers fighting internal insurgents conducted themselves as an aid to the civil power, an issue articulated at the time by Major-General Sir Charles Gwynn and Colonel H.J. Simson, building on the earlier work of Captain C.E. Callwell.14  The King’s Regulations and the 1929 Manual of Military  Law  bound  soldiers  of  all  rank,  the  latter  a  bulky hard-back volume updating the Army Discipline and Regulation

Act (1879)  and  Army  Act (1881),  the  key  points  of  which appeared in abridged form in pocket-sized paper-back pamphlets such as Notes on Imperial Policing, 1934 and the 1937 Duties in the Aid of the Civil Power that officers could take with them on operations. 15 The 1929 manual was precise on how soldiers should conduct themselves, forbidding, for instance, stealing from and maltreatment of civilians. The 1929 regulations stated that a soldier was also a citizen and subject to civil as well as military law, and that an act which constitutes an offence if committed by a civilian is none the less an offence if committed by a soldiers, but it also provided a legal framework for shooting rioters and allowed for collective punishments and retribution, both loosely defined terms in the 1929 volume and both of which are

relevant  to  what  happened  in  Palestine.16  Neither  the    1929 volume nor the subsequent 1934 and 1937 pamphlets provided any concrete definition for what constituted collective punishment and  reprisals,  thereby  giving  field  commanders  considerable leeway  when  it  came  to  interpreting  the  rules.  The law for

soldiers was clear: they should use collective punishment and retribution as a last resort and, if possible, that they should avoid needless civilian suffering and any offence towards religion, race or class, but the 1929 law clearly stated that where coercion was required or where terrorism needed to be checked, collective punishment and reprisals, which will inflict suffering upon innocent individuals, were indispensable as a last resource. 17 As the law stated; The existence of an armed insurrection would justify the use of any degree of force necessary effectually to 18 meet and cope with the insurrection.

In Palestine, in 1924-25, the British had formalized the principle of collective punishment in the Collective Responsibility and Punishment Ordinances, building on the idea that Arab-Palestinian village life was a collective social system based on mutual protection rather than justice, a view in some measure endorsed by arrangements such as the  collective rural faza (alarm) security system whereby certain villages would help one another in times of crisis.19 The British updated these ordinances in 1936 with the Collective Fines Ordinance, these local regulations being compatible with the personal  instructions for soldiers detailed above.

While civil proceedings against servicemen for individual offences during any military operations were theoretically possible, a strict reading of the military law in force with its broad acceptance of group punishment and reprisal action meant that tough action was within the law. Where theft, brutality and assault occurred, unlawful under the civil element of the law governing conduct, soldiers had little to fear from disciplinary action as complaints about military were frequent, lawsuits rarer, and successful lawsuits almost unheard of in the colonies the military had a freer hand than in Britain, and restraint of excessive violence was far lighter. 20 Victims could take out civil proceedings but before 1947 and the Crown Proceedings Act the Crown was immune from prosecution, so these would have to be against individual soldiers, and the victim would have to prove that the  soldiers involved were acting beyond their lawful operational orders. This was not practicable, especially when soldiers had no identifying personal number or sign. One Arab claimed that soldier number 65 had beaten him, unaware that all the men from that unit, the York and Lancaster Regiment, formerly the 65th Foot, carried this number on the left side of their helmets.21 Moreover, the establishment of military courts and regulations in Palestine after September 1936 which could not be challenged by the ordinary civil courts made any such appeal almost impossible to succeed.22 This author has found only one successful prosecution of servicemen in Palestine, that of four British police officers who blatantly executed an Arab prisoner in the street in October 1938, witnessed by a number of non-British European residents, not Arabs, whose complaints never led to a 23 prosecution.

International conventions laying out rules of war, notably those at Geneva (1864, 1906 and 1929; superseded by the Geneva conventions of 1949) and The Hague (1899 and 1907; also the Draft Rules on Air War of 1923) also constrained British forces in

Palestine. While the fourth convention of the1949 Geneva conventions dealt specifically with the protection of civilians, the international laws in place in 1936 dealt with the conduct of war and the treatment of prisoners-of-war (POWs) rather than the maltreatment of civilians. Britain classified the Arab revolt as an internal insurrection and not an international war and so denied POW status to Arab fighters. Thus it treated captured Arab guerrillas as civilian criminals subject to the ordinary civil law modified by any conditions of martial law, such as the death penalty for carrying ammunition or a firearm, and for whom international law did not apply. Anyone found with arms or ammunition, except for government-issued licensed shotguns rationed out to compliant village Mukhtar’s (headmen), was liable for the death penalty, an anomalous position in a country where rural villagers had rifles for hunting and personal protection. One old man with no criminal record received a sentence of ten years for having three rounds in a coffee pot which the police could easily have planted during their search a sentence reduced on appeal to four years. 24 The British during the revolt were careful to put captured suspects before the courts, before hanging, sentencing or acquitting them. Later on in the revolt, quickly convened military courts passed rapid judgment and justice soon followed, the convicted went very quickly to the gallows but there was always the veneer of legal respectability.

While British forces in Palestine during the revolt operated as an aid to the civil power, conditions in the country approached martial law, a situation that further eased civil limits on soldiers behavior as under a martial law regime acts might be carried out which would normally be illegal.25 The British never instituted full (or real) martial law in Palestine, but in a series of Orders in Council and Emergency Regulations, 1936-37, they issued statutory martial law, a stage between semi-military rule under civil powers and full martial law under military powers, and one in which the army and not the civil High Commissioner had the upper hand.26 The British by the 1930’s had ruled out full martial law in situations of sub-wars, excepting in the most extreme cases, the reference here usually being to the Indian Mutiny of 1857, but after the Arab capture of the Old City of Jerusalem in October 1938, the army effectively took over Jerusalem and then all of Palestine. In fact, since late 1937, the army had been in charge with the full power of search and arrest, independent of the police, and the right to shoot and kill any man attempting to escape search or ignoring challenges. Grenades may be used during searches of caves, wells, etc. Since November [1937] co-operating aircraft have been   bombed-up and pilots instructed to machine gun or bomb armed parties.í27 There was de facto if not de jure martial law from late 1937 or early 1938.

To be fair, the British never removed civil authority in Palestine from the decision-making process, but by 1938 the High Commissioner tempered rather than directed the actions of British armed forces and when Sir Arthur Wauchope, the High

Commissioner in place for the first phase of the revolt looked for a political solution to the revolt and challenged army efforts to institute martial law, he antagonized the armed forces who thought him too lenient and referred to him as washout and ga-ga.28 In March 1938, the Colonial Office replaced him with the more compliant Sir Harold MacMichael.

In the examination that follows, can we distinguish between, say, brutality, torture and atrocity, terms that are often used interchangeably? The language employed is significant. For instance, in 1991 one senior British officer objected to the BBC’s use of brutality  when describing British army actions in Palestine, suggesting determination as a  substitute, the BBC countering with an offer of ëharshnessí.29 The (British) dictionary definition of atrocity raises the issue of moral reference: an act of savage enormity, horrible or heinous wickedness, an atrocious deed, an act of extreme cruelty and heinousness with no moral referenceí.30  For  the  Americans,  such  an  act  is  outrageously wicked, criminal, vile or cruel, heinous, horribleí.31 Such definitions could also apply to torture or extreme brutality.

International conventions such as article five of the 1948 UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights32 and article three of the 1950 Council of Europe Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms33 do not define torture as

much as outlaw the practice: no one shall be subjected to torture or to inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment, 34 the same wording as was used in the 1987 European Convention for the Prevention of Torture and Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment.35 The 1984 United Nations (UN) Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment  defined (part  one,  article  one)  torture (but  not brutality) in the following terms, the last sentence being significant in relation to what happened in Palestine after 1936: 36 any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person for such purposes as obtaining from him or a third person information or a confession, punishing him for an act he or a third person has committed or is suspected of having committed, or intimidating or coercing him or a third person, or for any reason based on discrimination  of any kind, when such pain or suffering is inflicted by or at the instigation of or with the  consent or acquiescence of a public official or other person acting in an official capacity. It does not include pain or suffering arising only from, inherent in or incidental to lawful sanctions.

Similarly, the Council of Europe’s 1950 Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms (article 2) also raised the issue of the legal use of force: deprivation of life shall not be regarded as inflicted in contravention of this article [right to life] when it results from the use of force which is no more than absolutely necessary in action lawfully taken for 37 the purpose of quelling a riot or insurrection. The legal framework of reprisals and collective punishments directed British troops when they went on operations after April 1936. Punishment in the form of the destruction of Arab property across urban and rural areas of Palestine was central to British military repression after 1936, the countryside being badly hit although there were some egregious house demolitions in urban areas. Destruction and vandalism became a systematic, systemic part of British counter-insurgency operations during the revolt and justified by the legal measures in force at the time. Alongside the destruction, soldier’s looted properties, something not officially sanctioned; indeed officers often tried to stop the men pilfering. Alongside the blowing up of houses often the most impressive ones in the village and the smashing up of Arab villager’s homes, there were reprisals in the form of heavy collective fines, forced labor and punitive village occupations by government forces for which villagers bore the cost. One Arab rebel noted that the British army was unable to strike the fighters, so it had to resort to revenge and collective punishment. 38    Using air support, radio communications, intelligence, collaborators and mobile columns, the British improved their tactics against the rebel bands, but as they never were able to defeat an elusive enemy in open battle in rough terrain, they adopted a two-pronged military approach, targeting enemy fighters and the civilians on whom they relied for support.

The level of damage varied depending on time, place and the regiment involved, but it could be very severe. In 1940, after the revolt was over, John Briance, a police officer who became the head of the Criminal Investigation Department (CID) in Palestine,

witnessed the burn scars of the West Yorkshire Regiment at the village of Bayt Rima, north-west of Ramallah, a disgrace to the British name, an incident also referred to by a British doctor in Palestine at the time.39  Abuses went unreported as the British heavily censored  the  Palestinian  Arabic-language  newspapers, while commanders such as Major-General Bernard Montgomery in northern Palestine banished newspaper reporters so that his men 40 could carry on their work untroubled by the media.

During army searches, soldiers would surround a village usually before dawn so that they could catch any suspects before they fled the men and women then divided off, held apart from the houses, often in wired cages, while soldiers searched and often destroyed everything, burnt grain and poured olive oil over household food and effects.41 The men meanwhile were screened by passing hooded or hidden Arab informers who would nod when a suspect was found, or by British officials checking their papers against lists of suspects.

If the army was not on a reprisal operation but was following up an intelligence lead and looking for a suspect or hidden weapons, any destruction was incidental to the searching of properties, troops also used primitive metal detectors on such operations.42 On such operations, however, brutality against villagers could occur as the army tried to extract from them intelligence on the whereabouts of hidden weapons caches or suspects, as happened at the village of Halhul in 1939.

In some cases, the brutality would then extend to the vandalism of property as a means of gaining information. The level of destruction varied, the army using the excuse of weapons searches to justify any damage if there were complaints. Army engineers would also demolish houses or groups of houses.

The destruction of property was alien behavior for soldiers but they did the job with gusto, once prompted. The officer entrusted with checking on destruction in one village  reprimanded a corporal who left intact a beautiful cabinet full of glasses; the officer then destroyed the cabinet and its contents.43 The British designated some searches as punitive, as one private recalled, oh yes, punitive. You smashed wardrobes with plates, glass 44 mirrors in and furniture, anything you could see you smashed.

The local District Officer told Colonel J.S.S. Gratton, then a subaltern with the Hampshire Regiment, that the unit’s search of Safed (Zefat) was a punitive raid, and so they could knock the place about. And it is very alien to a chap like you or me to go in and break the chair and kick chatty in with all the oil in and mixed it in with the bedclothes and break all the windows and everything. You don’t feel like doing it. And I remember the adjutant coming in and saying; you are not doing your stuff. They’re perfectly intact all those houses you’ve just searched. This is what you’ve got to do. And he picked up a pick helve and sort of burst everything. I said, right OK, and so I got hold of the soldiers and said, this is what you’ve got to do you know. And I don’t think they liked it much but once they’d started on it you couldn’t stop them. And you’d never seen such devastation.45

In such operations, away from officer’s view, looting or the taking of souvenirs was inevitable, and periodic personal searches of men by NCOs under officers orders failed to stop the problem of endemic petty thieving. Looting was not official policy,

as a special order to the two battalions entrusted with re-taking the  Old  City  of  Jerusalem  in  October 1938  from  the  rebels reveals:  any  attempts,  even  the  most  minor,  at  looting, scrounging or souveniring by individual troops or police will be 46 rigorously suppressed.

The largest single act of destruction came on 16 June 1936 in the Arab city of Jaffa when the British blew up between 220 and 240  buildings,47  ostensibly  to  improve  health  and  sanitation, cutting  pathways  through  Jaffa’s  old  city  with 200ñ300  lbs gelignite charges48 that allowed military access and control.

By this act ó headlined in al-Difa as goodbye, goodbye, old Jaffa, the army has exploded you the British made homeless up to 6,000  Palestinians, most of whom were left destitute, having been told by air-dropped leaflet on the morning of 16 June to vacate their homes by 9 p.m. on the same day.49 Some families were  left  with  nothing,  not  even  a  change  of  clothes.50  Such callous vandalism shocked the British Chief Justice in Palestine,

Sir Michael McDonnell, who frankly condemned the action, for which he was dismissed; the Arabs with glee printed up 10,000 51 copies of the courts critical conclusions for public distribution.

Unable to express their opposition to the destruction of Jaffa, the Palestinian  press  resorted to sarcasm, reporting how the operation of making the city [Jaffa] more beautiful is carried out through boxes of dynamiteí.52 Particularly recalcitrant villages would be entirely demolished, reduced to mangled masonry, as 53 happened to the village of Mi’íar north of Acre in October 1938.

On other occasions, the British used sea mines from the battleship HMS Malaya to destroy houses.54 Sometimes the charges laid were so large that neighboring houses came down or flying debris hit watching bystanders. British troops even made 5

Palestinians demolish their own houses, brick-by-brick.

Following a search and cordon of the town of Safed by the Hampshire Regiment, the senior police officer, Sir Charles Tegart, noted simply and euphemistically that the soldiers did their work thoroughly, adding that local villagers had little sympathy,

feeling that the townsfolk of Safed now know what has been happening to usí.56  Hilda  Wilson, a British school teacher in Palestine, concluded that the reason for soldiers destructiveness was because they were bored stiff and had no social amenities, compounded by the alienation that they felt serving far from home:57

Soldiers are traditionally careless of other peoples property so what can be expected when they find themselves in a distant country among people who, they are told, are the enemy I remember one occasion when the troops were giving me a lift from Ramallah to Ain Sinia [properly Ayn Sinya], and while sitting in the foremost lorry of the procession, waiting in Ramallah’s main street, I heard a sergeant further down the line instructing men on what they were to do when they reached their destination. They were to cordon the village, and then proceed to drive the people out of their houses on to the hillside. I shall never forget the ferocity he put into that word drive.

Trapped between the hammer of rebel operations and the anvil of the British army, Arab peasants demanded army protection from the depredations of the rebels while also complaining about servicemen’s behavior.58 In June 1936, Muslim religious leaders

wrote to the High Commissioner detailing how police officers on operations stamped on things, destroyed everything, smashed doors, mirrors, tables, chairs wardrobes, glass,  porcelain and ripped women’s clothing and bed linen. Soldiers mixed in margarine and oil with foodstuffs, they trampled on holy books, and they destroyed wooden kitchen utensils, as well as glasses, clocks, smoking pipes and basins.59 In the same month, another protest complained about police and soldiers hitting innocent people, insulting  their dignity, stealing items and destroying furniture, goods and provisions.60 As one  rebel recounted, servicemen,61 Searched houses, each one by itself, in a way that was sabotaging on purpose, and they looted some of the assets of the houses, and burnt some  other houses, and destroyed provisions/goods. After putting our, wheat, rice, sugar and others together, they added all the olive oil or petrol they could find. And in every search operation they destroyed a number of houses of the village and damaged others. They also put signs on other houses to destroy them in the future if there are any incidents near the village, even if that incident is only cutting telephone wires.

Britain’s heavy-handed military methods combined with rebel demands to weaken, perhaps to shatter, Arab-Palestinian rural village society, creating in the process lawlessness, hunger and social dislocation. This was unjust collective punishment. The collective ones imposed were a heavy burden for poor Palestinian villagers, especially  when  the  army  also  took  away  all  the  livestock, smashed up properties, imposed long curfews and police posts, blew  up houses and detained some or all of  the men folk in distant detention camps. Rebels also fined (or robbed) villages for non-compliance with the revolt, £P1000 in one case, £P10ñ100 per  household  in  another.62  If  villagers  were  unable  to  pay collective fines, they paid them in produce: As usual police were called to do the dirty work, collecting chickens, eggs and grain 63 from each family and taking them to Haifa for sale.

Police activity went beyond the forced requisitioning of produce, as when the police went to a village after rebels had killed some wog’s, at which point they indulged in indiscriminate violence against villagers, not rebels. By the time we arrived of course they had vanished into the blue but we had orders to decimate the whole place which we did, all animals and grain and food were destroyed and the sheikh and all his hangers on beaten up with rifle butts. There will be quite a number of funerals their [sic] I should imagineí.64 when the police received a report that rebels had blocked the road with trenches and roadblocks near the village of Shafa Amr, they went to investigate. The local inhabitants protested that they had been compelled to do this sabotage by rebel gangs, but this excuse did not relieve them from a fine of £[P]700, and they had to repair the road. 65 For villagers, £P700 was a considerable sum of money to find. By

comparison, in the late 1930s a British police officer of constable rank earned a basic pay of £P11 rising to £P18 for an Assistant Inspector a month all found, an attractive wage that drew police recruits to Palestine. Fines varied but could be as high as £P5,000

and they had to be paid promptly in cash or in the form of produce such as animals, eggs  and cereals; in the village of a-Tira (or Taybe/Tayyiba, the transliteration from Arabic to Hebrew to English is not clear), peasants responded to a fine of 66 £P2,000  by  picking  up  what  they  could  carry  and  leaving.

Villagers were in permanent debt as village Mukhtar’s attempted to gather fines from their villagers who often had no livestock, no men folk and no food.  The  rationale  for  fines  was  at  times bizarre, with the authorities fining villages for forest fires in the summer months, the assumption being that local peasants must have  started  these  maliciously.67  Certain  villagers  were  also required to produce bonds of up to £P100 and additional sureties to ensure their good behavior. Failure to pay could result in 68 imprisonments.

While the British improved their methods of tracking rebels, the impact of military operations on villages changed little during the revolt. When rebels killed an RAF officer in an ambush twelve miles south of Haifa on 18 February 1938, badly wounding a British woman passenger, the British brought up a tracker dog, specially imported from South Africa, and the dog picked up the scent: 69

The trail was expected to lead up the Wadi Mughar to the bad village of Igzim [in literary Arabic Ijzim], and B Company, less one platoon, under Major Clay was detailed as dog escort. The fourth platoon was given the task of rounding up 2,300 goats and 200 sheep for confiscation as a punishment on the inhabitants of the area in which the crime was committed. The dog quickly took up the trail and moved up the Wadi Mughar to Igzim, where it imparked a house on the northern end of the village. It was then taken back to the coast road and put onto another clue, again tracking back to the same village, but to a house opposite the first one.  When searched, however, the owners of both houses were absent. The whole village was then cordoned and searched, while reports were sent to Brigade Headquarters in Haifa on the result of the dogs tracking. Later in  the  morning  orders  were  received  to  demolish  the  two houses marked by the dogs.

A  policeman  present  at  Ijzim,  Sydney  Burr,  recalled  the brutality of the search, one that was so tough as to prompt a complaint  about army behavior from the Anglican mission in Palestine.70 The use of Doberman tracker dogs specially brought in from South Africa gave a spurious exactitude to an operational method  that  relied  on  villagers doing the work of the British army, suppressing the rebels on pain of the collective punishment and reprisals that would inevitably ensue if there were any rebel actions in the local area. Critics alleged that tracker dogs always picked out some suspect on parade; on another occasion, the dog followed a scent after a robbery to a distant village, leading the police to an old blind man, and then barked at him proving that he was the robber.71 Once the tracker dog had marked a Arab-Palestinian or a dwelling, the police invariably found some bullets to confirm guilt, and the courts then took over with hanging the ultimate penalty for the possession of even one round.

The authorities punished villages because they were the nearest to an incident or because they thought that a particular village was pro-rebel a bad as opposed to a good village, terms that appear with regularity in the British files. In one operation, police dogs led troops to a house in the village of Naim (possibly al-Naí’ima, Nain or Bani Na’im) in which police officers found two Arabs   of known bad characterí.72 They told the owner of the house that unless he gave the police the information that they required, they would destroy his house. After imposing a

collective  fine  of £P50  on  the  village  Mukhtar’s,  the  British withdrew to return several days later, whereupon they loaded up grain on lorries to the value of £P50 and made the villagers and the owner of the house carry 200 lbs of explosives up to the village to blow the house. The authorities then collected the 73 inhabitants on the edge of the village to watch the explosion.

The British triaged villages, destroying Muslim Arab villages while leaving intact neighboring Druze villages that they viewed as anti-revolt. As one police officer recalled, The Druze are always friendly and pleased to see the police and hate the Arabs like poison. They are a much cleaner and better looking race and are supposed  to  be  descendants  from  the  English  and  French crusadersí.74 Soldiers reported that they had little trouble from the Druze and Christian Arabs of Palestine, especially around the predominantly Christian town of Nazareth.75 As the Hampshire Regimental Journal described it: We might mention Mughar is a Christian Arab village and not in such bad  odor  with  the authorities as some villages, and consequently this time was not searched . The Druse are a friendly people and our relations with them have been most cordial.76 Yet the authorities fined the Christians of Nazareth and destroyed houses in 1939 after a rebel raid, despite the local Christian clergy protesting their loyalty to the government. The terrorists will be glad that the fine has been imposed. Notices were said to have been left in the streets calling the people of Nazareth traitors noted the Anglican clergy.77 The sorting of villages was based on weak intelligence, as police officers letters home show: It is very difficult to catch the culprits as there is absolutely no information to work on and you can receive no support from the population in the villages.

You may follow the police dogs into one village and upon this vague clue you may smash the village and burn it down but the next night the wires are cut in another part of the road and so 78 it goes on.

A  British  doctor  in  Hebron  during  the  revolt,  Elliot  Forster, recalled  the  effect  of  living  under  sustained  British  military occupation. Accustomed to local life, Forster worked in Hebron is St Luke’s Hospital and held surgeries in outlying villages. He lived through periods of intense military operations as the army and police fought local guerrillas. The rule of law collapsed as troops ran amok, shooting Arabs at random simply because they were in what was, in effect, a free-fire combat zone. While some officers tried to restrain the men, local Arabs moved about Hebron and the surrounding countryside in fear of their lives, not from rebel actions but because of the violence meted out by marauding troops and police. Anyone who sees the army nowadays runs like a hare I do myself! Wrote Forster.79 In engagements with rebels, the army would shoot Arabs near the battle zone, even when these were old men and boys tending their flocks. Forster daily treated local people brought in to his hospital with gunshot wounds. Candid as to when he was treating a real rebel, most of the time he was tending gunshot wounds   indicted by trigger-happy British troops. He included a well-documented account of policemen executing in broad daylight in October 1938 an Arab suspect traveling in a  police vehicle through the Manshiya district of Jaffa, an outrage witnessed by non-British European residents, and repeated examples of  troops robbing Arabs of money, including young children who were relieved of their  pocket  money.80 The execution witnessed  by non-British Europeans did lead to an investigation and charging of four police officers who received minimal sentences reduced on appeal but this was a unique case of servicemen being brought to justice.81 In October 1938 troops even robbed the Anglican

Archdeacon of Jerusalem, maltreating in the process the Arab boy 82 whom the cleric had left to look after his affairs. For the soldiers, their activities in Palestine were unremarkable, their job being to bash anybody on the head who broke the law, and if he didn’t want to be bashed on the head then he had to be shot. It may sound brutal but in fact it was a reasonably nice, simple  objective  and  the  soldiers  understood  it.83  Regimental histories and contemporary regimental journals did little to hide the  reprisals,  destruction and collective fines, recording how villages were beaten up, homes burnt and  men detained in 84 cages on orders from above because of rebel activity nearby.

While euphemisms would be used the search was drastic enough to shake the villagers 85 regimental journals would cheerily and sportily describe the trashing of a village, as with the Essex Regiment at the sack (obvious pun intended) of Sakhnin, 25-26 December 1937, with physical force that stopped short of outright torture or blatant wanton destruction ó or these were not reported.86 The repeated complaints about the reprisals made to the mandate authorities by Arab petitioners and the Anglican clergy in Palestine, supported by first-hand evidence, met with 87 denials and promises to investigate.

Beyond the official policies designed to break the resolve of the Arab-Palestinian peasantry, there were also unofficial acts of brutality committed by rank-and-file servicemen. While these do not form part of the story of official reprisal and collective punishment, they contributed to the terrorizing of ordinary Palestinian civilians, and officers operating in the field with the men sometimes sanctioned or simply accepted a level of casual brutality by their men. While the ad hoc outrages committed by servicemen were in some measure the soldiers’ revenge against attacks and a means of defeating the rebels, a willingness to inflict suffering on others played its part in what happened. As the commanding officer of the Essex Regiment noted at the end of 1937, punitive search operations against Arab villages were 88 enjoyed by all ranks.

For instance, it was common British army practice to make local Arabs ride with military convoys to prevent mine attacks. Often,  soldiers  carried  them  or  tied  them  to  the  bonnets  of lorries, or put the hostages on small Oat beds on the front of trains, all to prevent mining or sniping attacks. The naughty boys who we had in the cages in these camps were put in vehicles in front of the convoy for the deterrent effect, as one British officer put it. 89 The army told the Arabs that they would shoot any of them who tried to run away.90 On the lorries, some soldiers would brake hard at the end of a journey and then casually drive over the Arab who had tumbled from the bonnet, killing or maiming him, as Arthur Lane, a Manchester Regiment private candidly recalled: 91 when you finished your duty you would come away nothing had  happened  no  bombs  or  anything  and  the  driver  would switch his wheel back and to make the truck waver and the poor wog on the front would roll off into the deck. Well if he was  lucky  he would  get  away  with  a  broken  leg  but  if  he  was unlucky the truck behind coming up behind would hit him. But nobody bothered to pick up the bits they were left. You know we were there we were the masters we were the bosses and whatever we did was right Ö. Well you know you don’t want him anymore. He’s fulfilled his job. And that was when Bill Usher [the commanding officer] said that it had to stop because before long they would be running out of bloody rebels to sit on the bonnet. 92

British troops also left Arab wounded on the battlefield to die and maltreated Arab fighters taken in battle, so much so that the rebels tried to remove their wounded or dead from the field of battle.93 Lane, the soldier with the Manchester Regiment, was in a clash with guerrillas in which several British soldiers had died and he provides a graphic,  disturbing account detailing what happened to the Arab prisoners captured after the fire-fight and who were taken back to the military camp and tied to a post, they were in a state of shock and they were really knocked about whoever had done it when they got them on the wagons to bring them back to camp the lads had beat them up, set about them [the  interviewer asks him with what]. Anything they could find. Riot butts, bayonets, scabbard bayonets, fists, boots, whatever. There was one poor sod there he was I would imagine my age actually and I have heard people say in the past that you could take your eye out and have it cleaned and put it back and I always believed it but it was not so because this lad’s eye was hanging down on his lip, on his cheek. The whole eye had been knocked out and it was hanging down and there was blood dripping on his face.

When asked why the soldiers had done this, Lane replied simply, same as any soldier. I don’t care whether he was English, German, Japanese or what. He is the victor he is the boss and you accept the treatment that he gives you. I don’t care what you say. That was repeated to me later [the Japanese took Lane prisoner in 1942]. But it is even today. There is a beast in every man I don’t care who he is. You can say the biggest queen or queer that you come across but there is a beast in him somewhere and in a situation like that it comes outí.94 Lane then described how the men destroyed their own tents, an act that the commanding officer allowed so that his men could let off steam, but in this trashing of their own camp the soldiers left untouched the Arab detainees. 

One sergeant described by Lane as deranged led the Arab captives to the armory to show them all the weapons there and spoke to them in English, which the Arabs did not seem to understand. He was on the point of letting the Arabs go free through the gates of the camp when an officer stopped him. Then before the army sent the Arabs to Acre jail, the soldiers took them95 around the back and any lads who were doing nothing at the time we all gathered round and stood and formed two lines of men with pick axes, pick axe helves, some with bayonets, scabbards you know with a bayonet inside, some with rifles, whatever was there, tent mallets, tent pegs. And the rebels were sent one at a time through this what do you call it?

Gauntlet and they were belted and bashed until they got to the other end. Now any that could run when they got to the other end went straight into the police meat wagon and they were sent down to Acre. Any that died they went into the other meat wagon and they were dumped at one of the villages on the outside.

These excesses were soldier’s response to rebels wounding or killing comrades in battles, with any prisoners, local village or villagers becoming the target for a revenge attack, something that Arabic sources also note.96 But British accounts also detail soldiers bayoneting innocent Arabs97 and Arab fighters in battle being machine gunned en masse by men from the Royal Ulster and West Kent regiments as they came out to surrender near Jenin. At one time the Ulster’s and West Kent’s caught about 60 of them [Arab guerrillas] in a valley and as they walked out with their arms up mowed them down with machine guns. I inspected them afterwards and most of them were boys between 16 and 20 from Syria. No news of course is given to the newspapers, so what you read in the  papers is just enough to allay public uneasiness in Englandí.98 There is also the  question  of the methods used by Order Wingate is Special Night Squads that mixed British servicemen with Zionist fighters and pitted them against the Arabs in Galilee extreme and cruel noted one colonial official, Sir Hugh Foot, a force that tortured, whipped, executed and abused Arabs according to another source but is 99 a subject beyond the scope of this article.

The brutality of the British Palestine police and prison service had some official sanction. Sir Charles Tegart, a senior police officer headhunted from India, authorized the establishment of torture centers, known euphemistically as Arab Investigation Centers, where suspects got the third degree until they spilled the beans, a major one in a Jewish quarter of West Jerusalem was only closed after colonial officials such as Edward Keith-Roach complained to the High Commissioner.100 Interrogators used what 101 we now know as the water-boarding torture at these centers.

Keith-Roach, to his credit, raised the issue that the questionable practices carried out by  CID officers on suspects were counter-productive both in terms of the information gathered and the effect on local people’s confidence in the police.102 For the Anglican Archdeacon in Palestine, police abuses were the cause of the violence  rather than  a response to it.103 He wrote to the Mandate Chief Secretary in June 1936 detailing the  daily complaints from Arabs of beatings at the hands of rampaging police officers, concluding with an account of a constable who was reprimanded for bringing in a suspect unharmed definitely 104 ordered to duff them up was the police order.

The letters home of Palestine policeman Sydney Burr provide an explicit personal account of police brutality it is the only way with these peopleí.105 Extra-judicial executions, torture, beatings and general violence were commonplace for the British

Palestine police officers with whom Burr worked during the Arab revolt. Burr discusses the third degree dished out to Arab suspect along with general beatings and trashing of Arab shops and houses in almost every letter home. Much of the brutality was casual and wantonly destructive, described by the police and soldiers in terms akin to a good, fair fight of rebel hunting is still the great sport enjoyed by all concerned.106 Most came in the form of beatings in the street rather than in sinister torture centers, but the effects could be severe, something than can be overlooked in the sporting-style descriptions given in many memoirs: it was a good fair fight with plenty of bottles and knives flying about. They are greatly helped by their womenfolk who specialize in dropping family utensils such as mangles and bedsteads out of the window on our unfortunate heads. 107 Thus, another British police officer, Douglas Duff, recalled the effects of a riot-butt beating delivered by a colleague to an Arab in the 1920’s: 108

Our attitude was that of Britons of the Diamond Jubilee era, to us all non-Europeans were wog’s, and Western on-Britons only slightly more worthy. When one of the Nablus detachment produced an old cigarette tin containing the brains of a man whose skull he had splintered with his riot butt. I felt physically sick the sight of that grog-blossomed face of the gendarme with his can half-full of human brains proudly brandishing his  smashed riot-butt as proof of his prowess, altered something inside of me; people who owned skins other than pink Western ones became human beings. Duff put it simply when talking about a Muslim Arab Palestinian crowd disturbance in 1922: had our Arabic been better we might have sympathized with them; though I doubt it, for most of us were so infected by the sense of our own superiority over lesser 109 breeds that we scarcely regarded these people as humane.

Police officers in vehicles would try to knock down Arabs, as running over an Arab is the same as a dog in England except we do not report ití.110 Moreover, in the early life of the Palestine police, many recruits were ex- black and Tans and auxiliaries from the Irish War of Independence (1919-21) and so came with experience of that brutal conflict, imbuing the force with a tough ethos when it came to policing the country. For a time I was seriously troubled at the Black and Tan methods of the police, of which I had overwhelming evidence, I wrote the Anglican Archdeacon in Jerusalem to his secretary.111 The toughness was, at times, amusing, as when Burr received a handkerchief from home, forcing him to write back, I am afraid I will not be able to use it here, the old Black and Tans who were the beginning of this force do not look upon such effeminate apparel in a kindly light. They think the force is going to the dogs as it is. It is because of the soft ways that are creeping into the police that the Arabs are so deÆantí.112 There was also some fascist insolence within  the  police  force,  the  authorities  having  to  issue  orders forbidding the practice of men giving each other the Nazi salute in public. On another occasion, Jews complained when a riot squad in Tel Aviv appeared with swastikas painted on their short riot shields.113  British  police  officers  saw  their  service  as  akin  to serving  in  the  French  Foreign  Legion,  many  making  explicit reference to this is British Foreign Legion. With the faults as 114 well and some seem to have acted accordingly.

The   insouciance   of   the   police   was   such   that   they smartened-up in jail a prisoner with rubber truncheons, not caring that a British clergyman who was waiting in the police station to report his car stolen witnessed this action. 115 This

smartening-up might be the same instance recorded in the Anglican Jerusalem Mission files in which a clergyman witnessed the savage beating of a suspect whose teeth were  already knocked out before he was brought in for a sustained assault by policemen and a man in civilian clothes who might have been a military intelligence officer working with the police:116

A second man came in who was in plain clothes, but whom I took to be one of the British Police, and I saw him put a severe double arm lock on the man from behind, and then beat him about the head and body in what I can only describe as a brutal and callous way. Once or twice he stopped and turned to the other people in the station, and in an irresponsible and gloating manner said I am so sorry I am awfully sorry. And then proceeded to punch the prisoner round the station again.

A third man came in. He was in plain clothes, and was wearing a soft felt hat. He was, I think, British, and may have been a member of the Police Force, but I thought at the time that he was a soldier in civilian clothes. But this man also made a vicious and violent attack on the prisoner, and punched him about the head and body. I am gravely disturbed at the possibility that one of the men who was in the station, and who beat up the first person who was brought in was not a member of the police force, but a soldier  this was the man who was wearing a soft felt trilby hat. I was for two years Chaplain to a  prison  in  England,  and  in  the  course  of  my  duties  not infrequently  witnessed  the  methods  which  police  and  prison warders were compelled to use with men detained or serving long terms of imprisonment, and can only say what I saw on

this  occasion  sickened  me  and  filled  me  with  the  gravest misgivings.

The presence of authority did little to blunt police violence, the Anglican  Bishop  in  Jerusalem  having  to  remonstrate  with  one police  sergeant is under  the  influence  of  drink  or  mentally disturbed who was threatening a school boy traveling in the

Bishop’s car.117 another police officer remarked to the Bishop that 118 he had orders from the High Commissioner to assault Arabs.

When clergymen discussed these issues on the telephone, the line went dead: With regard to our telephone conversation this morning I feel certain that someone was listening in and cut us off just when you were discussing with me the serious aspects of

119 the situation in Palestine.

On the receiving end, Arab-Palestinians made repeated complaints to the authorities. One young man wrote to the British detailing the treatment his father, Abd al-Hamid Shuman, a bank director, had received at the hands of the police. Arrested on 20 February 1938 in Jerusalem, the British moved the father to Acre jail and then al-Mazra  a detention camp (near Acre) before he ended up back in Acre prison hospital after what he claimed were severe beatings by prison guards that left him unable to walk. 120 There are other accounts in Arabic of suspects being tortured, of Arabs being blown to bits in vehicles after being forced along roads in which the British had placed mines, of British operatives placing huge terrorist bombs in Haifa, of detainees being left in open

cages in the sun without sustenance, of men being beaten with wet ropes, boxed and having their teeth smashed, and men having their feet burnt with oil.121 Those who were boxed were beaten until they were knocked out, needles were used on suspects, dogs were set upon Arab detainees, and British and Jewish auxiliary forces maltreated Arabs by having them hold heavy stones and then beating them when they dropped them.

Guards also used bayonets on sleep-deprived men and made 122 them wear bells around their necks and then dance.

In petitions made through the Anglican mission, Arab detainees in Palestine’s prisons protested at the extreme treatment meted out by guards. Prisoners jumped to their  deaths  from high windows to escape their captors, had their testicles tied with cord, were tortured with strips of wood with nails in, had wire tightened around their big toes, hair was torn from their faces and heads, special instruments were used to pull out fingernails, red hot skewers were used on detainees, prisoners were sodomized, boiling oil was used on prisoners as were intoxicants, there were electric shocks, water was funneled into suspect’s stomachs and there were mock executions.123 As one British resident in  Palestine concluded, after the murder [on 26 September 1937 by Arab gunmen] of Mr. [Lewis] Andrews [Assistant District Commissioner in Galilee] the police asked permission to use torture to the prisoners to extract information and that permission was granted from the Colonial Office. Several of the leading police officers in Jerusalem refused to countenance it. One of them has since left the country.124 The Arabs claimed that CID officers subjected suspects to such severe beatings that they made false confessions. Thus, in order to extract from him a fabricated admission and as a result of this method [severe inquisitorial proceedings and beating] he was compelled under stress and force and in order to overcome such an atrocious method against his body and spirit to admit that he gave to other 125 terrorist’s one time bomb, two bombs and a revolver.

Two single incidents during the Arab revolt arguably meet the definition of an atrocity. Neither has been widely discussed, even in the Arabic-language literature, but they have appeared in printed primary records and in television programs. 126 The British army was responsible for both incidents. They occurred at the villages of al-Bassa, in the Acre district by the Lebanon border, in September 1938, and at Halhul near Hebron in May 1939. Contemporaneous Palestinian papers such as Filastin made passing mention of an outrage that seems to be the one at al-Bassa, but there was nothing in Filastin on Halhul. 127 As already mentioned, strict British censorship during the uprising ensured that Arab-Palestinian (Arabic-language) papers were closed for long periods of time and the Arab-Palestinian press was unable to make critical comment on British military activities in the country after 1936. 128 Indeed, the Zionist press such as the Palestine Post now The Jerusalem Post, Haaretz or Davar had more comment on Britain’s repression of the revolt than the heavily censored Arabic-language press.

The British killed some twenty villagers at al-Bassa, most if not all in cold-blood, during an operation in which villagers were also tortured according to Arabic sources. Up to fifteen men died in Halhul, mostly elderly Arab-Palestinians (the youngest victim was thirty-five, the oldest seventy-five) who died after being left out in the sun for several days in a caged enclosure with insufficient water. Halhul villagers also claim that soldiers shot a local man at a well during the same operation in fact; it seems that soldiers 129 beat the victim and then left him to drown in the well.

At al-Bassa, British troops claimed that they had been the victims of roadside bomb and mine attacks what today we would call FIEDs. On the evening of 6 September 1938, an RUR armored fifteen-cwt lorry car hit a mine near the village of al-Bassa, killing four RUR soldiers Lieutenant John Anthony Law, Lance-Corporals J. Andrews and C. Kennedy, and Rifleman A. Coalter two of whom (Andrews and Coalter) died on the 6th, with two dying from their wounds on the 7th (Kennedy) and the 9th (Law).130 The blast also seriously wounded two men An RUR officer present at the time, Desmond Woods,  recalled what happened next in an oral history interview given many years later:131

Now I will never forget this incident. We were at al-Malikiyya, the other frontier base and word came through about 6 o’clock in the morning that one of our patrols had been blown up and Millie Law [the dead officer] had been killed. Now Gerald Whitfield [Lieutenant-Colonel G.H.P.  Whitfield,  the  battalion commander] had told these Mukhtar’s that if any of this sort of thing happened he would take punitive measures against the nearest  village  to  the  scene  of  the  mine.

Well the nearest village to the scene of the mine was a place called al-Bassa and our Company C were ordered to take part in punitive measures. And I will never forget arriving at al-Bassa and seeing the Rolls Royce armored cars of the11th Hussars peppering Bassa with machine gun fire and this went on for about 20 minutes and then we went in and I remembered we had lighted braziers and we set the houses on fire and we burnt the village to the ground. Now Monty was our divisional commander at the time, with his headquarters at Haifa, and he happened to be out on his balcony of his headquarters, and he saw a lot of smoke rising in the hills and he called one of his staff officers and he said I wonder what this smoke is in the hills there and one of them said I think that must be the Royal Ulster Riotes taking punitive measures against Bassa. Well we all thought that this was going to be the end of our commanding officer Gerald Whitfeld, because you know certainly if it happened these days it would off been. Well anyway Monty had him up and he asked him all about it and Gerald Whitfeld explained to him. He said Sir, I have warned the Mukhtar’s in these villages that if this happened to any of my officers or men, I would take punitive measures against them and I did this and I would off lost control of the frontier if I had not. Monty said All right but just go a wee bit easier in the future.

This is not the full story. Before or after destroying the village, almost certainly the  latter, RUR soldiers with some attached Royal Engineers collected approximately fifty men from al-Bassa and blew some of them up in a contrived explosion under a bus. Harry Arrigonie, a British Palestine policeman at al-Bassa at the time, recalled what happened in his memoirs, with the British herding about twenty men from al-Bassa onto a bus. Villagers who panicked and tried to escape were shot. The driver of the bus was forced to drive along the road, over a land mine buried by the soldiers. This second mine was much more powerful than the first [i.e., the rebels mine] and it completely destroyed the bus, scattering the maimed and mutilated bodies of the men on board everywhere. The villagers were then forced to dig a pit, 132 collect the bodies, and throw them unceremoniously into it.

Arrigonie provides grisly photographs of the maimed bodies, taken by British Constable Ricke, present at the incident, and he claimed that the officer involved had been severely reprimanded.133 Recalling the same incident, a senior British Palestine police officer, Raymond Cafferata, wrote to his wife, You remember reading of an Arab bus blown up on the frontier road just after Paddy [a slang term for the Irish] was killed. Well the Ulster’s did it a 42 seater full of Arabs and an RE [Royal Engineers] Sgt [Sergeant] blew the mine. Since that day not a 134 single mine has been laid on that road.

The atrocity at al-Bassa prompted the Anglican Bishop of Jerusalem, the Rt. Rev. G.F. Graham Brown, himself a former military man who had been battalion adjutant of the King’s Own Scottish Borderers in the First World War, to visit al-Bassa and then call upon Montgomery, the divisional commander for northern Palestine. Keith-Roach, the senior colonial official, recounted the encounter between the bishop and the general: He had a long interview with Montgomery and came back absolutely bewildered. To every question, he said, Monty had but one reply: I shall shoot them. The man is bloody mad, the bishop moaned 135 across my office table.

A letter in Arabic of 8 September 1938 giving the Arab-Palestinian side of the events extends the atrocity to include premeditated torture. The letter dates the rebel mine explosion to 10.30 p.m. hours on 6 September, following which, on the morning of 7 September, soldiers came to al-Bassa. They shot four people in the streets, in cafes and in the homes of the village, after which the soldiers searched and looted the village, before gathering and beating inhabitants with sticks and riot butts. The British then took one hundred villagers to a nearby military base Camp Number One where the British commander selected four men (the letter lists their names) who were tortured in front of the rest of the group. The four men were undressed and made to kneel barefoot on cacti and thorns, specially prepared for the occasion. Eight soldiers then told off the four men and two per Arab detainee set about beating them without pity in front of the group. Pieces of flesh flew from their bodies and the victims fainted, after which an army doctor came and checked their pulses. The army then took the group of villagers to another base Camp Number Two while soldiers destroyed the village of al-Bassa. All of this happened on the morning of 7 September, with the army withdrawing at 1 p.m. on the same day. 136 While this letter does not mention the villagers blown up on the bus, another letter of 20 September 1938 refers to the British police blowing up arrested suspects in this fashion along the Lebanese border, the British sending back to the villages the mangled bits of bodies or quickly burying them.137 Thus, it seems that the army destroyed the  village on the 7 September, returning some days later with engineers and some police officers to  kill  more  villagers  in  one  or  more  mine  explosions  under vehicles filled with local Arabs.

An 11th Hussar NCO present at al-Bassa remembered how he and his men had attended the village and blew the lot before referring to a similar incident near Nablus where the 11^th Hussars after suffering casualties destroyed another village. 138

In the archives there are other cryptic comments from British officers to their destroying and burning villages but the vague references to what happened and the reticence of British officers fully to record what they were doing hampers further research.

The Rt. Rev. W.H. Stewart, the Anglican Archdeacon of Jerusalem and, from 1938, Hon. Chaplain to the Palestine Police and so no enemy  of  the  force,  wrote  of  dark  deeds  in  rural  areas  of Palestine,  concluding,  however,  that  while  his  evidence  was absolutely trustworthy, is second hand and not such that I can produceí.139 After al-Bassa, the press in Beirut noted that British troops on fait plusieurs expeditions punitives dans les villages de la region, suggesting that it was not an isolated reprisal but one 140 of a set of punishments inflicted on the Arab-Palestinians.

The second major incident was at Halhul in May 1939. Located on the road between Hebron and Bethlehem, Halhul was, the British believed, sympathetic to the rebels. The Black Watch Regiment surrounded and took over the village in May 1939.

What followed was an attempt to get villagers to hand over rioters; a recurring British demand during village searches, by setting up two wired cages. One was a good cage in which there was plenty of water, food and shelter from the sun, and one was a bad cage in  which  men  were  left  in  the  open  in  the  intense  heat  with between half and one pint of water per day. In an interview with a BBC Time watch team working on a 1991 program on the Arab  revolt what it called the first Intifada the commanding officer of the Black Watch emphasized the voluntary nature of the action; villagers could escape the heat simply by handing over a rifle, after which they would be moved to the good cage. What he did not make clear is what the villagers 141 were to do if they did not have a rifle.

Again, a closer examination of the sources paints a less rosy picture of the events at Halhul. Keith-Roach, in a private letter, wrote that only a half pint of water was distributed, and he does not refer to a good cage.  Instead, after the military high

command  had  given  the  commander  of  the  Black  Watch  the green light, soldiers rounded up all the men of the village,142 instructed that they be kept there [in an open cage] and he gave them half a pint of water per diem. I saw the original order. The weather was very hot for it was summer. According to Indian Army Medical standards, four pints of water a day is the minimum that a man can live upon exposed to hot weather.

After 48 hours treatment most of the men were very ill and eleven old and enfeebled ones died. I was instructed that no civil inquest should be held. Finally, the High Commissioner, MacMichael, decided compensation should be paid, and my Assistant and I assessed the damage at the highest rate allowed by the law, and paid out over three thousand pounds to the bereft families.

The British doctor, Forster, talks of two cages, one for the men and one for the women, and makes no mention of an option to escape the cages. They were there just for punishment. We may yet teach Hitler something new about the conduct of concentration camps was Forster’s acerbic conclusion.143 An Arab whose father died at Halhul claimed that between eleven and fourteen men died after two weeks in the sun with no food and water, one at a village well where soldiers kept pushing him and he was killed.144 The same man recalled electric generators/floodlights/heaters running all night to increase the detainees privations, some being so hungry that they ate dirt. A woman from Halhul noted that ten men died, two at the well incident, the British only releasing the men after the villagers produced forty old Turkish rifles, and that this was after eight days captivity.

The same woman also recalled the night-time lights, and how the soldiers beat them and threw away food that the women brought for their captive men-folk. Without guns those men will never be released, one British official (local British ruler) told her. 145 Other

Arab accounts talk of the use of cages for three days at least in 146 military operations in other villages.

In correspondence surrounding a Thames Television program on Palestine,147 both Geoffrey Morton (formerly of the Palestine police) and Sir Thomas Scrivener (a former Assistant District Commissioner in Palestine) challenged the idea that villagers were  denied water in village searches, with Morton questioning the senile old peasant that Thames TV had dragged in to recount his tale. It is not clear if these relate to Halhul or are more general comment but Thames Television’s reply is interesting: 148

The problems of the oral tradition (confusing hearsay with personal experience) made us doubt it, too, and the sequence was cut when our Zionist adviser told us that these stories originated as black propaganda in Nazi Germany. One of my colleagues, however, undertook a personal search in the Public Record Office and found the original papers. As soon as this incident took place, Government House informed the Secretary of State that people had died during an arms search. The Secretary of State asked for full details because of the danger of Nazi propaganda, and payments of £2,000 were made to the bereaved families.

The mention of compensation suggests that this could be a reference to the Halhul incident of May 1939. One of the survivors of the cages at Halhul recounted to Forster, the Hebron doctor, the events of May 1939:149 On my return this morning I found man had been admitted suffering from the effects of his internment at Halhul. He is a Hebron man who had the misfortune to be caught in the round up. He has not suffered permanently and is not seriously ill.

The point is that he strikes me as being a quiet and reliable witness. He denies the lurid stories that were set forth in the two [Arab] petitions you showed me this morning, and says that apart from one man who was drowned in a well only the ten men we know of died from exposure. The death of this man in the well was bad enough, but again he says the horrible story told in the petition is not true. The man was suffering badly from thirst and in order to get a drink he told a false story of a rifle hidden in a well. He was let down into the well and drank his fill, but on being hauled up empty handed he was struck with the butts of rifles. He had a knife and managed to cut the cord on which he depended, fell back into the well and was drowned. My patient said the first few days were terrible, and the allowance of water was pitifully small. He says that he and others did in fact drink their own urine. During the latter part of his internment he was there twelve days in all things were somewhat better. As is usual with the oriental petitioner, these folk seem to spoil their case with exaggeration and falsehood. In this present case surely the unvarnished truth was terrible enough.

There are other references to similar excesses in the primary sources. Forster mentioned a worse atrocity at the village of Bayt Rima, another example of the tangential comments to other incidents for which there is some corroborating evidence:

Apparently the military authorities declared that they had issued strict instructions against frightfulness. I don’t know if this makes things better or worse. Ballard [a military officer in Hebron] says a man at Beit [Bayt] Rima died after a beating by an officer. He is a known sadist is the explanation. 150 The Anglican Bishop in Jerusalem wrote of serious charges against soldiers in operations at Bayt Rima and Michmash, following which the Bishop protested to senior officers.151 The Anglican Mission in Jerusalem listed twenty-two villages and towns in which troops inflicted single or multiple outrages, sometimes over 152 a period of many months. 

In 1977, a local man, Qasim al-Rimawi (likely a rebel and, later, Abd al Qadir al-Husayni’s secretary and a Jordanian cabinet minister), claimed that three villagers were tortured to death by troops at Bayt Rima during a thirteen-day search involving 2,000 troops.153 In November 1938, the army also set up fake executions for villagers in Halhul in the hope of getting them to hand over weapons, as a major recalled with enormous pride in a conversation with Forster. 154 There is a reference in the regimental journal of the RUR to severe reprisals following the death of soldier in a landmine attack on the Yirka track (usually Yarka, a Druze village about six miles south-east of Acre) in February 1939.155 The Royal Ulster Rifles treated the Arabs very firmly indeed but by Jove it paid dividends but of course you can’t do those sorts of things today, was how 156 one RUR officer put it.

After a soldier was blown up by a mine near the village of Kafr Yasif in February 1939, soldiers burnt down seventy houses, blew up forty more and, reportedly, then told nine villagers from the neighboring village of Kuwaykat to run after which the soldiers 157 gunned them down.  I do not think the circumstances differ from those with which we are familiar, noted a local Anglican Chaplain.158 Under pressure from the Anglican clergy, the army provided some relief to the homeless villagers, the Anglican Chaplain in Haifa concluding: 159

On the whole I cannot help wondering at the way the Arabs trust us and believe us and believe that in the end we will try and do what is right. Some of the villages which have recently been hardly [sic] hit seem to go as far as possible in making allowances.  Sometimes they appear to accept the severest treatment as the inevitable result of acts of violence by the gangs, even though they themselves are not responsible. And they do not hold the government responsible for actions taken by the military authorities, though we know that the government cannot disclaim responsibility. The people at Kafr Yasif  were  very  eager  to  point  out  that  the  troops  who destroyed their houses were not English but Irish.

Following the reprisal attack on Kafr Yasif, local Arabs gathered outside the German Consulate shouting we want Hitler we 160 want Mussolini.

Arab sources make claims of police assassination squads abducting  and  killing  villagers,161  the  RAF’s use of  incendiary bombs on villages near Bad al-Wad west of Jerusalem resulting in burnt bodies, artillery firing on villages at night sowing fear among the hearts of women and children, women being attacked by soldiers, bias in favor of the  Jews, and desecration of mosques and Korans.162 Arab leaders complained to Wauchope, the High Commissioner, that police and soldiers were desecrating mosques,  stealing  personal  property, destroying Korans and beating people up.163 In retaliation,  Arab-Palestinians targeted officials, often those who were especially brutal or pro-Zionist, one early victim being the British police inspector, Alan Sigrist, sentenced to death by local Jerusalemites, and shot along with his guard by two assassins in his car on 12 June 1936 outside St Stephen’s Gate by the Old City in Jerusalem.164 Notorious for his savage truncheon-wielding attacks on Arabs, including beating up the staff of the al-Difa newspaper office in May 1936, Sigrist launched indiscriminate assaults on Arab passers-by, including a well-dressed District Officer who refused to pick up nails left by rebels hoping to puncture tyres.165 After Sigrist’s shooting, British soldiers captured and, allegedly, maltreated one of his wounded attackers, kicking and beating him with rifle butts in the back of a truck, after which he died. 166 Another high-profile victim was Lewis Andrews, Assistant District Commissioner in Galilee, shot leaving church on 26 September 1937, accused of supporting Zionism; on 24 August 1938, a gunman shot dead British acting Assistant District Commissioner W.S.S. Moffat, known for his bad 167 behavior.

There were some complaints of soldiers molesting women, usually the claim that they touched women’s breasts: the wife of Asfur Shihadeh [Asfur Shihadeh] of Bir Zeit [Bir Zayt] while on her way to the village spring for water was stopped by a soldier who proceeded to search her and feel her breasts. On the same day, July 6th, 5 women of Bir Zeit [Bir Zayt] were fetching water from the spring to the north of the village. The troops rushed, searched them and shamelessly handled their breasts and bodies in spite of their cries and protests.168 Similarly, there was an account of an attempted assault by troops who attempted to attack the honor of the wife of Issa Rabah [Isa Rabah] but she refused and yelled for help and consequently was rescued from the claws of the civilized troops  by her village women neighbors.169 Again, In another case the soldiers went in and found an unmarried girl in bed they forcibly took off her vest played with her breasts and tried to assault her but her shrieks attracted the neighbors and this was prevented.170

At a search at Tulkarm, soldiers made women line up in front of them and bare their breasts to prove that they were not men.171 There was also an accusation of an assault against a girl, directed at British troops: Sophiye Ibrahim Hamoud [Hamud] aged 12, raped by the army. She received a dangerous wound on her head which broke the skull. 172 Finally, there was a serious sexual assault allegation but this was against three Arab policemen, not British soldiers: They beat me with their rifle butts laid me on the ground. One sat on my chest and kept my mouth shut, etc., while another assaulted me then the men changed places; all three 173 had me in turns.

The issue of sexual violence is opaque; but, in general, the Arabs complained about British physical force, not sexual assault against women. It seems that sexual violence was not common and some of the allegations might have resulted from soldiers clumsy attempts to search frightened women. Servicemen shot dead stone-throwing women, but they were careful to avoid sexual offence as but the Israelis after 1948 who, did not, use 174 the British repressive methods against the Arab-Palestinians.

When it came to searching local women, female wardresses attached to British units were deployed to search women villagers down to their private parts.175 On another occasion, an army officer complained of police mismanagement in failing to bring along a female searcher on an operation, suggesting that female searchers were used in the field.176

There were, however, very few female police searchers, some Arab/Armenian, some Jewish, for the whole of Palestine, so outside the major towns women should not have been searched unless a woman searcher was present, impracticable in fast-moving operations. The British used Jewish and Armenian women as searchers no British woman would lower herself to do it but, for example, in October 1938 in Jerusalem they had just two Arab women for this task, one at the Jaffa Gate and one at the Damascus Gate.177 In June 1936, when the British wanted to search women escaping the destruction of old Jaffa, they sent seven women from the prison service in Jerusalem down to Jaffa for the job, commandeering a local building especially for the purpose.178 The British police claimed that the Arab rebels hid their stuff with Arab-Palestinian women, the Arabs  countering that hidden goods were simply valuables or money that they did not want  stolen by 179 servicemen.

Nor did the British army act as one, regiments behaving differently on operations. Arab propaganda played on the fact that Scottish regiments were especially unpleasant. One Arab leaflet, written into (clumsy) English for distribution to soldiers, made clear the link between abuses and Scottish troops deployed to Palestine: 180

One can never imagine inhuman deeds than bombing up the houses over their inhabitants of innocent ladies and children, of robbing passengers, then shooting them, of ruining  whole villages and scattering their inhabitants to die of cold and thirst; and of obliterating the ladies of those killed persons in order that they might terrify the peaceful citizens.  These savage actions are mostly committed by ROYAL SCOTCH REGIMENTS in so many places of Palestine; and hundreds of photographs are kept for future generations to behold these actions of ROYAL SCOTCH REGIMENTS.

This is corroborated by police officer Burr who noted that Scottish regiments were the worst offenders when it came to causing trouble, and if an Arab sees anybody in a kilt they run a mile. In the trouble last year they used the bayonet on the slightest  excuse.181  The Arabs were aware of regimental differences, with Arab students in London in May 1939 protesting specifically against Black Watch soldiers following the Halhul outrage.182 Following the death of two Black Watch soldiers by the Jaffa Gate in  Jerusalem on 5 November 1937, General Archibald Wavell remarked on the restraint shown by the Black Watch on a subsequent operation against Silwan, the village south of the city blamed for the attack, although he admitted that a suspect died falling over a cliffs.183 Officially, after tracker dogs led the authorities to the village, one villager ended up hospital after falling off a cliff, while soldiers shot dead one man and wounded  another. Then the authorities sealed the village forbidding villagers to leave without a permit, made all males report every evening to the police and made the village pay for a twenty-man police post.184 Yet, the private diary of a North Staffordshire Regiment officer tells a different tale, recording how Black Watch men beat to death twelve Arabs in Silwan with rifle butts after the death of their omrades.185 Why would this officer lie to his private diary? Palestine policemen recalled that Scottish regiments were especially tough when it came to dealing with the Arabs, and several later counterinsurgency excesses after 1945’s at Batang Kali village in Malaya in 1948 (Scots Guards), the Aden Crater in 1967 (Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders) and the Falls 186 Road in 1970 (Black Watch) involved Scottish regiments.

While Black Watch (Scottish) troops were involved in actions at Halhul and Silwan, other Scottish regiments behaved properly, as Forster noted concerning the change in the Hebron garrison from the Queen’s Own Cameron Highlanders to the Cameronians

(Scottish Rifles), a far less aristocratic affair [and disbanded in the 1960’s] but worth about six times their predecessors. Soon after their arrival a village patrol was ambushed and a truck blown up by a land mine. The Cameronians bore no malice and for the rest of their stay became very popular with the people.

Gilmour [Captain G.H. Gilmour, the officer at the ambush] encouraged his men to go, in properly conducted parties, to look at the suq and the mosque.187 Moreover English county regiments could also act very robustly.188 While certain regiments recruited heavily from certain regions, these differences were fundamentally regimental and not regional, and were a function of the internal dynamics and leadership within different regiments. All of the servicemen in Palestine were regular volunteers, so there was continuity at the grass-roots level, especially as the different regiments drew recruits from broadly similar socio-economic backgrounds who then experienced a shared training and soldiering regimen. But regiments were not the same, some had weaker or tougher leadership cadres and command structures, and different traditions of soldiering, and so brutality was more or less likely to occur when men went on 189 operations against guerrillas.

On occasion, servicemen took the law into their own hands, not least as they did not appreciate that the judicial system supported their work in the field against the rebels as, while military courts with no jury did sentence to death Arabs brought before them, they also acquitted suspects or handed out lesser sentences. For instance, of eighty-two persons tried in the period from 20 May to 31 July 1938, the courts acquitted thirty-six, found one not guilty due to insanity and the average length of sentence was three and a half years. The British handed out nineteen death sentences, of which they commuted seven. 190 One British military prosecutor recalled how a judge acquitted a sniper caught with a rifle and ammunition on a legal technicality, and that Jewish evidence would never be sufficient to convict an Arab:

The Arab Bar appreciate the impartiality of the military prosecutorsí.191 On the other hand, a policeman relating the trial of a Jewish rebel in the 1940s, described military justice as akin 192 to kangaroo court’s.

The perceived leniency of the courts might help to explain the numbers of Arab suspects  shot while trying to escape, a recurring phrase in police files and which policeman Burr admits were assassinations by colleagues who were tired of the legal system and so shot out of hand suspects.193 Briance confessed to his mother that colleagues shot on the spot  an arrested rebel.194 Troops also shot captives, including the Arab-Palestinian suspected of assassinating acting Assistant District Commissioner Moffat in August 1938 in his office in Jenin. The British quickly apprehended the assassin after the murder he was, apparently, a blond hunchback and so rather visible after which he was shot trying to escape, despite his disability and being surrounded by fit, young British soldiers.195 Then again, the Arabs nicknamed Moffat’s assassin, Muhammad, gazelle 196 because he was so swift.

Arabic sources paint a harrowing picture of the judicial system.

Abu Gharbiyah secured a press post that allowed him access to the workings of the military tribunals set up in 1937 and presided over by three military judges. His accounts of the workings of these military as opposed to civil courts highlight a judicial system in which proceedings and the passing of the death sentence could take less than an hour. The commanding officer of the Essex Regiment noted how the courts worked at high pressure. The Arab is slow to learn.197 The supreme British commander at this time General Archibald Wavell confirmed one sentence the same evening and the British hanged the convicted man the next day. The whole sequence from the start of the trial to execution took forty-eight hours. Abu Gharbiyah noted with irony how he and his comrades, cheered for British justice! 198 On another occasion, a family of nine from Gaza came before the court charged with possession of one gun. The judgment took fewer than two hours, with the family of nine standing throughout with British guards pointing weapons at them. The judges found six children guilty and sentenced them to life imprisonment, sent two children who were minors to jail for seven years, while they   condemned the chief accused (presumably the father) to death.199 Abu Gharbiyah claimed that in 1938 military tribunals passed 2,000 long sentences and 148 death sentences, the latter not borne out by the official figures of those hanged. Finally, the British detained tens of thousands of Arabs, many of whom had no connection with the rebellion but were just unfortunate enough to be villagers in areas of rebel activity, or were sent into detention after screening procedures whereby hooded Arab informers working with the British checked over villagers, a widespread practice in later counterinsurgency campaigns.

According to official British figures, the army and police killed more than 2,000 Arabs in combat, while 100-112 were hanged, and 961 died because of gang and terrorist activities.200 Building on the British statistics, Walid Khalidi cites figures of 19,792 casualties for the Arabs, with 5,032 dead, broken down further into 3,832 killed by the British and 1,200 dead because of terrorism, and 14,760 wounded.201 The accounts of the fighting in Palestine in which unofficial deaths were high bear out Khalidi’s statistical examination. If we accept an overall figure of 5000-6,000 Arabs killed during the revolt, how many died because of non-British actions? Yuval Arnon-Ohanna produced figures  of between 3,000 and 4,500 Arabs killed due to intra-Arab fighting, often against  suspected collaborators or because of fighting between the Nashashibi and Husayni  families, a point he emphasized in his critical examinations of Arab Palestinian unity and  social cohesion during the revolt.202 More recent Hebrew work by Hillel Cohen  questions Arnon Ohanna’s scholarship, claiming that he misread Arabic sources, lowering the figure of Arabs killed by Arabs to 900-1,000, providing a total that is more sympathetic to the Arab cause as it puts less emphasis on 203 intra-Arab clashes.

What are we to make of these figures? The  non-Jewish population of Palestine in 1939 comprised 927,133 Muslim, plus 116,958 Christian and 12,150 other non-Jewish, giving a grand total of non-Jews of 1,056,241.204 If we accept a total of 3,832 Arabs killed by the British, this results in percentages of 0.36% non-Jewish killed. Khalidi shows that the comparable percentages for Britain and the US, taking the higher total figure of dead of 5,032, would have resulted in 200,000 British and 1,000,000 Americans killed. 205 Put  this way, the figures do look more dramatic than they do when seen as absolute totals, and it is for this reason that the same statistical method was applied by pro-Zionist historians when detailing Israeli casualties during the 1948-49  Arab-Israeli  War,  showing that they suffered more 206 casualties than Britain did in the Second World War.

By late 1938, once the Munich crisis had passed, the British had deployed two full-strength divisions to Palestine. The British government was keen to resolve the Palestine revolt before war broke out with Germany and so allowed these forces to increase the tempo of their operations. The military command in Palestine and the High Commissioner were able to do more or less as they liked because of the threat from Germany, recalled one officer in Palestine at the time.207 With such a large deployment, some level of human rights abuse was inevitable, especially as successful counter-insurgency demanded some degree of brutality. Did the reprisals and collective punishment allowed by the 1929 Military Law that the British used in Palestine in the 1930’s constitute the severe pain or suffering demanded by, say, the UN definition of torture? This article has uncovered evidence of blatant torture and recognized as such at  the time but most of what it describes is premeditated, systematic, officially sanctioned brutality in the form of collective punishments and reprisals directed primarily at  property not people. 

There are fewer instances of unpremeditated and extreme wild reactive rank-and-file brutality. These could reflect soldier’s anger at a guerrilla attack notably if rebels killed or wounded a comrade in an attack and a subsequent desire for revenge. Unofficial torture and brutality were illegal then and now pace the arguments of those such as Alan Dershowitz legitimizing the use of torture against terrorist suspects.208 The officially directed brutality was legal at the time, leaving aside the moral outrage that such action would now provoke. Britain’s concern to follow the law modified as necessary meant that her actions were usually within the law.

While some incidents such as al-Bassa meet the dictionary definition of an atrocity, these outrages were not the systematic excesses that one would expect to see in a police state in which service personnel could act without moral reference. In her charged attack on British imperialism, Elkins described Kenya in the 1950’s as Britain’s Gulag, not a phrase that is readily applicable to Palestine in the 1930’s, at least not with the records currently available.209 Army actions at Halhul and al-Bassa saw the deaths of around thirty-five people, tragic, wrong and illegal, but in a three-year insurgency evidence that restraint and moral reference rather than unalloyed wickedness guided military operations. That recognized; other outrages similar to those at al-Bassa and Halhul undoubtedly occurred this article has touched on some of them although the numbers of dead in each incident were small. Cumulatively, however, these boost the figure of thirty-five dead to something much greater, especially if one considers the recurring incidence of single or several Arabs shot dead while running from troops, although troops were legally empowered to shoot suspects who were running away following a verbal challenge.

The question is partly how one measures the severity of excesses, partly what one looks for in the archival material.

Wilson, the British teacher in the village of Bir Zayt, noted that the British soldiers whom she met daily behaved very correctly towards both herself and the local Arab-Palestinian community. 210 Of course, that Bir Zayt was a Christian Arab village in which there were female British teachers could also explain the troop’s gentler behavior, but when soldiers detained some local Arabs and took them into captivity in Ramallah prison, they did little to them beyond making them mend some buildings. The Arabs main complaint to Wilson was that the better-educated ones resented their jailers leaving them in a cell with ordinary peasants. The extent of British military violence towards the suspects was to manhandle them through the door into the basement cell in which the soldiers detained them. Once released, their soldier Jailers gave the local men cigarettes and then a lift home.  211

The villagers were not especially indignant, taking it rather as part of life’s general unpleasantness. 

Turkish soldiers before 1918, they said, English soldiers now. All soldiers are alike. 212 Forster, typically very critical of the British army, also commented on positive changes  in British behavior in Hebron military thieving has stopped showing that there was no consistent 213 pattern of abuse.

Local Arab women came to see Miss Hulbert, one of Wilson’s Bir Zaytís teaching colleagues, crying and complaining about the British detaining their men-folk for road repairs: They are beating them! The soldiers are beating our men! Beating! Exclaimed! Miss Hulbert. How do you mean like this? Giving an energetic pantomime of two-handed whacking with a stick.

Oh no no! Replied the women. Only like this demonstrating the mildest of pats and pushes; obviously no more than would be necessary to show the men where to go or what to do not surprising when soldiers and villagers cannot speak each other’s languageí.214

Whom are we to believe? Both Forster and Wilson are credible witnesses, both spoke some Arabic and both were sympathetic to the Arab-Palestinians amongst whom they lived.

Similarly, the account above from Abd al-Hamid Shuman’s son regarding his father’s  maltreatment at al-Mazra a detention camp is not supported by one of Shuman’s fellow detainees, Abd al-Hamid al-Saí’ih, who remembered calling in take-away food, jogging, sun-beds, educational classes, and a prison governor’s humane gesture worthy of praise  and I thank him for 215 this.

British troops acted correctly and with humanity, contradicting the negative accounts detailed above. If we wounded a terrorist or anything like that well I mean he was usually looked after as well as one of our own chaps. I don’t think there was any great sort of animosity, or, British soldiery were very bad at brutality; we used it half-heartedly or even not at allí.216 The Arab revolt raises methodological issues when faced with masses of primary evidence pointing in opposite directions. Soldier’s memories of the conflict vary greatly, acts of great kindness sitting oddly alongside brutality towards vulnerable people, sometimes in the same soldier’s record, all evidence of the peculiar experience of soldiering and the later process of memory and historical record.

Similarly, Arabic accounts are not consistent and do seem, at times, exaggerated. Perhaps the issue is whether one is looking to support or to deprecate the British army, its counter-insurgency methods, and imperial rule generally.

Casual racism certainly influenced servicemen’s conduct towards the wog’s There is apparently only one method of handling the Arabs with the exception of the Bedouin, that is by ruthless white domination, or the Arab was a slightly half-witted younger brother 217 but there was none of the racial hatred that, say, white settlers directed at the black Africans involved in the Mau Mauí revolt in Kenya. Moreover, soldiers disliked Jew and Arab in equal measure. One police officer remarked on the real Arabs of the desert, like chalk and cheese compared to the craven, cowardly Arab-Palestinians, before going on to describe Jews as poor soldier’s lacking initiative and gutsy who were also ill-mannered, arrogant and ësubversiveí.218 For the British troops, by and large the Arab was a clean fighter and they respected him accordingly.219 While servicemen commented on the dirt in Arab areas, they rated the rebels as worthy opponents, they saw the Arabs as a once-powerful culture and service in the Holy Land impressed them. To think we British rather admire the Arabs, was one officer’s far from isolated comment.220 Servicemen were disinterested when it came to the Arab-Zionist conflict in Palestine, excepting that the Arabs in the 1930’s were the rebels and so were the enemy. Towards the Arabs, there was little of the prejudice shown after 1945, when anti-Semitism among servicemen was rife, perhaps because while the Arabs failed in their revolt, the Zionists were successful in their struggle against the British.

As for the Arab-Palestinian villagers, they were so desperate to escape the rebels who came by night for sustenance and the troops who came by day to punish them that many Owed their homes, creating an internal refugee crisis requiring official relief 221 and soup kitchens, the latter organized by the Muslim waqf’s.

By the end of the revolt, Arab-Palestinian villagers were referring to the guerrillas not as  mujahidin in a holy war but as rebels (thuwwar).222 While grossly unfair, the targeting  of  non--combatants worked, the British suppressing the revolt by 1939, leaving them free to deploy their troops for the coming war in Europe. Britain directed operations against the Arab-Palestinian Muslim population along with the rebel bands that the army hunted down, when it could find them and bring them to battle. As with later successful counterinsurgency campaigns such as Malaya in the 1950’s, British forces discriminated in Palestine, targeting some of the Muslim community while working with or treating leniently friendly groups in Palestine such as the Yishuv the pre-1948 Jewish community in Palestine and, arguably, the Druze’s and the Christian Palestinians, the latter a sensitive  subject that deserves more examination. Support for the Yishuv during the revolt is beyond the remit of this article, but Britain’s recruitment of thousands of extra Jewish supernumerary police 14,411 according to one source was one sign of her recognition of the relative value of the different communities in Palestine. 223 When inflicting reprisals  and instituting collective fines, the British treated the Jews softly, avoiding, for instance, house demolition of Jewish homes in Tiberias following the death of an Arab in a 224 land mine attack.

After 1936 in Palestine, the British established a systematic, systemic, officially sanctioned policy of destruction, punishment, reprisal and brutality that fractured and impoverished the Arab-Palestinian population. Most of this repression was legal to the letter of the military law and the emergency regulations in force in Palestine after 1936. 

The army maintained that destruction was not its primary aim during operations even when this was its operational method, suggesting that soldiers knew that such actions were questionable morally if not legally, servicemen also  had  orders  banning  photographing of demolitions. 225 The authorities (re)constructed the law to give soldier’s actions legality. The British had to balance what was lawful, what was morally right, and what worked, and these were not compatible.

The regulations in force after 1936 made, as a pro-Arab British resident of Haifa wrote, lawful things which otherwise would be unlawfulí.226 Lawlessness was the law. Servicemen were guided by a legal system that meant that they could accept the premises of their government that allowed for brutal actions, and they could do so with all the energy of good bureaucrats obeying orders hence the phrase banality of brutality in the title to this article, a tilt to Hannah Arendt’s study of Adolf 227 Eichmann.

Where the British army tortured and illegally executed Arab-Palestinians, these were the casual, uncontrolled actions of servicemen operating outside of the law and without explicit orders. That noted, while there was no discernible army chain of command guiding a system of extreme brutality directed at persons, and which broke civil law, police officers and prison staff might have directed torture that was systematic or even systemic. Looking at the Arab revolt as a whole, extreme acts of personal abuse were probably not systematic, and almost certainly not systemic. Admittedly, the British high  command tolerated the less blatant abuses committed by its men in the field,  but  senior  officers  based  in  Haifa  and  Jerusalem  were sensitive to charges of abuse, politically if not morally, and so it was junior officers in the field who were intimately involved in any excesses. The Anglican Bishop in Jerusalem put it succinctly, writing how outrages are not officially sanctioned although they have not been officially regrettedí.228 

Whether there was an unwritten code from on high sanctioning grass-roots level gross abuse is unproven, and probably impossible to prove, precisely because those involved were unwilling to leave a written record of such orders. For the Anglican Bishop, those in the highest positions of authority deplored the deaths of innocent civilians,

suggesting that civil and military forces acted as a brake on counter-rebel operations.229 Britain’s forces of repression were not united, with the army, for instance, working with the Shai, the Zionist intelligence branch, handing it Arab material to translate, sidelining the colonial administration that opposed army 230 methods that were outside usual police activities.

Britain lost control of Palestine in the late 1930’s during the Arab revolt. Faced with similar disturbances, other imperial powers responded much more harshly than the British did in Palestine, as even a cursory glance at other twentieth-century

counter-insurgency campaigns shows, whether it is the Spanish in the Rif mountains, the Germans in Africa before the Great War and during the Second World War, the Japanese in China, the Italians in Libya, the French in Algeria, the Americans in Vietnam, the  Portuguese in Africa or the Soviets in Afghanistan. These actions included systemic,   boundless violence, large-scale massacres of civilians and POWs, forced starvation, overt racism, gross torture, sexual violence and rape, the removal of legal process, the use of chemical and biological weapons against civilians, ethnic cleansing, extermination camps and genocide.

This does not excuse British abuses in Palestine but it provides some comparative context. Put simply, in Palestine the British were often brutal but they rarely committed atrocities. Indeed, by moderating its violence, Britain was probably more effective as an imperial power. Perhaps this is the best that can be said for the British ways in repressing the Arab insurgency in Palestine: it was, relatively speaking, humane and restrained the awfulness was less awful when compared to the methods used by other colonial and   neo-colonial powers operating in similar circumstances, an achievement, of sorts.

*This article has been completed during tenure of the US Marine Corps

University’s Major-General Matthew C. Horner Chair of Military Theory, funded by the Marine Corps University Foundations through the gift of Mr. and Mrs. Thomas

A. Saunders. The author also acknowledges the support of the British Academy, the American University in Beirut, and the following individuals: Martin Alexander, Ian Beckett, Joanna Bourke, Zeíev Elron, David French, Itamar Radai, Najate el-Rahi, Helen Sader, Avi Shlaim and Asher Susser.

1. al-Jamië a al-Islamiyya [The Islamic Community] (Jaffa), 16 Apr. 1936 records three killed.

2. A. Schleifer, ëIzz al-Din al-Qassam: Preacher and Mujahidí, in E. Burke et al.,

eds., Struggle and Survival in the Modern Middle East (Berkeley, 2006), 139.

3. I. Beckett and J. Pimlott, eds., Armed Forces and Modern Counter-Insurgency

(New York, 1985); I. Beckett, Modern Insurgencies and Counter-Insurgencies:

Guerrillas and Their Opponents since 1750 (London, 2001); J. Ellis, From the

Barrel of a Gun: A History of Guerrilla, Revolutionary and Counter-Insurgency

Warfare,  from  the  Romans  to  the  Present (London, 1995);  D.  Galula,

Counter-Insurgency Warfare (London, 1964); F. Kitson, Low Intensity Operations

(London, 1971);  T.  Mockaitis,  British  Counterinsurgency, 1919ñ60 (London,

1990); J. Paget, Counter-Insurgency Campaigning (London, 1967); M. Shafer,

Deadly  Paradigms:  The  Failure  of  US  Counter-Insurgency  Policy (Princeton,

1988); R. Taber, War of the Flea (New York, 1965); Sir R. Thompson, Defeating

Communist  Insurgency (London, 1965);  C.  Townshend,  Britainís  Civil  Wars:

Counterinsurgency in the Twentieth Century (London, 1986).

4.  J.  Pimlott,  ëThe  British  Experienceí,  in  I.  Beckett,  ed.,  The  Roots  of

Counter-Insurgency: Armies and Guerrilla Warfare, 1900ñ45 (London, 1988), 11.

5. F. Kitson, Bunch of Five (London, 1977), 289.

6. C. Elkins, Britainís Gulag: The Brutal End of Empire in Kenya (London, 2005),

306.

7. Conversation, Lt-Gen A. Wavell to Brig J. Evetts, in P.C. Munn, 4503, tape 3, I[mperial] W[ar] M[useum] S[ound] A[rchive].

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Resistance  in  Palestine,  1917ñ1948  ]  (Beirut,  1969);  Muhammed  ë  Izzat

Darwazah,   Mudhakkarat Muhammad ëIzzat Darwazah: Sab ëa wa tisëuna ë aman Æ

l-hayat [The Diaries of Mohammed ë Izzat Darwazeh: 97 Years in a Life ] (Beirut,

1993);  Bahjat  Abu  Gharbiyah,  Fi  Khidamm  al-nidal  al-ë  arabi  al-Æ  lastini:

mudhakkarat al-munadil Bahjat Abu Gharbiyah [In the Midst of the Struggle for

the  Arab  Palestinian  Cause:  The  Memoirs  of  Freedom-Fighter  Bahjat  Abu

Gharbiyah (Beirut, 1993); Ghassan Kanafani, ë Thawrat 1936ñ1939 Æ Filastin:

KhalÆyyat, tafasil wa tahlil í [ëThe 1936ñ39 Revolt in Palestine: Background,

Details and Analysisí],    Shuíun Filastinyya [Palestinian Matters] 6 (Jan. 1972),

45ñ77; Kayyali, Wathaíiq al-muqawama al-Filastiniyya al ëArabiyya didd al-ihtilal

al-Baritani  wa  al-Sahyuniyya [Documents  of  the  Palestinian  Arab  Resistance]

(Beirut, 1968); W. Khalidi and Suweyd, Al-Qadiyya al-Filastiniyya wa al-Khatar

al-Sahyuni [The Palestinian Problem and the Zionist Danger ] (Beirut, 1973);

Khayriyya  Qasmiyya,  ed.,  Filastin  Æ-Mudhakkarat  al-Qawuqji [Palestine  in  the

Memories  of  Fawzi  al-Qawuqji]  (vol.  ii)  (PLO  Research  Centre  and  Jerusalem

Publishing House, 1975); Khalil al-Sakakini, Kadha Ana Ya Duniya [Such Am I, Oh

World!] [1955] (Beirut, 1982); Subhi Yasin, Al-Thawra al-ëArabiyya al-Kubra (Æ

Falastin) 1936ñ1939 [The Great Arab Revolt in Palestine, 1936ñ1939] (Damascus

Shifa ë Amru Haifa, 1959); Akram Zu ë aytir,   Wathaíiq al-Haraka al-Wataniyya

al-Filastiniyya, 1918ñ39: Min Awraq Akram Zuëaytir [Documents of the Palestinian

National  Movement, 1918ñ39:  From  the  Papers  of  Akram  Zuëaytir  ] (Beirut,

1979);  Akram  Zu  ë  aytir,  Al-Harakah  al-Wataniyah  al-Filastiniyya,  1935ñ39:

Yawmiyyat Akram Zuëaytir [The Palestinian National Movement, 1935ñ39: Diaries of Akram Zuëaytir ] [1980] (Beirut, 1992).

9. T. Bowden, The Breakdown of Public Security: The Case of Ireland, 1916ñ21

and  Palestine,  1936ñ39 (London,  1977);  J.  Norris,  ëRepression  and  Rebellion:

Britainís Response to the Arab Revolt in Palestine of 1936ñ39í, Journal of Imperial

and  Commonwealth  History,  xxxvi (2008), 25ñ45;  Pimlott, ëThe  British

Experienceí ; S. Shoul,   ëSoldiers, Riots and Aid to the Civil Power in India, Egypt

and Palestine, 1919 ñ 39í, (Univ. of London Ph.D. thesis, 2006); C. Smith, ë Two

(University of Cambridge D.Phil. thesis, 1989); C. Townshend, ëThe Defence of Palestine: Insurrection and Public Securityí,   ante, ciii (1988), 917ñ49.

10. H. Cohen, Tzva ha-Tzlalim [An Army of Shadows: Palestinian Collaborators in

the Service of Zionism ] (Jerusalem, 2004) (translated into English, 2008); Y.

Eyal, Ha-Intifada ha-Rishona: Dikuy ha-Mered ha-Aravi al yedey ha-Tzava ha-Briti

be-Eretz Israel, 1936ñ39 [The First Intifada: The Suppression of the Arab Revolt

by the British Army, 1936ñ39] (Tel Aviv, 1998); and (translated into English) Y.

Porath, The Palestinian Arab National Movement: from Riots to Rebellion. Volume

Two, 1929ñ39 (London, 1977).

11. Y. Arnon-Ohanna, Herev mi-Bayit: ha-Maëavak ha-Pnimi ba-Tnuë a ha-Le ë

umit  ha-Falastinit, 1929ñ39 [The  Internal  Struggle  within  the  Palestinian

Movement, 1929ñ39] (Tel  Aviv, 1989);  Arnon-Ohanna,  Falahim  ba-Mered

ha-Aravi be-Eretz Israel, 1936ñ39 [Felahin during the Arab Revolt in the Land of Israel] (Tel Aviv, 1978); Cohen, Tzva ha-Tzlalim.,í48ñ1936 Revolts in Palestine: An Examination of the British Response to Arab and Jewish Rebellion.

12. Shoul, ëSoldiers, Riots and Aid to the Civil Powerí, 10. See also S. Shoul,

ëSoldiers, Riot Control and Aid to the Civil Power in India, Egypt and Palestine,

1919ñ39í,  Journal  of  the  Society  for  Army  Historical  Research,  xxxvi (2008),

120ñ39.

13. US veteran quoted in C.M. Cameron, American Samurai: Myth, Imagination

and the Conduct of Battle in the First Marine Division, 1941ñ1951 (Cambridge,

1994), 258.

14. C.E. Callwell, Small Wars: Their Principles and Practices (London, 1896); C. Gwynn, Imperial Policing (London, 1934); H.J. Simson, British Rule and Rebellion (Edinburgh, 1937).

15. War OfÆce, Issued by Command of the Army Council, Manual of Military Law

(London, 1929); War OfÆce, By Command of the Army Council, Notes on Imperial

Policing, 1934 (War OfÆce, 30 Jan. 1934); War OfÆce, By Command of the Army

Council, 5 August 1937, Duties in the Aid of the Civil Power (War OfÆce, 1937).

16. Manual of Military Law, 1929, 103.

17. Manual of Military Law, 1929, 331ff, 343; Notes on Imperial Policing, 1934, 12, 39ñ41.

18. Manual of Military Law, 1929, 255.

19. Y. Miller, ëAdministrative Policy in Rural Palestine: The Impact of British Norms

on Arab Community Life, 1920ñ1948í, in J. Migdal, ed., Palestinian Society and

Politics (Princeton, 1980), 132; S. Fathi el-Nimri, ëThe Arab Revolt in Palestine: A

Study Based on Oral Sourcesí, (Univ. of Exeter Ph.D. thesis, 1990), pp. 128ñ30.

20. Shoul, ëSoldiers, Riots and Aid to the Civil Powerí, 18ñ19.

21. The Tiger and Rose: A Monthly Journal of the York and Lancaster Regiment, xiii (1936), 390.

22. ëPalestine: Martial Law Order Issuedí, Palestine Post, 30 Sept. 1936, 1.

23. Manshiya Exploits by the Three British Policemen in Mufti during the Night of the 23ñ24 Oct. 1938 in J & E Mission papers, GB 165-0161, Box 66, File 2, MEC; J & E Mission papers, GB 165-0161, Box 66, File 5, MEC.

24.  El  Abd  Abu  Shabaan  of  Nazareth,  Free  Translation  of  a  Letter  in  Arabic

Received from a Reliable Friend in Nazareth, 27 Feb. 1938 in J & E Mission papers,

GB  165-0161,  Box  66,  File  3  M[iddle]  E[ast]  C[entre],  St  Anthonyís  College,

Oxford.

25. Shoul, ëSoldiers, Riots and Aid to the Civil Powerí, 18.

26. Simson, British Rule, 96ff, 103.

27. Essex Regiment Gazette, vi/46 (Mar. 1938), 282.

28. Letter, Burr to Parents, 24 Feb. 1938, Burr papers, 88/8/1, I[mperial] W[ar]

M[useum] D[epartment of Documents]; The Disturbances of 1936ó Cause and

Effect (General Political No. 5), US Consulate General to State Department, 6 June

1936,  signed  Leland  Morris,  US  Consul  General, 867N.00/311, 8,  N[ational]

A[rchives and] R[ecords] A[dministration II, College Park, MD, USA].

29. ëHackett Protests at BBC Palestine Filmí, Daily Telegraph, 26 Mar. 1991.

30. Oxford English Dictionary (1983).

31. Funk and Wagnalls College Standard Dictionary (1946).

32.  Available  at  http://www.un.org/Overview/rights.html (accessed 20  Sept.

2008).

33.   Available   at   http://conventions.coe.int/Treaty/en/Treaties/Html/005.htm (accessed 20 Sept. 2008).

34. Ibid.

35.   Available   at   http://conventions.coe.int/Treaty/en/Treaties/Html/126.htm (accessed 20 Sept. 2008).

36. Available at http://www.au.af.mil/au/awc/awcgate/treaties/cat.htm (accessed 20 Sept. 2008).

37.   Available   at   http://conventions.coe.int/Treaty/en/Treaties/Html/005.htm (accessed 20 Sept. 2008).

38. Abu Gharbiyah, Fi Khidamm al-nidal, 59.

39. Diary, 13 Dec. 1940, Briance papers, in possession of Mrs Prunella Briance; Diary, 14 May 1939, Forster papers, GB 165-0109, 119ñ20, MEC.

40.  See  Musafa  Kabha,  The  Palestinian  Press  as  Shaper  of  Public  Opinion,

1929ñ1939: Writing Up a Storm (London and Portland, 2007), 227ff.

41. For an account of a village search, see Diary of School Year in Palestine, 1938ñ39, by H.M. Wilson, about 31,000 words, Wilson papers, GB 165-0302, 36ff, MEC; also the correspondence and pictures in J & E Mission papers, GB 165-0161, Box 61, File 3, MEC.

42. D.S. Daniell, The Royal Hampshire Regiment, Volume 3 (Aldershot, 1955), 34.

43. ëPalestine: The First Intifadaí (BBC: Timewatch, 27 Mar. 1991).

44. Fred Howbrook, 4619, 2, IWMSA.

45. Col J.S.S. Gratton, 4506, 14ñ15, IWMSA.

46. Special Order by Brig I.C. Grant, CO, 20th Infantry Brigade, Oct. 1938 in J & E Mission papers, GB 165-0161, Box 61, File 4, MEC.

47.  A.W.A.A.  Rahman,  British  Policy  Towards  the  Arab  Revolt  in  Palestine,

1936ñ39  (London:  Doctoral  Dissertation, 1971),  pp. 140ñ42;  Arnon-Ohanna,

Falahim, p. 33; Abu Gharbiyah, Fi Khidamm al-nidal, 60ñ1; al-Difaë [The Defence] (Jaffa), 17 June 1936.

48. The Wasp: The Journal of the 16th Foot, viii/5 (Mar. 1937), 267.

49. al-Difaë, 17 June and 23 July 1936; Abu Gharbiyah, Fi Khidamm al-nidal,

60ñ1.

50. Filastin [Palestine] (Jaffa), 19 June 1936.

51.  E.  Keith-Roach,  Pasha  of  Jerusalem:  Memoirs  of  a  District  Commissioner under the British Mandate (London, 1994), p. 185; Eyal, Ha-Intifada, p. 110; Khalidi and Suweyd, Al-Qadiyya al-Filastiniyya, 234.

52. Filastin, 19 June 1936.

53.  N. Bethell, The Palestine Triangle (London, 1980), 49. See also Col W.V. Palmer, ëThe Second Battalion in Palestineí, in H.D. Chaplin, ed., The Queenís Own Royal West Kent Regiment (London, 1954), 102.

54. Letter, Burr to Parents, 9 Sept. 1938, Burr papers, 88/8/1, IWMD.

55. Monthly News Letter No. 2, 2nd Battalion, Lincolnshire Regiment, 1ñ30 Sept. 1936 in Abdul-Latif al-Tibawi papers, GB 165-1284, MEC.

56. Diary, 22 Jan. 1938, Tegart papers, GB 165-0281, Box 4, MEC.

57. Diary, Wilson papers, GB 165-0302, 28ñ9, MEC.

58. Report dated 5 May 1939, 10 pages in J & E Mission papers, GB 165-0161, Box 62, File 1, 3, MEC.

59. Memorandum of Protest from the Religious Scholars to the HC about the

Police  Aggression  against  Mosques  and  Houses, 1  June  1936  in  Zu  ë  aytir,

Wathaíiq al-Haraka, 436.

60. Memorandum of the AHC to HC to Protest on the Laws and the Behaviour of

the Authorities, Jaffa, 22 June 1936 in Kayyali, Wathí iq al-Muqawam, 407ñ11 (from Filastin newspaper, 22 June 1936).

61. Abu Gharbiyah, Fi Khidamm al-nidal, 60.

62. Report dated 5 May 1939, 10 pages in J & E Mission papers, GB 165-0161, Box 62, File 1, p. 1, MEC; Haaretz [The Land] (Tel Aviv), 18 Aug. 1938.

63. J. Binsley, Palestine Police Service (Montreux, 1996), 99.

64. Letter, Burr to Parents, n.d. [Dec. 1937], Burr papers, 88/8/1, IWMD.

65. Palmer, ëSecond Battalioní, 100. At this time, £P1 was equivalent to £1 UK

sterling.

66. Abu Gharbiyah, Fi Khidamm al-nidal, 60ñ1; Haaretz (Evening Issue), 22 Dec.

1937.

67.  Disturbances  of 1936:  Events  from  May 6  to  May 16,  Report  by  US

Consulate-General in Jerusalem, signed by C.G. Leland Morris, 16 May, sent to

State Department, 867N.00/292, NARA II.

68. See the Æles in M4826/26, I[srael] S[tate] A[rchive], Talpiot, Jerusalem.

69. Palmer, ëSecond Battalioní, 85; Haaretz, 20 Feb. 1938.

70. Letter, Burr to Parents, 24 Feb. 1938, Burr papers, 88/8/1, IWMD; J & E

Mission papers, GB 165-0161, Box 61, File 3, MEC and material in ibid., Box 66,

File 2.

71. Request for Intercession, Abdulla Family by Attorney for Convicts, 7 July 1938 in J & E Mission papers, GB 165-0161, Box 66, File 3, 3, MEC. On the unreliability of dogs as trackers, see ibid.

72. The Hampshire Regimental Journal, xxxii/12 (Dec. 1937), 383.

73. Ibid.

74. Z. Lockman, Comrades and Enemies: Arab and Jewish Workers in Palestine,

1906-48 (Berkeley, 1996), 251; K. Firro, A History of the Druzes (Leiden, 1992),

337, 340ñ1; T. Swedenborg, Memories of Revolt: The 1936ñ39 Rebellion and the

Palestinian National Past (Minneapolis, 1995), 91ñ2; el-Nimri, ëThe Arab Revolt in

Palestineí, 184ñ6.  For  quotation,  Letter,  Burr  to  Parents,  24  Feb.  1938,  Burr

papers, 88/8/1, IWMD. See also Lt-Col G.A. Shepperd, 4597, 47, IWMSA and Sir

Gawain Bell, 10256, IWMSA.

75. See, for instance, Maj-Gen A.J.H. Dove, 4463, 30, IWMSA.

76. The Hampshire Regimental Journal, xxxiii/2 (Feb. 1938), 51 and ibid., xxxiv/2 (Feb. 1939), 31.

77. Bishopís Visit to Nazareth, 4 May 1939 in J & E Mission papers, GB 165-0161, Box 62, File 1, MEC.

78. Letter, Briance to Mother, 8 Jan. 1937, Briance papers, in possession of Mrs

Prunella Briance.

79. Diary, Forster papers, GB 165-0109, 74, MEC.

80. Diary, Forster papers, GB 165-0109, 6, 74ñ5, 78ff, 105, MEC.

81. Manshiya Exploits by the Three British Policemen in Mufti during the Night of the 23ñ24 Oct. 1938 in J & E Mission papers, GB 165-0161, Box 66, File 2, MEC; J & E Mission papers, GB 165-0161, Box 66, File 5, MEC.

82. Diary, Forster papers, GB 165-0109, 74, MEC.

83. Maj-Gen H.E.N. Bredin, 4550, 10, IWMSA.

84. C. Graves, The Royal Ulster RiØes. Vol. 3 (Mexborough, 1950), 28ñ9.

85. The Hampshire Regimental Journal, xxxiii/1 (Jan. 1938), 22.

86. Essex Regiment Gazette, vi/46 (Mar. 1938), 292ñ5.

87. See the correspondence in J & E Mission papers, GB 165-0161, Box 61, File 3,

MEC.

88. Extracts from the COís Quarterly Letter for Period ending 31 Dec. 1937 in Essex Regiment Gazette, vi/46 (Mar. 1938), 282.

89. G.A. Shepperd, 4597, 64, IWMSA. Quote from D. Woods, 23846, IWMSA.

90. Woods, 23846, IWMSA.

91. A. Lane, 10295, 18, IWMSA.

92. F. Howbrook, 4619, 35ñ6, IWMSA.

93. Letter, Percy Cleaver [Palestine police] to Aunt, 10 Feb. 1937, Cleaver papers, GB 165-0358, MEC.

94. Lane, 10295, 23ff, IWMSA.

95. Ibid., 26ñ7.

96. A Notice of the OfÆce of the Arab Revolt about the Tragedy of ë Atil [ ë Ateel], 11 Dec. 1938 in Zu ë aytir, Wathaíiq al-Haraka, 529 (see also 545).

97. Binsley, Palestine Police Service, 104ñ5.

98. Letter, Burr to Parents, Mar. 1938 [date pencilled in], Burr papers, 88/8/1,

IWMD.

99. H. Foot, A Start in Freedom (London, 1964), 51ñ2.; T. Segev, One Palestine, Complete (New York, 2000), 430ñ1; R. Catling, 10392, 16ñ17, IWMSA; Æles in S25/10685, 3156, 8768 C[entral] Z[ionist] A[rchive], Jerusalem.

100. Keith-Roach, Pasha of Jerusalem, 191; E.H. Tinker, 4492, 34ñ5, IWMSA; Smith, ëTwo Revolts in Palestineí, 114ñ19; (Judge) Anwar Nusseibeh, 28 Mar. 1977, Thames TV Material (not on open access), Lever Arch Æle: Nigel Maslin, I[mperial] W[ar] M[useum] F[ilm] A[rchive].

101. Segev, One Palestine, 416ñ17.

102. Typed two-page document by Edward Keith-Roach, untitled or dated, at the

end of which is added pencilled comment, Keith-Roach papers, in possession of Mrs Christabel Ames-Lewis.

103. Letter, Archdeacon to Stanley Baldwin, 16 July 1936, J & E Mission papers, GB 165-0161, Box 61, File 1, MEC.

104. Letter, Archdeacon to Chief Secretary, 2 June 1936, J & E Mission papers, GB 165-0161, Box 61, File 1, MEC.

105. Letter, Burr to parents, n.d., Burr papers, 88/8/1, IWMD.

106. ëA Gunnerís Impression of the Frontierí, Quis Separabit, x/1 (May 1939), 45.

107. Letter, Burr to Parents, 22 April 1938, Burr papers, 88/8/1, IWMD.

108. D.V. Duff, Bailing with a Teaspoon (London, 1953), 46.

109. Ibid., 36.

110. Letter, Burr to Alex, n.d. [Dec. 1937], Burr papers, 88/8/1, IWMD.

111. Letter, Stewart to J.G. Matthew, 9 June 1936, J & E Mission papers, GB 165-0161, Box 61, File 1, MEC.

112. Letter, Burr to Parents, n.d. [April 1937], Burr papers, 88/8/1, IWMD. 113. Letter, Burr to Jill, n.d., Burr papers, 88/8/1, IWMD.

114. Alexander Ternent, 10720, 18, IWMSA.

115. Letter, Burr to Father, n.d. [Dec. 1937], Burr papers, 88/8/1, IWMD. See also the correspondence on police abuses in J & E Mission papers, GB 165-0161, Box 61, File 3, MEC.

116.  David  Irving  (Anglican  Chaplain, Haifa) to  the Lord  Bishop  in Jerusalem (Graham Brown), 29 Dec. 1937 in J & E Mission papers, GB 165-0161, Box 65, File 5, 21ñ3, 29ff, MEC.

117. Note by George Francis Graham Brown, Bishop in Jerusalem, 19 April 1939 in J & E Mission papers, GB 165-0161, Box 62, File 1, MEC.

118. Bishop in Jerusalem to Major Wainwright (Palestine Police), 18 Apr. 1938 in J & E Mission papers, GB 165-0161, Box 65, File 5, 95, MEC.

119. Margaret Dixon, Government Welfare Inspector, to Lord Bishop [Graham

Brown], 3 Feb. 1938 in J & E Mission papers, GB 165-0161, Box 65, File 5, MEC.

120.  Letters  of  Protest  to  the  British  Government  about  the  Torture  of  Abd al-Hamid Shuman and the Detainees in Acre Prison, 29 April and 23 June 1938 in Zu ë aytir,   Wathaíiq al-Haraka, 478.

121. A Letter from the Fighter Arrested, Subhi al-Khadra, 20 Sept. 1938 in Zu ë aytir,   Wathaíiq al-Haraka, 505ñ6. See also, ibid., 548.

122.  Statement  about  the  Torture  of  Arabs  Arrested  in  Military  Camps  and Prisons, 1938ñ39 in Zu ë aytir, Wathaíiq al-Haraka, p. 548. See also the accounts in ibid., 579, 594, 601 and Yasin, Al-Thawra al-ëArabiyya, 47.

123. See, Palestine Prisons for Howard League for Penal Reform, 6 Apr. 1938 in J & E Mission papers, GB 165-0161, Box 65, File 5, 76ff, MEC and Allegations of Ill-treatment of Arabs by British Crown Forces in Palestine (translated from the Arabic by Frances Newton, 19 June 1939) in ibid., 141ñ3.

124.  The  Alleged  Ill-treatment  of  Prisoners  by  Frances  Newton  (sent  to  the

Howard League for Penal Reform), 15 Apr. 1938 in J & E Mission papers, GB 165-0161, Box 65, File 5, 94, MEC.

125. Statement of Mutah Said Lababidi of Hama, Syria, Resident of Jerusalem in J & E Mission papers, GB 165-0161, Box 66, File 4, 1, MEC.

126. ëPalestine: The First Intifadaí  (BBC: Timewatch, 27 Mar. 1991); Segev, One

Palestine, 421ñ2; ëPalestine: Promises and Rebellioní (London: Thames TV, three parts, 1977ñ78).

127. Filastin, 15 Sept. 1938, 1ñ2 was closed during the al-Bassa incident. al-Difaë was closed 13 Aug. to 13 Sept. 1938, after which it said nothing about al-Bassa. The press outside of Palestine brieØy discussed al-Bassa:    al-Nahal [The Day] (Beirut), 9 Sept. 1938, 5 LíOrient (Beirut), 9 Sept. 1938, 2.

128. See Kabha, The Palestinian Press as Shaper of Public Opinion, 227ff.

129. ëPalestine: The First Intifadaí  (BBC: Timewatch, 27 Mar. 1991); Allegations

of Ill-treatment of Arabs by British Crown Forces in Palestine (translated from the Arabic by Frances Newton, 19 June 1939) in J & E Mission papers, GB 165-0161, Box 65, File 5, 145, MEC; ëPalestine: Promises and Rebellioní (London: Thames TV, three parts, 1977ñ78).

130. Dates conÆrmed by the menís headstones in the Ramle British war cemetery. Palestine Post, 11 Sept. 1938, 1; Filastin, 15 Sept. 1938; H. Arrigonie, British Colonialism: 30 Years Serving Democracy or Hypocrisy (Bideford, 1998), 35ñ6. 131. Woods, 23846, IWMSA.

132. Arrigonie, British Colonialism, 35ñ6.

133. Ibid., 36.

134. Letter, Cafferata to Wife, 22 Oct. 1938, Cafferata papers, in possession of Mr John Robertson.

135. Keith-Roach, Pasha of Jerusalem, 194ñ5.

136.  Letter  from  Acre  about  the  English  Soldiersí  Atrocities  in  the  Village  of

al-Bassa, 8 Sept. 1938 in Zu ëaytir,   Wathaíiq al-Haraka, 503ñ4.

137. A Letter from the Fighter Arrested, Subhi al-Khadra, 20 Sept. 1938 in ibid.,

505ñ6.

138. Charles Tinson, 15255, IWMSA.

139. Letter, Stewart to J.G. Matthew, 9 June 1936, J & E Mission papers, GB

165-0161, Box 61, File 1, MEC.

140. LíOrient (Beirut), 9 Sept. 1938, 2.

141. ëPalestine: The First Intifadaí (BBC: Timewatch, 27 Mar. 1991).

142. Typed two-page document by Edward Keith-Roach, untitled or dated, at the end of which is added pencilled comment, Keith-Roach papers, in possession of Mrs Christabel Ames-Lewis.

143. Diary, 13 May 1939, Forster papers, GB 165-0109, 119, MEC.

144. Account Translated from Arabic of Hassan el-Quader, Thames TV Papers, GB 165-0282, Box II, File 5, MEC. This is a jumbled Æle and there is ambiguity about whether this witness is from Halhul.

145. Account Translated from Arabic of Woman Resident of Halhul, Thames TV Papers, GB 165-0282, Box II: File 5, 16ñ18, MEC.

146.  Account  Translated  from  Arabic  of  Unnamed  Arab  Villager,  Thames  TV Papers, GB 1650282, Box II: File 4, 12, MEC.

147.  ëPalestine:  Promises  and  Rebellioní, (London:  Thames  TV,  three  parts,

1977ñ78).

148. Letter, Nigel Maslin to Sir Thomas Scrivener, 29 Aug. 1978, Thames TV

Material (not on open access), Lever Arch File: British Letters S-T, IWMFA.

149.  Forster [unsigned]  to  Anglican  Bishop  in  Jerusalem [Graham  Brown],

ConÆdential, Not to be Quoted or Referred to in Public, 25 May 1939 in J & E Mission papers, GB 165-0161, Box 62, File 1, MEC.

150. Diary, 14 May 1939, Forster papers, GB 165-0109, 119ñ20, MEC.

151.  Anglican Bishop in Jerusalem to Miss Trevelyan, 29 May 1939 in J & E Mission papers, GB 165-0161, Box 62, File 1, MEC.

152. J & E Mission papers, GB 165-0161, Box 66, Files 1-2, MEC.

153. Dr Qassam al-Rimawi, Amman, 19 Sept. 1977, Thames TV Material (not on open access), Lever Arch Æle: Nigel Maslin, IWMFA.

154. Diary, 5 Nov. 1938, Forster papers, GB 165-0109, 93, MEC.

155. Quis Separabit: The Regimental Journal of the Royal Ulster RiØes, x/1 (May 1939), 28.

156. Woods, 23846, IWMSA.

157. Anglican Chaplain [signature illegible], Haifa, to Bishop [Graham Brown], 28 Feb. 1939 in J & E Mission papers, GB 165-0161, Box 62, File 1, MEC. See also Swedenborg, Memories of Revolt, 108.

158. Anglican Chaplain [signature illegible], Haifa, to Bishop [Graham Brown], 28

Feb. 1939 in J & E Mission papers, GB 165-0161, Box 62, File 1, MEC.

159. Ibid.

160. Ibid.

161. British sources claim that the executions were false ó shots Æred wide to

give villagers the impression that they had executed someone and so force them

to divulge information: G. Morton, Just the Job: Some Experiences of a Colonial

Policeman (London, 1957), 104; Frank Proctor, 16801, IWMSA.

162.  Atallah  Bey  to  Dr  Tannous, 1  Mar.  1939, P361/5, ISA; Letter  from  the

Amman Ladiesí Committee, 28 July 1936, RG65 P3221/18, ISA; 1 Aug. 1936

entry, RG65 P3221/18, ISA; 8 Aug. 1936 entry, RG65 P3221/18, ISA; 19 Aug.

1936 entry, RG65 P3221/18, ISA; 5 Sept. 1936 entry, RG65 P3221/18, ISA; T.

Mayer, ëEgypt and the 1936 Arab Revolt in Palestineí,   Journal of Contemporary

History,  xix (1984), 275ñ87,  277;  Rahman,  ëBritish  Policy  Towards  the  Arab

Revolt in Palestineí, 148.

163. Smith, ëTwo Revolts in Palestineí, 26. 164. Haaretz, 14 June 1936.

165.  al-Sakakini,  Kadha  Ana  Ya  Duniya,  pages  covering 13  June  1936;  Abu

Gharbiyah,  Fi  Khidamm  al-nidal, 72ff;  al-Sirat  al-Mustakim [The  Right  Path]

(Jaffa), 1 June 1936.

166.  al-Sakakini,  Kadha  Ana  Ya  Duniya,  pages  covering 13  June  1936;  Abu

Gharbiyah, Fi Khidamm al-nidal, 72ff.

167. Zu ë aytir, Al-Harakah al-Wataniyah, 438. Haaretz, 25ñ26 Aug. 1938; Davar [Thing/Issue], 25 Aug. 1938.

168.  Points 7ñ8 in President of Bir Zeit Council in J & E Mission papers, GB 165-0161, Box 66, File 1, MEC.

169. S.O.S. From Halhool, The Martyr Village [stamped 22 May 1939] in J & E Mission papers, GB 165-0161, Box 66, File 1, MEC.

170.  Report by Frances Newton dated 27 June 1938 on Search in Balad esh

Sheikh of 24 June 1938 in J & E Mission papers, GB 165-0161, Box 65, File 3,

MEC.

171. Segev, One Palestine, 421.

172. Allegations of Ill-treatment of Arabs by British Crown Forces in Palestine (translated from the Arabic by Frances Newton, 19 June 1939) in J & E Mission papers, GB 165-0161, Box 65, File 5, 144, MEC.

173. Report on Visit to ëAzzun, 12 May 1938 and ëAzzun, 16 May 1938 [account of assault on ëAysha bint Hasan al-Faji, wife of   ëAbd al-Fattah al-Jammal í, aged about 16ñ18] both in J & E Mission papers, GB 165-0161, Box 66, File 1, MEC. Quote from 16 May report, 1.

174.  C.G.T.  Dean,  The  Loyal  Regiment  (North  Lancashire)  1919ñ53 (Preston,

1955), 66.

175.  Report by Frances Newton dated 27 June 1938 on Search in Balad esh

Sheikh of 24 June 1938 in J & E Mission papers, GB 165-0161, Box 65, File 3,

MEC.

176.  Diary, 19  Oct. 1937,  Major  White,  Relating  to  Service  in  Palestine,

1974-04-24-8, N[ational] A[rmy] M[useum].

177.  J.M.  Thompson  (Government  Welfare  Inspector)  to  Archdeacon,  23  Oct. 1938 in J & E Mission papers, GB 165-0161, Box 61, File 4, MEC.

178. al-Difaë, 18ñ19 June 1936.

179.  Quote  from  Diary,  Wilson  papers,  GB  165-0302,  MEC,  p.  12.  See  also Interview, Ted Horne (formerly Palestine police), Barton-on-Sea, 9 Sept. 2006; Roger Courtney, Palestine Policeman (London, 1939), 88; Diary, Wilson papers, GB 165-0302, MEC, 12ñ13.

180.  Addressed to British  Regiments in Palestine. Arab  Revolutionary  Council,

Southern Syria, Palestine, signed Aref Abdul Razik, Commander-in-Chief of the

Arab Forces in Palestine, 19 Nov. 1938, 41/94, Haganah Archive, Tel Aviv. See

also Diary, Wilson papers, GB 165-0302, MEC, 12; Letter, Briance to Mother, n.d.

[Aug. 1936], Briance papers, in possession of Mrs Prunella Briance; Courtney,

Palestine Policeman, 88.

181. Letter, Burr to Parents, n.d [27 May 1937], Burr papers, 88/8/12, IWMD.

182. Mary Trevelyan, Warden, The Student Movement House, London to Anglican

Bishop in Jerusalem, 23 May 1939 in J & E Mission papers, GB 165-0161, Box 62,

File 1, MEC.

183. J. Connell, Wavell: Scholar and Soldier. To June 1941 (London, 1964), p. 194. See also E. and A. Linklater, The Black Watch (London, 1977), 175.

184. Haaretz, 7ñ8 Nov. 1937.

185.  Diary, 7  Nov. 1937,  Major  White,  Relating  to  Service  in  Palestine,

1974-04-24-8, NAM.

186.  Interview, Ted Horne (formerly Palestine Police), Barton-on-Sea, 9 Sept.

2006.

187. Diary, Oct. 1936, Forster papers, GB 165-0109, 1ñ2, MEC.

188.  Interview, Ted Horne (formerly Palestine Police), Barton-on-Sea, 9 Sept. 2006; Letter, Burr to Parents, n.d. [late 1937], Burr papers, 88/8/1, IWMD.

189. See D. French, Military Identities: The Regimental System, the British Army, and the British People c.1870ñ2000 (Oxford, 2005).

190. Appendix. Analysis of Cases tried by Military Courts, Palestine, 20 May ñ 31

July 1938, Haining papers, Despatches, GB 165-0131, MEC; and the other court

statistics in the same Æle.

191. Col A. Ingham-Brokke, 13 Oct. 1976, Thames TV Material (not on open access), Lever Arch Æle: Nigel Maslin, IWMFA.

192. Jack Denley, Thames TV Papers, GB 165-0282, Box I, File 20, 17, MEC.

193. Letter, Burr to Parents, 19 Dec. 1937, Burr papers, 88/8/1, IWMD.

194. Letter, Briance to Mother, 14 May 1938, Briance papers, in possession of Mrs Prunella Briance.

195. Telegram to Secretary of State, n.d., S25/22762, CZA, Jerusalem; Haaretz, 26 Aug. 1936.

196. Zu ë aytir, Al-Harakah al-Wataniyah, 438.

197. Extracts from the COís Quarterly Letter for Period ending 31 Dec. 1937 in Essex Regiment Gazette vi/46 (Mar. 1938), 280.

198. Abu Gharbiyah, Fi Khidamm al-nidal, 113ñ14.

199. Ibid., pp. 115ñ16; Bishop in Jerusalem to the Archbishop of Canterbury, 26

Feb. 1938  in  J  &  E  Mission  papers,  GB 165-0161,  Box 64,  File 4,  MEC;

correspondence in Gaza Æle in ibid., Box 66, File 1.

200. W. Khalidi, ed., From Haven to Conquest (Beirut, 1971), 846ñ9.

201. Ibid., 846ñ9; Swedenborg, Memories of Revolt, xxi; Khalidi and Suweyd, Al-Qadiyya al-Filastiniyya, 239ñ40.

202. Arnon-Ohanna, Herev mi-Bayit, 286ñ7; Arnon-Ohanna, Falahim. 203. Cohen, Tzva ha-Tzlalim, 142ñ5.

204.  Statistics  from  A  Survey  of  Palestine.  Prepared  in  December  1945  and

December 1946 for the Information of the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry [1946ñ47] (Washington, 1991), i, 141; A.M. Lesch, Arab Politics in Palestine, 1917ñ37: The Frustration of a National Movement (Ithaca and London, 1979), 56. 205. Khalidi, ed., From Haven to Conquest, 846ñ9.

206. E. Karsh, Fabricating Israeli History: The ëNewí Historians [1997] (London, 2000), 22ñ3.

207. Maj-Gen H. Bredin, Thames TV Papers, GB 165-0282, Box I, File 22, 5ñ6,

MEC.

208. A. Dershowitz, Why Terrorism Works (London, 2002), 144. 209. Elkins, Britainís Gulag.

210. Diary, Wilson papers, GB 165-0302, MEC. 211. Ibid., 27ñ31.

212. Ibid., 32.

213. Diary, 14 Nov. 1938, Forster papers, GB 165-0109, 95, MEC. 214. Diary, Wilson papers, GB 165-0302, 27, MEC.

215. Shayk ëAbd al-Hamid al-Saíih,   Filastin; la Salat Tahta al-Hirab: Mudhakkarat

al-Shaykh  ëAbd  al-Hamid  al-Saíih [Palestine;  No  Prayer  Under  Bayonets:  The

Memoirs of Shaykh ë Abd al-Hamid al-Saíih ] (Beirut, 1994), 44ñ8.

216. Maj-Gen H.E.N. Bredin, 4550, 11, IWMSA; Gen Sir John Hackett, 4527, 50,

IWMSA.

217. Letter, Briance to Home, June 1936, Briance papers, in possession of Mrs Prunella Briance; Bredin, 4550, 11, IWMSA.

218. Courtney, Palestine Policeman, 41, 50.

219. Lord Birdwood, The Worcestershire Regiment, 1922ñ50 (Aldershot, 1952),

16.

220. Capt C.P. Norman, 4629, 8ñ9, IWMSA.

221. Correspondence in J & E Mission papers, GB 165-0161, Box 61, File 3, MEC; Addressed by the Bishop in Jerusalem at the Council Meeting on 10 Jan. 1939 in ibid., Box 62: File 1; Letter, Archdeacon Stewart to Canon Gould, 17 July 1938 in ibid., Box 61: File 1.

222. Keith-Roach, Pasha of Jerusalem, 202.

223.  Asa  Lefen,  Ha-Shai:  Shorasheha  Shel  Kehilat  ha-Modiíin  ha-Israelit  [The Roots of the Israeli Intelligence Community] (Tel Aviv, 1997), 273.

224. Anglican Bishop in Jerusalem to Miss Trevelyan, 23 June 1939 in J & E Mission papers, GB 165-0161, Box 62, File 1, MEC.

225. Report dated 5 May 1939, 10 page, in J & E Mission papers, GB 165-0161, Box 62, File 1, 2, MEC.

226. Frances Newton to Mrs Erskine, Secretary of Arab Centre in London, 5 Apr.

1938 in J & E Mission papers, GB 165-0161, Box 65, File 4, MEC.

227. H. Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (New

York, 1963), 231.

228. Anglican Bishop in Jerusalem to Miss Trevelyan, 23 June 1939 in J & E Mission papers, GB 165-0161, Box 62, File 1, MEC.

229. Anglican Bishop in Jerusalem to Miss Trevelyan, 29 May 1939 in ibid.

230.  Y.  Slutsky,  ed.,  Sefer  Toldot  ha-Haganah  [Book  of  the  History  of  the

Haganah] vol. 2, part 2, Me-Haganah le-Maíavak [From Defence to Struggle] (Tel Aviv, 1963), 991; Lefen, Ha-Shai, 44ff.