The occupation of Palestine during World War I by British-led forces and the subsequent formation of a British-run Mandate government in the country triggered waves of resistance from the local Palestinian population opposed to the new colonial regime and the official policy of support for Jewish immigration to Palestine. Palestinians rioted and attacked Jews in 1920, 1921, 1929, and 1933; Britain countered these civil disturbances with force, deploying police and soldiers and shooting rioters. The Palestinians launched a full-scale rebellion (or insurgency) in April 1936 that consumed the country for three years with pitched battles, ambushes, sniping, strikes, and assassinations. The British responded with an imperial policing operation in aid of the civil authority—or, as we would say today, a counterinsurgency campaign—sending to Palestine an immense force of 25,000 soldiers, defeating the Arab rebels by 1939, after which a new enemy emerged in the form of Jewish insurgents fighting for the establishment of a Jewish state. After 1945, units of the British Army—such as the paratroopers of the 6th Airborne Division—were once again sent to Palestine, this time to fight Jewish insurgents. Many of the British soldiers who went were veterans of World War II, deploying for a new style of irregular, urban warfare against Jewish guerrillas. Where the Palestinians failed, the Jews succeeded in their mission. Terror attacks by Jewish fighters in insurgent groups such as Haganah (“the Defense”), Irgun Zvai Leumi (“National Military Organization”), and Lochmei Heruth Israel (LEHI) (“Fighters for the Freedom of Israel,” also known as the “Stern Gang”) helped make Britain’s position untenable, and in late 1947 the British made the decision to quit Palestine. In May 1948, Israel was formed in the midst of a war between the Israelis and the Arabs, just as the last British troops were leaving the country from the port of Haifa. This chapter details the military traditions of the British Army when fighting rebels, the nature of the colonial state that supported counter-rebel operations, and asks the question: why did the Palestinians fail while the Jews succeeded in their insurgency? It examines the tactics used by the British in their counterinsurgencies in Palestine, the role played by intelligence, and the impact of local collaborators on the course of the army’s operations, especially the early use of “pseudo” warfare with Palestinian “peace bands” and forces such as British General Orde Wingate’s Special Night Squads. Operations in Palestine against the Arabs and the Jews in this period foreground a British “way” in counterinsurgency, establishing a pattern for subsequent wars against rebels in places such as Malaya and Kenya in the 1950s, colonial hot spots where soldiers and police who had served in Palestine went on to fight.
Britain as an imperial power had long experience of dealing with colonial rebellions. An influential volume published in 1896 by a British Army officer, Colonel C. E. Callwell, titled Small Wars: Their Principles and Practice, condensed into writing well-established counterinsurgency methods from places such as the North-West Frontier of India, methods that the army would later employ in Palestine and that pivoted on the notion of collective punishment and reprisals against civilians:
The adoption of guerrilla methods by the enemy almost necessarily forces the regular troops to resort to punitive measures directed against the possessions of their antagonists. It must be remembered that one way to get the enemy to fight is to make raids on his property—only the most cowardly of savages and irregulars will allow their cattle to be carried off or their houses to be destroyed without making some show of resistance … it has generally been found very useful to send raiding parties consisting of mounted men great distances to carry off the enemy flocks and herds or to destroy encampments and villages.2
“Uncivilised races attribute leniency to timidity” and must be “thoroughly brought to book and cowed or they will rise again,” warned Callwell.3 Collective punitive measures such as “destroying villages, carrying off livestock and trampling down crops and so on,” already well established in irregular “small” wars against guerrillas by the time that Callwell wrote his book, were used in the Boer War (1899–1902), during the Egyptian and Iraqi revolts (1919–20), and in India and during the Irish war of independence (1919–21).4 Captain Phillipps, who fought against the Boers in South Africa, illustrates what this meant in practice, noting how he had to go, “at the General’s bidding, to burn a farm near the line of march. We got to the place and I gave the inmates, three women and some children, ten minutes to clear their clothes and things out of the house, and my men fetched bundles of straw and we proceeded to burn it down. … The women cried and the children stood by holding on to them and looking with large frightened eyes at the burning house. They won’t forget that sight, I’ll bet a sovereign, not even when they grow up. We rode away and left them, a forlorn little group, standing among their household goods.”5 Major General Sir Charles Gwynn and Colonel H. J. Simson—the latter served in Palestine during the revolt after 1936—codified Callwell’s lessons in books published in the 1930s, applying them to imperial hot spots such as Palestine, arguing that such situations require firm military rule. Interested readers are directed to these key texts.6 General Sir Andrew Skeen, who had served in India, made similar points in his “how-to,” “lessons learned” volume of 1932 in which he laid out in stark terms what British forces should do to rebels: “You are going out to set your mark on a stubborn enemy, to punish him for years of accumulated evil-doing in the only way bar killing that has the least effect on him. There is usually an outcry about this form of punishment, with good reason. I dislike it intensely, but after the enemy’s will to stand and take punishment is broken, there is no other way to make him watch his step in the future.”7
The British military legal system and the colonial “emergency” state supported harsh measures by troops fighting insurgents, including collective punishments that would be impracticable back in the United Kingdom (or in counterinsurgencies fought today by democratic powers), an issue discussed in depth elsewhere.8 The King’s Regulations and the Manual of Military Law (1929 edition) bound soldiers fighting in Palestine, key points from these volumes appearing in abridged form in pocket-sized paperback 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 (and which Gwynn helped to write).9 The manual was very precise on how soldiers should conduct themselves, forbidding stealing from and maltreatment of civilians. The 1929 regulations stated that every 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 soldier.”10 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 in the late 1930s. This policy was not new. Callwell’s turn-of-the-century work cited earlier explicitly justified reprisals and punitive actions against civilians, and the practice of British counterinsurgency methods before and after Palestine routinely included such measures, including in Ireland during its war of independence (1919–21).11 The 1929 manual clearly stated that where the army needed to coerce people and to check terrorism, collective punishment and reprisals that would “inflict suffering upon innocent individuals,” were “indispensable as a last resource.”12 According to the law, “The existence of an armed insurrection would justify the use of any degree of force necessary effectually to meet and cope with the insurrection.”13
Strictly speaking, the 1929 manual applied punitive laws only to civilians living under military occupation during wartime. In the case of Palestine, the military rule imposed by Britain in 1917 was lifted in 1920 with the establishment in the country of a civil government, but collective punishment was explicitly permitted under the Ordinances and Orders-in-Council introduced in Palestine by the Mandate authorities in 1922 and regularly updated thereafter. Indeed, a “Collective Responsibility for Crime Ordinance” dates back to 1921.14 The British used these local laws when implementing collective punishments on Palestinians and villages, referring to them after April 1936 as “emergency” laws. 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 by soldiers occurred, unlawful under the “civil” element of the law governing conduct, military personnel had little to fear from disciplinary action: “Complaints about [the] 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.”15 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.16 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.17 This author has found only one successful prosecution of servicemen in Palestine, 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 prosecution.18
Moreover, after September 1936, the army established military courts and regulations in Palestine that were separate from the ordinary civil courts and were not open to the usual legal challenges. The shift from a civil to a military judiciary was partial and gradual, but the general effect was that legal appeals by Arabs, when allowed, would invariably fail.19 While British forces in Palestine during the revolt officially operated as an aid to the civil power, conditions in the country in practice approached martial law, a situation that further eased civil limits on soldiers’ behavior. The British never instituted full (or “real”) martial law in Palestine, but in a series of Orders-in-Council and through emergency regulations after 1936 they issued “statutory” martial law, a level between semi-military rule under civil powers and full martial law under military powers and one where the army and not the civil high commissioner had the upper hand.20 After September 1937, when the rebellion intensified, the army increasingly took charge in Palestine, 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.”21 Emergency legislation also made possible the mass detention without trial of Palestinians in concentration camps, sometimes for months on end—a familiar tactic from later British counterinsurgencies.
From late 1937 or early 1938, Palestine was under de facto if not de jure martial law of some sort. Nor was military rule much affected by the international laws in place at the time (e.g., the succession of Geneva conventions from 1864 to 1929 and the Hague conventions of 1899 and 1907) as these dealt mainly with the conduct of war and the treatment of prisoners of war (POWs) rather than with the maltreatment of civilians. Britain had classified the Arab revolt as an internal insurrection and not an international war, thereby denying POW status to captured Arab fighters and allowing them to be treated as civilian criminals subject to ordinary civil law modified by conditions of martial law, such as the death penalty for carrying a weapon or ammunition. To be fair, the British never entirely 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. 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.”22 In March 1938, the Colonial Office replaced him with the more compliant Sir Harold MacMichael.
While military operations tackled rebels in the field, reprisals, collective punishments, and the draconian colonial emergency state underpinned what the army did in Palestine. Without collective punishment, military operations in isolation would not have worked to defeat the insurgency. Indeed, a central element to military operations was the punishment of the civilians on whom the rebels depended for support. It might not have been fair, but it worked—unjust collective punishment for a collective society unused to justice, and effective against inarticulate, “native,” non-white opposition. It would not work against articulate, organized, “modern,” white (i.e., European) insurgents with foreign support from countries such as the United States, as the British would discover when fighting the Jews after 1945.
Britain’s most spectacular single act of destruction in Palestine during the Arab revolt was the demolition of large parts of the old city of Jaffa—a tangled urban area used by insurgent fighters—just two months after the outbreak of the rebellion. Beginning on June 16, 1936, and continuing in several phases to the end of the month, the British Army, ostensibly to improve the sanitation system, cut wide pathways through the old city with large gelignite charges to allow military access to, and control of, a rebel-held area that had previously eluded military control.23 In the process, the army blew up between 220 and 240 multi-occupancy buildings, rendering homeless up to 6,000 Palestinians, most of whom were left destitute, having been told by air-dropped leaflets on the morning of June 16 to vacate their homes by 9 p.m. the same day.24 Some families were left with nothing, not even a change of clothes.25 As a British Army intelligence officer observed, “That will fucking well teach them.”26 Such vandalism shocked the British chief justice in Palestine, Sir Michael McDonnell, who frankly condemned the action, for which he was dismissed.27 Under strict censorship and therefore unable to express its outrage at the destruction of the heart of old Jaffa, the Palestinian press resorted to irony. Jaffa’s leading newspaper, Filastin [Palestine], reported how the “operation of making the city [Jaffa] more beautiful is carried out through boxes of dynamite.”28 al-Difa‘ [The Defence] headlined the assault with “Goodbye, goodbye, old Jaffa, the army has exploded you.”29 Many Jaffans, now refugees, ended up living in shanty towns, an ironic finale to an action officially depicted as an attempt to improve health and sanitation.
While the destruction of old Jaffa did not contravene the legal framework and principles governing collective punishment discussed in the previous section, the “pacification” permitted under these rules easily elided brutality and torture and blurred the distinction between official and unofficial punishment. Nor was there a clear division between what constituted “punishment,” “reprisal,” or simply a “search,” a looseness facilitated by the leeway given to officers in the field and by the fact that British regiments responded differently to the stresses of suppressing the revolt. Most often, the widespread use of punitive actions and destructive and brutal reprisals stopped short of actual atrocity, but such actions were central to British military repression after 1936 and constituted the core experience for Palestinians during the revolt.
The level of damage varied considerably depending on time, place, and the regiment involved, but whatever the law sanctioned, destruction and vandalism were a systematic, systemic part of British counterinsurgency operations. The destruction could take the form of blowing up houses—often the most impressive ones in the village—or the vandalizing and smashing of household effects. Alongside the destruction, servicemen often looted properties, though the authorities did not officially sanction this and the army issued orders forbidding such things. There were also 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, Bahjat Abu Gharbiyah (interviewed by this author before his recent death in Jordan), noted that the British Army was unable to “strike” the fighters so it had to resort to “revenge” and “collective punishment.”30 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 June 1936 operation in Jaffa was atypical; troops by and large avoided large-scale destruction in the bigger towns, although they destroyed large parts of Jenin following the assassination by an Arab gunman of a British colonial official, W. S. S. Moffat, in the town in August 1938. Generally, the army and colonial authorities singled out smaller, remote villages in rural areas of Palestine for incremental punitive measures. Villages that proved particularly recalcitrant would be entirely demolished, reduced to “mangled masonry,” as happened to the village of Mi‘ar, north of Acre in October 1938.31 On other occasions, the British used sea mines from the battleship HMS Malaya to destroy houses.32 Sometimes the charges laid were so large that neighboring houses collapsed or flying debris hit bystanders. The laying of oversized explosive charges by Royal Engineers to effect maximum damage was intentional. British troops even made Palestinians demolish their own houses, brick by brick.33
During army searches, soldiers would surround a village and then detach and guard the women and children separately from the men who were often held in wire “cages” during protracted searches, while soldiers searched the empty houses, often destroying everything therein, burning grain, and pouring olive oil over household food and effects.34 The village men meanwhile were “screened” by having them pass in front of hooded or hidden Arab informers who would nod when a “suspect” was found, or by British officials checking their papers against lists of suspects, a familiar tactic adopted in later counterinsurgencies. If the army 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.35 The army used the excuse of weapons searches to justify damage if there were complaints.
Destruction of property was not part of soldiers’ training, but once prompted they did the job with gusto. The officer tasked with checking on a search carried out in one village reprimanded a corporal who left intact a beautiful cabinet full of glassware and then proceeded to destroy the cabinet and its contents himself.36 The British designated some searches as “punitive.” Recalling such raids, a private remarked, “Oh yes, punitive. You smashed wardrobes with plates, glass mirrors in and furniture, anything you could see you smashed.”37 The local district officer instructed Colonel J. S. S. Gratton, then a subaltern with the Hampshire Regiment, that the unit’s search of Safad (Zefat) was a punitive raid, meaning that (in Gratton’s words) they could:
knock the place about. And it’s 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,” 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.38
Following the cordon and search of the town of Safad by the Hampshire Regiment, a senior police officer in Palestine, Sir Charles Tegart, noted simply that the soldiers “did their work thoroughly,” adding that local villagers had little sympathy for the townsfolk of Safad, who had hitherto been spared and who would now “know what has been happening to us.”39 For the soldiers, their job in Palestine was simply, “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.”40 Hilda Wilson, a British school teacher in Palestine, concluded that the reason for soldiers’ destructiveness was that they were “bored stiff” and had no social amenities, compounded by the alienation that they felt serving “in a distant country among people who, they are told, are the ‘enemy.’ ”41
Arab villagers were trapped between the hammer of rebel operations and the anvil of British forces.42 When the police went to investigate a report that rebels had blocked the road with trenches and roadblocks near the village of Shafa ‘Amr, the “local inhabitants protested that they had been compelled to do this sabotage by rebel gangs, but this excuse did not spare them from a fine of £[Palestine]700,” and they had to repair the road.43 The collective fines imposed were a heavy burden for Palestinian villagers, especially when the authorities also took away all the livestock, smashed up properties, imposed long curfews and established police posts, blew up houses, and detained some or all of the menfolk in distant detention camps. 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.44 To make matters worse, the rebels also fined or robbed villages for not supporting the revolt, £P1,000 in one case and £P10–100 per household in another.45 To give a sense of the magnitude of the fines, in the late 1930s a British police officer of constable rank earned a basic pay of £P11 per month rising to £P18 for an assistant inspector, an attractive wage that drew police recruits to Palestine. By contrast, Rosemary Sayigh has estimated the average yearly wage of a Palestinian rural family at between £P25 and £P30.46 In the village of Tira (or Taybe/Tayyiba, the transliteration from Arabic to Hebrew to English is not clear), peasants responded to a fine of £P2,000 by picking up what they could carry and leaving.47
If villagers were unable to pay collective fines in currency, they paid in produce: “As usual police were called to do the dirty work, collecting chickens, eggs and grain from each family and taking them to Haifa for sale.”48 Police activity often went beyond the forced requisitioning of produce, as when the police went to a village after rebels had killed some “wogs,” at which point they indulged in indiscriminate violence against the villagers rather than the 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 imagine.”49 Villagers were in permanent debt as their mukhtars (headmen) attempted to gather in official fines from their penniless and hungry villagers. 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 imprisonment.50
When on February 18, 1938, rebels ambushed a car 12 miles south of Haifa, killing an RAF officer and badly wounding a British woman passenger, near the bad village of Ijzim (good and bad villages are recurring terms in British files), the authorities brought in a tracker dog to pick up the scent:
The trail was expected to lead up the Wadi Mughar to the bad village of Igzim [Ijzim in literary Arabic], 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 “marked” 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 dog’s tracking. Later in the morning orders were received to demolish the two houses marked by the dogs.51
A policeman present at Ijzim, Sydney Burr, wrote to his parents that the brutality of the search was such as to prompt a complaint about army behavior from the Anglican mission in Palestine.52
Alongside the targeting of Arab civilians, the army developed counterinsurgency tactics in the field, especially after October 1938 when the resolution of the Munich crisis in Europe meant that Britain could release two infantry divisions for service in Palestine and swamp the country with troops. The tactics used were not new but variations on existing counterinsurgency methods, developed from the army’s long experience of fighting colonial “small wars” across the empire. Troops formed lightly armed mobile columns—some with donkeys in the back of lorries for extra mobility, called “donkvans”—and using radios and ground-to-air signaling called in RAF close air support—what was called “airpin” or the “XX” system, the latter because of the named grids on army maps used to direct the aircraft to the right spot. The army hunted gangs of rebels across the rough countryside, coordinating and closing in with other ground units, maintaining the pressure on rebel groups that diminished in size as the revolt waned. This was a subaltern’s war: battles were small-scale affairs and rebels making good use of the terrain to escape after engaging with machine guns and grenades. The rebels also laid mines—what we would now call “IEDs”—to ambush military vehicles, such as near the village of al-Bassa, an incident discussed in full elsewhere.53 The casualties in counterinsurgency firefights were usually low. The British pinned rebel groups and destroyed them, as when men from the Royal Ulster and West Kent regiments machine-gunned rebels as they came out to surrender near Jenin: “At one time the Ulsters and West Kents 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 England.”54 On at least one occasion, rebel fire brought down RAF warplanes. (Local villagers would at times augment rebel forces.) RAF warplanes helped with reconnaissance and “fixing” villages, which intelligence said held rebels and which, surrounded at night by soldiers, would be searched at daybreak, with anyone running from the village a target for the machine guns of the RAF. The official policy was not to bomb villages from the air but to bomb and strafe rebels found in open areas, not least because of the possible adverse publicity that would result, especially from the Italian and German press eager to criticize Britain in this period. That said, Bahjat Abu Gharbiyah claimed to this author that the RAF used warplanes to bomb villages in rural Palestine.55
Good intelligence was vital for army operations in the field, coming initially from RAF-based Special Service Officers (SSOs), tasked strategically with running empire intelligence across the Middle East, and from a relationship that the army established between Jewish and British military intelligence. The Jews had been building files on the Palestinians from the 1920s. The army had poor intelligence at the start of the Arab revolt, not least as the Palestine police force had collapsed, and short of Arabic speakers, so the army naturally turned to its enemy’s enemy. The result was an intimate relationship between British military intelligence and the Jews.56 When it came to intelligence gathering, the British Army at this time embedded military intelligence within line regiments—Britain did not (re)establish the Intelligence Corps of the Army until 1940—which worked alongside the RAF SSOs.57 The army seconded regimental officers in Palestine for intelligence duties, as with A. C. Simonds of the Berkshire Regiment, who admitted that most of his intelligence came from Jewish sources and from the Palestinian Nashashibi family that was willing to work with the British.58 British Army and SSO intelligence used information from Arab sources—and Arab informers accompanied troops in the field on operations—alongside material that came from collaboration with the Jewish intelligence network, run in the field by Jews such as Reuven Zaslany (later Shiloah) and Ezra Danin, the latter based in the Jewish settlement of Hadera.59 Simonds remarked how the “Head of the Jewish Agency Intelligence Service” was his “friend.”60
For instance, when Jews heard of a rebel band in the locality, they passed the information to the army, “who took immediate action”—British officers accompanied one Jew and his Arab informer in the former’s car to survey the rebels before calling in the army for an assault.61 Danin provided informers and detailed information for the British who in return told him about their operations. The British gave Danin direct access to their operations, including investigation of arrested gang members; Danin helped the army by supplying the Arab informers who picked out supposed rebels on village searches.62 Danin’s published collection of captured Arabic documents from 1944 is testament to the information exchange with the British, the documents coming from joint operations.63
Danin was one of a group of Jews with good links to the cadre of British intelligence officers in Palestine. For instance, in late 1936, Joshua Gordon was the Jewish agency’s liaison with the RAF intelligence officer in Nablus, Captain Windsor, known to the Jews as “The Duke.”64 In 1938, Windsor set up a meeting between Danin and Army Captain Fitzpatrick, intelligence officer for the 9th Royal Hussars. An officer called Colonel Lash—code-named “The Lion” by the Jews and referenced as (later) Brigadier Norman Lash of the Arab Legion—replaced Windsor.65 J. P. Domville was another key British intelligence operative, an RAF SSO officer, who went to serve in Iraq after December 1937.66 Zaslani was Domville’s interpreter, and they were friends well into the 1940s; the Jewish political leader, David Ben-Gurion, met with Domville. Earlier, in 1934, Hos, another Jewish agent, had characterized Domville as the country’s “best Zionist informer on the English.”67 There was another SSO officer, much used by the Jews, Hackett, Jews referring to him as A. Hackett-Fine (a phonetic transliteration from Hebrew, code-named “Khamis” and an MI5 or MI6 agent), who replaced Lash and with whom Danin was close.68
The cozy relationship between British and Jewish intelligence officers was a combined effort to defeat and destabilize Arab rebels. The British could deal with a local imperial hot spot that was a strategic distraction in the years leading up to World War II, while for the Jews it mitigated the Arab violence directed at their community. The British were supporting the Jews’ efforts with the strength of the British armed force, giving operatives such as Danin access to the heart of the British military machine. To draw an imperial comparison to Kenya in the 1950s—another colony with an articulate, nonnative settler community—it was as if the British handed over part of their military operations, such as pseudo warfare, to the white settlers of the Kenya Regiment and the Kenya Police Reserve, with the Kikuyu Home Guard playing the part of the peace bands. (Of course, in some measure this is what happened in Kenya.) The collaboration between the British and the Jews would have spectacular “blowback” later on when Britain’s Jewish erstwhile friends became enemies, and in a well-organized revolt after 1945, they threw the British out of Palestine.
Arab collaborators in “peace bands” supplemented the work of the army, a subject that will resonate with other chapters in this volume that touch on the work of pseudo gangs. The British authorities worked with the Palestinian Nashashibi family—in charge of the National Defence Party (the Opposition)—to raise local pro-government Arab militia forces known as peace bands. The bands opposed the violent antigovernment direction of the Arab revolt led by the Palestinian Husayni family, headed by Hajj Amin al-Husayni (the “Mufti”), and they were active in the second phase of the Arab revolt after September 1937. The idea of forming peace bands was not new, not for the British anyway, who had a tradition of using local forces to maintain imperial order and to fight colonial rebellions—divide et impera—that predated the conquest of Palestine by Britain. The peace bands in Palestine were not, however, locally recruited indigenous soldiers in British-officered units, as with the king’s African Rifles or the Gurkhas, nor were they comparable to local white settlers in units such as the Kenya Regiment. The peace bands were part of a strange, amorphous tradition of imperial control that came to prominence after 1945 in counterinsurgencies in Malaya and Kenya where the British deployed turned insurgent rebel soldiers in pseudo gangs—or “pseudo gangsters” and “contras” as critics have put it—to gather intelligence and sow discord within rebel ranks by pretending to be guerrillas.69 Such units might comprise British soldiers pretending to be rebels, as happened in Kenya in the 1950s when white service personnel “blacked up” using burnt cork and greasepaint to infiltrate insurgent black Mau Mau units.70 Soldiers in such units could speak local languages as a “native,” as do Mista’arvim (literally “Arabized”) Israeli security personnel in their fight against the Palestinians today. White Rhodesian soldiers in the 1970s in the Selous Scouts military unit that fought insurgent black African guerrillas, a force with mixed white and black soldiers, also blackened their faces, with little success—hence the employment of black soldiers in the unit, most of whom were pro-government black Rhodesians, alongside “turned” black guerrillas. One white Selous Scouts soldier even tried to dye his blue eyes brown.71 (A recent collection of memoirs of service in the Selous Scouts provides excellent coverage of the unit’s work.72) Pseudo warfare often merged with the use of local “loyalists” against rebels who might be indistinguishable from the enemy, or not. In Palestine in the 1930s, the British supported the Jews against Arab rebels, recruiting and arming thousands of extra Jewish supernumerary police—14,411 according to one source73—and establishing British Army Officer Orde Wingate’s Special Night Squads that combined British soldiers and Jewish Haganah fighters and that fought against the Arabs in Galilee in 1938.74 The Jews used the training afforded by the Special Night Squads in their fight later against the British; many key Israeli soldiers after 1948, such as Moshe Dayan, having served in Wingate’s unit. (There is a question mark surrounding the methods used by the Special Night Squads—“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 a subject beyond the scope of this chapter.75) During the Arab revolt in Palestine, soldiers and police officers on operations also disguised themselves as Arabs in what they called “Q squads.”76 British counter-gangs could include army personnel in special squads, such as the one led by Major Roy Farran in Palestine in 1947. These forces were not traditionally formed military units. Other colonial armies did similar things: the French with the harkis in Algeria and the Portuguese with the flechas in Mozambique, for instance.
The “collaborators” in the peace gangs never won the war for the British, but they helped the authorities by supercharging endemic feuding in rural Palestine, divided Britain’s enemies, acted as a force multiplier of sorts, and spread psychological disorder among the Palestinians. This was an early example of “black ops” and one that bears comparison to the French army’s guerre révolutionnaire of the 1950s. For instance, the Nashashibis and pro-government Palestinians from the village of Abu Ghosh produced leaflets purporting to come from the rebels but which subtly undermined the insurgents’ cause.77 The peace bands assisted well-established British punitive pacification tactics that pivoted on punishing the villagers on whom rebels relied for support, putting them on notice, making them choose sides, and drawing them away from the rebellion. This had an impact, and by October 1938, the rebels were fining villages that cooperated with the peace bands: “We have warned the villages not to cooperate with the traitors and we shall impose a heavy fine on them.”78 Elsewhere, there was a two-hour battle where rebels killed 20 “traitors.”79
While the defeat of the Arab revolt freed up the army for the war in Europe after September 1939, Britain’s decision in 1939 to end its support for Jewish immigration to Palestine led to a new insurgency in Palestine as Jews moved to throw off British rule. Jewish extremists in LEHI assassinated the British minister, Lord Moyne, in the Middle East in Cairo in 1944, signaling the start of a wave of attacks against British targets that carried on until the end of the British Mandate. The mainstream Haganah, the military wing of the Jewish agency, led the Jewish insurgency, tens of thousands strong and divided into frontline and second echelon forces, its prime aim being “constructive” terror attacks so as to facilitate the influx of Jewish refugees escaping the Holocaust and trying to reach Palestine. The Haganah became the Israeli Defence Forces in 1948, augmented by the men of the Irgun Zvai Leumi. Women fighters served in these organizations, the subject of interesting recent research.80 The Jewish insurgent groups united in 1945 against the British in a well-organized, modern, and disciplined front, one that benefitted from the prior training afforded by the Special Night Squads and from the men who had served in the British Army—including in the Jewish Brigade—during World War II. Fund-raising trips to the United States brought in money and arms for the Jewish rebellion. The Jews were formidable opponents, and they kept in check, while fighting the British, the latent disunity between the different insurgent groups, differences that finally led to intra-Jewish fighting in June 1948—what is known as the “Atlalena” affair. There were no Jewish collaborators willing to form pseudo gangs, so the British formed their own irregular units led by men such as Major Roy Farran, as will be seen.
The British tried (and failed) with a punitive method called “cordon and search,” used in Jewish neighborhoods in built-up areas such as Tel Aviv. The urban environment was a much tougher place in which to fight, presaging later British counterinsurgencies in Nicosia, Aden, and Belfast. Cordon and search was the hybrid endpoint of the army’s pre-1945 experiences, similar in some ways to the methods used against the Arabs a decade earlier and harsh enough to earn global opprobrium but not harsh enough to defeat Jewish insurgents. Collective punishment failed when employed against the Jews. Propaganda, global politics, lack of information on the Jews, and poor intelligence conspired to confound the army. The nature of the opposition was crucial. The Jews in Palestine were articulate and vocal, had an excellent intelligence service known as the Shai—the forerunner of Israeli military intelligence and Shin Bet—which had infiltrated the British police and colonial government, had support in the United States, were largely European (namely, “white”) in origin, and had been well organized since the 1920s.81 Race had a part to play, not least as harsh actions outside of Europe against non-white peoples with no lobbying power or presence in Britain’s decision-making structure were bound to be treated differently when compared to, say, European Ashkenazi Jews in British Mandate Palestine in the 1940s. The British could not easily treat the Jews as “wogs” were across the empire—to use the contemporary phrase.
Jewish fighters matched the British. They retaliated against British reprisal methods, launching terror attacks in the United Kingdom and capturing and flogging British soldiers (including officers) in reply to the authorities’ caning of a Jewish insurgent guilty of a bank robbery. In 1947, Irgun fighters seized two British NCOs in an effort to save fighters about to be hanged by the British. When the hangings went ahead, the Jews killed (and booby-trapped the bodies of) the two British sergeants, matching official reprisals with unofficial reprisals in a way that the Arabs had never done in the 1930s. There were also spectacular terrorist attacks, such as in 1946 when the Irgun blew up the wing of the luxury King David Hotel in Jerusalem that housed army intelligence officers, killing almost 100 people (including Jews and Arabs working in the hotel). The largest mainstream force, the Haganah, benefitted from the extreme shock action of the ultras in the Irgun and LEHI, while being able morally to distance itself from outrages, such as the assassination by LEHI gunmen of the peace envoy, Count Bernadotte, in 1948. The Jews targeted British intelligence officers, knowing these were the key link people for the British—echoes here of Michael Collins’s attack on British intelligence operatives in Dublin in 1920 in the IRA’s war against the Crown. The Jews were also attacking at a time when Britain was reassembling its Middle East strategy and considering whether it needed a base in Palestine. The Jewish military forces combined terrorist attacks with giving practical help to Jews trying to get to Palestine from Europe. British intelligence gathering on their Jewish opponents was poor; meanwhile, headed by the Shai, the Jews built up an alternative intelligence network. Information was the key component to success or failure, something that the Jews knew from early on in the Mandate period.82
In Britain’s previous campaign against rebels elsewhere, the army had employed considerable force and had been successful. The same methods tried against the Jews did not work. Thus, in April 1946, the Stern Gang killed seven soldiers from the Parachute Regiment. This provoked a near mutiny among the troops, to the extent that the senior officer of the 6th Airborne Division went to the British Palestine high commissioner to demand a punishment of a £1 million fine, requisitioning and blowing up of Jewish buildings, and the closure of restaurants and businesses. The high commissioner agreed only to restaurants being closed. Why was there such a limited reply? After all, in the 1930s, the response to such an outrage would have been draconian, had it been conducted by Palestinian Arab guerrillas. But the British had to consider the political imperative of maintaining good relations with America—where pro-Zionist Jewish Americans and parts of the government were supportive of a Jewish state—and this combined with the existence of a vibrant local Jewish democracy and the presence of the world’s press to make Britain’s position untenable. The USSR also supported the newly formed Israel.83
There were also practical problems with cordon and search. When Operation Hippo-Elephant imposed military rule on Tel Aviv in 1947, it lasted for two weeks because the army could not maintain the troop numbers required to contain a substantial urban area. Cordon and search in Palestine found little and contained even less. It simply antagonized moderate Jews and provided good propaganda for the enemy. The response to cordon and search could also be swift. During Operation Shark, British paratroopers sealed off Tel Aviv: 17,000 troops for four days to deal with an urban area of 170,000 Jewish inhabitants. During this operation, Police CID Sergeant T. G. Martin recognized a key terrorist suspect dressed as a rabbi. Two months later, Jewish gunmen shot Martin dead.
One of the most spectacular events of the Palestine insurgency was itself recognition of the British failure to get to grips with the opposition. In 1947, the British set up several special squads to tackle the terrorists—the infamous “Farran affair.”84 These murky groups of British soldiers were, at worst, death squads who targeted suspected Jewish terrorists; they certainly used unorthodox methods. But even this did not work. Under the direction of Brigadier Bernard Fergusson of World War II Burma Chindit fame, the authorities had sanctioned a dirty war of sorts. This was not new and it would happen again, but in Palestine the squads came to an abrupt end in the face of Jewish protests. Major Roy Farran, formerly of the SAS, and in charge of one of the squads, stood trial for the murder of Alexander Rubowitz of LEHI who went missing in May 1947. Farran fled to Syria, under threat of prosecution; a Jewish terrorist revenge bomb sent to his family’s U.K. address killed his brother. Interestingly, without Hebrew speakers, both squads were not intelligence units but, rather, an executive arm of the CID branch of the British police in Palestine.
By late 1947, the British had had enough and passed the problem of Palestine to the United Nations. The Jews had succeeded in their mission, and in May 1948, Israel was formed. While the British operational method was flawed, a few years later British forces would be successful in Malaya, Kenya, and to an extent, Cyprus. Here Britain held the political cards—offering independence—and the opposition that the army faced was not so well mobilized as in Palestine in the 1940s, nor did it have significant levels of international support. The British Army entered the Palestine campaign against the Arabs in the 1930s with counterinsurgency methods that worked; it was ill prepared intellectually and organizationally for the Jewish revolt in the 1940s. The Jewish insurgency was exceptional, and the British could not deal with it using dated prewar methods. After Palestine, the British learned from their mistakes and fought with some success against insurgents elsewhere in the collapsing British Empire, right up to the Northern Ireland Good Friday Agreement of 1998. Indeed, during the Troubles in Northern Ireland, the army successfully played the long game, combining increasingly low-key soldiering with criminalization of the enemy and passing operations to the police, creating a gold standard of how to do such things. The Troubles represented a shift for the army from imperial to postimperial operations, the definitive end to the sorts of operations described in this chapter in the context of Palestine in the 1930s and 1940s.
1. This chapter draws upon material from the author’s “From Law and Order to Pacification: Britain’s Suppression of the Arab Revolt in Palestine, 1936–39,” Journal of Palestine Studies 39, no. 2 (Winter 2010), pp. 6–22. Used by permission of University of California Press.
2. C. E. Callwell, Small Wars: Their Principles and Practice (London: HMSO, 1906), p. 145.
3. Ibid., p. 148.
4. Ibid.
5. Quoted in Denis Judd and Keith Surridge, The Boer War (Houndmills, UK: Palgrave, 2003), p. 192.
6. C. Gwynn, Imperial Policing (London: Macmillan, 1934); H. Simson, British Rule and Rebellion (Edinburgh: Blackwood, 1937).
7. General Sir Andrew Skeen, Passing It On: Short Talks on Tribal Fighting on the North-West Frontier of India [1932] (Aldershot, UK: Gale and Polden, 1943), p. 125.
8. For the emergency state, see Nasser Hussain, The Jurisprudence of Emergency: Colonialism and the Rule of Law (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003).
9. Manual of Military Law, issued by Command of the Army Council (London: War Office, 1929); Notes on Imperial Policing, 1934, by command of the Army Council (London: War Office, 1934); Duties in the Aid of the Civil Power, by command of the Army Council (London: War Office, 1937).
10. Manual of Military Law, p. 103.
11. Callwell, Small Wars, pp. 145–48.
12. Manual of Military Law, pp. 331ff, 343; Notes on Imperial Policing, 1934, pp. 12, 39–41.
13. Manual of Military Law, p. 255.
14. N. Bentwich (ed.), Legislation of Palestine 1918–25, vol. i (Jerusalem: Whitehead, 1926), pp. 246–49.
15. Simeon Shoul, “Soldiers, Riots, and Aid to the Civil Power in India, Egypt and Palestine, 1919–39,” Doctoral Thesis, University of London, 2006, pp. 18–19.
16. The Tiger and Rose: A Monthly Journal of the York and Lancaster Regiment 13, no. 16 (October 1936), p. 390.
17. “Palestine: Martial Law Order Issued,” Palestine Post, September 30, 1936, p. 1.
18. Discussed in Matthew Hughes, “A British ‘Foreign Legion’? The British Police in Mandate Palestine,” Middle Eastern Studies 49, no. 5 (2013), pp. 696–711.
19. “Palestine: Martial Law Order Issued,” p. 1.
20. Simson, British Rule, pp. 96ff, 103.
21. Essex Regiment Gazette 6, no. 46 (March 1938), p. 282.
22. Letter, Burr to Parents, February 24, 1938, Burr Papers, 88/8/1, I[mperial] W[ar] M[useum] D[ocuments], London; The Disturbances of 1936—Cause and Effect (General Political No. 5), U.S. Consulate General to State Department, June 6, 1936, signed Leland Morris, U.S. Consul General, 867N.00/311, p. 8, National Archives and Records Administration II, College Park, MD.
23. A. Rahman, “British Policy towards the Arab Revolt in Palestine, 1936–39,” Doctoral Thesis, University of London, 1971, pp. 140–42; Y. Arnon-Ohanna, Falahim ba-Mered ha-Aravi be-Eretz Israel, 1936–39 [Felahin during the Arab Revolt in the Land of Israel] (Tel Aviv, Israel: Tel Aviv University Press, 1978), p. 33; Bahjat Abu Gharbiyah, Fi Khidamm al-nidal al-‘arabi al-filastini: 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: IPS, 1993), pp. 60–61; al-Difa‘ [The Defence] (Jaffa), June 17, 1936; The Wasp: The Journal of the 16th Foot 5 (March 1937), p. 267; John Newsinger, The Blood Never Dried (London: Bookmarks, 2002), pp. 131ff.
24. al-Difa‘, June 17 and July 23, 1936; Abu Gharbiyah, Fi Khidamm al-nidal, pp. 60–61.
25. Filastin [Palestine] (Jaffa), June 19, 1936.
26. “Pieces of War,” typed memoir, Simonds Papers, 08/46/1, p. 149, IWMD.
27. The Arabs with glee printed up 10,000 copies of the court’s critical conclusions for public distribution. E. Keith-Roach, Pasha of Jerusalem: Memoirs of a District Commissioner under the British Mandate (London: Radcliffe, 1994), p. 185; Y. Eyal, Ha-Intifada ha-Rishona: Dikuy ha-Mered ha-Aravi al yedey ha-Tzava ha-Briti be-Eretz Israel, 1936–39 [The First Intifada: The Suppression of the Arab Revolt by the British Army, 1936–39] (Tel Aviv, Israel: Ma’arahot, 1998), p. 110; W. Khalidi and Y. Suweyd, Al-Qadiyya al-Filastiniyya wa al-Khatar al-Sahyuni [The Palestinian Problem and the Zionist Danger] (Beirut: IPS, 1973), p. 234.
28. Filastin, June 19, 1936. For press censorship, see M. Kabha, The Palestine Press as Shaper of Opinion, 1928–39: Writing Up a Storm (Ilford, UK: Vallentine Mitchell, 2006).
29. al-Difa‘, June 17 and July 23, 1936.
30. Abu Gharbiyah, Fi Khidamm al-nidal, p. 59; author interview, Bahjat Abu Gharbiyah, Amman, June 21, 2009, and subsequent elucidatory correspondence to Abu Gharbiyah via his son Sami Abu Gharbiyah, July–December 2009.
31. N. Bethell, The Palestine Triangle (London: Futura, 1980), p. 49; W. Palmer, “The Second Battalion in Palestine,” in The Queen’s Own Royal West Kent Regiment, ed. by H. Chaplin (London: Michael Joseph, 1954), p. 102.
32. Letter, Burr to Parents, September 9, 1938, Burr Papers, 88/8/1, IWMD.
33. Monthly News Letter No. 2, 2nd Battalion, Lincolnshire Regiment, September 1–30, 1936, in Abdul-Latif al-Tibawi Papers, GB 165-1284, M[iddle] E[ast] C[entre], St Antony’s College.
34. For village search, see Diary of School Year in Palestine, 1938–39, by H. M. Wilson, about 31,000 words, Wilson Papers, GB 165-0302, pp. 36ff, MEC; see also the correspondence and pictures in J & E Mission Papers, GB 165-0161, Box 61, File 3, MEC.
35. D. Daniell, The Royal Hampshire Regiment, vol. 3 (Aldershot, UK: Gale, 1955), p. 34.
36. “Palestine: The First Intifada” Timewatch, BBC, March 27, 1991.
37. F. Howbrook, 4619, p. 2, I[mperial] W[ar] M[useum] S[ound] A[rchive], London.
38. J. Gratton, 4506, pp. 14–15, IWMSA.
39. Diary, January 22, 1938, Tegart Papers, GB 165-0281, Box 4, MEC.
40. Major General H. E. N. Bredin, 4550, p. 10, IWMSA.
41. Diary, Wilson Papers, GB 165-0302, pp. 28–29, MEC.
42. Report dated May 5, 1939, 10 pages in J & E Mission Papers, GB 165-0161, Box 62, File 1, p. 3, MEC.
43. Palmer, “Second Battalion,” p. 100. £P1 equaled £1 U.K. sterling.
44. Abu Gharbiyah, Fi Khidamm al-nidal, pp. 60–61; Haaretz (The Land) (evening issue), December 22, 1937.
45. Report dated May 5, 1939, p. 1; Haaretz, August 18, 1938.
46. R. Sayigh, The Palestinians (London: Zed, 2007), p. 25.
47. Abu Gharbiyah, Fi Khidamm al-nidal, pp. 60–61; Haaretz (evening issue), December 22, 1937.
48. J. Binsley, Palestine Police Service (Montreux, Switzerland: Minerva, 1996), p. 99.
49. Letter, Burr to Parents, n.d. [December 1937], Burr Papers, 88/8/1, IWMD.
50. See the files in M4826/26, Israel State Archive, Jerusalem.
51. Palmer, “Second Battalion,” p. 85; Haaretz, February 20, 1938.
52. Letter, Burr to Parents, February 24, 1938, Burr Papers, 88/8/1, IWMD; J & E Mission Papers, GB 165-0161, Box 61, File 3, MEC, and material in Box 66, File 2.
53. Matthew Hughes, “The Practice and Theory of British Counter-Insurgency: The Histories of the Atrocities at the Palestinian Villages of al-Bassa and Halhul, 1938–39,” Small Wars and Insurgencies 20, no. 3 (September 2009), pp. 528–50.
54. Letter, Burr to Parents, March 1938 [date penciled in], Burr Papers, 88/8/1, IWMD.
55. Author interview, Bahjat Abu Gharbiyah, Amman, June 21, 2009.
56. Y. Gelber, Sorshey ha-Havatzelet: ha-Modi‘in ba-Yishuv, 1918–1947 [Growing a Budding Fleur-de-Lis: The Intelligence Forces of the Jewish Yishuv in Palestine, 1918–47] (Tel Aviv, Israel: Misrad ha-Bitahon, 1992), pp. 149–64.
57. For SSOs, see Martin Thomas, Empires of Intelligence: Security Services and Colonial Disorders after 1914 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008).
58. “Pieces of War,” p. 55.
59. War Diary, May 3, 1939, 2nd Battalion, Queen’s Royal West Surrey Regiment, QRWS/3/6/6, Surrey History Centre.
60. “Pieces of War,” p. 42.
61. Jewish report dated January 13, 1939, p. 141, S25/22269, C[entral] Z[ionist] A[rchive], Jerusalem.
62. Ian Black and Benny Morris, Israel’s Secret Wars: The Untold History of Israeli Intelligence (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1991), p. 15.
63. Ezra Danin, Te‘udot u-Dmuyot me-Ginzey ha-Knufiyot ha-Arviyot, 1936–39 [Documents and Portraits from the Arab Gangs Archives in the Arab Revolt in Palestine, 1936–39] [1944] (Jerusalem: Magnes, 1981); see also Gelber, Sorshey ha-Havatzelet, p. 164.
64. Ezra Danin, Tsiyoni be-kol Tnay [Zionist under Any Condition] (Jerusalem: Kidum, 1987), pp. 135–36.
65. Ibid.; Asa Lefen, ‘ha’Shai’: Shorasheha shel kehilat ha’Modi’in ha’Israelit [The Roots of the Israeli Intelligence Community] (Tel Aviv, Israel: Ministry of Defence, 1997), p. 44.
66. Air Force List, July–September 1930, September 1937, and December 1937–January 1938.
67. Tuvia Friling, Arrows in the Dark: David Ben-Gurion, the Yishuv Leadership and Rescue Attempts during the Holocaust, vol. i (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2005), pp. 279–80.
68. Lefen, ‘ha’Shai’, p. 44; Danin, Tsiyoni be-Kol Tnay, pp. 135–36, 163.
69. Caroline Elkins, Britain’s Gulag: The Brutal End of Empire in Kenya (London: Jonathan Cape, 2005), p. 67; Ted Swedenburg, Memories of Revolt: The 1936–1939 Rebellion and the Palestinian National Past (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995), p. 86.
70. David Anderson, Histories of the Hanged: Britain’s Dirty War in Kenya and the End of Empire (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2005), pp. 284–85; Frank Kitson, Gangs and Counter-Gangs (London: Barrie and Rockliff, 1960), pp. 78, 84, 150–51; Huw Bennett, Fighting the Mau Mau: The British Army and Counter-Insurgency in the Kenya Emergency (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), pp. 152–58.
71. R. F. Reid-Daly, Pamwe Chete: The Legend of the Selous Scouts (Weltevreden, South Africa: Covos, 1999), p. 22.
72. Jonathan Pittaway, Selous Scouts: The Men Speak (Avon, UK: Dandy, 2013).
73. Lefen, ‘ha’Shai, p. 273.
74. Hugh Foot, A Start in Freedom (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1964), pp. 51–52; Tom Segev, One Palestine, Complete (New York: Owl, 2000), pp. 430–31; R. Catling, 10392, pp. 16–17, IWMSA; files in S25/10685, 3156, 8768, CZA.
75. Ibid. See also Simon Anglim, “Orde Wingate the Iron Wall and Counter-Terrorism in Palestine 1937–39,” Strategic and Combat Studies Institute, Occasional Paper 49, 2005.
76. Regimental War Diary, 1st Battalion, the Border Regiment, December 13, 1937, the Border and King’s Own Royal Border Regiment Museum, Carlisle, UK; H. D. Chaplin, The Queen’s Own Royal West Kent Regiment (London: Michael Joseph, 1954), pp. 105–6.
77. CID Police Intelligence Summary, 89/38, December 17, 1938, S25/22732-94, CZA; MacMichael (high commissioner, Palestine) to MacDonald (secretary of state for colonies), January 16, 1939, Security Matters 1938-39, S25/22761, CZA.
78. Abd el Rahim el Haj Mahmad, Office of the Arab Rebellion in Palestine, Mountains, to Abdallah el Beiruti, October 19, 1938, Wingate Papers, M2313, p. 43, B[ritish] L[ibrary].
79. Abd el Rahim el Haj Mahmud, Office of the Arab Rebellion in Palestine, to Abu Abdallah, n.d., Wingate Papers, M2313, p. 52, BL.
80. Efrat Ben-Ze’ev, Remembering Palestine in 1948: Beyond National Narratives (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), pp. 146ff.
81. The Haganah archive in Tel Aviv is full of British (English-language) police records, evidence of the Shai’s successful work in infiltrating the British-run Palestine police.
82. For the early roots of Jewish intelligence, see Haggai Eshed, Reuven Shiloah: The Man behind the Mossad (London: Cass, 1997); Gelber, Sorshey ha-Havatzelet; and Efraim Dekel, Shai: The Exploits of Hagana Intelligence (New York: Yoseloff, 1959).
83. David Cesarani, Major Farran’s Hat: Murder, Scandal and Britain’s War against Jewish Terrorism, 1945–48 (London: Heinemann, 2009), p. 215; John Newsinger, British Counterinsurgency from Palestine to Northern Ireland (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave, 2000), p. 18.
84. The Farran story is told in full in Cesarani, Major Farran’s Hat.