Читать книгу Empire of Secrets: British Intelligence, the Cold War and the Twilight of Empire - Calder Walton - Страница 27

Britain became the uneasy patron of Zionism when it was granted Mandatory Power over Palestine by the League of Nations in 1921. The doctrine of Zionism, the political movement seeking to establish a Jewish national homeland in Palestine, was largely derived from the writings of Theodor Herzl, in particular his book Der Judenstaat (1896). However, it was the famous (and fateful) Declaration framed by the British Foreign Secretary, Arthur James Balfour, in November 1917 that set the agenda for British policies in Palestine for the next twenty years. The Balfour Declaration provided Zionist groups with a moral, and they argued also a legal, right for Jews to settle in Palestine. Made public on the same day as the Bolshevik coup in St Petersburg, the Declaration was designed to be a rallying point for the Allies, a kind of Christmas present for beleaguered troops and governments which was also intended to whip up further support for Britain in Russia and the United States. The Declaration stated that Britain aimed to establish a ‘National Home for the Jewish People’ in Palestine, but went on to state, ‘it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights existing of non-Jewish communities in Palestine’. Balfour was a man of deep intellect, who in his youth had published a book defending philosophic doubt. Unfortunately, his Declaration left a good deal of doubt, failing to explain what the nature of the Jewish homeland in Palestine would be, leading to the joke that Palestine was the twice promised land.¹⁸

Despite the British government’s clear wording in the Balfour Declaration of its intention to create a ‘National Home for Jewish People’, it was subsequently interpreted by many Zionists as a pledge to create a Jewish state, not just a state for Jews. The description of Palestine by the Zionist writer Israel Zangwill as ‘a land without people for a people without land’ apparently overlooked the fact that Arabs and Christians had been living there for generations. At the time of the Balfour Declaration, the Jewish community in Palestine (the Yishuv) numbered 85,000, while the Arab population was 750,000, but over subsequent years Jewish immigration steadily increased, so that by 1946 the Jewish population totalled 600,000. Growing levels of Jewish immigration to Palestine soon sparked off major Arab disturbances in response. In 1933 the Syrian Wahhabist preacher Izz al-Din al-Qassam launched pro-intifada attacks on Jews and the British police in Palestine – for which he is commemorated to this day by teams of Palestinian suicide bombers, who remember him as the leader of the first Palestinian armed nationalist grouping.

It was largely in response to increased levels of Jewish immigration that in 1936 a major Arab revolt erupted, lasting until 1939. The so-called ‘Arab Revolt’ was only put down by a tough response from the British military and police, who, backed up by the RAF, fought Arab forces in pitched battles. The British military and the Palestine police inflicted brutal interrogations on Arab insurgents, a practice that was known as ‘duffing up’ after one especially robust police officer, Douglas Duff, who before serving in the Palestine Police had been one of the Black and Tans in Ireland. British forces also collaborated with Haganah, which had been formed in 1921 in response to anti-Jewish violence in Palestine. Applying the military doctrine that the best form of defence is offence, the British military leader Captain (subsequently Major General) Orde Wingate – whose Christian beliefs made him a natural Zionist supporter – established ‘Special Night Squads’, whose ranks consisted of Haganah and British volunteers, and included legendary future Israeli military leaders such as Moshe Dayan. Wingate would later be famed for creating the Chindits, a special-forces airborne deep-penetration unit, who were trained to operate far behind enemy lines in Japanese-occupied territories in the Far East during the Second World War.¹⁹

The British government generally favoured the position of Arabs in Palestine, despite the anti-British violence unleashed there during the Arab Revolt. This was because the Chiefs of Staff in London, their views coloured by nostalgic memories of Lawrence of Arabia, feared doing anything that could destabilise Palestine, which was a crucial strategic base from which to guard the eastern Mediterranean, the gateway to the Suez Canal, and the vital supply route to the subcontinent of India. The Arab Revolt revealed to London that an orgy of violence between Jews and Arabs would arise if Jewish immigration to Palestine were not restricted. Military and Colonial Office mandarins were also worried about provoking the sixty million Muslims living in India. As a result, in 1939 the British government published a White Paper limiting the number of Jewish immigrants to Palestine to a total of 75,000 over the next five years, which effectively meant a quota of 1,250 immigrants per month.²⁰

When the war in Europe broke out, the majority of the Yishuv remained strongly opposed to the White Paper, but nevertheless supported Britain in the conflict. The Zionist leader David Ben-Gurion said that Jews had to fight the war as if there were no White Paper, and the White Paper as if there were no war. The British Army quickly found recruits for a special unit it formed, the Jewish Brigade, which acted as a counterpart to the Nazi SS Division of Muslims that fought in the Balkans. However, matters soon became more complicated. In 1941 the Haganah established a special ‘commando’ unit, the Palmach, one of the aims of which was to fight anyone, including the British, who opposed increased levels of Jewish immigration to Palestine. It was during a Palmach operation that Moshe Dayan lost an eye. Furthermore, for a minority of so-called ‘Revisionist’ Zionists, even the Palmach’s ‘resistance’ against the British was not enough. Revisionists were so-called because they purported to revise the ideas of Zionism. They pursued a fanatical right-wing agenda, taking inspiration from the extremist writings of the Polish Zionist politician Vladimir Jabotinsky. Their beliefs lay in sharp contrast to the broadly left-wing politics of the majority of the Yishuv, who followed a generally socialist agenda tinged with Marxism – reflective of which is the fact that Israel did not elect a right-wing government until the 1970s. Revisionists dispensed with traditional Jewish doctrine of restraint (havlagah), rejected mainstream Zionist aspirations derived from Herzl’s writings in the 1880s, and instead believed that it was necessary to fight for the establishment of an independent and predominantly Jewish state in Palestine (eretz Israel) on both sides of the river Jordan. The cornerstones of Revisionist Zionism were a belief that the Haganah’s reliance on defence was inadequate given the wartime threat, and more offensive action was needed; that the British must be compelled to fulfil their pledges to protect and defend the Yishuv; that neither Britain nor Jews would ever placate the Arabs with political concessions or buy them off with economic development; and that an ‘iron wall’ had to be erected to separate the two peoples in Palestine.

The main Revisionist fighters were the Irgun and the Stern Gang. The Irgun had been established in 1931 in opposition to the ‘moderate’ policies pursued by the Haganah, and was led first by David Raziel and then, after 1944, by Menachem Begin, a future Prime Minister of Israel. One of the reasons Begin was chosen as the Irgun leader was that he was invisible to British intelligence and the Palestine Police. After fleeing his native Poland to escape invading Nazi forces, he was arrested by the Soviet NKVD and sent to a Gulag, from which he escaped, it seems with the assistance of Soviet intelligence, to Palestine. The Irgun guessed rightly that because of his itinerant background, Begin would not appear on Britain’s wartime intelligence’s radar. Under Begin’s command, the Irgun specialised in bombing buildings and other infrastructure, and by 1945 was estimated by British intelligence to have between 5,000 and 6,000 members – figures that were exaggerated, perhaps by as much as three times, due to the difficulties in penetrating the Irgun with agents.

The Stern Gang was an even smaller and more extremist group than the Irgun, from which it split in 1940 because the Irgun was too ‘moderate’. It was led by Avraham Stern, a romantic poet, former philosopher and gunman, whom the British eventually eliminated in 1942. The circumstances of Stern’s death were controversial. It appears that a Palestine police officer, Geoffrey Morton, shot him dead while he was unarmed and un-handcuffed, apparently as he was attempting to jump out of a window. Thereafter the Stern Gang’s leadership included the future seventh Israeli Prime Minister, Yitzhak Shamir, who was the architect of Lord Moyne’s assassination and who adopted the nom de guerre ‘Michael’ in honour of Sinn Féin’s Michael Collins. The Stern Gang’s speciality was political assassinations, and by 1945 it was estimated to have between three hundred and five hundred members – again an inflated estimate, but about the same number of trigger-pulling members as there then were in the IRA.²¹

After the Stern Gang’s assassination of Moyne in 1944, the Haganah helped the British to track down Stern Gang members – a period known as the ‘hunting season’, or Sezon. Zionist political leaders initially hoped that the 1945 election victory in Britain of the Labour Party, traditionally a supporter of the Zionist cause, would help to ease British restrictions on Jewish immigration to Palestine. However, their hopes were soon dashed. The new British Foreign Secretary, Ernest Bevin, came to office with a background as a tough trade union negotiator, and had formerly been a supporter of the creation of a Jewish state, but within days of coming to power he changed his mind – and thus became public enemy number one for Zionist Revisionists, who regarded him as the main impediment to eretz Israel. Bevin’s policy over Palestine was not shaped by closet ‘anti-Semitism’, a claim that has often been made, but instead by his belief that a civil war would break out between Jews and Arabs if unrestricted Jewish immigration were permitted in Palestine. That said, he often displayed shocking insensitivity, joking that the US government supported mass immigration to Palestine ‘because they did not want too many Jews in New York’, and when power cuts threw one set of Anglo–Jewish negotiations in 1947 into literal darkness, he ponderously joked that ‘there was no need for candles because they had Israelites’.²²

The Holocaust transformed British policies on Palestine. As details of Nazi mass-murder programmes in Europe appeared in the world’s media after 1945, it became increasingly unacceptable to world opinion for Britain to block the entry of Jewish refugees into Palestine. The new US President, Harry Truman, repeatedly demanded that the British government should allow 100,000 Jewish refugees immediate entry into Palestine, even though his demand was not supported by the US State Department, which advised that Jewish immigration to Palestine should be controlled. Despite the pressure on it, the British government refused to increase substantially the Jewish immigration quota. With their hopes of securing greater Jewish immigration now sunk, all of the Zionist militias in Palestine – the Haganah, the Irgun and the Stern Gang – came together in late 1945 to fight the British in what was termed the Hebrew or United Resistance Movement.

At this stage the British were faced with what appeared to be a hopelessly irreconcilable situation. By the end of the war, some British officials were already pessimistically forecasting that Britain would be unable to square the circle in the Palestine triangle between themselves, Jews and Arabs. In 1945 the Special Commissioner in Palestine, Sir Douglas Harris, said that Britain was doing little more than ploughing sand. Not long after, the British Chancellor of the Exchequer, Hugh Dalton, complained to Attlee that it was impossible to build a firm base on a wasps’ nest.²³

Before 1948 several leading politicians of the future state of Israel were involved in fighting the British. Menachem Begin, one of the great pillars of Israeli politics, was denounced by the British as a terrorist, as was another future Israeli Prime Minister, Yitzhak Shamir, and at least one future Israeli Supreme Court Judge (Meir Shamgar) as well as a future Minister of Justice (Shamuel Tamir). Avraham Stern himself was subsequently commemorated on an Israeli postage stamp, and today the Israeli town of Stern is home to a number of the country’s leading political and intellectual elites. All of this leads one to ask whether it is legitimate to call these fighters ‘terrorists’. After the state of Israel was established in May 1948, the overwhelming majority of those who had fought the British refused to admit that they were ever ‘terrorists’, instead labelling themselves ‘freedom fighters’. However, the fact of the matter is that, at the time, Stern Gang operatives openly admitted to using ‘terrorist’ tactics. The Stern Gang is thought to have been one of the last groups in the world to call itself a ‘terrorist’ organisation. Some of its members apparently used the term ‘terrorism’ as a badge of honour, romanticising the role of violence. Deceitful mythologies still insist that the Irgun and the Stern Gang acted as ‘soldiers’ and were ‘freedom fighters of the highest moral standards’. As recently as July 2006 a group of right-wing Israelis, including Benjamin Netanyahu, attended a commemoration organised by the ‘Menachem Begin Heritage Centre’ for the sixtieth anniversary of the bombing of the King David Hotel, which they insisted on labelling an act of ‘freedom fighting’. A plaque commemorating the attack attracted an official response from the British ambassador in Tel Aviv, who urged that it was offensive to celebrate an act of terrorism. In reality, the Irgun and the Stern Gang targeted and killed innocent civilians. The victims of over half of the forty-two assassinations carried out by the Stern Gang and the Irgun were Jewish, supposedly acting as ‘collaborators’ with the British.

The extent to which the Irgun and the Stern Gang lacked legitimacy was seen in the fact that, after the state of Israel was created in May 1948, the new Israeli government was itself forced to deal with their threat. When David Ben-Gurion became Israel’s first Prime Minister, the firm stance he had always taken against the Stern Gang and the Irgun led to some dramatic confrontations. In June 1948 he ordered Jewish troops to fire on a boat moored off the coast of Tel Aviv, the Altalena, named after Vladimir Jabotinsky’s old nom de plume, which was bringing Jewish sympathisers and arms to the Irgun. At this point the fragile young Israeli state came closer to civil war than it would in its entire history. The episode has echoes closer to our own time. In 1995 Israel’s Prime Minister, Yitzhak Rabin, was assassinated by an ultra-Zionist Jewish extremist in a ‘revenge attack’ for proposed Israeli withdrawals from the Gaza Strip and for the fact that Rabin had been one of the troops responsible for shelling the Altalena in 1948.²⁴