In the midst of Israel’s recent action against Hamas, British Foreign Secretary
William Hague warned that the Jewish State would “lose a lot of international
support and sympathy” if it sent in ground troops. Hague’s assertion was widely
understood as an attempt to pressure Jerusalem to refrain from going all-out
against the terrorists.
Israelis have heard this before – as a matter of
fact, they heard it from another senior British foreign affairs official,
William Waldegrave, the minister of state in the Foreign Office, when he visited
Gaza in March 1989. At a press conference, Waldegrave dramatically brandished
four rubber bullets, which he accused Israel of firing “indiscriminately” at
Arab rioters.
Afterwards, Waldegrave met with the mayor of Jerusalem,
Teddy Kollek. Since Kollek was a longtime Labor Party figure and well known
political dove, Waldegrave probably thought they were kindred
spirits.
The British official was in for quite a surprise.
Kollek
told Waldegrave – and told reporters afterwards – that “the British have no
right to preach morals to Israel” on fighting terrorists, considering how the
British themselves treated Palestinian Arab terrorists in the 1930s. The mayor
pointed out that recently-released British government documents described
“British army atrocities against the Arabs in Palestine” during those
years.
The documents recounted the British authorities’ response to the
assassination of a British district commissioner in Jenin in 1938. The killer
was captured, jailed, and then shot to death “while trying to escape.” But the
Mandate government decided that was not enough, and that “a large portion of the
town should be blown up.”
Other anti-terror tactics employed by the
British against the Palestinian Arabs in the 1930s included shooting handcuffed
prisoners, blowing up civilians’ homes and forcing Arabs to drive “mine-sweeping
taxis” in front of British soldiers searching areas where they suspected mines
were planted.
Naomi Shepherd, in her book Ploughing Sand (about British
rule in Palestine) describes how eight Palestinian Arabs in Halhul died of heat
exposure when, “on a scorching day,” British soldiers “rounded up a group of men
during a search for arms and kept them standing without water for hours.” After
an attack on a British patrol in the village of Kawkab Abu Haija, the British
army “destroyed the entire village.” When a British army vehicle ran over a mine
near Kafr Yasif, soldiers burned down 70 houses and machine-gunned nine
villagers.
HUGH FOOT, a district commissioner in 1930s Palestine who
narrowly escaped assassination by Arab terrorists, later recalled the arbitrary
nature of house demolitions: “When we thought that a village was harboring
rebels, we’d go there and mark one of the large houses. Then, if an incident was
traced to that village, we’d blow up the house we’d marked.” The tactic was
“drastic,” High Commissioner Harold MacMichael conceded, “but the situation has
demanded drastic powers.”
An Associated Press correspondent permitted to
travel with a British anti-terror unit in October 1938 reported how he watched
them “blow up with dynamite about a dozen houses in an Arab village from which
shots twice were fired at the troops... [W]hen the troops left there was little
else remaining of the once busy village except a pile of mangled
masonry.”
In another Arab town, Miar, the British troops “dynamited about
forty stone houses” and arrested hundreds of villagers. Sometimes Arab detainees
were “put to to work building roads.”
Reports in The New York Times that
month offered similar descriptions of British “clean-up” operations, as the
Times called them. In Lydda (today known as Lod), “twenty-one Arabs’ homes were
destroyed by British troops because of recent attacks on military police.” In
Nablus, “severe measures by British troops resulted in about six
casualties.”
While some British officials privately expressed unease at
the harsh counter-terror methods, most voices in the Colonial Office apparently
supported the crackdown. “I do not feel we have the right to interfere,” Lord
Dufferin asserted. “British lives are being lost and I don’t think that we, from
the security of Whitehall, can protest squeamishly about measures taken by the
men in the frontline.”
His colleague Sir John Shuckburgh emphasized that
the British authorities in Palestine were faced “not with a chivalrous opponent
playing the game according to the rules, but with gangsters and
murderers.”
All of which may leave some Israelis today wondering which
makes more sense – England’s current advice, or the positions taken by British
leaders when they themselves had to deal with the forerunners of
Hamas.
The writer is director of The David S. Wyman Institute for
Holocaust Studies, and coauthor, with Prof. Sonja Schoepf Wentling, of the new
book Herbert Hoover and the Jews: The Origins of the ‘Jewish Vote’ and
Bipartisan Support for Israel.
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