Armed struggle

Inside the years of the British Mandate,and the Jewish organizations that embarked on a violent campaign to end British rule.

By SETH J. FRANTZMAN
The King David Hotel after it was bombed in 1946. (photo credit: Wikimedia Commons)
The King David Hotel after it was bombed in 1946.
(photo credit: Wikimedia Commons)
September 18, 1944, was a typical, warm day in Cairo. Five Jews sat chatting at the Astra Café on what is now Tahrir Square.
It could have been a typical scene in those days of British rule in the Middle East, where cosmopolitan cities gyrated to the current European tastes and music and pondered the progress of the war.
But not all was normal that day. The five Jewish coffee-drinkers were plotting the killing of Lord Moyne, the British minister of state resident in Egypt and a close friend of Winston Churchill.
The subsequent assassination in November 1944 would send shock waves throughout the empire. How did a small group of extremist Jews from Mandate Palestine decide that gunning down a British colonial official would help their cause? Prof. Bruce Hoffman, an expert on terrorism and insurgency who is the director of the Center for Security Studies at Georgetown University, seeks to examine the Jewish violence in Palestine as a case study into whether terrorism is effective.
“The political violence that plagued Palestine when it was ruled by Great Britain presents an ideal case with which to examine and assess terrorism’s power to influence government policy and decision- making,” he argues in Anonymous Soldiers: The Struggle for Israel, 1917-1947.
This 600-page tome, however, is not the inaccessible, dowdy academic work one might expect on analyzing terrorism’s role. The opposite: It is a colorful tale of derring-do, about men in the shadows with revolvers and the British forces sent to track them down.
To start out, Hoffman sets the stage by outlining how the British Mandate in Palestine, which began so fruitfully at the end of the Second World War, became a bloody zone of terror. He glosses over the Arab struggle against the British and against Zionism, devoting only a few dozen pages to the 1920 disturbances, the 1929 riots and the Arab revolt of 1936 to 1939.It’s not that he is not being even-handed, but his focus is a case study of the Irgun Zva’i Leumi and the Stern Group. His approach is very clinical and nonjudgmental; he doesn’t draw moral conclusions about these organizations’ tactics.
The Arab attacks against the British and the Jews in Palestine, which resulted in hundreds of deaths, are mentioned to frame the Jewish response. In April 1937 the Irgun, a Zionist paramilitary organization that would eventually be led by Menachem Begin, issued a statement defining their goals: “We believe in the sacrifice of battle and the sacrifice of the Israeli youth that sets as its goal the strength and independence of the core of the Hebrew strength.”
Their leader at the time, David Raziel, argued that the time for “passive defense,” preferred by many mainstream Zionists, was over and that “active defense” must begin. “He who does not want to be defeated has no choice but to attack.”
But the British defeat of the Arab rebellion and the outbreak of the Second World War derailed the fantasies of the Jewish armed struggle against both the British and the Arabs. More than two thirds of Hoffman’s book is thus devoted to the period after 1944, when Lord Moyne was killed by an offshoot of the Irgun called the Stern Group (Lehi).
The problem is that these stories are well-known. There is no shortage of books on this subject, not least of which are Menachem Begin’s own book The Revolt, and 1996’s Terror Out of Zion. There are whole books devoted just to the killing of the Lehi leader Avraham Stern, or to the Irgun blowing up the King David Hotel in 1946.
So what is new here? Some of the most interesting information Hoffman presents relates to British policy and British reactions to the terrorist acts of Jewish fighters. He notes that during the struggle against the Arab rebellion, the British not only detonated homes as retaliation for Arab terror, but that they authorized the use of 20-pound bombs against Arab rebels. “Machine-gun fire from aircraft could only be directed against armed rebel bands sighted in open country,” he writes. The British even lost three planes to the Arab fighters.
Against the Jewish terror, the British were hamstrung. First of all, the Irgun and Stern Group operated primarily in the cities. They choose their targets carefully and looked for weak points in British security to strike at officers’ clubs or kill individuals. “We were never allowed to hit back at the terrorists,” claimed Roy Farran, a British soldier implicated in the murder of a 16-year-old Stern Group member. The British forces knew how to use artillery or blow up houses, but chasing down terrorists was not easy for a ham-handed military.
Of course, the British had dealt with insurgents before, in India, Ireland and elsewhere; in Palestine, though, the British were flustered. After an attack on the Sixth Airborne Division in Tel Aviv, in which a half-dozen British soldiers were killed, the British officials considered retaliating by imposing a collective fine on all of Tel Aviv. Other theories of how to respond included demolishing the buildings around the area that had been attacked, imposing a curfew on roads, or making Tel Aviv a no-go zone for British soldiers – in short, a series of responses that would not help defeat the armed resistance.
Hoffman concludes that “the Irgun’s success in attracting attention to itself and its cause and most significantly both hastening and profoundly affecting government decision-making demonstrates that… terrorism can, in the right conditions and with the appropriate strategy and tactics, succeed in attaining at least some of its practitioners’ fundamental aims.” So terrorism can win, if everything is perfectly ordered to suit it.
The reader may be left unconvinced of this larger model, but certainly will not be left unmoved by a well-written and interesting account of the last decade of the British Mandate