The Banality of Brutality British Armed Forces and the Repression of the Arab Revolt in Palestine - Posted by YJ Draiman
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 11th 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.
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