British Counterinsurgency

John Newsinger

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780230298248, 9780230298231
• eBook ISBN: 9781137316868
• Edition: 2
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: History

British Counterinsurgency challenges the British Army's claim to counterinsurgency expertise. It provides well-written, accessible and up-to-date accounts of the post-1945 campaigns in Palestine, Malaya, Kenya, Cyprus, South Yemen, Dhofar, Northern Ireland and more recently in Iraq and Afghanistan.

1

At War with Zion

When the Second World War finally came to an end, the British found themselves confronted by a challenge from the Yishuv, the small Zionist settlement in Palestine. This challenge, tacitly supported by the United States, was to compromise the British Empire’s overall position in the Middle East and thereby begin the process of its dissolution in the region. This failure to overcome the Zionist challenge is one of the most humiliating episodes in immediate post-war British history. How was it that the Yishuv was able to inflict such a defeat on a British military establishment fresh from its victories over Germany and Japan?

Exercising the Mandate

At the time the challenge was mounted, the British considered Palestine to be a territory of vital strategic importance, providing a military base from which to dominate the rest of the Middle East. In this way oil supplies and oil profits could be secured and any threat from the Soviet Union could be countered. Such was the region’s importance that in the event of war with the Russians the British planned a hurried withdrawal from continental Europe but intended to defend the Middle East at all costs, according the area a priority second only to the defence of the British Isles themselves.¹ The incoming Labour government hoped to be able to control the region informally, by means of a series of unequal relationships with a network of Arab client states, but a large military presence was still regarded as essential. Only British troops could, in the last resort, it was thought, ensure that friendly governments remained in power and defend against external attack in the event of another world war. The Mandate over Palestine was seen as providing the British with a degree of freedom of action which they were in the process of losing in Egypt and would not possess anywhere else in the region. There was certainly no expectation that the British position was soon to crumble.²

British policy was fatally compromised by the Zionist settlement in Palestine, a settlement that had initially been sponsored as a counterweight to Arab nationalism. The Balfour Declaration of 1917 committed Britain to supporting the establishment of a European Jewish colony in a land overwhelmingly inhabited by Arabs. While the settlement initially stagnated, the numbers seeking entry rose dramatically with the rise of Nazism in Germany. Whereas in 1931 there were only 4075 Jewish immigrants, by 1935 the number had risen to 66 472. Denied entry to other European countries or to the United States, German and Central European Jews increasingly came to look to Palestine as a safe haven.³

Arab opposition to this colonisation of their homeland culminated in the great revolt of 1936–39, the first Intifada, which led to what was, in effect, the reconquest of the Mandate by British troops. The insurgency was only suppressed with great difficulty and considerable brutality, costing over 3000 lives. The British turned to the Zionist settlers for assistance in the campaign, recruiting some 19 000 Jewish police and encouraging the activities of the Special Night Squads, Jewish murder gangs, trained by a British officer with strong Zionist sympathies, Orde Wingate. The Arab revolt was defeated and the Palestinians left disarmed, disorganised and leaderless to confront a Yishuv that was to increase dramatically in strength and determination during the Second World War.⁴

At the time, however, while the Palestinian Arabs might well have been defeated militarily, the scale of their revolt, together with the hostility of the Arab states to the Zionist colony, won a significant political victory in the shape of the 1939 White Paper. With war imminent in Europe, the British felt the need to conciliate Arab opinion. The White Paper limited Jewish immigration, restricted Jewish settlement and promised independence to an Arab Palestine within ten years.⁵ This commitment was condemned at the time by British Zionist sympathisers, among them Winston Churchill, as a betrayal of the Balfour Declaration and was, of course, bitterly opposed by all elements of the Yishuv.

The Zionist movement was divided in its response to the White Paper, with the Jewish Agency and the rival Revisionist movement taking very different stands. The Jewish Agency functioned as the effective settler government in Palestine, had the allegiance of the overwhelming majority of the Jewish population and was determined to overturn the White Paper by diplomatic methods. The Agency was sympathetic to the British Empire, which was still regarded as a friend and protector, and rallied to the British war effort against Nazi Germany, the enemy of all Jews. Settlers were encouraged to enlist in the British armed forces and an attempt was made to persuade the British to establish a distinct Zionist army brigade. Altogether some 32 000 settlers served in the British armed forces, fighting in Greece, North Africa and Italy. Within the Jewish Agency, this stance was strongly associated with Chaim Weizmann. It was to be challenged as the war progressed by more militant elements, led by David Ben Gurion, who looked increasingly to the United States for help in pressurising a recalcitrant Britain. While the war continued, however, the Jewish Agency remained committed to the British Empire on whose victory its very survival depended.⁶

Having made use of the settlers to help in the defeat of the Arab revolt, once war broke out, and in line with the White Paper policy, the British withdrew their encouragement of Zionist paramilitary forces. There was a crackdown that drove the Jewish Agency’s militia, the Haganah, underground, imprisoning a number of its cadres and seizing whatever arms could be found. Defeat in Europe and the German threat to the Middle East led to yet another change in British policy. The Haganah was once again recognised and an elite formation, the Palmach, was formed from its ranks and trained in partisan warfare by officers from the Special Operations Executive (SOE). This force was to organise resistance if the German Afrika Korps should overrun Palestine. A number of volunteers also played a part in Britain’s undercover war against the Axis. As far as the Jewish Agency was concerned, however, the most important development was the eventual establishment of a Zionist brigade within the British Army in 1944 which went into combat in Italy the following year. This was regarded as a diplomatic triumph presaging the abandonment of the White Paper policy and there was considerable confidence that, once the war was over, Britain would return to its Zionist commitment. After all, Churchill was known to be sympathetic, and the Labour Party, his coalition partner and the only alternative government, was committed by its 1944 conference to a Zionist policy more extreme than that advocated by the World Zionist Organisation itself.⁷

On the right of the Zionist spectrum was the minority Revisionist movement established by Vladimir Jabotinsky, an admirer of Benito Mussolini and Italian Fascism. The Revisionists had their own paramilitary forces, the Irgun Zvei Leumi (IZL), which had carried out indiscriminate bombings and shootings against the Arab population during the Arab revolt and who were prepared to fight the British in 1939 in order to overturn the White Paper policy. With the outbreak of war, however, the main body of the Revisionist movement rallied to the British Empire and suspended hostilities. Indeed, the IZL commander, David Raziel, was killed on a SOE operation in Iraq in May 1941.⁸

LEHI and IZL

The exception was a small breakaway terrorist group, the Lohamei Herut Israel (LEHI), usually known after its founder, Abraham Stern, as the Stern Group or by the British as the ‘Stern Gang’. This tiny organisation identified the British Empire as Zionism’s main enemy and throughout the war continued a terrorist campaign of assassinations and bombings against the Palestine police and the administration. The LEHI went so far as to offer its services to Nazi Germany, proposing to act as a fifth column in the German conquest of Palestine in return for an agreement to resettle Europe’s Jews there. Its politics, a peculiar amalgam of anti-imperialism and fascism, were informed by a mystical belief that the Jewish people would have to be redeemed by sacrificial violence. They were actually proud to call themselves ‘Terrorists’.⁹

On its own the LEHI never constituted a serious threat to British control over Palestine. The organisation never numbered more than a few hundred members during the war, and it was extremely unpopular with the rest of the Yishuv both because of its continuing terrorist activities and because of its fundraising through armed robbery and extortion. This hostility ensured that the police received the necessary intelligence effectively to cripple the organisation. It became involved in a bloody vendetta with the Criminal Investigation Department (CID), a vendetta in which Stern himself was a casualty, shot dead while in custody in January 1942.¹⁰ By the middle of that year further arrests and shootings appeared to have eliminated the organisation.

The situation began to change in 1944. By this time it was clear that the Allies were winning the war and that the Yishuv was no longer under direct threat from the Nazis. The impact of the Holocaust was also changing attitudes, with a growing number of people convinced that British refusal to allow Jewish refugees into Palestine had sentenced them to death. Britain was from this point of view an accessory to the Holocaust. Together these factors contributed to the revival of the Revisionist paramilitary formations.

The LEHI regrouped under the leadership of a three-man executive consisting of Yitzhak Shamir, Nathan Yellin-Mor and Israel Scheib. The organisation quickly returned to its vendetta with the Palestine police. More important, however, was the reorganisation of the IZL, a much more substantial force that had almost disintegrated in the early years of the war with so many of its leading cadres following Raziel into the British armed forces. Now the IZL reformed itself and under the leadership of a refugee from Poland, the hard-line right-winger Menachem Begin, prepared for armed revolt. The IZL rejected the individual terrorism of the LEHI in favour of a protracted campaign of guerrilla warfare intended not to persuade the British to return to the Balfour commitment, as the Jewish Agency intended, but to drive them out of Palestine altogether. The decision to wage war was taken in 1943, but the proclamation of the armed revolt against the British was not made until 1 February 1944.

The declaration, addressed to both the Yishuv and the British, declared:

Four years have passed since the war began, and all the hopes that beat in your hearts then have evaporated without a trace. We have not been accorded international status, no Jewish Army has been set up, the gates of the country have not been opened. The British regime has sealed its shameful betrayal of the Jewish people and there is no moral basis whatsoever for its presence in Eretz Israel.

We shall fearlessly draw conclusions. There is no longer any armistice between the Jewish people and the British Administration in Eretz Israel which hands our brothers over to Hitler. Our people is at war with this regime – war to the end ... We shall fight, every Jew in the Homeland will fight. The God of Israel, the Lord of Hosts will aid us. There will be no retreat. Freedom – or death.¹¹

As the year progressed there was a succession of attacks that left an increasing toll of destruction, dead and injured. The British only began to take the revolt seriously after a series of co-ordinated attacks on the police on 23 March when the LEHI shot up police stations in Tel Aviv, killing two policemen, while the IZL made bomb attacks on police stations in Jerusalem, Jaffa and Haifa, killing six more. These attacks were followed by a curfew that lasted for nine days and large-scale searches in the districts affected. On 28 July the High Commissioner, Sir Harold MacMichael, reported to London that, ‘The security position may be deteriorating, and the outlook is not encouraging’.¹² Only ten days later, on 8 August, the LEHI narrowly missed assassinating him, machine-gunning his car on the Jerusalem-to-Jaffa road and killing his ADC in the attempt. The attacks continued into September. On 27 August some 150 IZL guerrillas made co-ordinated attacks on four heavily fortified police outposts, leaving two soldiers and two policemen dead. Two days later a CID Assistant Superintendent, Tom Wilkins, regarded as the most dangerous of the group’s enemies, was assassinated, shot 11 times by LEHI gunmen in broad daylight in Jerusalem.

The decisive act of this first phase of the revolt, however, occurred on 6 November 1944 when two young LEHI gunmen, Eliahu Hakim and Eliahu Bet-Zouri, assassinated the British Minister Resident in the Middle East, Walter Guinness, Lord Moyne.¹³ According to Yellin-Mor, ‘We weren’t yet in a position to try to hit Churchill in London, so the logical second best was to hit Lord Moyne in Cairo’.¹⁴ This killing of a senior government figure and a personal friend of Churchill’s had a shattering effect. Lord Moyne’s death broke Churchill’s already weakening faith in the reliability of the Yishuv as an ally, and he warned in the House of Commons that if these outrages continued, ‘many like myself will have to reconsider the position we have maintained so consistently in the past’.¹⁵

Lord Moyne’s assassination provoked the Jewish Agency into action. The activities of the IZL and LEHI were beginning to compromise the security of the whole Yishuv, undermining its diplomatic position and threatening to bring British reprisals. However spectacular their attacks, the dissident Zionist organisations were still only very small (the LEHI and IZL between them probably had only about a thousand members) and enjoyed the support of only a tiny proportion of the settler population, less than one per cent according to one estimate.¹⁶ By way of contrast, the Jewish Agency commanded the allegiance of virtually the entire Yishuv, had considerable financial resources both in Palestine and abroad, controlled the 60 000-strong Haganah militia together with its elite strike force, the Palmach, and had quantities of weapons hidden throughout the country. The IZL and LEHI were putting all this at risk. Moreover, as far as Ben Gurion was concerned they were politically little better than Nazis; indeed, he condemned the IZL as a ‘Nazi gang’ and as ‘Jewish Nazis’ and compared Begin to Hitler.¹⁷

The ‘Saison’

As far as Ben Gurion and the Jewish Agency were concerned, the real enemy was not the British Empire but the Arabs. In the end, the Zionists were going to have to fight the Arabs for control of Palestine and whatever other Arab territory they might eventually be able to seize. For this reason it was absolutely vital to avoid a full-scale confrontation with the British which, even if it ended with their withdrawal, would still leave the Yishuv crippled in the face of Arab attack. The IZL and LEHI threatened to provoke such a confrontation, and indeed this was very much Begin’s intention. The British were aware of plans being hatched in New York for an uprising modelled on the Easter Rising in Dublin in 1916, involving the seizure of buildings in Jerusalem, including the General Post Office.¹⁸ While this particular plan was stillborn, Begin still hoped to bring about a full-scale rebellion involving the entire Yishuv, an outcome that Ben Gurion quite correctly regarded as a recipe for disaster. The British, with their overwhelming military superiority, would have been able to inflict a crushing defeat on a full-scale rebellion. Moreover, at the time it still appeared possible that once the war was over the British government would return to its Zionist commitments without the need for conflict in the Mandate. The Jewish Agency therefore resolved to put a stop to the activities of the dissident organisations.

Once it was made clear that the Agency intended to take the necessary physical measures to curb the dissidents, the LEHI promptly agreed to suspend operations. Begin, however, refused to comply, whereupon Ben Gurion launched the ‘Saison’, a campaign of intimidation and betrayal that saw Palmach volunteers collaborating with the CID in an effort to smash the IZL. The split within Zionism between the followers of Ben Gurion and the followers of Begin was to be one of the decisive factors in Israeli politics for many years.

From the very beginning of the IZL offensive in February 1944, elements within the Haganah had taken action against their rivals, but only towards the end of the year did this become a co-ordinated campaign designed to root them out of the colony once and for all. Palmach volunteers, working together with Haganah intelligence, the Shai, began by seizing suspected or known IZL members, inflicting salutary beatings or holding them for interrogation, which often...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction to the 2nd Edition
• 1  At War with Zion
• 2  The Running Dog War: Malaya
• 3  The Mau Mau Revolt
• 4  Cyprus and EOKA
• 5  The Struggle for South Yemen
• 6  The Unknown Wars: Oman and Dhofar
• 7  The Long War: Northern Ireland
• 8  Americas Wars: Afghanistan and Iraq
• Notes
• Select Bibiliography
• Index