Legacy of Violence: A History of the British Empire

by Caroline Elkins

The Haganah, incensed by Britain’s rejection of the Anglo-American Committee’s recommendation, blew up ten train and road bridges, mostly along the Transjordan border.

The Irgun followed this June 16, 1946, “Night of the Bridges” with a brazen kidnapping of five British officers while they lunched at the Tel Aviv Officers’ Club. Begin’s men chained the officers in a cellar hideout, then released two of them with a message. They would execute the other three British officers if the Mandate government did not release two Irgun members it had condemned to hang.

The time had come for British forces to claim the initiative, and Field Marshal M...

a heated cabinet meeting, Montgomery wrested Bevin’s support to launch an offensive, and on June 29, D’Arcy’s replacement, Evelyn Barker, ordered Operation Agatha.

The military imposed a curfew throughout the country, and nearly the entire strength of the British security forces—one hundred thousand men—surrounded

settlers at Mishek Yergoa stared down Agatha’s security forces and tanks, blocking the gate of their kibbutz with a human shield of women and children.

Operation Agatha, or the “Black Sabbath,” as locals called it, weakened

the Haganah, but it barely touched the Irgun or Lehi, despite continued

The next day the Irgun chloroformed and boxed into a crate the three British officers it had kidnapped, then unceremoniously dumped them onto Rothschild Avenue in downtown Tel Aviv.

Even in the midst of the insurgency, there was nothing like Jerusalem’s elegant King David Hotel in the rest of Palestine or, arguably, Britain’s empire.

For military officers, administrators, and high-end civilians, it was a four-and-a-half-acre slice of heaven perched above the Old City, surrounded by a cordon of barbed wire, antigrenade netting, state-of-the-art alarm controls, machine gun pits, and countless security force members.

Gentlemen in dark suits and tuxedos, ladies in evening dresses, and Sudanese waiters plying aperitifs mingled there after a day of tennis or swimming and before a night of recitals, literary events, or some other form of cultural incongruity relative to the c...

The British Army had requisitioned part of the hotel ever since the Arab Revolt, and the Mandate’s secretariat had moved most administrative functions to its...

was there that the senior police officer Richard Catling was chatting with his friend Roderick Musgrave on July 22, 1946, when an explosion sent them both racing to the balcony for a closer look through the midday sun. Catling hustled down the steps to ask his driver idling out...

Catling made his way back through the hotel lobby, seven large milk churns filled with explosives detonated and shredded the military and secretariat offices. Catling survived with only minor injuries, which was m...

people trapped by the rubble,” one police officer recalled.[105] The Irgun’s strike, which had entailed weeks of planning and subterfuge, had used force the size of a thousand-pound aerial bomb. The south wing of the hotel collapsed,...

British security forces search for survivors after the King David Hotel bomb explosion, July 28, 1946.

Gaza 2025

This was the Irgun’s most spectacular

In the wake of the King David Hotel’s destruction, British forces launched Operation Shark, sealed off Tel Aviv, and conducted house-to-house searches and

interrogations of the entire adult population. A thousand suspects were detained.

Police Sergeant T. G. Martin picked out Yitzhak Shamir, the mastermind of the Lord Moyne assassination and the Lehi leader, in a lineup, even though he was disguised as a rabbi. Shamir was deported to an East African detention camp for interrogation. ...

As far as Ben-Gurion was concerned, “the Irgun is the enemy of the Jewish people,” and Begin was as much a threat to the Yishuv as the British.[109]

Irgun and Lehi violence continued “deliberately, tirelessly, [and] unceasingly,” making a mockery of British rule.

“In the development of certain British Colonies the whip has been made to serve an educational purpose,” Begin wrote. “It is applied, of course, not to recalcitrant boys but to adults who are treated like disorderly children.”[110] The Irgun zeroed in on this loathed symbol of imperial paternalism, a method of “civilizing” reform, and turned it against British soldiers with startling effect.

At the end of 1946, Begin declared through the Irgun’s undergroun...

For hundreds of years you have been whipping “natives” in your colonies—without retaliation. In your foolish pride you regard the Jews of Eretz Israel as natives too. You are mistaken. Zion is not exile. Jews are not Zulus. You will not whip Jews in their Homeland. And if the British Aut...

True to his threat, and in retaliation for British security forces caning two young Irgun members, Begin had several of his men abduct Major Paddy Brett while he dined with his wife at a waterfront hotel in Netanya. Shortly thereafter armed Irgun fighters took three more British officers hostage. They whipped the captured men severely, binding them to a tree in a public garden, where a search patrol later found them.[112]

was no longer possible, according to one high-ranking officer, “to differentiate between passive onlookers and active armed members of the Jewish population, and the word ‘terrorist’ is no longer being applied to differentiate one from the other.

All suffer from the martyrdom complex and instability of temperament, which makes their reactions in circumstances of any political stress both violent and unpredictable.”[113]

Mounting security force frustration and its plummeting morale translated into open hostility. The Jewish Agency routinely filed complaints against soldiers and policemen who used anti-Semitic slurs. Security force members shouted “Bloody Jew,” “pigs,” and “Heil Hitler,” promising to finish off what Hitler began.[116]

Members of the police force derided the Jews as “dirty” and “filthy.” “You could have kicked the Arab up the bottom and nothing would have been said, but if you put a little finger on a Jew-boy Westminster would have gone crazy….When

Montgomery was furious not at his troops but at the British government. He had returned to Palestine to repress Zionist insurgents with the same force that he had used to quash Arabs a decade earlier.

Instead, the situation had gone from bad to worse.

“If we are not prepared to maintain law and order in Palestine,” Montgomery told Attlee, “then it wou...

Political language—and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists—is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind. One cannot change this all in a moment, but one can at least change one’s own habits, and from time to time one can even, if one jeers loudly enough, send some worn-out and useless phrase…into the dustbin where it belongs. George Orwell, 1946[1]

“Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting them both. The Party intellectual knows in which direction memories must be altered; he therefore knows that he is playing tricks with reality; but by the exercise of doublethink he also satisfies himself that reality is not violated.”[4]

He finished “that bloody book,” a masterpiece illustrating deceit’s ominous effects, in 1948, allegedly twisting the year’s numbers to create one of the twentieth century’s most famous titles.[5]

1984 is about totalitarianism’s consequences, but it also speaks to those of liberal imperialism whose evolutionary framing could adapt under duress, as we’ve seen with the postwar partnership motif. Yet liberal imperialism’s reforms became harder to discern, save for triumphant rhetoric and independence day ceremonies obfuscating the repression needed to hang on to the empire’s most coveted jewels until the bitter end.

How much the public knew about the violence, and what knowing meant, impacted the state’s response, and it was here that Orwell’s fictive Oceania, where “War is Peace” and “Freed...

One of imperialism’s staunchest critics, Orwell knew the state was masterful at speaking with a forked tongue and at choreographing internal investigations that played to good governa...

Cultural conditions were ripe for an Orwellian universe, but one rooted in liberalism, not in fascism. With other forms of knowing threatening to erode state secrecy, doublethink doubled down, protecting the British state and the nation’s future. Orwell’s own experiences with

empire informed his thinking on how this duplicity worked:

The process has to be conscious, or it would not be carried out with sufficient precision, but it also has to be unconscious, or it would bring with it a feeling of falsity and hence of guilt….To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just so long as it is need...

denies—all this is indispensably ...

1984’s publisher rushed the novel’s release in June 1949. In one of the final scenes, the novel’s protagonist, Winston, is sitting beside a chessboard, drinking gin, in the Chestnut Tree café. “Winston’s heart stirred,” Orwell began.

All day, with little spurts of excitement, the thought of a smashing defeat in Africa had been in and out of his mind. He seemed actually to see the Eurasian army swarming across the never-broken frontier pouring down into the tip of Africa like a column of ants. Why had it not been possible to outflank them in some way?

The outline of the West African coast stood out vividly in his mind. He picked up the white knight and moved it across the [chess] board. There was the proper spot. Even while he saw the black horde racing southward he saw another force, mysteriously assembled, suddenly planted in their rear, cutting their communications by land and sea….But it was necessary to act quickly. If they could get control of the whole of Africa, if they had airfields and submarine bases at the Cape, it w...

He drew a deep breath….He put the white knight back in its place….His thoughts wandered again. Almost unconsciously he traced with his finger in the dust on the table: 2 + 2 = 5.[8] Seven months after 1984’s publication, Britain’s truth teller wa...

The winter of 1947, the harshest in sixty years, took other tolls.