Legacy of Violence: A History of the British Empire

by Caroline Elkins

On February 14, 1947, the sun hadn’t shone on Britain for nearly two weeks.

Attlee’s cabinet bundled up and trudged through snowdrifts to convene at 10 Downing Street. They had already decided, but not yet announced, Britain’s retreat from the Raj by June 1948.

But Palestine’s future remained...

“The period from 1933 to 1944 had been one of continuous persecution in Europe in which hundreds of thousands of innocent persons had become refugees,” British delegate on the committee Richard Crossman reminded his fellow members. He compared Britain’s admission of two hundred thousand Jewish refugees before and during the war to that of the Americans: In this period of appalling suffering the American [immigration] quota had been so administered as to cut down the number of immigrants….In this period, three hundred sixty-five thousand immigrants

had been permitted to enter the country—roughly two hundred fifty thousand of them refugees, the lowest immigration figures for a hundred years. Despite the Nazi persecution the number of Jewish immigrants was only one hundred sixty thousand in these eleven years, about half the number of Jews who entered America in the twenties. The records of Canada and Australia were no better.[11]

After the war, Jewish refugees lived in squalid European displaced persons camps. Few countries wanted to take responsibility for them. The British were allowing fifteen hundred Jews into Palestine per month, whereas the Americans let in less than six thousand between May 1945 and September 1946, an average of 350 per month.

“By shouting for a Jewish state, Americans satisfy many motives,” Crossman complained. “They are attacking the Empire and British imperialism, they are espousing a moral cause, for whose fulfilment they will take no responsibility, and most important of all, they are diverting attention from the fact that their own immigration laws are the basic cause of the problem.” The American Zionists, he said, were “passionately anti-British and have organized nearly all the American Jews and all the Press.”[12] They also, according to Crossman, had the direct ear of Truman through his special adviser, David Niles, whose job was to keep the Zionists happy.

Of the Americans, Bevin said “they don’t want too many Jews in New York,” another poorly judged remark, offending both Truman and th...

the Morrison-Grady plan, was agreed on and ready for a series of Arab-Zionist meetings in London during the fall of 1946. “The central element of the Morrison-Grady plan was ambiguity,” the historian William Roger Louis points out:

The American Zionist Emergency Council organized a protest against British policy in Palestine, Madison Square Park, July 1946.

The Americans refused to commit to boots on the ground to enforce the plan and rejected joint trusteeship with Britain. By the end of negotiations over the Morrison-Grady plan, even Truman was exhausted by the Zionist lobby, who berated him for co-creating a “ghetto” in Palestine, an insult he took seriously given Jewish voting power, real and perceived. “Jesus Christ couldn’t please them when he was here on earth,” he told his cabinet, “so how could anyone expect I would have any luck?”[15]

Truman thought, as did Chaim Weizmann, that the plan was a precursor to a Jewish state in Palestine. When the Zionist Congress met in Basel in December 1946, its delegates disagreed, voting 171 to 154 to boycott the next round of negotiations in London, which was a clear rejection of the Morrison-Grady plan and Bevin’s latest revision of it, the allowance of one hundred thousand Jewish immigrants to Palestine over two years.

Delegates dismissed him as “too flippant—too pro-British.” Rabbi Silver “threw down the gauntlet—against partition and in favour of ‘resistance’—but

but not one word to distinguish it from terrorism.”

The London conference was a bust, confirming Arab and Zionist entrenched positions and Bevin’s diplomatic paralysis. The Arabs were resolutely opposed to partition and a continuation of Jewish immigration, while the Zionists were equally insistent on the creation of a Jewish state.

On that frigid February 14 day in Downing Street’s cabinet room, Bevin and Colonial Secretary Creech Jones made the case for going to the United Nations.

the Arabs and Jews were opposed to UN interference, and if Britain “now announced our firm intention” to do so, “this might bring [the Arabs and Jews] to a more reasonable frame of mind,”

The General Assembly wouldn’t sit for another seven months, so there was plenty of time to let the weight o...

Bevin’s recommendation

was approved, and on February 18, two days before Attlee announced to Parliament Britain’s timetable for leaving India, Bevin delivered the news about Palestine:

Churchill was incredulous. Ever since Zionist assassins had murdered Lord Moyne in Cairo, he had modified his previous position on Palestine, never again meeting with Weizmann. Of the original Balfour Declaration, Churchill said, “Promises were made far beyond those to which responsible Governments should have committed themselves.”[20] It was time for the UN to step in, the sooner the better. Instead, Labour, according to Churchill, was protracting a crisis made catastrophic by its feckless policies:

In fact, as we have seen, the cabinet had authorized a full “offensive” in January, more than a month before Bevin announced plans to appeal to the UN to broker a diplomatic solution. The foreign secretary disingenuously bought more time to subdue the Zionist insurgents, forcing them to offer additional concessions to the Arabs, whose interests now aligned most closely with Britain’s.

In the winter of 1947, Montgomery wasn’t the only one unleashing state-directed coercion on Palestine’s Yishuv. As far back as March 1946, High Commissioner Cunningham had been beefing up his approach to counterinsurgency, bringing in former Royal Marine Commando Colonel William Nicol Gray, who had no policing experience but had seen years of war-tested combat, to take over as police commissioner.

He was known as a “man of action” with “little time for subtle intelligence work”; he was also notorious for his discipline and imperious brusqueness that discomforted some and alienated others.[23]

First and foremost, the insurgency had to be defeated. The dwindling ranks of policemen who “are hated like poison out here and any chance of shooting them is welcomed,” according to one police officer, had to be protected while the Mandate’s leadership devised new strategies.[24]

Ten most wanted men in Palestine, including “Menahem Beigin,” Menachem Begin (top left), 1947

Gray consulted closely with the Colonial Office, MI5 and MI6, the network of Special Operations Executive and Special Air Service operatives, and Attlee himself.[25] Together, they formulated plans for undercover

Gray first tapped Bernard Fergusson to take charge of the Mandate’s clandestine “anti-terrorist activities.”

Fergusson was the Colonial Office’s first choice for Gray’s job, but it wasn’t until the Palestine crisis reached alarming proportions in the fall of 1946 that the War Office was willing to second him to the Mandate’s police force. Fergusson quietly amassed a new fleet of covert operatives, calling them “special squads”

Once in Palestine, he would dress them as civilians, hoping they would pass for members of the Yishuv.[28]

His top recruit was Roy Farran. Short yet chiseled, with sandy blond hair and arresting blue eyes, Farran was the stuff of legend.

Farran was precisely the kind of operative Fergusson needed.[30]

In March 1947, a month after Britain referred Palestine to the UN, Farran landed at Lydda airport together with Alistair McGregor, both resplendent in their new Palestine police uniforms.

Like Farran, McGregor had extensive wartime covert experience in the Special Air Service as well as the Special Operations Executive and MI6. As for their mission, Farran recalled, “We would each have full power to operate as we pleased within our own specific areas. We were to advise on defence against terror and to take an active part in hunting down dissidents. It was to all intents and purposes a carte blanche and the original conception of...

The “Fergusson Force” then suited up to look like kibbutzniks, though few spoke any Hebrew, and the government issued them battered civilian cars and trucks loaded with weapons and ammunition. It also assigned them urban safe houses stocked with supplies. Fergusson’s entire operation rested on making targeted strikes with little or no intelligence to go on. Commando hubris riddled the whole operation. “The circumstances were not right,” Richard Catling recalled. “The scene of operations was not right, the enemy was not right, the population was hostile, everything was against its success.”[32] Farran later insisted that his operation bagged quick victories, but there’s little other than his word for it.

In Britain in the immediate postwar years, MI5 considered the Zionists the nation’s greatest security threat, for good reason.[33] On October 31, 1946, months after the King David Hotel attack, the Irgun had struck the British embassy in Rome, shearing off its ornate exterior wall from roof to ground with the explosive force of a thousand-pound bomb.

Eliyahu Tavin, the Irgun’s point person in Italy, found ready recruits among those who had survived Hitler’s concentration camps only to languish in the displaced persons camps that swelled with refugees whom ...

In all, MI5 estimated there were 350,000 displaced persons across Europe whose desperate fates were hanging in the international negotiating balance. Ya’acov Eliav, better known as “Dynamite Man,” was similarly recruited for Lehi in Europe, from where he targeted Britain. Both Revisionist cells received support and training from the Irish Republican Army, which, in t...

Revisionists were “training members for the purpose of sending them to the United Kingdom to assassinate members of Her Majesty’s Government, Mr Bevin being especially mentioned….Irgun Zvai Leumi and Stern Gang have decided to send five cells to London to operate in a manner similar to the IRA.”[35]

MI5 knew attacks were coming, but it couldn’t infiltrate the Revisionist organizations; nor could it crack the Revisionists’ vertically organized cell structures with members of one cell being purposefully unaware of members in another cell. In March 1947 British intelligence failed to stop Lehi from blowing up the Colonial Club in central London.

On May 4, 1947, Menachem Begin’s men launched another brazen strike in Palestine, this one on Acre prison, another symbol of Britain’s imagined impregnability.[37]

Irgun insurgents managed to overcome seventy-foot-high walls that were three feet thick, medieval-like iron gates and portcullises, and a gargantuan moat to liberate nearly 250 Acre prisoners. Begin called the operation “amongst the most daring attacks of the Hebrew underground and possibly of any underground.”[38]

“The attack on Acre jail has been seen here as a serious blow to British prestige,” London’s Haaretz correspondent wrote the day after the raid.

Foreign journalists called it “the greatest jail break in history” and “an ambitious mission, [the Irgun’s] most challenging so far, in perfect fashion.”

On the evening of May 6, Farran and his men were trolling the tree-lined Jerusalem suburb of Rehavia when they spotted sixteen-year-old Alexander Rubowitz.

Rubowitz had joined the Jewish underground at a young age and was a courier who moved guns around the city and also hung Revisionist posters in streets and alleyways. Sometime around eight p.m. an eyewitness saw a “burly, fair-haired man” chasing Rubowitz down Haran Street. Two other boys nearby saw a six-seater sedan pull up, and after a violent struggle, the men inside forced Rubowitz into the back seat.

Before the car sped off, the boys heard a scream: “I’m from the Rubowitz family.” Next morning, Rubowitz’s brothers inquired about Alexander’s whereabouts at the local police station; coming u...

The search continued, with the Palestine Post picking up the story. Many of the tips that came in pointed directly to Farran. They included a physical description and a felt hat found at the abduction scene with the letters “FAR-AN” or “FARSAN” smudged on its leather headband.[40]