Legacy of Violence: A History of the British Empire

by Caroline Elkins

Farran and his men had driven twenty-five kilometers to Jericho where, in a remote olive grove, they tied Rubowitz to a tree “for further questioning.” Farran recalled that he “had gone further than he should in trying to make the youth talk,” during which time he “had killed the youth by bashing his head in with a stone and that knife wounds had been added to the body after death.

[He also said that] the dead youth’s clothing had been removed and burned and that the body had been left unburied somewhere in the o...

The morning after, Farran confessed these events to Fergusson, who then went to great lengths—along with many higher-ups in Palestine and members of ...

At the end of May, Inspector General Gray had to launch an official investigation. Farran fled to Syria, where he hoped to parlay a deal within the old boy channels.

In mid-June his luck seemed to run out when he was apprehended and brought back to Jerusalem, where he awaited his trial in a heavily guarded military court.

The courtroom drama was poised to expose not just the inner workings of Gray and Fergusson’s hit squads but also the lengths to which officials all the way up the chain of command went to cover them up, along with Farran’s murderous deed.[42]

In the pared-down, two-day trial that opened on October 1, 1947, Farran refused to testify in the face of possible self-incrimination. The court ruled his confession inadmissible due to an exaggerated interpretation of attorney-client privilege. Without a body, the eyewitness accounts of the abduction were circumstantial. According to Farran’s counsel, English law was clear: given the evidence, or lack thereof, the defendant could not be charged with murder. After fifteen minutes of deliberation, the military panel agreed. It acquitted Farran, and cheers of “jolly good show” filled the courtroom packed with British officers.

Nonetheless, he made his way to London to shake hands with a beaming U.S. general who pinned him with the American Legion of Merit medal for his bravery and leadership during World War II. A few months later Farran was back at Buckingham Palace where George VI decorated him with a Distinguished Service Order medal and whispered to Roy that “he was very glad the whole business was over.”

The Revisionists, however, were still targeting Roy, leaving a package bomb on his doorstep. It detonated, killing Roy’s brother, Rex.

The pillar of empire Roy Farran eventually made his way to Canada, where he took his place alongside earlier IRA targets pensioni...

On June 16, as the Farran scandal was unfolding, a British military court found the three Acre prison defendants—Habib, Nakar, and Weiss—guilty, sentencing them to the gallows. Habib addresse...

You [British tyrants] set up gallows, you murdered in the streets, you exiled, you ran amok and stupidly believed that by dint of persecution you would break the spirit of resistance of free Irishmen….If you were wise, British tyrants, and would learn from history, the example of Ireland or of America would be enough to convince you that you ought to hurry out of our country, which is enveloped in the flames of holy revolt, flames which ar...

Britain’s commanding military officer refused to commute the execution orders. The Irgun was poised to reciprocate.

Weeks later, on the evening of July 11, 1947, Sergeants Clifford Martin and Mervyn Paice, members of British Army Intelligence, made their way to the

Gan Vered Café, a small coffee shop not far from their military camp in north Netanya, where they met with Aharon Weinberg, one of the handful of Haganah intelligence officers who was willing to do business in the aftermath of the King David Hotel bombing and myriad other Revisionist strikes. As they strolled home afterward, a large black sedan pulled up beside them, and five masked men wielding machine guns jumped out, clubbed, chloroformed, and bound and gagged all three, then shoved them into the vehicle and sped off. Martin and Paice were taken to an abandoned diamond f...

cubic-meter underground cell complete with oxygen tanks, food, and a toilet bucket. Begin’s men then dumped Weinberg, bound but alive, in a nearby orange grove, where he eventually wrestle...

The unsuccessful searches and harsh crackdown measures accompanying them triggered seventy separate Revisionist incidents in less than two weeks after the sergeants’ abductions,

which was more than in the prior three months combined.[45]

On July 29, two weeks after the sergeants’ kidnapping, Habib, Nakar, and Weiss sang “Ha-Tikva” as they made their way to the hangman. Hours after their executions, Begin instructed his men...

Earlier, an Irgun court had found the British sergeants guilty of a host of Revisionist-defined crimes that included “illegal entry into our homeland” and “membership in the British criminal-terrorist organization.” Irgun operatives summarily removed the two men from below the diamond factory floor and hung them. For deliberate effect, Begin’s men blindfolded the baby-faced soldiers in their khaki shi...

They also pinned straight through the sergeants’ flesh and bloodied undershirts the ...

The Zionist insurgents then evaded swarms of security force patrols and, in a nearby eucalyptus grove, hung the bound corpses from a pair of trees. Two days later an army patrol discovered the bodies. The press corps was called to witness the scene. An army captain cut Martin down, and the corpse fell onto an undetected mine below. The blast shredded what was left ...

In Tel Aviv, police went on a rampage. They burned buses and homes and tossed grenades into cafés and other civilian establishments.

Britain witnessed five days of unprecedented anti-Semitic riots, which broke out first in Liverpool, then spread throughout the country. Rioters burned synagogues and ransacked shops; in all, they destroyed over three hundred Jewish establishments and defaced others with graffiti and signs reading “Hang all Jews,” “Hitler was right,” and “Destroy Judah.”[49] The press fueled public anger. Newspapers printed the mutilated images of the sergeants day after day and often refused to run Jewish condemnations of Revisionist terrorism.

“hanged britons: Picture that will shock the world,” Daily Express, August 1, 1947

The Zionists weren’t alone in deploying brutal tactics and being scorned for them.

Some of the charges were wholly justified, the British government knowing well that anti-Semitism was spreading among its security forces. One British officer warned Bevin’s office that “Goebbels has many apt pupils wearing British uniform in Palestine”

Britain, anti-Semitism’s rise corresponded with the Revisionists’ relentless attacks against “British prestige.”

As far as many Britons were concerned, liberal imperialism was literally being blown to smithereens and its entrails scattered across the Holy Land for all to see. Either Attlee’s men had to crush the Zionists using every means necessary, or Britain had to get out of Palestine.

With nearly one-tenth of the army deployed there, the war was costing British taxpayers £40 million a year in military expenses alone.

Equals 1.8-2 Billion pounds in 2025 In 2024 US Aid to Israel ws $17.9 Billion

“The time has come not to examine international or Arab or Jewish or even American interests in Palestine, but to write the British balance sheet,”

Once again the repressive center could not hold, and Begin was promising to finish Britain off in Palestine. “You did not expect it—dirty oppressors? But we warned you,” the Irgun’s underground radio, Voice of Fighting Zion, announced in August, days before The Economist

voiced its concerns. “We warned you day in and day out, that just as we smashed your whips we would uproot your gallows—or, if we did not succeed in uprooting them, we would set up next to your gallows, gallows for you….And we have not yet settled our hanging accounts with you, Nazi-British enslavers.”[54]

The Labour MP Harold Lever castigated his government for “two years of planless, gutless and witless behavior which has not only cost us treasure in terms of money but uncountable treasure in manpower and loss of life…[...

We stayed on in Ireland until we were virtually driven out.”[55] Churchill urged his fellow members in the House to “take stock round the world at the present moment”:

We declare ourselves ready to abandon the mighty Empire and Continent of India with all the work we have done in the last 200 years, territory over which we possess unimpeachable sovereignty. The Government are, apparently, ready to leave 400 million Indians to fall into all the horrors of sanguinary civil war—civil war compared to which anything that could happen in Palestine would be microscopic; wars of elephants compared with wars of mice.[56]

it was Britain’s method of rule in India, dividing populations and hastily abdicating responsibility in the face of incipient violence, that helped define the Raj’s legacy. Events were poised to obliterate the remaining luster on British imperial resurgence in Palestine.

The UN Special Committee on Palestine hastened Britain’s exit terms. In the summer of 1947, its delegation undertook a probing fact-finding mission, and two of its members were on hand to witness yet another British public relations disaster.

That Britain had thought it a good idea to intercept the Exodus on July 18, 1947, while the UN’s special committee was undertaking its work in Palestine, was sheer folly.

1960 movie starring Paul Newman , based on the book by Leon Uris. Screenplay by Dalton Trumbo

Having set sail from France, the boat carried 4,500 Holocaust survivors. As it neared Palestine, British troops boarded it, and after a fierce hand-to-hand struggle, three Jews were dead and scores of others injured.

Security forces awaited the seized vessel at Haifa, where its men forced the remaining refugees onto three British boats primed to ca...

Nearly all the Holocaust survivors aboard were deposited in Hamburg, from where they were taken by rail to either Poppendorf or Am Stau, two displaced persons camps. Three members of the UN’s special co...

In September 1947, the UN Special Committee on Palestine released a hundred-plus-page report. Its eleven members unanimously recommended ending the British mandate in Palestine, and the majority supported partition.

Two

months later, the UN general assembly overwhelmingly supported the adoption of Resolution 181: Palestine, after a period of British mandatory trusteeship to end no later than August 1, 1948, would be carved into two independent states, one Arab the other Jewish, linked by a joint economic oversight board, as well as a “special international regime” for the City of Jerusalem administered by the UN. The Zionists acc...

Bevin and other British officials had miscalculated UN sentiment and underestimated Sumner Welles’s organizing ability ...

That British forces had blown up Jewish refugee boats and blamed the Arabs and Soviets for their handiwork mattered little in Bevin’s calculus of fairness.

As far as he was concerned, the UN recommendation was “so manifestly unjust to the Arabs that it is difficult to see how…we could reconcile it with our conscience.”[63]

Hemorrhaging money and men, with the Mandate poised to descend into civil war, Britain moved its exit date forward. In their final months, Palestine’s administrators, confined largely to their security zones, which the locals derisively called “Bevingrads,” destroyed documents.