Legacy of Violence: A History of the British Empire

by Caroline Elkins

Meanwhile the security forces were subsumed in a civil war that escalated as the date of their withdrawal drew near. Some of their members openly participated in anti-Zionist attacks, while others deserted to assist the Arabs in preparations for their coming war against the Yishuv.

“The last three months in Palestine were quite horrific,” police officer John Sankey recalled. “We no longer had authority in fact. The two communities were then establishing themselves within their enclaves, and we were driving through, sort of Jewish road blocks and Arab road blocks, and having to submit to being stopped….Clearly

The Zionist War of Independence was already well under way. For the Arabs, it was the start of the Nakba, or the Catastrophe. The British presence quickly became a sideshow to the civil struggle for Palestine’s future, and High Commissioner Cunningham, secretly a Zionist, felt he had to remain neutral; it was therefore his duty “to allow both sides to defend themselves.”[68]

Palestine, United Nations Partition Plan, 1947

On May 14, 1948, at Government House on Jerusalem’s Mount Zion, Cunningham struck the Union Jack, while a lone officer’s bagpipe wept the Highland Lament.

With His Majesty’s last ship sailing out of Haifa and thirty years of tumultuous British rule in Palestine over, the Zionists declared the establishment of the State of Israel, and the territory descended into a brutal war.

Nearby Arab countries sent troops, and the Zionists organized the new Israeli Defense Force (IDF), deriving tactics and strategies from years of British training during the Arab Revolt and the Second World War.[70]

By the time the fighting paused, the Zionists had ground down Arab homes, villages, and communities in ways reminiscent of Britain’s 1930s tactics. “More than half of Palestine’s native population, close to 800,000 people, had been uprooted,” according to the historian Ilan Pappe. “531 villages had be...

The 1948 war proved to be the first of many conflicts, all sides of the Arab-Zionist divide having historically rooted claims to Palestine. It was the gift that the Balfour Declaration and Britain’s vacillating, self-interested policies bequeathed to them.

The use of state-directed violence to enforce British policies and interests created a culture of violence, the legacy of which fueled sensibilities, tactics, and strategies in the Mandate’s aftermath. “I would go so far as to say, after this period of time, that the whole of the troubles in the Middle East which have affected the world since 1948, can be laid fairly and squarely at Britain’s door,” John Beard, who served in the Palestine Police Force for nearly thirty years, recalled.[72]

Britain, exit from the Mandate was another clumsy and humiliating sign of imperial decline.

Britain eventually recognized the State of Israel with Ben-Gurion and Weizmann serving as its first prime minister and president, respectively.

It also crafted a triumphant narrative, entwining the heroics of Orde Wingate with the history of Israel.

In 1990 in the Victoria Embankment Gardens, not far from London’s Ministry of Defence, Prince Philip u...

Beneath the memorial’s life-size profile of Wingate is etched: “A man of genius who might well have become a man of destiny.” This epitaph, bestowed by Churchill, is accompanied by a second one: “An Important Influence in the Creation of the Israel

Defence Force and the Foundation of the State of Israel.”[74]

Such sentiments are not solely British. “Wingate was the father of the IDF,”

Israeli Knesset member Michael Oren recently said. “The IDF today remains Wingatean in terms of its tactics.” On the seventy-fifth anniversary of Wingate’s death in March 2019, The Times of Israel offered a lengthy tribute to the man who “might have become the Israel Defence Force’s first chief of staff” had he lived.

“Many Israeli towns have a Wingate street or square, and relatives and others who share his name are often reminded of Israel’s debt to him.”[75]

At the time of Britain’s ignominious retreat from Palestine, other legacies of British rule there rippled through the empire.

Between 1926 and 1947, around ten thousand men passed through either the police training depot at Jenin or the potential officers training unit outside Ramallah. Over these decades, Palestine’s police force developed a culture all its own. The early years of Irish influence mattered greatly, but so did the acculturating effects of British rule in

Palestine. It had developed its own ethos, training methods, and traditions. Indeed, just as events in Palestine were crucial to the convergence and consolidation of colonial-era legalized lawlessness during the Arab Revolt, they were also pivotal in the evolution of paramilitary mindsets, tactics, and equipment that undulated through the empire with the circulation of thousands of men trained and combat-tested in Palestine.[76]

76] — Two months after Britain’s retreat from the Mandate, Inspector General Nicol Gray stood one last time before his Palestine policemen adorned in their full-dress uniforms, hundreds of them assembled in perfectly aligned rows, eyes forward. Their steely upright postures betrayed a sense of unmitigated pride as George VI, clad in full military dress, surveyed them. There,...

His Majesty put a final discursive imprint on the Mandate’s narrative when he declared to Gray and his force, “You can ...

When George VI congratulated those assembled in July 1948 for “a job well done,” he also emboldened them for their next imperial mission. Nearly fourteen hundred disbanded Palestine policemen soon fanned out across the empire and the Commonwealth.

One of them was John Coles, who developed a strike force in the Gold Coast similar to the Mandate’s. There, in Britain’s West African colony, dozens of other former Palestine policemen joined him.

The Gold Coast’s force expanded to eight thousand, suppressing local rioting and nationalist demands emerging from Kwame Nkrumah and his supporters, some of whom had incubated ideas alongside George Padmore in London. Other agents of empire who had learned ideas and techniques in Britain also made their way to the Gold Coast. Among them was Robin “Tin Eye” Stephens, f...

Stephens had a direct pipeline to Governor Charles Arden-Clarke.

The relationship reflected Stephens’s track record and skills. For years, he routinely oversaw torture techniques to get suspects to talk.

Nkrumah was the West African National Secretariat’s general secretary, and he considered the organization crucial. Its hub in London was a “rendezvous” location, according to Nkrumah, “of all African and West Indian students and their friends. It was there that we used to assemble to discuss our plans, to voice our opinions and air our grievances.”

As the direct conduit to the Gold Coast after 1948, Stephens passed the Home Office’s surveillance of Nkrumah’s London operations on to the colony’s governor.

The Gold Coast was one of several locations around the empire beset with possible Communist threats. In February 1948, in the face of local riots, colonial authorities arrested and locked up Nkrumah. They had discovered on him an unsigned Communist Party of Great Britain membership card, along with notes on something called the “Circle,” an organization about which local intelligence knew nothing.

London top security officials such as Guy Liddell retained their liberal imperial views:

so far as West and East Africa were concerned, there was no evidence of Communism as it was understood in Europe, there was no local Communist Party. There was, however, a lot of nationalism, which received considerable encouragement fro...

It was true that niggers coming here often went to the C.P. This did not mean that they were Communists or that they understood anything about Karl Marx or dialectical materialism: it merely meant that they found the Communists sympathetic because they had no racial discrim...

Thousands of miles away in Malaya, another rebellion was brewing. There the disastrous legacies of the war, together with Britain’s self-interested recovery efforts, witnessed rising levels of civil and labor conflict. Communism also spread among parts of the colony’s Chinese population.

June 16, 1948,

Two days later Britain declared a circumscribed state of emergency.[83]

Attlee’s government turned to those who had just exited Palestine to enforce it. One of Britain’s top choices to lead the way in Malaya was Nicol Gray.

along with nearly five hundred of his policemen, many of them self-described as disgraced, angry, and demoralized over the Mandate’s loss.

Initially, Richard Catling was not among them.

Had he not caught Gray’s eye at Buckingham Palace, he would have gone to Greece. But Gray needed Catling’s help in Malaya’s intelligence unit and wouldn’t take no for an answer. “You’re coming with me!” Gray barked to his old comrade, and by August 1948, the two men and scores of others fresh out of the crucible that was Palestine’s final months were on planes to the Malay...

To understand why Gray, Catling, and hundreds of former Palestine policemen were en route to Kuala Lumpur, we need

to return to Southeast Asia in the aftermath of the Second World War.

chain of events, each one contingent on the one before, fueled Chinese anger that had been building around British economic policies and concerted attempts...

These struggles coalesced, and as often happened, isolated events, in this case the murders of Malaya’s European planters in June 1948, trigged the empire’s defenses.

Malaya, nearly three years before the Palestine veterans boarded their planes for Kuala Lumpur,

It was mid-November 1945, and the city was host to members of the Malayan Peoples’ Anti-Japanese Army,

For British officials, the day was a symbolic end to the humbling and disgraceful necessities that Singapore’s fall engendered, and a return to Malaya’s status quo.