Empire of Secrets: British Intelligence, the Cold War and the Twilight of Empire. Calder Walton

his Declaration left a good deal of doubt, failing to explain what the nature of the Jewish homeland in Palestine would be, leading to the joke that Palestine was the twice promised land.¹⁸

      Despite the British government’s clear wording in the Balfour Declaration of its intention to create a ‘National Home for Jewish People’, it was subsequently interpreted by many Zionists as a pledge to create a Jewish state, not just a state for Jews. The description of Palestine by the Zionist writer Israel Zangwill as ‘a land without people for a people without land’ apparently overlooked the fact that Arabs and Christians had been living there for generations. At the time of the Balfour Declaration, the Jewish community in Palestine (the Yishuv) numbered 85,000, while the Arab population was 750,000, but over subsequent years Jewish immigration steadily increased, so that by 1946 the Jewish population totalled 600,000. Growing levels of Jewish immigration to Palestine soon sparked off major Arab disturbances in response. In 1933 the Syrian Wahhabist preacher Izz al-Din al-Qassam launched pro-intifada attacks on Jews and the British police in Palestine – for which he is commemorated to this day by teams of Palestinian suicide bombers, who remember him as the leader of the first Palestinian armed nationalist grouping.

      It was largely in response to increased levels of Jewish immigration that in 1936 a major Arab revolt erupted, lasting until 1939. The so-called ‘Arab Revolt’ was only put down by a tough response from the British military and police, who, backed up by the RAF, fought Arab forces in pitched battles. The British military and the Palestine police inflicted brutal interrogations on Arab insurgents, a practice that was known as ‘duffing up’ after one especially robust police officer, Douglas Duff, who before serving in the Palestine Police had been one of the Black and Tans in Ireland. British forces also collaborated with Haganah, which had been formed in 1921 in response to anti-Jewish violence in Palestine. Applying the military doctrine that the best form of defence is offence, the British military leader Captain (subsequently Major General) Orde Wingate – whose Christian beliefs made him a natural Zionist supporter – established ‘Special Night Squads’, whose ranks consisted of Haganah and British volunteers, and included legendary future Israeli military leaders such as Moshe Dayan. Wingate would later be famed for creating the Chindits, a special-forces airborne deep-penetration unit, who were trained to operate far behind enemy lines in Japanese-occupied territories in the Far East during the Second World War.¹⁹

      The British government generally favoured the position of Arabs in Palestine, despite the anti-British violence unleashed there during the Arab Revolt. This was because the Chiefs of Staff in London, their views coloured by nostalgic memories of Lawrence of Arabia, feared doing anything that could destabilise Palestine, which was a crucial strategic base from which to guard the eastern Mediterranean, the gateway to the Suez Canal, and the vital supply route to the subcontinent of India. The Arab Revolt revealed to London that an orgy of violence between Jews and Arabs would arise if Jewish immigration to Palestine were not restricted. Military and Colonial Office mandarins were also worried about provoking the sixty million Muslims living in India. As a result, in 1939 the British government published a White Paper limiting the number of Jewish immigrants to Palestine to a total of 75,000 over the next five years, which effectively meant a quota of 1,250 immigrants per month.²⁰

      When the war in Europe broke out, the majority of the Yishuv remained strongly opposed to the White Paper, but nevertheless supported Britain in the conflict. The Zionist leader David Ben-Gurion said that Jews had to fight the war as if there were no White Paper, and the White Paper as if there were no war. The British Army quickly found recruits for a special unit it formed, the Jewish Brigade, which acted as a counterpart to the Nazi SS Division of Muslims that fought in the Balkans. However, matters soon became more complicated. In 1941 the Haganah established a special ‘commando’ unit, the Palmach, one of the aims of which was to fight anyone, including the British, who opposed increased levels of Jewish immigration to Palestine. It was during a Palmach operation that Moshe Dayan lost an eye. Furthermore, for a minority of so-called ‘Revisionist’ Zionists, even the Palmach’s ‘resistance’ against the British was not enough. Revisionists were so-called because they purported to revise the ideas of Zionism. They pursued a fanatical right-wing agenda, taking inspiration from the extremist writings of the Polish Zionist politician Vladimir Jabotinsky. Their beliefs lay in sharp contrast to the broadly left-wing politics of the majority of the Yishuv, who followed a generally socialist agenda tinged with Marxism – reflective of which is the fact that Israel did not elect a right-wing government until the 1970s. Revisionists dispensed with traditional Jewish doctrine of restraint (havlagah), rejected mainstream Zionist aspirations derived from Herzl’s writings in the 1880s, and instead believed that it was necessary to fight for the establishment of an independent and predominantly Jewish state in Palestine (eretz Israel) on both sides of the river Jordan. The cornerstones of Revisionist Zionism were a belief that the Haganah’s reliance on defence was inadequate given the wartime threat, and more offensive action was needed; that the British must be compelled to fulfil their pledges to protect and defend the Yishuv; that neither Britain nor Jews would ever placate the Arabs with political concessions or buy them off with economic development; and that an ‘iron wall’ had to be erected to separate the two peoples in Palestine.

      The main Revisionist fighters were the Irgun and the Stern Gang. The Irgun had been established in 1931 in opposition to the ‘moderate’ policies pursued by the Haganah, and was led first by David Raziel and then, after 1944, by Menachem Begin, a future Prime Minister of Israel. One of the reasons Begin was chosen as the Irgun leader was that he was invisible to British intelligence and the Palestine Police. After fleeing his native Poland to escape invading Nazi forces, he was arrested by the Soviet NKVD and sent to a Gulag, from which he escaped, it seems with the assistance of Soviet intelligence, to Palestine. The Irgun guessed rightly that because of his itinerant background, Begin would not appear on Britain’s wartime intelligence’s radar. Under Begin’s command, the Irgun specialised in bombing buildings and other infrastructure, and by 1945 was estimated by British intelligence to have between 5,000 and 6,000 members – figures that were exaggerated, perhaps by as much as three times, due to the difficulties in penetrating the Irgun with agents.

      The Stern Gang was an even smaller and more extremist group than the Irgun, from which it split in 1940 because the Irgun was too ‘moderate’. It was led by Avraham Stern, a romantic poet, former philosopher and gunman, whom the British eventually eliminated in 1942. The circumstances of Stern’s death were controversial. It appears that a Palestine police officer, Geoffrey Morton, shot him dead while he was unarmed and un-handcuffed, apparently as he was attempting to jump out of a window. Thereafter the Stern Gang’s leadership included the future seventh Israeli Prime Minister, Yitzhak Shamir, who was the architect of Lord Moyne’s assassination and who adopted the nom de guerre ‘Michael’ in honour of Sinn Féin’s Michael Collins. The Stern Gang’s speciality was political assassinations, and by 1945 it was estimated to have between three hundred and five hundred members – again an inflated estimate, but about the same number of trigger-pulling members as there then were in the IRA.²¹

      After the Stern Gang’s assassination of Moyne in 1944, the Haganah helped the British to track down Stern Gang members – a period known as the ‘hunting season’, or Sezon. Zionist political leaders initially hoped that the 1945 election victory in Britain of the Labour Party, traditionally a supporter of the Zionist cause, would help to ease British restrictions on Jewish immigration to Palestine. However, their hopes were soon dashed. The new British Foreign Secretary, Ernest Bevin, came to office with a background as a tough trade union negotiator, and had formerly been a supporter of the creation of a Jewish state, but within days of coming to power he changed his mind – and thus became public enemy number one for Zionist Revisionists, who regarded him as the main impediment to eretz Israel. Bevin’s policy over Palestine was not shaped by closet ‘anti-Semitism’, a claim that has often been made, but instead by his belief that a civil war would break out between Jews and Arabs if unrestricted Jewish immigration were permitted in Palestine. That said, he often displayed shocking insensitivity, joking that the US government supported mass immigration to Palestine ‘because they did not want too many Jews in New York’, and when power cuts threw one set of Anglo–Jewish negotiations in 1947 into literal darkness,