Another Book Review of "Major Farran's Hat"

Jonathan S. Tobin is executive editor of COMMENTARY and someone I know for some 25 years. He also has reviewed the new book on the Roy Farran-Alexander Rubovitz incident, as I did.

Some excerpts from: "The Trilby That Sank an Empire"

An English nursery rhyme tells the tale of how for “want of a nail a shoe was lost,” which leads eventually to the loss of a horse, a rider, a battle, and a kingdom, “all for the loss of a horseshoe nail.” Major Farran’s Hat, David Cesarani’s new work of popular history, recounts the 20th century’s great horseshoe-nail story, in which the loss of a mere gentleman’s hat played a significant role in the British Empire’s humiliating defeat and retreat from Palestine in 1947. Now, to be sure, even if British Major Roy Farran had not been exposed by his missing topper as the abductor of a Jewish teenager who was subsequently tortured and murdered, the British would not have been able to hold on to a fractious possession where, even more so than in most other post–World War II colonial conflicts, the forces of empire had everything going against them.

...The fallout from the discovery of the major’s hat, which implicated him and his superiors in the barbaric murder of Alexander Rubowitz in May 1947, was a perfect illustration of the incoherence of the British imperial claim to be upholding the rule of law in Palestine even as the empire roughly imposed itself on the Jews and Arabs resident there. Though his riveting account of crime and non-punishment is the centerpiece of Major Farran’s Hat, Cesarani’s ancillary interest is to lay bare the fallacies that underpinned Britain’s counterterrorist strategy...

As Cesarani ably shows, there are few worse examples in the annals of counterterrorist warfare than the record of Britain in Palestine from 1945 to 1948—and the failure was due primarily to the fact that the government of Prime Minister Clement Atlee could never make up its mind about what it wanted in Palestine...

Britain’s initial strategy was to isolate the Irgun and the LEHI with the help of other Jews. That worked for a while, since Begin’s impudent declaration of war on the British in 1944 while the Allies were still fighting Nazi Germany struck most Jews as folly at best and insanity at worst...By the end of 1945, Irgun and LEHI attacks on British targets had won not only the sympathy of the Jewish population but also the cooperation of the Haganah...

...Farran, a decorated veteran of commando actions against the Germans during World War II, was deployed to Palestine to lead a special squad tasked with tracking down the Jewish underground. Armed with only a vague prejudice against Zionism and Jews, with no intelligence worthy of the name or knowledge of the languages spoken in the country, operating blindly, and lacking cooperation from the population, Farran’s unit never had a chance of doing much harm to the Irgun or the LEHI, let alone the Haganah. The hope the British high command had nevertheless invested in Farran and his men was ultimately destroyed by the Rubowitz affair.

...Farran’s squad nabbed him. Frustrated by his inability to make a dent in any of the Jewish groups, Farran drove Rubowitz out of the city to the desert near Jericho and brutally interrogated him. The boy could not have known much and apparently said little to please his captors. A day later Farran admitted to his commander, Colonel Bernard Fergusson, that he had personally smashed Rubowitz’s head in with several blows from a rock and then left the bloody body where he hoped it might be devoured by animals...Farran fled to Syria before he could be arrested. Eventually he was enticed to return to Palestine, where, after another comic escape and surrender, he was court-martialed in September for his role in Rubowitz’s death.

But the trial did nothing to reinforce respect for British rule. Evidence in army records of the crime was not brought to light; Farran’s written confession was ruled inadmissible; and Fergusson was allowed to avoid testifying about his knowledge of the murder because he might have incriminated himself. The preordained verdict of “not guilty” was handed down, and Farran was spirited back to England as Jewish Palestine seethed. The Atlee government, however, faced embarrassing questions about Farran from Parliament.

As Menachem Begin later wrote in his memoirs, it was precisely the limits that the British placed on themselves as representatives of a democratic country unwilling to commit mass atrocities that ensured the empire’s defeat. Under the bright spotlight of the international media, the British military’s effort to fight a dirty war against the Jews was undermined by the expectation of their own government...

...Less insightful is the author’s misleading injunction that British and other NATO troops now tasked with counterterrorism in Iraq and Afghanistan in particular avoid the same mistakes. The circumstances Western troops find themselves in today bear no resemblance to the situation faced by the British in Palestine. The lesson to be learned here is not one about the folly of unleashing a ruthless fighter like Farran but instead one of first principles. Counterterrorism can only be successful when those whom it seeks to protect actually want to be protected and cooperate with the forces fighting the terrorists. Farran found himself turning to extralegal violence because he was trying to root out Jewish groups that were in many cases not only acting to protect their own people but also whose existence was a legitimate expression of suppressed Jewish political ambitions. Any attempt to link Farran’s tactics with contemporary targeted killings of al-Qaeda or Taliban operatives cannot be sustained. Similarly, the State of Israel’s attempts to forestall Arab terrorist attacks on its population cannot be compared with the last gasps of the British Empire in the same territory...