The Palmach and the Arabs Up Until November 1947

I have in the past dealt with the issue of the presumed "better morality" of the Palmach pre-state defence units under the aegis of the left-wing socialist Zionist parties, Ahdut Ha'Avoda and HaShomer HaTzair. Their claim was always that the Irgun and the Lechi were but fascists and blackguards and roughnecks.

However, Palmach members also were involved in activities that today would land them in an international tribunal for 'war crimes'.

I blogged about the attack on an Arab village.

I also blogged about castrations of Arab rapists.

 The Book of the Palmach 

published in 1957 contains more instances which I will briefly summarize.

Starting on page 602 and continuing until 605, under the heading "Guerrilla Actions" or "Small-scale Combat", several anti-Arab reprisal attacks are described.

For example, in the autumn of 1943 (the actual time was March 1942), a three-man squad of Pluga Alef entered a Bedouin encampment near Waldheim (today's Alonei Abba) 

to avenge the murder of Alexander Zaid. Zaïd was murdered on July 10, 1938 when ambushed by an Arab gang while on his way to meet members of kibbutz Alonim. The killer was Qassem Tabash, a Bedouin from the al-Hilaf tribe. He was killed in reprisal in front of some 20 of his fellow tribemen.

By the way, the Palmach eliminated two Germans at the Templar village there as well in 1948.

In February 1944, a squad from Pluga Alef were in the vicinity of Masada on a training trek. Near Ein Gedi, they were set upon by armed Beduoin brigands and, in defending themselves, killed two in an exchange of fire.

During the spring of 1945, the Palmach was involved in leading clandestine immigration overland from Lebanon. On occasion, they were set upon by Arab gang members who demanded, with threat of death, a payment as if a toll crossing. To halt this practice, members of Pluga Gimel disguised themselves as Arabs, crossed into Lebanon, engaged the gang members in conversation and then opened fire and killed several. This put an end to the attempts to threaten Jews coming into the homeland.

In the spring of 1947, Arab terror was resurrected. Two Jews were murdered in mid-May and the Palmach determined that a cafe in Fajja village, some 2 kilometers east of Petah Tikva,  was a gang headquarters for members of the Arab Al-Suwerka tribe. It was subsequently attacked on May 21. 

Palestine Post, May 22, 1947

More on this incident here.

Another incident occured in August 1947 at the Cafe Hawai. Following a murderous robbery attempt, the Palmach and Hagan made a reprisal raid a week later:

Palestine Post, August 17, 1947

On October 7, 1947, a Palmach unit set out on a reprisal raid against a murderous gang near Kfar Syrkin who had killed two Jews previously that week.

Palestine Post, October 7, 1947

That evening, a Palmach squad set out to the orchards near Rosh Ha'Ayin to find the gang. In the battle, three gang members were killed, as well as a Jaffa prostitute who was spending the vening there, and one was wounded.

Palestine Post, October 8, 1947

A few incidents happened in the fall on the Negev protecting the supply and transportation lines to the kibbutzim there.

As a result of the start of the Arab-Israel War of 1947-49, the situation only worsened.

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Why Did England Turn to the UN in 1947?

Einat Wilf, together with Adi Schwartz, has just had a new book published.  Entitled The War of  Return, it seeks to explain, as its subtitle reads: How Western Indulgence of the Palestinian Dream Has Obstructed the Path to Peace. It seems to be an important contribution to the pushback against the maliciousness and malignant misrepresentations of Arab propaganda.

An excerpt can be found here.

There is a typo which caught my eye which reads that

the Mandate, which was given to Britain in 1920 by the newly created League of Nations

That should be, arguably, 1922. True, the Mandate was decided upon in 1920 by a decision of the Supreme Council of the League of Nations at its conference in San Remo but it was phrased in general language, that “a Mandatory” be responsible for putting the Balfour Declaration into effect but without formally naming Great Britain. It was only in 1922 that the British Mandate, with all its 25 Articles, came into force voted upon by the full plenum of the League of 50 countries.  There is even an opinion that it was only in 1923 that the mandates administrating the countries evolving from the vanquished Turkish Ottoman empire came into force. 

But what caught my brain was this

The violent intercommunal struggle between Jews and Arabs, which started almost at the outset of British rule in the 1920s, eventually exhausted Britain, which decided to refer the question of Palestine to the United Nations 

That surely is wrong.

Between August 1939 and August 1947, there was no “intercommunal conflict” between Jews and Arabs. The Arabs had already gained their political goals in 1939 with the publication in May of the infamous White Paper which unilaterally altered the terms of the 1922 Mandate from reconstituting a Jewish National Home to establishing a state in Palestine, restricted land purchaces and severely curtailed Jewish immigration.

As stated therein:

Palestine was not to be converted into a Jewish State...His Majesty's Government...objective is self government, and to see established ultimately an independent Palestine State. It should be a State in which the two peoples in Palestine, Arabs and Jews, share authority in government in such a way that the essential interests of each are shared. 

There was, of course, normative Arab acts of murder, rape, theft and property damage against Jews but not in any organized fashion nor as part of acts conducted at the direction of a political command.  

The May 15, 1948 British White Paper is clear on who caused them to turn to the United Nations in early 1947:

a campaign of terrorism waged by highly organized Jewish forces equipped with all the weapons of the modern infantryman. Since the war, 338 British subjects had been killed in Palestine, while the military forces there had cost the British taxpayer 100 million pounds. 

That is, the underground war declared by Yair and the Lechi beginning in 1940, the revolt of the Irgun declared by Menachem Begin in 1944 and the United Resistance Movement of the Palmach and Hagana when they joined the Irgun and Lechi during 1945-1946.

I look forward to reading the book in its entirety.

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The Other Tale or What Matti Friedman Missed

Makor Rishon published an interiew-review with Matti Friedman now that his new book has been published in Hebrew. The book, `Spies of No Country` is based mostly on the reminisces of four former members of the pre-State Palmah`s “Arab Section”. It was first called the `Mista’arvim Unit` which engaged in intelligence gathering and sabotage operations both in the territory of the Palestine Mandate and in Arab countries.

The story is important, even if a Forward reviewer thinks negatively of  Friedman`s book (it avoids the `moral` question of killing and links up with the current `political` question) although he did express appreciation of the book. In fact, two of the protaganists have already published their memoirs, one almost 30 years ago and another 18 years ago.

I have not read the book (but commented on it briefly). But from what I have read, I do not think Friedman related to the issue of Jews spying and operating in Arab neighborhoods and countries, disguised as Arabs but simply the Shachar Unit of the Palmah.

If, indeed, that is the case, I would wish to make sure that the other two pre-State undergrounds also had their own Jews-as-Arabs agents.

On July 26, 1938, five years prior to the establishment of the Palmah unit, the Irgun sent Yaakov Raz, 

dressed as an Arab porter into Jerusalem`s Old City market area on a reprisal mission following Arab terror attacks on the Jewish population.

He took part in attacks against Arabs in reprisals for attacks against Jews, and in his last operation, he was suspected by Arab passersby who grabbed him and dumping his vegetable basket, revealing a bomb. He was severely wounded when they fell upon him nd stabbed him repeatedly. Arrested by the British, he was subjected to constant interrogations and at the beginning of August, he felt he was too weak to prevent an accidental divulging of secret information he was party to while delirious, and so, under the covers, removed his bandages and undid his stitches thus bleeding to death. Israel`s national poet Uri Zvi Greenberg wrote a poem in his honor:
  
...Does anyone know how his face shone in the Jerusalem dawn?
I know, I know his face, for I shine in its light
He was sent forth from Lachish and Betar
A single man, enemies felled by his might.
So once walked, in the early hours of Jerusalem...
...Among demeaned Jews, among Jewish slaves
The lone hero and most beautiful person.
As the attackers circled and pierced him through
Taking their meals or stretched out in bed,
The Jews of Zion, the listless Jews,
Did not know whose body fell dead.

Another Irgun fighter was Rachel Ohevet-Ami (Havshush), born of Yeminite and Moroccan parents. On June 9, 1939, she was given a 15-kilogram food basket with the bomb hidden underneath to be brought to the entrance of the Central Jerusalem Prison on the day it was full of Arabs coming to visit the Arab gang members imprisoned fpor anti-British and anti-Jewish terror. She donned traditional dress including a veil. It being too heavy for her, she requested a young Arab to help her. After being paid, he went to a guard and told him there was something suspicious as the girl`s Arabic was not local, the basket was unduly heavy and it contained Jewish-style bread. She was arrested despite a struggle. A British demolitions expert defused the time mechanism (a few days later, another Irgun bomb at the Central Post Office killed him as he dattempted to defuse it)

In a 1964 photograph

At her trial, the judges accept the testimony that she was not yet 18 years old and instead of the gallows - Emergency Regulations had supplanted normal legal procedures at this time - she was sentenced to life imprisonment.

A third Irgunist was Baruch Mizachi. 

Born a Moslem Arab in Safad, he became a member of Betar, converted and joined its fighting ranks. He was detained and flown off to Eritrea where he was wounded by gunfire from the guards. He had insisted that he be allowed to take his tallit and tefillin with him to exile. 

Upon his return, he was sent on April 18, 1948 on an intelligence mission to Jab`a, a village near Jenin, the site of the headquarters of the Arab Liberation Army whose commander, Fawzi al-Qawuqji, led during 1936 the Army of the Arab Revolution in South-Syrian Palestine. At a roadblock he was identified, taken to a cave near Jab`a and executed, his body found only after 1967 and reburied.

A Lechi fighter, Elisha Ivzov, was also operating in Arab districts disguised as an Arab. On January 4, 1948, he drove a lorry loaded with with explosives into Jaffa and parked it in an alley adjacent to the Sariah Building, headquarters for the Arabs military units attacking Tel Aviv and its environs. Dozens died and scores were injured in the blast.

On March 5, another truck was loaded with a ton or so of explosives and Elisha drove off 

to Jab`a to eliminate the ALA command center. At the Tannin roadblock, like Mizrachi after him, he was stopped. His guide gave him away. Two British Army deserters who had prepared bombs for the Arabs in Jerusalem, attempted to defuse the bomb but it went off, killing them and others. Elisha was then summarily shot dead and buried in nearby Kuffeir. In 1950, his body was exhumed and returned to Israel.


And so, there is another story to tell. Palmah undercover agents were not the only, and, indeed, not the first to so operate. 

^

Palmach vs. Palmach and What About That Castration?

I caught this in Haaretz this week:

“Have a little sensitivity. Our generation may be nearing the end of the road, but we have children, grandchildren and families,” said Maj. Gen. (res.) Amos Horev, 92, on Wednesday.Horev, a Palmach veteran, has joined the Palmach veterans’ protest against a cabinet decision to build a permanent memorial to former minister Rehavam Ze’evi at the national memorial site at Sha’ar Hagai, near Jerusalem – one of the symbols of the Palmach generation and its Harel Brigade.“The Israeli government did a terrible thing; this isn’t wise or fair,” said Horev, who took part in Palmach battles near Jerusalem in the War of Independence.

A "terrible thing"?

Not "wise"?

Not "fair"?

No "sensitivity"?


A little research will reveal something interesting about Horev, who waves about now the banner of "purity of arms".

In 1945 a series of sexual assaults troubled the Jewish inhabitants of Beit She’an Valley [and] motivated the regional commander of the Haganah to react. The suspect was identified shortly after the first incident...[as] Aref Ben Ahmad Esh Sharida, a nineteen year old Arab from Biesan, was arrested, identified [ Amos Nevo, a journalist who interviewed Palmachniks who participated in the operation, identifies the rapist as Mohammad Tawash. This indiscrepancy might be attributed to the fact that the rapist had an accomplice. Amos Nevo, "The Punishment," Yediot Ahronot April 30, 1993]...members of the Palmach, the striking forces of the Haganah, made their own inquiries about the identity and whereabouts of the suspect, and resolved to castrate him (after two more sexual assaults had occurred). The operation was approved by the Palmach’s chief commander, Isaac Sadeh, who decided they should teach a lesson, but not kill. A Palmach unit prepared for the operation. Undercover agents gathered information about the suspect and consulted with a doctor [Mendele of the Kupat Holim Clalit] who instructed them how to use ether and which veins to cut. Disguised as Arabs, they came to the suspect’s house and lured him to come with them to a wadi. Despite the anaesthesia their victim remained confused and active, and was therefore stunned with a club’s blow on his head. The primitive operation was performed with a shaving knife and the veins were tied with a shoe lace...The brutal castration was commemorated in a popular Hebrew song “We castrated you, Mohammed!”...

Two members of the Palmach unit were Yochai Bin-Nun and ... Amos Horev, himself. A book by Gamliel Cohen, “Undercover: The Untold Story of the Palmach’s Undercover Arab Unit,” published by the Ministry of Defense and the Galili Center for Defense Studies, provides more details.

Would Ze'evi had done this?

__________________

UPDATE

To be fair to the Hagana:

A similar occurrence took place in late 1946, when a mentally-ill Jewish woman was raped near Ramat Gan by an Arab greengrocer from Sheik Munes, who was consequently arrested, but released on bail despite his admission. (HA 173-23, HA 177-27).  The Haganah abducted the man, Mahmoud Mohammad Shoulabi, upon his release. The castration was performed in a forest near a governmental hospital (Bellinson Hospital, in Petach Tiqva), by Dr. Reuven (Rudolph) Meir, a psychiatrist. After the operation, an anonymous caller notified the police about a wounded Arab in the forest. Mahmoud was hospitalized. He was eventually convicted, but given a short sentence in consideration of what he had gone through. One Haganah member indicated that after a while the castrated victim became their informant, and was subsequently murdered by fellow Arabs who suspected him.  A critical Jewish newspaper article titled “Rascals take the law into their own hands” denounced the operation.

^

The "Saison" To Be Debated

There'll be a panel discussion on the "Saison" period during the pre-state Yishuv institutions when the dissidents, that is, the Irgun and to a lesser extent, the Lechi, were hounded by the Palmah, beaten, incarcerated in caves, interrogated and handed over to the British:

If I could attend, but I cannot, I would ask this in the Q & A session, if there'll be one:

Since the Palmah and Hagana engaged in activities no less morally "impure" than those they opposed, such as the assassination of a British officer, Thomas Bruce in October 1947 simply for breaking the fingers of Palmahniks from Birya, or murdering suspected collaborators with the British such as Mordechai Berger in March 1947 or the three in Haifa in 1940 suspected of informing on illegal arms held by the Hagana, was the Palmah morally superior or simply blindly obedient to a more powerful political, ideological and financial institution such as the "movement", or the "party" or the Histadrut?

The reason given for the justification of the "Saison" is threefold:

a.  Mapai and the Left are in charge, not the Revisionists or anyone else.  They were the bosses.

b.  the Irgun's policies were wrong from a political/diplomatic sense.

c.  the actions of the Irgun and Lechi were morally tainted, what was referred to as "purity of arms".

I think (b) and (c) were patently in error and all that's left is the amoral (a).

^

Haaretz's Tom Segev on the Map I Produced

In the footsteps of terror

Menachem Begin regularly rejected any comparison between the terrorist acts carried out by members of the Irgun (pre-state underground militia) and the actions of Palestinian terrorists; he claimed that in contrast to the Arabs, the Irgun - his organization - spared civilians' lives. Begin was even more angered when Irgun members were called "dissenters" and cast out from the pantheon of Israeli heroism. After he became prime minister, he frequently took the trouble to correct the historical narrative, and after his death, the Menachem Begin Heritage Center was founded, which operates by force of a special law, at the state's expense.

The center has just put out a map for travelers. The Begin Center takes pride in the terrorist acts that Irgun and Lehi (another pre-state militia) members carried out; the map it published leads travelers along a route of those attacks in Jerusalem.

It is a large and eye-opening map, lavishly printed on glossy paper. There are a total of 165 flag markers on it, the vast majority of them denoting terror attacks perpetrated by members of Irgun and Lehi, and a minority marking acts by members of the Haganah and Palmach. Contrary to Begin's claims, the map enumerates a long series of outright terror attacks, including bombings of places where civilians tended to congregate, such as buses, cafes, markets, a cinema, a post office and the like. The terror attacks are termed "acts of retaliation."

The chronology of terror attacks that accompanies the map strengthens the thesis that no less than they were intended to hurt the Arabs and the British, the actions of the various organizations were designed to bolster their standing, in anticipation of the struggle over the governing of the state about to be established, and it's hard not to get the impression from the map that this competition continues to this day.

As expected, the map shows that the Irgun did much more for the country than the Haganah. The number of Arabs the Irgun killed is almost quadruple the number of Arabs the Haganah killed (according to the map a total of around 250. In actuality there were more ). Some 60 British were also eliminated, nearly all of them by the Irgun and Lehi. The Haganah mainly ran interference: According to the map, one in every four actions it carried out was aimed at hurting the Irgun, by abducting its members and disrupting its activities. There is no mention of the Haganah's efforts to defend the Jewish Quarter, or of the Hish, the secretive field corps of the Haganah, or of the convoys that brought supplies to the besieged city, or of the Convoy of 35 ("Lamed Heh" ), or of other actions. On Mount Scopus a traveler relying on the map will find a marker for "the Haganah's failed attempt to conquer Augusta Victoria." The truly significant event that occurred nearby is not referenced on the map at all: the attack on the doctors' convoy in April 1948, in which 78 people, mostly personnel from Hadassah Hospital and the Hebrew University, were killed. One may speculate as to why this incident has no place in Begin's heritage. Perhaps it is because the convoy was traveling under the Haganah's protection; perhaps because Irgun and Lehi members did not rush to its defense; and perhaps because the attack came just a few days after the conquest of Deir Yassin by Irgun and Lehi members.

The Deir Yassin affair is described on the map at length; as expected, the text portrays the conquest of the village as a military operation in every way, and does not mention the death of more than 110 Palestinians, and states: "About a third of the Irgun's and Lehi's fighting force was hurt by the gunfire and sustained many dead and wounded." The map does not note the numbers: 35 wounded and five dead.

A response will be forthcoming.

^

The Unknown May 15, 1948 White Paper

Very few persons know that on May 15, 1948, at the termination of Britain's Mandate over Palestine, HMS Government published a White Paper policy statement (and here, too).

It opens:

His Majesty's Government in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland will cease to be responsible for the administration of Palestine from midnight on 14 May 1948.   The ending of thirty years of British rule in Palestine, begun when General Allenby's troop occupied that country towards the close of the first world war, provides a fitting occasion for a brief review of its history and of the policy pursued by His Majesty's Government.

The various sections are entitled:

I. THE ORIGIN AND NATURE OF THE BRITISH MANDATE FOR PALESTINE
II.  THE DEVELOPMENT OF PALESTINE 
III.  THE JEWISH NATIONAL HOME
IV. THE OBSTACLES WHICH FRUSTRATED THE EFFORTS OF HIS MAJESTY'S GOVERNMENT TO ESTABLISH SELF-GOVERNING INSTITUTIONS IN PALESTINE
V.  THE PROBLEM REFERRED TO THE UNITED NATIONS
VI.  THE LAST MONTHS OF THE MANDATE
 
So, what is the official British explanation for quitting the Mandate?
 
Here:
 

His Majesty's Government had now striven for twenty-seven years without success to reconcile Jews and Arabs and to prepare the people of Palestine for self-government. The policy adopted by the United Nations had aroused the determined resistance of the Arabs, while the States supporting this policy were themselves not prepared to enforce it. 84,000 troops, who received no cooperation from the Jewish community, had proved insufficient to maintain law and order in the face of a campaign of terrorism waged by highly organized Jewish forces equipped with all the weapons of the modern infantryman. Since the war, 338 British subjects had been killed in Palestine, while the military forces there had cost the British taxpayer 100 million pounds. The renewal of Arab violence on the announcement of the United Nations decision to partition Palestine and the declared intentions of Jewish extremists showed that the loss of further British lives was inevitable. It was equally clear that, in view of His Majesty's Government's decision not to enforce the partition of Palestine against the declared wishes of the majority of it inhabitants, the continued presence there of British troops and officials could no longer be justified.

In these circumstances His Majesty's Government decided to bring to an end their Mandate and to prepare for the earliest possible withdrawal from Palestine of all British forces.

So, who were those "extremists", those "highly organized Jewish forces"?  Who killed over 300 British security personnel?  The Hagana?  The Palmach?

Or were they the soldiers of the Irgun Tzvai Leumi  and the Lechi fighters?

^

Another Letter in The Jerusalem Post

Life of the Palmah

Sir, - I would like to correct a point in "In the underground" (UpFront, August 29) Alexander Zvielli's review of First Tithe, the memoirs of a decade in the life of Dr. Israel Eldad between 1938-1948, ably translated by Ze'ev Golan.

Zvielli wrote: "Lehi was finally dissolved together with the Irgun and the Palmah on May 29, 1948, and most of its members joined the IDF and the Herut political party."

In actuality, units of the Irgun and Lehi maintained an independent existence in Jerusalem until September 19, 1948, two days after the assassination of Count Folke Bernadotte, at which time they were dissolved. The Palmah, however, continued to operate autonomous command groups within the IDF for two more months, and this throughout the country. It wasn't until November 7, 1948, that David Ben-Gurion asserted the state's authority over what had become the armed socialist militia of Mapam-Hashomer Hatza'ir.

It would have been interesting for your writer to explain how, in his opinion, Eldad "unjustly denigrates other existing Jewish youth movements" in the pre-war period. Betar members suffered severe discrimination at the hands of the Jewish Agency's immigration officers regarding their preparatory hachshara period, receiving certificates and, once in the Mandate, obtaining employment.

YISRAEL MEDAD
Shiloh

I Have a Letter in Haaretz English

Professor Norman Rose deserves appreciation for pointing out that the "sensational revelation" of Chaim Weizmann's support for collaborating with the British occupier was already published some 30 years ago (letter, August 20). Nevertheless, I would suggest it is quite sensational to be reminded by Rose that Weizmann's policy predated the official Yishuv "Saison" operation by some six months.

Rose's desire to see the "wider perspective," which includes Lehi's personal assassination (when is assassination not personal?) operations and its "flirtation with the Axis powers" is problematic. When the Hagana assassinated several Jews in 1940, who were suspected of informing on arms caches, and when the Palmach assassinated a British officer in Jerusalem in 1946, who had tortured prisoners at Biriah, did that stain them the way that the Irgun and Lehi were ostracized? Or was Weizmann's opposition more political than moral?

Moreover, as the "flirtation" he notes occured in 1940-41, and as Stern had been personally assassinated by the British in 1942 and therefore a whole new chapter had begun in the fight for Israel's liberation, one in which the Hagana and Palmach joined the so-called "dissidents" in November 1945 in the United Resistance Movement framework, perhaps Weizmann was wrong in his grovelling before the British.

Yisrael Medad
Shiloh