On Palestine Policing - Mandate Days

Excerpts from

“Going Beserk”:“Black and Tans” in Palestine

by Richard Andrew Cahill

...The “Black and Tans,” whose official name was the “Auxiliary Division of the Royal Irish Constabulary,” were auxiliary police that the British brought to Ireland to try to squelch the Irish Rebellion in 1919 and 1920....By 1922, the “Irish Free State” (today’s Republic of Ireland) was established in the south and the British retreated. The “Black and Tans” were disbanded. But where could a young former member of the “Black and Tans” hope to find work? Did some find their way to Jerusalem and other places in Palestine?

...With the civilian British government [in 1920] came the establishment of the Palestine Police Force, consisting of 18 British officers supported by 55 Palestinian officers and 1,144 rank and file. With a total population of 639,228 in 1920 (consisting of 512,090 Muslims, 60,883 Christians, 66,102 Jews, and 153 Samaritans),3 the relatively small number of 18 British officers is striking.

Almost immediately, the role of the police force or lack thereof was called into question. During the riots of 1920, Jews accused the “lower police officials” of standing by and allowing violence to be done to them...

...The Mandate Government decided that the task of maintaining public security would best be accomplished by forming two gendarmerie units.8 Both were called Palestine Gendarmerie. One consisted of Arabs and Jews under British officers and was established in 1921. The second, established in 1922, consisted exclusively of British recruits....in April 1922, approximately 650 former “Black and Tans” arrived in Haifa, Palestine and commenced their duties as the British Palestine Gendarmerie. How did so many former “Black and Tans” end up in Palestine? They were not transferred there as a unit. Rather, there seems to have been a personal connection...So it was the case that 75 to 95 percent of the new British Palestine Gendarmerie were former members of the “Black and Tans.”11

The group of former “Black and Tans” deployed in Palestine were a motley crew. Among them were excommunicated priests and other former clergy, lawyers who had been debarred, a man who was arrested for murder in Mexico but had escaped, and a former medical doctor who allegedly raped a female patient after performing an abortion. In addition to formerly serving in the “Black and Tans,” most of these men were also veterans of WWI, some holding high ranks and many having received medals of distinction. They drank heavily. In Palestine, they wore a distinctive uniform that included a Stetson broad-brimmed hat, reminiscent of a cowboy hat.12

According to their own reports, these former “Black and Tans” were brash and anxious for action. They delighted in skirmishes with bandits in the hills...The British Gendarmerie in Palestine was short lived. In 1926, it was dissolved due to financial constraints. But did all of the former “Black and Tans” then leave Palestine?

T. W. Williams reported to the New York Times that he had spoken with A. S. Mavrogordato, the British Deputy Inspector General in charge of the Palestine Police, who had informed him that “two hundred members of the former British constabulary, the famous ‘Black and Tans,’ are to be retained for any sudden uprising.”15 Indeed, about 200 of these former “Black and Tans” joined the “British Section” of the Palestine Police.16 One such person was Douglas V. Duff, a former “Black and Tan” who rose to the rank of the Police Inspector for Jerusalem.

...Inspector Duff seems to have played a dubious role at the outset of the Western Wall Incident of 1928. The Wailing Wall, or Western Wall of the Haram al-Sharif in Jerusalem, is sacred to both Muslims and Jews. In the 1920s, tensions mounted between Palestinian Muslims and Zionists over ownership, control, and access to the Wall. The Western Wall incident of September 1928 sparked rivalry and violence that spread across Palestine. By the end of the following year, the violence left 133 Jews and 116 Arabs dead.18

In September of 1928, just prior to the Jewish holiday of Yon Kippur, the Jews erected a screen across the alley that ran along the Wall. Inspector Duff visited the Wall area with the District Commissioner of Jerusalem, Edward Keith-Roach and exchanged words with the leader of the Ashkenazi community, “beadle Noah Gladstone” [Rabbi Noah Baruch Glasstein], there that same evening. The Jewish leader promised to have the screen removed by the next morning, but this did not happen.19 The following day, Inspector Duff, sent a few of his local police down to remove the screen. When they returned tattered and beaten, he called for ten British officers, in battle gear, from nearby Mount Scopus. Once they arrived, Duff was pleased to find that four of the ten were his old comrades, also former “Black and Tans.” They hurried down to the Wall, pushing through the crowds, and removed the screen, as Jewish women hit them with their parasols. After tearing down the screen, a Jewish man clung to it as Duff and his men pushed through the angry crowd. Duff then threw the remains of the screen down into the Tyropean Valley, along with the man who was still clinging to it.20

(here's a headline: Western Wall Scandal: Defamation of Yom Kippur in Jerusalem by the Police)



In the days that followed the “Black and Tans” removal of the screen at the Wailing Wall, Douglas Duff became a public enemy of the Zionist Jews in Jerusalem. Zionists quickly criticized the “brutal” tactics of the British Palestine Police. One incident occurred, which Duff recorded later in his account of events, which sheds light on his bearings and psychological outlook. He and other police went to disperse a Jewish demonstration in the new part of Jerusalem. The angry crowd attacked their two trucks and forced Duff and the other police to retreat to a police outpost. Soon afterward, when the District Superintendent and a dozen troopers arrived, he ordered Duff not to show himself to the crowd. Defying these orders, Duff flung open the door and charged outside yelling, kicking and swirling his whip. As he describes it, “Once again I experienced that strange and utterly sublime ecstasy of ‘going berserk,’ as my barbarian forefathers had done. I had no consciousness of what I was doing as I sprang at that crowd.” The crowd dispersed as the other officers and troopers came out of the outpost. But, reminiscent of the Irish Rebellion, in the weeks that followed, three attempts of assassination were directed at Duff.21

...Another former “Black and Tan” who had a long career in Palestine was Raymond Cafferata.25...By 1943, he was a district commander and served in Haifa from 1944 until his departure from Palestine. He was accused of excessive force during searches of Ramat Hashoron (6 November 1943) and Kibbutz Givat Chaim (25 November 1945), as well as torturing Asher Trattner, a member of the Jewish underground group Irgun, after his arrest on 16 October 1944.28 The Jewish underground groups attempted to assassinate Cafferata on 15 February 1946. He narrowly escaped the TNT and accompanying bullets.29

Captain John M. Rymer-Jones was Inspector General of the Palestine Police from August 1943 until March 1946. He too had a connection to the Irish Rebellion as he had served in the British Army in Ireland as they sought to squelch the rebels at all cost...Rymer-Jones and McConnell set up the PMF as a type of “crack unit of the police force” drawing on their experiences in Ireland.30 But the PMF, most of who were young, inexperienced recruits, were undisciplined. After allegedly carrying out attacks of revenge, the PMF was disbanded.31

...During the Arab Revolt in Palestine from 1936-1939, when the number of British police swelled and reinforcements from the Army and Royal Air Force were brought in large number, brutal tactics were employed, similar to the ones used to put down the Irish Rebellion in 1919 and 1920. These tactics included demolition of homes, or in some cases, entire villages of suspected rebels; arrests and imprisonments without warrants, charges or trials; beatings; and torture. Yet, unlike the media coverage of the Irish Rebellion with its sharp criticism of “Black and Tan” tactics, the media coverage of the situation in Palestine generally praised the British efforts and villainized the local Arab Palestinian rebels.

Richard Andrew Cahill holds a PhD in History from the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is currently Associate Professor of History and Director of International Education at Berea College in Kentucky. He teaches courses on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict,the Middle East, and Islam.

Endnotes

8 An initial attempt to supplement police with a “Palestine Defense [sic] Forces” (made of one Jewish and one Arab battalion) was short lived. A riot broke out between Jews and Arabs between Jaffa and Tel Aviv on 1 May 1921 and Arab members of the Palestine Police
reportedly openly joined in. Charles Smith, “Communal Conflict and Insurrection in Palestine, 19361948,” in Policing and Decolonisation: Politics, Nationalism and the Police, 1917-1965, ed. David Anderson and David Killingray (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1992), 63.

11 Charles Jeffries, The Colonial Police (London: Max Parrish, 1952), 153. Jeffries states that the
British section of the gendarmerie consisted of 38 officers and 724 other ranks, “partly recruited from men who had been servicing in Ireland with the RIC and its Auxiliary Division….”

12 Several members of the British Section of the Palestine Police wrote personal memoirs concerning their time in Palestine. In addition to Duff (cited above), see: Colin Imray, Policeman in Palestine (Bideford: Edward Gaskell, 1995); Michael Lang, One Man in his Time: the Diary
of a Palestine Policeman 1946-1948 (Lewes: Book Guild: 1997); and Geoffrey Morton, Just the Job: Some Experiences of a Colonial Policeman (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1957).

15 “Palestine Arabs Give No Trouble,” New York Times, 25 April 1926.

18 Studies on the Wailing Wall disturbances of 1928-1929 include: Philip Mattar, “The role of the Mufti of Jerusalem in the Political Struggle over the Western Wall, 1928-1929,” Middle Eastern Studies 19:1 (1983), 104-118; and Martin Kolinsky, “Premeditation in the Palestine
Disturbances of August 1929?” Middle Eastern Studies 26:1 (1990), 18-34; and Lawrence Davidson, “Competing Responses to the 1929 Arab Uprising in Palestine: The Zionist Press versus the State Department,” Middle East Policy 5:2 (1997), 93-112.

19 Duff ’s account submitted to the District Superintendent of Police, W. F. Wainwright, CO 733-163-4, 0001, p. 126. A similar account was submitted by a certain American named Author Raus to the Zionist Executive of Palestine with copies provided to other Zionist organizations and to the British Mandate Government. In Raus’ account, the beadle had not agreed to take down the screen, but rather Keith-Roach was informing him that Duff would take the screen down the following morning. Arthur Raus to Colonel Kisch, 3 January 1929, CO 733-163-4, 0001, p. 143-145.

20 Duff, Bailing, 169-177. See also Tom Segev’s narrative of the events in his One Palestine, Complete (New York: Henry Holt, 2000), 296-297.

21 Duff, Bailing, 176-178.

25 Although Raymond Cafferata was a colourful character, there seems to be no serious scholarly work devoted to him exclusively. Five boxes of materials await in Middle East Centre Archive St Antony’s College, Oxford, reference number GB165-0044.

28 Nachman Ben-Yehuda, Political Assassinations by Jews: A Rhetorical Device for Justice (New York: SUNY Press, 1993), 217-218.

29 Ha’aretz, 17 February 1946.

30 Smith, “Communal Conflict,” 73.

31 After terrorists had blown up a police vehicle on 18 November 1946, some PMF men allegedly went on a rampage in Tel Aviv. And in the summer of 1947, a police armoured car threw a grenade into a café, killing four Jews. This was seen as retaliation for the Irgun hanging two British officers shortly prior. Smith, “Communal Conflict,” 75-76.