Another Book Review of Cesarani's Major Farran's Hat

And another ripping apart of Cesarani in addition to mine.

Excerpts from The Birth Of Modern Terrorism? by Ira Stoll, in Forbes:

...Cesarani, a professor of history at Royal Holloway College of the University of London, attempts to document what he calls "the full extent and ambition of Jewish terrorism in the late 1940s," an effort he refers to as "the first modern international terrorist campaign."

Framing the story this way allows Cesarani to contextualize the murder of Rubowitz as a counterterrorist operation and to conclude with a warning that "At a time when counter-insurgency warfare is once again at the forefront of military operation by the British Army and NATO, it is perhaps an opportune moment to revisit the events that took place on that balmy evening in Jerusalem sixty years ago as warning of everything that can go wrong when young warriors directed by desperate and unscrupulous politicians wage war on terror."

It's hard to communicate just how misguided this interpretive framework is. If anyone is a terrorist in this story, it's Farran, who has killed a civilian, Rubowitz, to advance the political goal of keeping the British in control of Palestine, where they had been granted a League of Nations mandate after World War I. All Rubowitz had been doing was putting up some Zionist posters [actually, he was just carrying the leaflets for distribution].

It's clear where Cesarani's sympathies lie--he refers to the British as "brilliant, courageous" heroes, while the Jews are "murderous." Violence against the Jews seems always to be the fault of the victims; thus, the 1929 Arab riots in which more than 100 Jews were killed are said by Cesarani to be a consequence of "the growing number and assertiveness of the Jews," and attacks on synagogues and Jewish-owned stores and factories in Liverpool, Manchester and Glasgow in August 1947 to be the result of "the antipathy generated by Jewish terrorism."

The author's definition of "terrorism" is one that will strike many readers as careless or overly broad. Cesarani at one point references the "vicious terrorist attacks on the security forces." But if attacks on British troops by those seeking self-rule and independence from a colonial power constitute "terrorist attacks," then the American minutemen at Lexington and Concord were terrorists too. The term starts to lose meaning. Most of us today think of terrorist attacks as those targeting civilians, not security forces.

Cesarani describes a Zionist bombing of the British embassy in Rome as another example of "Jewish terrorism." But the embassy was a center of British attempts to prevent the hundreds of thousands of Jewish Holocaust refugees in Europe from making their way to the land of Israel, and the author even acknowledges that the bomb was timed intentionally to cause "minimum loss of life." The only person injured was "an unlucky Italian who was cycling past."

Given that Allied forces had just bombed Dresden, Hiroshima and Nagasaki and inflicted hundreds of thousands of civilian casualties, for the British to get on a high horse about a bombing that was timed deliberately to cause minimum loss of life is not only hypocritical but morally obtuse. The targets chosen by the Israeli fighters--British police headquarters in Haifa, the Tel Aviv British Military district, the British Colonial Club in London, the British Officers Club and the British civil administration headquarters wing of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem--were overwhelmingly not the civilian buses, pizza parlors or discos favored for attack by Israel's Islamist enemies of today. They were, instead, the government officials and troops of a colonial power that was barring the immigration of Jewish refugees to Israel and that was clinging to arbitrary, non-democratic and un-free rule in Palestine despite having promised in the 1917 Balfour Declaration that it would "view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people."

Not that every action of Lehi was admirable or even defensible...But it would be a mistake to tar the whole Zionist cause with the terrorist label, as Mr. Cesarani veers close to doing...

In Major Farran's Hat, Cesarani has told the story from the point of view of the English. The result leaves Israel as a kind of British Vietnam--a failed counterinsurgency campaign. How much more constructive it would be for Britain to take pride in its contributions toward the birth of the Jewish state and to seek a "special relationship" of the sort it shares with that other former colony where it fought a failed counterinsurgency campaign, America. Give it time.

My Book Review of "Major Farran's Hat"

Not yet up online, Here's the link

but my book review of "Major Farran's Hat" is in the print edition of the Jerusalem Post Weekly Magazine today.

Here's the version I submitted (some slight editorial alterations were made):

Cesarani, David
MAJOR FARAN'S HAT:
Murder, Scandal and Britain's War Against Jewish Terrorism 1945-1948
William Heinmann, London, 2009
20 Pounds Sterling


Exceptionally Good; Exceptionally Bad

By Yisrael Medad


The outlines of the story David Cesarani unfolds are not complicated. On May 6, 1947, teenager Alexander ("Haim") Rubovitz approached a rendezvous with Yael, his liason in the Lechi underground, with a packet of leaflets to be distributed. He never arrived. He was snatched by a special counter-terrorist unit recently formed by the British command of the Palestine Police Force, presumably taken to Wadi Kelt, tortured and killed by blows to his head with a rock. The killer was Roy Farran whose hat was found at the kidnapping scene, Ussishkin Street. His crime, which made world headlines, was covered up and he gained an acquittal at his court martial. Lechi took revenge by sending him a book bomb the following year that was opened at the Farran household outside Wolverhampton by his younger brother who was killed. Farran died in 2006 denying his role and never revealing where the body was buried.

Major Roy Farran was a commando, imperial soldier, buccaneer and adventurer. He was brave, flamboyant, swashbuckling and assuredly heroic.

He was also a philandering lady's man, a frequently inebriated lout, at times a ill-disciplined commander and, most horrifically, a cold-blooded torturer and a killer of a defenseless sixteen-year old. He was exceptionally good and he was exceptionally bad.

David Cesarani has written a wonderful book, riveting, persuasive, based on (lucky for him) newly released 60-year old archival material as well as a wealth of other books, documents and newspaper reports that were disconnected and lost. He zeroes in on his subject and leaves the reader without a doubt of the guilt of Farran. Nevertheless, he inexplicably gets dates wrong, leaves unfortunate typos uncorrected, fails to include crucial and readily available archival material, skips over important subject matter, seems to be uncomfortable with Hebrew sources and has a nasty habit of using '[sic]' pedantically ad nauseum. He is exceptionally good and he is exceptionally bad.

A Research Professor could and should do better than to allow silly items to slip through a book loaded down with references to Public Record Office papers, books, academic papers, stashed-away memoirs and personal correspondence of British officials and soldiers. He writes, p. 96, that Rubovitz was tied to a tree but his source, the Hadingham Report, does not include this fanciful situation. He refers to the activities of Rabbi Baruch Korff, pp. 149-151, but fails to acknowledge Korff's own 1953 book, "Flight from Fear" which reproduces hundreds of documents on the period which, incidentally, can be found on an internet site. He suggests that Chaim Weizmann (p. 14) 1Z 2led no party of his ownS when, in truth, he was the head of the General Zionist faction. On p. 185, he records the day of the UN Partition resolution approval as being November 28 when it was the 29th. He records the date, p. 57, of an Irgun attack in Tel Aviv when flamethrowers were used to set alight parked vehicles as January 7, 1947 when it was January 3. Was Lechi actually "delighted" (p. 23) to assassinate British Mandatory officials and security personnel? Any other spelling of Alexander Rubowitz's name, despite the fact that it being of European origin and in Hebrew phonetics could be spelled a number of ways, Cesarani tirelessly and annoyingly appends a [sic] to it perhaps a dozen times.

But worse is his interpretive prose. It is here that Cesarani injects an unsubstantiated political and ideological backdrop to the unfolding events in Mandate Palestine, one that is highly subjective and biased.

Cesarani, after misleading the reader into thinking the land of Israel was empty ("forced dispersion of the Jews and depopulation of the land"), asserts that "since the 1880s Jews had started emigrating to Palestine from countries where they suffered discrimination and persecution" (p. 11). That formula is historically false and reads like it was lifted from some Arab propagandistic manual. In every single century since 135 CE and the failure of Bar Kochba s revolt, Jews returned to the Land of Israel in small and larger numbers and the continuum of a Jewish presence despite the conquests and persecution in the Holy Land is a fact. To credit British involvement in restoring to the Jews their national homeland in such a limited fashion does a disservice to Lord Shaftesbury, Laurence Oliphant and a major social-religious movement of the 19th century with masses of adherents not to mention previous support in Holland or Ezra Stiles in the United States. The British Government discussed Jewish restoration in 1840 and in 1818, President John Adams wrote, "I really wish the Jews again in Judea an independent nation" .

Even the position of Zionism s international legal justification is faulted by Cesarani. Cesarani skips over the February 1919 Versailles War Conference to which draft proposals were made including "The High Contracting Parties recognize the historic title of the Jewish people to Palestine and the right of Jews to reconstitute in Palestine their National Home" and which detailed the historic title of Jews to their land. So, too, he eliminates the January 1919 Faisal-Weizmann Agreement.

Returning to the Rubovitz affair, Cesarani could have done more investigating the historical record and providing his readers with a more comprehensive work. What was the identity of "X" who passed on a detailed letter, p. 8, to the Rubovitz family on what happened to their son? Why was Franciscan monk Eugene Hoade, the Roman Catholic chaplain to the Palestine Police Force, not even mentioned by Cesarani? He might have hidden Farran during his second escape and even help dispose of the body. Why does he fail to mention the Acre Prison breakout on May 4, 1947, two days prior to Rubovitz s kidnapping, as a possible motive for the perverse wrath of Farran and his fellow policemen? What happened to the members of the ‘Q Squads other than Farran and were they contacted to elicit further information? Why did the most senior British government officials who knew the truth keep mum for decades? Was Rubovitz s snatch truly coincidental or had there been a tip-off about his whereabouts as he had been under Hagana surveillance for over a year? And was Rubovitz the sole victim of a snatch-torture-murder scenario or were there additional victims as Farran himself claimed in an intelligence document I have read?

At the present, a detective, Steve Rambam, is seeking information on the whereabouts of the remains of Alexander Rubovitz. If he is successful, then the sorry tale will truly be brought to closure and with it, perhaps further details of the comprehensive historical record.

David Cesarani on Roy Farran On CBC Radio

The life of Roy Farran

The life of Roy Farran was a celebrated one. He served with the British Special Air Service during World War Two and left the service, highly decorated. After the war, he went on to serve as Solicitor General for Alberta in the government of Peter Lougheed.

But last week on The Current, we heard another version of Roy Farran. In an investigation, he is being directly linked to the 1947 disappearance and death of Alexander Rubowitz.

We heard from many of you in our audience, but these reponses also prompted us to get in touch with David Cesarani. He has just completed a new book about this contentious piece of history. It's called, Major Farran's Hat: Murder, Scandal and Britain's War Against Jewish Terrorism, 1945-1948. It was released this week. And David Cesarani was in Washington.

The broadcast from March 26th can be heard by clicking on the bar down at the bottom of the page.

It starts at 11:45 into the tape and ends at 24:20.

Video Clip on the Rubovitz-Farran Affair

From the IBA English TV broadcast:

David Duke Does Farran

Well, well. David Duke dusts it up over the Roy Farran case.

After quoting from the UK Telegraph story, he makes some comments and I add my comments:

First of all, don’t let Mr. Rubowitz’s young age cloud the issue. Jews tend to be precocious, even at murder and terrorism. The Jewish Menendez brothers were 18 and 21 when they murdered their wealthy parents. Two famous Jewish psychopaths, Leopold and Loeb, were 18 and 19 when they murdered a fourteen year old boy in an attempt to commit the perfect crime.

One famous Zionist, Herschel Grynszpan, at the age of 17 gained world-wide notoriety when he assassinated a German embassy worker in Paris in 1938 in a political hate-crime murder. Grynszpan - by the way - was a Zionist just like Rubowitz. The Zionists were always a bloody, murdering lot - even to this day.

[I guess you say the same, with much more truth, about a lot of other peoples which would mean nothing. How many Jews killed Christians in pogroms, holocausts and general mayhem and how many Jews killed Christians would be an interesting question for Duke to answer. But the point is that (a) the British regime in Mandate Palestine had turned oppressive and after the May 1939 White Paper which, by the way, indirectly aided Hitler by keeping more Jews in Europe so he could kill them; (b) Farran was in the Police and the police just don't go around torturing and killing unarmed persons under 17 without prioper judicial procedure - and, refuse to divulge where the body is after six decades while denying you were involved; (c) and notice that "Grynszpan - by the way - was a Zionist". Yes, and his victim was a Nazi.]

England had occupied Palestine after taking it in World War One until 1948. Zionist Jews demanded that this real estate be handed over to them. Rather than wait for Jewish-owned newspapers and Jewish-controlled politicians in the West pulled the necessary strings to steal Palestine for them, some Jews began murdering British soldiers. The Jews were using tactics, which historians today would describe as “terrorism.” These Zionist Jews even blew up the King David Hotel, killing 91 people in a terrorist attack not equaled for decades.

[England "occupied" Palestine? Well, almost. It held it militarily until granted a Mandate status by the League of Nations for the purpose, by the way, of reconstituting the Jewish national home. Jews didn't demand but requested and pleaded for Gt. Britain to fulfill its international legal obligations - not restrict immigration, prohibit land purchases and muck things up. Oh, and that KDH operation? The Irgun blew up not a hotel with tourists inside but the offices of the Mandate Secretariat and the Army HQ, after telephoning through a warning of almost 30 minutes.]

The rules of war say that any combatant who does not wear a uniform can be executed as if he were a spy. Jewish terrorists in Palestine did not wear uniforms. Perhaps some British soldiers caught a young Yiddish terrorist and executed him.

[funny but his superiors didn't think so. they arrested him and put him on trial]

Curious how the Jews are trying to reopen this case. I guess they’ve run out of old Germans, Ukrainians and Latvians to accuse of war crimes. Now they’re biting the hand that fought for them in World War Two and accusing the British of atrocities in Palestine. Perhaps they see a new opportunity to extort reparations.

[not curious at all. if the bloody Brit had the guts enough to admit he killed the kid and simply informed the parents where he left the body, none of this would have been necessary. after all, if Duke had done something similar, we're all sure he would be crowing to the rafters]

Don’t expect the British to file any lawsuits or new investigations to find the Jewish murderers who killed Major Farran’s brother. Apparently murders and atrocities committed by Jews get swept under the rug. Meanwhile, any actions against Jews – even if they were justified at the time – will never be forgotten by the Jews and will be used to extort as much money as possible.

[the person who sent the bomb has given interviews (here, too) and now published his memoirs (in Hebrew), so, again, Duke is proving his ignorance.]

A Roy Farran Error

Tom Segev continues with Roy Farran revelations:

In this column last week I wrote about a member of the British counterterror unit, Roy Farran, who allegedly murdered a member of the pre-state Lehi underground militia, Alexander Rubowitz, in May 1947. It seems Farran did not concentrate exclusively on rightist terror organizations. Israeli attorney Mati Atzmon claimed this week that in late February 1948, Farran detained three Haganah members who were manning the Israeli position at Mandelbaum Gate next to Jerusalem's Old City. According to Atzmon, Farran handed over the Haganah members to an Arab mob that murdered them. The crew's commander, Shimon Nissani, was Atzmon's uncle.

Segev got taken in. Perhaps the fact that Lechi might get some positive PR blinded him to the dates.

It was impossible for Farran do be personally involved as Farran left Mandate Palestine in October 1947 never to return.

Perhaps friends of his were involved as we know that British AWOLs were busy blowing up the editorial office and print shop of the Palestine Post, the Jewish Agency building and a car bomb in Ben Yehudah Street, Jerusalem which killed over 50.

By the way, this does not appear in the Hebrew edition. Perhaps he caught his mistake but the English went out as is.

Roy Farran Case Continues

The Roy Farran story gets a boost:


The Sunday Telegraph -

British war hero to be investigated again for murder of Jewish 'terrorist'
A private detective has been hired to investigate an alleged murder of a Jewish underground fighter in 1947 by a British major.

...But Major Farran's record of service after the war, when he was seconded to the British Section of the Palestine Police, cast a shadow over the rest of his life. He was implicated in the murder of Alexander Rubowitz, a 16-year-old member of the Jewish underground fighting British rule, who was kidnapped in Jerusalem in May 1947 - and was cleared at the time of any involvement in the Jewish teenager's death.

Now, however, his reputation is posthumously at risk again from a fresh investigation into the ugly incident, and friends fear that it may be tarnished for ever by the claim that Major Farran was the killer.

Steve Rambam, a private investigator from New York, has been hired by an unnamed Israeli living in America to reopen the case. He hopes to find Rubowitz's body, so that he can be given a proper burial, and discover more about who was responsible for the boy's murder.

He will soon visit Britain, where he hopes that five surviving members of the Palestine Police whom he has identified as members of the covert units might be willing to "clear their consciences" and reveal the burial place of their alleged victim. "There are people in the UK who have personal knowledge of the operations of these so-called 'snatch squads' because they were participants," Mr Rambam told The Sunday Telegraph.

"They would have been privy to who the local co-conspirators were, and all sorts of other good intelligence information that could lead us to where the body was concealed."

..."Roy Farran was a lifelong friend, and a murderer he was certainly not," said Mr Green, who now lives in the Cotswolds. "The whole thing was a put-up stunt. He was one of the most highly decorated officers. He was a legend among fighting men. Someone tried to pin something on him to provoke trouble out there."

He added: "I can think of many atrocities committed by Jewish terrorists." He recalled how many of his friends had been killed or badly injured, including one who was paralysed for life. Asked whether Major Farran had a violent temper, Mr Green said: "No, Roy was always very calm."

In October 1947, the entire investigation file was burned by the British authorities in Palestine. Mr Rambam believes this was an officially sanctioned cover-up. But copies of some documents had been already sent to London, where they were kept secret for almost 60 years until being disclosed in 2005.

...When he visits Britain, Mr Rambam hopes to meet surviving members of the so-called "Q" patrols, the secret counter-terrorism force charged with suppressing the Jewish underground.

His client wants to find Rubowitz's body so that the boy can finally be given a proper burial. The documents suggest his corpse was disposed of somewhere along the road between Jerusalem and Jericho.

...But Edward Horne, 87, who serves as President of the Palestine Police Old Comrades' Association, said: "It's not the way the British do things, we were not fighting the Gestapo. I was vehemently against the squads, the incident never should have happened."

and the Jewish Chronicle

SAS hero’s guilty secret

...Farran described some of their operations and claimed they were on the brink of a decisive success when he was framed. The Jews accused him of abducting and killing a teenager named Alexander Rubowitz. With bitterness he alleged that the British government was prepared to make him a scapegoat so he fled to Syria and was only persuaded to return by his old regimental commander. Farran absconded from detention a second time after he was formally charged with murder and gave himself up only after Lehi gunned down several British soldiers as a reprisal.

He was eventually acquitted after a remarkable trial in October 1947...What Farran did not reveal was that his barrister, William Fearnley-Whittingstall, got him off the hook thanks to some dubious manoeuvres. Fearnley-Whittingstall manipulated client-attorney privilege to prevent the prosecution submitting in evidence a potentially damning written statement Farran had made while in detention. The rules of a court martial also enabled Fergusson to decline to give evidence of what Farran had said to him about the incident lest he incriminate himself.

After the trial, Farran’s solicitor blackmailed the Palestine administration and police into destroying this crucial evidence. He threatened to expose the covert operations of the “special squads” unless every copy of Farran’s statement was burned. Even though the Rubowitz case was still open, the police felt forced to comply.

However, Farran’s lawyer overlooked crucial dispatches that were sent to the Colonial Office in London. These survived in the files unnoticed until they were recently released. They include the report of a statement by Bernard Fergusson that, on May 7 1947, the day after Rubowitz was abducted, Farran told him that his squad had seized the boy, whom they spotted distributing Lehi posters in a Jerusalem suburb. They had driven to a remote spot outside the city, where, in the course of “interrogation”, Farran struck the teenager on the head with a rock and killed him. The policemen had then mutilated the boy’s body, burned his clothes, and left the corpse in the desert.

The historian is always to some extent a detective, but it’s rare that scholarly research leads to the solution of an actual crime. Sadly, the proof that Roy Farran of Winged Dagger was a killer casts a pall over his glittering career.

Sneaky Segev

Ha'aretz's Tom Segev doesn't write tongue-in-the-cheek history, unless the "cheek" you think to which I am referring is part of his posterior.

Here follows his reporting on the Farran-Rubovitz Affair press conference I posted about earlier and I follow with my comment.

The Makings of History / Beyond the grave

The Israel Defense Forces' missing persons unit is searching for the remains of Alexander Rubowitz, a teenage member of the pre-state Lehi underground militia who was murdered in 1947, and has even enlisted the help of a private investigations firm in New York [not quite. Steve is working as an independent]. Two unit members attended a press conference on the matter this week at the Menachem Begin Heritage Center in Jerusalem. An American detective, Steve Rambam, claimed there is a chance that Rubowitz's remains will be found in Wadi Kelt east of Jerusalem, in the West Bank.

It was an interesting event. Although nothing historically new was revealed, at a time when Likud is preparing to form a government, it once again illustrated the centrality of history in Israeli political discourse. Advertisement

When he was approximately 16 years old, Rubowitz was arrested. It was the evening of May 6, 1947 and he was in the process of distributing Lehi flyers in Jerusalem's Rehavia neighborhood. The members of the British counter-terror unit who arrested him drove him toward Jericho. One of them, Roy Farran, beat Rubowitz to death with a rock, and his body was never discovered. [he leaves out the torture inflicted on Rubovitz and the knife carvings into his body]

The case kicked up a storm. Farran was court-martialed, acquitted, and returned to England. Lehi members sent him a letter bomb, which killed his brother [who mistakenly opened the package]. Farran emigrated to Canada [after first standing for Parliament in England] where he entered politics; late in life he served as solicitor general of the state of Alberta. He died about three years ago [June 2006]. Farran always denied killing Rubowitz, but official British documents that were unsealed five years ago strengthen the suspicions against him [and I wonder whether any of his four children, Sally, Peter, Teresa or David have any information].

Initially, Rubowitz was only included in the heroic pantheon of the right-wing terrorist groups Etzel and Lehi. But over time, Israeli cultural memory grew to include individuals who did not operate under the auspices of the Labor Movement, at which point Rubowitz's name went up on a memorial plaque, next to the site of his arrest. There is also a street in Jerusalem named after him.

The Rubowitz affair is quite well known; the unsealing of the British papers documenting the case was covered in a Haaretz article by. A new book on Rubowitz's murder has just come out ("Major Farran's Hat"), written by the well-known British historian David Cesarani, and Canadian Television CBC is making a film about the case. The main element keeping Rubowitz's case alive is the question mark that continues to hover over it: Where is the body? As long as it isn't found, Rubowitz is officially considered missing.

Several months ago, a veteran of the Revisionist Movement who lives in the United States contacted Pallorium Inc., the investigative services firm owned by Steve Rambam, a former member of the Betar youth movement, and asked him to investigate Rubowitz's murder. The man has since run out of money, but several Betar loyalists in Israel agreed to bankroll the continued investigation. Rambam says he makes do with covering his expenses.

At a press conference he convened in Jerusalem this week, Rambam claimed to have a lead on the body's burial site. He said he is working together with the IDF, but refused to go into details.

This story resembles the search for the body of Avshalom Feinberg, of the Nili underground organization working with the British against the Turks in World War II, which was found after the Six-Day War with the help of a few elderly Bedouin in Sinai. As with the Feinberg case, the Rubowitz case also has a political aspect to it. According to Rambam, he has managed to track down several of Farran's associates, and the law allows for trying them as war criminals. Some of his Israeli associates think such a move could "balance out," or even thwart, the attempts made in Britain, among other places, to try Israeli officers for suspected war crimes, including torture of Palestinian terrorists.

Historical comparisons are a dangerous business. Menachem Begin and Yitzhak Shamir fought their entire lives against the equation of the terror sowed by their organizations with Palestinian terrorism. Farran's career naturally recalls that of former Likud MK Ehud Yatom, of the Bus 300 affair: Just like the Canadian politician, he, too, killed his terrorist with a rock.

Leave it to Segev and the Haaretz editorial line: Jews are no better than Arabs and even worse.

But, of course, Rubovitz was not caught in a bus full with civilians, armed and threatening to blow them up, thus causing the overreaction of Yatom who was concerned that if he didn't pressure that terrorist, more innocents would be killed.

That non-parallel is typical of Segev.

Roy Farran Continued

Two interviews on CBC.

The Current for March 17, 2009
-------------------------------

It's Tuesday, March 17th.

Part One: Farran 1947 Murder: Rambam

When Roy Alexander Farran died two and a half years ago, he was remembered as a great -- even legendary -- man.

Roy Farran served as a commando with the British Special Air Service, the SAS during World War Two. He was highly decorated, he came to Canada in the 1950s and worked as a journalist. In the 1970s, he was elected to the Alberta legislature and served as Solicitor General under Premier Peter Lougheed.

But yesterday, at a press conference in Jerusalem, a private investigator named Steven Rambam painted a very different picture of the man many remember as a hero.

Back in 1947, Alexander Rubowitz was a 16-year-old boy living in what was then British-mandated Palestine. It's believed that he was part of the Zionist insurgency against British rule. And according to Steven Rambam, Roy Farran -- the man so many people came to revere -- was also the man who commanded a British police squad that tortured and murdered Alexander Rubowitz and then covered it up.

Stephen Rambam is a private investigator from Brooklyn. He was hired to investigate the disappearance of Alexander Rubowitz. He was in Jerusalem this morning.

We tried to get a comment from a member of Roy Farran's family. But we have been unsucessful so far.

Farran 1947 Murder: Charters

The allegations against Roy Farran stem from a complicated historical moment. David Charters has closely studied the final years of British mandated rule in Palestine. He's a professor of history at the University of New Brunswick and the author of The British Army and Jewish Insurgency in Palestine, 1945 to 47. He's also the author of an article called "Special Operations in Counter-Insurgency: The Farran Case, Palestine 1947." David Charters was in Fredericton, New Brunswick.

Here's the link, twent-on and a half minutes.


And this from the Jerusalem Post today:

ALTHOUGH THERE were witnesses to the murder, the perpetrator who had actually confessed was acquitted. Yet 62 years later, the body of the victim has not been recovered. A substantial reward for information leading to the recovery of the remains of the victim was offered this week by American private investigator Steven Rambam, whose Pallorium detective agency operates in New York, San Antonio, Hong Kong, Los Angeles, Toronto and Jerusalem. Rambam has been retained to set the historical record straight, find the remains and bring about closure for members of the victim's family. Addressing a press conference at the Begin Heritage Center in Jerusalem this week, Rambam was not at liberty to disclose the name of his client, nor the actual sum of the reward.

The case involves the abduction and murder on May 6, 1947 of 16-year old Alexander Rubowitz, a member of the Lehi underground organization, who was captured by Roy Alexander Farran, who headed a special British Palestine police unit. Rubowitz was tortured and later killed by Farran, who smashed in his head with a rock. Farran filed a full report with his commanding officer, but the document in which he implicated himself has conveniently disappeared. Rambam presented a comprehensive report of his investigations and said that the case was still being investigated by the Israel authorities. Although Farran has since died after a long, diverse and successful career in Canada, at least five members of his squad are still living and should be tried for war crimes, said Rambam. While he believes that they can be forced to testify, he doubts that they would ever be brought to trial.

The most dramatic part of the press conference was when Rubowitz's commander Yael Ben Dov rose to speak, and related the story with a degree of passion and recall as if it had taken place only yesterday. After the arrest of Geula Cohen, who had been the Lehi broadcaster and head of Lehi's information effort, Lehi's only means of promoting its views was through posters and the distribution of leaflets. The British were always on the alert for poster people and had no compunction about shooting them. Thus distribution of leaflets and the pasting of posters was very dangerous. For all that, Rubowitz volunteered, and refused to heed warnings from his Lehi colleagues. He had a mission, and he intended to fulfill it. But the British had their eye on him and apprehended him in Jerusalem's Rehavia neighborhood, where he was so well known that witnesses to his abduction were able to identify him. Ben Dov recalled being told about the abduction by a group of children who had picked up a hat that had been knocked off the head of one of the members of the police squad in the struggle in which Rubowitz was forced into a car. Inside the hat's head band was Farran's name.

Rubowitz's three cousins want to give him a proper Jewish burial. Rambam thought that there was a 50/50 chance of recovering the remains by May 6 this year. There are leads, he said, but was either unwilling or unable to explain why the location, in which eye witnesses had seen the murder committed, was not excavated. Nor could he say whether it will be in the few weeks between now and May 6.

Hat Off

Tony Kushner has reviewed a new book in the Times Higher Education magazine:

Book of the week: Major Farran's Hat

The book deals with the case of Alexander Rubovitz of the Lehi who, on May 6 1947, was snatched off a Jerusalem street by one Roy Farran. Farran eventually was brought before a court martial but was acquitted. Farran was one of the most decorated British servicemen of the Second World War, recipient of the DSO and three Military Crosses.

[due to an unfortunate error of misidentity I have deleted a section here and rewritten the next part . The author of the review is not Tony Kushner, the playwright but the Professor of History at the University of Southampton, England and thanks to Geoffrey Alderman for drawing my attention to a rather egregious error on my part (see comments)]

Kushner chooses to highlight this bit:

Fascinating in this regard is the story he relates of attempts at Jewish terrorism in Britain itself. While most of those involved in smuggling and sending bombs into the UK were not British, including those who succeeded in murdering Farran's brother in May 1948, there were young British Jews who, often returning from the war and radicalised by the horror of the Holocaust and postwar British Palestinian policy, dabbled with terrorism or, more frequently, supported those attempting to carry it out on major British targets and individuals in the UK.

Not surprisingly, these troubled years immediately after the war have been subject to amnesia by British Jewry, even more so because of the collective violence in August 1947 - the last riots against Jews in Britain during the 20th century...

Amnesia? Perhaps. But see this regarding recent scholarship on the issue and related matters touching on British Jewry:

'British intelligence and the Mandate of Palestine. Threats to British national security immediately after the Second World War', Intelligence and National Security, (August 2008), pp. 435-462 by Cambridge scholar Calder Walton with whom I am in contact regarding some of those British Jews during 1945-48.

And this, too:

British Intelligence and the Jewish Resistance Movement in the Palestine Mandate, 1945-46 by Steven Wagner and David Charters' Eyes of the underground: Jewish insurgent intelligence in Palestine, 1945-47

Kushner continues::

...He (Cesartanti) does, however, succeed in showing, via high-level government documentation and Montgomery's diaries, the tension between the military forces who wanted continued British power in Palestine, and the civil authorities and senior Labour Party politicians keen to get out of the region's escalating violence and chaos...

...Many in the Jewish world believed that British rule and misrule in Palestine was motivated by anti-Semitism - Ernest Bevin especially was often portrayed in revisionist Zionist propaganda as the new Hitler. Not surprisingly, Farran was frequently perceived as an anti-Semite, but again Cesarani is cautious on this front...as Cesarani points out, that Farran's limited writings on the Jews after the murder showed an increasing irritation with the Jewish world and a claim in one article that Jews were creating anti-Semitism in Britain. The book reveals other glimpses of anti-Jewish prejudice from British officials in the last days of the mandate, although there is not a sustained analysis of how important it was, other than noting the negative impact that such statements had in the Zionist world, helping to intensify the circle of violence.

But the greatest triumph of this book is in exposing what happens when those in the world of intelligence work outside the law...Cesarani ends..."in Jerusalem 60 years ago as warning of everything that can go wrong when young warriors directed by desperate and unscrupulous politicians wage war on terror". Major Farran's Hat, then, is a piece of contemporary history with bite and verve.

Well, I think Kushner should check out this MA Thesis:

Nick Kardahji: "A Measure of Restraint: The Palestine Police and the End of the British Mandate", St. Antony's College at Oxford

as well as this, too:

"The Impact of the Jewish Underground upon Anglo Jewry: 1945-1947", M.Phil Thesis in Modern Middle Eastern Studies, Paul Bagon

And there is another review article which appeared in The Jewish Chronicle, written by Geoffrey Alderman and it,too, glaringly reveals the political and ideological, and perhaps the psychological, bias that certain Jews have developed.

Some examples from his review material:

Lehi was a terrorist organisation of limited competence, specialising in indiscriminate murder both in Palestine and Europe;

Actually, it was very competent. Lord Moyne, Count Bernadotte, scores of British army and police personnel killed, bank heists, and more, including the revenge attack on Farran which, because his brother decided to open the parcel, did not kill Roy Farran but Rex Farran. These were not "indiscriminate" murders. They were planned, they were politically-motivated and the targest were selected for the most effect to pressure Britian either to fulfill the original terms of the Mandate they had been tasked with or, give it up. Eghich, eventually, they were forced to do, mainly by the armed resistance.

That is how wars are won...Farran’s battle tactics differed little from those of the notorious “Black and Tans”...Farran’s tragedy was that he and his military superiors failed to detect a sea-change in the relationship between Britain’s military strategy and its political objectives in Palestine as the Mandate drew to a close...

That was the "tragedy", not that of 16-year old Rubovitz?

...The disappearance and murder of Rubowitz, Farran’s escape to Syria, and his eventual trial and acquittal, were inevitably exploited by the Zionists and their supporters in the USA...

"Exploited"?

Gee, reading all this, one does not obtain any moral judgment - which one would noramally expect from someone like Kushner or Alderman.

All this is an introduction to a press conference that was held today in Jerusalem by Steve Rambam of Pallorium who has been investigating the murder and possible whereabouts of Rubovitz's remains.

Here's Steve, second from left, with Yair Stern, at right


and this is Yael Ben-Dov who was Rubovitz's squad commander and who was waiting for him and the delivery of the leaflets he was bringing that evening when he was snatched and later tortured and murdered.

The investigation indicates that Rubovitz was not the only victim of these Q Squads and that there are probably several members of these squads still alive.

Rambam hopes to be able to find the remains.

Here's one of the documents Rambam displayed:

Document R/1

Type: Telegram
From: High Commissioner Sir Allen Cunnigham
To: Secretary of State for Colonies
Date: July 1, 1947
Classification: Most Immediate; Top Secret

Summary

The HC explains to the Secretary of State for Colonies that the criminal proceedings based on a June 19th charge sheet against Farran must continue since (a) Farran admitted he had killed Rubowitz to his immediate superior, Col. B. Ferguson; (b) Farran left behind a diary at his barracks in his own handwriting admitting he committed the murder; (c) Rubowitz cannot be found; (d) no other evidence contrary to the supposition that Farran is the murderer.

But the really interesting aspect is the list of persons were aware of the contents of this telegram by virtue of receiving copies:

Secretary of State
Sir T. Lloyd
[Sir Thomas Ingram Lloyd, Permanent Under-Secretaries of State for the Colonies, 1947-1956]
Mr. I. Thomas
Mr. Martin
[Sir John Martin, Secretary to the Palestine Royal Commission, 1936; Churchill's Private Secretary,1940 and Principal PS with Management of the Private Office, 1941-45; served later in Palestine]
Mr. Gutch
[Sir John Gutch, later, High Commissioner for Western Pacific]
Mr. Trafford Smith
Mr. Mathieson
Mr. Higham
[John D. Higham, Assistant Secretary for State, Head, Eastern Department]
Mr. Bennet
Mr. Eastwood
[C.G. Eastwood, Private Secretary to the High Commissioner]
Mr. Dale
Miss Boyd

So all these knew but kept quiet. Some British morality.

For my part, here's my impressions of the press conference:

1. The establishment of the Special Squads:
- Who was responsible for them being set up and who authorized their activities?
- How was their mission defined?
- What were their permitted modes of operation?
- What were their achievements?
- Were there any other victims?
- Any members of these squads or the relatives of those who passed on available?

2. In the wake of the Rubovitz murder:
- Who knew and when?
- If there was a cover-up, how high did it extend?
- Why was there a cover-up?
- Did the Prime Minister Clement Atlee know?

3. The trial:
- Why was there an acquittal?
- Why was Farran awarded medals from the King and the US Ambassador?
- How was it possible for him to run for Parliament?

4. Canada:
- Was there any official connivance that permitted his entry, or any discussion as to his possible criminal status? (who was his father-in-law)
- How was it possible for him to achieve the position of Solicitor-General of Alberta?
- Why, following his death, no mention of the Rubovitz affair was made in the obituaries?


=====================

P.S.

Here's from the UK Telegraph obit:

Becoming second-in-command of the 3rd Hussars, he accompanied them to Palestine. One day he was lunching in the officers' mess at Sarafand when terrorists attacked a nearby ammunition dump. Farran and his comrades pursued them, wounding two.

After a spell as an instructor at Sandhurst he returned to Palestine to put his knowledge of clandestine intelligence-gathering at the disposal of the Palestine Police. He formed "Q" Patrols, made up of hand-picked undercover police officers whose job it was to infiltrate the terrorists' network.

There were claims that a hat bearing Farran's name had been found at the spot where a 16-year-old Jewish youth, Alexander Rubowitz, had been abducted; and there were also reports that the youth had been killed. After allegations had appeared in the Palestine Post, Farran was put under house arrest.

Farran claimed to have a water-tight alibi, but believed that he would be sacrificed by the British authorities in order to demonstrate impartiality in dealing with the Jews and Arabs. When he heard that he was to be charged with murder, he stole a car and, accompanied by two of his NCOs, crossed the border into Syria and told his story to the head of the British Legation in Damascus.

Farran flew back to Palestine with the Assistant Inspector-General of the Palestine Police and was incarcerated in Allenby Barracks, Jerusalem. He escaped again, but surrendered after members of the Stern gang started to take reprisals against his friends.

At his trial it was maintained that no body had been discovered and that Farran had not been identified in a line-up by those who claimed to have seen the boy taken away in a car. The case was dismissed because of lack of evidence. But when he was in Scotland shortly before the first anniversary of the boy's disappearance, Farran's youngest brother, Rex, was killed by a letter bomb sent to the family home near Wolverhampton; Farran suspected the Stern gang.

P.S.


A video clip of Cesarani discussing his book.



And a new review:

David Pryce-Jones
TROUBLE IN PALESTINE
Major Farran's Hat: Murder, Scandal and Britain's War Against Jewish Terrorism, 1945-1948 By David Cesarani (Heinemann 290pp £20)

A last-minute addition to the British Empire, Palestine was always troublesome. The British presence there brought no very clear political or strategic advantage, only an immense moral dilemma. Nobody had the imagination or the skills to reconcile the local Arabs and Jews, two communities with cultural and national values in complete opposition, as is still in evidence today.

The consequences for Palestine of the rise of Hitler could not have been anticipated. The British were to be locked into inescapable violence. The belief that Nazism spelled the end of the British Empire inspired a widespread Arab revolt. This had to be crushed, but not so severely that other Arabs were encouraged to side with Hitler. After the war, Jewish survivors of Nazism tried to enter Palestine in numbers that the authorities could not deal with. The Jewish Agency, representing those already in Palestine, did what it could to work with the British while also laying the foundations of a state. Two groups, the Irgun and the Stern Gang, took the alternative view that if there was to be a state of Israel the British had first to be driven out. Activists numbered a few hundred at most, and they had to be crushed, but not so severely that other Jews supported them, or that it provoked a possible backlash of anti-Semitism in Britain.

In his opening chapters David Cesarani sets this scene succinctly. A historian, he has made use of material recently available from the archives, and the rest of this book comes to focus on the terrorism of the Irgun and Stern Gang and its consequences. Those responsible for Jewish terror were ideologues and fantasists, grounded in the revolutionary violence of Eastern Europe. One of them invented an 'explosive coat' - forerunner of today's suicide belts - while another was the granddaughter of the composer Scriabin. Generating the crisis they felt would serve their cause, they committed more and more outrages, first in Palestine and then in Europe. The British Embassy in Rome was destroyed, but bombs and letter-bombs in England mostly did not explode or were detected.

In the face of this rather haphazard campaign, the authorities panicked. A report had recommended more imaginative policing. The Chief of Staff, Field Marshal Montgomery, disagreed. During the pre-war Arab revolt he had served in Palestine, and now wanted the army to have a free hand to eradicate Jewish terrorism. Palestine in his view was an essential strategic asset of the Empire. By then, he was the country's most eminent soldier, far too famous to be criticised. But Cesarani traces a lot of the final disaster in Palestine back to his arrogance and narrow-mindedness.

There were to be Search and Seek Squads, as they were called, composed of hand-picked men operating undercover as Jews, with loose instructions to arrest terrorists or shoot to kill. To recruit these squads, Montgomery turned to Bernard Fergusson, a colonel whose prissy voice and permanent monocle gave a misleadingly Wodehousian impression of his tough character. Previously a Chindit with Wingate behind the Japanese lines in Burma, he had the self-confidence of the Scottish grandee that he was. He in turn enrolled Roy Farran in the Palestine Police with the rank of Deputy Superintendent.

The introduction of Farran into the narrative dramatises and personalises this whole issue. Much decorated, Farran had had an exceptional war, serving in Egypt, Crete, Italy and France as a member of the Special Air Service or SAS, valued by its commanding officers Bill and David Stirling, themselves famous freebooters. Debonair, brave to the point of recklessness, Farran romanticised himself as 'a G A Henty figure', but he had a dark side that took pleasure in killing. In the war he had got away with disobeying orders, and also shooting German prisoners. 'I do not think I would make a practice of shooting prisoners,' Farran was to write in his memoirs without a trace of remorse, 'but Crete was different.' Cesarani's portrayal of this equivocal personality is fair and therefore convincing.

Unable to pass as Jews, not speaking Hebrew and therefore on a mission with little hope of success, Farran and his squad interpreted their instructions in Palestine as a license to be law-breaking thugs. A day came in 1947 when they caught the seventeen-year-old Alexander Rubowitz in Jerusalem in the fairly humdrum act of delivering Stern Gang posters. Perhaps his innocence exposed the futility of this approach to combating terrorism. At any rate, Farran and the squad drove him into the Judean desert and murdered him. The body was never found. But other Jewish boys were witnesses to the kidnapping, and handed to the police a hat which they had picked up at the scene, with Farran's name in it.

Farran immediately confessed this brutal killing to Fergusson, and an extraordinary rigmarole then ensued, during which Farran twice ran away from custody in Palestine only to return and hand himself in. His guilt was there for all to see while Fergusson and the authorities were made to look lax or conniving. The instinct of the Palestine authorities and the army was to cover up. There had to be a court-martial and the officers sitting on it were carefully chosen. First-rate lawyers brought in from London ran rings round the prosecution, and then managed to have destroyed every copy of a document Farran had written about what had happened. Fergusson's subsequent account of all this was, in Cesarani's words, 'witty and elegant dissimulation'. As for Montgomery, he pretended that he had always been against the special squads.

For a while the popular press in Britain built the wrongfully acquitted Farran up as a hero and patriot. Stern Gang terrorists then posted a letter-bomb to his house, and his brother was killed opening it. Farran remains somewhere in the collective memory of Jews, at least those in Israel, as nothing but a murderous anti-Semite and fascist, representative of Britain at its worst. Eventually he emigrated to Canada, where he had a successful journalistic and political career, and was a pillar of the community by the time of his death.

In his official history of the Palestine Police published five years ago, Edward Horne described Farran as a 'fine young man' but went on to say that Fergusson and Farran and the other ranks were essentially soldiers, 'out of their depth in the police world'. To Horne, that was a complete explanation of what had gone wrong. While concurring that policemen are more effective than soldiers in combating terrorism, David Cesarani goes further, and attributes the end of empire in large part to the mistaken use of military methods. Whether such a generalisation is valid in all circumstances must remain an open question. Palestinian Arabs and Israeli Jews surely continue to prove that they are special cases.

And here's a British reaction (at the end of March 12 entry):

I spent the evening reading some more of "Major Farran's Hat", learning about the murderous activities of Jews during the period 1945-48 in their attempts to force British troops out of Palestine. Terrible people, gunning down British troops in cold blood and blowing up the British Embassy in Rome. The Jew thugs issued a communiqué saying: "Let every Briton who occupies our country know that the armed hand of the Eternal People will reply with war everywhere until our fatherland is freed and people redeemed." The I.R.A. would have been proud of that brutal message.

As Chief of the Imperial General Staff, Montgomery commendably believed that the only way to deal with the Jew terrorists was to shoot them, but the shilly-shallying of Attlee and Bevin, incredulously believing that there could be a reasoning with the Jews, initially made Montgomery's position difficult.. It was not until further murder and mayhem committed by the Jew thugs that our troops were given the all clear to sort them out, but the intervention of America with its millions of Jews, made any full-scale assault impossible.

Oh, that British troops had remained there, preventing the state of Israel being set up! How different the history of the Middle East would have been, the Palestinians being able to live peacefully in their own country, instead of being invaded and treated with Nazi-style brutality by the Jews, their movements restricted and denied food, water and electricity by the so-called "Eternal People" who eternally wail about the Holocaust in the belief that nobody else suffered during the Second World War.