By William A. Cook
First Published 2010-05-13
Courtesy Of "Middle-East-Online"
This week marks 62 years of the state of Israel, and of the Palestinian nakba. Looking back, many ambiguities still shroud this time. One is the dearth of information from the British Mandate forces governing Palestine from 1940 to 15 May 1948, the date planned for British withdrawal under the UN partition plan, General Assembly resolution 181.
However, Sir Richard C Catling, deputy head of the special branch of the Criminal Investigation division in Jerusalem in 1944 and then Assistant Inspector General, left us a file that provides insight into conditions in Jerusalem at the time. Catling’s Top Secret file lay untouched in the Rhodes House archives of the Bodleian Libraries of Oxford University until I received permission to cite its contents two years ago.
Two documents stand out (the file has 62 appendices of evidence totaling close to 500 pages). The first is a dispatch sent to the Secretary of State, dated 16 October 1941, by the High Commissioner of Palestine, Harold MacMichael, labeled “Most Secret.” The second is a “Top Secret” Memorandum on the Participation of the Jewish National Institutions in Palestine in Acts of Lawlessness and Violence, prepared by the Criminal Investigation division headquarters, the Palestine Police, Jerusalem, dated 31 July 1947.
With the scholarly work of the Israeli new historians Ilan Pappe and Benny Morris, plus Catling’s records, the truth surrounding the creation of the state of Israel becomes clearer: The Jewish Agency provisional government did not accept the Jewish state designated under UN resolution 181 with the intention of abiding by the General Assembly goal of providing a state for two peoples in the land of Palestine. Rather, it sought to use it as a means of gaining control of all the land and ridding it of its indigenous people so far as possible.
MacMichael’s dispatch resulted from an investigation into the funding practices and use of those funds by various Jewish organizations. The memorandum reveals that the Mandatory power was faced potentially with as much danger from Jewish violence in Palestine as from Arab violence -- danger that was far less easy to counter by the repressive methods employed against Arabs. The dispatch said: “In the first place, the Jews … have the moral and political support … of considerable sections of public opinion both in the United Kingdom and the United States of America. … all the influence and political ability of the Zionists would be brought to bear to show that the Jews in Palestine were the victims of aggression, and that a substantial body of opinion abroad would be persuaded of the truth of the contention.”
MacMichael added: “The Jews in Palestine are by no means untrained in the use of arms … large numbers have received training in the Palestine Police… or in His Majesty’s Forces. At the present time, in addition to approximately 10,000 Jews in His Majesty’s Forces, there are 5,800 in various units of the police force and 15,400 special policemen (31,000) … When to those men … are added the illicit ‘defence’ organisations of the Jews (Haganah alone had an estimated 60-70,000 men by 1945, see Mss, Med S20 Appendix XXI), it will be evident that the Jewish people in arms would numerically and in calibre be a very formidable adversary.”
This was in 1941, before the full deployment of Jewish violence against the legitimate Palestine government got under way (from movements such as Lehi and the Stern Gang). MacMichael and Catling had to confront the “facts on the ground”: resistance by the Zionist Executive movement against Britain’s limitation of immigrants into Palestine (as stated in the White Paper of 1939) and the outright terrorism of the Stern Gang which “deemed Britain to be the bitter enemy of Zionism.”
Lehi emphasized anti-British rebellion, including robbing of banks, indiscriminate killing of British police and the assassination of British minister-resident, Lord Moyne, in 1944, as “the Nazi death machinery continued to swallow European Jewry.” The situation worsened as the end of the war loomed. “The Haganah carried out anti-British military operations -- liberation of interned immigrants from the Atlit camp; the bombing of the country’s railroad network; sabotage raids on radar installations and bases of the British police mobile force; sabotage of British vessels … and the destruction of all road and railroad bridges on the borders.” Throughout this violence against the Mandate government, the home government remained silent under the pall of Zionist propaganda.
Catling’s Top Secret memorandum makes clear the extent to which the supreme Jewish national institutions in Palestine and their principal officials had been parties to acts of sedition, violence, incitement and other offences against the laws of Palestine. “The [Jewish] Agency,” he reported, “unquestionably exercises, both in Jerusalem and in London, a considerable influence on the conduct of government.” Catling’s frustration with the Zionists’ control over British policy in Palestine glares through this document. “This powerful and efficient organization amounts, in fact, to a government existing side by side with the Mandatory Government,” he wrote.
The Criminal Investigation division itemizes six areas of subversive activities undertaken by the Jewish Agency against the British Mandate government: maintenance of a secret army and espionage system; smuggling, theft and manufacture of arms; illegal immigration; violence and civil disobedience; seditious and hostile propaganda; encroachment upon the civil rights of Jewish citizens.
The Zionist-controlled Jewish Agency actively undermined the legal authority in Palestine and also tried to undermine support for the government at home, by putting British forces in harm’s way as they attempted to fulfill their authorized responsibilities in Palestine – a mark of the Agency leadership’s determination to undermine the nation that had given it a means of establishing a homeland in Palestine through the Balfour Declaration.
William A. Cook is professor of English at the University of La Verne in southern California. His latest book is The Plight of the Palestinians, forthcoming in June from Macmillan.
Copyright © 2010 Le Monde diplomatique -- distributed by Agence Global.
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