300. Gaza: The 1948 War (Part 10)

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0:29Hello and welcome to Empire with me, Anita Harnon. And me, William Durimple. Now, in the last episode, we left you, or Caroline Elkins talked us through a Palestinian revolt, a report sent to the League of Nations. Yet all eyes are turned away as the world enters its next phase of tumult, and that is the Second World War. And with the end of that war, the mandate entered its last and most fateful phase that led on one hand to the great triumph of the creation of the state of Israel, and on the other to the great catastrophe, the expulsion of most of the Palestinians known to them as the Nakba, meaning the catastrophe.

1:09Well, here to guide us through what is, I think it's fair to say, one of the most contested territories of history, is a rare figure who is respected by both sides of this conversation, Eugene Rogan, Professor of Modern Middle Eastern History at the University of Oxford. He is the author of two seminal books that tell the story of this land, The Arabs, A History and The Fall of the Ottomans, a friend of the show since our very inception. Eugene, welcome to you. Thanks very much for being with us. It is a pleasure to be back with you. Thank you, Anita. Eugene, we haven't mentioned there, you actually edited a book, didn't you, on exactly this topic?

1:45The War for Palestine, which I edited with Avi Shlame and brought together a lot of the then new historians and other leading scholars on the Nukba itself in the 1948 war. 1948 war. And that's very much what we're going to be diving deep into here. As we've said, this is highly controversial territory, but we're going to go through it factually and calmly with the help of Eugene. Now, by 1948, Eugene, the Zionist leadership has split in two, hasn't it? Both sides wanted the British out. But while the mainstream Zionists under Ben-Gurion were more cautious, especially about the use of violence, their right-wing rivals, the Ergun and the Stern Gang, were ready to resort to what the British call terrorism.

2:27Tell us about that and tell us who the Stern Gang are, what do they do, and what do they want? Start by looking at Zionism. And Zionism is basically the national movement of the Jewish people seeking the revival of the Jewish people on the land of Palestine. And that mission had been led since Theodor Herzl's demise by the World Zionist Organization. And by the time we get to the interwar years, it's been Hein Weizmann, who's been the leading shaper of the international efforts, and David Ben-Gurion, the leader of the Zionist movement in Palestine itself. But that movement does not hold together.

3:07And there is a challenge from what is called the revisionist Zionist movement led by Zev Jabotinsky. And Jabotinsky is far less accommodating in plans for cohabitation between Arabs and Jews. He believed that the only way the Jews had realized their goal of statehood in Palestine was by erecting an iron wall of pure force and driving all Arab Palestinians out of the territory. The iron wall is his phrase, isn't it? It is his phrase. And this was a political platform that appealed to some of the more radical Zionists, both in Palestine and in the diaspora. And this is where you get the breakaway movements that were inspired by Jabotinsky, the Stern Gang, or the Lehi, and the Irgunzweleumi, or the Etzel.

3:51And these would be challenges to the position of Ben-Gurion in holding the Zionist movement together. We're going to cover both of those. And also, you will have heard the term use Haganah. I think it would be really helpful to explain the origin stories of all three of these groups, Haganah, Irgun, and the Stern gang. Who are they? Who makes them up? What is their inception, if you will? So the Haganah is basically the regular army of the Yishuv, or the Jewish community of Palestine. And it's governed by the Jewish executive as part of the official Jewish state in the making that was going on under the British mandate.

4:28Very different from the experience of Palestinians who really never had the capacity to build such institutions as an army, the Yishuv did, and that's the Haganah, and they're answerable to Ben-Gurion and his officers. Are they used by the British? What is the motivation of the British in allowing an armed force within their mandate? The British did draw on Jewish volunteers during the Second World War. The British were themselves quite divided between those who were philo-Semitic and were sympathetic to Jewish settlement in Palestine, and those who sided with the Arabs and were less supportive of the Balfour Declaration's promises.

5:07And among the Philo-Semitic, you had people like Ord Wingate. Who we talked about with Caroline Elkins, this extraordinary figure. Your listeners are familiar with Wingate, but he represents one of those Brits who would be training up members of the Jewish community in Palestine for self-defense and for military action. Some are drawn into military service with the British and patrolling the eastern Mediterranean. Famously, this is when Moshe Dayan, famous general in Israel, famous for his eyepatch, he lost his eye to a Senegalese rifleman serving for Vichy France off the coast of Lebanon when he was serving with the British in the Second World War.

5:50As a regular British soldier? As a regular British soldier. And the British allow the Haganah arms? They're allowed to have guns and training and uniforms and that sort of thing? Or what's the rules? The Haganah was not reliant uniquely on British arms. And so while in the capacity that they were assisting and advancing British security interests, they were armed. There was at the same time an initiative by the Yishuv to acquire arms, particularly in the course of the Second World War, as the bid for statehood would lead the leaders of the Yishuv to see the risk of war. And just for clarity, there's no equivalent Palestinian group.

6:31There are Palestinians recruited into the regular army, but you don't have an equivalent of the Haganah, which is an armed group working with the British. No, there's no equivalent. There were no Palestinian militiamen working with the British. The closest you get would be the Palestine police, which recruited Arabs and Jews to the police force under British command. But as you will have covered in your last episode, you know, the Palestinians were more or less broken of all military capacities by the repression of the Palestine revolt of 1936 to 1939. And they certainly had not recovered from that in the course of the Second World War.

7:06So that's the Haganah who are working closely with the British. You have also mentioned two other groups, the Irgun and the Stern Gang. Let's start with the Stern Gang and their activities in the 1940s. Well, the Stern Gang is an offshoot of the Irgun, so it might actually make sense to begin with the Irgun. The Irgun are directly linked to Zev Jabotinsky, the revisionist Zionist, and they had their own youth movement. This was where Menachem Begin was drawn into revisionist Zionism already in the Russian Empire. He had joined Betar and was an ardent supporter of revisionist Zionism. That is the beginning of the Irgun.

7:46From the Irgun, you'll have a breakaway movement in the 1940s led by Abraham Stern. Stern himself was born in Poland, came to Palestine as a young man in the 1920s at the age of 18. So he really is fully established in the Yishuv by the time we get to the Second World War. And he is not persuaded of the more moderate position taken by Ben-Gurion to fight Nazism with the British, while the British were now implementing measures that were limiting the scope for Jewish statehood. So Avraham Stern believed that you needed to treat the British like a colonial occupier. He took his inspiration from Irish resistance in the IRA and believed that by assassinating key figures, you could change the formula.

8:35And so the Stern gang would emerge as a movement that was seeking to use terrorist tactics to change the reality in Palestine. And in a very similar story to the Irish story that we've also covered here on Empire, they focus in on those very high up in the British chain of command in the territory. So in August of 1944, the Stern gang attempt to assassinate the High Commissioner of Palestine, a man called Sir Harold McMichael. They don't manage to kill him, but in November, they succeed in killing the British Minister of State in Cairo. Tell us a little bit about the killing of Lord Moyne. Well, the assassination of Lord Moyne really established the Stern gang's notoriety.

9:17And for the British, this was Ireland coming to Palestine. And they were determined to respond in force to crush this movement before it gained traction. And of course, Abraham Stern then became one of the most wanted men in Palestine. And he was tracked down and ultimately was killed by the British authorities. LESLIE KENDRICK Churchill, who has been a supporter of Zionism up to this point, it gives him pause. I mean, he says, if our dreams of Zionism are to end in the smoke of assassins' pistols and our labors for its future to produce a new set of gangsters worthy of Nazi Germany, many like myself will have to reconsider the position we've maintained so consistently and so long in the past.

9:56So, I mean, how much did that shake those involved in this idea that a state of Israel is within reach if one of your greater supporters is now being turned off the whole idea. Well, here we really come to the crux of the contradiction in Britain's position since the Balfour Declaration. There is a tendency to believe that since the Balfour Declaration, Britain had been working to give Palestine to the Zionist movement to make a Jewish state. And I would argue that was never their agenda, that the British had hoped to use the Jewish community in Palestine as partners to help govern Palestine against the expected resistance of its Arab majority, and that the compact minority of Jews in Palestine would be totally dependent on Britain, and in that way, totally dependable to work together with the British.

10:42But the British, I think all the evidence shows, intended to keep Palestine for their empire. They saw it still as essential for the security of the Suez Canal, and they were resisting the creation of a Jewish state. So, in a sense, the actions of the Stern Gang were bringing things to a head, the contradiction between Britain seeming to be favoring the creation of a Jewish state, but in action doing everything it can to limit Jewish immigration to Palestine and to prevent the Jews from seizing statehood and creating Israel. And just again for clarity, the Haganah is legal and is working with the British and is armed partly by them, but the Stern Gang and the Irgun are both illegal and prescribed organizations.

11:26Prescribed organizations that are not acting like formal militaries, but rather like militias or even as terrorist groups. And I don't use the word terrorist unadvisedly. It's the word that Begin himself used for their methods. They saw themselves as deploying terror to change a political stalemate that they thought was to the disadvantage of Jewish national aspirations. And what did figures like Weizmann and Ben-Gurion make of these people? Well, publicly, they denounced the actions of the Irgun and of the Stern gang. In a sense, they had to because they continued to rely on the international community, and Britain in particular, to advance their goals in the course of the wartime of destroying Nazi Germany.

12:12and then they still hope to usher in a Jewish state in Palestine. But there are times in the Second World War where we can see that the Haganah was cooperating actively with both the Stern gang and the Irgun. And in that sense, the period of collaboration was to leave all Jewish armed organizations suspect in the eyes of the British authorities. The British, in the course of the Second World War no longer knew who to trust as the Jewish community of Palestine was rising up in a Jewish revolt that was to prove far more devastating and effective than the earlier Palestine revolt of the 1930s. Right.

12:54Eugene, do tell us about the most famous action of the Irgun, the attack on the King David Hotel. First of all, what was the importance of that as a landmark and what happened afterwards? So the King David Hotel was Jerusalem's biggest, poshest hotel. and in the course of the Second World War had come to house the administration of the British mandate authorities in Palestine. In the immediate weeks before the attack on the King David Hotel, the British had conducted a series of operations to clamp down on the Irgun and the Stern Gang. And they had seized a group of documents as they made hundreds of arrests that incriminated the Irgun-Stern Gang and Haganah as having collaborated.

13:38It became imperative to the Zionist executive to eliminate the traces and the evidence of this because it would fundamentally compromise the Haganah standing and that of the Yishuv. And so the people of action here were the Irgun, led by Menachem Begin, himself, a late arrival in Palestine from his native Russia. And we should say again, for people that don't know this name, Malachem goes on to become the Prime Minister of Israel. Absolutely. But in the course of the Second World War, he would become one of the most wanted men in Palestine. So he was branded by the British as a terrorist. The most notorious of his actions was the bombing of the King David Hotel.

14:23The Irgun infiltrated the basement of the hotel, dressed as milkmen, delivered a series of milk canisters into the basement, gave a warning, but too late to be actioned. And the bomb detonated, collapsed a full wing of the hotel. Over 90 people are killed, most of them Arab, no small number of them Jews, but a large number of British mandate officials. I've got the figures here. I think there are 41 Arabs, 28 Britons, and 17 Jewish workers. So you can see where this was indiscriminate violence targeting primarily the British presence, but also trying to sap the morale of the British to continue to hold on to Palestine against such determined resistance.

15:07So, I mean, we have an account of that. So, we're talking about the 22nd of July, 1946. And as you say, Eugene, this was sort of a housing point for journalists. And a British journalist called Barbara Bord was there. She'd been reporting from Palestine for a decade. So, she was very au fait with the region. She was walking into the King David Hotel when the explosion went off, and this is how she described it, the boom of exploding admiral roared over the city like a giant thunderclap. The six stories of the southern wing bulge swayed and crashed in the ghastly mountain of crumbling cement, twisted girders and snapped off blocks of masonry, out of which the screams of the dying rose in a piercing chorus of agony.

15:48A vast mushroom of sepia smoke climbed up into the sunlit sky and rolled away in the awful silence that followed. Now, she survived, but there is something in that kind of testimony, first-person testimony, that then gets published and republished and syndicated that is very powerful when it comes to public opinion. And so, was this attack on the King David Hotel scene-changing in the minds of many countries around the world? It was certainly scene-changing in Britain. And I think the images of the bombing of the hotel, the reports of survivors, the death toll of those killed. There were atrocious stories that circulated, and I think it generated tremendous outrage.

16:35All this is happening in the aftermath of the Second World War, when full knowledge of the Holocaust is already reaching public consciousness. And yet, you could still have very strong anti-Semitic responses to what groups were doing in Palestine when it caused British casualties. And it seemed to many in Britain that this was the ultimate betrayal, that the British who had, through the Balfour Declaration, paved the way towards the Jewish presence in Palestine, should now be victims of a Jewish revolt like this, provoked just fury in British public opinion. Eugene, what happens to Jerusalem overnight then?

17:13How does it transform after an attack like this? Jerusalem became a security state. Basically, the deployment of police, the unrolling of barbed wire, the controls on the free movement of people were all, as it turns out, vain efforts to try and establish Britain's control over a situation that was rapidly rolling beyond their reach. They were losing control of Palestine. Remember, this is after the end of the Second World War, where Britain had emerged victorious from that war, but at such a cost. And that cost meant that it had fewer and fewer means with which to respond to overseas challenges.

17:48It was still trying to rebuild London from the Blitz. It was dealing with the impending loss of India. They simply did not have the means or the will to be combating this kind of insurgency now in Palestine. There is this feeling that you have in India at this time, which we just had in our partition series talking about the end of the Raj, when there's just this feeling of exhaustion. The soldiers want to go home. They've fought a major war. All the ambition for empire, which has propelled the British for 300 years, is completely extinguished. They're exhausted. They want to go home. They're broke.

18:23And this is just a nightmare. This is a kicked hornet's nest for them. So as you say, post-war exhaustion kicks in, but there's also the moral difficulty what do you do? Especially if you've got an insurgency and things like the King David Hotel happening at the same time news of the Holocaust and the industrialized wiping out of a people because they are Jewish. So Britain then throws its hands up in the air and says, you know what, United Nations, that's what you're for, bye-bye, and passes it all over. I mean, is that how it happens and is that why it happens? Well, there's one other element, Anita, and you will have covered in your last episode, but in 1939, the British announced a new policy.

19:03It was to try and bring an end to the Arab revolt, and it was trying to put a cap on Jewish ambitions. And that policy basically said that the British would allow five years of reduced immigration, no more than 15 ,000 a year, a total of 75 ,000 more Zionist immigrants to be allowed into Palestine, and then no more Jewish immigration without the consent of the majority population, which would never, ever, ever happen. That was going to take the Jewish population of Palestine to 35%. Compact minority, nothing bigger. This is what, if you like, Ben-Gurion, as well as the radical factions like the Stern Gang and the Irgun, are fighting against.

19:45But Britain doesn't have another policy. And so it finds itself in this position of trying to reduce Jewish immigration to Palestine after the Second World War. This is where you get the exodus and all the displaced person boats making their way across the Mediterranean to Palestine, and the British continuing to resist to let them in, turning them back, and public opinion internationally is judging the British's actions very, very harshly. Eugene, just for those that don't know the Exodus, don't know the novel that was inspired by Leonuris or the movie, which then followed, which was a major big Hollywood production, just briefly tell us what the Exodus was.

20:22The Exodus represents all those boats that the Jewish agency hired, many of them broken down tramp steamers that were not seaworthy, and just loaded them with Jews who survived the Holocaust. They were known as the displaced persons, and they were kept in camps that were called DP camps, displaced person camps. And for the Zionist movement, the idea was overcome British policy restricting Jewish immigration, flood Palestine with the survivors of the Holocaust, reach a critical mass to enable the bid to statehood. As long as the Jews would be a minority in Palestine, the chances of ever realizing their goal of statehood would be stymied.

21:05And the British continued to resist these tramp steamers filled to the decks with survivors, people in just deplorable state of health, filthy conditions. The misery of these boats was captured by Leon Uris in his novel Exodus, based on established facts. But the real story was being carried in the 1940s in the newspapers, and the villain was Britain. The awareness of the Holocaust, it's very hard for us in 2025 to understand how slowly that is entering public consciousness, because after World War II and the millions who were killed on all sides, Jewish suffering had not yet been singled out as distinctive.

21:47The evil of the death camps was revealed by their liberation and the photographs that emerged of what was done there. But it was against the background of the millions of Russian victims and all those around the world who died, and of nuclear war in Nagasaki and Hiroshima. It just took time for the Shoah to become what it is to us now. And I think it was maybe more of a driver for the Jews of Palestine trying to harness the survivors and to more desperate than ever to create a Jewish state so that there'd be one place in the world where Jews would be safe against ever facing Holocaust again. So the Jews in Palestine knew what the Holocaust were.

22:28The rest of the world, they were waking up to it slowly, but it created a situation in which those displaced person boats were adding more and more pressure to the British, along with all the violence of the Jewish revolt and the terrorism that they couldn't contain, and all the antagonism internationally. When you talk about what leads the British to hand the file on to the United Nations, there was a lot of pressure that led to that decision. We should also just mention the figures. Between 1945 and 1947, the number of British troops in Palestine doubles from 50 ,000 to 100 ,000. Now, this is the opposite of what the British want.

23:01They want everything to be winding down. They're just about to leave India, and everyone wants to go home. Instead, they're forced to double. And then the price of this, one-tenth of the armed forces of the British Empire now occupied a territory around the size of Wales. Palestine was costing the British Exchequer close to 40 million a year. This is more than post-war Britain could afford. And so they hand the file on. But the horrors do not stop. Well, I was just going to say, I mean, you've got that much expenditure, that much sort of troop investment. And yet, and yet, in July 1947, there's another incident that takes place that inflames British public opinion.

23:36And that is when the Irgun kidnapped and hanged two British sergeants in retaliation for the execution of three of its own members. Tell us a little bit more about that, because it was one of those stories. Again, newspapers have a crucial role to play in this because the Daily Express leads on the front page with a picture of these hanged men on its front page. It would be hard to overstate the way that inflamed public opinion back home in Britain. The picture of young servicemen being hanged, their bodies actually have been booby-trapped, so that those who cut them down would also be maimed or killed.

24:13It just, one, generated tremendous anger against the Jewish community in Palestine. And it's shameful to recount, but this led to pogroms against Jewish shops and communities in Britain, in Liverpool, in London, in other cities, you actually had riots targeting the Jewish community of Britain in anger against the hanging of the sergeants in Palestine. But in terms of sapping imperial morale to keep up the fight, I mean, it was very effective. There just was consensus in Britain that there was no reason for young men to be dying in Palestine against such barbaric people. And I think it served the turns if terrorism pays.

24:58I think it was an instance of terrorism paying, but terrible consequences. Right. So that took place in July and it is in September that Bevan decides or declares rather that Britain's going to go the following year. So now you've got a clock ticking on all of this. So from the moment you have a clock ticking, Britain is left in a position of impotence. And in my own work, I've had the privilege of interviewing a number of Britons who served in the Palestine police at just this time. And they describe a time where increasingly the initiative slipped out of the hands of British forces and officials in Palestine.

25:37They were clearly no longer seen as relevant. And increasingly, it will be the Jewish community, the Yishuv, that's going on a war footing with the Arab population. And they're just operating over the heads of the British without really any concern. It's clear that the British days are numbered. And with their announcement of ending the mandate and withdrawing, then everything was up for grabs. and it was a situation in which Palestinians and members of the Yeshuv were both driven by a view that the winner would take all. And in both of their minds, an existential crisis, I guess. So for those who are seeking to create a safe place for a community that's gone through the Holocaust, this is existential.

26:23Either we have this or we could go through this again. And for the people who live there already, an existential crisis. This is where we live. This is who we are. It's absolutely right, Anita. And again, to view things from the Zionist perspective, coming out of the experience of the Holocaust and 30 years of hostilities with Palestinian neighbors and with surrounding countries, there was no confidence that the compact Jewish community of the issue would survive the hostility of its neighbors with the British gone. So their position was absolutely existential, and they have the Holocaust at the very forefront of their thinking as the risk that they face if they fail.