Anonymous Soldiers: The Struggle for Israel, 1917-1947

795 Pages·2015·23.59 MB·English

by  Bruce Hoffman

THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK
PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF
Copyright © 2015 by Bruce Hoffman
Map copyright © David Lindroth Inc.
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random
House LLC, New York, and distributed in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto,
Penguin Random House companies.
www.aaknopf.com
Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House LLC.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Hoffman, Bruce, [date] author.
Anonymous soldiers : the struggle for Israel, 1917–1947 /
Bruce Hoffman.
pages; cm
“This is a Borzoi book.”
ISBN 978-0-307-59471-6 (hardcover);
ISBN 978-1-10187466-0 (eBook)
1. Palestine—Politics and government—1917–1948.
2. Counterinsurgency—Palestine—History—20th century.
3. Palestine—History—1917–1948.
4. World War, 1939–1945—Palestine.
5. Zionism—Palestine—History—20th century.
I. Title.
DS126.H634 2015 956.94′04—dc23 2014018177
Jacket image: Ruined wing of the King David Hotel, Jerusalem,
July 24, 1946 © Imperial War Museum (E 31975), London
Jacket design by Stephanie Ross
v3.1
For you again, D.
And, this time for M., N., S., and A., too.
Also, in memoriam: David Hoffman, 1921–2009
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Preface
1 To Die for Our Nation
2 The Seeds of Terror
3 Red Days of Riots and Blood
4 Terror Against Terror
5 Dark Nights of Despair
6 The Shadow of Death
7 The Revolt
8 Conscripted for Life
9 The Deed
10 Tears of Bereaved Mothers
11 Wider Horizons
12 To Defend and to Guard Forever
13 Only Death Will Free Us
14 Defense and Conquest
15 Beating the Dog in His Own Kennel
16 Blunted Bayonets
17 An Instrument of Death
18 Buried Quietly in the Night
19 Drunk with the Hangman’s Blood
Epilogue: Only Thus
Acknowledgments
Appendix: Who Was Who
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Illustration Credits
A Note About the Author
Illustrations
Other Books by This Author
Preface
Does terrorism work? Its targets and victims steadfastly maintain that it
does not, while its practitioners and apologists claim that it does.
Scholars and analysts are divided. Given the untold death and
destruction wrought by terrorists throughout history, the question has an
undeniable relevance that has only intensified since the September 11,
2001, attacks. Yet a definitive answer unaccountably remains as elusive
as a universally accepted definition of the phenomenon itself.1
“Terrorists can never win outright,” Prime Minister Ian Smith of
Rhodesia confidently declared in 1977. Following the 1983 suicide truck
bombing that killed 241 U.S. military service personnel in Lebanon,
President Ronald Reagan defiantly proclaimed that “the main thing” is
to show that terrorism “doesn’t work … [and] to prove that terrorist acts
are not going to drive us away.” Margaret Thatcher described the
attempt by the Provisional Irish Republican Army (PIRA) to kill her at
the 1984 Conservative Party Conference as illustrative not only of a
failed attack but of a fundamentally futile strategy. And in July 2006,
Prime Minister Ehud Olmert of Israel promised that his government “will
not give in to blackmail and will not negotiate with terrorists when it
comes to the lives of Israel Defence Force soldiers.”2
Scholars have made similarly sweeping claims. The Nobel laureate
Thomas Schelling observed in 1991 that despite considerable exertion,
terrorists mostly have little to show for their efforts except for fleeting
attention and evanescent publicity. In the wake of the September 11,
2001, attacks, the historical novelist cum military historian Caleb Carr
consolingly averred, “The strategy of terror is a spectacularly failed
one.” And in a 2006 article unambiguously titled “Why Terrorism Does
Not Work,” the political scientist Max Abrahms argued that terrorism
was also tactically ineffective. “The notion that terrorism is an effective
coercive instrument,” he concluded, “is sustained by either single case
studies or a few well-known terrorist victories.”3
Yet if terrorism is so ineffective, why has it persisted for at least the
past two millennia and indeed become an increasingly popular means of
violent political expression in the twenty-first century? The sense of
personal empowerment and catharsis articulated by Frantz Fanon in The
Wretched of the Earth, based on his experiences in Algeria during that
country’s struggle for independence against France, only partially
explains terrorism’s enduring attraction to the alienated and
disenfranchised, the “so-far powerless [and] would-be powerful,”
described some forty years ago by Frederick J. Hacker, a psychiatrist like
Fanon.4 It is necessarily incomplete because individual motivations are
only one side of a coin that also must address organizational dimensions
and imperatives and the collective mind-set that they reflect.
Hence, much as statesmen and scholars may trumpet terrorism’s
ineffectuality, it is nonetheless widely accepted that terrorist violence is
neither irrational nor desperate but instead entirely rational and often
carefully calculated and choreographed. Terrorism is thus consciously
embraced by its practitioners as a deliberate instrument of warfare, a
pragmatic decision derived from a discernibly logical process. As the
doyenne of terrorist studies, Martha Crenshaw, explained in her seminal
1981 article on the causes of terrorism, “Campaigns of terrorism depend
on rational political choice. As purposeful activity, terrorism is the result
of an organization’s decision that it is a politically useful means to
oppose a government … Terrorism is seen collectively as a logical means
to advance desired ends.”5
Terrorism’s posited ineffectiveness as a coercive strategy—confined to a
handful of case studies or to infrequent and entirely sui generis successes
—thus hardly squares with the terrorists’ own fervent and abiding faith
in the efficacy of their violence, its intractable persistence over the
course of history, or indeed the disproportionate influence that even a
small number of well-known victories has had in inspiring imitation and
emulation by successive generations of terrorists.6
In other words, the handful of supposed exceptions may be far more
important and far more compelling than the perceived rule. And even if
terrorism’s power to dramatically change the course of history along the
lines of the September 11, 2001, attacks has been mercifully infrequent,
terrorism’s ability to act as a catalyst for wider conflagration or systemic
political change appears historically undeniable. The assassination of the
archduke Franz Ferdinand by a young Bosnian terrorist in June 1914
and the cross-border Palestinian terrorist attacks that led to the 1967
Arab-Israeli Six-Day War are arguably examples of the former, while the
struggles for independence won by Ireland in 1922, Cyprus in 1960, and
Algeria in 1962 are among the examples depicting the latter.7
The list goes on: Rhodesia is now Zimbabwe; the U.S. Marines soon
departed Lebanon; Sinn Féin’s Martin McGuinness, a former PIRA
terrorist, has been the deputy first minister of Northern Ireland since
2007; and that same year Israel freed five of its imprisoned terrorists in
exchange for the bodies of two kidnapped Israeli sergeants. Hezbollah’s
significant role in Lebanon further challenges arguments about
terrorism’s strategic futility. Indeed, neither Sinn Féin nor Hezbollah
could ever have acquired the power, influence, and status both enjoy
today if not for its terrorist antecedents.
The political violence that plagued Palestine when it was ruled by Great
Britain presents an ideal case with which to examine and assess
terrorism’s power to influence government policy and decision making.
Prior to 1948, the land that eventually became the Jewish state of Israel
was administered by Britain under the terms of the mandate awarded it
in 1922 by the League of Nations. Charged with preparing this territory
for eventual independence, Britain was regularly subjected to violent
pressure by both Arab and Jew alike. Arab rioting and attendant anti-
Jewish violence and terrorism during the 1920s led to more widespread
insurrection in the late 1930s. Then, during the 1940s, two Jewish
terrorist organizations—the Irgun Zvai Le’umi (National Military
Organization) and the Lohamei Herut Yisrael (Fighters for the Freedom
of Israel), known to Jews by its Hebrew acronym, Lehi, and to the
British as the Stern Gang—arose to challenge Britain’s rule over
Palestine.
The terrorist campaigns waged by both these organizations, it should
be emphasized, were only one facet of a broader confrontation that