By Caroline Elkins, Knopf, 2022, hardcover, 896 pp. MEB $37.50
Reviewed by John Gee
DURING THE First Intifada in 1988, Israeli troops were reported to have tied Palestinians to the front of their vehicles to deter others from throwing rocks. Comparisons were quickly made to British practices during the 1936-39 Arab Revolt, when the previous occupier perched captive Palestinian Arabs on the hood of trucks or tied them to the front of trains as a precaution against ambushes and mines.
Most of the means of repression deployed against Palestinians by Israel were used previously by the British: deliberately wrecking the contents of homes during searches, home demolitions, selective and not so selective killings, imprisonment without trial and obtaining information through torture. These tactics are intended not merely to punish individuals, but to penalize and intimidate into submission a whole people.
Israel did not simply learn these British methods from counter-insurgency texts. Thousands of founding members of its army had experience and training with the British, and the Zionist colonies in Palestine were briefly (between 1945 and 1947) on the receiving end of British repression, though in a much less severe form than that inflicted upon the Palestinians.
In Legacy of Violence, Caroline Elkins, professor of history and of African and African American studies at Harvard University, examines how Britain used violence to maintain its global empire while attempting to sustain a self-image as a liberal country, extending its benevolent rule over so-called “lesser races.” Elkins does not, it must be said, draw out the parallels between Israel’s current behavior toward the Palestinians and British imperial violence, but informed readers might easily do that for themselves.
Elkins uses the term “legalized violence” to describe Britain’s barbaric acts that would have been widely recognized as reprehensible if used at home or in Europe. In Palestine and elsewhere, they were justified as being an exceptional measure for extraordinary circumstances. Powers were given to colonial administrators that essentially allowed them to permit whatever actions they thought might serve to suppress the resistance of the people over whom they ruled.
For anyone who follows what has happened to Palestinians under Israel’s rule, the comparison seems to leap out: “the only democracy in the Middle East” violates international law and human rights conventions every day, but it is all rendered legal under Israeli law and military orders and enabled by supporters who are ready to accept the most convoluted and unreasonable efforts to reconcile brutal repression with legal standards.
The British often imported individuals with expertise in violent repression from elsewhere in their empire to train and develop local colonial forces. In 1922, early in Britain’s rule over Palestine, veterans from the Black and Tans, Auxiliaries and the Royal Irish Constabulary—known for their violence during Ireland’s War of Independence—were brought to Palestine to staff the police force. They brought methods of repression honed in Ireland with them, as was well understood by the government in Westminster.
Later, during the 1936-39 Palestinian Revolt, the number of British police in Palestine was boosted to 3,000, and ultimately some 20,000 British soldiers were also deployed. While Palestinian police officers either resigned in compliance with rebel demands or were relieved of duty, a Jewish “supernumerary” force of nearly 12,000 men was recruited. Charles Tegart, a Northern Ireland Protestant with experience in suppressing Bengali resistance, was brought to Palestine to advise on the full-scale reorganization of the Palestine police in December 1937. Under Tegart’s oversight, 70 fortified police posts were constructed, where selected police officers tortured captive Palestinians to obtain information.
In the summer of 1938, with much of the countryside under rebel control, Orde Wingate, an intelligence officer and ardent pro-Zionist, came up with a new plan to counter the Arab Revolt, particularly their attacks on the oil pipeline from Iraq to Haifa. From British and Jewish recruits, he created the Special Night Squads with the mission of wiping out rebels. During some raids on villages, Elkins writes, “Arabs were counted off, and every fifteenth man was shot dead; women and children were killed in their sleep.”
As Elkins notes later, Wingate remains highly regarded in Israel, credited with developing tactics that are still used by the Israeli army. She quotes a March 2019 Times of Israel article that says, “few non-Jews and even fewer British soldiers are regarded as highly in Israel as Orde Charles Wingate, a senior officer who became a legend here by shaping Israel’s pre-state military.”
Legacy of Violence is a hefty size, but is well written as well as well researched, and it is to be hoped that it gains a wide readership. Its subtitle is “A History of the British Empire,” but Palestine looms large in it, with good reason. As Elkins writes of the 1936-39 Revolt: “Its three years had witnessed the efflorescence of legalised lawlessness and the consolidation of norms and logics that various British actors had honed elsewhere in the empire, whether in the air, on unconventional battlefields and interrogation sites, in domestic spheres, or on the floor of Parliament and in the cabinet’s smoke-filled rooms.” Elkins concludes that the revolt was a “crucial turning point in imperial convergences.”
John Gee is a free-lance journalist based in Singapore and the author of Unequal Conflict: The Palestinians and Israel.
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