Nine
It is hard to imagine a more troublesome handful of words than those contained in the letter written to Lord Rothschild by Arthur Balfour on 2 November 1917. There are 117 of them, but the 67 which really count are those Balfour put in inverted commas, expressing the Cabinet’s ‘declaration of sympathy with Jewish Zionist aspirations’:
His Majesty’s Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use all their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.
The British Mandate for Palestine, approved by the League of Nations in July 1922, used more or less the same form of words and gave recognition ‘to the historical connection of the Jewish people with Palestine and to the grounds for reconstituting their national home in that country’. Churchill spelt out the British position in 1922 when he asserted that the Jews were in Palestine ‘of right, and not on sufferance’. The resulting influx of European Jews was met by sporadic Arab violence that escalated to widespread rioting in 1929. The British aim was the gradual creation of a multi-racial, multilingual, multi-faith and eventually independent state and so they sought to regulate the numbers of Jewish immigrants through a system of annual quotas. After the rise of Hitler in Germany and anti-Semitism elsewhere in Central Europe, the system broke down, unable to cope with the flood of refugees. Although the quotas were increased – sixty thousand for 1935 – the majority of those fleeing persecution were forced to enter Palestine illegally. Even at the approved rate of sixty thousand a year, the Arabs calculated that they would be outnumbered in their own land by 1947. The quota was reduced to thirty thousand for 1936, but that was thirty thousand too many for the Arab Council. In May of that year they met to demand an end to all Jewish immigration, a ban on further Jewish land purchase, and an Arab majority government. The demands were accompanied by a general strike and countrywide attacks against Jewish property. Twenty-one Jews were killed by Arabs in the month of May, and 140 Arabs were killed by the British in suppressing the violence.
Of more concern to the British was the appearance of armed Arab bands from outside Palestine. The 8th Hussars were among those sent to counter this more organized threat. Still a lieutenant and in the middle of writing his thesis, Hackett was appointed liaison and intelligence officer for the Gaza-Beersheba district; his time was soon taken up with a different kind of writing. He took to composing reports in such quantity and so much detail that they were regarded almost as an annoyance. He came to be known, somewhat mockingly, as ‘Hackett of Gaza’, but from the reports it is evident how much relish he took teasing out the connections between the various Arab factions and analysing the internal and external dynamics of urban, rural and nomadic elements of the population.
Gaza was the quietest area of Palestine during the general strike owing to the lack of Jewish settlement in the district, but the local notables, divided into two factions, were engaged in their own squabble ‘under the cloak of the general disturbance’. The Shawa and Shaba’an families were playing out the old civic drama, and at that moment the Shawas had the upper hand. The Mayor, a Shaba’an supporter, had been put in fear of his life by Shawa-sponsored bombers and had fled to the Lebanon. ‘Eighty piastres is said to be the price paid for the throwing of one bomb. The people named on the above list as bomb throwers or snipers are often to be seen at the offices of the [Strike] Committee. They come for payment, it is said. A Receipt would be a very good thing for us to get, but very few are given.’ Usually the bombs were set to damage only property. The Shawas seemed to control most of the guns as well, and the snipers’ targets were British patrols. One Shawa was said to have brought six new rifles to Gaza from Jerusalem, but more usually firearms went in the other direction – rifles scavenged from the defeated Turkish Army in 1917 that had lain buried in orchards wrapped in oily rags. Hackett reports a slump in the market, ‘the price of an old but serviceable rifle is not more than two pounds.’ The local price of tomatoes, however, had gone up, indicating perversely a weakening of the strike, wrote Hackett, since it seemed that the better part of Gaza’s abundant crop was being shipped out once more. Two other members of the Strike Committee approached Hackett to enquire about the awarding of the army’s orange juice contracts.
The reports show an acuity and maturity that seem beyond Hackett’s twenty-five years, on best display in his analysis of inter-clan politics of the Beersheba’s Bedou population where his Arabist inclination comes to the fore. In the Imperial War Museum interview, Hackett remembers this as ‘a really very, very interesting time’, but he also recalls the frustration – absent from the reports, but one imagines not from opinions expressed off the record – he felt with aspects of the British response to the unrest.
We went up … in the V8 pick-ups with machine guns mounted on each into the Gaza/Beersheba area, where our vehicles were very well adapted for the sort of policing role that was necessary there. There was occasional shooting … there was the occasional infliction of a collective punishment upon a village … which would be the blowing up by the sappers of a house after the evacuation of all of the inhabitants of the village … I don’t think it ever did any more than harden opposition.
What he had learnt from his study of mediaeval Arab tactics, based on the razzia principle of lightning raids by irregular forces that melted away into the countryside, showed him ‘your only hope is to operate on similar lines’. When the Arab violence stopped abruptly, the British commanders attributed to their own tactics a cessation that had in fact been caused by political intervention from Iraq and Trans-Jordan. In consequence they failed, in Hackett’s opinion, to learn this lesson, and regular troops unsuited to the job of suppressing civil unrest continued to be so deployed. Riding in the car behind that of General Dill as the ‘victorious’ commander made a flag-showing tour of Beersheba, Hackett had to dodge the stones aimed at the lead vehicle. People shouted at General Dill and he waved back, unaware of the ‘ruderies’. “‘Go Home Dill” was about the essence of it.’
Hackett also discerned a complacency in the British units that caused them to underestimate the danger of the situation. He bet a ‘brother’ officer in the South Wales Borders, who were guarding a pumping station, that he could slip past his sentries, through the wire and plant a ‘bomb’ inside their perimeter. He left an empty whisky bottle with a message round its neck right against the pump. This complacency was coupled with a sentimentality Hackett thought natural in the British soldier.
British soldiery is very bad at brutality, we use it half-heartedly or even not at all … [The] South Wales Borderers … kindly folk, they were told to do what they could to find weapons round the place, and I saw one of them at it, not beating the lights out of the little boy for information but showing him his rifle and saying ‘Our lad, has your Dad got one of these?’ It’s very endearing, the British way of handling insurgency … you see the Turks took a much rougher line … they’d come [into a village] and as a preliminary to any negotiation they’d throw half a dozen of the leading men from the top of the minaret and, having encouraged cooperation by these means, then set about discussing the matter with the rest of the population, beating one or two to encourage the others as they went along … Our attempt at brutality was half-hearted, unconvinced and unconvincing.
British measures against the ‘habitual snipers and bomb throwers’ were usually confined to demolishing their homes. Hackett’s opinion in the 1979 interview, that these collective punishments merely hardened opposition, may have been proved right by the escalation of the General Strike to the Arab Revolt of 1938–9, but one of his 1936 reports states that:
Fear of demolitions is strong, particularly in the President of the Strike Committee, Rushdi Shawa, who has just built for himself a large house of which he is very proud. He has given frequent signs of nervousness on its account … and last week his wife told another woman that he could not sleep at night for worrying over his house. ‘And if they blow it
