The Darker Angels of Our Nature by Philip Dwyer;Mark Micale;

Author:Philip Dwyer;Mark Micale;
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781350140615
Publisher: Bloomsbury UK

12

British imperial violence and the Middle East

Caroline Elkins

By the summer of 1938, the Arab Revolt in Mandatory Palestine had been raging for some two years and Britain had lost control of the situation. Both sides of the imperial divide terrorized Arab villagers, and the rebels dominated the countryside where they destroyed vast swaths of Palestine’s infrastructure. As Britain scrambled to reassemble a new leadership cadre to take charge and crush the rebellion once and for all, a lone intelligence officer, Captain Orde Wingate, stepped forward with an idea to ‘terrorize the terrorists . . . [to] catch them and just wipe them out’.1 Officials at the highest level endorsed Wingate’s brainchild – the Special Night Squads – and with it the plan ‘[t]o set up a system and undetected movement of troops and police by night, across country and into villages, surprising gangs, restoring confidence to peasants, and gaining government control of rural areas’.2 For Wingate and his superior officers, translating Britain’s superior ‘national character’ and prowess in training and natural aggression into a highly disciplined counterterror operation with the single goal of wiping out Arab rebels was the key to re-establishing British colonial control.

Wingate’s Third Force took its brand of counterterrorism straight to the heart of the Arab villages. The Special Night Squads soon earned their legendary status when body counts and repression were the barometers for success. On their captain’s orders, Wingate’s men preferred inflicting bodily harm with blood-staining and dismembering bayonets and bombs rather than bullets; their leader’s ‘morality of punishment’ also inspired them.3 Reprisals became part of the Squads’ repertoire, with oil-soaked sand stuffed into the mouths of uncooperative Arabs. Wingate boasted how ‘anyone hanging about the line for an unlawful purpose was liable swiftly and silently to vanish away’.4

Britain’s empire would become as renowned for creating civil wars as they would be for leaving them in its wake, and Palestine was no exception. The Special Night Squads would become a training ground for future Jewish insurgents, both against Britain and eventually the Arab population. So, too, did the Squads embrace a wide swath of British security forces, some of whom, like Corporal Fred Howbrook and Lieutenant Rex King-Clark, were professional soldiers trained to kill.5 Others, when the Special Night Squads expanded, were like the inexperienced, job-seeking Sydney Burr, who, on a policing contract in Palestine, only knew Arabs as ‘wogs’ and casually recounted at the time how ‘most of the information we get is extracted by third degree methods, it is the only way with these people’.6 Many of these men were young, rough and ready recruits who were steeped in the Black and Tan traditions that suffused the Palestine Police Force after many within the Irish forces took up posts in the Mandate after 1922.

From the start, Arab politicians, including the president of the Palestine Arab Delegation to the League of Nations, Jamal al-Husayni, as well as European missionaries, local colonial officials, residents of Palestine, and military and police personnel documented Britain’s repressive measures

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