Blood and Rage: A Cultural history of Terrorism

Over the following days, the press filled with murderous exhortations: ‘Let us whip these Slavic wolves back to the European dens from which they issue, or in some way exterminate them.’ In the financial district, brokers and traders offered personally to lynch anarchists and hang them from the city’s lampposts, while businessmen financed the police investigation. The prosecuting attorney Julius Grinnell urged the police not to bother with such niceties as warrants: ‘make the raids first, and look up the law afterwards’. The police descended on the offices of the Arbeiter-Zeitung, dragging August Spies and Michael Schwab to Central Police Station where the leading officer fell upon Schwab screaming, ‘You dirty Dutch sons of bitches, you dirty hounds, you rascals, we will choke you, we will kill you.’ The paper’s assistant manager, Oscar Neebe, was picked up the following day. The police then came for Fielden, who was nursing his leg wound at home. The chief officer pointed his finger at Fielden’s head and said: ‘Damn your soul, it should have gone here.’ Next the police pulled in Seliger and Lingg. Lingg put up a desperate fight in his hidey-hole; a policeman had to bite the anarchist’s thumb to stop him cocking his revolver. The police managed to detain and then release the person most widely suspected of throwing the bomb, who of course was never seen again. A middle-aged anarchist toy-shop owner, George Engel, was arrested and thrown in a police sweat-box to encourage him to talk. Eventually, eight anarchists were indicted for conspiracy to commit murder. Sensationally, on the opening day of the trial, a relaxed Albert Parsons walked into the courtroom, his previously dyed hair restored to its black sheen. His defence counsel had persuaded him to surrender himself as his continued flight seemed like an admission of guilt. Although the accused had decently courageous defence lawyers, both the judge and the jury were openly biased against them. The jury selection dragged on over twenty-one days in order to weed out any working-class men who might view the anarchists with sympathy. Once the defence had exhausted its right to query some 160 candidates, the court bailiff was allowed to go out into the streets to select jurors who had already condemned the defendants.

The charge of murder was outrageous, because how could one have a trial of accessories without the bomb-throwing principal? The star prosecution witness, a Swiss anarchist cabinet-maker, had been given money and immunity from prosecution for his testimony that two of the accused had conspired to use bombs at the fateful meeting in the saloon cellar. The prosecution was allowed to lay before the court lavish displays of bomb-making paraphernalia with obscure connections to the matter in hand. Inevitably, Most’s bomb-making manual became People’s Exhibit 16. As the prosecution and defence witnesses testified to the events of that night, it seemed that they were recalling two entirely unrelated scenarios. On 19 August the jury retired, rapidly reclining in armchairs to smoke cigars, after apparently reaching an instant verdict. The following morning they announced that seven of the defendants were guilty of murder and would hang, while Oscar Neebe should serve fifteen years’ hard labour. Parsons was allowed an incredible eight hours to address the court, further adding to the theatrical nature of the proceedings. After the appeals process had been exhausted, the four men, who refused to seek clemency, on the grounds of their belief in their innocence, were hanged wearing white shrouds. There should have been five executions, but Louis Lingg – a search of whose cell had earlier revealed four sticks of dynamite – cheated the hangman by exploding a small detonator cap in his mouth which blew away half of his face, a scene that became an illustrators’ favourite. It was an agonising death.

II THE BLACK INTERNATIONAL

These dramatic events in Chicago were symptomatic of the near-global panic that the anarchist Black International inspired in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Such an entity did exist, for in July 1881, a few months after the assassination of Alexander II, forty-five radicals gathered in London to form an International Anarchist Congress, although it failed to reconvene until 1907. While use of violence was controversial in these circles, it was nonetheless resolved by the participants to pay greater attention to explosives chemistry and technology so as to match the evolving forces of repression. This gathering, replete with loose talk about dynamite, ‘the proletariat’s artillery’, gave substance to the widespread fear that there was a single controlling intelligence behind each and every manifestation of political violence that could not be attributed to Fenians or nihilists.

It has long been almost axiomatic to regard a ramified anarchist conspiracy as the product of fevered bourgeois imaginations. Certainly, people in authority thought there was a single conspiracy animating anarchist deeds just as today Al Qaeda is blamed for, and opportunistically takes credit for, a welter of terrorist atrocities. The Spanish ambassador to Rome wrote of an ‘international anarchist impulse’ which informed the spirit if not the letter of anarchist deeds. The Italian press was convinced that the killing of king Umberto was part of ‘the vastness of the plan of the anarchists and of the aims they propose, the assassination of all of Europe’s monarchs’.

Although in reality there was no single directing conspiracy, and no single anarchist party, there were good reasons for contemporaries to believe that individual anarchists were acting in response to generalised injunctions to destroy bourgeois civilisation. That anarchists were often foreigners, with unpronounceable names like Bresci or Czolgosz, automatically fostered the impression of a very cosmopolitan conspiracy, as did the international circulation of the multilingual anarchist press, copies of which were invariably found in the homes of dynamiters and their sympathisers. That press also sedulously propagated the idea of a worldwide army of anarchists willing to avenge suffering humanity. In other words, the anarchists themselves propagated the notion of a worldwide conspiracy. Improved telegraphy and successive daily newspaper editions updating the cycle of atrocity, arrest, trial, speeches from the dock, imprisonment or execution meant that readers could quite justifiably conclude that the activities of bomb-throwing maniacs were being co-ordinated on behalf of sinister objectives across Europe or North and South America, for Argentina too was not spared propaganda by the deed. Detailed and extensive press coverage had its drawbacks, since even the most hostile newspapers invariably printed the courtroom justifications of convicted anarchists virtually verbatim, fuelling the lethal ardour of anarchists everywhere. The reporting of the killing of king Umberto of Italy directly inspired the assassin of US president William McKinley. As Sir Howard Vincent, one of the founders of Scotland Yard’s Criminal Investigation Department (CID), put it: ‘The “advertisement” of anarchism, as of many other crimes, infallibly leads to imitation.’ That was why the French Chamber of Deputies made serious legislative efforts to prohibit reporting of trials of anarchists.

The sheer repetition of high-level assassinations also inclined people to think a vast conspiracy was abroad, even though the politics of the assassins – assuming they were not madmen – were hardly uniform. In 1878 Hödel and Nobiling made successive attempts on the life of the German emperor, the second of which resulted in his being badly wounded. That year a republican cook stabbed king Umberto of Italy, twenty-two years before his eventual assassination, while there was a bomb attack on a monarchist parade the following day. In 1881 a young French anarchist and unemployed weaver, Emile Florion, shot a total stranger having failed to find the republican politician Léon Gambetta. Florion then unsuccessfully tried to shoot himself. In the autumn of 1883 an anarchist plot was uncovered to blow up the German Kaiser, the crown prince and several leading military and political figures as they gathered to open the monument to Germania on the Niederwald above Rüdesheim. Sixteen pounds of dynamite were concealed in a drainage pipe beneath the road so as to blow up the imperial entourage as it passed overhead. Luckily, one of the terrorist assassins had decided to save a few pfennigs by purchasing cheap fuse cable that was not waterproof; the cheap fuse was so damp it could not be lit. The chief anarchist plotter, August Reinsdorf, and an accomplice were beheaded two years later. In January 1885 the chief of police in Frankfurt, who had played a major role in capturing Reinsdorf, was stabbed to death by an unknown assailant; circumstantial evidence was used to convict the anarchist Julius Lieske of the crime. Instead of an unending chain reaction of terror and counter-terror, these events resulted in the virtual demise of the German anarchist movement. Foreign policemen hastened to Berlin to discover the secrets of Prussian policing.

In France, meanwhile, anarchists were responsible for a series of random attacks, some of them indicative of the perpetrators’ mental derangement. Too inept to make a bomb, the young cobbler Léon Léauthier simply sat down in an expensive restaurant and knifed a neighbouring customer who turned out to be the Serbian ambassador. Charles Gallo threw a bottle of prussic acid on to the floor of the Stock Exchange, crying ‘Vive l’Anarchie!’ at the startled traders, as he fired a revolver into their midst. The lethal suppression of labour disputes served as a pretext for anarchist attacks. On 1 May 1891 police used a newly invented machine gun to break up a demonstration for the eight-hour day at Fourmies in the Nord department. Nine people were killed, including four women and three children. Simultaneously at Clichy the police employed excessive violence to break up an anarchist procession following a woman bearing a red flag. Despite being unlawfully beaten by the police, two men received considerable sentences of hard labour. By way of revenge for these incidents, the anarchist former dyer François-Claudius Ravachol placed bombs in the homes of Benoit, the advocate-general, who lived on the smart Boulevard Saint-Germain, and Bulot, the judge who had presided in the Clichy affair. In the second incident, a smartly dressed Ravachol walked up to the second floor of the building with a bomb in a briefcase, set the fuse and left, bringing the entire four floors crashing down, although the judge survived unscathed. A little too exultant about his recent accomplishments, the thirty-two-year-old Ravachol was betrayed by a waiter in the Restaurant Véry. A brave police detective was summoned, who after scrutinising his fellow diner apprehended Ravachol before he could draw his revolver or deploy his sword cane.

The restaurant was bombed the day before Ravachol stood trial. The proprietor died a slow death after losing most of a leg, while an equally innocent customer, rather than the waiter, was killed. Ravachol – whose name became the verb ravacholiser (to blow up) – was sentenced to life imprisonment for these offences. He blamed unemployment for his criminal turn: ‘I worked to live and to make a living of my own; as long as neither myself nor my own suffered too much, I remained that which you call honest. Then work got scarce and with unemployment came hunger. It was then that great law of nature, that imperious voice that allows no retort – the instinct for survival – pushed me to commit some of the crimes and offences that you accuse me of and that I recognise being the author of He was subsequently tried in Montbrison for offences committed long before he became a bomber for murdering and robbing ‘the Hermit of Chambles’, an elderly miser called Brunel with much gold and silver hidden in his cupboard, and for profaning the grave of baroness de Rochetaillée where he hoped to find the jewels she had reportedly been buried with, but which instead contained a wooden crucifix and a single medal. When he recommenced his lofty claims to being the arm of justice for the oppressed, the judge snapped back: ‘Do not pretend to speak for the working men, but only for murderers.’ Ravachol was guillotined before he had time to make further speeches. One of his admirers, the novelist Octave Mirbeau, described him as ‘the peal of thunder to which succeeds the joy of sunlight and of peaceful skies’, one of a number of instances when idiot liberal artists and men of letters glorified common criminals, such career felons increasingly describing themselves as anarchists so as to bask in refracted acclaim.

The anarchist response to Ravachol’s execution came from Auguste Vaillant, who on 9 December 1893 threw a bomb hidden in an oval tin box on to the floor of the Chamber of Deputies, although the accidental jogging of his arm meant that the bomb exploded over the deputies’ heads, causing cuts and fractures rather than fatalities. In addition to installing iron grilles in the public gallery, and prohibiting the wearing of coats or cloaks inside the building, the Chamber promulgated the ‘scroundrelly laws’ proscribing publications that incited acts of terrorism. One of the first to be convicted as a ‘professor of Anarchy’ was Jean Grave, who received two years’ imprisonment for passages in a book that appeared to incite anarchist violence. Vaillant had his admirers in an artistic milieu where, among others, Courbet, Pissarro and Seignac were anarchist supporters. The poet Laurent Tailharde shocked a literary supper when he exclaimed: ‘What do the victims matter, as long as the gesture is beautiful?’ – a view he probably revised when a random anarchist bomb took out one of his eyes in a restaurant. The execution of Vaillant allegedly provoked the young anarchist Emile Henry to detonate a bomb in the Café Terminus in the Gare Saint-Lazare, killing one person and wounding twenty. He chose this target after failing to get in to a theatre that was sold out, and after inspecting a restaurant with only a scattering of diners. The station café was full of commuting workers, a fact that did not disturb the workers’ advocate unduly. Henry was a cold-blooded killer whose avowed intent was to murder as many people as possible. At his trial he confessed to a murderous moralism with his infamous remark ‘there are no innocent bourgeois’: ‘I wanted to show the bourgeoisie that henceforth their pleasures would not be untouched, that their insolent triumphs would be disturbed, that their golden calf would rock violently on its pedestal until the final shock that would cast it down among filth and blood.’

That resentful desire to inflict chaos on ordinary people going about unremarkable lives would become a recurrent terrorist motive; what the victims of terrorists usually have in common is often overlooked. Henry warned the jury that ‘It [anarchism] is everywhere, which makes it impossible to contain. It will end by killing you.’ He was guillotined early on the morning of 21 May 1894. In retaliation for his refusal to grant Henry and Vaillant pardons, president Marie François Sadi Carnot was stabbed in the heart by an Italian anarchist Santo Jeronimo Caserio as he rode through Lyons in his carriage.

This was the first in a spate of assassinations of heads of state that made the years 1894–1901 more lethal for rulers than any other in modern history, forcing them to use bodyguards for the first time. Following the killing of Carnot, the prime minister of Spain was assassinated by Italian anarchists in 1897, in retaliation for confirming the death sentences passed on anarchists who had been rounded up and tortured after a bomb flew into a Corpus Christi procession in Barcelona. He was followed by Elizabeth empress of Austria, stabbed by an Italian anarchist drifter in 1898; king Umberto of Italy, shot dead in Monza by an Italian-American anarchist Gaetano Bresci in 1900; and president McKinley, assassinated in 1901. McKinley’s assassin was an Ohio farmboy turned factory worker called Leon Czolgosz, although he sometimes used the aliases John Doe and Fred Nobody. He was inspired by Emma Goldman’s passionate espousal of anarchism, although the direct inspiration to shoot McKinley at the Pan-American Expositon in Buffalo came from his reading of a newspaper report of Bresci’s shooting of king Umberto that July. Czolgosz approached McKinley outside the Temple of Music, where he shot him at close range; one bullet was deflected by the president’s breast bone, but the second went so deep into his abdomen that surgeons could not recover it. The president slowly bled to death. A search revealed that Czolgosz not only had a folded newspaper clipping in his pocket of Umberto’s murder, but that he had used the same .32-calibre Iver Johnson revolver as Bresci. Narrowly surviving the beating he received from McKinley’s security officers as they pummelled him to the floor, Czolgosz went to the electric chair after a trial that lasted eight-and-a-half hours from jury selection to verdict.

In 1892 Alexander Berkman had been inspired by Emma Goldman to stab Henry Clay Frick, the managing director of Carnegie Steel, in Frick’s Pittsburgh offices. Henry’s attack on commuters nursing a beer or glass of wine had already been preceded by the bombing of Barcelona’s Liceo Opera House during a performance of Rossini’s William Tell that killed more than thirty people, one of several bomb attacks in major European cities. The assassin chose the opera house as a target because it seemed to epitomise bourgeois conspicuous consumption. Six anarchists were subsequently shot by firing squad at the Montjuich fortress for this outrage. In the same year, 1893, Paulino Pallás threw two bombs at the military governor of Catalonia, to avenge the torture of hundreds of anarchists detained in the wake of the Corpus Christi attack and the garrotting of their five colleagues. The would-be assassin warned at his trial that ‘Vengeance will be terrible!’ In Italy, government repression of demonstrations in Sicily and of a rising by Tuscan quarry workers resulted in a bomb attack outside the parliament building and an attempt on the life of the prime minister. Anarchists also stabbed to death a journalist who had condemned the Italian anarchists responsible for killing president Carnot. When a Portuguese psychiatrist certified an anarchist insane, after the latter had hurled a rock at the king, a bomb tore apart the asylum building in which the doctor dwelt.

Even the tranquillity of London’s Greenwich Park was not immune from anarchist activity. On a wintry February evening in 1894 park keepers heard the muffled thud of an explosion from the winding path leading up to Wren’s Royal Observatory. They raced to the scene where they saw a young man kneeling on the ground with agonising wounds to his abdomen and thighs and a missing hand. This was Martial Bourdin, a young anarchist, who had accidentally set off the ‘infernal machine’ he was carrying towards the Observatory, embedding iron shards in his own body. His brother-in-law probably gave him the bomb, in his sinister dual capacity of anarchist cum police agent, the basis for ‘Verloc’ in Conrad’s Secret Agent. Bourdin expired in the delightful Seamen’s Hospital down on the river front fifty minutes after the explosion. A search of his clothing revealed a membership card for the Autonomie Club, a notorious haunt of ‘cosmopolitan desperadoes’ on Tottenham Court Road. Emile Henry had allegedly been seen there a few weeks before the Terminus bombing. The Times took the commonsense view that perhaps the theory of ‘liberty for everybody on British soil’ had been taken ‘a little too far’, although no British government was disposed to address this, then or now.

These multifarious acts of anarchist violence achieved nothing beyond the individual tragedies of those people killed and maimed. They had no significant impact on the domestic or international politics of any of the countries concerned, and certainly did not collapse the social order in favour of whatever infantile arrangements the Henrys, Ravachols and Vaillants of the time desired.

The burghers of Chicago probably took things too far when they built a huge fortified Armoury in the city and insisted on basing a regular army division only thirty miles away from the seething alien helots of the South Side. President Theodore Roosevelt fulminated against anarchism, this ‘daughter of degenerate lunacy, a vicious pest’, and in 1903 introduced laws prohibiting anarchists from entering the United States, along with paupers, prostitutes and the insane. Immigrants who ‘converted’ to anarchism during their first three years in the country could be deported, an interesting example of conditional citizenship. Similar expulsions of dangerous foreigners were adopted in France and Italy, and in France two thousand anarchists were simultaneously raided by the police in twenty-two departments, resulting in a host of prosecutions for petty offences that kept some of them in jail. Refusing to take lessons in good governance from concerned friendly governments, the British persisted in maintaining liberal asylum laws that anarchists were manifestly abusing. One minor concession was that the Metropolitan Police hauled in anyone looking like an anarchist (and there was indeed an almost obligatory sartorial code in such circles) in order to photograph them -thereby making them less elusive in future – while drawing up a list of anarchist suspects, whom they encouraged to talk freely in East End pubs. They gave these lists to employers in the expectation that, impoverished by chronic unemployment, these men might be forced to leave Britain’s welcoming shores. There were a few fitful attempts to organise international police co-operation – notably the 1898 International Anti-Anarchist Conference of police chiefs and interior ministers – but Britain and Belgium insisted that anarchist violence could be adequately contained by existing domestic laws. Inevitably, in their dealings with the subterranean world of anarchist conspiracy, the police forces of Europe recruited agents or involved themselves too deeply in financing anarchist journals, lending some substance to Chesterton’s surreal vision in The Man Who Was Thursday of the police chasing anarchists who were themselves.

Anarchist terrorism did manage to generate widespread fear of a single conspiracy, with fake threatening letters from ‘Ravachol’ or suspicious boxes and packages contributing to urban psychosis. Fanciful journalists and novelists imagined weapons of greater destructive power rather than the modest explosive devices that anarchist plotters disposed of, although that may not be how the patrons of the Café Terminus or the Liceo Opera House would have seen things. Politicians and mon-archs could no longer go among their citizens and subjects with relative ease, and government buildings took on some of the forbidding, fortified character they often possess today. Above all, perhaps, anarchist violence served to discredit political philosophies whose libertarian impulses might otherwise strike some as praiseworthy, by associating them, however unfairly, with the murderous vanity of sad little men labouring over their bombs in dingy rooms. A philosophy which regards the state as nothing more than the organisation of violence on behalf of vested interests came to be universally identified with murderous violence, obliterating the more harmless aspects of the underlying philosophy. One observer of these anarchists felt that ‘All these people are not revolutionaries – they are shams.’ This was the Anglo-Polish novelist Joseph Conrad, a man too admiringly grateful to England to breach its unspoken etiquette by publicly criticising how it had afforded asylum to ‘the infernal doctrines born in continental back-slums’. Edward Garnett paid him an immense (backhanded) compliment when he reviewed The Secret Agent: ‘It is good for us English to have Mr Conrad in our midst visualising for us aspects of life we are constitutionally unable to perceive.’

Partly inspired by Bourdin’s death in Greenwich Park, in 1907 Conrad devoted The Secret Agent to the theme of ‘pests in the streets of men’, notably the pain and suffering they inflicted on everyone they touched in their immediate private circle. Although in the wake of 9/11 many commentators rightly discovered precursors of the Saudi hijackers in Conrad’s depiction of squalid anarchists blindly following a plot elaborated by a tsarist diplomat in 1900s London, this was not where the author’s primary interests lay. The chief focus is Winnie Verloc, who commits suicide after murdering Adolf Verloc, her anarchist, agent-provocateur and pornographer husband who acts on behalf of a sinister Russian diplomat seeking to make London inhospitable to terrorists by inciting them to blow up Greenwich Observatory as a symbol of bourgeois belief in scientific progress. Winnie inadvertently discovers that her husband was responsible for the death, while carrying a bomb destined for the Observatory, of her simpleton half-brother Stevie, the other innocent victim in a tale that Conrad invested with little political significance. The anarchists depicted in the book are composite characters drawn from several real people we have encountered already. The character of Verloc was indebted to the fact that Bourdin’s brother-in-law was a police agent as well as editor of an anarchist paper. Karl Yundt is based on Mikhail Bakunin and Johann Most. Michaelis is a fusion of the Fenians Edward O’Meagher Condon, who attacked the prison van in Manchester in 1867, and Michael Davitt, like Michaelis author of a book about his experiences in prison. The ‘Professor’ is probably none other than the eponymous ‘Russian’ bomb-making genius who figured in O’Donovan Rossa’s newspapers.

The private moral squalor, shabbiness and smallness of the men who terrorise a major city are among the novel’s most striking features beneath their grandiose apocalyptic talk: ‘no pity for anything on earth, including themselves, and death enlisted for good and all in the service of humanity – that’s what I would like to see’, says Yundt. ‘They depend on life, which, in this connection, is a historical fact surrounded by all sorts of restraints and considerations, a complex, organised fact open to attack at every point; whereas I depend on death, which knows no restraint and cannot be attacked. My superiority is evident,’ opines the Professor. In reality he was not a ‘Professor’ at all, but the meanly countenanced son of a preacher in an obscure Christian sect who had discovered in science a faith to replace that of conventicles’ so as to realise his limitless ambitions without effort or talent. Conrad continues: ‘By exercising his agency with ruthless defiance he procured for himself the appearance of power and personal prestige. That was undeniable to his bitter vengeance.’ He believed in nothing: ‘ “Prophecy! What’s the good of thinking what will be!” He raised his glass. “To the destruction of what is,” he said, calmly.’

CHAPTER 4 Death in the Sun: Terror andDecolonisation

I HOLY LAND, HOLY WAR

At the time of the 1917 Balfour Declaration, favouring ‘the establishment in Palestine of a National Home for the Jewish People’, land designated by the Roman name of Palestine was part of the Ottoman Empire, with which Britain was at war. The Ottoman Empire, and Kemal Atatürk’s regime that superseded it, had sought to draw closer to European civilisation. One measure of this was how religious minorities were treated within an Islamic tradition that traditionally accorded non-Muslims dhimmitude or submissive status. This was not quite what it sounds. Throughout urban centres, Jews could become members of parliament, hold government posts and, after 1909, be recruited into the military. Following on from this late and poignant flourishing of Islamic modernism, Atatürk abolished sharia law in 1924, while in Egypt this applied only in the private realm. All of which is to say that Islam was contained by the nation state rather than the other way around.

The Jewish community in Palestine was known as the settlement or Yishuv, and consisted of about eighty-five thousand people; some had been there for half a century or more, others were recent emigrants. There were three-quarters of a million Arabs. The League of Nations accorded Britain mandatory authority over Palestine in 1919. In welcoming Zionist settlers, the British were in step with educated Arab opinion in the Middle East. The editor of Egypt’s Al-Ahram wrote: ‘The Zionists are necessary for this region. The money they bring in, their intelligence and the diligence which is one of their characteristics will, without doubt, bring new life to the country.’

The Zionists colonised desolate lands where absentee Arab landlordism was rife, although tenant graziers did not regard this as creating entitlement.

Zionists felt that development would register a moral claim, irrespective of conflicting Arab and Jewish versions of the venerability of their respective presences in the region. Israel Zangwill’s 1901 dictum, ‘a land without a people for a people without a land’, indicated that some Zionists apparently did not notice the Arab inhabitants. Theoretically, in the minds of both the British and some Zionists, Jewish settlement could be achieved without prejudice to the indigenous Arab inhabitants, for everyone would benefit from improved irrigation, medicine and sanitation.

Zionist immigrants regarded themselves not as colonial subjects, but as fellow colonists alongside the British. Their intention was to create a durable Jewish state under the temporary aegis of the imperial Mandate. They were diligent and purposeful state-builders pursuing a secularised messianic ideal. Long before the European Holocaust, Zionists argued that, as the Arab nation disposed of a million square miles of territory, the Jews were morally entitled to a tiny polity roughly the size of Scotland and with much the same sporadic population density. By contrast, the Palestinians were more reactive, divided by allegiances to clan or tribe, and dependent upon the British for a state infrastructure. Only their religious leaders were more politically engaged than those of the Jews.

Among some contemporary Israelis the British Mandate has come to be viewed nostalgically. Although Palestine did not have the elephants, maharajahs and tigers of the Indian Raj, the same culture of Highland reels, polo and pink gins in the King David hotel flourished. So did an incorruptible civil service, possibly a novelty in the region.

Under this aegis, the Jews of the Yishuv determinedly elaborated proto-national institutions, including a Jewish Agency, while immigrants – many of them idealistic Zionist socialist kibbutzim – set about bringing life to stony ground rich in associations among people who had never seen it except in their mind’s eye. An ancillary Zionist objective was to confound the anti-Semitic claim that Jews had no ‘racial’ aptitude for farming or manual labour, a notion hard to square with the orderly citrus trees, vegetables and vines that appeared in the new Jewish settlements. Entirely new cities, like Tel Aviv, arose beside Arab Jaffa, essential elements in the Zionist equivalent of the Whig view of history, but based on exchanging the dark and cold of eastern Europe for a light-filled modernist seaside setting.

It is salutary to recall that, below the antagonisms of Arab and Jewish notables, on a local level ordinary Jews and Arabs co-operated with one another. They shopped in each other’s stores, worked alongside one another in bakeries, petroleum and salt plants, transport, post and telegraphy, and from time to time went on strike together to protest against some arbitrary decision of their Mandatory employer. Moreover, as late as 1933, the Egyptian government gladly allowed a thousand Jewish emigrants to disembark at Port Said en route to Palestine.

Jewish immigration, and the eviction of Arab tenants from land the Jews bought from absentee landlords based in Beirut or Damascus, triggered Arab unrest in 1920–1 and 1929, which acquired focus in Haj-Amin al-Husseini. A gangling teacher with a ginger beard and a red fez, Husseini was the scion of a notable Palestinian family. Despite having been sentenced to ten years’ imprisonment in absentia for orchestrating mob violence in 1920, the British pardoned him a year later and rigged his election as grand mufti of Jerusalem, to balance the appointment to the city’s mayoralty of a man from the rival Nashashibi clan. As a pupil of the Wahhabist Rashid Rida, the mufti’s primary objection to the Jews was that they were symptomatic of a threatening Western modernity: ‘They have also spread here their customs and usages that are opposed to our religion and to our whole way of life. Above all, our youth is being morally shattered. The Jewish girls who run around in shorts demoralise our youth by their mere presence.’ Careful to wipe his fingerprints from Arab urban violence, the mufti was mainly responsible for inciting it.

Anti-Jewish violence led to the creation in 1921 of an underground Jewish defence force, the Haganah, designed to protect remote Jewish settlements when the British authorities wouldn’t or couldn’t. Weapons were smuggled in from Europe hidden in beehives and steamrollers. Such self-consciously tough Jews would confound common anti-Semitic stereotypes about the Jews being averse to a fight. In 1924 the Haganah assassinated the Orthodox Jewish leader Israel de Haan who was endeavouring to have the British exclude his co-religionists from rule by secular Zionists. Not for the last time, the British sought to appease Arab sentiment – at least as expressed by notables like the mufti – by limiting Jewish immigration to what the country’s economy could satisfactorily absorb, a policy that took little notice of the evil currents abroad in Europe which were pushing Jews in Poland or the Ukraine to emigrate.

With the exception of those like Winston Churchill who had keen Zionist sympathies, British officials imbued with nostalgic memories of colonel T. E. Lawrence were keen not to do anything to unsettle the sixty million Muslims in India on behalf of Jews in Palestine or Britain itself, towards whom some members of the British Establishment (and opposition Labour movement) harboured old-fashioned prejudices. In one of its slippery retreats from the airy grandiosity of the Balfour Declaration, in 1928 the British cabinet rejected Chaim Weizmann’s request for a substantial loan designed to buy further Arab land to build more Jewish settlements and thenceforth tried to restrain immigration.

The following year, the mufti incited attacks on Jewish worshippers at Jerusalem’s Wailing Wall, claiming that they planned to demolish the Al-Aqsa mosque, events that led to the deaths of sixty Jews in the Old City. Even as he pretended to calm the mobs, the mufti was actually egging them on. These casualties were some of the 133 Jews killed that year by Arab violence throughout Palestine. Such murderous riots had an international dimension, as Arabs in Syria, Transjordan and Iraq threatened military involvement if Jewish immigration to Palestine was not halted. One consequence of the riots was that a number of Haganah’s military commanders led by Avraham Tahomi, its chief in Jerusalem, seceded from the parent body, forming a National Military Organisation (Irgun Zvai Leumi or Etzel for short after its Hebrew acronym), arguing that Haganah itself was too close to one political party, a notion they felt did not apply to themselves.

Arab unrest at the prospect of Jewish hegemony led the British to carry out two investigations, in 1929–30, which concluded that Jewish immigration had allegedly exceeded the absorptive capacity of the economy in Palestine, although the country would sustain a much larger population in future. They were shocked by the extent of pauperisation among the Arab population, which either eked out a miserable existence on the land or tried its luck as a proletariat in the cities, but they did little to alleviate it through aid or investment. In and around the shanty districts of the port of Haifa, ironically one of the towns where Arabs and Jews lived in conspicuous amity, some of these people joined the guerrilla army formed by a charismatic Syrian Wahhabist preacher, Izz al-Din al-Qassam, who for two years from 1933 launched attacks on the Jews and British policemen until the latter killed him and three associates in 1935. He is commemorated in the name of present-day teams of Palestinian suicide bombers, since his was the first armed Palestinian nationalist grouping.

Broadly speaking, the Zionist Establishment was either socialist or Marxist, a characteristic evidenced by the fact that it was not until 1977 that the state of Israel elected a right-wing government. While the majority of Zionists in the Yishuv supported its left-leaning and pro-British leadership, a right-wing minority were adherents of a Polish-based Revisionist Zionism that followed the charismatic Zeev Jabotinsky. Although Jabotinsky subscribed to an expansive version of otherwise thoroughly Zionist objectives, namely to return all Jews to a predominantly Jewish ‘Eretz Israel’ on both sides of the Jordan, which would act as a ‘laboratory’ for a ‘model Jewish citizen’, the means were heavily permeated with the political culture of inter-war Poland. This is almost impossible for anyone brought up in a stable liberal Western democracy to comprehend, but it would probably resonate with historically minded Italians. Jabotinsky was much taken with the nineteenth-century revolutionary Garibaldi’s legion, which had played such a major role in the creation of Italian statehood. This had served as a model for the Polish Legion of Marshal Józef Pifsudski, which had made itself sufficiently indispensable to the Allies in the Great War for them to favour the restoration of Polish independence after an interval of more than a century of partition.

Other features typical of the 1920s and 1930s included the creation of a youth movement, called Betar, with its red-brown uniforms and anti-Marxist middle-class intellectual membership. The model for this was the Ballila youth movement of Italian Fascism. Unsurprisingly, the Marxist-Zionist leadership of the Yishuv referred to these Betarim as Fascists, although only the most implacable of them had active flirtations with Mussolini and Hitler. In 1929 the British banned Jabotinsky from Palestine while his Arab antipode, the grand mufti, fled abroad; two years later Jabotinsky withdrew from the World Zionist Organisation.

In Palestine, frustration among Jabotinsky’s followers with the cautious land reclamation and settlement policy of the Yishuv’s socialist-Zionist leadership led to the formation of a virulently anti-Marxist nationalist movement called the Bironyim, which roughly translates as ‘Zealots’. They hoped that a Jewish state could be created quickly through terrorist violence against the British Mandatory authorities. The extent to which they were swimming in dangerous waters can be gauged from the fact that the journalist Aba Achimeir, who had been seared by experience of the Bolshevik Revolution, wrote a Hebrew column called ‘From a Fascist Notebook’. ‘We need a Mussolini,’ he argued, although he would also have settled for something like Sinn Féin/IRA, the model for how to achieve independence from the British through armed insurrection. These ideologues inspired what became the main radical-right Zionist terrorist cum guerrilla organisation, called Irgun here for short.

On 16 June 1933 one of Achimeir’s protégés, Avraham Stavsky, shot dead Chaim Arlosoroff, head of the Jewish Agency’s Political Department, as he walked with his wife along the beachfront at Tel Aviv. The pretext for this assassination was that Arlosoroff was negotiating with Hitler’s Germany to transfer the assets of persecuted Jews to Palestine. This assassination poisoned relations between the socialist Zionists and the Revisionists, which descended into mutual slurs. The parents of the boy Ariel Sharon, the prime minister of Israel seventy years later, who favoured Arlosoroff’s killers, were reminded of the culture of public denunciation they had experienced in Bolshevik Russia as they were ostracised by the leftist community of their neighbours. Charges of anti-Semitism were hurled back and forth with the usual tedious abandon. Jabotinsky himself weighed in with an article entitled ‘Blood Libel’ arguing that his opponents were using the tactics of medieval Christian anti-Semites to smear not only Stavsky but the Revisionist movement as a whole. Stavsky was acquitted of murder, but Achimeir was arrested and jailed.

Although in 1933 Avraham Tahomi abandoned Irgun to return to the bosom of Haganah, some of its supporters, notably Avraham Stern, decided to colonise the youthful Betarim – much like aggressive African bees taking over a relatively placid hive – with a view to fighting the perfidious British Mandatory authority. Stern may have been romanticised subsequently by his Israeli admirers, but there is no doubt that he was a terrorist.

The right-wing and anti-Semitic colonels who ruled Poland actively connived at Irgun establishment of training facilities in Poland, while weapons were shipped to Palestine from Gdansk. The worsening climate for Jews in Europe led to an acceleration of emigration and corresponding Arab fears of inundation, as the Jewish population of Palestine surged from 20 to 30 per cent in the three years 1933–6 alone. Because unemployed Jewish immigrants would confirm British beliefs that the country had reached the population density it could absorb, the Zionists consciously adopted the policy of ‘Hebrew labour’ which discriminated against Christian or Muslim Arabs. Both the death of Izz al-Din al-Qassam and the discovery of ammunition in barrels of ‘cement’ landed at Jaffa and intended for the Haganah prompted Arab leaders into more radical action, as they abandoned urban rioting for guerrilla activity in the countryside.

In 1936 the mufti’s Higher Committee declared a general strike, with follow-up mass demonstrations, that were forcibly suppressed by the British. The strike meant that Arab peasants lost the urban seasonal work on which many depended, one of the main reasons why some were available for guerrilla fighting. Arabs attacked Jewish-owned stores and cut down or uprooted orchards. Twenty-one Jews were killed, the British shot dead 140 Arabs, and thirty-three British soldiers were killed in clashes with Arab gunmen. The British despatched the Peel Commission, which recommended the absorption of most of Palestine into Transjordan, continued British control of such strategic points as Haifa and Lydda, and a small Jewish state. While David Ben-Gurion, Labour Party leader, accepted partition as the basis for future negotiations, radical Arab leaders including the exiled mufti’s nephew decided upon violence, telling the British to choose ‘between our friendship and the Jews’. At this point the Nazis became interested in resisting the creation of a Jewish state, using their short-wave radio transmitter at Zeesen outside Berlin to beam a mixture of Arabic music, Koranic quotations and their own brand of racial anti-Semitism to the Arab world. The Nazi contribution, as mediated by the mufti in his various writings, was to transform Muslim disdain for Jews – whom the Muslims had ruled for centuries – into Muslim fear of Jews as powerful global conspirators with a money-smoothed line to the ears of the world’s most powerful rulers.

In the remoter countryside the British were confronted by armed bands, often fifty to seventy strong, which ambushed trucks, cut telegraph wires and blew up railway track with discarded First World War artillery shells wired up as improvised explosive devices. One four-man team blew up the railway from Lydda to Haifa. Its leader was Hassan Salameh, a barefoot peasant boy from Kulleh who by early adulthood had a reputation as a tough guy, as symbolised by his nickname ‘the Cut-throat’. Although his three cousins were killed in the gunfight that ensued after the railway attack, Salameh lived to fight another day, forming his own guerrilla band under the patronage of Aref Abd-el-Razek. The legend of his escape led to his being dubbed ‘Sheikh’. Sheikh Hassan’s army was a motley crew, clad in white robes with criss-crossed ammunition belts and colourful keffiyeh headdresses, bearing an assortment of British, German, Italian and Turkish rifles. These bands menaced isolated Jewish settlements, while practising robbery and extortion against fellow Arabs. Their ranks were made up of villagers, some of them part-time fighters who returned home each day, others full-timers armed and paid by the Higher Arab Committee, with the occasional contribution from Mussolini who was keen to cause trouble for the British to distract from his war in Abyssinia. This composition gave the fighting a seasonal character as it waxed and waned according to whether the fighters were needed to bring in the harvest. Wider Arab nationalism was evident as two hundred Iraqis, Jordanians and Syrians arrived to aid the armed uprising under a former Ottoman Iraqi officer Fawzi al-Qawuqji. These were effective fighters since they were capable of waging a six-hour battle with British troops who eventually called in RAF support. They even managed to shoot down one of the British aircraft. By the autumn of 1937 most of the uplands of Palestine were in rebel hands. In September Arab terrorists killed the district commissioner for Galilee who had shepherded the Peel commissioners around Palestine.

The British response to this Arab Revolt was brutal and based on techniques imported from the Indian North West Frontier and Sudan.

Between 1937 and 1939 British military courts executed a hundred Arabs and imposed many life sentences, while captured rebels were detained in special camps. An identity-card system was introduced to impede rebel movement on the country’s roads. When Arab guerrillas briefly occupied Jerusalem’s Old City, the British used Arab human shields to wrest back control. They constructed roads to penetrate remote mountainous regions. They used aircraft to bomb and strafe concentrations of guerrillas, although the RAF unaccountably broke off a raid on a guerrilla general assembly at Dir Assana. British troops routinely demolished houses and orange groves wherever they were fired upon, applying the doctrine of collective reprisals that was commonplace in other colonies. To prevent attacks on trains, male relatives of local guerrilla commanders were placed on inspection trolleys attached to the front of each train, a tactic that proved an effective deterrent. Suspected terrorists were so roughly handled that the local Anglican clergy was moved to protest at practices that were christened ‘duffing up’ after an especially robust police officer called Douglas Duff. In addition to giving the British its intelligence on these Arab bands, the Haganah undertook its own patrols, based on the maxim that the best defence was attack. The chiliastic Christian soldier captain Orde Wingate advised and led Special Night Squads of Haganah troops in Lower Galilee, whose ranks included such future military eminences as Moshe Dayan and Yigal Allon.

There was much about the Arab rebels that was brutal too, a fact often overlooked in literatures that excoriate the Irgun and the Stern Gang on the other side, perhaps as a reaction to the air of Jewish moralism which claims that Zionist forces always fought the good fight. The Arab insurgents set up a Court of the Revolt to hand out summary justice to those who did not get the message, including informers, Arabs who sold land to Jews, political moderates and policemen. The punishments were floggings and execution. Capture sometimes involved being dropped into pits filled with scorpions and snakes, or one’s corpse left lying in the road with a shoe in the mouth as a symbol of disgrace. Financial levies on ordinary villagers by these bands gave way to outright extortion. As moderate Arab leaders learned to go about with bodyguards, village sheikhs formed their own defensive groups to ward off these Arab nationalist bands, a few of which were covertly operated by the British to discredit the wider enemy in the eyes of the local population. The guerrillas also made use of the British by informing on opponents in order to have the British liquidate them. Sometimes the sheikhs even asked their Jewish neighbours for advice and support as fellow victims of these depredations. With British help, moderate Arab leaders paid one of the rebel leaders to defect and to lead so-called ‘peace bands’ which fought the nationalist guerrillas in a war that began to assume an intra-Arab character. Out of six thousand Arab casualties of the Revolt, only fifteen hundred were slain by the British or the Haganah; the rest were done in by fellow Arabs. The Revolt petered out amid endless blood feuds and vendettas.

The Peel Commission and the Arab Revolt also divided the Zionists. While the Jewish Agency and the socialist Zionists wanted to work with the British and condemned Jewish terrorism against Arabs, the Revisionists rejected attempts to renege on promises to the Jewish people. Their extreme supporters in Palestine decided to meet Arab terror with terror, meaning the indiscriminate killing of innocent civilians. Parallel with the Arab Revolt against the British, Arab and Jewish terrorists targeted each other’s civilian populations. Throughout the summer of 1938 there were vicious killings by Arab and Jewish extremists, including the murder of Arabs who worked for Jews. On 29 June an Arab terrorist threw a bomb into a Jewish wedding in Tiberias; on 25 July thirty-nine Arabs were killed when a Jewish terrorist bomb exploded in Haifa’s melon market. It should be carefully noted that both the Jewish Agency and the Hisradut trades union were explicit in their condemnation of the ‘miserable (Jewish) cowards’ who executed these attacks.

At a time when the major and minor powers, led by the United States, were doing their best to impede the flight of European Jews from Nazism at the 1938 Evian Conference, the 1939 British ‘Black Paper’ (the sinister name for a class of policy documents that were routinely white in colour) proposed drastic cuts to the number of legal Jewish emigrants to Palestine – effectively to twenty-five thousand a year – while promising to institute Arab majority rule. There were also to be restrictions on Jewish purchases of land beyond existing settlements. The British calculation was that with war looming in Europe, the Jews would have no alternative other than to back the Western Allies, while Arab loyalties might be biddable to the Rome-Berlin Axis, into whose camp the exiled mufti (as a dedicated anti-Semite) steadily drifted. He fled French-controlled Syria for Iraqi Baghdad, where he was joined by Hassan Salameh, whose wife gave birth there to a son named Ali Hassan Salameh, the future leader of Black September. Since Jewish illegal immigration continued unabated – with the added urgency of the extension of Hitler’s sway – the British retaliated by halting all legal immigration to Palestine. Illegal immigrants who did reach its shores were interned, with a view to repatriating them after the duration, while mean-minded efforts were made by the Foreign Office to prevent Jews seeking access to Greek or Turkish merchant shipping if they reached the mouth of the Danube. The Haganah established an intelligence arm called Mossad le-Aliyah Bet to facilitate transport of illegal immigrants by sea.

The outbreak of war between Britain and Nazi Germany saw some curious reversals of allegiance. The mufti was forced to flee first Iraq and then Persia, as British forces invaded. After a spell hiding in the Japanese embassy in Teheran, Italian agents spirited him to Rome, where the Duce installed him in the Villa Colonna and promised to liberate Palestine. A written plea for aid submitted to the Nazi Führer led to his translation to Berlin and a new home in the splendid Bellevue Palace. In November 1940 he had an agreeable meeting with Hitler, who promised to make him a German Lawrence of Arabia. The Nazi leader evidently admired his guest in the red fez: ‘He looks like a peaceful angel, but under his robe hides a real bull!’ Not forgetting his friends, the mufti had the Germans fly Hassan Salameh from Aleppo to Berlin, where he and others received military training. In the absence of volunteers, however, no large Arab Legion materialised, although the mufti helped recruit a Bosnian Muslim SS division to fight in the Balkans. Only when in 1944 the British formed the Jewish Brigade did Hitler decide to facilitate the mufti’s scaled-down schemes. In November that year Hassan Salameh and Abdul Latif were dropped with three German agents from a Heinkel-111 in the vicinity of Jericho. Along with bags of banknotes and gold coins, their equipment included ten cylinders of poison, the intention being to contaminate the water supplying Tel Aviv, thereby killing or forcing out its inhabitants. Latif and the Germans were captured; Salameh limped off injured to fight another day.

By contrast, the mainstream Yishuv rallied to the Allied cause. The Haganah was quietly refashioned from a local defence force into a model army, with crop-dusting light aircraft standing in for an air force. Elite Palmach commandos took part in Allied operations against the Vichy French in Lebanon and Syria. It was on one such operation that the young soldier Moshe Dayan lost an eye. In total, some twenty-seven thousand Jews served with the British armed forces, some in the famous Jewish Brigade, while the corresponding figure for Arab Palestinians was twelve thousand. This disparity in military experience would prove decisive in future. While supporting the British war effort, the Haganah simultaneously tried to circumvent British restrictions on Jewish immigration. This resulted in the tragedy of the Patria.

This was a French liner which the British intended to use to ship to Mauritius illegal migrants who had arrived off Haifa in the Milos and Pacific in November 1940. The Haganah determined to disable the Patria in Haifa harbour, but used too large a consignment of explosives. The ship sank in fifteen minutes, drowning two hundred and fifty refugees. While the British decided on compassionate grounds to allow the nineteen hundred survivors of the Patria to remain in Palestine -against, it has to be noted, the vehement protests of general Wavell – they resolved to deport a further seventeen hundred refugees newly arrived on a ship called the Atlantic. Only Churchill’s personal intervention saved the day for those on the Patria.