{"id":190,"date":"2019-05-28T21:24:21","date_gmt":"2019-05-28T21:24:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/podcasts.la.utexas.edu\/british-studies-lecture-series\/?post_type=podcast&p=190"},"modified":"2021-01-20T21:36:09","modified_gmt":"2021-01-20T21:36:09","slug":"how-the-british-left-palestine","status":"publish","type":"podcast","link":"https:\/\/podcasts.la.utexas.edu\/british-studies-lecture-series\/podcast\/how-the-british-left-palestine\/","title":{"rendered":"How the British Left Palestine"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

Speaker – Bernard Wasserstein<\/strong><\/p>\n

At the end of its three-decades-long mandate in 1948, Britain withdrew its administration and 100,000-strong armed forces from Palestine. But unlike its departure from any other dependent territory, it did not hand over to any successor government. Instead it left Arabs and Jews to fight for possession of the Holy Land. Historians have long debated why Britain left Palestine. But how did they leave? Was it a dignified withdrawal or a disorderly cut and run?<\/p>\n

Bernard Wasserstein was born in London in 1948 and was a Professor of History at several British and American universities. A Guggenheim and British Academy fellow, he has been a recipient of the Golden Dagger and Yad Vashem book awards. Since 2014, when he retired from the University of Chicago, he has lived in Amsterdam. His books, which have been translated into twelve languages, include The British in Palestine, Divided Jerusalem, and Israelis and Palestinians.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Speaker – Bernard Wasserstein At the end of its three-decades-long mandate in 1948, Britain withdrew its administration and 100,000-strong armed forces from Palestine. But unlike its departure from any other dependent territory, it did not hand over to any successor government. Instead it left Arabs and Jews to fight for possession of the Holy Land. […]","protected":false},"author":13,"featured_media":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","episode_type":"audio","audio_file":"http:\/\/podcasts.la.utexas.edu\/british-studies-lecture-series\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/4\/2019\/05\/How-the-British-Left-Palestine.mp3","podmotor_file_id":"","podmotor_episode_id":"","cover_image":"","cover_image_id":"","duration":"","filesize":"59.03M","filesize_raw":"61898366","date_recorded":"27-04-2019","explicit":"","block":"","itunes_episode_number":"","itunes_title":"","itunes_season_number":"","itunes_episode_type":""},"tags":[165,163,167,40,169,166,4,164,168],"categories":[],"series":[2],"class_list":{"0":"post-190","1":"podcast","2":"type-podcast","3":"status-publish","5":"tag-165","6":"tag-bernard-wasserstein","7":"tag-british-history","8":"tag-british-studies-lecture-series","9":"tag-divided-jerusalem","10":"tag-holy-land","11":"tag-israel","12":"tag-palesting","13":"tag-university-of-chicago","14":"series-bsls","15":"entry"},"acf":{"related_episodes":"","hosts":[{"ID":949,"post_author":"10","post_date":"2021-01-20 19:50:06","post_date_gmt":"2021-01-20 19:50:06","post_content":"\n

Wm. Roger Louis is head of the British Studies Lecture Series. He is an American historian and a professor at the University of Texas at Austin<\/a>. Louis is the editor-in-chief of The Oxford History of the British Empire<\/a><\/em>, a former president of the American Historical Association<\/a> (AHA), a former chairman of the U.S. Department of State's Historical Advisory Committee, and a founding director of the AHA's National History Center in Washington, D. C.<\/p>\n","post_title":"Wm. Roger Louis","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","post_password":"","post_name":"wm-roger-louis","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2021-01-20 19:50:06","post_modified_gmt":"2021-01-20 19:50:06","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/podcasts.la.utexas.edu\/british-studies-lecture-series\/?post_type=speaker&p=949","menu_order":0,"post_type":"speaker","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"}],"guests":[{"ID":857,"post_author":"45","post_date":"2020-06-24 16:45:21","post_date_gmt":"2020-06-24 16:45:21","post_content":"\n

Bernard Wasserstein was born in London in 1948 and was a Professor of History at several British and American universities. A Guggenheim and British Academy fellow, he has been a recipient of the Golden Dagger and Yad Vashem book awards. Since 2014, when he retired from the University of Chicago, he has lived in Amsterdam. His books, which have been translated into twelve languages, include The British in Palestine, Divided Jerusalem, and Israelis and Palestinians.<\/p>\n","post_title":"Bernard Wasserstein","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","post_password":"","post_name":"bernard-wasserstein","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2020-06-24 16:45:21","post_modified_gmt":"2020-06-24 16:45:21","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/podcasts.la.utexas.edu\/british-studies-lecture-series\/?post_type=speaker&p=857","menu_order":0,"post_type":"speaker","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"}],"transcript":"

Well, George Christian has is here so we can begin<\/p>\n

Bernard Wasserstein represents the University of Chicago.<\/p>\n

But as you will know from his name, Wasserstein, he is a Scotch.<\/p>\n

And we have two Glaswegians who are actually students. And my own course.<\/p>\n

There they are right there. This is quite, quite extraordinary.<\/p>\n

Berner gave a talk here several years ago about Blasco growing up in<\/p>\n

Glasgow. And there was a fellow Scot who was actually from Glasgow and she didn’t<\/p>\n

like at all. What about the city? And I was<\/p>\n

reminded of all this in a comment just a few days ago in The New York<\/p>\n

Times, which describes Glasgow as a desperately grim<\/p>\n

place, not unlike parts of America now ravaged.<\/p>\n

It was staggered by alcoholism, environmental hazards, high suicide<\/p>\n

rates, corruption, gang warfare, loss of industrial jobs,<\/p>\n

and a significant rise in drug drug abuse that almost matched Chicago.<\/p>\n

So this raises the question of what it was like at the same time<\/p>\n

in the land of milk and honey and how Jerusalem would compare to this description.<\/p>\n

And this is what Bernard is going to talk about, the end of the British Empire in<\/p>\n

Palestine.<\/p>\n

Thank you. And good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen.<\/p>\n

Nothing in his life became him like the leaving it<\/p>\n

the death of the thane of Qatar, thus reported by Malcolm<\/p>\n

to Duncan in act one. Scene four of Hamlet of Macbeth.<\/p>\n

The poor thayne, who never even gets to make an appearance in person in<\/p>\n

the play, enters English literary memory solely<\/p>\n

via that brief posthumous encomium.<\/p>\n

And the British Empire is often eulogized in like manner, no<\/p>\n

doubt. Empires after 1945 were pernicious and doomed.<\/p>\n

Nevertheless, we are often told nothing became the British like the way they left theirs,<\/p>\n

the peaceful handover of sovereignty in colony after colony was a model of imperial<\/p>\n

abnegation almost without parallel. True, there were violent exceptions<\/p>\n

like Kenya or Cyprus or Aden, but in general,<\/p>\n

the process was nonviolent. In sharp contrast with other imperial ending,<\/p>\n

such as those of the Dutch and the East Indies or the Portuguese in Mozambique and Angola<\/p>\n

and so forth. Those of us who grew up in Britain in the postwar decades<\/p>\n

recall the newsreel footage as the British flag was lowered in<\/p>\n

colony after colony all the way from the Gold Coast in<\/p>\n

Those epic scenes you may recall the British mandate in<\/p>\n

Palestine was unique in many ways, in particular in the way of its ending on<\/p>\n

the 15th of May 1948. This has often been<\/p>\n

noted. This was the only the only dependent territory from<\/p>\n

which Britain ever withdrew without handing over authority to any successor<\/p>\n

government refusing to commit to implement the United<\/p>\n

Nations partition resolution for Palestine. Of the twenty ninth of<\/p>\n

November 1947.<\/p>\n

The British government embraced an apparent policy of Uprate new le deluge.<\/p>\n

Indeed, that is the accusation voiced in several accounts of the<\/p>\n

end of the mandate. Arthur Cussler, for example, dubbed the British withdrawal<\/p>\n

operation Deluge. Xav Sharif, secretary<\/p>\n

of the provisional government of Israel at its inception, and the man chiefly responsible for the construction<\/p>\n

of the state’s administrative machine in 1948, wrote in<\/p>\n

his memoir Chaos was implicit in the British government’s decision.<\/p>\n

The British departure plan ruled out any transfer of government institutions and<\/p>\n

public services to the trustworthy charge of the successor authority. And<\/p>\n

this inimical official attitude could not have could not but have a<\/p>\n

provocative effect on the individuals carrying out the plan.<\/p>\n

I recall an interview in 1970 with one of the officials involved<\/p>\n

in that. End of the mandate. John Sharing,<\/p>\n

who had been a senior official in Palestine and even 22 years after<\/p>\n

the event, he told me he felt shame at this policy of Scuttle.<\/p>\n

So far as he was concerned, nothing less became the British then<\/p>\n

nothing less became the British then their manner of leaving Palestine. Was<\/p>\n

he right? There can be little argument that<\/p>\n

at the level of high policymaking in London, the end of the Palestine mandate<\/p>\n

was marked by a despairing anxiousness anxiety on the part of the British government<\/p>\n

to wash its hands of Palestine.<\/p>\n

Which was in 1947, tying down one hundred<\/p>\n

thousand British troops and security forces. And by the<\/p>\n

way, that is more than the entire strength of the British armed forces<\/p>\n

today. But one hundred thousand men were tied down and this was at a time when Britain was on<\/p>\n

its knees economically and dependent really on<\/p>\n

the prospect of a an American loan to for its economy to survive.<\/p>\n

So it was desperately anxious to get out at whatever cost<\/p>\n

at the level of high policy and unwilling to be seen as aiding and abetting partition<\/p>\n

of Palestine and the consequent creation of a Jewish state there for fear of its<\/p>\n

collapse, of its influence in the entire Middle East. Britain abstained<\/p>\n

in the UN vote on the twenty ninth of November, forbade the UN Palestine<\/p>\n

Commission charged with implementing the partition even to set foot<\/p>\n

in Palestine, and forbade it to set foot in Palestine until the 1st of May 1948,<\/p>\n

advance party in March, the petition commission never actually arrived in Palestine<\/p>\n

because it was disbanded for reasons we didn’t enter into. On the 14th<\/p>\n

of May. So that was what Britain did at the level of<\/p>\n

high policy. But if we turn our attention from London to Jerusalem,<\/p>\n

does a different picture emerge now in an article published 30 years ago by<\/p>\n

main host William Roger Lewis. Professor<\/p>\n

Lewis analyzed the role of the head of the government of Palestine, the high commissioner in Jerusalem,<\/p>\n

Sir Alan Cunningham, on the basis of the scrutiny of his contemporary<\/p>\n

papers. Lewis, if I may refer to that,<\/p>\n

it to some extent salved Cunningham’s reputation, concluding<\/p>\n

that whatever his other failings which he enumerated, he<\/p>\n

in Palestine presided over a well or I’m quoting now, presided over a well organized and carefully<\/p>\n

planned withdrawal that took place entirely according to plan.<\/p>\n

Others have been more critical. The Palestinian historian is Hala, for example, complains<\/p>\n

that the withdrawal was, I quote, confused and disorderly, having taken place under conditions<\/p>\n

of almost complete anarchy. And that’s a view that’s echoed by both Israeli<\/p>\n

and Palestinian historians down to the present.<\/p>\n

Most of them. Cunningham was primarily concerned with trying<\/p>\n

to preserve some semblance of peace in Palestine and to minimize bloodshed.<\/p>\n

He saw his job. Lewis writes principally as holding the ring while the civil administration<\/p>\n

closed down and British troops evacuated from the Olympian<\/p>\n

Heights of Government House in Jerusalem, built on a hill,<\/p>\n

the hill of evil counsel allegedly from the New Testament.<\/p>\n

He largely delegated the handling of the withdrawal to his officials.<\/p>\n

Now let’s descend. This is what I’d like to do today. Let’s descend to those lower<\/p>\n

levels and survey what happened in the government offices and in the towns and villages<\/p>\n

of Palestine between the two dates that are behind me, between the UN partition<\/p>\n

vote and the British<\/p>\n

withdrawal from Palestine as the struggle for the succession to the mandate intensified.<\/p>\n

And before we performed that exercise, let me just<\/p>\n

mention three contextual points. First, the fact that in spite<\/p>\n

of its long history and experience of imperial acquisition,<\/p>\n

Britain in the spring of 1948 had as yet little experience of imperial<\/p>\n

deaccessioning. Among the few notable<\/p>\n

instances of that were Iraq in 1932 and the more recent incident<\/p>\n

instances in August 1947 of India, and both<\/p>\n

of those were followed by terrible bloodshed. Neither offered a promising<\/p>\n

model for emulation. And the second contextual point. The withdrawal<\/p>\n

was a colossal logistic exercise. It involved the trans shipment of<\/p>\n

five thousand military personnel. That’s as of the first of December 1947.<\/p>\n

It had gone down from its high point, six thousand British police and officials,<\/p>\n

the disposal of massive quantities of government assets of all kinds, and the removal<\/p>\n

or destruction of a quarter of a million tons of military stores.<\/p>\n

And the third point that withdrawal took place against the background, of course, as we know, of civil<\/p>\n

war that was already taking place between Arabs and Jews<\/p>\n

and of Jewish attacks against British military targets. The carnage was horrific<\/p>\n

and the British were powerless to contain it. By early 1948,<\/p>\n

the government of Palestine was clearly, as the American consul in Jerusalem reported on<\/p>\n

the 9th of February, in a state of disintegration.<\/p>\n

Now, the managing director of Britain’s of the mandatory administration’s withdrawal<\/p>\n

was not, in fact, the high commissioner. It was a lower official. A man called Eric<\/p>\n

Mills. He had served continuously in Palestine since the start of British<\/p>\n

rule in December 1917 with the title Commissioner<\/p>\n

on special duty. Mills was charged with advising on and in effect,<\/p>\n

supervising, overseeing, supervising the liquidation of the mandatory government.<\/p>\n

Zabbaleen, who had met Mills on his first visit to Palestine in 1934,<\/p>\n

called him a clever, disillusioned, cynical person, but<\/p>\n

like some of Berlin’s snap judgments, this was unfair. I believe Mills,<\/p>\n

who had been comptroller of the 1931 Census of Palestine. Incidentally,<\/p>\n

the only census of the whole of the area. Of<\/p>\n

what is now Israel and the West Bank that ever took place. The only serious<\/p>\n

census. And who had also been director of Manpower<\/p>\n

during the Second World War was in fact, an able and conscientious administrator. And<\/p>\n

whatever degree of success the opposite the withdrawal operation enjoyed must be attributed.<\/p>\n

Success or failure must be attributed in large measure to him now<\/p>\n

immediately upon the UN partition vote in November. Mills issued<\/p>\n

a draft general scheme for withdrawal, and this provided for the transfer<\/p>\n

of government fixed assets such as post offices, schools, telephone exchanges<\/p>\n

and hospitals, as well as vehicles, machinery, records and stores.<\/p>\n

As far as possible to local authorities, pending the emergence<\/p>\n

of successor governments, which British did not want to be responsible for handing<\/p>\n

over to the public works<\/p>\n

department, accordingly prepared voluminous handing over notes on<\/p>\n

public utilities and infrastructure such as water and sewage works, roads and bridges,<\/p>\n

machinery and surveying instruments.<\/p>\n

In early 1948, instructions were issued for the selective destruction of<\/p>\n

government records. Of course, particularly of interest to historians and the guiding<\/p>\n

principle was, I quote, to destroy as much as possible. That does not involve<\/p>\n

frustration of a successor administration. Among the records<\/p>\n

designated to be spared were those concerning births, marriages and deaths, nationality<\/p>\n

and citizenship. Most other so-called secret registry files, however,<\/p>\n

were to be destroyed. An exception was made for files, I quote, whose<\/p>\n

destruction would frustrate a successor government, provided that the publication<\/p>\n

would not embarrass HMG Comanches government or injure an<\/p>\n

individual in doubtful cases. I am still quoting doubtful cases. The degrees<\/p>\n

of frustration or embarrassment must be weighed against each other.<\/p>\n

End of quotation now files in the top secret registry were all to be destroyed<\/p>\n

or downgraded before z. today, which I’ll translate for you.<\/p>\n

Zayday The last day of British rule. Behind me,<\/p>\n

all other files were to be stored and then handed over to the UN commission.<\/p>\n

Mills suggested, for example, that the plans and field records of the service<\/p>\n

department, which alone comprised six tons, might be shipped to England.<\/p>\n

The process of destruction and preservation, however, turned out to be more haphazard.<\/p>\n

Many papers scheduled for destruction were preserved. None at all appear<\/p>\n

to have been transferred to the UN. Some were shipped to Cyprus. Others were sent to England<\/p>\n

and opened to researchers at various points after 1966. Some as late<\/p>\n

as 2013. Those remaining in Palestine, for the most<\/p>\n

part, ended up in archives in Israel. And much of what I report here today is drawn<\/p>\n

from those. All documents bearing on security were supposed to be destroyed,<\/p>\n

but many in fact survived. Bank vaults in Jerusalem with a capacity of one<\/p>\n

hundred and thirty five cubic meters were set aside for secure storage of government<\/p>\n

files. But the fighting in Jerusalem was particularly severe around<\/p>\n

the Barclays bank building. In fact, I think you can still see on the facade of that building<\/p>\n

the the bullet marks and the shell holes<\/p>\n

and so forth. Any files stored there?<\/p>\n

Sorry. There’s that Barclays bank was the government bank, so that was probably<\/p>\n

the bank that they had in mind. Now the fighting there was particularly<\/p>\n

severe and it ended up just on the Israeli side of the final demarcation line in Jerusalem,<\/p>\n

which you’ll remember was divided at the end of the war in 1948 into the<\/p>\n

east, controlled by Jordanian forces and the west controlled by Israelis. So it ended<\/p>\n

up just on the Israeli side. Any files stored there were probably among those captured<\/p>\n

by a SWAT team of Israeli archivists, specially commissioned<\/p>\n

for the task of scouring government buildings for files and scooping them up<\/p>\n

while the war was still raging. And overall, a surprising amount of important<\/p>\n

documentation survived. Luckily for historians<\/p>\n

in his liquidation planning, Milice had proposed that the income tax files, which<\/p>\n

he said which are confidential, he wrote, be moved to England for safekeeping<\/p>\n

pending their transfer to a successor government. But that seems not to have been done<\/p>\n

at the end of March. The tax records were still in place in the government offices and the finance<\/p>\n

secretary ordered that, I’m quoting now, in view of their bulk.<\/p>\n

Local authorities should be asked to arrange for their safe custody, that this<\/p>\n

is the best that we can do, he wrote. Resignedly and in their massive transfer<\/p>\n

in Tel Aviv on the 10th of May, just before the end of the mandate,<\/p>\n

five days before all tax and other financial and legal records for the city of Tel Aviv,<\/p>\n

the largest Jewish city in Palestine, as well as all other Jewish towns and settlements<\/p>\n

in the coastal area where deposited with the Tel Aviv municipality, I<\/p>\n

quote, intrust pending the constitution of a successor government.<\/p>\n

Now, one other British bureaucratic legacy that proved to be of critical importance in this<\/p>\n

case, particularly to many Palestinian Arabs, was the accumulation of land records,<\/p>\n

particularly registers of land ownership, which the British<\/p>\n

mandatory government made considerable efforts to preserve. M. emphasized that<\/p>\n

the mills emphasized that the land registers, whereas he wrote of vital importance<\/p>\n

to the whole country. And he ordered that microfilm copies should be made. At least<\/p>\n

some were photographed. But the volume of such records rendered the task of Mike<\/p>\n

microfilming them all unfeasible. The remainder of those in Jerusalem<\/p>\n

were stored under Red Cross protection in the YMCA building today a four<\/p>\n

star hotel. Fortunately, a large proportion survived intact<\/p>\n

and are today in Israeli archives and are much consulted by lawyers dealing with<\/p>\n

Palestinian Arab land issues.<\/p>\n

But let me move on from records. What was to be done, for example, with<\/p>\n

prisoners? In the absence of the short continuity of service by prison guards,<\/p>\n

they could hardly be left behind, locked up just to rot<\/p>\n

away. Now serious British citizen offenders<\/p>\n

could be moved to the UK. But what about Palestinians, Arabs and Jews?<\/p>\n

A partial amnesty was granted in less serious cases, reducing the prison<\/p>\n

population. It has already been substantially diminished<\/p>\n

by the by the time we are dealing with by the escape of 251<\/p>\n

prisoners from the Acher prison and a famous breakout in<\/p>\n

May 1947. And the further 18 escaped in December.<\/p>\n

By the middle of March 1948, only two thousand one hundred seventy<\/p>\n

seven prisoners remained in custody. And those included 407 political<\/p>\n

detainees. Arabs and Jews and 110 criminal lunatics, as they<\/p>\n

were called it was decided to release nearly all the political detainees.<\/p>\n

Further, releases of ordinary prisoners reduced the total to<\/p>\n

twelve hundred. The remaining Jewish and Arab convicts<\/p>\n

were redistributed to prisons within the territories of their<\/p>\n

respective proposed states. Under the UN resolution<\/p>\n

and confidential contacts were established with the Jewish Agency, the embryo government of Israel<\/p>\n

and the Arab Power Committee representing Arab nationalists in Palestine, whereby they<\/p>\n

agreed to take responsibility for their prisoners. After the 15th<\/p>\n

of May.<\/p>\n

Then there was the problem of the railways. Even had<\/p>\n

the British been ready to hand it over the railway system to the successor states,<\/p>\n

that could not be partitioned. It was a unified system for the country as a whole. So what would<\/p>\n

be done with the buildings roiling stock and personnel? In a memo on<\/p>\n

the 12th of April 1948, general manager of the railways despaired of any easy solution,<\/p>\n

noting that the system it already suffered severely from looting and destruction. He feared<\/p>\n

that the entire organisation would soon disintegrate. By the end of the mandate, hardly any trains<\/p>\n

were, in fact, running. Nevertheless, on the 13th of May, the last chief<\/p>\n

accountant of the Palestine Railways transferred to his Jewish successor<\/p>\n

in Haifa, the keys to the office, the head office of the of the Palestine Railways.<\/p>\n

The keys also to the safes, as well as and I’m quoting now, to spare motors for<\/p>\n

the accounting machines. Several sporting trophies, also an automatic<\/p>\n

pistol. My own personal property, which he wrote, please hand over to the proper<\/p>\n

authorities. You didn’t say what those authorities were, of course.<\/p>\n

And you concluded almost as if he was speaking at a retirement party and handing over a gold watch.<\/p>\n

I’d take this opportunity of thanking you most sincerely for your long and valuable service with the Palestine Railways<\/p>\n

and wishing you a happy and prosperous future. Well, while men<\/p>\n

and goods could be withdrawn, the same did not apply so easily to beasts.<\/p>\n

What about the two hundred fifty seven horses and twenty seven camels of the Palestine<\/p>\n

Police? Mills noted that the animals represent an<\/p>\n

asset that should, strictly speaking, be transferred to the United Nations at the end of the mandate,<\/p>\n

but apparently didn’t particularly trust international control of such valuable<\/p>\n

assets. He expressed concern that there is every reason for supposing that the animals cannot be tended<\/p>\n

and fed after the administration ends. The inspector general<\/p>\n

of police declared himself most anxious that no horses should be left ownerless at the termination<\/p>\n

of the mandate, and he proposed as a humane measure. Therefore, that horses above the age<\/p>\n

of 12 years should be destroyed. Many were in fact sent<\/p>\n

to the knacker’s yard. The remainder were offered for sale at 30 Palestinian<\/p>\n

pounds each. It was a bargain price, but there were a few takers and there were few<\/p>\n

takers. And in the end, it was decided to reduce the price to 15 pounds and to divide them,<\/p>\n

as it were, to partition them, as it were, by nationality. Those the Jewish horses,<\/p>\n

as it were, those in Jewish areas, would be sold to Jewish buyers and those in Arab areas<\/p>\n

to Arabs. And as for the camels, they were to be offered to Bedouin sheiks<\/p>\n

in Shaikh’s in Beersheba. But then there was<\/p>\n

a related issue, particularly dear, of course, to British hearts. Mills proposed<\/p>\n

that police dogs were to be offered to other colonial governments unless,<\/p>\n

as he put it, a properly constituted successor authority requires them. He added,<\/p>\n

And I want you to listen carefully to this, because I’m not quoting precise the precise words he wrote.<\/p>\n

He wrote Masters may be transferred with them. The dogs speak Afrikaans.<\/p>\n

Dogs and masters work together. The dogs are not domestic. It<\/p>\n

may be best to destroy them, since we cannot feed them after departure, unquote.<\/p>\n

Well, all that, of course, no doubt testifies to the notorious British concern for the welfare<\/p>\n

of dumb animals. In many respects, v withdrawal<\/p>\n

did not proceed as smoothly in real life as in Mills’s scheme.<\/p>\n

Not all local authorities were able or willing to take responsibility for institutions<\/p>\n

that were to be transferred to them. In Nablus, for example, the Arab town of Nablus. The<\/p>\n

municipality declared itself unable to afford the expense of maintaining the government hospital<\/p>\n

after the 15th of May. The government rejected an appeal. The central government<\/p>\n

rejected an appeal for transition funding for the hospital. And the district commissioner advised<\/p>\n

the mayor of Nablus to, as he put it, I’m quoting his letter now to take the matter up with whatever<\/p>\n

Arab authority or body he thinks fit in order to obtain assistance.<\/p>\n

Drawings of buildings in Jaffa, Haifa and Nazareth districts were<\/p>\n

stolen in transit from the public works department to the local authorities.<\/p>\n

They probably ended up in in the hands of their Israeli<\/p>\n

successors. Until we reach a critical point<\/p>\n

in this this discussion, because the government superficially nonpolitical<\/p>\n

approach of handing over to local authorities obscured what I would<\/p>\n

argue is an underlying reality of acquiescence in the partition of Palestine.<\/p>\n

And that is because, in fact, nearly all local authorities in Palestine were<\/p>\n

controlled either by Jews or by Arabs. There were only four<\/p>\n

that weren’t, in fact, in the case of municipalities. Almost all were wholly<\/p>\n

or largely mono ethnic to Tel Aviv. And<\/p>\n

Netanya, for example, were Jewish. Nablus and Hebron were Arab. The two most important exceptions<\/p>\n

were Jerusalem, the capital and Haifa. Let me say a word about each<\/p>\n

of those owing to the inability of Arabs and Jews to agree on the choice of a mayor,<\/p>\n

the Jerusalem and this apparently had been under the control since 1945 of an unelected<\/p>\n

commission which replaced the town council was headed in the final months of the mandate by<\/p>\n

a retired Palestine government official, Richard Graves. Incidentally, the<\/p>\n

brother of the poet Robert Graves, a bomb attack in<\/p>\n

December 1947 led all the Jewish officials to leave the municipality<\/p>\n

building and moved to a separate office in a Jewish district. Graves tried<\/p>\n

without success to persuade them to return on the 25th of April.<\/p>\n

He recorded in his diary, Government have instructed me to recognize unofficially,<\/p>\n

so to speak, the new Jewish Municipal Committee appointed to look after the Jewish area.<\/p>\n

Unquote. In the very last days of the mandate remaining, Jerusalem<\/p>\n

municipal funds were split, a check for \u00a330000 was issued to the head of<\/p>\n

the Jewish Municipal Committee and one for twenty seven thousand five hundred. I’m<\/p>\n

not sure why it was a slightly lower amount was handed to a representative of the<\/p>\n

Arab section of the city. Now, as for Haifa,<\/p>\n

uniquely in Palestine, it was designated as a reserved enclave<\/p>\n

where British military occupation would persist for several weeks after<\/p>\n

the withdrawal date. After Z Day after the 15th of May, while the<\/p>\n

Army completed its withdrawal through what was Palestine’s most important port.<\/p>\n

But by the 21st of April, the Hogan-Howe, the Jewish underground army<\/p>\n

in the civil war that was already raging, as I mentioned, had won control<\/p>\n

over Haifa, except for the British controlled port area and the main road<\/p>\n

and the airport of the city, a small airport. Over the next few days, most of<\/p>\n

Haifa’s Arab population fled in British army and Navy<\/p>\n

convoys. Here, the British not<\/p>\n

didn’t just acquiesce in partition. They colluded at least this<\/p>\n

is one way of looking at it. I think a reasonable way of looking at it. They colluded in what<\/p>\n

we would now call ethnic cleansing because it was the British who shipped out<\/p>\n

the Arabs from Haifa.<\/p>\n

The government and the Haifa municipality agreed that as of the 15th of May, the municipality would<\/p>\n

take over. I’m quoting now from the handover documents, control and management of the Port<\/p>\n

Authority with the proviso that it would provide full facilities<\/p>\n

for the completion of the withdrawal of British forces and that a meeting on the 12th of May.<\/p>\n

Most of the Port Authority files and accounts were handed over to representatives<\/p>\n

of the municipality, I’m quoting, in the capacity of a trustee pending<\/p>\n

the establishment of a settled form of government in Palestine.<\/p>\n

Well, we’re already seeing that the notion that the British just burnt all the files and skipped<\/p>\n

out doesn’t conform with reality. Now, in some cases,<\/p>\n

the government machine was not so much bequeathed successors as disemboweled<\/p>\n

from within. By the end of March, the 30000 Palestinian,<\/p>\n

Arab and Jewish civil servants were being supervised by just 200<\/p>\n

remaining British officials. In these circumstances,<\/p>\n

Jewish and Arab officials of the government, who, of course, had nothing now to look forward<\/p>\n

to except maybe their pensions from the British scrambled to seize<\/p>\n

control of what remained of the administrative apparatus. And<\/p>\n

I’ll just mention one example, very interesting example of that. And that’s the fate of the<\/p>\n

Palestine Broadcasting Service. The the government controlled<\/p>\n

monopoly broadcaster in Palestine. The PBS had been<\/p>\n

founded in 1936 and it broadcast in English, Arabic and Hebrew from its transmitter<\/p>\n

in Ramallah, ten miles north of Jerusalem, in his withdrawal scheme.<\/p>\n

Melissa had proposed that the PBS should continue to transmit a new service up to the last.<\/p>\n

Up to Z day. He advised that when that was no longer possible, consideration<\/p>\n

should be given to removing, I’m quoting from his scheme, vital parts to it<\/p>\n

to immobilize the transmitter to prevent mischief makers misusing it<\/p>\n

unquote. By late 1947. Indeed. The broadcasting<\/p>\n

studios in Jerusalem had perforce been split up the the Hebrew service<\/p>\n

employees, fearful of attacks, had moved with their files, record and records and equipment<\/p>\n

to recover a Jewish district while the Arabic service remained in broadcasting<\/p>\n

house in most rah-rah, an Arab district. In January 1948, the<\/p>\n

PBS program Planning was decentralized so that the Arabic and Hebrew services<\/p>\n

were completely separate, except that all broadcasts still went out through the Ramallah transmitter<\/p>\n

and each service operated now with its separate bank accounts. By<\/p>\n

late April, Jerusalem was in a state of siege. The<\/p>\n

division of the service was almost complete, although broadcasting continued until the<\/p>\n

last day of the mandate. When the Ramallah transmitter was damaged in the fighting,<\/p>\n

transmissions were divided to the Arabic ones went out from reserve equipment in Ramallah,<\/p>\n

the Hebrew ones on low-power on a low powered emergency transmitter in the general post office<\/p>\n

building in Jerusalem. The war left the Ramalla<\/p>\n

transmitter station in Jordanian hands and the Jerusalem headquarters building under Israeli<\/p>\n

control. But the broadcasting service had already been partitioned before<\/p>\n

the 15th of May. As the assistant director of the service, Rex Keating later recalled,<\/p>\n

the PBS examples was quickly followed by other departments. Despite all the efforts of<\/p>\n

government to stop them, the split tape became total in effect, he wrote.<\/p>\n

The incipient Israeli government was being realized, and his emphasis on<\/p>\n

the Israeli success in this is important because the Zionists, with<\/p>\n

their preexisting institutional apparatus, a state in the making since the<\/p>\n

officials and civil servants of the new state. Even before the end of May.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, the Arab hire committee headed from exile by the ex mufti of Jerusalem<\/p>\n

had to I mean Hussein. He proved itself toothless and internally divided.<\/p>\n

It had no significant institutional foundations. In Palestine, Palestinian<\/p>\n

Arab society, unlike Jewish, dependent heavily on government services in such matters<\/p>\n

as education, health and social welfare by early May. In<\/p>\n

any case, all but one of the members of the Arab PA committee had fled the country.<\/p>\n

The committee requested of Arab officials that they should take charge of<\/p>\n

government departments and where they could, some did so. But the arrival<\/p>\n

in the eastern part of the mandate area of Arab Legion<\/p>\n

forces from Trans-Jordan, loyal to King Abdullah of Jordan, led<\/p>\n

them to see that these officials to see him and not the Arab higher committee of the Palestinian<\/p>\n

body as they are likely future employer. Quite apart from<\/p>\n

Abdullah’s military power, which rested on the British officer, the Arab Legion, Abdullah had other<\/p>\n

advantages. He ruled, after all, and existing state that had close links with sections of<\/p>\n

the Palestinian notable elite. And he enjoyed continuing British military,<\/p>\n

diplomatic and economic support. An attempt by the Mufti later<\/p>\n

in 1948 to set up a so-called All Palestine government in Egyptian<\/p>\n

occupied Gaza soon collapsed. Abdullah swept aside<\/p>\n

any pretensions of the Palestinian Arabs to a separate nationalism and united<\/p>\n

the two banks of the Jordan under his autocratic rule. In<\/p>\n

other words, Transjordan and what we now call the West Bank. That’s why it’s called the West Bank, because<\/p>\n

it’s a western part of what what became until 1967<\/p>\n

the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan. Now, Mills’s scheme<\/p>\n

did not, of course, make provision for the armed forces, which operated under a separate<\/p>\n

withdrawal plan. He was responsible only for the civil government and both Jews and<\/p>\n

Arabs complained bitterly at the time and ever since that British military actions in 1948<\/p>\n

favored the other side. The military withdrawal plan required the army<\/p>\n

to abstain from involvement in fighting between Jews and Arabs. It was to concentrate on holding<\/p>\n

lines of communication for withdrawal. But as<\/p>\n

Benny Morris has written and his history of the 1948 war and quoting<\/p>\n

from him his book now The Guideline of Impartiality,<\/p>\n

translated into a policy of quietly assisting each side in the takeover<\/p>\n

of areas in which that side was dominant. At the same time,<\/p>\n

there was large scale finished quotation, at the same time, there was large scale looting<\/p>\n

of arms and military stores and the flourishing black market in military equipment.<\/p>\n

And the fascinating picture of the underside of the military withdraw<\/p>\n

is provided in a source that has been little noticed by historians, although it’s freely available<\/p>\n

on the Internet. It’s not not been published a book. I wish it were. And that is the<\/p>\n

diary and memoir. It’s a memoir which can includes<\/p>\n

large quotations from a contemporary diary of Ivan Wilkes,<\/p>\n

Ivor Wilkes in 1948, a twenty year old second lieutenant<\/p>\n

in the British Army and Palestine as a satire on army life. Wilkes<\/p>\n

is now a narrative bears comparison with I think with England. War<\/p>\n

Emblem was sort of a trilogy, but Welles was not only a gifted writer,<\/p>\n

he was also a socialist and an intellectual who later became a professional historian.<\/p>\n

He ended his career as a neighbor of mine. Alas, I never met him. He died a few years ago.<\/p>\n

He ended his career as a distinguished professor of African history at Northwestern University in Chicago,<\/p>\n

and his four na\u00eff memoir is an extraordinary<\/p>\n

historical, literary and human document. And allow me to take a few minutes to<\/p>\n

to show how fascinating it is from the 23rd<\/p>\n

of December, 1947. Wilkes was stationed at an army base<\/p>\n

near Haifa where petroleum was stored for the army. The base was situated<\/p>\n

between two villages, one Jewish, the other at Jewish Nasha,<\/p>\n

Arab Balad. I’ll share. One of Wilkes as responsibilities<\/p>\n

was to measure each night. It had to be done at night for technical reasons.<\/p>\n

The amount of petrol in storage tanks on the base after<\/p>\n

a time he noticed discrepancies in the reported and actual amounts of petrol<\/p>\n

in the tanks. He discovered that a diversionary pipe had been opened<\/p>\n

and large amounts of petrol were being siphoned off for use by a small contingent<\/p>\n

of Syrian forces who had infiltrated into the Arab village of ballah. They’ll check.<\/p>\n

He also learned that his commanding officer, Captain Webster, was illicitly permitting<\/p>\n

a Hagana Jewish underground army unit in Nasher<\/p>\n

to obstruct empty jerry cans of fought<\/p>\n

for for oil. Now, Webster. A marvelous<\/p>\n

character. Which war could not have invented war of Webster? A<\/p>\n

closet homosexual with a bath man who was as flamboyant in his sexual<\/p>\n

orientation as his master, was secretive in his. Webster<\/p>\n

had one passionate desire that he shared with nearly all his fellow<\/p>\n

soldiers in Palestine. And that was, of course, to get home as soon as possible. One<\/p>\n

day, Wilkes learned that Webster was supplying the hunger. Now, not only<\/p>\n

with old. Jerry cans, but with arms from<\/p>\n

the camp that were. Surplus to requirements. I hate doing<\/p>\n

this, but surplus to requirements and Wilks protested and<\/p>\n

I now quote from Wilkes as memoir, which as I say, is based on his contemporary diary.<\/p>\n

He protested to Webster. To supply the Jews with old and better<\/p>\n

jerry cans was one thing. Firearms and ammunition were quite another.<\/p>\n

I Wilkes but certainly not ill disposed towards the Palestinian Arabs. I had<\/p>\n

come to like working with them. Many of them worked in the camp. You see, I pointed<\/p>\n

this out to Webster. I take these things very seriously, he said,<\/p>\n

but you must remember that it’s not your workers who are leading the Liberation Army. It is men who collaborated<\/p>\n

with the Nazis and came to believe that the Jews should be exterminated.<\/p>\n

At this point in the conversation, I had decided to press him on the nature of his relationship sorry, nature<\/p>\n

of his arrangement with Nisha’s Hugger Now unit. His answer took me<\/p>\n

completely by surprise. Prof. Prof. Was Websters<\/p>\n

hugging noncontact contact inertia? Prof. He said.<\/p>\n

And I talked the matter over and perhaps suggested that the handgun should be valued at 15<\/p>\n

Palestinian pounds and ammunition at around \u00a31 for 10000 rounds.<\/p>\n

I Wilks was taken aback. I’d be brought up to think of arms trading<\/p>\n

as reprehensible. I said something to that effect to Webster. His reply took<\/p>\n

me by surprise and I can only recollect the gist of it. I am, he said.<\/p>\n

Or well, it’s effect. I am a businessman by profession and I was doing business with pref.<\/p>\n

I was giving him a good deal because they would rather get a bargain from a businessman than<\/p>\n

receive a free gift from a do gooder. Works concludes<\/p>\n

his section of his memoir by saying I I was more than a little impressed by this gem of capitalistic<\/p>\n

wisdom. Now, Webster was undoubtedly an outlier<\/p>\n

in his political outlook, as in his sexuality.<\/p>\n

There is ample evidence that British troops, prompted by a mixture of anti-Semitism<\/p>\n

stoked by Jewish terrorism and profiteering, transferred large amounts<\/p>\n

of military equipment to the Arabs. Wilkes himself,<\/p>\n

although drawn to socialist Zionism, as he<\/p>\n

freely describes in his memoir, nevertheless participated almost without realizing<\/p>\n

what was going on in a large delivery of British arms from Haifa<\/p>\n

to the Egyptian army at the border just south of Gaza.<\/p>\n

Wilkes was attracted to Zionism by more than ideology, sexual,<\/p>\n

innocent. He was suborned by<\/p>\n

valid Tina, a young Jewish woman in Haifa who introduced him to<\/p>\n

so-called friends who turned out to be Haganah agents. And Wilks<\/p>\n

relates how, at the request of one of Valentinos friends, a man called Dan<\/p>\n

Lanner, later an Israeli major general Wilkes relates how he helped Spirit,<\/p>\n

a consignment of Czechoslovak arms through the high for port for the pal Mark, the<\/p>\n

elite striking force of the Haganah.<\/p>\n

In the last days of the mandate, Wilkes found himself caught up in negotiations between<\/p>\n

the Muqataa, a village head of ballah Dale Schiff and The Hunger Now unit<\/p>\n

in Nasha, who demanded the surrender of arms that had been left<\/p>\n

behind by the Syrian infiltrators. I mentioned a little earlier. Now<\/p>\n

the Arabs in Balad, L-shape, produce very little by way of arms. Perhaps very little<\/p>\n

had been left, and the Haganah announced that they would conduct a search of bilateral ships.<\/p>\n

They announced this in advance. The villagers without the end of April,<\/p>\n

no doubt mindful of the massacre of Arab civilians by<\/p>\n

Jewish terrorists at the village of Dary are seen near Jerusalem two weeks earlier, did not<\/p>\n

wait to see how such a shirt search would be would but turnout at midnight<\/p>\n

on the 24th of April, Wilkes recorded the aftermath in his diary. The<\/p>\n

Arabs have gone carrying what they could with them. The rest has been<\/p>\n

looted. The few belongings they had to leave and the horses, goats and fowl.<\/p>\n

I don’t know what would have happened had the Arabs allowed an immediate search of the town.<\/p>\n

I believe that even the hugging now commander would have left them in the town once, sure that it was neutralized<\/p>\n

by the handing over of the arms. But the Arabs, by and large believed that their lives were<\/p>\n

in danger and fled. It’s the end of the quotation. Now, Wilkes<\/p>\n

was troubled about his own role in that miserable affair and his mind was not eased<\/p>\n

when at their final meeting, a final meeting he had with<\/p>\n

Dan Lanner, the Hagana agent. Lanner and I’m quoting again from.<\/p>\n

From the diary, Lannert produced a watch from his<\/p>\n

case and passed it to me. It was Swiss. It seemed to be gold<\/p>\n

and it had a multiplicity of small dials. I was unsure what I was<\/p>\n

supposed to do. Should I admire it and pass it back?<\/p>\n

lonell saw that I was embarrassed. It’s a present. He said.<\/p>\n

He said simply, you were a great help to us in avoiding a heavy loss of life in bilat culture.<\/p>\n

I have never been sure, wrote Wilkes in his memoir. Whether I should have accepted<\/p>\n

that watch. But I did, and I have it to this day.<\/p>\n

In his tedious, lonely life on the Army base, Wilkes fantasized about taking<\/p>\n

Valentino back to England as his bride only at the end<\/p>\n

in the bitter disclosure scene. Did you find out that she herself was an Haggada agent<\/p>\n

who had bedded him as well as other British soldiers? As a matter, more of duty<\/p>\n

than of love. On the 14th of May,<\/p>\n

the high commissioner departed. The state of Israel was declared, and the Palestinian<\/p>\n

Nakba or catastrophe took shape. Although the mandate terminated at midnight,<\/p>\n

some British forces remained in the Haifa enclave, which was gradually reduced<\/p>\n

in size until the 30th of June, and Wilkes was among those who left on that very<\/p>\n

last day. So what emerges from all this?<\/p>\n

The proposition that the bridges simply washed their hands of Palestine cannot be sustained<\/p>\n

at any rate, as regards the men on the spot. John and David kimche, for example,<\/p>\n

and others like them, including, I must say myself in early<\/p>\n

writings were far from accurate in their claim. I’m quitting cheese now<\/p>\n

that there had been no attempt to transfer government and administrative matters to the Jews and<\/p>\n

the Arabs. The British officials there wrote the kimche brothers burnt<\/p>\n

their files, destroyed their records, and departed. I dont think that can be sustained<\/p>\n

on the basis of what we now know. Notwithstanding the British government’s public stance of<\/p>\n

noninvolvement, the mandatory administration did not pursue a scorched earth<\/p>\n

policy, nor did the British permit limit themselves to seeking an even balance<\/p>\n

between the warring parties. It would be more correct to say that in the final weeks of the mandate,<\/p>\n

they participated directly in the implementation of partition,<\/p>\n

and in doing so they helped pave the way for the establishment of Israel<\/p>\n

and for King Abdullah’s takeover of the West Bank.<\/p>\n

And the last words go fittingly to Eric Mills in something<\/p>\n

that he wrote with some foresight, I think, in as early as 1936.<\/p>\n

It was he penned this epitaph that he wrote in a letter to the head<\/p>\n

of the Palestine, to the man who became head of the Palestine Broadcasting Service. Edwin Samuel. But to<\/p>\n

appreciate it, I have to just explain one thing. And that is these two<\/p>\n

Hebrew letters here. Olaf Ude. They stand for. They<\/p>\n

stand for edits. Israel. The first two letters of which means<\/p>\n

the land of Israel in Hebrew in the early days of the mandate. There was much controversy<\/p>\n

arising from the Zionist demand that the Hebrew name of the country should appear<\/p>\n

on all official documents that were written in one of the three official languages of Palestine,<\/p>\n

namely Hebrew. But there was some resistance to this, and in<\/p>\n

the end the compromise was adopted in the short form. I love your. But not<\/p>\n

the full name. And it’s Israel is printed on postage stamps, coins<\/p>\n

and so forth. Together with the English Palestine, the Arabic<\/p>\n

philistine and the Hebrew transliteration Palestina. So it was<\/p>\n

I love you, Palestina. Edit Sister. So just to you understand now why<\/p>\n

I say this, because here is Mills’s epitaph. Here lies<\/p>\n

Palestine. Olaf Yot have mercy on her soul. Lord<\/p>\n

God, unwanted child of Arab and Jew. She needs<\/p>\n

no love. So let your tears be few.<\/p>\n"},"episode_featured_image":false,"episode_player_image":"https:\/\/podcasts.la.utexas.edu\/british-studies-lecture-series\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/4\/2017\/09\/british-studies.png","download_link":"https:\/\/podcasts.la.utexas.edu\/british-studies-lecture-series\/podcast-download\/190\/how-the-british-left-palestine.mp3","player_link":"https:\/\/podcasts.la.utexas.edu\/british-studies-lecture-series\/podcast-player\/190\/how-the-british-left-palestine.mp3","audio_player":"https:\/\/podcasts.la.utexas.edu\/british-studies-lecture-series\/podcast-player\/190\/how-the-british-left-palestine.mp3<\/a><\/audio>","episode_data":{"playerMode":"dark","subscribeUrls":[],"rssFeedUrl":"https:\/\/podcasts.la.utexas.edu\/british-studies-lecture-series\/feed\/podcast\/bsls","embedCode":"

How the British Left Palestine<\/a><\/blockquote>