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A landmark history, based on newly available documents, of the battles between Jews, Arabs, and the British that led to the creation of Israel
Anonymous Soldiers brilliantly re-creates the crucial period in the establishment of Israel, chronicling the three decades of growing anticolonial unrest that culminated in the end of British rule and the UN resolution to create two separate states. This groundbreaking book tells in riveting, previously unknown detail the story of how Britain, in the twilight of empire, struggled and ultimately failed to reconcile competing Arab and Jewish demands and uprisings. Bruce Hoffman, America’s leading expert on terrorism, shines new light on the bombing of the King David Hotel, the assassination of Lord Moyne in Cairo, the leadership of Menachem Begin, the life and death of Abraham Stern, and much else. Above all, Hoffman shows exactly how the underdog “anonymous soldiers” of Irgun and Lehi defeated the British and set in motion the chain of events that resulted in the creation of the formidable nation-state of Israel.
This is a towering accomplishment of research and narrative, and a book that is essential to anyone wishing to understand not just the origins of modern-day Israel or the current situation in the Middle East, but also the methodology of terrorism. Drawing on previously untapped archival resources in London, Washington, D.C., and Jerusalem, Bruce Hoffman has written one of the most detailed and sustained accounts of a terrorist and counterterrorist campaign that may ever have been seen, and in doing so has cast light on one of the most decisive world events in recent history. This will be the definitive account of the struggle for Israel for years to come.
- Sales Rank: #537424 in Books
- Brand: Hoffman, Bruce
- Published on: 2015-02-24
- Released on: 2015-02-24
- Format: Deckle Edge
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 9.50" h x 1.56" w x 6.58" l, 1.25 pounds
- Binding: Hardcover
- 640 pages
Review
Praise for Anonymous Soldiers:
"A gripping narrative history . . . Its major contribution is to demonstrate that the Irgun-led insurgency played a larger role in paving the way for Israel’s founding than we previously believed . . . A pathbreaking book.” – Michael Doran, The Wall Street Journal
“Riveting and deeply researched . . . Something remarkable . . . Hoffman excels at describing the complex internal politics of the terrorists, the Yishuv, and the British administration, which were constantly evolving . . . Extensive detail . . . Anonymous Soldiers does a wonderful job of elucidating this enormously complex and important period in Jewish history.” —Adam Kirsch, Tablet
“Riveting . . . Terrorism may work, as Hoffman suggesting in this thought-provoking book . . . Hoffman writes skillfully.” —Tom Segev, The New York Times Book Review
“A magisterial history that is indispensable to anyone wishing to understand how and why the State of Israel came into existence… More than most insurgent groups in history, the “anonymous soldiers” of Hoffman’s history left behind a legacy of accomplishment, as well as of terror—a conclusion as remarkable as the story that he has told so well.” —Eliot A. Cohen, Foreign Affairs
“Gripping detail . . . Anonymous Soldiers can be seen as a corrective to the understatements and misstatements about the role of the Revisionist movement in the history of Zionism and, especially, the creation and defense of the Jewish state . . . An even-handed work of history that is, at the same time, a morally illuminating and challenging.” —Jonathan Kirsch, Jewish Journal
“[Bruce Hoffman] presents a detailed chronicle of the guerrilla war waged by the Irgun, the Stern gang (also known as Lehi) and occasionally the Haganah against the British authorities . . . A valuable contribution . . . Hoffman is the first scholar of the subject to fully utilize the many thousands of British intelligence documents from the 1940s that have been declassified in recent years . . . Revealing.” —Rafael Medoff, Haaretz
"An authoritative, sweeping, important history that shows how terrorism 'is neither irrational nor desperate but instead entirely rational and often carefully calculated and choreographed.'" —Kirkus (starred review)
“Drawing on prodigious research and employing fine narrative pacing, Hoffman has produced a first-rate work on the ‘endgame’ in the Zionist struggle to establish a Jewish state.” —Publishers Weekly (starred)
“Well-sourced, exhaustive . . . Those interested in the Arab-Israeli conflict will want this book in their library. Hoffman has written it without using the kind of accusatory language that often is the hallmark of such books . . . Written in an interesting style, and richly footnoted based on the author’s access to declassified British, Israeli and American documents.” —St. Louis Post-Dispatch
“Terror works – at least sometimes – and there is no better proof than the success of the Israeli underground during the British Mandate in Palestine. In Anonymous Soldiers, Bruce Hoffman, the dean of counterterrorist scholars, explores the history and methods that would become the template for terrorist movements of the present day. This book will become a classic on the shelf of those who seek to understand and fight against non-state actors, who were themselves inspired by the Israeli example.” —Lawrence Wright, author of The Looming Tower and Thirteen Days in September
“This is the most important book for years on the prehistory of the state of Israel. Based to a large extent sources not tapped hitherto. At the same time it is an invaluable contribution to the history of political violence and counterterrorism, shedding new light on conditions in which terrorism succeeds and when it fails." —Walter Laqueur, author of A History of Zionism
“Anonymous Soldiers is the best comprehensive study of the Jewish extremists' terror\guerrilla campaign against the British in Palestine in the years 1939-1947. It is also a fine case study of a modern insurgency and counter-insurgency, with lessons for all students of terrorist\urban guerrilla wars around the globe. Hoffman is properly mindful of what motivated both the Jews and the British and of the decision-making processes at each turn in the bloody saga. And it is based on a very thorough trawl through the British and American archives, making it a lasting contribution to the historiography of British Mandate Palestine. Henceforward, few will be able to avoid the conclusion that the extremists' bloodletting was a primary cause of Britain's decision to leave, indeed, abandon, Palestine.” —Benny Morris, author of Righteous Victims
“This is Bruce Hoffman’s magnum opus. Hoffman asks an uncomfortable question: ‘Does terrorism work?’ And he provides an uncomfortable answer in this deeply researched account of the Jewish terrorists who forced the British out of Palestine: Sometimes it does. Hoffman brings great analytic rigor to a history that is based on a deep dive into the relevant archives, many of which were hitherto secret and have been recently declassified. This is the definitive account of one of the key factors in the formation of Israel.” — Peter Bergen, author of Manhunt: The Ten-Year Search for Bin Laden from 9/11 to Abbottabad
“Hoffman, who has studied and written extensively on terrorism in the Middle East, asserts that terrorist activities by the Jewish underground played an essential role in forcing Britain to abandon its mandate in Palestine, leading to the establishment of Israel in 1947. . . Well-researched and highly detailed . . . Thorough and well argued . . . [With] important implications.” —Jay Freeman, Booklist
“[An] exhaustive detailed history of British Mandate Palestine . . . A must read for anyone interested in the origins of the State of Israel.” —Joel Neuberg, Library Journal
About the Author
BRUCE HOFFMAN is the director of the Center for Security Studies and director of the Security Studies Program at Georgetown University’s Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service. He is also a senior fellow at the U.S. Military Academy’s Combating Terrorism Center. His previous books include Inside Terrorism and The Failure of British Military Strategy within Palestine, 1939–1947.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Preface
Does terrorism work? Its targets and victims steadfastly maintain that it does not, while its practitioners and apologists claim that it does. Scholars and analysts are divided. Given the untold death and destruction wrought by terrorists throughout history, the question has an undeniable relevance that has only intensified since the September 11, 2001, attacks. Yet a definitive answer unaccountably remains as elusive as a universally accepted definition of the phenomenon itself.
“Terrorists can never win outright,” Prime Minister Ian Smith of Rhodesia confidently declared in 1977. Following the 1983 suicide truck bombing that killed 241 U.S. military service personnel in Lebanon, President Ronald Reagan defiantly proclaimed that “the main thing” is to show that terrorism “doesn’t work . . . [and] to prove that terrorist acts are not going to drive us away.” Margaret Thatcher described the attempt by the Provisional Irish Republican Army (PIRA) to kill her at the 1984 Conservative Party Conference as illustrative not only of a failed attack but of a fundamentally futile strategy. And in July 2006, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert of Israel promised that his government “will not give in to blackmail and will not negotiate with terrorists when it comes to the lives of Israel Defence Force soldiers.”
Scholars have made similarly sweeping claims. The Nobel laureate Thomas Schelling observed in 1991 that despite considerable exertion, terrorists mostly have little to show for their efforts except for fleeting attention and evanescent publicity. In the wake of the September 11, 2001, attacks, the historical novelist cum military historian Caleb Carr consolingly averred, “The strategy of terror is a spectacularly failed one.” And in a 2006 article unambiguously titled “Why Terrorism Does Not Work,” the political scientist Max Abrahms argued that terrorism was also tactically ineffective. “The notion that terrorism is an effective coercive instrument,” he concluded, “is sustained by either single case studies or a few well-known terrorist victories.”3
Yet if terrorism is so ineffective, why has it persisted for at least the past two millennia and indeed become an increasingly popular means of violent political expression in the twenty-first century? The sense of personal empowerment and catharsis articulated by Frantz Fanon in The Wretched of the Earth, based on his experiences in Algeria during that country’s struggle for independence against France, only partially explains terrorism’s enduring attraction to the alienated and disenfranchised, the “so-far powerless [and] would-be powerful,” described some forty years ago by Frederick J. Hacker, a psychiatrist like Fanon. It is necessarily incomplete because individual motivations are only one side of a coin that also must address organizational dimensions and imperatives and the collective mind-set that they reflect.
Hence, much as statesmen and scholars may trumpet terrorism’s ineffectuality, it is nonetheless widely accepted that terrorist violence is neither irrational nor desperate but instead entirely rational and often carefully calculated and choreographed. Terrorism is thus consciously embraced by its practitioners as a deliberate instrument of warfare, a pragmatic decision derived from a discernibly logical process. As the doyenne of terrorist studies, Martha Crenshaw, explained in her seminal 1981 article on the causes of terrorism, “Campaigns of terrorism depend on rational political choice. As purposeful activity, terrorism is the result of an organization’s decision that it is a politically useful means to oppose a government . . . Terrorism is seen collectively as a logical means to advance desired ends.”
Terrorism’s posited ineffectiveness as a coercive strategy—confined to a handful of case studies or to infrequent and entirely sui generis successes—thus hardly squares with the terrorists’ own fervent and abiding faith in the efficacy of their violence, its intractable persistence over the course of history, or indeed the disproportionate influence that even a small number of well-known victories has had in inspiring imitation and emulation by successive generations of terrorists.
In other words, the handful of supposed exceptions may be far more important and far more compelling than the perceived rule. And even if terrorism’s power to dramatically change the course of history along the lines of the September 11, 2001, attacks has been mercifully infrequent, terrorism’s ability to act as a catalyst for wider conflagration or systemic political change appears historically undeniable. The assassination of the archduke Franz Ferdinand by a young Bosnian terrorist in June 1914 and the cross-border Palestinian terrorist attacks that led to the 1967 Arab-Israeli Six-Day War are arguably examples of the former, while the struggles for independence won by Ireland in 1922, Cyprus in 1960, and Algeria in 1962 are among the examples depicting the latter.
The list goes on: Rhodesia is now Zimbabwe; the U.S. Marines soon departed Lebanon; Sinn Féin’s Martin McGuinness, a former PIRA terrorist, has been the deputy first minister of Northern Ireland since 2007; and that same year Israel freed five of its imprisoned terrorists in exchange for the bodies of two kidnapped Israeli sergeants. Hezbollah’s significant role in Lebanon further challenges arguments about terrorism’s strategic futility. Indeed, neither Sinn Féin nor Hezbollah could ever have acquired the power, influence, and status both enjoy today if not for its terrorist antecedents.
The political violence that plagued Palestine when it was ruled by Great Britain presents an ideal case with which to examine and assess terrorism’s power to influence government policy and decision making. Prior to 1948, the land that eventually became the Jewish state of Israel was administered by Britain under the terms of the mandate awarded it in 1922 by the League of Nations. Charged with preparing this territory for eventual independence, Britain was regularly subjected to violent pressure by both Arab and Jew alike. Arab rioting and attendant anti-Jewish violence and terrorism during the 1920s led to more widespread insurrection in the late 1930s. Then, during the 1940s, two Jewish terrorist organizations—the Irgun Zvai Le’umi (National Military Organization) and the Lohamei Herut Yisrael (Fighters for the Freedom of Israel), known to Jews by its Hebrew acronym, Lehi, and to the British as the Stern Gang—arose to challenge Britain’s rule over Palestine.
The terrorist campaigns waged by both these organizations, it should be emphasized, were only one facet of a broader confrontation that dominated Anglo-Zionist relations throughout the mandate’s final decade. Palestine’s Jewish community and Britain came into conflict over a number of issues involving the rights of Jews—immigration to Palestine; the purchase of land and construction of settlements; the acquisition, importation, and storage of weapons; the organization and training of civilian self-defense forces—and, most fundamentally, over Palestine’s political future. The struggle for Jewish statehood employed almost every means possible: diplomacy, negotiation, lobbying, civil disobedience, propaganda, information operations, armed resistance, and terrorist violence.
But the Palestine case is especially valuable in understanding the impact that terrorism can have on government policy and decision making. The Jewish terrorist campaign was arguably the first post–World War II “war of national liberation” to clearly recognize the publicity value inherent in terrorism; the violence was often choreographed for an audience far beyond the immediate geographic locus of the terrorists’ struggle. The lessons with respect to government policy responses and tactical countermeasures are equally profound. Modern Western nations’ fear of foreign terrorist infiltration and radicalization of an indigenous minority population, for instance, echoes concerns sixty years ago about the spread of Jewish terrorist activities from Palestine to Britain and Europe.
Many of the security challenges that Britain subsequently encountered in Malaya, Cyprus, and Kenya during the 1950s and in Northern Ireland throughout the closing decades of the twentieth century and that the United States and Britain together have faced in Iraq and Afghanistan since 2001 were also present in Palestine throughout the period of British rule. Highly professional military forces, in some cases flushed with recent hard-fought victories on conventional battlefields, were perplexed by their failure to swiftly suppress and ultimately defeat numerically inferior, poorly armed, enigmatic adversaries. They chafed at highly restrictive rules of engagement in densely populated urban areas and often had grave difficulties in obtaining the cooperation of the local population. Intelligence collection and analysis were similarly frustrating and often inadequate; policing was largely accorded a low priority, and consequently training was poor and personnel numbers deficient; proficiency with local languages was frequently a problem; and civil-military relations were strained and coordination fractured.
Since the late 1970s, a more complete understanding of the events and processes that led to Britain’s decision in 1947 to surrender the mandate and leave Palestine has emerged as a result of the declassification of many critical state documents from that time. The British Public Records Act of 1958 stipulates that official records will be made available to the public thirty years after their creation—unless they are either still in use by government ministries or deemed by those ministries to be of sufficient sensitivity that they must be retained.
Accordingly, three decades after Britain left Palestine, a variety of cabinet papers, minutes, and memorandums became available along with correspondence from the Colonial, Foreign, Prime Minister’s, and War Offices, among other government ministries. The material included reports and analyses prepared by individual departments and the reflections of the senior officials who reviewed and commented on them, telegrams and letters exchanged between ministers in London and their subordinates overseas, the war diaries of military forces deployed to Palestine, the records of the colonial police service, and so on. The array of personal papers deposited in private archives by many of the dramatis personae involved in the formulation and execution of British policy in Palestine during the mandate filled in more of the details, as did official documents of various kinds found in both Israel and the United States.
As a young doctoral student, I spent several years researching this subject during the late 1970s and early 1980s. I examined material in the Public Record Office at Kew, London, as well as in collections of private papers scattered throughout England, consulted archives in Israel and the United States, and interviewed many former British statesmen, soldiers, and police involved either in governing Palestine or in crafting British policy for the mandate, along with past members of the Irgun and Lehi (my doctoral thesis was submitted to the Faculty of Social Studies at Oxford University in 1985).
I was always conscious of the material at the Public Record Office to which public access was denied. Notations attached to numerous files in archival registries stated that they were either closed for fifty years or “retained by department.” Equally frustrating were the fleeting glimpses of individual intelligence reports and analyses occasionally found in the files of other ministries or departments that had somehow escaped vetting and exclusion. These lacunae were perhaps most conspicuous with respect to the records of Britain’s intelligence and security services and those of the Palestine Police Force’s intelligence arm, the Criminal Investigation Department (CID).
The centrality of intelligence to understanding history has long been the focus of research by the renowned Cambridge historian Professor Christopher Andrew. “Secret intelligence in twentieth-century Britain,” he wrote in the preface to Her Majesty’s Secret Service: The Making of the British Intelligence Community, “has varied greatly in both quantity and quality but the historian of national and international politics can never afford to ignore it. Any analysis of government policy, particularly on foreign affairs and defence, which leaves intelligence out of account is bound to be incomplete. It may also be distorted as a result.”
I subsequently moved on to the study and analysis of more contemporary issues of terrorism and counterterrorism, often on behalf of the U.S. government while employed for some twenty years at a prominent think tank. Nonetheless, I always carried with me the nagging thought that the work for my doctorate, as Professor Andrew’s admonition implied, was incomplete and thus was best regarded rather as a work in progress— to be amended at some future time.
The opportunity to undertake this work finally presented itself about a decade ago as a result of two developments. First, starting in the late 1990s, the British Security Service (MI5) made available at the Public Record Office— renamed the National Archives in 2003— the first tranche of documents pertaining to its early history. This was the start of subsequent, often annual releases of hitherto highly classified intelligence reports, analyses, interrogations, intercepts, diaries, and other communications. Second, in 2002 the service selected Professor Andrew, by now a cherished friend and mentor, to write its official history— the magisterial book published in 2009, to coincide with the service’s centenary, titled The Defence of the Realm: The Authorized History of MI5 (and in the United States as Defend the Realm). Professor Andrew’s work on this project continued the flow of additional files, including many pertaining to Palestine. The KV series, as the Security Service’s papers are designated, I soon discovered, yielded a treasure trove of new information on Palestine, among which were handwritten minutes to memorandums by Winston Churchill and correspondence sent to MI5 signed by H. A. R. “Kim” Philby, the notorious cold war spy.
Over the next seven years I made several visits to the archives at Kew. I also revisited private papers collections in Britain and archives in both Israel and the United States— where I found a large amount of newly donated papers and recently declassified documents. As the participants in the struggle over Palestine in the 1940s aged and, in many cases, passed away, either they or their heirs had increasingly deposited at university libraries and research centers hitherto unknown and unavailable material in the form of long-forgotten official papers and personal diaries. The papers of John J. O’Sullivan, a senior British intelligence officer who served in Palestine and was at the vortex of virtually all the investigations into all the major terrorist attacks both in Palestine and elsewhere between 1944 and 1947, proved invaluable especially with respect to the assassination of Lord Moyne in Cairo in 1944, the bombings of Jerus-lem’s King David Hotel and the British embassy in Rome in 1946, and the kidnapping and lynching of two British field intelligence sergeants the following year. In addition, the discovery in Israel of the long-mislaid intelligence files of the Palestine Police Force, now housed at the Haganah Archives in Tel Aviv, also provided insight.
The result is the research presented in Anonymous Soldiers, which takes its name from the title of a poem written by Abraham Stern that subsequently became the Irgun’s and then Lehi’s anthem. The book is divided into three parts.
The first part, comprising chapters 1 through 6, covers the period of time from Britain’s conquest of Palestine in 1917, toward the end of World War I, to the early years of World War II. It attempts to depict the reasons behind the emergence of a Jewish underground in response to Arab violence and terrorism and traces its evolution into a counter-terrorism strike force that eventually turned its weapons on Britain as well.
The second part, chapters 7 through 10, focuses on wartime Palestine: the split that produced rival Jewish terrorist factions; their relations with the mainstream, official Zionist movement; and the growing polarization of the Jewish community from the British government that led in turn to the escalation of Jewish terrorism, now directed solely against the British government.
The final part, chapters 11 through 19, chronicles the war that Britain fought in Palestine following World War II. It was during this time that a concatenation of powerful forces, including Jewish terrorism, combined to render Britain’s continued rule of Palestine untenable. These chapters, accordingly, focus on terrorism’s role in the momentous events that led to Britain’s decision to abandon the mandate. An epilogue assesses the lessons of this struggle in the context of both terrorism’s subsequent trajectory and the challenges faced by governments in countering this menace.
Neither this book nor its author makes any pretension to providing a definitive history of the Zionist struggle against British rule or the entire spectrum of factors that led to the creation of the State of Israel. Rather, as might be expected from someone who has spent his entire career studying terrorism and counterterrorism, this book considers those specific dimensions of this story in light of the broader question raised at the beginning of this preface: how terrorism affects government policy and decision making and whether terrorism is an effective weapon with which to achieve fundamental political change. Anonymous Soldiers thus recounts the history of this struggle mostly through the eyes of the British statesmen, soldiers, officials, policemen, and others variously charged with administering the mandate, policing it, and crafting policies for, or making decisions about, it.
Bruce Hoffman
Washington, D.C.
May 2014
Most helpful customer reviews
32 of 34 people found the following review helpful.
A fascinating yet narrow history
By Mohe
This is basically a relatively thorough, and thoroughly researched, but rather narrow, history of British counter terrorism policy in the Palestine Mandate with an almost sole focus on the Irgun and Lehi, the "Stern Gang", it includes considerable Israeli material, particularly the strategy and tactics of the Irgun and Lehi, and spends considerable time discussing the responses of the Jewish Agency, though it basically has nothing to say about Haganah or the Palmach, except when it directly relates to Irgun, Lehi, or to British discussions about them. The focus is continuously on the British point of view though its sympathy is fundamentally not with them. Its chief problems lie in its framing as a discussion of terrorism's political effectiveness and its complete focus on the Jewish community in the Mandate.
The first four chapters are basically proto-Israeli history, but then the rest is a lengthy, if fascinating, account of British reactions to Irgun and Lehi provocations. The problem is that this is completely divorced from context, while Jewish factional struggles are discussed early on; there is no real inquiry into what motivated them. Haganah's hostility to Irgun was hardly just about tactics, but here it is barely discussed. Similarly the British reaction, especially in the military which dominated, was much colored by the experience of the Arab Revolt, which is barely covered, and the greater political context of the British cabinet's decision making is essentially left out.
The difficulty is clearly caused by a narrow study being expanded to make it more universal without reducing is narrowness. If one already knows this story, there is a considerable wealth of very interesting new information, even if much of it is delivered in a frequently irritating oblique style. But if the reader is new the subject they will not only get some very strange impressions but also miss even the existence of the most of the most interesting parts because the author is so deadpan in delivering them. It is as if he is trying to obscure as much as enlighten.
In short while I would heartily recommend this to someone with quite a bit more than a passing familiarity with the last years of the Palestine Mandate, and in particular the Palestine Police Force, I cannot in good conscience recommend it to anyone else.
11 of 11 people found the following review helpful.
Important, Meticulous Account of Terrorism's Success & Counterterrorism's Failure.
By mirasreviews
"Anonymous Soldiers: The Struggle for Israel, 1917-1947" is a detailed account of three decades of Zionist terrorism and British counter-terrorism efforts that ended when Great Britain surrendered the Mandate of Palestine to the United Nations, having been unable to effectively counter or control Zionist violence or to find a political solution that was tenable. The author is Bruce Hoffman, director of Georgetown University's Center for Peace and Security Studies, whose earlier work on this subject was "The Failure of British Military Strategy within Palestine, 1939-1947" (1983). Since then, more information has come to light, as Britain's MI5 made documents concerning its early history publicly available for the first time in the 1990s, and relevant documents trickled into private libraries in the United States. In "Anonymous Soldiers", Hoffman examines the positions and activities of the British government vis à vis insurgent violence from 1917, when Great Britain assumed control of Palestine after four centuries of Ottoman rule, until it decided to abandon the Mandate in 1947.
Hoffman's purpose is lay out a case in which terrorism achieved its goal, to show what that terrorism was, why it succeeded, and why counterterrorism efforts failed. "The political violence that plagued Palestine when it was ruled by Great Britain presents an ideal case with which to examine and assess terrorism's power to influence government policy," he says. Two-thirds of the book cover wartime and post-WWII Palestine, but it begins with Arab riots in the early 1920s and in 1929, directed primarily against the growing Jewish immigrant population, which encouraged Jews to dedicate more resources to their security force, Haganah. Hoffman spends some time on the 1936-1939 Arab Rebellion, which was directed primarily against the British. The rebellion consisted mostly of guerilla armies and cells in rural areas, about which Hoffman does not provide much detail, as he is interested in terrorism specifically. So he concentrates on urban terrorism and the founding of the Irgun, a paramilitary splinter of Haganah.
While the Irgun suspended its anti-British operations for the duration of World War II, it's more radical splinter group, known to the British as the Stern Gang, later Lehi, did not. Hoffman follows its activities during the war, culminating in the disastrous 1944 assassination in Cairo of Britain's Minister Resident in the Middle East, Lord Moyne. The future Prime Minister of Israel, Yitzhak Shamir assumed leadership of Lehi in 1943. Another future Prime Minister, Menachim Begin, assumed leadership of the Irgun in 1942 and dedicated the group to "relentless targeting of those government institutions that symbolized Britain's oppressive rule of Palestine." At this point, Britain was wrestling with what to do about Jewish immigration to Palestine, Arab discontent with their handling of Zionist terrorism, and what could be expected from the Jewish Agency that represented the Jewish population of Palestine and seemed to have a love-hate relationship with the terrorists. Adding to Britain's woes were a perpetually understaffed police force and incompetent CID.
After the War, the violence picked up pace, with sustained terrorist campaigns against British targets between 1945 and 1947, initially under the auspices of the Hebrew Resistance Movement, which united the Irgun, Lehi, Haganah, and their elite fighters in the Palmach under common cause. One result was, of course, the bombing of the King David Hotel by Irgun in July 1946, blame for which continues to be passed around. Hoffman dedicates a Chapter 14 to this event. It seems more information about the timing and failure to evacuate the hotel has come to light since Thurston Clarke's 1981 book on the subject. Hoffman's account lays out what happened, exactly when, and why, concluding with the British reaction. Ultimately, 100,000 British soldiers in Palestine, twenty for every suspected terrorist, at a cost of £35 million per year, repeated cordon-and-search operations, curfews, identity checks, mass arrests, and even martial law failed to reduce the bombings, kidnapping, and murders of British police. By this point, we understand why.
This detailed history is essential for students of terrorism and counterterrorism, 20th century Middle Eastern history, the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, or of either nationalist movement. It is dense but literate and readable. Some policy questions remain unanswered. For example, Hoffman repeatedly asserts that the harsh counter-measures taken by Britain further alienated the Jewish population that did not support the Zionist terrorists, but it is unclear how many Jews in Palestine supported or did not support the terrorist operations or what impact, if any, their views would have on extremist paramilitary organizations. The first question in anyone's mind who is considering reading "Anonymous Soldiers" is probably about political bias. To me, Hoffman betrayed some sympathy toward the Zionist cause in the book's early chapters, though it might have been more disapproval of Britain's position. As the book progressed, I did not detect a bias. In case the dramatis personae become confusing, there is a helpful Appendix of "Who Was Who".
14 of 15 people found the following review helpful.
Dense but worthwhile analysis of terrorism during the birth of Israel
By Indy Reviewer
Bruce Hoffman's "Anonymous Soldiers" is an worthwhile analysis of the terror operations undertaken by Jewish partisans and the corresponding countermeasures by the British prior to their withdrawal in 1948. In short, Hoffman concludes that terrorism worked to effectively undermine British control and effectively spread their targeted message well beyond the confines of Palestine. The book bogs down as it gets into the minutiae of the 1944-1947 period, though, and and probably will turn off readers looking for a more general history on the region. However, this will still likely serve as a reference for those looking to understand what was the most politically effective terror campaign in history and will be a staple on academic reading lists for some time to come. 4 stars.
There's been a lot of history written on Israel's birth, but the British role in administering the Mandate has not received as much attention, partially because documentation of that side of the struggle was locked away for 50 years. Having finally received access to the British archives, "Anonymous Soldiers" - the title comes from a partisan poem - recounts a more balanced view of the struggles than in the past.
The first 150 pages tell the story of the Mandate from 1917 to 1944, and there are some startling revelations thanks to the newly uncovered British records. Besides immigration quotas being unfilled in the early years before they were lowered in an attempt to appease the Arab population, a remarkable statistic is that between 1927 and 1929 Jewish emigration from Palestine actually exceeded immigration. The story of the Arab revolts starting with the incident at the Western Wall in 1929 is well known, but the narrative would have been helped by some explanation of the history of just how the British ended up with the mess of the Mandate in the first place. A more generally oriented book like Lawrence in Arabia is almost essential reading to understand how the situation evolved, and important topics like the initial attempts to partition Palestine by the British (not to mention the complex internecine politics of the era) are barely addressed.
Once he gets to 1944, though, Hoffman slows down and spends the remaining 350 or pages of the book going through the intricate details of Jewish partisan operations - mainly Irgun, which generally targeted property and the smaller Lehi, which conducted assassinations, with the Haganah largely being left out of the narrative - and the inept British response. Hoffman deconstructs many of the myths of the terror campaign, and one in particular, the bombing of the King David hotel by Irgun, is done in such a way that advocates for the traditional narrative will find themselves squirming.
On the British side, what jumps out is just how underfunded and understaffed the police force and the military were for most of the Mandate until the very end when it did little good. 10% of the entire British army and 3% of the budget (a remarkable 1 solider for every 18 residents and 20 for every one of the estimated terrorists) proved remarkably ineffective by the time Britain finally attempted a more robust but ultimately futile response. Just as interesting is the role of international pressure on the British, especially from Americans. Most discussion of America and Israel starts in 1948 with Truman's decision to recognize the nascent state, but Hoffman provides some valuable context in the immense financial and political pressure brought to bear prior to that; among other things, examining the 1944-1947 period explains Marshall's position far more thoroughly than has been done by other historians.
Despite the flaws, this will be the reference guide on the subject for years, and it's no coincidence that a copy of Begin's history of Irgun, The Revolt was found on the shelf of an Al-Qaeda training facility in Afghanistan in 2001. 4 stars.
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