“Winning the War by Hiding the Jewish Share”: More on the Palestine Censor (Daphne Anson)

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In last Tuesday’s column I quoted part of Baron Davies of Llandinam’s speech in the House of Lords on 10 March 1942 condemning, inter alia, the Palestine Censor’s ludicrous savage cuts to an eminent Jerusalem-based Church of Scotland minister’s Christmas message intended for the Palestine Post in 1940.   Also speaking in that debate was a firm friend to Jewry and the Yishuv, the recently ennobled Baron Wedgwood of Barlaston (1872-1943), better known to history as Colonel Josiah Wedgwood MP.  This member of the famous pottery family was a genuine philosemite – I won’t belabour that point here, since I hope to address the issue of philosemitism in a subsequent column or columns and to discuss him as an exemplar.  Suffice it to say, for our purposes here, that in his book The Seventh Dominion (1928) he advocated an independent Jewish state on both sides of the Jordan as an integral part of the British Commonwealth, and that he supported the Zionist cause through thick and thin. On 9 June 1942, during the course of a pro-Jewish speech laden – to quote the Jewish Chronicle of 12 June – with “deep emotion,” he told the House of Lords that it had been “years” since any speech of his had been reported in Palestine.  He added that a recent broadcast he made to America had been censored despite British assurances to the contrary.  Furthermore, an official Mandate Administration radio program for the Arabs had advised that he and Baron Davies were not genuine bluebloods but social upstarts who had been created peers for party reasons.

Also deeply troubled by the behaviour of the Palestine Censor was Lewis Bernstein Namier (1888-1960), the distinguished Polish-born Professor of Modern History at Manchester University, who was a convinced Zionist.  In a letter to the staunchly pro-Zionist Manchester Guardian early in April 1942, he complained that the Censor had deleted the following concluding paragraph from a leading article in the Palestine Post (27 February 1942) about the Struma tragedy:

“It is yet too early and the shock too fresh for responsibility to be allotted and the guilt to be established. But that there must be an inquiry goes without saying. That is one of the most established traditions of the Empire under whose protection we live. Catastrophes such as these have led more than once in British history to far-reaching decisions. But whatever investigation is conducted, whatever action taken, one thing is certain: This must never happen again.”

Namier wondered whether the similar sentiments regarding the Struma expressed by British Colonial Secretary Viscount Cranborne (1893-1973; later the 5^th Marquess of Salisbury) had been cut by the Censor, and wrote of the excised passage:

“Surely this is legitimate comment and, indeed, remarkably restrained in the circumstances.”

Meanwhile, the Manchester Guardian, in a leader about the same incident, observed that the Palestine Censor appeared to be encroaching on new territory in his evident desire not to offend the Arabs:

“This particular exercise, if it is confirmed, would mean that the censorship was protecting the Administration not only from criticism but even from possible or implied criticism, for the passage does not impute responsibility from anyone.”

In another leader quoted in the Jewish Chronicle (10 April 1942), the Manchester Guardian stated that the Palestine Censor had obfuscated the political situation in the Middle East.  That leader went on:

“Presumably we have been suffered to hear so little because there is so little good we could have heard. Except in one point there is no enthusiasm for the Allied cause anywhere in the Middle East.... Only in Palestine is there a compact, resolute, tough people anxious to place all its resources of men and talent at the disposal of the Allies because their cause is the cause of the Allies. But we have discouraged the Jews and chosen to believe, against all the facts, that we can win the phantasmal cooperation of the Arabs by sacrificing the real cooperation of the Jews. We may reasonably hope to have a space of time ahead of us to review our policy and correct our errors. Shall we be resolute and imaginative enough to do it in that vital region?”

When angry letters from Palestine-based subscribers asking where their copies were began to mount up, the Jewish Chronicle realised that it too had fallen foul of the Censor.  In March 1943 the paper contacted the British Colonial Office seeking an explanation. In its issue of 20 August that year it reported the resultant response, which had awaited enquiries by the Colonial Office to the High Commission for Palestine, Sir Harold MacMichael:

 “The general policy of the Palestine Censorship in dealing with periodicals is to ban only those issues which contain articles deemed likely to excite public opinion in a way which might lead to disturbance. Latent ill-feelings between the two main communities in the country are apt to be aroused, and indeed exacerbated, when claims are made over-emphatically by or on behalf of the other community. The policy of the censorship is based on the consideration that articles likely to arouse such feelings might cause disturbance and therefore prejudice the war effort. Certain issues of the Jewish Chronicle included articles containing allusions to such matters as the establishment of a Jewish State and the formation of a Jewish Army, which appeared to the competent authorities to be of a tendentious nature, and it was on this account that it was found necessary to stop these issues.”

Possessing no illusions as to the Administration’s practice of appeasing Arab opinion at the expense of Jewish interests, the Jewish Chronicle’s Jerusalem Correspondent noted (23 April 1943):

“Apart from the absurd and damaging antics of censorship in [Palestine] – responsibility for which is passed from one to another à la Spenlow and Jorkins [business partners in Dickens’s David Copperfield] – there have been other priceless examples of how not to run an administration. At least one of the wartime orange crops was allowed to rot on the ground because the available outlet to Egypt was blocked – not by the enemy but by the internal enemy, Messrs. Dilly, Dally, Prejudice, and Red-Tape. The British Embassy authorities in Cairo and the Palestine Government between them were so busy running round finding out everybody – except Jews, of course, who might have corns that might be trodden on, that while thousands of British troops in Egypt and Libya yearned for oranges, millions of oranges rotted in the Palestine orchards.”

On 15 October 1943 the Jewish Chronicle carried a long editorial headed “More Light!” regarding the Palestine Censor. It deplored

“the kind of censorship practised in Palestine, where, on the flimsiest and most artificial pretexts, papers and periodicals are eviscerated or barred, reputable British newspapers from outside are confiscated – often merely for referring to a particular point of view which the Palestine Government officials do not like – news going into the country is ruthlessly controlled in the interests of the Administration’s policy of the moment, and a heavy hand clamps down on correspondents’ outgoing messages if they should venture to deviate from the opinions of, or reveal facts inconvenient for, the officials at Government House.”

“The maintenance of the censorship in Palestine during the period of the war produced many curiosities in the way of prohibited material,” the paper’s Jerusalem Correspondent observed two years later (JC, 19 October 1945).  He recalled that it was only in the Spring of 1943 that the system of sending – with indicated excisions – copies of his and other press correspondents’ cables began; up to that time, they had no idea that their material had been expurgated.

The file he had kept from then onwards of material he had sent to his London paper for publication but which the Censor had mutilated “makes amazing reading,” he informed readers:

“It shows the lengths to which local bureaucracy was prepared to go, not in protecting the interests of local security, but in justifying the White Paper policy, in white-washing the blunders of meddling departments, in concealing official incompetence, and in pursuing that course which a friend of mine here aptly described as trying to keep the dilapidated old ship of state afloat by taking the patch off one leak and putting it over another.”

With a readily discernible touch of bitterness he continued:

‘The weekly issues of the Jewish Chronicle arrived in Palestine as regularly as the dislocated wartime mails permitted, but only occasional, presumably innocuous copies trickled through to subscribers. The others were piled up and burnt: a waste of postage to the newspaper publishers, a waste of shipping to the war effort. But then, why should the bureaucrats in Palestine worry overmuch about waste? Had they not wasted so much Jewish manpower in Europe by keeping the gates of the country locked, bolted, and barred, and what did a few thousand copies of overseas Jewish newspapers matter? ....

Early in the war, when the British military authorities announced recruiting of Palestinians, the Palestine Government did its best to play down the Jewish effort. The Arabs were then reaching the top of their bent in disloyalty, the pro-Axis elements in Iraq and Syria were simmering (with what results we know), the British thought they were caught in the cleft stick of the Middle East between the powerful Axis forces to the west and north and the Arabs all around them. The Arabs of Palestine were scornful of the attempts to raise a local force of Palestinians to defend the country. Only the Jews cooperated.

So the publicity given abroad for a Jewish Army was put under a censorship ban. Obviously the Arabs would be peevish if they knew that the Jews wanted to raise a fighting force to help Britain in her predicament and stress, and the appeasement wallahs in Cairo would have nothing of that. Oh, no! Better that the Jews do their enlisting and their fighting and their effort for the Empire anonymously, secretly, without fuss or [b]other, than that the noble son of the desert be enraged at this challenge to his own lagging loyalty.’

He proceeded to give further examples of the Palestine Censor’s shenanigans:

‘A Jewish news agency sent a cabled account abroad of a wartime exhibition in Tel-Aviv, around the summer of 1943...  [T]he exhibition was a Palestinian Jewish tribute to the Soviet war effort. The cable stated: “Zionist, British and Russian flags flew over the entrance to the exhibition.” The word “Zionist” was deleted by the Censor.

When the Palestine Regiment was formed out of the three Jewish battalions of the Buffs (to which the Jewish infantry regiments were originally attached), it was necessary to take account of the three or four companies of Arab infantry. So the badge devised was the same emblem as appears on a Palestinian 100-mil (two-shilling) coin: the olive branch. The Jewish soldiers wanted a national design of their own and refused to wear these two-bob badges.  Courts martial ensued.

The P.B.S. [Palestine Broadcasting Symphony] Orchestra, an ensemble composed wholly of Jewish musicians, although organised by the Broadcasting Service, gave a concert at an army camp in Palestine, but had been ordered not to play “Hatikvah” at its conclusion. When the orchestra was packing its instruments at the end of the recital, a young Jewish subaltern in the A.T.S. [Auxiliary Territorial Service, composed of women] rose and began singing the [Jewish] national anthem in a high clear voice. The audience joined in. So did the musicians. An emotional scene was witnessed at this remarkable demonstration of national pride.

When the Palestinian Regiment went out into the desert, and the Jewish transport companies of the R.A.S.C. [Royal Army Service Corps] did such yeoman work in servicing the Eighth Army from El Alamein to the Po, they had no flag of their own. At one place near Benghazi a Jewish company mounted its own blue and white colours and refused to strike them when ordered by the British Area Commander. “That is the flag we are fighting for,” they said. They were all charged with mutiny, and the matter would have ended disastrously for both officers and men, who had enlisted primarily as Jews, had not wiser counsels prevailed.’

Then, from the Jerusalem Correspondent, came this unpleasant revelation:

'Pro-Fascist elements in the Polish Army in the Middle East – about which a chapter of itself could be written – were protected by military censorship because it was an Allied Army. It is now no secret that Jews were put in gaol as “deserters,” that anti-semitism assumed a militant and active form among both the higher-ups and subordinate ranks in General Anders’ forces, and that there were numerous cases of the humiliation of Jews. I have it on good authority that a Polish colonel used to parade his battalion every morning, give the order “Jews to the front!” and when the Jewish soldiers stepped forward, he would say contemptuously, “You Jews cost us our country and are responsible for our exile. When we get you back to Poland we will murder you.” This, I am told, was part of the parade ritual and was not excepted even on the Sabbath. The story could not be printed – that Polish colonel was the ally of Britain.'

The Jerusalem Correspondent continued:

'Space would not permit the publication of the many incidents which occurred in the war years as part of the supreme contribution by the Palestine Government to winning the war by hiding the Jewish share. The Jewish Agency Executive’s files must contain more of the accounts of this debasing and shameful treatment than the memory of the ordinary mortal can encompass. It would be interesting in due course to read the history of the war against the Jews of Palestine which the protracted negotiations between the Jewish Agency and the Government and the archives of the Agency’s political Department would disclose. Perhaps that history will one day be written.’

In the Jewish Chronicle of 2 November 1945 the Jerusalem Correspondent returned to his theme, to complete it.

‘There is no doubt that the appeasement-minded circles in British officialdom in Palestine, who took their cue from the man at the top, Sir Harold MacMichael, were definitely hostile to the manifestations of Jewish loyalty in the early days of the war and subsequently. The Arabs, as everyone but these sanguine souls had expected, were not “playing the game”. They had no aversion to taking British money in the form of war contacts and purchase of farm produce for the Army commissariats, but they showed a pronounced opposition to being roped in to fight the Axis. After all, was not the Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin Al Hussein, an honoured guest of first the Italian Fascists and then the German Nazis? What was good enough for him was good enough for them.

Today there is no move to secure the custody of the Mufti, who, as a Palestinian citizen, and subject of His Majesty’s Mandatory rule, was as much a traitor as William Joyce to Britain and Vidkun Quisling to Norway.

Nor did those Arabs who joined the Palestinian units of the British Army behave any better. After a little while they began deserting in large numbers, with, of course, their rifles and ammunition. There were frequent outbreaks of mutiny; I can cite three which came to my knowledge:

One was at the Wadi Sarar ordnance depot, when Arab infantrymen attacked Jewish soldiers and had to be confined to barracks by force of arms, and subsequently transferred; another was during the troubles in the Lebanon this year, when Palestinian Arab troops joined a VE Day procession in Beirut without authority, carried a picture of the Mufti of Jerusalem at the head, and engaged in hooliganism and shop-window breaking, and, I am told, tried to attack a French convent because it showed only French flags and no Arab banners; again during this summer there was a similar outbreak.

As a result of the third demonstration, the Arab infantrymen were discharged out of their regular release groups on the ground that “their services were no longer required”. Today, few if any Arabs are left in the Palestinian units, but 15,000 Jewish men and women are still serving.’

A document in the Jerusalem Correspondent’s possession showed that, following a

‘long period of frustration of their effort, the Jewish Agency Executive was informed ... that its Liaison Officer at the Sarafand Recruiting Depot, who had been active in that capacity for over two years (... since the early part of 1941) was notified by the officer in charge to leave the Recruit Training Depot by May 1. On April 29, the premises of the Recruiting Office of the Jewish Agency in Tel-Aviv were entered by the police, a search was carried out, officials and members of the public who were present were interrogated, and the official in charge of the office was “detained for further examination”. The Jewish Agency was not advised of the action taken nor was it informed of any complaints or charges against the officials concerned.

The Jewish Agency Executive registered on April 29, in a letter to the Chief Secretary, its “most emphatic protest against the action.” It was added: “A police search in an institution of the Jewish Agency of the Mandate regime of which the Agency forms an integral part. The incident is all the more grave as the search and men and women for His Majesty’s Forces.”’

The letter continued:

“The Jewish Agency is driven to the conclusion that by the demonstrative action now taken the authorities have broken off their cooperation with the Jewish Agency in the organisation of Jewish recruiting. The Jewish Agency can obviously expect its officials and the numerous volunteers assisting them to engage in the tasks of recruiting under conditions which expose them to police searches, interrogations, and detention. It, therefore, begs to inform the Government that the procedure they have authorised has compelled the discontinuance of the activity of the Jewish Agency’s recruiting offices.”

“That,” went on the Jewish Chronicle’s man,

“was the position in April 1943. The letter from which I have quoted was sent to foreign press correspondents by the Jewish Agency, but the correspondents (myself among them) could not get it through censorship. Subsequent efforts succeeded in overcoming the formidable obstacles which this letter indicated, and the Jewish Brigade Group finally emerged as a fighting force. It was not for several months, however, that Jewish recruiting was resumed.”

Observed a report in the Jewish Chronicle (23 June 1944):

'The persistence with which the censorship in Palestine tries to obliterate that terrible word “Jewish” from references to the Palestinian Jewish volunteers in the British forces is amazing!

A friend has shown me a communication he recently received from Jerusalem, in which a friend of his wrote of some comrades who had given their lives in the United Nations’ [i.e. Allies’] cause, while serving in the British Army. A word in a certain phrase, however, has been thoroughly blacked out by the censor in Palestine. “Reasons of military security”, you may sapiently observe, but I should be willing to wager quite a large sum that the only reason for the censorship is political. The phrase in each case now reads: “He enlisted in a Palestinian ------ unit of the British Army”; my guess is that the “------ ” represents the obliteration of the word “Jewish”’. [In the original each gap has a thick continuous black line, not the six dashes I, D.A., have here.]

Moshe Braver, a correspondent for the religious Zionist newspaper Hatzofeh (“The Observer,” founded in Palestine in 1937) informed a London audience in 1945 that the suppression of news about Jewish achievements in Palestine and the contribution of the Yishuv to the war effort eased with the appointment as Censor in the Summer of 1944 of Edwin Samuel (who eventually succeeded his father, the former High Commissioner, as Viscount Samuel).

There was still plenty of interference, however, as when in 1945 the South African Jewish Times was banned from Palestine owing to its inclusion of a speech made by United Zionist Revisionist Organisation head Dr Aryeh Altman (1902-82) at a Revisionist meeting in Tel Aviv, under the headline “Revisionists’ Feelings towards Britain are the same as those of the Jews towards the Czar”.

An editorial in the affected paper commented:

“The Palestine censor allowed the report in the first place to be transmitted to the United States. The ban, therefore, is Gilbertian, with the censor rebuking himself. If the censor holds the view that insistence on just Jewish demands is anti-British, if the denunciation of the iniquitous White Paper and the sufferings of children are subversive – then he can go ahead and ban us.” (Quoted in JC, 27 July 1945).

In 1946 political notes (“Reshimot Mediniot”) in the Zionist Organisation’s official organ Haolam (“The World”), written by Aharon Reuveny (brother of future Israeli president Yitzhak Ben-Zvi, who headed the Vaad Leumi) demonstrated – said a writer in the Jewish Chronicle – “the aggressive clamp that the Palestine Censor seeks to impose on the press of that country ... the sorry lengths to which such censorship goes”. The expunged passage went (in English translation):

“The Arab Boycott and the Mandate for Palestine [heading]. Why does Great Britain not protect the Jewish population of Palestine against the boycott proclaimed by a number of foreign States? There seem to be only three possible explanations: (a) Great Britain wishes to protest but cannot; (b) She can protest but is unwilling to do so; (c) She neither can nor wishes to protest. Whichever of these is the true explanation there can be only one conclusion, to wit, that Great Britain is no longer fitted or entitled to retain the Mandate for Palestine.”

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Daphne Anson is an Australian who under her real name has authored and co-authored several books and many articles on historical topics including Jewish ones. She blogs under an alias in order to separate her professional identity from her blogging one.