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 5th
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.”
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.