In recent years a re-evaluative historiography on Mandatory Palestine has emerged, not only on Palestinian Arab–Jewish/Zionist dynamics but on the British imperialist context as well. Based principally on archival deep-mining, but acknowledging new theoretical approaches, this canon has gone beyond, or deeper into, denunciatory first-generation conclusions, notably of Tom Bowden, Michael Cohen, Bernard Wasserstein, and Martin Kolinsky, which emphasized culpable British cynicism, incompetence, pro-Arab appeasement, and betrayal of the Jewish National Home; their schadenfreude over Britain's downfall suggests a vindicatory predisposition towards Zionist national liberation mythologies. The “new historians” of the late-1980s had little time, space, or inclination, when exposing Israel's subsequent “ethnic cleansing of Palestine,” to revisit this “chose jugée” of originating British sin. Later treatments, notably by Sahar Huneidi, countered strongly that rather than appeasing Arab Palestine, the Mandate fundamentally enabled Zionist proto-statehood, implicitly heralding the nakba.
Subsequent new histories of British administration, among which Steven Wagner's monograph properly resides, have tried to follow-up empirically on its character, and failings. Overall, Britain remains an ill wind, blowing nobody in Palestine any good, rendered essentially impotent by the implacably conflicted demands of its subjects. Among other spheres, internal security has elicited much new attention. The noted small-wars historian Charles Townshend resumed where his predecessors left off, asserting weakness, vacillation, and pro-Arab appeasement from the 1929 Buraq riots onwards. Gad Kroizer was more nuanced, on competing civil versus paramilitary policing philosophies, with the latter made ascendant by the great Palestine Arab rebellion of 1936–39. Martin Thomas's pioneering Foucault-influenced account of British and French “intelligence states” in the interwar Middle East correspondingly emphasizes surveillance and punishment, albeit with British colonial knowledge more the domain of scholar-bureaucrats than police commissars. On Palestine particularly, Matthew Hughes, Georgina Sinclair, Jacob Norris, and John Knight cumulatively suggest an impoverished, procrustean British Palestine Police, antimodernizing, racist—despite relying on mainly Arab enlistment—and given to nihilistic violence, contemptuous of its reformist commanders before the great rebellion precipitated its collapse, demoralized and ineffectual. The British military took over, expanding violent repression to totemic extremes, more pacification, with extreme prejudice, than appeasement. Mathew Kraig Kelly concludes that the British intrinsically criminalized emerging Palestinian Arab nationalist consciousness during this critical period.
These findings serve as a pre-history of recent skeptical investigations of Britain's “hearts and minds” counterinsurgent techniques during many subsequent wars for neo-empire. Parallel updates in British intelligence historiography also note intriguing imperial and colonial dimensions, which Wagner now amplifies. Also on Mandatory Palestine, Hillel Cohen's study of Zionist intelligence activities has already discerned them creating shadow Arab Palestinian collaborator networks, psychically and materially negating nationalist solidarity, sustaining land-expropriation and, ultimately, turncoat counterterrorism against the great rebellion. These divisive legacies prepared the ground for the nakba, in ways he implies were partly self-inflicted, compounding the effects of British and subsequent Zionist aggressions.
Steven Wagner's new work is an enticing fusion, expansion, and variation on these themes, notable for its exploration of British-Zionist collaboration and the consequences. He emphasizes the reinterpretative significance of newly available clandestine service files, consequently focusing on police, military, Foreign Office/MI6, Home Office/MI5 (responsible for the Mandate as a legal colony), and Government Code & Cypher School (GC&CS – now GCHQ) materials. Promisingly, he also includes Royal Air Force Special Service Officers (SSOs) who began secret intelligence duties after the 1929 riots, fixed upon supposedly dangerous levels of new Arab Palestinian radicalism. He tends to overlook political information from civil officers, and open sources, as intelligence; the work overall reflects, and seemingly accepts, the views of the aforementioned secret agencies.
Wagner works via chronologically-arranged chapters, whose main currents are reprised below. He begins with the “burgeoning profession” of intelligence (p. 4), during and after World War I. Then he suggests how, despite postwar retrenchment, “intelligence [remained] fundamental to British power and policy in Palestine” in both “institutional and informational forms” (pp. 3, 5). His interesting premise is that to the British, Arab Palestine was still so inscrutable as to require intimate reliance on locally more acculturated Jewish informants, agents, and organizations. The Zionist Jewish Agency and its nascent defense arm, the Haganah, were thereby privileged. Collaboration followed on surveilling and controlling dissident Jewish elements, notably far right-wing Revisionists and Communists. But inevitably an Arab “common threat” (p. 10), supposedly directed by the omnipotent Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini, took center-stage. SSOs, followed by military commanders, became persuaded, along with the Palestine Police CID and MI6, that Haj Amin was the lynchpin of a vast pan-Arab, pan-Islamic network, reciprocally integrated with and instrumental to Arab Palestinian radicalization. Wagner's somewhat over-ready concurrence with these primary documents suggests a seduced credence that secret must mean cosmically true—observable by this reviewer as the Tony Blair syndrome—rather than, alternatively, as reports stealthily legitimating the self-serving positions of the actors concerned. Although Wagner underemphasizes this, at issue were High Commissioner Sir Arthur Wauchope's schemes to stabilize British regional interests by reconciling Jewish and Arab Palestinians within a single state based on demographically proportional bicommunal power-sharing. But this implied Arab majority dominance, notwithstanding Jewish minority protections, and critically for Zionists, precluded a Jewish ethno-state in the territory.
Wagner's reconstruction contains a major breakthrough, albeit one requiring a dialectical reading. He documents the hitherto unexplored depths of Zionist influence, via intelligence cooperation, which entrenched nodes of British hostility towards Arab Palestinian nationalism and its potentially legitimate grievances. Consequent processes “created a security state and devastated Palestinian society” (p. 6) which, rebelling in frustration, “faced the might of empire and was crushed” (p. 5). Yet, as the price of peace, Britain's endgame revived Wauchope's formulations. However, Wagner concludes, British authority was by then so reliant on Zionist agents and forces that it “lost its long-term ability to govern” and impose this outcome (p. 5). The reckoning was merely deferred by interim common enmity for Hitler.
The latter is one among several leads this study slightly buries. Another is how that part of the security state under British military control emerged from retrenched marginality to overthrow Wauchope in 1937. The High Commissioner was so discredited by the rebellion, supposedly caused by his untenable confidence in Haj Amin, that he and his civil system were abandoned to a totalizing “counter-rebellion” (p. 190). The British thereby disrupted Husseini clan leadership over the rebellion by using espionage, countersubversion, and irregular warfare. They deployed Zionist paramilitary cadres and induced the Husseinis’ rival elite clan, the Nashashibis, to mobilize collaborationist “peace bands” for reconquering rebel-held areas (p. 203). Rebel fighters were encircled by a network of blockhouses, fortified barracks, patrolled infrastructure, and border defenses designed by Sir Charles Tegart, a consulting expert in colonial repression, presaging their eradication. Overwhelming reinforcements settled matters in late 1938, following the postponement of war in Europe.
What constitutes intelligence, politics, security, and counterinsurgent warfare and their mutual influence gets somewhat submerged, and momentum lost, by Wagner's reversion at key junctures to a familiar political narrative. More could be done on actual intelligence work and how internecine differences predominated in British institutional praxis. For example, Eldad Harouvi, has shown how the Palestine Police's CID reinvented itself after 1938, in part defying the army, as a resourceful, innovative unit, vigilant towards Zionist as well as Arab terrorism. More importantly, that Palestine experienced a British military/security state coup needs prime reiteration. As Wagner concludes, this coup decisively institutionalized Zionist intelligence/paramilitary capabilities, with crucial future implications.
Finally, using newly-available signals intelligence records, Wagner offers a novel explanation of Colonial Secretary Malcolm Macdonald's seemingly paradoxical 1939 White Paper on Palestine; it severely restricted Jewish immigration, served to rehabilitate leading Arab Palestinian nationalists, (save arch-fiend Haj Amin) while, as Zionists saw it, reneging on the Balfour Declaration's prime directives on Palestine as the Jewish National Home. This interpretation is that during Britain's 1936 expedient of engaging neighboring rulers to broker peace, King ʿAbd al-ʿAziz al-Saʿud was revealed to be an amenable asset. With other Arab loyalties unclear, securing a pro-British Saudi orientation became strategically crucial. ʿAbd al-ʿAziz's price was to dictate Macdonald's turn away from Zionism and towards Palestinian Arab grievances, and he remained steadfastly pro-British thereafter. Like so many ideas in this stimulating monograph, it is an intriguing signpost, if a debatable conclusion.
