Subject: JUICE Pioneers 10 - The Haganah
Date:    Wed, 3 Jun 1998 00:30:24 +0000
To:      "Hebraic Heritage Newsgroup"<heb_roots_chr@geocities.com>

From:          JUICE Administration <juice@wzo.org.il>
To:            pioneers@wzo.org.il
Subject:       JUICE Pioneers 10

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                  World Zionist Organization
                Jewish University in CyberspacE
          juice@wzo.org.il         birnbaum@wzo.org.il 
                     http://www.wzo.org.il 
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Course: Pioneers of Israel
Lecture:  10/12
Lecturer: Doron Geller


The Haganah

Soon after the fall of Tel-Hai and Kfar Giladi in March 1920, a decision
was taken to organize broader self-defense measures in the yishuv.  When
the Arab riots broke out in Jerusalem and Jaffa in April 1920, the Jews
began to realize that they could not depend on the British for their own
security.  Jabotinsky and many others hoped that the Jewish Legion formed
in World War I would develop and expand into a regular Jewish army in
Palestine under British auspices.  The British thoroughly frustrated that
attempt, however, as was made clear by their prevention of any Jewish
forces to even defend their people being beaten and killed within the Old
City Walls of Jerusalem in April 1920.

It became clear to much of the yishuv that an underground defense force
would have to be created in order to deter Arab attacks and at the same
time not arouse the suspicion of the British Mandatory power.  Ha-Shomer,
hardly a factor after the creation of the Jewish Legion in 1917, and
members of the almost defunct Jewish Legion itself decided in 1920 to
create that force.  In June 1920 Ha-Shomer officially disbanded and the
Haganah (meaning "defense") was created in its place.  The main officers
and men comprising the Haganah were former members of Ha-Shomer and the
Jewish Legion.

The Yishuv, however, was lulled into a sense of security with the removal
of the British military Administration - openly hostile to Zionist aims -
by the British government after the riots of 1920.  A Civilian Government
was set up the same year.  A British Jew, Herbert Samuel, was appointed as
the first High Commissioner of the British Civilian Administration.  This
administration was far more sympathetic to Zionist aims.

Thus in the 1920's Haganah activities were fairly dormant, mostly dealing
with small-scale arms acquisitions.  The riots of May 1921 caught the
Haganah unprepared, but there were no further serious disturbances in
Palestine until August 1929.

The 1929 riots in many ways marked a turning point in the history of
Jewish defense in Palestine.  The quiet of the previous eight years had
lulled the British into a laissez-faire approach to security.  The
situation, in retrospect, was almost ludicrous.  Hardly any British
security forces were stationed in the country at the time, and the local
Arabs employed as policemen by the British did not fulfill their duty to
protect the Jews against Arab rioters.  Hebron was the city worst hit by
Arab violence.  Hebron's Jews were mostly Sephardi and religious, taking
no part in the Zionist movement.  But that didn't deter the Arab mobs.
Crowds of Arabs armed with sticks, clubs and swords swarmed their way into
the Jewish Quarter of Hebron and began hacking, raping, and killing Jewish
men, women and children.  There was exactly one British policeman in the
town - R.O. Cafferata - assisted by a few Arab constables.  As riots got
out of hand, Cafferata did most of the work himself, chasing the rampaging
Arabs, which even included one of his own Arab police officers.  The
scenes were gruesome and grizzly; 64 Jews were killed and 54 wounded in
two days.  

There was no Haganah in Hebron.  

Neither was there a Haganah in Safed.  Like Hebron, Safed was a community
of religious Jews, taking no part in the Zionist movement.  The Jews in
Safed, as in Hebron, had lived amicably with their Arab neighbors for
centuries.  But they were massacred as well.

By contrast, the Haganah had sufficiently organized and prepared itself to
defend the Jewish communities of Jerusalem, Tel-Aviv, and Haifa. Thus they
were spared mass slaughter.   The Haganah was prepared in other, smaller
settlements as well.  Not every settlement had adequate protection, but
those that did were able to stand firm in the face of Arab violence.  "A
deep impression was made by the defense of Huldah, in which a handful of
Haganah members fought against thousands of Arab attackers until the
British forces evacuated them."  

After a few days British forces began pouring into the country and
restored order.  But the Haganah was more determined than ever to limit
the damage of Arab attacks if they should ever materialize again.  "Steps
were taken to speed up training and procure arms.  No longer were isolated
settlements to be without the means of their self-protection."

The period of 1929-1935 was once again one of quiet development, but the
Haganah grew considerably.  Firstly, the population of the yishuv almost
doubled between 1929 and 1933.  Many young men and a considerable number
of young women joined as well.  Most members of the Haganah came from the
agricultural settlements, from the kibbutzim and moshavim.  They mostly
subscribed to the labor Zionist ideal, emphasizing physical labor and
advocating self-defense as a last resort.  Training usually consisted of
learning the use of revolvers and hand grenades, and sometimes rifles.
The Haganah began manufacturing their own weapons, usually hand-grenades,
on a small scale as well.  But most of the training was only held on
week-ends in that the covert nature of the organization necessitated a
secretive approach to training (at any time the British could arrest them
and confiscate their illegal weapons).  "The rural settlements began to
organize into `blocs', and by 1936 about 20 of these blocs came into
existence.  At the head of each bloc was a bloc commander who was
responsible for the training of its members, acquiring arms and protecting
them, and gathering intelligence on the security situation in the area.
The position of the Haganah in each bloc was largely dependent upon the
initiative of its commander."  The leaving of authority to the initiative
of the local commander was a precursor of the Israeli army, which has
always encouraged individual initiative and improvisation rather than
relying on the tradition-bound models of more established armies such
as the British one, whom the Haganah members were in such close contact
with.

The Arab disturbances that broke out in 1936 were by far the most serious
and long-lasting the yishuv had ever faced.  They were mainly instigated
by Haj Amin al-Husseini, the Mufti of Jerusalem and a fiery and fiercely
anti-Jewish Arab nationalist.  During World War II he cooperated with
Hitler.

Beginning in 1936 Arab bands from all over Palestine - and from Syria and
Iraq as well - attacked Jewish settlements throughout the yishuv.  The
riots of 1929 had given the Jews bitter experience, however, and the
Haganah "confronted riots by using methods learned from the previous
disturbances.  The Jewish quarters and settlements in the cities and
countryside were surrounded by defense devices: wire fences, concrete
positions, trenches, communication trenches, and floodlights."  The
success of these measures soon proved itself.  Although many villages were
attacked, not one was abandoned.  Gradually the Arabs concentrated  more
and more on attacking travellers on the open roads.  

Yitzhak Sadeh became one of the mainstays of the Haganah.  He became
something of a legend to his own men.  Sadeh was born in Russia in 1890
and served in the Russian Army in World War I.  He was decorated for his
bravery.  While studying at university following the war, he became a
champion wrestler and weight lifter.  When Joseph Trumpeldor died at
Tel-Hai in 1920, Sadeh decided to immigrate to Eretz-Israel.  He had met
Trumpeldor in 1917 and Trumpeldor had had a decisive impact on him.  When
Sadeh arrived in Palestine he became a founding member of the Gedud
ha-Avodah, a labor battalion founded in honor of Trumpeldor.  He worked as
a stone quarrier - he was an expert - and provided other members of the
battalion with military training.  Thus he was the fulfillment of the
labor ideal par excellence, as Ha-Shomer and Joseph Trumpeldor had come to
be.  

Sadeh, however, retired from public service when the Gedud ha-Avodah (also
known as the Joseph Trumpeldor Labor Battalion) disintegrated in the
1920's.  But when the 1936 riots broke out he was quick to volunteer for
service, and quickly rose through the ranks to become a commander and
decision-maker in the Haganah High Command.

The 1936 riots posed a serious test to the Haganah.  "In the north and
south, there were solitary agricultural communes, isolated in desert and
wilderness, remote from centres of help.  They were obvious targets for
Arab bands.  With the memories of 1921 and 1929 fresh in the minds of the
Mufti.  They were attacked.  In every case, the settlers defended
themselves.  They suffered casualties.  But they inflicted casualties on
their attackers.  No Jewish settlement was evacuated and none was wiped
out."  The British were frequently unable to come to the assistance of
these isolated settlements, and if the Jews had only resisted according to
British plans - whereby hardly effective weapons had to remain in sealed
cases until the time of attack - Jewish settlements certainly would have
been wiped out, their inhabitants massacred, the formerly beautiful
settlements reduced to a burning memory. 

The Arab attackers had a much easier time of acquiring weapons than the
Jews did.  The frontiers of Palestine bordered on other Arab states
friendly to their cause, and thus the acquisition of weapons and
cross-border movement of Arab bands, attacking and escaping, was
relatively easy.

Fortunately the British did not completely hinder the development of
Jewish defense.  The fact that the Arab riots and even rebellion was as
often directed against the British as well as the Jews furthered the
readiness of the British to assist the Jews.  

The British first permitted the establishment of a Jewish Settlement
Police - also known as supernumerary police.  They were charged with
protecting and defending Jewish settlements and were paid, trained, and
equipped by the British.  These also included mobile units, who were
"responsible in their areas for patrolling roads and crops, reinforcing
settlements under attack, and ambushing Arab guerrillas on their approach
to or retreat from Jewish zones."  

Many of these supernumerary police were Haganah members, and as such the
Haganah was given semi-official recognition by the Mandatory government -
for the time being it suited its purposes.  By 1940, the number of
supernumeraries reached 16,000 members.

But these units did not go on the offensive, did not take active
initiative to track down, find, and destroy the Arab bands in their home
bases.  That was left to Orde Wingate and the Special Night Squads, which
we learned about 3 weeks ago.  Many Haganah members joined Wingate and
benefited greatly from his training, experience, initiative, and
improvisation, which in turn the Haganah members bequeathed to men under
their own command.

The above-mentioned Yitzhak Sadeh had very similar ideas to Orde Wingate,
and was Wingate's Jewish counterpart.  After Wingate was withdrawn and
transferred from Palestine by the British authorities, Yitzhak Sadeh
remained the guiding force behind the Haganah.  Yigal Allon, another great
Israeli commander, called Yitzhak Sadeh "a military genius of world
caliber, one of the greatest commanders in Jewish history, the father of
modern warfare, the teacher of most young Israeli commanders, including
myself."  Along with Wingate Yitzhak Sadeh encouraged the use of active
defense to respond to Arab attacks.  "By teaching the Haganah units to
patrol remote fields, plantations and roads, to ambush enemy paths, and to
carry out raids against enemy bases which helped to check the enemy's
initiative, they effectively pulled the Haganah out of its trenches and
barbed wire into the open field, making it adopt a more active defense."
The Haganah units, often in cooperation with Wingate, learned to fight the
enemy by night as well as by day, in hilly country as well as the open
field.  As Yigal Allon writes, the "immediate aims of the Arabs were to
annihilate as many existing settlements as possible (either by isolating
them or by direct attack), to prevent the creation of new settlements, to
break down Jewish resistance, to deter the Jews from claiming statehood.
Their ultimate aim was to force the British to repudiate their commitments
to the Zionist movement, and to establish a state with an Arab majority."  

The first objective, regarding security, achieved exactly the opposite of
the intended effect.  Many new Jewish settlements were established in the
midst of the Arab rebellion in the most isolated areas.  These were called
stockade and watchtower settlements, and in my recent traveling around the
north of the country, I saw numerous former watchtowers from the pre-state
era - they are actually not very high at all - in the midst of settlements
that no longer have need of them.  But at the time these settlements
extended the reach of Jewish settlement in Eretz-Israel, and by dint of
their successful defense, established facts which could be used for future
territorial boundaries.  "The method employed was as original and
unmilitary as it was effective.  On the chosen site they would erect a
whole settlement-outpost prefabricated out of wood, composed of a number
of wooden huts, a communal dining hall, kitchens, and so on.  In the
middle of the campus there would be a watchtower with a searchlight at the
top; the whole was surrounded by a wooden double-wall filled with
bullet-proof rubble and punctuated by firing-slits; and this in turn was
encircled by barbed wire and mine strips."  The setting up of a
rudimentary village, equipped for both living and defense, was established
in the space of a single day.  By nightfall the new settlers already had a
new home.  "By day, the Jewish Settlement Police provided the immediate
defense, while the illegal units undertook the ambushes and patrols
further off, guarding the approaches to the new settlements.  The settlers
themselves, carrying light arms while at work and taking it in turn to
guard their settlement, were a modern version of the labourers in Nehemiah
who with one hand `wrought in their work, and with the other hand held a
weapon.'"  The surrounding land was then cultivated under the protection
of the new settlement/fortress, and soon enough, wives and children would
be brought in to the new settlement - a cause for celebration, in that
these darting settlers were successfully establishing a Jewish settlement
and Jewish life in the further reaches of Eretz-Israel under extremely
trying conditions.  This was also the reaction to Arab attack - not
retaliation or revenge, but the further building of Jewish settlements. 

Former Israeli army officer Moshe Pearlman writes in The Army of Israel;
"This constructive reaction revealed the trend of the Haganah.It showed
that Haganah was in truth the military arm of a thoughtful, democratic,
peace-loving people.  For throughout these trying years, and in face of
grave provocation, Haganah never perpetrated any act of aggression, never
struck the first blow - even when they knew the dangers of restraint;
never resorted to destructive acts of retaliation; spurned the vendetta
principle of a life for a life.  Their motto was "Havlagah", the Hebrew
word meaning `Restraint.'  And Palestinian Jewry, standing behind Haganah,
lived up to it with nobility.  Haganah proved itself the popular militia,
disciplined for the defence, and defence alone, of Palestinian Jewry."  

Not everyone agreed with their policy of restraint, however, such as the
Irgun and Lehi, who advocated a more violent response to Arab terror.  The
"iron" restraint the Haganah prided itself on was seen by some Jews in the
yishuv as a continuation of traditionally Jewish passive attitudes to
provocation.  The Haganah attitude was that it was a defense force used
merely to beat off their attackers - nothing more.  They did not want to
descend into a Levantine blood-feud situation, common enough for the Jews
in the Bible and the Arabs of the modern Middle East, but quite against
the idealistic compunctions of these idealistic, European-born settlers,
inspired by socialist doctrines emphasizing the brotherhood, progress, and
development of modern man.  Their Zionism - and their Haganah - was for
many of them a way of putting their inspired socialist ideals into
practice, defending them, and assuring the Jewish people could develop a
national home on the land of their forefathers.  As the Haganah commanders
explained to those who disagreed with their policy of mere defense said;
"Let us ever remember the meaning of Haganah.  It is our defense force,
the militia that enables us to continue our work of settlement and
creation.  It is subordinate to those ideals, the instrument that enables
us to live here and work.  It is our servant.  It must never become our
master."  The Haganah became a necessity during the Arab Rebellion of
1936-1939.  But it also expanded, improved its methods and capabilities.
It admirably withstood the threat and actualization of Arab attacks once
it had the means to do so, just as its predecessor Ha-Shomer had.  

The end of the Arab riots brought out the White Paper of 1939 - severely
curtailing Jewish immigration and land purchase in Palestine.  But soon
after the White Paper was issued World War II broke out, and Haganah
members, like much of the rest of the yishuv, rushed to enlist in the
British Army.  Many Palestinian Jewish soldiers served in the British Army
during World War II, both in units under British command or all-Jewish
units.  They tried to serve in the front lines in order to strike at
Hitler's armies, but the British consistently delayed their requests for
front-line stationing or real battle experience.  Both sides seemed to
understand that cooperation was temporary; it was a marriage of
convenience.  Following the war, the Jews and British were likely to be at
loggerheads over the future of Palestine.  The British did not want too
many trained and battle-hardened Jewish troops fighting against them; at
the same time the British needed the Jews, as they were loyal and devoted
- and needed - allies in a desperate war against Hitler, in which both the
Jews and the British were threatened.

After France was overrun by the Germans in 60 days in 1940, French forces
in Syria and Lebanon declared themselves loyal to Vichy - and thus the
enemies of the Jews.  Jewish units, known as the Palmach, took part in the
British invasion of Syria and Lebanon in August 1941, serving as guides
and saboteurs.  The Palmach had been set up a few short months before, in
May 1941.  It was to serve as an elite assault force within the Haganah,
ready to strike at a moment's notice, and available for action at any
time.  They were quite effective in the Allied invasion of Syria and
Lebanon.  Meanwhile the Haganah prepared a number of German and
Arabic-speaking Jews for intelligence assignments behind enemy lines,
which were again of some assistance to the allied war efforts.  There were
losses too, such as the 23 Haganah men and their British commander who
sailed to Tripoli, Lebanon, in May 1941 in order to blow up the oil
refineries there.  No trace of them was ever found.

Through the first half of 1941 the momentum of the war was on the German
side.  They were advancing on their Eastern front deep into Russia.  In
the western desert of the Middle East they were approaching dangerously
close to Egypt.  The Germans could have approached via Turkey and Syria
into Palestine, or if Rommel continued his desert victories in North
Africa, through Egypt and Sinai into Palestine.  Although hardly anyone in
the yishuv knew of the extent of Hitler's extermination of the Jews in
Europe in 1941, everyone was aware that he was brutal to the Jews and thus
the Jews in the yishuv began to prepare for a worst-case scenario of a
Nazi invasion.  The British also increased their training of Haganah men
as saboteurs, laying mines, blowing up radar installations, railroad
tracks, military depots, and other commando and intelligence operations.
Jews were also trained in advanced systems of communications.  

The Palestinian Jews were quite afraid that if the British Army in Egypt
would fall, the British would evacuate their forces from Palestine and
would retreat further into the Middle East.  This could have meant doom
for the Jewish community in the yishuv. 

Haganah men of course continued to maintain alertness for the possibility
of Arab riots during the war, which would have been of far less
consequence than a German invasion.  In the event, the Arabs of Palestine
were quiet during the war, waiting to see which way the war would go.  But
an elaborate plan was devised by the Haganah for the defense of the yishuv
in the case of German invasion.  As Yigal Allon writes, the "scheme
devised was a highly imaginative one.  It was resolved to turn the area
consisting of the whole of Mount Carmel, the valley of Zebulun (between
Haifa and Acre), the mountain chains of the western Galilee based on Haifa
Bay on the Mediterranean, and an airfield strip on the coast into a huge,
well-fortified escape fortress for all the Jews of Palestine (numbering
just over a half a million): a kind of modern Massada, only stronger and
therefore with better chances of survival than its historic prototype.  It
was thought that the combination of a hilly country with some access to
the sea and air, fully supported by the Allied forces in the matter of
supplies, defended in depth and assisted by guerrilla raids against enemy
lines of communication, bases and installations, carried a fair chance of
success."  In the event the scheme was never put into practice.  There was
no need.  Palestine was a safe haven during the war for the Jews who could
make it there or who were already there.  The Russians stopped the rolling
German advance outside of Leningrad on the eastern front, and Rommel's
western advance was stopped by British forces commanded by General
Montgomery, both in 1941.

Much of Haganah activities thus were concentrated on facilitating illegal
immigration into Palestine as well as illegal arms acquisition.  Both were
difficult prospects.  The vigilant British forces were determined to
thwart both of these endeavors, especially as the tide of the war turned
in their favor in 1941 and 1942 - and thus there was less of a need for a
Jewish contribution to the war effort.  A trickle of illegal immigration
did take place during the war.  The Haganah was slightly more successful
with arms acquisition, from British stores in Palestine, and more so from
the remains of Rommel's army in the desert in North Africa, from purchases
in Europe, and from British and Arabs who could be bought. 

The training, battle experience, and preparations for battle all improved
the effectiveness of the Haganah as well.  On the other hand, while the
Haganah cooperated with the British for the duration of the war, dissident
groups such as the Stern Gang and the Irgun did not.  The Haganah even
gave intelligence information to the British regarding the whereabouts of
Lehi members, and in some cases Lehi members were killed as a result of
this information.  The Haganah later did the same to the Irgun.  Once the
Irgun proclaimed its revolt against British rule in Palestine in 1944, the
Haganah leadership, instructed by its civilian supporters in the Jewish
Agency and the Histadrut - especially Ben-Gurion - ordered the Haganah to
assist the British in finding these dissident groups.  In the Fall of
1944, under pressure from the British, the Haganah, led by Palmach
officers, began taking part in operations against the Irgun.  At first
these actions were mainly confined to interrogation and imprisonment under
Haganah auspices, but later the Haganah turned members of the Irgun over
to the British.  This period, called the "Saison" in the historiography of
the yishuv, left a bitter taste in everyone's mouth, those who were
effected and those who took part.  

The Haganah ceased these operations after about six months, while Irgun
activity was still going on.  But this was a sordid period in the history
of the left-wing establishment and its security arm, the Haganah.  Even a
devoted left-winger, Yehuda Bauer, writes "The question was asked then,
and has been asked since, what justification there was for handing over
Jews to a regime (the English) which had watched passively while Jews
fleeing for their lives were barred entry to what that regime itself still
preferred to call their `national home.'  Even if Etzel (an acronym for
Irgun Tzvai Leumi, or short for the Irgun) was believed to comprise
political criminals, handing them over to the British .was and remains a
moral blemish on the Haganah's name."  

After World War II ended, however, the Haganah joined the Irgun and Lehi
in an active rebellion against British rule.  Rail lines and bridges were
the most frequent objects of such attacks.  Palmach units began destroying
police and army equipment, and "the Haganah organized mass demonstrations
that clashed with the British police and army.  In addition to these,
I.Z.L. (the Irgun) and Lehi carried out their activities with the approval
of the Haganah."  On June 17, 1946, "these activities reached their height
with the blowing up of all the bridges on the borders of Palestine by the
Haganah forces."  The British responded by imprisoning the Jewish Agency
Executive and conducting arms searches all over the kibbutzim and moshavim
- and in some cases they found and confiscated considerable arms stores.

The Haganah also stepped up its efforts in abetting "illegal immigration",
bringing rusty old ships filled with thousands of survivors of the Nazi
concentration camps to the shores of Palestine, such as the Exodus.  The
British turning away and maltreatment of these survivors turned world
opinion substantially against a continuation of British rule, and this
finally led to a United Nations partition resolution declaring a separate
Arab and Jewish state in Palestine on November 29, 1947. 

 By the war of Independence, beginning with the creation of the state of
Israel on May 15, 1948, the Haganah could mobilize about 45,000 men, about
3,000 of them in the elite Palmach units.  When the state of Israel was
declared, the acting Prime Minister, David Ben-Gurion , dissolved and
disbanded all underground military units - including the Haganah - in the
process of forming the Israeli Army.  He wanted all partisan and political
influences to be completely anathema to the army.  The army was to be one
of the people.  But the ideals and leadership of the Haganah continued to
exist in the Israeli Army long after the Haganah was disbanded.  This is
perhaps best exemplified by the name of the I.D.F. (Israel Defense Forces)
in Hebrew, "Tzava Haganat Yisrael".  The Haganah was incorporated in name,
as we can see, as well as in spirit.  The creators of the Haganah welded
the Jewish people in Palestine - with all their partisan differences -
into an effective fighting force in the form of the I.D.F.  The Israeli
Defense Forces, led by former Haganah members such as Yigal Allon, Moshe
Dayan, and many other heroes who worked so hard for Jewish safety and
security during the pre-state era, were there for the state of Israel in
its infancy, when she faced the combined challenge and threat of five Arab
armies on her doorstep.  Israel lost many lives in the War of Independence
- about 6,ooo Jews died - but they died so that Israel may live.  Fifty
years later, we still appreciate the enormous contribution of these
pioneer/ fighters of the Haganah, who by their forbearance, sacrifice,
drive, and determination, assured the creation and existence of Israel for
all Jews, everywhere, and hopefully, forever.


Bibliography

1). Yigal Allon - The Making of Israel's Army

2). Encyclopedia Judaica

3). Munya Mardor - Strictly Illegal

4). Moshe Pearlman - The Army of Israel

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