“Anonymous Soldiers: The Struggle for Israel, 1917-1947,” by counterterrorism expert Bruce Hoffman, is not for the faint of heart. Comprehensive, with penetrating thoroughness and interesting though at times excessive detail (there are almost 100 pages of notes and bibliography), the book may be a challenge to read and absorb.
It is less a book for the general reader than a specialized volume covering terrorism and counterterrorism over a 30-year period in the narrative of Israel, the Palestinians and the British Mandate.
Hoffman, relying on recently declassified documents, portrays the chaos in Palestine that followed British efforts after World War I to establish peace in the region. Jewish extremists were a primary cause of British government policies and political decisions to eventually abandon Palestine, setting the stage for the emergence of the modern state in 1948.
But prior to that time, the warring sides and their “anonymous soldiers” (non-state actors) utilized terror as British authorities tried to reconcile the demands of the Jews and Arabs.
Ultimately the British failed to develop the historic mandate conferred by the League of Nations in 1919, but in the process spawned terrorism and counterterrorism units to take what the world would not give them.
The Jews responded to British and Arab oppression by the organization of lethal force via the Zionist groups Irgun and the Stern Gang, which included such later-day Israeli heroes as Ze’ev Jabotinsky, Menachem Begin and Yitzhak Shamir.
These groups carried out deliberate acts of anti-colonial violence, including the horrific bombing of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem. The July 1946 attack destroyed British government and military offices, and left 92 dead. Hoffman shows the Jewish leadership second-guessing its actions, and claims that they planned to give warnings before the explosion.
Hoffman outlines this “pre-history of the State of Israel” and draws a sobering conclusion: The march to Jewish statehood employed every conceivable means of intervention, including diplomacy, negotiation, lobbying, civil disobedience and propaganda. Yet when one examines how diplomats arrived at the policy decisions leading the British to abandon Palestine, it was the bloodletting, first and foremost, that influenced the day. This was terrorism “carefully calculated and choreographed,” Hoffman writes.
Even Winston Churchill, a lifelong Zionist, found his prodigious political skills insufficient as he promoted a “separate states” solution. The plan was torpedoed by the Jewish terrorists’ assassination of Churchill’s colleague Lord Moyne, the British cabinet minister for the Middle East. Such acts caused disruptions and setbacks in the negotiation process.
The 30-year period of the British Mandate was replete with actions by Jewish extremists in a terror/guerrilla campaign blurring distinctions between terrorism and counterterrorism. Morale throughout the region already was shattered when the King David was bombed.
Hoffman poses the question: Did terrorism work, was it effective? Many readers will not like his conclusion.
Repercussions of the excesses by both Jews and Arabs made each party to the violence no less sanguinary or abominable. Anti-Semitism rose throughout Europe but especially in Poland, which exported thousands of Jews to Palestine. Hoffman is convincing that terror works — at least sometimes. British men, women and children eventually were evacuated from Palestine as the Jewish underground pushed the cost of occupation higher.
Echoes of headline-grabbing and heart-wrenching terrorism in the contemporary world come to mind: the 1983 bombing of the Marines barracks in Beirut, the 9/11 catastrophe in New York. The wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria and other bloody locales are reminders that terrorism and counterterrorism alike are irrational and yet may be productive of historic fulfillments such as the struggle for Israel, 1917-1947.
“Anonymous Soldiers: The Struggle for Israel, 1917-1947” by Bruce Hoffman (618 pages, Alfred A. Knopf)
Stephen Mark Dobbs is a historian and a consultant in philanthropy.