Between 1945 and 1947 the Haganah’s intelligence service surveyed more than six hundred of Palestine’s eight hundred Arab villages and wrote a file on each one. The stated purpose was precision: knowing the approaches and the families well enough to point at the house a particular man lived in. Seven years earlier a British captain had trained some of the men who would command in 1948, in reprisal methods the British Army would not use with its own regular troops. On 12 July 1948, at half past one in the afternoon, the order that went out at al-Lidd named no house and no man.
In April 1940 Ezra Danin of the Haganah’s intelligence service put a proposal to Reuven Zaslani: the service should produce a comprehensive survey of the Arab villages of Palestine. The work began in earnest in 1945, under a steering committee of three. More than six hundred of the country’s eight hundred Arab villages were surveyed, from agent reports and from aerial photographs taken by light aircraft, because the sale of proper topographical maps was forbidden in wartime.
One of the men who ran it described what the files were for. The whole idea, he said, was that retaliation had to be against the right target — and when you knew who had done it, and you had detailed maps of the village and knew the approaches, “you could point precisely to the house where the perpetrator lived.”
Seven years before that survey began, a British intelligence captain had formed a joint unit of British soldiers and Haganah men in the Jezreel Valley, and taught it how to work at night against villages. Two of the Jewish sergeants in it were Moshe Dayan and Yigal Allon.
In July 1948 both things were in the same town.
The Palestinian general strike began in April 1936 and the armed phase of the revolt ran, with a pause, until 1939. The Mandatory government met it with the army, with emergency regulations, and with an auxiliary force recruited from the Jewish settlements and paid, armed and uniformed out of public funds.
The branch set up in June 1936 was the Jewish Supernumerary Police. The government supplied the rifles, the ammunition and the uniforms. The force was expanded through the revolt, and in 1938 a second branch was created as a mobile unit, the Jewish Settlement Police.
That is the standing arrangement into which the next section fits. A colonial government facing an insurgency armed a settler community against it, and then trained part of it.
Orde Wingate was a captain on the intelligence staff at British Army headquarters in Jerusalem. He obtained Lieutenant-General Archibald Wavell’s permission in March 1938 for experimental night patrols, and the new commander, Lieutenant-General Robert Haining, approved the unit itself in June. It was called the Special Night Squads.
The British component was thirty-six men in three twelve-man squads drawn from the Royal Ulster Rifles, the Royal West Kent Regiment and the Manchester Regiment, under Lieutenants Bala Bredin, Michael Grove and Robert King-Clark. The Jewish component was twenty-five Haganah men at first, selected by regional commanders and by Yitzhak Sadeh, and later seventy-five. Wingate picked some of them himself. The unit’s standing task was the Iraq Petroleum Company pipeline running across Galilee to Haifa.
The operational life of the squads under Wingate was five months, June to October 1938. The historian Matthew Hughes, working from British and Hebrew-language sources and from Wingate’s own papers, lists the places: Kfar Hittin, Hittin, Nin, Kufur Masr, Danna, Silat al-Dahr, Beisan, and in and around Dabburiyya, alongside what he calls cumulative acts of extra-judicial brutality in villages whose names did not survive transliteration.
Lining up the men of a village and shooting a fixed proportion of them to obtain rifles or information. At Kufur Masr the Jewish supernumeraries shot every eighth man. Bredin killed every fifteenth man — three in total — in a village that failed to produce rifles. Another group under Bredin demanded seven rifles in fifteen minutes and said that otherwise every tenth man would be shot, and every eighth the next time. Brigade headquarters called Bredin in afterwards, and he told his British and Jewish soldiers what to say if there were an inquiry.
At Danna, after a pipeline attack, villagers were lined up at the pool of burnt oil beside the broken pipe and had the oil-soaked earth forced into their mouths. One of the British soldiers present described it in an interview decades later.
At Kfar Hittin, Bredin had three prisoners brought to him by the Jewish members of the squad, told them he found them guilty of murder in the name of the King of England and sentenced them to death, and ordered the British soldiers to shoot them where they stood.
At Khirbat Lidd in September 1938 King-Clark signalled to a Jewish soldier beside him to use the bayonet on a man hiding behind a wall, and watched him do it. He described the man coming back with a captured rifle and his bayonet bloodied to the hilt.
The squads also operated outside Galilee. A Palestine police officer, Richard Catling, said that on two occasions in the countryside around Jaffa his men picked up the bodies of Arabs killed by the unit.
After an attack on the pipeline, and acting on Haganah intelligence intercepts, Bredin took squad troops to the village of Silat al-Dahr, south-west of Jenin. Three villagers were selected. What happened next is recorded in a captured Arab document that ended up in Wingate’s own papers.
Lufti el Yousef, Mohammed el Youssef and Rashid Ibrahim el Kassem, and took them out 30 metres from the village. There they were tied, shot and they are dead.
Pamphlet of the Great Leader of the fighters on British Atrocities, 14 October 1938. King-Clark, writing to one of Wingate’s biographers many years later, recalled reading of three men shot at Silat al-Dahr in his notes on Wingate’s Palestine papers.
Wingate left for leave in England in October 1938, was removed from command of the squads in November, and was eventually posted out of Palestine with his passport stamped against re-entry. From January 1939 British policy barred the Jewish supernumeraries from offensive operations; the unit was wound up that year.
Dayan wrote about Wingate afterwards. What impressed him was the professionalism that came out of British army training, and a quality he described as utter ruthlessness — a willingness to shoot men on the spot to make an example of them. The Haganah men called Wingate Hayedid, the Friend.
James Pollock, a district commissioner, put the same thing from the other side: Wingate taught the Jews blood-letting, and they never looked back.
Wingate told the Haganah men in the squads that the day was a memorable one for the people of Israel, because what they were seeing was the beginning of a Jewish army. Hughes notes that this was a sentence the Haganah men did not say out loud themselves.
Field Marshal Montgomery, who as commander in northern Palestine had authorised the squads to operate in his area, told Dayan in 1966 that he thought Wingate had been mentally unbalanced.
David Ben-Gurion ordered the creation of the Haganah’s intelligence service, the Shai, in September 1940, and it opened an Arab department under Ezra Danin. Danin had already put the survey idea to Reuven Zaslani in April 1940, and individual officers had surveyed their own districts before that. The project proper began in 1945, run by a steering committee of Danin, Yaacov Shimoni and Yehoshua Palmon.
More than six hundred of the eight hundred Arab villages in Palestine were surveyed. The sources were agent reports and aerial photographs taken from light aircraft, the photographs doing the work of topographical maps whose sale was forbidden in wartime. In 1948, with the British about to leave, Shai men broke into the Government Survey Office in Tel Aviv and photographed the master copies of the official maps.
What the files were for was stated plainly by one of the men who made them, in an account published in Ian Black and Benny Morris’s history of the Israeli intelligence services.
The whole idea behind the Haganah in those days was that all retaliation by us had to be against the right target. In order to know what was the right target, you also needed to know what was the wrong one. So the Shai did an immense amount of work documenting villages, collecting information about their families, their internal conflicts… And when you knew who’d done it, and you had detailed maps of the village and knew the approaches, you could point precisely to the house where the perpetrator lived.
Precision is the whole argument for the apparatus. It is what distinguishes a reprisal from a punishment of everybody, and it is what the files were built to make possible.
The files were a card index. Each card held the same categories for every village. Take them one at a time, and ask of each what it is for.
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Nine fields. Eight of them describe a place. The last one is a list of people, and it was compiled from a revolt that had been over for six years.
Operation Dani ran from 9 to 19 July 1948, between the first and second truces. Yigal Allon commanded it. Yitzhak Rabin was his deputy. The objective was the corridor to Jerusalem and the two towns astride it, al-Lidd and al-Ramla, which together held between fifty and seventy thousand Palestinians, about twenty thousand of them already refugees from Jaffa and elsewhere.
On 11 July the Israeli air force dropped leaflets demanding surrender, and the assault came in at about noon. In the afternoon Moshe Dayan’s 89th Battalion drove a column of jeeps and armoured vehicles straight through the town firing as it went. Benny Morris puts the dead from that drive at perhaps as many as two hundred.
Spiro Munayyer was working at the hospital in al-Lidd and later wrote an account of the four days, published by the Institute for Palestine Studies and then in the Journal of Palestine Studies in 1998. He describes soldiers going into houses on the afternoon of the 11th and gathering the residents into the great mosque and its courtyard, and the mosque filling up through the evening.
At about half past eleven on the morning of 12 July a few Arab Legion armoured cars entered the town and there was a short firefight. Morris records that probably no more than several dozen townspeople took part in it. Afterwards, soldiers stormed the Dahmash mosque, where people had taken shelter, and killed those inside.
I heard from some colleagues who had helped remove the dead from the mosque that they had carried out ninety-three bodies; others said that there were many more than a hundred casualties.
Estimates of the number killed at the mosque run from several dozen to a hundred and seventy-six, depending on the account. Morris writes “dozens”; the Palestinian encyclopedia gives a range of eighty to a hundred and seventy-six.
At half past one that afternoon the order was signed by Yitzhak Rabin.
The inhabitants of Lydda must be expelled quickly without attention to age.
Munayyer records that the expulsion of al-Lidd had in fact begun during the night of the 11th, with soldiers going house to house in the quarters they held and telling people to go to Kharruba and Barfiliyya, or to go to King Abdullah in Ramallah. By the morning of the 12th the streets were full.
Of al-Lidd’s roughly fifty thousand inhabitants, forty-nine thousand left. With al-Ramla and the surrounding villages the figure for the week is on the order of seventy to eighty thousand people — the largest single expulsion of the 1948 war. They walked east in July heat, six or seven kilometres to Bayt Nabala and then ten or twelve more to Barfiliyya. Morris says a handful and perhaps dozens died on the road; the Palestinian historian Aref al-Aref put it at five hundred.
The two men who had been sergeants in the Special Night Squads ten years earlier were, that week, the officer commanding the operation and the officer whose battalion drove through the town.
The card index did not stop in 1948. Black and Morris record that it became the basis of Israeli military intelligence’s targeting in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip in the 1950s — a hangover, they call it, from the Shai days. Gideon Mahanaimi, the Paratroop Brigade’s intelligence officer, was ordered by his commander, Ariel Sharon, to bring the material up to date. Soon there was a file on every village and every military and police post, with ground and aerial photographs, observation reports and agent reports in it.
That is three custodians of the same instrument in fifteen years: a pre-state intelligence service that built it, an army that used it in a war, and a standing military intelligence branch that updated it for a different territory.
A colonial government facing an insurgency armed, paid and uniformed an auxiliary force recruited from the settler community, and in 1938 gave part of it a mobile branch of its own.
A British captain ran a joint British and Haganah unit in Galilee for five months. Its recorded methods include shooting a fixed proportion of a village’s men to obtain rifles, forcing oil-soaked earth into mouths, summary execution of prisoners, and the bayonet. Two of the Jewish sergeants were Moshe Dayan and Yigal Allon.
Three men of Silat al-Dahr — Lufti el Yousef, Mohammed el Youssef and Rashid Ibrahim el Kassem — were taken thirty metres out of their village, tied and shot. The document that names them is in the papers of the officer who created the unit.
More than six hundred of eight hundred Arab villages were surveyed and given a file. The stated purpose was precision: to be able to point at the house a particular man lived in. The last field on the card was a list of men by name, graded by what they had done in a revolt that had ended six years earlier.
The order issued at al-Lidd named no house and no man. It said the inhabitants must be expelled quickly, without attention to age. Forty-nine thousand of the town’s fifty thousand people left.
The same card index was still the basis of military intelligence targeting, updated on the order of a brigade commander for a different territory.
What that establishes is a continuity of apparatus, and it is narrower than a continuity of intention. The training was real and the record of it is in the trainers’ own papers and the students’ own memoirs. The index was real, it was built to a stated standard of precision, and three successive services used it. Two men appear in both halves of it, which is a fact about two careers and not a demonstration that the first thing caused the second.
The sharper point is what the apparatus was for. Every field on that card exists to make an action specific — this village, these approaches, this family, this man. On 12 July 1948 the instruction that went out of Operation Dani headquarters was the one instruction in the whole file for which none of it was any use.
The index was built to name one house.
The order named a town, and gave it an hour.
Grouped by the section each one supports.
The auxiliary force the Mandate armed
The unit, its methods, Silat al-Dahr, and what the students said
The village files, their purpose, their fields and their later custodians
The operation, the mosque, the order and the march
Visual direction after the oceanographic films of Jacques-Yves Cousteau and the crew of the R.V. Calypso, 1943–1996. The saucer is the SP-350 “Denise”. No affiliation; the debt is the point.