Anonymous Soldiers: The Struggle for Israel, 1917–1947 by Bruce Hoffman (review)

Bruce Hoffman’s book about Jewish terrorism against the British Mandate in Palestine concludes that terrorism was an effective weapon for the Zionist cause and helped accelerate Britain’s withdrawal in 1948. Anonymous Soldiers is the most comprehensive scholarly account of terrorism by the clandestine Irgun (short for Irgun Tseva’i Le’umi, or National Military Organization) and the more radical Lehi (known often as the Stern Gang, after its founder Avraham “Ya’ir” Stern) before Britain abandoned the Mandate in 1948. Based heavily on recently opened British archives and rich in detail, the book is sober and judicious, unlike so much partisan writing on terrorism and Israel.

Hoffman describes how Jewish terrorists first attacked Palestinians and later targeted British institutions and personnel as the British refused to lift the immigration limits in the 1939 White Paper and moved further away from support for Zionism. By that time, only a political compromise allowing increased immigration and creating a clear path to statehood could have headed off the Jewish revolt. But the British were trapped between their commitment in the Balfour Declaration to a Jewish national home and their interests in the Arab and Muslim worlds. For the British and the Jews, it had become a zero-sum game. This was the context in which Irgun and Lehi terrorism accelerated their violent attacks as Hitler loomed in Europe and Western states shut their doors to Jewish immigration. During World War II, terror wound down. But the Holocaust and the plight of Jewish survivors made the Zionist cause even more urgent, and terrorism surged again.

Relations between Irgun, led by Menachem Begin, and Lehi, ultimately led by Yitzhak Shamir, and the Jewish leadership under David Ben-Gurion and the Jewish Agency varied. At times Ben-Gurion’s Haganah, the predecessor of the Israel Defense Forces, clashed bitterly with Irgun and Lehi. At other times, they quietly cooperated.

The British lacked any effective political response to terrorism and resorted fitfully to increasingly harsh military and police measures that had the effect of provoking more frequent and ruthless terror. The British were exhausted by World War II, outraged by and unable to cope with rising terror. Broke, overextended in their waning empire, and lacking support from America, they finally cut their losses and announced they would hand over Palestine to the United Nations. Having turned against a Jewish state and partition as well, they abstained on UN Partition Resolution 181 in November 1947, favoring a unitary Palestine.

Anonymous Soldiers describes this saga in fascinating detail. It traces the emergence of Irgun and Lehi in the late 1930’s and their break with the Haganah that reflected the ideological split between pragmatic Labor Zionism of David Ben-Gurion and the militant Revisionist Zionism of Ze’ev Jabotinsky and Begin. Revisionism, the doctrine of Binyamin Netanyahu’s Likud today, mistrusts political compromise, dismisses Palestinian legitimacy, and elevates military power as the sole means of protecting Israel’s security and its control over all of “greater Israel.”

Hoffman analyzes various sensational attacks by Irgun and Lehi, who understood the psychological power of terrorism as political theater. These dramatic attacks included the 1944 murder of Lord Moyne, the British Resident in Cairo; the 1946 bombing of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem; and the liberation of terrorists from the Acre prison in 1947 and the grisly killing of two British policemen.

There are also descriptions of lesser-known incidents of Jewish terrorism, for example, Irgun’s bombing of the British Embassy in Rome, and its repeated attempts to assassinate British officials in Palestine and England. A young Irgun agent, ‘Ezer Weizmann, was sent to London on an abortive mission, to blow up the hated Evelyn Barker, the former British military commander in Palestine and a vocal anti-Semite. Weizmann was the nephew of the Zionist leader, Chaim Weizmann. (Both Weizmanns later became presidents of Israel, just as Begin and Shamir became prime ministers.) Also, Irgun’s master bomb...