British Atrocities in Palestine

[Ishmael]

Gastly!!!
British Atrocities in Palestine
These are the words of Major John Edward "Jock" Hargreaves DSO of the Pioneer Corps and Irgun to his nephew Norman Richard Bassett in Singapore in 1953:

"When I was in Palestine, Normie, the thing that inspired me to start my guards business - inspiration is the word for it because it, and the target-shooting, allowed shooting to become so commonplace it wasn't noteworthy any more and psychologically attuned the settlers to equate guns with security - was an atrocity carried out at a kibbutz in the Negev where artesian wells had been drilled to allow crops to be grown. It was a very isolated kibbutz, Normie, and the first anyone knew was maybe a week after it had happened. After the wild dogs had been chewing at the exposed bodies and reduced parts of them to skeletons. I've always hated wild dogs, Normie, and advocated shooting them in the guts. They don't recover from it and it takes them hours to die.

The kibbutzim - forty of them - men, women and children - had been murdered by Arabs, Normie. There was a survivor - Miriam was her name - I spoke to her before she died. She willed herself to live until she'd given witness, Normie, and then willed herself to die to get peace. If every life is a chapter in a book hers ended in appalling suffering and tragedy. Two of her sons were among the dead. I won't dwell on the details, Normie, everyone who knows of Abu Hassan knows his trademarks. Extensive mutilation over a period of hours. Gang rape. They'd made pigs of themselves with forty Jewish men, women and kids.

I was one of the first people to hear about it. I was called in as a famous psychotherapist. There was a surviving witness, a woman, Miriam, who was too traumatised to speak, but still had her tongue. The British officer in charge, a Lieutenant from the Home Counties, fair-haired, pink-cheeked and ageing rapidly after what he'd seen, had me flown down from Tel Aviv in a Beaufighter - a heavily-armed fighter-bomber they'd been trying to make obsolete for years but the pilots loved them. Like the flying equivalent of a Bren gun, if that's not too strange a concept for you, Normie.

She was in hospital at R...[sounds like Rosh Hoshana], which we're both familiar with from our time there during the war. I read the medical report on her injuries and it was absolutely appalling. How someone could do that to someone and call themselves human - and she was old, Normie, fifty-something. They had guns on the kibbutz. They used them principally on wild dogs, which get braver the more frightened you are, the filthy vermin - but they'd been overrun by superior numbers. It was the usual thing - military preparedness and training almost nil - result, disaster.

I sat for hours beside her bed, Normie, this ruin of a woman. They'd put a bandage over the place where her eyes had been before they'd been cut out. There was a bandage over her chest where her breasts had been - before they'd been cut off. Naturally, she'd been gang-raped front and back and after that they'd proceeded to mutilate her genitals. And for good measure they'd hammered pointed wooden poles, of agricultural origin, into her vagina and rectum.

If any of your brave racist friends at MI5 are feeling queasy at this point, Normie, let them refresh their bigotry on the photographs the Lieutenant had taken, which he showed me, of what had been done to the other 39 kibbutzim and I swear to you, Normie, if one single one of them makes any jokes about them being "[color=red]EDITME[/color][color=red]EDITME[/color][color=red]EDITME[/color][color=red]EDITME[/color]ing Jews" or something similar I will show him the torments of Hell for a month to explain my feelings on the matter. The 39 bodies had been chewed and partly-eaten by wild dogs but there was so much meat compared to the numbers of wild dogs the evidence was still clear.

The Lieutenant was only 23 - and looked 33. He sat on the other side of the bed and wrote down what was said on a notepad like me when I finally got through to her and got her to talk.

Miriam had been working in the kitchen when the Arab raid began a few hours after sunset. Looking out of the window - it's strange how much time people spend in kitchens looking out of windows, Normie - Miriam had noticed furtive movements near the sheds and had turned off the kitchen light and called one of her sons to her to look. Even then it wasn't too late, Normie, if they'd done the right thing they could've survived and won the day. Instead they committed the cardinal sins one after the other.

It was a classical kibbutz, Normie, it's a kind of communism. Everything is shared, nothing is your own - not even your underpants. The main house or hut was partitioned internally for different purposes so defensively it was quite sound. The windows opened and you could climb in and out of them - totally insane, Normie, you'll notice very few windows in Singapore like that, they're just extra doors for thieves to climb in and out of. Two doors, one front, one back, both securable with bolts. The children's nursery at one end of the building, the kitchen at the other. Living/dining room and individual bedrooms and dormitories in between. Pretty standard for a kibbutz, I'd come to recognise. The guns were in a rack by the front door and kept loaded all the time. Lee-Enfields, ten shots. The British had imported their usual bizarre attitude to rifles. You could have one to kill wild dogs with to protect your stock, but not one to kill wild Arabs with to protect your life. Guns are power, Normie. If you wanted one to protect your life you had to pretend you wanted one to protect your stock with. Ludicrous and despicable.

They had three rifles to protect forty of them. Bolt-action rifles aren't much good for close-up work, you need a submachinegun or semi-automatic rifle. Grenades are always handy. This was war fought in civilian circumstances. The back door was bolted and the windows closed and the front door open. One of her sons took a rifle from the rack and checked it and opened the front door to receive a burst of bullets in the chest and collapse to the floor. You mean a submachinegun, I said. No, she said, it was a machinegun. My son had big holes in his back where the bullets came out. I looked at the Lieutenant. Bren, he said, they're widely available. Not to Jewish settlers they're not, I said. You know what the situation is, he said, we didn't start this, we're trying to keep them from each others' throats.

The next thing was they heard the smashing of the windows at the nursery end of the hut and took the two remaining guns down there. Did someone close the front door, I asked. Yes, she said, they pulled Shlomo's body out of the way and picked up the rifle. Shots were being fired through the nursery windows by Arabs at the children and the defenders were shooting at the windows from the doorway. Bullets were going through the walls in the hut as if they weren't there. Civilian architecture in a military situation. The Arabs appeared to be present in sufficient numbers to smash all the windows and start shooting in from all of them, from the dark outside into the lighted hut. The unarmed settlers took cover behind furniture or lay flat on the floor.

Fire continued from the three Lee-Enfields, in various hands, until the three magazines were empty. At that point the three settlers with empty rifles headed simultaneously for the arms rack in the front room for more ammunition, which wasn't kept loaded in magazines but was loose in a cardboard box.

Needless to say none of the rifles was reloaded with a single round. The defenders were shot down and the Arabs climbed in through the windows. Two of the children had been killed, Miriam's son Shlomo was dead and a number of the male settlers had bullet wounds, none of them fatal.

The Arabs tied everyone up and Abu Hassan, clad like his followers in all-black robes, introduced himself - in English. He told them they were foreigners in his country - aliens. He told them they were all going to be killed and an example would be made of them for their presumption in coming to his country and trying to take it for their own.

At this point he found himself a comfortable chair and his followers, of which there were about fifty, started raping the women and girl children, not apparently drawing any distinction whether they were pre- or post-puberty. The Arabs had continued in this fashion until they tired and then started skinning and mutilating the men.

A jolly good time was had by all the Arabs, at the expense of the settlers, who died in agony one by one. Miriam had been saved to last - possibly as a result of her age - and had seen it all happen - while she still had eyes to see. Abu Hassan had taken a managerial interest but hadn't taken part in the raping, which puzzled her. Eventually, she too had been left for dead and the Arabs departed. As a sign of their displeasure Abu Hassan had cut the heads off the children and put them on stakes in a row outside the front of the main hut. One or two had been removed by inquisitive wild dogs but the main impact remained as intended. It was common Arab symbolism to say "Your children have no future here." The Arabs have a symbolic, or token, language in mutilation which varies from country to country but this was widely understood. It wasn't something I'd come across before because western Armies don't take children to war, but the Lieutenant explained it to me as it had been explained to him by Arabs working for the British Army. Over the thirty years the British Army had acquired a very useful range of Arab assistants who interpreted, scouted and did the dirty work where necessary.

[Ishmael]

I asked Miriam if the leader had given his name at any stage. She said yes, he'd said he was Abu Hassan something-or-other. And the word on the end - Mahout.[in fact, a fake "Mahout" - Abu Hassan had been castrated by an enemy] The Lieutenant looked relieved at this point and I asked him why. We'd heard a whisper it was him, he said, his men had been boasting. From the Lieutenant's point of view knowing who they were looking for was obviously more than half the battle. I don't see why you look so relieved, I said, it must be like looking for a needle in a haystack.

He explained a few things to me. First, he said, you take a map. You put a garrison in every town and a section of men in every small town. You connect them all with a telephone network, and a telegraph network for coded messages. You operate patrols at irregular intervals along all of the roads. You have aeroplanes - with cameras if necessary. You set up a tax system. For that every single person has to be known, registered and issued with ID documents. Those taxes pay for all the troops and everything you're doing. You offer rewards for information and set up a network of spies who work for you part of the time and work in other occupations the rest of the time.

The Lieutenant was giving me my first lesson in the application of military government. How long does it take to set all this up, I asked. We didn't, he said, the Turks handed the whole thing to us on a plate in 1918. We gradually changed the troops over and the Turkish government's civil servants were replaced by the British government's civil servants once they'd learnt the ropes. In exchange for their full and unstinted co-operation, the British government agreed to an exchange of prisoners without any conditions being put on the exchange. The Turkish government had been concerned about members of their royal family who it had been thought would be charged with war crimes for some notorious massacres of British troops during the Dardanelles Campaign. This was after they'd put their hands up, of course.

He went on to describe a few other aspects of the deal between the two governments which were public knowledge in Turkey but not in Britain. We have the best-managed Press in the world, he said - and some people are actually proud of that.

Back to Palestine, Normie. Back via the English Lieutenant's explanation of why just a name made him so confident they could find Abu Hassan and my eye-opening introduction to the orderly delights of military government. Back to a Jewish woman called Miriam floating on a cloud of heroin on the borderline between life and death. I stayed with her day and night for three days, Normie, in the military hospital at R....[sounds like Rosh Hoshana, but may not be] "Flower of the Valley" is the literal translation, Normie. The Lieutenant was satisfied we'd had all the information we could out of her. Her body was healing, Normie, but her mind was destroyed by what she'd seen.

I spoke to the woman who was doing the reincarnations at the hospital,Normie. She'd nodded to me when she realised I could see her. I asked her to reincarnate Miriam. She was doubtful because her body was healing but I told her I would push Miriam's spirit out of her body and she'd have to do it willy-nilly. I told her what had happened to Miriam and she agreed to fly scry it and came back in a few moments looking physically sick. I will rehouse her soul tonight, she said, and did. The doctors were slightly surprised but relieved. The Lieutenant's death-count went up from 39 to 40 and the Lieutenant provided me with a copy of the report and the photos - which I still have in my archives, Normie. I'll get them now and show you. Time's getting short. I fly scryed it, Normie, you'll see the date on the report, it's easy enough to do. The Ordnance Survey map shows it pretty well.

The kibbutzim were replaced. I put five of my best men on the job - the beginning of my security guard firm. I transferred my patients to other therapists and got into it full time. Abu Hassan never showed his face there again, wily dog - that was a bit too obvious. But some of his men did. A group of ten of them dressed all in black were creeping through a wadi I'd land-mined when one of them trod on something that didn't agree with him. A shipment of butterfly-mines - not common in the desert but seen later in the Italian campaign. They jump up in the air when you tread on one and blow your balls off. They're intended to maim, not to kill. A psychological weapon designed to send cripples home and waste hospital time.

Three of the Arabs were writhing on the ground all night. The others froze in their tracks not daring to move, waiting for daylight when they could see what they were doing and could dig themselves out. Having a map of the minefields and a general direction from the sound of the explosions my men were on the edge of the wadi before daybreak.

They were Ethiopians, Normie, not Arabs at all. Miriam had described them as wearing Arab robes but she was no expert on Arab and north-east African races, which I was after my time in north-east Africa and the Libyan Desert. My tourist trip round the Middle East had further clarified my knowledge of Arab physiognomy - that's facial features, Normie. I'm going to miss poking gentle fun at you and our conversations, Normie. I'm going to miss you, Normie, I'm going to miss you very much.

My men enlisted the kibbutzims' help to bury the bodies when we'd finished torturing the information out of them. The injuries from the torture were not dramatic but had been very painful for a very long time. It increased the confidence of the kibbutzim to be burying some Arabs instead of burying kubbutzim. The kibbutzim style of living led itself to the formation of militias. They had discipline and understood self-sacrifice, the psychological essentials of infantrymen.

The Ethiopians weren't religious fanatics or Palestinians with some kind of a grudge. They were mercenaries, Normie, hired in the market place in Addis Ababa as guards for a camel train.

The Ethiopians were mercenaries, Normie, and had been hired by Abu Hassan - in conjunction with other men, also mercenary camel train guards - at a kind of hiring-fair in Saudi Arabia. Abu Hassan, we eventually discovered, was Saudi Arabian, not Palestinian. The only reason he was "Mahout" was his cock and balls had been cut off by an enemy earlier in his career as an intelligence agent and agent provocateur working for the British government. Under a variety of names, and with a variety of associates - usually hired for the purpose - he'd been committing atrocities from one end of Palestine to the other. We didn't find all that out at once.

We found out from the Ethiopians that wasn't the first raid they'd been on with him, it was the fourth. They'd been travelling by truck in ordinary Arab robes from one end of Palestine to the other, butchering, gang-raping, mutilating. I was present at the interrogations from the beginning.

Interrogation is what a psychotherapist does, Normie, I'd been doing it all my life. One question led to another, one insight led to another, one revelation led to another. Abu Hassan was well-known at the mercenary hiring-fair in Saudi Arabia. The work was regular, paid well by their standards and he always paid in gold - not the huge lumps we use in coins but the usual Arab thin flaky coins - but good stuff. Abu Hassan had been doing this for years, Normie.

You establish a rapport with people you're questioning, Normie, whether it's patients or prisoners. I compared what one prisoner said to me with what the other six said and kept them separate. I tortured them when I sensed they were hiding something and I stopped torturing them when they stopped hiding it. Slowly I and my men - none of whom were fools - grasped the enormity of what we were hearing.

The British, and it could have been no-one else, had been fomenting trouble between the Palestinians and the Jewish settlers right from the very beginning, Normie, from 1918. They'd been advised to do so by the Turks who'd been their predecessors as the imperial power in Palestine. One of the prisoners spoke of these butchering attacks on isolated settlers as having gone on since his father was young. I enquired about his father's health, but unfortunately the gentleman was dead or I might have continued my investigations elsewhere.

Even mercenaries like to know why they're doing things, Normie. I've always been interested when my services have been hired. Even if people lie to you people tell you something, Normie, even if it's just that they want to lie to you. Our prisoners started entering into the spirit of our enquiry. It's called "synchronicity" in the trade - more psychology than psychotherapy - it means that people try to work together, being social animals, even when in the grossly abusive situation of torturer and torturee. The word "victim" is commonly used but I didn't think it was appropriate in this case, Normie, bearing in mind the crimes of which they'd been guilty.

The Ethiopians were comprehensively of the opinion that Abu Hassan was doing this because someone was paying him to do it. The Arabs have a verbal culture, Normie, and listen to a very large number of tales which contain distilled wisdom - or cunning. The idea of a king having intelligence agents was not at all unfamiliar to them and they had a clear practical understanding of the things that kings did, and why.

Abu Hassan wasn't the only one hiring mercenaries for butchering operations, but he seemed to be the best-known in Saudi Arabia, which caused me to think that asking questions in adjacent kingdoms might produce equally revealing results.

They call it "geopolitics", Normie. The Great Game, played on the world map. At the top, ruthless greed and selfishness and the desire to commercially and socially exploit a militarily-subjected people.

The next time I saw the fresh-faced Lieutenant from R...[sounds like Rosh Hoshana] he was a different man to me. He turned up early one morning on my doorstep asking for the return of the report and photos he'd given me, saying he'd got into trouble about it, blushing like a schoolboy at the lying he was doing.

I cheerfully returned them, having copied them already. I dissembled, Normie, and said what a shocking thing it was and how we should put it all behind us, etc. And I smiled blandly at him and looked him right in the eye. He knew, Normie, he knew I wasn't going to leave it there. I handed the report and photographs back to him and shook his hand and showed him out. Two days later there was a thump from my letter-box and I proceeded to investigate with caution as bombs were being placed through people's letter-boxes.

It was a little parcel which contained a copy of the report and photographs I'd handed back, a reasonable precis of my military record - bearing in mind the amount of lying I'd done to the Army - an uncomfortably accurate summary of why I'd been demoted from Lieutenant Colonel back to Major. And a list of places, dates and casualty figures going back nearly 20 years - all of them attacks on Jewish kibbutzes, farms and settlements. The list of dead ran into thousands, Normie. I remembered my fresh-faced Lieutenant and watched him become a Captain.


http://drakenfels.tripod.com/atroc.html

[Solly]

Yep, that's us. It's shameful, and the chickens have come home to roost in that now we are almost duty bound to support a violent regime in Israel. Fact is though, in spite of all that we still have the respect of the Palestinians.
Does America?

[Solly]

Don't forget Africa and India Calvinist. Lots of stuff there.

[Ryokan]

That is because Britain tacitly blames Israel for Palestinians who target and blow up Israeli civilians as there primary strategy, which isn't the case for the Israelis. There isn't moral equivalency, Solly.:argh: