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Haganah

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aliases

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Summary

The Zionist armed force whose foundations, in Kanafani’s account, were laid under British supervision during the 1936-39 revolt, through the British-backed Quasi-Police Force and Colony Police.

Details

  • There were 12,000 men in the Haganah in 1937, in addition to 3,000 in Jabotinsky’s National Military Organisation (The 1936-39 Revolt in Palestine, PDF p.29 / printed p.57).

  • The Quasi-Police Force idea of spring 1936 served as a cover for the armed Zionist presence and, in David Ben-Gurion’s affirmation, an ideal framework for the training of the Haganah (The 1936-39 Revolt in Palestine, PDF p.29 / printed p.57).

  • At the beginning of 1937 the Haganah moved, with British awareness and help, to a stage of forays by patrols and limited operations against the Palestinian Arabs (The 1936-39 Revolt in Palestine, PDF p.29 / printed p.57).

  • In June 1938 British instruction courses trained large numbers of Haganah cadres, who later became cadres of the Israeli army (The 1936-39 Revolt in Palestine, PDF p.29 / printed p.57).

  • Charles Orde Wingate was sent to Haifa in autumn 1937 to form the nuclei of striking forces for the Zionist armed force, and taught his pupils at Ain Daur, among them Moshe Dayan (The 1936-39 Revolt in Palestine, PDF p.30 / printed p.59).

  • Sayegh lists the Haganah among the conditions Britain created for Zionist colonisation: Britain permitted the Zionist community to maintain its military establishment (the Haganah) (Zionist Colonialism in Palestine, PDF p.7 / printed p.212).

  • In Pappe the Haganah, established in 1920, its name literally ‘defence’ in Hebrew, became, under Charles Orde Wingate’s influence, the military arm of the Jewish Agency that in the end developed and then implemented the plans for the Zionist military takeover of Palestine as a whole and the ethnic cleansing of its native population; its headquarters from the end of 1947 was the Red House in Tel-Aviv (The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, PDF p.14, p.40).

  • During the Arab revolt Hagana troops attached to British forces learned what a ‘punitive mission’ to an Arab village ought to entail, including the joint Hagana-British occupation of a village in June 1938; in the Second World War its members gained experience in British service while others monitored and infiltrated the 1200 or so Palestinian villages (The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, PDF p.40-41).

  • Its command structure produced the sequence of plans Pappe traces: Plan A (the 1937 ‘Elimelech plan’ of its Tel-Aviv commander Elimelech Avnir), Plan B (1946), their fusion as Plan C, and finally Dalet Plan, finalised at the Red House on 10 March 1948 (The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, PDF p.15, p.52-53).

  • In Pappe’s Chapter Five, when Plan Dalet was put into effect the Hagana had more than 50,000 troops at its disposal, half of them trained by the British army during the Second World War; Operation Nachshon was the first operation in which all the Jewish military organisations endeavoured to act together as a single army, providing the basis for the future Israeli Defence Forces (The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, PDF p.116-117).

  • Its Science Corps, renamed HEMED in May 1948 under Ephraim Katzir, was the team Pappe describes working on Israel’s biological warfare capability, set up by Ben-Gurion in the 1940s (The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, PDF p.130-131).

The 1936-39 Revolt in Palestine, David Ben-Gurion, Charles Orde Wingate, Zionism, 1936-39 Revolt in Palestine

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