CounterPunch
September 3, 2002

The British in Palestine, 1945-48
A Conveniently Forgotten Holocaust

by Robert Fisk
The Independent

In the years that followed the Second World War, Lord Beaverbrook's old
Sunday Express would regale its readers with the secret history of the
1939-45 conflict: "What Hitler would have done if England was under Nazi
occupation"; "How Ike almost cancelled D-Day"; "Churchill's plans for using
gas on Nazi invaders." Often--though not always--the stories were true.
After war come the facts. It's not so long ago, after all, that we
discovered that Nato's mighty 1999 blitz on Serbia's army netted a total of
just 10 tanks.

But it took Eric Lowe of Hayling Island in Hampshire to remind me of the
inversion of history, the way in which historically proven facts, clearly
established, come to be questioned decades later or even deleted from the
record for reasons of political or moral weakness. Eric runs a magazine
called Palestine Scrapbook, a journal for the old British soldiers who
fought in Palestine--against both Arabs and Jews--until the ignominious
collapse of the British mandate in 1948. In Mr Lowe's magazine, there are
personal memories of the bombing of British headquarters at the King David
Hotel in Jerusalem--a "terrorist" bombing, of course, except that it was
carried out by a man who was later to become Prime Minister of Israel,
Menachem Begin.

Dennis Shelton of the King's Royal Rifle Corps writes a letter, recalling
an Arab attack on a British Army lorry in Gaza. "We opened up on them, the
ones who could still run away. We found two [British] army bods under the
wagon, both badly wounded. I went in the ambulance with them to Rafah
hospital. I was holding the side of one's head to keep his brains in. I
often wondered if indeed they recovered." Mr Lowe has asked for information
about the soldier whom Dennis Shelton tried to save.

But he's probably wasting his time, because the British Army's first
post-World War Two war--the 1945-48 conflict in Palestine--has been
"disappeared", sidelined as something that no one wants to remember.
According to Mr Lowe, many of the British campaign medals for Palestine
were never issued. Dennis Peck, of the Sherwood Foresters, only realised
he'd been awarded one in 1998. Until two years ago, the campaign was never
mentioned at the Armistice parade in London. There's not even a definitive
figure for the British troops who died--around 400 were killed or died of
wounds. And it took over 50 years for British veterans to get a memorial
for the dead: in the end, the veterans had to pay for it from their own
pockets.

But in the late Forties, all Britain was seized by the war in Palestine.
When Jewish gunmen hanged two British sergeants, booby-trapping their
bodies into the bargain, Britons were outraged. The British, it must be
added, had just hanged Jewish militants in Palestine. But now-- nothing.
Our dead soldiers in Palestine, far from being remembered at the going down
of the sun, are largely not remembered at all.

So who are we frightened of here? The Arabs? The Israelis? And isn't this
just a small example of the suppression of historical truth which continues
over the 20th century's first holocaust? I raise this question because of a
recent and deeply offensive article by Stephen Kinzer of The New York
Times. Back in 1915, his paper--then an honourable journal of record--broke
one of the great and most terrible stories of the First World War: the
planned slaughter of 1.5 million Christian Armenians by the Turkish Ottoman
government. The paper's headlines, based in many cases on US diplomats in
Turkey, alerted the world to this genocide. By 16 September, a New York
Times correspondent had spoken of "a campaign of extermination, involving
the murdering of 800,000 to 1,000,000 persons".

It was all true. Save for the Turkish government, a few American academics
holding professorships funded by Turkey and the shameful denials of the
Israeli government, there is today not a soul who doubts the nature or the
extent of this genocide. Even in the 1920s, Winston Churchill himself
called it a "holocaust". But not Mr Kinzer. Over the course of the past few
years, he's done everything he can to destroy the integrity of his paper's
brilliant, horrifying, exclusive reports of 1915. Constantly recalling
Turkey's fraudulent claim that the Armenians died in the civil unrest in
Asia Minor at the time, he has referred to the genocide as "ethnic
cleansing" and treated the figure of 1.5 million dead as a claim--something
he would surely never do in reference to the 6 million Jews later murdered
by the Nazis.

Recently, Mr Kinzer has written about the new Armenian Genocide museum in
Washington, commenting artfully that there's "a growing recognition by
advocacy groups that museums can be powerful tools to advance political
causes". In other words, unlike the Jewish Holocaust museum--and the Jewish
Holocaust itself, which would never be used by Israel to silence criticism
of its cruel behaviour in the occupied territories--there might be
something a bit dodgy about the Armenian version. Then comes the killer.
"Washington already has one major institution, the United States Holocaust
Museum, that documents an effort to destroy an entire people," Mr Kinzer
wrote. "The story it presents is beyond dispute. But the events of 1915 are
still a matter of intense debate." Are they hell, Mr Kinzer.

But why should we be surprised at this classic piece of historical
revisionism? Israel's own ambassador to present-day Armenia, Rivka Cohen,
has been peddling more or less the same rubbish, refusing to draw any
parallels with the Jewish Holocaust and describing the Armenian Holocaust
as a mere "tragedy". She is, in fact, following the official Israeli
Foreign Office line that "this [Armenian Holocaust] should not be described
as genocide".Israel's top Holocaust scholar, Israel Charney, has most
courageously campaigned against those who lie about the Armenian
genocide--I advise readers to buy his stunning Encyclopaedia of
Genocide--and he has been joined by many other Jewish scholars. But with
Turkey's alliance with Israel, its membership of Nato, its possible EU
entry, and its massive arms purchases from the United States, the growing
power of its well-paid lobby groups has smothered even their efforts.

Which raises one last question. Armenian academics have been investigating
the identity of those young German officers who were training the Ottoman
army in 1915 and who in some cases actually witnessed the Armenian
Holocaust--whose victims were, in some cases, transported to their deaths
in railway cattle-cars. Several of those German soldiers' names, it now
transpires, crop up again just over a quarter of a century later--as senior
Wehrmacht officers in Russia, helping Hitler to carry out the Jewish
Holocaust. Even the dimmest of us might think there was a frightening
connection here. But not, I guess, Mr Kinzer. Nor the modern-day New York
Times, which is so keen to trash its own historic exclusives for fear of
what Turkey--or Israel--might say. Personally, I'd call it all a form of
Holocaust denial. And I know what Eric Lowe would call it: cowardice under
fire.


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