Palestine Police
The Palestine Police , also Palestine Police Force , was the unit responsible for public security during the British military administration and the British League of Nations Mandate for Palestine (1918-1948) . The mandate of Palestine included what is now Israel and Jordan , the Gaza Strip and the West Bank . In 1923 the emirate of Transjordan was separated and a separate police unit, the Trans-Jordan Frontier Force (TJFF), was founded.
In addition to the normal tasks of a police force , the Palestine Police were also responsible for border security and for securing the prisons. From 1920 to 1926 she was also responsible for customs matters.
Police structure
In addition to the normal tasks of the police, they should be responsible for escorting and protecting tax collectors and the official money transport, as well as publicizing the letters from the administration. Over time, the tasks of the police were expanded to include other areas, such as border security, counter-terrorism, etc.
Palestine Police
The actual Palestine Police was founded on July 1, 1920. Except for the senior officers, who were British, this unit consisted exclusively of residents of the country, whereby efforts were made to take into account the population structure of Palestine when selecting the police officers.
Prison Service
This special department, which was also established in 1920, was responsible for guarding the prisons and later the internment camps (e.g. Central Prison of Acre ). In particular, monitoring the internment camps for the Jewish refugees was a task that displeased the police officers deployed there. There were repeated armed attacks on these camps in order to free those interned there.
Palestine Gendarmerie and British Gendarmerie
The Palestine Gendarmerie was founded on July 1, 1921 and existed until 1926. The unrest surrounding Vladimir Zeev Jabotinsky's protest march in 1920 clearly demonstrated the weaknesses of the police system. The police in particular could not control the rural areas. The British administration reintroduced a special unit of the Ottoman Empire - the gendarmerie . She was responsible for patrols in the country and for reinforcing the police in the event of a crisis. According to a given key, the unit consisted of people of all ethnicities in Palestine.
The 700-strong British Gendarmerie was founded in 1922 on the initiative of Winston Churchill and, like its Palestinian counterpart, existed until 1926. The recruitment took place among former members of the Royal Irish Constabulary . While the Palestine Gendarmerie was used to secure the borders and to support the police outposts, the British Gendarmerie should be used in the interior and the cities. By mid-1923, however, almost a quarter of the 700 men had been dismissed for being drunk or indiscipline. The responsible colonial ministry then selected the recruits more carefully. The originally purely Irish unit has now become a British one.
Parts of both units were incorporated into the Palestine Police . The rest of the gendarmes now formed the Trans-Jordan Frontier Force (TJFF), which was not affiliated with the police but with the army.
Tel Aviv Municipal Police
This Jewish-dominated police unit in Tel Aviv , which was founded on May 11, 1921 and lasted until the end of the British mandate, has always been a political issue. Tel Aviv was the only city in the mandate to receive permission to set up its own police unit. In 1932, the Tel Aviv Municipal Police were more closely monitored by the Jerusalem headquarters after allegations of a lack of cooperation , and British police officers were also transferred to Tel Aviv. In 1940, British mandate authorities seized the modern Beit Hadar office building located at a Tel Aviv junction and the Palestine Police set up a British-manned liaison and telecommunications center. The building on the Jaffa-Nablus highway also served as one of the police milestones to secure this connection as a safe traffic axis in the country.
The building immediately attracted attacks, which is why it was expanded in 1946 with other confiscated buildings around it to form a secured, barbed-wire- reinforced militarily reinforced zone (called Metzudat Tel Aviv , i.e. Tel Aviv Citadel, by the locals in the case of Tel Aviv ). Violent attacks by the illegal Irgun on April 23, 1946 (diversionary maneuvers to steal weapons from the Tegart Fort in Ramat Gan) and by LeCh "I on March 8, 1947 , were repulsed, sometimes with bloody results. In the course of their With the gradual withdrawal from Palestine, the mandate authorities cleared the Tel Aviv Citadel security zone at the beginning of November 1947 and released the buildings that had once been confiscated for the owners.
In 1946 the Tel Aviv Police Unit had its own patrol boat to monitor the Tel Aviv coast and the Yarkon . The Arab population of Palestine interpreted this as a renewed affront from the British side. On December 15, 1947, the British withdrew completely from Tel Aviv and the Tel Aviv Municipal Police became independent.
Palestine Mobile Force
Established in 1944, the Palestine Mobile Force was designed to support regular police units that were under attack. Ultimately, it was a mobile counter-terrorism unit. But since it also regularly monitored the beaches of Palestine and thus made it difficult for Jewish immigrants to land, it was fought by both the Haganah and other Jewish groups. The unit was disbanded on June 5, 1946.
Port and Marine Section
Founded on July 1, 1935, its tasks were as follows: 1. To prevent illegal immigration. 2. to stop smuggling, especially of weapons. 3. Monitor fishing rights. 4. to ensure compliance with the port rules. The first two tasks made this special police unit a hated target for freedom fighters and terrorists.
history
1918-1920
At the time of the British military administration (1918-1920) under Edmund Allenby , the police in Palestine consisted only of residents of the country, with the British military administration falling back on former Ottoman police officers . The previously applicable Ottoman law remained in force. The British administration focused on continuity. Only the higher police officers were occupied with British. When the administration was handed over to the civil administration on July 1, 1920, the Palestine Police was officially founded.
During the Nabi Musa riots in 1920, the Palestine Police had to deal with its first serious crisis. Some Arab police officers took an active part in acts of violence against Jews, while Jewish police officers left their posts to secure Jewish facilities. While there have been repeated violations of this kind over the years and police officers have taken sides, it must be said that the "Palestinian" police force did its job well.
1921-1928
The period after the Nabi Musa riots up to 1926 was characterized by relative calm. Although individual police patrols repeatedly fought smaller skirmishes with Bedouins who saw no point in the Europeans' borders and continued to use their traditional routes, these years were otherwise characterized by economic problems that also affected the work of the police. The most spectacular incident was surely the Druze attack on the convoy of High Commissioner Lord Plumer . Overall, the time under Lord Plumer was the quietest period in the history of the British Mandate over Palestine.
1928-1929
Plumer's successor, John Chancellor, was less successful. In the autumn of 1928, the Jewish authorities installed a screen on the so-called Wailing Wall to separate women from men. The Muslims protested because it was permanently installed and this contradicted the status quo. A police officer ordered the removal of the privacy screen. Later police investigations revealed that it was a deliberate provocation on the part of the Jewish yishuv .
On August 23, 1929, the tense situation escalated after Jewish groups repeatedly called for a new definition of the status quo around the Temple Mount . After Friday prayers, armed Muslim believers streamed to the Jaffa and Damascus gates. The police could only break up the demonstration by force. On August 24, angry Muslims in Hebron stormed the Jewish Quarter, destroyed buildings and attacked Jews. Of the 750 Jewish residents, the Palestine Police were able to save 700.
1930-1939
Again there was a period of relative calm. The Arab uprising from April 1936 to 1939 began with a series of acts of violence by Arab residents against Jews and the British mandate. The leader of the uprising was Mohammed Amin al-Husseini , who initiated a general strike . The uprising was put down by British forces with the support of the Palestine Police . The construction of fortress-like police stations served to secure the areas. These police stations were modeled and built under the supervision of Sir Charles Tegart , a police chief who had experience fighting rioting in British India . For 2.2 million British pounds , 69 such “Tegart forts” were built in an astonishingly short time. These forts were also the target of attacks by Zionist Jewish settlers ( Irgun Tzwa'i Le'umi ) under the military leadership of Moshe Rosenberg .
1940-1948
During the Second World War , the Irgun worked with the British. In 1940, mandate authorities set up a network of secured traffic axes in order to be able to persuade British security forces who moved out to combat increasing acts of violence in the Holy Land . British police stations were set up along the safe axes ( English security axes ) at intervals of one to five kilometers in order to be able to rush to the aid of British units moving there in the event of an attack by anti-British underground organizations or to offer a safe escape point. Because of the many murders of the British, they finally merged their facilities and homes in specially protected zones, known as Bevingrads in popular parlance , known by the British as Wingards .
The division of the country and the withdrawal of its own troops have already been debated within the British government. The main reason for the withdrawal was the cost of £ 40 million to maintain the 100,000 soldiers and police officers.
After the end of the Second World War, the Palestine Police found itself again between the fronts of the conflict between Jews and Arabs. In July 1946, for example, the Irgun, led by Menachem Begin , carried out the attack on the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, which until then had mainly been inhabited by officers of the British Mandate and their families.
As a result of the UN partition plan for Palestine , the British mandate for Palestine ended on May 14, 1948. The Palestine Police was dissolved, around 1,400 of the approx. 4,000 police officers were subsequently deployed in other parts of the British Empire . The police stations passed partly into the hands of Jewish and partly into the hands of Arab armed units. David Ben Gurion proclaimed the establishment of the state of Israel in the Israeli declaration of independence .
Commanders or inspectors general of the Palestine Police
- Percy Bramley , Commandant of Police, July 1920-March 1923.
- Arthur Mavrogordato , Commandant of Police, March 1923-July 1931.
- RGB Spicer , July 1931 - November 1937.
- Alan Saunders , November 1937-August 1943.
- John Rymer-Jones , August 1943-March 1946.
- Nicol Gray , March 1946 - May 1948.
Individual evidence
- ↑ a b c d e f Nir Mann ( נִיר מַן) and Danny Recht (דָּנִי רֶכְט), "בֵּית הָדָר"(Beit Hadar), on: תֵּל אָבִיב 100. הָאֶנְצִיקְלוֹפֶּדְיָה הָעִירוֹנִי, accessed January 4, 2020.
- ↑ a b c Michael Jacobson (מִיכָאֵל יַעֲקוֹבְּסוֹן), "סִבּוּב בְּבֵית הָדָר", Chap. 4 'תּוֹלְדֹת', January 1, 2019, in: חַלּוֹן אֲחוֹרִי: אַרְכִיטֶקְטוּרָה וְאִידֵאוֹלוֹגְיָה בְּדִּיסְנִיְלֶנְד מְקוֹמִי , accessed January 4, 2020.
- ↑ Cf. "גֵּדֶר תַּיִל“ , In: הַמַּשְׁקִיף , February 10, 1946.
- ↑ Cf. "הַתְקָפָה עַל בֵּית הָדָר - וּבָרָד יְרִיּוֹת נִתַּךְ עַל הָעִיר בְּמֶשֶׁךְ שְׁעָתַיִים: 3 מֵתוּ וּ -12 נִפְצְעוּ בְּלֵיל זַוְעַת דָּמִים בְּתֵּל־אָבִיב“ , In: הַצּוֹפֶה , March 9, 1947.
- ↑ Cf. "בֵּית הָדָר בְּת'א הֻחְזַר רִשְׁמִית לְבַעֲלָיו“ , In: הַמַּשְׁקִיף , November 4, 1947.
- ↑ Tom Segev : Once upon a time there was a Palestine. Jews and Arabs before the founding of the state of Israel. 4th edition. Pantheon, Munich 2006, ISBN 3-570-55009-5 , pp. 455-465.
- ↑ Tom Segev: Once upon a time there was a Palestine. Munich 2006, pp. 543-550.
- ^ Piers Brendon: The Decline and Fall of the British Empire 1781-1997. London, 2008, pp. 476-480.
- ^ Agreement Between Palestine and Syria and the Lebanon to Facilitate Good Neighborly Relations in Connection with Frontier Questions. In: The American Journal of International Law. Vol. 21, No. 4, Supplement: Official Documents (Oct., 1927), pp. 147-151.
- ↑ Georgina Sinclair, (2006). Get into a Crack Force and earn £ 20 a Month and all found. The Influence of the Palestine Police upon Colonial Policing 1922-1948. In: European Review of History. 13 (1), pp. 49-65.