In the UK, pro-Palestinian marches have been taking place every two weeks for the past two years. Despite promises to ruthlessly police the marches, the forces of law and order have tended to ensure the marches do not go out of control by clamping down on pro-Israel counter-protesters.
A non-Jewish Iranian protester has been repeatedly arrested for holding a placard that reads: “Hamas is a terrorist organization.” On no account must the mob be provoked.
Do the British authorities have a record in the way they treat anti-Jewish protests? Eighty years ago in November, a deadly pogrom broke out against Libyan Jews while the British were in control of the country. How far can the British be blamed for failing to stop the killing, and are we seeing history repeat itself in Britain today, where the authorities have done little to stem the tide of rising antisemitism?
Libyan Jewry
In 1945, the Jews of Libya had just come through one of the worst periods in their history. Twenty-thousand Jews were living in Tripolitania (western Libya) and 5,000 in Cyrenaica.
Under Italian Fascist and then Nazi rule until 1943, the community suffered racial discrimination and deportations. Jews had perished in the (mostly Allied) wartime bombing, and much property had been destroyed. Some 2,000 Jews were deported to Giado, an appalling labor camp in the desert where 600 died of starvation or typhus.
At first, the community welcomed the British Military Administration (BMA), which took over from the Italians. However, the relationship soon soured, and they lost all confidence in the British authorities, whom they had greeted as liberators.
On November 5, 1945, the community received a deadly blow. Anti-Jewish riots spilled over to Tripolitania from Egypt. Elderly Jews, women, and children were attacked by mobs with sticks, stones, knives, cleavers, iron bars, and hand grenades.
Entire families were annihilated. Women and girls were raped. Bodies were quartered, children crushed against stone walls, old men pushed from windows, and a grenade was tossed into a synagogue that served as a refuge for Jews. Three days of rioting left 130 murdered and 450 wounded.
The violence erupted simultaneously in several towns.
The Jewish community of Tripoli was furious. They alleged that the British were partially responsible for the riots. They did not prevent the disorder and, despite desperate appeals, did not take timely countermeasures.
The BMA insisted that it had the situation under control and so did not request reinforcements. They could have called out the 500 soldiers of the Jewish Brigade’s Royal Army Ordnance Corps. These were Palestinian Jews who had enlisted in the British Army to fight the Nazis.
The British are obsessed with Zionism
From the start, the British pinned the disturbances on provocation by Zionism. “Arab relations are at present good, but we fear infiltration of Zionism under cover of miscellaneous offers of help from Jews abroad, ” wrote an official in June 1943.
Indeed, the British had something of a fixation with Zionism. Already in 1944, one official reported: “Serious trouble is to be expected if Zionist zealots are allowed a free rein… We must not alienate the Arab cooperation on which we depend.”
Still, a connection with events in Palestine is doubtful; according to historian Maurice Roumani, no anti-Zionist cries were reportedly heard from the mobs.
The British arrested over 550 rioters, including 20 Arab nationalist leaders. Only 34 were tried, and 25 received five-year sentences. The damage was assessed at $4 million: 813 shops and nine synagogues were pillaged, 575 houses were looted, and some were burnt down.
The community demanded full reparations, but the British avoided paying compensation.
The 1945 pogrom was unprecedented and left a deep scar. With the declaration of the State of Israel in May 1948, the country’s 30,000 Jews now had a choice. Over 90% made aliyah.
On June 12, 1948, another round of violence erupted against the Jews. This time, the conflict in Palestine had a direct influence, but a British report asserted that “the proclamation of Israel aroused less interest than expected among Arabs.”
An argument between an Arab and a Jew became a brawl when Tunisians on their way to Palestine via Egypt joined in. “If we cannot go to Palestine to fight the Jews, let’s fight them here!” they shouted. Armed with sticks, razor blades, knives, and stones, rioters moved into the Tripoli Jewish quarter.
However, the Jews had learned the lessons of 1945, and they had received training in self-defense. In all, the Libyan Jews lost 14 members, but a massacre had been prevented.
The British found a ready scapegoat in Zionism. “It is up to the Jews themselves not to indulge in unnecessary acts of provocation,” one official reported.
Pointing to signs in Hebrew echoing Joseph Trumpeldor’s motto, “It is good to die for one’s country,” one official wrote: “It may be that [the Jewish minority] will pay a heavy price for what success might be achieved by Zionism.”
The British dismissed as groundless Jewish complaints that the police did nothing to prevent looting, murder, and arson.
The British failure to control events is reflected in other pogroms, for example, in Iraq in 1941, the British Army stood at the gates of Baghdad and could have intervened to stop rape, looting, and the murder of 179 Jews. In Aden in 1947, British-trained security forces were themselves responsible for killing 87 Jews.
In Britain today, antisemitic marches are permitted to spread hate while the police stand by or arrest the few counter-protesters. Although Palestine Action, with its record of vandalism, is proscribed, those who shout for “intifada” or wave the Hezbollah flag are frequently let off with nothing more than a slap on the wrist.
On the other hand, carrying an Israeli flag can be construed as a provocation. The road from moral equivalence and appeasement leads to the death of Jews, as we witnessed at Manchester’s Heaton Park synagogue on Yom Kippur this month. Have the British learned nothing since the 1940s?
The writer is the cofounder of Harif, the UK Association of Jews from the Middle East and North Africa. She is the author of Uprooted: How 3,000 Years of Jewish Civilization in the Arab World Vanished Overnight.