Wednesday, November 21, 2012

How to Deal with Terrrorists

March 29, 1939, the British engage Arab terrorists in Sanur, northern Samaria and killed the leader, Abd Rahim Haj Muhammed*:



That was the British army.


*
Abdul Rahim al Hajj Mohammed ('Abd al-Rahim al-Hajj Muhammad) in the Tulkarm area was a deeply religious, intellectual man and as a fervent anti-Zionist was deeply committed to the revolt.[138]He was regarded second to Qawukji in terms of leadership ability and maintained his independence from the exiled rebel leadership in Damascus.[138][139] He is still related by Palestinian Arabs as a hero and martyr and is regarded as a metonym "for a national movement that was popular, honourable, religious, and lofty in its aims and actions."[140] He was shot by an army patrol near Sanuron 27 March 1939.[138]

P.S.


...the efforts that were made to cut the rebels' links with the villages, exhausted the revolt. The killing of Abd al-Rahim al-Hajj Muhammad in March 1939 came as a crushing blow to the revolt, depriving it of one of the bravest, wisest and most honest of the popular revolutionary leaders. After that the local commands started to collapse and leave the field...
 
...(according to official figures, in February 1939, 110 were killed and 112 wounded in 12 engagements with the British, 39 villages were searched, curfews were imposed in three towns three times, about 200 villagers were arrested, there were fires in five government departments, ten Arabs were executed on charges of carrying arms, there were attacks on ten Zionist settlements, the oil pipeline was blown up; a train between Haifa and Lydda was mined, and a search post was set up in the Aqsa Mosque).The British figures presented by the Colonial Secretary show that "between 20th December and 29th February, there were 348 incidents of assassination, 140 acts of sabotage, 19 kidnappings, 23 thefts, nine mine and 32 bomb explosions, while the Army lost 18 dead and 39 wounded, and the Palestinians lost 83 dead and 124 wounded; these figures do not include casualties to the rebels. . ."94Things continued in this way until September 1939, the month in which the Second World War broke out. In the meantime the Palestinian Arabs suffered irreplaceable losses; the leadership quite apart from the spirit of compromise that was afoot, was outside the country; the newly constituted local commands were falling one after the other on the various fields of battle, British oppression had reached its climax, and Zionist violence had been constantly escalating since the middle of 1937. There can be no doubt that the British concentrated presence and the persistence that accompanied it in the Palestinian theatre had exhausted the rebels, who, with their leadership, no longer really knew who they were fighting against or why. At one moment the leadership would talk of traditional friendship and common interests with Britain, at another went so far as to agree to the granting of autonomy to the Jews in the areas where they were settled. There can be no doubt that the vacillation of the leadership, and its inability to determine a clear objective to fight for, played its part in weakening the revolt...
...The best estimate of Arab human losses in the 1936-39 revolt is that which states that losses in the four years totaled 19,792 killed and wounded; this includes the casualties sustained by the Palestinian Arabs at the hands of the Zionist gangs in the same period.
This estimate is based on the first conservative admissions contained in official British reports, checked against other documents.102 These calculations establish that 1200 Arabs were killed in 1936. 120 in 1937, 1200 in 1938 and 1200 in 1939. In addition 112 Arabs were executed and 1200 killed in various terrorist operations. This makes the total of Arabs killed in the 1936-39 revolt, 5,032, while 14,760 were wounded in the same period.
Detainees numbered about 816 in 1937, 2,463 in 1938, and approximately 5,679 in 1939.The real significance of these figures can be shown by comparisons. In relation to numbers of inhabitants, Palestinian losses in 1936-39 are equivalent to losses by Britain of 200,000 killed, 600,000 wounded and 1,224,000 arrested. In the case of America the losses would be one million killed, 3 million wounded and 6,120,000 arrested!


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1 comment:

Juniper in the Desert said...

Sorry, can you translate??