As with many films of Palestine from the Mandate period, Palestine Police begins with an introduction to the country and its people. Palestine is presented as a biblical melting-pot of old and new, and of the three Abrahamic faiths. The entire set of sequences is presented ahistorically in the style of a travelogue: the effect is to emphasise the presence of marvellous diversity in the land, and, as is often the case, this is epitomised by the sequence of Jerusalem, with its ‘endless stream of jostling, picturesque humanity.’ Palestine, the land where ‘three main lines of faith meet before spreading out to the ends of the earth,’ is presented as an extraordinary idyll where the ancient and modern, respectively personified as Arab and Jew, peacefully co-exist.

After introducing the audience to the land, the film moves on to the Palestine police themselves. ‘The security of this bewildering variety of people is in the hands of a highly efficient police,’ intones narrator Keating, as the film for the first time approaches its main subject matter with a shot of two policemen. ‘They are of different race,’ notes the commentary – one is British, one is ‘a Palestinian’, that is, an Arab. This gloss on race is the beginning of a glaring omission which continues throughout the film – despite the early emphasis on the three faiths of Palestine, there are now no further direct references to Palestine’s Jews.

The film continues with a loose narrative following the training and regular duties of a new recruit to the police. The bobby-on-the-beat imagery of the first police scenes soon gives way to evidence of the distinctly military nature of the job, with scenes of recruits in barracks, on parade, and on patrol in armoured cars. No explanation for this highly militarised life is given, besides a throwaway reference to ‘terrorist activities of political extremists,’ and the cheerful assertion that the mobile forces help to ‘suppress serious disorder in its initial stages’. None of the tasks demonstrated in the film – catching smugglers of ‘the vicious hashish drug’, preventing Arab fishermen from overfishing Lake Tiberias, detecting illegal immigrants, etc. – explain why the police appears to be more like the army.  (There are also some pointers, perhaps accidental, which make it apparent that the police are also under serious threat of attack. One extraordinary scene, showing life in the ‘married quarters’ of the police barracks, shows a mother pushing her child on a swing with a fortified barbed-wire fence clearly visible in the background.)

The film continues with further, rather romantic, examples of the varied kinds of police work in the territory: a mounted patrol to an Arab village greets the mukhtar; a radio patrol has tea on a sand-dune with some camel-mounted Arab officers; the ‘backroom boys’ of the CID conduct experiments to identify ‘a speck of blood’; the naval and canine divisions are shown. The film closes with the original British and Palestinian police duo out on the beat, with the voiceover giving the reassuring message that they are guarding the ‘peace and security of the ordinary citizen’. The film ends, and then the appeal for recruits is shown.

The middle section of the film, showing a highly militarised force, is never adequately explained, and indeed the implicit suggestion that all is not well in the Holy Land – the reference to ‘terrorist activities’, the indication that ‘peace and security’ are in fact at risk – is never elaborated on. This refusal to give anything more than the most perfunctory indication of the threat goes hand in hand with the total omission of all mention of Jews after the initial historical section. Unmentioned in the film is the fact that the recruitment drive of which the film is a part, and the most intense phase of police militarisation which is reflected in it, came in response not to the actions of rebelling Arabs, but to violence by Jewish paramilitary organizations.

The end of the war in 1945 had seen a marked intensification of the already serious campaign of violence being waged by Jewish paramilitaries against the Mandate authorities. After the British refused to countenance Truman’s proposal for the admission to Palestine of 100,000 Jewish refugees, attacks surged, with the Irgun and Lehi terrorist groups being joined in struggle by outlawed Hagana paramilitary forces. Much of the Jewish population of Palestine was in a state of revolt that recalled the Arab uprising, but which was more tactically sophisticated, better equipped and better organised. British civilian, military and police infrastructure and personnel were constantly attacked, and police in rural areas were confined to life inside fortified barracks, such as those seen in the film (‘Tegart Forts’; see Binsley 1996: 194-7 for an account of life within such a fort). A state of emergency was declared, nearly 100,000 troops were sent to the country, and it became increasingly clear that British control of the territory was unsustainable (Krämer, 2008, 304-5).

The Annual Administrative Report of the Palestine Police for 1946 gives some sense of the intensity of the situation, with the Port and Marine division reporting numerous cases of the mining of ships and ports, the Railways division reporting ‘widespread acts of sabotage’ throughout the year (car bombings of stations, large scale armed attacks on trains, train derailings, explosives placed on tracks), and the Police Mobile Force reporting repeated remotely triggered roadside bombing of patrol vehicles. Numerous policemen were targeted in ‘bomb outrages’, and several were killed in the notorious King David hotel blast. Over the course of the year, the police seized a staggering 18,817 ‘serviceable’ bombs, 24 machine guns, and nearly half a million rounds of rifle ammunition; in 1945 they had seized just 25 bombs, no automatic weapons, and just 10,000 rifle rounds (Palestine and Transjordan Administration Reports 1918-1948, 1995, 509-58).

Naturally none of this features in the film. The description early on of the general prevailing situation as ‘peacetime,’ and the film’s overall elision of the real role undertaken and challenges faced by the police are tantamount to being disingenuous. Official uncertainty over the role of the police and the refusal to admit the necessary military character of their duty, is evidenced by the bizarre disjunction between the scenes of the two friendly policemen and the military-style training scenes; the fatal British tendency to recruit from whichever portion of the populace was not in rebellion is clearly suggested by the absence of references to Jews or Jewish police recruits, and the repeated emphases on the Arab elements of the police. Omissions and internal contradictions such as these can be seen finally as a clear reflection of several of the most disastrous shortcomings of the security situation in the Palestine Mandate area, and beyond that the film as a whole can be seen as a typical symptom of the greater malaise: the lack of any clear strategy for British objectives in Palestine, and the steady, inevitable loss of political initiative in the country. 

Francis Gooding (July 2009)