By Roger Spooner
Tom Bateman writing in 2022 gave an example of the brutal methods Britain used to suppress the Arab revolt:
“The people of al-Bassa got their lesson in imperial brutality when the British soldiers came after dawn.
Machine guns mounted on Rolls Royce armoured cars opened fire on the Palestinian village before the Royal Ulster Rifles arrived with flaming torches and burned homes to the ground.
Villagers were rounded up while troops later herded men onto a bus and forced them to drive over a landmine which blew up, killing everyone on board.
A British policeman photographed the scene as women tended to the remains of their dead, before maimed body parts were buried in a pit.”
In 2023 Bateman produced a three-part podcast on BBC radio 4 The Mandates. It gives a picture of the Britain’s rule in Palestine from 1920-1948. It is well worth listening to. The second episode is about the Arab Revolt which covers examples such as al-Bassa but he also talks with Anita Shapira the doyen of Zionist historiography. She talks about the ‘Jews cooperating with the British army which showed them things they never imagined doing’. They learnt brutal methods from the British.
