Bombs in Palestine, then and now


That may sound like a description of the past week's violence between Israel and Palestinians in Gaza. But in fact, it comes from the letters and diary of a Baltimore teacher who volunteered to spend a year at a Quaker school in British-ruled Palestine in 1938-1939, only to find herself in the middle of a war between Arab terrorists and the British army.


At age 22, Ms. McDowell agreed to spend a year teaching at the Friends Girls School, a Quaker institution in Ramallah, one of the largest Arab cities in the territory today known as the West Bank. But as the Goucher College alumna discovered soon after her arrival in September 1938, Ramallah was "a rebel town." Palestinian Arab terrorists were waging war against the British authorities and Palestine's Jewish community. Clashes between the British and the Arab forces turned the city into a veritable battlefield.


And much worse than annoying. In an early diary entry, Ms. McDowell described the shock of walking to her classroom one morning and encountering a group of Arabs, with guns, crouching inside the school gate and taking aim at British soldiers on a hill nearby. She and her friend Gertrude McCoy, a fellow teacher from Ohio, lay on a floor in fear until the shooting subsided. But then the bombing began — British planes strafed the city, killing terrorists as well as "some innocent people who were only running home from their vineyards ... About 80 Arabs were killed."


A common refrain in Ms. McDowell's diary and letters is the strong determination of the British to root out the terrorists, despite possible civilian casualties or international criticism. "The British usually bomb towns where a British is killed," she noted, referring to the policy of bombing an entire area if a government official or soldier was attacked in the vicinity.


Collective punishment was not uncommon. "In the village of Nablus there was a bank robbery last week," Ms. McDowell recalled in one letter. "So the British herded all the inhabitants out to a field, where they had to stand in the hot sun all day while soldiers searched their houses. They rip up furniture, dumped out the food supplies and take all the money and valuable things they can find. One of our students from Nablus was unable to come back to school, because her father's jewelry shop was wiped out."

The British also imposed a strict nighttime curfew throughout the city. "Anyone breaking the evening curfew is shot without question ... They are doing too much damage, making holes in people's houses, shooting cats and donkeys or anything they see moving at night." Ms. McDowell loved to stargaze, but she knew — as she wrote to her parents — "that if I walked out on the balcony far enough to cast a shadow in the moonlight, all Ramallah might soon be torn awake by the sound of the hidden machine guns shooting at a curfew breaker."

Eventually, the year of bombs, battles and "sandbags in our windows to keep out stray bullets" came to an end, and Ms. McDowell returned to the calm of life in small town America. She married and raised a family in Indiana, where she remained for the rest of her life, passing away earlier this year at the age of 95.

Although she never returned to Israel, Ms. McDowell left behind a document that today's Israelis may find instructive. They are receiving a lot of unsolicited advice these days from those, like William Hague, who are pressing Israel not to go all-out against Hamas. But as the diary of Nancy Parker McDowell suggests, those who find themselves face to face with terrorists often have a clearer understanding of how best to combat them.

Rafael Medoff is director of the David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies, and coauthor, with Professor Sonja Schoepf Wentling, of the new book "Herbert Hoover and the Jews: The Origins of the 'Jewish Vote' and Bipartisan Support for Israel."

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