British Mandate: A Survey of Palestine: Volume II - Page 587

CHAPTER XV.

part of the Tegart committee's proposals which related to the main urban areas was deferred for reconsideration, in the light of prevailing conditions, along with the Government's general building programme. Throughout the greater part of the country, however, in the smaller towns and the rural areas, the police network is based on the buildings constructed in accordance with the 1940 programme and its supplements.

13. The growth of the Police Force reflected in table 1 continued up to the outbreak of war, when the Arab rebellion was brought to a close and also the .T ewish terrorist activities which bad broken out in the summer of 1939. Thereafter, new requirements both arising out of the war and in respect of the enforcement of law and order influenced the development of the Force. Since there is a substantial degree of correlation between war needs and the maintenance of internal security, it is not in the main practicable to distinguish as between these main causes underlying war-time development.

14. Attention may, however, be invited to certain of the principal factors which continue to be operative even after the end of the war. First, there has been considerable expansion of the system, originally adopted in 1936 with the object of extending additional protection to Jewish settlements, of supplementing the strength of the Police Force by the embodiment of temporary additional police. The development of the system for the furtherance of the particular object just mentioned will be treated in greater detail below, but during the war and afterwards it had far wider application. During the war the temporary additional police were extensively used for guarding lines of communications and vulnerable points generally and for such specialized duties as air and coast watch. They have also been employed, then and to a greater extent since, in guarding lines of communications and vulnerable points generally against terrorist attack. Secondly, there has been the prevalence of the arms traffic and the increasing assertiveness of illegal armed organizations. Both matters will be treated in greater detail below. Here it is sufficient to point out that, whatever may be the ostensible motive for the acquisition of illegal arms or the establishment of illegal armed organizations, Government has been obliged to take cognizance of both factors in concerting arrangements for the maintenance of law and order. Widespread and acknowledged concealment of illegal arms and membership of illegal bodies implies a degree of defiance and engenders a general unrest which (even if the point had not been underlined by murder, kidnapping and the destruction of Government properties) has made it essential that security dispositions be made accordingly. It has been against this background that the establishment of the

587

]]>