Op-Ed: A Quaker Eye Witness to Mideast Violence

Published: Thursday, December 13, 2012 3:13 PM

It is interesting to see what the British do when Arab terrorists in the Middle East attack them.

Arutz Sheva 7

Dr. Rafael Medoff

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

Bombs falling on Arab neighborhoods ... Homes demolished ... Civilians killed or wounded ... Soldiers shooting at anything that moves.

That may sound like a description of the recent violence between Israel and 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.

 

When Nancy Parker McDowell's 'Notes from Ramallah' was published ten years ago by a small Quaker press in Indiana, it attracted little attention. But her eyewitness account of life in a Mideast war zone deserves a long second look now, especially following British Foreign Secretary William Hague's statement urging Israel to restrain its actions against Hamas. It turns out that when it was the British who had to face Arab terrorists, they were far from restrained.

 

At age 22, Nancy 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 alumnus 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.

 

Soon after her arrival, Nancy became aware of the tense situation in the country, but it took a little while before it really hit home. "To have rebels charging across your yard is exciting for a while," she wrote, "but the sound of machine guns close by becomes annoying."

 

And much worse than annoying. In an early diary entry, Nancy 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."

 

Sometimes there would be a lull in the local fighting for days or even weeks, but soon the calm would be shattered again.

 

"Last Tuesday we teachers were reading aloud, as we often do in the evenings, and feeling so peaceful, when Bang-Bang-Bang! Rebel guns right outside the building," she reported. "The British machine guns started up soon. They were shooting across the school grounds, British on one side of the school, rebels on the other."

Nancy and Gertrude hurried the girls into a teacher's room and had them sit on the floor so they would be less exposed to gunfire. "I sang the 'Arkansas Traveler' with my teeth chattering, while the kids had to strain their ears to hear me above the guns." (One version of that 19th-century folk song, with its lyrics about "bringing home a baby bumble bee," is a popular children's song to this day.)

A common refrain in Nancy's diary and letters is the strong detrmination 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.

 

Mass detentions and forced labor were also used. "The British frequently detain Arab citizens, keeping them in a concentration camp for several days, hoping they may find the leader...In the daytime we could see a long line of them working for the British, tearing down the stone walls their ancestors had built between fields."

 

Collective punishment was not uncommon. "In the village of Nablus there was a bank robbery last week," Nancy 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 the our students from Nablus was unable to come back to school, because her father's jewelrly 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." Nancy 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 Nancy 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 96.

 

Although she never returned to Israel, Nancy left behind a document that today's Israelis may find instructive. They are receiving a lot of unsolicited advice these days from those, like British Foreign Secretary William Hague, who are pressing Israel not to go all out on Hamas, while Khalid Mashaal calls for the destruction of Israel.

 

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.

Reprinted with permission from the Baltimore Sun