That answer of course had been continually delayed since the Labour Party had come to power nearly a year before: first by Bevin’s efforts to draw America into the effort to resolve Palestine’s political future, then by the Anglo-American Committee’s formation and its inquiries, subsequently by the drafting of its report, and now by the negotiations over the report’s implementation. Pressed in the House of Commons for a timetable by Churchill, Attlee could only assure Parliament that a new government statement on Palestine would be forthcoming in early July. But this promise did little to blunt the tensions in Palestine that had been progressively sharpened both by these delays and by the recent spiral of violence.44
Arab opinion toward Britain was also hardening. “A Dark Age,” read the headline of one editorial that appeared in Al-Difa’. “The Government is adopting weak defensive tactics against strong waves of organized sabotage,” it stated. “It is the Government that encourages Jewish recklessness. So far this Government has completely failed in securing peace in the Holy Land.” “Why Should We Bear the Expenses of Terrorist Destruction?” was the title of an editorial in Falastin written in response to the Palestine government’s announcement that the cost of replacing or repairing the trains damaged or destroyed by the string of Irgun and Lehi attacks would fall on all Palestinian taxpayers. The only explanation for the government’s continued passivity in the face of continued Jewish violence and provocation, Al-Ittihad opined, is the “connection between Zionist terrorism and imperialism”: “They cooperate with each other against our national movement and prospective independence.”45
Motzei Shabbat, the end of the Jewish Sabbath, on the evening of June 22, however, brought some unexpected good news. In a gesture of good faith, Begin instructed his men to release two of the six kidnapped officers. They were blindfolded and then driven in circles around Tel Aviv for some twenty minutes before being dropped off near the Hayarkon Hotel from which they had been abducted—cleanly shaven and with a pound note each stuffed in their pockets, supposedly by Begin himself, as compensation for the “wear and tear” that their seizure might have caused to their uniforms. Another captive officer had managed to escape from custody two days earlier and flee the Jerusalem safe house where he had been confined. The sense of relief, though, was only temporary. New intelligence reports from American sources revealed that the Haganah and the Irgun had agreed to launch another series of attacks on the railways and that the Haganah had reorganized its defenses at rural settlements to better resist any organized search for arms.46
Word of the impending internment operation—now renamed Agatha—was passed by Barker to his divisional commanders on June 23. The following day individual officers cradling Thompson submachine guns in their laps and accompanied by armed escorts delivered the orders by hand to the units involved in the operation. The GOC set the target date for Saturday, June 29. The final list of people slated for arrest was approved by Cunningham on June 25. They included political leaders with any known or suspected connection to the “Jewish resistance movement,” Cunningham explained to Hall, “and others who have been guilty of inflammatory incitement.” The rationale was that anyone deemed by the authorities to “constitute a dangerous influence over the youth of the Yishuv after the operations have started should not remain in a position to do so.” In one fell swoop, the army would simultaneously arrest the Jewish Agency’s leaders, who, it was assumed, would most likely be asleep at their homes early on the Sabbath morning, and occupy the Jewish Agency headquarters in Jerusalem for as long as was necessary to seize the documents that the authorities were convinced would provide conclusive evidence linking it to the Hebrew Resistance Movement. Special search teams of CID officers and government officials had already been organized to identify and catalog the incriminating documents. Similar processes would take place at the Haganah general headquarters and at the Palmach’s command center in Tel Aviv. In addition, as many officers and lower-ranking personnel as possible of both paramilitary organizations would be arrested. Searches for arms, the order stressed, should be “incidental and only when it can be done without interfering with the main objects of the operation.”47
Meanwhile, Montgomery formally took up his appointment as CIGS on June 26. The following day he sent a personal directive to Paget’s successor as commander in chief, Middle East Land Forces, General Sir Miles Dempsey. Montgomery’s instructions were simple and straightforward: Britain was at war with the Jews, and no effort should be spared to achieve their defeat. “You will ensure that every officer and man in any way connected with this struggle realizes to the full, the fanatical and cunning nature of his enemy, the un-English methods that this enemy will use, and his personal responsibilities against kidnap and loss of arms and weapons,” reads one paragraph. Another stipulates that all social contact with the Jewish community must cease and that all ranks should be instilled with the “vigour and determination to finish off the job in the shortest possible time.” Montgomery also decreed that there was to be no hesitation in the confirmation of death sentences imposed on convicted Jews regardless of threats of reprisal, including “murder of British officers or men held as hostage.” Montgomery’s conception of the struggle as an entirely military one with no reference to, or perception of, the wider political and humanitarian issues stands in marked contrast to Barker’s more nuanced and perceptive orders to his subordinates. Indeed, no distinction whatsoever was made by Montgomery between the Jewish people and the Yishuv, between the moderate and the extremist wings of the Jewish Agency, between the Haganah and the two terrorist organizations, or between the community and those directly responsible for the violence. Rather, there is a palpable sense of profound umbrage toward a subject people who dare to challenge British rule and resist governmental authority. “Finally, it must be clearly realized by all ranks that, now that the Jews have flung the gauntlet in our face,” Montgomery concludes the directive, “they must be utterly and completely defeated and their illegal organization smashed forever.”48
By June 28 everything was in place for that process to begin. Throughout the preceding week, all meetings concerning the operation had been held at a variety of secret locations so as not to alert anyone watching divisional and regimental headquarters by the unusually large number of officers coming and going. As an additional precaution staff officers had been instructed to temporarily remove the distinctive red headbands from their caps. Everyone otherwise involved had been instructed to behave normally. Indeed, the two-day annual Jerusalem Horse Show went ahead as scheduled on the twenty-eighth. H hour was fixed for 4:15 the following morning. Starting at about 3:45 a.m., teams of Sixth Airborne signals officers and their men, escorted by detachments of the Glider Pilot Regiment, began to fan out across the country to take control of the main telephone exchanges. Less than ninety minutes later Palestine was completely without telephone service, the lines manned by British troops with their civilian operators kept under close guard. Search parties now converged simultaneously on the Jewish Agency headquarters in Jerusalem and its offices in Tel Aviv as well as those of the Histadrut, the Loan and Savings Bank, the WIZO (Women’s International Zionist Organization), and the command centers of the Haganah and the Palmach. Twenty rural settlements were also raided, and curfews were declared in the country’s three major cities and in four additional districts as well.49
Meanwhile, an assortment of Zionist leaders found themselves abruptly awakened by loud pounding on their front doors. Awaiting them were soldiers and police who placed the bleary-eyed leaders under arrest and removed them to specially prepared detention facilities at the Latrun and Athlit camps. The dragnet indiscriminately swept up hard-liners and moderates. Some detainees cooperated and went quietly, while others had to be forcibly subdued. One officer, for instance, reported being offered a brandy and soda while waiting for the leader he was assigned to apprehend to dress and pack a bag. Soldiers had to resort to fisticuffs, however, to manhandle the seventy-year-old rabbi Yehuda Fishma
n into the car waiting to transport him to Latrun after his offer to walk to a nearby police station rather than violate the Sabbath by riding in a vehicle was rejected by the officer in charge of his arrest detail.50
By the time the operation concluded on July 1, some seventeen thousand troops and police had taken 2,718 Jews into custody, including 56 women. Among them were 4 members of the Jewish Agency Executive, 7 Haganah officers, and nearly half of the Palmach’s fighters. The search teams carted away an estimated nine tons of documents from the various Jewish institutions that had been raided. Over the three preceding days, a total of twenty-seven settlements had also been searched, from which more than three hundred rifles, 425,000 rounds of ammunition, eight thousand hand grenades, fifty-two hundred mortar bombs, and a panoply of explosives were seized.51
The army hailed the operation as a success. “Palestine is a wasps nest. We dug it up on Saturday and captured a good many wasps,” Dempsey told Montgomery. “The remainder are now buzzing about angry and bewildered.” One British soldier lost his life, and one other was injured—both as a result of accidents. Despite the fierce resistance encountered by the search teams at many settlements, the Jewish casualty toll was similarly modest: three killed and three wounded by rifle fire with an additional fourteen persons requiring hospitalization for various injuries. That Agatha achieved its objective of surprise was indisputable. Despite the leaked planning document, the Haganah’s otherwise highly efficient intelligence service and its effective penetration of the British government and military establishment in Palestine, and even the Jewish Agency’s own anticipation of just such an operation at least six months earlier, the sheer scope and broad sweep of Agatha caught the Yishuv off guard. The loss of the vast quantity of weaponry discovered at Kibbutz Yagur alone, one of the Haganah’s three central arms dumps, dealt the Yishuv a major setback in its efforts to prepare militarily for independence. Such a series of bold, concerted blows, Cunningham had hoped, would bring the community to its senses. “I call upon all those who have the true interests of Palestine at heart to co-operate with the Government,” the high commissioner pleaded in his public announcement of the operation. “The door of negotiation and discussion is not shut.”52
But it was. And Agatha, as even the army recognized, had slammed it closed. “What imbecility as well as what evil this Government is capable of!” an incensed Blanche “Baffy” Dugdale, the influential London-based adviser to the Jewish Agency, Weizmann’s long-standing confidante, and a niece of Arthur Balfour’s, wrote in her diary that day—henceforth referred to as the Black Saturday or Black Sabbath. Indeed, so far as the Yishuv and its leaders were concerned, Britain had declared war on the Jews. That was precisely how Weizmann described the operation’s effects to Cunningham when they met at Government House within hours of the arrests’ announcement. Moreover, although the operation’s planners had anticipated trouble with the settlers, the depth of the hatred and the vitriol directed toward the troops conducting the searches still came as a shock. Soldiers were taunted with shouts of “Gestapo,” “Hitler’s Bastards,” and worse. Children were marshaled into lines by their elders and directed to spit on troops conducting searches or making arrests. They also sang the popular Hebrew song “Kalaniot”—Hebrew for the red poppy “with the black heart”—which was also the Yishuv’s nickname for the Sixth Airborne Division because of the paratroops’ distinctive maroon beret. The violent struggles that ensued with women settlers when the soldiers and police tried to effect arrests were also unexpected. At Kibbutz Yagur, the troops had to use tear gas to incapacitate the women and thus take into custody the male settlers on their arrest lists. Even so seasoned and sensitive an observer of events in Palestine like Martin Charteris, Barker’s intelligence officer, could only shake his head in bewilderment. The Jews, he observed in a top secret intelligence appreciation of the operation, are “quite unbalanced, dangerously emotional and psychologically insecure. This,” he posited, “may be the result of Centuries of pursecution [sic].”53
Provoked, goaded, spat upon, and subjected to all manner of physical and verbal abuse, the troops responded in kind. “Hitler didn’t finish the job!” or “What we need is gas chambers!” they shouted back. Although there were only a few instances of looting, vandalism appears to have been rife. According to Vera Weizmann, the WIZO building in Jerusalem was completely wrecked by the search teams, with entire walls demolished and windows, furniture, and crockery wantonly smashed. In addition, large sums of cash and other monetary instruments had been removed from safes blown open by explosives. She also recounts how thirty electric irons had been seized by troops from the building’s laundry along with rugs, embroidery, and other handiwork made by young women enrolled in WlZO’s evening classes. Mrs. Weizmann recorded identical damage and cash and documents seized from other Jewish institutions where swastikas were found scrawled across what walls remained beneath declarations like “Death to the Jews.”54
After touring the damaged WIZO building, Mrs. Weizmann asked her attorney to prepare a detailed report that she forwarded to Cunningham, Barker, Shaw, and Charteris. In reply, Charteris—who had personally warm relations with the Weizmanns and had often taken tea at their Rehovot home—attempted to smooth things over, admitting, “The British Army are NOT all angels; sometimes things are done thoughtlessly for which everyone is sorry, but I sincerely believe they are the best behaved Army in the world. They do NOT hate. They are NOT making war upon the Jewish people.”55
Regardless, the harm done to Anglo-Zionist relations was irreparable. “This is the first time that the public cannot escape the feeling that the bridges between us and Britain have been blown up and that the action taken by the Government affected not only this or that political scheme but the very foundation of the idea of the National Home,” Ha’aretz opined. Even the Sixth Airborne’s after-action report of the operation had to concede this point. Struggling to put the best face on the Yishuv’s unrestrained opprobrium, it noted, “The operation has temporarily lost us what friends amongst the Jews we still had.” Such hopes, however, were little more than wishful thinking. That much was already clear to Colin Mitchell, a young subaltern serving in a Scottish regiment attached to the Sixth Airborne. “So far as we could see,” he commented, “Operation ‘Agatha’ achieved little more than further inflaming Jewish opinion against the British.”56
On June 30 the Vaad Le’umi convened to pass a set of resolutions that would tangibly communicate the Yishuv’s indignation. All relations between Jewish municipalities and the authorities were severed. Jewish officials resigned from all but two of the thirty-nine government committees on which they served (the exceptions were those dealing with the citrus crop and demobilized soldiers). A tax strike was declared, and in essence a policy of deliberate noncooperation with all aspects of British rule was adopted. Weizmann’s impassioned appeal, on the grounds that these measures would ruin the Yishuv’s economy and might therefore put at risk the eventual hoped-for absorption of the hundred thousand new immigrants, resulted in an agreement to postpone their actual implementation and enforcement.57
On July 1, Attlee delivered the government’s promised statement on Palestine to Parliament. Rather than the long-awaited explication of policy, the prime minister provided a lengthy defense of Agatha. The passages from the Anglo-American Committee’s report that pertained to the “sinister” existence of illegal armed forces in Palestine were invoked to justify the operation, as was the Jewish Agency’s refusal to cooperate with the government in their suppression. The AAC, he explained, had determined that “such private armies constituted a danger to the peace of the world and ought not to exist,” hence the reasoning that had guided the government in approving the operation. Indeed, over the previous six months these underground movements had collectively been responsible for the deaths of twenty-one British soldiers and police as well as for material damages exceeding £4 million. The suffering experienced by European Jewry during the war, Attlee continued,
“cannot condone the adoption by Jews in Palestine of some of the very worst of the methods of their oppressors in Europe.” The accumulating evidence of the Jewish Agency’s close connection with the Haganah had therefore compelled the government to take this unprecedented action. “The operations are not directed against the Jewish community as a whole,” the prime minister assured the House, “but solely against those who have taken an active part in the campaign of violence and those responsible for instigating and directing it.”58
An editorial in the usually pro-Labour Manchester Guardian that morning had offered a different explanation for Britain’s travails in Palestine. The blame lay not with the terrorists or the Jewish Agency, it argued, but with the government for failing to articulate a clear policy for Palestine after months of repeated promises, raised expectations, and false hopes. Equally problematic, it averred, was the patent failure to take into account American sensibilities. “It would not seem, for instance, that this brusque action was the most tactful way to secure the help of the United States Government in Palestine to say nothing of the American loan,” the editorial stated. “We must expect a hurricane of abuse from across the Atlantic.” It came forty-eight hours later in the form of a joint statement released by President Truman and the American members of the Jewish Agency’s executive committee that decried the operation and again called for the immediate admission of the hundred thousand immigrants to Palestine per the Anglo-American Committee’s recommendation.59
The message was not lost on Hall. To his mind, the American Zionists were responsible not only for influencing Truman but also for encouraging terrorism in Palestine and creating sympathy for the terrorist organizations both in Palestine and in the United States. Tendentious and mostly inaccurate articles, for instance, had long been a feature of The Answer, the American League for a Free Palestine’s weekly newspaper. The article describing Operation Agatha depicted scenes where “thousands of Jews were arrested and dragged off to detention camps” and said the “cries of the tortured” at Athlit could be heard miles away. This propaganda was indeed effective. U.S. intelligence reported that American donations to the Irgun increased dramatically, with large-denomination U.S. banknotes now circulating in Tel Aviv. An investigation commissioned by Mrs. Weizmann of conditions at the camps revealed no instances of torture, although some men had been taken into a room and beaten by police at Athlit for refusing to give their names. Nonetheless, as a result of Operation Agatha, the American League for the first time openly proclaimed its affiliation with the Irgun.60
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