Anonymous Soldiers

by Bruce Hoffman

  But what the British feared most was that the Americans would now try to link the ongoing negotiations for the desperately needed loan with the Operation Agatha detainees’ release. Indeed, it was not long before the undersecretary of state, Dean Acheson, raised this very matter. Cunningham was resolutely opposed to any such deal unless the Jewish Agency first agreed to the surrender of illegally held Jewish arms and to cooperate with the government against terrorism. The impact of such a deal on Arab opinion, he warned, would be catastrophic and might provoke a violent response, which the military had long argued it could not handle in tandem with Jewish unrest. The Agatha operation in fact had already failed either to impress the Arabs or to allay their suspicions of Britain’s inherent pro-Zionist inclinations.61

  On July 10 the occupation of the Jewish Agency buildings ended. The soldiers withdrew, and those officials and employees who had not been on the arrest lists returned to their offices to find them bereft of all manner of records and documents. Hall assured the House the following day that the damage caused by the searches had been minor—less than £150 in total. He was also very pleased to report that the influence of Weizmann and other moderates was growing. The Zionist leader had told Shaw only a few days earlier that his efforts to persuade the Jewish Agency to abandon its policy of armed confrontation had nearly succeeded. On July 14, Cunningham met with Weizmann, who confirmed this but cautioned the colonial secretary that it affected only the two underground groups under the Jewish Agency’s control—the Haganah and the Palmach. Weizmann’s commitment was completely irrelevant so far as the Irgun and Lehi were concerned. Indeed, British and American intelligence was reporting a significant upsurge in recruits to the Irgun, including experienced partisans who had fought against the Germans in occupied Central and Eastern Europe, as well as in the Warsaw ghetto uprising. Equally disquieting was renewed intelligence traffic concerning a Lehi plot to assassinate Barker as well as a joint effort with the Irgun to murder Bevin either in England or during the foreign secretary’s forthcoming visit to Cairo.62

  Meanwhile, CID and military translators were combing through the tens of thousands of documents seized from the Jewish Agency. Among the treasure trove of materials found were top secret documents prepared by the British embassy in Cairo on the recently concluded Anglo-Egyptian Treaty that Jewish sources had somehow managed to acquire. There was also a detailed account of the closed proceedings of a government subcommittee charged with studying the Anglo-American Committee report. And copies of important government dispatches sent between Jerusalem and London and between Cairo and Jerusalem as well as between Cairo and British legations across the Middle East and various embassies’ communications with the Arab League were also discovered in the Jewish Agency files. “Documents found in the Jewish Agency,” a CID report concluded, “leave no doubt as to the existence of an elaborate Jewish intelligence system operation both in Palestine and abroad.”63

  Leaving aside the further erosion of Anglo-Zionist relations that Agatha caused, the operation otherwise achieved its objective. “It is enough to say that the events of that day changed the policy of the Haganah,” the Zionist historian Yehuda Bauer argues, “and, it may be added, had an important influence on British policy as well.” Henceforth, the Haganah focused exclusively on transporting illegal Jewish immigrants to Palestine, and any violence between its forces and the British was incidental to that activity.64

  Wielding the threat of resignation, Weizmann appealed successively to the Haganah, the Palmach, and the Jewish Agency to ensure that no acts of retaliation against the British would be attempted and that all cooperation with the Irgun and Lehi would cease. Despite being ill with a high fever, the frail, aging Zionist leader had summoned all his strength to attempt to avert what he feared was a still greater disaster should Anglo-Zionist relations be irreparably damaged. He sent an aide, Meyer Weisgal, to communicate this demand directly to Sneh, who, along with most of the Haganah’s senior leadership, had been warned in advance of the impending operation and had thus avoided capture. The Haganah commander in turn had brought the matter before the so-called X Committee, the secret entity that oversaw the joint resistance movement. By a four-to-two vote, the committee accepted Weizmann’s ultimatum. He next had his wife deliver a message to those members of the Jewish Agency Executive not in detention. “In every country in the world it is customary that the President is also the Commander in Chief of the military forces,” Weizmann explained. “I have never before needed to use this authority and have never interfered. But now, for the first and only time, I must demand this right and demand that you cease all military activities.” The executive fell into line and also authorized Weizmann to seek the release of their interned colleagues by offering in exchange to surrender all Jewishheld arms not required for the defense against possible Arab attacks. Cunningham himself later cited the cessation of Haganah involvement in the Hebrew Resistance Movement as Agatha’s most important achievement.65

  Finally, for the first time perhaps since the Arab Rebellion nearly a decade before, the British army was convinced that it had seized the initiative in the fight against terrorism and lawlessness. This may account for Cunningham’s decision, announced on July 3, to commute the death sentences imposed on the two Irgun fighters, Shimson and Ashbel, to life imprisonment. The Irgun’s remaining three British military hostages were released the next day. Believing the situation now sufficiently under control to permit his absence, Cunningham left Palestine on July 19 for consultations in London.66

  In 1946, air travel between the eastern Mediterranean and England still consumed nearly an entire day. It was therefore not until late the following morning that Cunningham’s plane touched down at London’s Northolt Aerodrome. A car was waiting to bring him straight to the Colonial Office, where he was greeted by Hall and congratulated for the skill with which Operation Agatha had been executed. The two men spent the next hour and a half in discussion. The colonial secretary was unstinting in praising Cunningham, and the high commissioner was as modest as ever, giving all credit to the army, which, he averred, had done a “wonderful job.” Cunningham then detailed for Hall the salutary effects that Agatha had engendered among both communities in Palestine. The Arabs as well as the Jews now realized that they “must behave themselves.” The impact on the Yishuv was especially profound, producing what Cunningham described as a “considerable change of outlook.” Indeed, it was even possible to envision an arrangement where the Haganah might agree to place itself completely under the command of either the GOC or the inspector general of police and fully integrate its units into the British security force structure in exchange for the release of the interned Jewish leaders. The possibility of renewed attacks by both the Irgun and Lehi could not of course be ruled out. But the high commissioner was confident that any recrudescence of violence would be limited in scope and certainly less significant than the previous month’s string of alarming incidents.67

  A very different picture, though, was emerging from both U.S. and British intelligence sources in Palestine. Criticism of Weizmann’s calls for moderation was mounting, and members of all three Jewish underground organizations were said to be pressing their commanders for permission to retaliate for Agatha. More disquieting were reports that despite Sneh’s pledge to withdraw the Haganah from the Hebrew Resistance Movement, cooperation with the Irgun had not only continued but intensified. OSS analysts believed that this development was likely the product of the Haganah leader’s deepening pessimism over the ultimate outcome of the ongoing U.S.-U.K. negotiations over Palestine’s future. His concerns were well-founded.68

  Coincidentally, on the same day that Sneh was expressing these fears to a closed meeting of Haganah commanders in Tel Aviv, the Chiefs of Staff were discussing this very issue in London. Their conclusions were somber. Adoption of the Anglo-American Committee report, the chiefs were convinced, would not satisfy the Yishuv’s more militant elements, who would continue to resort to terrorism in pursu
it of their declared goals. Not only would there be continued violence from the Jews, but it would be accompanied by renewed Arab unrest—“more serious and more widespread than in 1936 and 1938/39” and also more vigorously “supported with volunteers and arms from neighbouring Arab states” than before. The result would be a prolonged period of immense regional instability necessitating the commitment of additional British military forces. Demobilization of men drafted during the war would therefore have to be suspended, and personnel who had already been discharged would likely have to be called back into service. The cost of this remobilization alone would amount to at least £38 million above the existing £96 million allocated to Middle East Command—a figure that did not include the expenditures incurred by the actual operations required to suppress the anticipated lawlessness and restore order. Britain’s supplies of oil and access to regional ports and bases would also be impacted and Soviet expansion into the region thus facilitated. Finally, the chiefs cited the very real challenge of “sustaining the morale of British troops called upon to take action against Arabs in support of Jews, whose terrorist activities have already inflicted upon them irritations, insults, hardships and casualties.” The only viable option in their view was, as it had always been, to obtain American assistance, but this had long ago been taken off the table.69

  The cabinet agreed with the chiefs’ assessment when it met the following day. The Anglo-American Committee report’s recommendations, Attlee and his ministers concluded, “offered no practical prospect of progress towards a solution to the constitutional problem in Palestine.” Bevin’s scheme to draw the United States into helping with Palestine was now dead and buried. Hereafter, Britain—just as Sneh had worried—would alone determine Palestine’s future.70

  According to Elizabeth Monroe, the British journalist and scholar of the Middle East, the Labour government’s rejection of the report’s recommendations was a grave miscalculation, reflecting a grievously misplaced “overconfidence in British power.” Attlee and Hall, along with their fellow cabinet members, had doubtless been emboldened by Cunningham’s unbridled optimism and the similarly upbeat assessments provided by Montgomery and Dempsey, who also argued that a decisive corner had been turned in the suppression of the Jewish rebellion. But, along with the Americans, British intelligence was warning of more trouble ahead. On July 10 the Irgun had advised the Yishuv to stockpile sufficient food and water for a period of at least fourteen days in preparation for the commencement of a major new terrorist offensive. Then, lest that message be misconstrued or ignored, four days later Tel Aviv awoke to find the city’s walls plastered with Irgun posters calling upon the Yishuv “with weapon in hand [to] be ready for the fight!” “The atmosphere is very electric at the moment,” Lloyd Phillips wrote to his father, “and we have to be prepared for Jewish terrorist retaliation at any moment.” Indeed, unbeknownst to him or anyone outside a small circle of the most senior Haganah and Irgun leadership, plans were being laid for an attack that would shake the very foundation of British rule over Palestine.71

  CHAPTER 14

  Defense and Conquest

  There was no other place in 1940s Palestine like Jerusalem’s King David Hotel. The uncontested cynosure of the country’s social life, it was also the nerve center of British rule, housing the government secretariat, army headquarters, and the local offices of Britain’s military and civilian security and intelligence services. The hotel incongruously remained open to the public, even though it was ringed with barbed-wire defenses, searchlights, machine-gun pits, checkpoints, roadblocks, armored cars, radio police vans, and continuous foot patrols. Accordingly, Britons, Jews, and Arabs, along with a glittering array of visiting potentates, dignitaries, and the well-heeled, regularly congregated at its popular bar, dined and danced in its basement nightclub, La Regence, or took tea in the aptly named Grand Lobby.1

  The famed Israeli novelist Amos Oz recalled how his comparatively impoverished parents venerated the King David as a place “where culture-seeking Jews and Arabs mixed with cultivated Englishmen with perfect manners, where dreamy, long-necked ladies floated in evening dresses, on the arms of gentlemen in dark suits, where broad-minded Britons dined with cultured Jews or educated Arabs, where there were recitals, balls, literary evenings, thés dansants, and exquisite, artistic conversations.” A British army officer stationed in Palestine at the time vividly recalled the weekly Saturday evening dances that attracted “the youth and beauty of Jerusalem”; another fondly remembered the hotel as an island of comfort and serenity—what he described as a “never-never land” far removed from the horrors of the battlefield and discomfort of garrison life. Although the price of drinks was exorbitant, the spectacular surroundings were more than fair compensation.2

  Built during the 1929 riots, the hotel was also specifically designed to withstand earthquakes and aerial and artillery bombardment. It occupied a coveted four-and-a-half-acre site overlooking the Old City and featured two hundred bedrooms (and a perennially long waiting list for accommodation), sixty bathrooms, central heating, a tennis court, two restaurants, the aforementioned bar, a banquet hall, and a lovely rose garden. Upon arriving at the King David in 1941, Sir Henry “Chips” Channon, the American-born, millionaire Tory MP and bon vivant, recorded in his diary how he immediately “fell in love with it: next to the Ritz in Paris, it surely is the world’s best hotel.”3

  The King David, however, was unique in one other key respect: the government and military offices housed there. At the height of the Arab Rebellion, in October 1938, the British army had requisitioned the forty bedrooms and seventeen bathrooms on the hotel’s fourth floor for use as its Palestine headquarters. Then, the following month, the Palestine government took over the ground floor, mezzanine, and the three remaining upper floors of the hotel’s south wing for its secretariat. Less than a third of the grand hotel’s rooms remained open to the public, and these were all located in the center and north wings of the hotel on the first two floors only. The secretariat, accommodated in the hotel’s south wing, had its own entrance and staircases. But the military had to use the front entrance to access its space, resulting in a policy whereby only officers and guests were allowed to use the hotel’s elevators; other ranks and hotel employees had to make do with the crowded, narrow service stairs in the main part of the building.4

  The heavy foot traffic of both British officers coming in and out of headquarters and government officials popping over from the secretariat for a meal, a drink at the bar, or tea in the lobby created a frisson of importance and intrigue that attracted diplomats, spies, and journalists who mixed with the hotel’s guests and other civilian visitors. For all these reasons the King David, despite the two hundred soldiers who worked there and the four hundred more bivouacked three hundred yards away, presented an irresistible target to the Irgun.5

  Accordingly, sometime in April 1946 Begin put before the Hebrew Resistance Movement a plan to blow up the hotel. The group had developed a new weapon for this purpose—a time bomb that could be neither moved nor defused but that would also permit the issuance of a warning to evacuate the hotel and thereby avoid civilian casualties. Begin was confident that his fighters could penetrate the King David’s formidable defenses, accomplish their mission, and effect their escape. Although he accepted the Haganah’s initial veto of the operation, Begin wasn’t prepared to abandon it completely and instructed his men to continue to refine the attack plan, now code-named Chick. Then the British launched Operation Agatha, and everything changed. Within seventy-two hours, Sneh and the five other Haganah commanders still at large approved a new series of attacks in retaliation for “Black Saturday.” First, the Palmach would raid the British arms dump at Bat Galim and seize all the weapons removed from Kibbutz Yagur. Second, Lehi would attack the Palestine Information Office, located in the David Brothers building, at the intersection of Julian’s Way and King George V Avenue. And, third, the Irgun would bomb the King David Hotel, located just a few hundred yards awa
y.6

  Begin always maintained that the Haganah had another, equally critical objective in targeting the hotel. Sneh reportedly intended that the Irgun’s bomb would also destroy the highly sensitive documents directly implicating the Haganah in the resistance movement that had been taken from the Jewish Agency’s offices during Operation Agatha. The Irgun commander maintains that he was told that these documents were kept in the military and intelligence offices on the hotel’s upper floors.

  But Israel Galili, who succeeded Sneh as the Haganah’s chief of staff, contends that the documents’ destruction had nothing to do with the attack: “It is nonsensical to imagine that the explosion would destroy specific documents. It is nonsensical to assume that these documents were kept in only one copy. The question of documents was raised only as a by-product.” Nonetheless, according to British intelligence sources, the Haganah was convinced that these documents were stored at the King David. Accordingly, this consideration does in fact appear to have been behind Sneh’s request.7