Anonymous Soldiers

by Bruce Hoffman

  “Why was the King David Hotel not evacuated?” Begin asked five years later in his memoir of the Irgun’s struggle, The Revolt. “In this tragic chapter,” he claims, “there are certain facts which are beyond all doubt”: first, that the Irgun’s warnings were inexplicably ignored; and, second, that the hotel’s evacuation was specifically prevented. “There is reason to believe,” the Irgun leader wrote, “that a specific order was given, by someone in authority, that the warning to leave the hotel should be ignored. Why was this stupid order given? Who was responsible for it?” Although Begin provides no answers, his version of events has assumed almost totemic importance in the mythology of both the Irgun’s struggle and the history of pre-state Israel. It is today enshrined, albeit in redacted form, on a large tablet affixed to the wrought-iron fence outside the hotel’s southern wing. In white letters against a blue background, the colors of the Israeli flag, the plaque reads,

  King David Hotel

  The hotel housed the British Mandate Secretariat as well as the Army Headquarters. On July 22, 1946, Irgun fighters, at the order of the Hebrew Resistance Movement, planted explosives in the basement. Warning phone calls has [sic] been made, to the hotel’s dispatch, the “Palestine Post” and the French Consulate, urging the hotel’s occupants to leave immediately. The hotel was not evacuated, and after 25 minutes, the bombs exploded. The entire western wing was destroyed and to the Irgun’s regret 92 persons were killed.*

  The problem is that, like Begin’s account of the bombing, which claims that “twenty-five or twenty-seven minutes … elapsed from the receipt of the warnings to the moment of the explosion,” this purported statement of fact not only is inaccurate but also perpetuates an image of British malfeasance that is as false as it is self-serving.23

  Its provenance can be traced directly to the Irgun’s own acknowledgment of responsibility for the bombing in the form of a brief statement distributed to newspaper offices in Jerusalem the following night. The communiqué asserts that “the tragedy which occurred in the civil offices was not caused by Jewish soldiers who carried out their duty with soldierly courage and self-sacrifice, but by the British oppressors who disregarded the warning.” In support of this claim, the Irgun stated that it had given ample warning to the authorities via three telephone calls made between 12:10 and 12:15 as well as from the small bomb that exploded outside George Salameh’s shop, which was intended “to notify the guests so that they may leave the hotel and to passers-by in the neighbourhood.” Accordingly, the document concludes, “if the announcement of the British liars is correct, the big explosion occurred at 12.37, meaning that they still had twenty minutes to clear the building. The responsibility for the loss of life among the civil population [therefore] falls entirely on them.”24

  Even in the pyretic atmosphere engendered by Operation Agatha, with suspicion and hatred of Britain rampant, the Irgun’s shameless effort to absolve itself by in effect blaming the victim fell on deaf ears. Both the Vaad Le’umi and the Jewish Agency Executive held a special joint session for the express purpose of declaring their “utter horror at the outrage” and calling upon all Jews to “help stamp out the desperadoes,” while the chief rabbi, Ben Zion Uziel, called upon “all who have had a hand in this sin [to] cease from this dangerous path which is forbidden by the law of Israel.” The Hebrew press was particularly unsparing in the opprobrium heaped on the Irgun.25

  None of this, however, mattered to Begin, who brushed off the criticism as “journalistic hysteria and self-abasement.” What did wound him profoundly was the totally unexpected, searing rebuke from the Haganah. Ignoring its own role in the operation, the Haganah broadcast a statement over Kol Israel on July 23 denouncing the “heavy loss of life caused by the dissidents’ operation at the King David Hotel.” The Irgun commander was dumbstruck. It was not so long ago that the Haganah had used the same language to justify its cooperation with the authorities during the Saison campaign. As Begin pondered the matter, a courier sent by Galili arrived at his door bearing an urgent message requesting they meet at 9:00 that same evening.26

  “What does this mean?” Begin recalled asking his Haganah counterpart. “Don’t you know what and who caused the ‘heavy toll’? Why do you denounce us? The plan was agreed between us, our men carried out their instructions precisely, the warning was given—why don’t you tell the truth?” According to the Irgun leader, Galili prevaricated. He presumably did not wish to reveal that the operation had been vetoed weeks earlier by the X Committee, which in addition had forbade continued cooperation with the Irgun and Lehi. Instead, Begin recalled, Galili regaled him with a story about a member of the Haganah’s Information Service who had learned of a conversation that had supposedly taken place between a senior British police officer and a senior British official shortly before the bombing. Upon being informed of the Irgun’s warning, this official—whom Galili’s mysterious informant believed was the chief secretary—had replied that he was not here to take orders from Jews but to give them, thus preventing the hotel’s evacuation.27

  Begin demanded that this information be publicized. Galili complied and ordered Kol Israel to broadcast a statement to this effect that was heard throughout Palestine on August 6. The same tale had been fed to U.S. intelligence officers in Palestine the previous week, and the day before the broadcast it had been related to the MI5 station chief by Zeev Sharif, Kollek’s successor as Haganah liaison officer. Sharif’s account was dismissed as a craven effort “both to discredit Sir John Shaw, and to place on British heads guilt for the deaths at the King David Hotel. The Agency are, in other words,” the MI5 report to the Colonial Office correctly intuited, “attempting in some measure to find excuses for the Irgun Zvai Leumi.” The American historian and journalist Thurston Clarke reached precisely this conclusion in his exhaustively researched 1981 account of the bombing. “In fact, the story was a baseless rumor promoted by the Haganah in order to mollify the Irgun and fix responsibility for the carnage on Shaw.”28

  Begin and his followers, however, swallowed the story whole. Desperate to cleanse their bloodstained hands and deflect blame onto any plausible target, the Irgun wrapped their arms around this secondhand bit of tittle-tattle and embraced it with a fervor that belied both its questionable pedigree and the motive of the person who originally conveyed it. When the Irgun issued a pamphlet titled “The Truth About the King David” to mark the bombing’s first anniversary, this canard was prominently featured. Like all the best propaganda, which is built upon a kernel of truth but surrounded by lies, the document’s first four paragraphs accurately describe the operation. But it then diverges into fantasy, blaming “the criminal Shaw” for “the many casualties” caused by the Irgun’s bombs. “A representative of the ‘Resistance Movement’ told us privately,” the pamphlet continues, “that Shaw replied to the British Police Officer who informed him of our last telephonic warning, ‘I do not take orders from Jews—I give them orders.’ ” The remaining paragraphs are devoted to burnishing the Irgun’s image and sullying the Haganah’s—an indication of the depths to which their relations had sunk in the year that had followed the King David operation and the Hebrew Resistance Movement’s cessation. These same points were reiterated in a separate Irgun pamphlet, titled, “Background of the Struggle for Liberation of Eretz Israel: Facts on the Relations between the Irgun Zvai Leumi and the Haganah,” that was distributed in the United States by the American League for a Free Palestine around the same time.29

  Nor did it take long for the allegation to appear in print. In 1947, a book was published in New York titled Palestine Underground: The Story of the Jewish Resistance by J. Borisov, the pseudonym of an Irgun propagandist who, the book’s introduction explains, “was in a position to secure first-hand information about the resistance.” In the text, Borisov cites “abundant evidence” that British officials ignored the Irgun’s warnings but provides no evidence to support his claim beyond a vague reference to some “documentary proof” in the Haganah’s pos
session that confirms the story of Shaw’s alleged statement. On that basis alone, Borisov concludes that “the heavy loss of life was caused exclusively by Sir John’s vain pride and obstinacy.” This charge was repeated in Britain the following year with the publication of a revised edition of the 1938 book The Rape of Palestine, written by William B. Ziff. A prominent Jewish-American publisher, Ziff was a loyal follower of Jabotinsky’s as well as a former president of the Revisionist movement’s U.S. branch and a militant opponent of British rule of Palestine.30

  Although there is no evidence that Shaw was aware of the Borisov book, when The Rape of Palestine appeared, he sued Ziff and his British publisher for libel. The case was heard in the High Court of Justice, one of Britain’s most senior courts. Among those called to testify was Marjorie King, Shaw’s personal assistant in the secretariat at the time. She confirmed under oath that the chief secretary had received “no unusual [telephone] calls [from] outside the building” about a bomb or warning of any other kind of attack on the King David that fateful afternoon. Investigators hired by the defense in Israel were unable to discover any evidence to support Ziff’s allegation. The court decided the case in Shaw’s favor, ordering the author and his publisher to withdraw the book from publication, “unreservedly” correct “all imputations” of Shaw’s character, and apologize to the former chief secretary for slandering him.31

  Perhaps for this reason, Begin was careful not to cite Shaw by name when The Revolt appeared in British bookstores two years later. Among Shaw’s personal papers, however, is a letter to the Colonial Office’s Legal Department, detailing how he had consulted with his personal attorney about suing the former Irgun commander and Begin’s British publisher, W. H. Allen. Shaw, however, was advised against it on the grounds that Begin’s reference to “a high official” was insufficient to justify a claim of personal defamation. He did nonetheless write to the publisher in order to set the record straight. “The statement that any such warning reached me, that I made any comment on it, or gave any orders as the result of it, are lies and I categorically deny them,” Shaw declared. “No such warning reached me in any shape or form, or my Secretary through whom all telephone calls to me had to be made.”32

  None of this, however, deterred Begin and his apologists from continuing to peddle this canard—as the plaque outside the King David Hotel today attests. For example, volume 4 of the Irgun’s official history, Ma’archot Ha-Irgun Ha-Zvai Ha-Le’umi (Battle for freedom: The Irgun Zvai Le’umi), published in 1975, not only repeats the story along with Shaw’s alleged reply—citing Galili as the source—but also grafts onto it the additional allegation that the chief secretary deliberately prevented the evacuation by ordering British soldiers to open fire “in the direction of those trying to leave” the hotel. The author, David Niv, does not explain how, if Shaw had refused to communicate the warning to the rest of the secretariat, as is alleged, any of the staff would have known of the warning and therefore attempted to leave the hotel. As Shaw himself observed in a letter to Isham in 1972, “It is interesting that every time this story is revived some new detail embellishes it. This, if nothing else, is sufficient to indicate that it is untrue.”33

  Thirty years after the event, Begin, then Israel’s prime minister, stubbornly clung to this version of events in an interview with the British historian Nicholas Bethell. And, when pressed by Clarke in 1977, Galili, who had gone on to serve as a cabinet minister in several Israeli governments, was unable to provide any proof that the warnings ever reached Shaw or that the chief secretary had acted to prevent the hotel’s evacuation.34

  All of the above, however, should not be taken to imply that the official British accounts of the warning issue were any more accurate. In particular, the British army’s version of events must be treated with caution. The Quarterly Historical Report of the Third Parachute Brigade, for example, dismissed the Irgun’s initial statement that it had provided ample warning as “grossly untrue and issued as an attempt to justify … [the] outrage.” The official historical record maintained by Palestine headquarters concedes that warnings were issued but that they were so minuscule in timing as to have been rendered useless. “The telephone warning to the civilian operator on the Hotel exchange,” it states, “was received one minute before the explosion.” The hotel manager, the historical record continues, was informed of the warning “only a second before the explosion took place.” Moreover, this version claims that the Irgun’s calls to the French consulate and The Palestine Post were not made until “after the main explosion occurred,” concluding that the “myth of humanitarianism which [the] Irgun attempted to create was thus exploded and the cold-blooded nature of the attack revealed.”35

  The truth of the matter, however, is both more complex and more complicated than any of the preceding explanations allow. Although it is true that warning calls to evacuate the King David were received by both the hotel switchboard and an operator at The Palestine Post—a fact confirmed at the time by U.S. intelligence officers in Jerusalem—and were in turn communicated to the hotel’s assistant manager, Emile Soutter, the jumble of events and noise and confusion simultaneously occurring inside and outside the hotel—including the shoot-out in the basement between the Irgun assault team and the British soldiers as well as the running gun battle across the hotel’s garden that followed; the diversionary explosion outside George Salameh’s shop; and the sirens sounding the terrorist alarm, only to shortly afterward issue the all clear—together conspired to ensure that word was never passed to Shaw or any other person of authority in time. Indeed, the British army’s own historical account of the attack subscribes to this explanation of events to describe the failure to evacuate the King David. “The ‘success’ of the Jewish terrorists,” it states, “was aided by the confusion their disguise created and the terror their entry caused among the hotel employees in the basement. When the British officer was shot and fatally wounded, events moved with such rapidity that it was still impossible to elucidate from hotel employees that Jewish terrorists had been in the building for over half an hour. When it did become apparent that the Jewish raiders had conveyed milk churns and bulky packages in the direction of La Regence restaurant, it was too late to avert disaster.”36

  This final sentence is key to understanding why the warnings did not have their intended effect. The Irgun’s and Begin’s various claims both at the time and since to have provided twenty-two-, twenty-five-, twenty-seven-, and thirty-minute windows of time between the first call to the hotel and the bombs’ explosion have never been proven. Nor has the British army’s official histories’ assertion that the warnings were not received until either a minute or even a second before the blast. Rather, Clarke established that the first warning call was made to the hotel at 12:27—ten minutes before the blast—and the second was conveyed by The Palestine Post’s operator to the King David’s switchboard at 12:32, five minutes before the explosion. Soutter was in fact made aware of both calls but chose to take no further action for two reasons. The first was that British government offices in Jerusalem had long been subjected to bomb threats that had proven to be nothing more than disruptive hoaxes. Hence, the assistant hotel manager was not overly alarmed by the calls and, in any event, did not wish to cause potential panic by ordering the building’s evacuation. Soutter and his wife had themselves experienced two false alarms the previous month while waiting in line at a nearby Barclays Bank branch and then at the main post office. Both incidents had turned shambolic as patrons and employees alike had rushed for the exits. “He did not want to be responsible for a similar fiasco at the King David,” Clarke explains. “Furthermore, there had just been shootings and a bombing in the streets outside. Was it wise to send hundreds of people rushing into Julian’s Way?” It must also be said that because so many Jews either worked in the King David or regularly visited it, there was a false sense of security among the British and everyone else frequenting the hotel that 14.4terrorists would never dare to attack a target
that might in any way cause Jewish casualties.37

  Ironically, the sad truth of the matter is that even if the King David had been evacuated, as the Irgun intended, the casualty toll would likely have been even greater. Those passersby and personnel who had already gathered in front of George Salameh’s shop before the main explosion were mercilessly cut down by flying shards of glass and bits of masonry hurled in their direction by the force of the blast. Accordingly, had everyone in the building been standing on the pavement in front of the YMCA across the street from the King David, still more people would doubtless have been killed or hurt.38

  Begin and the Irgun had apparently neglected to consider this possibility in planning the attack. Therefore, arguments that the Irgun gave warning of the impending explosion—albeit with insufficient time to permit the hotel’s evacuation—and that the group’s proclaimed policy was to avoid harming civilians cannot in the final analysis absolve Begin and his organization from responsibility for the loss of life and harm that their bombs inflicted.

  The attack evoked horror and umbrage back in London. Addressing the House of Commons, Attlee termed it an “insane act of terrorism.” Daniel Lipson, a Jewish member of the opposition Conservative Party, declared that the bombing brought “dishonour and shame to the name of Jew”; his fellow Tory, the Earl of Winterton, described the Irgun “as vile and treacherous a foe as the Nazis.” Comment in the press was identically condemnatory in tone but significantly different in substance. For the first time, just as Begin had intended, doubt began to creep into the calculus of whether Britain should persevere in its stoic quest to achieve a just settlement of the Palestine problem. “Hopes that the teeth of terrorism had been drawn by recent arrests and discoveries of hidden arms dumps have been disappointed,” The Daily Telegraph lamented. The Manchester Guardian likewise observed that the bombing “will be a shock to those who imagined that the Government’s firmness had put a stop to Jewish terrorism and had brought about an easier situation in Palestine. In fact, the opposite is the truth … Yesterday was their answer and it would be foolish to hope that it will be the last.” Partition, the editorial concluded, “more than ever seems to be the best answer, and it is to be hoped that the British and American representatives will not reject it without far more careful consideration than the Anglo-American Committee gave it.”39