Anonymous Soldiers

by Bruce Hoffman

  Finally, the King David bombing raised anew fears of Jewish terrorist attacks outside Palestine. MI5 had received new information about a Jewish terrorist plot on Bevin’s life. On July 24, accordingly, representatives from the Security Service and Scotland Yard’s Special Branch met with Foreign Office officials and members of the foreign secretary’s staff to discuss additional security measures for Bevin, who was then attending the peace conference talks in Paris. Their concerns for his safety were heightened by the fact that for more than two years British intelligence had been aware of the active assistance being provided by France’s external military intelligence agency—the fabled Second Bureau of the General Staff, colloquially known as the Deuxième Bureau—to all three Jewish underground organizations. The Deuxième Bureau had reportedly not only turned a blind eye to Lehi and Irgun operations in Lebanon but also been providing funds to Lehi and selling arms to the Haganah. France’s motive, MI5 believed, was to stir up trouble in Palestine in retaliation for the support British intelligence had given to Lebanese and Syrian nationalist movements demanding independence from French rule as well as to distract Britain’s attention from the Levant by, Alexander Kellar surmised, “embarrassing our position in the Mandate.”78

  It was therefore decided that the French Foreign Ministry should be approached and asked to clear the luxurious George V hotel, where the British delegation was staying, of all guests; close its restaurants and bars; place armed guards on each floor and at each entrance; and assign plainclothes police officers to pose as waiters and bellmen and thus mingle with the hotel staff. From Palestine, Cunningham authorized the dispatch of a Palestine Police Force CID officer to Paris to serve on the joint MI5–Scotland Yard security detail protecting the foreign minister. The French, to everyone’s surprise, readily agreed to these demands, and by early afternoon on July 28 they all were in place. News of the threat, and the precautions undertaken, appeared in the British press on August 29, only to be strenuously denied by a Foreign Office spokesman.79

  Similar concerns had also been raised at the July 24 meeting about Bevin’s security during a likely forthcoming trip to Egypt. There, the danger was equally from Arab and Jewish terrorists. But whereas the Egyptian authorities were confident that they could neutralize any Arab threat, they were unable to make any such guarantee regarding Jewish terrorism. Accordingly, the Foreign Office and the Security Service agreed that the foreign secretary should stay at the British embassy in Cairo during his visit—which would not be announced ahead of time and would be restricted to two or three days at most. It was also decided that the level of security at the embassy should be commensurate with that in force when Prime Minister Churchill had hosted both President Roosevelt and the Chinese leader, Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek, at Mena House hotel, just outside Cairo, in 1943. Furthermore, the foreign secretary’s route of travel would always be lined with Egyptian troops and police facing the crowd and his personal vehicle escorted fore and aft by British troops in jeeps armed with automatic weapons.80

  These fears intensified the following month after Lehi announced that it would kill one hundred Britons if the death sentences imposed on eighteen of its fighters who had attacked the Haifa railway works in June were implemented. Both the Cairo- and the Jerusalem-based Jewish Agency liaison officers to British intelligence were emphatic that the threat was genuine, explaining that the Irgun had joined forces with Lehi for this purpose. These attacks, they emphasized, could conceivably occur in Palestine, elsewhere in the Middle East, or in Britain. To this end, an MI5 source had also reported that five cells of Lehi and Irgun terrorists had been dispatched to London to “operate in a manner similar to the I.R.A.” and assassinate British VIPs. Their intention—the informant had quoted the terrorists planning the operation as saying—was to “beat the dog in his own kennel.”81

  * The ninety-two persons cited on the plaque include one of the Irgun men who was killed at the King David Hotel in the course of the operation.

  CHAPTER 15

  Beating the Dog in His Own Kennel

  Amid great fanfare the theatrical production of A Flag Is Born debuted on September 5, 1946, at Broadway’s Alvin Theatre. Written by the Jewish-American screenwriter, director, producer, playwright, journalist, and novelist Ben Hecht, with music composed by the renowned German-Jewish refugee Kurt Weill, the play featured the Academy Award–winning actor Paul Muni in the role of Tevya, with Celia Adler, the “first lady of the Yiddish theater,” as his wife, Zelda. They portray an elderly couple who, having survived the Holocaust, are intent on reaching Palestine. In one of the play’s most poignant scenes Tevya asks the character in the role of the anonymous English Statesman, “Why did you fight the Germans, so you could take over their work of killing the rest of the Jews?” An up-and-coming twenty-two-year-old actor named Marlon Brando had the role of David, a young Holocaust survivor who accompanies Tevya and Zelda on their journey. Tragedy befalls the couple as, exhausted and shorn of hope, first Zelda and then Tevya die. A distraught David is on the verge of suicide when suddenly the stirring sounds of the Zionist anthem, “Ha-Tikva,” fill the theater. Three soldiers emerge onstage, representing the Irgun, the Haganah, and Lehi. “Don’t you hear our guns, David?” one asks. “We speak to [our enemies] in a new Jewish language, the language of guns. We fling no more prayers, or tears at the world. We fling bullets … We promise to wrest our homeland out of British claws as the Americans once did … Come, David, and fight for Palestine.” The play repeatedly drew such parallels between the Hebrew struggle for national liberation and the American Revolutionary War.1

  The production was staged for a mere $40,000—with Brando, Muni, and Adler accepting the minimum Actors’ Equity fee and the rest of the cast and crew forgoing their usual wages. Lauded by mass-market news-and-photo weeklies as well as by The Hollywood Reporter and the famed newspaper and radio gossip columnist Walter Winchell, A Flag Is Born was nonetheless panned by the highbrow media. The New Yorker, for instance, termed it “a combination of dubious poetry and political over-simplification,” and the doyen of Broadway critics, The New York Times’s Brooks Atkinson, described it as a “turgid stage polemic urging the Jews of the world to unite and concluding with an episode of flag waving, that from the point of view of stage craftsmanship, comes straight out of the rummage basket.” But even he had to concede that Weill’s score was “one of the finest” he’d ever written and praised Muni for giving “one of the great performances of his career.”2

  Earning rave reviews was not the play’s purpose. Raising money was. And its beneficiary was one of the various U.S.-based Irgun front organizations, the American League for a Free Palestine, that Peter Bergson had established. As an article in The New York Times heralding the production’s opening night noted, “Proceeds from the limited engagement … will be used by the American League for a Free Palestine, sponsor of the offering, to defray the expense of transporting Hebrews from Europe to Palestine.” In describing the play, Hecht, the first screenwriter to receive an Academy Award for best original screenplay, explained, “It is pure and unabashed propaganda for a race that I feel has been disenfranchised.” Indeed, on opening night he was up onstage immediately after the actors took their final bows, beseeching the audience, “Give us your money and we will turn it into history.”3

  To promote the play and its fund-raising mission, Bergson had put together a sponsoring committee that included such luminaries as Eleanor Roosevelt, the composer Leonard Bernstein, the German-Jewish refugee novelist Lion Feuchtwanger, and Mayor William O’Dwyer of New York City. Rabbi Judah Magnes, the president of Jerusalem’s Hebrew University and a prominent Jewish-American pacifist who clung to the ideal of a binational state in Palestine, wrote an open letter to Mrs. Roosevelt that appeared in The New York Times. It implored her to resign from the committee and dissociate herself from the play on the grounds that the revenue it generated would be used to fund Irgun violence. Mrs. Roosevelt, however, ignored the plea and remained a comm
ittee member.4

  A Flag Is Born’s original four-week run in New York was extended twice for a total of fourteen weeks before it went on the road to Detroit, Philadelphia, Chicago, Boston, and Baltimore. Congressmen, government officials, and other dignitaries were taken by a special train from Washington, D.C., to attend the Baltimore performance. Hecht would later claim that A Flag Is Born raised nearly $1 million for the Irgun—enough to warrant a vessel transporting illegal immigrants to Palestine the following year to be named in his honor (the Zionist historian Judith Tydor Baumel claims it raised only a modest $166,000, though more was raised through ancillary events, such as a fund-raising dinner honoring Muni on September 30, which alone reportedly netted the Irgun an additional $74,000).5

  Fund-raising advertisements placed in mass-market daily tabloids such as the New York Post in conjunction with the play so alarmed London that a formal protest was delivered to the State Department questioning the legality of openly raising money for illicit activities in a territory governed by “a friendly power.” Such activities by “extreme American Zionist groups,” Hall groused to Cunningham, “bear heavy responsibility for the increasing tendency of the Jews in Palestine to resort to terrorism. At the very least they have helped to create an atmosphere of sympathy for terrorism, both in Palestine and in the United States.”6

  The Irgun’s American support entities helped the group in other ways as well. While the Colonial Office parried the American League for a Free Palestine’s attempts to obtain information on the nearly three hundred Irgun and Lehi fighters interned at a British detention facility in Eritrea, its sister organization, the Hebrew Committee of National Liberation, succeeded in persuading the International Committee of the Red Cross to intervene on the detainees’ behalf. Unable to rebuff a request from an esteemed nongovernmental organization like the Red Cross, the Colonial Office granted permission for a representative to visit the facility in June 1946. His report was released at the end of September. Although it presented a mostly satisfactory assessment of conditions at the camp, the Red Cross official came away very concerned about both the circumstances of the detainees’ imprisonment and the deterioration of their physical and mental health. A combination of the dry climate and high altitude had perpetuated a cycle of insomnia and anxiety among some detainees that had in turn bred chronic heart and pulmonary problems. He was also disturbed by the deterioration of the mental health of other prisoners who had never been charged with any crime; having spent five and six years in indefinite captivity, they despaired of ever regaining their freedom and hence were suffering from acute anxiety and even hysteria. Their British jailers, the Red Cross official reported, were completely unsympathetic, maintaining that terrorism’s inherently conspiratorial nature meant that evidence could rarely be obtained with which to secure convictions and therefore these men could never be tried in a court of law. Hence, deportation and exile were the government’s only recourse. In a revealing observation the Red Cross delegate observed, “Although the British Authorities are unable to furnish peremptory evidence of the guilt of each detainee, they feel convinced that every Palestinian Jew plays the part of accomplice in Palestine.”7

  This was also the view of British soldiers and police in Palestine. It was vividly illustrated at the trial of a British officer accused of shooting to death a Jewish passerby on a Tel Aviv street the previous June. Lieutenant B. Woodworth testified that he had been among the diners at the British officers’ club in the Hayarkon Hotel on June 18 when Irgun gunmen had burst into the room. Although he was not taken captive because of his comparatively low rank, the entire experience had so rankled Woodworth that when he and a fellow officer were jostled while out walking the following evening, he feared that they were being attacked. He therefore drew his pistol and fired—killing a young Czech immigrant whose parents had perished in the Holocaust. In his defense, Woodworth claimed that “the people of Tel Aviv were 98 per cent anti-British” and that “it was very difficult to differentiate between peaceful and terrorist Jews.” Although he was acquitted of the murder charge, Woodworth was convicted of manslaughter and dishonorably discharged from the army. Nonetheless, the trial highlighted the suspicion and antipathy toward the Yishuv that, in the aftermath of the King David Hotel bombing, had resulted in a marked increase in the number of scuffles between British troops and Jewish passersby as well as acts of vandalism directed against Jewish-owned property. The problem had become sufficiently alarming that additional military police patrols had to be mounted in Jerusalem. The Sixth Airborne’s simultaneous searches of two Jewish settlements in the Gaza district, Dorot and Ruhama, in August provided further proof of the depth of this animus.8

  At dawn on August 28 both kibbutzim, with populations of 235 and 170 persons, respectively, were surrounded by at least ten times that number of troops, backed by police. The two settlements had ostensibly been targeted, according to Wilson, because they were “known … centres of illegal armed training” and were therefore believed to have large stockpiles of hidden arms. But the operation’s real intention, the division’s historian admits, was to pressure the Haganah into abandoning its efforts to transport illegal immigrants to Palestine or risk the continued confiscation of its arsenal. The searches, which lasted nearly a week, were unparalleled in terms of the damage and destruction of property that the troops caused. This perhaps explains why the operations’ commander barred a group of journalists, including a newsreel camera team, from entering either Dorot or Ruhama—despite an invitation from the army’s public relations officer and Sixth Airborne headquarters to observe the searches.9

  When The Palestine Post’s correspondent finally gained access to both settlements on September 2, he reported, “Not a single room was intact. All floors had been ripped up, and there were holes in some places to a depth of more than two metres. Holes were also knocked in walls and ceilings.” Although such extensive damage could be attributed to the search parties’ determination to discover caches of weapons hidden behind false walls, in ceilings, and beneath floors, less explicable were the smashed typewriters and duplicating machines in the settlements’ administrative offices, the deliberate sabotaging of farm vehicles and industrial equipment, the broken furniture, shattered windows, torn-up clothing, and destroyed kitchen utensils—in addition to the many swastikas scrawled across walls and doors. According to Daphne Trevor, when settlers pleaded with the officers directing the searches to intervene and halt the vandalism, they were reportedly told, “We’ll stop the trouble if you tell us where the arms are.”10

  Although army investigators breezily dismissed the accusations of vandalism as “a deliberate campaign of propaganda,” Cunningham privately told Hall that “a certain amount of unnecessary and willful damage” had in fact occurred. The high commissioner, however, attributed this “in part at least, to the fact that the troops were provoked by shouts of ‘Gestapo’ etc.” Wilson himself also concedes that the wreckage done by the paratroopers was a product of the taunting that they were subjected to. “It was certainly not in the interest of the soldiers deliberately to stir up hatred,” he explains. “But expressions such as ‘Gestapo’ and ‘English bastards’ spat out with such venom could hardly be ignored indefinitely, and without doubt were sometimes answered in kind.” A Ruhama settler, however, recalled how the troops responded to shouts of “Nazi! Nazi!” with chants of “Heil Hitler! Heil Hitler!” with “both sides spitting at each other.” In a public address he gave shortly before returning to England the following month, Martin Charteris implied that there was another reason behind the aggressiveness shown at Dorot and Ruhama: British forces simply no longer saw any difference between the community and the terrorists. Indeed, the army’s own historical account for that period noted the “growth of anti Jewish feeling amongst all ranks.” Accordingly, it is perhaps not surprising that the first report of British deserters selling arms and explosives to Palestinian Arabs surfaced at this time.11

  Thomas Scrivenor had not b
een back to Palestine for three years. As assistant district commissioner for Tel Aviv from 1937 to 1943, he had gotten to know the country and the Yishuv well before promotions took him first to Malta and then to a policy-making position at the Colonial Office in London. He was thus surprised by what he found when he returned that fall as the newly appointed principal assistant secretary of the Palestine government—his predecessor having perished in the King David Hotel bombing. “Oh yes, we were on our way out then, there is no doubt about it,” he recalled in a 1969 interview, “and we were in the—to my mind—invidious position of putting ourselves behind barbed wire in all the major centres of government and leaving the terrorists very largely in command. In spite of the fact that we had I think two divisions of troops and 15,000 armed police. It was a wholly unsatisfactory, frustrating set-up.”12

  Perpetuating and exacerbating this “unsatisfactory, frustrating set-up” was precisely Begin’s strategy. As he explained in The Revolt,

  Eretz Israel was a centre of world interest. The revolt had made it so. It is a fact that no partisan struggle had been so publicized throughout the world as was ours … The reports on our operations, under screaming headlines, covered the front pages of newspapers everywhere, particularly in the United States … The interest of the newspapers is the measure of the interest of the public. And the public—not only Jews but non-Jews too—were manifestly interested in the blows we were striking in Eretz Israel.13