Anonymous Soldiers
Page 64
During the first six months of 1947, there had been nearly as many terrorist incidents as in the entirety of 1946. One week of attacks in April had alone cost the Palestine government some £60,000. Indeed, as of May, almost its entire reserve budget had been consumed by the escalating violence. Although the postwar Jewish unrest in Palestine was far less pervasive and intense than the Arab Rebellion had been, it was proving significantly more expensive to suppress. Over the course of some forty months a decade earlier, Arab violence had claimed the lives of four thousand people and caused at least £1 million in property damages. By comparison, in just two years Jewish violence had killed fewer than three hundred people but had already inflicted £1.5 million in damages (the equivalent of some $86 million today). In view of Britain’s parlous economic condition, Dalton had already warned the cabinet in May that “the British taxpayer could not be expected to assume further burdens in respect of Palestine.”14
July also brought more bad news from the United States. First was the announcement just in time for July 4 of the founding of Americans for Haganah. The new organization, whose fund-raising efforts were to be dedicated to facilitating the immigration of European Jews to Palestine—whether legally or otherwise—now joined the various Irgun front groups that Peter Bergson had organized alongside Lehi’s more modest U.S. philanthropic arm, the American Friends of the Fighters for the Freedom of Israel. Then there was the joint resolution condemning British rule of Palestine introduced in Congress a week later. Although it never came to a vote, the strident language and censorious tone—roundly decrying the oppression of the “Hebrew population of Palestine … by a British Army of Occupation”—did little to ameliorate Anglo-American tensions.15
The resolution had followed by less than seventy-two hours MacMillan’s confirmation of Habib’s, Nakar’s, and Weiss’s death sentences. His decision had never been in doubt. “You don’t understand the situation here nor the psychology of the terrorists,” MacMillan had lectured García-Granados at a Government House dinner party the previous month when the Guatemalan had inquired about the fate of the three condemned Irgunists. “They would interpret a generous gesture as a sign of weakness.”16
Indeed, the rationale behind the evacuation of the wives and children and the creation of the special security zones earlier in the year had been to accord the GOC and the high commissioner the freedom both to implement tougher security measures and to uphold capital punishment sentences without fear of terrorist retribution. It had nonetheless proven impossible to completely deprive the terrorists of hostage-taking opportunities. In addition to the swimming pool incident at the beginning of June, the Irgun had attempted to seize a police officer on June 22 while he was shopping in Jerusalem and more brazenly to abduct five soldiers bathing in the sea near Herzliya three days later. Lehi had also gotten into the act. Hoping to acquire a high-ranking British hostage to exchange for the missing Rubowitz, it had tried to kidnap the Palestine government’s liaison to UNSCOP on June 26. The Irgun, however, had persuaded its rival to postpone any further kidnappings, according to Samuel Katz, so as not “to frighten British personnel away from Jewish areas and [harm] our chances of capturing British officers.” With this agreement in place, the Irgun’s hunt for potential captives intensified.17
Sergeants Clifford Martin and Mervyn Paice were attached to the 252nd Field Security Section of British army intelligence. Their mission was to circulate among the Jewish community in order to obtain information on the terrorist organizations and their local supporters. Accordingly, both men often operated in plain clothes and were not subject to the movement restrictions imposed on other British soldiers—that is, they did not have to walk in groups of four, nor were they necessarily always armed. On the evening of July 10, Martin and Paice were sitting at Café Pinati in Netanya with one of their informants, a Haganah intelligence officer named Aharon Weinberg who worked as a clerk at a nearby army camp. The three men made plans to meet there the following evening and departed. Whether they were overheard at the café or identified and followed by an Irgun surveillance team has never been established. What the police investigation subsequently determined was that the next day Weinberg asked his roommate, who worked at another café, the Gan Vered, to reserve a table there for him and two companions later that evening.18
At 7:30 p.m. on July 11, Weinberg took a seat at the Café Pinati and waited for the two sergeants. After an hour passed and they had failed to appear, the Haganah officer left. However, while walking down Herbert Samuel Street, he encountered Martin and Paice and the three proceeded to the Gan Vered. The men talked and drank beer for the next four hours or so and were the last to leave the café at 12:30 a.m.19
As the two sergeants walked Weinberg toward his home, a dark sedan pulled over. Five masked men armed with pistols and submachine guns alighted from the car and ordered the three men inside. One of the sergeants resisted and was struck in the head with a pistol and forced into the car. The other was subdued with chloroform. Weinberg pleaded that he suffered from asthma and was instead blindfolded and gagged. The car sped off. About twenty minutes later it pulled over and left Weinberg and two of his captors by the road. Another twenty minutes passed before the vehicle returned—without the two sergeants. Weinberg was taken to an orange grove, where he was left bound hand and foot and instructed to remain there until at least 4:30 a.m. At daybreak, he managed to free his feet and walked to a nearby pump house, where a night watchman untied his hands. Weinberg immediately reported the incident to an officer at the army camp where he worked, and at 5:45 a.m. police from the nearby Tulkarm station were alerted. Five minutes later the first roadblocks were thrown around Netanya, and the search for the two missing sergeants began.
At 9:00 a.m., the area military commander summoned Oved Ben Ami, Netanya’s mayor, to his headquarters and obtained Ben Ami’s assurance that both the town council and the city’s residents would do everything possible to help locate the two captives. By midday the army had established a ten-by-three-mile cordon surrounding the entire area as parties of local youths also searched orange groves and other potential hiding places throughout the afternoon. A second meeting between Ben Ami and the commander occurred later that afternoon, during which a warning from General Gale was communicated to the mayor. If the two sergeants were not quickly found or released, Netanya and the surrounding environs would be declared a “controlled area,” the First Infantry commander explained—the new nomenclature for martial law decreed by the cabinet the previous March.20
Massive security force sweeps of the city and its environs commenced just before dawn on July 13. Army units, accompanied by police, combed through Netanya and the surrounding area, searching dwellings, storage areas, places of business, settlements, fields, and fruit groves. The Jewish Agency instructed the Haganah to join in the hunt for the two sergeants. All told, five thousand First Infantry Division troops searched some twenty different settlements and communities in addition to Netanya that long day. Nearly fifteen hundred people were detained for further questioning, of whom all but nineteen were subsequently released.21
All these efforts, however, came to naught. In preparation for the kidnapping, Paglin had constructed an underground bunker beneath a disused diamond factory near the city limits. It comprised an airless three-meter cube separated from the factory floor by three feet of sand designed to muffle any sounds coming from below. He stocked it with bottles of oxygen so the captives could breathe, a mattress, some food, and a canvas bucket for use as a toilet. Both Martin and Paice had been brought there immediately after their abduction. The Irgun officer in charge of the kidnapping detail told them the reason why they had been seized and the consequences if the lives of the three condemned Irgun fighters were not spared. He had also advised the two sergeants that the entrance to the bunker was mined to discourage any thoughts of escape. The dungeon had been so carefully constructed that twice army patrols searched the factory above without discovering it.22
&n
bsp; Netanya was placed under martial law that evening. Operation Tiger, as this military action was code-named, established at the high commissioner’s direction a “controlled area” affecting fifteen thousand people and encompassing some thirteen square miles, from which no one was allowed to enter or depart. Telephone and postal communications were suspended and a twenty-four-hour curfew imposed. It remained in force for the next forty-five hours but was briefly lifted at 4:00 p.m. on July 16—before reverting to a dawn-to-dusk curfew, which, along with the searches, continued for another two weeks.23
The Irgun, meanwhile, struck repeatedly that same evening with a series of road mine attacks near Petah Tiqva and Hadera, killing one soldier and wounding twenty-five others. More significant, however, was the message broadcast by the Voice of Fighting Zion earlier in the day. “If the criminal hand is raised against our captive comrades,” the announcement warned, “we shall make our arrows drunk with the hangman’s blood.”24
True to its word, the Irgun as well as Lehi unleashed a deliberately intimidating campaign of unrelenting road mining, mortar attacks, railway sabotage, shootings, and bombings. Not since the Arab Rebellion had the country been subjected to such a sustained onslaught. Over the succeeding twelve days nearly seventy separate incidents claimed the lives of eight soldiers and police and injured eighty others. Almost as many terrorist attacks occurred in that short space of time as in the previous three months combined. But neither this dramatic show of force nor the Irgun’s continued possession of its two hostages was sufficient to shake the government’s resolve to carry out the scheduled executions.25
Shortly after midnight on July 29, Haifa’s chief rabbi, Nissim Ohana, was awakened by police and brought to Acre prison. There, he administered the last prayers to Habib, Nakar, and Weiss. Once again the plaintive melody of “Ha-Tikva” echoed throughout the prison as the three condemned men joined one another in song. Starting at 4:00 a.m., each man was delivered to the hangman at twenty-minute intervals. Although their families had also been summoned to Haifa in the middle of the night, they were not permitted to meet with the condemned men. Instead, the three Irgunists had asked Rabbi Ohana to pass along a final message. “Do not grieve too much,” they consoled their bereft relations, “what we have done we did out of conviction.” The rabbi reported that despite the imminence of death, each man was “composed and steadfast.”26
The army’s search for the two sergeants now expanded. More than a dozen locales in an ever-widening arc beyond Netanya were cordoned off and placed under curfew. On July 30 the hunt for the missing men was extended to Tel Aviv. Later that afternoon, telephone calls were received at the offices of various Jewish newspapers as well as some army and police installations. Claiming to speak for the Irgun, the callers stated that the two sergeants had been executed and explained where their bodies could be found. Police searches of the purported venues, however, proved fruitless. Rumors now swept the city that the Irgun was planning to sneak into Netanya under cover of darkness and string the sergeants’ bodies up in front of Weiss’s former home. The Haganah mobilized more than fifteen hundred people to blockade the city and prevent the Irgun from doing so. It was already late in the evening when Mayor Ben Ami received a telephone call from another person representing the Irgun. The bodies of Martin and Paice, he was told, could be found the following morning at map coordinate 13751895—a Palestine government forest preserve located a mile and a half southeast of Netanya.27
At 5:30 a.m. on July 31 two members of the Jewish Settlement Police on patrol reported that they had come across two corpses hanging from a pair of eucalyptus trees in the preserve but had neither approached nor actually examined them. About three hours later, police accompanied by a unit of the Welsh Guards, some civilian officials, and a handful of journalists arrived on the scene. An unimaginably barbaric tableau awaited them. Suspended only a few inches above the ground were the two corpses bound hand and foot. Each man was attired in the khaki trousers that he was wearing the night of July 12. They were shoeless and their khaki shirts had been tied around their faces as blindfolds. Pinned through their flesh and blood-soaked white undershirts was a copy of an execution order signed by a specially convened Irgun tribunal. “The two British spies, MARTIN and PAICE, who were under arrest by the Underground since 12 July 1947,” it read, “have been put to trial, following the enquiry into their criminal anti-Hebrew activities.” They had been charged with the following crimes:
1. Illegal entry into our homeland.
2. Membership in the British criminal-terrorist organization know[n] as “British Army of Occupation” which is responsible:
for depriving our people from the right to live;
for cruel, oppressive acts;
for tortures;
for the murder of men, women and children;
for the murder of prisoners of war;
and for the deportation of Hebrew citizens from their country and homeland.
3. Illegal possession of arms, intended for the enforcement of oppression and despotism.
4. Anti-Jewish spying, disguised in civilian clothes.
5. Conspiracy against the Hebrew Underground, its soldiers, bases and arms—the arms of freedom.
The Irgun court had found the two men guilty as charged and sentenced them to hang “until their soul would leave them.” Both sergeants’ appeals for clemency had been denied and the executions carried out. This was not, the Irgun hastened to add, “a retaliatory act for the murder of Hebrew prisoners of war.” Rather, it was claimed to be “an ordinary legal action of the court of the Underground which has sentenced and will sentence the criminals who belong to the criminal Nazi-British Army of Occupation.”28
Despite the Irgun’s insistence that the sergeants’ execution was an act of justice and not blind retribution, Begin never denied its real motive. “We repaid our enemies in kind,” he later asserted. “We had warned him again and again and again. He callously disregarded our warnings. He forced us to answer gallows with gallows.” Indeed, immediately upon hearing the news from Acre, Begin instructed Paglin to carry out the Irgun’s sentence. The Irgun operations chief went immediately to the diamond factory, where he pulled one of the sergeants from the stifling oubliette. Dazed and confused by the light and weeks of oxygen deprivation, the condemned man was quickly bound, hooded, and placed on a chair. A noose was then flung across a roof beam and fastened around his neck. A final request to leave a message behind was denied, and the chair was kicked from beneath him. The same procedure was repeated on the other sergeant. Both bodies were loaded into a jeep and taken to the eucalyptus grove on the outskirts of Netanya, which today is a park where there is a section known as the Sergeants’ Grove.29
As a Royal Engineers captain proceeded to cut down Martin, the corpse fell to the ground, detonating a small mine that the sappers had missed in their initial sweep of the area. The ensuing explosion completely obliterated Martin’s body and hurled Paice’s some distance from the splintered trees. The captain also suffered serious wounds to his face and arms. This gratuitous act of vengeance was the last straw.30
The fear and alarm already pervading the Yishuv were virtually without precedent. A profound sense of mortification combined with a dark foreboding of the government’s intended response to the hangings created a state of anxiety equaled perhaps only by the King David Hotel bombing twelve months earlier. The community’s leaders were desperate to avoid the reimposition of martial law or of any security measure that would again adversely impact the Yishuv’s economy and upset daily life. But to do so meant finding a way to navigate between collaborating with the same government that denied Holocaust survivors the right to enter Palestine and still meeting the Palestine administration’s demands for the resumption of a counterterrorism campaign along the lines of the original Saison.31
The Haganah was deeply divided over this issue. Although one faction supported resurrecting the Saison, another opposed it on the grounds that this time civil war woul
d result. A third, even more militant, but smaller element had completely lost faith in Britain’s commitment to Zionism and therefore pressed for the return to armed resistance in concert with both terrorist organizations.32
The Jewish Agency tried to steer a middle course. The Haganah issued a public plea for any information on either the Irgun or Lehi—and most especially if it pertained to plans to kidnap British soldiers or attack military or police targets. In addition, the agency announced that a meeting had been called for the following day that would be attended by members of the Vaad Le’umi, the Histadrut, Agudath Israel, the Manufacturers’ Association, and the rabbinical councils and by the mayors of Jewish townships and the heads of local councils. Its purpose was to agree to a new counterterrorism program. On successive days, Golda Meyerson, the acting head of the Jewish Agency’s political department, met with Vivian Fox-Strangways, the acting chief secretary while Gurney was away, and then with Cunningham, in hopes of making a deal that would both satisfy the government and spare the Yishuv. She was not successful. The high commissioner expected nothing less than the agency’s full cooperation. He was angered to learn that Meyerson’s proposal fell far short of that. The “strong and definite campaign” she promised was one that would be undertaken completely independently of the government’s own counterterrorism efforts. The high commissioner did not conceal his frustration. For the past six months the Jewish Agency had repeatedly assured him of various campaigns and initiatives that had either never materialized or proven halfhearted and therefore largely ineffectual. Moreover, the last time that the Zionist institutions had issued a resolution decrying terrorism, it had also included an attack on the government’s immigration policy, thus thoroughly undermining its intent. The Jewish Agency, Meyerson replied, fully understood that “terrorism was a cancer and was alienating sympathy for the Jewish cause in the outside world.” It was therefore willing to risk provoking a civil war, but she nonetheless said that “the Agency should carry out this campaign in their own way.” That was unacceptable to Cunningham, who admonished the Jewish Agency leader that “the patience of the British people had gone.” Events later that same evening would show just how prescient the high commissioner’s warning had been.33