Toward Statehood: the wreckage of a bridge that was blown up by PALMACH, 1946.
These operations, though, only represented the cutting edge of a much greater organizational effort. In summer 1940, Hagana’s leaders met to start planning for the establishment of a regular Jewish force that would attempt to fight and delay an eventual Axis invader. Some nine months later preparations went into high gear. As usual, the greatest obstacle was financial; not being a state, the Yishuv did not yet have a regular taxation system at its disposal, and voluntary contributions were insufficient. It was surmounted by means of an extraordinary arrangement between Hagana and the kibbuts movement. In return for two weeks’ labor every month, the latter undertook to maintain the troops.3
Since few kibbutsim had housing to spare, the new force, known as PALMACH (for Plugot Machats, literally “shock companies,” possibly a translation of the German stosstruppen), was made to live in tents among the eucalyptus trees that surrounded many settlements; so spartan were living conditions that, as legend has it, only one person in the entire organization even possessed a bathrobe.4 These arrangements may explain why, then and later, PALMACH looked and felt much like a youth movement complete with campfires, singsong, pranks played among the members, and the like. They also fostered an extremely strong team spirit that, as outsiders thought, was not always compatible with loyalty to Hagana as a whole.5
PALMACH’s commander in chief (CIC) was once again Yitschak Sadeh, now fifty-one years old, bald, and, though with a heavy paunch and suffering from a heart condition, apparently the only senior Hagana member qualified for the task. He selected his company commanders from among former nodedot, SNS, and FOSH personnel, including above all Yigal Allon and Moshe Dayan. Six companies were established, including both male and female; though no precise figures are available, something about the relative size of the two groups may be gathered from the fact that when the first class of recruits completed its training in May 1942, the passing-out parade included 427 men but only six (some say eight) women.6 Later the organization expanded until it could muster 1,000 troops in 1943 and around 1,500 in 1944. Operating with British permission, they engaged in intensive training, including sniping, reconnaissance, and demolition work. After two years the recruits were released, and others took their place; some of the veterans, instead of going home, organized in so-called hachsharot (preparatory groups) and set out to found new kibbutsim where, of course, they remained active as Hagana members. In time PALMACH, an enterprising lot if ever there was one, was even able to maintain a naval company (PALYAM) and a handful of aircrews who operated under the guise of an aerial sports club.
Originally PALMACH was intended to fight the Germans in case Palestine should be evacuated by the British, leaving the Jewish population unprotected. According to a plan coordinated with British military intelligence, known as the Palestine Post Occupation Scheme, the area around Mount Carmel was to be turned into a sort of national redoubt and used as a base for guerrilla operations. The topography appeared favorable and included, besides the cover provided by the woods, a large number of hillside caves, some of which had already served as hideouts in prehistoric times. Now plans were laid for storing arms and ammunition, destroying roads and communications, blowing up bridges, sowing mines, laying booby traps, and the like, all in order to delay the Wehrmacht for as long as possible while allowing the British to make good their escape.
In the next year, heartened by Germany’s failure to seize the Libyan port of Tobruk, the leaders of Hagana became more ambitious. They even negotiated with the British for the construction of a four-division force (thirty-six battalions) that would try to hold the entire northern part of the country, including Haifa with its modicum of industry, heavy earth-moving equipment, airstrip, and port.7 Apparently the fact that the loss of Egypt would effectively bring about the end of the Royal Navy in the eastern Mediterranean was overlooked; ever the optimist, Sadeh at one point believed—or pretended to believe—that his well-trained men could take on 500 German tanks with Molotov cocktails.8 This, of course, was a gross exaggeration. Yet it also overestimated the size of the force that the Wehrmacht, now fully occupied in grinding its way toward Stalingrad, could deploy in the Middle East. When the Afrika Korps arrived at El Alamein in late July 1942, it was down to exactly nineteen operational tanks.
As usual, British connivance with Hagana’s activities did not survive the period of greatest danger. The Battle of El Alamein opened on October 23, 1942, and ended with mostly British forces driving the Germans out of Egypt. The invasion of French North Africa followed in November, and by the end of 1942, at the latest, it was clear that any danger from that quarter had definitely passed. The British Foreign Office, as well as the military and intelligence authorities deployed in Palestine itself, started contemplating the possibility of a Jewish revolt after the war.9 They were aware of Ben Gurion’s growing power and the “activist” line that he took. They also consistently overestimated the forces of Hagana and occasionally invented Jewish paramilitary organizations when in fact there were none.
As part of this policy, plans were made to reinforce the British military presence in Palestine. Raids and searches were resumed but rarely yielded considerable results. For example, in October 1943 kibbuts Chulda was surrounded and searched. More than eighty mortar rounds were unearthed, a loss by the standards of those days but one that did not affect the operations of Hagana countrywide.10 Meanwhile PALMACH in its camps defied the British and continued to train. In 1941 a platoon commanders course was held at Juara, a remote hilly district south of Esdraelon; it became the first in a long series of courses that produced a number of future IDF chiefs of staff. Three years later Sadeh already felt sufficiently confident in his commanders’ ability to consolidate his eleven companies, plus a headquarters company, into four battalions.
Nor were PALMACH and Hagana the only organizations that provided Jewish soldiers with training during those years. Given the horrible rumors that were beginning to reach the Yishuv from Nazi-occupied Europe, many of the Yishuv’s members felt they could do better than to spend their time raising cucumbers for the kibbutsim and playing with pistols when no British troops were nearby. With or without permission from the Jewish Agency—the latter, fearing that its own forces would become depleted, initially attempted to resist the movement—they volunteered for the British armed forces. Eventually the number of volunteers approached 30,000, a little more than 10 percent being women. Numerically speaking and relative to its size, the Yishuv’s contribution to fighting the Axis was thus as great as that of any other country at the time.
Almost all the volunteers served in various second-line units—in particular, women from Palestine were used to drive trucks along the endless supply routes of the 8th Army across the Sinai, Egypt, and Libya. Others spent their careers digging trenches, guarding bases, or carrying out quartermaster duties far in the rear. Some 500 were even organized into a Palestinian Coast Guard and positioned in a chain of watch stations; initially without arms, their job was to alert the authorities in case German or Italian ships presented themselves.11 Still, a select few found their way into combat forces, including signals, engineers, sappers, and artillery, as well as the Royal Air Force and the Royal Navy.12 By pressing the British to set up a Jewish brigade on the model of the World War I battalions, Ben Gurion and his “foreign minister” at the Jewish Agency, Moshe Shertok (later, Sharet), hoped to derive the maximum benefit from the volunteer movement. The authorities dragged their feet, and it was not until the winter of 1944-1945 that a Jewish brigade, with the Star of David as its symbol, was formed. By the time it reached the front in northern Italy (March 1945) the war was all but over.13
When members of the British and Jewish forces reencountered one another in Hagana after 1945, they discovered that their differences could not be greater.14 From “Chinese” Gordon to T. E. Lawrence the British military has always had a sprinkling of brilliant eccentrics; Wingate himself used to
conclude each SNS operation by sitting stark naked in the dining room and munching an onion.15 In the main, however, they consisted of regular soldiers with a powerful bureaucratic structure and an emphasis on uniforms, hierarchy, drill, punctiliousness, ornamental swords, and swagger sticks. Like all good soldiers (their own favorite term was lochem or “fighter”) PALMACHniks also liked to swagger; but their idea of doing so was to wear carefully cultivated forelocks, formless home-knit headgear known as “socks,” wide-open shirts, and so-called palm-length khaki shorts with the whites of their pockets dangling out below. Their “stumpy, dumpy” women also wore shorts, making for an interesting anatomical display that did not escape foreign observers.16 Young, ingenious, and independent-minded, they were a disorderly lot and proud of it. Informality reached the point where subordinates addressed commanders by their nicknames; thus Rechabam Zeevi (who was to command the central front in 1970-1973) became “Ghandi,” David (Elazar) “Dado,” Mordechai (Gur) “Motta,” Refael (Eytan) “Raful,” and one particularly tall officer “Guliver.” All of this not seldom degenerated into simple sloppiness.
Both traditions were carried into the IDF, where they competed for decades thereafter, particularly in regard to questions of organization, training, and the amount of drill required of troops. PALMACH commanders rejected formal discipline, salutes, and even the insignia of rank; to their former British rivals such attitudes bordered on sacrilege. As the Yishuv’s leader and the highest civilian authority in charge of defense matters, Ben Gurion was inclined to favor the members of the British school—the more so because, not being associated with the kibbuts movement, they were considered politically neutral and more amenable to discipline. It is true that few of them had gained much command experience; Laskov, who was the highest-ranking, had been a major in charge of two platoons.17 Still, to Ben Gurion’s mind it was they and not the PALMACH rabble who knew how to run an army and thus represented “real” soldiers.
Nevertheless, a few years after Israeli independence had been achieved, the PALMACH veterans came out on top. One reason may have been that they systematically trained for leadership; for example, Sadeh had insisted that every qualified PALMACHnik go through a squad commanders course in addition to basic training. At a time when the rest of Hagana still thought in terms of part-time volunteers, PALMACH commanders already led a regular strike force that was organized first in battalions and then in brigades, albeit ones that were increasingly forced to operate underground as the mandate entered its last years and anti-British operations and persecution intensified. Last but not least, the native-born PALMACH approach was better adapted to the spirit of a people who, then and later, distrusted formality as well as spit and polish. One way or another, and except for the years of Chayim Laskov (1958-1961) and Tsvi Tsur (1961-1964), from 1953 to 1983 all IDF chiefs of staff were former PALMACH personnel, as were many of its generals.
Once World War II had ended and the servicemen returned, Hagana could muster about 30,000 men and women in various degrees of training and readiness. The core consisted of the 2,000 mobilized members of PALMACH. Its new commander, Yigal Allon, was the first native-born Israeli to reach such a high position in Hagana; a surprisingly gentlemanly character for a man of his background (he had been born in 1918, the son of an out-of-luck peasant in Kfar Tabor), in time he proved to have a first-class strategic mind. He molded the troops into a highly motivated fighting force, “deployed from the sea to the desert” and “always ready to take orders,” as their anthem proudly proclaimed. The remaining Hagana members were reservists available in an emergency. Some 4,000 had passed through PALMACH and constituted its reserve—throughout the period PALMACH tended to look upon itself as a separate corps d’elite, an attitude fraught with implications for the future. An additional 3,300 were organized in CHISH (Chel Sadeh or “Field Force”) and represented the direct descendant of the old nodedot and FOSH. The bulk of the force, however, was known as CHIM (Chel Mishmar or “Home Guard”). As its name indicates, it consisted of personnel—units would be too strong a word—who were intended for stationary self-defense should the places in which they lived be attacked.
Just as important as organization was the acquisition of additional arms. As had been done previously, some arms were smuggled into the country by various means—a favorite method was to conceal them inside construction and earth-moving equipment—or else procured locally by buying or stealing them from the British. Moreover, Hagana’s own military industries (Taasiya Tsvait, TAAS) had been expanding to the point that, between 1939 and 1944, its size increased sixfold.18 By 1944 twelve “institutions,” scattered all over the country, were turning out explosives, detonators, hand grenades, mortars, submachine guns, and various types of ammunition—including, on the eve of independence, as many as 20,000 rifle rounds per day. Often located in or near kibbutsim, the institutions were staffed by a core of specialists as well as a larger number of youths, both male and female, who volunteered for the task. From time to time the British discovered a workshop and raided it. These raids, however, represented isolated reverses and never disrupted TAAS for long.
In autumn 1945, TAAS’s chief, an engineer named Chayim Slavin, was sent to the United States on a subsistence budget of $9 per day.19 With funds from the Zionist organization and making use of the postwar glut, he bought up machines for manufacturing ammunition at a fraction of their original cost. They were dismantled into small parts and shipped home in 800 separate crates—the reassembly instructions are said to have taken up an index consisting of 70,000 cards. By the time the War of Independence broke out in November 1947, Hagana possessed 754 mortars of all calibers, 16 antitank rifles, 980 machine guns, 3,662 submachine guns, 17,642 rifles, 3,830 pistols, and 53,751 hand grenades.20 Once they had been taken out of the slikkim and distributed to the units, these weapons turned out to be more than sufficient to take care of the homegrown Palestinian Arab militias. They were, however, hopelessly inadequate for fighting the regular forces of neighboring Arab countries possessing armor, artillery, and aircraft.
In 1945, however, it was the British and not the Arabs who most concerned Hagana. As already mentioned, World War II had brought about a lull in Jewish-Arab relations. Heavily decimated in 1936-1939—as much by their own gangs as by the British and the Jews—many Arab leaders were already beginning to realize that their last hope of survival vis-à-vis the growing Jewish forces depended upon continued British occupation of the country; in fact those who could afford to do so were already beginning to sell property and move elsewhere.21 In any case the Arabs were relatively quiescent. This enabled Jews and Britons to turn against one another on a scale and with a fury unequaled since the beginning of the mandate.
Both sides did, in fact, have much to complain about. Intent on maintaining their imperial presence in the Middle East, the British regarded the activities of Hagana—even its very existence—as illegal and were concerned with limiting its operations as much as possible. For their part, Hagana and the Yishuv behind it were furious at what they saw as the British breach of the promises contained in the Balfour Declaration; from 1941 on, Ben Gurion, as the leading personality, was determined to create an independent Jewish state despite anything the government in London might say or do. Other, more immediate bones of contention included restrictions that had been placed on the purchase of land as well as continuing constraints on immigration—the latter becoming a major issue during the years immediately following the Holocaust, when hundreds of thousands of survivors were desperately trying to get into the region.
Against this background, Hagana, heretofore concerned primarily with defending the Yishuv against the Palestinian Arabs and not seldom cooperating with the British, opened operations against the occupiers. The first “action” took place on October 9, when a PALMACH unit numbering a hundred men (it is not known whether there were women among the participants) broke into the camp at Atlit, south of Haifa, where two hundred illegal immigrants were being held. The infiltrat
ors knocked out the Arab guards, and a British police car that appeared on the scene was attacked with grenades and machine guns; it overturned, killing one of its occupants. The internees were smuggled to nearby kibbuts Bet-Oren, which in turn was surrounded by thousands of Haifa residents who came out to demonstrate against the British. Fearing a major clash, the latter desisted.
From now on such attacks multiplied. Hagana’s stated preference was for a bloodless struggle; normally it was only when British personnel sought to interrupt the operations (participation in which naturally carried the death sentence) that they were subjected to direct fire. Thus, on November 1, 1945, Palestine’s railway net was sabotaged at no fewer than 153 places, and three patrol boats in the ports of Haifa and Jaffa were sunk. On November 24 two observation posts that had been intercepting immigrant ships were demolished (and like the Irish Republican Army years later, Hagana would call the British ahead of time to let them know that bombs had been planted). All these operations were carried out by PALMACH members who, in their minds, thereby justified the long years of preparation and training. The first months of 1946 saw more attacks on observation posts, a radar station, and four police stations. The climax came on June 17. Several hundred troops set out simultaneously and dynamited ten out of eleven border bridges, causing 250,000 pounds’ worth of damage and temporarily halting traffic between Palestine and the neighboring countries.22
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