Not all operations were completely successful, and there were casualties on both sides. Moreover, Hagana was not the only Jewish organization fighting the British during these years. The need to use armed force—at least for self-defense—had been acknowledged by the nascent Yishuv since the arrival of the second wave of immigrants in 1900. However, to the mind of the socialist majority such force was only one element in the Jewish awakening. At least as important was the need to “settle the country” and “liberate” (li-geol, a term that also carried apocalyptic connotations) it from its “desolation.” Incidentally this was not a uniquely Zionist argument but was one that echoed late-nineteenth-century imperialist ideas concerning Europe’s “civilizing mission.”23 From the beginning, though, there were those who disagreed. The most important of the “dissenters” or “revisionists,” as they were known, was Zeev Jabotinsky, a bespectacled, highly cultured, and charismatic journalist from Odessa.
Having served in the Jewish battalions during World War I, Jabotinsky in 1920 helped defend the Jewish community in Jerusalem, for which the British gave him fifteen years in jail. Granted amnesty, he found himself at odds with the Yishuv’s leaders. Unlike most of them he was no socialist and regarded the communal settlements as secondary—important, perhaps, but hardly the highway to independence and statehood. Instead, and acting on the belief that the British would support such a course, he emphasized the need to prepare a Jewish armed force to take over Palestine from its Arab inhabitants once the British gave the green light. In retrospect Jabotinsky’s belief in British benevolence, which he shared with others such as Dr. Weizman, appears naive, whereas his own craving for things military—including insignia, uniforms, salutes, parades, and certain affectations of behavior that he called hadar (glory)—was merely childish. Still, arguably these weaknesses were balanced by a better understanding of the Arab-Jewish conflict. Unlike his socialist opponents, Jabotinsky was ready to admit that the Arab resistance did not result from some terrible misunderstanding. Instead they too were building an embryonic national movement that had right on its side; hence the issue could be settled only by force of arms.24
In 1925 the Zionist revisionist movement, as well as its youth movement Betar (after the site where the Jews had made their last stand against the Romans in the revolt of 132-135 A.D.), was founded. Its members recited Cohen’s poem about the need to redeem Judaea with “blood and fire” as well as Jabotinsky’s own poem about “dying or conquering the mountain.” In 1931 the dissidents, perhaps 10-20 percent of the entire Yishuv, set up their own military organization with the objective of taking a more aggressive line against the Arab gangs as well as the British. During the late thirties, ETSEL (Irgun Tsvai Leumi, or “National Military Organization”) made its presence felt by launching attacks on Arab civilians—a bomb was planted amid a crowded Haifa market, for example—as well as sabotaging government targets such as telephone wires, railways, and a Jerusalem radio station. In response the authorities took action and on September 1, 1939, were able to achieve something of a coup by arresting the entire ETSEL leadership.
Once World War II broke out, Jabotinsky, who was organizing Betar from abroad, announced that ETSEL would suspend its struggle against the British in favor of cooperating with them against the Nazis. ETSEL’s two leaders, David Raziel and Abraham Stern, were released from prison; in May 1941 the former was even sent on a commando operation to Iraq, where he was killed. The truce was maintained, more or less, until December 1941, when the ship Struma, a 180-ton Danube cattle boat, limped into Constantinople harbor with 769 Jewish refugees aboard. For two months the Jewish Agency, the Turkish authorities, and the British engaged in negotiations as the latter refused to grant the passengers entry visas to Palestine; finally the Turks lost patience and ordered the ship to sea, where it promptly sank. Whether this was due to its own condition or to an attack by a German submarine, as has been claimed, remains unclear to the present day. In any case almost all its crew and passengers, including 250 women and 70 children, were lost.
Jabotinksy had died in August 1940 and ETSEL, already torn between those who favored continuation of the truce and those who wanted to resume the struggle against the British, split. Seeking revenge for the Struma episode one group, led by Abraham Stern, broke away to found LECHI (Lochame Cherut Israel, Israel’s Freedom Fighters), an even more extreme organization. Stern himself was a classics student at Hebrew University. Later he studied in Italy, where he was influenced by fascism; like his master, Jabotinsky, he was a gifted poet whose dark, solemn verses are laced with obedience, duty, and death. He was soon hunted down and killed in a shoot-out, but his followers refused to give up. Unlike Hagana they did not have either the Jewish Agency or Histadrut behind them. Unable to set up even an unofficial taxation system, they were compelled to obtain funds by raiding banks, post offices, and the like as well as by door-to-door collections. They resumed operations against the British, albeit on a very small scale as LECHI probably numbered no more than a few dozen activists.
By early 1944, ETSEL too was prepared to resume operations against the British. From 1943 on it was commanded by Menachem Begin, a fireeating orator from Poland, where his organizational skills had taken him to the head of the local Betar movement. Young—he was born in 1913—Begin, unlike Jabotinksy, was incapable of creating a coherent political ideology. Even more than Jabotinsky he was in love with things military and worshipped force for force’s sake, to the point that, after he had expostulated on the subject at a meeting held in Warsaw just before World War II, Jabotinsky told him to “go and drown yourself in the Vistula.”25 Between them the two organizations launched a terrorist campaign, attacking and demolishing government offices, capturing arms, and even temporarily occupying the government broadcasting station in Ramalla, north of Jerusalem. In August 1944 Sir Harold MacMichael, the departing high commissioner whom extremists blamed for the Struma affair, narrowly escaped an assassination attempt. Two months later two LECHI members killed Britain’s resident minister in Cairo, Lord Moyne.
When World War II ended there were thus three separate Jewish “armies” intent on fighting the British. Of the three, Hagana was semilegal—its role in defending outlying settlements continued to be grudgingly recognized by the British—and by far the largest. The other two were strictly outside the law and only numbered a few thousand (ETSEL) and a few hundred (LECHI) members respectively. Ideologically speaking they differed very sharply, Hagana being socialist, ETSEL nationalist, and LECHI—to which belonged the future prime minister, Yitschak Shamir—a terrifying amalgam of the two.26 As important, Hagana acted as the military arm of the Jewish Agency. Not so the “dissident” LECHI and ETSEL, which went their separate ways and refused to recognize the agency’s authority. From September 1944 to May 1945 their antagonism was carried to the point where the three organizations burned the others’ vehicles, raided the others’ hiding places for arms, and kidnapped and interrogated the others’ members. To forestall British retaliation for the assassination of Moyne, Hagana even tortured its rivals and turned them over to the authorities—an episode that became known as the saison (a reference to the hunting season) and left bitter memories on both sides.27 Indeed, so much did Ben Gurion personally hate Begin that for decades thereafter he refused to call him by name, always referring to him as “the man sitting next to [fellow] Knesset member Bader.”
As in other antioccupation struggles that took place in various countries during World War II, the internecine fighting among the separate resistance movements diverted time, men, and resources away from the anti-British campaign. Yet it tended to make the authorities’ position even more difficult, since there was no single, sovereign, and authoritative Jewish leadership to negotiate with. Internally Ben Gurion sought, though he did not succeed, to concentrate all authority in his own hands and rule with an iron fist. Facing the Yishuv’s external enemies, however, he could always blame extremists over whom he had no control, thanks in part to the author
ities’ own refusal to allow his organization a free hand. This ambiguity was not lost on the British on the various occasions that they negotiated with him.28 Nor was it to be the last one of its kind in the bloody history of the Arab-Israeli conflict.
In October 1945, only two months after World War II had ended, the British fear of a Jewish uprising became true as the three organizations began to coordinate their activities under what was known as the United Front of the Revolt. With Sneh as Hagana’s commander acting as the coordinator in chief, a semiofficial division of labor was established—the more easily because he and Begin knew each other from back home in Poland and, in spite of their pronounced political differences, got along well enough. As always, Hagana displayed a marked preference for bloodless operations such as bringing in immigrant ships, building new settlements in districts that were officially closed to Jews, and, of course, organizing the ubiquitous, noisy, and rowdy demonstrations against this or that aspect of mandatory policy. Less squeamish, ETSEL attacked British targets and deliberately set about killing security personnel by mounting ambushes and planting bombs; LECHI for its part specialized in pinpoint assassinations of selected persons, including Jewish “traitors .”29
In practice these fine distinctions tended to break down. Despite their ideological differences, LECHI and ETSEL worked so closely together as to be virtually indistinguishable. Whatever Hagana’s intentions, many of its operations also resulted in British—let alone Arab—casualties, particularly when things went wrong. Finally, Sadeh and his POUM emulated LECHI and also went after Jewish traitors. However, all three organizations differed from counterparts in other countries in one important way: Dependents of British officials and servicemen—in other words, women and children—were never targeted. Perhaps this was because, having come to Palestine with no intention of settling in it, dependents were not regarded as colons in the classic sense of that term.
Through 1946 and 1947 one terrorist operation followed another; for that period the average was calculated at precisely 17.285 “incidents” per month.30 Police stations and military offices were attacked, communications cut, oil refineries set ablaze, railway crossings demolished, trains derailed, air bases bombed, and cafes catering to British personnel blown up, often with heavy losses of life. From time to time the British CID succeeded in uncovering a terrorist hideout. This would lead to firefights and casualties on both sides (e.g., on June 16-17, 1946, eleven LECHI members were killed and twenty-three more captured, a heavy blow to such a small organization). As would happen in later liberation movements, such as those of the Croats in Bosnia and the Kurds in Iraq, operations tended to spread beyond the borders of the homeland. Both Hagana and ETSEL sent agents to Europe, where they lobbied governments. In Belgium, France, Italy, and Yugoslavia it was possible to find officials who, with or without payment, were prepared to close an eye to what was going on. While in Europe they also raised funds among the local Jewish communities, purchased arms, and bought or leased ships for smuggling immigrants into Palestine.
Like the ill-fated Struma, most of the ships were old and barely seaworthy. As one story has it, PALYAM personnel who were responsible for purchasing them were issued screwdrivers and told to stick them in the sides of the ships and see how far they would go.31 They were disguised as fishing boats or freighters, provided with false papers, packed chockablock with illegal immigrants, and shoved off to make their way toward Palestine’s shores as best they could. A few of the ships escaped detection and unloaded their passengers, who were promptly taken to the neighboring kibbutsim, where they would be at least temporarily safe from British eyes.32 Most ships, however, confronted by an efficient naval service that was provided with aircraft and radar, were intercepted during the voyage.
The authorities’ normal way for dealing with olim (immigrants) was to intern them in Palestine or, increasingly, Cyprus, where more than 17,000 people eventually came to live in camps. Later, to demonstrate the government’s determination to not give in, Foreign Secretary Ernst Bevin hit on the brilliant idea of sending one ship (President Warfield ) all the way back to Hamburg, whence it had come. When it returned the passengers refused to go ashore, and the ugly scenes of soldiers beating men, women, and children were repeated. In the face of this even the British press lost patience, calling the operation “a stupid decision,” “a manifest blunder,” and “the ultimate stage of lunacy.”33 Meanwhile the Cyprus camps were infiltrated by Hagana agents, who threatened to extend the terrorist campaign to that country as well.34
At peak the British deployed 100,000 men in Palestine.35 This represented one-tenth of their entire armed forces; the annual cost to the taxpayer was estimated at 40 million pounds. Besides the uniformed and nonuniformed police, two-and-a-half divisions were brought in, complete with tanks, armored cars, artillery, patrol aircraft, and, at sea, naval vessels as large as cruisers.36 Since Palestine’s Arab population sided with the British, even providing auxiliary manpower for guard duties and the like, this represented one of the highest ratios of troops to population ever deployed in any modern counterinsurgency (the French in Algeria never deployed more than 600,000 men to hold down 9 million or so people).37 In the authorities’ favor it should be said that they never deliberately fired into crowds. Although there were two or three occasions when troops panicked and a few demonstrators were killed, a Jewish large-scale massacre never took place and entire Jewish settlements were not demolished with explosives (much to the Arabs’ regret, it must be added). Thanks to the British recognition that Jews constituted a “semi-European” race,38 the struggle over Palestine was, relatively speaking, almost gentlemanly. By comparison, in Yugoslavia under the German occupation almost 1 million are said to have died.
Yet the British used their long experience in colonial policing to launch virtually every type of antiterrorist operation imaginable.39 In 1945 the Defense (Emergency) Regulations were issued, suspending civil liberties, such as freedom from arbitrary arrest, and giving the security forces a free hand.40 Thereupon they engaged in overt and covert surveillance, employing their own personnel as well as the rare member of the Jewish community who could be forced or persuaded to cooperate; mounted guards, many of them Arab, over sensitive installations throughout the country; fenced off entire areas (the center of Jerusalem was turned into “Bevingrad”) with barbed wire; imposed curfews; and set up roadblocks (the “checkpost” intersection near Haifa still exists) in hope of catching suspects traveling from one district to another.
The core of British counterinsurgency consisted of a policy known as “cordon and search,” divided into small searches, large searches, cordon searches, snap searches, countrywide searches, and ordinary searches. On top of this there were restorations of law and order, individual arrests, group arrests, mass arrests, trials, incarcerations, hangings, and deportations to such places as Mauritius and Somalia—where a number of captured ETSEL personnel promptly escaped. Whether with or without authorization from above, some British security personnel also set up death squads that kidnapped and tortured and murdered suspects, some of them mere teenagers. All these activities were crowned by executions and, as it turned out and inevitably had to turn out, made no difference whatsoever.
The largest antiterrorist operation took place on June 29, 1946. Known as “Operation Agatha,” in the words of Field Marshal Bernhard Montgomery, chief of the Imperial General Staff, its purpose was “to smash [the Jews] forever.”41 After careful preparation three British divisions went into action all over the country; they arrested almost 3,000 “ringleaders” and “instigators” and took them to a camp at Latrun some twenty miles to the west of Jerusalem.42 Not only that, but more than 200,000 people—one-third of the entire Jewish community—were put under curfew and had their houses systematically searched for suspects, arms, and information. Outlying settlements suspected of containing slikkim were surrounded with troops and subjected to extensive searches. A major hideout was discovered at kibbuts Yagur near Haifa and, a
ccording to Hagana’s own figures, yielded 325 rifles, 100 mortars, 10,000 hand grenades, and several hundreds of thousands of ammunition rounds.43 By a stroke of good luck the British captured a list of PALMACH members but could not decipher the code in which it was written. Consequently they failed to identify individuals who, forewarned by Hagana’s intelligence service,44 escaped by merging into the civilian population. Nor did the dragnet destroy the underground organizations of ETSEL or LECHI, though Begin himself spent four days in a waterless hole that had been dug below his house and came within a hair of being caught.
“Black Saturday”—the Jewish nickname for the British sweep—caused Hagana to suspend its attacks on British personnel and concentrate on bloodless operations such as bringing in immigrants.45 Not so ETSEL, which only three weeks later and with Sneh’s connivance46 carried out its bloodiest operation yet. A bomb was planted in British police headquarters in Jerusalem, which were located in the southern wing of the King David Hotel. It killed dozens, including some Jews who were in the building. Acting with or without their superiors’ permission, British agents later retaliated by blowing up the houses on Ben Yehuda Street, also in the center of Jerusalem. Besides the hotel proper, two entire apartment buildings went up in a column of dust; forty-eight people were killed and 200 or so wounded. However, in this case the operation, far from serving a useful purpose, only served to illustrate the way in which the government was losing control and itself turning terrorist.
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