Subject: JUICE Pioneers 11 - The Irgun Date: Wed, 10 Jun 1998 00:54:07 +0000 To: "Hebraic Heritage Newsgroup"<heb_roots_chr@geocities.com>
From: JUICE Administration <juice@wzo.org.il> To: pioneers@wzo.org.il Subject: JUICE Pioneers 11 ============================================================== World Zionist Organization Jewish University in CyberspacE juice@wzo.org.il birnbaum@wzo.org.il http://www.wzo.org.il ============================================================== Course: Pioneers of Israel Lecture: 11/12 Lecturer: Doron Geller The Irgun Menachem Begin's personal history of the Jewish rebellion against British rule in Palestine from 1944-1948, entitled The Revolt, is more than just the history of the four-year-long struggle against the British. It is a testimony to the will of a people no longer willing to let others determine Jewish fate. The British were not the worst or most inhumane administrators in the history of colonialism. Not by any means. But they certainly put British interests far and above Jewish interests. If the Jews had had their own state in 1939, a lot more undoubtedly could have been done to save the Jewish people from Nazi destruction. But there was no Jewish state, nowhere for the trapped Jews of Europe to go. Thus the Jewish people were at the complete mercy of others, and what befell them was a catastrophe of the greatest magnitude. By 1944 some members of the Jewish people were no longer willing to passively accept their fate. The Stern Group, which had broken away from the Irgun in 1940, had already initiated anti-British activity on a limited scale. But the Revolt really began in 1944, when the Irgun Zvai Leumi proclaimed open revolt against continuing British rule in Palestine. This is their story. The Irgun Zvai Leumi - The National Military Organization was founded as Haganah Bet, a Jewish underground organization, in Jerusalem in 1931. The Haganah Bet was led by Avraham Tehomi and a group of other Haganah officers disenchanted with the Haganah's strictly defensive approach to Arab terror. Haganah Bet didn't have much to do for the next relatively quiet five years, until the Arab Revolt broke out in 1936. By 1937 half of the Haganah Bet, headed by Tehomi, decided to return to the Haganah. The other half insisted on taking a more militant approach to Arab terrorism. It was at this point they came to be called the Irgun Zvai Leumi - or for short, the Irgun. The Irgun could not accept the principle of "havlaga" - self-restraint - of the Zionist left when Jews were murdered, settlements attacked, fields and crops burned, and animals senselessly slaughtered. They felt that hoping for an accommodation with the Arabs or relying on British good-will was no longer viable. They could not accept Arab terror without a response and they firmly believed - and they were proven correct - that the British felt that Arab grievances were justified, and the British would thus reward Arab aggression. As proud Zionists and proud Jews, they were not willing to passively accept this or hope for or plead with the British for a change of heart. They believed no change of heart would occur unless the Jews acted. As Avraham Stern said in 1937 (he was still in the Irgun at that time) "the time for parades has passed." The British, in fact, did begin to take more action against Arab rioters and rebels once their own troops were assaulted and killed between 1937 and 1939. But the attacks against Jews continued, often including the most brutal and elementary forms of violence. Jewish counter-attacks rapidly grew in form and ferocity. Arab attacks were met by massive Jewish revenge attacks, led by the Irgun. The problem was, at that time the policy of revenge did not seem to deter or diminish the Arabs' desire to continue attacking both the Jews and the British. When the British went firmly on the offensive in 1938, however, Arab enthusiasm for the rebellion began to wane. It was over in 1939. But the results were once again in the Arabs' favor. The White Paper of 1939 was issued on the eve of World War II, severely limiting Jewish immigration. The Jews needed free immigration more than anything else in 1939. But they were not to have it. Arab violence and Britain's pro-Arab policy had won out. The yishuv would have to wait idly by, once again, as others with little concern for them determined Jewish fate. Once World War II broke out there was little the Irgun or the rest of the yishuv could do - as the British had calculated - but back the British war effort against Nazi Germany. The Irgun was quiescent in Palestine until 1944. Not so the Stern Gang, which broke away from the Irgun in June 1940 in order to pursue a strictly anti-British policy. The Irgun fought on the side of the British until the tide of the war had decisively turned in favor of the Allies in 1943. By that time undeniable reports had surfaced of Nazi atrocities against Jews in Eastern Europe. The Irgun had had enough. They decided to kidnap the British High Commissioner in Palestine, Harold MacMichael. The intention was to humiliate the British and reveal to the world Britain's policy of "locked gates." But this plan, like so many other Irgun plans during the war, aborted. The great leaders - Jabotinsky and the military commander David Raziel - were no more. A number of Irgun men decided that something had to be done, and Menachem Begin, a leader of the Betar Revisionist movement in pre-war Poland - was the man to do it. "Somehow, some way, they must strike the first blow. There must be a revolt not only against the British, but also against history as written by the holocaust, and against two thousand years of persecution." Menachem Begin had grown up in Poland as a Zionist. He was imprisoned by the occupying Soviet forces of Eastern Poland soon after World War II broke out due to his Zionist inclinations. His iron will was forged in Soviet camps. He hardly had room to move, he was sometimes put in solitary confinement, but his strength and will power only grew. By the fortunes of history he was released and assigned to a Polish military unit that found its way to Eretz-Israel in 1941. He effectively deserted there and took up underground Irgun activity. By 1943 the Irgun had not only concluded that the tide of the war had turned in favor of the British and the Allies. The Irgun also saw little distinction between the Nazis, who were murdering Jews at an insane, astronomical rate, and the British, who, while aware of this, kept the gates of Palestine tightly closed. This could no longer be condoned by desperate Jews over the brink of despair. Begin seemed an unlikely man to lead an organization like the Irgun. He had little military experience and he was not a dashing figure as was Avraham Stern, David Raziel, or even his own deputy Eliahu Paglin. John Bowyers Bell writes that to "the romantic, Begin appeared a most unlikely underground leader. Unlike Stern, there was no aura of intense, burning, dangerous determination. Unlike Eldad (another right-wing revolutionary) there were no visions. He was no gunman, no hard man on the run, no poet of revolution, no splendid figure ripe for legend." Bowyers-Bell continues that Begin "closely resembled a small-town lawyer or a schoolteacher: middle sized, far from handsome, slender, immaculately dressed, with impeccable manners. In intimate conversation he was invariably kind and considerate." But he exuded a power based on his unflinching commitment and the necessity for a revolt against British rule. . This was essential in order to free the Jews from British domination, and thus establish an independent state which could take care of persecuted Jews everywhere as the only the Jews could do. Begin was also scrupulously honest in all of his dealings, something even in the left-wing establishment could not deny. He thus achieved "a most remarkable presence in the underground, which created an atmosphere of contained power and moral authority, combined with a keen analytical mind cleared of the dense undergrowth of previous Zionist assumptions." His outlook inevitably won out by the dint of logic and his grasp of the strategic situation, which was almost unerringly correct. Reading his book, The Revolt, one is taken by his sharp and lucid commentary on the Palestine situation. He writes of how the British viewed the situation; "The Jews might be good merchants, but soldiers, fighters? The mere thought was enough to make the British administrators laugh. The Jews had not handled arms for thousands of years. Those not yet in Palestine would be easily frightened off, and those already there would have to look to the British for protection. Thus the blueprint was evolved; the Arabs, when required, would `rebel' against the `foreign invasion'; and the Jews would be forever a threatened minority. Each would have to be protected from the other - by British bayonets." The truth is that the Arab riots were not actually looked forward to by the British, in that the British themselves were sometimes killed as well. But the British turned these outbreaks of Arab violence to their own advantage; the British restricted Jewish rights in Palestine in the hope of currying favor among the Arabs of the Middle East and even the Muslims of India. In this way the British hoped to maintain the imperial lines of communication across the Middle East, through the Suez Canal, and over to India open and unimpeded. The problem, as Begin and other Irgun members saw it, was that while Arab violence was rewarded, the tendencies of the Jews to abide by the law was not. That was the great mistake of the Jewish Agency and the left-wing political establishment. The left-wing Zionists believed that by having no moral blemishes, by acting above repute, the British, as a fair-minded people with a conscience, would continue to favor and encourage the Jewish position. By the 1920's, however, the British hardly viewed the Jews as a strategic ally. The Arabs were far more numerous, controlled much more land, and thus their militancy had to be appeased to a certain extent - all in the name of British interest. The Irgun wished to show the British that not only can the Arabs wreak havoc and then be rewarded; the Jews will prove that they can be a very tough, very nasty people when pushed against a wall as well. As Begin writes; "The world does not pity the slaughtered. It only respects those who fight. For better or worse, that is the truth.All the peoples of the world knew this grim truth except the Jews. That is why our enemies were able to trap us and shed our blood at will." The British were able to work with - and to a certain extent impose their will on the Jewish Agency (led by Ben-Gurion) as well. Notwithstanding Ben-Gurion's fighting words in 1939, the Haganah had done very little to undermine British authority in Palestine. And the British put the onus of responsibility for Jewish terror on the left-wing establishment, the Jewish Agency and the Haganah. The Jewish Agency did, in fact, as a semi-governmental body, have authority over much of the Jewish community. The settlements, the Haganah, the Histadrut - all were subject to the authority of the left-wing Jewish leadership. They had much to lose if the British ever decided on a full-scale crackdown. The Irgun, on the other hand, was an underground army. It had no home base, no official institutions, hardly any settlements. It didn't have to worry about British counter-measures as much as the Left. But the Irgun argued that showing the British that Jews are willing to fight and if need be, die for the defense of their rights and their country - as the Arabs seemed to have little trouble doing - would have a decisive impact on British public opinion and the British desire to remain in Palestine merely by force of arms. Begin argued that the British could count on the Jews to talk a lot but not make too much trouble. "They assumed that in Eretz-Israel, too, the Jews would be timid suppliants for protection. The conduct of the Jews - or rather the attitude of their official leaders, expressed in the well-known policy of self-restraint (havlagah) - seemed to justify and confirm this assumption.(But) A new generation grew up which turned its back on fear. It began to fight instead of to plead. For nearly two thousand years, the Jews, as Jews, had not borne arms, and it was on this complete disarmament, as much as psychological as physical, that our oppressors calculated. They did realize that the two phenomena were interdependent: we gave up our arms when we were exiled from our country. With our return to the land of our fathers our strength was restored." One of the more dramatic incidents that occurred before the revolt actually broke out (in February 1944) was at the Wailing Wall on Yom Kippur in the Fall of 1943. The Irgun was always more traditional in terms of religious observance than the Zionist Left, and this factor only increased with Begin's takeover of the Irgun in 1943. After the 1929 riots, which the Arabs initiated, the Jews were forbidden to blow the shofar at the Wailing Wall. Many on the Left did not care, unattached as they were to Jerusalem and Jewish tradition. As Begin writes, there were Zionists on the Left who "argued that a few pedigree cows were worth more than all of these stones." In 1943 the British police did break up the blowing of the shofar, even beating a few Jews while in the midst of prayer. They could not blow the shofar that year. The British overcame them. The Irgun members promised themselves this would not happen again. "What our ancestors refused to tolerate from their ancient oppressors, even at the cost of their lives and freedom - is tolerated by the generation of Jews which describes itself as the last of oppression and the first of redemption. A people that does not defend its holy places - that does not even try to defend them - is not free, however much it may babble about freedom. People that permit the holiest spot in their country and their most sacred feelings to be trampled underfoot - are slaves in spirit." They determined then and there this would not happen again. The following year, when the Revolt had already been in progress for about 8 months, the Irgun issued a warning to the British not to interfere with the blowing of the shofar on Yom Kippur. Tension mounted. Anxiety grew. No one knew what the British would do or how the Irgun would react. The Irgun did not plan a clash at the wall. Too many old people and children could be hurt. Instead, the Irgun planned attacks on British police stations all over the country. They carried them out, expecting the British to interrupt and intrude at the Western Wall. But the British did not - for the first time since 1929. They stood at a safe distance, and the Jews had their service. The blowing of the shofar was never impeded by the British authorities again, for the remainder of the Palestine Mandate. After February 1944 Menachem Begin became a wanted man. He changed his name and identity frequently as an underground leader. He first called himself Ben Ze'ev, then Israel Halperin, then Israel Sassover, then Yonah Koenigshoffer. He usually was in the Tel-Aviv area, sometimes living openly in hotels, sometimes disguised as a bearded religious Jew. But the British Secret Service, as legendary as their reputation was, never caught up with him. He was quite fortunate because in November 1944 the Haganah agreed to cooperate with the British authorities in ferreting out the Irgun and what ostensibly should have been Lehi (Stern Gang) members. (This period, from November 1944 through May 1945, is called "the Saison" or "Hunting Season" in Zionist historiography). But the Haganah made a deal with Lehi - in return for no more Lehi attacks, Lehi was exempt from Haganah probes during the Saison. The Haganah also feared Lehi's powers of resistance and violent reaction more than they feared the Irgun. Irgun members were taken to Haganah cells and interrogated and even beaten. The Haganah smashed the fingers of Irgun members between doors, burned them with cigarettes, and even chained one Irgun member to a bed for months. They later started turning over Irgun members to the British authorities. The vitriol of hate the Left had been pouring out on the Right for decades as "fascists", "fanatics", "militarists" and other epithets was coming to its fruition. The Left wing Zionists had their day with the Right. Begin and the Irgun were in a terrible bind. The Irgun could not in good conscience capitulate to the Haganah - in effect that would be capitulating to the British. And in Begin's view the Jewish people would thus always be enslaved to the foreign oppressor - which by World War II the British had indeed become. On the other hand, fighting back meant civil war between the Jews. The Left seemed ready enough for it, judging by their actions. They knew that their maltreatment and turning over of Irgun members to the British might lead to a violent response on the part of the Irgun. But Begin would not countenance it. The Jews of the Second Temple period had fallen to the Romans not only because of Roman power, but due to Jewish internecine strife. Jewish groups fought viciously against one another, severely weakening one another, before the Romans had even breached the walls of Jerusalem in 70 C.E. Josephus writes that the streets of Jerusalem at that time were running with blood. Begin would prevent this at all costs. It was a massive struggle with his conscience and the conscience of his organization. Their whole raison d'être was retaliation against those who oppressed the Jews. And the Jews had turned into their own oppressor. But Begin held the faith that those who were then hunting them down would soon join them in their struggle against the British. And the Haganah soon did join the Irgun in their struggle against the British. The Haganah had little stomach left for this kind of treatment of fellow Jews after nine months of one-sided civil war. The Irgun, meanwhile, had acquired an aura of national responsibility due to its self-restraint. It had shown that it put the interests of Zionism above those of the Irgun and Revisionism. The Irgun's faith and enormous restraint were justified. In the aftermath of World War II the Conservative British government of Churchill and Anthony Eden was replaced by the Labor government of Clement Attlee and Ernest Bevin. They had shown a strong sympathy to Zionist goals and the establishment of a Jewish state while in opposition. Thus the Jewish Agency and the Zionist Left in Palestine expected a reward. They did not get one. In contrast to the Left, the Irgun was pessimistic about any changes in British policy. British rulers had come and gone, but things had remained the same in Palestine. Ben-Gurion and the Left were soon disappointed with the new British government. The Jewish Agency received only vague promises, obscure statements, and obfuscation. In practice, nothing was going to change. A few months before, the Left had called the Irgun "crazy", "mad", and "deluded" for fighting against the British. The hurlers of these epithets decided to join their erstwhile enemy and whipping boy, the Irgun, in November 1945. They set up a united Command for taking joint actions, along with Lehi, against the British. The scope of Irgun activities significantly expanded. They attacked and blew up rail lines. They attacked the oil pipe line. The Haganah itself got into the act and sank several British patrol boats, attacked the radar station in Haifa, and blew up bridges. The Irgun attacked air bases and one day even blew up 28 Royal Air Force planes. Neither the British nor the yishuv could believe it. On June 29, 1946, the British arrested the Jewish Agency leadership. Ben-Gurion escaped to Paris, but many others were arrested, the Jewish Agency offices were raided, and many valuable and incriminating documents were uncovered and seized by the British. With the help of this information and the people they arrested the British uncovered many arms caches in the Jewish settlements. Half of the Palmach, the elite strike force of the Haganah, was arrested as well. Soon after the Haganah agreed to concede the idea of active resistance against the British. Their leadership and arrested members were allowed to go free. But they were hostage to the British authorities. The Irgun kept up the fight. They had no fear for their official leaders because they didn't have any. Meanwhile, the Haganah did continue to surreptitiously cooperate with the Irgun for a short time after the arrest of the Jewish Agency. On July 1st, 1946, the United Command approved the Irgun's plan to blow up part of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem. Although the High Commissioner was housed elsewhere, the King David was the headquarters of part of the British military leadership in Palestine. It was exceedingly difficult to penetrate. But the Irgun succeeded. Irgun men dressed as Arabs brought milk cans filled with explosives into the basement of the King David hotel. They overwhelmed 15 Arab employees and locked them away. Suddenly two British soldiers appeared. They drew their revolvers. A clash ensued. The British were put out of action. Outside of the hotel the Irgun, armed with revolvers and Sten guns, were clashing with British police. Meanwhile a warning had been given to employees of the hotel to run for their lives. The Arabs were freed and ordered to run for their lives. They did. A little more than a half hour later, the whole wing came crashing down. Many people had remained in the hotel. Perhaps they never received the warning. 91 people were killed, including 19 Jews. But two of the mainstays of the British military administration had escaped with their lives. The Jewish Agency disclaimed any responsibility. Ben-Gurion condemned the act - although he was certainly aware of it and may have given the order for it. Meanwhile, the "usual stringent regulations went into force and large cordon and search operations were set in motion - a process continued until August 7. In Tel Aviv screening cages were set up in every Jewish quarter, and the army had orders to search every Jewish house." Begin was trapped in Tel-Aviv. It looked like there was no way out. The police approached his house. Begin tried his luck in a trap door he didn't think held much chance of success. The British came to his house, talked to his wife, and searched the house. They didn't discover the secret compartment.. They camped outside his house for four days. Begin could not move, could not drink, could not eat - he could hardly breathe. The British came in his house every few minutes. Finally they left. Begin rushed up to dip his face in water again and again. Begin recounts that "I was told that during the great curfew in Tel Aviv orthodox Jews in a number of Tel Aviv synagogues gathered to offer prayers to the Almighty to preserve me from those who were seeking my life.Nothing I had ever heard moved me deeply than that" In December of 1946 the British sentenced two Irgun boys of 17 years to 15 years imprisonment and 18 lashes for illegal possession of arms. This was something Begin and the Irgun could not tolerate. Jews had suffered the whip of bestial Christian overlords for centuries in Poland, Russia, Germany, and elsewhere in Europe. Begin had seen it himself in 1920, when a Polish General ordered a number of prominent Jewish citizens to be publicly whipped. Jews were forced to watch. The Irgun was not going to accept this humiliation in Eretz-Israel. The Jews were not coming back to Zion for that. Even if the British had other ideas, that was not the way the Jews would live here, after suffering for hundreds of years at the hands of others. Begin wrote the first warning, which was posted all over the yishuv; "We warn the occupation government not to carry out this punishment, which is contrary to the laws of soldiers of honour. If it is put into effect - every officer of the British occupation army in Eretz-Israel will be liable to be punished in the same way: to get 18 whips." The Irgun directed their threat at officers only, however. They wished to strike only at the symbols of authority. This policy may have even aroused a certain amount of sympathy among low-ranking British enlisted men. One British soldier scrawled on the Irgun warning notice; "'Please don't forget my sergeant-major.'" The Irgun printed another warning poster soon after. "'For hundreds of years', we wrote, `you have been whipping `natives' in your colonies - without retaliation. In your foolish pride you regard the Jews in Eretz-Israel as natives too. You are mistaken. Zion is not Exile. Jews are not Zulus. You will not whip Jews in their Homeland. And if British Authorities whip them - British officers will be whipped publicly in return.'" Unknown to the Irgun, the British had already whipped one of the two imprisoned Irgun boys. When the Irgun found out about it, they quickly captured four British officers and whipped them, 18 lashes each. The Irgun then wrote; "If the oppressors dare in the future to abuse the bodies and the human and national honour of Jewish youths, we shall not reply with the whip. We shall reply with fire." The other Irgun boy was not whipped. He (along with a number of Arabs) was given clemency. The British military never again whipped anybody, neither Jew nor Arab, for the remainder of their administration in Eretz-Israel. But the struggle continued as long as the British remained. The Irgun pulled off a spectacular operation at the largest and most closely guarded British military base in Palestine, Sarafand. Dressed as British soldiers, they took crate after crate of arms and ammunition under the watching eyes of the British military and escaped to freedom. In the Spring of 1946, disguised as Arab prisoners and their British guards, the Irgun pulled off another spectacular operation at the Ramat Gan police station, carrying off considerable arms and ammunition once again. Only a fierce battle enabled them to escape. One of the wounded Irgun men who did not escape, Dov Gruner, was hanged along with three other Irgun men. In response, the Irgun stormed what was thought to be the impregnable medieval prison/fortress at Acre, and took the majority of the Jewish prisoners they had planned to take to freedom. The world was enthralled. The British were shocked but determined to pursue a hard-line policy. They responded by hanging three captured escapees. The Irgun responded by promptly hanging British servicemen. The whole of Britain was in a rage following this Irgun retaliation. There was small-scale rioting by British troops against Jews in the yishuv. But that was the beginning of the end of British rule in Palestine. Deadly Irgun attacks continued on all British military and police personnel. Within a few months the British had referred the Palestine quagmire to the United Nations. On November 29, 1947, the U.N. voted for partition. The British would evacuate Palestine in May, 1948. The Irgun continued to act even after the vote for partition. It continued to attack and raid British army camps for weapons. They joined the much larger Haganah in repulsing Arab attacks and initiating their own. After the state of Israel was declared on May 15, 1948, the Irgun offered to integrate all of its forces into the fledgling Israeli Army. Two incidents stand out in the last months of the Irgun's existence. The first, the Irgun attack on the Arab village of Deir Yassin, occurred a little before the regular Arab armies invaded the newly-proclaimed state of Israel. The Irgun perpetrated a general massacre there. There is much argument over how and why this happened. What is known definitively is that hundreds of thousands of petrified Palestinian Arabs ran out of Palestine upon hearing this news. The other incident occurred on June 20, 1948. The Irgun brought the ship The Altalena to the shores of the newly declared state of Israel. It was loaded with much-needed arms and men who had come to fight for Israel's independence. According to Begin, he had reached an agreement before the ship landed where 20% of the arms and ammunition were to go to the Irgun units still operating in Jerusalem and the rest to the Haganah under the auspices of the Israeli Army. The ship reached shore and Israeli government troops (Haganah men) demanded a complete hand over of the ship. The Irgun refused. On Ben-Gurion's orders the ship was shelled and destroyed with much of the arms still on board. This occurred in the midst of war when these arms and men were sorely needed. A number of Irgun men were killed in the artillery barrage. Some of them had survived the Holocaust only to be killed by their own brothers. But Begin ordered the men on board not to respond. He would not be the cause of a civil war. Certainly not when the very existence of Israel was at stake. Ben-Gurion did not want dissident groups in the Israeli army. Begin felt that his still-existing units were under-supplied and he wished to help them. Much more could be said about this, but I hesitate to do so without further research on the subject. Suffice it to say that this remained a very sore point, along with the Saison of 1944-45, for Begin and his former Irgun comrades for years afterwards. The remaining Irgun units, however, put these incidents behind them for the greater national good. They were soon incorporated into the Israeli Army and participated everywhere in the battles for the establishment of the state. Begin himself became one of the chief opposition leaders in the Israeli parliament for years. He was ostracized by Ben-Gurion and the Left wing establishment for almost three decades, until he finally became prime minister on the Likud list in 1977. He subsequently became one of the greatest prime ministers in Israel's short history