The Prime Ministers: An Intimate Narrative of Israeli Leadership (4 page)

During the Arab riots of 1936–1939, the British Army leased the hotel’s top floor as emergency headquarters. In 1938, the authorities requisitioned two-thirds of the hotel’s two hundred rooms to accommodate their military headquarters and government secretariat, taking over the whole of the southern wing, thus making the King David the nerve center of the British Government of Palestine. The hotel grounds were surrounded with a cordon of heavy barbed wire, butterfly nets to prevent grenades, and barricades manned by Bren-gun carriers and Argyll and Sutherland sentries. It was a fortress. But by the time I saw the King David Hotel, in the winter of 1947, it had been a ruin for over a year; a year in which the situation in Palestine had become more and more tense and explosive. The entire southern wing was a pile of rubble, dynamited to smithereens by an Irgun squad disguised as milkmen, delivering explosive-packed churns to the kitchens. Ninety-one people died in the blast: twenty-eight British, forty-one Arabs, seventeen Jews, two Armenians, one Russian, one Greek, and one Egyptian. Also killed was one of the operatives engaged in planting the explosives.

The action had been carried out with the approval of the United Resistance Command
–
an ad-hoc alliance embracing another underground splinter group called the Israel Freedom Fighters (Lechi), and headed by the mainstream Hagana. The bombing was a direct response to a British action named “Operation Agatha” taken some weeks before, when seventeen thousand British troops swept down upon Jewish settlements and confiscated vast quantities of hidden arms, arrested over two thousand activists, and took into custody prominent leaders of the Jewish community.

Among the spoils of Operation Agatha were believed to be
operational
plans of the Hagana and the Irgun, implicating much of the Jewish leadership of Palestine in conspiracies to carry out anti-British acts. These Intelligence files were said to be housed in the southern wing of the King David Hotel. They could possibly have provided enough evidence to bring down death sentences on many a Jewish head. Hence, the approval given to the Irgun operation by the United Resistance Command.

Not only was the British press up in arms about the hotel bombing, so too was the Hebrew press.
Hamishmar
described the action as “Treason and Murder.”
Haaretz
called it “A frightful blow to all the hopes of the Jewish people.” The
Davar
headline read, “Without Cause, Without Atonement.” And David Ben-Gurion, head of the Hagana, sought to distance himself from the whole thing by telling a French newspaper, “The Irgun is the enemy of the Jewish people.”

For the rest of his days Menachem Begin would defend his King David action as a legitimate military target, and asserted that ample warning had been given to evacuate the hotel. The hotel switchboard had been told to vacate the building at least a half hour before the explosives were detonated, and calls also went out to the
Palestine Post
–
forerunner of the
Jerusalem Post
–
as well as a warning to the operator of the nearby French Consulate, to open all windows so as to avoid injury from flying glass. Even a string of firecrackers was set off in front of the hotel driveway to frighten pedestrians away.

“Oh yes, we did all we could,” insisted Begin, talking to me, a new member of his prime ministerial staff, in 1977. “The warnings were given and received in time by the British authorities; they had time enough to evacuate the hotel twice over. Somebody, for some dark purpose, or because he lost his head, or to protect a spurious prestige, ordered that the hotel not be evacuated.”

British retribution was harsh. Lt. General Sir Evelyn Barker, the General Officer in Command of Palestine, laid into the whole Jewish community, issuing a notoriously anti-Semitic order commanding his troops to cease all fraternization with all Jews of whatever sort:

I am determined that they should be punished and made aware of our feelings of contempt and disgust at their behavior. I am certain that if my reasons are explained to the troops they will understand their duty and will punish the Jews in the manner this race dislikes the most: by hitting them in the pockets, which will demonstrate our disgust for them.4

After vehement protests, this order was rescinded; still, stringent curfews became routine, accompanied by mass roundups and search operations. Every Jewish house was suspect. When British troops encamped in the grounds behind Begin’s Tel Aviv hideaway on Yehoshua Bin Nun Street, he squeezed into a tiny cubbyhole prepared in advance for just such a contingency. There, he sat cramped, with hardly any food or water and little air, for three days, with no way of knowing how long the soldiers would bivouac. By the end of the third day he was faint with dehydration and lack of oxygen. Finally, on the morning of the fourth day, the soldiers moved on and Begin clambered out into the fresh air, gasping for breath, to plunge his head into a basinful of cold water.

Photograph credit: Hugo Mendelson & Israel Government Press Office

The ruins of the King David Hotel following the bombing, 22 July 1946.

There were some prudent voices in Whitehall who, hearing the death knell of Britain’s thirty-year presence in Palestine, urged their Government to give up and get out. Most objected however; they remained either deaf or blind. Some even asserted that British imperial authority over the Holy Land was the will of the Almighty and, therefore, eternal.

As the Irgun revolt hardened so did the response to it. The authorities began sentencing captured Irgun fighters to the most savage forms of capital punishment: flogging for relatively minor offences and hanging for relatively major ones. Instantly, Menachem Begin responded by posting the following warning:

“A Jewish soldier taken prisoner by the enemy was sentenced by an illegal British military court to the humiliating punishment of flogging. We warn the government of occupation not to carry out this punishment which is contrary to the laws of a soldier’s honor. If it is put into effect, every officer of the British occupation army in Eretz Yisrael will be liable to the same punishment: eighteen lashes.”
5

When Begin’s warning went unheeded he dared to defy the colossus of the British Empire and made good on his promise. He ordered the abduction of two British servicemen to be flogged, lash for lash. And as the tempo of the revolt quickened the searches and roundups intensified. Jails were jammed. Hangings followed hangings, some contrary to normal procedure, without fair warning to the families, and in virtual secrecy. Begin gave no quarter. In the dead of night his underground press distributed the following leaflet in English for the British to see:

“We recognize no one-sided laws of war. If the British are determined that their way out of the country should be lined with an avenue of gallows and of weeping fathers, mothers, wives, and sweethearts, we shall see to it that, in this, there shall be no racial discrimination. The gallows will not be all of one color…The price will be paid in full.”

He issued orders to kidnap a number of British servicemen and hold them hostage: hanging for hanging.

The first to be abducted insisted he was a victim of mistaken identity. He claimed not to be a military man at all, but a London businessman just arrived in Palestine from Cairo, called Collins. His executioners did not believe him. Nor did they believe his assertion that he was Jewish: what kind of a Jewish name is Collins? So, in the seclusion of an orange grove the execution party readied themselves to place the noose around the dazed man’s neck, when he began to mumble incoherently “Adon olam asher malach” – the opening line of a Hebrew chant of divine praise. Then, with an equally terrible whimper, he muttered the lament for the dead – “Yisgadal v’yiskadash sh’mei rabba.” Horrified at having almost murdered a fellow Jew, the executioners whisked him back to Tel Aviv, from whence he beat a quick retreat back to London.

So, two British sergeants, Cliff Martin and Mervyn Paice, were nabbed in his place. “Whatever is done to our people will be done to you,” warned Begin’s grim notices in the night.

The British executions were mostly carried out in the fortress of Acre, an imposing Crusader bastion that had been restored by the Turks, and was considered impregnable. In May 1947, in what was probably the Irgun’s most daring exploit, a wall of this great citadel was breached, allowing for a mass escape. However, three of the attacking party
–
Avshalom Haviv, Yaakov Weiss, and Meir Nakar
–
were captured and condemned to death.

On the day of the execution, 29 July 1947, the District Commissioner of Galilee, a man with the unusual name of Thorne Thorne, visited the Acre prison accompanied by the Commissioner of Prisons, a Mr. Hackett, to ensure the gallows were readied and all other necessary arrangements in place.

It would be wrong to think of these men as in any way vindictive or malevolent. They were bureaucrats doing their job; their writ did not extend to pondering the iniquity of destroying healthy, conscious men. Their task was to see to the formalities of the hangings. So imagine their astonishment when, upon calling on the Acre prison superintendent in his quarters, he told them in no uncertain terms that he would not carry out the execution orders.

What these three officials said and did on that day was documented in an official report drawn up by the District Commissioner, Thorne Thorne, and classified “Top Secret & Confidential.” Here is a construct of their exchange redacted from Thorne’s meticulous testimony:

Charlton
[Acre Prison Superintendent]: I suppose you know that I am not going to carry out these executions.

Hackett
[Commissioner of Prisons]: You are the officer detailed to carry them out. I have here the warrants.

Charlton:
I do not agree with the policy of Government regarding these hangings. The whole thing stinks. Why can’t Government carry out the executions in a normal manner, giving the prisoners and relatives proper warning as usual? I want no part of it. I am unhappy about the whole affair. Please send me home. I’ve had enough of this.

Hackett:
Do you absolutely refuse to carry out the death sentences?

Charlton:
Yes. I have carried out forty-four executions during my service in this country and I have not raised any objections before. But now I’m adamant. I had a definite promise from Mr. Bromfield when he was acting Commissioner of Prisons that secret executions such as that carried out in the hanging of Dov Gruner [a young Irgun commander] will under no circumstances occur again. I will not preside under the circumstances you have outlined. I am ready to execute the men on Friday of this week [August 1] or next Tuesday [August 5] provided the proper open procedures are followed, meaning that the date is announced in advance and that the relatives are given the opportunity to visit the condemned men prior to the event.

Hackett:
But the lawyer of the accused and their relatives will be informed prior to the event.

Charlton:
I am not satisfied. Why can’t Government carry out the executions in a normal manner, giving the prisoners and their relatives proper advance warning, as is usual procedure? The whole prison will be upset. It will be impossible for me to keep order or discipline if the executions are performed in a secretive manner. I am not going to carry out these executions, not because I am afraid but solely because it is against my conscience. If the executions are postponed as I suggest, and done later in a proper and regular manner I will certainly do as ordered.

Thorne
[District Commissioner of Galilee]
to
Hackett:
“The time now is 4.15
p.m.
The intention to execute the three men will be made public in an hour-and-three-quarters, at 6.00
p.m.
By that time the relatives will have been informed in Jerusalem. [
To Charlton
]: Unless you have someone else to carry out the executions, someone whom you can rely upon, we have to inform Government what is happening. I need hardly point out the political and other consequences if the executions are postponed because an Officer of the Crown refused to carry them out.