Moshe Sneh's Role in the King David Explosion

Recently, a new biography on Moshe Sneh has appeared, authored by Nir Mann, dealing with the period of his life when he commanded the Hebrew Resistance Movement.

Based on a review by Yossi Kister that appeared in Ha'Umma, in its issue 234, I summarize some new material on the King David Hotel explosion, portions which appeared in various articles Mann published.

Sneh pushed a line that was termed "activist" in those days in the Yishuv which meant that the fighting forces would attack rather than respond. As a result, between the end of 1945 and the summer of 1946, relatively large-scale and well-coordinated insurgency operations took place against British installations, rail lines, bridges and othe targets.

Already in May 1946, Sneh managed to get its Committee 'X' to authorize a new series of objects, one of which included the King David Hotel's southern wing. It was that section of the hotel that had been appropriated by the Mandate Government already in 1939 for offices. In 1946, senior officials, both in the civil and military departments, were in that wing.

However, on May 8, 1946, David Ben-Gurion had written of his unwillingess to continue offense actions. Sneh's policy was saved, as it were, by Britain's unwillingness to permit increased immigration which undermined the position furthered by Moshe Sharett and other moderates. In reaction to the "Black Sabbath" operation of the British, a further decision was taken to act in a triple operation.

Some ten days prior to the King David operation, the personal political secretary of Chaim Weizmann, Meir Wesigal, visited Sneh and instructed him to cease all military operations. As a result, Sneh tendered his resignation on July 17. However, despite the initial authorization given to both the Irgun and the Lechi for the planned actions at the Hotel and the nearby Royal Air Force Intelligence offices, Sneh did not inform neither Menachem Begin or Natan Yellin-Mor regarding his resignation.

His handwritten note to Begin of July 19 simply asked Begin, a second time, to delay the operation for a few days. Begin waited a few days and the new date was fixed for July 22. However, Begin was not apprised of the resignation. Moreover, he was unaware that Sneh on the day of the explosion was in Haifa sneaking aboard a commercial ship and the next day left the country clandestinely for Paris, there to join Ben-Gurion for a Zionist conference.

In a sense, Begin, and the Irgun, were left "holding the bag". The Hagana-led United Resistance Movement had insisted that the Irgun assume all responsibility even though the regular policy was that only the URM would appear as the sponsoring organization in announcements.

If Sneh had informed Begin of all the background, had told him he was no long the head of the URM (to one interviewer in his later years he said he didn't tell Begin to further delay the operation as he was no longer in command (!)) or even ordered him to halt the plans, there may have been a difference although I am not sure. 

In any case, the King David Hotel explosion was a joint Hagana-Irgun operation authorized by the highest echelons.

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When the 'Right' Had Problems Rallying in Tel Aviv

On February 26, 1948, in the evening, the Irgun Tzvai Leumi sought to gather for a rally in support of raisaing funds for jtheir military operations against the Arabs.

The Hagana would not allow the event to pass quietly and intervened with the result that stun grenades were thrown and fisticuffs broke out.

Newspaper reports:

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Hagana's Hypocrisy

As a result of the explosion on July 22, 1946 in the southern wing of the King David Hotel, the section that since 1939 had housed various government and army offices (only in the northern wing were there tourists and other civilians who were not targeted and not harmed), over 90 persons were killed, the majority of them employees or members of the Mandate government.

Despite the fact that the Irgun had not intended that anyone would be physically harmed and had made efforts to assure that warnings would be made, indirectly (releasing the kitchen staff; igniting a firewall in St. Julian's Way (today, King David Street); and tossing petards) and directly (phone calls to the hotel and police, as well as to the French Consulate), and despite Menachem Begin expressing regrets at the loss of life, the Irgun and Begin are vilified and castigated until this day.

The left-wing in Israel, and the Jewish people, never stop pointing an accusatory and damming finger.

But consider this:

On November 25, 1940, an installation in Palestine was attacked by a Jewish underground militia. The result of the explosion caused the deaths of almost 300 civilians with only 209 bodies recovered.

Are the perpetrators damned in the history books?  Is their deed recalled every year like with the King David Hotel?

No. 

Probably the fact that those who carried out the operation were members of the Hagana.

I am referring to the sinking of the Patria, a French-built 11,885-tin ocean liner.  The Patria 

was carrying about 1,800 Jewish refugees from Nazi-occupied Europe whom the British authorities were deporting from Mandatory Palestine to Mauritius because they lacked entry permits. Zionist organizations opposed the deportation, and the underground paramilitary Haganah group planted a bomb intended to disable the ship to prevent it from leaving Haifa.

The Haganah claims to have miscalculated the effects of the explosion.

As one can now read at Wikipedia:

A bitter debate over the correctness of the operation raged in secret within the Zionist leadership...An effort was made to enshrine the incident as an icon of Zionist determination...Some leaders of the Yishuv (the Jewish community in Palestine) argued that the loss of life had not been in vain, as Patria's survivors had been allowed to stay in the country. Others declared that the Haganah had had no right to risk the lives of the immigrants...The Haganah's role was not publicly revealed and a story was put out that the deportees, out of despair, had sunk the ship themselves...Britain believed the Irgun was probably responsible.
The Haganah's role was finally publicly disclosed in 1957 when Munya Mardor, the operative who had planted the bomb, wrote an account of his activities in the Jewish underground. He recounted, "There was never any intent to cause the ship to sink...

Hypocrisy of the left vs. the right in Zionism?

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The Hotel That The Hagana Blew Up

If you ask "which Jewish underground fighting force in Mandate period Palestine blew up a hotel with civilian casualties?", 99.9% would respond "the Irgun which blew up the King David Hotel", right?

Well, I'm the .1%.

From "The Collapse of the Palestinian-Arab Middle Class in 1948: The Case of Qatamon", by Itamart Radai in Middle Eastern Studies,Vol. 43, No. 6, 961–982, November 2007:-

Exchanges of fire between Qatamon and the adjacent Jewish neighbourhoods soon became commonplace. On the night of 2 January, Jewish Lehi blew up a number of abandoned buildings west of Qatamon. The explosions caused panic in the neighborhood, and in their wake ‘Abd al-Qadir al-Husayni, the commander of the irregular Arab forces in the Jerusalem area, paid his first visit to Qatamon.According to some accounts, ‘Abd al-Qadir and his men met with the residents at the Hotel Semiramis, a small family establishment in the centre of the neighbourhood, and made plans to defend the area.36 [go left on Rehov Hahish, and descend to Rehov Mehalkei Hamayim. On the corner to your left stands a large, modern villa that replaced the Semiramis Hotel.]

The  Haganah apparently got wind of the event through Shai, and this was one reason for the attack on the hotel on the night of 5 January. It was intended as retaliation against the Arabs for causing the flight of Jews from Qatamon and other neighbourhoods.37

The Qatamon guard force received a report (perhaps a police warning) of an imminent attack on the neighbourhood. On the night of 5 January 1948 most of the force was sent to the neighbourhood’s northern boundary, opposite the Jewish neighbourhood Kiryat Shmuel, from where, they believed – rightly – the attack would originate. Seven guards were stationed on the roof of the Hotel Semiramis, which at three stories was one of the tallest buildings in the neighbourhood. However, the guards dispersed towards midnight due to a thunderstorm, believing that it ruled out the possibility of an attack that night. Shortly afterwards the Haganah force arrived at the hotel in two vehicles, blew it up, and withdrew without interference. The guards rushed out of their homes and opened fire wildly, but to no effect.38

The explosion illuminated the sky above the neighbourhood for several minutes and shook the walls of houses hundreds of metres away. Frightened residents leaped out of bed and rushed to find shelter in the bowels of their homes. Close to the site of the explosion some people went into shock.39

The hotel’s eastern wing collapsed; 18 people were killed and dozens wounded. Most of the dead were from two Arab Catholic families of Lorenzo and Abu Suwwan, the hotel’s co-owners. They had taken refuge in the hotel, believing it was safer than their homes in the Nikophoria Jewish-Arab neighbourhood.40

Footnotes:

36. Levi, p.337; D. Ben-Gurion, War Diary, 1948–1949 (Tel Aviv: Ministry of Defense, 1982), 4 January1948, p.113; ‘A. al-‘Arif, al-Nakba (Sidon and Beirut: al-maktaba al-‘asriyya, 1956–60), p.81;L. Collins and D. Lapierre, O Jerusalem! (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1972), p.10.37. ‘Hotel Semiramis – A Regional Arab Base in Qatamon’, 8 January 1948, Central Zionist Archive,Jerusalem (CZA), S25/4013; Y. Berman to G. Myerson, 8 January 1948, ibid., S25/9200.38. ‘Foreign Document delivered by Yossef’, IDFA 1949/2605/3; Levi, p.183.39. Karmi, pp.86–7; H. Sakakini, 5 January 1948, pp.110–111; Toubbeh, pp.27–8.40. Filastin, 6 January 1948; ‘Hotel Semiramis’, 8 January 1948, CZA S25/4013; report on other twowomen who perished in Semiramis, al-Difa‘, 9 January 1948; obituary reporting that two AbuSuwwan children lost their parents and uncles, Filastin, 10 January 1948; Jawhariyya, p.595.

P.S.   The Spanish vice-consul, Manuel Allende Salazar, was also killed in the attack.

And this following development preceded Deir Yassin by three months:

the explosion brought about the first wave of departure from Qatamon, which included Arabs, Armenians, and Greeks. The deep shock and fear are reflected in the correspondence between Albina and the District Commissioner...

Oh, and unlike the Irgun, no warning was given.

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December 11, 1947: British Soldiers Shoot Jewish Civilian Dead

December 11, 1947:

Arara was 20, born in Turkey and immigrated in 1935.

Haaretz's Tom Segev on the Map I Produced

In the footsteps of terror

Menachem Begin regularly rejected any comparison between the terrorist acts carried out by members of the Irgun (pre-state underground militia) and the actions of Palestinian terrorists; he claimed that in contrast to the Arabs, the Irgun - his organization - spared civilians' lives. Begin was even more angered when Irgun members were called "dissenters" and cast out from the pantheon of Israeli heroism. After he became prime minister, he frequently took the trouble to correct the historical narrative, and after his death, the Menachem Begin Heritage Center was founded, which operates by force of a special law, at the state's expense.

The center has just put out a map for travelers. The Begin Center takes pride in the terrorist acts that Irgun and Lehi (another pre-state militia) members carried out; the map it published leads travelers along a route of those attacks in Jerusalem.

It is a large and eye-opening map, lavishly printed on glossy paper. There are a total of 165 flag markers on it, the vast majority of them denoting terror attacks perpetrated by members of Irgun and Lehi, and a minority marking acts by members of the Haganah and Palmach. Contrary to Begin's claims, the map enumerates a long series of outright terror attacks, including bombings of places where civilians tended to congregate, such as buses, cafes, markets, a cinema, a post office and the like. The terror attacks are termed "acts of retaliation."

The chronology of terror attacks that accompanies the map strengthens the thesis that no less than they were intended to hurt the Arabs and the British, the actions of the various organizations were designed to bolster their standing, in anticipation of the struggle over the governing of the state about to be established, and it's hard not to get the impression from the map that this competition continues to this day.

As expected, the map shows that the Irgun did much more for the country than the Haganah. The number of Arabs the Irgun killed is almost quadruple the number of Arabs the Haganah killed (according to the map a total of around 250. In actuality there were more ). Some 60 British were also eliminated, nearly all of them by the Irgun and Lehi. The Haganah mainly ran interference: According to the map, one in every four actions it carried out was aimed at hurting the Irgun, by abducting its members and disrupting its activities. There is no mention of the Haganah's efforts to defend the Jewish Quarter, or of the Hish, the secretive field corps of the Haganah, or of the convoys that brought supplies to the besieged city, or of the Convoy of 35 ("Lamed Heh" ), or of other actions. On Mount Scopus a traveler relying on the map will find a marker for "the Haganah's failed attempt to conquer Augusta Victoria." The truly significant event that occurred nearby is not referenced on the map at all: the attack on the doctors' convoy in April 1948, in which 78 people, mostly personnel from Hadassah Hospital and the Hebrew University, were killed. One may speculate as to why this incident has no place in Begin's heritage. Perhaps it is because the convoy was traveling under the Haganah's protection; perhaps because Irgun and Lehi members did not rush to its defense; and perhaps because the attack came just a few days after the conquest of Deir Yassin by Irgun and Lehi members.

The Deir Yassin affair is described on the map at length; as expected, the text portrays the conquest of the village as a military operation in every way, and does not mention the death of more than 110 Palestinians, and states: "About a third of the Irgun's and Lehi's fighting force was hurt by the gunfire and sustained many dead and wounded." The map does not note the numbers: 35 wounded and five dead.

A response will be forthcoming.

^

The Unknown May 15, 1948 White Paper

Very few persons know that on May 15, 1948, at the termination of Britain's Mandate over Palestine, HMS Government published a White Paper policy statement (and here, too).

It opens:

His Majesty's Government in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland will cease to be responsible for the administration of Palestine from midnight on 14 May 1948.   The ending of thirty years of British rule in Palestine, begun when General Allenby's troop occupied that country towards the close of the first world war, provides a fitting occasion for a brief review of its history and of the policy pursued by His Majesty's Government.

The various sections are entitled:

I. THE ORIGIN AND NATURE OF THE BRITISH MANDATE FOR PALESTINE
II.  THE DEVELOPMENT OF PALESTINE 
III.  THE JEWISH NATIONAL HOME
IV. THE OBSTACLES WHICH FRUSTRATED THE EFFORTS OF HIS MAJESTY'S GOVERNMENT TO ESTABLISH SELF-GOVERNING INSTITUTIONS IN PALESTINE
V.  THE PROBLEM REFERRED TO THE UNITED NATIONS
VI.  THE LAST MONTHS OF THE MANDATE
 
So, what is the official British explanation for quitting the Mandate?
 
Here:
 

His Majesty's Government had now striven for twenty-seven years without success to reconcile Jews and Arabs and to prepare the people of Palestine for self-government. The policy adopted by the United Nations had aroused the determined resistance of the Arabs, while the States supporting this policy were themselves not prepared to enforce it. 84,000 troops, who received no cooperation from the Jewish community, had proved insufficient to maintain law and order in the face of a campaign of terrorism waged by highly organized Jewish forces equipped with all the weapons of the modern infantryman. Since the war, 338 British subjects had been killed in Palestine, while the military forces there had cost the British taxpayer 100 million pounds. The renewal of Arab violence on the announcement of the United Nations decision to partition Palestine and the declared intentions of Jewish extremists showed that the loss of further British lives was inevitable. It was equally clear that, in view of His Majesty's Government's decision not to enforce the partition of Palestine against the declared wishes of the majority of it inhabitants, the continued presence there of British troops and officials could no longer be justified.

In these circumstances His Majesty's Government decided to bring to an end their Mandate and to prepare for the earliest possible withdrawal from Palestine of all British forces.

So, who were those "extremists", those "highly organized Jewish forces"?  Who killed over 300 British security personnel?  The Hagana?  The Palmach?

Or were they the soldiers of the Irgun Tzvai Leumi  and the Lechi fighters?

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I Have a Letter in Haaretz English

Professor Norman Rose deserves appreciation for pointing out that the "sensational revelation" of Chaim Weizmann's support for collaborating with the British occupier was already published some 30 years ago (letter, August 20). Nevertheless, I would suggest it is quite sensational to be reminded by Rose that Weizmann's policy predated the official Yishuv "Saison" operation by some six months.

Rose's desire to see the "wider perspective," which includes Lehi's personal assassination (when is assassination not personal?) operations and its "flirtation with the Axis powers" is problematic. When the Hagana assassinated several Jews in 1940, who were suspected of informing on arms caches, and when the Palmach assassinated a British officer in Jerusalem in 1946, who had tortured prisoners at Biriah, did that stain them the way that the Irgun and Lehi were ostracized? Or was Weizmann's opposition more political than moral?

Moreover, as the "flirtation" he notes occured in 1940-41, and as Stern had been personally assassinated by the British in 1942 and therefore a whole new chapter had begun in the fight for Israel's liberation, one in which the Hagana and Palmach joined the so-called "dissidents" in November 1945 in the United Resistance Movement framework, perhaps Weizmann was wrong in his grovelling before the British.

Yisrael Medad
Shiloh

And Just Who Was Blowing Up Arabs?

Attlee cabinet was split over Palestine

Rows between British leaders over the withdrawal of troops from Palestine at the end of the Mandate in May 1948 have been revealed in secret government papers. Files held by the National Archive in Kew, West London, show that as fighting between Jewish and Arab forces reached a peak in the run -up to Israel’s independence there was disarray in the government. Some politicians and military officials, desperate to dampen the violence, suggested giving the Jews early control of Tel Aviv.

Others, including Britain’s High Commissioner for Palestine, General Sir Alan Cunningham, urged delayed withdrawal from Jerusalem to safeguard the city. Both proposals were rejected.

...Confidential minutes revealed that there was a particularly bitter attack on the performance of the army by Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin, following its failure to stop the Haganah — Israeli’s fledgling army — from seizing control of Haifa on April 23, 1948.

Mr Bevin said he felt “let down by the [British] army in Palestine” and deplored the “leaking” of information about the situation by the War Office

Protests from Viscount Montgomery were dismissed by Attlee, who said that “plain speaking is the order of the day in a confidential meeting”.

Mr Bevin pointed out that Haifa was the main embarkation point for British troops leaving Palestine. He said: “We should not have lost control over the perimeter of Haifa. This has allowed so many Arabs to have been driven out of the city.

“We had large forces there and it was a blow to British prestige that it appeared the Jews could do as they liked. Resolute action by the army had been needed.”

Viscount Montgomery denied the army had lost control of Haifa. It was a “big place and for some time troops there had been unsure of the date of withdrawal”.

The high command, he said, had urged withdrawal before the scheduled date of May 15.

Earlier, in a top secret cable to the cabinet, Sir Alan said: “I feel bound to say that if the Jews continue in their policy of blowing up innocent Arabs, as sponsored by the Haganah, the situation will worsen.

“I cannot say that we will not be able to extricate ourselves but it will become increasingly difficult.”

As for Jerusalem, he said, “I feel it cannot be left without protection. We should not leave it until some arrangement is made for the security of the city.”