16. The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine took control of a deserted airstrip named Dawson’s Field in the desert east of the Jordanian capital Amman and declared it “Revolution Airport.” Between September 6 and 9, 1970, the PFLP hijacked an American TWA airliner, a British BOAC jet, and a Swissair flight to “Revolution Airport.” All 310 passengers were evacuated from the planes which were destroyed on September 12. The operation succeeded in bringing the Palestinian cause to international attention but provoked King Hussein to drive the Palestinian movement out of Jordan in the violent Black September War of 1970–1971.

CHAPTER 9

The Palestine Disaster and Its Consequences

In January 1944, Jewish extremists in Palestine declared war on Great Britain. “There is no longer any armistice between the Jewish people and the British Administration in Eretz Israel [i.e., the Land of Israel] which hands our brothers over to Hitler,” the underground resistance movement asserted. “Our people is at war with this regime—war to the end.”¹ It may seem incredible that Jewish settlers would go to war with the British government, which had turned the Zionist dream of a Jewish national home in Palestine into a reality. However, over the course of the Second World War, Britain had come under increasing attack by the Jewish community of Palestine. The 1939 White Paper, which had imposed strict limits on Jewish immigration and called for Palestinian independence under (Arab) majority rule by 1949, had infuriated the Zionist leadership. With war looming between Britain and Nazi Germany, David Ben-Gurion had pledged to help the British army fight fascism as if there were no White Paper, while opposing the terms of the White Paper as if there were no war. Most of the Zionists in Palestine fell in line with Ben-Gurion’s policy and grudgingly supported the British in their war against the Nazi regime in Germany. But other, more radical Zionist parties saw Britain as the greater threat. They launched an armed insurgency with the stated aim of driving the British out of Palestine. Two Jewish terrorist organizations, the Irgun and the Stern Gang, were responsible for the worst of the violence. The Irgun (short for Irgun Zvai Leumi, or National Military Organization) had been formed in 1937 to protect Jewish settlements from attack during the 1936–1939 Arab Revolt. After the White Paper was approved by the British Parliament in May 1939, however, Irgun members came to view Britain as the real enemy. The Irgun launched a series of bomb attacks on British government offices and police stations in Palestine before suspending hostilities in June 1940. With Britain at war with Germany, the Irgun leadership decided to comply with Ben-Gurion?s policies of working with the British to fight Nazism. One faction in the Irgun dissented and continued its attacks on the British. The splinter group, which came to be known in Hebrew by the acronym Lehi (for Lohamei Herut Yisrael, or Freedom Fighters of Israel), are better known in the West as the Stern Gang, after the leader of the faction, Abraham Stern. Stern and his followers believed that the Jewish people had an inalienable right to the land of Israel and that it was their duty to redeem the land—by armed force, if necessary. For Stern, the 1939 White Paper cast Britain in the role of an illegitimate occupier. Rather than siding with Britain against Nazi Germany, Stern actively approached the Nazis to make common cause against the British. Like some Arab nationalists, Stern hoped to work with the Germans to liberate Palestine from British rule—Nazi anti-Semitism notwithstanding. In Stern’s view, Nazi Germany was but a persecutor of the Jewish people, whereas England was an enemy who would deny the Jews statehood in Palestine. Toward the end of 1940, Stern sent a representative to meet with German officials in Beirut to argue for a convergence of interests “between the aims of the ‘New Order’ in Europe as interpreted by the Germans and the true national aspirations of the Jewish people.” Through his envoy, Stern offered to use Jewish forces to drive Britain out of Palestine in return for unrestricted Jewish emigration from Germany to Palestine and German recognition of Jewish statehood. He argued that such an alliance would resolve the Jewish question in Europe and Jewish national aspirations while dealing their common British enemy a crucial defeat in the Eastern Mediterranean.² Stern never received a response from the Third Reich. He clearly miscalculated the genocidal nature of Nazi anti-Semitism. For his overtures to the Germans, Stern was roundly condemned by both the Irgun and the Jewish Agency, which provided intelligence to the British to assist them in their crackdown on the Lehi. The mandate authorities were in hot pursuit of the Stern Gang for a string of attacks and bank robberies in Palestine. In February 1942, British officers killed Stern in a raid on a Tel Aviv apartment. Its leadership in disarray after Stern’s death, the Lehi lapsed into inactivity. A fragile truce prevailed between the Yishuv and the British between 1942 and 1944, while the Second World War raged. The Irgun began to reorganize itself as a resistance movement against British rule in 1943. The movement was headed by a dynamic new leader named Menachem Begin. Born in Poland, Begin (1913–1992) joined a Zionist youth movement before fleeing the country during the German invasion of Poland in 1939. He later volunteered for a Polish military unit in the Soviet Union. In 1942 his unit was sent to Palestine, where Begin was recruited to the Irgun. He rapidly rose to lead the organization and made contact with the new leadership of the Lehi, including Yitzhak Shamir. Both men would become prime minister of Israel toward the end of their lives, though they began their political careers in Palestine as terrorists. Continued restrictions on Jewish immigration to Palestine, combined with growing knowledge of the Nazi death camps and the Holocaust, exacerbated tensions between the radical Zionist movements and the British authorities in Palestine. By 1944, the Irgun and Lehi were no longer willing to be bound by the general truce and resumed attacks on the British in Palestine. The Irgun and the Lehi used very different tactics in their common conflict against the British. Begin’s Irgun carried out attacks against the offices of the British mandate and communications infrastructure in Palestine. Shamir’s Lehi, in contrast, conducted targeted assassination attacks against British officials. The organization gained particular notoriety when two of its members assassinated the British minister resident in the Middle East, Lord Moyne, outside his home in Cairo on November 6, 1944. Moyne was the highest ranking British official in the Middle East and had upheld the 1939 White Paper’s restrictions on Jewish immigration to Palestine. His assassins were caught by Egyptian police and subsequently hanged for their crime. The Jewish Agency and its paramilitary wing, the Haganah, distanced themselves from the Lehi and its acts, for fear of British retaliation. It was only after the end of the Second World War that the Irgun, the Lehi, and the Haganah combined forces to fight against the British in Palestine. The liberation of the Nazi death camps had revealed the monstrous crime of the Holocaust. The leaders of the Yishuv were determined to bring Jewish survivors of the genocide from displaced person camps in Europe to Palestine. They refused to respect the limits on Jewish immigration imposed by the 1939 White Paper and declared a revolt against the British mandate. For a brief period in 1945–1946, the Haganah secretly coordinated operations with the Lehi and Irgun, to force a change in British policy through violence. For ten months the Haganah cooperated with the Irgun and Lehi in a series of bank robberies, attacks on infrastructure, and kidnappings of British personnel. The Jewish Agency, led by Ben-Gurion, consistently denied any involvement in these operations and kept the Haganah’s participation secret. The British authorities, however, suspected the Yishuv as a whole of complicity in the violence and responded with a massive clampdown. Between June 29 and July 1, 1946, over 2,700 members of the Yishuv were arrested, including several Jewish Agency leaders. The British authorities also seized the papers of the Jewish Agency and took them back to the mandate secretariat, then housed in a wing of the King David Hotel. The British seizure of its documents amounted to more than an administrative problem for the Jewish Agency. Among the papers were items implicating the agency and the Haganah in attacks on the British.³ Were the mandate authorities to find the evidence of Haganah and Jewish Agency involvement in terror activities, it would only stiffen British resolve to prevent further Jewish immigration to Palestine, and to concede to Palestinian Arab demands. From the moment these incriminating documents were taken into the mandate secretariat, the fate of the King David Hotel was sealed. The Irgun already had detailed plans for an attack on the high-rise hotel in West Jerusalem, headquarters to both the civil and military administrations of Palestine, but the Haganah had previously restrained it, arguing that such an atrocity would “inflame the British excessively.” On July 1, immediately after the British seizure of the Jewish Agency’s files, the Haganah sent a command to the Irgun ordering it to carry out the operation against the King David Hotel as soon as possible. Preparations for the King David Hotel bombing took three weeks. On July 22 a group of Irgun operatives delivered a number of milk cans filled with 500 pounds of high explosives to the basement of the hotel. The “milkmen” were surprised by two British soldiers, and a fire fight ensued. But the terrorists had already managed to set the timers to detonate the explosives thirty minutes later. “Each minute seemed like a day,” Menachem Begin later wrote. “Twelve-thirty-one, thirty-two. Zero hour drew near. The half-hour was almost up. Twelve-thirty-seven.... Suddenly, the whole town seemed to shudder.”⁴ The British authorities claimed that they had received no advance warning of the attack. The Irgun insisted it had given telephone warnings to both the hotel and other institutions. Whatever the truth of the claims on either side, no attempt had been made to evacuate the King David Hotel. The explosives, detonated beneath a public cafй at the height of the lunch hour, sheared an entire wing from the hotel and collapsed all six stories into the basement. Ninety-one people were killed and over one hundred wounded in the explosion—Britons, Arabs, and Jews alike. The atrocity shocked the world and was denounced by the Jewish Agency as a “dastardly crime perpetrated by a group of desperadoes.” Yet the British government knew full well that the Haganah was implicated in the terror campaign, and it made the point in a White Paper on terrorism in Palestine published only two days after the King David bombing. The British recognized they were fighting more than just a radical fringe. The Jewish Agency and the Haganah might differ with the Irgun and Lehi on tactics and methods, but they were united in purpose: the expulsion of the British to achieve Jewish statehood in Palestine.