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 authorities’ 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, according 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 connivance
46
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.
Meanwhile anti-British operations, including in particular some daring prison escapes, continued. During a single week in July 1947, LECHI claimed to have carried out no fewer than twenty-two operations in places as far apart as Jerusalem and Haifa.
47
At about the same time, a crescendo of hatred was reached when the British started hanging captured ETSEL members. In retaliation Begin and his men kidnapped two British sergeants (one of whom later turned out to be part Jewish). They were hanged in defiance of world opinion as well as the
Yishuv
’s own leadership. For example, Golda Meir claimed to be “shocked” by the ETSEL action; as was her wont on such occasions, however, she did nothing. In a macabre touch the corpses were suspended from trees in a nearby grove. The ground between them was booby-trapped, and a British policeman was severely injured when he tried to cut them down.
48
This is hardly the place to inquire which of the two principal paramilitary forces—Hagana with its organization and bloodless operations or ETSEL with its acts of terrorism—did more to drive out the British. Since ETSEL developed into Likud and Hagana was run by the Labor Party, the echoes of this question continue to influence Israeli politics to the present day. Nor can we examine the relative roles played by military, political, and diplomatic events in Palestine, London, and the world arena, where decolonization and the Cold War had just begun.
49
Suffice it to say, facing determined opposition the authorities’ will to resist was broken. The turning point probably came in December 1946, when Britain’s Labor government, having failed to reach agreement with the Palestinian Arabs, decided to submit the question of Palestine to the United Nations (UN). On November 29, 1947, after an investigating committee (UNSCOP) had come and gone, the UN voted to partition the country. Next day the British announced they would evacuate by August 1948, a date later moved up to June 30. This was only four years after ETSEL and LECHI resumed the struggle and three since the assassination of Lord Moyne. Counting all forces combined, at bottom it was the handiwork of a few thousand activists armed with little more than high courage and their people’s near-unanimous support. Taking advantage of the international situation as well as Britain’s own domestic crisis during the postwar years, they took on and defeated one of the most powerful empires the world has known.