Anonymous Soldiers

by Bruce Hoffman

  For the British—both in Palestine and especially in London—MacMichael was a breath of fresh air. His appointment was greeted warmly and enthusiastically from the start, and his popularity among British civil servants in Jerusalem never waned. Indeed, with the selection of so accomplished a colonial administrator, steeped in Arab culture and fully conversant in the language, London was sending a clear message to its wayward mandate. The policy in force since the Balfour Declaration was no longer manageable. The Royal Commission’s partition scheme was now dead. The Foreign Office and Chiefs of Staff warned vehemently against any solution that alienated the Arabs in both Palestine and surrounding countries and would in turn undermine Britain’s influence and prestige throughout the region. And the Colonial Office and the Palestine administration were increasingly concerned about having to implement a policy rejected by the majority of the country’s population in the face of mounting bloodshed and continued unrest. Britain’s ebbing support for the Zionist enterprise would soon be enshrined in a new government policy. MacMichael as such was cast as the government’s hatchet man, a role to which he would quickly prove well suited.39

  One of MacMichael’s first duties was to determine the immigration schedule for the March to September 1938 time frame. This he fixed at three thousand persons—a total less than half that assigned for the preceding six-month period. The effect was that Jewish immigration to Palestine, which before the Arab Rebellion had reached a record level of sixty-two thousand persons in 1935, continued to decline to less than half that number in 1936 and to only a fraction of it in 1937 and again in 1938. However unintentionally, the government had once more signaled to the Arabs that violence paid. That Britain’s newly evolving Palestine policy incontrovertibly entailed the placation of Arab opinion—and that MacMichael had been specifically chosen to implement it—was again demonstrated only a few weeks later with the arrest of three young Jews charged with attacking an Arab bus.40

  A string of Arab attacks on Jewish travelers along the Tiberias–Safed road as it passed near the settlement of Rosh Pinna had claimed the lives of ten Jews. Plans were made, but subsequently shelved, by the local Betar contingent to punish the Arabs, who lived in a nearby village, believed to have been responsible for the incidents. Then an especially gruesome attack occurred. Four more Jewish travelers were killed—two women and a child among them. Two young Betarim from Rosh Pinna, Shalom Zurabin and Abraham Shein, resolved to defy their commanders’ orders and avenge the deaths. They recruited a slightly older Betar member named Shlomo Ben-Yosef, a twenty-two-year-old illegal immigrant from Poland who had recently arrived in Palestine. Their plan was to ambush an Arab bus on which they thought the men responsible for the attacks used to travel to their jobs in Tiberias. At three in the morning on April 21, the three Betarim broke into the group’s armory and removed two pistols and several hand grenades. Shein and Zurabin would shoot at the bus as it slowed along a sharp curve, and Ben-Yosef would then throw the grenade at the vehicle.41

  From the start, however, the plan went awry. As the Arab bus came into view, Ben-Yosef struck a match to light the grenade’s fuse. Suddenly a Jewish car sped past, the men hesitated, and in those few seconds the opportunity to launch their assault vanished. Undeterred, the three Betarim lay in wait until another Arab bus approached. This time Shein and Zurabin opened fire, while Ben-Yosef tossed the grenade in the bus’s direction. It failed to explode. Amid screams of fear and panic from the uninjured passengers, the bus driver accelerated and quickly disappeared behind the bend as Ben-Yosef and his companions walked forlornly back to Rosh Pinna. It was their misfortune to stumble into a police patrol searching for illegal immigrants. They were arrested and subsequently charged with three counts of violating the emergency regulations imposed under the Order in Council: illegal possession of firearms and explosives; the illegal discharge of said firearms; and the use of an explosive all with the intention of causing death and destruction. Each carried the death penalty. They were tried by a military court in Haifa on May 24.42

  Contemporary accounts depict an almost surreal quality to the trial. Three young men were facing execution for an attack in which no one had been injured and no damage had been done. Nearly a thousand Arabs had been arrested and charged with similar offenses, yet only two had in fact been executed. But with Arab violence again escalating and a new high commissioner in place with the remit to restore order in Palestine, the government was determined both to crack down harshly on lawbreakers and to visibly demonstrate its impartiality toward Jew and Arab alike. Indeed, by the end of the year, the death sentences imposed on fifty-three Arabs would be carried out. The defense attorney that the Revisionist Party retained for the three men struggled to distinguish their feckless act of retribution and self-defense from the other acts of sedition and violence endemic to Palestine at this time.43

  On June 3, 1938, the court found the accused guilty. Zurabin, who had pleaded insanity, was ordered confined to a mental institution. Shein and Ben-Yosef were sentenced to hang. Appeals were immediately filed on their behalf. Messages begging for clemency poured in from Jewish organizations in Europe, Britain, and the United States; from the Polish government (Ben-Yosef was a Polish citizen); from the chief rabbis of the British Empire and Palestine; from churches and synagogues in Palestine and elsewhere; and from Ben-Yosef’s impoverished, elderly mother, who beseeched the authorities to at least stay the execution until she could travel to Palestine to see her son for the last time. An editorial in The Manchester Guardian also called on the government to show mercy. At a mass rally in London, Jabotinsky blamed Britain for failing to protect the Yishuv and punishing two young men instead.44

  On June 24, Lieutenant General Sir Robert Haining, the new GOC, commuted Shein’s death sentence to life imprisonment because he was not yet eighteen years of age. Ben-Yosef was hanged five days later. Given the extenuating circumstances of Ben-Yosef’s crime, the government’s determination to make an example of him, and what struck many in the Yishuv as an unseemly rush to judgment—whereby trial, sentence, appeal, and execution took place in little more than a month—Ben-Yosef assumed in right-wing Zionist circles, according to one sympathetic observer, the hallowed status of a “martyr for the cause of liberty.” Certainly, the Irgun, Betar, Jabotinsky, the Revisionist Party, and others in Palestine and elsewhere regarded him as such. For example, a young member of Betar in Hungary named Dov Gruner, who two years later illegally immigrated to Palestine and would eventually acquire renown as an Irgun fighter, prophetically wrote to his girlfriend, “It is a shame that Ben Yosef had to go to the gallows to create a Jewish state, and it is more of a shame that others will have to follow him. But it is on the necks of the Ben Yosefs that a free Jewish state will one day rise.”45

  Accounts of Ben-Yosef’s composure, courage, and steadfast commitment to Revisionist Zionism’s ideals while awaiting execution contributed to his hagiography. Rosenberg, the Irgun’s commander, who visited Ben-Yosef the day before his execution, reportedly told a friend, “Either he doesn’t understand what he faces, or he is so brave that he does not fear death.” A letter reputedly written by Ben-Yosef to his friends in the Betar cell back in Poland to which they had all belonged suggests he was fully cognizant of his fate: “I am going to die tomorrow, despite this I am happy. Why? Because for a period of ten years I gave all of my strength to Betar and I am proud to be the first Betar member on the gallows … I believe that after my death they will not restrain themselves.” Ben-Yosef reportedly told a group of Jewish journalists who called on him that same evening, “Do not console me. I need no consolation. I am proud to be the first Jew to go to the gallows in Palestine. In dying I shall do my people a greater service than in my life. Let the world see that Jews are not afraid to face death.” Various sources relate how Ben-Yosef had carved slogans in poor Hebrew on the walls of his prison cell. They included “Death is nothing compared to the homeland”; “What is a homeland? It is something for which to live, to fight, an
d to die”; “I was a servant of Betar until the day of my death”; and the title of a well-known poem of Jabotinsky’s that was Betar’s anthem, “To Die or to Conquer the Mountain.” His final words were reportedly “Long live Jabotinsky, long live the Jewish state on both banks of the Jordan River.” He went to his death singing “Ha-Tikva.” Jabotinsky’s wife claimed to have seen her husband cry for the first time in her life. Jabotinsky himself later declared, “Ben Yosef has taught me the meaning of Zionism.”46

  The execution traumatized the Yishuv. The Revisionist Party distributed handbills and pamphlets calling for demonstrations, strikes, and the closure of all Jewish-owned businesses and cinemas in mourning. Protesters in Tel Aviv clashed with police and denounced the government as well as the Jewish Agency for failing to prevent the execution. The administration responded by imposing a curfew on that city as well as on the Jewish sections of Jerusalem to prevent the protests from escalating. Although the Mapai (the dominant Zionist Labor-Socialist political entity in Palestine) and Histadrut had publicly spoken out against Ben-Yosef’s death sentence on moral grounds, Zionist leaders such as Ben-Gurion had refused to condemn the execution. According to two of Ben-Gurion’s biographers, the Jewish Agency’s executive director believed that the life of a Jabotinsky acolyte, who had defied the Yishuv’s official policy of havlaga, was not worth a confrontation with the British. He ordered the removal of the black flag flying in mourning over the Histadrut’s headquarters building and then resigned from its executive committee in protest against the organization’s stance on Ben-Yosef. Ben-Gurion maintained that the Revisionists had orchestrated the crisis and sacrificed Ben-Yosef simply to further their aims and generate popular sympathy and support. At the same time, he thought the government’s decision to go ahead with the execution was a colossal strategic blunder in terms of its relations with the Yishuv. MacMichael, Ben-Gurion later observed, “was both inept and malicious, and he showed this soon after his arrival when he recommended the hanging of Shlomo Ben Yosef … This single act,” the Zionist leader argued, “contributed more than anything else to the growth of the dissident terrorist organization, Etzel.”47

  Indeed, the new high commissioner’s hopes of appeasing the Arabs with Ben-Yosef’s execution failed. In a report to Malcolm MacDonald, the new colonial secretary, MacMichael noted how much the Arabs had seemed to enjoy seeing Britain placed in the difficult position of responding to Zionist complaint and opprobrium. “It was one of the worst miscarriages of justice in the history of British Colonial administration,” Marlowe later reflected.

  It had not even the excuse of expediency. As a means of demonstrating that the Administration was not pro-Jew, it was superfluous. As an attempt to impress Arab opinion it was undesirable. As a demonstration of firmness it was ludicrous; all it demonstrated was the Administration’s extraordinary and discreditable desire to curry favour with the Arabs. The effect of the execution was to increase the Arabs’ contempt, the Jews’ dislike, and many other people’s disgust for the Administration. Members of the Administration were immoderately pleased about it, and seemed to think that they had scored a notable triumph.48

  The alienation of Jabotinsky, who for nearly a quarter of a century had placed his faith in Britain as the Jews’ only true patron and defender in the world, was profound. At a rally held in London on June 30, he ominously warned, “The Jews are beginning to ask themselves whether Ben Yosef’s way is not the best one. We know from history that martyrs become prophets and bombs become altars.” And just a few days later, during a secret meeting with Golomb, the Haganah’s commander, Jabotinsky hinted at a dramatic change in Irgun policy. “If I were a terrorist in Eretz Israel,” he had reportedly stated, “I would have felt the urge, after Ben Yosef’s trial, to do something against England … This had touched me so much that I am seriously considering a complete change in our orientation towards England.” Jabotinsky in fact had already taken that fateful step. As the final preparations were being made to hang Ben-Yosef, he had sent a telegram to Raziel, the Irgun’s chief of staff: “If final, invest heavily,” signed “Mendelson.”49

  Jabotinsky had made another important decision with Ben-Yosef’s execution. Frustrated by Rosenberg’s hesitancy and unimaginative strategy, he demanded the Irgun commander’s resignation. Jabotinsky then instructed the four members of the high command to select a successor from among themselves. They chose Raziel. He accepted on the condition that he be regarded as the “first among equals.” “For a man such as you I have waited fifteen years,” Jabotinsky told Raziel when they finally met for the first and only time in February 1939.50

  Born near Vilna (now Vilnius), Lithuania, in 1910, Raziel was descended from a religiously devout and learned family of rabbis. As a student at Hebrew University, he soon joined a right-wing student society called Brit El-Al, where he met a charismatic and brilliant fellow student named Abraham Stern. In 1932, Raziel was suspended from the university for disrupting a speech he disagreed with given by the incumbent professor of international law and former attorney general for Palestine, Norman Bentwich.51

  Raziel had served in the Haganah’s Jerusalem detachment during the 1929 riots, but two years later he sided with his mentor, Tehomi, in the split that resulted in the creation of Haganah-Bet. Raziel was thus one of the founding members of the Irgun and by 1935 was so completely immersed in all aspects of the organization that he left the university. That same year, at Tehomi’s request, Raziel and Stern wrote a 256-page textbook of Jewish military preparedness and another on military operations.52

  Raziel’s views and plans thus accorded perfectly with the prevailing sentiment within the Irgun. He had, moreover, already distinguished himself as the Irgun’s Jerusalem detachment commander and demonstrated his skills as a field commander in orchestrating the coordinated attacks that convulsed Palestine on Black Sunday the previous November. Most of all, he was resolutely opposed to havlaga and advocated a more aggressive, offensive strategy to deter Arab violence. Ben-Yosef’s execution had shaken him profoundly. In a collection of essays memorializing the martyred youth, Raziel had contributed the chapter titled “Those Who Die Will Redeem the Homeland.” In it, Raziel revealed his own personal philosophy—which would also become interwoven with the Irgun’s. “There can be no struggle for national freedom,” he wrote, “that is not accompanied by sacrifices, conflicts and the slaying of heroes … Rise up from the dust!” he commanded the Yishuv. “There are those who are dying to redeem you!” He heralded Ben-Yosef specifically as “the first victim of a Jewish National Liberation Front, a sacrificial lamb”—whom Raziel now vowed to avenge.53

  There had been a new outbreak of Arab violence on the day of Ben-Yosef’s execution. In a matter of hours, twenty-one Jews had been killed. Then, that evening, a bomb tossed into a wedding reception in Tiberias injured seven more, including three children. The next day, Raziel and Stern met with two senior Revisionist Party officials—Joseph Katznelson, a close associate of Jabotinsky’s, and Benjamin Eliav, one of Betar’s founding members—to discuss the Irgun’s response. Raziel and Eliav argued that with Ben-Yosef’s execution the Yishuv was at war with Britain and that offensive operations should commence at once against government as well as Arab targets. Stern and Katznelson took a more cautious line, maintaining that the Yishuv was under attack from the Arabs, not Britain, and therefore the Irgun should focus on Arab targets for the time being. “We must create a situation,” Katznelson urged, “whereby killing an Arab is like killing a rat, where Arabs are dirt, thereby showing that we and not they are the power to be reckoned with” in Palestine. Katznelson’s view carried the day, and plans were now laid for a new Irgun offensive.54

  About an hour after sunrise on Monday, July 4, an Irgun unit raked Tel Aviv’s Carmel Street with gunfire and hurled hand grenades at a group of Arabs gathered near the entrance to a British army encampment. Five persons were wounded, two seriously. Twenty minutes later, a second Irgun team struck diagonally across town near the
central train station, killing one Arab and badly wounding two others. The dead and the injured were still being removed from Carmel Street when an Irgun time bomb exploded, injuring several more Arabs. Panic ensued in nearby Jaffa as ambulance and police sirens wailed and an unruly crowd gathered. The government immediately imposed a curfew, ordering all shops closed as British military units and armored cars fanned out across the city. In Jerusalem, meanwhile, attacks had also commenced at daybreak. Two squads of Irgun gunmen opened fire on separate groups of Arabs near the city center and on the city’s northern outskirts, wounding four persons. Minutes later, a third squad attacked an Arab bus as it passed within sixty feet of the central police station near the main market in west Jerusalem. Under covering fire, an Irgunist ran up to the vehicle and tossed a bomb inside, killing four persons and wounding six others—four grievously.55

  The Arabs had their revenge that same evening, when an attack on a Jewish settlement near Tulkarm claimed the lives of four Jews. The next morning, a Jewish merchant and his son were slain in their shop in Jerusalem’s Old City, and on July 6 an Arab terrorist threw a bomb into a Tel Aviv train, killing a Jewish woman and seriously wounding four Jewish men. The Times termed these three days of bloodshed “the worst outbreak of terrorism yet recorded” in Palestine.56