Anonymous Soldiers

by Bruce Hoffman

  In any event, upon review the GOC Douglas McConnel commuted Shmulevitz’s sentence to life imprisonment. According to American intelligence sources, he had been pressured to do so by a threat from Lehi that it would kidnap and execute by hanging four British policemen if Shmulevitz was put to death. Some CID officers had in fact confidentially expressed their hope that Shmulevitz’s life would be spared, fearing that his execution would “probably be extremely disastrous” for Palestine’s security. A pamphlet that Lehi subsequently circulated to the Yishuv crowed about the group’s success in intimidating the British and thus saving Shmulevitz from execution.64

  Nor was the Yishuv’s sympathy confined to Shmulevitz’s specific case. On July 14, the Irgun launched a new series of attacks, simultaneously bombing the Jerusalem district police headquarters, a nearby police barracks, and the Land Registry Office. MacMichael was incensed by the editorial that appeared in The Palestine Post explaining away the attacks on the grounds that the terrorists had been driven to such desperate measures because of British indifference to the plight of European Jewry.65

  For Begin, the Irgun had achieved an important milestone. In less than six months it had elbowed its way into the narrative that would determine Palestine’s future. The Irgun could not be ignored or dismissed—whether by the British, the Yishuv, or its political representatives. “Our numbers grew. Confidence rose. Most important: belief in our strength was awakened,” Begin later wrote. “We were loved or hated—but no longer jeered at. Any underground that passes beyond the stage of inevitable ridicule has gone half way—to its goal. During that period, I wrote the pamphlet ‘We Believe’ in which I expressed our unshakeable belief that ‘out of our blood will flourish the tree of freedom for our country and the tree of life for our people.’ ”66

  CHAPTER 8

  Conscripted for Life

  Just as the war was ending in Europe, another was gathering momentum in Palestine. This was the gist of a message that the Irgun delivered to the U.S. consulate general in Jerusalem in late June 1944. The D-day landings in Normandy had taken place three weeks earlier, and Germany’s defeat was now only a matter of time. The Irgun congratulated the Allies on this triumph while also taking the opportunity to lament that Jews serving in the Allied forces were neither under Hebrew command nor in a Jewish army with its own flag. The brief message then concluded with the group’s pledge “to go on fighting against the oppressive [British] Government and administration without disturbing the war effort of the Allied Nations.”1

  The main purpose of this tightly choreographed piece of self-promoting propaganda was to create the perception in America that British policy was ultimately responsible for the violence that had erupted in Palestine since the New Year. There were encouraging signs that these efforts were already succeeding. Since 1939 a group of Jabotinsky’s loyal followers had been active in the United States pressuring the Roosevelt administration and lobbying Congress. Under the aegis of a variegated collection of political action committees, they all constituted what was known as the Bergson Group—named after their indefatigable leader, Peter Bergson (the former Hillel Kook).2

  In May 1944, Bergson and Jabotinsky’s son, Eri, had organized the Hebrew Committee of National Liberation, which functioned as the Irgun’s aboveground support group in the United States, raising money and attempting to generate political support for the group.3

  Among the Bergson Group’s most significant achievements was the recruitment of the U.S. senator Guy M. Gillette, a Democrat from Iowa, to its cause. Shortly after the Irgun’s coordinated assaults on the CID headquarters in March, he had publicly declared that although such acts of violence could not be condoned, “these outbreaks were the inevitable consequences of Britain’s deliberate and consistent policy of refusing to honor its pledge to facilitate the establishment of a Jewish homeland.” Other, better-known American supporters of the Bergson Group included Will Rogers Jr., the son of the legendary American humorist; the newspaper and magazine publisher William Randolph Hearst; and the renowned Jewish American author, playwright, screenwriter, director, and producer Ben Hecht, who wrote the screenplays for many of the blockbuster films of the 1930s and 1940s, including Scarface, The Front Page, Twentieth Century, and Gone with the Wind.4

  All these developments were monitored with increasing anxiety from London. Foreign Office officials were divided, however, over the best means to counter the Irgun’s American propaganda efforts. One sensibly proposed soliciting the advice of Isaiah Berlin, the distinguished Oxford scholar who was himself Jewish and was then on secondment as an information officer to the British embassy in Washington. His superior, however, disagreed. “The best method is to use the huge publicity machine we have to blacken the faces of all Jews with these [terrorist] incidents,” he argued, “then the Jews themselves will quickly stop them. Only the PM [Churchill] is unlikely to allow it for his own reasons.” For the moment, however, these efforts went nowhere.5

  The Irgun’s message to the American consulate was also designed to distinguish itself from Lehi, just as the communiqué following the March attacks on the CID headquarters differentiated the Irgun’s assault tactics from Lehi’s use of individual assassination. “To our regret there are human victims,” the March statement read, “both from among our lines and from the other side, but those victims fell upon fight and planned military attack; the soldiers of the I.Z.L. DO NOT FIRE FROM HIDDEN PLACES AT ACCIDENTAL OPPONENTS, for their arms are full of morality and their battle is with aim.”6

  Lehi was no less vehement in its denigration of the Irgun’s tactics, which it disparaged as “romantic,” if not “ineffectual.” “The British don’t mind your blowing up their buildings,” Friedman-Yellin recalled arguing with Begin. “They’ll simply rebuild them with the money of Palestine taxpayers.” Yezernitzky actually maintained that Lehi’s operations were “more humane” than the Irgun’s. “Frontal attacks on army camps or a bomb hurled in a police station … kill men at random,” he later explained. “The Sternists were selective in their targets, killing on an individual basis for a specific tactical reason.” Yezernitzky criticized Begin for a misplaced and, in his view, fundamentally hypocritical altruism and hollow morality.7

  The British, however, disdained both groups in equal measure and made little effort to distinguish between the two. American intelligence analyses were far more nuanced and appeared to carefully delineate the Irgun from Lehi in reports to Washington. As one dispatch sent by U.S. Army intelligence in Cairo noted,

  The distinguishing feature between the two organizations is the IRGUN ZVAI LEUMI is waging a general war against the government and at all times took special care not to cause damage or injury to persons, going so far as to post warnings on the mined places advising all to stay away, while the Stern Gang is responsible for the shootings and their acts are personally directed against individuals and are perpetrated without any care for human life.

  Apparently, while the object of the IRGUN ZVAI LEUMI was mainly in the form of a protest against the government and the White Paper policy, the principal aim of the Stern Gang seems to be one of revenge against the Police and the CID, meanwhile timing this revenge campaign with the topical interest of the public in the White Paper policy, thereby lending a note of glory and patriotism to a personal terrorist campaign.8

  But what really preoccupied Lehi’s high command was that the Irgun seemed to be monopolizing the Yishuv’s attention. In contrast to Lehi’s cold-blooded murder of policemen, its rival’s brazen assaults on government offices and police stations dominated the headlines. Although both groups were decried in equal measure as dangerous “fanatics” and “criminals” by Palestine’s mainstream Jewish press, Lehi was especially loathed. Mishmar, the leftist Zionist newspaper, for instance, described the group as evidencing all the most “hideous elements of Fascism” and reproached it for threatening to “cloak Zionism and all that is dear to us with a mantle of disgrace before the liberal, civilized world.” Ha’ar
etz, the independent Hebrew daily with the largest circulation in Palestine, and the leading English-language newspaper, The Palestine Post, were equally condemnatory.9

  Hence, scorned by their fellow Jews, condemned in the press, and denigrated by their enemies as crazed killers, Lehi languished during the summer of 1944 in the shadow of the larger and only somewhat better-armed Irgun. To a large extent, Lehi’s second-rate status was a product not only of its inferior numbers and constrained logistical capabilities but also of the strategy and tactics dictated by its small size and limited firepower. Nonetheless, despite the adverse publicity and unfavorable opinions, the group clung ever more fervently to its tactics. Its inability to carry out the coordinated, commando-type assaults that the Irgun preferred had decreed that Lehi continue to rely on the lone pistol-wielding gunman whose acts of “individual terrorism,” Yezernitzky hoped, would “render the government weak and ineffectual … and have powerful echoes everywhere.” Indeed, at the very foundation of the strategy that the Lehi operations chief had defined for the group was his unalterable conviction that “a man who goes forth to take the life of another whom he does not know, must believe one thing only—that by his act he will change the course of history.”10

  However, it was becoming obvious to Yezernitzky and his fellow Lehi commanders that the campaign against the police was neither changing the course of history nor having any demonstrable impact on the British. It had also failed to impress the Yishuv. Accordingly, they concluded that something needed to be done that would not only thrust Lehi into the limelight but firmly place its struggle within the wider political context of the Yishuv’s fundamental grievances against the government. The assassination of MacMichael—alleged architect of the hated white paper and the British official most directly charged with its implementation—was therefore pursued with a zeal born of desperation. Seven separate attempts had been made on his life. Yet, like the aforementioned plan to blow up St. George’s Cathedral during Sunday services, each Lehi plot was thwarted by a combination of unforeseen circumstances and poor timing. Time was also running out. MacMichael’s five-year term in office had already been extended once by six months, and he was now due to leave Palestine at the end of August. “We decided,” Friedman-Yellin recalled, that “MacMichael will not return alive to England, no matter what!”11

  The high commissioner knew that he was a marked man. Since March, intelligence reports had repeatedly warned of Lehi’s determination to kill him before he left Palestine. He was thus now more heavily guarded than ever: police motorcycle outriders accompanied by a separate vehicle containing his personal protection detail along with a truckful of armed policemen traveled with MacMichael everywhere. A potential window of opportunity, however, presented itself when Joshua Cohen, already a senior Lehi operations officer at only age eighteen, read in a newspaper that MacMichael would travel to Jaffa on August 8 to attend a party in his honor. Two and a half miles from Jerusalem there was a sharp curve in the road necessitating that vehicles slow down. It was an ideal spot for an ambush with a hill on one side and a steep slope on the other.12

  Plans were quickly made. As the convoy with the high commissioner approached, a team of Lehi operatives would place large stones on the road to force the vehicles to stop. They would then detonate land mines planted in the roadbed to destroy the convoy. Meanwhile, a second team of gunmen armed with submachine guns and hand grenades lying in wait would open fire and hurl their grenades at any survivors. A third team would be held in reserve in the event any vehicles attempted to back out of the ambush and drive off.13

  On the appointed day, Lehi fighters, disguised as surveyors, positioned themselves along the bend in the road as planned. From the start, however, things again went wrong. The command detonation wire for the mines had become hopelessly entangled while in transit and could not be unraveled. Accordingly, that part of the attack plan was scrapped. Then the frequency of advance police patrols sweeping the area made it impossible for the ersatz survey team to roll the heavy stones onto the road and create a barrier. Cohen quickly came up with a new plan. No sooner had he done so than the convoy came into view. “Positions!” he shouted as the Lehi teams sprang into action.

  The convoy, however, was traveling at a faster speed than anyone had anticipated. Attempting to compensate for this miscalculation, one of the Sternists hurled a smoke grenade in its path. A makeshift gasoline bomb followed, and a wall of flame engulfed the road in hopes of blocking the convoy. The Lehi gunmen opened fire and threw hand grenades at the passing vehicles. The bullet-riddled limousine carrying the high commissioner swerved out of control and crashed into a roadside embankment. A female voice cried out for help—it was Lady MacMichael.

  Assuming that their mission had been accomplished, Cohen ordered the teams to retreat before more police arrived. They were seen fleeing up the hill in the direction of Givat Shaul. When the smoke had cleared, the high commissioner’s aide-de-camp, Major K. I. Nicholl, and his police driver, had been seriously wounded. Miraculously, Lady MacMichael was uninjured. MacMichael had also survived, suffering only minor wounds to his arm and thigh.14

  In the wake of the assassination attempt, the Palestine government found itself in the quandary that sooner or later all regimes confronted by terrorist campaigns encounter: Having already resorted to extreme measures as a result of some previous incident, what does it do in response to the latest provocation?

  Although one might have expected a reaction commensurate with the gravity of the crime—as had happened in the wake of Lewis Andrews’s assassination in 1937—or, at the very the least, on par with the curfews following the Irgun’s attacks in March, this was surprisingly not the case.

  Security was increased around likely government targets and the high commissioner himself. British army units returned to the city in force. Machine-gun emplacements reappeared for the first time since the Arab Rebellion on the roofs of government buildings, and additional police patrols fanned out across Jerusalem. Armored vehicles took up positions, and at key strategic points all police were armed with rifles—many with small submachine guns in addition to their service revolvers. The police were also instructed to carry out spot checks of both pedestrians and taxis—but only after 11:00 p.m.

  When MacMichael left Government House a few days later to attend another farewell reception in Nablus, the entire route was lined with armed soldiers and British police. Additional armored scout cars packed with British police now shadowed the entourage—which U.S. intelligence reported gave the impression of a “small military expedition.” But apart from a somewhat bland and by now routine plea to the Yishuv to assist the authorities in their investigation of the attack, “especially by giving information to the security forces,” the Palestine government took no other action.15

  This proved to be a grave miscalculation. What the government had failed to consider was the Arab reaction to the assassination attempt and the government’s tepid response. Since the resumption of the Irgun’s revolt, Arab concern and criticism had been mounting. From the start, the Palestine government was repeatedly assailed for its alleged preferential treatment of the Jews as compared with the severe punishment meted out to the Arabs only a few years before. More disquieting were threats of a resumption of Arab violence should the authorities prove unwilling or unable to suppress the Jewish terrorism. The possibility that Britain could be confronted simultaneously by both Arab and Jewish violence had been raised in a secret MI6 report only weeks before. The commutation of Shmulevitz’s death sentence in June had provoked still more derision. Not for the first time, Arab complaints were heard of the perceived government’s fundamental pro-Zionist bias.16

  The attempt on MacMichael’s life had also raised new Arab fears in both Palestine and surrounding countries about the Jews’ ultimate intentions. If they were bold enough to try to kill the high commissioner, Palestinian Arabs believed that it was only a matter of time before the terrorists’ weapons would again be turned on th
em. Both King Farouk of Egypt and King Abdullah of Trans-Jordan had separately expressed concern to British officials about the Palestine administration’s inadequate reaction to the Jewish terrorist campaigns. But the attempt on the high commissioner’s life created a snowball effect whereby negative opinion over Britain’s handling of the incident had spread across the region.17

  From his office in Cairo, Lord Moyne, the minister of state resident in the Middle East, watched these developments with profound unease. A decorated veteran of the Boer War and World War I, Walter Edward Guinness, 1st Baron Moyne, was a scion of the Dublin-based Anglo-Irish family who had established the world-famous brewery of the same name. On August 18, he sent a sharply worded telegram to London criticizing the Palestine government’s handling of the attack on the high commissioner. Seven years earlier when Lewis Andrews—a mere acting district commissioner—was murdered, the government had responded forcefully and immediately, outlawing the Higher Arab Committee and deporting its executive board to the Seychelles. The contrast now, he warned, had not gone unnoticed by the Arabs and had harmed British standing in the region.18