The prime minister’s gruff response likely reflected his anger upon learning from British intelligence of the contents of an encoded telegram that Moshe Sneh, who had succeeded Golomb as the Haganah’s leader upon the latter’s death, had sent to the Jewish Agency’s London office on September 23. The intercepted communication revealed that the agency had already decided to “cause one serious incident … [and] then publish a declaration to the effect that it is only a warning and an indication of much more serious incidents that would threaten the safety of all British interests in the country, should the Government decide against us.” The message also confirmed the alliance negotiations under way between the Haganah and its two terrorist counterparts.52
The commanders of each underground movement in fact met earlier that same day to finalize the terms of their alliance. Although they all agreed that it would be useful to establish some joint command arrangement, Begin resisted a formal merger of the three organizations. Talks resumed on September 29, when a compromise was reached. While the Irgun and Lehi would retain their organizational independence, both groups agreed not to carry out any operation without first obtaining the Haganah’s consent. The arrangement governing the Tenuat Ha-Meri Ha-Ivri, or Hebrew Resistance Movement, as the alliance was known, also called for the establishment of a joint command, known as X Committee. This coordinating body would meet to discuss, plan, and approve joint operations. Additional provisions gave the Haganah high command the authority to order either of its allies to undertake specific operations, but each group would retain complete independence over operations designed to procure arms, secure funding, and free imprisoned members from British custody.53
Two days later Ben-Gurion instructed Sneh to implement the campaign of active resistance. Within the week, the British were confronted with mass demonstrations and outbreaks of civil disobedience as well as outright attack. On October 6, for instance, Jewish settlers at Kfar Giladi violently clashed with a contingent of the Trans-Jordan Frontier Force attempting to search for illegal immigrants. Two days later, demonstrators took to the streets to protest the white paper’s continued enforcement. Some sixty thousand people attended the Tel Aviv march. And on October 10, the Haganah carried out its first attack on a British government target. Before dawn a force of some fifty Palmach commandos raided the detention facility for Jewish illegal immigrants at Athlit, south of Haifa. A British constable was shot dead as police patrols attempted to round up the escapees. Later in the day, Jewish settlers armed with ax handles succeeded in releasing nine of the detainees whom the police had recaptured.54
The Jewish Agency made no secret that it had known about and approved the attack, warning—just as the intercepted telegram had stated it would—that this was only a hint of the trouble to come if the government rejected the Zionists’ demands. This message was communicated by Kol Israel (Voice of Israel), the Haganah’s clandestine radio station, which had commenced broadcasting the previous evening.55
Palestine’s deteriorating security now prompted the U.S. military command to declare the country off-limits to American troops. These developments were also watched with mounting unease by the British. In letters to his mother, Robert Scott, the Palestine government’s financial secretary, described how he had been assigned three bodyguards to accompany him wherever he went—a British constable and two Bedouin. “It is a very astringent thought that reversion to peacetime conditions means in Palestine a return of the pre-war conditions of gangsterism but this time it is the Jews and they are much more efficient.”56
On October 11, Gort, who had recently returned to Palestine, requested an urgent meeting with Jewish Agency officials. Like Weizmann, the high commissioner regarded the strained relations between the government and the Yishuv as a personal setback. Both men had worked hard to establish a dialogue and thus avert precisely the violent confrontation that had now materialized. Since taking office eleven months earlier, the high commissioner had indeed shown himself to be a tireless and personable administrator, admired and respected by Arab and Jew alike. Writing to Churchill in January 1945, Grigg marveled, following a visit to Jerusalem, at the “great difference in the atmosphere” of Palestine that Gort had achieved “by being so human, cheerful, fearless and accessible, and by moving about so freely. (I can confirm this, for I walked with him in the jostling streets of Old Jerusalem, and found him greeted on all sides by hats off, salaams and smiles of welcome).” He was certainly far more popular with the Yishuv than his predecessor had been. Although Lehi had tried on several occasions to assassinate MacMichael, it never once attempted to kill Gort.57
But all these accomplishments were now threatened, not only by the emerging violence and outright rebellion, but by Gort’s own mortality. Although he did not know it, and the doctors whom he had consulted in London were unable to diagnose his condition, at age fifty-nine Gort was dying of liver cancer. Despite being in great pain and discomfort, he resolved to carry on with his responsibilities and insisted on returning to Palestine at this time of acute crisis.58
With a purposefulness and determination driven by an awareness of his declining health, Gort desperately tried to reason with the three Jewish Agency officials—Bernard Joseph, Yitzhak Ben-Zvi, and Eliezer Kaplan—who arrived at his office that day. He got nowhere. Events had gone too far for either party to find common ground. The high commissioner’s warning that the government would tolerate no further violence and disorder was rebuffed by the officials’ proposal that the agency would suspend all resistance if the government promised henceforth not to deport any illegal immigrants from Palestine. Gort rejected the offer outright, beseeching the officials to consider the harm that would be done to the Zionist cause should the “impression get abroad that [the] Yishuv was trying to force the issue by a policy of lawlessness and violence.” The meeting ended on that dour note.59
Two weeks later Sneh published an article in Ha’aretz. “To this day,” it began,
every political activity of the Zionist movement has relied on two forces—the distressing plight of Jewry in the Diaspora … and the creative genius of Jewish pioneering in this country … However, these two factors have not been strong enough to achieve in 1945 the materialisation of the Zionist solution by international agreement … In these circumstances, we cannot afford not to resort to the third force hidden in Palestine Jewry—its power of resistance … Let the cost of sticking to the White Paper policy exceed that of scrapping it … We shall never acquiesce in the prohibition of immigration and settlement, and, if we prove that, no superiority of British force will be of avail.
Five days later the Hebrew Resistance Movement launched its first joint operation.60
In a dramatic show of force, the Haganah, the Irgun, and Lehi carried out a series of coordinated attacks throughout the country on the night of October 31. Explosive charges laid by Palmach sappers cut the rail line in more than 150 places, paralyzing rail service across Palestine for a full two days. Meanwhile, an Irgun raiding party destroyed three locomotives, a railway maintenance shed, and a signal box at Lydda. Palmach units sank two police launches in Haifa and a third in Jaffa that were used to intercept illegal immigrants on vessels at sea. And a Lehi assault team struck the Consolidated Oil Refinery in Haifa.61
The Jewish Agency deplored the attacks publicly while exulting in them privately. A telegram from Jerusalem to London intercepted by British intelligence clearly revealed the agency’s duplicity. “The activities have made a great impression in the country,” the cable read. “The authorities are bewildered and have proclaimed a curfew on the roads at night. They are waiting for instructions from London.”62
For the new Labour government, the unrest was an unwelcome distraction at a time when it was maneuvering to chart a new course for Palestine. Since the summer, pressure had been building from the United States to loosen the restrictions on Jewish immigration to Palestine. In July, Attlee had found waiting for him a letter that Truman had written to Churchill anticipat
ing the latter’s election victory. Truman expressed the hope that the 1939 white paper’s immigration restrictions would now be lifted, because they were the subject of “passionate protest from Americans.” The new prime minister was about to depart for the final Big Three conference in Potsdam and had other things on his mind. He discussed it with Bevin, but neither gave the issue much thought as more pressing international and domestic matters were competing for their attention. After a few weeks had passed without a reply, in mid-August Truman disclosed the letter’s contents at an impromptu press conference in Washington. But this was just an opening gambit.63
Armed with the report of a special emissary whom the president had sent to Europe at the end of June to investigate the condition of Jewish displaced persons, Truman called on Britain to issue a hundred thousand immigration certificates for the refugees to be resettled in Palestine. He further instructed the secretary of state, James Byrnes, who would soon be in London for a meeting of the Allied foreign ministers, to raise the matter with Attlee personally. Byrnes did so on September 10 and four days later communicated Truman’s request to Bevin, adding that the president intended to publicize these demands that same evening. Bevin exploded. Should Truman issue such a statement, the foreign secretary warned, he would proclaim before the House of Commons that Britain expected the United States to deploy four divisions of troops to Palestine to assist in maintaining order there. A panicked Byrnes persuaded Truman to delay any new policy pronouncement on Palestine in the interests of Anglo-American harmony. A telegram from Attlee arrived that same day at the White House, driving home this point. Continued pressure from Truman on Palestine, the prime minister wrote, “could not fail to do grievous harm to relations between our two countries.”64
The reality of the situation was captured by Arthur Creech Jones, the number two person at the Colonial Office, who later reflected that it was already clear that, like it or not, “no considerable diplomatic or practical changes in Palestine and the Arab countries could be made without American financial and strategic support.” Hence, however much British officials resented American attempts to dictate policy while offering no assistance in its implementation, U.S. support for any solution to the Palestine problem would be critical, not least because the issue would eventually need to be considered by the new United Nations organization—the successor to the League of Nations that had awarded Britain the Palestine mandate more than twenty years earlier. Moreover, negotiations for a new American loan were then under way in Washington. Bevin, accordingly, began to formulate a plan to draw the United States directly into the Palestine problem by inviting the Americans to serve on a joint committee of inquiry. At the very least, Lord Halifax, the British ambassador in Washington, told Bevin, such a joint undertaking “would get us to some extent away from the uncomfortable position in which the Americans criticise us without sharing responsibility.”65
The foreign secretary unveiled his idea for the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry (AAC) at the cabinet meeting on October 4. Increasing “agitation in the U.S.A.” over Palestine, he explained to his colleagues, “was poisoning our relations with the U.S. Government in other fields.” The AAC thus offered the possibility of engaging the Americans constructively to reach a joint solution on Palestine’s political future. The cabinet agreed and unanimously approved the foreign secretary’s proposal. There now remained the dual challenge of persuading the Americans to go along with the scheme while avoiding a complete breakdown of security in Palestine that would doom the proposed commission from the start. An additional complication was the mounting apprehension among Arabs both inside Palestine and elsewhere over the increasing stridency of the Zionists’ demands coupled with the latest outbreak of antigovernment violence.66
On November 3, Bevin met with Weizmann and Shertok. He was in no mood to listen to excuses. As a result of the intercepted telegrams, he knew precisely the extent of the Jewish Agency’s involvement in the October 31 operations. Without revealing his source, the foreign secretary stated, “It is clear to me that the Jewish Agency can no longer be regarded as an innocent party in relation to these outbreaks in Palestine.” Bevin concluded the meeting by cautioning the two Zionist officials that “we should have to re-examine our position in light of these [attacks], and that our future course would be determined to a very large extent by whether this kind of action was not only denounced but stopped.”67
That same evening’s Kol Israel broadcast answered Bevin’s question whether the Jewish Agency intended to settle the Palestine question by violence or negotiation. “The nights of heroism since Athlit,” the announcer proclaimed, “are an expression of our strength and decision. We lament the British, Arab and Jewish victims who fell in the attacks on the railways and ports of Palestine. They are all victims of the White Paper.” Identically defiant editorials appeared in the Hebrew press the following day. “We are today fighting with our backs to the wall,” Hatzofeh, the newspaper of the Orthodox Party, opined. “We have been systematically pushed to our final position.”68
Evidence of this hardening of attitudes across the Yishuv was palpable. Earlier that day, a police tracking team following the trail of the railway line’s attackers arrived at the Jewish settlement of Ramat Ha-Kovesh—the scene of violent disorders two years before. Nearly a thousand people from the settlement and the surrounding area hastily assembled to block the search, forcing the police to withdraw. The unrest shifted to a Tel Aviv suburb on November 3, when an angry mob freed an illegal immigrant being arrested by police and then stoned a police armored car attempting to extract the beleaguered arrest party.69
These events were to be the final repudiation of Gort’s determined effort to avoid a violent confrontation between the government and the Yishuv. The high commissioner’s physical health had declined precipitously since his return to Palestine the previous month. He was now in constant, agonizing pain. On November 2, the Palestine government announced that Gort would relinquish his post and leave Palestine within the next few days. The unexpected announcement caught the country by surprise. An editorial in The Palestine Post reflected the mood of Jew and Arab alike. “No High Commissioner in the twenty-five years of British rule in Palestine enjoyed greater popular trust and none repaid it with greater personal kindness.” The high commissioner’s farewell message to his staff clearly evinced his own profound sense of regret. “The wheel of Fortune,” he wrote, “has called me abruptly to lay down the task on which I embarked with such high hopes last year … To all of you I say good-bye with a heavy heart and a very real and deep sense of personal loss.”70
On the morning of November 5, Shaw accompanied Gort on his final journey from Government House to an RAF air base near Tel Aviv. Given the high commissioner’s condition, a stretcher team was waiting to carry him on board. Gort, however, refused their assistance and, attired in his field marshal’s uniform, climbed the steps to the fuselage on his own. He paused for a moment, turned, and waved farewell to the small group assembled to see him off. In London, at Guy’s Hospital, exploratory surgery revealed the extent of the cancer and the hopelessness of any cure. Gort died four months later.71
On November 13, the AAC was jointly announced by Bevin in London and Truman in Washington. The foreign secretary explained that Palestine’s Arabs would be asked to permit the continuance of Jewish immigration at a rate of fifteen hundred persons per month once the remaining two thousand certificates allocated under the 1939 white paper were exhausted. Thereafter, Jewish immigration to Palestine would cease until the government had the opportunity to consider the AAC’s interim report and proposed recommendations and consult with all concerned parties in Palestine. Following the release of the AAC’s final report, Britain would then submit to the United Nations the terms of a final settlement that would provide for Palestine’s independence—as a “Palestinian, not Jewish state.”72
The Yishuv was furious. To its eyes, delay and more discussion had been adopted as the new government’s po
licy rather than the decisive, positive action that the Labour Party had once promised. The Jewish Agency’s statement in response angrily denounced the committee as “a cynical and treacherous device to postpone [a] decision on mass immigration until displaced Jews in Europe in despair accept rehabilitation in [the] Diaspora.” Bevin’s tactless remark during the press conference that followed his statement to the House that “if the Jews, with all their sufferings, want to get too much at the head of the queue, you have the danger of another anti-Semitic reaction” poured oil on a burning fire. At an emergency session of the Vaad Le’umi hours later, the national council declared a noon-to-midnight strike and called for countrywide protests to commence the next day. The depth of the Yishuv’s despair was perhaps best illustrated by the Chief Rabbinate’s response to the announcement. The Yishuv’s supreme religious authority designated November 15 as a day of prayer and fasting. The rabbinate further decreed that the shofar, the sacramental ram’s horn—whose plaintive tone, symbolizing the suffering of Jews through the ages, which is usually heard only on the High Holidays of Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, and Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement—also be sounded throughout the country.73
CHAPTER 12
To Defend and to Guard Forever
Anonymous Soldiers Page 32
