Anonymous Soldiers

by Bruce Hoffman

  Gruner neither encouraged nor supported any of the efforts undertaken in his name. Instead, as he reportedly wrote in a letter to Begin that was smuggled out of prison, he willingly accepted his fate. “It is a law of history that only with blood shall a country be redeemed. I am writing this while awaiting the hangman. This is not a moment at which I can lie, and I swear that if I had to begin my life anew I would have chosen the exact same path, regardless of the consequences for myself. Your faithful soldier, Dov.”45

  As further appeals were lodged in London and Jerusalem, all four condemned prisoners were secretly moved to Acre jail. Nearly three months had now elapsed since the date originally set for Gruner’s execution—January 28. At the time, the cabinet had made clear its desire that it should proceed without any delay. The transfer of the men from the geographically vulnerable central prison in the heart of downtown Jerusalem to the forbidding crusader fortress in Acre had been the penultimate step in a process designed to fulfill the cabinet’s wish.46

  Smoke was still coming from smoldering fires at the Haifa oil refinery across the bay when at 4:00 a.m. on Wednesday, April 16, Gruner was abruptly awakened by his jailers. They crowded into his cell and ordered him to stand while the execution order was recited. Gruner refused, and a scuffle ensued during which he was pummeled before being forced onto his feet. As Gruner made his way toward the gallows, he sang Zionism’s (and subsequently Israel’s) plaintive national anthem, “Ha-Tikva.” “As long as the Jewish spirit is yearning deep in the heart,” his voice intoned,

  With eyes turned toward the East, looking toward Zion,

  Then our hope—the two-thousand-year-old hope—will not be lost:

  To be a free people in our land,

  The land of Zion and Jerusalem.47

  At roughly twenty- to thirty-minute intervals, Drezner, Kashani, and Alkachi followed. Both a British liaison officer from the Sixth Airborne Division who was present at the prison that morning and the condemned men’s fellow Jewish prisoners reported that each man went to his death singing “Ha-Tikva.” Each had made the same final request: that he be buried at Rosh Pinna, the site of the grave of Shlomo Ben-Yosef, whom the British had hanged at Acre nine years before.48

  At 7:00 a.m. the Palestine Broadcasting Service announced the four executions. Those listening to the radio that morning—including Begin himself—were shocked. Tuesday, not Wednesday, was the traditional hanging day in Palestine. Moreover, four persons had never been put to death in British-ruled Palestine on the same date. The condemned had also been deprived of the traditional rite of a last meal and the final ministrations of a clergyman—much less any warning of their imminent execution. Their families were apprised of their deaths only after the fact. Indeed, Gruner’s sister, Helen Friedman, who had traveled to Palestine from America, had come downstairs to the lobby of the Tel Aviv hotel where she was staying to meet her military escort and proceed to Acre to see her brother one last time before returning home, when she was informed of the executions that had just taken place.49

  The Jewish Agency issued a statement expressing its “profound shock and pain,” and several Hebrew newspapers published the names of the deceased framed by thick black borders. Protest in the Yishuv, however, was muted because, as a precaution, curfews had been thrown over Tel Aviv, Petah Tiqva, and the Jewish sections of both Haifa and Jerusalem. Later that day, the Palestine administration announced the enactment twenty-four hours earlier of a new provision to the Emergency Regulations eliminating the right to appeal sentences passed by military tribunals. This amendment was declared retroactive and therefore took precedence over all previous statutes. “I believe there is no precedent in history,” Begin observed, “of a Government carrying out a death sentence in such fear and in such secrecy”—a view apparently shared by the prison’s warden, George Charlton, who was among the longest continuously serving officers in the PPF. Appalled by the shameful treatment accorded Gruner during his final hours, Charlton, “to his eternal credit,” Rymer-Jones writes, refused to attend the execution, despite his legal obligation to do so. His principled stand cost him his job.50

  The Irgun had previously warned that “if the British continue to disregard the elementary rights of prisoner[s] of war, if they arrogate for themselves the rights which in recent wars only Hitler and the Jap arrogated to themselves—if they ‘hit below the belt’ and call it fair play, we shall have to consider adopting the same ‘rules.’ ” Hence, in anticipation of reprisals, including the abduction of military personnel, army commanders ordered increased security at bases and other facilities and imposed new restrictions on troop movement. Army vehicles were now directed to travel only in pairs. For the first time army patrols apparently left the main roads and organized ambush points on smaller dirt tracks and in orange groves. This was seen as a pioneering attempt by the army to adopt small-unit tactics in countering the terrorists. But even these redoubled measures were ineffective in halting a new round of terrorist attacks. The Irgun struck twice in Netanya alone, bombing an army medical facility and a military cinema. Additional incidents targeting security force personnel in Rehovot, Haifa, Jerusalem, and Jaffa left two persons dead and more than thirty others wounded.51

  Just as the Yishuv was absorbing the shock of the multiple executions at Acre, a new death row incident occurred in Jerusalem that would forever be enshrined in the hagiography of the Oley Ha-Gardom—the ones who rose to the gallows.52

  Fate and circumstance had conspired to intertwine the parallel lives of Meir Feinstein and Moshe Barazani. Feinstein, the younger of the two, was a sabra—born in Jerusalem’s Old City in 1927 to religious parents who had recently emigrated from Poland. He had been forced to grow up quickly and start work to support the family at a young age after his father died. Strikingly handsome with a head full of thick, straight jetblack hair that he neatly combed swept back from his forehead, Feinstein looked older than he was and, combined with his exceptional maturity, was able to bluff his way into the British army in 1944 at age sixteen. A longtime member of the Irgun, he used his position serving with the Royal Engineers in the Middle East to smuggle stolen arms and ammunition to the group. He was discharged in 1946 and immediately joined the Irgun’s Jerusalem cell. Feinstein was the driver of the stolen taxi used in the attack on that city’s rail station in October 1946. A severe wound sustained during the operation had necessitated the amputation of his left arm. On April 3 a military court had sentenced Feinstein to death. MacMillan confirmed the sentence two weeks later—just twenty-four hours after Gruner and his three Irgun colleagues had been hanged. That same day, the GOC also upheld the death sentence that a Tel Aviv military court the previous month had imposed on Barazani.53

  A native of the Kurdish region of northern Iraq, Barazani had immigrated with his family to Palestine in 1933. The son of an impoverished rabbi who devoted his life to the study of Kabbalah, as a young boy Barazani too had to work to help support his perennially destitute parents and five brothers, who lived in a cramped one-bedroom Jerusalem apartment. An ardent Zionist, Barazani eventually joined Lehi and was assigned to its local youth unit, which was responsible for disseminating the group’s clandestine newspaper and affixing posters to the city’s walls. After a year, the wavy-haired teenager with a captivating smile graduated to operational status, participating in an attack on a train. Barazani was arrested near the Schneller Barracks while Jerusalem was under martial law on March 9. A hand grenade was found in his pocket by a police patrol that had stopped and searched him.54

  Feinstein and Barazani were remanded to Jerusalem’s central prison, where, dressed in the red burlap attire of the condemned, they were kept in cells adjacent to Gruner, Drezner, Kashani, and Alkachi. Their execution was fixed for Tuesday, April 22. The British authorities were completely oblivious to the perfect martyrs they had inadvertently created for the terrorist organizations that both men served. One was aged nineteen and the other twenty. One was an Ashkenazic Jew of European heritage and the
other a Sephardic Jew of Middle Eastern descent. Both were religiously devout as well as passionate Zionists. And both had resolved that rather than perish by the hangman’s noose, they would take their own lives as they stood atop the gallows—and those of the entire execution party with them.

  A plan was resurrected from the preceding weeks when Gruner and his comrades had plotted a “Samson death”—in reference to the biblical hero who kills both himself and his Philistine captors in a dramatic, final feat of strength and determination. But before the Irgun could smuggle hand grenades into the central prison for this purpose, the four Irgun men were unexpectedly transferred to Acre. On the eve of Feinstein’s and Barazani’s executions, the Irgun delivered two hand grenades concealed within hollowed-out oranges to the two condemned men. An unexpected complication arose, however, when the rabbi comforting them insisted on being present on the scaffold the following morning. Adjusting their plan, the two men embraced each other. Barazani held one of the hand grenades between them while Feinstein detonated it. The ensuing explosion killed them both instantly.55

  “Man created and sanctified you as an instrument of death,” a contemporaneous poem honoring Feinstein and Barazani relates, “and you will exact your revenge from him.” Throughout the following week both the Irgun and Lehi struck almost daily. Six attacks against a variety of police and military targets claimed the lives of a dozen Britons and wounded more than twice that number. Among the victims was A. E. Conquest, an eighteen-year veteran of the PPF who was widely acknowledged as the force’s best detective. His killing profoundly affected Barker, who, in a letter to Antonius, wondered whether “this senseless killing [will] ever stop.” Then, in intemperate language, even by the former GOC’s standard of anti-Semitic vitriol, he exclaimed, “Just to think all this life and money being wasted for these f—ing Jews.”56

  The Irgun had not forgotten Barker either. “He behaved like a Nazi Gauleiter in our country,” Begin argued. “He tried to crush our resistance with hangings.” The security surrounding Barker during his final weeks in Palestine had been extraordinarily tight, so the Irgun planned to kill him once he had returned to England. The person recruited to undertake this mission in the spring of 1947 was Ezer Weizman, the Zionist leader Chaim Weizmann’s nephew (Ezer spelled his surname with one n). The younger Weizman had gone to London the previous June to study aeronautics. His family pedigree and wartime service as an RAF pilot doubtless made him appear to the authorities an unlikely terrorist. But even as a boy Weizman had begun to question the official Zionist policy of restraint during the Arab Rebellion, and more recently, albeit in the privacy of his famous uncle’s London hotel suite, he had lauded the Irgun for blowing up the King David Hotel. A student friend at the London School of Economics approached Weizman about joining the Irgun, and shortly afterward he found himself in France being trained in sabotage and subversion.57

  Back in England, Weizman discovered the location of Barker’s residence and was in the process of planning the assassination when one day a detective from Scotland Yard’s Special Branch appeared on his doorstep. Acting on a tip possibly provided by the Jewish Agency, the detective advised the future defense minister and subsequently president of Israel to “be so kind as to return to Palestine”; Weizman complied and shortly afterward left the country. Almost exactly a year later, the Irgun lost another opportunity to assassinate Barker when a parcel bomb sent to his home failed to explode.58

  Intelligence concerning Jewish terrorist operations in Britain was rarely as good as the lead that brought the Special Branch directly to Weizman’s front door. Repeated reports of Irgun and Lehi agents allegedly en route to or already present in the U.K. throughout 1946 consistently failed to materialize in the form of either hard evidence or actual arrests. Although relations between MI5 and Scotland Yard and between the Special Branch and the PPF were deemed excellent by all, the accuracy of the information they exchanged appears mostly to have been at the level of the multiple accounts of Begin’s supposed presence in Paris during November and December 1946 and the plastic surgery he had reputedly undergone to alter his facial features and thus make his travel to and presence in the French capital possible.59

  In hopes of getting a better grip on the threat, in December 1946 Rymer-Jones, now back at Scotland Yard, had enlisted the assistance of some of the same Jewish Agency intelligence officers with whom he had worked in Palestine. But more often than not, tragedy was averted less by the authorities’ interdicting plots (such as in the first attempt on Barker’s life) than by the malfunctioning of the terrorists’ improvised explosive devices (as in the second). A lone exception, however, was the successful bombing that Lehi carried out in the heart of London in March 1947. The person responsible for the attack was Ya’acov Eliav, a.k.a. Ya’acov Levstein, the group’s master bomb maker, known to his comrades as the Dynamite Man because of his expertise with explosives, and the self-described inventor of the letter bomb.60

  Born in Russia in 1917, Eliav had immigrated to Palestine with his parents eight years later. He joined the Irgun in 1935 and within three years was directing the group’s Jerusalem operations. In this capacity, Eliav had orchestrated the series of bombings of Arab targets that culminated in the infamous Black Sunday on November 14, 1937. He was subsequently one of a select group of twenty-six Irgun officers sent to Poland for training in conventional and guerrilla warfare tactics at a special camp run by the Polish army in the Carpathian Mountains. Returning to Palestine, Eliav was responsible for the bombing of Jerusalem’s Rex Cinema in May 1939 that had injured eighteen persons and also for the assassinations of two senior CID officers, Ralph Cairns and Ronald Barker, three months later. Eliav was arrested shortly afterward. Upon his release from prison in June 1940, he left the Irgun with Abraham Stern, becoming commander of the dissident faction’s Jerusalem cell, its first operational unit. Known by his nom de guerre, Yashka, Eliav built the bomb that killed several police officers at 8 Yael Street in Tel Aviv in January 1942. He was apprehended shortly afterward and spent nearly two years in Jerusalem’s central prison before escaping at the end of 1943. In late 1945, Eliav persuaded Lehi’s high command to allow him to open a second front in Europe. He traveled via Egypt to France, where he set about implementing his ambitious plan.61

  Arriving in Paris, Eliav obtained the assistance of Alexander Aaronsohn—the brother of Aaron, the famed head of the World War I Jewish intelligence service NILI (an anagram derived from a biblical passage), which had assisted Britain’s conquest of Palestine from the Turks. For his first attack, Eliav recruited a decorated veteran of the French Resistance named Jacques Martinsky who had lost a leg during the war. The plan involved sending Martinsky to London with explosives concealed in his artificial limb that he would then use to construct a parcel bomb to be sent to the Colonial Office. Although Eliav claims in his memoir that the plan in fact targeted the War Office and was indeed successful, it appears that Martinsky never made it out of London Airport when he arrived on a flight from Paris on March 6. Suspicious immigration officials, perhaps acting on information provided by MI5, refused to issue the Resistance veteran an entry permit, and Martinsky was immediately sent back to France.62

  Eliav had better luck the following evening, when one of his devices wrecked part of the British Colonial Club, just off Trafalgar Square, injuring three persons. The bomber was another French member of Lehi, Robert Misrahi, a philosophy student at the Sorbonne and protégé of Jean-Paul Sartre’s. He had successfully smuggled into Britain the explosives to be used for the attack ingeniously concealed in the shoulder pads of his topcoat. Although Eliav described the club as an “exclusive” facility frequented by “senior officials” where “several officials were killed and dozens wounded,” it was in fact a recreational center for service personnel and students from the West Indies and Africa visiting or living in London. Accordingly, rather than paragons of the British imperial establishment, the three victims were lowly enlisted men from among the poorest corn
ers of the British Empire. Eliav nonetheless issued a communiqué claiming credit for the attack, fatuously portraying the target as “the centre of British power in London” and “one of the centres of imperialist intrigue.” In hopes of actually targeting such a power center, Eliav next set his sights on the Colonial Office itself.63

  Security at likely Jewish terrorist targets in London had already been tightened following the Colonial Club bombing. It was increased further as a result of the executions of Gruner and the three other Irgunists on April 16. But the Dynamite Man was undaunted. “I learned an important lesson” from the Colonial Club operation, he recalled. “No security measures can stop sophisticated, imaginative planning. In any solid wall one could find a crack through which one could slip in and carry out an attack.” To find that crack, he turned to Betty Knout-Lazarus—an attractive young woman with impeccable underground credentials. Her stepfather, the Jewish writer, poet, and prominent anti-Nazi partisan leader David Knout, had been one of Eliav’s key contacts when he first arrived in France. Knout was too busy with other projects to become involved with Lehi, so he had referred Eliav to Knout-Lazarus. She was in every respect an ideal terrorist recruit. At age fourteen, she had become a courier for L’Armée Juive, the wartime Jewish partisan organization that the elder Knout helped found, and subsequently a war correspondent, before being injured by a land mine. Sharing her stepfather’s militant Zionist ideology, Knout-Lazarus worked closely with Eliav, helping him to build a terrorist infrastructure in France by recruiting members for Lehi’s fledgling overseas branch, organizing safe houses, acquiring weapons, planning operations, and crafting propaganda for the group’s French newsletter, L’Indépendance: Organe des Combattants pour la Liberté d’Israël.64