The Prime Ministers: An Intimate Narrative of Israeli Leadership

by Avner, Yehuda

  “Oh yes, we did all we could,” insisted Begin, talking to me, a new member of his prime ministerial staff, in 1977. “The warnings were given and received in time by the British authorities; they had time enough to evacuate the hotel twice over. Somebody, for some dark purpose, or because he lost his head, or to protect a spurious prestige, ordered that the hotel not be evacuated.”

  British retribution was harsh. Lt. General Sir Evelyn Barker, the General Officer in Command of Palestine, laid into the whole Jewish community, issuing a notoriously anti-Semitic order commanding his troops to cease all fraternization with all Jews of whatever sort:

  I am determined that they should be punished and made aware of our feelings of contempt and disgust at their behavior. I am certain that if my reasons are explained to the troops they will understand their duty and will punish the Jews in the manner this race dislikes the most: by hitting them in the pockets, which will demonstrate our disgust for them.4

  After vehement protests, this order was rescinded; still, stringent curfews became routine, accompanied by mass roundups and search operations. Every Jewish house was suspect. When British troops encamped in the grounds behind Begin’s Tel Aviv hideaway on Yehoshua Bin Nun Street, he squeezed into a tiny cubbyhole prepared in advance for just such a contingency. There, he sat cramped, with hardly any food or water and little air, for three days, with no way of knowing how long the soldiers would bivouac. By the end of the third day he was faint with dehydration and lack of oxygen. Finally, on the morning of the fourth day, the soldiers moved on and Begin clambered out into the fresh air, gasping for breath, to plunge his head into a basinful of cold water.

  Photograph credit: Hugo Mendelson & Israel Government Press Office

  The ruins of the King David Hotel following the bombing, 22 July 1946.

  There were some prudent voices in Whitehall who, hearing the death knell of Britain’s thirty-year presence in Palestine, urged their Government to give up and get out. Most objected however; they remained either deaf or blind. Some even asserted that British imperial authority over the Holy Land was the will of the Almighty and, therefore, eternal.

  As the Irgun revolt hardened so did the response to it. The authorities began sentencing captured Irgun fighters to the most savage forms of capital punishment: flogging for relatively minor offences and hanging for relatively major ones. Instantly, Menachem Begin responded by posting the following warning:

  “A Jewish soldier taken prisoner by the enemy was sentenced by an illegal British military court to the humiliating punishment of flogging. We warn the government of occupation not to carry out this punishment which is contrary to the laws of a soldier’s honor. If it is put into effect, every officer of the British occupation army in Eretz Yisrael will be liable to the same punishment: eighteen lashes.”5

  When Begin’s warning went unheeded he dared to defy the colossus of the British Empire and made good on his promise. He ordered the abduction of two British servicemen to be flogged, lash for lash. And as the tempo of the revolt quickened the searches and roundups intensified. Jails were jammed. Hangings followed hangings, some contrary to normal procedure, without fair warning to the families, and in virtual secrecy. Begin gave no quarter. In the dead of night his underground press distributed the following leaflet in English for the British to see:

  “We recognize no one-sided laws of war. If the British are determined that their way out of the country should be lined with an avenue of gallows and of weeping fathers, mothers, wives, and sweethearts, we shall see to it that, in this, there shall be no racial discrimination. The gallows will not be all of one color…The price will be paid in full.”

  He issued orders to kidnap a number of British servicemen and hold them hostage: hanging for hanging.

  The first to be abducted insisted he was a victim of mistaken identity. He claimed not to be a military man at all, but a London businessman just arrived in Palestine from Cairo, called Collins. His executioners did not believe him. Nor did they believe his assertion that he was Jewish: what kind of a Jewish name is Collins? So, in the seclusion of an orange grove the execution party readied themselves to place the noose around the dazed man’s neck, when he began to mumble incoherently “Adon olam asher malach” – the opening line of a Hebrew chant of divine praise. Then, with an equally terrible whimper, he muttered the lament for the dead – “Yisgadal v’yiskadash sh’mei rabba.” Horrified at having almost murdered a fellow Jew, the executioners whisked him back to Tel Aviv, from whence he beat a quick retreat back to London.

  So, two British sergeants, Cliff Martin and Mervyn Paice, were nabbed in his place. “Whatever is done to our people will be done to you,” warned Begin’s grim notices in the night.

  The British executions were mostly carried out in the fortress of Acre, an imposing Crusader bastion that had been restored by the Turks, and was considered impregnable. In May 1947, in what was probably the Irgun’s most daring exploit, a wall of this great citadel was breached, allowing for a mass escape. However, three of the attacking party – Avshalom Haviv, Yaakov Weiss, and Meir Nakar – were captured and condemned to death.

  On the day of the execution, 29 July 1947, the District Commissioner of Galilee, a man with the unusual name of Thorne Thorne, visited the Acre prison accompanied by the Commissioner of Prisons, a Mr. Hackett, to ensure the gallows were readied and all other necessary arrangements in place.

  It would be wrong to think of these men as in any way vindictive or malevolent. They were bureaucrats doing their job; their writ did not extend to pondering the iniquity of destroying healthy, conscious men. Their task was to see to the formalities of the hangings. So imagine their astonishment when, upon calling on the Acre prison superintendent in his quarters, he told them in no uncertain terms that he would not carry out the execution orders.

  What these three officials said and did on that day was documented in an official report drawn up by the District Commissioner, Thorne Thorne, and classified “Top Secret & Confidential.” Here is a construct of their exchange redacted from Thorne’s meticulous testimony:

  Charlton [Acre Prison Superintendent]: I suppose you know that I am not going to carry out these executions.

  Hackett [Commissioner of Prisons]: You are the officer detailed to carry them out. I have here the warrants.

  Charlton: I do not agree with the policy of Government regarding these hangings. The whole thing stinks. Why can’t Government carry out the executions in a normal manner, giving the prisoners and relatives proper warning as usual? I want no part of it. I am unhappy about the whole affair. Please send me home. I’ve had enough of this.

  Hackett: Do you absolutely refuse to carry out the death sentences?

  Charlton: Yes. I have carried out forty-four executions during my service in this country and I have not raised any objections before. But now I’m adamant. I had a definite promise from Mr. Bromfield when he was acting Commissioner of Prisons that secret executions such as that carried out in the hanging of Dov Gruner [a young Irgun commander] will under no circumstances occur again. I will not preside under the circumstances you have outlined. I am ready to execute the men on Friday of this week [August 1] or next Tuesday [August 5] provided the proper open procedures are followed, meaning that the date is announced in advance and that the relatives are given the opportunity to visit the condemned men prior to the event.

  Hackett: But the lawyer of the accused and their relatives will be informed prior to the event.

  Charlton: I am not satisfied. Why can’t Government carry out the executions in a normal manner, giving the prisoners and their relatives proper advance warning, as is usual procedure? The whole prison will be upset. It will be impossible for me to keep order or discipline if the executions are performed in a secretive manner. I am not going to carry out these executions, not because I am afraid but solely because it is against my conscience. If the executions are postponed as I suggest, and done later in a proper and regular manner I will certa
inly do as ordered.

  Thorne [District Commissioner of Galilee] to Hackett: “The time now is 4.15 p.m. The intention to execute the three men will be made public in an hour-and-three-quarters, at 6.00 p.m. By that time the relatives will have been informed in Jerusalem. [To Charlton]: Unless you have someone else to carry out the executions, someone whom you can rely upon, we have to inform Government what is happening. I need hardly point out the political and other consequences if the executions are postponed because an Officer of the Crown refused to carry them out.

  Charlton: I’m expecting Mr. Clow [superintendent of the Nablus jail] at five o’clock, and I’ll ask him if he will carry out the executions. I cannot guarantee that he will.

  Thorne: Under the circumstances, and in view of the fact that Clow may not get here in time, and given the importance of the time factor, I’m going to Haifa immediately and inform Government of the situation. [Haifa was the nearest place with a secure telephone line.]

  Later, Thorne phoned Hackett from Haifa:

  Thorne: Government confirms the executions must go forward as arranged. If Charlton still refuses to carry them out, either you or Clow must do so under all circumstances. Even if Charlton has a change of heart he has become so excited he won’t be in a fit state to carry them out, so there is no use in pressing the matter further.

  At 5.30 p.m. Clow, the superintendent of the Nablus prison, arrived at Acre.

  Hackett by phone to Thorne: Clow is here. He will carry out the executions if that is Government’s final instruction. He is pressing for a postponement though.

  Thorne: A postponement is out of the question. The executions must be carried out as ordered. You have confirmed that the warrant is made out to “the superintendent of Acre prison” [and not to Charlton by name]. So I have relieved Mr. Charlton of that post and have appointed Mr. Clow as superintendent in his stead.

  Hackett to Thorne [at midnight]: The tensions have relaxed. There will be no hitch in the executions.

  And, indeed, there was none: Avshalom Haviv was hanged at four in the morning, Meir Nakar at 4:25, and Yaakov Weiss at 5:00.

  No one in the Acre jail slept that night. One prisoner, whose Irgun name was Natan but whose real name was Chaim Wasserman, was in a nearby cell, and he smuggled out a letter to Menachem Begin describing what he saw and heard. He wrote:

  Early this morning our three comrades went heroically to the gallows. We were already aware what was going to happen between four and five in the morning, and pressed against the bars with bated breath watching haplessly what was going on around the cell. The prison superintendent, Major Charlton, had left the place yesterday afternoon and was not seen again. Toward evening a party of hangmen arrived.

  The officers went in and informed the condemned men they were to be executed between four and five in the morning. Their reply was to sing Hatikva and other songs in powerful voices. They then shouted to us that the hangings would begin at four o’clock, in this order: Avshalom Haviv, Meir Nakar, Yaakov Weiss. They added: “Avenge our blood! Avenge our blood!”

  We shouted back, “Be strong! We are with you, and thousands of Jewish youth are with you in spirit.” They replied, “Thanks,” and went on singing.

  At two a Sephardic rabbi whom we could not recognize from afar [Rabbi Nissim Ohana] was brought and stayed in the cell fifteen minutes.

  At four in the morning Avshalom began singing Hatikva, and we joined in loudly, pressing against the bars. At once armed police came up to the visitors’ fence near our cell. At 4.03 Avshalom was hanged. At 4.25 we were shaken by the powerful singing of Meir. Hardly able to breathe we nevertheless joined in. He was hanged at 4.28. At five o’clock the voice of Yaakov, this time alone, penetrated our cell, singing Hatikva. Again we joined in. Two minutes later he was hanged. Each of the bodies was left hanging twenty minutes before being carried off, one by one.

  The chief hangmen were Hackett, Inspector of Prisons, and Clow, superintendent of the Nablus jail.

  At dawn we informed the prison officers through an Arab warder that we would not be responsible for the life of any Englishman who dared enter the jail yard. We declared a fast and prayed. Later in the morning we found the following inscription on the wall of the cell of the condemned: “They will not frighten the Hebrew youth in the Homeland with their hangings. Thousands will follow in our footsteps.” Next to it was the Irgun insignia and their three names in the order they were executed.

  News of the execution quickly seeped out, the whole country was put under curfew, and Menachem Begin made good on his threat – gallows for gallows. Sergeants Martin and Paice were summarily tried and duly hung, and it was the following day, that I, a Manchester school lad, had shivered at the sight of the blood-red graffiti on the synagogue wall, “HANG THE JEW TERRORIST BEGIN.”

  The grisly images of their bodies swinging from eucalyptus trees in a Netanya grove filled the front pages of British newspapers, and the public outcry was huge. But Begin remained undaunted. “Flogging for flogging, hanging for hanging, until all capital punishment ceases,” he raged on a poster plastered on the walls of every Jewish quarter in Palestine in the dead of night. This measure for measure reprisal ultimately worked. Whitehall, humiliated into submission, quietly ordered a stop to capital punishment, a surrender which only served to deepen the frustration of an already demoralized Britain which, by 1947, was no longer great.

  Exhausted and bankrupted by World War ii, its influence on world affairs was essentially ended. Unemployment was high, austerity was everywhere, and everything was rationed. Pubs closed early for lack of beer. And on that particular oppressive August day in 1947 after the sergeants had been hung, the pub regulars, with nothing else to do, sat around feeding each other’s rage at the gruesome news. It didn’t take much for someone here and for someone there to spread the thought that it was time to show the Jews what real Englishmen thought of them. By late afternoon a mob had formed up and moved on Cheetham Hill Road, the heart of the Manchester Jewish ghetto.

  Yelling “Yids go back to Palestine,” “Beat up the Jews,” “Down with the Sheenies,” “Kick the kikes,” and all sorts of other jingoistic slogans, the rioters flung stones and bricks at Jewish shop windows, homes, synagogues, and social halls. In one, a Jewish wedding was being celebrated, and like the men of Sodom at the door of Lot, the rabble pounded savagely on the hall’s doors, which the terrified celebrants inside were trying to block. Saved in the nick of time by the arrival of the police, the horde was broken up temporarily but quickly regrouped to surround the place, howling and hurling threats and abuse and muck through its open windows.

  Later that evening, the mob massed again, but this time they were met by a phalanx of vigilante Jewish ex-servicemen. The police, under orders to act firmly, broke up the scuffles, and by the end of the melee Cheetham Hill Road looked as it had a few years before, when it had borne the blast of German bombs. As far as the eye could see, broken glass littered the sidewalks, and shiftless thugs hung about nursing bruises amid wreckage of their own doing.

  The next day, in school, I was accosted in class by a bully of a fellow whose father was serving with the British Police Force in Palestine. He had me pinned to the floor and was about to punch me in the nose when in walked our geography teacher, a fellow called Hogden, who bellowed, “Haffner” – that was my original family name – “what’s going on?”

  Pudgy, with a florid face and side-whiskers, and with a tendency to doze off after setting us an exam, Hogden automatically picked on me not only because I was a Jew but, equally, because I was not of the Church of England. Hogden had an aversion to anybody who was not of the Church of England. To him, there was only one path that led to the Almighty, and he was sure it did not pass through the synagogue or through Rome.

  “Nothing, sir,” I stammered, straightening myself up. “Nothing’s going on.”

  “Oh yes there is, sir,” blurted the bully. “Haffner’s terrorist boss, Begin, strung up our two sergeants and he’
ll be hanging my dad next.”

  “Is that so, Haffner?” said Hogden in a voice brimming with scorn. “Would your Mr. Begin do a thing like that?”

  “No, sir.”

  Hogden carried a long cane which he would frequently use on his wall map to point out the vast extent of the British Empire’s dominions and colonies that stretched over an immense proportion of the globe. He handed me the cane, and smirked: “I want you to show the class on the map exactly where your Mr. Begin is carrying out his atrocities against our lads who are risking their lives to serve our country.” Turning toward the class, he asked, “Who’s risking their lives to serve our country, boys?”

  “Our lads, sir,”

  “Exactly! So, come on” – he had me by the collar and was frog-marching me to the map – “show us where your Palestine is.”

  Classmates sniggered and made faces.

  “Here, sir,” I stuttered, indicating the slender strip of territory on the eastern seaboard of the Mediterranean Sea.

  “Quite right! Are you a Zionist, Haffner? Does Haffner look like a Zionist, boys?”

  “Yes sir.”

  “What does he look like, boys?

  “A Zionist, sir.”

  “And your mother’s from Romania, is she not? Her English could do with a bit of a polish, I would think. What could Haffner’s mother’s English do with, boys?”