As many of you know, I grew up in Baltimore. And when I was a kid, we used to visit my grandparents on Mendelei Street. It’s this little street in West Jerusalem, less than a half-hour walk to the Western Wall in the Old City, and it’s near all the famous hotels: the Inbal (or the Larom as I knew it as a kid, yes, I am getting older, friends), the Dan Panorama, and, at the end of the street, the King David Hotel.
Not taking shots here, but of all of these hotels, the King David was never my vibe as a kid. It felt too fancy, too historical. It’s a landmark building. Every room is suffused with history. The floor of the main lobby is inlaid with the names of all the dignitaries and celebrities who have stayed there over the years, from Winston Churchill to Henry Kissinger to Madonna and a whole lot more!
Today, that history is my favorite part of the hotel. I’m obsessed with the fact that for nearly a decade, the King David served as the nerve center of the British empire in Mandate Palestine, housing its military and government offices. Back when I was a kid, though? The thing I cared about most was… the chopped liver.
I tasted this delicious chopped liver for the first time when I was in my early 30s with my friend Ari, who was staying there, and it may have changed my life. I’m totally serious. What can I say – I like what I like! Those are my associations with the historic hotel: foreign dignitaries, the best chopped liver on the planet, and… what was for four decades the deadliest terror attack in history.
But unlike probably every other terror attack ever, this one wasn’t actually meant to be deadly. Really, really! The people who planned it had no intention of killing anyone – let alone 91 people of various nationalities.
Which I realize sounds very confusing. What is accidental terrorism? And – who bears responsibility for the so-called “collateral damage,” which is a euphemism for innocent civilians who were killed for being in the wrong place at the wrong time?
I wish these questions were irrelevant, that could just be confined to college philosophy classes. But they can’t. At the time of this recording, Israel is still at war: with Hamas, with the Houthis, with Iran. Despite the IDF’s best intentions – and I do believe the IDF has the best intentions – innocent people are still dying. They’re being killed, or being injured for life. Or being made homeless. Or losing their entire families.
So the questions we’ll raise today aren’t merely philosophical. They’re so of-the-moment that it hurts.
The straightforward version of the history goes something like this:
Shortly after noon on July 22, 1946, members of a hardline Jewish paramilitary group placed bombs in the basement of the King David Hotel, destroying the hotel’s southern wing and killing 91 people, mostly civilians, of various ethnic and religious backgrounds.
Nearly a century later, the story of the King David bombing remains controversial and contradictory. The paramilitary that took responsibility no longer exists – but all its former members insisted that they hadn’t wanted any casualties. They’d phoned in multiple bomb threats and given everyone time to evacuate. The British simply failed to listen. The blood of 91 people was on their hands. Palestine’s Jews even whispered that British Chief Secretary Sir John Shaw had scoffed at the warning, saying “I am not here to take orders from the Jews. I’m here to give them.”
That’s one version.
But the British told a different story, and yes, we can hear different sides of a story.
They maintained that they had never received a meaningful warning at all. Shaw had never said anything remotely resembling “I don’t take orders from Jews.” And whatever the paramilitary’s intentions, at the end of the day, 91 people were still dead.
This disagreement wasn’t just a matter of opinion, where there were two different perspectives on one set of facts. Both sides, British and Jewish, disagreed about what the basic facts even were. Either the paramilitary called first… or it didn’t. There was no gray area between the two positions. No ambiguity.
So… was this terrorism?
That’s precisely the question we’re going to explore in this episode. This story is full of twists and turns, and we’re going to follow them all. We’ll look at the sequence of events, and how we know what we know. We’ll learn about some of the people who lost their lives or their loved ones. And we’ll explore the moral and psychological consequences of the bombing – including its tragic and continued relevance.
This is a complicated story, and squeezing it into one episode wouldn’t do it justice. So this is a two-parter. In Part 1, we’ll give the background to this thrilling and troubling story, and set up all of the context. Context matters, folks! And then in Part 2, we’ll tell the story of the fateful day itself, its aftermath, and try to puzzle together what it all means.
So let’s begin, by going back, way back, to the fateful autumn of 1917…
World War I, or the Great War, as it was known as the time, was coming to an end, and with it, the global balance of power. The Central Powers were losing. The Ottoman Empire was on its last legs. (After a 600-year run, to be fair. 1299 until 1922 – definitely a top 7 empire of all time.)
The British had just issued a statement declaring, quote, “His Majesty’s Government view with favor the establishment of a Jewish national home in Palestine.” That was the worst accent ever, but I went there, I did it. Most of the Zionist movement was thrilled. They interpreted the Balfour Declaration to mean that they’d finally be the masters of their own destiny, secure in their ancestral homeland at last after millennia of exile and dispossession and antisemitism.
But as longtime listeners know, it would take a lot more blood, sweat, and tears before that happened. The Brits were talking out of both sides of their mouths, and for the next three decades, their policies would shift again and again – often with devastating consequences. Look, British individuals might have come to Palestine with all the best intentions, but colonial empires are gonna colonial empire. Their policies served who? The Empire – not the Jewish or Arab nationalist movements sweeping Palestine.
And as you know from previous episodes, both sides – Arabs and Jews – did their best to sway the British, using a variety of methods.
The mainstream Jewish leadership tried diplomacy, sending some of their most influential leaders to parlay with the Brits. Mainstream Arab leadership, unfortunately, was co-opted by our old friend Hajj Amin al-Husseini, who chose a more radical approach, and by radical, I mean violent. (Links in the show notes for more on that.) As the 20s bled into the 30s and the world once again rumbled with portents of war, the Jews of the Yishuv, aka pre-state Palestine, the Jewish community there, began to split into ideological factions. We covered a lot of this in our episode Black Saturday, all the way back in Season Two. Check it out:
“The loose confederation of Jewish militias that had existed since the days of the Ottoman Empire began taking shape, emerging in 1920 as the Haganah. Or in English, “the defense.”…Their official policy was one of havlagah, restraint. Take up arms when you’re attacked, but never attack first. And never seek revenge.
A noble sentiment, to be sure. But after the brutal 1920 riots that left 33 Jews dead, many felt that the Haganah had failed at its most basic task: keeping the Jews of the Yishuv safe. By 1931, these dissatisfied rumblings burst into an open secession.
From this split emerged “HaIrgun HaTzvai HaLeumi B’Eretz Yisrael,” “the national military organization in the Land of Israel.” According to historian Thurston Clark, whose controversial and provocative book By Blood & Fire details the history of this time, “the Irgun was a temporary organization with one goal: to force Britain to leave Palestine immediately and to bring about a Jewish State on both banks of the Jordan.”
To reach that goal, the Irgun attacked and blew up British government offices, military installations, and police stations.
But by 1939, the Jews had to fight tooth and nail for Palestine first. The British had just issued the White Paper, which limited Jewish immigration to Palestine to 75,000 Jews over the next five years, or 15,000 Jews a year. In other words, not nearly enough, especially considering the anti-Jewish violence – and “violence” is putting it lightly – that consumed Europe.
The Jews, of course, were less than pleased with a quota system that kept them out of their ancestral homeland. But of all the unfriendly European policies of the 1930s, the White Paper had nothing on, say, the Nuremberg Laws, the Nazis’ antisemitic and racist laws enacted in 1935.
No matter how unhappy they were with the British, by 1939 most Jewish leaders understood that they were the lesser of two evils. After Germany rolled into Poland on September 1, 1939, starting the Second World War, Ben Gurion urged his Haganah fighters to join the British army and “fight the war as if there were no White Paper, and fight the White Paper as if there were no war.” Even the Irgun, whose raison d’etre was resisting the British, declared a cease-fire in August 1940, uniting with the British against “the greatest enemy the Jewish people has ever known – German Nazim.
But not everyone agreed with this description. Avraham Stern, absolutely refused to consider cooperation with the British. Disgusted by the Irgun’s concession, he split from the organization to form LEHI, or Lochmei Herut Israel — Fighters for the Freedom for Israel.“
Whew, what a blast from the past. Did I sound younger back then? I think I sound younger. 2021, man, a different time. But back to the 1940s, and the three Jewish paramilitary organizations running around in Palestine. The biggest and most influential was the Haganah, which was basically the armed branch of the Yishuv’s mainstream Jewish establishment. The Haganah believed in using force solely for defense. But like for real, hence their name – Haganah literally means defense. As a matter of policy, they didn’t do reprisals and they didn’t attack first. Restraint was the name of the game, havlagah.
Then there was the Irgun, which formed when a handful of hardliners split off to start their own paramilitary. One that would show the world that Jewish blood was not cheap. One that was fine with reprisals. One that was happy to attack first if it meant establishing deterrence. The Irgun’s official name was “HaIrgun HaTzvai HaLeumi B’Eretz Yisrael,” which translates to “the National Military Organization in the Land of Israel.” If you’re asking me, not a name with a lot of pizzazz. For short, they went by their acronym Etzel, or else simply by the Irgun, the organization. Very shadowy, appropriate for an underground paramilitary. The Irgun had absolutely no love for the British. But while the Brits were fighting the Nazis, they put aside their differences and called a truce, recognizing that they were all fighting a mutual enemy.
And then there was the third group, Lehi, who most thought of as the fringiest paramilitary. It was tiny, never numbering more than two or three hundred. Lehi, or Lohamei Herut Yisrael, fighters for the freedom of Israel, kept up the fight against the British even during WWII. In their eyes, the Brits were no better than the Nazis. In fact, maybe they were worse. Because while the Nazis were persecuting Jews, the Brits were keeping them from fleeing Europe to the one place that would take them: Palestine.
The Brits called Lehi “the Stern Gang,” after their poet-slash-soldier leader Avraham Stern, whose worldview can be neatly summed up by the following quote:
“You can have nothing more noble and sacred than a national war, the war of a nation to safeguard its dignity, liberty and life… That is why any self-respecting nation, either big or small, is willing to take its destiny into its own hands and wage a national war, the course of which will be determined by the nation’s readiness and its determination to fight against all odds – to be killed rather than to surrender.”
Stern was, in fact, killed by the British shortly after he wrote this in 1942. But his organization, and their ideology, outlived him significantly.
So we have three quite different paramilitary groups all fighting in their own ways for Jewish sovereignty in the historic homeland of the Jewish people. They weren’t having pizza parties together, though that would have been nice. Unsurprisingly, the groups didn’t always get along. And the rift got deeper when 31-year-old Menachem Begin took over the leadership of the Irgun in 1944.
Unlike the Yishuv’s mainstream leadership, Begin was a Revisionist Zionist – an acolyte of the fiery Ze’ev Vladimir Jabotinsky, who believed that Jewish sovereignty in the Land of Israel would be bought only by force. I know I keep saying this, but one day, we really gotta do an episode on Jabotinsky.
Begin had a good reason for his fire. He had been born in Poland, but when the Nazis marched in, he fled east, to a town soon occupied by the Soviet Union. But the Soviets were, shall we say, not cool with Begin’s active Zionism, and in 1940, they sent him to the gulag – the notoriously harsh Soviet labor camp system. After two years of punishing labor and constant interrogations, he was released, and joined the Polish army-in-exile. It was with his Polish army unit that Begin arrived in Palestine in 1942 – only to find, a few years later, that he was the sole remaining member of his immediate family.
Their ghosts, and six million others, haunted Begin for the rest of his life. But he didn’t stoop under this constant invisible presence. Instead, he developed an iron spine. He rejected the Diaspora legacy of vulnerability and helplessness and fear. He refused to be, as he termed it “a Jew with trembling knees.” (By the way, that expression gives me chills whenever I hear it or say it.) And he would spend the rest of his life ensuring that the Jewish people would never again bend the knee or be crushed by the boot of the oppressor. That’s Begin./
By 1944, that oppressor included the British Empire.
For most of the war, the Irgun had kept their truce with the Brits. But as the war wound down and the scale of the Holocaust became clear, Begin changed his tune. Here’s me again, younger me, back in 2021:
“He declared open war on the British: “No more cease-fire in the land of Israel between the people and the Hebrew youth and the British administration which hands over our brothers to Hitler.” Those immigration quotas? They were literally responsible for the deaths of thousands of Jews. Kept out of Palestine, where their brothers and sisters waited for them eagerly, refugees were shunted from country to country and finally deported back to Europe.”
So by 1944, the Irgun had joined Lehi – that smallest and most radical Jewish paramilitary – in attacking the British.
“But where the Irgun largely confined itself to acts of sabotage and assisting illegal immigration, Lechi took matters much farther. In November of 1944, two Lechi assassins killed Lord Moyne, the British Minister of State and a close personal friend of Winston Churchill.“
Churchill, who had been a staunch supporter of a Jewish state, was furious, and threatened to reconsider British support for the entire Zionist project. For Yishuv leaders like David Ben Gurion, that was very troubling, and confirmed what they suspected, that the Irgun and Lehi were a major liability: hardline hotheads who could destroy everything that moderate and pragmatic Zionist leaders had worked so hard to build!
So Ben Gurion did something wild. Ready for this? Listen to this…He ordered the Palmach – the Haganah’s elite strike force – to hunt Irgun and Lehi fighters and turn them over to the British. From November 1944 to March 1945, it was open season against the Irgun, even though they had had nothing to do with Lord Moyne’s assassination!
Begin, for his part, instructed his people not to fight back. He understood that a civil war at this stage of the game could stop the Zionist project in its tracks. So for months, members of the Irgun and Lehi didn’t just have to guard against the British. They had to watch out for the Haganah, too. We’ve got some info about the so-called saison, the hunting season, in the show notes if you want to learn more about this painful chapter of Jewish history.
The only good thing I can say about this awful period is that it was, mercifully, brief. And when it ended, the three paramilitaries found themselves, surprisingly, united.
The war was over. Two thirds of European Jewry was gone. You realize how crazy this is? World! Two-third, gone. And over in jolly old England, Churchill was out and Prime Minister Clement Atlee was in.
And we’ll talk more about Atlee, and his Foreign Secretary’s complete disinterest in letting any of the 250,000+ plus Jewish refugees, when we come back.
Welcome back. Prime Minister Atlee’s Foreign Secretary, a man named Ernest Bevin, had zero interest in allowing any Jews into Palestine. Instead, he suggested, the quarter of a million Jewish Holocaust survivors and refugees languishing in squalid DP camps should be “repatriated” and “rehabilitated” across Europe. It’s literally the slogan go back to Poland, shaped into state policy. Thanks, Bevin!
Do I need to point out how monstrous this is? How insane that people who had just survived the most systemized genocide in history were now expected to just… go back to the neighborhoods that had spat them out?
And that’s if they even had neighborhoods to go back to. In many cases, their towns and homes were destroyed – vanished into rubble and smoke. If a survivor got lucky and found their home standing, they’d usually find a stranger inside.
No, the three paramilitaries in Palestine were not going to let Atlee and Bevins destroy what was left of European Jewry. So the Haganah, the Irgun, and Lehi teamed, forming the Tnu’at HaMered HaIvri, the United Hebrew Resistance Movement.
And they gave the British hell.
“Working as a team, they stormed a British prison in the coastal city of Atlit, releasing 208 illegal immigrants. They sank patrol ships and a radar installation in Haifa so that the British wouldn’t be able to detect ships full of refugees. The Palmach sabotaged railway tracks at 153 different points, crippling the Brits’ ability to transport goods or men, while the Irgun and the Lechi blew up the Lod train station. When the British refused to entertain the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry’s recommendation that another 100,000 European Jews be allowed into Palestine, the United Resistance Movement retaliated by blowing up 11 bridges connecting Palestine with its neighbors, effectively isolating the British. As historian Thurston Clarke puts it: “if Britain closed Palestine to Jewish refugees, the Haganah was capable of closing the country to everyone.”
The paramilitary leaders may have had their differences. But when it came to saving Jewish lives, they were all in. And the British immigration quotas were literally a matter of life or death.
In the summer of 1946, a nine year old Polish boy named Henryk Blaszczyk stayed out a little too late. Fearing a punishment, he concocted a story to explain why he’d failed to come home on time. He told his parents that a group of Jews had snatched him up and stuffed him in a cellar with the bodies of 15 Christian children. And his parents said, Henryk, what the heck, you can’t just make up blood libels anymore, it’s not 1480.
No, I’m just kidding, of course they didn’t say that. Instead, they organized a mob to punish the 200 Jews who lived in town, in a kibbutz-like commune, as they awaited their visas to Palestine. Another 42 Jews, lost to the mass grave that was Europe. Jews who could have, should have, been in Palestine, far away from Poland, far away from blood libels and antisemitic neighbors – if only the British had let them in.
The Kielce pogrom was a perfect example of everything the United Hebrew Resistance Movement was fighting against.
But the British weren’t going to let a bunch of angry Jews get them down. If you listened to our miniseries on 1936 – link in the show notes – then you might remember that the British were getting very tired of administering Palestine, with its constant bloodshed and its bitterly opposed groups clamoring for their own state. Being a colonial power – an actual colonial power – just sounds so exhausting. And now the Jews were blowing up bridges and sabotaging infrastructure? No. No, no, and no. So in the summer of 1946, the Brits launched Operation Agatha, which became known as the Black Shabbat – at least, until October 7th, 2023 replaced it as the blackest Shabbat in the Jewish calendar.
In a devastating raid, the British arrested thousands of Jews, including many leaders. Imposed a curfew on the entire Jewish community, the Yishuv. Confiscated weapons. The whole nine yards. The goal was to absolutely crush the Jewish resistance, and it was carried out as if the British were at war with the entire Jewish population.
Like I said: colonial empires gonna colonial empire.
The British suspected – correctly, I might add – that the Jewish Agency, which was the mainstream Jewish establishment, was colluding with the militias. But after Operation Agatha, they had concrete proof. The raid on the Jewish Agency offices had yielded a treasure trove of incriminating documents that proved there were ties between the mainstream Jewish establishment and the hardline militias, which the Brits viewed as terror organizations. The Yishuv’s only saving grace was that the documents were in Hebrew. They needed to somehow destroy or steal back the documents before the Brits could go through them and discover how deep the collusion went.
They knew the Brits had stashed the document in the southern wing of the King David Hotel, aka their military and government headquarters in Palestine.
Slowly, a plan began to form.
You following this? It’s getting juicy…
Menachem Begin didn’t care all that much about the documents. He was already a wanted man, living underground with his wife and child. But Operation Agatha had poured salt into open wounds. A year and a half after the liberation of Auschwitz, men in uniforms were once again herding Jews into barbed-wire cages, poking men with the tips of their bayonets, dragging Jewish women by the hair. They’d even blasted one kibbutz with tear gas.
Yes, gas. Against Jews. In 1946.
Twenty five thousand British troops had terrorized the Jews of the Yishuv on the Black Shabbat. It was the United Hebrew Resistance Movement’s job to restore their pride and “fighting spirit.” But what could they do that would boost morale, land a blow to the Brits, and incinerate all the evidence of the Jewish Agency’s collusion with the Irgun and Lehi?
You see where I’m going with this? You see?
The King David Hotel wasn’t just the home of the best chopped liver in the world. (I am fascinated, by the way, about whether they had this chopped liver yet… A topic for another episode.) It was also, in the words of terrorism expert Professor Bruce Hoffman, an “irresistible target.”
Begin had wanted to hit the hotel even before the Black Shabbat. He’d given the order to plan an attack back in April 1946. But it was only after the Black Shabbat that the Haganah commanders of the United Hebrew Resistance Movement got on board.
But what exactly would the attack entail?
The hotel was a government headquarters, sure, but it was also teeming with civilians. Begin had no issue with sabotaging infrastructure and even attacking military or government officials, but civilians were a different game altogether.
If the United Hebrew Resistance Movement attacked, what would happen to all the innocent hotel guests and cleaners and porters and cooks and businesspeople and journalists and dignitaries and It Girls who came to the King David to see and be seen?
Hoffman writes that Begin had, quote, “uncanny analytical ability to cut right to the heart of an issue and an intuitive sense about the interplay of violence, politics and propaganda that ideally qualified him to lead a terrorist organization.” But was he the kind of terrorist who targeted civilians?
Was he a terrorist at all?
What is a terrorist, anyway? What counts as terrorism?
My new best friend, ChatGPT, was no help. It said: “Defining terrorism is complex due to its political, legal, and emotional dimensions.”
No S, sherlock. So, I said, cmon, CHAT, BE REAL WITH ME.
So, Chat said fine, here:
“The unlawful use or threat of violence against civilians or non-combatants to achieve political, ideological, or religious objectives, typically by instilling fear, coercing governments, or influencing societal behavior.”
Which is more or less in line with Bruce Hoffman’s definition, quote:
“a phenomenon of political violence perpetrated by individuals belonging to an organization or ideological movement dedicated to revolutionary change – change that they fervently believed can only be effected through violence or the threat of violence.”
So – political violence in service of revolutionary change, with the added element of “fear” and “coercion.”
Think the state-sanctioned “Reign of Terror” in the bloody aftermath of the French Revolution. Think Stalinist Russia, or Nazi Germany. Think: the 1881 assassination of Tzar Alexander II, or the killing of Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand in 1914.
In other words, terrorism is kind of an equal-opportunity tool – whether it’s used by governments or non-state actors. After WWII, the concept expanded to describe systematic acts of political violence by local insurgents determined to unseat colonial rule. Think of the IRA fighting the British, or the Algerian National Liberation Front fighting the French.
But – and this is wild to me – that definition owes a lot to the Jewish paramilitaries of Mandate Palestine, and particularly to Menachem Begin, who literally wrote the playbook on this kind of revolution. Militant groups around the world have used his 1951 memoir, The Revolt, as a template – including Irish separatists, which I find hilariously ironic given Ireland’s less-than-warm attitude towards Israel today.
The US army even found a copy of The Revolt in the Al Qaeda library in Afghanistan, and if that’s not a textbook definition of irony, well, I don’t know what is. (We can always ask Alanis Morissette.) Low key, I think I may have just told you the most interesting piece of information I have ever shared here.
But here’s the thing: Begin’s tactics were very far from Al-Qaeda’s. And no, I am not just being defensive. The Brits may have seen him as a terrorist and the Jewish newspapers of the Yishuv may have condemned him (Ben Gurion had his political reasons), but Begin insisted for the rest of his life that he was a “freedom fighter.” And yes, there’s that old cliche that “one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter.” But I don’t view life through that relativistic lens. Begin had principles – a clear set of rules for what was and wasn’t fair game. You and I do not have to agree on whether we think he made the correct decisions or not. Sometimes yes and sometimes no is my hot take.
The Haganah drew the line at killing people – unless those people were literally attacking. Begin went a step further. He was okay with killing people – depending on who they were.
British officials rounded up and executed Jewish militiamen. So the Irgun and Lehi responded with their own retaliatory executions of British soldiers, or assassinations of British officials like Lord Moyne. An eye for an eye, a soldier for a soldier.
So when Begin first conceived of the attack on the hotel in April of 1946, he wasn’t planning on killing civilians. He wanted to show the British that the Jewish paramilitaries would and could take down the seat of their power. He wanted to remind them that they had no business keeping Jews out of their ancestral homeland.
But in the wake of the Black Shabbat, the Irgun was no longer alone. Now, they had help from the rest of the United Hebrew Resistance Movement, including Haganah commander Moshe Sneh and Lehi leader Nathan Yellin-Mor.
The Haganah sent 23-year-old Amichai Paglin – code name Gidi – to plan this whole project. Meanwhile, the Irgun sent 20-year-old Yisrael Levi – code name Gideon – to be the leader on the ground, making sure the plan went off without a hitch. Gidi and Gideon. And as if that wasn’t both confusing and charming enough, they gave the plan a cute, affectionate name: Operation Malonchik, which means little hotel – later shortened to Operation Chik.
Weirdly adorable for an event that would tragically kill nearly 100 people.
The plan was as follows: the Irgun had developed a timed bomb, which they planned to place into big milk churns. (By the way, never heard of milk churns except in the context of this story. I’m learning so much!) Anyway, Irgun members would pretend to be milkmen, conveniently bypassing all the British military security to bring the churns to the kitchen basement of the hotel. Once in the basement, the Irgun “milkmen” would activate the bomb, which would go off after a predetermined amount of time.
That interval was crucial.
After they delivered the “milk churns” but before the churns exploded, other Irgun members would call in several warnings to the hotel, giving everyone in the hotel time to evacuate safely. In the meantime, other fighters would set off a non-lethal bomb near the hotel, creating a diversion while all the operatives escaped. They planned the attack for midday because the hotel’s nightclub, which was in the basement, would be empty. Plus, the fewer people sniffing around the better.
I’ll say it again: the intention was never to terrorize civilians or kill innocent people. It was to show the British we can get you even at your government headquarters.
The United Hebrew Resistance Movement squabbled endlessly over how much time to allot between the warnings and the explosion. The Irgun wanted to give everyone 45 minutes, while the Haganah wanted to cap it at a tight 15. (They really, really didn’t want to give the Brits any time to save the incriminating documents.) In the end, they compromised on half an hour.
At last, everything was decided.
The details were ironed out.
The plan seemed solid.
And then Chaim Weizman, head of the World Zionist Organization, got cold feet. He was a diplomat, after all. He’d spent years cultivating strong relationships with higher-ups in the British government, all in the service of building a Jewish state. Was the movement really going to risk it all for some flashy show of power?
So he demanded that the Haganah stop working with the other two paramilitaries. At first, they complied. Haganah commanders Moshe Sneh and Yisrael Galili asked Begin twice to postpone the operation. And twice, Begin listened to them and postponed. But on day three, Begin gave his people the order. And to this day, no one knows whether he purposefully went ahead on his own or whether he actually had the Haganah’s support.
What happened next was shocking. But you’ll have to wait for Part 2 to hear more.