Welcome back to the 2-part series on the bombing of the King David Hotel. I could summarize Part 1 for you, but honestly, just listen to it, it’s really important to help us understand the background for the bombing. If you already listened, awesome, welcome back. If you haven’t, go check out Part 1.
When we left off in last week’s episode, the Irgun had decided to move forward with the attack on the historic King David Hotel. Here’s what happened next.
Monday, July 22, 1946. Morning.
The front page of The Palestine Post, which later became The Jerusalem Post, featured a short article quoting Mahatma Gandhi, urging nonviolence in the Holy Land. The irony would become horrifyingly apparent in just a few hours, when the southern wing of the hotel became a smoking ruin.
From here, accounts diverge.
The British have their sequence of events. The Irgun have another.
In the late 1970s, the historian Thurston Clarke tried to figure out who was right. Meticulously, he traced every clue and pulled on every thread he could find, interviewing as many people as possible. The result is one of the most gripping, detailed accounts of the bombing ever published: the controversial book By Blood and Fire: The Attack on the King David Hotel.
This is how Clarke reconstructs the timeline.
At 11:45AM, a stolen delivery truck pulled up to the hotel. Two Irgun fighters held up the kitchen staff at gunpoint while four of their comrades delivered seven large milk churns to the basement, each filled with 100 pounds of explosives and labeled “MINES–DO NOT TOUCH” in English, Arabic and Hebrew. Gideon, the Irgun’s leader on the ground, secured and activated the detonator and timing devices.
Things went downhill from there.
A British officer spotted the Irgun team holding up the kitchen staff. Soon, he and the Irgun were trading shots – until the officer took a fatal bullet. But the noise attracted the attention of the switchboard operators, who were also housed in the basement and immediately called the military police. They weren’t the only ones raising the alarm. A hotel porter had witnessed the firefight and called in with a distressing report at 12:15pm.
So Gideon and his men exited the basement just in time for the military police to pull up to the hotel, sparking a second firefight that claimed one Irgun fighter’s life. The rest – including Gideon – managed to get away, along with the second team who had been keeping watch.
It was all spiraling so fast.
Sometime between 12:20 and 12:27pm, the diversionary bomb went off right across the street. It wasn’t lethal – the point of the bomb was to herd people away from the southern wing of the hotel, where the milk churns were lying in wait, about to explode. But the bomb did some damage, injuring several unlucky Arab men and women whose bus had just pulled up outside.
As soon as the bomb went off, Adina Hay Nissan sprang into action. The teenage Irgun courier been lurking near a public telephone waiting for her signal to call the front desk of the King David and warn everyone to evacuate.
The explosion was her signal.
At 12:22pm, she made her first call, warning the hotel’s switchboard operator in both English and Hebrew: “This is the Jewish Resistance Movement, we have planted bombs in the hotel. Please vacate it immediately. You have been warned.”
But her job wasn’t done. After she hung up, she ran to a telephone booth on King George Street, to give the French Consulate the same warning. 12:27.
Four minutes later, she placed a call to the offices of the Palestine Post newspaper, telling them to relay her warning to the hotel once more. To their credit, they did.
The bombs went off six minutes later, at 12:37pm.
A mighty boom as the King David’s magnificent six-story southern wing collapsed in on itself, its sides sheared away as though they’d been scooped out with a spoon. Rubble everywhere, screams all along the street. Bodies buried under an avalanche of concrete.
Years later, Shoshana Levy Kampos, who worked as a typist in the hotel, would give her testimony to the BBC.
“Suddenly, everything was black. What happened? I couldn’t understand. You only think, how do you get out?…I knew there would be many, many, many dead, victims, terrible, terrible. I started to cry”.
I don’t want to discount how terrible it must have been for her – but Shoshana was lucky. She made it out alive.
91 people did not. 41 Arabs, 28 Brits, 17 Jews, 2 Armenians, a Russian, an Egyptian, and a Greek. Sixteen of the victims were senior British government officials and 13 were British military personnel, but the rest? Regular office workers, hotel employees, or unfortunate members of the public. In other words, mostly civilians, despite the Irgun’s intentions. Shoshana’s boss was among the victims.
“My boss, he was a very nice man and he was killed in the attack. Of course I was angry at who did it. I didn’t know til they told me it was the Etzel. The Etzel was one of the Jewish groups who were against the British. They wanted the British to go out, but this wasn’t the right way to do it. No, I can’t agree”.
Later, the British would claim they had had one minute, max, to evacuate the hotel.
But the math is a little confusing to me. The bombs went off at 12:37 – slightly earlier than planned, apparently due to the hot weather. (I don’t fully get that, but I’m trusting the science on this one.)
Adina Hay Nissan had made her first call 10 to 15 minutes before the explosion. It was a lot less time than the half an hour the Irgun had banked on. In fact, it was much closer to the 15 minutes that the Haganah had originally wanted. But it was a heck of a lot longer than 1 minute.
And maybe that’s why Begin reacted the way that he did. In his recent biography of Begin, the Israeli historian Avi Shilon recounts, quote:
“While the operation was being carried out, Begin sat in his usual place next to the radio in his apartment in Tel Aviv with Chaim Landau. He did not intervene with the technical aspects of the operation and expected to be updated over the radio. He remained silent as they waited. When the BBC reported on the many casualties and Begin realized that the building had not been evacuated before the explosion, he was shocked. He went closer to the radio to make sure he was hearing correctly, and when the station started playing a funeral march, he sagged into his armchair. The mournful tune increased his agitation. Begin muttered to himself, ignoring Landau, “What happened, what the hell happened?” When he learned that among those killed was a deputy secretary of the British government, Richard Jacobs, an Englishman of Jewish descent, he burst out at Landau, “Was it not possible to warn him?”
What the H happened, indeed. The Irgun called in three warnings. So why didn’t anyone evacuate?
In the 1970s, the hotel’s assistant manager, Emile Soutter, told the historian Thurston Clarke that he’d definitely gotten the warning. Soutter wasn’t Jewish, and he had no reason to protect the Irgun or the Haganah, so I think his testimony is pretty credible. But the hotel was an attractive target. They’d gotten fake bomb threats before, and nothing had ever happened. So Soutter didn’t take this one very seriously. By the time the warning trickled down to the hotel workers, it was already too late. Here’s Shoshana again:
“There was a warning, a telephone call that the bombs were laid in the cellar of the King David Hotel, that the people should all – the workers should all go out immediately. I was just getting up from my place and suddenly I heard an explosion and black – I don’t see anything. After some time, I heard somebody was coughing. [Coughs.] I said, oh, there’s another one living”.
But there’s another, tragic explanation here, too.
Remember the gunfights that broke out as the Irgun were placing the bombs? Remember the diversionary bomb? Well, the switchboard operators had sounded the alarm. The police had showed up. True, Adina had made the calls after all that. But in all the chaos, it’s possible that everyone believed that this was the attack she had warned about. And so despite the calls, no one expected the hotel itself was the target.
In 2015, Hoffman published a whole book on the Irgun based on archival evidence. Anonymous Soldiers, as it’s called, reports that there is no concrete evidence that the warning was ever passed on to British officials with any authority. Which means that there’s no evidence that Chief Secretary Sir John Shaw got the warning, let alone dismissed it so derisively, as the Irgun later claimed.
No matter the exact sequence of events, everyone agrees on what happened next.
The condemnations of the bombing were fast and furious. The Brits were livid. The Americans, too. But the worst of it came from Jewish leaders themselves. Both Chief Rabbis condemned the attack. The Sephardic Chief Rabbi, Ben Zion Uziel – fascinating guy, we should do an episode on him one day – declared, “From the depths of my heart, I call on all those who have had a hand in this sin: cease from this dangerous path which is forbidden by the law of Israel, and from which there can be no returning for those who take it.” Rabbi Uziel was a kind of liaison between the Mandate government and Palestine’s Jewish community, and his word carried a lot of weight.
Meanwhile, Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi Yitzhak HaLevi Herzog said, quote: “I could never have imagined that the descendents of those who received the law of life on Mount Sinai could show such disregard for the security of human life.”
Ben Gurion told a French newspaper that the Irgun was the enemy of the Jewish people. Yes, Ben Gurion, who was well aware of the plot and very much involved in the United Hebrew Resistance Movement.
But in this case, I don’t blame Ben Gurion for throwing Begin under the bus. What else was he going to do? He was a politician, and this was politics. If he wanted a country, he had to stay on the good side of the imperial powers. And the Haganah had been iffy on this whole attack, anyway. Clearly, things had spiraled outside their control.
Ben Gurion wasn’t the only one thinking about the consequences.
OK, old-timey newscaster, way to use the term “final solution” totally inappropriately. Yikes.
But it’s that last thing I want to focus on – the report of the Anglo-American Palestine Committee. As I mentioned at the beginning of this episode, there were still a quarter of a million Jewish refugees in Europe, waiting to go – well, anywhere that would take them. The Americans wanted the Brits to let 100 thousand Jews into Palestine, but the British stubbornly refused. And the New York Post took notice. The paper condemned the bombing – but it also blamed the British for their lousy immigration policy keeping Jews out. Damn, New York Post, speaking truth to power since 1946.
Meanwhile, the Irgun issued a statement of its own. We mourn for the Jewish victims, they said… but not for the British. After all, the Brits didn’t mourn the six million Jews murdered in the Holocaust. And they certainly weren’t mourning the thousands of Jews who died after being turned away from Palestine.
But nearly a century later, I think we can spend some time on the British victims. None of them were the architects of the British immigration policy. And yet the bombs destroyed their lives. And I’d like to tell the story of some the victims of the King David Bombing. Which is what we’ll do when we come back.
Welcome back. When we left off a minute ago, we said we’d tell the stories of some of the victims of the King David Bombing. Let’s start with the British.
Chief Secretary John Shaw’s wife, Lady Shaw, said that her husband was never really the same after the bombing. He was haunted – both by the loss of many friends, and by the baseless accusation that he had refused to evacuate the hotel. Or take 22-year-old Celia Musgrave, whose husband, Roderick, was killed in the blast, leaving her a young widow and their infant daughter an orphan. The attack, she said later, “broke her heart.” She was far from the only widow left behind.
But the majority of the victims were not British. They were Arab. And – unsurprisingly – the attack did little to restore trust between Arabs and Jews in the Holy Land. In fact, at first, rumors circulated in Arab communities that the bombing was intended to target them. That mistrust deepened when they learned the Haganah had been involved.
After all, the Haganah was supposed to be the “moderate” paramilitary, the one more interested in defense than revenge. And perhaps that explains why, at the funeral for an Arab victim, one speaker vowed: “Your death in this treacherous manner has done our cause much good and has strengthened our morale, but be sure that we will avenge you, and our revenge will be terrible.”
Arabs weren’t the only ones blaming the Haganah. Among the dead were 17 Jews, some of whom had worked as civil servants for the British government.
Julius Jacobs was a doting father, poetry lover, and one of two senior British Jewish civil servants in the government who had access to top secret documents. His wife blamed Ben Gurion for her husband’s death – and her anger deepened when she learned that their former Jerusalem home had become Ben Gurion’s residence when he assumed the role of Prime Minister in 1948.
Jacobs died side by side with a close friend, Victor Levi, whose daughter told a newspaper 20 years later that she “never understood how her father, who was so loyal to the Yishuv, could be murdered by other Jews.”
And another Jewish victim died in the bombing, a young administrative assistant named Leo Baum, who had no relatives to give quotes for Thurston Clarke’s book 30 years later. He was the last remaining member of his entire immediate family, who had been murdered by the Nazis. He survived only to be killed in Jerusalem, the city of hope and longing for the Jewish people, by Jewish resistance members fighting to bring people just like him into Eretz Yisrael. It’s so unbelievably tragic.
The British, of course, weren’t just going to sit back and take it. They launched a manhunt for the man they considered Arch-Terrorist #1, Menachem Begin, who was hiding under their noses. They stationed themselves outside his house for days, not knowing that Begin had locked himself into a tiny secret compartment inside his house, custom-built by one of his fighters. There’s no doubt that if they’d caught him, Begin would have ended up dangling from a noose, changing the course of history. In fact, the British officers were far from Begin’s main concern as he crouched in his little hiding spot. His comrades had forgotten to leave him any water. In Jerusalem. In high summer. In 1946, before air conditioning. When the soldiers finally left, Begin emerged, delirious from thirst, and immediately plunged his whole head into a basin of water.
The Brits weren’t just angry at Begin. They cracked down on the entire Yishuv, instituting strict curfews and searching for anyone involved. But it was a losing battle. The Brits had just won World War II, but their victory came at a price. Their coffers were empty. London was in ruins. They’d sacrificed a second generation of young men, so soon after the Great War.
Now, they needed to focus on rebuilding their tiny island, and they just didn’t have the money or energy to pour down the drain in Palestine. Taxpayers back home were done paying for this fiasco. And, according to Hoffman, quote, “each successive terrorist outrage illuminated the government’s inability to curb, much less defeat the terrorists.” It just didn’t seem worth it anymore to stay.
Still, they trucked on half-heartedly for another year, trading blows with the Irgun and Lehi, until they ran completely out of steam. The final straw came in July of 1947, when the Irgun caught and hanged two British Army sergeants in revenge for the killing of two Irgun men. Photographs of the bodies made the rounds, shocking British citizens back home. Four months later, Britain turned the Palestine question Palestine over to the United Nations, as if to say, here. You solve this mess.
The UN who voted for the partition of Palestine and the creation of a Jewish state and an Arab state side by side – but that’s a story for a different episode. (Link in the show notes!)
And that’s the end of the story of the bombing of the King David Hotel. Or is it?
Because once you’re through with the chain of events, once you’ve listened to the interviews and read the articles and scanned the footnotes, you’re left with some unsettling moral questions that sit in the pit of your stomach like too many extra helpings of chopped liver.
What do we make of the legacy of the Irgun, and of Menachem Begin himself, who became a towering figure in Israeli politics? For the British, and even for some Jews, he was the villian. But for many other Jews, he was a hero, uncompromising in his dedication to the Jewish people’s national liberation and security.
The British might have thought they were done with Menachem Begin when they finally rolled out of Palestine in May 1948, never dreaming they’d cross paths with Public Enemy #1 in the cramped corridor of #10 Downing Street. But that’s exactly what happened. Menachem Begin had run for Prime Minister no less than 8 times. 31 years after the King David bombing, he was finally elected Prime Minister of Israel in a landslide. Less than a year later, he was on his way to London, greeted warmly at Heathrow by the British Foreign Secretary.
But all was not forgotten. When he’d visited London as an Israeli opposition leader in 1972, Begin had been met with angry protests, and his 1977 visit was controversial. During the six days he spent in London, Begin was hosted in undisclosed locations and moved frequently, for security purposes. Recently, former Israeli president Reuven Rivlin stated Queen Elizabeth II never invited any Israelis to Buckingham Palace outside of official international visits, because “she viewed us all as terrorists or the sons of terrorists.” The Queen would have been in her teens and early twenties during the days of the United Hebrew Resistance Movement, so I get her point of view here. I really do.
The Queen may have been bitter about Begin’s past, but other heads of state were surprisingly good with the hardline Prime Minister. Even notoriously dovish US President Jimmy Carter – who just died at the age of 100 – stated that he did NOT believe that Begin would be an obstacle to peace in the Middle East.
He was right. Begin was the first Israeli prime minister to ink a peace deal with an enemy country – which you know from our episode about Sadat in Jerusalem. (Link in the show notes!)
So that’s the story of the King David hotel bombing, and here are your five fast facts.
- Three underground Jewish paramilitaries operated in Mandate Palestine, the geopolitical entity that existed between 1920 and 1948. The Haganah, with its policy of “restraint,” was considered moderate and pragmatic, while the Irgun and Lehi were considered the hardliners, to different degrees.
- The three paramilitaries didn’t agree on a lot. But they all wanted the same thing: a Jewish state in historic homeland of the Jewish people, that would welcome the quarter million refugees languishing in DP camps across Europe. Despite their differences, they teamed up to sabotage British infrastructure.
- In response, the Brits launched a nasty raid on the entire Yishuv, confiscating thousands of documents that linked the Jewish Agency to acts of sabotage. They kept the docs in their HQ: the southern wing of the King David hotel.
- That made the hotel a target. So on July 22, 1946, the Irgun carried out an operation jointly planned with the Haganah and the Lehi to bomb the King David Hotel. They called in several warnings, but the bombs exploded early, killing 91 people, mostly civilians.
- For decades, the British denied they had received those warnings, harshly criticizing the Irgun for its “terrorist” tactics. But those tactics seemed to work, contributing to the British decision to leave Palestine less than two years later.
Those are your five fast facts, but here’s one enduring lesson as I see it.
Terrorism has become a fixture of modern life. I wish that weren’t true, but it is. The US began 2025, just a few weeks ago, with a terror attack. 14 people are dead after a terrorist rammed a car into a crowd of civilians on New Years Day. A few weeks earlier, five people died in a similar attack in Germany. And those are just the recent ones.
These are the kinds of attacks we refer to as “terrorism.” Attacks on “soft targets” – public squares, houses of worship, markets, cafes, movie theaters, concerts. All the places people go to have a good time.
The terrorism we know is a violent interruption of public life, meant to intimidate and devastate and frighten. The randomness of the targets is the point. The message is clear: no one is safe. No one is innocent. It could be any of you, because all of you deserve this.
Of course, terrorism doesn’t have to be “random.” The white supremacists who murdered nine Black worshippers at church or eleven Jews in synagogue clearly targeted their victims. But the message is the same: if you’re Black, or Jewish, watch out. This is an attack on all of you.
It’s all so different from the attack on the King David.
That doesn’t make the King David bombing right, by the way. It just makes it… different.
Mark Edmundson is an English professor at the University of Virginia with strong opinions about education. He writes:
“Our students must learn to engage in civilized mental struggle. Too often we ask them to have opinions on what they’ve read in class without exposing them to competing ideas.”
So let’s talk through the competing ideas here. Was the bombing of the King David an act of terrorism… or an example of fighting for freedom?
That’s a real question – and it’s worth considering. I want to be curious. I want you to be curious. That’s the only way to learn. “Wisdom begins in wonder,” as Socrates reportedly said. And remember, he was an educator first and foremost.
So. Let’s be curious here.
On the one hand, on the one hand, Begin knew exactly where to draw the line. From his perspective, everything he did, he did for the Jewish future. He wrote at the end of The Revolt, quote: “If we learn and remember, we shall overcome our enemies. They will never succeed in enslaving us again. Never. Even if they overwhelm us we shall throw off their yoke. If we have no arms, we shall make them. If we have no force, we shall create it. They will not break us. The lore of revolt and the spirit of freedom will sustain us and our children.”
Stirring words. And familiar ones.
It’s so easy to give some highfalutin speech about resistance, about throwing off the yoke of the oppressor, about breaking the wheel. It’s so easy to twist those noble concepts – of freedom, of rebellion, of nurturing the bright spark of defiance in the face of insurmountable odds – into something dark and unrecognizable.
Let’s make this contemporary. Hamas talks a lot about resistance. So does Palestinian Islamic Jihad. So did the PLO, the Palestine Liberation Organization. It’s easy to make yourself sound noble – after all, that’s why some seem to have fallen for Hamas rhetoric hook, line, and sinker.
So while I might agree with Begin’s sentiments, I’m a lot more interested in the Irgun’s actions.
Like calling in three warnings. Like giving the entire hotel time to evacuate. Like labeling the bombs in three languages.
And yet… and yet. 91 people still died. No, they were killed. They were killed.
Professor Edmundon continues:
My hope is that helping students learn the arts of amiable opposition will put them in a position to savor civilized conflict in the political and social world. I want them to see that those who think differently from them are to be listened to and learned from. Students who emerge from an education in civil conflict will become citizens who won’t need to shout down speakers, cancel their opponents, or become confused and upset when they hear ideas they don’t concur with. They’ll understand that the future of our democracy is based on dissent within the context of a powerful commitment to unity. They will not hate their adversaries. Their response to what they see as an outrageous opinion will begin not with condemnation but with inquiry: What made you come to think that? Why do you hold that opinion? When the nation comes to contain a significant quotient of such people, our addiction to noisy, pointless invective will begin to dwindle.
A call for curiosity, not conformity.
So let’s look at the other side of the argument. The side that says, hey, wait a second. Noble intentions can’t let the Irgun off the hook. The victims of the King David Hotel were individuals with hopes, dreams, families. They didn’t deserve to die. And whether or not they meant to, it was the Irgun that killed them.
So what do you do with that? How do you square it? Is it moral to strike a military target if civilians have been warned, and how much time is enough? Who is responsible if something goes wrong? And does the end ever justify the means?
I mean, the British did leave Palestine. The Jewish state was established, welcoming millions of Jewish refugees with nowhere else to go. The bombing was extreme – the kind of “shock” to the system that can utterly reset the balance of power. But three decades later, Begin was received in the halls of Whitechapel, where he sat for 12 hours with the British Prime Minister to work out the future of the Middle East.
It’s a complicated history. And it’s up to you to draw your own conclusions. I’m not interested in answering these questions. I’m interested in raising them – in grappling sincerely with everything they mean.
From our vantage point, 80 years later, all we can do is remain curious. We study the history. We learn the context. We honor the victims. And we demand to see different sides of a story, because wisdom begins in wonder.
Our curiosity shouldn’t be a rebellion against the current social norms. It should be part and parcel of everyday conversation.
But until it is, we’ll be rebels, forever curious.