Beyond
Words
Volume 6 (excerpts from pages
548-571)
DEMOCRACY?
“Power.
That is what always obsessed them and that is what obsesses them today, both
Labor and Likud. Not “democracy” and not “law” and not “justice” but power.
Their power. And in order to keep that power, they are not above killing Jews.
They
murdered a religious Jew, Jacob de Haan, in 1934, because he was an
anti-Zionist. (Indeed, the leaders of the group that ordered the murder were
Yitzhak Ben-Zvi, later to be the President of Israel, and his wife, a famous
poetess — both of the hierarchy of the Labor movement.) They murdered a
17-year-old youth named Yedidya Segal, on suspicion of belonging to the Irgun.
He was tortured by a Haganah kidnap gang and died. The Mayor of Jerusalem,
Teddy Kollek, was a key figure in the kidnapping and torturing of Irgun
members and supporters.
Worst,
the most horrifying of the examples, is the deliberate blowing up of the Irgun
ship, Altalena, off the beach of Tel Aviv in
June 1948. Along with the murder of 16 Jews who were aboard.
It was a terrible time for the
fledgling Jewish state, established barely a month earlier. The armies of
Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon and Iraq had invaded the country. A severe
defeat, with heavy casualties, had been suffered by the new Israeli army at
Latrun, in the center of the country. Egyptian troops were now only 20 miles
from Ashdod, on the road to Tel Aviv. The Etzion bloc had fallen to the
Jordanian forces and Arab troops were at the southern end of Jerusalem, with
the Old City already in their hands. The most serious problem of all was the
overwhelming superiority of the Arabs in materiel. They far surpassed the Jews
in artillery, armor and planes. Worse, Ben-Gurion explained the terrible defeat
at Latrun by revealing that the entire Jewish force there had only 1,300
rifles. (Later it was learned that hundreds of newly arrived Jewish immigrants
were taken off the ships at Haifa and dispatched to the Latrun front, with only
sticks as weapons. They were slaughtered.) The very existence of the Jewish
state was in the balance and Jewish leaders desperately sought ways to get
arms and ammunition.
And
suddenly, as if some prayer Divinely-granted — there it was. A veritable
arsenal of ammunition, loaded on the ship, Altalena. The
product of years of fund-raising efforts by Irgun supporters in the United
States, it carried five thousand Lee-Enfield rifles, one million rounds of ammunition,
one thousand grenades, three hundred Bren guns, fifty cannons, four thousand
aerial bombs, nine tanks, fifty anti-tank guns, large quantities of medical
equipment, as well as 920 trained combat soldiers. The French government agreed
to allow the ship to be loaded and to sail for Israel from the port of
Marseilles.
Painstaking
discussions with the new Israeli government led to an agreement with Ben-Gurion
that the ship could land. It was agreed that the spot would be Kfar Vitkin, a
Labor settlement on the coast. When the ship arrived, however, the authorities
suddenly told the Irgun that it would not be allowed to land, and it was fired
upon from the shore and from two corvettes of the Israeli Navy. With Menachem
Begin aboard, the Altalena now set off for Tel Aviv, where she
was grounded opposite Frishman Street. There she was again attacked by heavy
fire from the beach and the best account is that of the commander of the Altalena, a
U.S. Navy veteran named Monroe Fein:
The
ship continued to receive heavy firing from the shore for a period of about
one-and-a-half hours. Some of the heavy machine guns ashore were using
armor-piercing ammunition which passed right through the steel bulkheads of the
ship. This fact began to cause numerous casualties. We had no doctor on board
and some of our casualties were very seriously wounded. We contacted, through
Irgun headquarters ashore, the army commander and requested a cease-fire in
order to allow us to remove the wounded men from the ship. We arranged that we would
use our own landing vessel for this purpose. Cease-fire was agreed to almost at
once and all firing on both the shore and ship had stopped within a few
minutes. From this point on there was not a single round of ammunition
fired from the ship for the remainder of the afternoon.
Immediately
after the cease-fire order we attempted to contact the landing vessel which had
remained on the beach to the north of the ship. However, we discovered that we
were unable to reach them as apparently their radio set had gone dead. Jack
Baron, the Chief Officer, volunteered to swim to the boat to tell the crew of
the arrangement that had been made. As soon as he was in the water, he was
fired upon many times from the shore. He succeeded in reaching the shore, only
to be captured by army men. He was not allowed to walk up to the boat. When we
saw there was no possibility of communicating with our own boat, we immediately
made this fact known to the Palmach commander and asked that a government boat be sent from the harbor to
take off the wounded. This was immediately promised us. We then settled down to wait for
the appearance of this boat, meanwhile caring for the wounded as best we
could.
During
this time one of them died. One hour and a half later, and after repeated
requests there was still no sign of any boat. We had also tried to signal to
the two corvettes to make the same request, but they gave no indication that
they even saw our signal. At this time, we were suddenly taken under fire by a
large gun which was located on the coast to the north of the city. This gun
fired three shots all of which passed over the ship and exploded in the water
beyond. We immediately got on the radio and asked whether or not the
cease-fire still was in effect and if so, what was the reason for the renewed
gun-fire. A reply was made that the cease-fire order was still in effect and
that the gun would be silenced immediately. Following this there was a period
of about fifteen minutes in which no more gunshots were made. During this time
I conferred with the Commander-in-Chief of the Irgun and told him that if the
gunfire should hit the ship, the ship, the cargo and possibly a good many lives
would be lost and that he should at all costs maintain the cease-fire order
until there could be further negotiations. This he agreed to do but as he
himself came up to talk on the radio to the headquarters ashore, the heavy gun
resumed firing.
As
soon as the gun started a second time, I struck the flag as a sign of
surrender. We again inquired of the Palmach commander whether the cease-fire
order was in effect and the reply came that the cease-fire order was in effect
but that he had been “unable to
contact
all fronts.” Within a few seconds after this message was received, there was a
direct hit on the ship which started a large fire in the cargo hold. The ship’s
crew made immediate and valiant efforts to put out this fire, but because of
the nature of the cargo it proved beyond our capacity and I ordered all men
aboard to prepare to abandon the ship.
The
first thought all of us had was to remove the wounded men. There was no panic.
Everyone behaved in an extremely calm and heroic manner. As the men began
jumping off the ship and swimming towards the shore, those of us still on board
saw that they were being shot at continuously from rifles and machine-guns on
the beach. I rushed to the bridge and began waving a white flag and shouting to
stop the fire on the men who were swimming for their lives. At the same time
another man hoisted a large piece of white canvas on the halyard, but these
efforts were of little avail, as the firing continued.
At
least 16 Jews died in the waters off Tel Aviv that day. Jews murdered by other
Jews, under orders of the Jewish authority that saw the Irgun as a threat to
its power. The commander of the forces that murdered the Jews was Yitzhak
Rabin, later to become Prime Minister and later yet, Defense Minister during
the intifada, where he showed far greater concern for “morality” towards Arabs
than to the Jews he murdered in 1948.
And
the man who gave the order, the Prime Minister of Israel, David Ben-Gurion, in
discussing the murder of Jews by Jews in the Land of Israel, told the
provisional State Council (acting Parliament) on June 23, 1948:
----
“Blessed
be the cannon that blew up the ship. It should be enshrined in the Third Temple
of the Jews.”
Appropriate
and emblematic of Ben-Gurion and of those who were the authority in the State
of Israel. Hard, cruel autocrats who used “the people” for their own political
ends. When, for example, he was asked to allow the remains of Jabotinsky to be
buried in Israel (he died in 1940 in New York), Ben-Gurion stated:
“Israel
does not need dead Jews but living Jews, and I see no blessing in multiplying
graves in Israel.” (letter to Judge Joseph Lamm of the Tel Aviv District Court, Vice
President of the B’nai B’rith in Israel, May 7, 1958)”
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