Jewish Insurgency in Mandate Palestine
Troops searching a Jewish immigrant ship, Haifa, 1948.
As the Nazi juggernaut blitzed throughout Western Europe in Spring, 1940, Jewish leaders in Mandate Palestine grappled with hard choices. The British White Paper of 1939 was clearly antagonistic to Zionist aspirations in the Land, recommending a single Palestinian state in which Jews would make up a tenuous minority. Some politically conservative members of the Hagenah, who had already split from the defense force to form the Irgun militia (also known as Etzel), had begun conducting deadly attacks against both Arab and British targets. Etzel had aligned itself with the Revisionist movement of exiled leader Je’ev Jabotinsky, who opposed the moderate socialism of David Ben-Gurion and the Histradrut labor unions in favor of a militant Zionism which demanded a Jewish state across all of Mandate Palestine. However, the onset of the Holocaust prompted a shift in priorities, and even Jabotinsky advocated for a ceasefire with the British in favor of Yishuv enlistment in the British army to fight the Nazis. The Hagenah also persisted in its cooperation with British authorities, forming an elite unit called Plugot Maḥatz in May, 1941. Hebrew for “strike force,” the commando force was more commonly known by its acronym Palmach. Using weapons provided by the British military, Palmach prepared for the possible Nazi invasion of Palestine, or a British withdrawal.
However, not all Zionist fighters were agreeable to British appeasement. Avraham Stern, a leader in the Etzel movement, who had penned a poem named “Anonymous Soldier” that had became the militia’s anthem, dissented from Jabotinsky and his Revisionist colleagues. Stern saw the British occupation as the primary enemy of the Yishuv, and especially its policy of restricting Jewish immigration. Seceding from Etzel in 1940, Stern formed a splinter group named Lohamei Herut Israel, or “Fighters for the Freedom of Israel,” alternately known by its acronym Lehi, or by its nickname, the “Stern Gang.” Lehi refused to honor Irgun’s ceasefire, instead vowing to continue its armed struggle for the full “liberation” of Palestine from the British. Stern had extensive contacts with the Polish government, from which Etzel had been procuring arms for years during the Arab Revolt. Many Lehi members received insurgency training in Poland, adapting Polish resistance tactics in the sabotage of Nazi railroads and bridges for use against the British in Palestine. Meanwhile, Stern engaged not only fascist Italy for support in Lehi’s anti-British insurgency, but even sent emissaries to meet with German diplomats, suggesting Jewish aliyah as a mutually acceptable solution to the “Jewish Question.” The Germans were not interested. Meanwhile, Lehi’s détente with the Nazis was deeply unpopular among both British and Zionist leadership. Mandate authorities launched a campaign to destroy Lehi, during which dozens of members were arrested and died in custody. Stern himself was captured in Tel Aviv in February, 1942, and was shot to death by British detectives while in custody. However, rather than quelling the Jewish insurgency, the British crackdown had only claimed its first leader.
After Lehi was temporarily sidelined in early 1942, the insurgency against British rule waned in Mandate Palestine. Etzel and the Hagenah had temporarily laid aside their differences to participate in the British war effort against the Nazis. However, by late 1943, the tide of the war had turned definitively against Germany, and news of the extermination camps in the heart of European Jewry had reached Zionist leadership in the Land. Hagenah, now under the authority of the Jewish Agency, preferred to continue cooperation with the Mandate in hopes of securing a favorable outcome for Zionism after the war. The leaders of Etzel, however, had grown impatient. British authorities were still adhering to the immigration restrictions outlined in the 1939 White Paper which allowed for just 1,500 Jewish olim every month, during a time when as many as 15,000 Jewish men, women and children were dying across Europe every day. Moreover, the Jewish immigration quota was set to expire in March, 1944, and would thereafter be subject to the approval of Arab leadership in Palestine, meaning that even the small trickle of Holocaust survivors would be completely ended. Ze’ev Jabotinsky and his Revisionist leadership in Etzel knew that time was short. Rather than hoping for a favorable outcome with the British, they were prepared to forge their own way. On February 1, 1944, a circular was posted across the Jewish communities of Eretz Yisrael. The Etzel militia was declaring a revolt against British occupation, and calling on all young men of the Yishuv to join them. The document was penned by the new leader of Etzel, Ze'ev Jabotinsky’s new lieutenant, Menachem Begin.
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Menachem Begin was born in the Brest-Litovsk region of the Russian Empire in 1913, just four years before the Romanov dynasty was overthrown by the Communist Bolsheviks. As a teenager, he joined the Zionist scouting group Hashomer, and later Betar, the conservative Zionist group founded by Ze’ev Jabotinsky. He attended law school in Warsaw, Poland, and as war loomed in the fall of 1939, Begin began working with the Jewish underground movement to smuggle Jews out of the path of the Third Reich. First from Warsaw, and then from Soviet-occupied Poland after the German invasion, he tried unsuccessfully to transport 1,500 Polish Jews to Romania. Begin joined Etzel, and rose through the ranks quickly as a gifted orator and writer. By the end of 1943, Jabotinsky had tapped him to lead Etzel’s operations in Mandate Palestine, where Begin hoped to create a “glass house” into which the entire world would see the struggle for a Jewish homeland against British occupation. After the declaration of revolt in February, 1944, Etzel began targeting British civilian administration and and military bases in Palestine. The Jewish Agency and the Hagenah made several attempts at dialogue with Begin and Etzel leadership, hoping to avoid a rift that many feared could lead to a civil war among the Yishuv. Begin assured the other Zionist leaders that Etzel had no aspirations to usurp the Hagenah, but nonetheless, the resistance would continue. Talks broke down in October, and the leadership of the Hagenah and the Jewish Agency prepared to take action.
When a senior British diplomat was assassinated by Lehi agents in Cairo, Egypt on November 6, 1944, the Jewish Agency began actively suppressing the militia. Over the course of the following year, in a period known as Saison, or “The Hunting Season,” known and suspected Lehi members were fired from their jobs, expelled from schools, and forbidden sanctuary. The Hagenah employed its elite Palmach commando units and its intelligence gathering unit, called Shai, in the campaign, providing information to the British authorities regarding hundreds of Etzel and Lehi members. Over 250 Jewish insurgents were deported to Eritrea, Africa as a result. By February,1945, Menachem Begin’s revolt had all but ceased. The campaign of repression had appeared to be successful, but the underlying issues which had stoked the fires of revolt in the first place were left unaddressed.
Public demonstrations against the Jewish Agency grew in the Spring of 1945, as the Yishuv decried the repression of fellow Jews by Zionist leaders while the British denied hundreds of thousands of Jews sanctuary from the Holocaust. Etzel and Lehi settled their differences and joined together in May, just as the war ended and the Jewish Brigade began encountering tens of thousands of refugees from the Shoah near the Austrian-Italian border. With a fresh wind, Etzel reignited their revolt, destroying dozens of British telegraph poles across Palestine. But the ascendance of the Labour Party in British parliamentary elections gave the revolutionaries an opportunity to pause their hostilities in July and wait for a change in British policy. However, their hopes would soon be turned to bitter disappointment.
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In August, 1945, despite touting a pro-Zionist platform, British Labour Party leadership informed Chaim Weizmann and David Ben-Gurion that there would be no change in British policy regarding Jewish immigration to Palestine. Meanwhile, tens of thousands of European Jews languished in detention camps across Europe, including the very concentration camps from which they had been “liberated” months before. Those who managed to reach the Mediterranean coast with the help of the underground Berichah movement and board a ship were often intercepted by the British military as they reached the shores of their homeland. Thousands were either sent back to Europe or held at the British-run Atlit detention camp south of Haifa, where barbed wire fencing and guard towers eerily resembled the German-run camps from which many of the same Jews had escaped. It became clear to the Jewish Agency and the Hagenah that three decades of British appeasement had brought them no closer to a Jewish homeland. The victorious Allies had no consensus on the question of how to resettle hundreds of thousands of Jewish survivors in Europe. And worst of all, Polish Jews returning home were met with yet another pogrom between 1944-46, in which 1,500 more were murdered by communities who did not want them returning to reclaim their land and property. Zionist cooperation with the British Mandate had reached a tipping point.
In August, 1945, the Jewish Agency organized secret talks between the Hagenah, Etzel and Lehi to discuss an alliance. In October, the Jewish Resistance Movement was formed, and the three Jewish militias who had opposed one another just months before were finally united against the British occupation. The resistance’s first operation was carried out that same month by commandos in the Palmach, who raided the Atlit camp and freed over 200 Jewish prisoners. Then a general campaign of sabotage began against British railways, locomotives, coast guard ships and oil refineries. The British Foreign Secretary reiterated his government’s position on the “illegal” immigration of Jews to Palestine, and declared that an independent Jewish State was not London’s policy. The Yishuv exploded. Riots broke out across Tel Aviv, in which dozens of British government offices and businesses were torched. British forces were reinforced and began patrolling Jewish communities, but were met with violent resistance. Meanwhile, the Palmach and Etzel commandos attacked British installations used to spot Jewish refugees. Three British airfields were raided in February, 1946, and in June, all of the transport bridges between Palestine and neighboring countries were destroyed in a coordinated attack. By this time, British authorities suspected the Jewish Agency’s complicity in the resistance, despite David Ben-Gurion’s assurances otherwise. The entire executive board of the Agency was arrested. British forces launched Operation Shark, a series of cordon and search operations that resembled British strategy during the Arab Revolt of the previous decade. The objective was to seize weapons caches and to arrest resistance fighters, especially the Palmach. Over 2,000 arrests were made. Etzel responded by bombing the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, an attack which killed 80 people, including Britons, Jews and Arabs. Ben-Gurion condemned the attack, and the Jewish Resistance Movement was dissolved. The leader of British forces in Palestine, who was involved in a romantic affair with the widow of a late Arab nationalist leader, ordered that his forces boycott Jewish establishments and residences, stating,
"No British soldier is to have social intercourse with any Jew…I appreciate that these measures will inflict some hardship on the troops, yet I am certain that if my reasons are fully explained to them they will understand their propriety and will be punishing the Jews in a way the race dislikes as much as any, by striking at their pockets and showing our contempt of them."
The Jewish Agency complained to British authorities in London regarding the blatant anti-Semitism of many British troops,
"they frequently said 'Bloody Jew' or 'pigs', sometimes shouted 'Heil Hitler', and promised they would finish off what Hitler had begun. Churchill wrote that most British military officers in Palestine were strongly pro-Arab."
Meanwhile, guerilla attacks continued against British forces. British soldiers, officials, and even judges were ambushed, kidnapped and killed. Efforts to quell the violence with cordon operations and heavy prison sentences were unsuccessful, and it became clear that the British presence in Palestine was unsustainable. In February, 1947, the British declared martial law across the Land and evacuated all non-essential personnel. Etzel attacked a British officers club on March 1st, killing thirteen, followed by a spate of attacks throughout the spring. After 4 Etzel members were hanged at the British-run prison in Acre, members of the militia raided the old citadel, freeing 41 of their compatriots. More attacks continued throughout the summer. Growing weary of the violence, the British government appealed to the newly-formed United Nations to form a special observatory mission to Mandate Palestine, which would be tasked with recommending a solution. In June, the United Nations Special Committee on Palestine (UNSCOP) arrived in the Land, and Hagenah commanders finally saw an opportunity for progress. They began suppressing Etzel attacks once again, albeit without British cooperation as before. But events in the summer of 1947 would seal the fate of the British Mandate for Palestine once and for all.
