Altalena Revealed

Jonathan Tobin reveals the true story of the Altalena in response to a New York Times May 30 editorial by Ethan Bronner.

Titled "What Palestinians Can Learn From a Turning Point in Zionist History," the piece purported to show that the key for Middle East peace was the willingness of the new Palestinian prime minister, Mahmoud Abbas, to turn his guns on Hamas the way David Ben Gurion did on his own rivals in 1948.

The Altalena was a ship bearing arms and volunteers to fight in Israel's War of Independence that had been brought to the newly born State of Israel by the Irgun Zvai Leumi, the guerilla force led by Menachem Begin that had helped chase the British out of the country.

As Bronner tells it, Ben Gurion's decision to order the Haganah to fire on the ship and kill their fellow Jews solidified Israel's fledgling democracy. The Times wants Abbas to do the same thing with his rivals. That's an excellent suggestion but the analogy Bronner makes between the Irgun and Hamas is as wrongheaded as his acceptance of Ben Gurion's self-serving narrative of one of the most shocking and tragic incidents in modern Jewish history.

Contrary to the Times, the Irgun and the Lechi (known pejoratively in English-language histories as the Stern gang) attacked only military targets and have nothing in common with Palestinians who deliberately seek to kill civilians.

The Etzel's targets were military. A fact usually left out of thumbnail histories is that their famous bombing of the King David Hotel in 1947 was that the building they attacked was, at the time, actually the headquarters of the British occupation force not a tourist attraction.

Bronner also repeats the Arab propaganda story that the Irgun attack on the village of Deir Yassin near Jerusalem in April 1948 was simply a "massacre." Though civilians died there, the truth is, the incident was a battle in which the Irgunists (who were acting in cooperation with Haganah forces) took casualties while taking a strategic town that had been occupited by Iraqis seeking to besiege Jerusalem.

Moreover, had Bronner researched the issue further, he would have learned that, Ben Gurion's memoir to the contrary, the real story which is rather more complicated.

The only real difference between Ben Gurion and Begin at the time was that the latter was hoping to prod the prime minister to re-take the Old City of Jerusalem whose Jewish Quarter had just been sacked by Arab forces. The Irgun was still operating separately from the Haganah only in Jerusalem. And that was only because it was the Israeli government's decision at that time to maintain the fiction that it was not claiming Israel's capital which was supposed to be under international control under the United Nations partition plan.

Ben Gurion's motives for firing his "sacred canon" were complicated, but the notion put forward then and since that Begin was plotting his violent overthrow had more to do with the need of Israel's first prime minister to discredit a potential foe than anything else.

The true hero of the story was actually Begin who single-handedly averted a Jewish civil war by ordering Irgunists not to retaliate. He had done the same thing in 1944 when Ben Gurion had the Haganah turn Begin's men over to the British.