The Prime Ministers: An Intimate Narrative of Israeli Leadership Read Online Free PDF Page B

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    During the Arab riots of 1936–1939, the British Army leased the hotel’s top floor as emergency headquarters. In 1938, the authorities requisitioned two-thirds of the hotel’s two hundred rooms to accommodate their military headquarters and government secretariat, taking over the whole of the southern wing, thus making the King David the nerve center of the British Government of Palestine. The hotel grounds were surrounded with a cordon of heavy barbed wire, butterfly nets to prevent grenades, and barricades manned by Bren-gun carriers and Argyll and Sutherland sentries. It was a fortress. But by the time I saw the King David Hotel, in the winter of 1947, it had been a ruin for over a year; a year in which the situation in Palestine had become more and more tense and explosive. The entire southern wing was a pile of rubble, dynamited to smithereens by an Irgun squad disguised as milkmen, delivering explosive-packed churns to the kitchens. Ninety-one people died in the blast: twenty-eight British, forty-one Arabs, seventeen Jews, two Armenians, one Russian, one Greek, and one Egyptian. Also killed was one of the operatives engaged in planting the explosives.
    The action had been carried out with the approval of the United Resistance Command – an ad-hoc alliance embracing another underground splinter group called the Israel Freedom Fighters (Lechi), and headed by the mainstream Hagana. The bombing was a direct response to a British action named “Operation Agatha” taken some weeks before, when seventeen thousand British troops swept down upon Jewish settlements and confiscated vast quantities of hidden arms, arrested over two thousand activists, and took into custody prominent leaders of the Jewish community.
    Among the spoils of Operation Agatha were believed to be operational plans of the Hagana and the Irgun, implicating much of the Jewish leadership of Palestine in conspiracies to carry out anti-British acts. These Intelligence files were said to be housed in the southern wing of the King David Hotel. They could possibly have provided enough evidence to bring down death sentences on many a Jewish head. Hence, the approval given to the Irgun operation by the United Resistance Command.
    Not only was the British press up in arms about the hotel bombing, so too was the Hebrew press. Hamishmar described the action as “Treason and Murder.” Haaretz called it “A frightful blow to all the hopes of the Jewish people.” The Davar headline read, “Without Cause, Without Atonement.” And David Ben-Gurion, head of the Hagana, sought to distance himself from the whole thing by telling a French newspaper, “The Irgun is the enemy of the Jewish people.”
    For the rest of his days Menachem Begin would defend his King David action as a legitimate military target, and asserted that ample warning had been given to evacuate the hotel. The hotel switchboard had been told to vacate the building at least a half hour before the explosives were detonated, and calls also went out to the Palestine Post – forerunner of the Jerusalem Post – as well as a warning to the operator of the nearby French Consulate, to open all windows so as to avoid injury from flying glass. Even a string of firecrackers was set off in front of the hotel driveway to frighten pedestrians away.
    “Oh yes, we did all we could,” insisted Begin, talking to me, a new member of his prime ministerial staff, in 1977. “The warnings were given and received in time by the British authorities; they had time enough to evacuate the hotel twice over. Somebody, for some dark purpose, or because he lost his head, or to protect a spurious prestige, ordered that the hotel not be evacuated.”
    British retribution was harsh. Lt. General Sir Evelyn Barker, the General Officer in Command of Palestine, laid into the whole Jewish community, issuing a notoriously anti-Semitic order commanding his troops to cease all fraternization with