The Jewish Story: Survivalist Zionism

extinction says Carl Sagan is the rule survival is the exception and I can tell you as a graduate of a geology department and a teller of the Jewish story that this is not a small event I'm Rob McClure in this Jewish story episode 37 survivalism Zionism in my eyes Darwin and Herbert Spencer affected one of the most profound shifts in how humanity knows the world because the consciousness that evolutionary thinking offers in the biosphere and the world in which we actually live are as fundamental as they are revolutionary and there are potential implications for sociology in history how we live in that world are just downright frightening now the Nazis in the eugenics without question the most self-conscious and extreme application that any society has ever seen a biological evolutionary approach toward social construction and that's what makes them really the quintessential modern evil but at the same time they were the most primeval expression of the dark gods in man of that lust of the barbarian horde to conquer and consume but no matter how we paint them through the Shoah the Germans brought a great selection on em Israel one that was really exceeded only in our history by the fourth fifth at our sages teach us didn't make it out of Egypt now before the war we know that there was a rich conversation going on particularly amongst the Jews of Europe over where does the future of Ami's real lay and it's important to remember that most of ami sir I was not sold on the Zionist dream not even to the very end and thus the relative handful that made it to the land before the gates of Europe were shot now back in Europe the boone socialists were for some time the numerically largest group and the rest were split between nationalists of various sorts cyanus of course chief among some communist traditionalists assimilationists and lots and lots of very poor people just trying to feed their families but once the slaughter had ended 1/3 of world jury had been destroyed and that wasn't just any third it's more than the numbers if you've been following the Jewish story since the beginning so you've watched the center of Turin culture shift from the land of Israel to Babylon from Babylon to Spain from Spain to Europe and now that transition from the destruction of Spain to the building of Europe was really first season and second season for us has left us with a smoking crater in the center and that part of a Mistral that was directly in the path of a meteor has basically been broken into three pieces so that first piece of European jury is actually um barred so it's actually the people in the land even though many of them were not born in Europe because they've now seized a very important role in the Jewish story first of all abundantly confirmed that the Zionists instinct about the future of Jewish life in Europe had been sound remember since Herzl there's been an awareness of a tidal wave of Jew hatred lurking just below the surface of society in Europe that it served as a motive force for both political and pragmatic Zionism not to mention Jabotinsky and the revisionists who he's been screaming from the rooftops for ever but none of them could have possibly known how right they would be if you want to get a sense of the really chilling death of their premonition go back and listen to the first few minutes of episode one of this season and see what the maja said to the Jews of Poland about what they could learn from the story of the Gemara in Baba Batra that's your homework but for now the worst fears of the Zionists had been truven true the only worries feed Greenberg the poet prophet could have possibly guessed at how dark they would actually be but in a strange and perhaps uncomfortable way the disaster of Europe was also their great evolutionary opportunity because the arguments that had divided European Jewry weren't over as we can see just looking around us today but most of its voices we're gone think of it as the Jewish intellectual and spiritual biosphere that gets hit by a meteor it's not like everything died I mean thank God our brothers and sisters of the earlier dispersions of our history are scattered all over the world particularly in North Africa in the Middle East and it's not for naught that they're playing an increasingly important part of the story right now but in 1945 so much was wiped out and in to have that cultural and conceptual vacuum that was left by the Nazi mass murder Zionism will flourish its adherents right now at this point in our story are the majority of the Jewish population in Eretz Israel virtually holding all the reins of power that the British have been kept tight to their own chests and though the six hundred thousand or so Jews that are in the mandate at this point are will only be 6% of world Jewry by 1948 they're going to play an outsized role in the coming chapters of the Jewish story as by the way those who choose to return designs always have in this story and though it is an important question that we're going to return to whether the traits cultural biological or otherwise that push people to jump ship from Europe early and allow them to take root and fight to hold the land and survive are the same traits you want running our country right now at this point of our story the future of Zionism is looking bright and I just have to note for the sake of our particular location in the narrative the political impact of the extermination of European jury will have a very specific application to the ongoing struggle between the labor and revisionists within the Zionist movement because the millions that Jabotinsky and Bagan represented at that last Betar conference in Warsaw in 1938 are no more and so labor Zionism is dominance within the life of the issue of the community in land of Israel will now be all but a dominance within Zionism altogether so that's the first third and those millions of batteries are gone but of course their remnants represent the second piece into it on Israel was split by the show the survivors now looking from over in America Hillel cooked Peter Bergson I hope you recall solemn as the Hebrew nation chewed up and spit out of Europe by its great natural knows Cataclysm and we're going to speak in coming episodes about how exactly Hebrew nationalism was forged and what it was forged into in these the hottest fires the earth had ever known but for now in Bergson's eyes the survivors were destined to join with the Hebrews of the mandate and to evolve together into a new national identity of a people in its land something that would be wholly other than the religious identity of Exile that had preceded it and if you don't really get what I'm talking about a substitute Israeli for Hebrew and read the news today about the gap between the Jews of here and there and you'll get the picture of what he saw coming now the Zionists in Eretz Israel saw these survivors as potential population because even in their decimated or more properly tertiary right a third were long numbers the huddled masses of the displaced person camps of Europe could still tip the scales in favor of that long for a Jewish majority within the mandate and the Zionists saw every able-bodied man no matter how wrapped right now by disease and starvation as a potential soldier in the conflict sure to come don't forget that in the Warsaw Ghetto where after the liquidation it was really only the young and strong who survived the fight was to the end and if they weren't in the fittest then who was and how does a survivor's see themselves that's a hard question you'd have to ask each and every one of them who they were and what it meant that they'd seen the gates of Hell and you have to follow the arc of their lives down to our very day to see the places which they went now because it's so close to my heart we will speak in the coming episodes about the fear the shame the anger and the miraculous hope and choosing of life but for now here at the end of the war the immediate question that weighed on this second piece of European jury was where to go the general momentum of refugee policy in Europe in the immediate wake of the world repatriation we're sending people home and the Jews were no exception in that except for the mass majority returning home wasn't even an option first many simply would not could you imagine going back to the places you're slaughtered to live also many tried and failed like for instance my great aunt Colleen who when she returned to her parents home after seeing both sides of the gates of Auschwitz was shooed away by the non-jews who'd moved in or like those who actually succeeded in returning to their lives in Poland only to flee once again from post-war violence you know the 1946 key el SAPO crumb in which dozens were killed and wounded was only the worst single event there were over a thousand Jews murdered by poles in the year after the war's end so Europe didn't look too inviting now many will make it to the Americas and those that do will make a vast contribution to American Jewish culture as I'm sure many of you listening know their story lies further ahead in season three for now Jacob drove the first JDC Joint Distribution Committee representative to arrive in Bergen Belsen estimated that 80 percent of the survivors wanted to leave immediately for the land of Israel and the truth is no one doubted this ben-gurion was the first official Zionist leader to visit the DP camps and when he did he got there just as the quota of 75,000 Jews over five years that had been promised by the 1939 white paper promised or stipulated probably better was used up and he was coming on the wake of a Jewish Agency declaration that the British blockade of Eretz Israel continuing even after the war was tantamount to a death sentence upon these liberated Jews still languishing in the internment camps of Germany so he saw the brutal truth with his own eyes and he left with a certainty that at least 80% of the survivors wanted to come home and what's just is important and perhaps more so for our story he saw that nearly a hundred percent agreed with him when he said quote Hitler was not far from Palestine there could have been terrible destruction there for what happened in Poland could not happen in Palestine they would not have slaughtered us in synagogues every boy and girl would have shot at every German soldier do you hear it there's a new type of Zionism coming to the surface let's call it survivalist Zionism and it's going to prove an all but unstoppable force and by the way survival Zionism will have its impact on American Jews as well those who don't feel the flames of Europe or the war of the Middle East and they're the third piece into which European Jewry has been broken post Holocaust and we mentioned a bit of the story of the complex relationship to the Shoah happening within American jury in the last episodes and that is only going to deepen as they absorb so many of the survivors but no matter what you think about the reaction of American Jewry actually during the Shoah we can all agree that they've been on spill cos they've been sitting on pins since word of the final solution first reach them as have being the Zionists in the land although they have the outlet of war against the British to at least focus on but with the end of World War two the moment of truth has come what do the Allies really think all the claims that the only solution to the Jewish problem aside from the final one was to win the war against the Nazis are now going to be put to test okay they won now what and the survivalist scientism that emerges from the flames of the Shoah is going to play a large part in the decisions to come as the evidence of the extent in horror of the shore percolated into public consciousness outside of continental europe sympathy for the zionist cause began to grow throughout the Western world and in particular in Great Britain when films of a liberated camps reached London just as the war ended their public viewing actually broke all previous box-office records imagine eight lines stretching four blocks late into the night as people come one by one to witness what the incomprehensible actually looks like and think about this as they left the theatres a sense that the Jews had been abandoned through the collective will of government began to arise with all these individuals who saw those undeniable Horrors on the screen and along with that recognition arose a desire that the moral will of individuals must now make amends and before the war's end even hopes were running high amongst the leaders of the Zionist movement that the horror of the final solution would force the British people and therefore the British government to finally recognize the justice of their cause and open the gates of immigration to the Palestine mandate the Labour Party in particular which counted many Jews in its ranks was extremely encouraging of this dream at the 1944 Party conference the hall rang with emotional calls for a Jewish state and the growing evidence of the extent of the Nazi murder along with significantly the Soviet Union's then strong endorsement of the Zionist cause gave the idea of a Jewish socialist state rising from the ashes of Europe a revolution a it's not messianic glow that very same year in 1944 the Party executive actually argued for a transfer of the Arabs out of the mandate in order to make way for the Jews post-war quote let the Arabs be encouraged to move out as the Jews move in let them be compensated handsomely for their land and let their settlement elsewhere be carefully organized and generously financed the Arabs have many wide territories of their own they must not claim to exclude the Jews from this small area of Palestine less than the size of Wales you may think of it as a dark right-wing fantasy now but population exchange was first mooted by the peel Commission back in 1937 and was presented as the most feasible approach to ending this conflict within the mandate and don't forget in a decade that witnessed the expulsion and integration of millions of people through the splitting of Pakistan and India through the splitting of North and South Korea and of course the Germans driven out of Czechoslovakia post-war not to mention tens of millions of war dead and displace this notion appeared not only feasible but logical as well but no matter because it was not to be the hopes of a Zionist wave washing over the British government along the lines of the one that brought about the Balfour Declaration and Anglo Zionist Alliance in the wake of World War one died quickly in 1945 Clement Attlee was the head of the Labour Party it was he who brought labour into Churchill's unity government in 1940 and he'd served as Deputy Prime Minister since 1942 now during the war Churchill was the undisputed head of the nation he took center stage in diplomacy military policy brought social issues that's what people picture his voice his face but at leading was actually its hands and brain working tirelessly backstage on all the details and organisational work of making that vision happen in Parliament and with Germany's unconditional surrender on may 8th 1945 the coalition government in England was dissolved and only two months later at least swept Churchill from office in a completely unexpected landslide victory actually the 12% national swing from conservative to labour remains to this day the largest ever achieved by any party at a general election in British history so during the campaign labour promised pledged even to revoke the white paper and permit the survivors to emigrate without delay the also promised to finally act toward the establishment of a true Jewish National Home which was after all the expects purpose for which they'd received the mandate but this landslide victory and did that talk once installed the New Labour government declared that there would be no changes in Britain's foreign policy nor any concessions in regard to Jewish immigration to the Palestine mandate the new Prime Minister knew full well that campaign promises are one thing imperial interests are entirely another the Jews may have helped badly get elected but he needed the cooperation of the tens of millions of Arabs and Muslims in his Empire in order to rule now in general Antley did not define himself as a Zionist unlike certain of his predecessors in his eyes the Jews in Palestine were not an emerging nation to be fostered toward independence along a model of the other national groups demanding such a thing in the wake of the war they were part of world Jewry a cluster within a dispersed religious group without national status after all as he pointedly asked how many British Jews were really ready to pick up and move to Israel and in order to enact his new foreign policy in general in the Palestine policy in particular Antley appointed Ernest Bevin as his foreign secretary and the mandate was transferred de facto from the ages of the colonial office to that of the Foreign Office which already heralds big changes to come now Ernest Bevin is one of those historical figures that the Jews love to hate and in truth he may deserve it born the poor village in Somerset England Bevin worked his way up from labor to lorry driver to organizer to founding leader of Britain's largest train unique but lest you characterize him overly quick Bevin was no leftist he had an almost obsessive opposition to communism and some say due to its nature as a Jewish plot against Britain and therefore his right wing labor stance made him the perfect partner for Clement Attlee both during the war where he served as Minister of Labour and now when Atlee was Prime Minister as foreign secretary Bevins Palestine policy was based on two premises first nothing should be done which might set the Arab world against the British Empire and the West in general and that wasn't just cold imperial interest it was cold war thinking it's important to note that Bevin could rightly be called one of the architects of the Cold War his advocacy led in a large part to NATO the North American treaty organization that was founded in the wake of the war and he pushed a militantly anti-communist stance within the British Parliament so in his eyes the Arabs could not be lost as allies in the global struggle that was now taking place with the Soviet Union in particular and communism in general so that's one piece the other piece is that Bevin believes that Palestine was not the solution to the Jewish problem he felt the Jews should stay in Europe and thus do their fair share in the region destruction by the body and in that light is important to note that Bevin was also a driving force behind the Marshall Plan that massive structure of aid to post-war Europe for rebuilding so that was Bevins policy number one don't rock the boat with the Arabs and Muslims number two the Jews belong in Europe and in order to make this happen aside from the Zionists who are advocating on the world stage for repatriation to the Land of Israel and militarily attacking the power symbols of the Empire on the ground Bevin had only one problem and that was the United States by the end of the war the Zionists had fixed on the demand of the immediate permission for 100,000 refugees to come into the mandate and u.s. President Harry Truman who took over at Roosevelt to death during the last months of the war had been convinced by the Intergovernmental Committee on refugees that this was what the people in the DP camps actually wanted and lo and behold it mattered to him where they wanted to go suddenly Clement Attlee and Ernest Bevin war between a rock and a hard place on one side they saw the pressure building in the DP camps of continental Europe and certainly could not afford to defy the US President as their war-torn economy hung by an American financial threat on the other side stood the realities of empire you know on November in 1945 Balfour Declaration day there were anti Zionist demonstrations in Syria Egypt Lebanon and Iraq in Alexandria crowds attacked Jewish shops homes and synagogues and in British govern Libya the mob murdered almost a hundred Jews so Bevans hoped that the Jews would play their part in the reconstruction of Europe as a whole and not quote overemphasize their Septimus from other people's fell completely flat in the ears of a American and furthermore the underground war which is growing in Palestine as we'll speak about is threatening to explode he's got only one hope at this point and that is to make Palestine someone else's problem and so the anglo-american Committee of Inquiry was born on November 13th 1945 Ernest Bevin announced the formation of an anglo-american Commission on Palestine and a few months later six Americans and six Britons each chosen by their government and awkwardly called the twelve apostles gathered in Washington DC to receive their charge and their task was quote to examine political economic and social conditions in mandatory Palestine as they bear upon the problem of Jewish emigration and settlement Varian and the well-being of the people's now living there in to consult representatives of Arabs and Jews and to make other recommendations as may be necessary for an interim handling of these problems as well as their permanent solution this was to be the solution the permanent solution to the Jewish problem and in launching the committee Ernest Bevin made clear the British governmental policy toward Palestine before they even began number one Britain aimed to give up the mandate as soon as possible in favour of an international trustee ship as they called which after time would evolve into a Palestinian state specifically Palestinian and not Jewish he told Jews that the whole world was in shambles in the aftermath of the war and warned them not to try and quote push to the head of the queue lest they provoke an anti-semitic reaction and last but certainly not least Bevin declared that there would be a camp of 1,500 immigration permits per month in the meantime these statements amounted to a prejudicing of what the committee might even see much less recommend and they so provoked the Jewish agency that they formally endorsed illegal immigration which up until now they'd only clandestinely aided as a response so the committee toured the DP camps travelled to the Middle East to hear testimony from Arabs Zionists and British representatives collected massive amounts of documentation and unlike previous Commission's which the Arabs of the Palestine mandon had often ignored or just rejected out of hand this time the Palestinian Arab propaganda agency the Arab office submitted a three-volume survey entitled the problem of Palestine maybe it's that Haj Amin al-husseini and his radicalism had been totally wiped away by their association with the Nazis anyway this survey warned the committee against regarding quote Jewish colonization in Palestine and Arab resistance to it in terms of white colonization of North America and Australia and the resistance of the indigenous peoples there so aside from the ominous implication that the Jews were aiming to wipe out the natives as in sad honesty was done in the Americas and in Australia this statement exposes the entire model of how the Arabs viewed the Zionists as nothing more than European colonizers and rejected out of hand any indigenous ties the Jews might happen to have the Land of Israel so the Arab office also asserted that any alleged prosperity that the Jewish influx might bring which had been a big selling point of the Zionists for almost 100 years would never persuade the Palestinian Arabs to acquiesce to their dispossession as Zeb Jabotinsky had warned in his essay the iron wall back in 1923 you can't buy a man's homeland but not to be outdone the Jewish agency submitted a thousand-page volume entitled the Jewish case before the AAC of inquiry on Palestine the focus was on Zionism role as a bearer of enlightenment and progress in a backward region it was of course supported by reams of Statistics and grass and by tours of the countryside the Americans in particular were deeply impressed by what the Zionists had done for the country one of their committee members later wrote I left Washington pretty strongly anti Zionists but when you see firsthand with these Jews have done in Palestine the greatest creative effort in the modern world the Arabs are not equal to anything like it and would destroy all the Jews had done this we must not let them do there you can hear the roots of today's houses barrage days Israel advocacy right sure it's a morally complicated situation but have you seen the cherry tomatoes we grow and the new Intel research lab and the pioneering spirit but Zionism is appeal to the American imagination was more than it's sort of can-do capacity as another committee member Frank Ruxin said how my Vermont father would have been amazed at the greater deeds of the Palestinian Jews I came away from those farms less cocky and more humble and not quite so certain than American pioneers left no successors so the committee Redd talked traveled they even visited Aziz even Saud the Saudi King whose family had recently taken over the Arabian Peninsula who warned them that the Jews our our enemies everywhere now could you imagine a more overwhelming task there's a reason that every effort will ask hundred years to bridge the gap between Arab and Jew in the Land of Israel has failed but in the end of the day it was the plight of the Jewish refugees the survivors of the death camps now huddled in the DP camps that tipped the scales Richard Crossman a leading academic appointed by Prime Minister Attlee himself and therefore not an advocate of the Zionist cause put it this way in the end what stuck in my gullet was the idea that British troops should be used to hold the Arabs down while the Jews were given time to create an artificial Jewish majority sure enough I at last come to the conclusion that the injustice done to the Arabs by dividing the country and permitting the Jews to achieve a majority in their portion will be less than the injustice done to the Jews by implementing the 1939 white paper but this was a complicated terribly difficult decision to reach so the committee in the end did indeed reach a decision they rejected partition as unworkable recommended actually independence when it was feasible within a bi-national framework and called for United Nations trusteeship in the meanwhile but in the more immediate they called for emigration of a hundred thousand displaced persons as a rapidly as conditions would permit as well as an annulment of the regulations that restricted Jewish purchasing of any land within the mandate but there was to be no joint anglo-american solution to the Jewish problem the Jewish Agency greeted the report with limited approval as it seemed to deny a Jewish state but they in particular endorsed the immigration recommendation the Arabs rejected it out of hand and there were even riots in Baghdad Palestine and Beirut now Bevin had told the committee that he would accept their decision if it were unanimous which it was but he and Prime Minister Attlee opposed any mass emigration until the underground movements of the issue of were disarmed and as will soon see the report did not even slow the rising tide of the revolt against the British power in Palestine they weren't about to give up their arms so the British struggled to make the mandate a joint responsibility threatening to reject the report altogether unless its implementation rested on military and financial assistance from the US meanwhile the United States War Department estimated that an open-ended US troop commitment of 300,000 personnel would be necessary to assist the British government in maintaining order against an Arab revolt you imagine the cost and logistics as we'll see going forward in the story it's not a small part of designers victory and so even though the committee's plans spawned further plans down the road like the Morison gravy plan for federalization the realities of the US desire to rapidly demobilize its citizens still underarms meant that American might would not make it happen instead Truman formally enunciated us support for partition and Jewish statehood and he called for an immediate start to significant immigration he was increasingly clear - at lean bevin that without american support their position in palestine was untenable and that support was not going to be forthcoming meanwhile the pressure of the arab street grew as did britain's cost and blood and treasure as the underground war progressed the labor parties about turn after the 1945 victory was seen as nothing short of betrayal by the mainstream zionist leadership during the war they'd stood shoulder to shoulder as good socialists ought in the face of fighting fascism and they'd received at least commitment to 1939 white paper therefore as a complete slap in the face at some separate 23rd 1945 moses net head of the Hagana General Headquarters cabled David ben-gurion who was then in London the following it has been proposed that we staged a grave incident then we will issue a statement declaring that this is only a warning and hint at much more serious incidents to follow then Goren's reply was unequivocal we must not confine our reaction in Palestine to immigration and settlement it is essential to adopt tactics of s meaning sabotage and reprisal not individual terror the retaliation for each and every Jew murdered by the white paper the action must carry weight and be impressive and care should be taken insofar as possible to avoid casualty the two rival factions meaning fear good and Alesi should be invited to collaborate on condition that there is uniform Authority and that total discipline is observed constant effort is required to ensure solidarity within the issue and above all among the fighters for the sake of the struggle our reaction should be constant bold and calculated for a considerable period and so upon receiving this cable snap mmediately called off the hunting season who's in turn I seen strife was increasingly dividing the issue and then despite the open wounds in the relationship discussions began on collaboration between the Hagana veer Geun and Alessi by the end of October 1945 an agreement was signed between the three organizations to the establishment of the United Jewish resistance movement now the leadership of this movement consisted of two representatives of Hagana which ended up being Israel Gabi and Moshe snare an ear goon representative who was Menachem Begin himself Anna laughing representative not son yelling more their goal was to keep a united military front in the struggle against the British occupation but they would do so by maintaining their own structures and operations however as a reflection of ben-gurion absolute insistence which we heard on the subordination of the military to the civilian meaning his authority the Irgun and Lehi were required to submit all their plans of action beforehand to a joint body and that's what it looked like the United resistance actually made its entrance into the war on November 1st 1945 with what's known in Zionist history as the night of the trains that night haganai units sabotage some 150 spots along railway tracks throughout the country they blew up patrol launches in Jaffa in Haifa ports and a joint you're good and letting you in an attack the main railway station at Leda the operation not only temporarily paralyzed all rail transport in the mandate it made a strong impact back home in Britain the newspapers published detailed articles on almost every act of sabotage and the government allowed Leigh denounced the perpetrators and when called upon as the Jewish represents his law and order ben-gurion in the Jewish Agency issued the following statement it is a tragedy that matters in Palestine have reached such a pass the Jewish Agency abhors the use of violence as a weapon in the political struggle but realizes that its ability to impose has been severely tested by the continued policy of the British government which the Jews regard as fatal for them now it's important to note that after the war the mandate had become an increasingly important center of activity for the British Air Force in particular always the strongest arm of empire in this new age and so it was only natural that the United resistance would want to strike at such a critical symbol of imperial power on a cold rainy night in February 1946 a Latin unit attacked the airfield near Farseer Caen and set eight aircraft ablaze while at the same time in a year doing unit destroyed 11 military aircraft on the ground with a raid on a little air film and that was the opening of a year of relentless pressure placed on the British Imperial forces army and police scrambled to contain this rising threat of the Jews United and largely failed but I can't detail for you all that happened during these ten months of glorious resistance however the height of the haagen-dazs operations within this framework of united resistance also proved to be its end on the night of June 17th the haagen-dazs commando arm the Puma destroyed eleven bridges linking the mandate to the neighboring countries effectively cutting Palestine off from the region and the Empire as a whole it became known as the night of the bridges and owes the illegal paper of aku Devaux da the most activist of the socialist parties put it this way the reason operations attest to the fact that the struggle has reached a more acute stage these were no longer mere cautionary acts they were aimed at immobilizing transportation between this country and its neighbors and it was in fact suspended these activities have demonstrated that as long as there is knows I'm a solution for this country the government will not be able to rule now no Empire goes down without a fight they'll always strike back but the powerful negative feedback cycle that Bagan and the let had both foreseen was already hard at work I hope you remember that last episode describe the strategy of the Jewish underground as the same as that of manly revolutionary movements before and after them a relentless wave of guerrilla attacks which aimed to humiliate the British and damage their prestige rather than actually destroy their power and these blows would force the British to resort to ever more repressive measures which in turn would alienate the Jews of the shoe pushing them into the arms the underground while the same time attracting the attention and condemnation of the international media and so as the Jews stood united against British oppression global sympathy would swell and with it international pressure and all this was before the DP camps and the recommendations of the anglo-american committee the underground like their contemporaries in Gandhi's Indian independence movement knew that the British were not just a simple brutal occupier Great Britain was a society of law a democratic society which would eventually come to hate the very measures they were forced to take in order to keep the peace and in particular because of the parliamentary structure of Britain that legal element ends up present even in its most oppressive colonial culture we've mentioned a few times that the mandatory government had already taken major legal steps to enhance its power in the mandate during the Arab revolt of the 30s the Palestine order-in-council 1937 authorized the British High Commissioner in Palestine in the wake of the Arab revolt to enact such regulations as quote appeared to him in his unfettered discretion to be necessary or expedient for securing public safety the defense of Palestine the maintenance of public order and the suppression of mutiny rebellion and riot and for maintaining supplies and services essential to the life of the community that order was a blank check to the forces of control and the immediate result was the establishment of the military court I think you'll probably recall which in turn declared the shooting of firearm any person possession of weapons at all and access sabotaging terror to be capital crimes number were eight years later the Arab revolt is over and in 1945 those regulations and others had had followed were consolidated into the defense emergency regulations of 1945 and applied in full force against the Jews now we've reached an important but somewhat delicate part of our story as a whole I don't just mean in the immediate narrative I mean in where the Jews are at and because it opens out a relationship between oppression liberation power and the rule of law historian Benny Morris among many others notes that the emergency regulations of 1945 are actually alive and well in Israeli law as part of the Israeli Army's Civil Administration through which it rules you don shunran's mechanism for rule that's because in this case as in so many others mandatory law was adopted as general law by the State of Israel and the tools that are used to fight terror housing demolitions censorship extensive powers of search and seizure administrative detention widespread collective curfews are all deemed legal even by the liberal Israeli Supreme Court because the emergency regulations enacted by the British against the Jews back in the 40s are now applied by the Israelis against the Arabs now this deserves some serious thought particular if you're interested how we can move as a people past the posture of occupying our own land now Morris also notes interestingly enough that it was under the allah coud government's that will speak about in the third season from 1977 to 1984 which were led by underground veterans like Menachem Begin in the lessees attack Shamir the use of the emergency regulations actually fell off very sharply and I'm holding a question was that because beggin and his followers were deeply committed to democratic norms in a way in which perhaps the labor Zionists were not or was it that they themselves had suffered from those very same laws or was it both either way the legal framework for the application of British power was well in place by the night of the bridges and therefore the retaliation was Swift in coming in the early hours of Shabbat Saturday June 29 1946 a countrywide curfew was proclaimed 17,000 British soldiers began to enter institutions and settlements throughout the land in order to confiscate weapons and documents and to arrest leaders of the issue and Hagana activists as they like to be called now in military terms the British had their greatest success at kyboots yet güell their the search lasted for a week it seems the CID that criminal investigative department had prior information about the arms caches that they eventually found there and they concluded more than three hundred rifles some 102 inch mortars more than 400,000 bullets and some 5000 grenades and 78 revolvers at this point in the struggle this was real armament public figures were detained all through the country and brought to a special camp built for them in Latrun in tel-aviv a thorough search was conducted at the Histadrut executive those are the union offices at the office of the d'Ivoire newspaper and even at Bank of Halim the workers Bank in Jerusalem British troops ransacked the Jewish Agency building confiscating a extremely large number of documents which were loaded onto three trucks and taken to the government Secretariat and military command in the King David hotel now these documents may be said to be a far greater blow to the official Zionist movement than the loss of the Hagana arms caches at the Agora why because guns can be purchased again but political legitimacy is a currency not so easily regained among the many papers taken were cables that clearly demonstrated the role of the Jewish Agency in the leadership of the United resistance movement as well as even the tax of the agreement between the Hagana the e.r internal efi and messages that were approving specific your Gruen and letting operations there was no longer plausible deniability the Zionists called it Black Sabbath and the haganai command who being as they were already in an underground war remained largely untaken gathered to discuss the response to such a massive show of British force led by Moshe Smith the debate was resolved in favor of continuing the armed struggle in their eyes it was critical to prove to the British that they had not succeeded in breaking the United resistance and perhaps there was another motivation the documents that the British had sieved proved conclusively that the official Jewish leadership of the issue of which publicly deplored and condemned the violence of the underground was secretly directing its course and thus there was a potential catastrophe political on the horizon you can imagine that the leader is now sitting in prison are those watching from safe places abroad were trembling at the thought of what would happen when British intelligence got around analysing their hull and so in a letter to Menachem Begin Moshe snare wrote the following at the earliest possible opportunity you are to carry out the operation at the chick a codename and at the house of your servant in Messiah another inform me of the date preferably at the same time do not reveal the identity of the implementing body either by announcing it or by hinting the time had come to strike at the heart of the British occupation before it was too late you know the very scale and oppressive nature of the British response to the night of the bridges showed that the United resistance was on the path to success and so rather than retreat in the face of the occupiers new methods the logical next step was escalation and as I already hinted at the plan was in effect a three-pronged revenge the first was to be a Palma raid on the Bott golem army camp where according to haganai intelligence all the weapons confiscated at butea Ghul were being stored the second mission was entrusted to the or goon as we saw on the letter just a moment ago and that was to blow up the King David hotel which held the offices of the mandatory government and in particular the British military command the third piece was allotted to the Leckie the task of destroying the adjacent David brothers building that house even more government offices but word of the coming steps leaked back to the shoes political leadership I hope you remember that even amongst the labor zionist there's been a long-standing split between the activists so to speak led by ben-gurion and the moderates who still at this point put their hopes in diplomacy and the legitimacy of British rule in the mandate this latter group was headed by Haim Weitzman who though he identified with the general Zionists claiming to be the carriers of Herzl original a political vision was nonetheless revered by all with the personal exception of ben-gurion as we'll get to down the line as president of the W Co the World Zionist Organization and therefore has the closest thing to a chief executive that the movement had and so when a messenger from the president arrived at Moshe snez underground hideout everyone turned to listen Weitzman's message was a demand a demand that all plans for vengeance against the British cease and a threat that if they did not he would immediately resign and publicly declare his reasons for doing so the United resistance was shaken to its roots from the very outset the Hagana had sought to dominate that struggle in order as we saw to keep it subordinated to the issues political leadership but now the politicians had balked and they were looking to subordinate the haagen-dazs own operational vision the X Committee the political body that oversaw the operational plans of the resistance and which did not include any members of Allah he or the Yuen debated through the night and in the end they voted to recognize hoisin status as president of the wzo and therefore accede to his demands the politicians had spoken there would be no revenge or at least not officially because though Moshe snare resigned his post as head of a haganai in protest to the decision he kept his role as the liaison officer to the ear Gordon alecky even though unbeknownst to them the United resistance was crumbling and furthermore he didn't inform bagan and the lacking of the political developments within the Hagana instead he sent a message ordering them to just delay their elements of the plan three-pronged assault strike the coming days were filled with fits and starts delays and confusion as a result the left he cancelled their attack on the David brothers building but bagan in their gun remained cocked and ready now the King David hotel in Jerusalem was built by the Moceri family wealthy influential Jews from Egypt and it was meant to be the finest hotel in the Middle East in fact it was such an expensive and unprecedented project that they set up a share holding company of Egyptian businessmen and wealthy Jews from around the world just to finance its construction and in 1931 the luxurious seven storey 200 room building was open to the public now the value of such a location was obvious to mandatory government and in 1938 they requisitioned the entire southern wing of the hotel two houses military command and government Secretariat then the British built a military communication center in the basement and added a side entrance linking their offices to an army camp just south of hotel when they were finished less than a third of the rooms were left for civilian use in the eyes of the mandatory authorities the King David hotel was the perfect headquarters spacious comfortable centrally located and easy to guard or so they thought at 7:00 a.m. on Monday July 22nd 1946 the goon fighters began to gather at the bait our own Talmud Torah school in Jerusalem they slipped silently through the streets arriving one by one to give their password and assemble in one of the classrooms looking around and who was gathered it became quickly clear that a major mission was afoot but nonetheless none of them knew their target but soon the senior command arrived and announced that after several delays they were finally to strike at the heart of the British occupation in the Land of Israel the King David hotel the first group set out by bus and took up their position near the hotel's side entrance disguised at airport earth they would help to unload the explosives when they arrived the strike force left next in a van loaded with seven milk canisters each one packed with 50 kilograms of explosives the commander of the operation destroy a lady also known as get on rode shotgun dressed as a Sudanese waiter while the other members of the unit appeared to be Arab workers riding in the back the van wound its way through the streets of Jerusalem with its deadly cargo and came to a stop at the side entrance of the hotel which also served as the delivery door for the lara jones restaurant in the basement leaping from the cover the fighters overcame the guards at the gate and rushed into the basement quickly searching all the rooms and until eight assembled the workers in the restaurant kitchen then together with the porters they brought down the explosives setting the canisters carefully against all the supporting pillars of the building you don't set the time fuses for 30 minutes and ordered his men to retreat and then he told the staff gathered in the kitchen to run in ten minutes in order to avoid injury discovered as they were exiting the team withdrew under fire one man dying later of his wounds but so far the mission was a success and so safe outside didn't put the last piece in place he sent two female fighters running to the nearby telephone booth and they delivered the following message to the hotel operator and to the office of the Palestine Post I am speaking on behalf of the Hebrew underground we have placed an explosive device in the hotel evacuate at once you have been warned they also called the French consulate which sat adjacent to the hotel and warned them to open their windows in order to prevent any blast damage and then the team scattered 25 minutes later all of Jerusalem shook with a shattering explosion and a calm of smoke and dust rose high into the air when it cleared the damage was planed for all to see the entire southern wing of the King David hotel all seven stories was completely destroyed in his book the first time you ll dot the ideologue of Alette he actually derides bacons decision to give the british time to evacuate their headquarters in general he called the ear goons focus on the destruction of infrastructure useless at best and a product of their lack of ideological vision as he said buildings are not the occupying enemy but rather the people in them and as we saw in a previous episode this ideological clarity and the ferocity and war that accompanied it was one of the major elements that led to the original split between the Ergo and laughing but in this case at the King David hotel though it was the hand of the Irgun and Bagan who pulled the trigger it ended up being the vision of lucky that carried the day because for reasons that remain unclear even now the staff of the government Secretariat and the military command remained in their rooms and after 10 days of clearing the wreckage the British engineering Corps announced that they'd recovered the bodies of 91 people British Arab and Jew from the rubble at first the mandatory government denied ever having received any message but testimony submitted during the subsequent investigation made it clear that a warning had in fact been given furthermore the Palestine Post telephone operator attested under oath that immediately after receiving the telephone message she had telephoned the duty officer at the police station and not a window of the French consulate was broken in the end all this combined with Israel Dodds testimony in his book that Menachem Batum himself told him with pride that they'd warn the British raises some deep questions about why the hotel was not clear to people but either way the heads of the Jewish Agency were stunned by the scale of attack as was everyone and filled with a fear over a retaliation that would be even worse than Black Sabbath and therefore despite the fact that the bombing of the King David was carried out as a part of the activities of the United resistance and on the explicit instruction of Moshe Smith not to mention that it served her race much of the evidence that would have incriminated them the agency denounced the operation in the strongest terms issuing a statement the next day which expressed their quote feelings of horror at the base and unparalleled at perpetrated today by a gang of criminals in an interview at the same time to the French newspaper Francois given from his retreat in Paris ben-gurion declared the Irgun was the enemy of the Jewish people now in accordance with the original plan the Irgun had issued a leaflet accepting responsibility for the operation which stated among other things that warning had indeed been given at this stage they chose to ignore the duplicity of the issues leadership which perhaps was unfortunate because as we'll see in coming chapters this pattern of accusing near goon and using its atrocious force will establish itself in the struggle ahead but in addition to the Jewish agency's response the British reaction was also Swift in coming only hours after the explosion General Sir Evelyn Barker British Army commander in Palestine ordered all Jewish places of entertainment restaurants shops and homes out of bounds for all British officers and soldiers and his instructions ended by saying the aim of these orders are to punish the Jews in a way of the race dislikes as much as any namely by striking at their pockets now the air goons intelligence service got hold of Barker's orders and immediately publicized them both in the mandate and throughout the world the anti-semitic tone of the letter was a great embarrassment to the British government questions were asked in the House of Commons about it and the London Daily Herald actually wrote that if general Barker had in fact written a letter he was quote demonstrating his unsuitability for his position and in fact it was officially rescinded two weeks later but public opinion had already been diverted by that time from the tack on the King David hotel nevertheless as a result of Black Sabbath and the wave of condemnation which the King David bombing provoked the moderates now held the upper hand on the Jewish Agency executive and when they met in Paris on August 5th 1946 it was decided to terminate arms struggle against the British in Palestine the 10 month period of united resistance had come to an end the Hagana will continue their struggle but their focus will be on illegal immigration as we'll see in the story of the exodus that lies ahead and the Irgun and Lehi will continue their armed battle as will also speak about and as the flames of war increase within the mandate and the pressure of the displaced in Europe continues to rise that survival strain of Zionism is going to draw after it an ever larger part of the people just as a postscript for your thought a year after the King David operation the Year Guin issued the following statement the truth about the King David hotel on July 1st two days after the British raid on the national institutions and on our towns and villages we received a letter from the headquarters of the resistance movement demanding that we carry out an attack on the center of government at the King David hotel as soon as possible it was finally approved on July 22nd but notwithstanding this days later cold Israel broadcast a statement in the name of that resistance movement and pouring the high death toll at the King David caused by the actions of the dissidents we have kept silent for a whole year we have faced savage incitement such as this country has never before known we've withstood the worst possible provocations and remain silent we have witnessed evasion hypocrisy and cowardice and remain silent but today when the resistance movement has expired and there is no hope that it will ever be revived there are no longer valid reasons why we should maintain our silence concerning the assault against the center of Nazi British rule one of the mightiest attacks ever carried out by a militant underground now it is permissible to reveal the truth now we must reveal the truth let the people see and judge I just want to thank a few people as I'm wrapping up I want to thank all the folks who give their hard-earned money to help make this show happen to keep it free and make it widely available and I want to encourage you to join them go right now drop mic calm in the upper right hand corner you'll see a button says be a patron you can click on through there to give a little bit of per pod cast support and I want to encourage people out they were interested you can dedicate a show to a loved one someone who's here with you now that you love and you want to honor as someone who's left the world and you'd like to bring honor to their memory just be in touch with me and Rob Mike Feuer at gmail.com or you personal message me at Facebook at route Mike I also want to thank the Land of Israel Network that's the Land of Israel comm for creating a platform allows me to reach so many amazing people I wanna thank partes Institute dar es org dot al for building an educational institution allows me to teach so many wonderful young