6

The Jewish Problem

WENDELL WILLKIE NEVER LIVED TO SEE, LET ALONE CONTEST, THE 1944 presidential election, which took place on the day after Lord Moyne was murdered in Cairo. The man once tipped to succeed Roosevelt that November had died suddenly from a heart attack, aged fifty-two, the previous month, having failed to win the Republican nomination in the summer. Contrary to the assumption he had made two years earlier—the calculation that had led him to the Middle East in the first place—the election had demonstrated that Roosevelt was not “through.” On November 7, 1944, the president defeated his opponent, Thomas Dewey, overwhelmingly.

Under fire from the Zionists for failing to do more for Jewish refugees, Roosevelt had gone further than he had ever done before to court the Jewish vote during the campaign. Three weeks before the poll, he had announced he favored “the opening of Palestine to unrestricted Jewish immigration.” A day later he declared that he knew “how long the Jewish people have worked and prayed for the establishment of Palestine as a free and democratic Jewish Commonwealth.” Were he reelected, he continued, “I shall help to bring about its realization.”¹

ALTHOUGH STATEMENTS LIKE these helped Roosevelt to a fourth successive win, they endangered his relationship with Ibn Saud, at a time when his administration needed the support of the king to advance two vital projects. One was the trans-Arabian pipeline that Harold Ickes had floated earlier that year. The other was an air base on the limestone plateau at Dhahran in eastern Saudi Arabia.

As Willkie’s airborne odyssey had demonstrated, a new era of long-distance international flight was approaching. Although the Americans enjoyed a technological advantage because they had been developing and building bombers while encouraging the British to make fighter planes, the British controlled more landing rights, particularly in the Middle East, where the main route between Cairo and Karachi hopped via Habbaniyah, Abadan, and Bahrain. A runway at Dhahran—the only spot in northern Saudi Arabia where the geology could cope with heavy aircraft—would enable the Americans to bypass these British staging posts, establishing a new trans–Middle Eastern route that enjoyed the distinct advantage of being two hundred miles shorter. Since British air force officers had also recently been spotted prospecting the site, the Americans knew they had no time to lose.

If only for these immediate reasons, the president needed to mend fences with Ibn Saud. But it seems that he thought a meeting might achieve something far greater. If he could reconcile the king to the Jews’ presence in Palestine, he might permanently resolve a tension that his country’s domestic politics created. Months earlier he had written to Ibn Saud, expressing his disappointment that they had never met. In February 1945, the opportunity now arose to do so, as the president returned home via Cairo from the summit at Yalta, where he, Churchill, and Stalin had met to discuss the end of the war and the arrangements for Europe in the peace. Roosevelt hoped that, by force of personality in a meeting, he might be able to bring the king around. Yet again, he was pursuing a consensus.

Bill Eddy, left, interprets for Ibn Saud and Franklin Roosevelt at the Bitter Lake Meeting. His record of the conversation landed Roosevelt’s successor, Truman, in hot water.

On February 12, 1945, Ibn Saud boarded an American destroyer at Jeddah, together with a retinue that included an astrologer, a food taster, servants, bodyguards, slaves, and six sheep. Two days later, on the Bitter Lake on the Suez Canal, he met Roosevelt for the first, and only, time. Ibn Saud compared their age and infirmity: the gray-faced president gave him his spare wheelchair, and then asked him how they might resolve the question of Palestine. The king repeated his opposition to Jewish immigration to Palestine: “the Arabs,” he stated, “would choose to die rather than yield their lands to the Jews.”²

“We talked for three hours and I argued with the old fellow up hill and down dale, but he stuck to his guns,” Roosevelt said afterward. “There was nothing I could do with him.”³

ROOSEVELT RUFFLED FEATHERS when, on his return, he told Congress that he had “learned more about the whole problem, the Moslem problem, the Jewish problem, by talking with Ibn Saud for five minutes than I could have learned in an exchange of two or three dozen letters.” But by far the most important outcome of the conversation was the incendiary minute it produced. Written by the American ambassador Bill Eddy, who translated, this revealed that Roosevelt, in his effort to win over Ibn Saud, had suggested Poland, not Palestine, might provide “space… for the resettlement of many homeless Jews,” that “as Chief Executive of the United States Government” he would “do nothing to assist the Jews against the Arabs,” and that he thought an Arab mission to the United States would be “a very good idea” because many people in America were “misinformed.”⁴

Three weeks later Ibn Saud tried to drive home his victory by seeking to extract in writing what the president had said during the meeting. On March 10, 1945, he wrote Roosevelt a long letter that set out his opposition to the Zionists’ claim to Palestine and asked the president to prevent the Jews from consolidating their position in the Mandate any further.

Once the king’s letter reached Washington, the minutes of the Bitter Lake meeting were retrieved from the State Department files, and on April 5, Roosevelt replied to Ibn Saud. In his letter he reminded the king of the evenhanded promise he had made back in May 1943, that no decision on Palestine would be taken “without full consultation with both Arabs and Jews.” Not only had this policy not changed, he continued, but he was happy to renew the assurance that he had given him during their meeting. As president he would “take no action… which might prove hostile to the Arab people.” This, as the minutes showed, was not what he had said, but Roosevelt would never have to account for the difference. A week later, he was dead.⁵

The man obliged to pick up where Roosevelt had abruptly left off was Roosevelt’s running mate and vice president of twelve weeks, Harry Truman. Whereas Roosevelt was a natural leader, Truman was the perfect sidekick: an earnest, bespectacled details man who gave the administration the sense of being in touch with ordinary Americans’ concerns. A former farmer and failed businessman before he was elected to the Senate, Truman had made his name as chairman of a committee investigating the war effort—the committee that had sparked outrage in London at the end of 1943 with its proposal that the British government might turn over its stakes in foreign oil fields to the United States government. The Truman Committee, as it became known, had made him the champion of the taxpayer against fraud and waste, inept bureaucrats and politicians, big businessmen, and union barons.

Throughout his first term, Truman was acutely aware of the fact that it had been Roosevelt, not he, who had been elected. “I don’t feel that I am,” he said, when he was once asked what it felt like being president. “I feel that I am trying to carry on for someone else.” While he felt his way into the job, he followed Roosevelt’s equivocal policy on Palestine. In response to a query about the issue, from Ibn Saud’s Hashemite rival and neighbor Abdullah of Transjordan, he signed off on a letter drafted by the State Department that stuck to Roosevelt’s “no decision… without full consultation” script. But this ran counter to the pro-Zionist manifesto that he and Roosevelt had stood on, and he soon decided it was not tenable. The end of the war in Europe in May that year finally made the scale of the refugee crisis apparent. An estimated quarter of a million “displaced people” needed to be found a home. For the estimated 138,000 of them who were Jewish, the Zionists were adamant that it should be Palestine.⁶

This issue mattered because, from the moment Truman was sworn in, he knew that his first electoral test would be for the New York mayoralty on November 6, 1945. New York had the largest Jewish population of any city in the country: there were nearly four times more Jews in New York than in the whole of Palestine. And unlike his own party, which had picked a candidate with Irish roots, the Republicans’ contender was Jewish too.

That election made Truman peculiarly sensitive to American Jews’ interest in the Palestine question. “I’m sorry gentlemen,” he would tell a group of American diplomats who disliked that fact, “but I have to answer to hundreds of thousands who are serious for the success of Zionism; I do not have hundreds of thousands of Arabs among my constituents.” To show the Zionists that he was taking action that June, he asked the U.S. representative on the Intergovernmental Committee on Refugees, Earl Harrison, to go to the American-occupied zone in Europe to investigate. But he did not wait for Harrison to report. At a press conference in mid-August, in answer to a question that had been planted with a reporter, Truman said that his aim was “to let as many Jews into Palestine as possible and still maintain civil peace.” Crucial to this plan was the acquiescence of both the British and the Arabs, since Truman had no desire to send half a million American soldiers to Palestine to keep the peace.⁷

Eight days later, Harrison reported the terrible conditions he had found in the American zone, where Jewish survivors of the Holocaust were trapped in limbo, still living in concentration camps, clad in their camp pyjamas or discarded German uniforms, because they had nowhere else to go. Aware that winter would cause many deaths, he highlighted a “persuasive” proposal made by the Jewish Agency. This was for the British government to create a hundred thousand extra immigration visas to enable “the quick evacuation of all non-repatriable Jews in Germany and Austria, who wish it, to Palestine.”⁸

This large round number appealed to Truman. A week later he forwarded the report to Britain’s new prime minister, Clement Attlee, under a letter pressing him to accept one hundred thousand Jewish refugees in Palestine. With his eye firmly on the forthcoming mayoral election, he also allowed a former Democratic senator turned Zionist lobbyist, Guy Gillette, to reveal what he had privately asked Attlee for.

This gambit did nothing to improve Truman’s relationship with Attlee, which had got off to a bad start. On becoming prime minister, Attlee found a letter from the president that left no doubt that Truman had assumed Churchill would win. Truman’s willingness to let Gillette spread the message suggested that he took Attlee’s approval of his demand for granted. It was presumptuous but not entirely unreasonable. Attlee was a quiet and modest man, and perhaps Truman mistook these qualities for weakness. Perhaps equally, he could not understand how his request could possibly be contentious. After all, like the Democrats the previous November, the British Labour Party had just won that summer’s election on a pro-Zionist platform. As Earl Harrison had noted in his report, the Labour politician Hugh Dalton, now Attlee’s chancellor of the exchequer, had said publicly that the “unspeakable horrors perpetrated upon the Jews” in occupied Europe made it “morally wrong and politically indefensible” to bar entry to Palestine to any Jew who wished to go there.

What neither Truman nor Harrison had allowed for was that a key member of the new government had since changed his mind. “Clem,” the new foreign secretary Ernest Bevin said to Attlee one day, “about Palestine. According to the lads in the Office, we’ve got it wrong. We’ve got to think again.”⁹

It took Truman’s letter eleven days to reach Attlee, and in the meantime, Bevin had been reviewing British Middle Eastern policy. An earthy bruiser who had started out in life as a farmhand, Bevin had briefly caused consternation in the Foreign Office when it transpired that he ate food off his knife. That disquiet evaporated as he revealed himself a robust defender of the country’s interests. Critical of the Atlantic Charter from the outset and an implacable anti-communist, he believed that an ongoing British presence in the Middle East would assure the country’s continued international relevance and prevent the expansion of Soviet influence southward into Africa and beyond.

As there was mounting opposition in Egypt to the continued presence of British forces, Bevin hoped to switch Britain’s military base from one bank of the Suez Canal to the other. His plan was to negotiate an exit from Egypt that would improve Britain’s reputation in the wider Arab world enough to permit a deal with the Jews that gave Britain an ongoing right to base her forces in Palestine. Until such an agreement could be worked out, the government would allow a low level of immigration to Palestine. Following military advice that it would require far fewer British troops to deal with “localized trouble with the Jews in Palestine” than with “widespread disturbances among the Arabs throughout the Middle East,” ministers hoped to do just enough “to appease Jewish sentiment” but not so much as to provoke Arab uproar.¹⁰

Maintaining this finely calibrated piece of prevarication might have been possible had Britain been acting in a vacuum. But this plan was immediately upset by Truman’s demand to Attlee to accept a large number of Jewish refugees to Palestine. When, four days after delivering the letter, Truman’s secretary of state James Byrnes told Bevin that the president intended to endorse Harrison’s conclusions that very evening, the foreign secretary threatened to demand publicly that American soldiers police the situation that Truman’s intervention would cause. Attlee echoed this, warning the president that his policy might “set aflame the whole Middle East” and do “grievous harm” to transatlantic relations.¹¹

Truman backed off; his demand had also produced opposition on two other fronts. At home, his own administration was ganging up against him. Prompted by the State Department, which feared the damage he was doing to relations with the Saudis, the War Department warned him that his all-important demobilization plans would be delayed indefinitely if he persisted with his support for Jewish immigration. This was because more American troops would be needed in Germany if British forces based there were redeployed to the Middle East to quell an Arab backlash. Thanks to Guy Gillette, news of Truman’s support for large-scale Jewish immigration to Palestine had reached Baghdad and Cairo. There, the secretary-general of the Arab League said that the president’s insistence that one hundred thousand Jews be let into the Mandate conflicted with Roosevelt’s pledge to Ibn Saud in February 1945, that the United States would “never support the Zionists’ fight for Palestine against the Arabs.”¹²

This first hint of what had passed between Roosevelt and Ibn Saud at that February’s meeting on the Bitter Lake immediately intrigued journalists. Asked at a press conference whether Roosevelt had indeed said this, Truman answered reflexively “with a flat ‘no’”—which was untrue. Digging himself deeper and deeper, he went on to claim “that he had looked through the records of the foreign conferences very carefully and had found no such commitment” and “that since there was no official or other record of any such pledge having been made by his predecessor in the White House, he would not feel bound by any such understanding.” It all sounded very fishy.¹³

Truman’s performance was a red rag to Ibn Saud and his advisers, who were avid listeners to radio news. After hearing reports of what the president had said, they told the American ambassador Bill Eddy that the king would be asking Truman for clarification. They knew, and so did Eddy, that the minutes of the king’s meeting with Roosevelt clearly contradicted what the president had just claimed. In a letter to Truman, Ibn Saud now threatened to publish it.

That prospect left the administration aghast because the record of the meeting was dynamite. Publication of Roosevelt’s candid views would not only show that Truman had lied but also, as a senior State Department official observed, “would have unfortunate consequences both in this country and abroad.”¹⁴

Desperate to stop Ibn Saud from carrying out his threat before the election, Truman wrote a groveling letter to the king. In it he claimed his remarks had been inaccurately reported and said that he was willing to publish Roosevelt’s letter of April 5, 1945, but not the original minutes of the meeting as its release “just now… would not be in the common interest of our two countries.” After Ibn Saud had accepted this suggestion, the letter was published on October 18. That same day Truman tried to regain the initiative ahead of the election by saying that he hoped that Attlee would accept his proposal.¹⁵

As the British realized, Truman was now relying on a positive response from Attlee, and they immediately tried to exploit the president’s vulnerability. Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin, under pressure to set out the new government’s policy on Palestine, had wanted to establish a joint Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry. Mindful of his broader strategic objective to maintain a British base in Palestine, his aim was to rope the Americans into finding a permanent solution that would enable Britain to remain there. Time was short. Although in the absence of a new policy on Palestine the government was allowing the remaining immigration permits from the White Paper regime to continue to be used, these would soon run out. MI6, meanwhile, had just reported that the two main Jewish terrorist groups in Palestine, the Stern Gang and the Irgun, had both placed themselves at the disposal of the Haganah for a coordinated onslaught on the British. On the day after Truman’s press conference, the British ambassador went to see James Byrnes with a memorandum outlining Bevin’s proposal, which he said the foreign secretary wanted to announce on October 25. “That is next Thursday,” the secretary of state spluttered. More importantly, it was twelve days before the New York mayoral election.¹⁶

For the next fortnight, Bevin and Byrnes haggled over whether the committee’s remit would include a specific reference to Palestine. Bevin felt that to do so would preclude the consideration of other potential safe havens; Byrnes, with one eye on the New York election, insisted that it must. Fearing that Bevin might jump the gun and make an announcement before the election had taken place, Byrnes withdrew his offer of involvement in the committee altogether. It was only on the day after the election that Truman overruled his secretary of state’s decision. His price for doing so was that Palestine must be the focus of the committee’s investigation. But he had now also accepted a reference that the committee might also investigate the possibility that the refugees might go to other countries.

The terms of reference were not as Bevin wanted, but he was in no position to argue. On the night of October 31, 1945, a chain of one hundred fifty coordinated attacks on the rail network across Palestine had killed four people and confirmed the accuracy of MI6’s intelligence. A new, more violent era in the Mandate had begun. Moreover, Attlee had by then arrived cap in hand in Washington to request a $3.75 billion loan from the United States that would enable the Labour government to fund its ambitious welfare state. The American government was insisting on tough terms, including the free convertibility of sterling for dollars by the summer of 1947. “We are in Shylock’s hands,” Bevin grumbled during a cabinet meeting. He would not make further efforts to rewrite the committee’s mandate, he explained, since he had no wish “to make our political relations with the United States any worse.” And, at bottom, he had got what he had wanted. His announcement, in the House of Commons on the afternoon of November 13, 1945, that the United States government had accepted his invitation to join the Committee of Inquiry was met by cheers.¹⁷

THE TWELVE MEMBERS of the Committee of Inquiry met in Washington in January 1946. The British party had a dreary respectability: three members of Parliament, a judge, the economist of the Midland Bank, and an expert on industrial disputes. Their American counterparts were more varied. Since no congressman dared get involved for fear of crossing the Zionist lobby, their delegation comprised a Texan judge, a former head of the State Department, a newspaper editor, a former commissioner for the League of Nations High Commission for Refugees, and a successful California lawyer. “We had one common characteristic,” said Richard Crossman, one of the British MPs,“a total ignorance of the subject.”¹⁸

After hearings in Washington, where the witnesses included Albert Einstein and the British delegates felt like the accused at a show trial, and then in London, where the Americans correctly realized they were under surveillance, the committee split and fanned out across continental Europe. Its members were all shocked by what they saw. When they reconvened in Vienna, they discussed their shock at the prevalence of anti-Semitism. “They all should be killed! We want none of them!” a German hotel porter had spat at the California lawyer, whose name was Bartley Crum. “It’s too bad this war didn’t last another two or three months,” a red-faced British officer had told Crum and Crossman. “They’d all have been done away with by then. We’d have had no problem.” The stories of the survivors they had met were no less appalling. Some had returned home—as Roosevelt had thought they would—only to find that every other member of their community had been wiped out. Some of these had then committed suicide. One young man produced a photograph of his school class. Out of the forty-three children in it, only the ten who went to Palestine had survived. The moral of that story was obvious.¹⁹

The committee proceeded, via Cairo, to Palestine. “This is Texas,” the American judge declared when he stepped off the train at Lydda, in the south of the country. The landscape reminded Crum of California. It was early spring. The Jews they met were happy and healthy; the Arabs visibly better off than their Egyptian cousins. And briefly there was peace. Apart from a raid on an arms depot, there were no significant attacks while the committee was in Palestine because the Haganah, the Irgun, and the Stern Gang had decided it was in their interests for there not to be. The tight security the British organized around the party then looked to the Americans like a theatrical charade.²⁰

The seemingly pointless security reinforced Crum’s growing conviction that the problem was not the Jewish but the British presence. The lawyer had been a friend of Wendell Willkie’s, and he had been re-reading his copy of Willkie’s memoir of his 1942 mission, One World, in which Willkie quoted Henrietta Szold implying that the British were the root of the tension. In Washington, Einstein had said exactly the same thing: Palestine’s problems had been “artificially created” by the British. If there were a “really honest government for the people there which would get the Arabs and Jews together,” the theoretical physicist insisted, then “there would be nothing to fear.” Three weeks in Palestine left Crum convinced that Zionism would benefit the Arabs as well. Remove the British—whose alliance with the landowners held the Middle Eastern countries back—and there could be “freedom and progress,” he felt sure.²¹

One day Crum and another American member of the panel had a drink in La Régence, the basement bar of the King David Hotel, where they were staying in Jerusalem and which also housed the British administration up above. “I felt like getting down on my knees before these people,” Crum’s colleague admitted. “I’ve always been proud of my own ancestors who made farms out of the virgin forest. But these people are raising crops out of rock!” During the hearings, the Zionists worked this parallel hard. “The leaky boats in which our refugees come to Palestine are their Mayflowers,” said Chaim Weizmann, “the Mayflowers of a whole generation.” Crossman thought history explained a lot. While the Americans empathized with the Zionists as pioneers, the pro-Arabism of the majority of his British colleagues derived from “our deepest national fear… invasion by a foreign conqueror.” At the end of March 1946, the committee repaired to Lausanne in Switzerland to write its report. The Irgun resumed hostilities with another spectacular attack on the railway system on April 3.²²

By now the committee members’ tempers were fraying. The Americans felt that Bevin had outwitted Truman. Under constant pressure from Washington, they were determined to do no more than endorse their president’s demand on immigration and avoid entangling their country further. That attitude exasperated their British counterparts because it meant that the administration in Palestine would have to deal alone with the violence that the arrival of a hundred thousand Jewish immigrants was bound to cause.

On the other hand, the British committee members knew that Bevin wanted unanimity: Crossman feared that disagreement might even lead the United States government to pull the all-important multibillion-dollar loan. They had also heard evidence in camera from senior British soldiers who now told them that it would be far more costly to impose a pro-Arab settlement than one that was pro-Jewish. This was the opposite of what the military had said a few months earlier, but it was entirely plausible: a funeral for two Jews killed in an attack, which took place during their stay in Palestine, had attracted perhaps sixty thousand mourners.

When it started to look like the committee might have to produce two or three conflicting reports, the fear of an open split with the Americans drove the committee’s British members to compromise. In exchange for their acceptance of the proposal that one hundred thousand Jews be allowed entry into Palestine, the Americans agreed that the report should include a detailed statement on Jewish terrorism and a recommendation that the Jewish Agency resume cooperation with the British authorities so that terrorism could be “resolutely suppressed.” Together, the committee’s members, hamstrung by their realization that they would trigger violent upheaval if they endorsed partition, could only recommend that the Mandate should continue, pending the involvement of the United Nations. It fell far short of the permanent solution that they had been asked to find.²³

In London, the report went down extremely badly. Although Bevin defended his brainchild when it was discussed in the cabinet, even he admitted that it would be impossible to implement without American support, which he now proposed to ask for. The potential cost was astronomic. The chancellor, once a fervent pro-Zionist, estimated this at £100 million up front and £5 to £10 million a year thereafter, at a time when the government was straining to cut military spending. “We can’t contemplate that,” he said. Attlee agreed. The committee had “ignored everybody’s responsibility but ours,” he said. Although he supported Bevin’s effort to make the United States say what share of the financial burden she would take, he clearly did not expect the foreign secretary to succeed. “The truth is,” he told his cabinet, “the United States wants her interests at our expense.”²⁴

Attlee’s pessimism was well founded. When the report was published on both sides of the Atlantic on April 30, 1946, Truman seized on its endorsement of his immigration proposal. “The transfer of these unfortunate people should now be accomplished with the greatest dispatch,” he stated. But he refused to engage with the other recommendations that the British had insisted on, beyond saying they raised questions that merited “careful study.”²⁵

Annoyed by Truman’s cherry-picking, on May 1, Attlee drew the House of Commons’ attention to the section of the report the president had ignored and refused to accept the entry of so many immigrants until the illegal armies disbanded and surrendered their weapons. It was, he added pointedly, a process in which the Jewish Agency had an important part to play.²⁶

THE JEWISH AGENCY had originally been established to represent the interests of the Jewish inhabitants of Palestine to the British Mandate authorities. But by May 1946, it had long outgrown its advisory role and was behaving disconcertingly like a government-in-waiting, with an elected legislature, a council, executive departments, and a semisecret army of its own. Operating from Bauhaus-style headquarters on George V Avenue in Jerusalem, it was a “state within a state,” the head of the British administration in Palestine said, when he appeared before the Committee of Inquiry. Another senior official told Crossman that the agency was managing to purloin top secret British documents the day after they were issued.²⁷

Equally, the British were spying on the agency. By the end of 1945, they had established that it was actively colluding with the terrorists. Intercepted telegrams, and their sources inside the organization, showed that the agency’s executive had approved the railway attacks of October 31 and had responded positively to the overture made by the Irgun and the Stern Gang reported by MI6, reaching a working arrangement with both groups to “assign tasks to them under our command.” The British found it telling that the head of the agency, David Ben-Gurion, refused to condemn the mounting violence in the Mandate. In his testimony to the Committee of Inquiry, Ben-Gurion would only associate himself with Weizmann’s disapproval of the recent attacks. He stuck to the line that any effort by the agency to prevent terrorism would be “rendered futile by the policy pursued by His Majesty’s Government,” which he blamed for “the tragic situation created in the country.”²⁸

For six months, the British high commissioner in Palestine had been asking his boss, the colonial secretary George Hall, for discretion to take action against the agency and the Haganah, but each time his request had been rejected. His case was strengthened by the series of attacks that followed the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry’s departure. On April 23, 1946, the Irgun had attacked the police station at Ramat Gan, killing one policeman but losing two of their own fighters—one killed, the other captured and badly wounded. Not to be outdone, the Stern Gang attacked the Sixth Airborne Division’s vehicle park in Tel Aviv two days later after dark, killing seven soldiers, two of whom were asleep in a tent. The following night the paras retaliated, going on a rampage in two nearby towns, vandalizing houses and beating up Jews they came across. The reprisals would have been worse had not some senior officers got wind of what was being plotted and confined other troops to barracks. On a visit to London in mid-May, the general in command of British forces in Palestine warned that his men were approaching the breaking point and that, in the event of further terrorist attacks, it might be impossible to restrain them.

The final straw came on June 18, 1946. After two members of the Irgun were sentenced to death for their roles in an attack, the Irgun kidnapped five British officers while they were having lunch in their club in Tel Aviv. A sixth was taken shortly afterward in Jerusalem on George V Avenue—the same street on which the Jewish Agency was situated. The potential fate of the six hostages was clear. Unless the death sentences were commuted by the British general in command, the Irgun said that “we shall answer gallows with gallows.”²⁹

After the high commissioner appealed, yet again, for discretionary powers, the colonial secretary George Hall interviewed the head of the Jewish Agency, David Ben-Gurion, who was in London at the time. Although the Jewish leader denied any association with the Stern Gang and the Irgun, he was evasive when Hall asked him about the agency’s relationship to the Haganah. Hall’s account of this conversation, in the cabinet the following day, finally convinced his colleagues to grant the high commissioner the power to raid the agency. The new chief of the imperial general staff, Bernard Montgomery, whose “almost fanatical personality” had so impressed Wendell Willkie four years earlier, put it more strongly following his appointment a few days later. “Now that the Jews have flung the gauntlet in our face, they must be utterly and completely defeated and their illegal organisations smashed forever.”³⁰

The British launched Operation Agatha at dawn on Saturday, June 29, 1946, descending on the Jewish Agency and the homes of its executives and known members of the Haganah and its elite Palmach commando unit, early on the Sabbath. They carted away three truckloads of documents from the agency and made nearly three thousand arrests, which included almost half of the Palmach’s strength. Simultaneous searches of Jewish settlements yielded a few hundred rifles, nearly half a million rounds of ammunition, and thousands of grenades and mortar bombs. “What we need is gas chambers,” yelled British troops involved in these sweeps, when they were taunted by Jewish settlers. Jews returning to raided buildings found swastikas and graffiti like “Death to the Jews” daubed on their walls. The Sixth Airborne Division’s report admitted that the operation had “lost us what friends amongst the Jews we still had,” but it hoped the split would only be temporary. In fact, it proved to be permanent.³¹

Truman’s swift criticism of the raid put the onus on Attlee to justify what he had done. The operation had come at an awkward moment: Congress was due within days to debate whether it should grant the British loan, and the vote was expected to be tight. With newspapers speculating that some representatives might be swayed by Britain’s conduct in Palestine, Attlee’s hand was forced. Facing criticism during a late-night debate on the conduct of the operation, the prime minister decided to reveal that “we have evidence—I will produce the evidence in due course—of a very close link up between the Jewish Agency and the Haganah. We also have evidence of the close connexion between the Haganah and the Irgun.”³²

Attlee’s revelation had an appalling unintended consequence. Worried about precisely what the British had found out and believing that it might still be possible to destroy the evidence, the head of the Haganah ordered the Irgun’s leader, Menachem Begin, to bomb the King David Hotel, which housed the headquarters of the British administration and where, he assumed, the paperwork seized on June 29 was being analyzed. Begin, a future Israeli prime minister, had been planning such an operation for months. On July 22, 1946, seven Irgun members, disguised as Arab milkmen, managed to get through the hotel’s security. They wheeled milk churns containing a quarter of a ton of high explosive into La Régence, the basement nightclub where Bartley Crum and his colleague had sat praising the Jews’ pioneering spirit four months earlier, and then shot their way out of the hotel, escaping in a getaway car parked round the corner. The explosion of a second, much smaller bomb across the street from the hotel diverted the arriving security forces, and according to the Irgun, telephone warnings were ignored. The main bomb went off at 12:37 p.m. “First there was a great explosion,” said one eyewitness. “Then the south-western corner of the hotel seemed to bulge. It collapsed with a great roar and a huge column of brown-gray smoke billowed up.” Ninety-one people were killed, and another fifty-three were injured. “Bombed Hotel Property of New York Corporation,” the following morning’s New York Times also informed its readers.³³

The head of Britain’s administration in Palestine, the chief secretary, narrowly survived the blast. “I lost nearly 100 of my best officers and old friends,” he wrote to Crossman a fortnight afterward. “I have been in Palestine off and on for 11 years: these people meant a lot to me, not only the British officers by any means, but also the loyal and faithful Palestinians including several Jews. My own police escort had been my inseparable companion and friend for 20 months, my own Armenian chauffeur and many other humble persons of this type were among the dead. I helped to dig out their stinking putrefying bodies and I attended about 14 funerals in 3 days.”³⁴

“A large proportion of my staff are dead, missing or wounded,” the colonial secretary George Hall reported to his colleagues the day after the bombing. Irgun had dealt the British administration a near-fatal blow. They next turned their attentions to destroying any possibility of an Anglo-American initiative and, with it, British hopes of clinging on in Palestine.³⁵