Текст книги "The Arabs: A History"

Автор книги: Eugene Rogan

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Текущая страница: 21 (всего у книги 47 страниц)

Leon Blum’s Popular Front government had also hoped to resolve differences between France and its mandates in Syria and Lebanon. After years of opposition interspersed with fruitless negotiations, nationalists in Beirut and Damascus responded to the change of government in Paris with a new optimism. The year 1936 seemed to herald a new age of broader Arab independence and reduced imperial controls. Britain, which had conceded independence to Iraq in 1930, was on the verge of concluding a similar agreement with Egypt in 1936. Nationalists in Syria and Lebanon had every reason to believe the Popular Front government, with its enlightened views on empire, would follow suit and conclude treaties that would allow them to follow Egypt and Iraq into the League of Nations as nominally sovereign states. In the aftermath of the 1925–1927 revolt, Syrian nationalists had pursued the politics of national liberation through nonviolence and negotiation, in a policy known as “honorable cooperation.” The National Bloc, headed by wealthy urban notables, became the dominant coalition of parties and factions working toward the common aim of securing Syria’s independence. They redoubled their efforts after Iraq secured its nominal independence in 1930. However, faced with the persistent opposition of the conservative French colonial lobby, the National Bloc had made no gains through cooperation. The first treaty the French offered, in November 1933, fell far short of granting independence and was rejected by the Syrian Chamber. Honorable cooperation began to give way to systematic resistance, culminating in a fifty-day general strike called by Syrian nationalists at the start of 1936. The Popular Front government of Leon Blum seemed both to sympathize with the demands of Syrian nationalists and to place a high priority on restoring peace and stability to their troubled mandate. Shortly after coming to power, the Blum government entered into fresh negotiations with the Syrian National Bloc, in June 1936. The two sides made rapid progress as the French negotiators conceded many of the nationalists’ demands. A draft treaty of preferential alliance was concluded between the French and Syrian negotiators in September 1936 and submitted to their respective parliaments for ratification. Syria believed itself on the verge of independence. In light of Syria’s success, the Lebanese pressed the French to draft a similar treaty granting Lebanon its independence. Negotiations were opened in October 1936. Following the model of the Syrian document, a draft Franco-Lebanese treaty was concluded in just twenty-five days and sent on for parliamentary approval in Paris and Beirut. Nationalists in Syria and Lebanon were very satisfied with the terms of the new treaties with France, as demonstrated by the ease of the ratification process in Beirut and Damascus. The Lebanese Chamber approved its treaty in November, and the Syrian Chamber approved its own at the end of December 1936, by unanimous vote in both countries. However, as with the Blum-Violette bill, the colonial lobby in France succeeded in blocking any debate or vote on the 1936 treaties with Syria and Lebanon in the French National Assembly until the fall of the Blum government in June 1937. Lebanese and Syrian hopes for independence crashed with Blum’s government. In 1939, with war looming in Europe, the French Assembly refused to ratify the treaties. Adding injury to insult, French colonial authorities took the further step of ceding the northwestern Syrian territory of Alexandretta to Turkey, which had long claimed the region for its 38 percent Turkish minority, in order to secure Turkey’s neutrality in the impending war in Europe. Outraged Syrian nationalists organized huge rallies and demonstrations, provoking massive repression by the French authorities, who suspended Syria’s constitution and dissolved its parliament. France was on the verge of a major confrontation with its two Levantine mandates when Nazi Germany occupied the country and overthrew its government in May 1940. A collaborationist French government—the Vichy Regime—was set up under Marshal Philippe Pйtain, the same “hero of Verdun” who had displaced Lyautey in Morocco at the height of the Rif War. Under the new regime Syria and Lebanon were to be ruled by a Vichy high commissioner, General Henri Dentz. The British, already troubled by the pro-Axis leanings of Arab nationalists in Egypt, Iraq, and Palestine, saw the Vichy administration in Syria and Lebanon as a hostile entity. When Commissioner Dentz offered Germany the use of Syrian airbases in May 1941, Britain was quick to intervene. United with the anti-Vichy Free French forces, headed by General Charles de Gaulle, the British occupied Syria and Lebanon in June–July 1941. With the British occupation of Syria, the Free French promised full independence to Syria and Lebanon. In a proclamation read shortly after the Anglo-French invasion, General Georges Catroux, speaking on behalf of General de Gaulle, announced: “I come to put an end to the mandatory rйgime and to proclaim you free and independent.” ⁴⁴ The French declaration of Syrian and Lebanese independence was guaranteed by the government of Great Britain. Nationalist celebrations in Syria and Lebanon proved premature. The Free French had not forsaken the hope of retaining their empire after the war. Both Syria and Lebanon would face an uphill battle to secure their independence against tremendous French opposition.

No sooner had the Free French proclaimed an end to the mandates than the Lebanese began to prepare for independence. Nationalist leaders of the different religious communities worked out a power-sharing arrangement in an unwritten agreement known as the National Pact, concluded in 1943. Witnessed by the political heads of all of the communities involved, the Lebanese upheld the National Pact without ever seeing the need to record its terms in an official document. According to the terms of the pact the president of Lebanon would henceforth be a Maronite Christian, the prime minister a Sunni Muslim, and the speaker of the parliament a Shiite Muslim. Other important cabinet posts would be distributed among the Druzes, Orthodox Christians, and other religious communities. Seats in the parliament would be distributed in a ratio of six Christian seats for every five Muslim deputies (for which purposes the Sunnis, Shiites, and Druzes were all considered Muslim). The National Pact seemed to have resolved the tensions between Lebanon’s communities and given them all a stake in their country’s political institutions. Yet the pact enshrined the same principle of “confessionalism” upheld by the French, rigidly distributing posts based on religious community, undermining Lebanese politics, and preventing the country from achieving genuine integration. In this way, the French left a legacy of division that long survived their rule in Lebanon. Once the Lebanese notables had resolved their political differences, they called for fresh parliamentary elections in 1943. In keeping with the country’s constitution, the fifty-five new members of parliament assembled to elect the president, and on September 21, 1943, they chose the lawyer and nationalist Bishara al-Khoury to serve as the first president of independent Lebanon. Al-Khoury was the same lawyer who had once advised General Gouraud and who had been an early critic of the French mandate in Lebanon. He had risen to national prominence in 1934 when he and a like-minded group of politicians formed the Constitutional Bloc, seeking to replace the French mandate with a Franco-Lebanese treaty. Since that time he had worked consistently to bring French rule in Lebanon to a close. The deputies broke out in loud applause when al-Khoury was named president, and white doves were released in the Chamber. “When the final result was announced,” al-Khoury recalled, “and I went up to the podium to give my speech, I could barely hear my own voice over the shouts and gunfire from outside. Yet I managed to make myself heard and told how we would cooperate with the Arab states and end Lebanon’s isolation.”⁴⁵ The Lebanese considered themselves fully independent and saw no grounds to expect any resistance from the French. The Free French had pledged to end the mandate, and the Vichy Regime had been forcibly expelled from the Levant by the British. The Lebanese parliament proceeded to assert its independence by revising the constitution to strip France of any privileged role or right to intervene in Lebanese affairs. However, when the Free French authorities learned of the agenda for the Lebanese parliamentary session of November 9, 1943, they demanded a meeting with al-Khoury. They warned the Lebanese president that General de Gaulle would not tolerate any unilateral measures to redefine Franco-Lebanese relations. It was a tense meeting that ended without a resolution of the two sides? differences. The Lebanese paid little concern to French warnings. The Free French were a fragmented government in exile whom the Lebanese believed to be in no position to halt their legitimate claim to independence—which Great Britain had guaranteed. The Lebanese deputies met as planned and revised Article 1 of the Constitution, which defined the frontiers of Lebanon as those “the Government of the French Republic officially recognized” to assert their “complete sovereignty” within the country’s current and recognized boundaries, which were spelled out in some detail. They established Arabic as the sole official national language, relegating French to a subordinate status. They empowered the president of Lebanon, rather than the government of France, to conclude all foreign agreements, with the parliament’s consent. All powers and privileges delegated to France by the League of Nations were formally excised from the Constitution. Finally, the deputies voted to change Article 5 of the Constitution, which defined the national flag: horizontal bands of red, white, and red replaced the French Tricolor, with the national symbol, the cedar tree, still emblazoned in its center. Legally and symbolically, Lebanon had asserted its sovereignty. It remained to secure French agreement to this new order. The French authorities reacted swiftly and decisively to the revision of the Lebanese Constitution. President al-Khoury was awakened in the early morning hours of November 11 by French marines who burst into his house. His first thought was that they were renegades who had come to assassinate him. He shouted to his neighbors to call the police, but no one answered. The door to his room was flung open by a French captain armed with a pistol, holding his son. “I do not mean to do you harm,” the Frenchman said, “but I am carrying orders from the High Commissioner for your arrest.” “I am president of an independent republic,” al-Khoury replied. “The High Commissioner has no authority to give me orders.” “I will read the order to you,” the captain responded. He then read a typewritten statement that accused al-Khoury of conspiracy against the mandate. The officer refused to give the order to al-Khoury and allowed him only ten minutes to pack his things. He was surrounded by soldiers “armed to the teeth.” Al-Khoury was disturbed to see that the soldiers were Lebanese. The French took al-Khoury by motorcar to the fortress of the southern town of Rashayya. They were joined en route by several other cars carrying the prime minister, Riyad al-Solh, and leading members of his cabinet. By that afternoon, six members of the Lebanese government had been taken to Rashayya. Violent demonstrations broke out in Beirut as word of the arrests spread. Al-Khoury’s wife joined the demonstrators to show solidarity with those protesting the injustice done to her husband and the Lebanese government. The Lebanese appealed to the British, in their role as guarantors of the Free French declaration of Lebanon?s independence in July 1941, who intervened to force the French to release President al-Khoury and the other Lebanese politicians. The changes to the Lebanese Constitution were preserved, but France clung to its Levantine mandate through its control over the security forces. The government of Lebanon would continue its struggle against the French to secure command of its army and police forces in a tug-of-war that would last another three years.⁴⁶

The Syrians were less sanguine than the Lebanese about their prospects for achieving independence after the July 1941 Free French proclamation. The Free French authorities in Damascus had made clear to the Syrian political leadership that they had no intention of conceding independence to Syria or Lebanon until a new set of treaties had been concluded to secure French interests in both countries. The National Bloc needed to mobilize for a major confrontation with the French to force its demands for independence. The leader of the National Bloc was Shukri al-Quwwatli, a wealthy Damascene from a notable land-owning family. Exiled in 1927 by the French for his nationalist activities, al-Quwwatli returned and assumed the leadership of the National Bloc in September 1942. When parliamentary elections were called in Syria in 1943, al-Quwwatli’s list emerged with a clear majority and elected their leader as president. The National Bloc government pursued conciliatory policies toward France, hoping to persuade the Free French to relinquish increasing authority until Syria might secure its independence. However, as in Lebanon, the Syrians found the French unwilling to make concessions with the country’s security forces—the national army, known as the Syrian Legion, and the internal security force, the Suretй Gйnйrale. Al-Quwwatli’s government in Syria worked closely with the al-Khoury government in Lebanon, seeking international support for their position against France. Large anti-French demonstrations were held in the winter of 1944 and spring of 1945. When France announced it would not surrender control over the Syrian national army until the government of Syria had signed a treaty, the governments of Syria and Lebanon refused further negotiations. French intransigence led to widespread demonstrations and anti-French protests across Syria in May 1945. Damascus emerged as the center of opposition, as the capital and the seat of national politics. Without sufficient armed forces at their disposal to police a situation rapidly deteriorating beyond their control, the French responded with lethal force to decapitate the government and bombard its citizens in to submission. The first target of the French attack was the Syrian government itself. Khalid al-Azm was a member of the National Bloc who had been elected to parliament in 1943 and was appointed finance minister. On the evening of May 29, 1945, he was in the Government Palace in downtown Damascus discussing the crisis with a group of deputies when they heard the first rounds of artillery at six in the evening.⁴⁷ Al-Azm and his colleagues were appalled by the French escalation of the crisis and the severity of the artillery bombardment. They tried to call for help but found that all the telephone lines in the government offices were dead. Al-Azm received reports from messengers that the parliament building had already been stormed and occupied by French troops, who had killed all of the Syrian guards there. Shortly after they had taken the parliament, French soldiers took up positions around the Government Palace. They opened fire on the building, shattering its windows. The French had cut the electrical power supply to Damascus, and night fell over the darkened city. The politicians and their guards in the Government Palace worked together to barricade the entrance to the building with tables and chairs in a vain attempt to deter the French from entering. Before midnight, al-Azm and his colleagues were tipped off that the French planned to occupy their building, and they slipped out through a back window. They made their way through the back streets of the city, eluding the French forces, and took refuge in al-Azm’s spacious house in the center of the Old City of Damascus. His large courtyard was soon filled with over one hundred refugees—government ministers, deputies, and guards. The French discovered their whereabouts when the prime minister, Jamil Mardam, foolishly attempted to use al-Azm’s telephone, which was under French surveillance. Once the French knew their whereabouts, they trained their artillery on al-Azm’s neighborhood and unleashed a merciless barrage. The government ministers and deputies sought refuge in the most secure rooms of the house. The ground shook beneath their feet with the impact of the artillery and aerial bombardment, showering plaster and masonry onto those sheltered inside. They passed the night in fear and uncertainty, to the sounds of the destruction of their city. The French redoubled their efforts to reduce the Syrian government to submission the following day. President al-Quwwatli had set up office in the hillside suburb of Salihiyya, where most of the government ministers went to join him. Al-Azm chose to remain with his family in Damascus and share the city’s fate. The French attack grew yet more severe. They began to fire incendiary shells into the city’s residential quarters, setting fires that blazed out of control. “Terror spread among the residents who feared the entire neighbourhood would be consumed by the flames,” al-Azm recalled. “The shells continued to fall, and there was no fire brigade willing or able to fight the fires, as the French soldiers would not allow them to perform their duty.” After another day under the artillery barrage, al-Azm decided to abandon his home and take his family to the relative safety of the suburbs with Shukri al-Quwwatli and the rest of the government. From his safe house in Salihiyya, President al-Quwwatli appealed to British officials to intervene. Invoking the 1941 guarantee of Syrian independence, he formally requested the British to intercede with the French to stop the bombardment of Damascus. The Syrian president?s appeal gave Britain legitimate grounds to interfere in French imperial affairs, and they prevailed upon their wartime ally to lift their attack. By the time French guns fell silent, more than four hundred Syrians had been killed, hundreds of private homes had been destroyed, and the building that housed the Syrian parliament had been reduced to rubble by the ferocity of the attack. France?s desperate bid to preserve its empire in the Levant had failed, and nothing could persuade the embittered Syrians to compromise on their long-standing demand for total independence.

The French finally admitted defeat in July 1945 and agreed to transfer control of the military and security forces to the independent governments of Syria and Lebanon. There was no question of France imposing a treaty on either state. The international community recognized the independence of Syria and Lebanon when the two Arab states were admitted as founding members of the United Nations, on an equal footing with France, on October 24, 1945. All that remained was for France to withdraw its own troops from the Levant. The French military withdrew from Syria in the spring of 1946 and that August boarded ships in Beirut to return home. As a young woman, Damascene journalist Siham Tergeman remembered the celebrations in Damascus on “the Night of Evacuation,” when the last French soldier withdrew from the capital in April 1946. She described a jubilant city celebrating its first night of true independence as a “wedding of freedom” in which “the happy charming bride” was Damascus herself. “The guests came in carts and in cars big and small, and torches lighted up all the roofs of the city, the hotels and sidewalks, electrical poles, the gardens of Marje and the poles of the Hejaz Railway line, the iron railings of the River Barada, and all the thoroughfares and crossroads.” Tergeman and her family celebrated through the night as singers and musicians entertained the crowds that gathered around the central Marje Square. “And the wedding of independence in Syria,” she recalled, “continued on until daybreak.”⁴⁸ Syrian joy was matched by French bitterness at the end of the mandate. Though France still held its Arab possessions in North Africa, it regretted the loss of influence in the Eastern Mediterranean. After twenty-six years in Beirut and Damascus, the French had nothing to show for their efforts. Worse yet, France suspected its wartime ally and imperial rival, Great Britain, of coming to Syria and Lebanon’s assistance only to draw the Levantine states into its own sphere of influence. Even so, the British Empire in the Middle East was under pressure and on the retreat in 1946. Indeed, France’s troubles in Syria and Lebanon seem benign in comparison to the crisis Britain faced in Palestine in 1946.

1. Abd al-Aziz ibn Abd al-Rahman Al Saud, better known in the West as Ibn Saud, founder of the modern Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, is pictured here (center with glasses) towering over his advisers in Jidda in 1928. Following his conquest of the Hashemite Kingdom of the Hijaz in 1925, Ibn Saud took the title “Sultan of Najd and King of the Hijaz.” In 1932, Ibn Saud renamed his kingdom Saudi Arabia, making it the only modern state named after its ruling family.

2. Fawzi al-Qawuqji (center) among commanders of the 1936–1939 Arab Revolt in Palestine. Qawuqji took part in the most famous Arab revolts against European rule, including the Battle of Maysalun in Syria (1920), the Syrian Revolt (1925–1927), the Arab Revolt in Palestine, and the Rashid Ali Coup in Iraq (1941). He took refuge from the British in Nazi Germany during WWII before returning to lead the Arab Liberation Army in Palestine in 1947–1948.

3. Exemplary punishment: The British Army destroy the homes of Palestinian villagers suspected of supporting the 1936–1939 Arab Revolt. Such collective punishments, conducted without due process, were given legal standing by a series of Emergency Regulations passed by British authorities to combat the Arab insurgency. An estimated 2,000 houses were destroyed between 1936 and 1940.

4. The opening of the Syrian Parliament, August 17, 1943. Following the Free French declaration of Syrian and Lebanese independence in July 1941, the Syrians went to the polls to elect their first independent government. The National Bloc list took a clear majority and, in the first parliamentary session (pictured right), their leader Shukri al-Quwwatli was elected president of the republic.

5. The Syrian Parliament in disarray, May 29, 1945. Despite French assurances, De Gaulle’s government had no intention of conceding full independence to Syria and refused to transfer control of the country’s armed forces to President al-Quwwatli’s government. When the Syrians rose in nationalist demonstrations in May 1945, the French stormed the Parliament, fired upon government offices, and bombarded residential quarters in Damascus in a vain attempt to impose their authority on the unwilling Syrians. The last French soldier withdrew from Syria in April 1946.

6. This posed propaganda photo portrays a mixed group of regular and irregular soldiers defending the walls of Jerusalem from Jewish attack, under the command of a Muslim cleric distinguished by his turban.

7. In reality, Palestinian fighters were ill-prepared to defend their country in 1948. Poorly armed and trained, none had combat experience to match that of the Jewish forces they faced in 1948. Worse yet, they underestimated their adversary, and suffered total defeat to Jewish forces by the time the British withdrew from Palestine on May 14.

8. The Egyptian Free Officers shortly after taking power in Egypt in July 1952. At 51, General Muhammad Naguib (seated behind the desk) was the elder statesman of the young Free Officers, whose average age was 34. Lieutenant-Colonel Gamal Abdel Nasser (seated to Naguib’s right) had Naguib placed under house arrest and assumed the presidency in 1954. Nasser’s right-hand man, Major Abd al-Hakim Amer is standing to Naguib’s right. Republican Egypt’s third president, Lieutenant-Colonel Anwar al-Sadat, is seated fourth from the left.

9. The leadership of the Algerian National Liberation Front (FLN) is shown here before boarding the Moroccan airliner that would fly them to captivity. Originally destined for Tunis, French warplanes intercepted the DC-3 and forced it to land in the Algerian city of Oran on October 22, 1956, where (from left to right) Ahmed Ben Bella, Mohammed Khider, and Hocine Ait-Ahmad were arrested and held for the remainder of the Algerian War. Prince Moulay Hassan (later King Hassan II, pictured here in uniform), son of Sultan Mohammad V of Morocco, saw off the Algerian revolutionaries.

10. Christian women, supporters of former president Camille Chamoun, taunted soldiers of the Lebanese Army with broomsticks in popular demonstrations against the government of Prime Minister Rashid Karami and the new president, General Fuad Shihab, in July 1958. Many women were reported wounded in the fighting.

11. Lebanon became the only country to invoke the Eisenhower Doctrine when President Chamoun requested American support against “Communist subversion” in the aftermath of the Iraqi Revolution in July 1958. Within three days, some 6,000 U.S. Marines landed on the shores of Lebanon, where they came under the scrutiny of the residents of Beirut. The force grew to a total strength of 15,000 men, backed by the Sixth Fleet and naval aircraft, before withdrawing on October 25 without having fired a shot in anger. [original caption: Interested Lebanese watch as U.S. marines relax . . . ]

12. Colonel Abd al-Salam Arif was one of the leaders of the Iraqi Revolution that overthrew the Hashemite monarchy in July 1958. He seized the national radio station on July 14 to declare the Republic and the death of King Faysal II to the shocked Iraqi nation. The Iraqi people gave their full support to the revolution. Here Arif addressed masses of supporters in the Shiite shrine city of Najaf on the objectives and reforms of the new government. Arif subsequently overthrew President Abd al-Karim Qasim in 1963 to become the second president of the Iraqi republic.

13. The Israeli Air Force initiated the June 1967 War with a series of devastating attacks on Egyptian, Jordanian, and Syrian air bases on the morning of June 5. In less than three hours, the Israelis had destroyed 85 percent of Egypt’s fighter aircraft and rendered their air bases unusable. Once they had achieved air superiority, Israeli ground forces swept over the Sinai, the West Bank, and Golan, inflicting total defeat on the armies of Egypt, Jordan, and Syria. Here, Israeli soldiers examine destroyed Egyptian aircraft in a Sinai air base.

14. The Israeli conquest of the West Bank in June 1967 drove over 300,000 Palestinians to seek refuge in the East Bank of Jordan. The journey was made all the more perilous by the destruction of road and bridges between the two banks of the Jordan River. Many of the new refugees fled with only those possessions they could carry.

15. Leila Khaled was a member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine who successfully hijacked a TWA airliner in 1969 from Rome to Damascus, where all passengers and staff were released unharmed. Her second operation, against an Israeli airliner, was foiled by El-Al security officers who killed her partner and overwhelmed Khaled before making an emergency landing in London, where Khaled was taken into custody by British police. She was released by the British on October 1, 1970, as part of a prisoner exchange.

16. The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine took control of a deserted airstrip named Dawson’s Field in the desert east of the Jordanian capital Amman and declared it “Revolution Airport.” Between September 6 and 9, 1970, the PFLP hijacked an American TWA airliner, a British BOAC jet, and a Swissair flight to “Revolution Airport.” All 310 passengers were evacuated from the planes which were destroyed on September 12. The operation succeeded in bringing the Palestinian cause to international attention but provoked King Hussein to drive the Palestinian movement out of Jordan in the violent Black September War of 1970–1971.

CHAPTER 9

The Palestine Disaster and Its Consequences

In January 1944, Jewish extremists in Palestine declared war on Great Britain. “There is no longer any armistice between the Jewish people and the British Administration in Eretz Israel [i.e., the Land of Israel] which hands our brothers over to Hitler,” the underground resistance movement asserted. “Our people is at war with this regime—war to the end.”¹ It may seem incredible that Jewish settlers would go to war with the British government, which had turned the Zionist dream of a Jewish national home in Palestine into a reality. However, over the course of the Second World War, Britain had come under increasing attack by the Jewish community of Palestine. The 1939 White Paper, which had imposed strict limits on Jewish immigration and called for Palestinian independence under (Arab) majority rule by 1949, had infuriated the Zionist leadership. With war looming between Britain and Nazi Germany, David Ben-Gurion had pledged to help the British army fight fascism as if there were no White Paper, while opposing the terms of the White Paper as if there were no war. Most of the Zionists in Palestine fell in line with Ben-Gurion’s policy and grudgingly supported the British in their war against the Nazi regime in Germany. But other, more radical Zionist parties saw Britain as the greater threat. They launched an armed insurgency with the stated aim of driving the British out of Palestine. Two Jewish terrorist organizations, the Irgun and the Stern Gang, were responsible for the worst of the violence. The Irgun (short for Irgun Zvai Leumi, or National Military Organization) had been formed in 1937 to protect Jewish settlements from attack during the 1936–1939 Arab Revolt. After the White Paper was approved by the British Parliament in May 1939, however, Irgun members came to view Britain as the real enemy. The Irgun launched a series of bomb attacks on British government offices and police stations in Palestine before suspending hostilities in June 1940. With Britain at war with Germany, the Irgun leadership decided to comply with Ben-Gurion?s policies of working with the British to fight Nazism. One faction in the Irgun dissented and continued its attacks on the British. The splinter group, which came to be known in Hebrew by the acronym Lehi (for Lohamei Herut Yisrael, or Freedom Fighters of Israel), are better known in the West as the Stern Gang, after the leader of the faction, Abraham Stern. Stern and his followers believed that the Jewish people had an inalienable right to the land of Israel and that it was their duty to redeem the land—by armed force, if necessary. For Stern, the 1939 White Paper cast Britain in the role of an illegitimate occupier. Rather than siding with Britain against Nazi Germany, Stern actively approached the Nazis to make common cause against the British. Like some Arab nationalists, Stern hoped to work with the Germans to liberate Palestine from British rule—Nazi anti-Semitism notwithstanding. In Stern’s view, Nazi Germany was but a persecutor of the Jewish people, whereas England was an enemy who would deny the Jews statehood in Palestine. Toward the end of 1940, Stern sent a representative to meet with German officials in Beirut to argue for a convergence of interests “between the aims of the ‘New Order’ in Europe as interpreted by the Germans and the true national aspirations of the Jewish people.” Through his envoy, Stern offered to use Jewish forces to drive Britain out of Palestine in return for unrestricted Jewish emigration from Germany to Palestine and German recognition of Jewish statehood. He argued that such an alliance would resolve the Jewish question in Europe and Jewish national aspirations while dealing their common British enemy a crucial defeat in the Eastern Mediterranean.² Stern never received a response from the Third Reich. He clearly miscalculated the genocidal nature of Nazi anti-Semitism. For his overtures to the Germans, Stern was roundly condemned by both the Irgun and the Jewish Agency, which provided intelligence to the British to assist them in their crackdown on the Lehi. The mandate authorities were in hot pursuit of the Stern Gang for a string of attacks and bank robberies in Palestine. In February 1942, British officers killed Stern in a raid on a Tel Aviv apartment. Its leadership in disarray after Stern’s death, the Lehi lapsed into inactivity. A fragile truce prevailed between the Yishuv and the British between 1942 and 1944, while the Second World War raged. The Irgun began to reorganize itself as a resistance movement against British rule in 1943. The movement was headed by a dynamic new leader named Menachem Begin. Born in Poland, Begin (1913–1992) joined a Zionist youth movement before fleeing the country during the German invasion of Poland in 1939. He later volunteered for a Polish military unit in the Soviet Union. In 1942 his unit was sent to Palestine, where Begin was recruited to the Irgun. He rapidly rose to lead the organization and made contact with the new leadership of the Lehi, including Yitzhak Shamir. Both men would become prime minister of Israel toward the end of their lives, though they began their political careers in Palestine as terrorists. Continued restrictions on Jewish immigration to Palestine, combined with growing knowledge of the Nazi death camps and the Holocaust, exacerbated tensions between the radical Zionist movements and the British authorities in Palestine. By 1944, the Irgun and Lehi were no longer willing to be bound by the general truce and resumed attacks on the British in Palestine. The Irgun and the Lehi used very different tactics in their common conflict against the British. Begin’s Irgun carried out attacks against the offices of the British mandate and communications infrastructure in Palestine. Shamir’s Lehi, in contrast, conducted targeted assassination attacks against British officials. The organization gained particular notoriety when two of its members assassinated the British minister resident in the Middle East, Lord Moyne, outside his home in Cairo on November 6, 1944. Moyne was the highest ranking British official in the Middle East and had upheld the 1939 White Paper’s restrictions on Jewish immigration to Palestine. His assassins were caught by Egyptian police and subsequently hanged for their crime. The Jewish Agency and its paramilitary wing, the Haganah, distanced themselves from the Lehi and its acts, for fear of British retaliation. It was only after the end of the Second World War that the Irgun, the Lehi, and the Haganah combined forces to fight against the British in Palestine. The liberation of the Nazi death camps had revealed the monstrous crime of the Holocaust. The leaders of the Yishuv were determined to bring Jewish survivors of the genocide from displaced person camps in Europe to Palestine. They refused to respect the limits on Jewish immigration imposed by the 1939 White Paper and declared a revolt against the British mandate. For a brief period in 1945–1946, the Haganah secretly coordinated operations with the Lehi and Irgun, to force a change in British policy through violence. For ten months the Haganah cooperated with the Irgun and Lehi in a series of bank robberies, attacks on infrastructure, and kidnappings of British personnel. The Jewish Agency, led by Ben-Gurion, consistently denied any involvement in these operations and kept the Haganah’s participation secret. The British authorities, however, suspected the Yishuv as a whole of complicity in the violence and responded with a massive clampdown. Between June 29 and July 1, 1946, over 2,700 members of the Yishuv were arrested, including several Jewish Agency leaders. The British authorities also seized the papers of the Jewish Agency and took them back to the mandate secretariat, then housed in a wing of the King David Hotel. The British seizure of its documents amounted to more than an administrative problem for the Jewish Agency. Among the papers were items implicating the agency and the Haganah in attacks on the British.³ Were the mandate authorities to find the evidence of Haganah and Jewish Agency involvement in terror activities, it would only stiffen British resolve to prevent further Jewish immigration to Palestine, and to concede to Palestinian Arab demands. From the moment these incriminating documents were taken into the mandate secretariat, the fate of the King David Hotel was sealed. The Irgun already had detailed plans for an attack on the high-rise hotel in West Jerusalem, headquarters to both the civil and military administrations of Palestine, but the Haganah had previously restrained it, arguing that such an atrocity would “inflame the British excessively.” On July 1, immediately after the British seizure of the Jewish Agency’s files, the Haganah sent a command to the Irgun ordering it to carry out the operation against the King David Hotel as soon as possible. Preparations for the King David Hotel bombing took three weeks. On July 22 a group of Irgun operatives delivered a number of milk cans filled with 500 pounds of high explosives to the basement of the hotel. The “milkmen” were surprised by two British soldiers, and a fire fight ensued. But the terrorists had already managed to set the timers to detonate the explosives thirty minutes later. “Each minute seemed like a day,” Menachem Begin later wrote. “Twelve-thirty-one, thirty-two. Zero hour drew near. The half-hour was almost up. Twelve-thirty-seven.... Suddenly, the whole town seemed to shudder.”⁴ The British authorities claimed that they had received no advance warning of the attack. The Irgun insisted it had given telephone warnings to both the hotel and other institutions. Whatever the truth of the claims on either side, no attempt had been made to evacuate the King David Hotel. The explosives, detonated beneath a public cafй at the height of the lunch hour, sheared an entire wing from the hotel and collapsed all six stories into the basement. Ninety-one people were killed and over one hundred wounded in the explosion—Britons, Arabs, and Jews alike. The atrocity shocked the world and was denounced by the Jewish Agency as a “dastardly crime perpetrated by a group of desperadoes.” Yet the British government knew full well that the Haganah was implicated in the terror campaign, and it made the point in a White Paper on terrorism in Palestine published only two days after the King David bombing. The British recognized they were fighting more than just a radical fringe. The Jewish Agency and the Haganah might differ with the Irgun and Lehi on tactics and methods, but they were united in purpose: the expulsion of the British to achieve Jewish statehood in Palestine.