More on the King David Hotel

Tom Segev is your typical Haaretz liberal.
Clever, knowledgeable and oh-so-anti (and borderline sympathetic to the enemy)

His new piece, "The spirit of the King David Hotel", is just plain nasty.

The terror attack on the King David Hotel in Jerusalem was in its day the equivalent of the Twin Towers;

Not really. No civilian casualties were intended and no suicide mission was planned.

The unveiling of the other plaque this week was meant to cap an academic conference held at the Menachem Begin Heritage Center on the issue of who is a freedom fighter and who is a terrorist...Twenty-five minutes went by and then "for some reason" the British did not evacuate the building "and as a result" 91 people were "regrettably" killed. There were 28 British, 41 Arabs, 17 Jews and five others. To emphasize the military aspect of the operation, the plaque notes that one of the Etzel people was killed "in an exchange of fire."

But that's exactly what happened. It is Segev who is attributing evil intentions, stemming from, perhaps, his evil intentions.

The British government is demanding the plaque's removal. Her Majesty's ambassador and the consul have written to the mayor of Jerusalem that such an act of terror cannot be honored, even if it was preceded by a warning. To this day, it is not clear what made the bombing's planners believe the British would evacuate the building. Would Benjamin Netanyahu, as prime minister, have ordered his bureau evacuated on the basis of telephone threat from a Palestinian terror group?

Let me make it clear.

There was a telephoned warning. It was received. Flash grenades and a petard were set off. Phone calls from within the hotel from a signals officer who witnessed the shooting of a British Major were made to three separate security stations. The British troops on the roof opened fire for a few minutes on the escaping Irgun soldiers. Nothing set off alarm bells but we do have testimonies that the Brits all thought it was a bluff.

...In the 60 years since the attack at the King David Hotel, Israel has hurt some two million civilians, including 750,000 who lost their homes in 1948, another quarter million Palestinians who were forced to leave the West Bank in the Six-Day War and hundreds of thousands of Egyptian civilians who were expelled from the cities along the Suez Canal during the War of Attrition. And now tens of thousands of Lebanese villagers are being forced to abandon their homes, and air force pilots are once again bombing Beirut and other cities. Hundreds of civilians have been killed. Regrettably. It's all in the spirit of the King David Hotel. One can always say there was a mishap.

It's all in the spirit of Amin El-Husseini, the Grand Mufti, and Yasser Arafat who consistently tried to kill as many Jews as possible and eradicate the Jewish state.

Segev, you're really some piece of work.

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And here is the text of the letter sent to the London Times, which hasn't yet (if at all?) published:-

The Menachem Begin Heritage Center is a state-sponsored institution created by a law of Israel’s parliament, the Knesset. It is not “right-wing” and does not promote any party partisan agenda. The Center conducted a two-day academic conference on the occasion of the 60th anniversary of the 1946 resistance attack at the King David Hotel, as reported in your paper. The hotel’s southern wing served as the offices of the British Mandate’s Secretariat as well as those of the British Army. The event most certainly was no “celebration” as your paper asserts. Scholars presented papers, not all laudatory, in traditional academic freedom.

At the opening session, by implication, the protests of HMG Ambassador S. McDonald and the Jerusalem Consul-General J. Jenkins were rejected. The operation was not an act of terrorism and most assuredly, warnings to evacuate the building were relayed.

Harry Hurwitz, Head of the Center, made the following three points: (a) British authorities made a cardinal blunder in situating their military and administrative headquarters in a civilian setting; (b) the operation, carried out by the Irgun, was initiated and authorized by the command of the United Resistance Movement which included also the Haganah and Lechi; (c) there was most certainly no intention to cause civilian casualties and among five examples cited in proof was one that was made in the House of Lords in 1979 by Lord Barnett Janner.

Major-General Dudley Sheridan Skelton, CS, DSO, FRCS, formerly DGMS in India, Hon. Physician to HM the King and to HE the Viceroy of India, was, in 1946, head of a hospital in Palestine. He was at the hotel on the day of the explosion and testified that a warning was passed on to the officers in the bar but they reacted in rather jocular terms implying is was a 'Jewish bluff'.

The cause of the resistance was the reneging by Britain of its international commitments and responsibilities to facilitate the reconstitution of the Jewish national home in its ancient patrimony. The closing of the gates of the Mandate to Jews attempting to flee Hitler’s Europe and the prohibition to purchase land defined Britain as an occupier administering an oppressive regime in the country. These are topics which another academic conference will surely review in the near future.