Off Goes Another Letter-to-the-Editor

The Editor
TLS
London

Sir,

Daniel Pick’s review of Mike Davis’ history of the car bomb, BUDA’S WAGON, (“The first car bomb”, July 1) includes the assertion that a “seminal date..is January 12 1947, when Zionist extremists, the Stern Gang, drove a truck of explosives into a British police station in Haifa to lethal effect”. Unfortunately, Davis has erred, twice.

In the first instance, the first Sternist car bomb attack was over a month previously, at Sarafand Army camp on December 5, 1946. Two hundred kilos destroyed offices in the camp and there were casualties and injuries. Moreover, it cannot be ignored that car bombs were placed by British soldiers in Palestine, among them Eddie Brown, a police captain and Peter Madison, an army corporal, who crossed over to the Arab side in early 1948. One blew up the Palestine Post editorial offices on Feb. 1 causing one fatality and 20 injured. Another left in Ben-Yehuda Street on Feb. 22 killed 52 with 123 injured. On March 11, a car bomb exploded in the Jewish Agency courtyard leaving 13 dead and 84 wounded. Although the driver of the last one was an Arab, he was aided by British explosives experts.

In the second instance, as the Palestine Post reported on July 25, 1938, a car bomb was detonated the previous day on Sir Herbert Samuel Quay in Tel Aviv. Twenty-one passers-by were injured. Eyewitnesses claimed, albeit ambiguously, that Arabs had driven the car whereas a car dealer said it had been sold to a TransJordanian. At that time of the Arab Revolt, hundreds of Jews had been murdered in Arab terror attacks and dozens of British troops also were victims. It is illogical that Jews would have placed the car bomb. Can one hope that this information was also included in the book?