July 21, 1938: Five Dead by Arab Terror

During the "Disturbances" or the Great Arab Revolt of 1936-1939, the Mufti succeeded in causing the British to alter their concept of what was the purpose of the League of Nations Mandate - from reconstituting  the Jewish people's national home in Palestine in a territory from the Mediterranean Sea to the Jordan River (taking into consideration that the territories lying between the Jordan and the eastern boundary of Palestine as ultimately determined, the Mandatory shall be entitled, with the consent of the Council of the League of Nations, to postpone or withhold application of such provisions of this mandate) and that stems from a recognition given to the historical connection of the Jewish people with that country, to a decision that "His Majesty's Government therefore now declare unequivocally that it is not part of their policy that Palestine should become a Jewish State" which members of the League of Nations Permanent Mandates Commission considered an illegal act, one that reneged on what had been decided 17 years earlier.

That move by the British, which was accompanied by a severe restriction of immigration certificates to 75,000 over the next five years, obliquely aided Hitler's mission to eradicate the Jews of Europe by keeping them within his grasp, as they had no where to go,

In addition, over 500 Jews who were in Palestine were killed by Arab terrorist gangs and untold Jewish property was burned, uprooted and destroyed.

The Yishuv , in general, maintained a policy a Havlaga, self-restraint, whereas the Irgun, from mid-1937 on, conducted counter-terrorist operations which included marketplace bombings, bus bombings, incursions into Arab villages and assassinations.  At times, the Hagana also engaged in such actions, especially in the Haifa district.

Whether or not these Havlaga-breaking actions more moral or not has been argued since that time, most recently in a new, rather tendentious and error-ridden book.

I picked one incident that, perhaps, provides an insight into the thinking of the Yishuv's defense forces at that time.

It is not mentioned in this Wikipedia entry.

In Parliament, on July 20, 1938, the Secretary of State for the Colonies Mr. M. MacDonald informed the members of the House that

"During the fortnight ended the 19th July, 77 persons were killed and 247 wounded, and there were 32 cases of bomb-throwing. Other terrorist acts included 52 cases of sniping, seven armed robberies and one kidnapping. There were two outbreaks of arson at Haifa, which were suppressed, and a number of acts of sabotage against Jewish, Arab and Government property; but I am unable to estimate the extent of the damage to property sustained during the period."

The very same night, at a location called Kiriat HaCharoshet (now within Kiryat Tivon) then populated by 60 families with a train station, marked in blue:

now an upscale area:

an attack by Arabs took place. Here's Davar of July 21:

In the upper left-hand corner is the short report.   This is the following day's item on the funerals:

Here is the Palestine Post report in English on another terror attack at a nearby location:

On that very same page, you can read about other events just to get an idea of what was happening:

This record informs the the five people murdered were Shmuel Gutterman, Leah (Lotte) Gutterman (34), Bilhah Gutterman, Rivka (Regina) Spiegler and Yaakov Spiegler. The Guttermans were three years in the country and Shmuel, 38, worked as a baker. That evening, the family was in the midst of sitting Shiva for their oldest boy who had died of cancer, it seems. Their daughter was less than two years old.  The Arabs who broke into their shack shot and stabbed them to death and then set the place alight.  They then broke into the nearby shack where the husband had not yet returned home.  The mohter and son were stabbed and burnt alive while a daughter, six-year old Ora, managed somehow to slip out and hide in the yard until rescued by defenders who, despite shooting and wounding several attackers, were outnumbered and had to withdraw to the center of the neighborhood.

The next day's Palestine Post:

Was this an isolated incident?

Here's more of page 2:

and from the previous day's paper:

And the following day's edition

Maybe now you have a better perspective on whether restraint or response was the policy to be adopted.

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She Came To Pillory, Not To Praise

Sara Hirschhorn has an op-ed in the New York Times (see below) and I will deal with its contents further on but one element jumped out at me and so I left a comment there and it is this:

"Settler rabbis and the leaders of American immigrant communities in the West Bank have either played down their crime or offered muted criticism."

That assertion is either a lie or a sign of ignorance to my mind.  Or a dubious misrepresentation of the reality.  Either Sara is an op-ed columnist or she is an academic, at east in this stage of her life.

More than three dozen Rabbis, leading Rabbis from within the Gush Emunim/Yesha camp, Rabbis of communities, signed a proclamation entitled "Thou Shall Not Murder" and more joined later.  Here: 

Leading spokespersons of the Yesha Council denounced the act as they have done for the past years, notably by Dani Dayan and others. So have educators like the head of the most prestigious pre-Army mechina. Rabbi Haim Druckman issued a strong statement. Tzohar Rabbis, too. There is also this story and even I upped the poster at my FB account.  There was an interfaith event in Gush Etzion. Well, sort of interfaith. If she was looking for a serious moral problem she should have pointed the finger at the Palestinian Authority and its attitude towards the killing of Jews.  The few Rabbis that were equivocal in their pronouncements are either part of the 'price tag' thinking or known for their out-of-camp views and no one follows them.  Maybe she relied on this claptrap.  Of course, for some people, there is never enough evidence that some people are not doing the wrong thing.  

Pillorying is easier than praising.

I know Sara, even well, and here we are in the hills back of Shiloh.  

I  tried to assist her in her research and connect her to friends.  No regrets.  Luckily, she found a wealth of documentation to trace the history of Jewish Americans in the early days of the revitalization of Jewish life in Judea and Samaria and Gaza then as well.

I am aware that Sara doesn't think this is happening enough.  Condemnations should be louder and stronger in her opinion.  By the way, did the PA condemn an American's act of terror in the driver-by murder of Malachi Rosenfeld?

She assumes that 'price tag' activities are being tolerated like this person publishing in the Jewish Press.  She probably would have me send out of our community someone like my neighbor Era Rappaport who was sentenced to prison for an attack on a terrorist leader even after he fulfilled the terms of his imprisonment and punishment.  Raising money for his defense fund seems to be a crime in her mind.

Our fundamental respect for life, she assumes, has been lost.

We Shilonians turned in a 'price-tagger', who did not live in Yesha, who had broken windows of the cars of Arab laborers in Shiloh parked outside our entrance gate.  A recent inflammatory poster on churches didn't last the night on our billboards. We need no patronising lecturing.

I could, of course, quote Rabbi Elazar in the Midrash Tanhuma, at Metzora :

he who is merciful to the cruel, in the end becomes cruel to those who are merciful

But the fact of the matter is that not of our initiative, we are in a terror war, one the Arabs have directed almost totally exclusively against the unarmed and defenceless, especially children.  It was launched in the political sense in April 1920 although anti-Jewish violence meant to prevent Jews from buying property and repopulating the land of the Jewish homeland reached back into the mid-1850s.

If many people can seek to support and justify an Arab claim to establish an independent state of Palestine after all this terror, this ongoing terror, then I admit, I feel no moral inadequacy in this matter for as much as the 'price tag' phenomenon is wrong, criminal and senseless, besides being quite unhelpful and even harmful to our enterprise - and Hirschhorn's article is an example of that - I do make comparisons overall and see our moral and ethical standard as much higher than that of our neighbors overall.  After all, we recently learned that the Palestinian Authority promotes a libel, informing all that "Jews of high position" planned an arson attempt at the Al-Aqsa Mosque.  Duma is nothing compared to what this portends.

As for Duma itself, I am still not convinced Jews perpetrated the torching and until suspects are caught, place on trial and found guilty, I'll be a Western democrat human rights advocate and withhold judgment [UPDATE, in Hebrew: unlike the IDF which is "sure" it's a Jewish terror act].  That would be the ethical stance.  [UPDATE, in Hebrew]

   -     -     -     -     -


And now comments on some excerpts from her op-ed:

Israeli Terrorists, Born in the U.S.A.
Jerusalem — ON July 31, in the West Bank village of Duma, 18-month-old Ali Dawabsheh was burned alive in a fire. All available evidence suggests that the blaze was a deliberate act of settler terrorism. 

And exactly how much evidence is that "all"?  Can she explain a Chabad-like graffiti on the wall?  She should have noted that the police were not neutral by not offering the standard reaction of "all avenues of investigation are being followed".

More disturbingly, several of the alleged instigators, currently being detained indefinitely, are not native-born Israelis — they have American roots.  But there has been little outcry in their communities. Settler rabbis and the leaders of American immigrant communities in the West Bank have either played down their crime or offered muted criticism.

See above for quantity and quality.

After years of impunity for settlers who commit violent crimes, Israel’s internal security agency, the Shin Bet, has now supposedly cracked down 

Impunity or perhaps bad police procedures or being fixated on certain subjects, the wrong ones?

by rounding up a grand total of four youths believed to be connected to recent acts of settler terrorism — three of whom trace their origins to the United States.

So, that's it?  Four?  And they are only suspects.

...Rabbi Shlomo Riskin...to him, settlers were now the victims. “We’re not fighting against an enemy who plays by the same rules as we do,” he argued. “Given the cruelty and barbarism of the Arabs to their own people, our ethical imperative is not to commit suicide.” 

And he is wrong?

...many mainstream American settlers...have also learned the value of speaking fluent liberalese on the international stage. By translating Scripture into sound bites, Jewish-American settlers have played a pivotal role in the public relations rebranding of the Israeli settler movement — and these professed liberals are now helping to deflect attention from crimes committed by Jews.

No, we are not.

For all their protestations that they are good liberals, many American settler leaders have been deafeningly silent on recent acts of Jewish terrorism...Where are their op-eds in American and Israeli newspapers condemning violent Jewish extremism?

The NYTimes, The Forward, etc. do not publish me for I am a "settler".

For four decades, their condemnation has often been either muted or tempered by attempts to play down Jewish terrorism by framing it as an issue of “understanding the context” — a euphemism for reacting to Palestinian violence. 

And, for a scholar, context is ... wrong?

...it is not enough for Jews to preach to Palestinians that moderates must speak out, murderers must be cast out, and incitement must be stopped without taking the same aggressive steps within their own communities.

And it is not enough for Sara and fellow liberals to preach solely to the Jews.  Or to castigate them unfairly, especially to promote a book, based on her PhD dissertation, like her forthcoming “City on a Hilltop: American Jews and the Israeli Settler Movement Since 1967.”

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P.S.  I see now that the Israeli government is to blame:.

The Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) has said it holds the Israeli government "fully responsible" for the death of Riham Dawabsheh, the mother of a Palestinian toddler killed in an arson attack on 31 July in a Palestinian village in the West Bank...Saeb Erekat, Palestinian chief negotiator, called the assassination a consequence of a "culture of hate that has been developing in Israel by supporting settlements and apartheid", which, he claimed, is fuelled by "hate speech, settlement expansion and the impunity granted to Israel by the International community".

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Haaretz Strikes Terror

From the paper:-

With the shrapnel comments about the Palestinians, it was clear to everyone else that the true shrapnel − or “pain in the ass,” in Bennett’s American mother tongue − is actually the settlement movement itself. It’s that same settlement movement that is the real terrorist attack − not just any attack, but a suicide bombing. The same post-Zionist messianic settler camp is aptly labeled as suicide bombing. An entire nation has succumbed to it, and knowingly serves it, even as it becomes abundantly clear that it is being led into the abyss.

Eyes Wide Open
by Uri Misgav

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The New Israel Fund's Campaign of Terror

If you go here (in Hebrew), you can see how the New Israel Fund is launching a terror campaign against its right-of-center rivals.

While their ad terms the actions of the "Price Tag" phenomenon as terror, their text doesn't.  It avoids it.  Was their a change of mind but too late to alter the ad?

Do all the sponsoring/participating organizations agree that the actions are "terror"?

Is the throwing of rocks by anarchists also terror?*

Have the organizations been bought by NIF money into a radical leftwing frame?



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* at last Friday's demo at Nebi Salah, I have this information from a resident of Neveh Tzuf:

They came from Nabi Salah to block the road 1.5 - 2 hours before Shabbat when most guests arrive. The residents here had nothing to do with them - the shomer yom waited inside the gate to prevent any assault on the fence but the soldiers appeared quickly and took them away. For us, the incident was over.
I reported this to Yediot's Akiva Novick and to Josh Breman's Y-Net.
Tazpit has footage.

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Meet A Jewish Terrorist

First, PM Benjamin Netanyahu displayed adroitness:

Prime Minister Netanyahu rejected, at this stage, the recommendation to define the rioters as terrorists.  Prime Minister Netanyahu said that, "Those who raise a hand against IDF soldiers or Israel Police personnel will be punished severely. Those who rioted at the IDF Ephraim Brigade base are like those who riot in Bilin. It is important to me to emphasize that this is a small group that does not represent the public that lives in Judea and Samaria, who are loyal to the state and its laws and who condemn the
rioting."

 
And about those stonethrowers, here is a song of praise for very violent Arab protesting by one of those Bilin rioters, Jonathan Pollak:
 

A courageous Palestinian has died, shrouded in stones

The army spokesman was right - Mustafa died because he threw stones; he died because he dared to speak a truth, with his hands, in a place where the truth is forbidden.

Mustafa Tamimi threw stones. Unapologetically and sometimes fearlessly. Not on that day alone, but nearly every Friday. He also concealed his face...so he could continue to throw stones and resist the theft of his land. He continued to do this until the moment of his death.

...A gas grenade was fired at him from an armored military Jeep at a distance of only a few meters. It was not out of fear that the person who did fired the shot hit him. He poked the barrel of the rifle through the door of the armored vehicle and fired with clear intent. [the soldier has now testified that he did not see the Arab when he opened the back door just a crack to fire the cannister]

...Mustafa's body is lying lifeless because he had the courage to throw stones on the 24th anniversary of the first intifada, which begot the Palestinian children of the stones. His brother Oudai is imprisoned at Ofer Prison and was not allowed to attend the funeral, because he too dared to throw stones...Mustafa was a brave man killed because he threw stones and refused to be afraid of a soldier bearing arms,

...Thousands of stone-throwers followed him at his funeral...Mustafa, we walk behind your body with our heads bowed and eyes full of tears. We cherish you, because you died for throwing stones and we did not.

And that, Mr. Pollack, is support for terror, encouraging violence.

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Off The Wagon

Previously, here, I wrote about a book, Burda's Wagon by a Mike Davis (and here's my letter to TLS).

While recently in NY, I stopped by Strand Bookstore to flip through the few pages on the Jewish undergrounds and found a good few silly errors.

Here are some of them:

p. 18     The name of the founder of Lechi, the 'Stern Group', was Avraham not Avram.

p. 19     The bombing in Jerusalem involving a taxi in 1946 was Irgun, not Lechi.

p. 20     While noting a January 12, 1947 Irgun attack, he claims previously on p. 4 that the car bomb apparatus was fully conceptualized by the Lechi earlier. 
Bit of a mix-up.

p. 20     The Goldschmidt attack did not exactly involve a car bomb.  The jeep broke through the fence, the sappers then unloaded explosives from the car into the building. (*)

I probably did not catch all as I was standing in an aisle, jotting down things in not that an organized fashion.

This is research?

___________

(*)   Here's the official first report:

1 MARCH 1947


At approximately 3.20 p.m. on 1st March, 1947, truck No. M740R drove into King George Avenue, Jerusalem, from Keran Kayemeth Street through the barbed wire surrounding Goldsmith House Officers Club in King George Avenue. One person dismounted and placed a package in the building. At the same time, automatic fire was opened upon the sentries at Goldsmith House from the vicinity of the houses adjacent to the Synagogue in King George Avenue. The sentries replied. A small explosion occurred at this time at the rear of the East side of Goldsmith House which set a tent on fire. During exchange of shots, a number of persons dressed in Khaki as British O.R.'s jumped from the truck and ran away. A heavy explosion then occurred causing extensive damage to Goldsmith House. Shortly before the explosion, a police vehicle proceeding along King George Avenue in the direction of Goldsmith House, was caught in cross-fire. Mr. Beynon, British Clerical Officer of Police H.Q., was killed and Inspector Price, British Constable Church and Mr. Cleary, British Clerical Officer of Police H.Q., were wounded. Casualties as known at present are twelve dead, including Jewish female Telephone Operator, fifteen injured. At least three more bodies are believed to be under the rubble.

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Churchill on the Crosshairs of Lechi?

I think this Yedhioth Ahronot story doesn't sound right:

The Lehi group planned to assassinate British Prime Minister Winston Churchill in 1944, MI5 records exposed by The Telegraph indicate.  According to the files, Eliyahu Bet-Zuri, who was executed in 1945 for assassinating Lord Moyne, suggested sending agents to London to murder the British prime minister in order to force the British out of Palestine.

"Suggested"?  To who?

...Major James Robertson, from the agency's Middle East section, said threats made by Bet-Zuri in November 1944 were disclosed by another member of the Lehi, also known as the "Stern Gang."  The suspect revealed: "As soon as he (Bet-Zuri) returned to Stern Group headquarters he proposed to suggest a plan for the assassination of highly placed British political personalities, including Mr Churchill, for which purpose emissaries should be sent to London."

Robertson nevertheless noted: "The above information does not, as you will see, amount to very much."

"Returned"?  "Another member"?  See below.

This is true:

According to the files, attempts to target British officials continued after the World War II in order to put pressure on the UK to create a Jewish state.  In February 1946 the British defense security officer in Israel sent a secret coded telegram back to London revealing intelligence from "reliable sources" about a plot to kill British ministers, The Telegraph reported.

"Stern Group are training members to go to England to assassinate members of His Majesty's Government, especially Mr Bevin... Stern further reported to be receiving practical sympathy from important Jews (in) Palestine," the telegram stated.

Item:

Yaakov Heruti was a member of the technical department of the Lehi (The Stern Gang), a radical pre-state underground group, and specialized in preparing explosive devices.  In 1947, Natan Yellin Mor, a Lehi leader dispatched him to London to set up a branch there. Among the tasks he was assigned were the assassination of British foreign minister Ernest Bevin (the order was rescinded), attacking General Evelyn Barker (the bomb was sent, but neutralized) and the assassination of Roy Farran, a British police officer who was responsible for the death, following an intense interrogation, of Alexander Rubowitz, a Lehi pamphlet delivery boy. The bomb was delivered but accidentally killed Farran's younger brother.

See this interview, too.

The BBC did an interview with him:-

It wasn’t long before British security services got wind of what was happening and in early 1946 they issued this top secret internal warning:  “Members of the Stern group are now being organised and are under training. It is expected that they will be sent to the United Kingdom to assassinate important members of his majesty’s government, particularly, Mr Bevin.”

In the months that followed a number of bombs exploded in London and an attempt was made to drop on a bomb on the House of Commons from a hired plane. This last effort was only stopped after French Police discovered Stern Gang members preparing to cross the channel in a plane containing a large bomb.

Mike Thomson and the Document team track down the assassin sent to kill Earnest Bevin and the man who gave him the explosives to do it.

As for The Telegraph story, here, well, after November 6, when Bet-Zuri assassinated Lord Moyne, he never returned to HQ as he was arrested.  What is that source talking about?

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