What to Keep in Mind Regarding the Altalena Incident

The Hagana in Europe was aware early on that the Irgun had purchased a ship and were preparing it for sailing to Israel with arms and men/women to fight early in 1948.

At one point, given the expense of keeping the Altalena in port (rental fees, etc.), the Hagana was offered to purchase it from the Irgun.

On June 16, a meeting was held in Tel Aviv between the Irgun High Command and Yisrael Gallil, Levy Eshkol and other Defense Ministry officials to arrange its arrival.

The arrival location, Kfar Vitkin, was a Mapai moshav.

Defense Minsitry officials were update on Saturday night, June 19, that the Altalena had reached the area off of Tel Aviv and would be proceeding to the off-load area near Kfar Vitkin.

The talks broke down on the beach at Kfar Vitkin over the division of the arms and Begin was given 10 minutes to stand down his men. The people who were there with whom I spoke insist it were the IDF soldiers under Moshe Dayan's command who first fired on those on the beach.

The Altalena was shadowed by navy corvettes on its way to Tel Aviv. As the ship neared the coastline, the corvettes began firing at it with bursts of machine gun fire, and stopped after fighters on board. 

According to the book Altalena by journalist and political analyst Shlomo Nakdimon [he], Ben-Gurion instructed the Israeli Air Force to sink the ship on the high seas, long before it approached the shore. This would have resulted in much greater loss of life aboard. Gordon Levett, a Mahal volunteer pilot, wrote in his book Flying Under Two Flags that Heiman Shamir, deputy commander of the Air Force, tried to convince non-Jewish pilot volunteers to attack the ship. However, three pilots refused to participate in the mission, one of them saying, "You can kiss my foot. I did not lose four friends and fly 10,000 miles in order to bomb Jews."

On June 22, the day the Altalena reached the Frishman Street area of the Tel Aviv shoreline, where subsequently it was fired upon, the Palmach arms ship Inaco slipped into Jaffa Port indicating that the excuse that the Altalena should not have set sail as the UN Truce had begun was only applied to the Irgun, not the Palmach.

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