A Roy Farran Error

Tom Segev continues with Roy Farran revelations:

In this column last week I wrote about a member of the British counterterror unit, Roy Farran, who allegedly murdered a member of the pre-state Lehi underground militia, Alexander Rubowitz, in May 1947. It seems Farran did not concentrate exclusively on rightist terror organizations. Israeli attorney Mati Atzmon claimed this week that in late February 1948, Farran detained three Haganah members who were manning the Israeli position at Mandelbaum Gate next to Jerusalem's Old City. According to Atzmon, Farran handed over the Haganah members to an Arab mob that murdered them. The crew's commander, Shimon Nissani, was Atzmon's uncle.

Segev got taken in. Perhaps the fact that Lechi might get some positive PR blinded him to the dates.

It was impossible for Farran do be personally involved as Farran left Mandate Palestine in October 1947 never to return.

Perhaps friends of his were involved as we know that British AWOLs were busy blowing up the editorial office and print shop of the Palestine Post, the Jewish Agency building and a car bomb in Ben Yehudah Street, Jerusalem which killed over 50.

By the way, this does not appear in the Hebrew edition. Perhaps he caught his mistake but the English went out as is.

Sneaky Segev

Ha'aretz's Tom Segev doesn't write tongue-in-the-cheek history, unless the "cheek" you think to which I am referring is part of his posterior.

Here follows his reporting on the Farran-Rubovitz Affair press conference I posted about earlier and I follow with my comment.

The Makings of History / Beyond the grave

The Israel Defense Forces' missing persons unit is searching for the remains of Alexander Rubowitz, a teenage member of the pre-state Lehi underground militia who was murdered in 1947, and has even enlisted the help of a private investigations firm in New York [not quite. Steve is working as an independent]. Two unit members attended a press conference on the matter this week at the Menachem Begin Heritage Center in Jerusalem. An American detective, Steve Rambam, claimed there is a chance that Rubowitz's remains will be found in Wadi Kelt east of Jerusalem, in the West Bank.

It was an interesting event. Although nothing historically new was revealed, at a time when Likud is preparing to form a government, it once again illustrated the centrality of history in Israeli political discourse. Advertisement

When he was approximately 16 years old, Rubowitz was arrested. It was the evening of May 6, 1947 and he was in the process of distributing Lehi flyers in Jerusalem's Rehavia neighborhood. The members of the British counter-terror unit who arrested him drove him toward Jericho. One of them, Roy Farran, beat Rubowitz to death with a rock, and his body was never discovered. [he leaves out the torture inflicted on Rubovitz and the knife carvings into his body]

The case kicked up a storm. Farran was court-martialed, acquitted, and returned to England. Lehi members sent him a letter bomb, which killed his brother [who mistakenly opened the package]. Farran emigrated to Canada [after first standing for Parliament in England] where he entered politics; late in life he served as solicitor general of the state of Alberta. He died about three years ago [June 2006]. Farran always denied killing Rubowitz, but official British documents that were unsealed five years ago strengthen the suspicions against him [and I wonder whether any of his four children, Sally, Peter, Teresa or David have any information].

Initially, Rubowitz was only included in the heroic pantheon of the right-wing terrorist groups Etzel and Lehi. But over time, Israeli cultural memory grew to include individuals who did not operate under the auspices of the Labor Movement, at which point Rubowitz's name went up on a memorial plaque, next to the site of his arrest. There is also a street in Jerusalem named after him.

The Rubowitz affair is quite well known; the unsealing of the British papers documenting the case was covered in a Haaretz article by. A new book on Rubowitz's murder has just come out ("Major Farran's Hat"), written by the well-known British historian David Cesarani, and Canadian Television CBC is making a film about the case. The main element keeping Rubowitz's case alive is the question mark that continues to hover over it: Where is the body? As long as it isn't found, Rubowitz is officially considered missing.

Several months ago, a veteran of the Revisionist Movement who lives in the United States contacted Pallorium Inc., the investigative services firm owned by Steve Rambam, a former member of the Betar youth movement, and asked him to investigate Rubowitz's murder. The man has since run out of money, but several Betar loyalists in Israel agreed to bankroll the continued investigation. Rambam says he makes do with covering his expenses.

At a press conference he convened in Jerusalem this week, Rambam claimed to have a lead on the body's burial site. He said he is working together with the IDF, but refused to go into details.

This story resembles the search for the body of Avshalom Feinberg, of the Nili underground organization working with the British against the Turks in World War II, which was found after the Six-Day War with the help of a few elderly Bedouin in Sinai. As with the Feinberg case, the Rubowitz case also has a political aspect to it. According to Rambam, he has managed to track down several of Farran's associates, and the law allows for trying them as war criminals. Some of his Israeli associates think such a move could "balance out," or even thwart, the attempts made in Britain, among other places, to try Israeli officers for suspected war crimes, including torture of Palestinian terrorists.

Historical comparisons are a dangerous business. Menachem Begin and Yitzhak Shamir fought their entire lives against the equation of the terror sowed by their organizations with Palestinian terrorism. Farran's career naturally recalls that of former Likud MK Ehud Yatom, of the Bus 300 affair: Just like the Canadian politician, he, too, killed his terrorist with a rock.

Leave it to Segev and the Haaretz editorial line: Jews are no better than Arabs and even worse.

But, of course, Rubovitz was not caught in a bus full with civilians, armed and threatening to blow them up, thus causing the overreaction of Yatom who was concerned that if he didn't pressure that terrorist, more innocents would be killed.

That non-parallel is typical of Segev.

The Beguiling Tom Segev

Tom Segev of Haaretz quotes Professor Renana Meridor, Eliyahu Meridor's widow and mother of Salai, Dan and Avital (there's another sister):-

Renana Meridor from Jerusalem writes in response to the affair of the Nakba being mentioned in textbooks, which was surveyed here last week: "Both Arab schoolchildren and Jewish schoolchildren in Israel are apparently not allowed to know that at the end of the hostilities of 1948, the part of Mandatory Palestine which remained in the hands of the Arabs was 'cleansed of Jews,' as all its Jewish residents were either killed or expelled from it."

but adds:

What both Jewish and Arab children ought to know is the following:

It is true that no Jews remained in some of the territories of Mandatory Palestine, which remained in Arab hands at the end of the hostilities of 1948. Most of the Jews who fled and were expelled lived in the Jewish Quarter of the Old City of Jerusalem, in the settlements of Gush Etzion, in Atarot and in Neveh Yaakov - a total of no more than 2,500 people, less than half of 1 percent of the Jews who then resided in the country. The Arab refugees numbered 650,000, and fewer than 150,000 Arabs remained in the territory of Israel after the war.

Besides leaving out a few places, notably the Labour movement's kibbuzt, Bet Ha'aravah, Segev fails to note that many more places were set aside by the UN to be included in the borders of the "Arab state" and they would have suffered the same fate of ethnic cleansing not to mention what I have repeatedly poasted here, that this policy of ethnic cleansing by Arabs directed at Jews started at Tel Hai in 1920 already.

Just Who Is Irrational?

Tom Segev strikes again:-

It all happened in what Segev depicts as a two-act drama of irrationality between June 5 and 10, 1967. The first act came when, in the throes of a national depression and existential angst, Israel invaded Egypt, destroying its air force and seizing both Gaza and the Sinai Peninsula. The second came a few days later when, in the irrational exuberance of that victory, Israel turned to the north and east, to Jordan and Syria, extending its realm in both directions.

While I haven't finished reading his book (in Hebrew), it is so off-the-mark and retrospectively biased.

I was here 1966-67 so this time I have full personal memories.

Follow-up Letters to Tom Segev

Okay, so my letter didn't get in. Here it is:-

Why should Tom Segev limit his query of what could have happened if "Israel Had Turned Back?" (June 5) to the year 1967?

Could we not ask what would have happened had the Arabs accepted the territorial compromise plan of the United Nations in 1947? And would the answer be no refugees, on either side; no establishment of the PLO and its terror apparatus; no denial of Jewish rights to visit their holy sites in Jerusalem until the city was united, again, in 1967 but rather the beginnings of peace?

These did, though:-

The Six-Day War, Plus 40 Years

To the Editor:

Tom Segev poses some interesting “what if” questions in connection with Israel’s capture of East Jerusalem and the West Bank in the Six-Day War in 1967 (“What if Israel Had Turned Back?,” Op-Ed, June 5). Here are some additional “what ifs” that deserve equal consideration:

What if the Arabs had accepted the United Nations partition plan of 1947, dividing the remainder of mandatory Palestine into a Jewish state and an Arab state? What if in the aftermath of Israel’s 1948 war of independence the Arab states had assimilated the refugees into their societies, rather than leave them to fester in refugee camps for generations?

What if the Arabs had created a Palestinian state in the West Bank between 1948 and 1967, when it was held by Jordan? What if Jordan had heeded Israel’s pleas at the outbreak of the Six-Day War and not joined the attack?

What if the Palestinians had accepted the “Clinton parameters” in late 2000, calling for the creation of a Palestinian state on more than 90 percent of the West Bank, all of Gaza and with East Jerusalem as its capital? What if in the wake of Israel’s unilateral disengagement from Gaza in 2005 the Palestinians had sought to create a viable society rather than a launching pad for rockets aimed at Israel?

And what if the Saudi peace proposal was not premised on the “right of return” of Palestinians into pre-1967 Israel?

Rather than young Israelis questioning why their parents didn’t turn back in 1967, young Palestinians should be asking why, at every opportunity, their parents have chosen conflict over compromise.

Gregg M. Mashberg
New Rochelle, N.Y., June 5, 2007

•


To the Editor:

The major obstacle to peace between Israelis and Palestinians is not Israel’s control of East Jerusalem, despite what Tom Segev writes. There is no peace today in the region because of Hamas’s firing Qassam rockets into the south of Israel and the continued threat of Hezbollah’s launching rockets into the north, as it did all last summer.

This, in conjunction with weak Palestinian leadership and the continued teaching of anti-Israel propaganda in the Palestinian school system, contributes largely to the complete lack of even a vision for a peaceful co-existence.

Stuart Pilichowski
Mevaseret Zion, Israel, June 5, 2007

•

To the Editor:

Tom Segev argues that, although “some kind of retaliation” by Israel against Jordan’s June 1967 attack was justified, it should have stopped short of taking East Jerusalem and the West Bank.

Mr. Segev tells us that in January 1967, Israel’s leaders concluded that it would not be in the country’s interest to occupy those areas. That’s hardly surprising, since doing so then would have meant initiating an aggressive war against what appeared to be a relatively moderate Arab state.

But in June, King Hussein attacked Israel, ignoring the pleas of its leaders to stay out of the fighting. Had it turned out differently, the war Jordan entered would have been one of extermination, as evidenced by the blood-curdling Arab calls that preceded it for the destruction of Israel and the death of the Jews.

Israel’s only possible response to such aggression was to destroy Jordan’s capacity to pose a future threat; to suggest that it could or should have done so without achieving borders with some defensive depth ignores reality.

Howard F. Jaeckel
New York, June 5, 2007