The Underground Zionist Movements of Pre-State Israel
By Omer Hortig
On April 25, Israel celebrated its 75th independence day, or Yom Ha’atzmaut in Hebrew, with celebrations and televised events despite recent social unrest. Declared a nation in 1948 against the backdrop of the Holocaust and an Arab invasion aimed at its eradication, Israel has persevered and prospered amidst constant existential threats. Today, as Israel’s survival continues to be under threat, it is important to celebrate the nation’s fighting spirit on which it was founded and has relied upon for the better part of a century. This is exemplified by the daring underground paramilitary organizations which fought for the defense of the Jewish people in their homeland and for the formation of a free and independent Jewish state in the decades leading up to Israeli independence.
Jews have had a presence in Israel since biblical times, either as their own nation-state or as a minority in the many conquering empires which have claimed the area. Due to invasion and persecution by numerous armies, from the Babylonians to the Greeks to the Romans, the Jews entered a period of diaspora lasting for millenia, always with a yearning to return to their homeland. The longing of diaspora Jews to return to Israel was immortalized by Spanish poet Naphtali Herz Imber in 1886 in “Hatikvah” (“the hope”), later to become modern Israel’s national anthem — “The hope of 2000 years/ To live as a free people/ In our own land/ The land of Zion and Jerusalem.” For generations, Jewish statehood was seen as an impossible dream. However, as anti-Semitic persecution reached unbearable levels around the world, the creation of a Jewish nation became less of a hope and more of a necessity. While covering the infamous “Dreyfus affair” in 1895, in which a decorated French military officer Alfred Dreyfus was framed as a spy simply because he was Jewish (later to be exonerated by new evidence), journalist Theodor Herzl became convinced that Jews must exit the diaspora and form their own nation in Israel. Herzl, who would become one of the most heralded Zionists of his time, and others would form the first organized Zionist organizations which promoted Jewish return to the Holy Land.
In the decades ensuing the Dreyfus Affair, tens of thousands of young Zionist Jews — among them future Israeli leaders such as Golda Meir and David Ben-Gurion — would make their way to modern-day Israel. These new settlers would make up what was called the “Yishuv,” a disorganized collection of agricultural settlements spread throughout what was then the British Mandate of Palestine. After their victory over the Central Powers in World War I and the subsequent collapse of the Ottoman Empire, the British gained control of a vast portion of the Middle East, including modern-day Israel, Jordan, and Iraq. The territory of Palestine, a name for the region which can trace its origins to the ancient Greeks, was inhabited by mostly Hashemite Arabs and a long-standing Jewish minority.
Even before the arrival of the British, Jewish settlers in the Yishuv recognized their need for self-defense. The first Jewish self-defense organization in Palestine, Bar-Giora, was formed by settlers in 1907; among them was Yitzhak Ben Zvi who would become the second president of Israel. Many of these early settlers were pacifist Socialists, reserving their use of force only to self-defense, or havlaga. After widespread Arab riots resulted in Jewish deaths in 1920, the leftist Jewish Agency formed the Haganah, an underground defense force composed of earlier militias and normal Yishuv residents. The Haganah would greatly grow in size, becoming the main defense force for Jewish Palestinians with a membership of 21,000 by 1937.
Yet, disagreements existed between Zionist settlers. The Haganah, the Jewish Agency, and the Zionist establishment was dominated by socialists like Ben-Gurion and Meir. This establishment preferred diplomacy with the British over militant action and limited their activities to self-defense. Others preferred more drastic measures. Vladimir Jabotinsky, a Russian Zionist activist and one of the founding members of the Haganah, wrote The Iron Wall in 1923, which called for the establishment of a Jewish state by force. Jabotinsky believed Zionist leaders were being too weak and passive in the face of existential threats. His splinter movement, known as Revisionist Zionism or “pragmatic Zionism,” gained popularity in the 1920s as anti-semitism thrived in Europe and Arab attacks threatened the Yishuv in mandatory Palestine.
In 1931, Revisionist Zionists inspired by Jabotinsky split from the Haganah to form the Irgun Zvai Leumi, known shortly as the Irgun. The Irgun called for a violent struggle for independence, relying on sabotage, intimidation, and retaliatory attacks as a way to force the British out of Palestine. A smaller organization, it had a membership of 1,800 in 1937. Even still, some settlers believed the Irgun had not gone far enough. The most militant Irgunists broke away in 1940 to form their own group, Lohamey Heruth Israel (Lehi), under the leadership of Avraham Stern. Also known as the “Stern Gang,” the Lehi pushed their agenda solely through violence; Lehi engaged in robbery, murder, and saw “no political reason to spare the lives of Englishmen as long as they remained in Palestine.” Infamously, Lehi even attempted to collaborate with the genocidal Axis powers to sabotage the British. The mainstream Jewish leadership were in constant conflict with the Irgun and Lehi, with Ben-Gurion calling them “harmful, destructive gangs,” who threatened diplomatic efforts with the British.
Prompted by violence between Jews and Arabs in Palestine, as well as mass Jewish migration which threatened the status quo in the region, the British implemented the White Paper of 1939 which strictly prohibited Jewish immigration. Under this law, the British began to turn away refugee ships of Jews fleeing persecution in Europe just as World War II began. Opposed by Zionists seeking to turn Palestine into a safe haven for Jews, the White Paper exacerbated hatred of the British. Faced with a humanitarian crisis, the Haganah diverted its efforts towards aiding Jewish illegal immigration. At the same time, many Palestinian Jews sought to aid the war effort against the anti-Semitic Nazi regime. While furious over the White Paper, the Jewish Agency maintained contact with the British and pushed for Jewish recruitment in the war effort. Explaining this near form of doublethink, Ben-Gurion explained, “We must assist the British in the war as if there were no White Paper and we must resist the White Paper as if there were no war.” Ten thousand Palestinian Jews would go on to fight in the British Army during the war.
As the Jewish Agency maintained its policy of diplomacy with the British, the White Paper proved to be a generational act of cruelty. Quickly, information about the fate of European Jewry at the hands of the Germans reached Jewish leaders in Palestine and the world at large. Despite being outlawed by the British, ships full of desperate Jews continued to arrive in Palestine. In one instance, after being refused entry in Haifa, the illegal immigrant ship Patria was destroyed by a bomb planted by the Haganah to prevent the ship being able to leave. The effects of the explosion were miscalculated, killing 267 out of the 1,800 Jewish refugees on board. In 1942, the Struma immigrant ship sank after the British turned it away from Palestine, killing 768. Unable to find refuge in their homeland, Jews sought refuge elsewhere, only to be turned away time and time again. Six million Jewish civilians would be exterminated in the Holocaust between 1939–1945, abandoned by the rest of the world.
While the Haganah focused on smuggling Jews to safety, the Irgun and Lehi turned to violence to enact change. After Jabotinsky died in 1940 of a heart attack, his protégé and future Prime Minister of Israel Menachem Begin took charge of the Irgun. In 1944, he declared a revolt against the British, proclaiming:
“This then is our demand: immediate transfer of power in Eretz Israel to a provisional Hebrew government. We shall fight, every Jew in the homeland will fight. The God of Israel, the Lord of Hosts, will aid us. There will be no retreat. Freedom — or death.”
Begin and the Irgun continued to fight the British even amidst their fight against the Nazis in World War II, orchestrating train sabotages and kidnappings of British soldiers. The Lehi went even further; British Minister of State for the Middle East and the architect of Palestine immigration policy Lord Moyne was assassinated by Lehi militants in Cairo in November 1944. Close friends with British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, Lord Moyne’s assassination came as a shock — he was the first high profile British official to have been targeted in the conflict.
Faced with international condemnation of the assassination, the Jewish Agency became deeply worried about the activities of the Irgun and Lehi. In the eyes of the Agency international support was instrumental in any potential future agreement for the establishment of a Jewish state. Such a high-profile act of violence was the last straw for Jewish leadership, with Golda Meir stating, “We have to do everything to make them stop in this work.” What ensued was a so-called “hunting season” of Irgunists and Lehi militants by the Palmach, the full-time commando force of the Haganah. As the Haganah aided the British in hunting down dissidents, Begin refused to retaliate, saying, “No, not civil war. Not that at any price.” Nevertheless, the Irgun’s membership dwindled.
World War II ended in 1945 with the defeat of Nazi Germany and its allies, but the White Paper remained, despite the millions of Jewish refugees seeking to flee a destroyed Europe. Decades after the Balfour Declaration promised the Jews a national homeland in Palestine, the British still did not have a concrete plan for the future of the territory. The leaders of the Haganah had had enough. In spite of decades of disagreement and conflict, the Haganah agreed to join forces with the Irgun and Lehi and form the United Resistance Movement (URM). The URM staged attacks on strategic points, railways, ships, radar equipment, and bridges to cripple the British administration. In response, the British cracked down on the Yishuv in unparalleled fashion; 17,000 newly deployed British soldiers imposed curfews, engaged in mass arrests, instituted the death penalty for carrying firearms, and arrested the acting head of the Jewish Agency J.C. Fishman. The URM’s response to “Black Sabbath” would prove to be decisive.
On July 22, 1946, a bomb planted by the Irgun exploded in the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, which had been serving as the British military and administrative headquarters for Palestine. Despite three calls being placed to the hotel to warn guests of an impending attack, 91 people were killed. While the Haganah had initially signed off on the attack, they had changed their mind as the date approached. The Jewish Agency joined the British in condemning the bombing, and the URM dissolved. But the existence of an alliance was still significant — for half a year, the settlers had been able to put aside their differences and put up a united front to the British. The King David Hotel bombing became a watershed moment in convincing the British it was time to leave Palestine.
In 1947, the British brought their Palestinian problem to the newly formed United Nations. In a historic move, the United Nations adopted Resolution 181, partitioning the Palestinian territory into two separate and independent Arab and Jewish states. With the departure of the British, the Jewish underground came out into the open, but disagreements remained. In the early scramble for territory, as neighboring Arab nations attacked the fledgling Jewish state, miscommunication, pride, and the fog of war resulted in the Altalena affair — the final confrontation between the Irgun and the Haganah, which would lead to the formation of the IDF. A month after the declaration of Israeli independence and the ensuing Arab-Israeli war, the Irgun organized a large shipment of weapons onboard the ship Altalena. Worried about a potential coup d’état by Begin, newly inaugurated Prime Minister Ben-Gurion barred the Altalena from landing at Kfar Vitkin on June 20, 1948. The ship continued to Tel Aviv where it once again tried to land, and where Haganah soldiers opened fire on the Altalena. As the Altalena burned, the Irgun abandoned the ship and the weapons. Under pressure from an ultimatum from Ben-Gurion’s cabinet to either disband or be destroyed, the Irgun ceased to exist in August 1948. Thus, fighters of the Haganah, Irgun, and Lehi joined together to form the backbone of the newly created Israel Defense Forces (IDF) which would fight in the War of Independence.
The struggle of the underground Jewish resistance in pre-state Israel came to define the next 75 years of its existence — a people outnumbered, kept alive by ingenuity and courage. The political tensions of pre-state Israel did not simply go away when the state was established. Ben-Gurion and Begin would go on to found influential political parties. In a hostile region, the dilemma of when the ends justify the means did not end with the Irgun or the Lehi and continues with nearly every single security decision Israel faces. After many more wars and two deadly Intifadas, today’s Israel resembles less of Ben-Gurion’s idealism and more of Jabotinsky’s pragmatism; in fact, current Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s father was Jabotinsky’s personal secretary, and Begin’s Likud party is the largest in the nation.
This Yom Ha’atzmaut, amidst political vitriol, let’s look to the example of Israel’s founders. Though bitter rivals, these leaders were able to come together when they were most needed and fight to create a miraculous state against long odds. Even with strong conviction, collaboration is possible, and yes, needed, to ensure celebrations of Israel’s independence will go on for 75 more years — and hopefully far beyond.
