The Unmaking of Israel (3 page)

But it didn’t. On June 13, Begin informed Galili that the
Altalena
was en route from Marseilles. It was loaded with arms that the Paris office had mysteriously received from the French government—over 5,000 rifles, at least 4 million bullets, hundreds of machine guns, bazookas, mortar shells, and more. It also carried 900 immigrants, Irgun supporters from among the homeless Jews of Europe. Begin had known of plans to send the ship, but the affair had gotten out of hand: the weapons and immigrants were set to arrive in violation of the UN-supervised cease-fire, which had begun two days before, the same day the ship sailed. In return for help, Begin appeared ready to turn over the arms to the government. The IDF’s arms-acquisition chief chose Kfar Vitkin as the spot for nighttime unloading, out of sight of the UN inspectors. The village, north of the coastal town of Netanyah, had been used for arms smuggling in the past.

The Irgun, however, began upping its demands, perhaps encouraged by Galili’s concession on separate battalions. It wanted to unload the weapons itself. It wanted to store them in Irgun warehouses. Most important, it wanted the arms to be allocated to its own battalions. On June 18, Galili informed Begin of Ben-Gurion’s response: “The arms must be turned over to the government of Israel on the beach.” Begin consulted his comrades, and said no. In a summary of the contacts, Galili stressed that the Irgun HQ was still operating in Israel, and sought “a relation of equals” with the state.

After nightfall on June 20, the
Altalena
approached the shore at Kfar Vitkin. In Tel Aviv, Ben-Gurion brought the crisis before the provisional government. “There cannot be two armies and there cannot be two states,” he told his eight fellow ministers. “We have to decide whether to turn power over to Begin and dissolve our army or to tell him to stop his rebellious actions.” The unanimous decision was that the army should bring in enough forces to Kfar Vitkin that the Irgun would capitulate—if possible, without a fight. Ben-Gurion feared that the government might have waited too long to act. If the Irgun gained 5,000 rifles and 250 machine guns, he warned, “what they are doing now is child’s play compared to what they will do tomorrow.”

By then, Begin was on the beach, along with other Irgun commanders and hundreds of members and supporters of the organization. Some dug foxholes in preparation for an attack. The ship’s landing boat and two rowboats from a nearby fishing village brought the immigrants ashore first, then crates of guns and ammunition. The atmosphere was festive; Begin was apparently euphoric. During the night, he rejected Galili’s final ultimatum, which gave him ten minutes to surrender the arms and warned him that the IDF had encircled the beach. The unloading stretched into the next morning and afternoon.

So, actually, did the IDF’s effort to bring troops to surround the Irgun bridgehead, despite what Galili told Begin. The Alexandroni Brigade, based close to Kfar Vitkin, included one of the new battalions drawn from the Irgun. The battalion had deserted, led by its commander, to join the forces on the beach. In another battalion, the 71st, many of the soldiers were unwilling to take part in an operation against Jews. In the morning, the commander of the 89th Battalion, Moshe Dayan, got orders to bring his troops from a base outside Tel Aviv. He left behind a company made up of former Lehi men.

By late afternoon, the army was finally encircling the beach. To the south, beyond a low hill, Dayan’s battalion was approaching on foot and in half-tracks. Begin and his top commanders met. They decided that Begin should take the landing craft back to the
Altalena
, sail to Tel Aviv, and unload the arms there. The Irgun had more support in the city, people would come to help, the government would have to compromise. Daylight was fading. Begin, a man of ceremony, ordered his forces to line up in formation so he could address them. As he began to speak, a fusillade of gunfire began. The formation unraveled into men running for cover.

According to the best reconstruction of events, Dayan’s mechanized column had come under fire several times from Irgun positions south of the hill. Finally, Dayan’s column opened up for several minutes with heavy machine guns, firing mostly in the air. Begin’s review of the troops was actually hidden beyond the hill. The effect of the shooting was panic, not casualties. Begin left for the
Altalena
, which sailed south. At Kfar Vitkin, Irgun men hastily unpacked guns from crates. A standoff lasted through the night. In the morning, when Dayan again advanced, the Irgun commander on the beach began negotiating surrender.

Meanwhile, though, the climactic act of Irgun defiance had begun. Just after midnight on June 22, the
Altalena
either anchored or ran aground a hundred meters off the Tel Aviv shore. It faced the heart of the city, making it easier for supporters to gather. It also faced the Kate Dan hotel, where the UN cease-fire inspectors were based; the Home Guard headquarters of the Kiryati Brigade, the army unit responsible for the city; and the Ritz Hotel. The Ritz, it happened, was the headquarters of the Palmah, formerly the elite fighting force of the Haganah and now part of the IDF. The Palmah had its own political character: it was closely tied to the left-wing United Kibbutz Movement and the pro-Soviet Mapam (United Workers Party); its military models included the Spanish Republican army and the Soviet Red Army. United Kibbutz ideological leader Yitzhak Tabenkin had once described the Palmah as “strengthening proletarian hegemony in Zionism.”

In the morning, the overage Kiryati guardsmen did nothing to keep the
Altalena
’s boat from landing and unloading arms. Nor could Kiryati roadblocks stop the mixed mob of local Irgun members, army deserters who’d flowed into the city, and Irgun supporters from reaching the beach. When the boat returned to the shore a second time, the small Palmah contingent at the Ritz opened fire. Yitzhak Rabin, the twenty-six-year-old deputy commander of the Palmah, showed up at headquarters and took charge there. An intermittent gun battle with the Irgun forces on the beach and the ship continued through the day. In the meantime, the IDF general staff ordered artillery to deploy at Camp Yonah, a base just to the north on the coast. When an
Altalena
crew member swam ashore to seek a cease-fire, Palmah commander Yigal Allon gave orders to send him back with an ultimatum and a promise: surrender the arms within half an hour, and no one will be arrested. The ultimatum ran out at 4:00 p.m. The cannon at Camp Yonah fired several shells. One hit the
Altalena
. A column of smoke rose, and people began jumping overboard.

Altogether, sixteen Irgun fighters and three IDF soldiers were killed in the fighting. The shell that hit the
Altalena
did not quite end the affair. Troops under Allon’s command mopped up in Tel Aviv. The Irgun issued a statement calling Ben-Gurion a dictator, and warning that his government would rule “by means of concentration camps, torture cellars, and hangings.” At the same time, it labeled the provisional government a “Judenrat.” To avoid “terrible bloodshed between Jews in the hour of danger,” however, it ordered its fighters not to use their weapons. Only in September did the Irgun accept a final ultimatum to disband. Yet the shell that hit the
Altalena
—Ben-Gurion’s willingness to order it fired, the extremely reluctant willingness of the cannon’s crew to fire it—effectively ended the Irgun’s challenge to the government.

To this, I must add a postscript. The following week, Yisrael Galili resigned his post. Before independence, he had been the head of the civilian staff appointed by political parties that directed the Haganah. He himself was a member of Mapam and the United Kibbutz. Ben-Gurion did not want a tie between parties and the army, and had been working for months to push Galili out. The next step came at the end of September: overcoming intense resistance from Mapam, Ben-Gurion dissolved the Palmah command and completed integration of its units in the IDF. In the early months of independence, he also rejected requests from rabbis and from the religious Hapoel Hamizrahi party to allow Orthodox soldiers to serve in separate units.

Since 1948, there have been two ways of remembering the
Altalena
in Israel. The political camp created by Begin and other Irgun veterans has nurtured one memory, in which the affair stands for perfidy, tyranny, and inexcusable violence by Jew against fellow Jew. In the other memory, the
Altalena
represents resolute decision making that established the government’s authority and averted wider civil war.

Underlying these two versions and the clash itself is a half-political, half-psychological issue: the transition from revolution to institution, from movement to state, is hard for people to make. It is not accomplished merely by proclaiming independence or appointing a government. There is greater romance in being a rebel than in being a bureaucrat.

Before the revolution succeeds, the law belongs to a foreign or illegitimate regime. Breaking it for the cause is heroic. When they ruled Palestine, the British restricted Jewish immigration—before, during, and after the Holocaust. Both the Haganah and the Irgun illegally brought shiploads of immigrants as a means of getting Jews from Europe to their homeland and as a way to challenge British rule. Illegal immigration gained mythic status in Zionist memory, as did illegal use of arms.

Ideally, after the revolution, the ex-rebels should aspire to the rule of law, legitimated by popular consent, applied equally even to acts committed in the name of ideology or patriotism. The ideal is likely to be achieved slowly at best.

Before May 14, 1948, the Zionist movement sought the liberation of territory from foreign rule, but also the liberation of Jews through control of that territory. The Palestinian Arabs were a problem, not a responsibility. Within the mainstream—the Zionist Organization, the Jewish Agency, and the Va’ad Le’umi—relations between political factions were determined by elections. But a disgruntled minority group could bolt, as the Revisionists had, so a broad consensus was vital. Between the Irgun and the mainstream, the relation was one of rivalry, suspicion, and sometimes partnership. Cooperation, when it happened, was based on agreements colored by the fact that both sides had guns.

The Irgun saw itself as representing the purest Zionism, unwilling to concede any part of the Land of Israel and unadulterated by other ideologies, such as socialism. It asserted that liberation could come only by the gun. In its statement after the sinking of the
Altalena
, it referred to weaponry as “precious beyond all value.” That love of “iron,” as Begin called weapons, came from emotional as well as pragmatic need. The Zionist right carried a small stick and loved to speak very loudly. The mainstream, meanwhile, saw the Irgun as separatists and terrorists.

In the
Altalena
affair, the Irgun showed how hard the adjustment to independence could be. Begin and his colleagues treated the provisional government as a rival movement. Before May 14, Begin dreamed of conducting his own military campaign. After independence, the Irgun consented to join forces with the government, but when its guns belatedly arrived, it wanted them for its own units. Ben-Gurion’s mark of Cain—or Rabin’s, in the extreme right’s version in the 1990s—was that he was responsible for killing Jews.

For Ben-Gurion, on the other hand, statehood meant that the civilian government alone could possess military power. To be sure, the Israeli army was never quarantined from politics. The political leanings of top officers were known, especially in the state’s first years. Ex-generals dominate Israeli politics to this day. The military’s analysis and policy proposals, biased toward force, have strongly influenced government decisions.

What Ben-Gurion did accomplish, though, was to ensure that political factions neither had their own military forces nor controlled parts of the country’s army. Disarming parties created the space for real politics. It made way for groups to negotiate and compromise based on their ability to sway public support, not their ability to fight. It was a necessary though not sufficient condition for democracy.

Given experience elsewhere, I’d argue, this was no small accomplishment. In Europe, as Tony Judt has written, World War II included “a whole series of local, civil wars,” some between rival partisan movements, some continuing well after Germany’s defeat. The Greek Civil War, a legacy of liberation, was still burning when Israel became independent. The retreat of European colonial empires opened up more conflicts between rival liberation groups backed by outside patrons. In Angola, civil war lasted from 1975 to 1991. In the Palestinian Authority, even without independence, elections were held in 2006 between armed parties, which then fought and split their meager territory. The outcome of the
Altalena
affair headed off such a breakdown in Israel. What helped limit the clash was that both sides knew that it was a sideshow to the real postcolonial struggle: the one that started as a communal war with the Palestinian Arabs and continued as war with the neighboring Arab countries.

Because of that conflict, a second condition for both statehood and democracy took longer to achieve. According to Max Weber’s classic description of the state, it has a “monopoly on the legitimate use of force
within a given territory
” (emphasis added). To rule by the consent of the governed, a state must have borders that define who is being governed. What was Israel’s territory?

The Arab leadership within Palestine and in the neighboring countries had rejected the UN partition. Soon after the General Assembly’s November 29, 1947, approval of partition, the British cabinet secretly decided to prevent the United Nations from implementing the plan, apparently in deference to Britain’s Arab allies. Israel’s declaration of independence did not describe borders. When it was issued, Jewish forces did not hold all the land that the partition plan had assigned to the Jewish state—but they did control some land beyond the partition lines, including a besieged piece of Jerusalem and other isolated enclaves. As the fighting continued, the IDF took more land outside the UN map.