Yehuda Avner on Deir Yassin

The ghosts of Deir Yassin
YEHUDA AVNER,
THE JERUSALEM POST
Apr. 7, 2007

In October 1952, I attended a debate at the Oxford Union between a Dr. Ali el-Husseimi, adviser to the Secretary General of the Arab League Abdul-Khalek Hassouna, and Dr. Gershon Levy, adviser to prime minister David Ben-Gurion. The motion was, "This House Condemns Zionism as Imperialism."

Gershon Levy I knew. He had lectured at a course I attended in Jerusalem some years before.

As their war of words mounted, the contenders, fighting fire with fire, sought to clinch their arguments with every verbal device they could muster in an effort to vanquish the other over the slaughter that had occurred in a place called Deir Yassin.

Deir Yassin - now Har Nof - was an Arab village on the western outskirts of Jerusalem. It was located across the valley from Beit Hakerem where I was lodging. In the early spring of 1948, Deir Yassin gunmen began taking potshots at Beit Hakerem and other nearby neighborhoods, and at dawn on Friday, April 9, Menachem Begin's Irgun Zvai Leumi, assisted by members of the Stern Group, attacked the village.

I was 18 at the time, and this is what I scribbled in my diary: "Practically knocked out of bed by big explosion at 5 a.m. and then another at 7 a.m. They were explosions from Deir Yassin, a village across the valley. Told that IZL and Lehi attacked the village. Had always been very quiet and quite friendly. Told that Arab gangs had pushed themselves in. Went at 10 a.m. to investigate. Crawled down valley behind rock. Could see Jews maneuvering into positions. Crashed Jewish lorry on hill.

"Hagana asked for reinforcements for wounded etc. Village captured by 2 p.m. Jewish flag raised over destroyed mukhtar's house.

"Prisoners taken around town by terrorists [sic] in lorry with their hands up. Idea is to bolster morale. Rumored they were to be shot.... Walking home we saw the captured women and children in a truck. They just stared. Many Jews around. I felt ashamed the way they cheered. Told that Hagana were going to hand them over to the British."

AND NOW, more than four years later, there I sat crammed into the spectators' gallery of the Oxford Union, looking down on a chamber packed with students listening to Dr. Ali el-Husseini lashing out at Dr. Gershon Levy over what he asserted was a deliberate Jewish massacre at Deir Yassin.

"Menachem Begin," he raged, "stands indicted as a war criminal for the deliberate brutal massacre of 254 innocent men, women and children at Deir Yassin. He ordered his thugs to descend upon this quiet village, savage its women, throw scores of mutilated bodies down the village wells, and burn the rest. Those who survived the massacre were, at Begin's command, loaded onto trucks and paraded throughout Jewish Jerusalem, to be stoned and spat upon, before being taken to a nearby quarry to be shot."

Then, thunderously, bitterly, in a tear-smothered voice:

"What happened at Deir Yassin was emblematic of the notorious and horrific totality of Zionist massacres and imperialist crimes committed against the Palestinian people. The Deir Yassin massacre and the resultant terror that seized the Palestinian people marked the beginning of the depopulation of Arab Palestine. For millions upon millions of Arabs this tiny village has become a symbol of Zionist imperialistic perfidy, brutality and aggression."

WITH THAT, he sat down and Gershon Levy jumped up. In an incensed voice that lifted to a shout stopping all applause dead, he fumed, "What this House has just heard is an elaborate exercise in Arab myth-making. On trial here is not what happened at Deir Yassin but what has been invented about Deir Yassin."

And now, tersely, vigorously, powerfully, as an attorney might address a jury, he made his points - that Deir Yassin, high on a ridge overlooking the Jerusalem-Tel Aviv highway, was a place of strategic importance in a life-and-death struggle for Jewish survival; that on Menachem Begin's orders a loudspeaker mounted on a truck had forewarned its inhabitants of the impending assault, thereby surrendering the element of surprise; that the fighting was house-to-house and, therefore, murderous, causing heavy civilian casualties; and that the number of dead was less than half of what Arab propaganda alleged.

Turning now to Ali el-Husseini he said to him in a voice as cold as his eyes:

"I would advise you, sir, not to don the cloak of hypocrisy before an audience as perceptive as this. You cannot pull wool over their eyes, as the show of hands shall presently reveal. For they know it to be true that we Jews, unlike you Arabs, are not a martial people. And unlike the Arab nation" - he was talking to the students again - "the legendary heroes of the Jewish nation are not warriors and conquerors, but prophets and scribes. There never was, never could be, a Begin policy of deliberately attacking civilians as there has been a consistent Arab policy of doing just that. I speak of the policy of massacre and mutilation of Jews in the riots of 1920, in the riots of 1921, in the riots of 1929, in the riots of 1936 to 1939, and in the recent 1947-1948 war in which the Arabs set out to massacre and mutilate the Jewish state at birth; a war, in the course of which a convoy of 77 Jewish doctors and nurses, in clearly marked ambulances en route to the Hadassah Hospital in Jerusalem, met with massacre and mutilation. I speak of the massacre and mutilation of the 35 ambushed in a convoy en route to the Etzion Bloc. I speak of the massacre and mutilation of all but four survivors of Kibbutz Kfar Etzion. I speak of the massacre and mutilation…"

Cries of revulsion and nausea suddenly cut him short as a foul stench inexplicably suffused the hall. Outrageously, an unseen blackguard - or a mere prankster, perhaps - had hurled a fistful of stink bombs in the direction of the president's chair. They fell at his feet, and the reek was so pungent people held their noses, their faces screwed up as though biting into lemons. The Oxford Union president, handkerchief over his nose, began yelling, "Order! Order!" but his audience was fleeing in such droves he declared the debate null and void.

THIS EXPERIENCE came to mind almost 30 years later, in 1980, when I found myself working closely with the man who had actually assumed command of the IZL attack on Deir Yassin. His name was Yehuda Lapidot, a soft-spoken professor of biological chemistry at the Hebrew University. He had taken a leave of absence to head up a unit in the Prime Minister's Office called Lishkat Hakesher, a semi-covert operation that maintained contact with Jews locked behind the Iron Curtain during the Cold War.

One day, over coffee, I shared with him my diary notes of that bloody Friday of April 9, 1948. He mulled over the pages trying to decipher my boyish handwriting, and when he spoke there was a tinge of sadness in his voice.

The battle had not gone as planned, he said. They had been repeatedly hit, sustaining heavy casualties from the start. He had taken command after the officer in charge, a fellow called Ben-Zion Cohen, went down early in the fighting.

Menachem Begin had ordered that bloodshed be avoided as much as possible, which was why he had insisted upon the use of a loudspeaker to forewarn the villagers, giving them a chance to flee. Many did. The intention had been to smash right into the center of the village with the truck and blare the announcement: "You are being attacked by superior forces. The west exit of Deir Yassin leading to Ein Karem is open to you! Run immediately! Don't hesitate! Our forces are advancing! Run to Ein Karem!"

But the loudspeaker vehicle plunged into a ditch at the village outskirts. The overturned vehicle I had seen on the crest of the hill mentioned in my diary was probably that loudspeaker truck, and its breakdown marked the beginning of the calamity.

The Arabs chose to stand and fight. They were better armed. The 120 Jewish attackers had, between them, something like 20 rifles, three Bren guns, 30 to 40 Sten guns - most of which proved defective - and grenades.

None of them had house-to-house battle experience, and all they could do was toss grenades and spray gunfire. A few buildings were dynamited, and those were probably the explosions I had heard in Beit Hakerem. Thus it was that instead of smashing right through to the heart of the village as planned, it took them two hours of horrific fighting to reach and capture the mukhtar's house and raise the flag.

"No! No! No!" insisted Prof. Yehuda Lapidot, with emphatic conviction. "Absolutely no! There was absolutely no deliberate massacre at Deir Yassin. It is a lie!"

"But what of those dazed and shaken Arabs I had seen being driven through Jerusalem on trucks that Friday afternoon?" I asked. "Were they not being taken away to be shot?"

"That is a pernicious lie, too," answered Lapidot, his face frowned with fury. "It was part of a smear campaign spread by the Ben-Gurion camp which would stop at nothing to slander Menachem Begin. Those Arabs were being taken to the Arab side of town where they were released among their own people."

And so it is that that the cant of Deir Yassin lives on. Like Scheherazade narrating one of her never-ending tales of the Arabian Nights, Arab storytellers continue to weave their gory fiction, resurrecting the ghosts of Deir Yassin from generation to generation.

Surf the Internet and see.

=========================

For example, here's a recent metion of the Deir Yassin "maasacre" and how it is manipulated for Arab propaganda and read the comments.

The Bible, the Jailer and the Gallows Martyrs

The good jailer
By Yair Sheleg

In two weeks, the Bible that a condemned member of the Irgun gave to his British prison guard minutes befo re he and a fellow militia member blew themselves up will be returned by the guard's son in a state ceremony in Jerusalem, exactly 60 years after the events.

Meir Feinstein and Moshe Barazani actually gave the guard, Thomas Goodwin, two gifts: By asking him to step out of their cell, the members of the pre-state militias Irgun and Lehi also spared his life.

The ceremony will be held at the Museum of the Underground Prisoners. The Bible, which Feinstein kept in his cell, contains about 115 woodcut illustrations by Gustave Dore. The son of Sergeant Thomas Henry Goodwin, the guard, will hand the volume to Feinstein's nephew, Eliezer. Goodwin's son does not wish to reveal his full identity due to his work in the British gas industry, which entails a close relationship with several Arab countries. Subsequently, the book will be presented for safekeeping to the museum, which is located in the same building in the Russian Compound that housed the Mandate-era prison where Feinstein and Barazani took their own lives rather than be executed a few hours later.

Goodwin kept the book at home. "I knew about this Bible my whole life and saw it once," his son says. "But my father didn't say much about his service in Palestine." When he found the book, after his father's death in November 2005, the son remembered that his father always wanted to return to the Bible to the family. "My mother said he told her that if he died first she should try to contact the family and return the Bible."

Goodwin Jr. e-mailed the Prime Minister's Bureau. His message was forwarded to the museum, which is dedicated to perpetuating the memory of Olei Hagardom ("those who ascended the gallows" - members of the pre-state Jewish militias who were arrested by British Mandate authorities and sentenced to death by hanging). The museum, which maintains regular contact with the prisoners' families, had no difficulty locating Feinstein's nephew, and thus the circle was closed.

Feinstein wrote a dedication in the Bible to the guard, in Hebrew and English, which was in effect his last testament: "In the shadow of the gallows, April 21, 1947, to the British soldier as you stand guard, before we go to the gallows, accept this Bible as a memento and remember that we stood in dignity and marched in dignity. It is better to die with a weapon in hand than to live with hands raised. Meir Feinstein." There is a hint ("to die with a weapon in hand") that the prisoners might be in possession of a weapon but the words apparently did not arouse Goodwin's suspicion.

The son recounts his father's description of how he obtained the Bible: "[Feinstein and Barazani] called him to their cell and asked to speak with him in private. Feinstein handed him the Bible. Then they told him they wanted to say a few prayers in private and asked him to step away. He went into the corridor and they blew themselves up. Apparently they sent him away because they didn't want him to be hurt." Feinstein and Barazani detonated two booby-trapped oranges they had hid in their cell.

The story of Feinstein and Barazani became one of the most famous tales of heroism in the history of Zionism. Feinstein, of the Irgun, was sentenced to death for his part in the bombing of the train station in Jerusalem. Barazani, of Lehi, was apprehended four months after Feinstein's arrest with a grenade in his pocket and accused of attempting to assassinate the military commander of Jerusalem. Condemned prisoners were usually held in separate cells, but according to museum director Yoram Tamir, "Feinstein was put in Barazani's cell because he needed assistance as a result of the injuries he sustained during his capture, which led to the amputation of his left arm."

Tamir says the Lehi had envisioned a suicide operation during the hanging of one of their men prior to this incident: "They called it Operation Samson, in an allusion to the suicide of the biblical figure." Eliezer Ben-Ami, who prepared the makeshift orange grenades while he was imprisoned along with the two men, confirms that the plan was to turn their ascent to the gallows into an action that would harm the British authorities.

"Of course, we needed the condemned men's approval," Ben-Ami recalls. "Moshe agreed right away, but since there was an Irgun man with him we had to request their approval, too. We asked the person responsible for Irgun prisoners in the jail, Yehoshua Tamler, what he thought, and he said they needed the consent of the top command. We had to wait a few days, despite fearing that they would be taken to the gallows in the meantime, until approval arrived from the commander of the Irgun, Menachem Begin."

The original plan was to hide the explosives in the set of tefillin brought to the jail by Rabbi Aryeh Levin ("the father of the prisoners"), who ministered to the underground prisoners throughout the period. (Levin, of course, knew nothing about the phylacteries' intended use.) When Ben-Ami opened up the boxes of the tefillin he realized they were too small to hold the required amount of explosives. One day at lunch in prison, he looked at the oranges that were served for dessert and had the idea of scooping out the flesh and replacing it with explosives. Two booby-trapped oranges were smuggled into Feinstein and Barazani's cell. Ben-Ami kept a third for himself, "to see how long it takes for the peel to dry out and fall off, exposing the explosive."

To Ben-Ami's dismay, he found that within a few days, before the date was set for the men's execution, the peel of the orange in his cell had begun to detach. "We passed [Feinstein and Barazani] an order to dismantle the grenades, but that day they were informed that they were to be hanged the following day," Ben-Ami recalls.

The announcement of their imminent execution came from Rabbi Yaakov Goldman of the Jewish Agency, who had been asked to be with the condemned men in their final hours and to recite with them the vidui, the confessional prayer recited by Jews before death. Goldman's involvement was out of the ordinary, since this was usually Levin's role.

Tamir says Goldman replaced Levin after Feinstein, a student of Levin's, asked for his opinion on the anticipated suicide. When Levin rejected the idea, Goldman was brought in instead. "[The switch] was an intelligence failure on the part of the British," Feinstein's nephew Eliezer says. "They should have realized that something unusual was about to happen."

Goldman's involvement also caused a change in the plan. He told the condemned men that he insisted on escorting them right up to the gallows. Tamir: "Goldman told them that he wanted the last face they see to be that of a Jew. He repeatedly rebuffed their request that he not escort them, missing their hints." His insistence caused Feinstein and Barazani to kill themselves in their jail cell rather than on the gallows, since Goldman as well as the British guards would have been killed.

According to contemporary newspaper reports, Goldman left the cell and went to the officers' room in the prison to wait there until the men were brought out for their execution, which was scheduled for 2 A.M. But at 11:40 P.M. a loud explosion shook the prison. The guards who rushed to the condemned men's cell found their bodies. Ben-Ami, who was in his own cell at the time, remembers hearing first the traditional song "Adon Olam," with all the militia prisoners joining in, and then the explosion. Goldman's account is slightly different: He recalls Feinstein and Barazani singing "Adon Olam" while he was still with them, followed by "Hatikva" (which became the Israeli national anthem), but does not remember hearing singing right before the explosion.

This story begs the question of why the men did not blow up Goodwin together with themselves. After all, if the original plan was to take as many British guards as possible with them when they died, then why not at least make sure that Goodwin was killed? One possible answer comes from Goldman. The rabbi relates that he spoke with the two prisoners from the corridor outside their cell.

"A British sergeant stood there guarding them," Goldman recalls. "They told me, 'We want you to thank the sergeant. He's a good fellow, he treated us well.'" Goodwin's kindness was also apparently the reason Feinstein decided to give him his Bible.

Ben-Ami confirms this: "In our secret correspondence with the two, when the gallows suicide operation was still the plan, they said that they had two guards, one who was a bastard and one who was nice, and they said that if the 'good cop' was there when they ascended the gallows they would try not to hurt him."

The ceremony in two weeks will mark not only the return of the Bible to the Feinstein family but also the 60th anniversary of the entire Olei Hagardom episode. In 1947, the hangings of members of the Jewish underground reached a peak, with the execution of nine of the 12 who were eventually hung.

Irgun and Lehi prisoners refused to recognize the legality of British rule in Palestine, including a rejection of the courts' authority to judge them. Naturally, they refused to ask for clemency, even when it was hinted that such a request could lead to a more lenient sentence.

This policy aroused a public debate in the Jewish community, even among Irgun and Lehi sympathizers: Were terror operations justified? Was it right to insist on non-recognition of British rule even at the price of the condemned prisoners' lives? The equivocal stance in relation to the underground's terror activities was perhaps best expressed by the "national poet" of the time. After Feinstein and Barazani's suicide, Natan Alterman published "Lail Hit'abdut" ("night of suicide") in his regular "The Seventh Column" in Davar. The poem was mainly a paean to their heroism. But after commending the men's bravery, it concludes with three stanzas condemning the stupidity and arrogance of their commanders.

According to political scientist Dr. Udi Lebel of Be'er Sheva's Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, who has researched the role of the executed Irgun and Lehi fighters in the national memory, during the term of Israel's first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, there was a deliberate effort to suppress the memory of Olei Hagardom.

"There was no mention of them in the school curriculum," Lebel says. "The most blatant examples of the attitude toward them was the speed with which Acre Prison, where most of the underground prisoners were hanged, was converted into a mental hospital and the prison in Jerusalem, where Feinstein and Barazani committed suicide, into a book warehouse - all to prevent them from becoming heroic sites and pilgrimage destinations," Lebel states.

Ben-Gurion's successor, Levi Eshkol, was more conciliatory. Lebel says he ordered the Acre psychiatric hospital moved, although this did not take place until after 1977, when Begin became prime minister. By total coincidence, in 1963, when Eshkol formed his first government, Am Oved published "Bekolar Ehad" (English title: "The Gallows"), by Haim Hazaz, which was devoted to the suicide of Feinstein and Barazani, treating it as a tale of exceptional heroism. (In order to maintain literary freedom Hazaz changed Feinstein's name to Menachem Halperin and that of Barazani to Eliahu Mizrahi in the novel.)

Hazaz, like Alterman, was identified with the Labor movement, although he was not a party member. "Their story attracted him from the beginning," his widow, Aviva Hazaz, says. "He stressed that it was not about the Irgun and the Lehi or the issue of the undergrounds, but about kiddush hashem (sanctifying the name of God, used to describe Jewish martyrdom). This subject appealed to him since his bar mitzvah, when his father taught him what Maimonides wrote about kiddush hashem. He even looked for a way to connect with the people from the undergrounds to get to know the story from up close, but they weren't very receptive to him," Aviva Hazaz recalled.

According to Hazaz's widow, it was a random meeting with Rabbi Aryeh Levin that brought the writer back to the story. "In 1958 Haim was very ill and in hospital. Another patient was put in his room, it was Rabbi Aryeh Levin. They formed a special bond and naturally they also talked about the men of the underground. There were two elements at that time that made him go back to the story: the attempt to stand up to death and the compassion that Rabbi Aryeh Levin showed for the underground prisoners."

Eshkol sent Hazaz a warm letter after the book's publication. "Some say that book was a factor in the decision to bring Jabotinsky's bones to Israel," Aviva Hazaz says. She says her husband was horrified by the conversion of the site where Feinstein and Barazani took their lives into a storeroom for the Bialik Institute. As a member of the institution's board of directors he actively tried to have the books moved.

In the early 1970s, the status of Olei Hagardom changed again, when streets throughout the country began to be named for them. The most prominent instance is in Jerusalem's Armon Hanatziv neighborhood, which was built after the area was captured in the Six-Day War. In a gesture of "historic vengeance," its main street in the neighborhood, not far from the mansion in which the British high commissioner lived during the Mandate, was called Olei Hagardom. Other streets were named for individual prisoners, including Feinstein and Barazani.

The change in status reached its peak when Begin came to power. Instead of following the tradition of giving his Memorial Day speeches at the country's main military cemetery, on Mount Herzl in Jerusalem, Begin went to the cemetery in Safed, where the first Oleh Hagardom, Shlomo Ben-Yosef, is buried. It was during Begin's term as prime minister that the prisons in Jerusalem and Acre were converted into national museums. Stamps were also issued in memory of the underground prisoners.

Lebel notes another interesting and significant step taken by Begin: "He 'annexed' to the list of Olei Hagardom others from other periods, such as Na'aman Belkind and Yosef Lishansky from Nili (the underground that aided the British during World War I, whose members were hanged by the Turks); Eli Cohen, the spy who was hanged in Damascus; and even Mordechai Schwartz from the Haganah, who was hanged by the British after he killed an Arab policeman in 1938."

The Haganah leadership refused to acknowledge Schwartz as a casualty from its ranks, let alone an Oleh Gardom. Not until 1987, after repeated appeals from Schwartz's fiancee, did the organization of Haganah members agree to have Schwartz's picture in the museum's exhibit of Olei Hagardom members, with a notation that he was from the Haganah.

"Begin acted as he did in order to embarrass the Labor movement," Lebel said, "which in its disavowal of the Irgun and Lehi Olei Hagardom was in effect disavowing all the others, including its own."

Begin's identification with Olei Hagardom culminated in his will. He, and his wife Aliza before him, asked to be buried not in the area on Mount Herzl reserved for the nation's leaders but rather on the Mount of Olives, next to the graves of Feinstein and Barazani.

Begin and the Carter Book

In a report inn The Forward on the controversy over former President Jimmy Carter's book accusing Israel of apartheid, the rivalry between him and former President Bill Clinton is discussed.

These sentences appear there:-

Carter, in describing the historic peace talks at Camp David that culminated in the groundbreaking Israeli-Egyptian peace deal, has portrayed the late former Egyptian president Anwar Sadat as a visionary and heroic statesman who gave his life for peace, and the late former Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin as a difficult interlocutor less prepared to transcend his past as an underground leader of Jewish nationalists.

In sharp contrast, Clinton developed a close personal relationship with Yitzhak Rabin before the Israeli prime minister was assassinated. Years later, after marathon talks at Camp David failed to produce an Israeli-Palestinian peace deal, Clinton blamed the stalemate on Yasser Arafat, essentially casting him as a guerilla leader unable to embrace the role of statesman.

Teddy Kollek's Role During the 'Saison'

Newsreports are in about Teddy Kollek's role during the 'Saison' period, 1944-1945, when members of the Irgun, mainly, were handed over to the British:

1. JTA

The late Teddy Kollek reportedly spied for Britain against the hard-line Jewish underground in British Mandate Palestine. Citing declassified documents, Yediot Achronot reported Thursday that Kollek, who is best remembered as Jerusalem's longest-serving mayor, had spent much of the 1940s passing information to the British authorities that helped them crack down on Etzel and Lehi fighters. At the time Kollek was a senior figure with the Jewish Agency, which was largely aligned with the more moderate Zionist movements Haganah and Palmach.

One of Etzel's leaders, Menachem Begin, topped Britain's wanted list, eluded capture and went on to become Israeli prime minister. According to Yediot, Israeli diplomats asked Britain's government archives to keep the files on Kollek sealed while he was still alive. Asked about the report, Kollek's son Amos told the newspaper, "Dad never spoke of his activities during that period."

2. Israel Insider

MI5: Teddy Kollek served as informer for British against other Jews
By: israelinsider staff and partners
Published: March 29, 2007

Yediot Aharonot reporter Ronen Bergman uncovers the unsavory news that an Israeli hero, recently deceased, was in fact an informer against Jewish patriots on behalf of the British occupiers in pre-State Palestine, and even tried to rat out future prime minister Menachem Begin.

Teddy Kollek, the legendary mayor of Jerusalem, lent a hand to the British authorities in their 1940s crackdown against the underground movements that sought to drive the British out of Palestine, secret MI5 documents have shown.

Kollek, who died three months ago, supplied the British intelligence agency with information about the activities of the Irgun and Stern Gang.

Beyond intelligence about the clandestine activities of the two groups, Kollek tried to help the British capture one of their most wanted men: Irgun leader and future Prime Minister Menachem Begin.

3. YNET

Kollek was British informer


Former mayor of Jerusalem helped British troops in their 1940s crackdown against right-wing underground Zionist groups, Irgun and Stern Gang

Ronen Bergman Published: 03.29.07, 12:54 / Israel News

Teddy Kollek, the legendary mayor of Jerusalem, lent a hand to the British authorities in their 1940s crackdown against right-wing underworld movements that sought to drive the British out of Palestine, secret MI5 documents have shown.

Kollek, who died three months ago, supplied the British intelligence agency with information about the activities of the Irgun and Stern Gang.

Beyond intelligence about the clandestine activities of the two groups, Kollek tried to help the British capture one of their most wanted men: Irgun leader Menachem Begin.

Begin commanded the Irgun from 1944 to 1948.

According to the newly released files, Kollek was instrumental in leading to the arrests of dozens of Irgun and Stern Gang members, the confiscation of arms, and the thwarting of numerous attacks against British interests.

Kollek's collaboration with the British came in the framework of a campaign waged by the Jewish Agency against the Irgun and Stern Gang, whose violent activities it deemed harmful to its political plans.

Leaders of the Yishuv, the Jewish population in Palestine, were keen on building bridges with the British to seek approval for their plans to bring thousands of refugees to Palestine from Europe.

The British mandate cashed in on Kollek's position as the deputy head of intelligence in the Jewish Agency to gain access to sensitive information about the Irgun and Stern Gang.

The scorpion

During a meeting with an MI5 officer on August 10, 1945, Kollek disclosed the location of a secret Irgun training camp in an abandoned building near Binyamina [Shuni].

British forces raided the training camp soon after, arresting 27 Irgun members, including three women and a handful of commanders who topped Britain's list of most wanted underworld figures.

"It will be a great idea to raid the place," Kollek is quoted as telling his British contact during one of their meetings.

The British contact wrote in one of his briefings that success against "Zionist terror" depended on Kollek and his men.

Last year the British government opened its extensive intelligence library on MI5 activities in the '40s to the public.

The Israeli Embassy in London was particularly interested in file number 66968, which documented Kollek's collaboration with MI5.

The Foreign Ministry however asked that Britain freeze the release of Kollek's file so long he was alive.

Although many of Kollek's testimonies were omitted, his name appeared on the file in which he is referred to as "the source." His codename was Scorpion.

Kollek never admitted to having collaborated with the British against Zionist underground groups but in his autobiography he said that he was against the violence exhibited by the Irgun and Stern Gang, referring to their attacks as "anarchy."

Kollek served as the mayor of Jerusalem from 1969 to 1993 when he lost to Ehud Olmert.

Letters to the Editor of the Canadian National Post

Canada's National Post newspaper published an item (see below) about a new choral production portraying Samson as an Irgun fighter about to blow up the King David Hotel in 1946.

But he will be attired with an explosive's belt, a la Arab suicide bombers.

The following two letters were published today.

1.

'Bomber' Samson not appreciated

Thursday, March 29, 2007

Re: Choir to depict bible hero as a suicide bomber, March 28.

The choice of Simon Capet -- musical director of the Victoria Philharmonic Choir -- to portray Samson as a suicide terrorist is perhaps a legitimate literary licensed decision. However, it is nevertheless invidious to link the Zionist Irgun resistance underground in 1946 to the Arab terror in Israel today. Mr. Capet is not reinterpreting the Bible, he is attempting to apply a moral equivalency: Jews in the 1940s were no better than Arabs today. That parallel is mendacious and malicious.

Irgun fighters took up arms against a regime that didn't belong to the country, as it had reneged on reconstituting the Jewish national homeland as charged by the League of Nations in 1922. They never purposefully attacked targets that were civilian.

Arab terrorists, on the other hand, are active almost exclusively against Israeli citizens. They had been killing Jews even before the 1967 war, before a presumed "occupation," their excuse for their actions.

Mr. Capet's real intention, I fear, is not a perversion of history but the maligning of Israel.

Yisrael Medad, Shiloh, Israel.

2.

'Bomber' Samson not appreciated

Thursday, March 29, 2007

Menachem Begin's Irgun gave advance warning before its attack on the King David Hotel in an effort to avoid loss of human life. Its target was not people, but information which could have been used to destroy the resistance movement. The distortion and degradation of Jewish biblical and contemporary history does not render a performance depicting Samson as a suicide bomber "relevant." It does, however, permit the use of the performance for the demonization of Jews, on the one hand, and the excuse of contemporary suicide bombers and terrorists, on the other.

What can be the motivation for that?

Lloyd Hoffer, Toronto.

==============================================

Choir to depict bible hero as a suicide bomber
Samson to be a Zionist terrorist
Sarah Petrescu, CanWest News Service
Wednesday, March 28, 2007

VICTORIA - In the Bible, Samson is a hero who used his superhuman strength to do God's will by pulling down pillars in a Philistine temple, killing thousands and himself in an act of vengeance.

But in what's sure to be a controversial interpretation of the story, a Victoria choir will next month present Samson as a suicide bomber.

Simon Capet, music director of the Victoria Philharmonic Choir, says he wanted to update Handel's Samson oratorio to be relevant to today's audiences by drawing comparisons to ongoing conflicts in the Middle East.

While the music will not change, the setting of the oratorio will be 1946 Jerusalem. Mr. Capet says he chose the period to draw comparisons to the bombing of the British headquarters at the King David Hotel by the militant Zionist group Irgun in that year. Menachem Begin, who ordered the attack, would later become Israel's prime minister and win the Nobel Peace Prize.

Mr. Capet says presenting Samson as a terrorist is not meant to offend anyone or point the finger at one group, but to challenge our notions of what a terrorist is.

"Is there any difference between pulling down a pillar or blowing a bomb?" asks Mr. Capet.

"Samson killed thousands of people. To show him in the traditional mythological sense does a disservice," Mr. Capet says.

The choir would not be the first to drawing comparisons between Samson and terrorism.

"There's a large focus on this right now, with Israel being presented as the Samson figure," says Andrew Rippin, dean of humanities at the University of Victoria and a specialist in Islamic studies. American journalist Seymour Hersh coined the term "the Samson option" in his book about Israel's development of a nuclear arsenal.

Shadia Drury, a philosophy professor and Canada Research Chair for Social Justice, recently compared Samson to World Trade Center bomber Mohammed Atta in a talk at UVic. In her book, Terror and Civilization: Christianity, Politics and the Western Psyche, she argues that terrorism is a biblical problem.

"The concept of a collective guilt is a flawed morality," she says. "The idea that 'We're on the side of God and everyone else is evil' has and always will be disastrous."

Ms. Drury says she thinks the choir's modern interpretation of Samson -- scheduled to run April 5, 7 and 8--is heroic.

But local Rabbi Itzchak Marmorstein says comparing Samson and the Irgun bombing will offend Jews and Israelis.

"It's an inappropriate comparison that promotes a shallow understanding of history," says Rabbi Marmorstein. "Israelis never supported Irgun or that kind of terrorism. They weren't heroes ... and Begin went into politics legitimately decades later. He wasn't some crazy terrorist."

One man who is already uneasy about the performance is Samson himself, played by Vancouver Island tenor Ken Lavigne.

"I'm really struggling with this," says Mr. Lavigne, 33. "I can't help but feel that a number of people will not enjoy this rejigging of a biblical hero."

Mr. Lavigne says he has warmed up to the idea of putting on an Irgun uniform and wearing a bomb-belt to sing the emotionally charged part since discussing it with Mr. Capet.

"Simon wants to get people talking about music and its relevance today," Mr. Lavigne says. "In the end I've had to accept that whoever I thought Samson was, what he committed was an act of mass murder."

Screening of the Film "Tammuz"

On Friday, April 13, the Begin Center will be screening the new documentary (in Hebrew) on the bombing of the Irqi nuclear reactor.

The invitation:

Peace Treaty Commemoration on BBC

Go here and see and hear various videos and audios, including that of Menachem Begin on the occasion of the signing of the 1979 Peace Treaty with Egypt on the BBC's "On This Day" section.