Correcting a Misleading Assertion

This Letter-to-the-Editor was sent to the UK's Jewish Chronicle:

In Lawrence Joffee's review ("The Rise of the Israeli Right", March 31) of Colin Shindler's most recent book, we read that on June 20, 1948, Menachem Begin "defied the state of Israel's month-old provisional government by smuggling forbidden weapons aboard a requisitioned ship, the Altalena". That assertion is misleading.
The arms ship Altalena had docked near Moshav Kfar Vitkin in accordance with the agreement with Israel's Defence Ministry officials. The government was informed of the ship's existence on June 1 whereas the Hagana had been contacted about the ship while it was in France months earlier.
On June 15, Begin and members of his staff met with government representatives and reported the ship's imminent arrival.  As even Wikipedia notes, David Ben-Gurion wrote in his diary entry for June 16: "Yisrael [Galili] and Skolnik [Levi Eshkol] met yesterday with Begin. Tomorrow or the next day their ship is due to arrive…I believe we should not endanger Tel Aviv port. They should not be sent back. They should be disembarked at an unknown shore."  At a second meeting, the Mapai-dominated Kfar Vitkin moshav was selected.
At the beach, the IDF demanded a different distribution of the weapons and ammunition than that had been originally agreed upon which was 20% would go to Irgun units enlisted in the IDF.  Seeking to settle that issue, Begin refused to submit to the 10-minute ultimatum handed to him and, given the lack of communication facilities, ordered the ship, which had been fired upon resulting in the deaths of both Irgun members and IDF soldiers, to sail to Tel Aviv. There, on June 22, it was fired upon and eventually shelled and abandoned.
The real question for historians is why did Ben-Gurion defy his own agreement.

It was published in this week's edition (no online link available) and so I do not know if, or how much, it was edited.


However, I had to send this letter of complaint:

I understand my letter appeared today in The JC.
I have not as yet seen it but I received this note from a friend:
Have just read your letter to the JC. Surely the subeditor's heading for the letter: "Begin's action is still begging an explanation" is completely wrong? Your final para makes clear it is Ben Gurion's actions which require explanation. (I think the sub ed got carried away with his attempted pun of Begin and begging.) You should ask for a correction! 
If my correspondent is right, I do think a correction is warranted, something along the lines of:
"In a letter published last week by Yisrael Medad on the Altalena Affair, the heading gave a misleading impression that Medad considered Menachem Begin's actions as "begging an explanation" whereas, as his letter makes clear, David Ben-Gurion's actions still require an explanation."
Thank you.

________________

UPDATE

The letter:

^

The Way Things Were Done Then

Corruption charges abounded even in Ben Gurion's day

By Anshel Pfeffer, Haaretz Correspondent

Allocating land to political organizations in contravention of
regulations. Using military funding for non-security projects. Raising funds from rich American Jews for a sitting prime minister. Exploiting the residents of poor areas.

These activities may sound like they were ripped from the headlines, but they are not new trends. Recent research by historian Dr. Zvi Zameret indicates that all this dubious behavior can be attributed to Israel's first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, and dates back to nearly 50 years ago, when he worked to found an educational institution in the heart of the Negev that became Midreshet Sde Boker, a collection of about two dozen research and educational centers.

Ben-Gurion decided to found such an institution in Sde Boker in 1954, while he was on a 15-month break from politics and living on Kibbutz Sde Boker. He chose a spot a few kilometers from the kibbutz and announced that this was where "our Oxford" would be built. Ben-Gurion got his close friends to help fulfill the dream.

The first step to establishing Midreshet Sde Boker was taken in January 1960, after Ben-Gurion was back in government, serving as premier and defense minister, according to Zameret, who published his findings in the latest issue of the history journal Et-Mol. The journal is published by the Yad Ben-Zvi Institute, which Zameret heads.

Zameret said the head of the Prime Minister's Office at the time, Teddy Kollek, made sure that 3,000 dunams of Negev land would be transferred to the Negev Fund, which was made up of Ben-Gurion's political cronies, without being encumbered by any planning or legal procedures.

Kollek then started raising money to fund the new buildings for the institution. He received the first quarter of a million liras from the Rothschild family, but he needed a lot more. In a letter to the United Jewish Appeal, Kollek wrote that American Jews should get ready to give Ben-Gurion "a serious gift" - $1 million - for his upcoming 75th birthday. The construction began a short time later.

In October 1961, Ben-Gurion convened a meeting in his office in the Defense Ministry to find out what the holdup was. Shimon Peres, who was deputy defense minister at the time, said there was a money problem, because the treasury was refusing to hand over the funds to the Education Ministry. Ben-Gurion demanded that classes begin within three months, Zameret recounted.

To meet the time crunch, Defense Ministry funds were used to build the institution's initial infrastructure, and a base of the Gadna youth corps was set up there, according to Zameret.

Ben-Gurion's political opponents were worried that he was establishing an
ideological center of his own in the guise of an educational institution, and accused him of trying to hide the program's details. One argument was that a document connected with the institute was classified as top secret.

Reports of covert activity in connection with the institution reached the Knesset. In February 1962, an opposition MK asked Ben-Gurion: "As is known, [Labor forerunner] Mapai, with the assistance of American donors, established an educational-ideological college next to Sde Boker .... Is the report about the college's acquisition by the Defense Ministry for the purpose of establishing a Gadna base correct?" Ben-Gurion issued a denial.

In November 1962, the first educational institution at the site opened a field school. A year later, after Ben-Gurion resigned as prime minister, an official cornerstone-laying ceremony took place. "Think of me as a nut or an idiot, but I dream of a kind of Hebrew Oxford in the Negev, a kind of Hebrew Yavneh ... that will be a place of spiritual creativity," Ben-Gurion said.

A high school was subsequently founded on the site, along with a dormitory and a teacher-training college. Fearing that there would not be enough students in the school, the Education Ministry transferred all the high-school students from the low-income towns of Mitzpeh Ramon and Yeruham to Sde Boker and did not allow those towns to operate their own high schools.

Zameret, who was the principal of the Sde Boker high school at the time, said his students had to travel about an hour to get to school.

The establishment of Midreshet Sde Boker was "a story of corruption," said Zameret. "They used the army, they allocated resources without permits and they lied in the Knesset."

All the same, he said, no one kept any of the money raised for the institution.

"Ben-Gurion wanted to make the Negev bloom," said Zameret. "And at the time, that goal was above everything."