On The Hanging of the Two Sergeants

The story of 'a cruel revenge'

A chance encounter led filmmaker Peleg Levy to bring to the big screen a Mandate-era tale about two British soldiers who were hanged in Netanya.

By Ofer Aderet | Aug.07, 2012 | 1:37 AM

In July 1947, two British sergeants were being held in a narrow, closely-guarded bunker that had been dug underneath a diamond-polishing plant in Netanya. The two were captured by the Irgun, and the Jewish underground militia threatened to hang them unless the British commuted the death sentences of three Irgun operatives.

On August 1, nearly three weeks after the kidnapping, Haaretz reported that the Palestine Police found "the two corpses ... in a government eucalyptus grove" near Netanya.
The front-page headline in the UK's The Daily Express was more acerbic. "HANGED BRITONS: Picture that will shock the world," it screamed to its readers. Beneath that was a grisly photo of the two young soldiers' bodies on a tree, bound and blindfolded.

This past weekend marked the 65th anniversary of these dramatic event that became known as the Sergeants affair, an event that agitated the entire pre-State community in Palestine and has been named in history books as one of the factors that led to the end of the British Mandate.

Filmmaker Peleg Levy has devoted considerable time to researching the affair for a documentary he is producing together with veteran filmmaker Herb Krosney. "You have to understand," says Levy, "that there are many people who are afraid to open this story."

Last Thursday night, Levy marked the anniversary by leading a group of 70 people, aged 11 to 95, on a tour of the final stations in the lives of the two soldiers. The first stop was 15 Herzl Street in Herzliya, where Sergeants Clifford Martin and Mervyn Paice were abducted on July 11. From there the group moved on to the building where they were hidden. The tour ended in "the sergeants' forest" in Kiryat Hasharon, where "the affair reached its climax," according to Levy.

The hanging of the sergeants was the peak of a stubborn battle between the British and the Irgun. During the course of that battle, the Irgun captured (or tried to capture ) British soldiers and commanders to use as bargaining chips, to obtain the release or the commutation of death sentences for Jewish fighters caught by the British.

Between 1938 and 1947, 12 members of the Irgun and the Lehi, the other underground militia, were sentenced to death by the British. Ten of them were executed by hanging. The other two committed suicide in prison. The last three on the list were Avshalom Haviv, Yaakov Weiss and Meir Nakar. After they were abducted, Menachem Begin - the Irgun commander who was hiding in a Tel Aviv safe house - ordered the capture of British hostages to secure the trio's release.

Martin and Paice were easy prey: They frequently met with Aharon Weinberg of the rival Haganah underground, and gave him intelligence information about the British forces. A surveillance team followed the pair after one such meeting and abducted them.

But the Irgun failed in their goal. The British hanged the "Olei Hagardom," as they are called in the underground martyrology - Jews who went to the gallows in the struggle against the British. Begin ordered that the sergeants be hanged in response. He later said that this was "the most difficult decision of my life" and defined it as a "cruel revenge."

Levy's interest in the affair began six years ago, when he happened to have met Moshe Moldavsky on a public bench in Netanya. Levy tells how the former Irgun member explained to him that "When the British started hanging Jews, there were those who said aloud that it would be the end of the Empire; they warned them against breaking the neck of 'this stiff-necked people,' aspiring to return to its land."

Levy took a special interest in the unanticipated Jewish angle of the affair: Clifford Martin was the circumcised, Hebrew-speaking son of a Jewish mother. After his abduction, his mother pleaded for help to a Jewish member of Parliament.

"I ask myself how the fact that the abducted man was a Jew affected the abductors for the Irgun on the one hand, and the British commanders on the other," says Levy.

Marvin Paice, was also "one of ours," he adds. "[Paice] was deeply involved in the country, he helped the Jews and he reported to them on the British plans." Paice's father appealed to Begin to have mercy on his son, in a letter addressed simply to "The commander of the Irgun." A postal worker who was an Irgun member got the letter to Begin, who replied in an open radio broadcast: "You must apply to your government that thirsts for oil and blood."

Levy defines the hanging of the sergeants as a tragedy. He believes they should be added to the list of Olei Hagardom.

Before he passed away, Shmuel Katz, a member of the Irgun high command, told Levy: "The British understood that after the Olei Hagardom went to the noose with their heads held high and after the sergeants were hanged, there was no more scope for escalation. The game was over."

The affair left an impact that can still be felt in Israel to this day. One of the scenes in Levy's film shows two participants in the affair: Yossi Meller, an Irgun member who participated in the abduction and who passed away a year and a half ago, and Meir Novick, a Haganah member involved with getting intelligence from Martin and Paice. As fate would have it, both of them lived in the same old age home, but refused to ever speak to each other.

Levy hopes that the film will come out next year.

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Upcoming in the May Issue of SH'MA

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Irgun Operation Documented in Photograph

The damage done to Police H.Q. at the Russian Compound in Jerusalem by an Irgun attack on Dec. 27, 1945






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LA Times Links Mumbai Attack to King David Hotel Blast

The LA Times found an opportunity to smack around Israel regarding the Mumbai attacks on hotels:

Hotels have always been prime targets for soldiers and terrorists, and you could fill an entire guidebook with the list of lodgings that have been bombed or shot at by combatants looking to spill blood and get attention.

Here are some of the more notable hotel episodes of the last seven decades:

— The King David Hotel in Jerusalem was bombed in June, 1946. More than 90 people were killed, most or all of them British officials using the building as a headquarter. The British controlled Jerusalem at the time, and the bombers were Zionists, commanded by Menachem Begin (who was to become Israel’s leader decades later).

These comments were left there:

Mike Jefferson Says:
November 29th, 2008 at 5:38 pm
I find it ironic that the LA Slimes would lead off with the Irgun bombing of the King David. A few salient points are in order. First the King David Hotel was primarily a military target as it was the HQ of the occupying British troops. Second, the British received a phone call from the Irgun urging them to evacuate in advance of the bombing - the British chose not to. All of the other terror incidents you mention were perpetrated against innocent civilians.

Also, I find it interesting that the paper chose to ignore the many high profile bombings perpetrated by Palestinian terrorists including the Passover massacre in Netanya.

Seth Levy Says:
November 29th, 2008 at 7:33 pm
Why did you mention it was Zionists responsible for the King David Hotel, the IRA responsible for the Hotel Europa and Grand Hotel, and so on but omitted any responsible parties that were Muslim such as in Islamabad or Taba? Why did you forget the many hotel attacks in Israel that the Palestinians committed such as the recent Netanya Hotel attack in 2002 that killed 30? Will I ever see a response to this? Probably not but hopefully (if you publish it at all) someone will see it and recognize your bias towards appeasing radical Muslims.

Yisrael Medad Says:
November 29th, 2008 at 10:51 pm
One more comment on the King David Hotel attack: only the southern wing was targeted which was wholly British, having been taken over from the owners in stages, beginning already in 1938. The Army Headquarters were located there as were the offices of the Mandate Government Secreteriat. See Thurston Clarke’s book, “In Blood and Fire”.

An Article on the Irgun

The Use of Force Beyond the Liberal Imagination: Terror and Empire in Palestine, 1947
Shai Lavi

Abstract

The question of the use of force and its relation to political power has resurfaced in an era of terror attacks and wars against terror. The liberal conceptualization of this relation is limited by the bipolar understanding of force as either legitimate or illegitimate. Turning to the history of the Irgun, a Jewish underground movement, and its struggle against the British Empire in 1947 Palestine, this article seeks to expand the understanding of force beyond the liberal paradigm.

The article offers a new model for understanding the use of force by the liberal nation-state and distinguishes between four different modes of force: violence, legality, terror, and empire. Whereas the liberal paradigm is limited to a conception of force as either justified and, hence, just (legality), or unjustified and, hence, unjust (violence), one may think of two additional forms of force, which, at first, may seem paradoxical: the unjust but justified force of terror and the force of empire, which is just but not in need of justification. Rather than using these forms as stable categories, the article seeks to understand the ways in which the uses of force became destabilized in times of political contestation. The article concludes by pointing out the broader implications of this model for the political analysis of the liberal nation-state and its use of force.

Recommended Citation:

Lavi, Shai (2006) "The Use of Force Beyond the Liberal Imagination: Terror and Empire in Palestine, 1947," Theoretical Inquiries in Law: Vol. 7 : No. 1, Article 9.

Available at: http://www.bepress.com/til/default/vol7/iss1/art9

Academic Studies

In an academic research article published in Contemporary Security Policy, Kate Utting deals with the British experience in Palestin 1945 -1948 and writes there:-

The terrorist campaign [by the Jewish resistance undergrounds] had been successful in confronting Britain with 'a direct choice between total repression and total withdrawal' (according to Ian Beckett, "Modern Insurgencies...", 2005, p. 89)

and

General Sir Alan Cunningham, ,the High Commissioner after 1946, recognised that Britain faced a different type of military challenge with 'sophisticated Zionist irregulars, who practiced modern guerrilla warfare" (according to Tim Jones, "The British Army and Counter-Guerrilla Warfare in Trasition, 1944-1952", 1996, p. 89)

Irgun Jaffa Operation Mentioned in New Book

A new book has just been published, An Intimate History of Arabs and Jews in Jaffa.
By Adam LeBor, Illustrated, 424 pp., W. W. Norton & Company, Paper, $14.95 and in the New York Times review, we caught this:-

Reading Adam LeBor’s “City of Oranges,” I once again met Fakhri Geday, along with much displacement. LeBor writes Jaffa’s past as a sprawling family saga. At its center are a half-dozen or so clans, Jewish and Arab, whose lives intertwine from the 19th century till today, as the Mediterranean port flowers and then is torn apart by conflict.

The Gedays, a Christian Arab family in Jaffa for generations, are one thread in the chronicle. Unlike other wealthy Arabs, Fakhri’s father, Youssef, refused to sell land to the Jews who poured into British-ruled Palestine. Unlike his neighbors, he also rejected panic and flight when Menachem Begin’s right-wing Irgun underground overran Jaffa in April and May 1948.

Since the reviewer is Gershom Gorenberg, it is to be expected to find the following line:-

That era ended in 1921, when tension between Arab nationalists and Zionists erupted into riots in Jaffa.

One might get the impression that the riots were mutual. After all, there was "tension" and riots (plural) "erupted". But as we all know, Arabs exploited a May Day march by socialists and communists which had nothing to do with the Arab-Israel conflict and set about invading Jewish homes, pillaging and murdering, including Yosef Haim Brener, the famous author, who wasn't in Jaffa at the time but in an orange grove near Abu-Kabbir. Almost 50 Jews were killed by Arabs and no Arabs were killed by Jews rather by British security personnel.

See here, here too and here as well.

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.

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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."