JPost report on the Bombing Raid Exhibition

Former colleagues of PM mark Osirak anniversary

To commemorate the 30-year anniversary of the Israel Air Force strike on Saddam Hussein’s Osirak nuclear reactor, the Menachem Begin Heritage Center in Jerusalem unveiled an exhibit about the June 7, 1981, raid on Monday evening.

David Ivry, who commanded the IAF at the time of the mission; Maj.-Gen. Ido Nechushtan, the present IAF commander; Arye Naor, the cabinet secretary in 1981; and Deputy Prime Minister Dan Meridor, who succeeded Naor as cabinet secretary, spoke at the opening. Some of the pilots who participated also attended.

The exhibit will remain at the Begin Center for a month before moving to IAF bases around the country.

Code-named Operation Opera, the mission required IAF planes to fly more than 1,600 kilometers across Jordanian, Saudi and Iraqi airspace, and success was not assured. Prime Minister Begin gave the order despite opposition from then- Deputy Prime Minister Yigal Yadin, Minister of Interior Affairs Yosef Burg, Mossad chief Yitzhak Hofi, military intelligence head Maj.-Gen. Yehoshua Saguy, opposition leader Shimon Peres and others.

Meridor noted that exactly 44 years ago, he was fighting in a tank division during the Six Day War, when Israel’s military might was at its peak intensity for the time.

Some of Israel’s enemies, such as Egypt, came to accept the existence of Israel and chose peace, said Meridor, while Iraq did not, pursuing nuclear weapons because it knew Israel could not be defeated on the battlefield.

“We must identify opportunities to make smart decisions that require courage and vision,” said Meridor, who praised the decision to bomb Osirak as well as Begin’s pursuit of the peace treaty with Egypt. “Begin was such a leader. He was unique.”

After the raid, Begin stated that Israel would never allow its enemies to acquire weapons of mass destruction, a concept that later became known as the “Begin Doctrine.” The doctrine is the backbone of the argument for a preemptive military strike against Iran. Israel also reportedly bombed a nuclear reactor in Syria in September 2007.

“In my view an operation should correspond with the target,” Naor told The Jerusalem Post before he spoke at the exhibit opening.

“We want them not to have nuclear capability – that is the target. The target is not to send the air force to bomb Iran.”

The raid on the Iraqi reactor was very risky, and the risks involved with an attack on Iran would be more numerous, said Naor, adding “That’s why a strike perhaps is not the right answer to this threat. We should find something [else], and perhaps we are doing it.”

Israel was reportedly behind the Stuxnet computer virus which caused significant set-backs to Iran’s uranium enrichment program, as well as several assassinations of nuclear scientists working on Tehran’s nuclear program.

Moshe Arens, who served three terms as defense minister and held that position during the First Gulf War, said there can be no comparison between Operation Opera and a possible strike against Iran because the Iranian program includes multiple facilities, some of which are underground.

When asked if Iraq could have fired a nuclear weapon instead of Scud missiles at Israel during the Gulf War in 1991 had it not been for the 1981 strike, Arens, who did not attend the opening, responded, “It’s a possibility.”

Uri Avnery Recalls A Chance Meeting

In recalling his wife, Rachel, who just died:

Once we went to see a film set in a small Slovak town during the Holocaust. A solitary old woman did not understand what was happening when the Jews were summoned for deportation to the death camps; neighbors had to help her to the assembly point.

We arrived late and found seats in the dark. When the lights came on at the end, Menachem Begin got up in front of us. His eyes, red from weeping, locked with Rachel's. Oblivious to everybody around, Begin walked straight up to her, took her head in his hands and kissed her on the brow.

^

Irgun History

From a Haaretz story:

..."The British managed to penetrate deep into the [underground] organizations in an astonishing manner," says [Dr. Eldad] Harouvi [who today heads the Beit Hapalmach center]. "They knew a lot about the happenings in the underground movements."

...After reading thousands of documents, hearing testimony from police officers and Mandatory officials and perusing additional documents at the Imperial War Museum in London, Eldad Harouvi concluded that the CID had a senior and very reliable agent in the top echelons of the Haganah and various national Zionist institutions. This agent provided reports about secret meetings at the Haganah's highest level, in which David Ben-Gurion, Jewish Agency political department head Moshe Sharett and others participated. One of the reports, by that senior agent, concerned meetings at the home of Dr. Chaim Weizmann (later Israel's first president) in Rehovot with some 10 of the Yishuv's leaders.

The documents do not give the agents' names, but rather refer to them by nicknames or code names like Y21 or P85.

...The book contains a few documents and testimonies about the explosion of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem in 1946 by the Etzel, and about the escape of Etzel and Lehi prisoners from the prison in Acre. The Etzel people had blown up the King David, which housed the British Mandate administration in one of its wings. On July 22, they hid explosives in milk containers delivered to the hotel's kitchen. Ninety-one people - British, Jews and Arabs - were killed in the blast; the attack is considered a historic event.

According to Harouvi's book, an Irgun agent provided the CID with reliable information about the organization's intention to blow up the hotel using milk containers. [that would be, perhaps, Yannai, Heinrich Reinhold, see below]

About six months before the attack, the Palestine police commander, Brig. John Murray Rymer-Jones, met John Shaw, the chief secretary of the British government in Palestine, commander of the British forces, Gen. Evelyn Barker, and the high commissioner, Sir Alan Cunningham, and demanded increased security around the hotel. The three ignored his warnings, telling Rymer-Jones that life in the country was in any event dangerous.

Rymer-Jones left his post and returned home some two months before the Irgun attack.

About a year after part of the King David was destroyed in the blast, the Irgun's intelligence and operations specialists organized a daring escape operation of prisoners from a British jail in Acre. A report about the plans for a jailbreak reached one of the wardens in November 1946. As an Irgun prisoner walked one morning in the prison yard, a piece of paper fell from his pocket. On it were drawings depicting a planned escape route to be dug under the prison walls. The warden forwarded the drawing to his superiors and it was then passed to the CID, which stepped up security in and around the jail for a few weeks. When nothing happened, they returned to the regular routine.

The documents show that in the 1940s there were contacts between the Irgun and the CID that led to an understanding and even a "cease-fire." One of the liaisons between the two organizations was David Rosenthal, a Tel Aviv customs broker who in the 1960s published his own book, "Besherut Hamahteret" ("In the Service of the Underground" ). Catling himself initiated a few of the meetings. He even met, twice, with Ya'akov Meridor, who became commander of the Irgun after David Raziel joined the British Army and was killed in Iraq, in 1941.

In one of those meetings, in September 1943, Meridor asked Catling: "Why do you arrest Etzel people who are not operating against you?"

Catling answered: "Why do you kidnap rich Jews, rob and extort them? If you stop, I shall see to it that your people [detained in the British facility in Latrun] will be released," referring to the Irgun practice of financing its operations by committing robberies.

In 1944 Meridor himself was arrested and sent, along with hundreds of other Irgun people, to a detention camp in Eritrea in 1945. That followed the announcement by Menachem Begin, Meridor's successor as commander, in February 1944, of a "revolt" against the British authorities. At the end of 1945 the British offered to release the Irgun leaders in Eritrea if the organization would agree to end its terror attacks. The talks, which were secretly taped, were mainly held with Ya'akov Meridor and attorney Eliyahu Meridor (no relation; later a member of Knesset, and the father of Minister Dan Meridor ). In his book "Aruka Haderekh Leherut" ("Long Is the Path to Freedom" ), Ya'akov Meridor boasted of his ability to remain tight-lipped during his interrogation. According to the documents, however, Meridor answered most of the questions almost without protest.

While talking to Etzel, the CID continued to operate agents in the organization. Two of them, "Yanai" (Heinrich Reinhold) and Yaacov Chilevich, were the subjects of books and many articles. Both fled the country with British help after their deeds were exposed. Chilevich handed over to the British dozens of members of the Irgun, including such senior figures as Eliyahu Meridor, Aryeh Ben-Eliezer and Shimshon Unichman. Harouvi discloses in his book that Chilevich was also given the assignments of tracking down Menachem Begin.

"From the British perspective, says Harouvi, "Begin was a mystery. They never detained him, never interrogated him, and did not have his fingerprints. Even the picture they attached to an announcement declaring him a wanted person did not quite look like him. The operational compartmentalization in the Etzel was quite high, especially with everything that had to do with Begin. That was the biggest failure of British intelligence."

Chilevich did manage to get the address of Begin's hideout in Jerusalem, at 23 Alfasi Street, as well as an old photograph of him. These he obtained when he went to congratulate Begin on the birth of his son Benny.

The CID managed to recruit agent-informers in the Lehi underground too. One of the documents talks of an agent code-named "Levine." In 1940 the Lehi (an acronym for Lohamei Herut Yisrael - Israel Freedom Fighters ), in contrast with the Haganah and the Irgun, continued to consider the British the greatest enemy. The British declared a battle to the end against the Stern Gang, as they referred to the organization. In October 1940, agent "Levine" turned over 40 of his comrades, including all of the organization's top echelon excepting leader Avraham (Yair ) Stern. The people who drafted the document ordered the interrogators to free one of the detainees if he presented himself as "Levine."

In many studies of that period, and especially in the memoirs of the Irgun and Lehi people, there is a widespread assumption that the Haganah turned in members of the other underground organizations to the British. In his book, Harouvi says it was the Irgun that handed over many Lehi people - in part because Yair Stern had broken away from the Irgun and created a separate organization. "The Haganah did not turn in Lehi members," he stresses.

One of the most important and most fascinating items published by Eldad Harouvi is something called "The Jerusalem Agreement." This is a document composed by Stern, and dated September 15, 1940, describing a sort of friendship accord with fascist Italy. With 22 clauses, the agreement was to be signed between the "official representative" of side A - that is, the Italian government - and the "Temporary Hebrew government, "hereafter side B," which was the Lehi.

The full text of the agreement appears in a comprehensive study from 1967 by Irgun historian, David Niv, entitled "Ma'arkhot Ha'irgun Hatzva'i Haleumi" ("The Etzel's Campaigns" ). In a parenthetical clause in his research, Niv noted that Yair's agreement was reached with the help of "the agent" or "the mediator." Dr. Harouvi discloses that person's identity: Moshe Rothstein, an agent who worked with the British but also helped the Irgun.

The agreement, it should be noted, was no fabrication. It was designed to reach representatives of the Italian government, and accurately reflected the sentiments of Stern, who sought understandings with Nazi Germany and fascist Italy, in keeping with the concept that "My enemy's enemies are my friends." The Irgun's intelligence division got its hands on the agreement and turned Rothstein into a kind of agent provocateur and persuaded Stern that he was representing Italy.

What was fabricated in the agreement was the supposed Italian side. "My argument," says Eldad Harouvi, "is that Moshe Rothstein was managed by the Irgun people for the purpose of slandering Avraham Stern and presenting him and his group as a fifth column and quislings. That is how they were referred to by both the British and the Irgun. It was only more than a year after the operation was launched that a British report, in a secret internal account, said that they were partners to it, that actually it was all fictitious."

A representative of the Irgun's intelligence division, Yitzhak Berman, who was later a minister in Menachem Begin's government and a speaker of the Knesset, was in on the sting operation.

Several years ago Harouvi and Haran invited Berman to visit the Haganah archives. When they showed Berman the British report about the Jerusalem Agreement he smiled and said, "That was me."

When Lehi found out that the Irgun had trapped them, they retaliated with vengeance. Some three years later, in September 1943, at midday, in a Tel Aviv street, they fired dozens of submachine-gun bullets at Israel Pritzker, one of the Irgun's intelligence commanders, and killed him.

Book Review of "Brothers At War"

A book researched, in part, at the Begin Center, has been published and here are exceprts from a book review:

EXCLUSIVE: BROTHERS AT WAR: JEROLD AUERBACH, A REVIEW BY RAEL JEAN ISAAC

Brothers at War: Israel and the Tragedy of the Altalena by Jerold S. Auerbach (Quid Pro Books, 2011)

...The Altalena was a ship bringing nine hundred young fighters (most of them survivors of Nazi camps) and a large arsenal of weapons (most of them supplied by France) to newly-established Israel, attacked by five Arab states and desperate for arms to defend itself. The entire project was the work of the Irgun, the underground organization whose attacks on British forces in Palestine had a major role in Britain’s decision to throw in the towel. Ben-Gurion’s then provisional government gave orders to destroy the ship and its armaments. Sixteen Irgun members were killed as the ship went down, its munitions ablaze, with Irgun leader Menachem Begin himself narrowly escaping the fire aimed at fleeing survivors. (Most of the passengers had disembarked earlier in the two-day showdown.)

Begin was the hero in this squalid story. As Auerbach writes: “Begin commanded his loyal fighters not to return fire. His insistence upon restraint demonstrated his unyielding determination to prevent civil war from once again dividing the Jewish people and shattering Jewish sovereignty, as it had done nineteen centuries earlier.”


...If the hatred that destroyed the Altalena lacked a cause (in the sense of a justifiable ground for the action against the ship), it was not without background, and this Auerbach recounts. The first deep fissure in the Yishuv (as the Jewish community of Palestine was known) grew out of the 1933 murder of Labor leader Chaim Arlosoroff, as he strolled with his wife on a Tel Aviv beach. Arlosoroff had been harshly attacked by the rival Revisionists for making a “transfer agreement” with the Nazi government that brought money and Jews to Palestine, but at the cost of undermining a global anti-Nazi boycott. The Labor movement was convinced at the time (wrongly as subsequent investigations have concluded) that the Revisionists were responsible for his murder.
Hostility was fanned by divergent approaches between Labor and Revisionist factions on how to deal with the violence and terror accompanying the Arab revolt of 1936 and how to react to British betrayal of the Mandate, even as the need for a Jewish refuge from the Nazis became stark...by 1944, when it was clear the Allies would win, the Irgun, now commanded by Menachem Begin, returned to its policy of resisting British rule.

...Ben-Gurion would insist (as Auerbach notes, without a scintilla of evidence) that the Irgun planned to use the weapons for a military putsch. On the contrary, writes Auerbach, Begin was confident that “the arrival of desperately needed weapons and munitions would be recognized as an exemplary demonstration of patriotism. Here, after all, was a significant Irgun military contribution to the struggle for statehood–anything but an attempt to overthrow the government.”
In fact the only genuine disagreement concerned the distribution of arms. Ben-Gurion insisted all the arms should be turned over to him unconditionally. Begin wanted 20% of the arms to go to Irgun forces in Jerusalem. While “what ifs” can never be certainties, it is likely the Altalena’s arms would have made it possible to unite the city under Jewish sovereignty in 1948, greatly strengthening Israel’s negotiating position in the years ahead.

...Nonetheless, ugly episode though it was, what was most important was that the Altalena did not serve as prelude to more fratricidal strife...in the wake of the Yom Kippur War of 1973, there began a new growth of sinat hinam, this time a groundless hatred by secular Israelis directed against religious Jews, especially the religious nationalists who settled outside the ceasefire lines of 1949. Auerbach’s subject is the Altalena so he does not go into the same detail on the growth of this new manifestation...

...In 1975, then Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, speaking to young people at seminary Efal, declared: “There is no more dangerous organization in this country than Gush Emunim.” (There were multiple ironies here. Efal was a project of the Hameuchad movement which had been dedicated to settlement throughout the land of Israel. And it was Rabin, as a young officer in the Palmach, who had been in charge of the destruction of the Altalena.) Less than a year later the famous writer A.B. Yehoshua sent a letter to Haaretz: “One should encourage them [the people of Gush Emunim] to settle more and more beyond the Green Line. Thus, when the hoped-for peace comes, and we shall be freed of the territories, we shall also be freed from them.”...

...“The Altalena episode, and the killing of Jews by Jews that accompanied it, remains a lingering self-inflicted wound from Israel’s heroic struggle for independence. If wisely used as historical memory, the Altalena might serve Israelis as a reminder of the ominous possibility that civil war could destroy Jewish national sovereignty. If not, Altalena memories may finally–and disastrously–be erased by an even more devastating tragedy.”

^

Begin Mobilized On Behalf of A Palestinian State

By Begin's logic, the Palestinians should have a state

Those rejecting a future independent Palestinian state as an Iranian proxy must have missed the history lesson of the establishment of a strikingly similar small country not far away.

By Ron Ben-Tovim

In "The Revolt," his seminal depiction of the Jewish resistance against British rule in Palestine, Irgun chief and future Prime Minister Menachem Begin often returns to his interrogation at the hands of the Soviets. These references apparently are intended to counter a contemporary communist argument raised during these interrogations, that the Zionist movement was a hoax, a "puppet show," meant to divert attention from the Jews' revolutionary role in Europe and turn them into a tool for British imperialism in the Middle East.

"This talk of a State conceals the true purpose of Zionism - which is to divert the Jewish youth from the ranks of the revolution in Europe and put them at the disposal of British imperialism in the Middle East. This is the kernel of Zionism. All the rest is artificial shell, deliberately made to deceive."

Begin, of course, repeatedly balks at these claims, referencing centuries of Jewish craving to return to their historical homeland and flee from the kind of persecution and massacre made manifest at that time by the camps and furnaces of Europe.

Later, Begin repeatedly cites the deep chasm running between British imperialist objectives – for which, he said, they were more than willing to sacrifice the Jews – and the very real, heartfelt Jewish desire for freedom from both persecution and foreign rule.

In one famous metaphor, Begin tells his Soviet interrogator that the need to establish a Jewish state was not a purely theoretical ambition, one motivated by either a revolutionary or a counter-revolutionary movement, but was like saving a family from a burning house. In other words, urgent and real.

Begin is asking his Soviet interrogator to disregard for a moment the political powers at play, undoubtedly necessary for the creation of Israel, and look the hopes and dreams of real people: People that care for their children, that cry out against injustice, that find life hard, if not sometimes impossible, when lived under the specter of constant foreign occupation, exile, and persecution.

Real people that crave real self-determination.

Yet as convincing as Begin's arguments were, the tendency (typified here by the Soviets) to subjugate human needs with purely geopolitical considerations have far from disappeared from the Middle East. Indeed, they have become the official line of the State of Israel.

Objections to the creation of an independent, viable Palestinian state often run the gamut of the kind of conspiracy theories realized by Begin's interrogator, opinions made strikingly evident since peace talks with the Palestinian Authority lost momentum (if indeed such momentum ever existed) late last year.

"A Palestinian state would function as an Iranian proxy," one version of this argument goes. In another: "A Palestinian state would in effect act as a place holder, allowing weapons and terrorist groups to flow uninterrupted, putting larger cities such as Tel Aviv in range of rocket fire and closing crucial buffer zones protecting central Israel from bombing attacks."

These arguments have been instrumental in the creation of several hardened positions, such as those lamenting the "indefensible" 1967 borders, a demilitarized Palestine, or "the need to retain an Israeli military presence in the Jordan Valley" (the latter two ostensibly to prevent the flow of weapons into the newly formed Palestine), and so on. But most importantly, they have served to delegitimize the entire Palestinian quest for self-determination.

The actual argument, similar to the Communist claim, is that the Palestinian desire for a state is not genuine, that the Palestinians do not truly seek self-determination, and, in some cases, might not even mind Israeli occupation that much. And let's not forget those who insist the Palestinian population is now "better off." (Whatever that might mean).

The Palestinians, they say, seek a stronghold - one erected by faceless Arabs. And once completed, one which could be filled with the kind of faceless Arabs that seek Israel's destruction, if not the annihilation of the entire Jewish people.

The beauty of Begin's nuanced commentary on the criticism of Zionism, what I would term his turn toward the human, seems completely lost on proponents of the aforementioned positions. The consequence of this blindness to a facet of nationhood so close to our own is - as the unshakable leader of the dream of an Israel on both sides of the Jordan River must have understood - tantamount to a loss of humanity. It is a faceless doctrine that crushes individual lives.

What proponents of such anti-human stances also apparently fail to see is that while it is possible that certain political powers have nefarious intentions regarding a Palestinian state, it is nevertheless true that the establishment of Israel may not have been endorsed solely by those with the Jews' best interests in mind. In fact, Western imperialism, expansionism, trade, religion and, perhaps above all, racism, played a significant part in the establishment of the State of Israel.
The dangers of foreign influence, whether Iranian or other, are of course real. They are, however, as real to us as the fear of Western imperialism and exploitation was real to every other country in our region over Israel's creation.

To understand that, finally, is to let go of the fears of an Iranian outpost. Not because those fears are unfounded, but because they are not what should determine how Israel treats its neighbors. To mistrust those who, in good times and bad, live alongside Israel and share its fate is to perpetuate those nefarious motivations for Israel's foundation, to prefer blind dogma over the real and the human.

This is something Begin understood, and his nearsighted followers of today do not. We must live with those who share our fate, not rely on a culture that while instrumental in establishing Israel, should have been discarded immediately after. And that is why the former prime minister remains the only Israeli leader to sign a peace deal that actually had substance, both in terms of Israel's integration in the region and its security.

Begin's vision should help us understand that as long as we refuse to come to terms with both our own desires and those of the people around us and among us, we shall never be fully here. That to be fully here is to sever the umbilical cord of dogma and start - as Begin himself did in 1979 - to live with our neighbors, whether they are truly the proxies of the Islamic Republic of Iran or not.

Tom Segev of Haaretz on the New Begin Center Map of Jerusalem

In the footsteps of terror

Menachem Begin regularly rejected any comparison between the terrorist acts carried out by members of the Irgun (pre-state underground militia) and the actions of Palestinian terrorists; he claimed that in contrast to the Arabs, the Irgun - his organization - spared civilians' lives. Begin was even more angered when Irgun members were called "dissenters" and cast out from the pantheon of Israeli heroism. After he became prime minister, he frequently took the trouble to correct the historical narrative, and after his death, the Menachem Begin Heritage Center was founded, which operates by force of a special law, at the state's expense.

The center has just put out a map for travelers. The Begin Center takes pride in the terrorist acts that Irgun and Lehi (another pre-state militia) members carried out; the map it published leads travelers along a route of those attacks in Jerusalem.

It is a large and eye-opening map, lavishly printed on glossy paper. There are a total of 165 flag markers on it, the vast majority of them denoting terror attacks perpetrated by members of Irgun and Lehi, and a minority marking acts by members of the Haganah and Palmach. Contrary to Begin's claims, the map enumerates a long series of outright terror attacks, including bombings of places where civilians tended to congregate, such as buses, cafes, markets, a cinema, a post office and the like. The terror attacks are termed "acts of retaliation."

The chronology of terror attacks that accompanies the map strengthens the thesis that no less than they were intended to hurt the Arabs and the British, the actions of the various organizations were designed to bolster their standing, in anticipation of the struggle over the governing of the state about to be established, and it's hard not to get the impression from the map that this competition continues to this day.

As expected, the map shows that the Irgun did much more for the country than the Haganah. The number of Arabs the Irgun killed is almost quadruple the number of Arabs the Haganah killed (according to the map a total of around 250. In actuality there were more ). Some 60 British were also eliminated, nearly all of them by the Irgun and Lehi. The Haganah mainly ran interference: According to the map, one in every four actions it carried out was aimed at hurting the Irgun, by abducting its members and disrupting its activities. There is no mention of the Haganah's efforts to defend the Jewish Quarter, or of the Hish, the secretive field corps of the Haganah, or of the convoys that brought supplies to the besieged city, or of the Convoy of 35 ("Lamed Heh" ), or of other actions. On Mount Scopus a traveler relying on the map will find a marker for "the Haganah's failed attempt to conquer Augusta Victoria." The truly significant event that occurred nearby is not referenced on the map at all: the attack on the doctors' convoy in April 1948, in which 78 people, mostly personnel from Hadassah Hospital and the Hebrew University, were killed. One may speculate as to why this incident has no place in Begin's heritage. Perhaps it is because the convoy was traveling under the Haganah's protection; perhaps because Irgun and Lehi members did not rush to its defense; and perhaps because the attack came just a few days after the conquest of Deir Yassin by Irgun and Lehi members.

The Deir Yassin affair is described on the map at length; as expected, the text portrays the conquest of the village as a military operation in every way, and does not mention the death of more than 110 Palestinians, and states: "About a third of the Irgun's and Lehi's fighting force was hurt by the gunfire and sustained many dead and wounded." The map does not note the numbers: 35 wounded and five dead.

Our response will be forthcoming.

^

On The Altalena

Prof. Jerry Auerbach conducted research at the Begin Center Library and Archives for his forthcoming book on the Altalena arms ship of June 1948. Here is his recent article from The Jewish Press:

Remember The Altalena
By: Jerold S. Auerbach

Why should anyone remember a notorious pariah ship from Israel's war for independence? If for no other reason (and there are many), because it is likely to resurface from the depths of memory should Israeli-Palestinian negotiations, if and when they ever begin, focus on Jewish settlements.

The prospect of expelling thousands of Jews from the biblical homeland of the Jewish people will surely widen, perhaps violently and irreparably, the deep chasm that already separates secular from religious Israelis. Such a dangerously polarizing conflict has not roiled Israel for more than sixty years. When it did, in 1948, it brought the fledgling Jewish state to the precipice of civil war.

During its first weeks of independence, Israel confronted a military invasion from five Arab nations that were determined to annihilate it. The new state was already battered from months of Palestinian Arab violence within its porously unstable borders, climaxing with the fall of the Jewish Quarter in the Old City of Jerusalem. Israel was desperate for an infusion of weapons and fighters to prevent its annihilation.

Enter the Altalena, with more than nine hundred Holocaust survivors, war refugees and fighters, and tons of desperately needed military supplies. It sailed for Israel from Port-du-Bouc in southern France on June 11, the day when a month-long United Nations ceasefire began. Inspired, funded, and provisioned by loyalists of Menachem Begin's Irgun, it would join the roster of ill-fated ships that had exemplified the Zionist struggle to rescue Jews from annihilation and return them to their homeland.

If the Exodus - popularized in the romantic novel by Leon Uris that became an iconic Hollywood movie - is still revered as the valiant ship, the Altalena instantly became the reviled pariah ship. It arrived with the permission of the Israeli government - meaning Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion - at Kfar Vitkin, north of Netanya, on June 21. While weapons were unloaded on the beach, fighters were taken to a nearby immigrant camp to prepare for induction into the army.

But Ben-Gurion, fearing a right-wing insurrection, ordered the beach surrounded. Altalena passenger Dov Shilansky encountered an Israeli soldier in a command car. "I spoke to him in Hebrew," he recalled. "It was my first speech in Israel." Shilansky (who, forty years later, became Speaker of the Knesset) told him: "We've just arrived. We survived the Holocaust. We've come here to fight by your side. The homeland is in danger. We will join the army."

The soldier instructed him to go no farther. Shilansky replied: "We have no other way. I won't go back to Dachau. If we can't come to Israel, we'll go back to the sea." The soldier replied: "I don't care. Go back to the sea."

Later that afternoon, Begin - disregarding a ten-minute ultimatum to surrender all weapons - spoke to his assembled fighters. Suddenly, Israeli soldiers raked the beach with machine-gun bullets. Yaacov Meridor, Begin's second in command, ordered: "Don't shoot back." An Irgun fighter realized: "I couldn't shoot. My brother was on the other side."

Another newcomer was uncomprehending: "Instead of welcoming us they were killing and wounding many of our men whose only purpose was to help." Six Irgun men died in the fighting.

The Altalena sailed south, running aground off the Tel Aviv shore. After a battle erupted on the beach, Ben-Gurion ordered the Israel Defense Forces to destroy it. Some IDF soldiers refused to obey.

An officer protested: "I'm here to fight the enemy. I won't fight another Jew." He instructed the soldiers in his squad: "Do what your conscience tells you." (He became one of eight soldiers to be court-martialed for their disobedience that day.)

An Irgun fighter remembered: "If Begin had told us to fight we would have, but he did not want war between brothers and we accepted his leadership." Irgun fighters obeyed his command not to return fire.

Ben-Gurion was convinced - without a shred of supporting evidence (then or since) - that the Irgun was launching a putsch to overthrow his government. Late that afternoon, he ordered cannons to open fire on the ship. Hilary Dilesky, a volunteer from South Africa who had arrived in Israel only two months earlier, commanded the battery that was chosen to fire the first shot. Receiving his orders, he recalled, "I suddenly was struck with a heavy, deep feeling that I didn't want to shoot."

Dilesky approached his corps commander, telling him - in English, for he could not yet speak Hebrew: "I hadn't come to Israel to fight Jews." The commander yelled back that his job was to obey orders. It was, Dilesky recalled, "a fateful moment" when he realized that "following orders was the right thing to do." But "my heart was broken when we began firing," he confessed nearly fifty years later. "This has been a burden all my life," he recalled, "and still is."

With the Altalena ablaze from a direct hit, and the explosion of its munitions imminent, Irgun leaders (including Begin) and members of the crew jumped overboard, filling lifeboats and swimming ashore. An astonished American crew member observed that "continuous small arms fire from shore ... was directed at everyone in the water."

A 17-year-old Haganah soldier on the beach never forgot that "there were people on our side who waited until they saw heads above water, and then they fired at them."

A Palmach soldier recalled, "Firing on each other: it seemed illogical, unbelievable." He confessed: "I had many doubts, when I pointed the gun at the approaching boat filled with Jews." But he overcame them. "You tell yourself, you are guarding Israeli democracy. And with this belief, you shoot."

Another Palmach soldier was stunned by what he saw: "Before my eyes was waged a war between brothers. Jews are shooting Jews - in order to kill!"

Ben-Gurion enthusiastically blessed the "holy cannon" that destroyed the Altalena. He denied as false rumors the eyewitness reports from soldiers and journalists at the site of the Tel Aviv battle that Israeli soldiers on the beach had fired on desperate swimmers. That day, ten more Irgun men were killed. In the months that followed, eighteen Altalena fighters died for their country during the War of Independence.

* * * * *

The Altalena marked a tragic climax to fifteen years of bitter acrimony between Zionists on the left and right that had plagued the Yishuv during the years of British Mandatory rule. To some, it was a sorrowful reminder of the groundless hatred (sinat chinam) that was said to have plunged Jews into their devastating civil war in 1st century Jerusalem.

By now, however, most Israelis have long since repressed any memory of the Altalena, while few Jews outside of Israel have even heard of it.

But within the past decade, members of the Israeli left, taking Ben-Gurion's order to sink the Altalena as a model for the proper treatment of political opponents, proposed it as the solution to Yasir Arafat's internal conflict with Hamas.

The Arafat-Altalena analogy quickly caught on as a teachable moment. A Palestinian Authority official told the Jerusalem Post that in confronting Hamas and Islamic Jihad, "we have to act like Ben-Gurion in 1948."

Not long after proposals for an Arafat-style Altalena had receded, a far more volatile analogy erupted. Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's decision to remove 9,000 Jewish settlers from Gaza provoked wrenching and acrimonious debate over the future of Jewish settlements. The Israeli press, which enthusiastically supported the Gaza expulsion, vigorously defended Ben-Gurion's action in 1948 as a model to emulate.

To exercise its "sovereign duty," Yaron London wrote in Yediot Aharonot, Israel must once again use its "muscles" against those who violently opposed its decisions.

Moshe Negbi, legal commentator for the Israel Broadcasting Authority, complained (in Haaretz) that "Ben-Gurion's successors have demonstrated total limpness in imposing law and order on extremists.... It is this limpness that has brought down upon us the malignancy of the Jewish settlements" and their "fanatics."

On the political left, Ben-Gurion remained the inspirational leader who certainly could not be accused of "limpness."

The barrage of encouragement for an Altalena reprise roused 91-year-old Shmuel Katz, who had been a member of the Irgun high command at the time, and then a founder of the Herut party and Member of the Knesset.

These "pundits," Katz wrote in the Jerusalem Post, were "conjuring up the Altalena myth of a revolt that was never planned and never took place, a fiction woven by an unscrupulous politician at the cost of a score of innocent young lives and the loss of a valuable ship and an invaluable store of arms."

He claimed: "The memory of the Altalena is being manipulated for political purposes to facilitate the expulsion of the Jews from Gush Katif [Gaza]."

That same year, during the bitter Knesset debate over the expulsion of Orthodox settlers from the outpost of Yitzhar, Prime Minister Sharon was accused of wanting "a second Altalena" so that he, too, could "fire the 'holy cannon.' "

He was warned by settler groups: "You will not get a second Altalena from us. You will not get a civil war from us, because we - the citizens whom you wish to go to war against - will not fight against our brothers."

As national debate over settlements became increasingly acrimonious, some Israelis urged soldiers to refuse to obey orders for the forced evacuation of settlers. They cited the precedent of Palmach soldiers who had disobeyed orders to fire on the Altalena: "Refuse to obey the transfer order against your brothers, just as ... soldiers refused to shoot at their brothers in Ben-Gurion's day."

Recalling the tragic war between brothers in 1948, 82-year-old Yosef Nachmias, then a company commander on board the Altalena, recounted the refusal of his own brother, a Palmach fighter, to shoot at the ship because he knew that his sibling was on board. For Nachmias, killing brothers was not merely a metaphor.

During a military ceremony at the Western Wall in October 2009, two religious soldiers displayed a sign protesting settler expulsions. They served time in jail for their misbehavior; one of them was discharged from the army after refusing to express regret for his protest. Then, when Israeli security forces destroyed two Jewish homes in the settlement of Har Bracha, two religious soldiers displayed a banner from the roof of their military base opposing the expulsion of its residents. Sentenced to thirty days in military jail, they were demoted in rank and dismissed from command and combat duties.

Amid this simmering political and religious confrontation, Altalena parallels proliferated. Writing in Haaretz, Hebrew University political scientist Shlomo Avineri accused settlement defenders of attempting to undermine the "historic achievement of Zionism," the creation of "a single binding [national] authority" for the Jewish state.

Ben-Gurion's decision to attack the Altalena, he suggested, may have displayed "ruthless determination," but it assured to the Israel Defense Forces "a monopoly on the legitimate use of force." The pain and distress of settlement supporters was understandable, Avneri conceded, but "in the Jewish state only one legitimate body is authorized to enforce political decisions."

When six infantry soldiers refused to participate in demolitions in the settlement outpost of Negohot, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu - sounding very much like Ben-Gurion in 1948 - asserted ominously: "If you support this refusal, it will bring about the collapse of the state." Israeli leaders, claimed Defense Minister Ehud Barak, were confronting "the same fateful decision that David Ben-Gurion faced in the first days of the state."
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Should Israel and the Palestinian Authority ever reach agreement on the terms of peace between peoples who have engaged in bitter conflict over the same land for nearly a century, it will likely require the forcible removal of many tens of thousands of Jewish settlers from their homes.

Yet few Israelis who argue passionately for this outcome are likely to realize that soldiers who refuse to force settlers from their homes would be responding precisely as did the Haganah and Palmach soldiers in 1948 who refused to shoot their Irgun "brothers."

Such a confrontation would expose the core of Israel's still unresolved national identity struggle: Jewish state, secular state, democratic Jewish state? It has the ominous potential to reduce the Altalena to historical insignificance by comparison.

At a crucial moment in 1948, David Ben-Gurion faced the urgent necessity to protect the fledgling Jewish state and defend its sovereignty. But did he decide wisely when he issued the command to shoot Jews on the Altalena who wanted only to fight for the independence of Israel?

In his unrelenting determination to concentrate authority in his hands, did Ben-Gurion undermine, rather than strengthen, legitimacy in the new nation? Did he set a dangerous precedent for battles between brothers that has haunted Israel ever since and may yet explode into a far more volatile internecine conflagration than anything that happened in 1948?

The confrontation over the Altalena, and the tragic killing of Jews by Jews that accompanied it, remains a lingering, self-inflicted, wound from Israel's desperate fight for independence. It cuts to the very core of the enduring Israeli struggle over political legitimacy - then, now, and in the foreseeable future.

It also braids themes that are woven into the biblical narrative. In the beginning, after Creation went awry, Noah's ark - the first ship to be mentioned in a Jewish text - transported a righteous man and his family from impending disaster to safety.

There is also the recurrent tragedy of sibling rivalry, even fratricide. Cain and Abel. Isaac and Ishmael. Jacob and Esau. Joseph and his brothers. And in 1st century Jerusalem, Zealots ruthlessly slaughtered their fellow Jews in a civil war that shattered national sovereignty for two thousand years.

Whether secular and religious Jews can live together in Israel without the groundless hatredthat retains the potential to destroy their nation from within remains an open question. If not, the Altalena may finally - but disastrously - be supplanted by a far more devastating Jewish tragedy.

Jerold S. Auerbach is the author of "Brothers at War: Israel and the Tragedy of the Altalena," from which this essay is adapted, to be published later this month by Quid Pro Books.

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