77 Years of Killing 28 British to Create Israel: King David Hotel
Seattle Washington, 11.11pm
During a confrontation between Saul Berenson (Mandy Patinkin) and CIA black ops specialist Dar Adal (F. Murray Abraham), the latter justifies his recent cavorting with Islamabad high-ranked Taliban leader Haissam Haqqani (Numan Acar) by referencing former Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin.
“Menachem Begin killed 91 British soldiers at the King David Hotel before becoming Prime Minister,” says Dar Adal in the scene, speaking of Begin, whom in the 1940s led underground Zionist group Irgun (Etzel), before Israel’s independence was proclaimed in 1948. Dar Adal continued: "the Taliban (Haqqani) has reclaimed district in all but 1 city (means: Kabul), Haqqani will be in Kabul by Christmas."
I agree: at the risk of alienating many friends & subscribers & inviting controversies at a time we need to come together as a nation and a world, I would argue that the final episode of SHOWTIME “HOMELAND” was superior to the final episode of either Succession, Seinfeld or Sopranos. One man’s opinion.
Today (July 22, 2023), 29 weeks consecutive protesters say no for Netanyahu. After 1000s of Israelis commanders & pilots pledge not to turn up to reserve duty if Netanyahu continues with his coup, there's a new bizarre twist. The captains of business/industry are now calling the Histadrut national labor org. to call a general strike. The national Labor organization, the Histadrut, has been much less active in the protests than other sectors. It's often attributed to the Histadrut Secretary General purported affinity with Netanyahu. He's tried to be a broker between Netanyahu and the opposition too.
With Netanyahu saying he will stop and negotiate after passage of the reasonableness law, Ben Gvir said they "it's just, the salad before the main course". Shabbat is out. Ben Gvir looks around and sees Israel in unprecedented turmoil, the IDF gravely damaged & society torn apart - & his first tweet after Shabbat says "the salad bar is open". Not only a violent, racist thug - he's infantile
All the Chiefs of Staff, Heads of Mossad of Shabak, & 100s of additional commanders have sent a brutally frank letter to Netanyahu, saying the see him personally responsible for the grave damage inflicted on the IDF, and calling him unequivocally to stop. They express unequivocal support for those who intend to cease their periodic service in the IDF, (such as the hundreds of pilots and thousands of officers). This turn of events strikes me as historically significant , possibly unique in the wider world. The (reservist) military withdrawing its services in protest at the executive’s treatment of the judiciary. Remarkable.
Back to 1940s. Two years prior, following a British raid on Jewish civilians, the Irgun executed a bombing at Jerusalem’s King David Hotel, which served as an administrative and military headquarters for the British, who had the mandate in the region at the time. Despite issued warnings to evacuate the premises by the Irgun, the attack totaled in 91 casualties, among them 28 Brits, 41 Arabs and 17 Jews, and is regarded historically as a contributing factor to the British mandate’s decline.
Speaking to Israeli news website Ynet, Herzl Makov, director of the Menachem Begin Center, demanded explanations regarding the comparison. “It is slander against Menachem Begin and the state of Israel,” said Makov. “To say, ‘Begin killed’? He wasn’t even there. The underground resistance group was under his command, and he took responsibility. In addition, three warnings were given to the British to vacate and their commander refused. So there is a dramatic difference between the two cases compared. For me, it is like saying that [Begin and Haqqani] are both terrorists, just like saying they both wore brown shirts. It is surprising specifically because Homeland is based on the Israeli format Prisoners of War.”
Begin went on to head major right-wing political party Herut (Freedom) and in 1977 became Israel’s sixth Prime Minister in what is known locally as “the revolution,” making him the first ever right-wing leader to dethrone the left-wing dominance in the country’s 30 years existence. Begin is also regarded for the 1979 unprecedented peace treaty with the Arab state of Egypt, and along with Egyptian president Anwar Sadat, received the Nobel Prize for peace.
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77 Years ago, July 22, 1946, the King David Hotel in Jerusalem was bombed, destroying the center of the British Mandatory administration. The attack by the Irgun pre-state Jewish underground killed 91 and wounded 46. Among the dead were British employees, both civilian and military, members of the hotel staff, both Jewish and Arab, and other bystanders.
The act of terror shocked the British, and helped accelerate their decision to withdraw from Palestine two years later. It also led to a split within the Jewish community in the Land of Israel: the mainstream Jewish Agency and Haganah attempted to dissociate themselves from the operation - though it had in fact been carried out at their behest.
The King David bombing took place less than a month following Operation Agatha, a British round-up of some 2,700 officials of both the Jewish Agency and the Haganah, carried out on June 29, 1946. When the British police occupied Jewish Agency headquarters that day, they also confiscated large numbers of sensitive files.
The Haganah leadership was under the impression – mistaken, it turned out – that the files had been taken to the King David Hotel, where both the British civilian government and its military leadership in Palestine were headquartered.
British offices took up about two thirds of the area of the lavish six-story hotel. At the same time, the hotel, which had opened in 1931, continued hosting guests, functioning as a neutral space in the city’s center where people of different backgrounds and loyalties could meet.
The proposal to blow up the hotel -- specifically its southern section – came from Menachem Begin, later Israel's prime minister but then, head of the Irgun Zvai Leumi (National Military Organization), also known by its Hebrew acronomyn, Etzel. [But approval for the operation came from top officials of the Haganah – Moshe Sneh, the chief of general headquarters, and Yitzhak Sadeh, commander of the Palmach, the militia’s elite commando unit.
Begin however is the one who insisted that a warning be given before the blast, so that the hotel could be evacuated, though there was concern within the Haganah that too much warning might allow the British to remove the incriminating documents the attack was intended to destroy.
The decision to conduct the attack on July 22 was made after two earlier plans were vetoed by the Haganah.
At the last minute, the Haganah and the Irgun also argued over the exact timing of the blast. At that point, Begin decided to go ahead with the operation unilaterally.
Possibly this lack of coordination may have allowed the mainstream leadership to try and deny any involvement in the attack. Agency chairman David Ben-Gurion, for example, responded to the explosion by declaring the Irgun to be “the enemy of the Jewish people.”
There is no doubt that Irgun gave a warning of the impending explosion, but it’s also clear that the warning did not reach anyone “in an official position with any power to take action,” as a British inquiry later concluded.
An initial call to the hotel switchboard, about 15 minutes before the blast, was ignored. Ten minutes later, the French consulate, on the hotel’s northern side, received a call, alerting it to open its windows, so as to reduce damage from the impending blast.
Oddly, the warning that finally elicited a reaction within the hotel came to it by way of the Palestine Post (predecessor to today’s Jerusalem Post), which received a call at 12:32 P.M. The paper’s operator passed on that message to both the hotel and the police.
British guards rushed to the hotel’s basement, where they found six milk cans holding a total of 350 kilograms of explosives, but it was too late for significant action, as the timer detonated the bombs at 12:37.
Rescue and salvage workers took three days to comb through the wreckage, and 2,000 truckloads of rubble needed to be removed from the site.
To this day, Revisionists and Labor-Zionist sympathizers still argue about the propriety of the attack – and even whether it was an act of “terrorism” – as well as responsibility for the large toll in human life.
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-prada- Adi Mulia Pradana is a Helper. Former adviser (President Indonesia) Jokowi for mapping 2-times election. I used to get paid to catch all these blunders—now I do it for free. Trying to work out what's going on, what happens next. Arch enemies of the tobacco industry, (still) survive after getting doxed. Now figure out, or, prevent catastrophic situations in the Indonesian administration from outside the government. After his mom was nearly killed by a syndicate, now I do it (catch all these blunders, especially blunders by an asshole syndicates) for free. Writer actually facing 12 years attack-simultaneously (physically terror, cyberattack terror) by his (ex) friend in IR UGM / HI UGM (all of them actually indebted to me, at least get a very cheap book). 2 times, my mom nearly got assassinated by my friend with “komplotan” / weird syndicate. Once assassin, forever is assassin, that I was facing in years. I push myself to be (keep) dovish, pacifist, and you can read my pacifist tone in every note I write. A framing that myself propagated for years.
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