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By Root 2051 0

strangely, was denied permission to drop anchor unless all of its cargo was handed over to Tsahal. The Irgun commander decided to take the ship to Tel Aviv. There, on Ben-Gurion’s orders, the Palmach greeted it with artillery fire, sinking it. The operation was commanded by high-ranking officers whose names would later shine in the Tsahal firmament: the future general and minister Moshe Dayan; future archaeologist, general, and minister Yigal Yadin; future minister of foreign affairs Yigal Alon; and a young officer as staunch as he was shy, the future chief of staff, minister of defense, and prime minister Yitzhak Rabin. Ben-Gurion was stubborn. His directives spoke of an “enemy” that had to be liquidated at all costs. He demanded unconditional surrender, seeking to humiliate as much as to defeat. Respected rabbis and political leaders tried to convince him that mediation was not only desirable but possible. In vain. There would be no mercy for the “enemy.” Anglo-American volunteers refused to open fire on the ship. “We didn’t come here to kill Jews,” they said. Some officers (among them Dayan’s aide) took a similar position. But these acts of conscience were exceptional. For the Irgun, this battle was lost in advance. There was talk of twenty victims, nearly all of them camp survivors. Was it true that some Palmach officers drank to their victory? Begin, in tears, issued an appeal to his troops: “No vengeance, no civil war, no fratricidal struggle!”

During a stormy Knesset debate Ben-Gurion made a speech that to this day I find hard to comprehend, let alone forgive. Justifying his order, he declared: “When the Third Temple is rebuilt, the cannon that fired on the Altalena will have a place of honor.” I was angry at Ben-Gurion. Later—much later—I came to feel lasting admiration for him and for his political vision (in spite of the Altalena).

In its issue devoted to the event, Zion in Kamf published a polemical article brimming with prophetic indignation by Israel’s leading editorialist, Dr. Azriel Carlebach (translated from Maariv by a rabbi, Eliézer Halberstam, a member of the Irgun and scion of a prominent Hasidic dynasty). Inspired by this text, entitled “The Sacred Cannon,” and deeply moved by the event itself, I wrote a piece that appeared under the byline Ben Shlomo. In it I recounted the tragedy of two brothers belonging to opposing camps. The Irgun fighter becomes the victim of his brother, a Palmach soldier.

Thinking back on it now, I find it curious that my first published article dealt with an evil that has always afflicted my people’s history. Was it merely an accident that Cain and Abel, the first two brothers of the Bible, were murderer and victim, and that the children of our patriarchs quarreled incessantly? There was scarcely a generation not cast into turmoil by some internal Jewish schism, scarcely a century not marked by some Jewish ideological conflict, by various splits and sunderings: Isaac against Ishmael, Jacob against Esau, Judah against Israel, the Pharisees against the Sadducees, Maskilim against Hasidim, Bundists against Zionists, Communists against everyone else. What about the Jewish solidarity so praised in our literature and decried by enemy propaganda?

Yet I believed in it. I wanted to believe in it. In my eyes, to be a Jew was to belong to the Jewish community in the broadest and most immediate sense. It was to feel abused whenever a Jew, any Jew anywhere, was humiliated. It was to react, to protest, whenever a Jew, even an unknown Jew in some distant land, was attacked for the simple reason that he was a Jew.

It never occurred to me that a Jew might be capable of spilling Jewish blood, of waging war on other Jews, and surely not on Jews who refused to fight back. The renegades of the Middle Ages were exceptions, as were the kapos during the war. In both cases the perpetrators were marginal figures lacking all authority. But here were good Jews—indeed, Jewish soldiers, even Jewish heroes—firing on their brothers, survivors of hell who had come to aid them, to join their cause, to fight