The Haj - Leon Uris [78]
When Winston Churchill was voted from office, the New British Labour Government chose as its foreign secretary a rather heartless bullyboy and Jew-baiter named Ernest Bevin. Crudely he told the survivors of Hitler that he would not allow the Jews to push to the head of the queue and ordered the Royal Navy to blockade Palestine against refugee ships.
Desperate to flee the graveyard that was Europe, the survivors were to find no place in the world that would offer them refuge, except for the Yishuv in Palestine. Those who had survived Hitler were to board unseaworthy boats and be further victims of the outrage of British warships ramming them on the high seas and boarding and bludgeoning them into submission. They arrived in Palestine under British bayonets and were locked in new concentration camps.
The Haganah plunged into the battle of Aliyah Bet, the ‘illegal’ immigration. Gideon Asch was commissioned to establish an underground operations unit to purchase refugee boats, find Jewish naval veterans from around the world to form crews, and seek out sympathetic ports in southern France and Italy to begin their blockade runs.
In Palestine itself the Jewish Agency restrained the Haganah in order to be able to keep a political dialogue going with the British. At the same time they covertly trained the Palmach under the cover of the kibbutzim. Although the Haganah kept its powder dry, the Yishuv had two smaller armed bands operating outside of Jewish Agency jurisdiction and these were furious and volatile.
There was the Irgun, led by a Holocaust survivor named Menachem Begin, and a smaller group known as the Stern Group. Gideon Asch was trusted by both organizations and was assigned as a liaison to them. For a time Gideon was able to keep a semblance of cooperation between the Irgun and the Haganah. But that time passed, as the new British policy became apparent.
No amount of argument Gideon tried to put forth could keep the Irgun and Stern Group from unilaterally going to war against the British, and they stung them with bomb and ambush. As the Royal Navy prowled the Mediterranean for refugee runners, more thousands of British combat troops poured into fortress Palestine to stem what was expanding into a Jewish revolt.
The treatment of the survivors became so inhumane that the Jewish Agency could no longer remain silent and keep its credibility. Gideon, who had tried to restrain the Irgun, now led a group of hard-line Haganah commanders to pressure Ben-Gurion into action and the Haganah was finally unleashed!
In their initial operation the Haganah attacked a British concentration camp set near the ruins of a Crusader fort at Athlit, on the Mediterranean. Executing a textbook strike, they liberated over two hundred illegals and dispersed them in the kibbutzim. This was followed by attack after attack on British installations: police forts, radar emplacements, munitions dumps, naval bases, communications centers. The British answered with more fresh troops until their garrison contained upward of a hundred thousand men.
By 1946 Palestine was in chaos.
In May of that year Foreign Secretary Bevin made a series of treacherous declarations. After initially agreeing to accept an immediate hundred thousand refugees into Palestine, he reneged, reversed his position, and declared an end to all Jewish immigration! He further declared an end to all land sales to the Yishuv and rejected all Jewish political claims in Palestine. Henceforth, Bevin stated, any refugee boat caught on the open seas would be escorted by force to the Island of Cyprus, the victims to be interned in new concentration camps established there.
A month later His Majesty’s forces made a gigantic sweep of Jewish Palestine, arresting a thousand of the Yishuv’s leaders,