Jerusalem. The Biography

Final Solution and the White Paper convinced many Zionists that violence was the only way to force Britain to grant the promised Jewish homeland.
    The Jewish Agency controlled the largest militia, the Haganah, with its 2,000-strong special forces, the Palmach, and its 25,000 militiamen trained by the British. Ben-Gurion was now the unrivalled Zionist leader, ‘a short tubby man with a prophetic shock of silvery hair’ around hisbald patch, in Amos Oz’s words, ‘thick bushy eyebrows, a wide coarse nose, the prominent defiant jaw of an ancient mariner’ and the laser-beam willpower of a ‘visionary peasant’. But it was the more belligerent Irgun, under an implacable new leader, that now waged war against the British.

1945–7
     
    MENACHEM BEGIN: THE BLACK SABBATH
     
    ‘I fight; therefore I am,’ said Menachem Begin, adapting Descartes. Born in Brest-Litovsk, this child of the
shtetl
had joined Jabotinsky’s Betar movement in Poland, but he had clashed with his hero, throwing out his subtleties, to forge his own harsher ideology of military Zionism – a ‘war of liberation against those who hold the land of our fathers’, combining maximalist politics with emotional religion. After the Nazis and Soviets had carved up Poland at the start of the Second World War, Begin was arrested by Stalin’s NKVD and sentenced to the Gulag as a British spy: ‘What became of this British agent?’ he joked. ‘He soon had on his head the largest reward offered by the British police.’
    Released after Stalin’s 1941 pact with the Polish leader General Sikorski, Begin joined the Polish Army which brought him via Persia to Palestine. Formed in the dark continent of Stalin’s meatgrinder and Hitler’s slaughterhouse – in which his parents and brother perished – he came from a harsher school than Weizmann or Ben-Gurion: ‘It’s not Masada,’ he said, ‘but Modin [where the Maccabees started their rebellion] that symbolizes the Hebrew revolt.’ Jabotinsky had died of a heart attack in 1940 and now in 1944, Begin was appointed commander of the Irgun with its 600 fighters. The older Zionists regarded Begin as ‘plebeian or provincial’. With his rimless glasses, ‘soft restless hands, thinning hair and wet lips’, * Begin looked more like a provincial Polish schoolmaster than a revolutionary mastermind. Yet he had ‘the patience of a hunter in ambush’.
    Although the Irgun had joined the Allied war against the Nazis, some extremists, led by Abraham Stern, had split off. Stern was killed by the British in 1942. But his faction, the Lehi, Fighters for the Freedom of Israel, nicknamed the Stern Gang, now launched their own revolt againstthe British. As Allied victory became more likely, Begin started to test British resolve in Jerusalem: the blowing of the
shofar
, the ram’s horn, on The Day of Atonement, had been banned at the Wall since 1929. But Jabotinsky had annually challenged the rule. In October 1943, Begin ordered the blowing of the
shofar
: British police immediately attacked the praying Jews but in 1944, the British desisted. Begin took this as a sign of weakness.
    This impresario of violence declared war on Britain and in September 1944, the Irgun attacked British police stations in Jerusalem and then assassinated a CID officer as he walked through the city. Begin, nicknamed the Old Man (the same nickname enjoyed by Ben-Gurion), even though he was about thirty, descended into the underground, constantly moving address and adopting the disguise of a bearded Talmudic scholar. The British placed a £10,000 bounty on his head, dead or alive.
    The Jewish Agency condemned terrorism, but as the Allies launched the D-Day invasion of German-occupied Europe, * the Lehi twice tried to assassinate the high commissioner Harold MacMichael in the streets of Jerusalem. In Cairo that November, they killed Walter Guinness, Lord Moyne, Minister Resident in Egypt and friend of Churchill, who had tactlessly suggested to Ben-Gurion that the Allies should establish a Jewish state in East Prussia, instead of Zion. Churchill called the Zionist extremists the ‘vilest gangsters’. Ben-Gurion condemned the murders and, during 1944–5, helped the British hunt down the Jewish ‘dissident’ militias – 300 insurgents were arrested. The Zionists called this ‘
la saison
’, the hunting season.
    On 8 May 1945, Victory in Europe Day, the new high commissioner, Field Marshal Viscount Gort, took the salute outside the