Bella and Chaim, the author’s parents were known as Basia and Heniek. For eighteen months from late 1943 they hid in a hole under the backyard workroom of a retired Polish policeman in a suburb of occupied Warsaw. In the claustrophobic dark, they waited while outside a world war raged. – Sarah Vidal in Bella and Chaim – the story of Beauty and Life.
After World War II, in 1948, driven by European guilt about the Holocaust, the United Nations set up the state of Israel after the British relinquished their mandate given to them by the League of Nations. The bombing of the King David Hotel by the Irgun was a factor in British departure. Menachem Begin led his militia, “the Irgun”, and bombed the King David Hotel in 1946. The purpose was to destroy records held by the British Mandate of Palestine about terrorist Zionist groups, the Hagannah and the Irgun. The Zionists were pressing for greater immigration of Jewish people from Europe. The British called out much of the migration to be illegal. On November 2, 1917, Foreign Secretary Lord Balfour wrote a letter to leading Zionist Baron Rothschild, providing British government’s support for a Jewish homeland in Palestine. In the years that followed, particularly in the 1930s, Meanwhile in the 1930s there was a Palestinian revolt against British rule and waves of Jewish migration from Europe administered according to the Balfour declaration.
So on July 22, 1946, Menachem Begin and his cohort set the fuses on bombs planted in the basement of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem. At 12:37pm a huge explosion ripped through the building, killing 91 people. Among the dead were 25 Britons, 41 Arabs, and 17 Jews. Many in the British General staff and administrators were killed or injured in the attack. The British were their own worst enemies having made conflicting promises to both the Jews and the Palestinians after the Balfour declaration in 1917.
Long before this, in the 19th century, Zionists had created the myth of national liberation for Jewish people suffering from European racism: a land for a people, in a land without people.
In 1977, Israelis made former terrorist, Menachem Begin, their Prime Minister after his party, the Likud, won most seats in the Knesset (parliament). Ironically the slogan of the Likud party was “From the river to the sea …”
The Likud manifesto read: “Judea and Samaria will not be handed to any foreign administration; between the Sea and the Jordan there will only be Israeli sovereignty.”
The slogan was repeated by Menachem Begin during the 1977 election and is still the slogan of Netanyahu’s Likud during the genocide in Gaza in 2023-24.
I think most western academic histories hide the fact of occupation and genocide. They fail to recognise that in order for Israel to exist required the displacement of Palestinians. This fact has never been dealt with, and it needs to be, now more than ever.
If you look closely through the cloud of dust and smoke behind the British Army Land Rover, you can see the outline of the King David Hotel.
Picture was taken by an British army photograher. No 1 Army Film & Photographic Unit, Turner W R H (Sergeant).
This is the explosion of a second bomb at the King David Hotel in Jerusalem. The first bomb was set off as a decoy. The hotel housed the Military headquarters for all British armed forces in Palestine as well as the offices of the Palestine Government.
Ian Curr
21 Feb 2024