Caroline Glick On Yitzhak Shamir

Before concluding, "We were blessed to have had him as our leader," Caroline Glick quoted Benjamin Netanyahu:  ""Yitzhak Shamir was from the generation of giants that founded the State of Israel."  I have never understood these (familiar) assessments.   As a Stern Gang member, Shamir had been arrested in 1946, escaped, and was in exile in France when Israel was founded.   Irgun and Stern Gang methods since 1940 were deplored and opposed by the official Jewish Agency leaders who actually proclaimed Israel's independence in 1948.  Notably, it appears Shamir ordered or planned the assassinations of Lord Moyne (Cairo, 1944) and Count Bernadotte (Israel, 1948), the latter for domestic political reasons. 

After 1948, the Labor Party in Israel did a good deal to blacken the names of those who took their inspiration not from Ben Gurion but from Vladimir Jabotinsky, the writer, translator, feuilletonist, and orator (Nabokov's uncle, who heard him speak in London, said he was the greatest orator he had ever heard). It refused to give the members of the Irgun and Legi credit, for by their actions they did indeed help drive the British out of Mandator Palestine, and at the time, the British were keeping out boats laden with survivors of the camps, in some cases boarding them, as the Exodus, and even on occason beating to death the American Jewish veterans who had volunteered to be on the ships to help.

In Great Britain, Ernest Bevin was darkly warning that "the Jews should not think they can go to the head of the queue" -- this, just a year or two after all the extermination camps were discovered -- and he was especially threatening, later on, when some Israeli pilots (and one celebrated English volunteer) went up in the air in the rickety Messerschmitts that had been smuggled in from Czechoslovakia, and shot down five British planes that were in the service of the Egyptina miliatry (which then, just like the Jordanian Arab Legion, under Glubb Pasha and Alec Kirkbride, or the Iraqi Army, was trained and outfitted and in the case of the Arab Legion led, by the English).

In Mandatory Palestine, Sir Evelyn Barker, the military commander of Jerusalem, wrote to his mistress, the widow of George Antonius (author of "The Arab Awakening") that he would love to help the Arabs finish the job of "extermination" of the Jews that the Germans had not completed. His correspondence with her was discovered in Jerusalem after the Six-Day War; you can find the full text in Segev's otherwise forgettable "One Palestine, Complete."

The killing of Lord Moyne was meant to warn the British that they should stop the blockade of ships bearing Jewish refugees, a blockade which in some cases led to their deaths.

It was in this period, of utter despair, when the British government, or its Foreign Office under Bevin, and the administration in Mandatory Palestine, which was jam-packed with antisemites, because ever since the Mandate began, those who showed sympathy to the Jews, and a desire that Great Britain fulfill the commitments it had made when it assumed the role of Mandatory authority, were pushed out. One was Colonel Meinhertzhagen, former intelligence officer with General Allenby, who was sent away when, in the early 1920s, he dared to point out that British officers had egged the Arabs in the Old City on to explode in a pogrom, and did nothing to help the Jews, but instead made sure they were deprived of weaopns and, when Jabotinsky attempted to arrange for some Jewish defenders, promptly arrested him, and put him on trial, and would no doubt have sentenced him to a long jail term had not there been an international outcry. Meinertzhagen's Diary is worth reading, and not just for its account of this episode.

The other great example is Captain Orde Wingate, who tried to teach Jewish settlers, in their rural villages, who were under constant Arab attack, to defend themselves. For his pains, he was exiled to Ethiopia.

I could go on, but the tale of betrayal of the Mandate, by many in London (though Josiah Wedgewood was one of those who constantly protested), is too long. You can read about it in many places.

And to understand more fully the state of mind of the men who joined the Irgun Zvai Leumi you should consider the whole history of how the British behaved during the 1930s and 1940s. Read, for example, about the  the Macdonald White Paper of1939, which proposed that,though according to the Mandate's terms the English were required to encourage and faciliate Jewish immigration to Palestine, as they were to encourage and facilitate "close Jewish settlement on the land." deaths, , only a handful of Jews -- 15,000 a year, for five years, would be allowed in. This at a time when perhaps as many as a million Jews might have been saved -- after all, the Rumanian ports were still wide open, and remained so for several years into the war. And after that five-year period? Oh, then, according to this White Paper, the Arabs would be the ones who had the right to veto any further Jewish immigration.

If one is lacking in detailed knowledge of this period, it is easy to acquire. And if one acquires it, and has a reasonable understanding of the period, and a modicum of imaginative sympathy, then the real question becomes not why Yitzhak Shamir is or should be honored, but why the Labor Party in Israel behaved so atrociously, as it did, toward those who, in taking part in the Irgun and Lehi, did much with so little.

There were many others who never received their due, in Lehi and the Irgun. Some were killed, as was Avraham Stern, commander of the Altalena operation, by the Haganah. Other Revisionists, such as Benzion Netanyahu, eventually found the political climate in Israel so unfriendly that he left the country and took an academic position in the United States. Eliyahu Lankin, who commanded the Altalena, married the first wife of Shmuel Katz, and became a lawyer. Israel Eldad continued to write, and effectively, on the Jewish claim to the land -- much more effectively, than many in Israel's Foreign Office, hampered, as they were, with a party line and a worldview they could not shake.

It is amazing that it took such a long time for the Israelis, in the grip of the pensee unique of the Labor Party, to come -- not everyone as yet has, of course -- to a correct understanding of what happened before, and during, and after the war, with, to, and by, the Irgun and Lehi.