Shlomo Ben Yosef (1913-1937)
Once again, we find ourselves torn between negotiation or warfare.
Jeremy Rosen
Over 80 years ago, under the British mandate, Jews were divided in what was then called Palestine. Ben Gurion favored real-politick and negotiation. While Begin preferred reacting to violence against Jews with violence. Who was right? It is still debated.
There was, from the start of the twentieth century, tension between nationalists in both communities as there were pacifists. The Arab Riots of 1929 set the tone for violence. The British High Commissioners in general tried their best to mediate. Tensions grew as the Arabs objected to Jewish refugees from Hitler. While the Jews were campaigning to save them from death by any means. The British reacted by banning illegal immigration and sending those who tried to evade the blockade to primitive internment camps in Atlit, Cyprus and Mauritius.
As diplomacy was not working, Jewish groups, the Irgun/Etzel, and the Lehi/Stern Gang, began to return violence with violence against British military and Arab targets. The first member of a Jewish underground to be executed by the British was Shlomo Ben-Yosef in 1938. His Yaarzeit is the 29th of June.
Szalom Tabacznik was born in Ukraine. He joined the Revisionist Zionist youth movement Betar in 1928. In 1937, the British refused his application to emigrate to Palestine. So, he immigrated illegally. He changed his name to Shlomo Ben-Yosef and was accepted into the Irgun. He found a job at the port of Haifa.
On April 21, 1938, in response to the Arab riots, armed with a hand grenade and two guns, Shlomo Ben-Yosef, Avraham Shein, and Shalom Zurabin ambushed an Arab bus near Safed. Their plan was to destroy the engine with a hand-grenade; as the bus approached, they shot at it and Ben-Yosef tossed the grenade, which failed to detonate it. The bus drove away. The three perpetrators were soon discovered in the possession of pistols and homemade bombs.
Ben-Yosef, Shein, and Zurabin were put on trial. They pleaded not guilty. Shein and Ben-Yosef were found guilty of discharging a firearm and carrying firearms, bombs and ammunition, but not guilty of a third charge of throwing bombs. Zurabin was found not guilty of all charges on grounds of insanity, Shein and Ben-Yosef were sentenced to death by hanging. Shein’s death sentence was commuted to life imprisonment when his birth certificate fetched from Poland proved he was under 18 years old.
The British authorities wanted to hang Ben-Yosef to make an example of him. A demonstration of their even-handedness. General Haining was pressured to confirm Ben-Yosef’s death sentence by senior figures in the Palestine Mandate administration with a record of antipathy towards the Jews.
All requests for clemency were refused. Ben-Yosef wrote: “I am going to die, and I am not at all sorry, because I am going to die for our country!” On the wall of his death cell, he etched out “to die or to conquer the height” and “death compared with one’s country is nothing.” Ben-Yosef was executed in Acre Prison on June 29, 1938. An uneasy truce held during the Second World War.
In January 1947, another Irgun militant, Dov Gruner was sentenced to death. The Irgun kidnapped two British officials in retaliation. Sixteen hours before the scheduled execution, the British forces commander announced an “indefinite delay” of the sentence, and Irgun released its hostages. But Gruner and three other militants, Yehiel Dresner, Mordechai Alkahi and Eliezer Kashani, were executed, nevertheless.
In May 1947, forty-one prisoners broke out from Acre Prison. Six of them were killed and seven others were rearrested. Among the organizers Avshalom Haviv, Yaakov Weiss, and Meir Nakar , were tried by a military court and sentenced to death. The Irgun retaliated by capturing two British soldiers and this time announced that if their men were put to death, they would do the same to the British soldiers. The High CommissionerAlan Cunningham gave the order and the Irgun men were executed. The day afterwards the bodies of the two British soldiers were discovered hanging from olive trees. The Irgun admitted to the killings.
This was the one act that Britain never forgave the Jews for. Fascist and anti-Semitic groups rioted across the country and smashed Jewish stores and homes. The British press and radio attacked the Zionists. Who was right?
Some claim that the campaigns of the Lehi and Stern Gang contributed as much as anything else to Britain’s giving up on Palestine. The UN, voted for partition. The Arabs rejected the compromise and declared war. Behind the scenes the British Foreign Minister Bevin plotted with the Jordanians and also negotiated “the Portsmouth Treaty” with Iraq (signed on January 15, 1948), with the British undertaking to withdraw from Palestine in such a fashion as to provide for swift Arab occupation of all its territory to destroy the Jewish state. As the British withdrew, they handed over as much of their hardware as they could to the Arabs. The ill feeling with the Foreign Office has festered to this day, which is why the late Queen was never allowed a formal visit to Israel.
We now have hundreds of martyrs , the jewels of our people. And once again it is clear that if we do not fight for ourselves, no one else will. I never liked racism or extremism. But neither did I like the delusion that if we made concessions they would be reciprocated. Too many ( if not all) Muslims and Left-wing ideologues hope to see the end of a Jewish State. Whatever the failures and there have been many, and however much I despise extremism, I see no other answer to this current existential threat.
Rabbi Jeremy Rosen lives in New York. He was born in Manchester. His writings are concerned with religion, culture, history and current affairs – anything he finds interesting or relevant. They are designed to entertain and to stimulate. Disagreement is always welcome.
