![]() Underground strikes were aimed at symbols, not people. One of those Irgun plans was an attack on the King David Hotel, the administrative headquarters of the British civilian and military authority. The underground groups had various plans drawn up and put on the shelf to collect dust waiting for Haganah to approve them. This new coordination presented an opportunity to retaliate against the British authorities for Black Sabbath. It was a marked change from a couple years earlier, when the Haganah had collaborated with the British against Menachem Begin’s Irgun out of fear that Begin represented a challenge to the Haganah’s, and Ben-Gurion’s, dominance. The underground militias (Irgun and Lehi) were already planning anti-British sabotage on their own that they would only carry out with approval from the Haganah. Threatening to delegitimize the Jewish Agency was seen as an existential escalation, and the whole event took the name “Black Sabbath.” The intent was not only to deplete the Haganah’s capabilities but to damage the Jewish Agency by finding documents with which the British could implicate Jewish leaders in acts of violence. Over 2,000 people were arrested and a key Haganah arms cache was raided, as were the offices of the Jewish Agency (the government-in-waiting led by David Ben-Gurion). The British responded by launching Operation Agatha, a sweeping crackdown of arrests and raids, on a Saturday soon after the bridge bombings. One night in 1946, Haganah’s elite fighters blew up nearly a dozen bridges and roads connecting Palestine to its neighbors, the most significant act of sabotage yet. The Haganah was the mainstream defense force of the bodies overseeing Jewish resettlement in the land. The three major Jewish underground organizations-Haganah, Irgun, and Lehi-continued their (mostly) coordinated acts of sabotage against British military and bureaucratic infrastructure. In 1946, Palestine was still ruled by Britain, which had gone from turning away the Jews seeking refuge from the Holocaust to turning away the Jews seeking refuge after the Holocaust. It is also not the first Black Sabbath in Israel’s modern history. It’s a natural label for an all-day attack that shattered Israel’s self-conception after first shattering the peace of the Day of Rest. October 7 quickly came to be known in Israel as Black Shabbat, or Black Sabbath.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |