Gideon's Spies

The network of Arab informers was extended. A Haganah Political Department was set up to spread dissension through disinformation. Men who later became legends in the Israeli intelligence community learned their skills in that formative period before the start of World War II. The Haganah—the word means “defense” in Hebrew—became the best informed of all the forces in the Holy Land.

World War II brought a renewed uneasy peace to Palestine. Jews and Arabs sensed the grim future they would both face if the Nazis won. The first details of what was happening in the death camps of Europe had reached the Yishuv.

David Ben-Gurion and Yitzhak Rabin were among those who attended a meeting in Haifa in 1942. There was consensus that the survivors of the Holocaust must be brought to their spiritual home, Eretz Israel. No one could estimate how many there would be, but everyone agreed the arrival of the refugees would rekindle confrontation with the Arabs—and this time the British would openly side against the Jews. Britain had steadfastly said it would refuse to admit the survivors into Palestine after Hitler was defeated, on the grounds it would create a population imbalance.

Ben-Gurion’s urging for an upgrade of the Haganah’s intelligence capacity was fully endorsed by the meeting. More informers would be recruited. A counterintelligence unit would be formed to uncover Jews who were collaborating with the British and unearth “Jewish communists and dissenters in our midst.” The new unit was known as Rigul Hegdi and was commanded by a former French foreign legionnaire working under cover as a traveling salesman.

Soon he was turning up Jewish women who consorted with officers of the Mandate; shopkeepers who traded with the British; café owners who entertained them. In the dead of night the culprits were brought before Haganah drumhead courts-martial; the guilty were either sentenced to be severely beaten or were executed in the Judaean hills by a single bullet in the back of the head. It was a precursor to the ruthlessness Mossad would later display.

By 1945 the Haganah included a unit responsible for procuring arms. Soon caches of Italian and German weapons captured in North Africa after the defeat of Rommel were being smuggled by Jewish soldiers serving with the Allies across the Egyptian Sinai Desert into Palestine. The arms came by ramshackle trucks and camel caravans and were stored in caves in the Wilderness where the Devil had tried to tempt Jesus. One hiding place was close to where the Dead Sea Scrolls were waiting to be discovered.

After the defeat of Japan in August 1945 ended the war, Jews who had served in Allied military intelligence units arrived to provide their expertise for the Haganah. The elements were in place to deal with what Ben-Gurion had forecast—“the war for our independence.”

The trigger point he knew would be the bricha, the Hebrew name for the unprecedented operation to bring the Holocaust survivors from Europe. First they came in the hundreds, then thousands, then tens of thousands. Many still wore their concentration camp garb; each bore a tattoo with a Nazi identification number. They came by road and rail through the Balkans and then across the Mediterranean to the shores of Israel. Every available ship had been bought or rented by Jewish relief agencies in the United States—often at highly inflated prices: tramp steamers, coasters, landing craft from the beaches of Normandy, riverboats, anything that could float was pressed into service. There had not been an evacuation like it since Dunkirk in 1940.

Waiting for the survivors on the beaches between Haifa and Tel Aviv were some of the very British soldiers who had been ferried back to England from Dunkirk. They were there to carry out their government’s order to keep out the Holocaust survivors. There were ugly clashes, but also times when the soldiers, perhaps remembering their own salvation, had looked the other way as a boatload of refugees struggled ashore.

Ben-Gurion decided that such acts of compassion were not enough. The time had come for the Mandate to end. That could only be done by force. By 1946, he had united the disparate Jewish underground movements. Fired by the unquenchable spirit of those who had first settled the land, the order was given to launch a guerrilla war against both the British and the Arabs.

Every Jewish commander knew it was a dangerous gamble: fighting on both fronts would stretch their resources to the very limit. The consequences of failure would be dire. Ben-Gurion ordered a noholds-barred policy. Soon the catalog of atrocities was appalling on all sides. Jews were shot on suspicion of collaborating with the Haganah. British soldiers were gunned down and their barracks bombed. Arab villages were set to the torch. It was medieval in its ferocity.