Lazlo Toth
A Disturbance in the Force
“Black Saturday,” Operation “Chick,” and the Demolition
of the Solomon Brothers Building on 9/11
Dr. Lazlo Toth
June 2008
INTRODUCTION
The following is an excerpt from my upcoming (and still in various stages of research and writing) “Wired for Terror: On the Trail of the Men Who Brought Down the Towers, PART THREE: From the Balfour Declaration to Statehood – 32 Years of Terror and Deception in Palestine.” The first section of “Part Three,” on the Balfour Declaration, has already been posted as an excerpt here _http://www.wtcdemolition.com/blog/node/562. The second excerpt, presented herein, covers the July 1946 bombing of the King David Hotel and David Brothers Building in Jerusalem. Although this double terror attack—called by the Zionist underground, “Operation Chick” (the attack on the King David Hotel) and “Operation Your-slave-and-redeemer” (the attack on the David Brothers Building)—took place towards the latter part of the thirty-two year period of history (1917-1949) being covered in Part Three of “Wired for Terror,” I was compelled, nonetheless, to complete and present this section ahead of the rest of the material. The simple reason was, while reading through the details of this operation in relation to its tightly knit context of surrounding events and circumstances in 1945-46 British Palestine, the parallels to various significant details of the New York part of the 9/11 operation, and specifically, the demolition of Silverstein Properties’ World Trade Center Building 7 (the Solomon Brothers Building) were stunningly apparent. What is also important to our historical understanding of these events is that many of the inside operational details, as well as ideological and psychological context, have been filled in by published memoirs and interviews given by some of the main conspiratorial participants, such as Menachem Begin (1913-1992) and hotel bomb-squad commander Yisrael Levi (1926-1990), among others. Many key operational details presented herein have been gathered from Menachem Begin’s 1951 historical memoir of the period, “The Revolt” (ha-Mered). Because these particular events place you, the brave and open-minded reader, in the middle of this story, so to speak, before going further, it will be necessary to provide some very brief background information on the two major protagonists operating within the 1930s-1940s Zionist underground, or using Menachem Begin’s terminology, the “Hebrew underground.” These two highly militant, religio-nationalist protagonists were known, among other names, as the Irgun and the LeHI.
BACKGROUND ON THE UNDERGROUND
“The Irgun,” short for Ha-Irgun Ha-Zvai Ha-Leumi B’Eretz Yisrael (“National Military Organization in the Land of Israel,” or the NMO), operated as a Zionist paramilitary organization in Palestine from 1931 to 1948. It was formed by Avraham Tehomi in 1929 in an organizational and ideological split with the more Yishuv-accepted and “mainstream” Haganah (“the Defense”). Tehomi’s new organization was originally named Irgun Bet Ha-Haganah Ha-Leumit (“Organization B for the National Defense”), but was also known in the underground as Haganah Bet (“Defense B”). In case the leaders and fighters of the Haganah (organized for settlement and neighborhood defense) or the mobile strike force, the Palmach, got “cold feet,” were disarmed, or were rounded up and jailed by the British, Avraham Tehomi and his more militant comrades, such as Avraham Stern, thought that there should be a “second defense,” or a “B group” to drive the British and Arabs from Palestine. Avraham Tehomi and a small group of Haganah military officers split off from the parent organization in 1929 because they felt that the Haganah was not militant enough to get the job done.(1) In the Palestine of the 1930s and 1940s, this group of terrorist saboteurs, assassins, bank robbers, and kidnappers was commonly referred to as “Etzel,” a name derived from the pronunciation of its Hebrew acronym IZL (Irgun Zvai Leumi). For the newcomer to this history, the Irgun, the NMO, and the IZL (“Etzel”) all refer to the same Zionist paramilitary organization, which at the time of the King David Hotel bombing was headed by “wanted terrorist” and future Israeli prime minister, Menachem Begin.
The other paramilitary group taking part in the dual, simultaneous terror bombings of the King David Hotel and the David Brothers Building in Jerusalem was a smaller, but even more militantly aggressive organization called Lohamei Herut Yisrael (“Fighters for the Freedom of Israel,” or the FFI). This group was known in Palestine by its acronym LeHI (The H, representing the Hebrew word Herut “freedom”], is a hard Semitic ‘h’ pronounced similar to the ‘ch’ in the Scottish “loch,” or the German/Yiddish “nach.”). From its beginnings in 1940 as an IZL splinter organization, Avraham Stern’s group (LeHI), called “the Stern Gang” by the British, came to quickly be regarded as a highly volatile and dangerous “terrorist” organization by the Mandate government of Palestine. The colonial branch of MI5, the Defense Security Office, was specifically charged with tracking down its leaders and operatives. At the time of the King David Hotel bombing, the LeHI, or FFI, was led by a man named Yitzhak Yzernitzky.
Yitzhak “Rabbi Shamir” Yzernitzky joined the Irgun (IZL) in 1937. In 1940, however, he left IZL with Avraham Stern, Yaakov “Yashka” Eliav, and several others to form LeHI, of which he became Commander after Stern’s assassination on the morning of February 12, 1942 by Criminal Investigation Department (CID) Inspector Geoffrey J. Morton, whom LeHI operatives, just the month before, had barely missed killing with their “trap-bomb” operation at 8 Yael Street in Jerusalem.(2)
Yitzhak Yzernitzky, who legally adopted the last name of his underground, ‘on-the-run’ character “Rabbi Shamir,” was later to head the Israeli Mossad during the Eisenhower-JFK era (1955-1965), and would serve under former Irgun Commander Menachem Begin as Israel’s Foreign Minister (1980-1983), a position now being occupied by the daughter of Eitan Livni, another Irgun commander. Shamir then succeeded Begin as Israeli prime minister and head of the right-wing Likud Party (1983-1984), and after only two years out, was again prime minister of Israel (1986-1992), succeeding Shimon Peres. For over three decades, it was Yitzhak Shamir, the former LeHI terrorist leader, who acted as a key planner and overseer of the illegal Euro-Jewish settlement of Gaza and the West Bank. In the 1992 elections Shamir lost to Yitzhak Rabin (who would be assassinated by a Mossad patsy on November 4, 1995 for his peace-making activities) and was succeeded as head of the Likud Party by Binyamin Netanyahu (a guy who, on a need-to-know basis, probably knows a little something about that Rabin hit as well as the 9/11 and 7/7 things, etc.]).(3)
When Menachem Begin was on the run after an Irgun terror operation, he would, like Yzernitzky, adopt the disguise and fake identity of “Rabbi Israel Sassover.” Because of “Rabbi Shamir” and “Rabbi Sassover,” British police and detectives actually started pulling on orthodox rabbi’s beards during on-the-street searches to find “the wanted terrorist leaders” behind the possibly fake whiskers, all of which made Begin and Yzernitzky (Shamir) quite an unpopular duo amongst the real rabbis.(4)
PRELUDE TO “BLACK SATURDAY” AND OPERATION “CHICK”
In the fresh aftermath of World War II, with the surrender of Germany in May of 1945, Chaim Weizmann, then President of the World Zionist Organization (WZO), petitioned the British government to allow European Jewry unlimited, restriction-free immigration into Palestine (one of Zionism’s traditional, long-time goals). He was informed, however, on the 25th of August by the Colonial Office of the new, post-Churchill Labour government of Prime Minister Clement Attlee that the 15,000 person annual limit of Jews allowed to emigrate to Palestine—stipulated by the despised 1939 White Paper—would not be increased. This may have been the final blow to the Anglo-centric policies and orientation of many pro-British Zionists, even within the “mainstream, respectable” Jewish Agency. Thus, by the autumn of 1945, even the Haganah, traditionally tied to settlement and neighborhood defense, began to give ears to the case against the British that was again being made by the Maximalist Revisionists of the Irgun and LeHI undergrounds, for on the 9th of October, Kol Israel (the underground radio station run by Haganah) began broadcasting their call to active resistance.(5) Dr. Moshe Sneh, Commander-in-Chief of Haganah, who at the time only considered the British a “bad partner,” not necessarily an “enemy,” wanted, nevertheless, to organize a single serious incident that would send a clear message to the British,
“...as a warning and an indication of much more serious incidents that would threaten the safety of all British interests in the country if the Government did not grant the Zionist requests.”(6)
In the weeks following the Colonial Office’s informing of Weizmann and the WZO that the immigration quotas would not be increased over that stipulated by the 1939 White Paper, men from the more “mainstream” defense militias of the Haganah and Palmach began leaving to join the Irgun (IZL) and the “Hebrew underground.” In these new and disturbing political conditions, however, spokesmen for the Jewish Agency in Palestine, instead of calling for a saison of “Jewish dissident hunting,” as was their custom, suggested to the Irgun and LeHI that they merge with the Haganah and together wage a campaign of military pressure to get the British to accede to Zionist demands for unlimited Jewish immigration. Although the Irgun trusted Ben-Gurion, they did not trust his colleagues at the Jewish Agency. Menachem Begin and the Irgun, along with Shamir and the commanders of LeHI, suggested instead, that there be formed a single, representative strategic command over a United Resistance, wherein the Jewish Agency, through a representative from the Haganah, such as Moshe Sneh, Israel Galili, or Yitzhak Sadeh, would have final veto over all operations except arms-raids. In this way, the Irgun and LeHI could still maintain their organizational independence. This arrangement was agreed upon by all parties from the Jewish Agency on down into the underground and formed what was called the Tenuat Hameri, or United Resistance Movement. The top commanders on this single strategic command were: for the Haganah, Yitzhak Sadeh; for the Irgun, Eitan Livni—and after Livni’s capture—Amichai “Giddy” Paglin; and representing LeHI was Yaakov Banai. Below this joint, Tenuat Hameri command group, each group’s members remained within their organizations, operating both jointly and separately.(7)
The terror, or “political pressure” campaign of the Tenuat Hameri opened on Halloween night of 1945 when the Haganah, the Palmach, the Irgun, and the LeHI joined together for Dr. Moshe Sneh’s aforementioned “serious incident” – a nearly simultaneous quartet of night time terror attacks. The Palmach would attack British Coast Guard craft at Haifa and Jaffa; the Haganah would detonate over five hundred charges, breaking the Palestine railway at two hundred and forty-two places; the Irgun would seriously attack the Lydda railway station; and the LeHI would attack the Consolidated Refinery at Haifa. Months before this Halloween operation, LeHI operatives had gotten hired at the refinery. Using their newly acquired, “inside” employee status, they gradually smuggled small amounts of nitroglycerin into the plant and stashed it for later placement beside the petrol tanks for the attack on All Hallow’s Eve.(8)
In November, the Irgun stole ninety-eight 100 lb. sacks of Chilean nitrate from British Imperial Chemical Industries in Haifa and lifted two truckloads of weapons from a Royal Air Force (RAF) camp. The Haganah then attacked a police station at Givat Olga and a coast guard station at Sydna-Ali near Herzliya. On November 26, the British security, military, and police began a 10,000 man cordon and search operation for Jewish terrorists in Samaria and on the Plain of Sharon. Then a series of small-scale incidents—road mines, arson, letter bombs, bank robberies, and the like—began to be punctuated by large-scale, multiple and simultaneous terror strikes, accompanied by assassinations of policemen and kidnappings of British military personnel.(9)
The new year of 1946 opened with more Zionist terror attacks and criminal operations, followed by more British curfews, round-ups, searches, and prosecutions. On January 12, terrorists of the “Hebrew underground” blew up railroad track near Binyamina as an eight-car train approached. They then made off with the £35,000 payroll the train was carrying. Around the 19th of the month, the Irgun tried to blow up the RAF radar station on Mount Carmel as well as the Palestine Broadcasting Service in Jerusalem. They were, however, able to successfully detonate a mine at the coast guard station at Givat Olga. On January 29, the Irgun launched an arms-raid operation against an RAF base at Akir (Ekron) near Gaza. During these arms-raids against British military bases, the Irgun operatives would always dress up as either British officers or Arab civilian workers, and they usually had some type of inside assistance from Jewish civilians working as RAF base employees. Finally, on January 31, the RAF had had enough of these arms-raids and dismissed, as a treacherous and untrustworthy lot, all Jews working either as airbase employees or lorry drivers for the base.
In February, early in the month, while the Irgun began another round of attacks on British police stations, such as the one at Safed, Irgun operations officer Eitan Livni (father of current Israeli Foreign Affairs Minister Tzipi Tzipporah] Livni) began planning a joint IZL-LeHI operation involving three explosives teams launching simultaneous, synchronized attacks on RAF airdromes at Lydda, Kfar Sirkin, and Qastina, with the idea of blowing up British aircraft, such as their Halifaxes and Spitfires. They indeed succeeded in blowing up the aircraft and left £2,000,000 worth of damage in their wake.
On March 7, fourteen men of the Irgun, dressed in stolen Airborne uniforms, entered the army camp at Sarafand and drove out with a lorry loaded with weapons. At this point, with thousands of pounds of explosives and truckloads of weapons and ammunition suddenly shifting into the hands of the “Hebrew underground,” the British decided a change in command was needed, and Lieutenant General J.C. D’Arcy was replaced by Lieutenant General Sir Evelyn Hugh Barker, a general with an extremely low tolerance for Jewish terrorism. He would win no friends among the underground. That was a nearly guaranteed certainty.
Despite the ever-evolving, multi-levels of security the British implemented to prevent arms theft by the Zionist militias, Menachem Begin writes, “But right to the end of our fight we never ceased taking arms from the government forces—in spite of all their precautions and notwithstanding the big notices stuck up in all the camps exhorting the soldiers: ‘Your uniform does not prove your identity.’”(10)
On April 2, Eitan Livni directed an attack force of seventy-five Irgun operatives divided into three teams. They launched a major operation on the Palestine railway system, blowing up five railway bridges, along with the Ashdod station, and cutting off all railway traffic between Haifa and Acre. During this blitz of sabotage, one column of terrorists, or “freedom fighters,” however, did not reach their intended target of Bat Yam until after 8:00 pm, by which time the British had already ringed the area, and British paratroopers soon surrounded them. Dov “Shimshon” Cohen, the unit commander, escaped with another man into the dunes during the gun fight, one was killed, but the rest of the 34-man unit, along with Tzipporah’s dad, Mr. Livni, were forced to surrender.
Amichai “Giddy” Paglin, the mastermind behind the King David Hotel demolition and other large operations, immediately replaced Eitan Livni as Irgun operations officer and began planning the next arms-raid operation. From Josef Zinger, a Jewish constable working inside the Ramat Gan police station, Paglin was able to secure the station’s building plans to help him plan the ten-minute, in-and-out operation. On April 23, driving off in a hail of machine gun and pistol fire, the Irgun made off with yet another lorry full of military firearms and ammunition from this aforementioned police station at Ramat Gan. Two days later, at 8:45 pm, with land mines scattered behind them to block a counter-attack party, LeHI operatives began gunning down British paratroopers, caught unawares, in the parking lot of the Sixth Airborne on the Tel Aviv-Jaffa boundary. On April 27, after a seven-casket funeral amongst bitter British paratroopers, the commander of these seven men, Major General A.J.H. Cassels, replied with curt and righteously indignant anger to the message of condolence sent by Mayor Perelson of Tel Aviv:
“I have received your message of regret but I have sent for you today to say how horrified and disgusted I am at the outrage committed by the Jews on the night of April 25, when seven British soldiers were willfully and brutally murdered by members of your community.
“As a result I have decided to impose certain restrictions on the Jewish community as a whole. My decision to restrict the whole community has been made in order to maintain public security and because I hold the community to blame.
“There is no doubt whatsoever in my mind that many members either knew of this project or could have given some warning before it happened.
“Further, I am quite certain that if you, as representative of Tel Aviv, chose to do so you could produce sufficient information to lead to the arrest of the criminals.”(11)
On May 12, Major General Cassels’ curfew over Tel Aviv and other areas was finally lifted, and the Zionist underground of militant Russian and Eastern European, Jewish immigrants went right back to work, holding up the Barclay’s Bank in Nablus on May 20 for £6,228, a third of which was (wait for the drum roll and cymbal crash) marked “C” for non-negotiable, as these bills were set aside by the bank for burning.
On the 10th of June there was yet another Irgun attack on the Palestine railway system. Simultaneously, at 6:45 pm, three trains in the Lydda district blew up, a Jerusalem-to-Jaffa train was stopped and then blown up, and a Jaffa-to-Jerusalem train was blown up just outside of Tel Aviv. In a single 21-hour period on June 16-17, a combined LeHI-Irgun operation blew up eleven road and railway bridges. As I’ve written many times before in previous blogs, these Zionist extremist folks just love blowin’ shit up. One demolition team during this 21-hour blitz, however, ran into an armoured British roadblock on the escape road out. Heavy automatic weapons fire was poured upon their lorry, and the next day in Haifa, eleven LeHI saboteurs were buried. On this same day, the 18th of June, an Irgun attack squad, armed with pistols and iron pipes, entered the British Officer’s Club at the Yarkon Hotel in Tel Aviv, and after clubbing a couple of officers, herded the rest into a corner. The clubbed and unconscious Captain D.T. Rea was bound by the hands, duct tape placed over the mouth, hauled to a small green lorry, and dumped into a crate in the back as it drove off. Flight Lieutenant P.A.E. Russell tried to escape through the dining room’s back entrance and was met by armed men who bound him and placed him in a stolen taxi. The taxi reached the waiting green lorry, Lt. Russell was thrown into the same crate with Capt. Rea, and the lorry drove off. Meanwhile, back at the Officer’s Club, two captains from the Fourth Paratroop Battalion (K.H. Spence and G.C. Warburton) and Captain A.E. Taylor from the Seventeenth Paratroop Battalion were taken out at gunpoint and placed in another waiting lorry. The very next day (June 19), down in Jerusalem, a taxi pulled up next to Major H.P. Chadwick, four armed men of “middle eastern appearance” got out, chloroformed him, stuffed him into the taxi, and took off. Later the next day, June 20, Major Chadwick was able to escape from the house where he was being held. Total: (for those out there keeping score so far) Six British Officers kidnapped and held as hostages by Jewish terrorists, with a single officer making an escape from his captors, leaving five remaining hostages. The deals will come later.
On June 24, 1946, the opening of the trial of the thirty-one Irgun terrorists captured during the April 2nd attack on the Palestine rail system at Bat Yam began with Eitan Livni, his head swimming in romanticist, Zionist mythology, telling the presiding judge Colonel Peel that, “you are the representative of an occupying power, and we are Hebrew soldiers. As such, we deny you the right to judge us.”(12) All the Bat Yam defendants were given the opportunity to make a statement before the court, which some used and abused to the limits of the court’s patience. Menachem “Ze’ev” Schiff, a young man of twenty-two who had joined the Irgun at sixteen, concluded his FOUR HOUR statement by saying, “You cannot hold this country with bayonets”(13) but with 150+ nookular weapons and control of the U.S. Government and media, you certainly can]. Two days later, on June 26, the Bat Yam terrorists were all found guilty and the court literally burst into song. Literally. In the Palestine Post there was a bit of reported dancing as well.
On the day of the verdict, with five British officers still being held as hostages, the Irgun decided to release Lieutenant Russell and Captain Rea as “messengers.” This was done in order to let Lieutenant General Barker know that if the two Irgun men (Yosef Simchon and Yitzhak “Michael” Ashbel) captured during the March 7 arms-raid on the Sarafand army base are hung for their crimes, the three other British officers, still being held hostage by the Irgun, would be summarily executed, no problemo. On this same day (June 26), the terrorists launched a raid on a diamond polishing plant, making off with £40,000 in diamonds. At this point, the British decided to bring the hammer down upon the anvil and crush whatever was in between. For some time, British intelligence suspected that the “mainstream” Jewish Agency, the Haganah, the Palmach, and the terrorist underground were all working together in a two-faced, “good cop/bad cop” manner. Their suspicions would soon be verified.(14)
“BLACK SATURDAY”
Against this nine-month background of unrelenting Zionist terror operations and general criminality came the events of what was to be called “Black Saturday” by the Jewish Agency. In a surprise series of pre-dawn raids on June 29, 1946, British forces launched “Operation Agatha,” a Mandate-wide maneuver personally ordered by the British commander-in-chief of the Middle East. It resulted in the British confiscation of many highly sensitive, “For Jewish Eyes Only” documents from the offices of the Jewish Agency, and also resulted in the arrest of its leadership – Acting Chairman of the Jewish Agency, J.L. Fishman, Isaac Gruenbaum, and Moshe Shertok. David Ben Gurion, however, was unavailable for arrest and detention because he was in Paris at the time, along with several other members of the leadership. A curfew was placed over all Jewish areas of Palestine, and by the end of “Black Saturday,” the British forces had arrested over one thousand Jews. By July 1, nearly three thousand (2,718) arrests had been made.
Valuing the lives of his officers, High Commissioner Cunningham finally gave in to the terrorist kidnappers. On July 3, he commuted the sentences of the two Irgun men caught during the Sarafand arms-raid on March 7, and at 6:00 pm the following day, on the 4th of July, the Irgun, in their own special kind of way, released the three remaining British captains they were still holding hostage from the June 18 attack on the British officer’s club in Tel Aviv. On Rothschild Boulevard, in the center of this same city, before making its getaway, a lorry stopped, and perhaps hoping that someone would run into or over “the package,” dumped a large crate into the middle of the street. Inside this crate were the three kidnapped British officers.
The hammer of “Black Saturday” and its aftermath continued into July with more roadblocks and curfews. In Tel Aviv, the British executed a “penning” move where the streets around a particular area are blocked off to form the perimeter of a pen. Within this area they put several thousand men through a line-up process, each man being scanned by CID terrorist specialist, Sergeant T.G. Martin. It was because of Martin that one of LeHI’s three high commanders (Yitzhak Yzernitzky, Nathan Friedman-Yellin or Yellin-Mor], and Israel Eldad) received an all-expenses paid trip to a British prison in East Africa. When “Rabbi Shamir” stepped to the front of the line, Sergeant Martin took his time and then recognized the face of Yitzhak Yzernitzky behind the long black beard. The LeHI lost their leader to a prison in East Africa, and they lost one of their big weapons caches, discovered by British soldiers in the Great Synagogue in Tel Aviv, but their well-hidden armoury in a Jerusalem synagogue was left untouched. The underground soon got its revenge though on Sergeant T.G. Martin for capturing Shamir. On the 10th of August, two LeHI assassins gunned him down on a tennis court in Haifa.(15)
OPERATION “CHICK” AND OPERATION “YOUR-SLAVE-AND-REDEEMER”
On July 1, just two days after “Black Saturday,” on behalf of the Jewish Agency, Moshe Sneh, the Commander-in-Chief of the Haganah, urged the joint command of the Tenuat Hameri (“United Resistance Movement”) to respectively authorize IZL and LeHI to carry out Operation “Chick” and Operation “Your-slave-and-redeemer.” At this point, it was all about destroying the highly incriminating documents that the British had hauled off during “Black Saturday” to the King David Hotel, and possibly the David Brothers Building as well. These documents, when examined, would show clearly and conclusively the cooperative relationship between the Jewish Agency, the Haganah, the Palmach, and the organizations of the “terrorist underground” in their mutual operational arrangement known as the Tenuat Hameri (“The United Resistance Movement”). Future operations against the British would be severely and highly compromised by all the documented, detailed information on identities, connections, and methods now in the hands of “the enemy” inside the King David Hotel. David Ben-Gurion, and others in the leadership hiding out in Paris at the time, feared that these documents might irreparably damage the entire Zionist project of “Israel” altogether.(16)
According to Menachem Begin, the IZL’s plan to attack the government wing of the King David Hotel actually began in the Spring of 1946, three months before the events of “Black Saturday” ever happened, and that the plan was submitted for approval at that time to the Haganah representatives to the joint command of the United Resistance Movement. Begin informed Moshe Sneh and Israel Galili from the Haganah that the Irgun plan was to carry out a massive demolition operation against the government wing of the King David Hotel with a new type of timed, tamper-proof, high-intensity explosive device invented by their Operations Commander, Amichai Paglin, who was known as “Giddy,” a shortened nickname derived from his underground pseudonym of “Gideon.” This new device would have a timing mechanism attached to it with the ability to delay the explosion for up to an hour, and once set, any attempt to touch or dismantle these “mines” would immediately set them off. Begin noted that IZL’s intention was to set the timers for half an hour, place three telephone calls as warnings, and have the hotel evacuated—a sort of “compassionate terrorism,” whatever that might be.
The Haganah leadership rejected this plan at first, feeling that it was too ambitious and too soon. The Irgun, however, did not give up their planning. In his historical memoir “The Revolt,” Begin explains that the IZL’s code name for the large, six story King David Hotel was malonchick (“little hotel”). In Hebrew, malon means “hotel,” with the “chick” being the affectionate diminutive in Russian, Yiddish, and colloquial Hebrew. In order to camouflage the code name for their target even further, malonchick was shortened to just “chick,” and thus the IZL’s blowing up of the British government section of the King David Hotel came to be called “Operation Chick.”(17)
In the 1930s, the Haganah adopted the doctrine of havlagah (”defense and self-restraint”). In the 1940s, they came to adopt the “doctrine of reprisal,” where military or terror operations must always be “reprisals for initial attacks” (cf. Eliahu Golomb’s historico-philosophical justifications). On Saturday, June 29, 1946 General Barker and the British military confiscated the Haganah arms caches at Yagur and occupied the offices of the Jewish Agency, regarded as “Jewish Headquarters” in Jerusalem. Thus, in accordance with the Haganah’s own doctrine of “the scope of the reprisal is equal to the magnitude of the attack,” on July 1, 1946 the leadership of the Jewish Agency, through their Haganah representative, gave the Irgun and LeHI the “green light” to attack the Jerusalem “headquarters” of the British.(18) Aside from Haganah’s “doctrine of reprisal,” however, the more important reason for this “green-lighted” operation was the destruction of documents and incriminating evidence. As Menachem Begin explains:
“The Haganah, which had become accustomed to its convenient ‘semi-legal’ status in the eyes of the British authorities, had never taken efficient steps to observe the rules of caution. The Jewish Agency leaders apparently put their trust in their imagined ‘international status’ which they fondly believed gave them immunity from police action. Consequently there were many secret documents in the Jewish Agency building which a wisely run organisation in such circumstances would never have allowed to be there. The booty which the British forces carried away as a result of their searches in the Jewish Agency building was considerable. The irresponsibility that prevailed in the Jewish Agency reached such a pitch that, as Haganah leader, Israel] Galili told me, the British were able to take out of a typewriter part of the verbatim report of Mr. Moshe] Shertok’s speech at the Zionist General Council. Mr. Shertok had praised the blowing-up of the bridges, and explained the great political significance of the operation.
“The report of Shertok’s speech, which corroborated Jewish Agency responsibility for the Haganah’s sabotage operations, gave the lie to the emphatic disclaimers Mr. Ben Gurion had made before the Anglo-American Commission only a few months previously. It was not the only document of this kind which the British carried away to the King David Hotel.”(19)
Thus, on July 1, 1946, two days after “Black Saturday,” Menachem Begin and the Irgun Command received the following letter from the Haganah leadership:
“Shalom!
“(a) You are to carry out as soon as possible the Chick and the house of ‘Your-slave-and-redeemer.’ Inform us of the date. Preferably simultaneously. Do not publish the identity of the body carrying out the operation—neither directly nor by implication.
“(b) We are also preparing something—shall inform you of details in good time.
“(c) Tel Aviv and neighbourhood must be excluded from all operations. We are all interested in protecting Tel Aviv—as the center of Yishuv life and our own work. If Tel Aviv should be paralysed by curfew and arrests as the result of an operation, we and our plans will also be paralysed. Incidentally, the important nerves of the other sides are not concentrated here. So—Tel Aviv is ‘out of bounds’ to Jewish forces.”(20)
The Irgun planned to coordinate their bombing of the King David Hotel with LeHI’s simultaneous bombing of the David Brothers Building, an operation referred to by the Haganah Command as “Your-slave-and-redeemer.” Upon receipt of this letter, the Irgun and LeHI began reconnaissance operations and the solidifying of operational details. Sarah Agassi, a twenty year old at the time of Operation “Chick,” was, along with several others, involved in the casing part of the operation. On the scope and magnitude of the event, Begin writes:
“We were well aware that this was the largest of our operations to date and that it might turn out to be unique in the history of partisan wars of liberation. It is no simple matter to penetrate the very heart of the military government, to deliver a blow within the fortified headquarters of a heavily armed regime. I doubt if this operation had any precedent in history....We always planned every undertaking with infinite care. But to none of our many operations—except, perhaps, the later attack on Acre Fortress—did we devote so much preliminary preparation as we did to ‘Operation Chick’.”(21)
TARGET AND OPERATIONAL DETAILS
The British Administration in Palestine, under Sir John Shaw and High Commissioner Cunningham, was run out of the southwest section of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, headquarters to the British Secretariat, the civil government, the military command, and the Criminal Investigation Division, or CID. An adjacent building also housed British military police and the Special Investigations Bureau (SIB). Between these two buildings, a military unit was placed, and the entire area was strategically secured by barbed-wire barricades and machine gun nests. Elaborate netting was also set up to prevent “terrorists” from the “Hebrew underground” tossing grenades onto the property. The hotel even had its own “terrorist siren” which would summon to the area, police and military units from all nearby sectors of Jerusalem. Located on the north side of the King David was the French embassy. Despite this martial, counter-terrorism atmosphere though, the King David Hotel, like Shepheard’s Hotel in Cairo, or the Raffles Hotel in Singapore (now gone), was a renowned establishment in the ‘Outer Empire’, and certainly the hub of social life in British Mandate Palestine, with its glamourous lobby, busy cocktail lounge, and a fine restaurant with Swiss cooks and distinctively dressed Sudanese waiters. (That should have been on the KDH marketing brochure, but wasn’t, and appears here for the first time.) Also, exactly under the government section of the King David, not far from the basement area, there was the Regence Café, a very popular lunch spot with the government bureaucrats, military, and civilian workers in the area. Sarah Agassi, and other Irgun operatives casing the hotel at the time, reported back to Amichai Paglin that regular deliveries were made to the kitchen of the Regence Café by Arab vendors, delivering such things as meats, produce, and milk.(22)
Menachem Begin credits Amichai “Giddy” Paglin as the strategic mastermind behind this whole operation, for it is he, who not only invented the explosive device to be used, but devised the idea of Arabs (or those dressed like Arabs) delivering his custom explosive devices in seven innocent milk-cans to the basement area down the hall from the Regence Café, just below the offices of the British Secretariat. All seven milk-can bombs were collectively controlled by only two devices – a timer and a device which detonated the whole lot if any of the milk-cans were touched, as in an attempt to dismantle or move them. In the planning stages of early July, when Giddy Paglin told Yitzhak Sadeh, the Haganah’s Operation Officer, that he planned to set the timer for 45 minutes, Sadeh strongly advised him to set the timer for 15 minutes so that the British would only have time to evacuate the building, but not have time to think about preserving any of the Jewish Agency’s documents. To prevent an even larger massacre than that which occured, however, they compromised – the explosives’ timer would be set for 30 minutes.(23)
It has often been reported (on the internets) that—as in a “false flag” attack—the Irgun men dressed as Arabs during this operation in order to give the impression to the British that the blame for the King David Hotel bombing should be placed upon the Arab community in Palestine, but this is completely incorrect. Just as the Irgun or LeHI men would dress up in British officer’s uniforms to gain entry into military bases for their arms-raids operations, similarly, for Operation “Chick,” the Irgun merely dressed in the garb of Arabs and Sudanese waiters because neither the kitchen staff of the Regence Café, nor anyone outside the hotel, would be initially surprised if Arabs came by the kitchen door of the café delivering sizeable quantities of milk in large cans. Aside from this, in the wake of the attack, there was never any doubt in the mind of the British as to the parties behind such an operation. (See above: Prelude to “Black Saturday” and Operation “Chick”) In the context of 1930s-1940s Palestine, it must be remembered that when the British (and the British press) referred to “terrorists,” they were referring to Jewish militants, not Arabs.
On July 22, 1946, three weeks after the Jewish Agency, through Haganah, had given the “green light,” Operation “Chick” was launched. At the last minute, however, the LeHI operatives were not able to properly launch their operation on the David Brothers Building, and had to pull out, leaving the King David Hotel operation as the main terrorist headline grabber of that day in July of ’46. Operation “Your-slave-and-redeemer,” the bombing of the Solomon Brothers, I mean, the David Brothers Building, would have to be postponed for another time.
The general plan was for the Irgun “Assault Unit”—all “dressed in the flowing robes of hotel workers,” and under the leadership of 20 year old Yisrael “Gideon” Levi—
to deliver the milk-can bombs, in the guise of Arab deliverymen, into the southwest basement of the King David, accessed through the Regence Café, an hour before the lunch crowd arrived. This 11:00 am hour would also coincide with the time the LeHI had chosen for their own attack on the David Brothers Building. After 12, the Regence Café filled up on weekdays with men and women civilians and army officers who worked in the building. Due to these last minute changes concerning the LeHI part of the joint operation, Operation “Chick” was unforeseeably delayed for an hour, and would not begin until noon. Luckily, the only people in the café at the noon hour on this day were the Arab cooks and waiters.(24)
When the commercial lorry carrying the 14-man Irgun “Assault Unit” reached the hotel’s basement and café kitchen entrance, it divided into two groups of seven—the “break-through” group (or café bomb team) and the protective “cover” group—Seven to carry the bulky milk-can bombs with their TNT-gelignite mixtures, one to hold the kitchen staff at gunpoint, and six guards on the perimeter. There was also a woman involved in the operation who acted as the “telephonist” to make three warning calls after the detonation timer was set for 30 minutes.
While Yisrael Levi and the “break-through” group were moving the milk-cans down a hall outside the café, which led toward the basement area directly under the British Secretariat, a hotel staff member, Johannides Constantine, approached to find out why the café staff was standing so quietly in front of a strange and unfamiliar Sudanese waiter. He approached and found out that this “Sudanese waiter” was holding a submachine gun on the staff. A hotel porter named Ahmad Abu Soleb noticed that two of the “Arabs” delivering milk were carrying submachine guns, and he noticed that these “Arabs” were not speaking in any of the languages he was familiar with (Arabic, Hebrew, English, German, or Italian). As many Irgun members came out of Vladimir “Ze’ev” Jabotinky’s Betar youth movement in Poland, they were most likely speaking Polish. Abu Soleb then informed the British policeman at the nearest guard post of this. A British officer then came by to assess the situation, began to speak to the “Sudanese waiter,” and then found himself wrestling with this man and his automatic weapon. At this point, one of the Irgun men from the six-man perimeter “cover group” came in and fired at the officer, felling him, but not fatally.
While this was all going on, the “break-through” group had quickly and carefully placed the seven deadly milk-cans around the central core pillars in the basement under the hotel’s southwest section. The detonator timer and non-tampering device were set at 12:07 pm for 30 minutes by the group leader Yisrael Levi, and the warning signs were then placed next to the milk-cans saying, “Mines. Do not Touch!” The café bomb squad then started running down the hall and into the café toward the kitchen exit and their lorry. On the way out, the café workers were freed and told to run for their lives.(25)
At 12:10, after the Assault Unit had gotten away from the hotel’s basement, Levi made it to the spot where the “telephonist” was stationed and waiting to call in the three warnings. One call was made to the management of the King David Hotel, one to the Palestine Post, and one to the French Consulate-General to tell them to open wide all their windows so that the glass would not be blown in by the blast.
To keep passers-by away from the building, noisy, but harmless fire cracker-M80 type bombs were set off near the southern and northern parts of the hotel. In the chaos and smoke of the “cracker-bombs” going off, and all the gunfire, the streets around the hotel emptied out, and the Irgun operatives made their escape out of Jerusalem and on to Tel Aviv as the King David Hotel’s “terrorist siren” blew.(26)
Aside from Paglin, Levi, and Agassi, some of the other participants in the bombing of the King David Hotel were Shraga Allis, Yitzhak Avinoam, Yehoshua “Gal” Goldschmid (one of the lead planners for the April 9, 1948 massacre at Deir Yassin), Yosef Avni (another Deir Yassin participant), Bezalel “Simon” Amitzur (later founder of Maman Aerospace), Nathan Friedman-Yellin (or Yellin-Mor), Meir Nakar, and Chaim “Avraham” Landau. Everyone in this underground, much like the modern world of global “dissident” blogging, took an underground pseudonym, or two, as protective cloaks. The last time I counted, in the Irgun alone, there were four members known as “Shimshon,” two guys known as “Giora,” and two Gideons (Amichai Paglin and Israel Levi), along with your usual distributions of multiple Avrahams and Moshes.
At 12:31, twenty-four minutes after Paglin had set the timer for 30 minutes, Inspector J.C. Taylor called off the general alert. Civilian employees again began preparing for lunch, some officers were already at the bar, and just at 12:37 pm, the No. 4 bus with the usual hotel lunch crowd had pulled up out in front. This was exactly at the moment of detonation, when the terrorists’ seven milk-cans exploded, rocking the hotel and the nearby area. A safe was blown skyward out of the hotel and landed on a pedestrian walking on nearby Julian’s Way. Then the entire southwest section of the hotel, housing the British Secretariat, began to crumble in a quick and progressive, six-story pancake collapse, and the blue sky, sunny day in Jerusalem turned dark from the thick cloud of debris caused by the massive explosions, which had created a 300-foot pillar of smoke above the King David Hotel. Covered in white dust and blood, some survivors were able to make it out of the rubble. Much to the disappointment of the Zionist underground, however, Sir John Shaw’s office was located just a short ways down the corridor from the corner of the building sheared off in the blast. He was untouched.
By 12:52, the Argyll and Sutherland troops arrived with equipment for the dig-and-rescue. They were assisted by a first-responder crew of two hundred and sixty Arab postal workers. Searchlights were brought in, and the dig-and-rescue, which had turned into a dig-and-recover operation by the time it had ended on August 4, went on all that night. In the YMCA across the street, Lady Shaw had set up a missing persons office. On August 4, the final toll from the Irgun’s Operation “Chick” was 91 dead and 45 injured, many of the injured were on that No. 4 bus.(27)
In the July 24 edition of the Palestine Post, British prime minister Clement Attlee warned the terrorists that, “The British Government have stated and stated again they will not be diverted by acts of violence in the search for a just and final solution to the Palestine problem.”
Although Ben-Gurion was well aware of the operation, he nonetheless told France Soir: “The Irgun is the enemy of the Jewish people.” The British did not buy it though and on the 24th of July a white paper was published laying out the entire program and network of relationships within the United Resistance Movement or Tenuat Hameri. The Commander-in-Chief of the Haganah, Israel Galili, immediately telephoned Menachem Begin and begged him to have the Irgun take full responsibility for the whole operation so as to provide cover for the Haganah and the Jewish Agency.(28)
The issue of whether the Irgun did in fact send three telephone warnings, or whether the British received them and ignored them, is still a “live” issue. Did the Irgun make only one actual call to the King David Hotel switchboard, and then considered that sufficient warning, as some have suggested? Although the Irgun did have a general policy of warning their demolition targets, they also often called in false bomb threats, which might have contributed to the British—if they did in fact receive any notice—just ignoring the “telephonist’s” warning and not calling for an evacuation of the King David Hotel, thinking that it was just the boy crying wolf again. The Haganah’s intelligence operatives claimed that one British official in the hotel, when hearing of the warning, replied that, “We are not here to take orders from the Jews.”(29)
OPERATION MALONCHICK’S AFTERMATH
After the bombing of the King David Hotel, the British army entered Tel Aviv “to track down the terrorists and to destroy them root and branch.” Tel Aviv went under complete martial law with 24-hour curfews. The British forces under General Cassells and Barker searched house to house for the Irgun leaders, especially Menachem Begin, but they were not to be found, even though they were all in the Tel Aviv area when martial law was declared. Begin had to hide inside a very small, nearly airless crawlspace in his house in the middle of a Tel Aviv summer with no food or water while a British patrol camped out in his house and garden for nearly four days, waiting for him to show up from Jerusalem, where his wife had told them he had gone. They finally left, Begin emerged from his hiding spot, and stuck his head in a large bowl of cool water.(30)
“Black Saturday” and its explosive aftermath ultimately resulted in the Haganah agreeing to a (fingers-crossed) cease-fire deal in which they agreed to halt their terrorist activities against the British, in return for which, the leaders of the Jewish Agency and those of the Yishuv would be released from Tegart Fort, the British prison where they were incarcerated.
After “the King David Hotel outrage,” as the press called it, Begin points out that, although this press put forward the big story that the Haganah had severed their ties to the Irgun, these two armed groups, in fact, became even closer than before. In August they went right back to planning more coordinated terror operations. They began devising a plan called Operation “Launch,” sometimes called “Mr. Launch,” where they would blow up one of the British “deportation ships” moored in Haifa harbour(31), only this time, they would not murder-with-intent 252 newly arrived Jewish immigrants as a symbolic “sacrifice” and moral bargaining chip of guilt to force the issue of “unlimited Jewish immigration,” as when they blew up the S.S. Patria in Haifa’s harbour on November 25, 1940. Although Operation “Chick” was certainly not a false flag op, the blowing up of the S.S. Patria was. The operation was designed to place the blame for the murderous event upon the British in order to shame them before the “civilized” world community, but as Israeli prime minister Moshe Sharett remarked during a memorial ceremony for the “victims” of the Haganah’s S.S. Patria operation, “It is sometimes necessary to sacrifice a few to save the many.”(32) The secret, of course, is to not let those “few” know that you are about to sacrifice them for the goals of “the many,” i.e. “the elite minority.”
Don’t be a chump. Jewish folks out there who are not a part of “the Big Club” should take note that the Zionist powers-that-be will “sacrifice a few” Jews, if necessary, to help “the cause,” cf. the S.S. Patria, Achille Lauro, and the Geneva-based Zionist-German Reich cooperation (“the Pact”) during WWII.
MODUS OPERANDI AND MOTIVE PARALLELS BETWEEN OPERATION “CHICK” AND THE WTC DEMOLITIONS ON SEPTEMBER 11, 2001
As the above history, which covers only a nine month period of Zionist terror, I mean “freedom fighting” in Palestine, illustrates, the “Hebrew underground” had a definite penchant for planning and launching large, simultaneous demolition and bombing operations on large buildings, houses, railroads, bridges, and ships. As you will remember, until the LeHI operationally pulled out, Operation “Chick” was supposed to coincide with the LeHI’s bombing of the David Brothers building, an operation known as “Your-slave-and-redeemer.” In light of all this, it should be noted that one detail about “al-Qaeda” that we were constantly told from all corners of the media on and after 9/11 was that “al-Qaeda” had a penchant for, and expertise in, planning and launching large, simultaneous demolition and bombing operations, such as Mossad’s, er, I mean, al-Qaeda’s August 1999 near simultaneous bombings of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania.
The professional saboteur expertise and experience of the Irgun, and specifically Amichai Paglin, was shown in the planning of Operation “Chick.” This was demonstrated by the specific placement of explosive devices around the central columns in the basement supporting the southwest section of the King David Hotel, similar to the explosives’ placements in the “al-Qaeda” February 1993 WTC bombing and the 2001 WTC1, WTC2, and WTC7 demolitions. From 1940s Palestine onward, the various Zionist terror groups have been practicing classic, bottom up controlled demolition all along.
From Operation “Chick,” with its famous, and still debated, “three warnings,” and many other Zionist operations in Palestine, we are informed of an underground policy of issuing guilt-assuaging warnings (both real and fake) to the target. This policy seems to have also been in play during the demolition events of 9/11 in New York City, and indeed for the entire operation, even months ahead of time. Mossad gave its usual useless and inaccurate warnings (watch out for these 19 Ayraabz, and never mind our Shin Bet ICTS guys wiring up planes out at Logan and Newark); the Joint-Chiefs-of Staff were warned the day before; SF mayor Willie Brown was warned in the middle of the night by someone whose name rhymes with Condi; AG John Ashcroft was warned in June of 2001; Giuliani and crew were warned on the day of “by some engineer type person” that “the building's stability was compromised and they felt that the north tower was in danger of a near imminent collapse...,” and the folks standing near WTC7, as bombs were going off in the background, were warned to move away from the building because it was also going to be coming down (blamed later on an Adobe Photoshop ‘cloning tool’ having eaten away at a large pixelated section of the building’s digital structure), or in the words of “Lucky Larry,” it was being “pulled.” When the nice man with the microphone starts counting down from the number ten, just start running like fucking hell. My guess at the time was that this was like a “real-world” trial run for a new “running with the bulls kind of thing” for the modern demolition industry. Those people in “marketing,” they’re absolutely crazed, I tell ya.
One thing though that the history of the demolition of the government section of the King David Hotel has shown us is that the ideologues of militant Zionism will blow up entire buildings, if necessary, in order to destroy any highly incriminating documents and/or operations-related technology which would empirically reveal an actual Zionist terror conspiracy in a particular event, or series of events. With a building like Larry Silverstein’s Solomon Brothers Building (World Trade Center 7) and the types of clients housed in that building, such as the Securities & Exchange Commission and Rudy Giuliani’s NYC Office of Emergency Management, contextually, we can only make educated guesses about what kinds of highly incriminating Enron-or-whoever-related financial documents or hardware/software consoles of wireless demolition and remote avionics technology might have been in that building on the afternoon of September 11, 2001, when, as predicted by the BBC twenty minutes prior to countdown, “the Solomon Brothers Building has already collapsed from intense fire damage.” One thing is for certain though, wherever a controlled demolition operation is taking place, there is always a central nerve center, or in the case of 9/11, perhaps two such local nerve centers, where the whole thing is controlled and monitored from, where someone in that control center is pushing a “Go,” “Yes,” “Enter,” or “Submit” button to initiate all the pre-programmed sequences. Let’s just say that if the David Brothers, I’m sorry, the Solomon Brothers Building had not miraculously been brought down by the intense heat of carpet fires and burning porno mags stashed away in various people’s private offices, and that later someone, just after 9/11, discovered a demolition software program in some folder on Rudy’s OEM network servers, as a lawyer or PR firm, I would definitely not want to take on this client’s job assignment to “make this all go away.”
In the Jewish Agency’s bombing of the King David Hotel—launched to destroy incriminating evidence of their complicity in terror operations and their using the underground as an operational proxy—and from other such operations, we can see the regular employment of disguises, costumes, and linguistic accents (Arabic, Scottish, or British), as well as the usage of fake or stolen military uniforms and fake IDs. This brings us to the crucial element of “inside help,” always welcomed in any military/intelligence operation. We have just seen from a sampling of only nine months worth of operations run by the Haganah and the militias of the “Hebrew underground,” that they would often rely on “inside help,” such as Jewish constables working for British police, or Jewish workers on RAF airbases or inside British refineries. This same type of “inside” helper system developed back then has been put to full operative use now for decades within the modern Mossad sayanim system, which allows Mossad to run a dedicated, international intelligence agency ‘on-the-cheap’. Of course, not all “helpers” work for free. For example, in the case of the New York demolition work witnessed on 9/11, someone like WTC lease-owner Larry Silverstein would, in this case, be performing as a primary “helper” or major sayan for the Israeli-run part of this operation. All Larry basically had to do was to give the green light for his buildings to cooperate with the ongoing work of the ‘demo squads’ from Urban Moving Systems—all most likely wearing Port Authority uniforms and in possession of fake Port Authority IDs—and in the end, this highly placed, highly paid, and valued sayan reaps many truckloads of insurance-fraud money, gets to play the poor, “why do all the Arabs hate my buildings so much” victim role, gets rid of those liability-laden, asbestos-filled buildings, and gets to help his country (Israel) all at the same time, just by making America think that it was attacked by Arabs so that it would then gladly pay and die for Israel’s long dreamed of “Final Solution to the Arab (and Persian) Problem.” To paraphrase the now famous 9/12/01 remarks of the soon-to-be-again Israeli prime minister, Bibi Nut’n’yahoo: For Israel (and Silverstein/Westfield Properties), 9/11 was, how do the yuppies always put it, a “win-win” situation.
Well, see ya next time for more tales of Zionist terror in Palestine and around the world. Until then, Shalom, Salaam, Shanti, Om Tat Sat, and thanks a lot. And always beware of men of “Middle Eastern appearance” (wink wink, nudge nudge) driving around in green lorries, dressed as Arabs, speaking in Polish or Hebrew, and carrying big milk cans with little clocks attached.
REFERENCES
(1) Joseph Heller, The Stern Gang: Ideology, Politics and Terror 1940 – 1949, London: 1995, p. 23.
(2) For a blow-by-blow description of the capture and CID assassination of LeHI founder Avraham Stern, see: J. Bowyer Bell, Terror Out of Zion: Irgun Zvai Leumi, LEHI, and the Palestine Underground, 1929-1949, New York: 1977, pp. 71-73.
(3) The Oxford World Encyclopedia, New York: 2001, p. 607.
(4) Menachem Begin, The Revolt, New York: 1977, p. 227.
(5) J. Bowyer Bell, Terror Out of Zion: Irgun Zvai Leumi, LEHI, and the Palestine Underground, 1929-1949, New York: 1977, pp. 142-45.
(6) Great Britain, Parliamentary Papers, Cmd. 6873, “Palestine Statement of Information Relating to Acts of Violence,” p. 4: Cited Ibid. p. 143.
(7) J. Bowyer Bell, Terror Out of Zion: Irgun Zvai Leumi, LEHI, and the Palestine Underground, 1929-1949, New York: 1977, p. 142.
(8) Ibid. pp. 145-46.
(9) Ibid. pp. 149-50.
(10) Menachem Begin, The Revolt, New York: 1977, pp. 68-9.
(11) Major R.D. Wilson, Cordon and Search: With the Sixth Airborne in Palestine, Aldershot: 1949, p. 47.
(12) Jan Gitlin, The Conquest of Acre Fortress, Tel Aviv: 1962, p. 21.
(13) Ibid. p. 21.
(14) J. Bowyer Bell, Terror Out of Zion: Irgun Zvai Leumi, LEHI, and the Palestine Underground, 1929-1949, New York: 1977, p. 153-66.
(15) Ibid. pp. 167-68.
(16) Ibid. pp. 168-69.
(17) Menachem Begin, The Revolt, New York: 1977, pp. 212-13.
(18) Ibid. p. 214.
(19) Ibid. p. 215.
(20) Ibid. p. 216.
(21) Ibid. p. 216.
(22) J. Bowyer Bell, Terror Out of Zion: Irgun Zvai Leumi, LEHI, and the Palestine Underground, 1929-1949, New York: 1977, p. 169.
(23) Menachem Begin, The Revolt, New York: 1977, pp. 215-16.
(24) Ibid. p. 218.
(25) J. Bowyer Bell, Terror Out of Zion: Irgun Zvai Leumi, LEHI, and the Palestine Underground, 1929-1949, New York: 1977, p. 170.
(26) Menachem Begin, The Revolt, New York: 1977, p. 217-18.
(27) J. Bowyer Bell, Terror Out of Zion: Irgun Zvai Leumi, LEHI, and the Palestine Underground, 1929-1949, New York: 1977, p. 171-72.
(28) Ibid. p. 173.
(29) Ibid. p. 175.
(30) Menachem Begin, The Revolt, New York: 1977, pp. 227-29.
(31) Ibid. p. 226.
(32) Sami Hadawi, Bitter Harvest: A Modern History of Palestine, New York: 1991, p. 55.
of the Solomon Brothers Building on 9/11
Dr. Lazlo Toth
June 2008
INTRODUCTION
The following is an excerpt from my upcoming (and still in various stages of research and writing) “Wired for Terror: On the Trail of the Men Who Brought Down the Towers, PART THREE: From the Balfour Declaration to Statehood – 32 Years of Terror and Deception in Palestine.” The first section of “Part Three,” on the Balfour Declaration, has already been posted as an excerpt here _http://www.wtcdemolition.com/blog/node/562. The second excerpt, presented herein, covers the July 1946 bombing of the King David Hotel and David Brothers Building in Jerusalem. Although this double terror attack—called by the Zionist underground, “Operation Chick” (the attack on the King David Hotel) and “Operation Your-slave-and-redeemer” (the attack on the David Brothers Building)—took place towards the latter part of the thirty-two year period of history (1917-1949) being covered in Part Three of “Wired for Terror,” I was compelled, nonetheless, to complete and present this section ahead of the rest of the material. The simple reason was, while reading through the details of this operation in relation to its tightly knit context of surrounding events and circumstances in 1945-46 British Palestine, the parallels to various significant details of the New York part of the 9/11 operation, and specifically, the demolition of Silverstein Properties’ World Trade Center Building 7 (the Solomon Brothers Building) were stunningly apparent. What is also important to our historical understanding of these events is that many of the inside operational details, as well as ideological and psychological context, have been filled in by published memoirs and interviews given by some of the main conspiratorial participants, such as Menachem Begin (1913-1992) and hotel bomb-squad commander Yisrael Levi (1926-1990), among others. Many key operational details presented herein have been gathered from Menachem Begin’s 1951 historical memoir of the period, “The Revolt” (ha-Mered). Because these particular events place you, the brave and open-minded reader, in the middle of this story, so to speak, before going further, it will be necessary to provide some very brief background information on the two major protagonists operating within the 1930s-1940s Zionist underground, or using Menachem Begin’s terminology, the “Hebrew underground.” These two highly militant, religio-nationalist protagonists were known, among other names, as the Irgun and the LeHI.
BACKGROUND ON THE UNDERGROUND
“The Irgun,” short for Ha-Irgun Ha-Zvai Ha-Leumi B’Eretz Yisrael (“National Military Organization in the Land of Israel,” or the NMO), operated as a Zionist paramilitary organization in Palestine from 1931 to 1948. It was formed by Avraham Tehomi in 1929 in an organizational and ideological split with the more Yishuv-accepted and “mainstream” Haganah (“the Defense”). Tehomi’s new organization was originally named Irgun Bet Ha-Haganah Ha-Leumit (“Organization B for the National Defense”), but was also known in the underground as Haganah Bet (“Defense B”). In case the leaders and fighters of the Haganah (organized for settlement and neighborhood defense) or the mobile strike force, the Palmach, got “cold feet,” were disarmed, or were rounded up and jailed by the British, Avraham Tehomi and his more militant comrades, such as Avraham Stern, thought that there should be a “second defense,” or a “B group” to drive the British and Arabs from Palestine. Avraham Tehomi and a small group of Haganah military officers split off from the parent organization in 1929 because they felt that the Haganah was not militant enough to get the job done.(1) In the Palestine of the 1930s and 1940s, this group of terrorist saboteurs, assassins, bank robbers, and kidnappers was commonly referred to as “Etzel,” a name derived from the pronunciation of its Hebrew acronym IZL (Irgun Zvai Leumi). For the newcomer to this history, the Irgun, the NMO, and the IZL (“Etzel”) all refer to the same Zionist paramilitary organization, which at the time of the King David Hotel bombing was headed by “wanted terrorist” and future Israeli prime minister, Menachem Begin.
The other paramilitary group taking part in the dual, simultaneous terror bombings of the King David Hotel and the David Brothers Building in Jerusalem was a smaller, but even more militantly aggressive organization called Lohamei Herut Yisrael (“Fighters for the Freedom of Israel,” or the FFI). This group was known in Palestine by its acronym LeHI (The H, representing the Hebrew word Herut “freedom”], is a hard Semitic ‘h’ pronounced similar to the ‘ch’ in the Scottish “loch,” or the German/Yiddish “nach.”). From its beginnings in 1940 as an IZL splinter organization, Avraham Stern’s group (LeHI), called “the Stern Gang” by the British, came to quickly be regarded as a highly volatile and dangerous “terrorist” organization by the Mandate government of Palestine. The colonial branch of MI5, the Defense Security Office, was specifically charged with tracking down its leaders and operatives. At the time of the King David Hotel bombing, the LeHI, or FFI, was led by a man named Yitzhak Yzernitzky.
Yitzhak “Rabbi Shamir” Yzernitzky joined the Irgun (IZL) in 1937. In 1940, however, he left IZL with Avraham Stern, Yaakov “Yashka” Eliav, and several others to form LeHI, of which he became Commander after Stern’s assassination on the morning of February 12, 1942 by Criminal Investigation Department (CID) Inspector Geoffrey J. Morton, whom LeHI operatives, just the month before, had barely missed killing with their “trap-bomb” operation at 8 Yael Street in Jerusalem.(2)
Yitzhak Yzernitzky, who legally adopted the last name of his underground, ‘on-the-run’ character “Rabbi Shamir,” was later to head the Israeli Mossad during the Eisenhower-JFK era (1955-1965), and would serve under former Irgun Commander Menachem Begin as Israel’s Foreign Minister (1980-1983), a position now being occupied by the daughter of Eitan Livni, another Irgun commander. Shamir then succeeded Begin as Israeli prime minister and head of the right-wing Likud Party (1983-1984), and after only two years out, was again prime minister of Israel (1986-1992), succeeding Shimon Peres. For over three decades, it was Yitzhak Shamir, the former LeHI terrorist leader, who acted as a key planner and overseer of the illegal Euro-Jewish settlement of Gaza and the West Bank. In the 1992 elections Shamir lost to Yitzhak Rabin (who would be assassinated by a Mossad patsy on November 4, 1995 for his peace-making activities) and was succeeded as head of the Likud Party by Binyamin Netanyahu (a guy who, on a need-to-know basis, probably knows a little something about that Rabin hit as well as the 9/11 and 7/7 things, etc.]).(3)
When Menachem Begin was on the run after an Irgun terror operation, he would, like Yzernitzky, adopt the disguise and fake identity of “Rabbi Israel Sassover.” Because of “Rabbi Shamir” and “Rabbi Sassover,” British police and detectives actually started pulling on orthodox rabbi’s beards during on-the-street searches to find “the wanted terrorist leaders” behind the possibly fake whiskers, all of which made Begin and Yzernitzky (Shamir) quite an unpopular duo amongst the real rabbis.(4)
PRELUDE TO “BLACK SATURDAY” AND OPERATION “CHICK”
In the fresh aftermath of World War II, with the surrender of Germany in May of 1945, Chaim Weizmann, then President of the World Zionist Organization (WZO), petitioned the British government to allow European Jewry unlimited, restriction-free immigration into Palestine (one of Zionism’s traditional, long-time goals). He was informed, however, on the 25th of August by the Colonial Office of the new, post-Churchill Labour government of Prime Minister Clement Attlee that the 15,000 person annual limit of Jews allowed to emigrate to Palestine—stipulated by the despised 1939 White Paper—would not be increased. This may have been the final blow to the Anglo-centric policies and orientation of many pro-British Zionists, even within the “mainstream, respectable” Jewish Agency. Thus, by the autumn of 1945, even the Haganah, traditionally tied to settlement and neighborhood defense, began to give ears to the case against the British that was again being made by the Maximalist Revisionists of the Irgun and LeHI undergrounds, for on the 9th of October, Kol Israel (the underground radio station run by Haganah) began broadcasting their call to active resistance.(5) Dr. Moshe Sneh, Commander-in-Chief of Haganah, who at the time only considered the British a “bad partner,” not necessarily an “enemy,” wanted, nevertheless, to organize a single serious incident that would send a clear message to the British,
“...as a warning and an indication of much more serious incidents that would threaten the safety of all British interests in the country if the Government did not grant the Zionist requests.”(6)
In the weeks following the Colonial Office’s informing of Weizmann and the WZO that the immigration quotas would not be increased over that stipulated by the 1939 White Paper, men from the more “mainstream” defense militias of the Haganah and Palmach began leaving to join the Irgun (IZL) and the “Hebrew underground.” In these new and disturbing political conditions, however, spokesmen for the Jewish Agency in Palestine, instead of calling for a saison of “Jewish dissident hunting,” as was their custom, suggested to the Irgun and LeHI that they merge with the Haganah and together wage a campaign of military pressure to get the British to accede to Zionist demands for unlimited Jewish immigration. Although the Irgun trusted Ben-Gurion, they did not trust his colleagues at the Jewish Agency. Menachem Begin and the Irgun, along with Shamir and the commanders of LeHI, suggested instead, that there be formed a single, representative strategic command over a United Resistance, wherein the Jewish Agency, through a representative from the Haganah, such as Moshe Sneh, Israel Galili, or Yitzhak Sadeh, would have final veto over all operations except arms-raids. In this way, the Irgun and LeHI could still maintain their organizational independence. This arrangement was agreed upon by all parties from the Jewish Agency on down into the underground and formed what was called the Tenuat Hameri, or United Resistance Movement. The top commanders on this single strategic command were: for the Haganah, Yitzhak Sadeh; for the Irgun, Eitan Livni—and after Livni’s capture—Amichai “Giddy” Paglin; and representing LeHI was Yaakov Banai. Below this joint, Tenuat Hameri command group, each group’s members remained within their organizations, operating both jointly and separately.(7)
The terror, or “political pressure” campaign of the Tenuat Hameri opened on Halloween night of 1945 when the Haganah, the Palmach, the Irgun, and the LeHI joined together for Dr. Moshe Sneh’s aforementioned “serious incident” – a nearly simultaneous quartet of night time terror attacks. The Palmach would attack British Coast Guard craft at Haifa and Jaffa; the Haganah would detonate over five hundred charges, breaking the Palestine railway at two hundred and forty-two places; the Irgun would seriously attack the Lydda railway station; and the LeHI would attack the Consolidated Refinery at Haifa. Months before this Halloween operation, LeHI operatives had gotten hired at the refinery. Using their newly acquired, “inside” employee status, they gradually smuggled small amounts of nitroglycerin into the plant and stashed it for later placement beside the petrol tanks for the attack on All Hallow’s Eve.(8)
In November, the Irgun stole ninety-eight 100 lb. sacks of Chilean nitrate from British Imperial Chemical Industries in Haifa and lifted two truckloads of weapons from a Royal Air Force (RAF) camp. The Haganah then attacked a police station at Givat Olga and a coast guard station at Sydna-Ali near Herzliya. On November 26, the British security, military, and police began a 10,000 man cordon and search operation for Jewish terrorists in Samaria and on the Plain of Sharon. Then a series of small-scale incidents—road mines, arson, letter bombs, bank robberies, and the like—began to be punctuated by large-scale, multiple and simultaneous terror strikes, accompanied by assassinations of policemen and kidnappings of British military personnel.(9)
The new year of 1946 opened with more Zionist terror attacks and criminal operations, followed by more British curfews, round-ups, searches, and prosecutions. On January 12, terrorists of the “Hebrew underground” blew up railroad track near Binyamina as an eight-car train approached. They then made off with the £35,000 payroll the train was carrying. Around the 19th of the month, the Irgun tried to blow up the RAF radar station on Mount Carmel as well as the Palestine Broadcasting Service in Jerusalem. They were, however, able to successfully detonate a mine at the coast guard station at Givat Olga. On January 29, the Irgun launched an arms-raid operation against an RAF base at Akir (Ekron) near Gaza. During these arms-raids against British military bases, the Irgun operatives would always dress up as either British officers or Arab civilian workers, and they usually had some type of inside assistance from Jewish civilians working as RAF base employees. Finally, on January 31, the RAF had had enough of these arms-raids and dismissed, as a treacherous and untrustworthy lot, all Jews working either as airbase employees or lorry drivers for the base.
In February, early in the month, while the Irgun began another round of attacks on British police stations, such as the one at Safed, Irgun operations officer Eitan Livni (father of current Israeli Foreign Affairs Minister Tzipi Tzipporah] Livni) began planning a joint IZL-LeHI operation involving three explosives teams launching simultaneous, synchronized attacks on RAF airdromes at Lydda, Kfar Sirkin, and Qastina, with the idea of blowing up British aircraft, such as their Halifaxes and Spitfires. They indeed succeeded in blowing up the aircraft and left £2,000,000 worth of damage in their wake.
On March 7, fourteen men of the Irgun, dressed in stolen Airborne uniforms, entered the army camp at Sarafand and drove out with a lorry loaded with weapons. At this point, with thousands of pounds of explosives and truckloads of weapons and ammunition suddenly shifting into the hands of the “Hebrew underground,” the British decided a change in command was needed, and Lieutenant General J.C. D’Arcy was replaced by Lieutenant General Sir Evelyn Hugh Barker, a general with an extremely low tolerance for Jewish terrorism. He would win no friends among the underground. That was a nearly guaranteed certainty.
Despite the ever-evolving, multi-levels of security the British implemented to prevent arms theft by the Zionist militias, Menachem Begin writes, “But right to the end of our fight we never ceased taking arms from the government forces—in spite of all their precautions and notwithstanding the big notices stuck up in all the camps exhorting the soldiers: ‘Your uniform does not prove your identity.’”(10)
On April 2, Eitan Livni directed an attack force of seventy-five Irgun operatives divided into three teams. They launched a major operation on the Palestine railway system, blowing up five railway bridges, along with the Ashdod station, and cutting off all railway traffic between Haifa and Acre. During this blitz of sabotage, one column of terrorists, or “freedom fighters,” however, did not reach their intended target of Bat Yam until after 8:00 pm, by which time the British had already ringed the area, and British paratroopers soon surrounded them. Dov “Shimshon” Cohen, the unit commander, escaped with another man into the dunes during the gun fight, one was killed, but the rest of the 34-man unit, along with Tzipporah’s dad, Mr. Livni, were forced to surrender.
Amichai “Giddy” Paglin, the mastermind behind the King David Hotel demolition and other large operations, immediately replaced Eitan Livni as Irgun operations officer and began planning the next arms-raid operation. From Josef Zinger, a Jewish constable working inside the Ramat Gan police station, Paglin was able to secure the station’s building plans to help him plan the ten-minute, in-and-out operation. On April 23, driving off in a hail of machine gun and pistol fire, the Irgun made off with yet another lorry full of military firearms and ammunition from this aforementioned police station at Ramat Gan. Two days later, at 8:45 pm, with land mines scattered behind them to block a counter-attack party, LeHI operatives began gunning down British paratroopers, caught unawares, in the parking lot of the Sixth Airborne on the Tel Aviv-Jaffa boundary. On April 27, after a seven-casket funeral amongst bitter British paratroopers, the commander of these seven men, Major General A.J.H. Cassels, replied with curt and righteously indignant anger to the message of condolence sent by Mayor Perelson of Tel Aviv:
“I have received your message of regret but I have sent for you today to say how horrified and disgusted I am at the outrage committed by the Jews on the night of April 25, when seven British soldiers were willfully and brutally murdered by members of your community.
“As a result I have decided to impose certain restrictions on the Jewish community as a whole. My decision to restrict the whole community has been made in order to maintain public security and because I hold the community to blame.
“There is no doubt whatsoever in my mind that many members either knew of this project or could have given some warning before it happened.
“Further, I am quite certain that if you, as representative of Tel Aviv, chose to do so you could produce sufficient information to lead to the arrest of the criminals.”(11)
On May 12, Major General Cassels’ curfew over Tel Aviv and other areas was finally lifted, and the Zionist underground of militant Russian and Eastern European, Jewish immigrants went right back to work, holding up the Barclay’s Bank in Nablus on May 20 for £6,228, a third of which was (wait for the drum roll and cymbal crash) marked “C” for non-negotiable, as these bills were set aside by the bank for burning.
On the 10th of June there was yet another Irgun attack on the Palestine railway system. Simultaneously, at 6:45 pm, three trains in the Lydda district blew up, a Jerusalem-to-Jaffa train was stopped and then blown up, and a Jaffa-to-Jerusalem train was blown up just outside of Tel Aviv. In a single 21-hour period on June 16-17, a combined LeHI-Irgun operation blew up eleven road and railway bridges. As I’ve written many times before in previous blogs, these Zionist extremist folks just love blowin’ shit up. One demolition team during this 21-hour blitz, however, ran into an armoured British roadblock on the escape road out. Heavy automatic weapons fire was poured upon their lorry, and the next day in Haifa, eleven LeHI saboteurs were buried. On this same day, the 18th of June, an Irgun attack squad, armed with pistols and iron pipes, entered the British Officer’s Club at the Yarkon Hotel in Tel Aviv, and after clubbing a couple of officers, herded the rest into a corner. The clubbed and unconscious Captain D.T. Rea was bound by the hands, duct tape placed over the mouth, hauled to a small green lorry, and dumped into a crate in the back as it drove off. Flight Lieutenant P.A.E. Russell tried to escape through the dining room’s back entrance and was met by armed men who bound him and placed him in a stolen taxi. The taxi reached the waiting green lorry, Lt. Russell was thrown into the same crate with Capt. Rea, and the lorry drove off. Meanwhile, back at the Officer’s Club, two captains from the Fourth Paratroop Battalion (K.H. Spence and G.C. Warburton) and Captain A.E. Taylor from the Seventeenth Paratroop Battalion were taken out at gunpoint and placed in another waiting lorry. The very next day (June 19), down in Jerusalem, a taxi pulled up next to Major H.P. Chadwick, four armed men of “middle eastern appearance” got out, chloroformed him, stuffed him into the taxi, and took off. Later the next day, June 20, Major Chadwick was able to escape from the house where he was being held. Total: (for those out there keeping score so far) Six British Officers kidnapped and held as hostages by Jewish terrorists, with a single officer making an escape from his captors, leaving five remaining hostages. The deals will come later.
On June 24, 1946, the opening of the trial of the thirty-one Irgun terrorists captured during the April 2nd attack on the Palestine rail system at Bat Yam began with Eitan Livni, his head swimming in romanticist, Zionist mythology, telling the presiding judge Colonel Peel that, “you are the representative of an occupying power, and we are Hebrew soldiers. As such, we deny you the right to judge us.”(12) All the Bat Yam defendants were given the opportunity to make a statement before the court, which some used and abused to the limits of the court’s patience. Menachem “Ze’ev” Schiff, a young man of twenty-two who had joined the Irgun at sixteen, concluded his FOUR HOUR statement by saying, “You cannot hold this country with bayonets”(13) but with 150+ nookular weapons and control of the U.S. Government and media, you certainly can]. Two days later, on June 26, the Bat Yam terrorists were all found guilty and the court literally burst into song. Literally. In the Palestine Post there was a bit of reported dancing as well.
On the day of the verdict, with five British officers still being held as hostages, the Irgun decided to release Lieutenant Russell and Captain Rea as “messengers.” This was done in order to let Lieutenant General Barker know that if the two Irgun men (Yosef Simchon and Yitzhak “Michael” Ashbel) captured during the March 7 arms-raid on the Sarafand army base are hung for their crimes, the three other British officers, still being held hostage by the Irgun, would be summarily executed, no problemo. On this same day (June 26), the terrorists launched a raid on a diamond polishing plant, making off with £40,000 in diamonds. At this point, the British decided to bring the hammer down upon the anvil and crush whatever was in between. For some time, British intelligence suspected that the “mainstream” Jewish Agency, the Haganah, the Palmach, and the terrorist underground were all working together in a two-faced, “good cop/bad cop” manner. Their suspicions would soon be verified.(14)
“BLACK SATURDAY”
Against this nine-month background of unrelenting Zionist terror operations and general criminality came the events of what was to be called “Black Saturday” by the Jewish Agency. In a surprise series of pre-dawn raids on June 29, 1946, British forces launched “Operation Agatha,” a Mandate-wide maneuver personally ordered by the British commander-in-chief of the Middle East. It resulted in the British confiscation of many highly sensitive, “For Jewish Eyes Only” documents from the offices of the Jewish Agency, and also resulted in the arrest of its leadership – Acting Chairman of the Jewish Agency, J.L. Fishman, Isaac Gruenbaum, and Moshe Shertok. David Ben Gurion, however, was unavailable for arrest and detention because he was in Paris at the time, along with several other members of the leadership. A curfew was placed over all Jewish areas of Palestine, and by the end of “Black Saturday,” the British forces had arrested over one thousand Jews. By July 1, nearly three thousand (2,718) arrests had been made.
Valuing the lives of his officers, High Commissioner Cunningham finally gave in to the terrorist kidnappers. On July 3, he commuted the sentences of the two Irgun men caught during the Sarafand arms-raid on March 7, and at 6:00 pm the following day, on the 4th of July, the Irgun, in their own special kind of way, released the three remaining British captains they were still holding hostage from the June 18 attack on the British officer’s club in Tel Aviv. On Rothschild Boulevard, in the center of this same city, before making its getaway, a lorry stopped, and perhaps hoping that someone would run into or over “the package,” dumped a large crate into the middle of the street. Inside this crate were the three kidnapped British officers.
The hammer of “Black Saturday” and its aftermath continued into July with more roadblocks and curfews. In Tel Aviv, the British executed a “penning” move where the streets around a particular area are blocked off to form the perimeter of a pen. Within this area they put several thousand men through a line-up process, each man being scanned by CID terrorist specialist, Sergeant T.G. Martin. It was because of Martin that one of LeHI’s three high commanders (Yitzhak Yzernitzky, Nathan Friedman-Yellin or Yellin-Mor], and Israel Eldad) received an all-expenses paid trip to a British prison in East Africa. When “Rabbi Shamir” stepped to the front of the line, Sergeant Martin took his time and then recognized the face of Yitzhak Yzernitzky behind the long black beard. The LeHI lost their leader to a prison in East Africa, and they lost one of their big weapons caches, discovered by British soldiers in the Great Synagogue in Tel Aviv, but their well-hidden armoury in a Jerusalem synagogue was left untouched. The underground soon got its revenge though on Sergeant T.G. Martin for capturing Shamir. On the 10th of August, two LeHI assassins gunned him down on a tennis court in Haifa.(15)
OPERATION “CHICK” AND OPERATION “YOUR-SLAVE-AND-REDEEMER”
On July 1, just two days after “Black Saturday,” on behalf of the Jewish Agency, Moshe Sneh, the Commander-in-Chief of the Haganah, urged the joint command of the Tenuat Hameri (“United Resistance Movement”) to respectively authorize IZL and LeHI to carry out Operation “Chick” and Operation “Your-slave-and-redeemer.” At this point, it was all about destroying the highly incriminating documents that the British had hauled off during “Black Saturday” to the King David Hotel, and possibly the David Brothers Building as well. These documents, when examined, would show clearly and conclusively the cooperative relationship between the Jewish Agency, the Haganah, the Palmach, and the organizations of the “terrorist underground” in their mutual operational arrangement known as the Tenuat Hameri (“The United Resistance Movement”). Future operations against the British would be severely and highly compromised by all the documented, detailed information on identities, connections, and methods now in the hands of “the enemy” inside the King David Hotel. David Ben-Gurion, and others in the leadership hiding out in Paris at the time, feared that these documents might irreparably damage the entire Zionist project of “Israel” altogether.(16)
According to Menachem Begin, the IZL’s plan to attack the government wing of the King David Hotel actually began in the Spring of 1946, three months before the events of “Black Saturday” ever happened, and that the plan was submitted for approval at that time to the Haganah representatives to the joint command of the United Resistance Movement. Begin informed Moshe Sneh and Israel Galili from the Haganah that the Irgun plan was to carry out a massive demolition operation against the government wing of the King David Hotel with a new type of timed, tamper-proof, high-intensity explosive device invented by their Operations Commander, Amichai Paglin, who was known as “Giddy,” a shortened nickname derived from his underground pseudonym of “Gideon.” This new device would have a timing mechanism attached to it with the ability to delay the explosion for up to an hour, and once set, any attempt to touch or dismantle these “mines” would immediately set them off. Begin noted that IZL’s intention was to set the timers for half an hour, place three telephone calls as warnings, and have the hotel evacuated—a sort of “compassionate terrorism,” whatever that might be.
The Haganah leadership rejected this plan at first, feeling that it was too ambitious and too soon. The Irgun, however, did not give up their planning. In his historical memoir “The Revolt,” Begin explains that the IZL’s code name for the large, six story King David Hotel was malonchick (“little hotel”). In Hebrew, malon means “hotel,” with the “chick” being the affectionate diminutive in Russian, Yiddish, and colloquial Hebrew. In order to camouflage the code name for their target even further, malonchick was shortened to just “chick,” and thus the IZL’s blowing up of the British government section of the King David Hotel came to be called “Operation Chick.”(17)
In the 1930s, the Haganah adopted the doctrine of havlagah (”defense and self-restraint”). In the 1940s, they came to adopt the “doctrine of reprisal,” where military or terror operations must always be “reprisals for initial attacks” (cf. Eliahu Golomb’s historico-philosophical justifications). On Saturday, June 29, 1946 General Barker and the British military confiscated the Haganah arms caches at Yagur and occupied the offices of the Jewish Agency, regarded as “Jewish Headquarters” in Jerusalem. Thus, in accordance with the Haganah’s own doctrine of “the scope of the reprisal is equal to the magnitude of the attack,” on July 1, 1946 the leadership of the Jewish Agency, through their Haganah representative, gave the Irgun and LeHI the “green light” to attack the Jerusalem “headquarters” of the British.(18) Aside from Haganah’s “doctrine of reprisal,” however, the more important reason for this “green-lighted” operation was the destruction of documents and incriminating evidence. As Menachem Begin explains:
“The Haganah, which had become accustomed to its convenient ‘semi-legal’ status in the eyes of the British authorities, had never taken efficient steps to observe the rules of caution. The Jewish Agency leaders apparently put their trust in their imagined ‘international status’ which they fondly believed gave them immunity from police action. Consequently there were many secret documents in the Jewish Agency building which a wisely run organisation in such circumstances would never have allowed to be there. The booty which the British forces carried away as a result of their searches in the Jewish Agency building was considerable. The irresponsibility that prevailed in the Jewish Agency reached such a pitch that, as Haganah leader, Israel] Galili told me, the British were able to take out of a typewriter part of the verbatim report of Mr. Moshe] Shertok’s speech at the Zionist General Council. Mr. Shertok had praised the blowing-up of the bridges, and explained the great political significance of the operation.
“The report of Shertok’s speech, which corroborated Jewish Agency responsibility for the Haganah’s sabotage operations, gave the lie to the emphatic disclaimers Mr. Ben Gurion had made before the Anglo-American Commission only a few months previously. It was not the only document of this kind which the British carried away to the King David Hotel.”(19)
Thus, on July 1, 1946, two days after “Black Saturday,” Menachem Begin and the Irgun Command received the following letter from the Haganah leadership:
“Shalom!
“(a) You are to carry out as soon as possible the Chick and the house of ‘Your-slave-and-redeemer.’ Inform us of the date. Preferably simultaneously. Do not publish the identity of the body carrying out the operation—neither directly nor by implication.
“(b) We are also preparing something—shall inform you of details in good time.
“(c) Tel Aviv and neighbourhood must be excluded from all operations. We are all interested in protecting Tel Aviv—as the center of Yishuv life and our own work. If Tel Aviv should be paralysed by curfew and arrests as the result of an operation, we and our plans will also be paralysed. Incidentally, the important nerves of the other sides are not concentrated here. So—Tel Aviv is ‘out of bounds’ to Jewish forces.”(20)
The Irgun planned to coordinate their bombing of the King David Hotel with LeHI’s simultaneous bombing of the David Brothers Building, an operation referred to by the Haganah Command as “Your-slave-and-redeemer.” Upon receipt of this letter, the Irgun and LeHI began reconnaissance operations and the solidifying of operational details. Sarah Agassi, a twenty year old at the time of Operation “Chick,” was, along with several others, involved in the casing part of the operation. On the scope and magnitude of the event, Begin writes:
“We were well aware that this was the largest of our operations to date and that it might turn out to be unique in the history of partisan wars of liberation. It is no simple matter to penetrate the very heart of the military government, to deliver a blow within the fortified headquarters of a heavily armed regime. I doubt if this operation had any precedent in history....We always planned every undertaking with infinite care. But to none of our many operations—except, perhaps, the later attack on Acre Fortress—did we devote so much preliminary preparation as we did to ‘Operation Chick’.”(21)
TARGET AND OPERATIONAL DETAILS
The British Administration in Palestine, under Sir John Shaw and High Commissioner Cunningham, was run out of the southwest section of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, headquarters to the British Secretariat, the civil government, the military command, and the Criminal Investigation Division, or CID. An adjacent building also housed British military police and the Special Investigations Bureau (SIB). Between these two buildings, a military unit was placed, and the entire area was strategically secured by barbed-wire barricades and machine gun nests. Elaborate netting was also set up to prevent “terrorists” from the “Hebrew underground” tossing grenades onto the property. The hotel even had its own “terrorist siren” which would summon to the area, police and military units from all nearby sectors of Jerusalem. Located on the north side of the King David was the French embassy. Despite this martial, counter-terrorism atmosphere though, the King David Hotel, like Shepheard’s Hotel in Cairo, or the Raffles Hotel in Singapore (now gone), was a renowned establishment in the ‘Outer Empire’, and certainly the hub of social life in British Mandate Palestine, with its glamourous lobby, busy cocktail lounge, and a fine restaurant with Swiss cooks and distinctively dressed Sudanese waiters. (That should have been on the KDH marketing brochure, but wasn’t, and appears here for the first time.) Also, exactly under the government section of the King David, not far from the basement area, there was the Regence Café, a very popular lunch spot with the government bureaucrats, military, and civilian workers in the area. Sarah Agassi, and other Irgun operatives casing the hotel at the time, reported back to Amichai Paglin that regular deliveries were made to the kitchen of the Regence Café by Arab vendors, delivering such things as meats, produce, and milk.(22)
Menachem Begin credits Amichai “Giddy” Paglin as the strategic mastermind behind this whole operation, for it is he, who not only invented the explosive device to be used, but devised the idea of Arabs (or those dressed like Arabs) delivering his custom explosive devices in seven innocent milk-cans to the basement area down the hall from the Regence Café, just below the offices of the British Secretariat. All seven milk-can bombs were collectively controlled by only two devices – a timer and a device which detonated the whole lot if any of the milk-cans were touched, as in an attempt to dismantle or move them. In the planning stages of early July, when Giddy Paglin told Yitzhak Sadeh, the Haganah’s Operation Officer, that he planned to set the timer for 45 minutes, Sadeh strongly advised him to set the timer for 15 minutes so that the British would only have time to evacuate the building, but not have time to think about preserving any of the Jewish Agency’s documents. To prevent an even larger massacre than that which occured, however, they compromised – the explosives’ timer would be set for 30 minutes.(23)
It has often been reported (on the internets) that—as in a “false flag” attack—the Irgun men dressed as Arabs during this operation in order to give the impression to the British that the blame for the King David Hotel bombing should be placed upon the Arab community in Palestine, but this is completely incorrect. Just as the Irgun or LeHI men would dress up in British officer’s uniforms to gain entry into military bases for their arms-raids operations, similarly, for Operation “Chick,” the Irgun merely dressed in the garb of Arabs and Sudanese waiters because neither the kitchen staff of the Regence Café, nor anyone outside the hotel, would be initially surprised if Arabs came by the kitchen door of the café delivering sizeable quantities of milk in large cans. Aside from this, in the wake of the attack, there was never any doubt in the mind of the British as to the parties behind such an operation. (See above: Prelude to “Black Saturday” and Operation “Chick”) In the context of 1930s-1940s Palestine, it must be remembered that when the British (and the British press) referred to “terrorists,” they were referring to Jewish militants, not Arabs.
On July 22, 1946, three weeks after the Jewish Agency, through Haganah, had given the “green light,” Operation “Chick” was launched. At the last minute, however, the LeHI operatives were not able to properly launch their operation on the David Brothers Building, and had to pull out, leaving the King David Hotel operation as the main terrorist headline grabber of that day in July of ’46. Operation “Your-slave-and-redeemer,” the bombing of the Solomon Brothers, I mean, the David Brothers Building, would have to be postponed for another time.
The general plan was for the Irgun “Assault Unit”—all “dressed in the flowing robes of hotel workers,” and under the leadership of 20 year old Yisrael “Gideon” Levi—
to deliver the milk-can bombs, in the guise of Arab deliverymen, into the southwest basement of the King David, accessed through the Regence Café, an hour before the lunch crowd arrived. This 11:00 am hour would also coincide with the time the LeHI had chosen for their own attack on the David Brothers Building. After 12, the Regence Café filled up on weekdays with men and women civilians and army officers who worked in the building. Due to these last minute changes concerning the LeHI part of the joint operation, Operation “Chick” was unforeseeably delayed for an hour, and would not begin until noon. Luckily, the only people in the café at the noon hour on this day were the Arab cooks and waiters.(24)
When the commercial lorry carrying the 14-man Irgun “Assault Unit” reached the hotel’s basement and café kitchen entrance, it divided into two groups of seven—the “break-through” group (or café bomb team) and the protective “cover” group—Seven to carry the bulky milk-can bombs with their TNT-gelignite mixtures, one to hold the kitchen staff at gunpoint, and six guards on the perimeter. There was also a woman involved in the operation who acted as the “telephonist” to make three warning calls after the detonation timer was set for 30 minutes.
While Yisrael Levi and the “break-through” group were moving the milk-cans down a hall outside the café, which led toward the basement area directly under the British Secretariat, a hotel staff member, Johannides Constantine, approached to find out why the café staff was standing so quietly in front of a strange and unfamiliar Sudanese waiter. He approached and found out that this “Sudanese waiter” was holding a submachine gun on the staff. A hotel porter named Ahmad Abu Soleb noticed that two of the “Arabs” delivering milk were carrying submachine guns, and he noticed that these “Arabs” were not speaking in any of the languages he was familiar with (Arabic, Hebrew, English, German, or Italian). As many Irgun members came out of Vladimir “Ze’ev” Jabotinky’s Betar youth movement in Poland, they were most likely speaking Polish. Abu Soleb then informed the British policeman at the nearest guard post of this. A British officer then came by to assess the situation, began to speak to the “Sudanese waiter,” and then found himself wrestling with this man and his automatic weapon. At this point, one of the Irgun men from the six-man perimeter “cover group” came in and fired at the officer, felling him, but not fatally.
While this was all going on, the “break-through” group had quickly and carefully placed the seven deadly milk-cans around the central core pillars in the basement under the hotel’s southwest section. The detonator timer and non-tampering device were set at 12:07 pm for 30 minutes by the group leader Yisrael Levi, and the warning signs were then placed next to the milk-cans saying, “Mines. Do not Touch!” The café bomb squad then started running down the hall and into the café toward the kitchen exit and their lorry. On the way out, the café workers were freed and told to run for their lives.(25)
At 12:10, after the Assault Unit had gotten away from the hotel’s basement, Levi made it to the spot where the “telephonist” was stationed and waiting to call in the three warnings. One call was made to the management of the King David Hotel, one to the Palestine Post, and one to the French Consulate-General to tell them to open wide all their windows so that the glass would not be blown in by the blast.
To keep passers-by away from the building, noisy, but harmless fire cracker-M80 type bombs were set off near the southern and northern parts of the hotel. In the chaos and smoke of the “cracker-bombs” going off, and all the gunfire, the streets around the hotel emptied out, and the Irgun operatives made their escape out of Jerusalem and on to Tel Aviv as the King David Hotel’s “terrorist siren” blew.(26)
Aside from Paglin, Levi, and Agassi, some of the other participants in the bombing of the King David Hotel were Shraga Allis, Yitzhak Avinoam, Yehoshua “Gal” Goldschmid (one of the lead planners for the April 9, 1948 massacre at Deir Yassin), Yosef Avni (another Deir Yassin participant), Bezalel “Simon” Amitzur (later founder of Maman Aerospace), Nathan Friedman-Yellin (or Yellin-Mor), Meir Nakar, and Chaim “Avraham” Landau. Everyone in this underground, much like the modern world of global “dissident” blogging, took an underground pseudonym, or two, as protective cloaks. The last time I counted, in the Irgun alone, there were four members known as “Shimshon,” two guys known as “Giora,” and two Gideons (Amichai Paglin and Israel Levi), along with your usual distributions of multiple Avrahams and Moshes.
At 12:31, twenty-four minutes after Paglin had set the timer for 30 minutes, Inspector J.C. Taylor called off the general alert. Civilian employees again began preparing for lunch, some officers were already at the bar, and just at 12:37 pm, the No. 4 bus with the usual hotel lunch crowd had pulled up out in front. This was exactly at the moment of detonation, when the terrorists’ seven milk-cans exploded, rocking the hotel and the nearby area. A safe was blown skyward out of the hotel and landed on a pedestrian walking on nearby Julian’s Way. Then the entire southwest section of the hotel, housing the British Secretariat, began to crumble in a quick and progressive, six-story pancake collapse, and the blue sky, sunny day in Jerusalem turned dark from the thick cloud of debris caused by the massive explosions, which had created a 300-foot pillar of smoke above the King David Hotel. Covered in white dust and blood, some survivors were able to make it out of the rubble. Much to the disappointment of the Zionist underground, however, Sir John Shaw’s office was located just a short ways down the corridor from the corner of the building sheared off in the blast. He was untouched.
By 12:52, the Argyll and Sutherland troops arrived with equipment for the dig-and-rescue. They were assisted by a first-responder crew of two hundred and sixty Arab postal workers. Searchlights were brought in, and the dig-and-rescue, which had turned into a dig-and-recover operation by the time it had ended on August 4, went on all that night. In the YMCA across the street, Lady Shaw had set up a missing persons office. On August 4, the final toll from the Irgun’s Operation “Chick” was 91 dead and 45 injured, many of the injured were on that No. 4 bus.(27)
In the July 24 edition of the Palestine Post, British prime minister Clement Attlee warned the terrorists that, “The British Government have stated and stated again they will not be diverted by acts of violence in the search for a just and final solution to the Palestine problem.”
Although Ben-Gurion was well aware of the operation, he nonetheless told France Soir: “The Irgun is the enemy of the Jewish people.” The British did not buy it though and on the 24th of July a white paper was published laying out the entire program and network of relationships within the United Resistance Movement or Tenuat Hameri. The Commander-in-Chief of the Haganah, Israel Galili, immediately telephoned Menachem Begin and begged him to have the Irgun take full responsibility for the whole operation so as to provide cover for the Haganah and the Jewish Agency.(28)
The issue of whether the Irgun did in fact send three telephone warnings, or whether the British received them and ignored them, is still a “live” issue. Did the Irgun make only one actual call to the King David Hotel switchboard, and then considered that sufficient warning, as some have suggested? Although the Irgun did have a general policy of warning their demolition targets, they also often called in false bomb threats, which might have contributed to the British—if they did in fact receive any notice—just ignoring the “telephonist’s” warning and not calling for an evacuation of the King David Hotel, thinking that it was just the boy crying wolf again. The Haganah’s intelligence operatives claimed that one British official in the hotel, when hearing of the warning, replied that, “We are not here to take orders from the Jews.”(29)
OPERATION MALONCHICK’S AFTERMATH
After the bombing of the King David Hotel, the British army entered Tel Aviv “to track down the terrorists and to destroy them root and branch.” Tel Aviv went under complete martial law with 24-hour curfews. The British forces under General Cassells and Barker searched house to house for the Irgun leaders, especially Menachem Begin, but they were not to be found, even though they were all in the Tel Aviv area when martial law was declared. Begin had to hide inside a very small, nearly airless crawlspace in his house in the middle of a Tel Aviv summer with no food or water while a British patrol camped out in his house and garden for nearly four days, waiting for him to show up from Jerusalem, where his wife had told them he had gone. They finally left, Begin emerged from his hiding spot, and stuck his head in a large bowl of cool water.(30)
“Black Saturday” and its explosive aftermath ultimately resulted in the Haganah agreeing to a (fingers-crossed) cease-fire deal in which they agreed to halt their terrorist activities against the British, in return for which, the leaders of the Jewish Agency and those of the Yishuv would be released from Tegart Fort, the British prison where they were incarcerated.
After “the King David Hotel outrage,” as the press called it, Begin points out that, although this press put forward the big story that the Haganah had severed their ties to the Irgun, these two armed groups, in fact, became even closer than before. In August they went right back to planning more coordinated terror operations. They began devising a plan called Operation “Launch,” sometimes called “Mr. Launch,” where they would blow up one of the British “deportation ships” moored in Haifa harbour(31), only this time, they would not murder-with-intent 252 newly arrived Jewish immigrants as a symbolic “sacrifice” and moral bargaining chip of guilt to force the issue of “unlimited Jewish immigration,” as when they blew up the S.S. Patria in Haifa’s harbour on November 25, 1940. Although Operation “Chick” was certainly not a false flag op, the blowing up of the S.S. Patria was. The operation was designed to place the blame for the murderous event upon the British in order to shame them before the “civilized” world community, but as Israeli prime minister Moshe Sharett remarked during a memorial ceremony for the “victims” of the Haganah’s S.S. Patria operation, “It is sometimes necessary to sacrifice a few to save the many.”(32) The secret, of course, is to not let those “few” know that you are about to sacrifice them for the goals of “the many,” i.e. “the elite minority.”
Don’t be a chump. Jewish folks out there who are not a part of “the Big Club” should take note that the Zionist powers-that-be will “sacrifice a few” Jews, if necessary, to help “the cause,” cf. the S.S. Patria, Achille Lauro, and the Geneva-based Zionist-German Reich cooperation (“the Pact”) during WWII.
MODUS OPERANDI AND MOTIVE PARALLELS BETWEEN OPERATION “CHICK” AND THE WTC DEMOLITIONS ON SEPTEMBER 11, 2001
As the above history, which covers only a nine month period of Zionist terror, I mean “freedom fighting” in Palestine, illustrates, the “Hebrew underground” had a definite penchant for planning and launching large, simultaneous demolition and bombing operations on large buildings, houses, railroads, bridges, and ships. As you will remember, until the LeHI operationally pulled out, Operation “Chick” was supposed to coincide with the LeHI’s bombing of the David Brothers building, an operation known as “Your-slave-and-redeemer.” In light of all this, it should be noted that one detail about “al-Qaeda” that we were constantly told from all corners of the media on and after 9/11 was that “al-Qaeda” had a penchant for, and expertise in, planning and launching large, simultaneous demolition and bombing operations, such as Mossad’s, er, I mean, al-Qaeda’s August 1999 near simultaneous bombings of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania.
The professional saboteur expertise and experience of the Irgun, and specifically Amichai Paglin, was shown in the planning of Operation “Chick.” This was demonstrated by the specific placement of explosive devices around the central columns in the basement supporting the southwest section of the King David Hotel, similar to the explosives’ placements in the “al-Qaeda” February 1993 WTC bombing and the 2001 WTC1, WTC2, and WTC7 demolitions. From 1940s Palestine onward, the various Zionist terror groups have been practicing classic, bottom up controlled demolition all along.
From Operation “Chick,” with its famous, and still debated, “three warnings,” and many other Zionist operations in Palestine, we are informed of an underground policy of issuing guilt-assuaging warnings (both real and fake) to the target. This policy seems to have also been in play during the demolition events of 9/11 in New York City, and indeed for the entire operation, even months ahead of time. Mossad gave its usual useless and inaccurate warnings (watch out for these 19 Ayraabz, and never mind our Shin Bet ICTS guys wiring up planes out at Logan and Newark); the Joint-Chiefs-of Staff were warned the day before; SF mayor Willie Brown was warned in the middle of the night by someone whose name rhymes with Condi; AG John Ashcroft was warned in June of 2001; Giuliani and crew were warned on the day of “by some engineer type person” that “the building's stability was compromised and they felt that the north tower was in danger of a near imminent collapse...,” and the folks standing near WTC7, as bombs were going off in the background, were warned to move away from the building because it was also going to be coming down (blamed later on an Adobe Photoshop ‘cloning tool’ having eaten away at a large pixelated section of the building’s digital structure), or in the words of “Lucky Larry,” it was being “pulled.” When the nice man with the microphone starts counting down from the number ten, just start running like fucking hell. My guess at the time was that this was like a “real-world” trial run for a new “running with the bulls kind of thing” for the modern demolition industry. Those people in “marketing,” they’re absolutely crazed, I tell ya.
One thing though that the history of the demolition of the government section of the King David Hotel has shown us is that the ideologues of militant Zionism will blow up entire buildings, if necessary, in order to destroy any highly incriminating documents and/or operations-related technology which would empirically reveal an actual Zionist terror conspiracy in a particular event, or series of events. With a building like Larry Silverstein’s Solomon Brothers Building (World Trade Center 7) and the types of clients housed in that building, such as the Securities & Exchange Commission and Rudy Giuliani’s NYC Office of Emergency Management, contextually, we can only make educated guesses about what kinds of highly incriminating Enron-or-whoever-related financial documents or hardware/software consoles of wireless demolition and remote avionics technology might have been in that building on the afternoon of September 11, 2001, when, as predicted by the BBC twenty minutes prior to countdown, “the Solomon Brothers Building has already collapsed from intense fire damage.” One thing is for certain though, wherever a controlled demolition operation is taking place, there is always a central nerve center, or in the case of 9/11, perhaps two such local nerve centers, where the whole thing is controlled and monitored from, where someone in that control center is pushing a “Go,” “Yes,” “Enter,” or “Submit” button to initiate all the pre-programmed sequences. Let’s just say that if the David Brothers, I’m sorry, the Solomon Brothers Building had not miraculously been brought down by the intense heat of carpet fires and burning porno mags stashed away in various people’s private offices, and that later someone, just after 9/11, discovered a demolition software program in some folder on Rudy’s OEM network servers, as a lawyer or PR firm, I would definitely not want to take on this client’s job assignment to “make this all go away.”
In the Jewish Agency’s bombing of the King David Hotel—launched to destroy incriminating evidence of their complicity in terror operations and their using the underground as an operational proxy—and from other such operations, we can see the regular employment of disguises, costumes, and linguistic accents (Arabic, Scottish, or British), as well as the usage of fake or stolen military uniforms and fake IDs. This brings us to the crucial element of “inside help,” always welcomed in any military/intelligence operation. We have just seen from a sampling of only nine months worth of operations run by the Haganah and the militias of the “Hebrew underground,” that they would often rely on “inside help,” such as Jewish constables working for British police, or Jewish workers on RAF airbases or inside British refineries. This same type of “inside” helper system developed back then has been put to full operative use now for decades within the modern Mossad sayanim system, which allows Mossad to run a dedicated, international intelligence agency ‘on-the-cheap’. Of course, not all “helpers” work for free. For example, in the case of the New York demolition work witnessed on 9/11, someone like WTC lease-owner Larry Silverstein would, in this case, be performing as a primary “helper” or major sayan for the Israeli-run part of this operation. All Larry basically had to do was to give the green light for his buildings to cooperate with the ongoing work of the ‘demo squads’ from Urban Moving Systems—all most likely wearing Port Authority uniforms and in possession of fake Port Authority IDs—and in the end, this highly placed, highly paid, and valued sayan reaps many truckloads of insurance-fraud money, gets to play the poor, “why do all the Arabs hate my buildings so much” victim role, gets rid of those liability-laden, asbestos-filled buildings, and gets to help his country (Israel) all at the same time, just by making America think that it was attacked by Arabs so that it would then gladly pay and die for Israel’s long dreamed of “Final Solution to the Arab (and Persian) Problem.” To paraphrase the now famous 9/12/01 remarks of the soon-to-be-again Israeli prime minister, Bibi Nut’n’yahoo: For Israel (and Silverstein/Westfield Properties), 9/11 was, how do the yuppies always put it, a “win-win” situation.
Well, see ya next time for more tales of Zionist terror in Palestine and around the world. Until then, Shalom, Salaam, Shanti, Om Tat Sat, and thanks a lot. And always beware of men of “Middle Eastern appearance” (wink wink, nudge nudge) driving around in green lorries, dressed as Arabs, speaking in Polish or Hebrew, and carrying big milk cans with little clocks attached.
REFERENCES
(1) Joseph Heller, The Stern Gang: Ideology, Politics and Terror 1940 – 1949, London: 1995, p. 23.
(2) For a blow-by-blow description of the capture and CID assassination of LeHI founder Avraham Stern, see: J. Bowyer Bell, Terror Out of Zion: Irgun Zvai Leumi, LEHI, and the Palestine Underground, 1929-1949, New York: 1977, pp. 71-73.
(3) The Oxford World Encyclopedia, New York: 2001, p. 607.
(4) Menachem Begin, The Revolt, New York: 1977, p. 227.
(5) J. Bowyer Bell, Terror Out of Zion: Irgun Zvai Leumi, LEHI, and the Palestine Underground, 1929-1949, New York: 1977, pp. 142-45.
(6) Great Britain, Parliamentary Papers, Cmd. 6873, “Palestine Statement of Information Relating to Acts of Violence,” p. 4: Cited Ibid. p. 143.
(7) J. Bowyer Bell, Terror Out of Zion: Irgun Zvai Leumi, LEHI, and the Palestine Underground, 1929-1949, New York: 1977, p. 142.
(8) Ibid. pp. 145-46.
(9) Ibid. pp. 149-50.
(10) Menachem Begin, The Revolt, New York: 1977, pp. 68-9.
(11) Major R.D. Wilson, Cordon and Search: With the Sixth Airborne in Palestine, Aldershot: 1949, p. 47.
(12) Jan Gitlin, The Conquest of Acre Fortress, Tel Aviv: 1962, p. 21.
(13) Ibid. p. 21.
(14) J. Bowyer Bell, Terror Out of Zion: Irgun Zvai Leumi, LEHI, and the Palestine Underground, 1929-1949, New York: 1977, p. 153-66.
(15) Ibid. pp. 167-68.
(16) Ibid. pp. 168-69.
(17) Menachem Begin, The Revolt, New York: 1977, pp. 212-13.
(18) Ibid. p. 214.
(19) Ibid. p. 215.
(20) Ibid. p. 216.
(21) Ibid. p. 216.
(22) J. Bowyer Bell, Terror Out of Zion: Irgun Zvai Leumi, LEHI, and the Palestine Underground, 1929-1949, New York: 1977, p. 169.
(23) Menachem Begin, The Revolt, New York: 1977, pp. 215-16.
(24) Ibid. p. 218.
(25) J. Bowyer Bell, Terror Out of Zion: Irgun Zvai Leumi, LEHI, and the Palestine Underground, 1929-1949, New York: 1977, p. 170.
(26) Menachem Begin, The Revolt, New York: 1977, p. 217-18.
(27) J. Bowyer Bell, Terror Out of Zion: Irgun Zvai Leumi, LEHI, and the Palestine Underground, 1929-1949, New York: 1977, p. 171-72.
(28) Ibid. p. 173.
(29) Ibid. p. 175.
(30) Menachem Begin, The Revolt, New York: 1977, pp. 227-29.
(31) Ibid. p. 226.
(32) Sami Hadawi, Bitter Harvest: A Modern History of Palestine, New York: 1991, p. 55.
