FDR died in April 1945. His successor, Harry S. Truman, wanted to settle Holocaust survivors in Palestine and asked the British to let them in. Truman, raised as a Baptist, a former farmer, bank-clerk, Kansas City haberdasher, was a mediocre Missouri senator with a sympathy for the Jews and a sense of history. When the new president toured the dynamited moonscape of Berlin in 1945, he ‘thought of Carthage, Baalbek, Jerusalem, Rome, Atlantis’. Now his longstanding friendship with his Jewish ex-haberdashery partner, Eddie Jacobson, and the influence of pro-Zionist aides, along with ‘his own reading of ancient history and the Bible, made him a supporter of a Jewish homeland’, recalled his adviser Clark Clifford. Yet Truman, facing the resistance of his own State Department, was frequently irritated by Zionist lobbying and was wary of any sign of the Jewish underdogs becoming the bullying overdogs: ‘Jesus Christ couldn’t please them when he was on earth,’ he snapped, ‘so how on earth could anyone expect that I would have any luck?’ But he agreed to create an Anglo-American commission of inquiry.
The commissioners stayed in the King David Hotel where one of them, Richard Crossman, a Labour MP, found ‘the atmosphere terrific, with private detectives, Zionist agents, Arab sheikhs, special correspondents, all sitting about discreetly overhearing each other’. At night, Arab grandees and British generals gathered at Katy Antonius’ villa. She was now alone. The Antoniuses’ decadent marriage had started to collapse at the same time as the Arab Revolt. During the war, Katy had divorced her ailing husband – who died unexpectedly just two weeks later. He was buried on Mount Zion: ‘Arise ye Arabs and awake’ was written on his headstone. But Katy’s soirées were still legendary. Cross-man, enjoying ‘the evening dress, Syrian food and drink, and dancing on the marble floor’, reported that the Arabs gave the best parties: ‘It’s easy to see why the British prefer the Arab upper class to the Jews. This Arab intelligentsia has a French culture, amusing, civilized, tragic and gay. Compared with them, the Jews seem tense, bourgeois, central European.’
Attlee had hoped that Truman would support his policies against Jewish immigration, but the Anglo-American Commission unhelpfully recommended that the British admit 100,000 refugees immediately: Truman publicly backed their recommendations. Attlee furiously rejected American interference. The Jewish Agency stepped up the secret immigration of refugees from the Holocaust, bringing in 70,000 in three years while its Palmach harassed the British, culminating in an explosive spectacular – the Night of the Bridges.
The British had crushed the Arabs; now they would crush the Jews. In June 1946, Viscount Montgomery of Alamein, now field marshal and Chief of the Imperial General Staff, returned to Jerusalem, complaining that ‘British rule existed only in name; the true rulers seemed to me to be the Jews, whose unspoken slogan was –“You dare not touch us”.’ But Montgomery dared, sending in reinforcements.
On Saturday 29 June, his commander, General Evelyn ‘Bubbles’ Barker, launched Operation Agatha, an attack on the Zionist organizations. He arrested 3,000 Jews – though failed to pick up Ben-Gurion who happened to be in Paris. Barker fortified three ‘security zones’ in Jerusalem, turning the Russian Compound into a fortress that the Jews nicknamed Bevingrad, after the British foreign secretary Ernest Bevin. To the Jews the operation came to be known as Black Sabbath, and Barker was at once the hated symbol of British oppression. The general was a regular at Katy Antonius’ parties. Now the hostess became his mistress: his love letters were passionate, indiscreet and hate-filled, featuring British military secrets and foam-flecked rants against Jews: ‘Why should we be afraid of saying we hate them?’ Lehi attempted to assassinate Barker, using a bomb disguised as a baby in a pram. Menachem Begin of the Irgun, assisted by the Lehi, planned a response to Barker’s Black Sabbath to resound across the world. The Haganah, though not Ben-Gurion and the Jewish Agency, approved.
The King David Hotel was the secular temple of Mandate Jerusalem, and one wing had been requisitioned by the British administration and intelligence agencies. On 22 July 1946, the Irgun, disguised as Arabs and hotel staff in Nubian costumes, stowed milkchurns filled with 500 pounds of explosives in the basement.23
MONTGOMERY’S CRACKDOWN: THE CASE OF MAJOR FARRAN
The Irgun made anonymous calls to the hotel, to the Palestine Post and to the French Consulate, to warn of the imminent attack so that the King David could be evacuated. But the calls were ignored – and they were too late. It is unclear if the mishandling of these warnings was by accident or design. Begin waited nearby: ‘each minute seemed like a day. Twelve-thirty-one, thirty-two. Zero hour drew near. The half-hour was almost up. Twelve-thirty-seven. Suddenly the whole town seemed to shudder!’ The bombs shattered an entire wing of the King David, killing ninety-one, including Britons, Jews and Arabs.* Five MI5 operatives were among the dead, but the Secret Service ‘London Ladies’ survived, staggering from the wreckage, their hair white with plaster dust, ‘looking like the wrath of God’. Ben-Gurion denounced the bombing; he regarded Begin as a threat to the Jewish community, and the Jewish Agency quit the United Resistance Command.
The King David bombing intensified the severity of the British counter-attack – but it succeeded in accelerating London’s retreat from the Mandate. In Jerusalem, the mixing of Jews and Arabs ceased. ‘It felt’, sensed Amos Oz, ‘as though an invisible muscle was suddenly flexed. Everyone prophesied war. A curtain had begun to divide Jerusalem.’ The Jews were terrified by rumours of imminent massacre. British civilians were evacuated from Jerusalem.
In October, the Irgun blew up the British Embassy in Rome. In November, Montgomery flew back into Jerusalem. ‘I saw Monty at one of Katy Antonius’ parties,’ remembers Nassereddin Nashashibi. The field marshal planned a harsh response to the Irgun’s outrage. A new police chief, Colonel Nicol Gray, recruited hard men, ex-policemen and former members of the special forces, to join new counter-insurgency Special Squads. Major Roy Farran DSO, MC was a typical recruit, an Irish SAS commando whose record revealed a history of trigger-happy exploits.
On arrival in Jerusalem, Farran was driven to the Russian Compound for briefing followed by dinner at the King David Hotel. Farran and the Special Squads started to drive around Jerusalem, looking for suspects to interrogate, if not shoot on sight. These Special Squads had no experience in covert operations, no local languages or knowledge, so, unsurprisingly, Farran had been almost comically unsuccessful until, driving through Rehavia on the 6 May 1947, his team spotted an unarmed schoolboy, Alexander Rubowitz, pasting up Lehi posters. Farran kidnapped the boy but, in the scuffle, dropped his trilby, marked with his ill-spelt name ‘FARAN’. He hoped that the scared teenager would betray bigger Lehi fish. He drove Rubowitz out of Jerusalem, down the Jericho Road into the hills, tied him to a tree, roughed him up for an hour, then he went too far and smashed his skull with a rock. The body was stabbed and stripped and probably eaten by jackals.
While Jewish Jerusalem frantically searched for the missing boy, Major Farran confessed to his superior officer at the police mess in Katamon, then suddenly disappeared, fleeing Jerusalem. There was first a cover-up, then an outcry across the world. The Lehi started to kill random British soldiers, until Farran returned to Jerusalem and gave himself up at the Allenby Barracks. On 1 October, 1947, he was courtmartialled in a fortified court in Talbieh, but was acquitted for lack of admissible evidence. Rubowitz’s body was never found. Farran was bundled away by two officers in an armoured car and driven into the night towards Gaza. The Lehi was determined to kill him. In 1948, a parcel, addressed to ‘R. FARRAN’ but opened by his brother, who shared the same initial, exploded: the brother was killed.*