The fire that wouldn't stop burning

Friday morning, July 19, 1946, three men stood and talked in a building in Jerusalem’s Bukharian quarter. These four were briefed first because their plan for a terrorist attack on the hotel required them to arrive first. The other members who were to take part in the attack, the exact number of which is unknown, would gather later.
One of them jumped into a pair of baggy white trousers, wrapped a red scarf around his waist, put on a short red jacket and vest and placed a fez, a traditional Muslim head covering, on his head. Another of those present, a large teenage boy, donned the blue overalls worn by most truck drivers and messengers in Jerusalem at the time. The last men present wore long Arabic blue cloaks and white and red checkered headdresses. They pointed at each other, laughed at the clothes, joked in Arabic and did pirouettes.
At 12:37 on the same day, a bomb that this group of men had placed at the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, located in the Mandated Area of ​​Palestine, went off, killing 91 people. Much of the hotel’s south wing, which housed the British Secretariat, which at the time controlled the area, collapsed, and it took rescuers 2,000 truckloads of rubble over three days to find the dead and survivors. But nothing in this attack was as it seemed. Like everything else in this conflict, making head and tail of the stories and conflicts was and is still challenging.

Sources:
By blood and fire by Thurston Clarke
Bethell, Nicholas (1979). The Palestine Triangle. Andre Deutsch.
Jerusalem – British Beneath the surface Archived April 24, 2009, at the Wayback Machine. The Jerusalem Post. Retrieved September 9, 2023.
Jerusalem – British Beneath the surface Archived April 24, 2009, at the Wayback Machine. The Jerusalem Post. Retrieved April 26, 2009.
Jerusalem – British Beneath the surface Archived April 24, 2009, at the Wayback Machine. The Jerusalem Post. Retrieved April 26, 2009.

Music used in this episode:
Dramatic Suspense: https://pixabay.com/music/suspense-dramatic-suspense-116798/ by https://pixabay.com/users/ashot-danielyan-composer-27049680/
Anuch – Our champion - Music from #Uppbeat: https://uppbeat.io/t/anuch/our-champion
Arabic Dance by Giulio Fazio: https://uppbeat.io/track/giulio-fazio/arabic-dance
Hava Nagila by Music_for-Videos: https://pixabay.com/music/folk-hava-nagila-violin-128866/
Pour Oil - Hanukkah Band (Simu Shemen) - P5 by Soundphenomenon https://www.pond5.com/royalty-free-music/item/143109141-pour-oil-hanukkah-band-simu-shemen
Crying Violin 30 Second Edit by Soundphenomenon: https://www.pond5.com/royalty-free-music/item/108114928-crying-violin-30-second-edit
Traditional Jewish Music: Shalom Aleichem Clarinet Trio by mbanksbenson: https://www.pond5.com/royalty-free-music/item/107349401-traditional-jewish-music-shalom-aleichem-clarinet-trio
Jewish Folk - Oseh Shalom Bimromav -Slow And Dramedy (Violin And Accordion) - P5 by eyeformusic: https://www.pond5.com/royalty-free-music/item/105999167-jewish-folk-oseh-shalom-bimromav-slow-and-dramedy-violin-and

See pictures from today's story and follow me on: TerrorTalks on Facebook and TerrorTalks on Instagram

Transcript

“In a couple of hours we will attack the King David Hotel.”
Friday morning, July 19, 1946, three men stood and talked in a building in Jerusalem’s Bukharian quarter. These four were briefed first because their plan for a terrorist attack on the hotel required them to arrive first. The other members who were to take part in the attack, the exact number of which is unknown, would gather later.
One of them jumped into a pair of baggy white trousers, wrapped a red scarf around his waist, put on a short red jacket and vest and placed a fez, a traditional Muslim head covering, on his head. Another of those present, a large teenage boy, donned the blue overalls worn by most truck drivers and messengers in Jerusalem at the time. The last men present wore long Arabic blue cloaks and white and red checkered headdresses. They pointed at each other, laughed at the clothes, joked in Arabic and did pirouettes.
At 12:37 on the same day, a bomb that this group of men had placed at the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, located in the Mandated Area of Palestine, went off, killing 91 people. Much of the hotel’s south wing, which housed the British Secretariat, which at the time controlled the area, collapsed, and it took rescuers 2,000 truckloads of rubble over three days to find the dead and survivors. But nothing in this attack was as it seemed. Like everything else in this conflict, making head and tail of the stories and conflicts was and is still challenging.

You are listening to TerrorTalks - a podcast about some of the most spectacular terrorist attacks in history. In this podcast, I tell the stories of the terrorists, their victims and the consequences for the survivors and society. About people who will sacrifice their own lives or the lives of others for a political, economic, religious or social goal. Who was behind it, who they wanted to hit, and why.
My name is Natasja Engholm, and I am a Danish journalist with a Master’s in Middle Eastern Studies based in Copenhagen, Denmark. Unfortunately, terror has come close to home a few times in my life. The massacre of 69 people on the small island Utøya in Norway happened half an hour’s drive from where some of my close family lives. 
A good friend was only a meter away from one of the suicide bombers on the London Underground in 2005. He miraculously escaped with two burst eardrums. And finally, I worked in Afghanistan some time ago, where a major terrorist attack on a local cafe claimed the lives of 21 people. Among them was the owner, who had served me cake on my birthday the year before. 
Fortunately, I have never been in the middle of a terrorist attack myself. However, these experiences have awakened my curiosity, fascination and, not least, a fear that most people probably know about: that it will happen to me someday. That it comes close.
Before you start listening, I must warn you that the podcast contains descriptions and details that can be violent and unsuitable for especially small children and people affected by hearing about murder and violence. This episode includes particularly detailed descriptions of the injuries the victims sustained during the attack. I warn before this, so you have a chance to skip it.

The story I want to tell today is, in every way, one that you have to tread carefully to understand and try to portray objectively. There are so many concepts, stakeholders and actors, and emotional opinions about what is truth, and still, it traces a long history of bloody trails that to this day cost innocent victims’ lives, limb and their homes. I will tell you the story as I have researched it based on unbiased sources. I will try to stick to the facts, refrain from taking sides, and use the officially recognized concepts and designations the world community has generally approved. From the beginning, I would also like to emphasize that my desire and purpose are to portray the events and the innocent victims and not to add fuel to the fire that should have been extinguished long ago. I apologize for the slightly longer historical walk-through and depiction of the parties in the story. Still, even to this day, there are so many prejudices and misunderstandings that it is vital to describe them in detail to not lose track of things.
But let’s get started with today’s story.
We are in the year 1946 in Mandatory Palestine, which today roughly corresponds to the state of Israel and the Palestinian self-governing areas. The geographical location has a long history, which I will not explore in this episode. Still, from 1516 until the First World War in 1914, it was under the control of the Ottoman Empire, which for many centuries was a gigantic and powerful Turkish Empire. World War I ended in 1918, after which the Treaty of Versailles was signed by France, Great Britain, the United States and its allies, and when the Ottoman Empire fell after World War I, it was left to the British to administer Palestine. And no, there is no political bias in calling it Palestine because that was what the area was called then. Because the British were given a mandate by their allies to rule the area, it is called Mandatory Palestine.
And Britain was to bear a large part of the blame for many of the problems we see today. Before and during establishing the mandate area in 1919, the British promised the Jews and the Palestinians, who felt a strong sense of belonging and ownership of the area, what should happen to it in the long term. In the Balfour Declaration, the promises of independence that the Jews believed they had received after World War I included, among other things, promises of an independent national home for the Jewish people and recognition of Arab independence from colonial powers in the Middle East. But did the wording “national home” mean a Jewish state or simply a home for a Jewish minority in an Arab state? It was the kind of fickleness and unclear politics that fueled discontent among both Jews and Palestinians.
But even considering the unclear policy of the British, it was also an almost impossible task because neither side seemed particularly interested in compromises, and the British also had their own strategic and economic interests in the region. Quote-on-quote “Justice” was the last thing both Jews and Arabs wanted. In 1936 the Arabs rebelled against the British Mandate rule. Arabs were now killing British officials as well as Jewish civilians. The British army and police force resorted to harsh punishments and reprisals to combat the rebellion. To prevent future Arab unrest, in 1939, Great Britain issued a so-called “white paper” for the area, which is a political statement of intent. It limited Jewish immigration to 75,000 people over the next five years. After that, any immigration would depend on “the consent of the Arabs.”
Britain hoped that this White Paper would guarantee that the Arabs of Palestine and neighbouring countries would support them, or at least remain neutral, in the event of war with Germany. As the bright listener has probably concluded, the restriction on Jewish immigration roughly corresponded to the years when World War II and the Holocaust of the Jews took place.
At least six million Jews, along with other minorities, were killed in the systematic genocide of the Nazis, including 4–5 million in concentration and extermination camps. Neither Great Britain, the United States, nor other European countries were prepared to assist Jewish refugees and welcome them with open arms, which made the situation of the Jews even more desperate and the bitterness against the Allies and the need for a Jewish state even greater when World War II ended.
For the Jews, it was a betrayal of the Balfour Declaration, i.e. the promises of independence the Jews thought they had received after World War I, as well as proof that the Palestinians had succeeded in intimidating Britain. When the European part of World War II ended in May 1945, the Jews living in Israel believed that Britain would revoke the White Paper. According to their own convictions, they had many reasons for thinking this: they had supported Great Britain during World War II, while the Arabs were on the side of the Nazis. Both because of the Arab countries’ opposition to the British and French colonial powers – using the motto: The enemy of my enemy is my friend – and the admiration of certain Arab leaders for anti-Semitism. But most Britons preferred the Arabs for what they considered to be political and moral reasons: The Palestinians were more submissive than the Jews, less educated and behaved more like typical colonial “natives”. That is, with the kind of good manners the British expected. The Jews, on the other hand, were angry and rude. They made no attempt to hide their hatred of British politics.
But while the British Mandate was sometimes oppressive, undeniably undemocratic and capable of cruelty and arbitrary rule, it was not a reign of terror. The British fickleness was frustrating, and the British should be much more transparent in their speech regarding the future of Palestine. But it was not a regime that could only be fought with violence. During the Mandate’s thirty years, fewer than 12 Jewish terrorists had been executed. No Jewish villages were blown up or exterminated, and most Jews convicted of political crimes under the harsh defence preparedness rules were given “special treatment” by British judges and segregated in prison from ordinary criminals and Arabs.

So we have three official parties here: the British, the Palestinians and the Jews, who all have their own interests in Palestine. The British Mandate was led by Sir Alan Cunningham, of course, on the orders of the British Government in Great Britain.
In a strangely ironic twist, when you look at the relationship between Jews and Palestinians today, it was the Palestinians who had relative power and the Jews who were in opposition. The Palestinians, who in 1945 made up 60% of the population of 1.7 million, were politically represented by the Higher Arab Committee. The Jews, who constituted 31% of the people in the same year, had established a network of political and administrative institutions without real political power. And precisely, population growth was one of the points of contention which created the most significant tension between the three parties. Among other things, the Jewish population from 1922 to 1945, in just 23 years, had grown from 83,000 to 553,000 primarily based only on immigration, part of it illegally.
There were different attitudes among the Jews about how the fight for an independent Jewish country should be fought. Some Jewish leaders were concerned about what violent attacks might bring on from further violence. But there were also groups such as the Irgun, a Zionist militant group that advocated fighting British rule through violence and terror. The group’s leader, Menahem Begin, who later became Prime Minister of Israel, issued a declaration of war against Great Britain on February 1, 1944:
“There is no longer any armistice between the Jewish people and the British administration of Eretz Israel which hands our brothers over to Hitler. Our people are at war with this regime—war to the end.… we shall fight, every Jew in the Homeland will fight. The God of Israel, the Lord of Hosts, will aid us. There will be no retreat. Freedom—or death”
It was two months after he had taken command of the Irgun, and Begin wanted a Jewish state here and now and was willing to use violence to achieve it. For him, violence was proof of the Jews’ will to live. He later wrote:
“We fight. Therefore we are”.
If we are to try to understand the Jewish perspective of why they so desperately needed their own state, we need to understand the suffering many of them had gone through. Through several centuries of persecution, the Jews had learned that resistance to superior power brought disaster. But the Holocaust taught them, in turn, that failure to resist led to annihilation. A large number of Jews were needed to build a Jewish state. The survivors of the death camps wanted to go there, but British law prevented them from doing so. Therefore, they had to fight the British to create a Jewish state.
In September 1945, three Jewish terrorist groups, the Haganah, the LEHI and the Irgun, under the command of Menahem Begin, put aside their fundamental differences and rebelled against British rule. They carried out minor acts of terrorism, such as sabotage of railway lines, police stations, and radar and police installations used to capture boats of illegal immigrants smuggled out of Europe by the Haganah. 

A car and a truck loaded with explosives drove east toward Jerusalem. The vehicle passed quickly through the British checkpoints. Its driver slowed down to make sure the truck also passed inspection.
The driver had done wartime service in the British Army, which had taught him that the Army had two levels of security: one for the natives and another for the British. He tried to place himself in the second category by dressing in Brithis clothes and greeting the guards at each roadblock with a solid British military accent. The soldiers manning the roadblock on the outskirts of Jerusalem stopped the truck. Sacks of grain were piled on its bed. A soldier poked one of them with a bayonet. It clanked as it hit a metal object. He carefully lifted one of the sacks. Down below was a milk can. There didn’t seem to be anything unusual about it. Milk cans and animal feed fit together nicely on a truck that belonged to a dairy farm. The soldiers lifted the roadblock and let the truck pass. The explosives had arrived in Jerusalem.
When the explosives had been in Jerusalem for three days, the terrorist group’s leadership decided that the attack against the Hotel King David should be launched. There was far too significant a risk that they could be discovered. At 11 o’clock, two and a half hours before the bomb was to explode, the terrorists drove towards the hotel at short intervals. One was pushing a wooden wheelbarrow with four milk cans in front of it. He wore baggy white pants over a loose-fitting smock shirt and headdress.
It was the traditional uniform of the Arab porters. Another terrorist followed a few steps behind. He wore khaki shorts and a white shirt that was open at the neck. There was nothing unusual about the two men, and what they were doing were everyday actions in Jerusalem: a man who had been to the market shopping and a porter who carried or drove his purchases for him. Ten minutes later, they passed the main entrance of the Hotel King David and stopped outside the part where the British Mandate Secretariat was located.
Two of their co-conspirators were at the same time at a bus stop on Jaffa Road. One was from Iraq, and when he got on the bus, he came face to face with the bus driver, who also happened to be his friend.
Then the driver exclaimed:
“Why are you dressed like an Arab?”
The terrorist shrugged and paid his ticket. The driver repeated the question.
“I don’t understand Hebrew,”
the man replied in Arabic. He and the other terrorist took seats at the back of the bus, as far away from the driver as possible.

Because none of the terrorists were actually Arabs or Palestinians. Each and every one of them was Jews and Zionists, that is, Jewish nationalists, and each and everyone was a member of the Jewish terrorist group Irgun. The impending attack on the Hotel King David was retaliation for the British operation called “Agatha”, among Jews called Black Saturday. Between 16 and 17 June 1946, one of the Zionist terrorist groups, the Haganah, blew up eight railway and road bridges connecting Palestine with the neighbouring countries in the operation called The Night of the Bridges. It was the most daring sabotage to date and was a protest against Britain’s refusal to welcome 100,000 European Jews in Palestine.
In retaliation and hoping to find evidence that the Jewish Agency leadership had known about the sabotage plans, on Saturday, June 29, 1946, British soldiers searched the homes of several leading Jews. In addition, they attacked Yagour, the largest Jewish settlement in Palestine, with tear gas.
“Gas!” screamed a woman. “Oh God, they’re gassing us!”
With the history the Jews had with gas in Europe, one can only imagine how traumatic it must have been. A total of 25 settlements were searched on Black Saturday, and many were Holocaust survivors. So it was for this reason that a group of Jewish terrorists from the Irgun group were now heading towards the Hotel King David to avenge these traumatizing attacks.

But why did the choice fall on the Hotel King David, and what was the symbolic and practical significance of the attack? The hotel was finished in 1930 and was, at the time, one of the most modern hotels in the Middle East. There were heated rooms, a rose garden, a tennis court, two restaurants and bars, a ballroom and a palace-like lobby.
The hotel resembled Jerusalem’s older stone buildings but had been built differently. It had the shape of a flattened “H”, with a long rectangular body of six stories, joining the wings to the north and south. Midway between the cities of Jerusalem and Jericho was a mountain. According to one legend, a stream of Jewish Blood from a massacre by the Romans ran down the mountain and stained its rocks red. Stones from these cliffs were used to build the Hotel King David. Each evening, the setting sun gave King David’s stone a reddish hue, reminding the Jews of Jerusalem of the legend. Grey-green marble slabs from another quarry covered floors and ceilings in the lobby, bar and main restaurant.
The stone matched the hills surrounding the hotel and the buildings next to it. The architect placed a huge expansion joint between each wing and the main building to protect the structure from earthquakes. These joints were designed not only to absorb the expansion of the building in hot weather but also to absorb the shock waves of an earthquake or explosion. If part of the building collapsed, the joints would allow the rest of the hotel to remain standing. When the first guest checked in in December 1930, the hotel was already a landmark in Jerusalem.
In October 1938, the British Army requisitioned the forty bedrooms and seventeen bathrooms on the hotel’s fourth floor for its Palestinian headquarters. From 1939 the hotel’s south wing housed the headquarters of the British Government in Palestine. It was known as the “Secretariat”. And that was what was now the target of the Irgun’s attack.

Irgun leader Amichai Paglin, codenamed “Gideon”, had explained the plan to the rest of the group:
“We’re going to attack King David in order to save Eretz Israel,” he said.
“We’re going to damage British prestige and destroy important documents the British have stolen from the Jewish Agency. These documents are being kept under guard in the Secretariat. The leaders of the Haganah have approved this operation because they fear that unless these papers are destroyed, there will be no Jewish State.”
Gideon’s decision to phone in a bomb warning was not to kill as many Britons as possible but to humiliate and terrorize them into leaving Palestine by destroying their supposedly impregnable headquarters. He also wanted to warn because Jewish officials worked at the Hotel King David, and Jewish lawyers, accountants and politicians visited it throughout the day. Any bomb exploding in the hotel without warning would kill dozens of Jews.
A year after the Holocaust, Jewish life seemed especially precious. The Irgun could not be responsible for the mass murder of Jews. Gideon bought the explosives from an Arab dentist. The dentist’s wife was Jewish, and they both loathed the British. He often returned from his clinics in Ramle and Gaza with the trunk of his car stuffed with weapons and explosives because the Arabs were not searched thoroughly at the roadblocks).
He resold some of these explosives to Gideon. The 10-year-old explosives had been stolen from the British Army by Arab terrorists, and Gideon bought them with money donated by supporters and “confiscated” from banks and merchants. He kept them in the Irgun house in Petach Tikva, about 60 kilometres from Jerusalem, and was the one that was transported through the British checkpoint by a co-conspirator. The small arms for the attack, such as pistols, rifles and machine guns, were bought from Arab or British soldiers or stolen from military arsenals.
Young oriental-looking Jews moved unnoticed in the Arab quarters and mingled with the crowds. Some were newly arrived immigrants from Syria, Iraq and North Africa, while others belonged to families who had lived in Jerusalem for generations. They spoke fluent Arabic and resembled the Palestinian Arabs with the same dark skin, brown-black eyes and Semitic features. They moved forward with the same rhythmic gait and haggled over the prizes with the same intensity. They bought work clothes, the traditional red fezzes and blue overalls worn by Arab workers and peddlers.
32,000 Palestinian Jews had fought alongside the British Army during World War II. For most, returning to Palestine was traumatic. They discovered that the British Army – which until recently had been their Army – had become the enemy of their people. Instead of receiving a hero’s welcome upon their return, Jewish children mocked and stoned them.
When they returned to Palestine, most of these 32,000 Jews joined the Jewish rebel groups in impotence and frustration.
The Irgun terrorists met two to three times a day leading up to the attack, dividing the roles in the attack: who would participate in the attack itself, who would care for the wounded, who would distribute weapons, guard the entrance, and take command if the leader Gideon was killed.

At the hotel, the terrorists first moved into the kitchen, where they pacified the kitchen staff. Then they began to carry the six milk cubs filled with 350 kilos of explosives, equivalent to the weight of a smaller polar bear, into the hotel’s basement, one by one.
Irgun leader Gideon squatted down and pulled a vial out of his pocket. It was four centimetres long, barely four centimetres in diameter and was covered by a bulbous wooden cap from which an aluminium tip protruded. The vial contained five millilitres of sulfuric acid, and Gideon tipped it over to allow the acid to escape.
The acid began to eat into the wooden plug wedged into a hole in the centre of its ebonite screw cap. In this hole sat an approximately two cm long and thin aluminium tube, which constituted the detonator, while the other end, sticking out of the cap, was packed with 9 grams of mercury fulminate, an easily evaporating explosive.
Gideon removed the cap from one milk boy, inserted the vial, and pushed the aluminium tip into a four-centimetre-long, wax paper cylinder inside the milk boy, surrounded by fifty kilos of light brown TNT. He pulled three more vials from his pocket and repeated the process on three more milklings. The time was 12:13. The young would explode at approximately 12:43 p.m. It would take half an hour for the acid to destroy the wooden plug, drip into the detonator and set off an explosion. Outside, he affixed two cardboard signs with the exact text in Hebrew, English and Arabic:
DANGER! BOMBS! WILL EXPLODE IF MOVED.
The purpose of the signs was to prevent a hotel employee from touching the jungs while the terrorists were leaving the basement and to protect themselves from the bombs exploding before the hotel had been evacuated. Gideon relaxed. The operation was successful.

It was 12.37 when the 350 kilos of TNT turned into 200,000 litres of hot gas. The air was heated to 3000 C and emitted 40,000 times the normal air pressure. By comparison, the sun’s surface is between 5,500 and 10,000 degrees hot. The pressure burst the liver, heart and lungs of the officials who were directly above. The pillars of the regency that supported the Secretariat fell apart. The force tore clothes, rings and watches from their owners. It sucked windows out of nearby buildings and scattered cities of broken glass on the streets. Cars were blown away, and trees uprooted. Sheets of paper from top-secret files flew out the window, chunks of cement hit pedestrians and bodies were blown onto the street. Even if the hotel had been evacuated, the evacuees would have been the target of these deadly missiles. Even scores of those who simply walked or drove past the hotel were killed or injured.
The group later claimed that it was not their intention for there to be human casualties. Therefore, one of the terrorists phoned in about fifteen minutes before a warning to the local police unit that a bomb would explode. The problem was those bomb threats were almost commonplace, and the officer on duty judged that an evacuation would create unnecessary panic. Indeed, many British soldiers saw the threats as a means of intimidation and terror rather than sincere warnings to minimize casualties.
On the other hand, Irgun also knew that many of these warnings were not taken seriously. In addition, a short time before, there had been a small explosion from a firebomb on the road in front of King David, so many in the hotel felt it was safer to stay indoors. So people continued to work and with their other chores. Some details are now about the injuries the victims sustained during the attack. I have chosen to include them because they give a good picture of how violent the attack was. But if you don’t like hearing that kind of thing, it might be a good idea to rewind approx. one minute ahead.
The building itself was six stories with 50 rooms, now masted flat to the ground with 150 people trapped between. 13 of the people who had been alive at the time of the explosion at 12.37 had turned to dust, wholly annihilated. All the clothes, jewellery and cuffs they had worn that could have identified them were gone. Others had been burned to charcoal and melted into chairs and desks.
 A Jewish typist’s face had been blown off her skull, out a window and sprawled on the pavement outside. Everything was a jumble of smoke, dust and flames for those who survived the initial blast. And all the while, loose objects, chandeliers, cupboards and rubble fell around them and became deadly projectiles. And while this hell unfolded, the Irgun members drove through an Arab village several kilometres west of Jerusalem, smiling and congratulating each other.

The Irgun had destroyed half of their targets, i.e. half of the Secretariat. It was equivalent to having destroyed half of the Folketing. The attack was as senseless as any other terrorist attack in history and had only targeted innocent people. 49 innocent people died in the attack. 21 were the first rank military officers, typists and couriers, clerical staff at the Secretariat, hotel staff and canteen staff. 13 were soldiers, 3 policemen and 5 spectators. 41 killed and wounded were Arabs, 28 British nationals, 17 Jews, two Armenians, 1 Russian, 1 Greek and 1 Egyptian. Two Irgun members also lost their lives during the attack.
The Irgun, the terrorist group behind the attack, did not seem to regret the attack either because, in the following years, they continued unabated their attacks on and rebellion against the British Mandate. They took hostages and executed them, blew up buildings, kidnapped British sergeants and attempted to assassinate British officials.
In 1947 Britain asked the UN to make recommendations for the future of Palestine. In late November, the General Assembly voted to divide Palestine into Jewish and Arab states and make Jerusalem an international city. Britain announced it would end the Mandate and withdraw its armed forces in mid-May 1948.
The Palestinian Arabs were outraged by the UN plan. Arab mobs and organized terrorist gangs began attacking Jewish civilians. By the end of 1947, they were murdering an average of fifty a week. The Irgun retaliated. On December 29, an Irgun bomb exploded near Jerusalem’s Damascus Gate, killing fifteen Arabs. The following day, the Irgun threw a bomb at Arab workers standing outside an oil refinery in Haifa. A week later, they rolled an oil drum packed with TNT and scrap metal into a group of Arabs travelling at a bus stop in Jerusalem.
The most notorious Irgun operation targeting Arabs occurred in April 1948, when Irgun and LEHI units attacked the Arab village of Dir Yassin, killing 254 men, women and children. The Haganah and the Jewish Agency condemned the attack, calling it a massacre. Irgun leader Begin claimed that the village had been a legitimate military target and that the Irgun had brought a loudspeaker mounted on a truck to warn the civilian population to flee. However, the truck drove into a ditch, and the villagers did not hear the warning. Another Irgun warning had failed.
Five weeks after the Irgun attack on the village of Dir Yassin, Britain withdrew from Palestine, and David Ben-Gurion proclaimed the State of Israel and became the state’s first Prime Minister. Immediately, the new state was invaded by armies from the neighbouring Arab countries. During the war that followed, the Irgun’s rival, the rebel group Haganahs, had excellent training and the personnel weapons they had smuggled into Palestine in the final years of the Mandate that proved decisive and ensured Israel’s survival.
No one was ever convicted of the attack on the King David Hotel. Several members of the Jewish terrorist movement were later given prominent and influential positions in Israeli politics. The leader of the Irgun, Menahem Begin, later became Prime Minister of Israel. The attack on the King David Hotel is not believed to have significantly impacted the formation of the state of Israel. On the other hand, establishing the Jewish state of Israel, unfortunately, became fertile ground for new terrorist movements, terrorist attacks and a new generation of radicalized and frustrated young people. But we will get into that in later sections.

You have listened to TerrorTalks, a podcast about terror and radicalization.
This episode was written, produced and narrated by me, Natasja Engholm, while Niels Peter Nielsen voiced the men in the story. Also, thank you to consultant and journalist Lars Hvidberg, who contributed with sparring and wise thoughts. Today’s episode has greatly benefited from the information in the book By Blood and Fire by Thurston Clarke.
You will find the episode’s sources in the show notes where you listen to your podcast.
TerrorTalks is on hiatus for the summer holidays, but tune in again on August 10 when I return with new tales of fascinating and gruesome terrorist attacks. Also, feel free to go in and follow TerrorTalk’s social media on Instagram and Facebook, where you can see pictures from today’s story.

You have listened to TerrorTalks, a podcast about terror and radicalization. This episode was written, produced and narrated by me, Natasja Engholm, while Jon Lobb voiced the men in the story. Also, a big thank you to consultant and journalist Lars Hvidberg, who contributed with sparring and wise thoughts. Today's episode has greatly benefited from the information in the book By Blood and Fire by Thurston Clarke.
You will find the episode's sources in the show notes where you listen to your podcast.
Listen to the next episode, where I talk about a terror attack that could have been the next 9/11. You will find the episode's sources in the show notes where you listen to your podcast. Also, feel free to go in and follow TerrorTalk's social media on Instagram and Facebook, where you can see pictures from today's story.