Irgun and Lehi

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British newspaper report on Jewish terrorism.

The Irgun (part of a longer Hebrew phrase meaning "The National Military Organization in the Land of Israel") was a Zionist terrorist organization, a more extreme offshoot of the older Haganah organization from which it split in 1931.

History

British newspaper report on the King David Hotel atrocity by Begin's Irgun terrorists.
The British administrative headquarters for Mandatory Palestine, housed in the southern wing of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, were bombed in a terrorist attack on 22 July 1946 by Irgun during the Jewish insurgency. 91 dead. A dozen of the slain were women. Serving military personnel accounted for 13 of the fatalities. More than two-thirds of the Secretariat's entire staff was either killed or wounded.
Lord Moyne's Cairo funeral.

Irgun

The Irgun was active between 1931 and 1948, and its leader in the 1940s was Menachem Begin[1]. The Irgun boasted of responsibility for attacks against Palestinian Arabs which marked the later stages of the disorders in 1936-39, and sometimes took the form of abominable bomb outrages.

From 1943 further outrages were committed in the form of the destruction with bombs and other lethal weapons of Government property including the police headquarters in Jerusalem.[2]

Possibly their most deadly atrocity was on 22 July 1946 when they blew up the five-story wing of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem which housed the offices of much of the British Palestine Administration. Over 90 British, Arabs and Jews lost their lives with three times that seriously wounded and mutilated.[3] Sir John Shaw, Chief Secretary of the Palestine Government wrote:

  • I lost nearly 100 of my best officers and old friends....I helped to dig out their stinking putrefying bodies and I attended 14 funerals in three days.[4]

The current Likud party partially originates from the Herut party which originated from the Irgun. Begin was later Prime Minister of Israel.

Legi

The Lehi (an abbreviation for a Hebrew phrase meaning "Fighters for the Freedom of Israel"), also known as the Stern Gang, after its founder, Avraham Stern. A more extreme Zionist terrorist organization, it split from the older Irgun organization in 1940.

It was active until 1948 and was responsible for the attempt on the life of the British High Commissioner on 8 August 1944, the murder of a high official of the British C.I.D., Assistant Superintendent T. J. Wilkin (29 September, 1944), and the assassination in Cairo of Lord Moyne, British Minister of State in the Middle East on 6th November 1944.[5] A leader, Yitzhak Shamir, later became Prime Minister of Israel.

Extremely anti-British, the group repeatedly attacked British personnel in Palestine [...]. The British police retaliated by killing Stern in his apartment in February 1942; many of the gang’s leaders were subsequently arrested. The group’s terrorist activities extended beyond Palestine: two members assassinated Lord Moyne, British minister of state in the Middle East, at Cairo (November 1944). Later the Stern Gang attacked airfields, railway yards, and other strategic installations in Palestine, usually with success, though at heavy loss in members killed or captured. After the creation of the state of Israel (1948), the group, which had always been condemned by moderate leaders of the Jewish community in Palestine, was suppressed, some of its units being incorporated in the Israeli defense forces.[6]

The history of these two organizations is closely interlinked and often discussed together in sources, such as regarding terrorism against British, Palestinian, and other individuals and groups.

See also

External links

Codoh

Associations with National Socialist Germany

Occidental Observer

References

  1. ↑ Pappe, Ilan, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, London, 2024 (Paperback) p.45, ISBN: 978-1-85168-555-4
  2. ↑ Barbour, Nevill, Nisi Dominus - A Survey of the Palestine Controversy, Geo G Harrap & Co., London, 1946, p.220 & 229.
  3. ↑ Sherman, A.J., Mandate Days: British Lives in Palestine 1918-1948, Thames & Hudson pubs., New York, 1998, pps:180-183, ISBN: 0-500-25116-9
  4. ↑ Sherman, 1998, p.182.
  5. ↑ Barbour, 1946, p.220.
  6. ↑ Stern Gang, Encyclopædia Britannica
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