The blast that still echoes: The King David Hotel bombing, 80 years on

Yet, the bombing of the King David Hotel, another seminal moment in the history of pre-state Israel, which took place on July 22, 1946 - 80 years ago this week - is not nearly as well-known to most Israelis today.

What was the significance of the attack, and what contemporary lessons can be learned for our time?

As a result, in September 1945, the three Jewish military organizations in Palestine - the Hagana, the most organized group, which was aligned with the Jewish Agency; the Irgun, the Revisionist movement led by Menachem Begin that had initiated many military actions; and Lehi, which was the acronym for “Lohamei Herut Yisrael,” the smallest and most extreme of the three - put aside their differences and rebelled against British rule to pressure the revocation of the White Paper.

For 10 months, from October 1945 until August 1946, the three organizations worked in tandem as the United Hebrew Resistance Movement, targeting British infrastructure, breaking into the Atlit prison and releasing 200 illegal immigrants detained by the British, bombing railroads and train stations, and attacking British police stations.

On June 16, “The Night of the Bridges,” Palmah forces - the Hagana’s elite fighting units - blew up eight railway and road bridges linking Palestine to neighboring countries. The symbolism of the attack was not lost upon the British; if Palestine was closed to Jewish refugees, the Hagana would close the country to everyone else.

The British responded by launching Operation Agatha on Saturday, June 29, 1946, in which 25,000 British troops participated, raiding the Jewish Agency headquarters and imposing curfews, seizing arms, and confiscating documents detailing Hagana operations and the activities of the joint resistance movement.

They arrested 2,700 individuals, including Moshe Sharett, head of the Jewish Agency’s Political Department and future prime minister; David Remez, chairman of the Jewish National Council; Yitzhak Gruenbaum, director of the Jewish Agency’s Labor Department; and Dov Yosef, a prominent Jewish Agency member and future minister.

Due to the seriousness of the raid, that day was described in the Yishuv as “Black Saturday” (until it was superseded by the events of Saturday, Oct. 7, 2023).

The documents seized by the British were taken to the British Mandate Secretariat, located in the King David’s southern wing. As the center of British rule in Palestine, the hotel was considered a target even before Operation Agatha. The transfer of documents to the secretariat hastened the decision to bomb the hotel.

Completed in 1930, the King David was considered one of the most luxurious hotels in the Middle East. In 1938, the British army took over the hotel’s fourth floor as its Palestine headquarters, and shortly thereafter, the civilian government took the hotel’s south wing where its secretariat was located.

In 1939, with the outbreak of World War II, the army took additional space on the third floor. By this time, less than a third of the hotel’s rooms - just 62 bedrooms and 24 bathrooms in the center and north wings of the first two floors - were available to the public.

The Irgun proceeded with its plans to bomb the hotel. Shortly before noon on Monday, July 22, 1946, a stolen delivery truck arrived at the King David Hotel. Two Irgun members held up the kitchen staff at gunpoint, while four other Irgun fighters delivered seven milk churns to the King David’s basement.

Each churn was filled with 100 pounds of explosives and was labeled “Mines - Do not touch” in Hebrew, English, and Arabic. A gun battle soon began between a British officer who had seen the holdup and the Irgun members. In addition, the hotel’s switchboard operators, who were in the basement, heard what was happening and called the military police.

The Irgun fighters left the hotel basement as the military police were arriving. One Irgun fighter was killed, and the rest escaped. In the meantime, between 12:20 and 12:27 p.m., a non-lethal explosion was set off near the hotel to enable the operatives to escape in the confusion.

As soon as the diversionary bomb exploded, a teenage Irgun courier called the hotel at 12:22 p.m., warning the hotel’s switchboard in Hebrew and English of the bombs. She announced, “This is the Jewish Resistance Movement; we have planted bombs in the hotel. Please vacate it immediately. You have been warned.”

After she completed the call, she ran to a second phone booth on King George Street and provided the same warning to the French Consulate at 12:27 p.m.

Six minutes later, at 12:37 p.m., the bombs detonated. The six-story southern wing of the hotel collapsed. Ninety-one people were killed, including 41 Arabs, 28 Britons, 17 Jews, and five other individuals of other nationalities.

At the time, Begin, head of the Irgun, claimed that Sir John Shaw, chief secretary of the British Mandatory government, had received the warning and had dismissed it, saying, “I am here to give orders to the Jews, not to take orders from them.” Shaw denied this, saying he never received the warning.

Author Thurston Clarke, in By Blood and Fire: The Attack on Jerusalem’s King David Hotel, wrote that the hotel’s assistant manager was indeed made aware of the earlier calls but assumed they were a hoax, as there had been numerous fake bomb threats in Jerusalem in the past. This warning was never passed on to Shaw.

While the Hagana had originally supported the bombing, Chaim Weizmann, head of the World Zionist Organization and later Israel’s first president, withdrew his backing before it took place.

Weizmann demanded the Hagana back out. Moshe Sneh, head of the Hagana National Command, and Yisrael Galili, the Hagana’s national commander and chief of staff, asked Begin to postpone the attack. Begin initially complied but eventually decided to proceed.

Begin himself, who had ordered the bombing and insisted that warning be given beforehand, was disconsolate at the human cost of lives.

In his book The Revolt, which details the history of the Irgun, he wrote, “For some reason the hotel was not evacuated, even though from the moment when the warnings had been received there was plenty of time for every living soul to saunter out. Instead the toll of lives was terrible. More than 200 people were killed or injured. Among the victims were high British officers.

“We particularly mourned the alien civilians whom we had had no wish to hurt, and the 15 Jewish civilians, among them good friends, who had so tragically fallen. Our satisfaction at the success of the great operation was bitterly marred. Again we went through days of pain and nights of sorrow for the blood that need not have been shed.”

Benny Morris, a leading scholar of the Arab-Israeli conflict who has written extensively about the final years of the British Mandate, the birth of Israel, and the events surrounding the War of Independence, says there was considerable confusion about the event.

“There is a lot of blur in this period,” he says. “It’s not all that clear who said what. But the Hagana in general opposed this particular act of terrorism. Since many Jews also died in the explosion, it was attributed to the Irgun. It persuaded more people that they were actually terrorists, not just freedom fighters demanding independence from Britain. It also strained the relations between the various Jewish organizations.”

Ben-Gurion was aware of the planning of the bombing, says Morris, and while he condemned the bombing, in a sense, it made his job easier.

“The Hagana also wanted the British out. So in some ways, the Hagana was using the Irgun, much as [Yasser] Arafat in later years used more extreme groups in the Palestinian so-called resistance. They condemned them in certain attacks but actually were happy they were doing it against the Jews. Here we have the Hagana condemning an attack, but Ben-Gurion probably understanding that it’s doing the Jews’ work, the Hagana’s work, in getting the British to decide to leave.”

The bombing played a major role in the breakup of the United Hebrew Resistance Movement, ending the Hagana’s alliance with the Irgun and Lehi. The Hagana concentrated its efforts on bringing Jewish refugees into Palestine, while the Irgun and Lehi continued their armed campaign against British rule.

After the bombing, the British and Americans were furious. Morris says the bombing prompted a forceful British response.

“The British cracked down on the Yishuv,” he explains. “They also cracked down on the Hagana, arrested many of their leaders and activists, and in the Yishuv in general. In some ways, it also deepened the antagonism between the British and the Yishuv, persuading the British that cooperation was impossible not only with the Arabs, but with the Jews as well.”

Interestingly, the reaction of Israel’s chief rabbis was equally negative. Sephardi chief rabbi Ben-Zion Uziel said, “I call on all those who have had a hand in this sin: cease from this dangerous path which is forbidden by the law of Israel, and from which there can be no returning for those who take it.”

Ashkenazi chief rabbi Yitzhak Halevi Herzog called the bombing “a dastardly crime,” adding, “I could never have imagined that the descendants of those who received the law of life on Mount Sinai could show such disregard for the security of human life.”

In the wake of the bombing, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency (JTA) reported on August 6, 1946, that for the first time in centuries, the Jews of Jerusalem were forbidden to visit the Western Wall on the eve of Tisha B’Av.

“The curfew which has been in effect since the King David Hotel bombing,” they reported, “was not lifted despite appeals by the Jewish community to the British military authorities.”

Many have speculated that the King David Hotel bombing was one of the major reasons the British left the Holy Land in 1948, leading to Ben-Gurion’s proclamation of statehood in May of that year.

“The whole campaign by Irgun and Lehi, and the cumulative losses in British life in Palestine, eventually led to their decision in February 1947 to leave. This was probably one of the most important events. It’s probably the most because so many people died there,” notes Morris.

Almost seven months later, on February 18, 1947, British foreign secretary Ernest Bevin announced that the government would refer the future of Palestine to the United Nations.

“The opening of British records over the past decades,” says Morris, “has firmed up the belief that it was this series of terrorist attacks by the Irgun and Lehi which persuaded the British that there was no future for British rule in Palestine, and no future for any hope of Jewish-Arab reconciliation mediated by the British. These two things together basically persuaded the British to leave - plus of course, the expense of keeping a large army here.”

Would one call the bombing of the King David a terrorist act, I ask Morris? “The word terrorism is always problematic,” he replies. “It was an attack which killed dozens of civilians. In that sense, that’s an act of terrorism. But the Irgun could say the British were a foreign occupying power in Palestine, and this was a struggle for liberation.”

Morris points out that the Arabs claimed the Jews were major terrorists, and did not differentiate between the Hagana, Lehi, and the Irgun. “The Arabs claimed the Jews were busy using terror as well.”

Is there a rejoinder to that, I ask? “No, no, there’s no rejoinder. The Jews did indulge in terrorism, and the Arabs then and before and later also indulged in terrorism.”

Few people alive today remember the bombing, which took place so many years ago. One person who remembers the event quite well is 94-year-old Hassia Yehuda - my mother-in-law - who today lives in an assisted living facility in Jerusalem. In 1946, she was 14 years old and lived with her parents in Jerusalem’s Geula neighborhood.

“I was sitting with my mother,” she recalls. “We were talking about current events. All of a sudden, I heard a boom. People were leaving their homes to find out what had happened. Soon after, I heard the sirens as ambulances were going back and forth. In a moment, everyone knew what happened.”

Eighty years later, the King David Hotel still stands, with its dun-colored stones shining in the hot summer sun. It is still one of the best-known hotels in Israel and retains its place among the country’s top destinations.

“Outside the main entrance to the King David Hotel in Jerusalem,” wrote author Tom Segev in his 2010 book, One Palestine, Complete: Jews and Arabs Under the British Mandate, “a small blue plate with an ornate golden rosette is fixed to the wall, informing visitors in Hebrew, Arabic, and English that during the British Mandate the building served as the offices of the British administration and that on 22 July 1946, ‘the Jewish underground Irgun Zvai Leumi (National Military Organization) blew up the Southern Wing.’

“It is an official sign, put up by the Israeli government tourist office and the Jerusalem municipality; there is no reference to the gruesome results of the attack, which cost the lives of over 90 people - British, Arabs, and Jews.

“Outside the hotel, there hangs a second, larger, prominent official sign written in Hebrew and English only; it offers the perpetrators’ version. Erected in 2006, it is topped by the emblem of what the British simply called ‘The Irgun’: a muscular arm holding a rifle over a map of Palestine up to the Iraqi border and the words ‘The Only Way.’

“The text on the sign first points out that in addition to the Mandate Secretariat, the Army Headquarters were also located in the building, which may have rendered the attack on the hotel some operational legitimacy.”

The Irgun, the text continues, did not act on its own behalf but on Hebrew Resistance Movement orders, which for a while included the three major Zionist anti-British underground organizations.

“The English text is not identical with the Hebrew,” concluded Segev, “and it wouldn’t be Jerusalem if that tragedy could be commemorated without insulting somebody’s national pride.

“Indeed, the sign provoked angry protests from the British Embassy, which threatened to escalate into a diplomatic crisis. For originally the sign had stated: ‘For some reason the British did not comply with the demand to evacuate the building, and as a result, 91 people were killed, including 28 Britons.’

“Ultimately, the Israelis replaced that sentence with the words, ‘To the Irgun’s regret, 92 persons were killed.’”

It is likely that with the passage of time, the bombing of the King David Hotel will recede even further from the collective memories of Jews, Arabs, and Britons. Yet its place in the turbulent final years of the British Mandate and in the events that led to Israel’s establishment will remain a subject of debate for years to come.