Black Sunday, 1937
Black Sunday | |
---|---|
Location | Jaffa and Jerusalem, Palestine |
Date | 11–14 November 1937 |
Target | Palestinian Arabs |
Attack type | Mass shooting |
Deaths | 10 |
Injured | 13+ |
Perpetrators | Irgun |
Black Sunday, 1937 refers to a series of acts undertaken by Jewish militants of the Irgun faction against Arab civilians on 14 November 1937. It was among the first challenges to the Havlagah (lit. restraint) policy not to retaliate against Arab attacks on Jewish civilians.
Background overview
In 1936, Palestinian Arabs launched
Restraint vs. militancy
The mainstream Zionist approach to the insurgency, set forth by David Ben-Gurion, was to avoid reprisal and rather prioritize the strengthening of defenses in Jewish areas, a policy of Havlagah (lit. Restraint). Notrim and Jewish supernumeraries had however been active after having been recruited by the British army to help repress the Arab revolt.[11] A militant form of Zionism, constituting a
Black Sunday, 1937
In July 1937, Jabotinsky met with
At this point the Irgun leader David Raziel authorized a programme of active rather than passive defense, consisting of bombing Arab coffee houses, in cities such as Haifa and Rosh Pinah, and attacks around Jerusalem, and on buses travelling between the cities of Tiberias and Safed,[14] in which Black Sunday marked the turning point.[7] Jaa’cov Eliav, the Irgun’s master bomb maker, was in charge of the operations generally that led to the November 14 attack,[17] David Raziel organized the attacks in Jerusalem.
The first attack had taken place on 11 November, when the Irgun murdered 2 Arabs at a Jaffa bus deposit, and wounded a further 5.[3][11][18] The second occurred early on the morning of 14 November.[19] Raziel had ordered multiple attacks to be undertaken almost simultaneously in order to hamper a coherent police response. At 7 am. 2 Arab pedestrians were shot on Aza Street in Rehavia, a neighbourhood in Jerusalem, by Joseph Kremin and Shlomo Trachtman. A half an hour later, another two were shot. In both cases, one of the victims survived. Some time later, Zvi Meltser armed an Irgun operative who then attacked an Arab bus, killing 3 passengers and wounding 8.[14][20] By the end of November 14, 10 Arabs had been killed and many more wounded.[21]
The Irgun commemorated the incidents on 14 November as "the Day of the Breaking of the Havlagah".
Aftermath
The renewal of Arab violence in October 1937 led to changes in tactics by the Zionists.[11] Morris states that the numbers of Arabs killed in these indiscriminate attacks matched the number of Jews killed by Arabs in the 1929 and 1936 uprisings.[11] In July 1938 alone two such Irgun bombs planted in Haifa’s central market accounted for 74 Arab dead and 129 wounded, leading to a generalized cycle of reprisal between the two groups.[23]
There are several notable incidents associated the Jewish insurgency fueled by the Irgun attacks in the summer of 1938.
- 6 July 1938 an Irgun militant in Arab garb planted milk cans loaded with explosives in an Arab market in Haifa killing 21, and wounding 52.[3][11]
- 25 July 1938 in the same market, operatives left an explosive-filled container marked ‘sour cucumbers’ which, on explosion, resulted in the death of 39 Arabs and the wounding of a further 46
- 26 August 1938, explosives planted in the Jaffa market took a lethal toll of 24 Arabs and 39 wounded.[3]
The British initially took no action against the Irgun itself, but rather arrested members of Jabotinsky’s group on suspicion they were connected to the incident. Jabotinsky distanced himself from the action adopted but later spoke of it as 'a spontaneous outbreak of the outraged feelings of the nation’s soul.' [14]
The British also enlisted 19,000 Jewish policemen to assist them in countering the insurgency, and eventually organized Special Night Squads.[2] The Irgun revolt effected a change in mainstream Jewish policy also. Despite official shock at these incidents, the tactic of a defensive response underwent reexamination, was found to be ineffective, with the result that the Haganah command began to set up field companies to engage in ambushes. Orde Wingate's night squads and Yitzhak Sadeh's mobile military units (plugot ha'Sadeh), established in December of that year,[14] also exercised an influence on the creation of such clandestine forces. Ben-Gurion in turn had one officer secretly establish pe'ulot meyudahot, or special operation squads specializing in retaliatory operations against Arab terrorists, villages thought to harbor them and, at times, against British units themselves. These squads operated at Ben-Gurion's discretion, and lay outside the official Haganah chain of command.[11]
See also
- Zionist political violence
- List of Irgun attacks
- The Bloody Day in Jaffa
References
- ISBN 9781135919665.
- ^ a b John Newsinger, British Counterinsurgency, Springer 2016 p.6.
- ^ a b c d e James Gannon, Military Occupations in the Age of Self-determination: The History Neocons Neglected, ABC-CLIO, 2008 pp.32-33.
- .
- S2CID 159997837.
- ^ '20th Zionist Congress, Resolution passed 299 to 160 with 6 absentions,'
- ^ ISBN 978-1-4422-2684-5.
...the Revisionists rejected it, as did the Arabs, but the Zionist Organization accepted it in principle
- ISBN 978-0-87451-962-4.
While rejecting the specific proposals of the Peel Commission, the congress accepted readiness, in principle, to consider a better partition proposal
- ISBN 978-1-135-24887-1.
Although in 1937 the Twentieth Zionist Congress had rejected the boundaries proposed by the Peel Commission, it did agree in principle to the idea of partition...
- ^ Henry Laurens, La Question de Palestine: Une Mission sacrée de la civilisation, Fayard 2002 p.373.
- ^ Knopf DoubledayPublishing Group, 2011 pp.145f.
- ^ Leonard Weinberg, Ami Pedahzur, Arie Perliger, Political Parties and Terrorist Groups, Routledge, 2008 pp.81-82.
- ^ Colin Shindler, A History of Modern Israel, Cambridge University Press 2013 p.36
- ^ a b c d e f Colin Shindler, The Rise of the Israeli Right, Cambridge University Press 2015 pp.182-183
- ^ I. B. Tauris2009 pp.195-196.
- ^ Henry Laurens , " La Question de Palestine:Une mission sacrée de civilisation, " Fayard 2002 p.374,p.654 n.74
- Knopf DoubledayPublishing Group, 2015 pp.17-18.
- ^ Ya'aḳov Eliav, Wanted, Shengold Publishers, 1984 pp.34f.
- ^ Patrick Bishop,The Reckoning: Death and Intrigue in the Promised Land-A True Detective Story, HarperCollins, 2014 p.35.
- ^ Zev Golan,Free Jerusalem: Heroes, Heroines and Rogues who Created the State of Israel, Devora Publishing, 2003 p.122.
- ^ J. Bowyer Bell, Terror out of Zion, Transaction Publishers 2nsd ed 2009 p.39
- ^ Monty Noam Penkower, Twentieth Century Jews: Forging Identity in the Land of Promise and in the Promised Land, Academic Studies Press, p.312.
- ^ Neil Caplan, The Israel-Palestine Conflict: Contested Histories, John Wiley & Sons, 2011 p.88.