No Civil War, Serendipity, and the Altalena
“No civil war,” Menahem Begin commanded after Yitzhak Rabin reported the command of the leader of the Haganah, Ben Gurion, to kill some Holocaust survivors, members of Irgun, being apparently more keen on brotherly competition than avoidance of shedding blood that in such competitions will spill.
The unfortunate coincidence of Yitzhak Rabin’s tragic assassination and the fact that he transmitted orders that led to some deaths on the Altalena is one whose forensic implications inspire not only my fatalistic fascination, but my rejection of conclusions whose serendipity makes me an unconvinced complainer.
This is my brief prosaic summary of the way that serendipity fatally generated the Altalena Affair: Yitzhak Rabin most surely did not issue the original order to fire on the Altalena; that directive came directly from Israel’s first Prime Minister, David Ben-Gurion, who insisted on a unified national military. However, Rabin was the IDF field commander on the Tel Aviv beach who passed down the order to shell the ship and oversaw the forces firing on the Irgun members.
Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion ordered the newly formed Israel Defense Forces (IDF) to use whatever force was necessary to confiscate the Irgun’s weapons cargo. He famously declared that the state could not have “two armies”.
Rabin was a 26-year-old officer at the time, and quite unexpectedly ended up taking command of the Palmach and IDF forces stationed on the Tel Aviv shoreline.
Ben-Gurion ordered the artillery shelling of the ship, and Rabin passed the command down to a South African volunteer artilleryman named Hillel (Billy) Daleski. When Daleski initially hesitated to fire on fellow Jews, Rabin threatened him with a court-martial, forcing him to fire the mortar shell that ultimately set the Altalena ablaze.
The tragic confrontation resulted in the deaths of 16 Irgun members and 3 IDF soldiers. A wider war was narrowly avoided because Irgun leader Menachem Begin ordered his men on the ship and shore not to return fire, declaring “Civil war—never!”. However, serendipity cast a long, forensically confused shadow on the affair when Yitzhak Rabin, while acting as the Prime Minister of Israel, echoing the role that Ben Gurion played in the Altalena Affair, was assassinated on November 4, 1995, for coincidental reasons that have no connection with the Altalena Affair.