Avi Shilon on the Legacy of the Altalena

By the spring of 1948, three armed Jewish militias had been fighting and working towards the birth of modern Israel. There was the Haganah, under David Ben-Gurion, which would become the core of the new Israel Defense Forces. There was the Irgun, led by Menachem Begin, and a smaller group, the Lehi. Begin agreed to dissolve the Irgun units operating in Israel into the new army, a decision he made in the name of national unity and cohesion even though tensions between the Irgun and the Haganah were deep, and Haganah operatives had previously informed on their counterparts in the Irgun to British officials. Even so, the Irgun had pledged to become a part of the IDF in the newly formed state of Israel.

A month after Ben-Gurion declared independence, a ship named the Altalena set sail from France under the auspices of the Irgun, carrying rifles and some 900 immigrants, many of them survivors of the Shoah. The ship left port the same day a United Nations cease-fire took effect, a truce that barred the importation of any new arms or combatants into the country. When it reached the coast at Kfar Vitkin just north of Tel Aviv, a dispute broke out over how the weapons would be distributed, and in particular over Begin's insistence that a share go to an Irgun battalion in Jerusalem, which he argued stood outside the truce's terms since Jerusalem's status remained unsettled under the UN partition plan. The standoff turned violent onshore, and Begin ordered the ship to sail south, to Tel Aviv, in full view of the city and the international press.

Near what is today Frishman Beach, Ben-Gurion gave the order to open fire on the ship, and by this time, with Begin aboard, on his main political rival. Two officers refused before a third accepted the command. Sixteen Irgun men and three IDF soldiers were killed. And Begin, standing on the burning deck with comrades dying around him, ordered his own men not to fire back. He would repeat that order over the radio that night: never, he said, could he condone a war between brothers.

The specter of the Altalena has haunted Israeli politics ever since. It plays a potent and mythological role in the imagination of the political right as one of the earliest examples of a centralized government dominated by the political left that uses the power of the state against its domestic opponents.

Now, six weeks before an Israeli election, the wreckage of the Altalena has been discovered. To discuss the ship's sinking and the significance of its recovery, Jonathan Silver, the host of the Tikvah podcast and the editor of Mosaic, is joined by the historian, educator, and writer Avi Shilon. Shilon is the author of, among other works of scholarship, the definitive biography of Menachem Begin, published in 2012 by Yale University Press.