The King David Hotel bombing was an
attack carried out on Monday July 22,
1946 by the militant Zionist underground
organization Irgun on the British
administrative headquarters for
Palestine, which was housed in the
southern wing of the King David Hotel in
Jerusalem. 91 people of various
nationalities were killed and 46 were
injured.
The hotel was the site of the central
offices of the British Mandatory
authorities of Palestine, principally
the Secretariat of the Government of
Palestine and the Headquarters of the
British Armed Forces in Palestine and
Transjordan. The attack initially had
the approval of the Haganah. It was
conceived as a response to Operation
Agatha and was the deadliest directed at
the British during the Mandate era.
Disguised as Arabs, the Irgun planted a
bomb in the basement of the main
building of the hotel, whose southern
wing housed the Mandate Secretariat and
a few offices of the British military
headquarters. The Irgun sent warnings by
telephone, including one to the hotel's
own switchboard, which the staff decided
to ignore, but none directly to the
British authorities. A possible reason
why the warning was ignored was that
hoax bomb warnings were rife at the
time. From the fact that a bomb search
had already been carried out, it appears
that a hoax call or tip-off had been
received at the hotel earlier that day.
Subsequent telephone calls from a
concerned Palestine Post staff member
and the police caused increasing alarm,
and the hotel manager was notified. In
the closing minutes before the
explosion, he called an unknown British
officer, but no evacuation was ordered.
The ensuing explosion caused the
collapse of the western half of the
southern wing of the hotel. Some of the
inflicted deaths and injuries occurred
in the road outside the hotel and in
adjacent buildings. Controversy has
arisen over the timing and adequacy of
the warnings and the reasons why the
hotel was not evacuated.
Background
= Motivation for the bombing=
The Irgun committed the attack in
response to Operation Agatha, known in
Israel as "Black Saturday". British
troops had searched the Jewish Agency on
June 29 and confiscated large quantities
of documents which contained
incriminating information about the
Agency's involvement in violence. The
intelligence information was taken to
the King David Hotel, where it was
initially kept in the offices of the
Secretariat in the southern wing. In
order to destroy the documentation, the
Irgun therefore determined to destroy
that wing of the hotel.
= Hotel layout=
In plan form, the six-story hotel, which
was opened in 1932 as the first, modern,
luxury hotel in Jerusalem, had an
I-shape, with a long central axis
connecting wings to the north and south.
Julian's Way, a main road, ran parallel
and close to the west side of the hotel.
An unsurfaced lane, where the French
Consulate was situated and from where
access to the service entrance of the
hotel was gained, ran from there past
the north end of the hotel. Gardens and
an olive grove, which had been
designated as a park, surrounded the
other sides.
= Government and military usage=
In 1946, the Secretariat occupied most
of the southern wing of the hotel, with
the military headquarters occupying the
top floor of the south wing and the top,
second and third floors of the middle of
the hotel. The military telephone
exchange was situated in the basement.
An annexe housed the military police and
a branch of the Criminal Investigation
Department of the Palestine Police.
Rooms had first been requisitioned in
the hotel in late 1938, on what was
supposed to be a temporary basis. Plans
had already been made to erect a
permanent building for the Secretariat
and Army GHQ, but these were cancelled
after the Second World War broke out, at
which point more than two-thirds of the
hotel's rooms were being used for
government and army purposes.
In March 1946, British Labour Party MP
Richard Crossman gave the following
description of activity at the hotel:
"private detectives, Zionist agents,
Arab sheiks, special correspondents, and
the rest, all sitting around about
discreetly overhearing each other."
Security analyst Bruce Hoffman has
written that the hotel "housed the nerve
centre of British rule in Palestine".
= Previous attacks=
Amichai Paglin, Chief of Operations of
the Irgun, developed a remote-controlled
mortar with a range of four miles, which
was nicknamed the V3 by British military
engineers. In 1945, after attacks using
the mortar had been made on several
police stations, six V3s were buried in
the olive grove park south of the King
David Hotel. Three were aimed at the
government printing press and three at
the hotel itself. The intention was to
fire them on the King's birthday, but
the Haganah learned about the plan and
warned the British through Teddy Kollek
of the Jewish Agency. Army sappers then
dug them up. On another occasion,
members of an unknown group threw
grenades, which missed, at the hotel.
Preparations for the attack
= Planning=
The leaders of Haganah opposed the idea
initially. On July 1, 1946, Moshe Sneh,
chief of the Haganah General
Headquarters, sent a letter to the then
leader of the Irgun, Menachem Begin,
which instructed him to "carry out the
operation at the 'chick'", code for the
King David Hotel. Despite this approval
for the project, repeated delays in
executing the operation were requested
by the Haganah, in response to changes
unfolding in the political situation.
The plan was finalized between Amichai
Paglin, Chief of Operations of the
Irgun, and Itzhak Sadeh, commander of
the Palmach.
In the plan, Irgun men, disguised as
Arabs, except for Gideon, the leader,
who would be dressed as one of the
hotel's distinctive Sudanese waiters,
would enter the building through a
basement service entrance carrying the
explosives concealed in milk cans. The
cans were to be placed by the main
columns supporting the wing where the
majority of the offices used by the
British authorities were located. The
columns were in a basement nightclub
known as the Régence. In the final
review of the plan, it was decided that
the attack would take place on July 22
at 11:00, a time when there would be no
people in the coffee shop in the
basement in the area where the bomb was
to be planted. It would be possible to
enter the hotel more easily at that time
as well.
It would have been impossible to have
planted the bomb in the Régence any
later than 14:00 because it was always
full of customers after that time. The
timing was also determined by the
original intention that the attack
should coincide with another, carried
out by the Lehi, on government offices
at the David Brothers Building. However,
that attack, codenamed "Operation Your
Slave and Redeemer", was canceled at the
last moment. The Irgun said details of
the plan were aimed at minimizing
civilian casualties. Irgun reports
allegedly included explicit precautions
so that the whole area would be
evacuated. This led to recriminations
between the Haganah and Irgun later. The
Haganah said that they had specified
that the attack should take place later
in the day, when the offices would have
been emptier of people.
= Warnings=
Since the bombing, much controversy has
ensued over the issues of when warnings
were sent and how the British
authorities responded. Irgun
representatives have always stated that
the warning was given well in advance of
the explosion, so that adequate time was
available to evacuate the hotel.
Menachem Begin, for example, writes that
the telephone message was delivered
25–27 minutes before the explosion. It
is often stated that the British
authorities have always denied that a
warning was sent. However, what the
British Government said, five months
after the bombing, once the subsequent
inquest and all the inquiries had been
completed, was not that no warning had
been sent, but that no such warning had
been received by anyone at the
Secretariat "in an official position
with any power to take action."
American author Thurston Clarke's
analysis of the bombing gave timings for
calls and for the explosion, which he
said took place at 12:37. He stated that
as part of the Irgun plan, a
sixteen-year-old recruit, Adina Hay, was
to make three warning calls before the
attack. At 12:22 the first call was
made, in both Hebrew and English, to a
telephone operator on the hotel's
switchboard. It was ignored. At 12:27,
the second warning call was made to the
French Consulate adjacent to the hotel
to the north-east. This second call was
taken seriously, and staff went through
the building opening windows and closing
curtains to lessen the impact of the
blast. At 12:31 a third and final
warning call to the Palestine Post
newspaper was made. The telephone
operator called the Palestine Police CID
to report the message. She then called
the hotel switchboard. The hotel
operator reported the threat to one of
the hotel managers. This warning
resulted in the discovery of the milk
cans in the basement, but by then it was
too late.
Begin claimed in his memoirs that the
British had deliberately not evacuated
so that they could vilify the Jewish
militant groups.
= Leaks and rumours=
Shortly after noon Palestine time, the
London UPI bureau received a short
message stating that 'Jewish terrorists
have just blown up the King David
Hotel!'. The UPI stringer who had sent
it, an Irgun member, had wanted to scoop
his colleagues. Not knowing that the
operation had been postponed by an hour,
he sent the message before the operation
had been completed. The bureau chief
decided against running the story until
more details and further confirmation
had been obtained. There were other
leaks.
Execution
The perpetrators met at 7 am at the Beit
Aharon Talmud Torah. This was the first
time they were informed of the target.
The attack used approximately 350 kg of
explosives spread over six charges.
According to Begin, due to
"consultations" about the cancellation
of the attack on the David Brothers
Building, the operation was delayed and
started at about 12:00, an hour later
than planned.
After placing the bombs in the La
Regence Cafe, the Irgun men quickly
slipped out and detonated a small
explosive in the street outside the
hotel, reportedly to keep passers-by
away from the area. The police report
written in the aftermath of the bombing
says that this explosion resulted in a
higher death toll because it caused
spectators from the hotel to gather in
its south-west corner, directly over the
bomb planted in its basement. The first
explosion also caused the presence in
the hotel of injured Arabs who were
brought into the Secretariat after their
bus, which had been passing, was rolled
onto its side. The Arab workers in the
kitchen fled after being told to do so.
During the attack, two Irgun casualties
occurred, Avraham Abramovitz and Itzhak
Tsadok. In one Irgun account of the
bombing, by Katz, the two were shot
during the initial approach on the
hotel, when a minor gunfight ensued with
two British soldiers who had become
suspicious. The Irgun did not explain
how the group would have been able to
move 350 kg of home-made explosives into
the hotel with the guards already
alerted. In Yehuda Lapidot's account,
the men were shot as they were
withdrawing after the attack. The latter
agrees with the version of events
presented by Bethell and Thurston Clarke
and is more credible. According to
Bethell, Abramovitz managed to get to
the taxi getaway car along with six
other men. Tsadok escaped with the other
men on foot. Both were found by the
police in the Jewish Old Quarter of
Jerusalem the next day, with Abramovitz
already dead from his wounds.
Explosion and aftermath
The explosion occurred at 12:37. It
caused the collapse of the western half
of the southern wing of the hotel. Soon
after the explosion, rescuers from the
Royal Engineers arrived with heavy
lifting equipment. Later that night, the
sappers were formed into three groups,
with each working an eight hour shift.
The rescue operation lasted for the next
three days and 2,000 lorry loads of
rubble were removed. From the wreckage
and rubble the rescuers managed to
extract six survivors. The last to be
found alive was Assistant Secretary
Downing C. Thompson, 31 hours after the
explosion, but he died just over a week
later.
91 people were killed, most of them
being staff of the hotel or Secretariat:
21 were first-rank government officials;
49 were second-rank clerks, typists and
messengers, junior members of the
Secretariat, employees of the hotel and
canteen workers; 13 were soldiers; 3
policemen; and 5 were members of the
public. By nationality, there were 41
Arabs, 28 British citizens, 17
Palestinian Jews, 2 Armenians, 1
Russian, 1 Greek and 1 Egyptian. 46
people were injured. Some of the deaths
and injuries occurred in the road
outside the hotel and in adjacent
buildings. No identifiable traces were
found of thirteen of those killed. Among
the dead were Yulius Jacobs, an Irgun
sympathizer, and Edward Sperling, a
Zionist writer and government official.
Reactions
= British reactions=
The bombing inflamed public opinion in
Britain. After the bombing, editorials
in British newspapers argued that the
bombing deflated statements by the
government that it had been winning
against the Jewish paramilitaries. The
Manchester Guardian argued that "British
firmness" inside Palestine had brought
about more terrorism and worsened the
situation in the country, the opposite
effect that the government had intended.
Speaker after speaker in the House of
Commons expressed outrage. Ex-Prime
Minister Winston Churchill, a prominent
and enthusiastic supporter of Zionism,
criticized the attack. He also related
the bombing to the problems within the
Mandate system, and he advocated
allowing further Jewish immigration into
Palestine. Chief Secretary for the
Government of Palestine, Sir John Shaw,
noted that the majority of the dead had
been members of his own personal staff.
He said, "British, Arabs, Jews, Greeks,
Armenians; senior officers, police, my
orderly, my chauffeur, messengers,
guards, men and women—young and old—they
were my friends."
British Prime Minister Clement Attlee
commented in the House of Commons:
"Hon. Members will have learned with
horror of the brutal and murderous crime
committed yesterday in Jerusalem. Of all
the outrages which have occurred in
Palestine, and they have been many and
horrible in the last few months, this is
the worst. By this insane act of
terrorism 93 innocent people have been
killed or are missing in the ruins. The
latest figures of casualties are 41
dead, 52 missing and 53 injured. I have
no further information at present beyond
what is contained in the following
official report received from
Jerusalem:"
"It appears that after exploding a small
bomb in the street, presumably as a
diversionary measure—this did virtually
no damage—a lorry drove up to the
tradesmen's entrance of the King David
Hotel and the occupants, after holding
up the staff at pistol point, entered
the kitchen premises carrying a number
of milk cans. At some stage of the
proceedings, they shot and seriously
wounded a British soldier who attempted
to interfere with them. All available
information so far is to the effect that
they were Jews. Somewhere in the
basement of the hotel they planted bombs
which went off shortly afterwards. They
appear to have made good their escape."
"Every effort is being made to identify
and arrest the perpetrators of this
outrage. The work of rescue in the
debris, which was immediately organised,
still continues. The next-of-kin of
casualties are being notified by
telegram as soon as accurate information
is available. The House will wish to
express their profound sympathy with the
relatives of the killed and with those
injured in this dastardly outrage."
In a visit made sometime before the
attack, Bernard Montgomery had told the
British army commander in Palestine,
General Sir Evelyn Barker, to emphasise
to the British servicemen that they were
"facing a cruel, fanatical and cunning
enemy, and there was no way of knowing
who was friend and who foe." Since there
were female terrorists as well,
according to Montgomery, all
fraternising with the local population
would have to cease. Within a few
minutes of the bombing, Barker
translated this instruction into an
order that "all Jewish places of
entertainment, cafes, restaurants, shops
and private dwellings" be out of bounds
to all ranks. He concluded, "I
appreciate that these measures will
inflict some hardship on the troops, but
I am certain that if my reasons are
fully explained to them, they will
understand their propriety and they will
be punishing the Jews in the way the
race dislikes as much as any by striking
at their pockets and showing our
contempt for them." His wording was
interpreted as antisemitic and caused
much outrage. The order was rescinded
two weeks later.
The attack did not change Britain's
stance toward an Anglo-American
agreement on Palestine, which was then
in its concluding phase. In a letter
dated July 25, 1946, Prime Minister
Attlee wrote to American President Harry
S. Truman: "I am sure you will agree
that the inhuman crime committed in
Jerusalem on 22 July calls for the
strongest action against terrorism but
having regard to the sufferings of the
innocent Jewish victims of Nazism this
should not deter us from introducing a
policy designed to bring peace to
Palestine with the least possible
delay."
= Israeli and Zionist reactions=
The Jewish political leadership publicly
condemned the attack. The Jewish Agency
expressed "their feelings of horror at
the base and unparalleled act
perpetrated today by a gang of
criminals", despite the fact that the
Irgun was acting in response to the
Jewish Resistance Movement, an
organisation governed by the Jewish
Agency. The Jewish National Council
denounced the bombing. According to The
Jerusalem Post, "although the Hagana had
sanctioned the King David bombing,
world-wide condemnation caused the
organization to distance itself from the
attack." David Ben-Gurion deemed the
Irgun "the enemy of the Jewish people"
after the attack. Hatsofeh, a Jewish
newspaper in Palestine, labelled the
Irgun perpetrators "fascists".
The Irgun issued an initial statement
accepting responsibility for the attack,
mourning their Jewish victims, and
calling into fault the British for what
they saw as a failure to respond to the
warnings. A year later, on July 22,
1947, they issued a new statement saying
that they were acting on instructions
from "a letter from the headquarters of
the United Resistance, demanding that we
carry out an attack on the center of
government at the King David Hotel as
soon as possible." The Irgun's radio
network announced that it would mourn
for the Jewish victims, but not the
British ones. This was explained by
claiming that Britain had not mourned
for the millions of Jews who died in the
Nazi Holocaust. No remorse was expressed
for the largest group of victims, the
Arab dead.
Richard Crossman, a British Labour Party
MP, whose experience on the
Anglo-American Committee had made him
sympathetic to Zionism, visited Chaim
Weizmann shortly after the attack.
Weizmann's ambivalence towards Zionist
violence was apparent in the
conversation. While condemning it, he
also stated that he sympathised with its
causes. When the King David Hotel
bombing was mentioned, Weizmann started
crying heavily. He said, "I can't help
feeling proud of our boys. If only it
had been a German headquarters, they
would have gotten the Victoria Cross."
Sir John Shaw controversy
At the time of the explosion, Chief
Secretary, Sir John Shaw was in his
office, which was in the eastern half of
the south wing, rather than the
destroyed western half. Jewish militant
organisations sought to shift the blame
to Shaw for the deaths.
Begin said that Shaw had been
responsible for the failure to evacuate
the hotel: "A police officer called Shaw
and told him, 'The Jews say that they
have placed bombs in the King David.'
And the reply was, 'I am here to give
orders to the Jews, not to take orders
from them.'" The 1947 Irgun pamphlet
Black Paper said that Shaw had forbidden
anyone to leave the hotel: "For reasons
best known to himself Shaw, the Chief
Secretary of the Occupation
administration, disregarded the warning.
That is, he forbade any of the other
officials to leave the building, with
the result that some of his
collaborators were killed, while he
himself slunk away until after the
explosion. … Shaw thus sent nearly 100
people to their deaths—including
Hebrews, including friends of our
struggle." Begin said that he had heard
the information about Shaw from Israel
Galili, Chief of Staff of Haganah, when
they met on July 23, the day after the
bombing. In an interview with Bethell,
Galili said that his source for the Shaw
story had been Boris Guriel, the future
head of Israel's intelligence service,
who had heard it in turn from the
American Associated Press bureau chief
Carter Davidson. Thurston Clarke
interviewed both Galili and Guriel, the
former in 1977. Guriel denied that he
had been the source of the story. Galili
was unable to produce any evidence that
Shaw had received a warning. Carter
Davidson died in 1958 and so could not
be asked to confirm or deny what Galili
had said. Clarke's assessment was that
the story about Shaw was, in fact, "a
baseless rumour promoted by the Haganah
in order to mollify the Irgun and fix
responsibility for the carnage on Shaw."
Shmuel Katz, who had been a member of
the Irgun's high command, later also
wrote that "the story can be dismissed."
In 1948, a libel action was taken out by
Shaw against a Jewish London newspaper
which repeated the allegations made by
Begin and the Irgun pamphlet. The
newspaper did not mount a defence and
made an unreserved apology to Shaw.
About the allegation that he had said
that he did not take orders from Jews,
Shaw said: "I would never have made a
statement like that and I don't think
that anyone who knows me would regard it
as in character. I would never have
referred to the Jews in that way".
Also in 1948, William Ziff, an American
author, wrote a book called The Rape of
Palestine which contained an embellished
version of Galili's story, similar to
the one given in the Black Paper
pamphlet. It said that Shaw had escaped
from the hotel minutes before the main
explosion, abandoning its other
occupants to their fate. Shaw took out
another libel action. After lawyers in
Israel failed to find evidence
supporting Ziff's version of events, the
book's publishers withdrew it from
circulation and apologised to Shaw.
Bethell says that all of the British
witnesses who were in the vicinity of
the hotel at the time of the explosion
confirmed what Shaw said. None of them
had any knowledge of a warning having
been sent in time to make evacuation of
the hotel possible. They said that, like
themselves, Shaw had not known about the
bomb beforehand and that he bore no
responsibility for putting colleagues'
lives at risk immediately before the
explosion. The only criticism made was
that Shaw should have closed the Régence
restaurant and put guards on the service
entrance weeks before. Shaw agreed that
not having done this was a mistake. The
decision not to do it had been made
because "everyone was under orders to
preserve the semblance of normality in
Palestine", "social life had to be
allowed to continue" and because nobody
had believed that the Irgun would put
the whole of the Secretariat, which had
many Jewish employees, in danger.
Two months after the bombing, Shaw was
appointed High Commissioner of Trinidad
and Tobago. The Irgun immediately sent a
letter bomb to him there, but it was
intercepted and successfully disarmed.
Legacy and later reports
= In Israeli history=
The attack ramped up the conflict
between Jewish miliants and the Mandate
government to a much higher level. Early
on July 30, 1946, in order to capture
wanted underground members, 'Operation
Shark' was mounted in Tel-Aviv. Four
army brigades, about twenty thousand
soldiers and police, established a
cordon round the city. A historian later
described the situation as looking for a
few needles of militants in a haystack
170,000 people deep. Nearly eight
hundred people were detained and then
sent to Rafah detention camp.
The attack led the British government to
enact widely unpopular restrictions on
the civil liberties of Jews in
Palestine, which included a renewed use
of random personal searches, random
searches of homes, military curfews,
road blocks, and mass arrests. The
measures shifted British public opinion
further against the Mandate system. They
also alienated the Jewish populace from
their government, which had been Begin's
intention from the beginning.
The Irgun and Lehi stepped up their
campaign after the bombing, committing a
series of attacks. According to The
Jerusalem Post, the bombing represented
the end of the united front that had
existed between the Irgun and other
Zionist groups such as the Haganah. From
then on, the groups maintained a more
adversarial relationship. Irgun
ex-members and sympathizers have argued
that modern historical accounts in
Israel are biased against them and in
favor of more established groups such as
the Haganah.
After the bombing, the hotel complex
remained in use by the British until May
4, 1948. It served as an Israeli
headquarters from the end of the Israeli
War of Independence to the Six-Day War.
Then, the Israelis reopened the hotel
for commercial business. Recently, it
has hosted visiting dignitaries and
celebrities.
= Army and police reports=
Various British government papers
relating to the bombing were released
under the thirty year rule in 1978,
including the results of the military
and police investigations. The reports
contain statements and conclusions which
are contradicted by other evidence,
including that submitted to the inquest
held after the bombing. Affidavits which
reflected badly on the security of the
hotel were removed from the army report
before it was submitted to the High
Commissioner and then the Cabinet in
London. The police report makes the
claim that the warning sent to the
French Consulate was received five
minutes after the main explosion. This
is contradicted by multiple eyewitnesses
who reported seeing staff opening the
Consulate windows five minutes before
it. The report also claims that the
warning received by the Palestine Post
was not received until after the
explosion. That claim is supported in
the report by the testimony of two
members of the Palestine Post staff, one
of whom said that she was put under
pressure by the Palestine Police to
withdraw statements she had made in her
account.
= Terrorism=
The bombing has been discussed in
literature about the practice and
history of terrorism. It has been called
one of the most lethal terrorist attacks
of the 20th century.
Security analyst Bruce Hoffman wrote of
the bombing in his book Inside Terrorism
that: "Unlike many terrorist groups
today, the Irgun's strategy was not
deliberately to target or wantonly harm
civilians. At the same time, though, the
claim of Begin and other apologists that
warnings were issued cannot absolve
either the group or its commander for
the ninety-one people killed and
forty-five others injured ... Indeed,
whatever nonlethal intentions the Irgun
might or might not have had, the fact
remains that a tragedy of almost
unparalleled magnitude was inflicted ...
so that to this day the bombing remains
one of the world's single most lethal
terrorist incidents of the twentieth
century."
A 2006 Cambridge University Press book
on political terrorism theorized that it
provided a model for the terrorist
bombings of the 1980s. Understanding
Terrorism: Challenges, Perspectives, and
Issues called the attack one of the best
historical examples of successful
terrorism and that it produced
everything that the Irgun had wanted.
The author compared the bombing
aftermath to that of Carlos Marighella's
campaign with the Brazilian Communist
Party.
The Irgun's activities were recognized
as terrorism by MI5. The Irgun has been
viewed as a terrorist organization or
organization which carried out terrorist
acts. In particular the Irgun was
branded a terrorist organisation by
Britain, the 1946 Zionist Congress and
the Jewish Agency. Begin argued that
terrorists and freedom fighters are
differentiated in that terrorists
deliberately try to target civilians,
and that the Irgun was not guilty of
terrorism since it supposedly tried to
avoid civilian casualties. At the events
to mark the 60th anniversary of the
attack, Benjamin Netanyahu, then
chairman of Likud and Leader of the
Opposition in the Knesset, opined that
the bombing was a legitimate act with a
military target, distinguishing it from
an act of terror intended to harm
civilians. He said, "Imagine that Hamas
or Hizbullah would call the military
headquarters in Tel Aviv and say, 'We
have placed a bomb and we are asking you
to evacuate the area.' They don't do
that. That is the difference."
= 60th anniversary controversy=
In July 2006, the Menachem Begin
Heritage Center organized a conference
to mark the 60th anniversary of the
bombing. The conference was attended by
past and future Prime Minister Benjamin
Netanyahu and former members of Irgun. A
plaque commemorating the bombing was
unveiled, stating "For reasons known
only to the British, the hotel was not
evacuated." The British Ambassador in
Tel Aviv and the Consul-General in
Jerusalem protested, saying "We do not
think that it is right for an act of
terrorism, which led to the loss of many
lives, to be commemorated", and wrote to
the Mayor of Jerusalem that such an act
of terror could not be honoured, even if
it was preceded by a warning. The
British government also demanded the
removal of the plaque, pointing out that
the statement accusing the British of
failing to evacuate the hotel was untrue
and "did not absolve those who planted
the bomb."
To prevent a diplomatic incident, and
over the objections of Knesset member
Reuven Rivlin, who raised the matter in
the Knesset, changes were made in the
plaque's text, though to a greater
degree in the English than the Hebrew
version. The final English version says,
"Warning phone calls has  [sic] been
made to the hotel, The Palestine Post
and the French Consulate, urging the
hotel's occupants to leave immediately.
The hotel was not evacuated and after 25
minutes the bombs exploded. To the
Irgun's regret, 92 persons were killed."
The death toll given includes Avraham
Abramovitz, the Irgun member who was
shot during the attack and died later
from his wounds, but only the Hebrew
version of the sign makes that clear.
See also
List of Irgun members
List of Irgun attacks
Zionist political violence
Violence in the Israeli–Palestinian
conflict
Further reading
Thurston Clarke, By Blood and Fire, G.
P. Puttnam's Sons, New York, 1981
Menachem Begin, The Revolt, W. H. Allen,
London, First edition 1951, Revised
edition 1979. Nash, Los Angeles, 1972.
Dell, New York, 1978.
J. Bowyer Bell, Terror Out of Zion: The
Fight for Israeli Independence,
Transaction Publishers, 1996
Nicholas Bethell, The Palestine
Triangle, Andre Deutsch, London, 1979.
G. P. Puttnam's Sons, New York, 1979.
The Palestine Post, Jerusalem: the
newspaper reported on the inquest into
the bombing throughout September 1946.
The final findings of the inquest into
the bombing: a copy is held by the State
of Israel Archives, Jerusalem.
Michael Quentin Morton, In the Heart of
the Desert, Green Mountain Press, 2006,
pp. 32–4, for an eye-witness account of
the immediate aftermath of the bombing
by a geologist working for the Iraq
Petroleum Company.
In media
Exodus, Hollywood film with Paul Newman,
directed by Otto Preminger
The Promise, a British television serial
in four episodes written and directed by
Peter Kosminsky
In the Name of Liberation: Freedom by
Any Means, one of the documentaries from
the series The Age of Terror: A Survey
of modern terrorism produced by Films
Media Group
Early Israeli Terrorism, a BBC
documentary
Footage of the bombed hotel collapsing
opens episode 2 of Foyle's War series
eight
"Last Night We Attacked: A Photographic
Record of Fighting Resistance in
Palestine", 35 mm film prepared by the
American League for a Free Palestine,
edited by Elizabeth Wheeler, written by
Larry Ravitz, narrated by Quentin
Reynolds & Bill Parker, copyright 2010
NCJF.
Endnotes
References
External links
Attack on the King David Hotel - an
account of the bombing, written by
Professor Yehuda Lapidot, an ex-Irgun
member. The first copy of the account is
on a website dedicated to recounting the
history of the Irgun. The second is on a
site carrying a translation of Lapidot's
book, Besieged - Jerusalem 1948 -
Memories of an Irgun fighter.
The Outrage - an account of the bombing
on a website set up by ex-British
servicemen, whose purpose was to detail
largely forgotten campaigns fought by
the British since the end of the Second
World War.
International Terrorism Since 1945 - The
King David Hotel bombing features in the
first episode of a 2008 BBC series which
investigates the motives, morals and
methods of some of what the BBC
describes as the most infamous terrorist
attacks of recent times.
UK national archives, Mi5 files of
Jewish Interest. Includes intelligence
about the activities of the Irgun.
