Earlier Intentions To Attack The Ship and IDF Disobedience
According to Shlomo Nakdimon's book, "Altalena", Ben-Gurion instructed the Israeli Air Force to sink the ship on the high sea, long before it approached Israeli shores. This would have resulted in much greater loss of life aboard. Gordon Levett, a Mahal volunteer pilot, wrote in his book Flying Under Two Flags that Heiman Shamir, Deputy Commander of the Air Force, tried to convince non-Jewish pilot volunteers to attack the ship. However, three pilots refused to participate in the mission, one of them saying, "You can kiss my foot. I did not lose four friends and fly 10,000 miles in order to bomb Jews."
The option of an aerial strike against the ship was then scratched, and the IDF opted to use Artillery. The first gunner ordered to fire on the ship, Yosef Aksen, refused, saying he was willing to be executed for insubordination and this would be "the best thing he did in his life." The next gunner, Hillel Dalesky, at first protested, but then relented and fired on the ship, igniting it.
Read more about this topic: Altalena Affair
Famous quotes containing the words earlier, intentions, attack, ship and/or disobedience:
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—Philip Larkin (1922–1986)
“A man sees only what concerns him.... How much more, then, it requires different intentions of the eye and of the mind to attend to different departments of knowledge! How differently the poet and the naturalist look at objects!”
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—Alice Foote MacDougall (1867–1945)
“It is said that a carpenter building a summer hotel here ... declared that one very clear day he picked out a ship coming into Portland Harbor and could distinctly see that its cargo was West Indian rum. A county historian avers that it was probably an optical delusion, the result of looking so often through a glass in common use in those days.”
—For the State of New Hampshire, U.S. public relief program (1935-1943)
“Disobedience, in the eyes of any one who has read history, is man’s original virtue. It is through disobedience that progress has been made, through disobedience and through rebellion.”
—Oscar Wilde (1854–1900)