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:
“Fair Hope! our earlier Heaven! by thee
Young Time is taster to Eternity.
The generous wine with age grows strong, not sour,
Nor need we kill thy fruit to smell thy flower.
Thy golden head never hangs down
Till in the lap of Love’s full noon
It falls and dies: Oh no, it melts away
As doth the dawn into the day,
As lumps of sugar lose themselves, and twine
Their subtle essence with the soul of wine.”
—Abraham Cowley (1618–1667)
“If my intentions were not to be read in my eyes and voice, I should not have survived so long without quarrels and without harm, seeing the indiscreet freedom with which I say, right or wrong, whatever comes into my head.”
—Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592)
“One’s condition on marijuana is always existential. One can feel the importance of each moment and how it is changing one. One feels one’s being, one becomes aware of the enormous apparatus of nothingness—the hum of a hi-fi set, the emptiness of a pointless interruption, one becomes aware of the war between each of us, how the nothingness in each of us seeks to attack the being of others, how our being in turn is attacked by the nothingness in others.”
—Norman Mailer (b. 1923)
“Thou, too, sail on, O Ship of State!
Sail on, O Union, strong and great!
Humanity with all its fears,
With all the hopes of future years,
Is hanging breathless on thy fate!”
—Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807–1882)
“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)