The Sergeants Affair - Background

Background

In the late 1940s, as the third decade of British Mandate was drawing to a close, many within and outside of Britain were calling to end the Mandate. They were led by opposition leader Winston Churchill, who denounced Britain's costly occupation of Palestine for no economic benefit.

Trying to maintain control and civil order as required under the Mandate, the British enacted the Defence Emergency Regulations in September 1945. These regulations suspended Habeas Corpus and established military courts. They prescribed the death penalty for various offences, including carrying weapons or ammunition illegally and membership in an organization whose members commit these offenses.

The British authorities began applying the death penalty under these regulations, specifically against those who participated in actions that undermined their authority (see below). While the first member of a Jewish underground group, Shlomo Ben-Yosef, was executed in 1938 for his part in an unsuccessful shooting attack on Arab civilians who were traveling on a bus, no further executions of Jews for politically motivated violence were held in Palestine until the late 1940s. The sentences affected the dissident extremist groups Irgun and Lehi, who were carrying out militant attacks largely in protest at the British refusal to allow unrestricted Jewish immigration to Palestine. Following unrest in the 1930s caused mainly by the rapid demographic change resulting from unrestricted immigration, in 1939 the Mandate authorities imposed a limit of 75,000 immigrants for the period 1940-1945; this was violently opposed by Revisionist Zionists such as Irgun, who believed that all Jews had a right to travel to Palestine irrespective of where they were born.

During one of the Jewish Resistance Movement attacks, Irgun militants Michael Eshbal and Yosef Simchon were arrested and sentenced to death on June 13, 1946. There were many pleas and petitions for clemency by various institutes and Jewish leaders, which were not effective. Irgun decided to threaten to carry out its own "gallows regime", declaring a policy of reprisal killings. Five days later, Irgun kidnapped five British officers in Tel Aviv, and another one the following day in Jerusalem. Two weeks later, perhaps due to the kidnappings, Eshbal and Simchon's sentences were commuted to life imprisonment. The officers were released the next day.

In January 1947 another Irgun militant, Dov Gruner, was sentenced to death for shooting and placing explosives with intent to kill during an Irgun raid on a Palestine Police Force station in Ramat Gan in April 1946. On January 26, two days before Gruner's scheduled execution, Irgun kidnapped a British intelligence officer in Jerusalem. The next day, on January 27, Irgun men also kidnapped the British President of the District Court of Tel Aviv. Sixteen hours before the scheduled execution the British forces commander announced an "indefinite delay" of the sentence, and Irgun released its hostages.

Meanwhile in Britain, Churchill, now the leader of the Opposition, demanded a special meeting on the subject, and on January 31, a four hour discussion in the British Parliament took place, with Churchill demanding the suppression of the "terrorists in Palestine".

On April 16, 1947, Gruner and three other Irgun militants, Yehiel Dresner, Mordechai Alkahi and Eliezer Kashani, who were caught during the Night of the Beatings, were executed. Five days later two other prisoners, Meir Feinstein of Irgun and Moshe Barazani of Lehi, were scheduled to be hanged for, respectively, a murder committed during the IED attack on the Jerusalem railway station and the attempted murder of a senior British officer. However, a few hours before they were due to be executed they committed suicide using IEDs smuggled to them by their colleagues.

May 4, 1947 saw the Acre Prison break: Forty-one prisoners were released, albeit six of them were killed and seven others were rearrested. Among the perpetrators of the prison break, three were killed and five were arrested. Those arrested included Avshalom Haviv, Yaakov Weiss and Meir Nakar. All of the arrested Irgun militants refused to accept British judicial authority. However they were tried by a military court and three of the five—those named above—were sentenced to death.

In an attempt to forestall the likely death sentences, the Irgun kidnapped two British military policemen, a sergeant and a private, at a swimming pool in Ramat Gan on June 9. However, the attempt to use them as hostages failed, as 19 hours later British troops aided by the Haganah found the hiding place and rescued them. Two days later the three Irgun militants were sentenced to death. All that was needed for the sentences to be carried out was approval from the Commander in Chief. Irgun resumed, with increased urgency, its kidnapping attempts. Several attempts were thwarted.

On July 8, three weeks after the sentences were passed, they were confirmed by the commander. Meanwhile, UNSCOP (the United Nations committee which was asked to recommend the future government of Palestine) visited the region and an appeal was made to the committee to intervene on the convicted men's behalf. Due to the concurrent visit of UNSCOP the executions were postponed. This delay, intended not to anger the committee, gave the Irgun extra time to accomplish the kidnapping of hostages.