History of the Jews

by Paul Johnson

further episode, for which Begin was again responsible, proved decisive. He was opposed to Sternist-type assassinations but he insisted on Irgun’s moral right to punish members of the British armed forces in the same way as Britain punished Irgun members. The British hanged and flogged. Irgun would do the same. In April 1947 three Irgun men were put on trial for an attack on the Acre prison-fortress, which freed 251 prisoners. Begin threatened retaliation if the three were convicted and hanged. They were, on 29 July. A few hours later two British sergeants, Clifford Martin and Mervyn Paice, who had been captured for this purpose, were hanged on Begin’s instructions by Irgun’s operations chief, Gidi Paglin. He also mined their bodies. This gruesome murder of Martin and Paice, who had committed no crime, horrified many Jews. The Jewish Agency called it ‘the dastardly murder of two innocent men by a set of criminals’.12 (It was even worse than it seemed at the time, for it emerged thirty-five years later that Martin had a Jewish mother.) It caused unrestrained fury in Britain. A synagogue was burned down in Derby. There were anti-Jewish riots in London, Liverpool, Glasgow and Manchester–the first in England since the thirteenth century. These in turn produced critical changes in British policy. The British had assumed that any partition would have to be supervised and enforced by them; otherwise the armies of the Arab states would simply move in and exterminate the Jews. Now ...