The Prime Ministers: An Intimate Narrative of Israeli Leadership by Yehuda Avner Read Free Book Online

Hackett, Inspector of Prisons, and Clow, superintendent of the Nablus jail.
At dawn we informed the prison officers through an Arab warder that we would not be responsible for the life of any Englishman who dared enter the jail yard. We declared a fast and prayed. Later in the morning we found the following inscription on the wall of the cell of the condemned: “They will not frighten the Hebrew youth in the Homeland with their hangings. Thousands will follow in our footsteps.” Next to it was the Irgun insignia and their three names in the order they were executed.
    News of the execution quickly seeped out, the whole country was put under curfew, and Menachem Begin made good on his threat – gallows for gallows. Sergeants Martin and Paice were summarily tried and duly hung, and it was the following day, that I, a Manchester school lad, had shivered at the sight of the blood-red graffiti on the synagogue wall, “HANG THE JEW TERRORIST BEGIN.”
    The grisly images of their bodies swinging from eucalyptus trees in a Netanya grove filled the front pages of British newspapers, and the public outcry was huge. But Begin remained undaunted. “Flogging for flogging, hanging for hanging, until all capital punishment ceases,” he raged on a poster plastered on the walls of every Jewish quarter in Palestine in the dead of night. This measure for measure reprisal ultimately worked. Whitehall, humiliated into submission, quietly ordered a stop to capital punishment, a surrender which only served to deepen the frustration of an already demoralized Britain which, by 1947, was no longer great.
    Exhausted and bankrupted by World War ii , its influence on world affairs was essentially ended. Unemployment was high, austerity was everywhere, and everything was rationed. Pubs closed early for lack of beer. And on that particular oppressive August day in 1947 after the sergeants had been hung, the pub regulars, with nothing else to do, sat around feeding each other’s rage at the gruesome news. It didn’t take much for someone here and for someone there to spread the thought that it was time to show the Jews what real Englishmen thought of them. By late afternoon a mob had formed up and moved on Cheetham Hill Road, the heart of the Manchester Jewish ghetto.
    Yelling “Yids go back to Palestine,” “Beat up the Jews,” “Down with the Sheenies,” “Kick the kikes,” and all sorts of other jingoistic slogans, the rioters flung stones and bricks at Jewish shop windows, homes, synagogues, and social halls. In one, a Jewish wedding was being celebrated, and like the men of Sodom at the door of Lot, the rabble pounded savagely on the hall’s doors, which the terrified celebrants inside were trying to block. Saved in the nick of time by the arrival of the police, the horde was broken up temporarily but quickly regrouped to surround the place, howling and hurling threats and abuse and muck through its open windows.
    Later that evening, the mob massed again, but this time they were met by a phalanx of vigilante Jewish ex-servicemen. The police, under orders to act firmly, broke up the scuffles, and by the end of the melee Cheetham Hill Road looked as it had a few years before, when it had borne the blast of German bombs. As far as the eye could see, broken glass littered the sidewalks, and shiftless thugs hung about nursing bruises amid wreckage of their own doing.
    The next day, in school, I was accosted in class by a bully of a fellow whose father was serving with the British Police Force in Palestine. He had me pinned to the floor and was about to punch me in the nose when in walked our geography teacher, a fellow called Hogden, who bellowed, “Haffner” – that was my original family name – “what’s going on?”
    Pudgy, with a florid face and side-whiskers, and with a tendency to doze off after setting us an exam, Hogden automatically picked on me not only because I was a Jew but, equally, because I was not of the Church of