| Black Sunday | |
|---|---|
| Location | Jaffa and Jerusalem, Palestine |
| Date | 11–14 November 1937 |
| Target |  Palestinian Arabs |
Attack type | Mass shooting |
| Deaths | 10 |
| Injured | 13+ |
| Perpetrators |  Irgun |
Black Sunday, 1937 refers to a series of acts undertaken by Jewish militants of the Irgun faction against Arab civilians on 14 November 1937. It was among the first challenges to the Havlagah (lit. restraint) policy not to retaliate against Arab attacks on Jewish civilians.
In 1936, Palestinian Arabs launched a revolt that was to last three years against British colonial rule. At first the revolt consisted of a general strike but later became more violent, attacking British forces and also including terror attacks against Jews. [1] In the preceding year Jewish immigration, blocked in the United States and many European countries had risen to 66,672 over the 4,075 in 1931. [2] In July 1937, the Peel Commission proposed a partition of Palestine, and recommended a population transfer of 225,000 Arabs out of the designated future Jewish territory and a smaller number of Jews out of the designated future Arab territory. [3] The Zionist Organization was strongly divided on the proposal, but historians consider them to have either "accepted" or "not rejected outright" the principle of partition, while rejecting the specific borders suggested by the Peel Commission and empowering the executive to continue negotiating with the British. [4] [5] [6] [7] [8] [9] The Arab Higher Committee rejected the plan outright, as did the Revisonist Zionists. [7] Soon after, a hated district commissioner, Lewis Yelland Andrews, known for his repressive measures was assassinated by militant followers of Izz ad-Din al-Qassam outside an Anglican church. [3] [10]
The mainstream Zionist approach to the insurgency, set forth by David Ben-Gurion, was to avoid reprisal and rather prioritize the strengthening of defenses in Jewish areas, a policy of Havlagah (lit. Restraint). Notrim and Jewish supernumeraries had however been active after having been recruited by the British army to help repress the Arab revolt. [11] A militant form of Zionism, constituting a paramilitary organization calling itself Irgun soon broke ranks with the Haganah over the issue of restraint. It was dominated by activists who had originally identified with Ze'ev Jabotinsky’s Betar movement, which had been founded in 1923, and eventually evolved into the core of Zionist Revisionism. Jabotinsky himself initially advised a diplomatic approach and held reservations about recourse to measures of retaliation. The Irgun, adopted a policy change from passive defense to active aggression, and considered terrorism against Palestinians a form of deterrence against Arab attacks. The active defense tactic adopted consisted of 4 kinds of assault: (a) assassinations (b) shooting fellahin or urban Arabs (c) ambushes of transport vehicles carrying Arabs and (d) outright terrorist assaults on densely populated Arab areas [12] Some of these practices were not new: on 20 April 1936, 2 Palestinians had been murdered while tending a banana grove, and on 20 April, pedestrians in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem were subject to attacks where guns and hand-grenades were used. In March 1937 right-wing Zionists had thrown a bomb into a coffee house frequented by Arabs in Tel Aviv. Throughout the three years of the revolt, the revisionist group mounted some 60 acts of terrorism against Palestinian targets. [13] [14]
In July 1937, Jabotinsky met with Robert Bitker, Moshe Rosenberg and Avraham Stern, the future leader of Lehi, in Alexandria and underwrote, despite his personal reservations, the proposal to have recourse to retaliatory action. Jabotinsky posed only one condition to his assent, that he not be kept informed about too many details. [15] At this stage in the revolt, the Arab uprising had degenerated into, in Colin Shindler’s words, ‘internecine Arab violence and nihilist attacks on Jews.’ [15] Demand for retaliation within the Irgun heightened with the killing of Rabbi Eliezer Gerstein on 3 September while he was en route to pray at the Western Wall. From 29 October to 11 November, 21 attacks were made against British police and Jews, 5 with bombs, resulting in 11 murders, many of the dead being Jews. [16]
At this point the Irgun leader David Raziel authorized a programme of active rather than passive defense, consisting of bombing Arab coffee houses, in cities such as Haifa and Rosh Pinah, and attacks around Jerusalem, and on buses travelling between the cities of Tiberias and Safed, [14] in which Black Sunday marked the turning point. [7] Jaa’cov Eliav, the Irgun’s master bomb maker, was in charge of the operations generally that led to the November 14 attack, [17] David Raziel organized the attacks in Jerusalem.
The first attack had taken place on 11 November, when the Irgun murdered 2 Arabs at a Jaffa bus deposit, and wounded a further 5. [3] [11] [18] The second occurred early on the morning of 14 November. [19] Raziel had ordered multiple attacks to be undertaken almost simultaneously in order to hamper a coherent police response. At 7 am. 2 Arab pedestrians were shot on Aza Street in Rehavia, a neighbourhood in Jerusalem, by Joseph Kremin and Shlomo Trachtman. A half an hour later, another two were shot. In both cases, one of the victims survived. Some time later, Zvi Meltser armed an Irgun operative who then attacked an Arab bus, killing 3 passengers and wounding 8. [14] [20] By the end of November 14, 10 Arabs had been killed and many more wounded. [21]
The Irgun commemorated the incidents on 14 November as "the Day of the Breaking of the Havlagah". [11] They regarded the operation as a commemorative symbol evoking the revolt of Judas Maccabeus against the Seleucids. [14] Raziel himself said that the operation had wiped out the shame of the policy of restraint. [22]
The renewal of Arab violence in October 1937 led to changes in tactics by the Zionists. [11] Morris states that the numbers of Arabs killed in these indiscriminate attacks matched the number of Jews killed by Arabs in the 1929 and 1936 uprisings. [11] In July 1938 alone two such Irgun bombs planted in Haifa’s central market accounted for 74 Arab dead and 129 wounded, leading to a generalized cycle of reprisal between the two groups. [23]
There are several notable incidents associated the Jewish insurgency fueled by the Irgun attacks in the summer of 1938.
The British initially took no action against the Irgun itself, but rather arrested members of Jabotinsky’s group on suspicion they were connected to the incident. Jabotinsky distanced himself from the action adopted but later spoke of it as 'a spontaneous outbreak of the outraged feelings of the nation’s soul.' [14]
The British also enlisted 19,000 Jewish policemen to assist them in countering the insurgency, and eventually organized Special Night Squads. [2] The Irgun revolt effected a change in mainstream Jewish policy also. Despite official shock at these incidents, the tactic of a defensive response underwent reexamination, was found to be ineffective, with the result that the Haganah command began to set up field companies to engage in ambushes. Orde Wingate's night squads and Yitzhak Sadeh's mobile military units (plugot ha'Sadeh), established in December of that year, [14] also exercised an influence on the creation of such clandestine forces. Ben-Gurion in turn had one officer secretly establish pe'ulot meyudahot, or special operation squads specializing in retaliatory operations against Arab terrorists, villages thought to harbor them and, at times, against British units themselves. These squads operated at Ben-Gurion's discretion, and lay outside the official Haganah chain of command. [11]
The Irgun, or Etzel, was a Zionist paramilitary organization that operated in Mandatory Palestine between 1931 and 1948. It was an offshoot of the older and larger Jewish paramilitary organization Haganah. The Irgun has been viewed as a terrorist organization or organization which carried out terrorist acts.
Zionist political violence refers to politically motivated violence or terrorism perpetrated by Zionists. The term is used to describe violence committed by those who support the political movement of Zionism, and violence committed against opponents of Zionism. The violence often takes the form of terrorist attacks and has been directed against both Jewish and Arab targets. The most active period of most notable Zionist political violence began on June 30, 1924, through the 1940s, and continues to the present day, usually for the purpose of expanding Zionist settlements in Mandatory Palestine.
Haganah was the main Zionist paramilitary organization that operated for the Yishuv in the British Mandate for Palestine. It was founded in 1920 to defend the Yishuv's presence in the region, and was formally disbanded in 1948, when it became the core force integrated into the Israel Defense Forces shortly after the Israeli Declaration of Independence.
A popular uprising by Palestinian Arabs in Mandatory Palestine against the British administration of the Palestine Mandate, later known as The Great Revolt or The Great Palestinian Revolt, lasted from 1936 until 1939, demanding Arab independence and the end of the policy of open-ended Jewish immigration and land purchases with the stated goal of establishing a "Jewish National Home".
Yishuv, HaYishuv HaIvri, or HaYishuv HaYehudi Be'Eretz Yisra'el denotes the body of Jewish residents in Palestine prior to the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948. The term came into use in the 1880s, when there were about 25,000 Jews living in that region, and continued to be used until 1948, by which time there were some 630,000 Jews there. The term is still in use to denote the pre-1948 Jewish residents in Palestine, corresponding to the southern part of Ottoman Syria until 1918, OETA South in 1917–1920, and Mandatory Palestine in 1920–1948.
The Betar Movement, also spelled Beitar (בית"ר), is a Revisionist Zionist youth movement founded in 1923 in Riga, Latvia, by Vladimir (Ze'ev) Jabotinsky. It was one of several right-wing youth movements that arose at that time and adopted special salutes and uniforms.
Revisionist Zionism is a form of Zionism characterized by territorial maximalism. Revisionist Zionism promoted expansionism and the establishment of a Jewish majority on both sides of the Jordan River.
David Raziel was a leader of the Zionist underground in British Mandatory Palestine and one of the founders of the Irgun.
Shlomo Ben-Yosef was a member of the Revisionist Zionist underground group Irgun. He is most noted for his participation in an April 21, 1938, attack on a bus carrying Arab civilians, intended as a retaliation for an earlier attack by Arabs against Jews, and emblematic as a rejection of the establishment policy of Havlagah, or restraint. For this reason, and especially for having been the first Jew executed by the British authorities during the mandate period, Ben-Yosef became a martyr for the Revisionist cause and is commemorated by the State of Israel as one of 12 Olei Hagardom.
Kol Tsion HaLokhemet was the underground radio station of the Irgun.
Havlagah was the strategic policy of the Yishuv during the 1936–1939 Arab revolt in Palestine. It called for Zionist militants to abstain from engaging in acts of retaliatory violence against Palestinian Arabs in the face of Arab attacks against Palestinian Jews, and instead encouraged the Jewish community to respond to the attacks through non-violent means, such as by fortifying their settlements. The policy was supported by the Yishuv's political leadership and many left-wing Zionists. It was adopted by Haganah, the main Zionist paramilitary in Mandate Palestine, as an official operational strategy. On the other hand, Irgun, Lehi, and other like-minded Zionist paramilitaries rejected the policy and engaged in indiscriminate violence against the Arab community.
Olei Hagardom refers to members of the two Jewish Revisionist pre-state underground organisations Irgun and Lehi, most of whom were tried in British Mandate military courts and sentenced to death by hanging. Most of the executions were carried out at Acre Prison. There were 12 Olei Hagardom.
During the British rule in Mandatory Palestine, there was civil, political and armed struggle between Palestinian Arabs and the Jewish Yishuv, beginning from the violent spillover of the Franco-Syrian War in 1920 and until the onset of the 1948 Arab–Israeli War. The conflict shifted from sectarian clashes in the 1920s and early 1930s to an armed Arab Rebellion against British rule in 1936, armed Jewish Revolt primarily against the British in mid-1940s and finally open war in November 1947 between Arabs and Jews.
A successful paramilitary campaign was carried out by Zionist underground groups against British rule in Mandatory Palestine from 1944 to 1948. The tensions between the Zionist underground and the British mandatory authorities rose from 1938 and intensified with the publication of the White Paper of 1939. The Paper outlined new government policies to place further restrictions on Jewish immigration and land purchases, and declared the intention of giving independence to Palestine, with an Arab majority, within ten years. Though World War II brought relative calm, tensions again escalated into an armed struggle towards the end of the war, when it became clear that the Axis powers were close to defeat.
Operation Hametz was a Zionist operation towards the end of Mandatory Palestine, as part of the 1948 Palestine war. It was launched at the end of April 1948 with the objective of capturing villages inland from Jaffa and establishing a blockade around the town. The operation, which led to the first direct battle between the British and the Irgun, was seen as a great victory for the latter, and enabled the Irgun to take credit for the complete conquest of Jaffa that happened on May 13.
Events in the year 1947 in the British Mandate of Palestine.
This is a timeline of intercommunal conflict in Mandatory Palestine.
Avraham Stern, alias Yair, was one of the leaders of the Jewish paramilitary organization Irgun. In September 1940, he founded a breakaway militant Zionist group named Lehi, called the "Stern Gang" by the British authorities and by the mainstream in the Yishuv Jewish establishment. The group referred to its members as terrorists and admitted to having carried out terrorist attacks.
The Jaffa riots of April 1936, refers to a spate of violent attacks on Jews that began on 19 April 1936 in Jaffa. A total of 14 Jews and 2 Arabs were killed during the riots.
...the Revisionists rejected it, as did the Arabs, but the Zionist Organization accepted it in principle
While rejecting the specific proposals of the Peel Commission, the congress accepted readiness, in principle, to consider a better partition proposal
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