David Raziel | |
---|---|
Native name | דוד רזיאל |
Born | Smargon, Russian Empire | 19 November 1910
Died | 20 May 1941 30) Habbaniyah, Kingdom of Iraq | (aged
Buried | |
Allegiance | |
Battles / wars | World War II |
Spouse(s) | Shoshana |
David Raziel (Hebrew : דוד רזיאל; 19 November 1910 – 20 May 1941) was a leader of the Zionist underground in British Mandatory Palestine and one of the founders of the Irgun. [1]
During World War II, Irgun entered a truce with the British so they could collaborate in the fight against "the Hebrew's greatest enemy in the world – German Nazism". Raziel was released from prison after agreeing to work with the British. He was killed in action in Iraq in 1941. [2]
David Rozenson (later Raziel) was born in Smarhon in the Russian Empire. In 1914, when he was three, his family immigrated to Ottoman Palestine, where his father taught at Tachkemoni, a religious school in Tel Aviv. During World War I, the family was exiled to Egypt by the Turks due to their Russian citizenship. They returned to Mandatory Palestine in 1923.
After graduation from Tachkemoni, he studied for several years at Yeshivat Mercaz HaRav in Jerusalem. He was a regular study partner of Rabbi Zvi Yehuda Kook, son and ideological successor to the Rosh Yeshiva and Chief Rabbi of Israel, Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook. [3]
When the 1929 Hebron massacre broke out, he joined the Haganah in Jerusalem, where he was studying philosophy and mathematics at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
His sister, Esther Raziel-Naor, became a member of the Knesset for Herut, the party founded by Irgun leader Menachem Begin.
When the Irgun was established, Raziel was one of its first members. In 1937, he was appointed by the Irgun as the first Commander of the Jerusalem District and, a year later, Commander in Chief of the Irgun. His term as leader was marked by violence against Arabs, including a sequence of marketplace bombings. [4] Some of those attacks were in response to Arab violence, although they did not target the specific perpetrators of this violence, as had been the case under the policy of Havlagah. Dozens of Arabs were killed in the attacks and hundreds more were maimed. Raziel worked in the Irgun with Avraham Stern, Hanoch Kalai, and Efraim Ilin. [5] On 6 July 1938, 21 Arabs were killed and 52 wounded by a bomb in a Haifa market; on 25 July a second market bomb in Haifa killed at least 39 Arabs and injured 70; a bomb in Jaffa's vegetable market on 26 August killed 24 Arabs and wounded 39. The attacks were condemned by the Jewish Agency. [6]
On 19 May 1939, Raziel was captured by the British and sent to Acre Prison.
After the 1941 Iraqi coup d'état, British called on assistance from the Irgun, after General Percival Wavell had Raziel, an Irgun commander, released from custody at Acre Prison. They asked him if he would undertake to kill or kidnap Amin al-Husseini, the Mufti, and destroy Iraq's oil refineries. Raziel agreed on condition that he be allowed to kidnap the Mufti. [7] On 17 May 1941, he was sent to Iraq with three of his comrades, including Ya'akov Meridor and Jacob Sika Aharoni, [8] on behalf of the British army to help defeat the Rashid Ali al-Gaylani pro-Axis revolt in the Anglo-Iraqi War. On 20 May, a Luftwaffe plane strafed near Habbaniyah the car in which he was traveling, killing Raziel and a British officer Major Patrick .H. Freke Evans . [9] [10] Meridor returned to Palestine and took over command of the Irgun, while Jacob Sika Aharoni commanded missions that led to the British entry into Iraq and the saving of the Jewish community following the Farhud pogrom.
In 1955, Raziel's remains were exhumed and transferred to Cyprus, and again in 1961 to Jerusalem's Mount Herzl military cemetery.
Ramat Raziel, a moshav in the Judaean Mountains, is named after Raziel, as well as many streets in Israel bearing his name in commemoration. The Israel postal service issued a stamp in his honor. There is a high-school in Herzliya named after him. [11]
The Irgun, officially the National Military Organization in the Land of Israel, 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.
Menachem Begin was an Israeli politician, founder of both Herut and Likud and the sixth Prime Minister of Israel.
Lehi, officially the Fighters for the Freedom of Israel and often known pejoratively as the Stern Gang, was a Zionist paramilitary militant organization founded by Avraham ("Yair") Stern in Mandatory Palestine. Its avowed aim was to evict the British authorities from Palestine by use of violence, allowing unrestricted immigration of Jews and the formation of a Jewish state. It was initially called the National Military Organization in Israel, upon being founded in August 1940, but was renamed Lehi one month later. The group referred to its members as terrorists and admitted to having carried out acts of terrorism.
The Palmach was the elite combined strike forces and sayeret unit of the Haganah, the underground army of the Yishuv during the period of the British Mandate for Palestine. The Palmach was established in May 1941. By the outbreak of the 1948 Arab–Israeli War, it consisted of over 2,000 men and women in three fighting brigades and auxiliary aerial, naval and intelligence units. With the creation of Israel's army, the three Palmach Brigades were disbanded. This and political reasons compelled many of the senior Palmach officers to resign in 1950.
The Altalena Affair was a violent confrontation that took place in June 1948 between the newly created Israel Defense Forces and the Irgun, one of the Jewish paramilitary groups that were in the process of merging to form the IDF. The confrontation involved a cargo ship, the Altalena, captained by ex-US Navy lieutenant Monroe Fein and led by senior Etzel commander Eliyahu Lankin, which had been loaded with weapons and fighters by the independent Irgun, but arrived during the murky period of the Irgun's absorption into the IDF. Nineteen Israelis, three of them IDF soldiers and 16 of them Irgun members were killed in the confrontation. The incident brought the newfound Israel to the brink of civil war.
Mercaz HaRav is a national-religious yeshiva in Jerusalem, founded in 1924 by Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook. Located in the city's Kiryat Moshe neighborhood, it has become the most prominent religious-Zionist yeshiva in the world and synonymous with Rabbi Kook's teachings. Many Religious Zionist educators and leaders have studied at Mercaz HaRav.
Hillel Kook, also known as Peter Bergson, was a Revisionist Zionist activist and politician.
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 Zionist Jews, and instead encouraged the Jewish community to respond to the attacks through non-violent means, such as by fortifying their settlements.
Ya'akov Meridor was an Israeli politician, Irgun commander and businessman.
Esther Raziel-Naor was a Revisionist Zionist, Irgun leader and Israeli politician. She was the sister of fellow Irgun leader David Raziel.
The Saison was the name given to the Haganah's attempt, as ordered by the official bodies of the pre-state Yishuv, to suppress the Irgun's insurgency against the government of the British Mandate in Palestine, from November 1944 to March 1945.
A successful paramilitary campaign, sometimes referred to as the Palestine Emergency, 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.
Amichai Paglin, codename "Gidi" was an Israeli businessman who served as Chief Operations Officer of the Irgun during the Mandate era. He planned and personally led numerous attacks against the British during the Jewish insurgency in Palestine, including the notorious King David Hotel bombing, commanded the battle to conquer Jaffa in the 1947–48 Civil War in Mandatory Palestine, and participated in the 1948 Arab–Israeli War. Following independence, he ran an industrial oven factory together with his father, and was later appointed Prime Minister Menachem Begin's counter-terrorism adviser. Only a few months after his appointment, however, Paglin died in a car crash.
Events in the year 1948 in the British Mandate of Palestine.
Events in the year 1947 in the British Mandate of Palestine.
Hanoch Kalai was a senior leader of Irgun and a co-founder of Lehi, and an expert on the Hebrew language. He was Deputy Commander in Chief of Irgun under David Raziel and spent three months as Commander in Chief after Raziel was imprisoned by the British authorities, until his own arrest. He was Avraham Stern's deputy until he left the organisation.
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.
Mordechai Petcho was an Israeli military officer who had earlier served as deputy commander of the Irgun under Ya'akov Meridor.
During the period of command over Etzel by Moshe Rosenberg and David Raziel, a great many assaults (some of them en masse) were carried out against Arab bystanders and shoppers: men, women, and children (November 1937 – July 1939).