Tilhas Teezee Gesheften (commonly known by its acronym TTG) was a group of Jewish Brigade members formed immediately following World War II. Under the guise of British military activity, this group engaged in the assassination of Nazis and SS conspirators, facilitated the illegal emigration of Holocaust survivors to Mandatory Palestine, and smuggled weaponry for the Haganah.
The three words that make up the phrase are Arabic : تِلحسْ طِيزي, romanized: tilḥas ṭīzī, lit. 'lick my ass' and Yiddish : געשעפטן, romanized: gesheften, lit. 'business', combined to form a modern Hebrew slang expression, meaning "You-lick-my-ass business." [1] It has been more colloquially translated as "up your ass/götveren", [2] whereas götveren is a vulgar Turkish slang term for "queer/fag/faggot".
Following the collapse of Nazi Germany and before the establishment of the State of Israel, the majority of Jews in Europe were living without clarification of their legal and national statuses. [3] The majority of them were classified as displaced persons, though where they were displaced from and where they ought to be relocated to were points of contention. [4] The official position of the Haganah, as defined by David Ben-Gurion and the Jewish Agency, was that European Jewry had been treated so differently that its members needed to continue to be differently treated. [5] Therefore, in opposition to the policies of quota immigration imposed by the British White Paper, they sought to permit and facilitate unlimited Jewish immigration of Holocaust survivors to Mandate Palestine. [6]
The TTG Brigade was created by Israel Carmi, who was an officer of the Jewish Brigade while concurrently acting as a senior representative of the then-underground Haganah. [7] Carmi was initially engaged in revenge operations against those believed to have been responsible, at least in part, for the Shoah. [8] Along with certain of his fellow soldiers in the Jewish Brigade, he was responsible for executing hundreds of Germans, Austrians, and Italians. Most of these were identified by Carmi and his men as having been active members of the SS or otherwise as having assisted in the deportation or extermination of Jews within the Nazi sphere of influence. The number of Nazis they killed is unknown, but may have been as high as 1,500. [9] [10] [11]
The TTG Brigade came into existence when Carmi falsely identified himself at a checkpoint to confuse a sentry and allow him and his companions to have unhindered passage. It led to the creation of fictional paperwork, seals, passes, orders, requisition forms, and even unit uniforms and insignia. [12]
As Carmi's goals shifted from revenge to rescue, so too did the TTG Brigade become more and more an instrument for the liberation of displaced persons and their eventual passage to Palestine. The function of the TTG was first and foremost to provide the illusion of official status before occupying Allied forces. This allowed the members of the Brigade to engage in rescue activities without undue interruption or objection from the occupying powers. Purporting to act as if they were under orders as part of the TTG Brigade allowed its members to pass through roadblocks, military checkpoints, and international borders, often with large numbers of displaced Jews in their care. [13]
The second function of the group, which developed over time, was to extract from the Allied forces the greatest quantity of material and personnel assistance for the rescue efforts of the Brigade's members. This included the fictional group's requisition and use of civilian and military vehicles, gasoline, rations, medical supplies, and other such materiel. The Brigade was also involved, with the assistance of false TTG paperwork, in the acquisition of large quantities of small arms and other martial equipment for use by the Haganah in Palestine. [14]
The first goal of the group, illegal emigration, became less important as military control of civilian movement became less strict. The group's Zionist goals, centering on illegal immigration to Palestine (Hebrew : הַעְפָּלָה, romanized: haʿappala), became obsolete with the acceptance of the United Nations Partition Plan for Palestine and the international recognition of Israel. As more and more allied forces withdrew from Europe, fewer resources were available for acquisition by the members of TTG. Likewise, as the Palestine war loomed, the military skills they had accumulated encouraged withdrawal of most of them to serve as officers in the newly formed Israel Defense Forces.
Most of the Jews who were rescued in this manner made aliyah to Israel, [15] where they settled in the cities or else became kibbutzniks. Many of these actively supported the war effort during the 1948 Palestine war. [16] The arms and materials stolen by the TTG contributed to the Israeli war effort and warmaking capacity. [17] Most of the members of the TTG Brigade entered service in the Haganah and fought as part of the IDF during the war. [18]
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.
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 Battle of Haifa, called by the Jewish forces Operation Bi'ur Hametz, was a Haganah operation carried out on 21–22 April 1948 and a major event in the final stages of the civil war in Palestine, leading up to the 1948 Arab-Israeli War. The objective of the operation was the capture of the Arab neighborhoods of Haifa. The operation formed part of the 1948 Palestinian expulsion and flight, with approximately 15,000 Arab residents being displaced between April 21–22, and with only 4,000 remaining in the city by mid-May from a pre-conflict population of approximately 65,000.
The Palmach was the elite fighting force 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 Jewish Infantry Brigade Group, more commonly known as the Jewish Brigade Group or Jewish Brigade, was a military formation of the British Army in the Second World War. It was formed in late 1944 and was recruited among Yishuv Jews from Mandatory Palestine and commanded by Anglo-Jewish officers. It served in the latter stages of the Italian Campaign, and was disbanded in 1946.
Aliyah Bet was the code name given to illegal immigration by Jews, most of whom were refugees escaping from Nazi Germany, and later Holocaust survivors, to Mandatory Palestine between 1920 and 1948, in violation of the restrictions laid out in the British White Paper of 1939, which dramatically increased between 1939 and 1948. With the establishment of the State of Israel in May 1948, Jewish displaced persons and refugees from Europe began streaming into the new state in the midst of the 1948 Palestine war.
Yehuda Bauer is a Czech-born Israeli historian and scholar of the Holocaust. He is a professor of Holocaust Studies at the Avraham Harman Institute of Contemporary Jewry at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
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The Patria disaster was the sinking on 25 November 1940 by the Jewish paramilitary organization Haganah of a French-built ocean liner, the 11,885-ton SS Patria, in the port of Haifa, killing 267 people and injuring 172.
Jon Kimche was a journalist and historian. A Swiss Jew, he arrived in England at the age of 12, becoming involved in the Independent Labour Party as a young man. In 1934–35, he worked with George Orwell in a Hampstead bookshop, Booklover’s Corner, and later managed the ILP's bookshop at 35 Bride Street, near Ludgate Circus. As chair of the ILP Guild of Youth, he visited Barcelona in 1937, where he again met Orwell.
Sh'erit ha-Pletah is a Hebrew term for Jewish Holocaust survivors living in Displaced Persons (DP) camps, and the organisations they created to act on their behalf with the Allied authorities. These were active between 27 May 1945 and 1950–51, when the last DP camps closed.
Hillel Kook, also known as Peter Bergson, was a Revisionist Zionist activist and politician.
Nakam was a paramilitary organisation of about fifty Holocaust survivors who, after 1945, sought revenge for the murder of six million Jews during the Holocaust. Led by Abba Kovner, the group sought to kill six million Germans in a form of indiscriminate revenge, "a nation for a nation". Kovner went to Mandatory Palestine in order to secure large quantities of poison for poisoning water mains to kill large numbers of Germans. His followers infiltrated the water system of Nuremberg. However, Kovner was arrested upon arrival in the British zone of occupied Germany and had to throw the poison overboard.
As an organized nationalist movement, Zionism is generally considered to have been founded by Theodor Herzl in 1897. However, the history of Zionism began earlier and is intertwined with Jewish history and Judaism. The organizations of Hovevei Zion, held as the forerunners of modern Zionist ideals, were responsible for the creation of 20 Jewish towns in Palestine between 1870 and 1897.
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.
The Battle of Mishmar HaEmek was a ten-day battle fought from 4 to 15 April 1948 between the Arab Liberation Army commanded by Fawzi al-Qawuqji and the Haganah commanded by Yitzhak Sadeh and Dan Laner. The battle began when al-Qawuqji launched an attack against Mishmar HaEmek with the intent of taking the kibbutz, which was strategically placed beside the main road between Jenin and Haifa. In 1947 it had a population of 550.
Operation Yevusi, also known as the second "Battle of Nebi Samwil," was a Palmach military operation carried out during the 1948 Arab–Israeli War to assert Jewish control over Jerusalem. The operation, commanded by Yitzhak Sadeh, lasted two weeks, from 22 April 1948 to 3 May 1948. Not all objectives were achieved before the British enforced a ceasefire.
Israel (Yisrael) Carmi, born 1917, died 20 January 2008, was the founder of the Tilhas Tizig Gesheften.
Carmi is a surname and a given name. It may be of Hebrew origin: Hebrew: כרמי and is sometimes transliterated as Karmi. Notable people with the name include:
Flight and Rescue: Brichah.ASIN B000RJ8XW6