When they went off, ninety-one were killed and forty-six injured, mostly civilians. If the Army HQ at one end of the building was the target, the bombers placed the device at the other end, hence the civilian casualties.
Twenty-eight British died, including thirteen soldiers, but they were well outnumbered by forty-one Arabs and seventeen Palestinian Jews. I mention this only because of what happened to me later that week.
For years, controversy raged as to whether a telephoned warning had ever been made, or, if made, received, and if received, disregarded. But the bombing was denounced by David Ben-Gurion and the Haganah, yearning for both the British Mandate to end and independence to arrive. In their view, the British were going to leave anyway, as soon as the newly born United Nations in New York made up its mind.
Mr. Ben-Gurion had just told me in Sde Boker, his desert retreat, that the real struggle would come after independence, when the Arabs launched themselves at the new Israeli state to snuff it out. To that end, the Mossad LeAliyah Bet, the purchasing agency outside the country, and Haganah inside the Mandate were trying to smuggle in both fighters and weapons under the noses of the British, who might choose to look the other way or not. Thus the King David Hotel bombing, which poisoned relations, was regarded by the calmer heads as completely counterproductive.
I was taking tea with friends on the upper terrace when I was invited over to be introduced to someone. I found myself facing the black eye patch of General Moshe Dayan, defense minister and architect of Israeli tactics for the Six-Day War. We talked for half an hour.
I had always presumed he lost that eye to a bullet, but he explained to me how it had happened. Before the Second World War, he had been on patrol with the British Zionist Orde Wingate, who designed and taught the principle of guerrilla warfare in that part of the world.
Wingate was a strange one, a Christian with an encyclopedic knowledge of the Old Testament and a conviction that God Himself had given the Holy Land to the Jews. Hence the Zionism. His skills in guerrilla warfare were such that Churchill later plucked him from the Middle East to form and lead the Chindits behind the Japanese lines in Burma.
On that patrol, Moshe Dayan had been staring at an Arab position through field glasses when a stray bullet hit the other end of the lens. It was the eyepiece being rammed back into the socket that blinded him.
I had one last interview set up via my contacts. I wanted to talk to Ezer Weizman, the founder of the Israeli Air Force and another revered figure after the IAF’s performance during the war of 1967. By then he was transport minister, and I turned up as agreed the next day at the ministry.
He came bursting out, late, in a tearing hurry and having completely forgotten about our interview. The only way of achieving it was to do it on the drive back to Tel Aviv, but he did not intend to drive; he wanted to fly and the airfield was only minutes away.
“Do you mind flying?” he asked. I knew he had once flown British Hurricanes with the RAF in Egypt during the Second World War, so I mentioned that I also had my RAF wings. He stared, then grinned.
“Right, you can be my copilot,” he said, and barked an order at the driver. His ministry attendant looked horrified.
I p
resumed he would be flying in a multiseat staff aircraft, but his chosen transport was a very small high-wing monoplane of the Cessna/Piper variety, although Israeli-made. We were strapped in, he did the preflight checks, and we took off. Almost immediately, the rising thermals from the Judean Desert caught us and the airplane began to rock and twist in the up-currents.
The interview would have to be conducted through face masks to be heard above the roar of the engine. He climbed to about 5,000 feet and set course for Sde Dov, the military airport outside Tel Aviv. So I asked him how he had established the now-mighty IAF.
He explained that as independence approached back in 1947, he had been charged to find and buy some serviceable fighter planes. The Mossad LeAliyah Bet traced a few to Yugoslavia, then recently liberated from German occupation and under the rule of the former guerrilla Marshal Tito.
Tito may have been a Communist, but it did not matter. He needed the foreign currency and the Haganah was anti-imperialist. The deal was done. There were four of them, abandoned by the Germans, still in maker’s grease, stored in their original crates. An Israeli team went north to assemble them. He and his three other pilots followed. Rather strangely, they were four young Jewish fliers at the controls of four Messerschmitt Bf 109s in full Nazi insignia.
Thus they flew south, refueled secretly in Turkey, and arrived over Tel Aviv on the day of independence and of the launch of the Arab war to snuff out Israel. They arrived, virtually flying on vapor, to be told that a squadron of Egyptian Air Force fighters was coming north over Ashkelon. There was no time to land and refuel. They turned south, to find King Farouk’s British-built Hurricanes coming toward them. Thus the first dogfight over Israel was between Egyptians in Hurricanes and Jews in Messerschmitts.
Up to this point, Ezer Weizman had been gesticulating copiously, but now he took both hands off the control column and raised them, fingers spread, to demonstrate how he had led the attack, with Benny Katz from South Africa as his wingman.
The monoplane promptly flipped over, and the Judean Desert went to the top of the windscreen. He didn’t seem to mind. As we began to dive upside down, I thought it wise to drop my notepad and pencil and grab the joystick. When she was back on an even keel and heading for the coast, I suggested he resume control. But he just shrugged and went on, with more copious hand gestures, explaining how they had scattered the Hurricanes, which turned back to Egypt, and landed at what is now Ben-Gurion Airport but was then a grass strip.
He took over again as we came to land, shut the engine down, jumped out, gave me a cheery wave, and shot off in his ministerial car. The ground crew let me examine his personal black Spitfire, a superb model, then I took an Egged bus from the main gate of the air base back to downtown Tel Aviv.
CONFESSION
My last night in Tel Aviv on that visit was spent at a pub down an alley running down the side of the Dan Hotel toward the sea. It was owned and run by a very feisty lady, a Romanian redhead, also called Freddie.
There was a crowd around the bar that I was invited to join, including, I think, Moshe Dayan’s daughter Yael and her husband, a former tank commander called Dov Zion. In deference to my ignorance of Hebrew, they very politely switched to English, and the conversation moved to where I had been and what I had seen. That included the King David Hotel.
Every one of them had been involved in some way in the independence struggle twenty years earlier, and half at least had been in the Haganah or the Palmach. As the British had then been the occupiers, I expected some hostility, but there was none.
There were anecdotes about smuggling consignments of small arms under melon cargoes past British roadblocks, and all of them were at pains to tell me that the British were divided into two types, so far as they were concerned.
The other-rank soldiers, many of them Paras, had nothing against Jews at all, having often been brought up with them in the streets of London, Birmingham, and Manchester. The soldiers had been fighting the Germans for four years before being posted to Palestine; some had seen the horrors of the concentration camps, and all just wanted to go back home to their wives and families.
They spoke neither Arabic nor Hebrew, and the Palestinians certainly spoke no English. So if there was any conversation, it was between the Diaspora Jews and the Tommies. It was friendly enough. Among the former guerrillas around the bar were several who narrated how consignments of Haganah weapons went past the roadblocks on a nudge and a wink, the melons undisturbed.
The anti-Semitic attitude came hot and strong from the Foreign Office, the civil servants and senior officer corps who rarely disguised their preference for the Arabs. I had heard it said before that more desert sand flows through the British Foreign Office than Lawrence ever saw.
But what really surprised me was that the Israelis’ real dislike was not for the British but for their own extremists, the Irgun and the Stern Gang. I could not detect one with a good word to say for them. The collective attitude seemed to be that the back-shooting of British Tommies by the extremists simply made the real job, preparing for the survival war of 1948, even harder.