Video: The King David Hotel Bomb Warning Controversy

One of the controversies surrounding the bombing of the King David Hotel in 1946 by Menachem Begin's Irgun is whether in fact there was advanced warning given.

The following video documents evidence that advanced warning was in fact given.
There is also a transcript of the video.




Transcript of the video, Palestine 1946: King David Hotel Bomb Warning Controversy--from the YouTube page

Narrator: Ian McKellen

July 22 1946 the KING DAVID HOTEL wing occupied by the British civil-military authorities in Jerusalem was blown up killing 91 people -- 28 British, 41 Arabs, 17 Jews and 5 others. The Irgun carried out the attack and claimed responsibility.

Mr. Begin's Irgun took on the task of blowing up the King David, but only after warning the British so that they would evacuate the building. Adina Hay-Nissan, then a teen-age girl who moved easily as an Irgun courier, was given the job of calling inthe warning.

She recalled that she had waited for a long time outside the hotel until she got a signal that the charges were planted. Then she telephoned the British command from a pharmacy across the street, she said, and spoke first in English, then in Hebrew: ''This is the Hebrew resistance uprising. We planted bombs in the hotel. Please vacate it immediately. See, we warned you.''

Then, she said, she ran to King George Street and phoned the French Consulate, which was near the hotel. Then she went farther along and phoned The Palestine Post, a newspaper that is now The Jerusalem Post. She walked slowly up Jaffa Road, and as she passed a police station near the market at Mahane Yehuda, she recalled, ''I heard the big explosion.'' When she learned later that the British had ignored her warnings, she said, ''I was baffled; there we were, genuinely trying to save lives, and they took no heed.''

The British went out of their way to try and prove there had been no warning. They clung to this lie as if it were an article of faith, and hitched to it all the official propaganda machinery available to them in this country and abroad.


They carried on with this even after the British Forces newspaper in the Middle East, the Middle East Post, reported in its 23 July issue (the day after the explosion): "Fifteen minutes before the explosion, the telephonist of the King David Hotel received an anonymous tip-off, warning that the hotel was about to go up and she should run for her life."


It took the British a little longer - 33 years - to admit that a warning had been given by the IZL: Lord Janner, formerly president of the Zionist Federation and not a political ally of Begin, made a speech in the House of Lords on 22 May 1979, a speech absolving the IZL of responsibility for the heavy loss of life caused by the bombing of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem in 1946. Ninety-one persons died in the King David Hotel explosion: 41 Arabs, 28 Britons, 17 Jews and five of other nationalities.

WHY DID Shaw not order the evacuation of the hotel?

Twenty-three years after the explosion - when he was interviewed for a Voice of Israel radio program - this was still a mystery to Begin: "...It didn't occur to them that we really had smuggled explosives into the hotel. As I've said before, it was a fortress, and it was hard for them to imagine us succeeding in penetrating the wire fence, evading the mobile patrols and the machine-gun emplacements and all the rest; and then there's the matter of the incendiary bomb outside, the one that preceded the main explosion - maybe they thought that was it, end of story! Perhaps they thought it was all a joke at their expense, meant as a blow to the prestige of the British government and the British empire; the Jews wanted to see the British ruling class running in panic from the hotel...They all should have gotten out, and what would it have mattered if it did turn out to be a false alarm, or just a smoke-bomb or something? If they assumed the warning wasn't serious and the intention was to humiliate them, that could explain why they preferred to stay put. And there's a third possibility: they were simply afraid to come out. Perhaps they thought we wanted to get them out of the fortress and into the open so we could ambush them. But of course these are only speculations. No one will know for certain, so long as Mr. Shaw declines to explain his reasons for not evacuating the hotel, despite the warning that was received."

Despite the bombing's importance, the contentious nature of the affair prevented the accurate recording of the chain of events leading up to it. The official account of the attack was not publicized by the Defense Ministry until the past few years. British accounts were kept confidential for 30 years, and to date some relevant documents remain closed in the British Foreign Office.

According to Neil Cobbett, of the British Public Record Office, certain documents pertaining to the bombing are kept closed because they may "cause distress to former members of the government, or personnel, or to public opinion."

Technorati Tag: Israel and Menachem Begin and Irgun.