| Black Sunday | |
|---|---|
| Part of the1936–1939 Arab revolt in Palestine | |
| Location | Jaffa andJerusalem,Palestine |
| Date | 14 November 1937 |
| Target | Palestinian Arabs |
Attack type | Terrorism,Mass shooting |
| Deaths | 10 |
| Injured | 13+ |
| Perpetrators | Irgun |
Black Sunday was a day of multipleterrorist attacks againstPalestinians committed by the militantRevisionist Zionist organization theIrgun. The attacks took place on 14 November 1937 inMandatory Palestine. It was among the first challenges to theHavlagah (lit. restraint) policy not to retaliate against Arab attacks on Jewish civilians.
In 1936, Palestinian Arabs launcheda revolt that was to last three years againstBritish colonial rule. At first the revolt consisted of ageneral strike but later became more violent, attacking British forces and also including 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, thePeel Commission proposed a partition of Palestine, and recommended a populationtransfer 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] TheArab Higher Committee rejected the plan outright, as did the Revisonist Zionists.[7] Soon after, a British district commissioner,Lewis Yelland Andrews, known for his repressive measures was assassinated by militant followers ofIzz ad-Din al-Qassam outside an Anglican church.[3][10]
The renewal of Arab violence in October 1937 led to changes in tactics by the Zionists.[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.[12]
The mainstream Zionist approach to the insurgency, set forth byDavid Ben-Gurion, was to avoid reprisal and rather prioritize the strengthening of defenses in Jewish areas, a policy ofHavlagah (lit. Restraint).Notrim andJewish 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 aparamilitary organization calling itselfIrgun soon broke ranks with the Haganah over the issue of restraint. It was dominated by activists who had originally identified withZe'ev Jabotinsky’sBetar movement, which had been founded in 1923, and eventually evolved into the core ofZionist 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) shootingfellahin or urban Arabs (c) ambushes of transport vehicles carrying Arabs and (d) outright terrorist assaults on densely populated Arab areas[13] 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.[14][15]
In July 1937, Jabotinsky met withRobert Bitker, Moshe Rosenberg andAvraham Stern, the future leader ofLehi, inAlexandria 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.[16] At this stage in the revolt, the Arab uprising had degenerated into, inColin Shindler’s words, ‘internecine Arab violence and nihilist attacks on Jews.’[16] 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 theWestern Wall. On 11 November, the Irgun murdered 2 Arabs at aJaffa bus deposit, and wounded a further 5.[3][11][17] 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.[18]
Irgun leaderDavid Raziel authorized a programme of bombing Arab coffee houses, in cities such asHaifa andRosh Pinah, and attacks around Jerusalem, and on buses travelling between the cities ofTiberias andSafed,[15] 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,[19] David Raziel organized the attacks in Jerusalem.
At 7 am. on the morning of 14 November, 2 Arab pedestrians were shot on Aza Street inRehavia, a neighbourhood in Jerusalem, by Joseph Kremin and Shlomo Trachtman.[20] Raziel had ordered multiple attacks to be undertaken almost simultaneously in order to hamper a coherent police response, and 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.[15][21] By the end of November 14, 10 Arabs had been killed and many more wounded.[22]
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 ofJudas Maccabeus against theSeleucids.[15] Raziel himself said that the operation had wiped out the shame of the policy of restraint.[23]
There are several notable incidents associated theJewish 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.'[15]
The British also enlisted 19,000 Jewish policemen to assist them in countering the insurgency, and eventually organizedSpecial 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 andYitzhak Sadeh's mobile military units (plugot ha'Sadeh), established in December of that year,[15] also exercised an influence on the creation of such clandestine forces. Ben-Gurion in turn had one officer secretly establishpe'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 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
Although in 1937 the Twentieth Zionist Congress had rejected the boundaries proposed by the Peel Commission, it did agree in principle to the idea of partition...