Too Safe to Run

Police and volunteers dig out survivors from the rubble. All of Menachem Begin’s explanations that his people had warned the British to clear the building didn’t help clear the Irgun’s reputation

It was a regular hot summer day in Jerusalem 23 Tammuz/July 22 1946 — 70 years ago last week. The area around the King David Hotel the headquarters of the British Mandate was bustling with activity. The upper floors of the elegant building were occupied by Mandate High Commissioner Sir Alan Cunningham senior secretary Sir John Shaw and military commander Sir Evelyn Barker. From time to time they glanced at the open windows (no air conditioning yet) and saw the barbed-wire fences and high checkpoints that the police had installed in order to prevent terrorists from throwing hand grenades into the complex. 

The luxurious 200-room 7-story building was opened to the public in 1931 yet in 1938 the Mandatory government requisitioned the entire southern wing of the hotel for its military command and the government secretariat. A British military communications center was built in the hotel basement and fewer than a third of the rooms were actually reserved for civilian use.

On a Shabbos a few weeks before on what was later known as “Black Sabbath” thousands of British troops swept across the country made up to 2 700 arrests (among them several rabbinic figures and future Israeli prime minister Moshe Sharett) and invaded the Jewish Agency building and confiscated large quantities of documents which were brought to the King David Hotel — including papers of crucial importance to the Jewish liberation movement and information relating to Jewish agents in Arab countries endangering vital intelligence activities.