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What Triggered the 1946 Attack by the Jewish Underground on British Headquarters in Jerusalem?
(Ha'aretz) David B. Green - On July 22, 1946, the pre-state Jewish underground destroyed the center of the British Mandatory administration at the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, an act which helped accelerate the British decision to withdraw from Palestine two years later. The bombing took place less than a month following Operation Agatha, a British round-up of 2,700 officials of both the mainstream Jewish Agency and the Haganah, carried out on June 29. The Haganah leadership was under the mistaken impression that the British police had taken large numbers of sensitive confiscated files to the King David, where both the British civilian government and its military leadership in Palestine were headquartered. The proposal to blow up the southern section of the hotel came from Menachem Begin, later Israel's prime minister but then, head of the Irgun Zvai Leumi (National Military Organization), also known as Etzel. But approval for the operation came from top officials of the Haganah - Moshe Sneh, the chief of general headquarters, and Yitzhak Sadeh, commander of the Palmach. Begin is the one who insisted that a warning be given before the blast, so that the hotel could be evacuated, though there was concern within the Haganah that too much warning might allow the British to remove the incriminating documents the attack was intended to destroy. There is no doubt that Irgun gave a warning of the impending explosion. An initial call to the hotel switchboard, about 15 minutes before the blast, was ignored. Ten minutes later, the French consulate, on the hotel's northern side, received a call, alerting it to open its windows, so as to reduce damage from the impending blast. A third warning came via the Palestine Post (predecessor to today's Jerusalem Post), which passed on a warning to both the hotel and the police.