Middle Israel: Netanyahu is digging up the Altalena to bury his own record - opinion

It started with Joseph.

The expat who made it big in Egypt commanded his people: “You must carry my bones up from this place” (Genesis 50:25). The Hebrew viceroy’s will was fulfilled to the letter, albeit centuries later, when “Moses took the bones of Joseph with him, because Joseph had made the Israelites swear an oath” (Exodus 13:19).

The same thing happened with Theodor Herzl and Ze’ev Jabotinsky, who died abroad and were reburied in the Jewish state they craved, but never saw.

Named after Jabotinsky’s pen name (Italian for “seesaw”), the Altalena sailed from Marseilles on June 11, 1948, carrying some 5,000 rifles, 450 machine guns, and carts of ammunition. The shipment was commanded by Begin’s Irgun, in the declared hope that it would help in the fight of the unfolding War of Independence.

It had been three weeks since Israel declared its independence and the Arab armies’ invasion of the newborn state. As Begin biographer Avi Shilon noted, the Irgun’s very purchase of arms violated its previous agreement to have the Hagana – now the IDF – approve in advance any such deal (Begin: 1913-1992, Am Oved 2007, p. 127).

Even so, after the ship reached Israel’s shores, a negotiation with prime minister David Ben-Gurion’s representatives ensued. Begin agreed to hand the arms to the IDF, but insisted that one-fifth go to Irgun units, which were still intact. Begin evidently thought, and certainly hoped, he could prolong his units’ separate existence. This, despite an agreement on June 1, 1948, that the Irgun’s fighters blend into the IDF.

The road from this bargaining to bloodshed was short. On the political level, Ben-Gurion presented an ultimatum, which the Irgun rejected. On the military level – shots were fired.

The Altalena showdown was turned by Begin into a big myth, a clash between a brutal Ben-Gurion and a magnanimous Begin, who – in this narrative – held his people back with the call “no to a civil war,” broadcast on radio after the battle had ended.

The opposite camp, needless to say, had its own narrative. Hundreds of Begin’s followers were defecting from their IDF units and thronging to Tel Aviv’s beach, spawning suspicion of a gathering revolt. And Begin’s brave call not to fight came only after he had been knocked out.

This is besides the sequel to the clash that Begin and his people conveniently ignored, namely, Ben-Gurion’s equally resolute dismantlement of the Palmach, the left-leaning crack units that spearheaded the IDF’s victory in the War of Independence.

Ben-Gurion understood that if Israel is to be a real state, it must monopolize violence, which meant one army with one command. To understand the alternative, one need only look at Lebanon’s two armies, or to the Kurds’ multiple militias, and understand that this is no way to build a nation.

The Altalena was not “found,” because its location, 20 km. offshore and 500 m. undersea, was well known. Still, saying it was “found” is designed to create the impression that Benjamin Netanyahu has just discovered Atlantis.

That is besides the insinuation that the wreckage can teach us something we didn’t know, the way US president Zachary Taylor’s body was exhumed in 1991 following suspicions he was poisoned (he wasn’t), or the way the grave of John F. Kennedy’s assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, was opened in 1981 to verify it actually contained him and not a Soviet spy.

Retrieving the Altalena’s decomposed skeleton would shed no light on what happened in June 1948. It would, however, be used to cultivate the myth that civil war was waged out of the blue by Ben-Gurion, and prevented by the man who, in fact, had provoked it.

But to Bibi, the facts are immaterial. What he cares about is the chance, no matter how slim, to change the approaching election’s subject, which is his role in Israel’s worst-ever catastrophe. That is why he emerged near the Altalena battle’s location, stared into a camera, and with the Mediterranean azure behind him declared: “Civil war – never!”

This eye-rolling sanctimony comes to us from the man who consciously pitted us against each other; inciting against the courts, the police, and the media; sending the serving population to unending wars while exempting a multitude of his supporters from any service; and libeling the serving “Left” for having “forgotten what being Jewish is.”

Exhuming the Altalena would therefore not be about yesteryear’s civil war, but about today’s, and it would not be about unearthing history, but about fleeing its verdict – the verdict that will soon be issued by the people Netanyahu divided, and read to his ashen face between his era’s last dusk and the following morning’s dawn.