July 22: King David Hotel Bombing

Ninety-one people were killed when the King David Hotel in Jerusalem was bombed by the Irgun on this date in 1946. The hotel served as headquarters for the British Mandate authorities in Palestine; the bombing was carried out in revenge for recent British raids in Jerusalem, Tel Aviv and Haifa, in which some 2,700 members of Jewish underground militias had been arrested and a great deal of weaponry confiscated. Among the future Israeli leaders involved in the King David attack were Menachem Begin and Moshe Sneh (a founder of Mapam). Begin claimed that warnings about the bombing were phoned into the hotel one half-hour before; a British inquest insisted that no warnings were received. Among the dead were 41 Arabs and 17 Jews, mostly employees of the hotel or of the British secretariat. The bombing was widely denounced by Zionist authorities, although the Haganah, the mainstream armed wing of the movement, had originally sanctioned it. As a result, the united front among Zionist groupings broke down and the Irgun and Lehi (Stern Gang) became renegade groups. In 2006, on the 60th anniversary of the bombing, Benjamin Netanyahu defended it: “Imagine that Hamas or Hizbullah would call the military headquarters in Tel Aviv and say, ‘We have placed a bomb and we are asking you to evacuate the area.’ ” he said. “They don’t do that. That is the difference.”

“[W]hatever nonlethal intentions the Irgun might or might not have had, the fact remains that a tragedy of almost unparalleled magnitude was inflicted . . . so that to this day the bombing remains one of the world’s single most lethal terrorist incidents of the twentieth century.” —Bruce Hoffman, Inside Terrorism