Finding the Altalena

The discovery by Israel of the remains of the Altalena — 78 years after its sinking — is an occasion to mark in the epic of the return of the Jews to Zion. The ship, which traveled from France in 1948 hauling weapons and men of the rightist Irgun as well as 900 refugees, was sunk after being strafed by gun and artillery fire from David Ben-Gurion’s Israel Defense Forces, commanded by Yitzhak Rabin. Sixteen Irgunists and three IDF soldiers were killed.“Brothers killed brothers” is how Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, in moving remarks on Monday, described the incident. He spoke via a video recorded on Tel Aviv’s shore. The premier, whose father was, like Menachem Begin, a disciple of the Revisionist hero Vladimir Jabotinsky, told Israel, riven ahead of this fall’s election, that “we are not going to have civil war. That’s the lesson of the Altalena.” He lamented the IDF’s “tragic decision.”Israel’s former president, Reuven Rivlin — who also hails from Revisionist stock — has called the sinking of the Altalena an “unpardonable crime.” Begin is reported to have shouted from the ship “There will be no civil war with the enemy at our gates.” Rabin, in a phrase that would attain an even more tragic tinge after his assassination at the hands of Yigal Amir, described the incident in his diary as “Jews shooting Jews.” The Jewish state’s heritage minister, Amichai Eliyahu, announced on Monday that “At 12:30 am, at a depth of 503 metres, west of the coast of Israel, the Altalena ship was located intact — 78 years after that painful and seminal event that shook the young State of Israel.” He called the Altalena “the story of a deep national wound, and the story of the historical responsibility that Menachem Begin showed when he prevented a civil war.”The shore on June 22, 1948, was also a precipice over which no faction of the inchoate Jewish state dared step. The Altalena was laden with matériel that the Irgun hoped to send to its Jerusalem fighters. Just weeks before, Ben-Gurion had declared the Jewish state, which was already facing invading Arab armies. Not since the days of ancient Rome had Jews inflicted violence at such scale on other Jews in their ancestral homeland. Jerusalem calls the effort to find the wreckage a “complex maritime search operation” that involved “long months of meticulous planning and preparation” and “special sensors and advanced survey systems.” Sonar technology was key, and initial indications suggest that what remains of the Altalena is too fragile to haul up to the surface. We reported last year that Israel had invested a million shekels in the hunt for the ship.Mr. Eliyahu calls the locating of the Altalena “a defining moment for our national memory.” It resonates with particular force with Israel’s right-leaning government. The Times of Israel reckons that the memory is for Begin’s heirs a reminder of the “dangers of internal conflict and violence, and about the ostensible perfidy of the political left.” Begin himself believed his restraint in the Mediterranean was his “greatest accomplishment.”Though the name of Altalena was borrowed from one of Jabotinsky’s noms de plume, its import reaches far beyond that internecine conflict at Israel’s dawn. These columns wondered earlier this month if Arab states could soon face their “Altalena Moment” with respect to the monopoly of force. That Israel overcame the sinking of the Altalena to rise to a democratic marvel is a truth of which the waves and sand are witnesses.

Finding the Altalena

Finding the Altalena

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