Word that Israel’s Heritage Ministry is planning to allocate one million shekels toward troweling the Mediterranean Sea off the coast of Tel Aviv for remnants of the Altalena is a moment to mark one of the most extraordinary — and tragic — chapters of the return to Zion. The ship belonged to the Irgun, the militia led by Menachem Begin. It was named after a nom de plume of Begin’s Zionist hero, Vladimir Jabotinsky. 

The ship, stocked with matériel and some 900 refugees, was intended to reach the shores of the Jewish state from France on May 15, 1948, just a day after independence was declared. Its arrival was delayed, though, and on June 1 the Irgun signed an agreement to be absorbed into the nascent Israel Defense Forces. A key condition was that the Irgun cease independent arms acquisition activity. The Altalena was sailing into turbulent political waters.

What happened next — the negotiations between Begin and Ben-Gurion — is much disputed. It came to pass, though, that the prime minister ordered Yigael Yadin, a general and the excavator of Qumran and Masada, to seize the ship by force.  Yitzhak Rabin was also on site. The shelling commenced on June 22. Sixteen members of the Irgun and three of the IDF were killed — though a white flag of surrender was waved. Civil war appeared possible.  

Begin, who would serve in Israel’s opposition for three decades before acceding to power in the political earthquake of 1978, by all accounts acquitted himself heroically. He refused to abandon the deck of the Altalena until the last of his wounded comrades was evacuated. Years later, he would approach the then-retired Ben-Gurion on the eve of the Six Day War and ask him to return to service from his retirement in the deep Negev desert.

The episode of the Altalena was a wound that took decades to heal, if it ever really has. The sight of Jew fighting Jew to the death in the Land of Israel had not been seen, it could be reckoned, since the days when Rome ruled. Now, the Israel Oceanographic and Limnological Research Institute has been hired to find the ship, which first ran aground ashore off of David Frishmann Street and then, a year later, was dragged out to sea and sunk. 

Israel’s Kan public broadcaster reports that the bulk of the shekels will go toward deploying Israel’s premier marine research vessel, the Bat Galim. The Makor Rishon newspaper reports that the minister of heritage, Amichai Eliyahu, told Israel’s cabinet this week that he wants the cannon — Ben-Gurion called it “holy” because its firing averted a civil war — that was used to shell the Altalena placed at the Menachem Begin Heritage Center. 

Justice Minister Yariv Levin, the mastermind of Israel’s efforts at judicial reform, ventured that the Altalena, once recovered, ought to “become a monument and a symbol of the bravery of the Revisionists.” Mr. Eliyahu tells Israel Channel 14 News, “For years, the legacy of the Revisionists was suppressed; there was no desire to acknowledge them. What interests us is not the steel of the Altalena but the story, the wound.”