Seventy-eight years after the Altalena was sunk, Yossi Sued, content development director at the Menachem Begin Heritage Center in Jerusalem and a doctoral student in Jewish history at Bar-Ilan University, highlighted details that are less widely known about the ship’s purchase, the Bergson Group, its voyage from France, and the decisions that led to its tragic end.
The Altalena was originally an American LST tank landing ship that took part in the Normandy invasion in June 1944. After the war it was sold for civilian conversion, bought by Irgun figures, and registered in Panama under the name Altalena, the literary pen name of Ze'ev Jabotinsky. The ship was adapted to carry hundreds of Holocaust survivors. Sued said the purchase was driven by the Bergson Group, an Irgun-linked activist network in the United States led by Hillel Kook, known as Peter Bergson, which worked with Jewish stars from Hollywood and Broadway, including Ben Hecht, Arthur Szyk and Kurt Weill, to raise awareness of the Holocaust and promote a Jewish army and a Jewish state in the Land of Israel.
The ship was intended to sail for what was then Mandatory Palestine in May 1948, before the state of Israel and the IDF existed, but delays in crew assembly, permits and weapons procurement left it waiting off the French coast. On June 11, the first truce in the War of Independence began, banning additional arms shipments, and on that same day the Altalena departed France for Israel. By then, its arrival meant a direct violation of the arms embargo, forcing David Ben-Gurion’s new government to decide how to respond.
Menachem Begin, then commander of the Irgun, was also caught in a difficult position. Although he had dissolved the organization, the Jerusalem battalion continued to operate, and Begin wanted weapons to reach its fighters, but he understood the government’s pressure. He ordered the ship to remain outside Israeli territorial waters, yet its commanders went ashore at Kfar Vitkin, where IDF forces fired on them and demanded surrender within ten minutes. Begin then ordered the ship to turn back to sea and head to Tel Aviv, believing it would find more Irgun supporters there and avoid further fire.
Sued said Begin had offered a compromise at Kfar Vitkin, asking that the weapons be unloaded, placed under joint control, and then divided, with 20 percent going to the Irgun in Jerusalem, but Ben-Gurion refused. The government ordered the Altalena stopped at any cost, and the command to open fire was reportedly carried out under the senior field command of Yitzhak Rabin. According to testimony, the first shell landed to the ship’s right, the second to its left, and the third struck it. As crew members jumped into the water, accounts say they were also fired upon while swimming to shore. Begin finally ran onto the deck calling in every language he knew for the shooting to stop, but his men, fearing for his life, threw him into the sea in a life ring. Later that day he delivered his “speech of tears,” urging Irgun members to obey the government.
