The Altalena Rises

Just weeks after Israel declared Independence in May of 1948, and the ensuing war broke out, the IDF sunk a ship armed with fighters and weapons making its way to Israel. The ship was the Altalena and the fighters and weapons were working their way into Jewish hands, not Arab.

The situation was complicated and to dissect the Altalena Affair properly, one would have to go into the difficult and contentious relationship between the Hagannah and the Irgun. That is outside of the scope of the post at hand. Suffice to say that the two militias were working towards the same goal of Jewish independence, but with very different methods and philosophies which were often incompatible with each other.

Menachem Begin, head of the Irgun, had received permission from David Ben Gurion, head of the IDF (only recently formed out of the now defunct Hagannah) to bring the Altalena, packed with upwards of 1,000 Jewish volunteers and a massive amount of arms, to Israel’s shores. While there are differing opinions over the exact agreement, it is widely understood that Begin had agreed to hand a majority of the weapons over to the IDF, and to keep only a small fraction for the Irgun. In the end, Ben Gurion ordered the ship sunk and while those who had abandoned ship swam to sea, they were shot at by IDF forces. Begin himself was on board at the time and while he survived, 16 members of the Irgun did not.

Ben Gurion’s reasoning for this controversial act was simple. He believed that a state must have a monopoly over the use of force. There could be no true Jewish state so long as armed militias were fighting with their own methods and philosophies.

Now we move forward to the current day and see that Israel and the IDF are giving away that monopoly. There have been reports since the summer – when the Palestinians requested statehood recognition from the UN – of Israel training, arming and preparing Israeli settlements throughout the West Bank to fight off attacks by Palestinians on their own accord.

And now yesterday, Haaretz has reported that teenagers, aged 16-18, are being trained and utilized by the Border Police to find and detain illegal Palestinian workers. With only several days of training, these teenagers are issued M-16s and put to work. They patrol construction sites, check buses and help at checkpoints. Currently there are 36 youth participating in the program. Another 30 are set to be trained next month.

If Israel needs more manpower to patrol their borders, they need to allocate funds, hire more police and then adequately train and prepare them for the job. Instead Israel is creating “interns,” giving them several days of training, and then handing out automatic weapons to kids who are not old enough to drive in some US states.

David Ben Gurion was willing to kill Jews to keep the monopoly of force within the hands of Israel. And now, just a few decades later, Israel is handing out guns to anyone with a permission slip from their parent and a note from their doctor (two requirements to sign up for the course).
With confrontations breaking out between the state and the religious, the state and the settlers, the state and their Arab population, it seems to me that Israel should be consolidating their monopoly, not fragmenting it.

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