Word: irgun
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...Among the more than 500,000 Hungarian Jews who died that year in Auschwitz' deadly shower rooms were 52 members of the family of Malchiel Greenwald. Malchiel himself managed to escape, found his way to Palestine, and cast his lot and his hopes for the future with the Irgun Zwei Leumi, the party that fought with the fiercest zeal against the British for Israel nationalism. But uppermost in Malchiel's mind was the fate that had befallen his relatives in Hungary. A bent, grief-stricken man in his 70s, he set himself the task of finding...
...suffered terribly from "a nostalgia for poverty." He gets some comfort out of the somewhat mistaken belief that until he spoke up in 1939 "no voice of any importance anywhere" had protested against Hitler's butchery of Jews. He is also proud of having backed Palestine's Irgun terrorists so vigorously that he found "British spies among the early irises" of his Nyack garden and became (evidently forgetting about Benjamin Disraeli) »'the first Jew to be denounced in the House of Commons for 500 years." But to Hecht none of this counts for much compared with...
...April 9, 1948, in the first days of the Arab-Israeli war, Jewish terrorists of the Stern Gang and Irgun Z-vai Leumi encircled Deir Yassin, an Arab village a few miles west of Jerusalem, and by loud speaker demanded its surrender. Their leader carried a cautionary wire from the regional commander of the Haganah, the predecessor of the Israeli army: "I learn you plan an attack on Deir Yassin. I have no objection [but] I warn you against blowing up the village...
...horror and disgust at the barbarous manner in which this action was carried out" and cabled the statement to Jordan's King Abdullah, leader of the Arab coalition. (Three months later, fed up with the terrorists' irresponsibility, the Haganah itself fought a pitched battle with the Irgun troops, forced them to disband as a private army...
...would-be assassin was Dov Shilanski, onetime inmate of Dachau concentration camp, later a member of the Irgun Zvai Leumi terrorist organization. When peace came to Israel, Shilanski became a terrorist without a target. He found a humdrum job as a clerk, slid out of sight for four years. Last spring, when the hard-pressed Jewish government sat down with the hated Germans to negotiate reparations, Shilanski took up his old tools and vowed to avenge the "betrayal...