Seeing who was behind the secret search (financed by government funds) makes it clear: If anything is refloated, it must be in the name of unity and not one side’s grievances

The Altalena burns off the beach at Tel Aviv in June 1948. (Wikimedia Commons)

Alamo, meet the Titanic.

That’s about the stretch of it. To right-wing diehards in Israel, the so-called Altalena Affair was a battle that, like the one at the Alamo, should always be remembered: a day of heroic defeat – and at the hands of fellow Jews yet.

Okay. It took the white-settler Texians barely a month and a half to get their comeuppance on Mexico’s Santa Anna for their March 6, 1836, defeat. For Israel’s political Right, it took significantly longer – some 29 years – until they won a national election and took control of the country from the political heirs of David Ben-Gurion.

THE ALTALENA WAS A decommissioned American tank-landing ship (LST). On June 16, 1947, it was sold as war surplus for conversion to a civilian transport and cargo ship. The new owner was the Three Star Line, a maritime service said to be based in Lake Charles, Louisiana.

With Israeli agents prowling North America for war surplus materiel, it was from there just a hop, skip and a jump to ownership by the Irgun. The vessel was renamed in homage to a pen name used by the late Irgun founder and Zionist-Revisionist leader Vladimir Ze’ev Jabotinsky. The plan was to use the vessel to bring Irgun volunteers to fight against the Arabs, as well as arms that the militia planned to keep for itself.

This represented the sometimes hodge-podge effort to integrate the pre-war militias into the nascent Israel Defense Forces, an effort that often led to high levels of unease and mistrust among soldiers and entire units.

After several delays, the Altalena sailed on June 11 from a port........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)