It was June of 1948. The State of Israel was barely five weeks old. Arab armies were attacking from every direction and the Jewish people were fighting for their very survival.

It was then, on a beach in Tel Aviv, that one of the saddest and most tragic events in the history of modern Israel took place. Jewish soldiers fired at a ship filled with other Jews, causing the ship to catch fire. Flames rose into the sky as men aboard leaped into the water while the gunfire of other Jewish soldiers continued around them.

The ship was called the Altalena.

Before Israel declared independence, several different Jewish organizations had fought to defend the Jewish population, including the Irgun, led by Menachem Begin.

Once the state was established, the new Prime Minister, David Ben-Gurion, insisted there could be only one government and one army. The separate fighting groups would have to dissolve and join the newly created Israel Defense Forces.

The Irgun had already arranged for the Altalena to sail from France carrying more than 900 Jewish immigrants and fighters, together with a desperately needed shipment of weapons and ammunition, valued at 153 million francs. By the time it reached Israel, the Irgun had already signed an agreement to join the national army.

However, the two leaders had a serious disagreement over who would control the weapons and where they would be distributed. Ben-Gurion insisted that every weapon had to come under exclusive government authority. The young country could not tolerate independent armies or private stockpiles of weapons.

While Begin agreed that most of the weapons should enter the national war effort, he also wanted some allocated specifically to his Irgun fighters defending Jerusalem.

Negotiations collapsed.

When the Altalena first came ashore near Kfar Vitkin, IDF soldiers surrounded the area and demanded that the weapons be surrendered. Shots were fired. Jews on one........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)