Israel and the Tragedy of the "Altalena"

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Brothers at War: Israel and the Tragedy of the Altalena, by Jerold Auerbach, (New Orleans, L.A: Quid Pro Books, 2011).

MILCHEMET ACHIM!--Brothers at war!--is a subject that has preoccupied Jews throughout their literature and history, from the narratives of Cain and Abel, Joseph and his brothers, in Genesis, the mutiny of Korach against the authority of Moses in Numbers, and the post-Biblical civil war that undermined the Jewish state from within while Roman legions were besieging it from without in the year 67 C. E. That was when Jewish national sovereignty came to an end until 1948. In his War of the Jews, Flavius Josephus, the Jewish military commander (and deserter), recounted the Jewish conflict within the larger one between Jews and Romans. If Josephus' account is to be believed, the Roman general Vespasian told his warriors (who had already killed 40,000 Jewish men) to hold back from further battle became "The Jews are vexed to pieces every day by their civil wars and dissensions, and are under greater misfortunes than, if they were once taken, could be inflicted on them by us.... Permit those Jews to destroy one another."

It is against the background of these wars between brothers that Jerold Auerbach, professor emeritus of history at Wellesley College and the author of numerous distinguished books about Jewish and American history, has written a luminous and probing history of the calamity of the Altalena, the ill-fated Irgun ship that tried to bring desperately needed refugee fighters, arms, and ammunition to the soldiers of Israel in June 1948,just weeks after the declaration of statehood and the ensuing invasion by five Arab armies. Readers familiar with Auerbach's own political views may be surprised to discover that his impulse to write the book came from an …