On July 31, 1947 rioting British soldiers rampaged through Tel Aviv, shooting at civilians and killing five Jews.
Eventually, during their killing spree, British soldiers would murder eight Jews.
The first five Jews killed in Tel Aviv were identified as Tova Harson, Victor Yedidia Mizrahi, Ze'ev Novakovsky, Kalman Reich and Yosef Azpai.
Who were these Jews the British murdered? Civilians who did not belong to any Jewish militia. They were people riding buses when British bullets ripped through them. They were a nine-year-old in his home and a man having coffee with friends. An additional 15 Jewish civilians were wounded by British fire.
Weeks earlier, on July 11, the Irgun, the militia led by future prime minister Menachem Begin, had kidnapped two British sergeants.
The kidnappings were the Irgun’s response to the British hanging of members of the Irgun, often for the crime of being in possession of a gun.
In fact, from August 1945 to August 1947 40 young Jewish men were killed or executed by the British, along with a small number who committed suicide prior to being hanged.
Three more Irgun members were scheduled to be hanged on July 29, 1947. At the same time, the Irgun announced that they would hang their British captives if their own men were hanged.
In spite of the warning, the British executed the three Jews on July 29, and on July 31 the bodies of the kidnapped British officers were found hanging in an orchard near Netanya. And their bodies were booby trapped, injuring a British officer.
Clearly, the arrogant British had been sure that the Jews would not dare to act against the mighty British empire. For after 2000 years of subservience, the British were sure that the Jews would know their place.
On the same day the dead British soldiers were discovered, July 31, British troops began rioting in Tel Aviv, smashing windows in shops and buses, overturning cars, stealing a taxi and beating up Jews on the streets.
Jewish youth responded by stoning those British troops found on the streets.
This triggered the arrival of armored cars into Tel Aviv, from which the British savages began firing from within their protected vehicles at unarmed Jewish civilians.
Within days, British troops also fired upon men having coffee near Rishon LeZion, killing one.
And shots were fired from a British military base into a nearby Jewish home, killing a nine year-old child.
All of these decades later the question must be asked: How could the well-disciplined British troops have rioted? Where were their officers?
A more frightening question is whether this killing of Jews was simply putting in action British policy created in London?
And what kind of policy would have encouraged the Arabs to kill Jews? While the British had announced they would leave Israel in May 1948, they also repeatedly warned the world that the entire region would erupt if they left. And allowing Arabs to kill Jews would have provided evidence that only the British could return to quell the anarchy.
In fact, we know that it was British policy to not interfere when Arabs rioted and killed Jews during the 1948 Hadassah massacre (79 Jews died) - and British soldiers prevented the Haganah from coming to the aid of those doctors and nurses shot in cold blood whose screams could be heard in Mea Shearim - and earlier in December 1947 during Jerusalem’s Shlom Tsiyon HaMalka Street riots (eight Jews died in Jerusalem and 184 Jews died throughout Israel).
Newspaper reports at that time quoted British soldiers admitting that they were ordered to stand down during the Arab massacres--not to do their duty and protect their Jewish colonial subjects. They had done the same in the 1929 Hebron pogrom.
The response within Britain to the hanging of the British officers was to return to their roots and conduct pogroms against the Jews.
Crowds of British civilians descended upon the Jewish communities in London, Manchester, Liverpool, Glasgow and elsewhere, where Jewish owned shops were targeted, synagogues were attacked, and anti-Jewish signs were erected throughout these British cities.
To no one’s surprise, frightened Jews throughout the world, particularly in Britain, America and Israel, loudly condemned the Irgun for hanging the British sergeants.
Fearing for their own comfort and safety, Jews worldwide reacted with hysteria to the killing of the sergeants. In Jewish newspaper editorials, in synagogue sermons, in declarations approved by Jewish organizations throughout the world, always meeting in their self-important emergency sessions, the common theme was that the Irgun had set back plans for the Jewish state by years, by decades, maybe by centuries!
And here we are, 78 years later, and what were the consequences of the Irgun’s hanging of the British sergeants?
The experts, of course, were wrong and the Jewish state came into being nine months later, regardless of the hangings carried out by the Irgun.
However, the one undeniable result of the hangings of the sergeants was that the British never again executed a single young Jewish man.
Looking back, think about the arrogance of those British.
The British were intensely frustrated after they initially had such high colonial hopes for Palestine, but by 1948 they were no longer wanted by the Jews of Israel.
So the British showed their true face by responding with violence against Jews, with beatings, arrests, trials and hangings.
Still, civilized people were supposed to believe that the hangings of Jews were not murder because they were ordered by British courts and British judges!
But of course, the British were murderers.
And Begin understood that we were at war with the British and the battlefield was on every square meter of Israel.
Throughout our long history, the world’s response to the killing of Jews has been that “the Jews got what they deserved."
Who deserved dying in Tel Aviv? Jews sitting on a bus? A Jewish child in his home?
And the non-Jew answers then, as now, that yes, the Jews deserved to be punished.
The pogroms….the expulsions…the suffocating anti-Jewish laws….the Pale of Settlements and October 7….it is always the same. The Jews deserved it.
Only a few years ago, during an inebriated evening in a Warsaw bar, I sat drinking with a former Polish ambassador who said to me, “You have to understand, the Jews were separate." In other words, the Jews deserved their being exterminated in Poland.
Perhaps the most hidden antisemite of the 20th century, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, is quoted in the diaries of his aides as saying that Jewish domination of the professions in Poland and Germany brought about the much deserved Jew-hatred and exterminations in those countries. Again, the Jews were to blame.
Author Andre Schiffrin quotes Roosevelt, who said the “understandable complaints which the Germans bore toward the Jews, namely that while they represented a small part of the population, over 50% of the lawyers, doctors, school teachers, college professors, etc. in Germany were Jews." Adds Schiffrin, “This astonishing claim showed the degree to which FDR had accepted Nazi propaganda about the German Jews…..while the Jews were between 1 and 2 percent of the German population before the war, they comprised no more than 2.3 percent of the professions. At most, 16.3 percent of the lawyers had been Jewish."
What are the lessons to be learned from the 1947 British rioting in Tel Aviv and Britain?
Let us not forget that the British not only reversed their promises to create a Jewish homeland, but they reversed their commitments to themselves to spread civilization when they did not stop their troops from rioting in Tel Aviv and killing Jews.
But what about the 30,000 Jews in pre-state Israel who volunteered to join the British military during World War II? Did the British not appreciate the Jewish effort? Clearly they did not.
So in 2026, what might we Jews learn from the British rioting and all the British lies of the final years of their colonial project in Israel?
Perhaps that throughout Jewish history there remains a very, very thin veneer separating the Jews from the untold horrors of the savage world.
Think about the years following the Shoah when the non-Jews, without missing a beat, returned to their 2,000 year hatred of the Jews. Even as the crematoriums remained warm, look no farther than the post-war pogroms in Poland, the expulsions of Jews from employment and daily life in post-war Russia, the expulsions of the Jews from the Arab countries and today’s mainstreaming of antisemitism in Europe and America.
And today we see how easily, after October 7, the West reignited the smoldering, genetic antisemitism they eternally harbor.
What must we learn? That October 7 is never far away. And in the West, now they out-source the beatings and killings of Jews to the invading Arabs who populate their cities.
Also, the British taught us that if the Jews depend upon others, then we will die. Additionally, the Americans, who unfailingly prevent Israel from winning wars, teach us that if we depend upon Washington, we will die.
And every day of the year is October 7 at that open sewer called the United Nations, as their General Assembly never stops demonizing us, their courts indict us and their UNRWA has a holy mission to provide employment to terrorists and educate young Arabs to grow up and kill Jews.
But not to despair, for there is also very good news. And that is that after 2,000 years, we in Israel have the privilege of being in control of whether we live or die.
Have no doubt that the non-Jewish world is unchanged and there remains no greater motivation for the world to hate us than that the Jews are thriving and remain safe in Israel.
And we must remember that all of the high minded phrases from the West about civilization and justice will be immediately discarded when the opportunity arises to strike at the Jews.
So let us embrace and learn from our past, while giving thanks that the Jews have found safety in Israel, but only through our own efforts and our enormous sacrifices.
May each of our families, along with all Israel, find good health, wisdom and peace in the coming year.