Page 133 - ISRAEL'S CRADLE

These were the days of the "Jewish Resistance Movement", when the three Jewish underground organizations, the "Haganah," Irgun and Lehi, were cooperating and conducting resistance and sabotage operations against the British on an almost daily basis. The British had decided to react, and their reaction was expressed in a widespread operation codenamed "Broadside." No less than 2,700 Jews were arrested that day, headed by several of the Jewish Yishuv's leadership, members of the Jewish Agency and the Jewish National Council. These were Moshe Sharett (then Shertok), Head of the Political Department, members of the Executive, Dov Yossef, Yitzhak Gruenbaum and Rabbi Yitzhak Leib Fishman (later Maimon) and David Remez, Chairman of the Executive of the Jewish National Council. However, the British failed to get their hands on their primary target for arrest – the Chairman of the Jewish Agency David Ben-Gurion. He apparently foresaw what was going to happen and was in France on Saturday June 29. Another member of the Executive, the Head of the Finances Department Eliezer Kaplan, was also abroad and was not arrested. Several additional members of the Executive, including the Head of the Aliya Department Eliyahu Dobkin and the Head of the Economic Department Emil Schmorak – were not arrested.
And there was one other detainee, no less well-known than the others – The National Institutions Building in Jerusalem. The building was "captured" by British paratroopers in the morning of that Sabbath, which was given an uncomplimentary name a few days later: "The Black Sabbath." The British decided that they needed to become intimately familiar with the heart of hearts of the Jewish Yishuv – The home of the Jewish Agency and the other institutions – in the Rehavia Neighborhood. Officially they announced that they wanted to prove – and were successful at this according to them – that the Jewish Agency was responsible for the acts of terror against the Mandate Government. Unofficially, the British wished to discover what was being kept in the National Institutions Building, who exactly was operating within it and what treasures were hidden in the Central Zionist Archive, whose documents filled the building's basement from floor to ceiling.
The British raid on the Jewish Yishuv and its control center in Jerusalem was not a complete surprise. Two weeks previously, on Saturday night of June 15, 1946, a lengthy message was broadcast on the underground broadcasting station of "Haganah" regarding a well-planned British operation intended, by their definition, "to break the 'Haganah' and suppress the nests of resistance to the British rule over the Jewish Yishuv." The details of the operation were acquired via a British officer who was fed up with the attitude of the authorities to the Jews of the Land of Israel, and on his own initiative, he informed the intelligence personnel of the "Haganah" about the details of the planned operation. These included, among other things, the names of hundreds of candidates for arrest throughout the Land of Israel.
The leadership of the Yishuv and the "Haganah" prepared for the British operation, which at the time they had no information on its date of execution. It also turned out, in retrospect, that the details that had been exposed were partial. Thus, for example, the name of the National Institutions
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