Page 171 - ISRAEL'S CRADLE

At the beginning of the War of Independence, the struggle was not just against the Arabs, but also the irregular British forces who assisted them. During February 1948, defectors from the British Army operated car bombs against buildings in the Jewish areas. On February 1, the building of the "Palestine Post" Newspaper, a Jewish English-language newspaper, was struck by a huge explosion, which killed three Jews and injured 16. The building itself was seriously damaged and the newspaper lost its archive, equipment and printing presses. Three weeks later, three trucks of the British Army, which were driven by defectors, entered the Jewish area in the heart of the city, while carrying over a ton and a half of explosives. The vehicles were detonated in Ben-Yehuda Street, killing 52 Jews – men, women and many children, injured 123 and caused tremendous damage.
The Jewish population in Jerusalem, which at the beginning of the fighting numbered 100 thousand, gritted its teeth and continued to fortify itself. Special strict instructions were given to the barricades guards. This did not prevent the next disaster. In the morning of March 11, 1948, a car of the American Consulate in the city, bearing the stars-and-stripes flag, arrived at the locked gate of the National Institutions Building – the Jewish Agency, the Jewish National Council, Keren Hayesod and KKL-JNF, which also housed the headquarters of the "Haganah" in Jerusalem. From this point on, the versions diverge.
According to one version, the driver, Anton Daud, a Christian-Arab born in Colombia and a resident of Bethlehem, was known to the Shai, the intelligence services of the "Haganah" and had received recommendations from several qualified individuals who knew him. In order to prove his loyalty, he handed three handguns to one of the Shai's people, and brought them in the car of the American Consulate. The car had a license to travel in any part of Jerusalem – the Jewish, the Arab and the British. Seemingly – a reliable person who can enter anywhere with his vehicle, even the most guarded location. Indeed, Daud visited the closed compound of the National Institutions Building on several occasions, delivered and took envelopes, and the guards knew him and would wave their hands at him.
According to this version, he parked his car near the main entrance to the National Institutions Building and hurried to exit the compound, claiming that he needed to bring "something else." He did not return, and a guard named Chaim Gur-Arieh decided that the driverless car was parked inappropriately. He entered the car and released the hand break, the car slid about twenty meters towards the offices of Keren Hayesod, in the left wing of the National Institutions Building. Suddenly, a huge explosion was heard.
According to another version, which appears in the book "Nine Measures – Jerusalem in the War of Independence" by Yitzhak Levy (Levitza), a Jerusalemite cab driver named Yossef Polyakov, who worked in the Shai Service, was in regular contact with Anton Daud and purchased handguns from
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