Page 23 - ISRAEL'S CRADLE

fasting, the leaders not only conducted a hunger strike in the building, they actually lived in the building, making this the only time, as far as anyone knows, that the building served as a lodge.
B. On the "Black Sabbath" of June 29, 1946, the National Institutions Building was "taken over" by British army and police and held by them for ten days. This was part of the British's attempt to break the leadership of the Yishuv and the "Haganah", which they perceived as being operated from the Agency's offices in the building. The British inflicted serious damage to the building, dismantled wall coverings and furniture in their search for concealed weapons and documents that they thought would prove a firm link between the Jewish Agency and the "Haganah". They also removed several tons of equipment and documents from the building, conducted a thorough search of the Zionist Archive and even took many documents from it. Once the building was returned to its owners, it took weeks to clean, repair and restore it to full operations. The capture of the building, the center of the Jewish Yishuv, was considered by that generation to be a gross violation of Jewish autonomy and a low point in the Yishuv's relationship with the British.
C. The greatest and most tragic drama in which the National Institutions Building was involved in took place on Thursday March 11, 1948, in the midst of the War of Independence. The vehicle of the American Consulate that would enter and exit the gates of the secured premises of the Institutions, arrived in the early morning hours and was permitted to enter. The driver, a Christian Arab named Anton Daoud, parked it in front of the main entrance and cleared out. A Jewish guard who disliked the car's placement moved it several meters from there, near the Keren Hayesod Wing. It was then that a massive explosion was heard, which caused the collapse of the Keren Hayesod Wing and damages in the remaining wings as well. The bombing resulted in 12 fatalities among the building employees and several passersby who happened to be in the area that morning and to about a hundred injuries.
In the following hours, as search and rescue operations were carried out throughout the huge building, difficult sights could be seen. The dead were removed from the wreckage including Leib Yaffe, Director-General of Keren Hayesod, one of the first members of the Zionist movement and a representative to the First Zionist Congress; the injured were rescued, bandaged and transferred to the hospitals. Chaim Herzog, the building's Security Officer and who would eventually become a Major-General in the IDF, a UN Ambassador and President of the State of Israel, found his young wife Aura seriously injured in one of the corridors and carried her to the ambulance waiting outside of the building. Walter Eytan, who would eventually become Israel's Ambassador to France and Director General of the Foreign Ministry, was slightly injured and Gershon Avner, who would become Cabinet Secretary, and was injured more seriously – both had appeared at noon, bandaged, at the daily press conference for foreign journalists – in the building that had been bombed.
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