ABSTRACT
The two helpless men were Clifford Martin and Mervyn Paice, sergeants in the field security section of the Army Intelligence Corps. They had been kidnapped by the Irgun Zwai Leumi, a Zionist insurgent group, on 11 July 1947 and hanged 18 days later, in retaliation for the British execution of three Irgun militants. Their bodies were transferred to a eucalyptus grove on the outskirts of Netanya and suspended from two trees; the ground underneath was mined. On 31 July, British attempts to retrieve the bodies – the exact location of which had been communicated anonymously by the Irgun, complete with a map reference – set off the mines. Both corpses were severely mutilated, one disintegrating completely in the force of the explosion.2 The gruesome spectacle – the recovery party were accompanied by journalists whose grisly photographs were reproduced in the world media – prompted an outraged reaction in Britain. Politicians and press vied with each other to denounce the killing in the strongest possible terms. The Manchester Guardian announced that ‘[i]n the whole record of political terrorism there has been no worse crime than the brutal and cold-blooded murder of the two British sergeants’, while The Times declared that ‘the bestialities committed by the Nazis themselves could go no further’.3 Anti-Semitic rioting occurred in British cities for five days, British forces in Palestine embarked on reprisals against the Jewish population in Tel Aviv, and two months later the British government resolved to withdraw from the Mandate.4 Amichai Paglin, known as ‘Gidi’ within the Irgun, had supervised the ‘Sergeants Affair’, providing Paice and Martin with oxygen cylinders with which to refresh the air in their underground cell, securing the agreement of the Irgun leader, Menachem Begin, for their execution, and hanging both men off a short rope in an abandoned diamond factory. Then a 25-year-old native of Tel Aviv, he had risen precipitously within the ranks of the organisation since he joined in 1943 and, by the time of the kidnapping of Paice and Martin, was Chief Operations Officer. Over the period of the insurgency, Paglin oversaw the most signi-
ficant attacks mounted by the Irgun, including the bombing of the King David Hotel in July 1946, the blasting of a hole in the wall of Acre Prison in May 1947, and multiple arms seizures and low-level sabotage. Despite this formidable record, it is not clear whether his name and identity were ever known to the British authorities. Certainly, he slipped through the fingers of the CID at Rehovot police station after he and two fellow insurgents were arrested at Akir airbase in early January 1946.5 Embedded at the heart of the Irgun command structure, Paglin’s narrative provides a synoptic lens through which to explore the wider history of the insurgency in Palestine in the late 1940s: the growth of Zionism as a political ideology; the adoption of terrorist violence as part of a broader revolutionary strategy; the challenges of counter-terrorism in a colonial setting; and the challenges of a return to ‘civilian’ life when the goal of the terrorist organisation – in this case national independence – has been achieved.
