22 July, 2012

My 91-Year-Old Grandfather Helped Blow Up the King David Hotel on July 22, 1946 – Tablet Magazine

My 91-Year-Old Grandfather Helped Blow Up the King David Hotel on July 22, 1946 – Tablet Magazine: The romantic militancy of my grandfather’s childhood dream should not shock me: I’ve known since I was young that the man I call Saba was partly responsible for the King David Hotel bombing, one of the largest terrorist attacks of its time. The operation against Britain’s military and administrative headquarters in Jerusalem on July 22, 1946, left 91 people dead. Of them, 54 were civilians. Twenty-eight were British. Seventeen were Jews.

Although there was always an uncomfortable kernel of truth beneath the family joke that my grandfather was a terrorist, the reality of Saba Shraga’s background had seemed like a fable until I moved to Tel Aviv last year, where he still lives with my grandmother, Savta Margalit. On the one hand, he was a hero, decorated by the state of Israel for his contributions to the pre-Israel Zionist paramilitary group Irgun Tzvai Leumi (commonly known as Etzel). The photos on their wall picture him with the likes of former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, long-time member of Knesset Uzi Landau, and, of course, former Prime Minister Menachem Begin, who headed the Etzel before entering politics and, eventually, signing the Camp David peace accords with Egypt as prime minister in 1979.