This Day in Jewish History: Irgun Blows Up British HQ at Jerusalem’s King David Hotel

The Irgun, headed by Menachem Begin, tried to warn the British to evacuate the King David in advance. But nobody listened, and 91 people died.

The King David bombing took place less than a month following Operation Agatha, a British round-up of some 2,700 officials of both the Jewish Agency and the Haganah, carried out on June 29, 1946. When the British police occupied Jewish Agency headquarters that day, they also confiscated large numbers of sensitive files.

The Haganah leadership was under the impression – mistaken, it turned out – that the files had been taken to the King David Hotel, where both the British civilian government and its military leadership in Palestine were headquartered.

The proposal to blow up the hotel – specifically its southern section – came from Menachem Begin, later Israel’s prime minister but then, head of the Irgun Zvai Leumi (National Military Organization), also known by its Hebrew acronomyn, Etzel. [But approval for the operation came from top officials of the Haganah – Moshe Sneh, the chief of general headquarters, and Yitzhak Sadeh, commander of the Palmach, the militia’s elite commando unit.