Un-British

Soon after midnight, guards at old Acre Prison, near Haifa, entered his cell and shook Dov Bela Gruner until he woke up. Sleepy-eyed, bewildered, he was taken to a large, dimly lit room. There stood a gallows. There also stood three other men of Palestine's Irgun Zvai Leumi terrorist organization. This was their first notice that death had come for them.

A prison official asked the Jewish prisoners if they had any final requests. Yes, they wanted a rabbi to be with them in their last minutes. Said the officer: "You'll have to do without; we can't get one for you." Dov Gruner then asked if he might sing Hatikvah ("The Hope"), the Zionist anthem. The four men's voices rolled the mournful words of Zion.

Dov Gruner, Hungary-born British Army veteran who participated in a terrorist raid on a Palestine police post (TIME, Feb. 17), was the first to go. The others--23-year-old Eliezer Kashani, 32-year-old Mordecai Alkashi, 24-year-old Dov Rosenbaum--followed him to the gallows (they had been found with guns and whips in their possession soon after a British major had been flogged).

A Matter of Prestige. Before dawn's light, the British Army moved its might into Jerusalem, Tel Aviv and other large towns. Loudspeakers blared that all residents must stay in their houses for 24 hours. At Safad a nervous British lieutenant called on Mrs. Helen Friedman, Dov Gruner's sister from Lancaster, Pa., and broke the news to her. She had seen her brother the day before and she had been told then that she could see him again this day. She sobbed, "Why did they do it? Why did they fool me?"

The British, ordinarily sticklers for procedure even in executions, had gone about this grim business in a secretive and notably un-British way. The executions underscored the evident ascendancy of the Army in making Palestine policy. General G. H. A. Macmillan, backed up strongly by Field Marshal Sir Bernard Law Montgomery, had pressed for the executions as necessary to the prestige of British authority. Jewish terrorism played into the hands of the Army's "tough" policy, helped it overcome the more moderate line of Palestine's kindly Governor Sir Alan Cunningham.

The outbreak of violence which Jews and British feared came with a rush. There were explosions and gun fights in Haifa, Natanya and at five Army camps; two British officers and a Jewish civilian were killed. (In London a bomb was found in the Colonial Office; its crude timing device failed to explode it.) Irgun announced that it would take ten British lives for each of its "soldiers" hanged. Palestine was taut. The Army's showdown with the terror gangs seemed to be at hand.

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