![]() Threatening to delegitimize the Jewish Agency was seen as an existential escalation, and the whole event took the name “Black Sabbath.” The intent was not only to deplete the Haganah’s capabilities but to damage the Jewish Agency by finding documents with which the British could implicate Jewish leaders in acts of violence. Over 2,000 people were arrested and a key Haganah arms cache was raided, as were the offices of the Jewish Agency (the government-in-waiting led by David Ben-Gurion). The British responded by launching Operation Agatha, a sweeping crackdown of arrests and raids, on a Saturday soon after the bridge bombings. One night in 1946, Haganah’s elite fighters blew up nearly a dozen bridges and roads connecting Palestine to its neighbors, the most significant act of sabotage yet. The Haganah was the mainstream defense force of the bodies overseeing Jewish resettlement in the land. The three major Jewish underground organizations-Haganah, Irgun, and Lehi-continued their (mostly) coordinated acts of sabotage against British military and bureaucratic infrastructure. In 1946, Palestine was still ruled by Britain, which had gone from turning away the Jews seeking refuge from the Holocaust to turning away the Jews seeking refuge after the Holocaust. It is also not the first Black Sabbath in Israel’s modern history. ![]() It’s a natural label for an all-day attack that shattered Israel’s self-conception after first shattering the peace of the Day of Rest. October 7 quickly came to be known in Israel as Black Shabbat, or Black Sabbath.
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