Influential US Senator wants to cut military training and financial aid to Israel. ( Archived) (139)

I believe all foreign aid provided by the USA should be stopped unless the recipients pay income and sales taxes to the USA! We can't afford to support the world anymore. Get a job slackers of the world.

Disaster

Meanwhile, the Zionist organizations were considering how the deportation plan could be thwarted. A general strike had little effect. The Irgun attempted unsuccessfully to place a bomb on the Patria to disable it. The Haganah also sought to disable the Patria, with the intention of forcing it to stay in port for repairs and thus buying time that could be used to pressure the British to rescind the deportation order. The officer in charge of the operation was Yitzhak Sadeh, but his authority came from Moshe Sharett, who was the leader of the Political Department of the Jewish Agency in the temporary absence of David Ben-Gurion, who had left for the United States on 22 September and did not return until 13 February, 1941.

On 22 November agents of the Haganah smuggled a two-kilogram bomb on board the ship, timed to explode at 9 pm that day. It failed to explode, and a second, more powerful device was smuggled on board on 24 November. This was secreted next to the inner hull of the ship. At 9 am on 25 November, it exploded. The effect of the explosives had been misjudged and a large hole measuring three meters by two was blown in the side of the ship, which sank in only fifteen minutes.

At the time the bomb exploded, the Patria was carrying 1,770 refugees from the Pacific and Milos and had taken on board 134 passengers from the Atlantic. Most of these were rescued by British and Arab boats that rushed to the scene However, 260 others – mostly Jewish refugees – were declared missing, with another 172 being injured. Many of the dead were trapped in the hold of the ship and were unable to escape as the ship foundered. 209 bodies were eventually recovered and buried in Haifa.

Aftermath

The surviving refugees from the Patria, together with the remaining 1,560 passengers of the Atlantic, were taken to the Atlit detention camp. Later, after an international campaign, the survivors of the Patria were given permits to remain in Palestine. However, the other Atlantic passengers were forcibly deported to Mauritius on 9 December. After the war, they were given the choice of where to go; 81% chose Palestine and arrived there in August 1945.

The role of the Haganah was not publicly revealed and a story was put out that the deportees, out of despair, had sunk the ship themselves (the version recounted, for example, by Arthur Koestler). For years the British believed that the Irgun was probably responsible. Ha-Po'el ha-Tza'ir, a newspaper of the ruling Mapai party, unaware that all of the persons responsible were Mapai leaders, lamented that "On one bitter and impetuous day, a malicious hand sank the ship." The article led Ben-Gurion's son Amos to physically assault the newspaper's editor.

Meanwhile, a bitter debate over the correctness of the operation was raging in secret within the Zionist leadership. The decision had been made by an activist faction, without consulting more moderate members according to normal procedure, and this caused serious internal divisions that persisted for many years. An effort was made to enshrine the incident as an icon of Zionist determination, but this was largely unsuccessful. Some leaders of the Jewish community in Palestine, the Yishuv, argued that the loss of life had not been in vain, as the Patria's survivors had been allowed to stay in the country. Others declared that the Haganah had had no right to risk the lives of the immigrants, as they had not decided of their own free will to become participants in the underground Jewish conflict with the British authorities.

The Haganah's role was finally publicly disclosed in 1957 when Munia Mandor, the operative who had planted the bomb, wrote an account of his activities in the Jewish underground.

Yes sir, a great seaport with a fine history. :)

The September 11 attacks (often referred to as September 11, September 11th or 9/11,[nb 1] in combination with the attacks' side effects on that day) were a series of four coordinated suicide attacks by al-Qaeda upon the United States on Tuesday, September 11, 2001. On that morning, 19 al-Qaeda terrorists hijacked four commercial passenger jet airliners. The hijackers intentionally crashed two of the airliners into the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in New York City, killing everyone on board and thousands of those working in the buildings. Both towers collapsed within two hours, destroying nearby buildings and damaging others. A third airliner was crashed into the Pentagon. Hijackers had redirected the fourth plane toward Washington, D.C., targeting either the Capitol Building or the White House, but crashed it in a field near Shanksville in rural Pennsylvania after passengers attempted to retake control of the airliner. There were no survivors from any of the flights.