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Haifa oil refinery massacre

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Summary

On December 30, 1947, ETZEL operatives threw bombs from a speeding car into a crowd of several hundred Arab day labourers outside the main gate of the Haifa oil refinery, killing six and wounding forty-two; within minutes, some of the crowd surged into the refinery compound and, with some Arab refinery workers, attacked the Jewish refinery workers, killing forty-one Jews and wounding forty-nine before British soldiers and police restored order an hour later — the largest and most brutal massacre of civilians in Palestine since the UN partition vote a month earlier (Comrades and Enemies: Arab and Jewish Workers in Palestine, 1906-1948, lines 4083-4085).

Details

  • The refinery had a history of close cooperation between Arab and Jewish unionists; in the summer of 1947 the Jewish workers’ committee attended the funeral in Acre of an Arab refinery worker killed in an industrial accident, eulogised him, and joined a brief memorial strike, a collection for his family and a compensation campaign (Comrades and Enemies: Arab and Jewish Workers in Palestine, 1906-1948, line 4079).
  • The good feeling evaporated during the fall of 1947, and after the General Assembly voted to endorse partition the Jewish workers became increasingly worried about their safety (Comrades and Enemies: Arab and Jewish Workers in Palestine, 1906-1948, line 4081).
  • In December 1947 ETZEL, commanded by Menachem Begin, devoted itself largely to retaliating for attacks on Jewish civilians by targeting Arab civilians; on December 29, 1947 it staged a bomb attack at the Nablus Gate of Jerusalem’s Old City which killed or wounded forty-four people (Comrades and Enemies: Arab and Jewish Workers in Palestine, 1906-1948, line 4083).
  • ETZEL later announced, quite unapologetically, that the Jerusalem and Haifa bombings had been carried out in retaliation for recent attacks on Jews elsewhere in Palestine (Comrades and Enemies: Arab and Jewish Workers in Palestine, 1906-1948, line 4083).
  • Lockman calls the incident one of the first massacres of the 1947-49 period and says it contributed greatly to the dissemination of fear and hatred among both Arabs and Jews in Palestine (Comrades and Enemies: Arab and Jewish Workers in Palestine, 1906-1948, line 4077).
  • The report of the Jewish committee investigating the massacre noted that “there were isolated incidents of Arab workers and [white-collar] employees who in various ways warned and even succeeded in saving a number of Jews, their coworkers” and that “not all the Arab workers at the enterprise participated in the rampage”, but also found that some took an active part and that “there was no effort by a group of Arab workers to prevent others from rampaging” — in contrast to the railway workshops that same day, where Arab unionists intervened to prevent violence (Comrades and Enemies: Arab and Jewish Workers in Palestine, 1906-1948, line 4087).
  • The intervention at the workshops received little public attention: the Yishuv focused on the massacre of Jews at the refinery, while the Arab community preferred to dwell on the preceding bomb attacks by Jews and the Hagana’s subsequent retaliatory raid which took an even larger number of Arab lives (Chapter 8 note 44 cites Morris and Khalidi on the attack on Balad al-Shaykh) (Comrades and Enemies: Arab and Jewish Workers in Palestine, 1906-1948, lines 4089, 4267).

Comrades and Enemies: Arab and Jewish Workers in Palestine, 1906-1948, Consolidated Refineries Limited, Irgun, Haganah, Haifa

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