Altalena Affair

The government meeting was a regular scheduled meeting of the cabinet with several items for discussion on the table, with the terrible situation in Yerushalayim being at the top of the list.

So this wasn't an emergency meeting convened about the Altalena.

This was a regular scheduled meeting where several items were on the agenda.

At one point in the meeting, Moshe Sharet, who was the foreign minister of the State of Israel at the time, reported to the cabinet about the Altalena and its imminent arrival.

Like I said, it arrived a couple of hours after this meeting took place.

Now the stunned government officials were informed about this for the very first time, about this ship.

The Irgun realized that they were surrounded, and it was in two significant ways that they realized this.

Number one, when Irgun trucks attempted to leave the area loaded with weapons from the Alta Lena, they were blocked by IDF checkpoints.

And, uh, and ironically, Israel is very much part of the region in that way, and there is a real danger of that.

And of course, in 1947, '48, that almost happened then when, um, Ben-Gurion, the, the first prime minister, fired on the Altalena, um, ship that was bringing in arms for Menachem Begin's Irgun militia, and he had to make the decision to kill Jewish people, to fire on Jewish militias to assert state authority.

Well, I think there's gonna be a crisis in the new government after October, um, in which, in which, um, they're gonna have to make some sort of decision to disarm or, or to, um, arrest, you know, these, these, these over-mighty militias, which is, which is still actually easily manageable if, with a bit of will.

But-

Even so, the Irgun had pledged to become a part of the IDF in the newly formed state of Israel.

A month after Ben-Gurion declared independence, a ship named the Altalena set sail from France, organized by the Irgun and carrying rifles and some 900 immigrants, many of them survivors of the Shoah.

The ship left port the same day that a United Nations ceasefire took effect, a truce that barred the importation of any new arms or combatants into the country.

So when the Altalena reached the coast of Kfar Vitkin, just north of Tel Aviv, a dispute broke out over how the weapons would be distributed, and in particular, over Begin's insistence that a share go to the Irgun battalion in Jerusalem, which, he argued, stood outside the truce's terms, since Jerusalem's status itself remained unsettled under the United Nations Partition Plan.

The standoff turned violent on shore, and Begin ordered the ship to sail south off the coast of Tel Aviv in full view of the city and the world's press.

Near what is today Frishman Beach, Ben-Gurion gave the order to open fire on the ship, and by this time, with Begin aboard, opened fire on his main political rival.

"Never," he said, "could he condone a war between brothers." Welcome to the Tikva Podcast.

I'm your host, Jonathan Silver.

Before that, we have this matter that we are following with alert interest and great concern as part of an occasional series we like to call The Promise Podcast Ponders Portside Passions That Fail to Pass.

At twelve thirty in the morning, on the night between this past Sunday and Monday, Aharon, or Roni Sadeh, and a team of scientists he put together on a thirty-nine-meter deep-sea research vessel named Bat Galim, found resting on the bottom of the Mediterranean, five hundred and three meters down, what is left of a ship called the Altalena.

Roni Sadeh is the director of the Marine Mapping Division of the Israel Survey.

He is the country's best hydrographic surveyor and a lead researcher, as part of his doctoral research, of the Israel Bathymetric Survey, bathymetry being the study of the floors of oceans, rivers, and lakes, which national bathymetric survey aims to map Israel's, quote-unquote, "margins" in the Mediterranean, the Red Sea, the Sea of Galilee, and the Dead Sea.

And in between his university work and his government work at the survey, Roni Sadeh also started his own marine surveying company.

It is called Yam Yafo Marom Projects, which in two thousand and eighteen did the first in-depth study of a hundred-year-old wreck of an Ottoman steamer named the Sharia in the Sea of Galilee, where it had been sunk by the British at the end of the Great War in a small naval skirmish in what, to call the thing by its name, is really not much more than a not-so-big lake, the Kinneret or the Sea of Galilee.

Roni Sadeh has been looking for the Altalena for more than twenty-five years.

The hunt for the ship has been his Holy Grail, as he says.

Some members of Sukkot's religious Zionist party also expressed concerns about the political implications.

Separately, National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir used the Altalena commemoration to politically confront Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, drawing commentary on his political maneuvering.

The Yisrael Beiteinu party, led by Avigdor Lieberman, continues to position itself ahead of upcoming elections with its right-wing, secular liberal platform, emphasizing calls for decisive action against Iran and its proxies.

I'm Noah Levi.

These are the top stories today from Monday, August 24th, 2026.

The Atalena ship has been found intact on the sea floor 78 years after it was sunk in 1948.

Solberg allows Ben-Gvir to attend a police event despite election campaign concerns.

An Iranian state affiliated TV channel reportedly threatened Trump's son and offered a $10 million reward for his death.

A Florida startup develops a low-cost drone interceptor to counter Iranian drone threats.

Recorded from the JPost studios in Jerusalem, I'm your host, Gadi Zieg.

The Atalena ship has been found intact on the sea floor 78 years after it was sunk during an altercation between the IDF and the Irgun in 1948.

National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir and the Heritage Ministry announced the discovery.