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The Sergeants affair ((ヘブライ語:פרשת הסרג'נטים)) was an incident that took place in Mandate Palestine in July 1947 during Jewish insurgency in Palestine, in which the Jewish underground group Irgun kidnapped two British Army Intelligence Corps NCOs, Sergeant Clifford Martin and Sergeant Mervyn Paice, and threatened to kill them if the death sentences passed on three Irgun militants: Avshalom Haviv, Meir Nakar, and Yaakov Weiss, were carried out. The three had been captured by the British during the Acre Prison break, tried, and convicted on charges of illegal possession of arms, and with 'intent to kill or cause other harm to a large number of people'.〔 When the three men were executed by hanging, the Irgun killed the two sergeants and hung their booby-trapped bodies in a eucalyptus grove near Netanya. This act was widely condemned in both Palestine and the UK. After hearing of the deaths some British troops and policemen attacked Jews in Tel Aviv, killing five and injuring others.〔 The killings also sparked off rioting in some British cities.〔〔 ==Background== In the late 1940s, as the third decade of British Mandate over Palestine was drawing to a close, many within and outside of Britain were calling to end the Mandate. They were led by opposition leader Winston Churchill, who denounced Britain's costly occupation of Palestine for no economic benefit. Trying to maintain control and civil order (a Mandate requirement if nothing else), the British enacted the Defence Emergency Regulations in September 1945. These regulations suspended Habeas Corpus and established military courts. They prescribed the death penalty for various offences, including carrying weapons or ammunition illegally and membership in an organization whose members commit these offenses.〔Guy Carmi, (On the Constitutionality of the Death Penalty in Israel )〕 As World War II ended, a Jewish insurgency began, with the Zionist groups Irgun and Lehi attacking British targets in order to compel the British to leave Palestine. The insurgency was a response to Britain's implementation of the White Paper of 1939, which greatly restricted Jewish immigration and land purchases. The British authorities began applying the death penalty against captured Jewish militants. While the first member of a Jewish underground group, Shlomo Ben-Yosef, was executed in 1938 for his part in an unsuccessful shooting attack on Arab civilians who were traveling on a bus, no further executions of Jews for politically motivated violence were held in Palestine until the late 1940s. During an Irgun attack on a British military base, Irgun fighters Michael Ashbel and Yosef Simchon were arrested. They were sentenced to death on June 13, 1946. There were many pleas and petitions for clemency by various institutes and Jewish leaders, which were not effective. Irgun decided to threaten to carry out its own "gallows regime", declaring a policy of reprisal killings. Five days later, Irgun kidnapped five British officers in Tel Aviv, and another one following day in Jerusalem. The Irgun then threatened to hang its hostages if Ashbel and Simchoni were executed. Two weeks later, following intense and secret negotiations, Ashbel and Simchon's sentences were commuted to life imprisonment. The officers were released the next day.〔〔Gordis, Daniel: ''Menachem Begin: The Battle for Israel's Soul'' (2013)〕 In January 1947 another Irgun militant, Dov Gruner, was sentenced to death for shooting and placing explosives with intent to kill〔 during an Irgun raid on a Palestine Police Force station in Ramat Gan in April 1946.〔 On January 26, two days before Gruner's scheduled execution, Irgun kidnapped a British intelligence officer in Jerusalem. The next day, on January 27, Irgun men also kidnapped a British judge, Ralph Windham, who was president of the Tel Aviv District Court. Sixteen hours before the scheduled execution, the British forces commander announced an "indefinite delay" of the sentence, and Irgun released its hostages. Meanwhile in Britain, Churchill, now the leader of the Opposition, demanded a special meeting on the subject, and on January 31, a four-hour discussion in the British Parliament took place, with Churchill demanding the suppression of the "terrorists in Palestine". On April 16, 1947, Gruner and three other Irgun militants, Yehiel Dresner, Mordechai Alkahi and Eliezer Kashani, who were caught during the Night of the Beatings, were executed. Five days later two other prisoners, Meir Feinstein of Irgun and Moshe Barazani of Lehi, were scheduled to be hanged for, respectively, the bombing of a Jerusalem railway station in which a policeman was killed and the attempted assassination of a senior British officer. However, a few hours before they were due to be executed they committed suicide using an improvised grenade smuggled to them by their colleagues. Irgun commander Menachem Begin was enraged by the executions, and ordered his men to abduct and hang British soldiers in retaliation. However, the British Army, well aware of possible retaliation, took precautions. As Begin would later recall, "our units went out on the roads, on to the streets in the towns. But the military were literally not to be found."〔 May 4, 1947 saw the Acre Prison break: the Irgun engineered a mass escape from Acre Prison, with the aim of freeing 41 Irgun and Lehi prisoners. Some 28 Jews and almost 200 Arabs managed to escape. However, nine Jewish fighters (both escapees and perpetrators of the prison break) were killed. Among the perpetrators of the prison break, three were killed and five were arrested. While two of those arrested, Amnon Michaelov and Nachman Zitterbaum, were minors, and thus too young to be executed under British law, the other three, Avshalom Haviv, Yaakov Weiss and Meir Nakar, were not. The Irgun High Command had no doubt that they would be tried and convicted of capital offences, and the Irgun immediately set out to find British hostages. All of the arrested Irgun militants refused to accept British judicial authority. However they were tried by a military court and Haviv, Weiss, and Nakar were sentenced to death.〔〔 In an attempt to forestall the likely death sentences, the Irgun kidnapped two British military policemen, a sergeant and a private, at a swimming pool in Ramat Gan on June 9. However, the attempt to use them as hostages failed, as 19 hours later British troops found the hiding place and rescued them. Two days later the three Irgun militants were sentenced to death. All that was needed for the sentences to be carried out was approval from the Commander in Chief. Irgun resumed, with increased urgency, its kidnapping attempts, which proved difficult due to British precautions against abductions: British soldiers were largely confined to heavily-guarded security zones that had been established throughout Palestine, and standing orders required troops to move around in groups of at least four. Matters were further complicated by Lehi's actions in retaliation to the killing of one of their members, Alexander Rubowitz, who was allegedly murdered in captivity by Major Roy Farran. Lehi decided to carry out revenge attacks. and the Irgun was concerned over the fact that it would be even more difficult to find hostages if Lehi began gun battles in the streets. Lehi agreed to hold off its attacks for a week, and Irgun carried out two unsuccessful abduction attempts. The first, on June 22, saw Assistant Superintendent of Police C.J.C. Pound escape from his would-be captors in Jerusalem. On June 25, an abduction squad in Jerusalem attempted to seize administrative officer Alan Major and hit him on the head with a hammer, but Major managed to struggle free. After the week passed, Lehi carried out two attacks in Tel Aviv and Haifa which killed two British soldiers and wounded five. These attacks resulted in even tighter security precautions.〔Bowyer Bell, John: ''Terror Out of Zion'' (1976)〕 UNSCOP (the United Nations committee which was asked to recommend the future government of Palestine) visited the region and an appeal was made to the committee to intervene on the convicted men's behalf.〔(UNSCOP Report to the General Assembly )〕 On July 2, an appeal by UNSCOP on behalf of the condemned men was rejected, and on July 8, three weeks after the sentences were passed, they were confirmed by the commander. Due to the concurrent visit of UNSCOP the executions were postponed. This delay, intended not to anger the committee, gave the Irgun extra time to accomplish the kidnapping of hostages.〔 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「The Sergeants affair」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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