From Hawaii to Haganah

Nathan Liff, a scrap metal dealer from Indiana, arrived in Honolulu in 1946. Awarded a War Assets Administration (WAA) contract for surplus war materiel stored at Pearl Harbor, he initially stayed at the Royal Hawaiian Hotel where the Liffs imbibed pineapple juice from the drinking fountains. A tropical paradise, yes, but not the promised land half a world away. The debate over Palestine’s future, soon to reach the new United Nations, was very much on Liff’s mind even as he opened his new business, the Universal Airplane Salvage Company. With hundreds of acres of war surplus at Iroquois Point bought from the government at “the best scrap-yard price,” it was located at the naval air station on Oahu. Honolulu-based steel executive Arnold Spitz, father of the Olympic phenom Mark Spitz, did business with Liff in the early 1950s.

Today, as Israel fights Hezbollah and Hamas, the predominant media image is of the Jewish state as a technologically-superior Goliath confronted by ragtag Arab Davids. The contrast is overdrawn, given the speed at which Israel’s adversaries are improving the distance, accuracy, and payload of their Kassam and Katyusha rockets, as well as deploying with deadly effectiveness state-of-the-art anti-tank missiles in Lebanon, supplied by Syria and Iran. But immediately after World War II, it was the Jews fighting for self-determination in Palestine who were truly the embattled Davids. Far from being militaristic, the Yishuv (as the Jewish community was called) had preferred to invest in “farms not arms.” Only in response to deadly riots by Arabs against Jews before World War II had it created the Haganah, a grassroots militia purely for self-defense.

In 1946, despite some success in manufacturing light arms, the Haganah didn’’t have enough rifles—much less, heavier weaponry; its men still trained with broomsticks. Palestinian Jewish Agency Executive, David Ben-Gurion, was a realist; yet even for him it was “a bitter pill” that the future of Palestine might be decided by military power. “The feeling that most depressed me in the War for Independence,” Yigal Yadin summed it up, “was one of impotence caused by the critical shortage of weapons.”

Liff through the grapevine heard that Ben-Gurion had come to the U.S. in the summer of 1945 to appeal to a score of Jewish businessmen to show their mettle as “daring and true Zionists who would follow me and do what I tell them to do without asking questions.” Ben Gurion’s purpose was to establish an American support and procurement network for Haganah. The British were allowing the Arabs in Palestine to arm, and were supplying weaponry to the surrounding Arab countries whose armies were trained by British officers. Haganah desperately needed to correct the balance, so that the Jews (in the words of journalist Max Lerner) “no longer be the anvil of history, but its hammer.”