King David Hotel Bombing - Sir John Shaw Controversy

Sir John Shaw Controversy

At the time of the explosion, Chief Secretary, Sir John Shaw was in his office, which was in the eastern half of the south wing, rather than the western half which was the one which was destroyed. It was to Shaw, that the Jewish militant organisations sought to shift the blame for the deaths.

Begin said that Shaw had been responsible for the failure to evacuate the hotel: 'A police officer called Shaw and told him, "The Jews say that they have placed bombs in the King David." And the reply was, "I am here to give orders to the Jews, not to take orders from them."' The 1947 Irgun pamphlet Black Paper said that Shaw had forbidden anyone to leave the hotel: 'For reasons best known to himself Shaw, the Chief Secretary of the Occupation administration, disregarded the warning. That is, he forbade any of the other officials to leave the building, with the result that some of his collaborators were killed, while he himself slunk away until after the explosion . . . Shaw thus sent nearly 100 people to their deaths - including Hebrews, including friends of our struggle.' Begin said that he had heard the information about Shaw from Israel Galili, Chief of Staff of Haganah when they met on July 23, the day after the bombing. This was confirmed by Galili. In an interview with Bethell, Galili said that his source for the Shaw story had been Boris Guriel, the future head of Israel's intelligence service, who had heard it in turn from the American, Associated Press bureau chief, Carter Davidson. Thurston Clarke interviewed both Galili and Guriel, the former in 1977. Guriel denied that he had been the source of the story. Galili was unable to produce any evidence that Shaw had received a warning. Carter Davidson died in 1958 and so couldn't be asked to confirm or deny what Galili had said. Thurston Clarke's assessment was that the story about Shaw was, in fact, "a baseless rumour promoted by the Haganah in order to mollify the Irgun and fix responsibility for the carnage on Shaw." Shmuel Katz, who had been a member of the Irgun's high command, later also wrote that "the story can be dismissed."

In 1948, a libel action was taken out by Shaw against a Jewish, London newspaper which repeated the allegations made by Begin and the Irgun pamphlet. The newspaper did not mount a defence and made an unreserved apology to Shaw. About the allegation that he had said that he did not take orders from Jews, Shaw said: "I would never have made a statement like that and I don't think that anyone who knows me would regard it as in character. I would never have referred to the Jews in that way".

Also in 1948, William Ziff, an American author, wrote a book called The Rape of Palestine which contained an embellished version of Galili's story, similar to the one given in the Black Paper pamphlet. It said that Shaw had escaped from the hotel minutes before the main explosion, abandoning its other occupants to their fate. Shaw took out another libel action. After lawyers in Israel failed to find evidence supporting Ziff's version of events, the book's publishers withdrew it from circulation and apologised to Shaw.

Bethell says that all of the British witnesses who were in the vicinity of the hotel at the time of the explosion confirmed what Shaw said. None of them had any knowledge of a warning having been sent in time to make evacuation of the hotel possible. They said that, like themselves, Shaw had not known about the bomb beforehand and that he bore no responsibility for putting colleagues' lives at risk immediately before the explosion. The only criticism made was that Shaw should have closed the Régence restaurant and put guards on the service entrance weeks before. Shaw agreed that not having done this was a mistake. The decision not to do it had been made because, "everyone was under orders to preserve the semblance of normality in Palestine", "social life had to be allowed to continue" and because nobody had believed that the Irgun would put the whole of the Secretariat, which had many Jewish employees, in danger.

Two months after the bombing, Shaw was appointed High Commissioner of Trinidad and Tobago. The Irgun immediately sent a letter bomb to him there, but it was intercepted and successfully disarmed.