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.”

These businessmen created an organizational arm, the Sonneborn Institute, and a distribution network, Materials for Palestine (MFP) which sent tents, clothing, radios, and ambulances to the Holy Land. It acquired ships like the famous Exodus, with 4,500 Holocaust Survivors and Displaced Persons aboard, to try to run the British blockade barring Jewish immigrants from Palestine. It also located potential surplus arms to ship to the Haganah, accepting even souvenir pistols and rifles donated by Jewish war veterans. There were links with Haganah’s Rekhesh (arms procurement) and Ta’as (arms manufacture) operations. These acquisitions did not come under serious FBI scrutiny until the U.S. government slapped an Arms Embargo on Palestine in December, 1947, that was tightened in April, 1948. Ultimately, 1700 Americans also joined Mahal, the volunteers who fought for Israel’s independence in 1948. Their contribution is honored in a new museum in Gainesville, Florida.

Liff dropped in on the Sonneborn Institute on a trip to New York to make known his war surplus yard in Honolulu. Not an ideologue, Liff was a Zionist with a small “z.” As a teenager in Russia 1905, he hid in an old well weapons for Jewish villagers to use in defending themselves during violent pogroms against them. He served in the U.S. Army in the Panama Canal Zone before World War I, and then again during the war. In 1929 when his family were the only Jews living in the small Ohio town of Delphos, Liff convinced the local Kiwanis (he was also elected president of the Chamber of Commerce, despite his thick Jewish accent) to pass a resolution urging the State Department to do what it could to help the Jewish community in Palestine that was under attack by Arab rioters. Liff lost 18 relatives, killed in the Holocaust. Now in 1946, Liff received a new challenge to help Jews defend themselves.

Hank Greenspun, later acclaimed as a fighting Las Vegas newspaper publisher opposed to Senator Joseph McCarthy, was a former Captain in Patton’s Third Army when he visited Liff in Hawaii in 1947. Al Schwimmer, a wartime TWA flight engineer who set up a small aircraft business in Burbank to recondition C-46 and Constellation transports and B-17 Flying Fortresses for eventual shipment to Palestine, had sent Greenspun to the Islands to procure surplus aircraft engines. Liff had Pratt and Whitney engines in his yard, but what impressed Greenspun, a veteran of the Normandy Campaign, were the hundreds of surplus .50 and .30 caliber machine guns. “I knew from St. Lo, Avranches, Falaise Gap, and the long push to Nancy,” Greenspun later wrote, “that the only way to gain and hold ground is with guns.” Seeing the furnaces in Hawaii for smelting down aluminum scrap into ingots, he murmured to Liff that they reminded him of the Nazi gas ovens. “Don’t believe for one second,” Liff responded, “that I am not remembering also.”