From Hawaii to Haganah

Though he lacked a budget with which to pay, Greenspun talked about prices to Liff who looked like his father would in a brightly patterned aloha shirt. Liff told him: “Take what you need. Forget about money. It’s all yours.” Greenspun also noticed open crates of new machine guns and gun barrels still wrapped and coated with grease. Liff told him those crates were not his to give because they “belong to Uncle Sam . . . Today, it’s new. Tomorrow, it’s junk. Only the used stuff is mine.” The government side of the yard was patrolled every few hours by a Marine sentry. Not asking Liff’s permission, Greenspun decided on his own to return at night to time the sentry’s rounds. He then helped himself to spare machine guns & barrels. The cost of shipping Greenspun’s 58 crates stateside was $7,000. Liff didn’t have that much, but gave $1,700, and prevailed on a dozen other Jewish businessmen in Honolulu to contribute the other $5,000.

By the time the 35 tons of armaments had reached Los Angeles for transshipment to Mexico and then on to Palestine, the United Nations in November, 1947, had approved the Partition Resolution authorizing the creation of a Jewish state. Yet the U.S. government, in cooperation with the British who still occupied Palestine, then embargoed arms shipments. Even so, Greenspun found a sympathetic Christian yachtsman to load the crates; but halfway out of San Pedro Harbor, the craft almost sank under the weight of the cargo. When the skipper threatened to turn back at Catalina Island, Greenspun commandeered the yacht, which continued on to Acapulco. Later, the cargo was transported to the port of Tampico for loading on the Kefalos. The machine guns reached the Haganah, renamed the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), in October, 1948, just in time to play a role in Israel’s defeat of an invading Egyptian Army in the climactic Battle of the Negev—the sparsely-populated southern desert that occupied 80 percent of the land allocated to the Jewish state under the UN Partition Plan.

In 1950, Greenspun and Liff met again, this time in a Los Angeles courtroom, where Liff was called as the prosecution’s star witness in the federal trial of Greenspun and his associates for violating the Neutrality Act and the Export Control Act. The prosecutors asked Liff if he had sold Greenspun the guns. Liff answered: “No.” Pressed about the answer, he explained that he gave the guns to “young Jewish boys who went to the door of Hitler’s ovens, and rescued Jews who bled and suffered” to bring them to the Jewish homeland. “When he told me where he was from,” Liff added tearfully, “”I said: ‘Take my salvage yard, take my money, take my life!”

Though the prosecutors made their case and Greenspun pleaded guilty, the jury — swayed by Liff’s testimony — recommended leniency. The judge fined the defendants, but somewhat reluctantly let them off without jail time. Greenspun was pardoned by President Kennedy in 1961; Schwimmer was pardoned by President Clinton in 2001.

Soon after, Nathan Liff returned to the Mainland, dying in Nashville in 1963. Yet he left his mark in Hawaii. Surfing guru Dorian “Doc” Paskowitz, now 85 years old, remembers Liff as the sparkplug of a circle of about ten Jews —“a mighty minyan”— who were instrumental in founding Temple Emanuel in Honolulu. The congregation’s organ still bears a plaque inscribed in honor of Liff’s wife, Fanny.

What about history’s verdict on Haganah’s arms procurement operations in the U.S., of which the Hawaiian operation to which Liff contributed was a part? Recent historians have been harsh. Amitzur Ilan calls it “a mirage” and Israel’s “deceptive American dream.” His reasons include the amateurish gaffes by agents inexperienced in spy work, the grandiose, impossible dreams of Haganah agent Yehuda Arazi (such as his ill-starred purchase of the aircraft carrier Attu), and an effective FBI crackdown after the U.S. Embargo took effect.

Yet the Haganah’s American operations made up in ingenuity and enthusiasm what they lacked in expertise. They raised large amounts in contributions, and devised a means of clandestine shipment of arms hidden in industrial machinery, called “the American manner,” which was copied by Haganah arms smugglers in Italy and elsewhere in Europe as early as 1946. Not until 1948 was the American operation overshadowed by heavy arms and fighter plane purchases from Czechoslovakia. And the bulk of the Czech purchases for Palestine was shipped on Schwimmer’s C-46 Transports, reconditioned in Burbank and then based in Panama as property of its fictitious “national” airline, Lineas Areas de Panama (LAPSA).

What was the enduring contribution of Nathan Liff, Hank Greenspun, and the Hawaii operation initiated by Al Schwimmer? By 1973, Schwimmer was already a legendary figure. Around the time of the Korean War, he moved his Burbank aviation factory (visited by Ben-Gurion on his 1951 trip to the U.S.) to the Jewish state where it became the nucleus of Israel Airlines Industries (IAI). Then, around the time of the 1967 Arab-Israeli War, he managed to acquire for Israel through Switzerland the plans for the French Mirage-III fighter, much to the consternation of General De Gaulle. When the 1973 Yom Kippur War erupted, Nathan Liff’s daughter, Selma Lesser, was vacationing with her husband, Reinhard, in Israel. She tells this story:

As we started climbing the four-lane highway (14 meters wide) toward Jerusalem, . . . [a hitch-hiking soldier named David] explained to us when we asked about the rusty war equipment lying randomly on either side of the highway that the IDF deliberately left these as monuments to their War of Independence in 1948. I then commented upon my special knowledge of that war and touched upon the role that my father had in providing some equipment for those fighting without it. “Was your father involved with Al Schwimmer?” Imagine my astonishment that here, 26 years later, a young stranger should know this kind of detail. He explained: “I am a born Israeli, but my parents moved back with my sister and me to Switzerland. They still live there, but I have returned to live in Israel. When I was a boy in Switzerland my parents were friendly with Mr. Eisenstadt who was a friend of Schwimmer and Hank Greenspun. From them we learned of the war-surplus purchased by your father after World War II and how some of it ended up in Israel. So after the Korean War, Eisenstadt did the same thing. So again Israel had equipment from a former United States arsenal during the Suez crisis. I guess he learned from your father!”

“Mr. Eisenstadt”— also known as Paritz “Fritz” Eshet (1915-1967) — was a key advisor to Ben-Gurion in 1948 and “father” of the Israeli Artillery Branch.

Thus, through the later contributions of Schwimmer and Eshet to Israel’s defense, Nathan Liff’s gift, via Hawaii to Haganah, continued to resonate.

*Harold Brackman, a consultant to the Simon Wiesenthal Center, lives in San Diego. An historian, he has written extensively about the history of antisemitism and racism.

Giveon Cornfield served in the RAF in World War II, in the underground Haganah, and in the Israel Defense Forces during the 1948 War. A contributing editor to the IHC (Israel Hasbara Committee), he has written extensively on the Arab-Israel conflict. He lives with his wife (a former volunteer paramedic with Magen David Adom and member of the Irgun) in Honolulu.