Altalena ship has been recovered

The Altalena ship, which was fired upon by Palmach soldiers led by somebody who became a bad politician years later, has been tracked by scuba divers off the Israeli coast, and the news site sure does want to paint right-wingers badly, even as they admit something not all do:

Divers have located the Altalena, a cargo ship bringing arms to the Irgun militia during the 1948 War of Independence that was hit on the orders of then-prime minister David Ben-Gurion and sunk off Israel’s coast, two far-right ministers announced Monday.

The ship, still intact, was located at 12:30 a.m. at a depth of 503 meters (1,650 feet), some 20 kilometers (12 miles) off Israel’s coast “during a complex maritime search operation,” National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir and Heritage Minister Amichai Eliyahu, of the Otzma Yehudit party, announced in a joint statement.

They credited “long months of meticulous planning and preparation” and “special sensors and advanced survey systems” for the find, saying more details were to be revealed at a press conference. [...]

Hagai Ronen, the agency’s director-general, said Monday that “The locating of the Altalena is an exciting historical moment, in which knowledge, technology and advanced mapping capabilities allow us to touch on a significant chapter in the history of the State of Israel.” [...]

The location of the Altalena was previously announced in December 2012, when it was said to be located a few miles off the coast of Rishon Lezion at a depth of 300 meters. At the time, the government said it was interested in raising it and installing it on dry land in Tel Aviv or Jerusalem as a monument.

The gun-running ship was initially brought to Israel by Menachem Begin’s right-wing Irgun militia during the country’s War of Independence in June 1948.

With the state and its military only a few weeks old, Ben-Gurion, who was at bitter odds with Begin, demanded that the ship and cargo be turned over to the newly formed IDF, sparking an armed confrontation.

As the ship reached the coast and then ran aground, a standoff ensued that ended in a shootout between Irgun members aboard and IDF and Palmach soldiers on the shore, who were ordered to destroy the vessel. The ship was set ablaze by artillery fire by the forces on the shore under the command of a young Yitzhak Rabin, later the IDF chief of General Staff and prime minister.

Sixteen Irgun members and three IDF soldiers died in the incident, and the ship’s cargo was lost.

The incident is widely perceived to have brought the nascent state to the brink of civil war. Begin, who ordered his forces not to fire back, would later say, “My greatest accomplishment was not retaliating and causing civil war.”

That's what Rabin did at the time, long before he led the country to serious disaster. All that aside, Ben-Gurion himself was being very petty at a time when unity was needed, but his communist side got the better of him. The whole incident was abominable, and something the Israeli left never genuinely apologized for, in all their obsessions with socialism and communism. It's reminiscent of how Canada's Pierre Trudeau had an accepting view of communism that, for all we know, may have precipitated the horror story that China is now.

Here's some more history of the Altalena, and how it was located, though it's unclear if the whole ship can be raised above water properly.