Yossi Harel: PERHAPS MORE than any other single event, the British blockade of the illegal immigrant ship Exodus 1947, carrying more than 4,500 displaced European Jews to Palestine, prompted the United Nations, in 1947, to vote in favour of the creation of the state of Israel.
Thirteen years later, the commander of that vessel, Yossi Harel, who has died of a heart attack, aged 90, became internationally famous as the character played by Paul Newman in the Otto Preminger film Exodus, itself based on Leon Uris's best-selling novel of the same name.
Harel was just 28 when he became involved in the secret operation to smuggle Jews from Europe into Mandate Palestine.
The British White Paper of 1939 had restricted entry to 75,000 Jews over five years, a minuscule figure considering the numbers trying to flee Nazi Germany. Hopes that the postwar Labour government would annul the Paper were dashed in 1945 when Ernest Bevin, the foreign secretary, concerned not to exacerbate tensions with Arab countries, held fast to the prewar restrictions.
So Jewish groups endorsed the idea of an illegal operation, Aliyah Bet (Immigration B), run by the clandestine naval force Palyam, to circumvent the British-imposed limits.
Harel was chosen to head the operation because he was daring yet plausible, and also had a passion for sailing. Already a seasoned veteran of the Haganah Zionist militia and a British military unit commanded by (then Captain) Orde Wingate, in all he ran four ships that carried more than 24,000 illegal immigrants from Europe to Palestine. But the voyage of the Exodus was the most famous.
The story began with the purchase of a discarded American steamer, the USS President Warfield, in Baltimore, in December 1946. Built in 1928, the ship had been attacked by a German submarine in 1942 and decommissioned in September 1945. Its buyers, the Weston Trading Company, a front for the Haganah, rescued a craft described as "a matchbox splintered by a nutcracker" from an appointment with the wreckers.
In January 1947, the Warfield sailed for Marseilles. The British, already wise to its use, blockaded the vessel off the Italian coast for seven weeks, but then let it go.
On July 10th, some 4,553 passengers, including 655 children, boarded the ship at Sete, near Marseille. Such a number clearly raised the stakes in the standoff with Britain. Most were Holocaust survivors who had already been barred from entering Palestine.
In mid-July, under Harel's command, the crew unfurled the blue-and-white Star of David (later the flag of Israel), renamed the ship Exodus 1947, evoking the ancient Israelite flight from slavery in Egypt, and sailed out into the Mediterranean.
On its voyage through international waters, the Exodus was escorted by the British cruiser Ajax and a convoy of destroyers. Harel had planned to slip away from the unwelcome escorts as he neared the coast of Palestine, but in the end he decided to ignore the British warnings to stop and make a run for the port.
The British intervened, firing a warning shot into the Exodus's bow and sending a detachment of troops to board the vessel. Under Harel's leadership, the passengers and crew resisted, and fierce fighting broke out. Three passengers and a soldier died, and many were wounded. The British then towed the Exodus into Haifa harbour, from where it was planned that the passengers would be sent back to France.
But the refugees refused to disembark and went on hunger strike. For 24 days - in the midsummer sun - the world witnessed the spectacle of the British preventing hungry and exhausted Holocaust survivors from finding shelter in a new land.
Crucially, members of the UN special committee on Palestine were in the country at the time, and the Exodus affair influenced their subsequent decision to support the creation of the state of Israel. Eventually, British transport ships took the Exodus refugees back to displaced persons camps in Germany, but to Harel the episode was an inspiring moment - he wrote later that he saw "a nation destroyed coming back to life".
Harel was born Yosef Hamburger in Jerusalem, where his family had lived for six generations. As a young man, he took labouring jobs in a quarry and laying post office cables.
But his youth was troubled, and he ran away from home to join the Haganah. His biographer, Yoram Kaniuk, writing in Commander of the Exodus, called him a "Zionist cowboy".
Harel was involved in the inter-communal violence between Arabs and Jews in 1929, but he also fought the British mandate forces at times, before signing up for the RAF during the second World War. In 1938 he became the personal bodyguard to Chaim Weizmann, later the first president of Israel; after the Israeli war of independence he moved to Los Angeles to study mechanical engineering.
He then worked for military intelligence, and, in July 1954, Moshe Dayan appointed him head of Unit 131, the secret Israeli group that ran spies in Arab countries.
Harel is survived by three children, including Lady (Sharon) Harel-Cohen, wife of the venture capitalist and benefactor of pro-peace charities in Israel and Palestine, Sir Ronald Cohen. as well as eight grandchildren and eight great-grandchildren.
Yossi Harel: born 1917; died April 26th, 2008