Promised Land on the first Irgun attacks

In Righteous Victims: A history of the Zionist-Arab Conflict, 1881-2001, Benny Morris writes that the Irgun Bombs of 1937 and 1938 “sowed terror in the Arab population and substantially increased its casualties. The bombs do not appear in any way to have curtailed Arab terrorism, but they do appear to have helped persuade moderate Arabs of the need to resist Zionism and to support the rebellion.”

The first Irgun attack occurred on November 11, 1937. Morris writes that the attacks were responsible for “killing two Arabs at a bus depot near Jaffa Street in Jerusalem, and wounding five. Three days later, on November 14, a number of Arabs were killed in simultaneous attacks around the country—a day that the Irgun thereafter commemorated as the ’Day of the Breaking of the Havlaga (restrain).’”

Morris also describes the events on July 6, 1938, when “an Irgun operative dressed as an Arab placed two large milk cans filled with TNT and shrapnel in the Arab market in downtown Haifa. The subsequent explosions killed twenty-one and wounded fifty-two. On July 15 another bomb killed ten Arabs and wounded more than thirty in David Street in Jerusalem’s Old City. A second bomb in the Haifa market—this time disguised as a large can of sour cucumbers—on July 25, 1938 killed at least thirty-nine Arabs and injured at least seventy. On August 26, a bomb in Jaffa’s vegetable market killed twenty-four Arabs and wounded thirty-nine.”

~ "The Beginning of the Israel-Palestine Conflict," Promised Land: The Jewish Museum of the Palestinian Experience

Wanted by the British government: Menachem Begin