A portrait Harry S. Truman. Photo: Greta Kempton.

“I think if the United States had insisted, the Lebanese would have had to back off,” Kaplan told JNS.org. But with the establishment of Israel, the Truman administration had expanded its embargo to include preventing “men of military age” from reaching the Jewish State. Lebanon’s intervention was consistent with Truman’s policy.

In meetings with representatives of the passengers, Consul Faust made no secret of his hostility toward the Zionists. Muriel Eisenberg, the future wife of Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Arens, who was part of the Betar contingent, told an Israel Television interviewer that Faust mockingly declared, “Moses was greater than any of you here, and he didn’t make it to Palestine either.” According to Esrati, Faust also used anti-Semitic language, referring to them as “kikes” and “Jew boys.”

The Lebanese soldiers, pointing their machine guns, arrested all 69 of the male passengers whose papers indicated they were bound for Haifa. Forty-one of the 69 were American citizens.

Betar member Marilyn Schindell watched the men being led away. “Did you ever feel your heart break into a thousand pieces? That is how I felt,” she wrote to a friend as the Marine Carp sailed out of the Beirut harbor.

“At gun-point the boys were herded off the ship and onto trucks like animals,” Schindell wrote. “Oh, what a sight they were! They were defiant, laughing and singing [the] fighting songs of the Haganah and the Irgun…Such poise and dignity I have never yet seen and I doubt whether I ever will. Never will I forget it…and don’t you either.”

They were driven 50 miles on army trucks to Baalbek, a ramshackle detention camp surrounded with barbed wire. For five and a half weeks, the 69 young men studied Hebrew, played cards, and subsisted mostly on pita bread, spoiled eggs, and thin soup. “I weighed 150 pounds when we arrived, 110 when we left,” King wrote. The guards were Palestinian Arabs, “and some of them were sadistic bastards,” according to King.

“One morning, out of the blue, Faust, the consul-general, shows up and tells us that we’re being sent back to America,” Esrati told JNS.org. “There was only one catch—Faust made us sign papers taking out a U.S. government loan of $300 each to pay our return fare. That’s what I call adding insult to injury.”

Protests by American Zionist groups and members of Congress over the continued detention of U.S. citizens had embarrassed the Lebanese government and convinced it to send the 69 back. But not all of them made the complete journey. Seventeen of the Haganah men left the ship when it docked in Palermo, Italy, and then made their way to Israel. Others disembarked in Naples. Esrati and two friends jumped ship in the Azores, but were arrested by the Portuguese police and taken back in handcuffs. They spent much of the return trip below deck, in the ship’s brig.

But Muriel Eisenberg and the other women of the Marine Carp had the last laugh. The Truman administration’s policy of barring “men of military age” from reaching Israel specified “men,” not women. The assumption in those days was that women would not serve on the battlefield. The policymakers did not take into consideration the fact that in the new state of Israel, women were not always confined to society’s traditional roles.

To the delight of their comrades behind barbed wire in Baalbek, most of the female passengers of the Marine Carp who were permitted to go to Haifa promptly enlisted in the Israeli army. Arriving just days after Israel’s establishment, they helped initiate a tradition of American Jews serving in the Israeli army that continues to this day.