Partition was the only practicable policy. In the
last resort the Jews would have accepted it, but
the Arabs were ready to resist it by force. Thus in
the end military arms would decide the issue; to
enforce partition Britain would have been drawn
into fighting the Arabs. But its interests were
overwhelmingly involved in maintaining goodwill
with the Arab nations. Bevin solved the dilemma
by handing responsibility over to the United
Nations. Meanwhile, as long as Britain continued
to station its troops in Palestine and to be respon-
sible for law and order and for the administration,
it was exposed to both Jewish and Arab hostility.
The position of the Jews in Palestine was pre-
carious. They faced catastrophe if the British
should depart before they could sufficiently
mobilise to augment their own armed defence
force, the Haganah. The Zionist leader David Ben
Gurion tried to persuade the British to delay their
departure, appealing to Bevin as late as February
- He offered to root out Jewish terrorism
against the British, provided the British troops
stayed. Bevin believed that the Ben Gurion offer
was just a tactic to build up a Jewish majority
under cover of the Mandate.
The acceptable face of Zionism was repre-
sented by Chaim Weizmann, who more than
anyone had been responsible for securing the
Balfour Declaration in 1917, and by David Ben
Gurion; the Haganah was the tolerated armed
wing of the Jewish Agency. The Irgun, led by
Menachem Begin, who eventually became prime
minister of Israel in 1977, belonged to the unac-
ceptable face of Zionism, and the Stern Group
was even more extreme. Begin and Stern were
ready to fight the British, who were (in their eyes)
accomplices of the Nazis in their failure to take
all possible steps to rescue the Jews from the
Holocaust. Begin was a Pole, a member of the
East European Jewry whose homelands had
become one great graveyard. In the struggle for
Israel’s survival, both the Irgun fighters and all
Jews able to bear arms would be needed once the
British had left, so the breach between Ben
Gurion and Begin could never be total.
Jews of all political complexions in Palestine
were ready to help outwit the British authorities
to make it possible for the Jewish survivors, sailing
in their ramshackle boats from the displaced-
persons camps in Germany, to land secretly in the
Holy Land. From the beaches, where men and
women were waiting for them, they were smug-
gled into the Jewish agricultural settlements – the
kibbutz. In material terms these refugees were no
great catch: penniless men, women and children,
the sick and the old predominating over the able-
bodied. For them Palestine was a haven – it was
what the ideal of a Jewish state was all about. The
‘illegal’ immigration did not always succeed; the
Royal Navy had the unenviable task of intercept-
ing and boarding the boats and forcing the
refugees to new camps in Cyprus. The seizure of
one such ship, the Exodus, led to worldwide con-
demnation of Britain, especially when the
refugees were shipped back to Hamburg, to the
country responsible for the Holocaust. It was a
gift for Zionist propaganda.
For Britain the option of remaining in
Palestine became increasingly less attractive. The
price that was being paid for the strategic base
was too high: 100,000 British troops were being
tied down in Palestine to try to keep the peace,
which they increasingly failed to accomplish.
British conscripts were being killed in raids carried
out by the Irgun and its splinter groups, the Lehi.
The Irgun’s answer to a massive military and
police action to round up suspects and disarm
Jewish irregulars was to blow up the King David
Hotel in Jerusalem, which housed the British
army and secretariat headquarters, on 22 July
- Menachem Begin later claimed that part of
the plan had been to avoid loss of life and that
sufficient warning had been given by telephone.
But the time allowed between the telephone call
and the explosion was far too short; part of the
hotel collapsed and ninety-one people were killed.
An attempt was also made to plant a bomb in the
Jerusalem railway station, but this was fortunately
frustrated in time. In all, between August 1945
and September 1947, some 300 people lost their
lives as a result of terrorist action, nearly half of
them British; seven captured Jewish terrorists had
been executed, two awaiting execution had com-
mitted suicide, and another thirty-seven were
killed fighting. It was the manner of the loss of
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