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state would lead inevitably to further trouble between the two peoples."29 `Abdullah, according to Britain's representative in Amman, Alec Kirkbride, concurred.30
    The Peel recommendations enshrined the principles of partition and a "two-state" solution as the international community's preferred path to a settlement of the conflict and were adopted by the mainstream of the Zionist movement (the minority right-wing Revisionists dissented). But the Husseini-led Palestinian leadership, and the Arab states in its wake, rejected both the explicit recommendations and the principle: all of Palestine was and must be ours, they said. They also, of course, abhorred the transfer recommendation.
    Responding to the Peel proposals, which Whitehall immediately endorsed, the Husseinis renewed the rebellion in late September 1937. The Opposition, which initially approved the recommendations and then recanted, sought to extend the truce, but vilified as traitors, they were effectively cowed and silenced by a Husseini campaign of terrorism.
    The second and last stage of the rebellion, lasting until late spring-summer 1939, was far bloodier than the first. The Arab rural bands renewed their attacks and were active in the towns as well. The Revisionist movement's military arm, the Irgun Zvai Leumi (IZL, the National Military Organization, or simply Irgun), which had been formed by activist breakaways from the Haganah, subjected the Arab towns to an unnerving campaign of retaliatory terrorism, with special Haganah units adding to the bloodshed through selective reprisals. More important, the British now took off the gloves. In October 1937 they outlawed the AHC and the NCs and arrested many of their members. Haj Amin al-Hussein himself fled into exile, where he remainedalternating mainly between Beirut and Cairo-until his death in 1974. After the rebellion peaked in summer 1938 (the rebels briefly occupied the Old City of Jerusalem and Beersheba) and after being temporarily freed by the Munich Agreement from the specter of war in Europe, the British went on the offensive, clamping down hard. Between October 1938 and April 1939 British units pushed into the casbahs and the rebel strongholds in the hill country and virtually annihilated the bands after coercing much of the rural population into collaboration. Dozens of houses were demolished, crops were destroyed, rebels and their accomplices were hanged, and thousands were jailed. In suppressing the rebellion, the British fenced and mined Palestine's northern borders and secured towns and crossroads around the country with reinforced concrete police and army posts, called Tegart forts (which were to figure large in the battles of 1948 and mostly exist to this day, serving as Israeli and Palestinian Authority police stations). In identifying the rebels' infrastructure, the British were assisted by the Haganah Intelligence Service, organized toward the end of the rebellion, and by newly created Opposition-aligned, anti-Hussein "peace bands," that denied the rebels entry into dozens of villages. There was no formally announced end to the rebellion, but hostilities tapered off in spring and summer 1939, With the surviving rebels fleeing to Lebanon and Syria.
    Yet the rebellion, coming as it did as Britain faced a worldwide three-front war against Japan, Italy, and Germany, almost succeeded-not militarily but politically. From the September 1938 Munich crisis onward, Britain came to view its Palestine policy almost exclusively through the prism of its needs and interests in the forthcoming global struggle. Simply put, London sought to appease the Arabs to assure quiet in the Middle East, which sat astride Britain's lines of communication to southern Asia and the Far East. In May 1939 Whitehall issued a new white paper. It promised Palestine's inhabitants statehood and independence within ten years; severely curtailed Jewish immigration, limiting it to fifteen thousand entry certificates per year for five