Read 1948: A History of the First Arab-Israeli War for Free Online Page A

years, with all further Jewish immigration conditional on Arab approval (thus assuring an overwhelming Arab majority when independence came); and significantly limited Jewish land purchase. In sum, this amounted to a complete reversal both of the Balfour Declaration policy and its muchmodified translation, the Peel Commission recommendations: Palestine was to remain Arab, and there would be no Jewish state. The Yishuv denounced the white paper as "illegal" and "appeasement" and mounted huge protest demonstrations; the IZL initiated sporadic attacks on British installations.
    The Palestinian street was overjoyed. But al-Husseini-as was the Palestinians' wont-managed to pluck defeat from the jaws of victory. Instead of welcoming the British move, which Winston Churchill denounced as a cowardly "surrender to Arab violence," al-Hussein and his colleagues rejected the white paper. They flatly demanded frill cessation of Jewish immigration, immediate British withdrawal, and immediate independence.
    In the brief months before world war broke out, nothing changed. The Arab Revolt thus ended in unmitigated defeat for the Palestinians. Somewhere between three thousand and six thousand of their political and military activists had been killed, with many thousands more either driven into exile or jailed; the leadership of the Palestine Arab national movement was decimated, exiled, or jailed; and a deep chasm, characterized by blood fends, divided the society's elite families. Indeed, much of the elite was so disillusioned or frightened by what had happened that it permanently renounced political activity. The Palestinians had also suffered serious economic harm, through both the general strike and British repression. They had prematurely expended their military power against the wrong enemy and had been dealt a mortal blow in advance of the battle with the real enemy, Zionism. The damage to their war effort in 1947-1948 was incalculable.
    The triangular conflict in Palestine was put on hold for the duration of World War II. The British made it clear to the Yishuv that they would not countenance renewed troubles, and the Jews took heed. They shelved the struggle against the white paper, and tens of thousands of young Jews volunteered for service in the British army. Even the IZL sent volunteers to aid British military operations. The Zionist movement closed ranks in support of the Allies in the war against the Nazis. Palestine, awash with British troops, served as a giant rear base and workshop for the Eighth Army, which engaged the Italians and Germans in North Africa.
    The Palestinians, reeling from the suppression of their rebellion and largely unsympathetic to Western liberal, democratic values, grimly hoped for an Axis victory. In this, they were at one with most of the Arab world. The Palestinians, Khalil al-Sakakini, a Christian Jerusalem educator, jotted down in his diary, "rejoiced [as did `the whole Arab world'] when the British bastion at Tobruk fell [in 1941] to the Germans."31 One of the first public opinion polls in Palestine, conducted by al-Sakakini's son, Sari Sakakini, on behalf of the American consulate in Jerusalem, in February 1941 found that 88 percent of the Palestinian Arabs favored Germany and only 9 percent Britain.32 The exiled al-Husseini himself helped raise a brief anti-British revolt in Baghdad in spring 1941 and then fled to Berlin, where he served the Nazi regime for four years by broadcasting anti-British, jihadist propaganda to the Middle East and recruiting Bosnian Muslims for the Wehrmacht. He was deeply anti-Semitic. He later explained the Holocaust as owing to the Jews' sabotage of the German war effort in World War 133 and the millennia of Gentile anti-Semitism as due to the Jews' "character": "One of the most prominent facets of the Jewish character is their exaggerated conceit and selfishness, rooted in their belief that they are the chosen people of God. There is no limit to their covetousness and