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

they prevent others from enjoying the Good.... They have no pity and are known for their hatred, rivalry and hardness, as Allah described them in the Qur'an."34
    But World War II was a crucible from which both the Jewish and Arab national movements would emerge strengthened and largely triumphant. The war's vast weakening of British (and French) power and the concomitant rise in national consciousness and ideologies in the third world resulted almost immediately in the liberation from imperial rule of vast domains, stretching from Indonesia through India to the Arab Middle East. At war's end, Transjordan (later Jordan), Syria, and Lebanon became independent, and other Arab territories-including Egypt and Iraq-enjoyed a loosening of the imperial grip.
    For the Jews, the world war meant, above all, the Holocaust. But while destroying Zionism's main potential pool of manpower, Eastern European Jewry, the Holocaust also reenergized the movement as a powerful vehicle of the victimized and stateless, who now enjoyed the international community's sympathy. In a larger sense, history was repeating itself, to the benefit of Zionism. As the pogroms in Russia in the i88os had launched modern Zionism, so the largest pogrom of them all propelled the movement, almost instantly, into statehood. And much as World War I had issued in the first important statement of support for a Jewish "national home," the Balfour Declaration, so the aftermath of World War II resulted in that decisive international warrant, the United Nations Partition Resolution of a9 November 1947, which would underpin the emergence of the State of Israel.
    In effect, the white paper policy remained in force through the war, even though Churchill-a pro-Zionist-had taken over the premiership in London in May 1940. In October 1941 he had written: "If Britain and the United States emerge victorious from the war, the creation of a great Jewish state in Palestine inhabitated [sic] by millions of Jews will be one of the leading features of the Peace Conference discussions."35 But during the war, there was, in fact, little Churchill could do, apart from winning the war quickly enough to save at least some of Europe's Jews. A secret cabinet committee he had set up in 1943 had recommended, as he had sought, a switch in British policy in favor of partition, but it was never acted upon. And although Churchill was continuously peeved by the Arabs' pro-Axis behavior, he knew full well that Britain needed a quiescent Middle East in the rear of its fighting formations and could not afford to rile them over Palestine. As Colonial Secretary Malcolm MacDonald put it, "If there was trouble in Palestine ... there would be repercussions in Transjordania, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt and even echoes of that trouble in India."36 But Churchill did authorize the establish ment of both the Palmah, a guerrilla strike force of Haganah members to be used if the Germans conquered Palestine, and the Jewish Brigade, a large formation composed mainly of volunteers from the Yishuv that fought with the British army in Italy. The veterans of both were to stand the Yishuv in good stead in the 1948 War.
    In the first months of World War II, Zionist organizations stepped up efforts to save European Jews from the impending massacre-and to strengthen the Yishuv by bringing them to Palestine-through an illegal immigration operation run mainly by the newly created Institute for Illegal Immigration (hamossad le`aliya bilti ligalit), a secret arm of the Haganah. The British countered with a Royal Navy cordon that intercepted the rickety steamers, and many were stopped and their passengers reshipped to detention camps in Mauritius and, later, Cyprus. But by mid-1941 both Zionist and British efforts had become largely irrelevant: the Germans had overrun Europe and closed its ports while changing their policy toward the Jews from one of encouraging emigration to initiating mass murder. Few Jews reached Palestine from