Arab household in Nazareth, ca. 1910. Most Palestinians were settled in towns and villages; about 25% of them were Christian.
Only 30% of Arab children went to school in the 1920s: The British spent next to nothing on their education.
The bombing of the King David Hotel by Irgun agents in Jerusalem, July 1946, when 91 people died
British commentators assumed that Zionism would forfeit all sympathy in the world
The Bat-Nesher Kindergarten in Haifa, 1925: The Hebrew schools of the Yishuv had a student-teacher ratio of 22:1 and some of the best equipment in the world
But Vladimir Jabotinsky (1880-1940, born in Odessa) persuaded his “Irgun” (National Military Organization) to declare war on Britain; they killed about 135 British soldiers.
“Liberation for the tormented. Vengeance for the slaughtered!” British Army recruitment poster for Palestine, 1943. (About 30,000 Jews did enlist.)
The Seventh Million: Young kazetniks arrive in Haifa in July 1945
THE FOUNDING OF THE STATE OF ISRAEL
• 1937: Peel Commission offers a plan to partition Palestine • May 1939: Rift between “revisionist” Zionists (Irgun and the Stern Gang) and the Jeing was the Haganah) • July 1946: Bombing of the King David Hotel • November 1947: UN Resolution on the partition of Palestine leads to fighting between Jewish settlers and Palestinian irregulars • May 1948: Proclamation of the State of Israel leads to war with Egypt, Jordan, Syria, and Iraq
The United Nations plan for partition, adopted in November 1947 with support from Truman, Stalin, and Leon Blum (see Israel-Arab Reader, pp. 69-77)
Palestinian Arab officers, led by Abd el-Kader el-Husseini
Jewish settlers also commanded investment capital: The Lodzia textile factory in Tel Aviv in the 1920s
THE LITERACY RATE IN PALESTINE IN 1930
Muslims Male Female 25% 3%
Christians 72% 44%
Jews 93% 73%
THE PEEL PLAN FOR THE PARTITION OF PALESTINE (1937): See Israel-Arab Reader, pp. 41-43.
David Ben-Gurion was outraged by the British White Paper of May 1939 (see Israel-Arab Reader, pp. 44-51)
Irgun leaders claimed that they had phoned in a warning…
MENACHEM BEGIN: TERRORIST OR FREEDOM FIGHTER? The Irgun leader stood on the British Most Wanted List when he visited Washington in 1946, but in 1978 he and Anwar Sadat won the Nobel Peace Prize for negotiating the Camp David Accord
The Haganah ship “Exodus” outside Haifa, July 18, 1947, with 4,515 illegal immigrants. On the day of its arrival, Irgun announced that it had just hanged two British sergeants.