During the early 1940s, as WW II raged in Europe, while Germans and their allies rounded up Jews, concentrated them in ghettos, made them converge before shipping them to slave labor, gas chambers, ‘medical’ labs and crematoria, the British occupiers of Israel harassed the Jews there in many ways. Among these were by enabling and inciting local or neighboring Arabs to pogroms and doing nothing while slaughter ensued as it did at Hebron, Tzfat, Jerusalem and scores of other places famous and forgotten. The Jews fought back as much as they could; they did whatever they could to acquire arms and hid them from increasing British searches.

It was a bloodier version of the British game that sparked the American Revolution in Concord in 1775 but for the Jews the odds were much greater, arms much more difficult to get and hide; the disparity of arms far greater and the international situation worst of all. The gravest problem was a pre-State (yishuv) establishment that collaborated with the British, vilified, spied-on, captured, tortured and turned in Jews with a spark of resistance in them. The pattern continues to this day and so this narrative of the 1940s, written retrospectively in 1949 by Israel Eldad has intense relevance. (more…)