Anonymous Soldiers: The Struggle for Israel, 1917-1947

Terror today is endless. However in the period of the 1930s and 1940s, a small number of committed individuals sought to achieve a specific goal: an independent Israel and an end to British rule under its League of Nations mandate. Actual terrorists were but a fraction of the total Jewish

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population of Mandate Palestine but they caused so much of a threat that by the mid-1940s the UK had stationed 100,000 troops in the nation, hid behind barbed wire and concrete fortifications, and created a Guantanamo-style prison in Kenya and Eritrea where suspected and actual terrorists could be held indefinitely without trial or appeal. At the end of WWII, for a period of time, Britain sought to maintain its pre-war hegemony and empire. But it was too exhausted fiscally and politically and the aim of using Palestine as a base by which India could be safer was a pipe dream--given the Indian thrust for independence. In the U.S., many people sympathized with the Israeli terrorists, and full-page fundraising letters (published in leading newspapers) were written by such famous individuals as Ben Hecht. Truman sought to push the British toward partition as well by supporting the immediate entry to Israel of 100,000 Holocaust survivors caught in European displaced persons camps. Britain, like the U.S. in Vietnam, was a pitiful helpless giant and here are the cables, correspondence, and insights that powered a successful terror campaign and the failed attempts to stop it. Probably a definitive work.

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