Abstract
The Second World War was a relatively peaceful period for Mandate Palestine in comparison to the preceding and succeeding periods of the Arab revolt in 1936–9 and the Jewish insurgency, which reached its peak in 1945–7. Apart from a few unimportant Italian, German, and French air raids on the cities of Tel Aviv and Haifa, Palestine did not witness any battlefield scenes. For the British, during the war the country became a strategic rear zone and served as an imperial communication corridor, logistic and administrative quarter, staging area for troops that took part in occupying pro-German Iraq and Vichy Syria and Lebanon in 1941, and a planned battleground of delay action in case the Axis occupied Egypt in 1942. For the Jewish community (the Yishuv), alarmed by the possibility of Axis occupation of the country in the first half of the conflict, the war provided an opportunity to enhance its armed force, mainly by overt and covert military and intelligence cooperation with the British, and to improve its economic basis, eventually catalysing the Zionist idea of establishing a Jewish state in Palestine as soon as possible. For the Palestinian Arabs the war served to deepen their distrust of and concern over Zionism.
Using secondary literature and British and Israeli archival documentation, Sharfman, a lecturer at the Western Galilee College, Israel, examines the history of Palestine during the Second World War II, focusing primarily on the part played by – and from the perspective of – the British and the Jews. The part played by the Palestinian-Arab community receives far less attention, and is discussed through British and Jewish sources alone and from their points of view. The book divides the war period into two. The first, covering the years 1939–42, examines the military activity and the apprehension of a German invasion. It overviews the strategic importance of Palestine for the British and the campaigns in Iraq, the Levant and the Western Desert, and describes in detail the internal developments in the country, as well as the contribution of the Yishuv to the war effort enlistment (creation of military units, clandestine intelligence cooperation, and logistic support). It also assesses the ambivalent attitude of the Jewish community towards the British as defenders of the country against the Germans, on the one hand, and constrainers of Jewish growth in the country, on the other. This was wonderfully summarized by the future prime minister of Israel, David Ben-Gurion, in September 1939: ‘we should support the British in their war as if the White Paper [that limited Jewish immigration to Palestine and the right to buy land from Arabs] does not exist, and resist the White Paper as if there is no war’.
The book’s second part deals with the years of 1943–5, when the external threat of invasion diminished and the direct linkage to the war was reduced, while political instability and British-Jewish tension in the country increased. The earlier ambivalence of the Yishuv with regard to the mandate shifted towards hostility, as reflected in the mounting Jewish resistance and terrorism against the British at the end of and soon after the war. Furthermore, the traditional Zionist approach of gradually building up the Jewish homeland was replaced, partly because of the Holocaust, by the demand for the immediate establishment of a state. The British pre-war inclination towards the continuation of the mandate also changed following the different strategic climate of the post-war period and the increased involvement of the US in the region (and with it American Jewry’s interest in the fate of Palestine).
Alongside the political and military aspects, Sharfman emphasizes the socio-economic impact of the war on the country and largely, according to the author, on the Jewish community, which initially suffered a grave economic crisis due to the closure of European markets and the limitations on Jewish immigration, but later increasingly recovered by supplying the growing demands of the Allied war effort in the Middle East. This economic boost was soon to greatly add to Jewish strength in the Israeli War of Independence.
The book has less to offer to the informed reader, as most of the issues examined have already been the object of in-depth studies in the existing literature, but their interweaving here within a coherent and informative framework does provide, primarily for newcomers to the field, a solid and readable overview of Palestine in the Second World War.