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Contents
1 ‘There Are Few Who Do Good and Many That Do Evil’
3 ‘Let Fists Be Flung Like Stone’
4 ‘A Soul for a Soul and Blood for Blood’
5 ‘And He Is a Rebel, Eager for the Storm’
7 ‘They Will Cover Your Memory with Spittle and Disgrace’
8 A ‘Trap for the British Brutes’
10 ‘It Doesn’t Matter If They Kill Me’
12 ‘The Blood of Your Brethren Is Calling to You from the Grave’
13 ‘Hatred Was Aflame in Their Hearts and the Need for Vengeance Burned’
14 ‘Terrorism Is an Infectious Disease’
15 ‘Striking a Blow against the Falsification of History’
16 ‘It’s Nothing Like the Truth’
IN MEMORY OF RICK BEESTON
AND
IAN MACKENZIE
I have not tried to impose any orthodoxy on spellings of Jewish and Arab personal and place names, which inevitably vary in transliteration. To keep things simple I have left some as they appear in contemporary documents, while those that might seem confusingly archaic have been updated. In writing the story I found it had a habit of straying from the path to dart down some fascinating alleyway. To keep the narrative moving, I have sometimes explored these byways in the source notes. Consulting them may also help to answer questions arising from the text.
Balfour Declaration
Statement issued by the British foreign secretary Arthur Balfour in November 1917 that the government favoured the idea that Palestine would one day be a ‘a national home for the Jewish people’.
Betar
Militaristic youth organisation of the Revisionist movement. Particularly strong in Poland.
Haganah
‘The Defence’. Militia founded in 1920 to defend ‘Jewish lives, property and honour’. Under the control of the left-leaning Zionist establishment.
Havlagah
Policy of self-restraint in the face of Arab attacks. Favoured initially by the Haganah and the Yishuv’s leaders but opposed by the Revisionists.
Irgun Zvai Leumi
The ‘National Military Organization’, which broke away from the Haganah in 1931 in protest at its unpreparedness in the face of Arab violence. Revisionist in outlook.
Jewish Agency
The body officially representing the Yishuv to the British administration of Palestine and the outside world.
Lehi
‘Fighters for the Freedom of Israel’. The name of the splinter group which followed Avraham Stern after the 1940 split with the Irgun.
Mapai
Left-wing political party led by David Ben-Gurion and the dominant political force in the Yishuv.
Palmach
Elite unit of the Haganah.
Revisionist movement
Founded by Ze’ev Jabotinsky in 1925 to demand a ‘revision’ of Zionist policies towards the British mandate. Its militarism and capitalist sympathies created sharp differences with the Yishuv’s establishment.
White Paper
The 1939 document drawn up by the British to decide the future of Palestine. Its proposal for strict limits on immigration, if implemented, would effectively have doomed the aspiration for a Jewish state and it was fiercely opposed by all