David Ben-Gurion’s Zionist Foreign Policy, 1938–48: The Democratic Factor

The years 1938-40 represent a critical watershed in Zionist history. Great Britain, the mandatory power committed to implement the Balfour Declaration on the establishment in Eretz Israel (Palestine) of a national home for the Jewish people, increasingly pursued a policy that threatened to undermine the entire Zionist enterprise at a time when the situation of European Jewry had disastrously deteriorated.