ABSTRACT
During the early stages of the war, years of military crises, the British imposed a ban on all Arab political activity in Palestine. Two major developments affected the Palestinian Arab cause during World War Two; the first was the disintegration and discrediting of their leadership in British eyes, a process that reached its climax with the flight of the Mufti to Berlin in 1941, and his wartime collaboration with the Nazis. The second development was the appropriation of the Palestinian's cause by the Arab League. One astute historian, an employee of the Ministry of Information when the league was founded, later wrote the following retrospective: Both the Jews and the Free French saw it as a threat to themselves, but also as fresh evidence of the extent to which British partiality for the Arabs led to delusions about Arab feelings for Britain; in their eyes it amounted to digging a pit into which the British too would ultimately fall.
