ABSTRACT
Two seminal developments affected the Jewish people and the Zionists during WorldWar Two: the Holocaust, the threatened physical elimination of European Jewry (some 12 million in 1939), and of the Yishuv in Palestine (some 450,000). In Europe, the Nazis murdered some 6 million Jews during the war; in Palestine, the threat of extinction hovered over the Yishuv for more than 2 and a half years. It was removed only during the winter of 1942-43, with the Allies’ final defeat of Rommel’s Afrika Korps. The “lesson of the war” for the Jews and the Zionists was that they could
not rely on the Great Powers to intervene on behalf of the Jewish Diaspora. All their appeals for operations to rescue Jews from Nazi-occupied Europe were met with either procrastination and/or rejection. In Palestine, the Yishuv could no longer rely on the mandatory Power, not even to furnish them with the elementary means for their own self-defence. The Zionists concluded that the fate of the remnants of the Jewish people now rested in their hands. But first, we turn our attention to the military exigencies that confronted
the British with the outbreak of World War Two.
