ABSTRACT
Apart from a few short-lived episodes just after the First World War, the history of Israeli Intelligence really began in the early 1930s. In the wake of the Arab Riots of August-September 1929, it developed two principal areas of operation: dealing with the threat to the Yishuv (the Jewish community in Palestine), and finding ways to overcome it by studying and penetrating the neighbouring Arab countries. The first of these tasks evolved directly from lessons learned in the riots, and the second from the policies instituted by Haim Arlosoroff after he assumed the position of head of the Jewish Agency's Political Department in the summer of 1931.
