ABSTRACT
The debate over the Peel partition plan represented a watershed in the history of rescue aliya. Zionists in eastern Europe saw the assumption of sovereignty by Jews, even in a rump state that represented only 10 percent of western Palestine, as the only way to continue rescue aliya in any systematic way, and lent considerable support for partition. The Jewish Agency Executive (JAE) remained adamantly opposed to aliya bet, fearing that illegal actions of this sort might jeopardize the partition scheme. The JAE did feel constrained to once again raise the issue of legalizing ma’apilim already in Palestine, especially after rumors of an impending amnesty for Arab terrorists surfaced in April 1937. A number of private parties, not all of them acting out of altruism, also arranged independent aliya. The possibility of legalizing ma’apilim, combined with increasing aliya bet and further British efforts to uproot illegal immigration, brought the issue of ha’apala back to the JAE in the summer of 1937.
