ABSTRACT
The revolt sounded the death-knell for hopes of any modus vivendi between Arab and Jew in Palestine, widening the gulf between the two peoples to the point where armed conflict became the dominant mode of encounter. The simultaneous rise of Arab nationalism and the tidal wave of antisemitism in central and eastern Europe, which drove Jewish immigrants in ever larger numbers to Palestine, created contradictory pressures which the mandatory authorities were unable to resolve. The British government was convinced that the Arabs had the power to ruin Britain’s Middle Eastern position; and they profoundly misunderstood the traumatic impact of the Nazi Holocaust on the Palestine Yishuv and American Jewry. Policy-makers in Washington and London consistently under-estimated the power of the two national ideologies, one Arab, the other Jewish, locked in territorial conflict over the destiny of Palestine.
