Nadene Goldfoot
Last Days of the 30 Year Mandate of the British in Palestine
For the past 1,877 years, from 70 to 1947 CE, the Land was ruled by foreign governments and never by the people who lived in it.
In a span of 400 years, from 1516 to 1917, the Land was ruled by the Ottoman Empire by dividing it into separately administered districts called Sanjaks or Vilayets. The Ottomans had no name for the Land as a whole.
In the past 29 years, from 1918 to 1947, the Land was ruled by the British who called the Land Palestine which had been called this after the Jewish General "Aluf" Bar Kokhba took back Jerusalem in 132 from the Romans, held it for 3 whole years at the embarrassment of the Romans, then died in 135 in the great battle. Rome was so mad that they named the Land for the Jews' worst enemy, the Philistines.
Originally, the 30 year British Mandate over Palestine extended to both sides of the River Jordan. In 1922, Britain partitioned the Mandated territory into Palestine (west of the Jordan) and Transjordan (east of the Jordan.) The Land in Hebrew is "Eretz Yisrael".
Hajj Mohammed Amin el-Husseini (1893-1974) in 1921 was a big Arab leader, called the Sherif of Jerusalem and the Grand Mufti, appointed by the British, the only Jew-Sir Herbert Samuel, who also chose Husseini for chairman of the Arab supreme Council. (Oy gavolt!) He was afraid of losing his high position if Jews entered the country. So he organized the Arab riots (nicely called 'the Palestine disturbances by the Brits). For these, he was sentenced to exile in 1937. He fled to Lebanon, and during WWII, participated in Rashid Ali's pro-Axis coup in Iraq before going to Europe where he assisted Hitler and was largely responsible for the liquidation of the Jews in the Moslem areas of Bosnia. In 1946 he escaped to Egypt. After 1948's Israel birth, he set up a short-lived "Palestine Government " in Gaza-which moved later to Cairo, Egypt.
During the 2nd half of the 19th century, both communities---Arabs and Jews---began to grow. By 1914, the population of the Land (west of the Jordan) was estimated at 680,000 of whom 85,000 were Jews.
In 1917, in order to win Jewish support for Britain's First World War effort, the British Balfour Declaration promised the establishment of a Jewish national home in Ottoman-controlled Palestine. However, the British had also promised Arab nationalists that a united Arab country, covering most of the Arab Middle East, would result if the Ottoman Turks were defeated.
The United Nations (October 24, 1945) was an outgrowth of the League of Nations(January 10, 1920) . On 15 November 1920, 41 members states gathered in Geneva for the opening of the first session of the Assembly. This represented a large portion of existing states and corresponded to more than 70% of the world's population. A UN Special committee on Palestine composed for statesmen and jurists from 11 member states, recommended the partitioning of Palestine into independent Jewish and Arab States, linked in an economic union, with Jerusalem under international control. Both times, the Nations voted for Israel to be created.
On November 29, 1947, the General Assembly approved this recommendation by more than the required 2/3 majority. Both the USA and the Soviet Union supported the resolution.
The decision of the United Nations was accepted by the Jewish Agency. It was rejected by the Arab Governments and by Palestinian Arab leaders.
The 6 months until the termination of the British 30 year Mandate were marked by Arab violence against the Jewish community. The Arabs attacked to interrupt communications between Jewish towns and villages and, above all, to isolate and conquer Jerusalem.
Prior to the entry of regular Arab armies into the Land in May 1948, not a single Jewish town or village was captured.
The British authorities aided the Arabs by handing over to them military bases and equipment. British officers led the Transjordan Arab Legion. (The Brits were given the 30 year mandate with the command to help the Jews created their Jewish Homeland.)They saw it differently. They kept Jews out and allowed Arabs in.
The main effort of the Jewish Haganah (meaning defense in Hebrew) was to maintain a corridor to Jerusalem and beat back the Arab assaults on the new western city. This was a secret organization kept from the British for Jewish self-defense because the Brits were not doing it. It grew out of Ha-Shomer in 1920 and existed until 1948.
Intensive efforts to strengthen the Haganah followed the 1929 Arab riots which resulted in a British policy of appeasement of the Arabs. In 1931, the Haganah split and the minority, chiefly right-wing groups, formed a separate organization; these reunited with the Haganah in 1936 but certain elements remained outside and formed the nucleus of the Irgun Tzevai Leumi.
Avraham Stern (December 23, 1907-February 12, 1942, born in Suwalki, Poland-or Lithuania where my Bubba was born. When 18 in 1925, he migrated alone to Palestine. He died at 35.
Avraham Stern (1907-1942) left the Irgun in 1939-1940 of which he had been a leader, because of its refusal to continue anti-British activities in Palestine during World War II. He formed an underground organization later known as Lohame Herut Israel. The British called it the Stern Gang. My 3rd cousin, Stanley Goldfoot, was the Chief of Intelligence for it. They carried out acts of sabotage, etc. Stanley was a writer; wrote "A Letter to the World." Stern was killed by the British police while being arrested.
Stern spent the rest of the 1930s traveling back and forth to Eastern Europe to organize revolutionary cells in Poland and promote immigration of Jews to Palestine in defiance of British restrictions (this was therefore known as "illegal immigration").
Stern developed a plan to train 40,000 young Jews to sail for Palestine and take over the country from the British colonial authorities. He succeeded in enlisting the Polish government in this effort. The Poles began training Irgun members and arms were set aside, but then Germany invaded Poland and began the Second World War in 1939. This ended the training, and immigration routes were cut off. Stern was in Palestine at the time and was arrested the same night the war began. He was incarcerated together with the entire High Command of the Irgun in the Jerusalem Central Prison and Sarafand Detention Camp.
The Haganah wasn't idle; and was strengthened during the 1936-1939 disturbances by the establishment of the Supernumerary Police Force which number 20,000 in 1939. This force was recruited by the Haganah command and operated as far as possible under its instructions.
At this period, the "special Field companies" were raised by Yitzhak Sadeh and the "Night Squads" established by Charles Orde Wingate (1903-1944). Wingate was a British soldier. While serving during 1936-1939 in Palestine, he organized formations of Jewish volunteers, known as the Special Night Squads, to defeat Arab terrorist activity. A keen bible student, Windgate remained an ardent supporter of Zionism to the end of his brilliant military career. Sadeh (1890-1952) assisted Trumpeldor in founding the Russian He-Halutz movement in 1919 and the following year settled in Palestine. He became an Israeli labor and military leader. I taught with one of his descendants-a teacher of English in Safed in 1981.
Joseph Trumpeldor (1880-1920) was going to be a dentist, but volunteered for the Russian army and lost an arm during the fighting in 1904-1905 while a Japanese captive. He was made an officer and settled in Palestine in 1912. During WWI he was in Egypt working with Jabotinsky for the establishment of a Jewish unit to fight with the British against the Turks in Palestine. He helped raise the Zion Mule Corps but this was dispatched to the Gallipoli. As an ex-Russian officer, Trumpeldor was excluded from the Jewish Legion. In 1917, he went to Russia to organize Jewish settlement groups for Palestine and from his activity the He-Halutz movement emerged. In 1919, he returned to Palestine as leader of a pioneer group and unsuccessfully tried to reconcile the antagonisms between the various workers' political parties inside the country. He organized volunteers to protect exposed Jewish settlements in Upper Galilee and was killed in defense of Tel Hai.
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The Haganah also executed settlement operations (Stockade and Tower), organized "illegal" immigration, and even set up its own secret plant for manufacturing equipment.
The ship, St. Louis, was refused landing in USA in 1939. The more than 900 passengers of the M.S. St. Louis were denied entry by immigration authorities in multiple countries in the lead-up to the Holocaust. As the M.S. St. Louis cruised off the coast of Miami in June 1939, its passengers could see the lights of the city glimmering. But the United States hadn’t been on the ship’s original itinerary, and its passengers didn’t have permission to disembark in Florida. As the more than 900 Jewish passengers looked longingly at the twinkling lights, they hoped against hope that they could land.
Most of the ship’s 937 passengers were Jews trying to escape Nazi Germany. Though World War II had not yet begun in the USA, the groundwork for the Holocaust was already being laid in Germany, where Jewish people faced harassment, discrimination and political persecution. But though the danger faced by the passengers was clear, they were turned down by immigration authorities, first by Cuba, then the United States and Canada. For many on the St. Louis, that rejection was a death sentence.
The world’s refusal of the St. Louis’ desperate refugees was a death sentence for 254 refugees—approximately half of the number who had returned to the European continent in 1939. Many who did not die were interned in concentration camps, like Max Korman, who built on lessons learned on the ship to help organize inmates of the Westerbork concentration camp in the Netherlands.
In these conditions, Britain withdrew its last forces from Palestine on May 15, 1948. This ended the spell of more than 1,800 years during which the Land had been governed by aliens.
1947 was the last year under such dictatorship.
Resource:
The New Standard Jewish Encyclopedia
https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/film/british-soldiers-deport-exodus-1947-passengers
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yitzhak_Sadeh
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orde_Wingate
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographic_history_of_Palestine_(region)
https://www.history.com/news/wwii-jewish-refugee-ship-st-louis-1939
https://www.nam.ac.uk/explore/conflict-Palestine
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avraham_Stern
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Trumpeldor
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