Excerpts from “Palestine and the Interwar” (1966: Abdullah Hassan, Nablus University Press)
“Chapter VIII - The Jewish Insurgency of 1937-1942”
…On 1 December 1937, eight months after the publication of the White Paper, the Irgun would declare its insurgency against the Mandate. At that time, Jabotinsky and many other Irgun-aligned Zionist activists were illegals, and were not allowed to step foot in the Mandate. The Irgun circumvented this, having Jabotinsky secretly arrive in the ports of Tel Aviv. Planning for the rebellion had started as early as August the moment Jabotinsky had read the White Paper. Jabotinsky reportedly was so outraged by the paper at the moment, that he had thrown his glasses on the ground, smashing them. A few weeks later, he had sent coded letters to the Irgun High Command proposing that the organization seize key centers of power in Palestine, take the Government House in Jerusalem and hold off the British for 24 hours by any means necessary while Zionist leaders across the world would declare an independent state in Palestine and form a government in exile.
It was a grandiose and ambitious plan. The High Command was impressed but not without reservations – knowing the severe casualties and losses they might face in actually carrying it out. Finally, Avraham Stern suggested to Jabotinsky and the Command that 40,000 European immigrants be recruited and trained for the cause. On the day of the rebellion they would be able to support Jabotinsky’s uprising. Jabotinsky liked the idea and even went so far as to contact the Polish government for their help. Fortunately for us, the government, although they had considered it a great deal, rejected the plan. They were willing only to help train 1,000. In the end, Jabotinsky grudgingly accepted their offer, and for the next several months he personally commanded and directed training efforts for an elite Beitar force.[…]
The campaign would be a deliberately provocative one against the British. In the revised plan, Jabotinsky explained that it would be:
”… a spectacle, a drama theater which the world shall set their eyes upon. We will live like true Hebrews, and fight like Hebrews! The world shall take pity on the yid Yishuv when the British have overplayed their hand, and the Mandate will be no more. They shall recognize us as the true leaders of the Jews, and when they have handed power over to us, we will reforge Israel in our image!”
By causing the British security forces to take overly repressive countermeasures and controversy among metropolitan citizens, both Britain’s allies and the Yishuv would be alienated. With world attention focused on Palestine, the Jews could force their hand and gain independence in this way. [1]
David Ben-Gurion, the leader of the Yishuv – the same Yishuv called yid by Jabotinsky, himself loathed the man deeply and hated the thought of him even taking foot in Palestine. But Jabotinsky was already in Palestine, and he appeared before a crowd in Tel Aviv: “Today, I declare, the struggle has begun!” Ben Gurion was somewhat supportive of an insurgency, but he decided that it would be not wise for the Haganah to immediately join. The Haganah thus far remained noncommitant on the question. […] But Jabotinsky would be arrested only several weeks after his arrival in Palestine, and was forced to undergo trial by the British. Despite international pressure just like had happened in his trial in the 1920s, Jabotinsky was sentenced to 25 years’ of imprisonment without the possibility of parole; his letters with the outer world would be watched by the government like a hawk.
A conspiracy theory among the “True Revisionists” alleges that Menachem Begin was behind the arrest and imprisonment of Jabotinsky. They allege that Begin was responsible for the idea of the insurgency. But his jealousy of Jabotinsky’s status was inflamed when he rebuffed him from leading it. According to their allegations, Begin devised a successful plan where Jabotinsky’s location would be given up to the British, in order to distract them from the 1,000 Beitar operatives entering Palestine at the same time. Only then, would the seeming survival of the operatives as had happened, make sense, whereas Jabotinsky had not escaped arrest.
In March, Begin would accede to the leadership of HaTzohar following Jabotinsky’s death, and consequently assume the status of “Supreme Commander”.
Jabotinsky’s sentence would inspire widespread outrage among the right wing in the Yishuv, as well as internationally. Finally, on 18 March 1938, a prominent British restaurant was bombed by Irgun militants. Planning for the operation had begun at least four weeks before – the restaurant would be at its peak on a Friday night: the detonation of a barrel of dynamite caused part of the entire building to collapse, killing dozens and wounding more. This was the opening act of the insurgency.
[…]
For several months, the Irgun would bomb governmental institutions like post, tax, immigration and intelligence offices, as well as killing and wounding British soldiers in shootings. In return, the British would carry out reprisals against the insurgents, sometimes extending to the Jewish civilians: casual police brutality, unwarranted stops on the road, and all kinds of minor torments by the mandatory police became commonplace.
The Irgun would finally carry out another major operation in September of the year, where a British payroll train – carrying 35,000 pounds, was successfully derailed by Irgun bandits. These bandits kidnapped the soldiers and the personnel, at least those that were not dead as a result of the crash, and made off with the money without ever being caught. The story was heavily publicized by Yishuv newspapers, taking money from the Irgun in secret; the group leader began calling themselves “Jewse James” after the train robber of the Wild West. The story also made its way to the home isles, making headlines…
Excerpts from “A Party History of the Tahlah; formerly, the Palestinian Communist Party” (2000 ed; Musa Budeiri, University of Haifa)
…The end of the 1935-1937 Arab Emergency had brought with it an unfixable and chronic depression for the Arab economy … Most of the Arab proletariat class had experienced back-migration, departing the cities and the towns in order to go to the countryside. This was done all in order to support the rebellion. When it ended, they had come back to the cities only to find that their previous occupations, their jobs, even homes and so on in some cases, were unavailable to them, taken by Jewish workers, taken by immigrants. Arab labor was thus in a disorganized and weak state following the rebellion.
While terribly unfortunate, it was an opportunity for the Palestine Communist Party to enlarge its membership. Najati Sidqi, head of trade union relations in the Party, capitalized on his relationship with Sami Taha, the ex-leader of the former Palestine Arab Workers’ Society – once aligned with the PKP, but closed due to the 1937 Arab revolt. A directly party-controlled trade union would be a blessing for the PKP, and so in late September the long-awaited fruit of Sidqi’s efforts would finally be produced: the All-Palestine Federation of Labor…
Excerpts from “Palestine and the Interwar”, continued
…The rhetoric of the rebels became increasingly drawn to the situation in Nazi Germany and their adoption of antisemitic policies. They pointed out that for many European Jews living under Nazi oppression, the choice for emigration was either communism, Palestine or death; most countries had closed their doors to Jewish immigration. In October of 1938, a certain group of the Irgun would make one of the most infamous assassinations: Malcolm MacDonald.
The late Secretary of State for the Colonies – and one of the chief architects of the White Paper of 1937, was assassinated by Irgun operatives under the personal command of a certain man called Avraham Stern in his hotel in Egypt. After two days the body was discovered in MacDonald’s hotel bathroom, when his political functionaries and colleagues had wondered just what in the world was taking him so long […]
This came directly after the Edward VIII visit to Nazi Germany where he received a personal audience from Adolf Hitler, receiving widespread condemnation and the ire of the Yishuv in Palestine. “BRITISH OVERLORDS – NAZI LOVERS” – Haaretz, a Yishuv newspaper, declared.
The assassination would send ripples throughout the world. Many of the factions in the Yishuv were quick to distance themselves from the Irgun, afraid of punitive operations by the British. Stern would be expelled from the Irgun, taking with him breakaway supporters. Stern, in a radio broadcast, announced the creation of the Meshachrerei Yisrael - Meyi (Liberators of Israel) organization. In an unexpected turn of events, Meyi attempted to forge an alliance with the Third Communist International [2]. Stern said that he had always been “inspired by Vladimir Mayakovsky’s beautiful and revolutionary poetry”, and he saw the Communists as a potential alternative to the Axis, who Stern considered allied to the British for the time being. The American Commission for the Levantine Proletariat, at the time unknown to virtually the entire Yishuv, saw the Meyi as just maybe useful.
The talks entirely and utterly failed, when Stern’s racism was considered entirely unacceptable by the American visitors:
Stern at first, after great consternation, said he could adopt “Borochovism” as an ideology. But this was not the point, and the visitors openly rebuffed him, asking him to leave behind his Zionism. Negotiations soon broke down after that. Privately, many of the PKP knew and denounced the man as “no more than a fascist opportunist”, and the Arab faction of the PKP, along with Jewish hardliners, completely opposed even letting the ACLP fund Meyi. Stern, rather than leave his racist intentions, decided to fight the insurgency alone.[…]
The Haganah finally announced on 20 May 1939, that they would be joining the insurrection – after “800 days of pleas to the British to end their unacceptable policies, met by 800 days of insults to the Jews.” The insurgency, with the entire backing of the Yishuv, entered its hot phase. The British haven’t seen nothing yet”, Ben-Gurion announced. Ben Gurion, the Haganah and the centrist Yishuv had enough of the government’s denials: only several weeks ago, the Nazis had invaded Poland, which was met with complete inaction on the part of the British government.
Ten days later, a one-day general strike across the Mandate was organized: this was also observed by a large contingent of Arabs as a sign of solidarity. In fact it was not the Histadrut that organized it, but rather the All-Palestine Federation of Labor. It would be largely political; a show of the APFL’s accruing power, an anti-imperialist demonstration against Nazi Germany, a call for Britain to cease their appeasement policies and to show solidarity with newly occupied Poland. Moreover, the actual intent of the strike was to capture more of the Yishuv into supporting and joining the APFL, to show that the binational union could put their differences aside to fight against a common enemy. “We hate Adolf Hitler just as much,” said a spokesman of the Arabs represented in the APFL.
Meanwhile, the Haganah had been ramping up their operations to facilitate illegal Jewish immigration to Palestine, attacking and disabling British radar tracking stations, and bombing patrol boats in the “Night of the Boats”. […] Palestine’s transport infrastructure is damaged, with trains grinding to a halt after the Irgun’s attacks on the rails and the bridges, once disrupting for example, the rail traffic between Jerusalem and Jaffa for a month. Moreover, the Irgun, Meyi and Haganah also organized prison breaks to free those that had been arrested in the course of their operations.
After a brutal wave of attacks from the Irgun, Britain enacts martial law in the Mandate. A three-hour curfew is imposed on Jewish settlements, and the authorities conduct cordon-and-search operations – filtering thousands of citizens at a time - which are partially successful in wiping out the leadership of the organizations, and seriously decimating their ability to organize an insurrection. The Yishuv soldiers on.
Over time the insurgency would reach a new low in late 1939, with activity slowly picking back up in 1941. […] For the Yishuv, it seemed the game of cat and mouse would never end. The insurgency, as far as they were concerned, was going to be an indefinite affair…
Excerpts from “Palestine in the Great Revolutionary War” (1968: Abdullah Hassan, Nablus University Press)
…On Valentine’s Day 1942, the Yishuv erupted into a shocked celebration. The declaration of war on the Axis by Britain had been something the Jews of Palestine had been calling, advocating, shooting for a very very long time. Just after the official formation of the Franco-British Union, the Haganah ceased all operations against the Mandate, under orders of the Jewish Agency. The Irgun soon followed suit. Some instead defected to Meyi, convinced that the insurgency must continue. The euphoria of the Yishuv with Jews flying British flags, marching out in the streets, was ultimately short-lived. News rapidly reached the Mandate following the contemporaneous invasion of Assyria and Syria by the Turanists: the “Two Hundred Days of Dread” soon began in Palestine with fears of an Axis invasion of the Mandate. In the coming months, tens of thousands of Jewish and Arab volunteers would join the Franco-British Army[…]
On 25 February, Avraham Stern, the leader of Meyi, was arrested by OVRA agents while in Rome, Italy. Stern had travelled to the country, believing that he would receive help from the Axis in liberating and establishing a Jewish state in Palestine. Little is known about the operation since many records were destroyed following the war, however it is assumed that Stern was handed over to Nazi agents on their orders. Deported and put on a train to Treblinka, he would die in the concentration camp in late March.[…]
The Palmach elite commando unit is formed by the Haganah, to be used in British operations and in case of an Axis victory in North Africa and Syria, threatening an invasion of Palestine. Similarly, noting the endangered situation of the population, the American Commission agitates for more funding and support to be sent to the PKP and their paramilitary, the PFFL. The PFFL begins a steady expansion.
The Husseinis, disgraced by Axis support for Turanist Turkey and the impending doom for the Syrian Arabs, lose all support in Palestine. The National Defence Battalions would be organized by the Nashashibis in March, with British oversight and support. Despite their near-total control of Arab nationalist politics, they now noticed that the PFFL had in fact, absorbed large swaths of Arab volunteers - this was because to their early concerted attempts to organize, their functional similarity to the Nashashibis in advocating for the White Paper, and control of the non-Jewish trade unions. This would only result in the PKP accruing greater and greater power and prominence. So too little and too late, it was for the Battalions.
Even Meyi would soon cease their operations against the (Franco-)British. Palestine, was now for all intents and purposes, a country in total defense. Every pound earned was a pound for the coming onslaught, every bullet and every manufactured good. To make good of their efforts, the FBU would channel additional funding to the Mandate to encourage industrial development. This, combined with the war demands, resulted in such a strong demand for employment that by June, there was actually a shortage of manpower with nearly all Arabs now working. “It is ironic that our Mandate is now undergoing an economic boom, even as we work with chilling tingles through our spines. We strike the hammer in the forge just that harder, with our eyes fixed to each coming report of every Axis success. It seems that with the Turks and the Italians coming in their tanks, speeding in the sand, we have no one but the Jews and for them us Arabs’ to turn to.”; said Bashar Alami, an acclaimed Arabic poet turned Jerusalem journalist[…]
Meyi, through their contacts in Europe, learns of their leader Stern’s death in the Treblinka concentration camp. Yitzhak Shamir would take power in a duumvirate with Nathan Yellin-Mor. Shamir wrote in his biography: “It seriously rattled us. We had to go on some soul searching that day.” Shamir and Yellin-Mor, far less rightist and extremist than Stern, were responsible for the leftward turn in Meyi, and the organization again became a fellow traveller of the TCI. It was always an ideologically heterogeneous organization – its sole declared goal being “the facilitation of the anti-imperialist struggle against the British Empire and the liberation of Palestine”.
In August of 1942, the Two Hundreds Days of Dread became, not dread, but terror. The fears of the Palestinian community had come true following the losses in the Battle of El-Alamein, and the successes of the Turanist operations in Syria. Mandatory authorities had already begun to enact Operation “Palestine Final Fortress”, a plan designed to line the northern mountain ranges of the Mandate – Carmel, Gilboa, Samarian, and the Anti-Lebanon Mountains - with networks of trenches and deep and fortified complexes. These would serve as bases for a skeletal British force in Israel, consisting of two infantry divisions, artillery, and an armored division, to be supported by the Allied forces in Syria who were retreating. All of the paramilitaries in Palestine – the National Defence Battalions, the Palestinian Freedom-Fighters’ League, Meyi, and the Haganah, offered their support to the British. HaShahar (The Dawn), an unit of “mista’aravim” (lit. Arabizeds) part of the Palmach, Haganah’s elite force, also began cooperating with the British in particular to sabotage Husayni’s supporters. HaShahar was composed of Arabic-speaking Jews of Sephardi and Mizrachi origin, who blended in and easily assimilated into the Arab population. These mista’aravim began operations against the forces of now Berlin-based, Nazi-supporting Amin al-Husayni in August[…]
The Italians enter the Sinai Peninsula on 23 October. As the Palestinians prepared for their impending doom, their spirits were slightly buoyed by C-39s landing in from Iran. This was part of Operation “Manna”, an American operation to airlift ammunition, arms and supplies to Palestine for use by the British garrison and the PFFL; Operation Manna resulted in the forces attaining a tremendous amount of firepower, which they could use against the Italians[…]
I talian forces finally march into Palestine following the fall of Aqaba in November. Gaza City and many of the southern settlements are taken without significant resistance. A failed attempt by HaShahar in Khan Younis at inciting a riot against the arriving Italian occupation force marked the only thing of note. While a large contingent decided to stay quiet, many cells of the Muslim Brotherhood in Gaza decided to celebrate the arrival of the Italians and to greet them as liberators. Meanwhile, much of the Jewish population had already fled the Negev and were making for Transjordan, or the better protected north. The Italians were beginning to see Palestine as much of a breeze than they thought, but Rehovot – 12 kilometers south of Lydda, would sorely put a booger in that perception. The Haganah, using a team of mortars and an artillery gun from the British, would continually shell the Italians’ position for several days and nights to spark terror in them: the Italians responded with devastating firepower but arrived on to the scene to find that it had been instead manned by just a few militants with a very big pile of shells. The event and the militants’ escape, led by a man called Shlomo Halperin, are remembered to this day. The PFFL and the Haganah, as well as the National Defence Battalions were involved in ferocious slugging matches in the coastal cities of Lydda, Jaffa and Tel Aviv – once again using the dense impassable streets of Jaffa to their advantage. They had given up any notion of actually defending the Mandate successfully but rather to enact pure and raw terror against their soon-to-be occupiers. The cities held out for two weeks of bloody block to block fighting but eventually broke, and the Italians soon moved onward into the hilly passes leading to Jerusalem, and farther north to Haifa. In the wake of the battles, a significant quantity of houses and buildings were destroyed. The towns were left in ruins – like scenes out of the Great War. Over time, the Italians began to treat their opponents even more brutally, in response to the terror they had inflicted on them, and most of all they especially loathed the communist Freedom Fighters’ League.
The Italians came upon a heavily fortified pass - Latrun. The resulting “Battle of Latrun” would come down in history as “Palestine’s Alamo”: the defenders of Latrun – a company of Jewish-Arab British soldiers supported by irregulars in the hilly countryside, held off the Italians’ advances for a week and managed to inflict significant casualties, until part of the fort was absolutely demolished by a barrage by an armored division.
Despite fierce resistance by the Palestine military garrison and the paramilitaries of the Mandate, many of their defenses were quickly overwhelmed. They were overrun in a couple of months. In the far north, the Palestinian united front fared better by preemptively marching into the Golan Heights and extending the defenses of Final Fortress, but even this failed and Turkish forces soon marched easily through the Hula Valley, onwards to the Galilee. Unlike the Italians, they were far more hateful to the enemy. The Turks gleefully massacred villages on occasion, and their antisemitic treatment of the Jews was little better.[…]
Heavy fighting in northern Samaria would cease with the fall of the Gilboa Complex, and the Italo-Turkish forces were poised to take the Jezreel Valley. Meanwhile in Jerusalem, the long siege was finally broken, with the already-low resources of the paramilitary defenders having been depleted. The Italians would set fire to multiple quarters attempting to completely eliminate the verminous activity of the paramilitaries, and soon occupied the formerly British governmental offices. They undertook preparations to transfer the country into joint governance under the Kingdom of Italy and the Republic of Turkey – broadcasting on radio the creation of the “Holy Land State”. Although fighting has not actually ended with holdouts still persisting – most importantly the Carmel fortress, the Kingdom of Italy announces the “complete capitulation of all forces in the Holy Land”. On 22 December, dictator Benito Mussolini arrives in the occupied port of Jaffa in time to visit Jerusalem in a grand motorcade by Christmas’s Eve, proclaiming: ”…At last, the Roman provinces of the Eastern Meditarranean have been brought back into the empire’s fold!”[…]
The Final Fortresses were overwhelmed once and for all by the beginning of January 1943. The first of “Einsatzgruppe Egypt”, the Nazi SS extermination force sent to massacre the Jewish population, enters the country. Nominally secular, the heavily catholic Italian governors of the Holy Land State are displeased with Nazi attempts to ‘desecrate the Holy Land’. A proposed concentration camp, “Pilgerburg” – to be set up in the former British Atlit internment camp, only 20 kilometers south of Haifa, is canceled. Instead, the Nazis decide to relocate their proposed camps to the Turanist-governed regions of northern Palestine. Another coastal site, due to railway restrictions, is selected – the Arab village of Al-Manshiyya[3], to be demolished. Meanwhile, much of the political leadership of the Mandate, and dozens of thousands of Jews and Arabs flee eastward, crossing the river Jordan – hoping to be smuggled into safety in the Arabian desert.
The Jewish and the Arab paramilitaries are left nearly totally destroyed. As an example, two-thirds of the Haganah’s forces had died in the invasion of Palestine. Meyi surviving, owing to their smallness, would serve as the nucleus of the nationalist resistance in the Yishuv. The PFFL is not much better off, but with the National Defense Battalions’ destruction, they see an opportunity…
Excerpts from “A Party History of the Tahlah”, continued
…Joseph Berger and Radwan al-Hilu negotiated a meeting place in the Arab village of Salbit, deep into the countryside. At first, they were cautious, worried that the National Defense remnants might out them to the Axis forces. But they had told their leader, Mufid Nashashibi, that they would be meeting their delegates. Berger and al-Hilu trusted the man more when he had generously accepted anyway, and the two revealed themselves to Nashashibi at the designated house. They ended up staying a week, above and beyond what was supposed to be the bare necessities for a merger, no they talked about all manner of things, politics, and so on … They decided there, in that groundbreaking summit, that the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine was to be founded.
The Front was finally organized after a month, and its existence was officially announced on 14 March, the month after the one-year anniversary of Britain’s entry into the war. Spies, resistance militants and all kinds of people, people who weren’t even associated with the PFLP – but rather simply excited about the founding of a resistance, spread pamphlets and put up posters. Its announcement was also broadcasted on radio.[…]
The PFLP’s executive committee was surprised to learn that Nathan Yellin-Mor, a leader of Meyi, had requested to join them. Along with Yellin-Mor, he had a following of a hundred trained fighters, which were ready to accept the binational liberation cause. They learned that Meyi had suffered a split when the Arab-tolerant faction had decided that they would join arms with the PFLP. In March of 1943, the PFLP was troubled not only by the fact that the Meyi organization still survived, being supplemented by Irgun remnants, and had in fact begun a close cooperation with the reconstituted Haganah, but that 1,000 Jews were now being “processed” at the concentration camp “KZ Akers” on its grand opening just north of the city of Acre…
Excerpts from “Palestine in the Great Revolutionary War”, continued
…The day before Erev Pesach (Passover’s Eve) on 21 April 1943, a massive bombing blasted the Government House in Jerusalem. An explosive-laden truck was parked next to the Government House. PFLP militant, Comrade Yehudah, calmly exited the truck, crossed the street and quietly announced to pedestrians in the area that there was going to be an explosion. Yehudah disappeared, and mere minutes later the truck exploded, sending hundreds of kilograms of iron chains and weights flying into the wall of the Government House at rapid velocity: the face of the building collapsed and hundreds of people were seriously wounded. Four Italian and Turkish guards were immediately killed as a result of the blast: they counted 13 more dead among the House personnel in overnight operations.
The PFLP claimed responsibility for the bombing, achieving a symbolic victory against the Axis occupation. It was also the first successful car bombing in history[4]. The next days that transpired however, would make them rue the thought that they’d even considered the attack, as a company of Turkish soldiers entered Jerusalem and began opening fire on civilians. In exchange for the 17 killed in the Government House bombing, the Italo-Turkish would kill 340 Arab and Jewish citizens in bloody reprisals over the entire 2 weeks of Passover, all the while blasting over megaphones: “Twenty dead for every single one killed!” It was an absolutely brutal response which showed the entire nation that these were no simple Brits. No, the real occupiers had arrived, the real occupation had begun. The entire ordeal would be remembered as “Bloody Passover”.
In May of 1943, due to the massacres of Bloody Passover, the PFLP – currently being seized by a major manhunting operation, would cease major armed resistance against the Italo-Turkish occupiers for the time being. “The PFLP underestimated them, and I am thankful that we had not gone against them sooner. For I underestimated them, friends, and we need to seriously reconsider our strategy against the Axis.”, Ben-Gurion would tell in a speech to his underground Haganah cell. The Haganah and Meyi soon follow the PFLP’s example, while negotiations begin for an “unified underground resistance”. This did not end up working out, but the three paramilitaries at least made official a long undeclared peace between them that had gone on since the beginning of the Days of Dread.
[…]
“Hallelujah! Hallelujah! The Turks and the Italians have left! No more is the Holy Land State! Tell your mothers, your fathers, your brothers and sisters, tell your neighbors and your friends, tell everyone! The Axis have left, tell everyone!” - Quote from Simantov, “The Four Seasons of Darkness”[5]
Following the successes of the Franco-British Army in their military operations against the Italians – liberating the Nile, and the march of Soviet forces in the east, a great retreat of Axis forces began. The Italians made for the safe shores of their mainland peninsula, all the while, yet more retreated into the deserts of their Libya colony.
The short-lived “Holy Land State” had indeed finally dissolved by 1 October 1943. The government made haste for their boats, waiting for them at the coast as a withdrawal of military forces began. The Italian and Turkish soldiers, once an omnipresent feature of the streets in the country, were now gone. Gone were the beatings and the random searches in the middle of night, which left houses picked clean of anything of value. Cities watched as entire convoys of trucks, cars and other military vehicles left for the roads in long lines. The docks of Jaffa, Haifa and Acre were unstoppably busy for many weeks. The KZ Akers concentration camp - the only one that had been constructed in Palestine - is forced to shut down, and moreover, is torched to the ground under the orders of Einsatzgruppe Egypt. They, and tens of thousands of soldiers leave the country, but not without their fair share of rapes and violence, one last little torment against the Palestinian population.
By late October, Allied forces will enter the land: hundreds of thousands march out into the streets in open jubilation…
[1] Typical terrorist modus operandi.
[2] Avraham Stern in this sense, can be compared to Subhas Chandra Bose of the Azad Hind - willing to work with anyone, as long as they help them gain independence.
[3] OTL also demolished by the IDF during the 1947-1948 Palestinian war.
[4] The first car bombing was actually in 1920 – the Wall Street bombing. OTL, it would be another 27 years before a successful use of it, specifically in a modern context as a weapon of urban warfare. OTL, this second bombing had been in fact carried out by the Irgun in Haifa. ITTL, it comes four years earlier, and all thanks to the PFLP. The author is also a little biased on such matters, because who doesn’t want to say that their country was the first one to invent the car bomb…?
[5] The Four Seasons of Darkness is a 1983 Palestinian film on the Axis occupation 40 years before, and its “spring, summer, winter and fall”. *[WPA]: Works Progress Administration *[NBI]: National Bureau of Investigation
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