, the head of the British branch of the famed Jewish banking family, in which he expressed his government's favorable policy toward the establishment of a national home for the Jewish people in Palestine. The promise also contained a warning: nothing should be done "to prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country" (Clarke, 1981, p. 16).
British policy toward Jews and Arabs became a more difficult balancing act after Hitler's ascent to power in 1933 Germany, when Jewish immigration to Palestine increased dramatically. As a consequence, Arabs rebelled in 1936 by killing British officials as well as Jewish civilians.
The rebellion was harshly put down, but in 1939 Britain, in order to forestall future Arab unrest, issued a White Paper, or statement of policy, restricting Jewish immigration to a total of 75,000 during the coming five years. The White Paper was seen by Jews as a betrayal of the Balfou Declaration and of the League's mandate, especially at a time when many of them were condemned to sure death in Europe at the hand of Nazism. Nevertheless, when war broke out few months later, following Ben Gurion's directives, Palestinian Jews enlisted in the British Army against Hitler.
At the end of World War II in 1945, the Yushuv, as Palestinian Jews were called, hoped that the White Paper was going to be rescinded, especially at a time in which hundred of thousands of refugees, survivors of the Holocaust, were stranded in Europe. The British government, anxious to guarantee Arab friendship during the Cold War, insisted on a limit to Jewish immigration. The Yushuv were bitterly disappointed.
At that time, Jews in Palestine could count on an official political organization recognized and accepted by the British government, the Jewish Agency. Created in 1929, it "was provided in the Mandate in order to coopera...