te with the British government in matters pertaining to the Jewish National Home" (Khalidi, 1987, p. 309).
In 1945, the British government in Palestine had to deal also with three underground military organizations: the Haganah, the Irgun Zvai Leumi and the LEHI. The Haganah (the Hebrew word for defense) was the illegal development of the former organization, in the days of Turkish rule, of armed watchmen who protected Jewish settlements. In the 1930s, even during the Arab revolt and after, Haganah soldiers followed a policy of restraint (Havlagah, in Hebrew) and were in the main repulsing Arab attacks against kibbutzim with a minimum of force and bloodshed. They, like most Palestinian Jews, were following Dr. Chaim Weizmann's hatred of terrorism and his vision of a peaceful, human Zionism. Weizmann was then Chairman of the World Zionist Organization (Clarke, 1981, p. 77).
The Holocaust transformed Havlagah. It taught that not resisting brought annihilation and showed some of the limits of liberal humanism and nonviolence. By 1945, many Yishuv had decid
...