206	A Short History of the Middle East
75,000 Jewish immigrants allowed by the White Paper might come
in. Now that the war had receded from the Middle East, the
Zionists were free to begin an all-out campaign against the White
Paper policy of strictly limited immigration and land-purchase,
and their demand was now for a Jewish State into which any Jew
who wished might enter freely. The Irgun Zvai Leumi made an
unsuccessful attempt to kidnap the High Commissioner; and the
Stern Group went one better by murdering in Cairo the British
Minister-Resident, Lord Moyne, who, they believed, had as
Colonial Secretary obstructed the admission into Palestine of
Jewish refugees from the Axis terror. This murder came as a great
shock to the Jewish Agency, who evidently feared drastic action
against the wtole community; and they made an offer to the
British military authorities to co-operate in rounding up the
terrorists. This co-operation produced some results over a number
of months: a number of suspected terrorists were arrested and in-
terned, and as late as June 1945 the Agency gave the authorities
information which assisted in the detection of a terrorist plot to
bombard with delayed-action mortars the King David Hotel, the
headquarters of the British forces and the government secretariat.
But mis liaison between the Agency and the British was subse-
quently discontinued, perhaps because it was found that the
I Agency was exploiting it as a means of furthering its own sub-
' versive purposes.
At the outbreak of war the French had suspended the Lebanese
constitution and, there and in Syria, dissolved a number of extreme
] nationalist organizations believed to be in sympathy with the Axis,
' sentencing some of their members to long terms of imprisonment.
The majority of poHtically-minded Syrians, like their brethren in
Palestine, decided that there was nothing to choose between op-
pression by a democracy and that exercised in the name of Fascism;
and consequently the general attitude towards the war was one of
apathy and scepticism towards both sides, though some flirted with
the Axis Armistice Commissions and a few committed themselves
more deeply.
On the first day of the Allied invasion of the Levant States in
1941, the Free French General Catroux proclaimed that he had