The Second World War and After
tions, and some of its members were given commando trainii^^r >
action against the Germans. Many of the Palestinian Jewish troops
in the Middle East Forces were employed in supply and ordnance
companies along lines of communication and in base areas,1 an
admirable situation for the smuggling of arms to Palestine, to
which they resorted on a large scale under Hagana direction. The
organization of this 'underground railway' was excellent; there
was no lack of funds and transport; and corruptible Allied and
British soldiers were drawn into the racket. The difficulty of
supplying the Middle East Forces by the dangerous and slow long-
sea-route round Africa had caused the British military authorities to
give contracts to Palestinian Jewish concerns for the manufacture
of small-arms, including mortars, which they produced with effi-
ciency; but these arms also found their way to the armouries of the
Hagana. These were well-constructed underground caches, mainly
in the collective settlements, though the search of Tel Aviv in
July 1946 revealed arms-caches in the basements of the Great
Synagogue and of a school. Ostensibly the Hagana's purpose
behind all this arming and drilling was the self-defence of the
Jewish community against Arab attack, such as had occurred before.
the war; but the Zionist leaders made it clear that the self-defence
of the community included resistance to any limitations placed on
immigration or land-purchase, i.e. resistance to the obnoxious 1939
White Paper on all points. The reports of the accumulation of
illicit arms were so frequent that late in 1943 two settlements were
raided by military and police in order to search them. At Ramat
ha-Kovesh the police met with furious resistance from both men
and women with missiles and boiling water; and the brigadier in
charge of the military party, who had had wide experience of civil
disturbances in various parts of the world, declared that he had
never seen anything to compare with the ferocity of the villagers.
It was not for nothing that Ben Gurion had exhorted the Jewish
youth to prepare themselves for the fighting which would fall to
their lot at the end of the war.
During 1944 Jewish terrorism increased, in spite of the indefinite
extension of the now-expired five-year period in which the final
1 Which does not prevent an American Revisionist from building up a myth
that 'At one time 40 per cent, of Alexander's effectives were Jewish boys from
Palestine. They formed the intrepid desert scouts on which Alexander relied
for much of his intelligence. ... It was a Jewish contingent which held Tobruk
during the siege.' (W. B. Ziff, The Rape of Palestine (New York, 1946), 111.)