The Jordanians, for their part, were also anxious for the war to be behind them. They and the Israelis had had an understanding to limit the scope of their fighting and to partition the land in such a way that the Jordanians would get the West…

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Some 190 of the volunteers served in the air force.29 Several of the pilots lost their lives in action. After the war, most of the Americans returned home. Others, though, decided that it was Israel that was home, stayed, and flew for El Al or worked in Israel’s aircraft industry. Benny Morris notes that in addition to its military significance,

The Western Wall—the only remnant of the ancient Temple in Jerusalem—was off-limits to Jews.

When he was seventeen, Gruen learned of the Uganda Plan discussions at the Sixth Zionist Congress and was livid that the movement would even consider giving up on the notion of a Jewish state in the Jewish people’s ancestral homeland.

HIS DISAPPOINTMENT IN AMERICAN Jews notwithstanding, Ben-Gurion presided over a project of immigrant absorption of unprecedented proportions. Never in human history had such a small population absorbed so many immigrants so successfully.

All three underground militias were working feverishly, often without coordination. To amass ammunition without it being discovered by the British (or in the case of the Irgun and the Lechi, without it being discovered by the Haganah), each of the military groups created its own secret caches of guns, grenades, bullets, and the like, all in

Almost immediately upon landing in Israel, the Americans were told that Egyptian forces were a mere six miles from Tel Aviv, and that if they did not attack immediately, there would be ten thousand Egyptian troops in Tel Aviv the next morning.27 So they took off, flying primitive, single-engine planes on their first bombing missions, and quickly

So the Yishuv stepped up illegal immigration.

Now, in the wake of spreading Arab violence, and recognizing that the British were not going to offer sufficient protection to the Jews, the Yishuv’s leaders decided in 1921 to create the Haganah (“The Defense”) to protect Jewish farms and villages.