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the country--roads, villages, Beersheba, and the old city of Jerusalem briefly in 1938. Hundreds of Jews were massacred. Jewish fighters naturally returned fire and took their measure.
    The British army was caught in the middle, and as they fiercely counter-attacked it was reported that if there were no men when they occupied an Arab village, they forced the Arab women to bare their breasts to show that they were not men in disguise. To terrorize the citizenry into submission, the British shot or hung so-called terrorists. Men and women were segregated into open-air pens in the sun without food or water. Women were released after awhile and men died.
    A British schoolteacher described the British soldiers guarding an Arab village, “They always looked tired, hungry, like sleepwalkers. They go on rampages out of boredom.” 2 The British High Commissioner’s secretary wrote, “How long O Lord, how long? Palestine hasn’t known peace for 2,000 years. Perhaps it is God’s punishment for the country that crucified Christ.” 3
    A poem of the times expressed Jewish hope:
Run quickly to Tel Aviv.
Go to the Hills; there in the evening
On the sand, there you will see,
You will find everything 4
    From their diaspora, Palestinians longed too. A poet wrote:
Oh Jaffa by God we will return to you,
Carrying the flag and crawling,
Watering your land with the blood of honor
and millions pushing millions.
We will build and raise what was destroyed,
Quenched by your sweet water
for your gardens.
We will lay ourselves down under the lemon trees
from which above sing the birds 5
    A sentence from the Old Testament appeared on a plaque on the door of the home of the mayor of Tel Aviv: God will restore the fortunes of my people, Israel, and they shall rebuild the ruined cities and inhabit them. 6
    The Arab Revolt finally calmed in the summer of 1939. By then the British finally had enough troops and police in the land to gain the upper hand by force. Further, too many Arabs were already without work, so that the calls for Arab general strikes could no longer bring out large numbers. The workers needed to feed their families first, but it had been one of the longest general strikes in history. The Jewish Agency and Histadrut labor union were constructing a new port in Tel Aviv as strike-proof competition. Further north the Histadrut had convinced the Arab mayor of Haifa that Jews and Arabs working together was better than striking, and Hisadrut representatives also bribed leaders of the Arab port workers union in Haifa to cooperate in keeping the port open. Thus for the most part Arab labor action was less effective in Haifa, even in the face of the fact that once the bribery was discovered Arab agents assassinated some Arab leaders who opted for worker solidarity between Arab and Jew.
    Further, everyone’s attention was turning toward Europe, where Hitler’s troops had just occupied Czechoslovakia in March of 1939. Britain had let Hitler proceed without English intervention in return for Hitler’s signing a non-aggression pact against England--later called the appeasement pact. This had freed up British troops for Palestine for a time. But most people assumed that it was just a matter of time before Hitler began World War II, not a question of whether he was going to invade the rest of Europe.
    When war came, everyone knew the Jews would support any alliance against Hitler, but the Arabs needed to be placated and brought into the fold against Hitler. In May 1939, Britain published their White Paper that announced that there would be a Palestinian state in ten years with a government elected by a representative vote. The White Paper included tight restrictions on further land purchases by Jews from Arabs, and a ceiling of 75,000 Jewish immigrants for the next five years after which further immigration would require Arab consent. Five years was precisely to be the length of the war during which 6 million Jews died in the Holocaust. Clandestine