Post: haganah in ww2
User: abi
Infraction: Wikispammer
Points: 1
Administrative Note:
Wikispammer - unattributed either
Message to User:
abi,
You have been spamming the forum with unsourced Wikipedia articles, in clear violation of the forum rules which may be found here. If you do this again, you will be perma-banned.
Posting Wikipedia links is against the rules because they contribute nothing at all to the site (anyone who wants to find out what wikipedia says is quite capable of finding it themselves) and failure to attribute them to Wikipedia is plagarism, a very serious academic offence.pdf27
Moderator
Original Post:
Haganah (Hebrew: “The Defense”, ההגנה HaHagana) was a Jewish paramilitary organization in what was then the British Mandate of Palestine from 1920 to 1948, which later became the core of the Israel Defense Forces.
The predecessor of Haganah was Hashomer (השומר, The Guild of Watchman) established in 1909, itself a successor of Bar-Giora, founded in 1907. It was a small group of Jewish immigrants who guarded settlements for an annual fee. At no time did the group have more than 100 members.
After the 1920 Arab riots and 1921 Jaffa riots, the Jewish leadership in Palestine believed that the British (whom the League of Nations had given a mandate over Palestine in 1920) had no desire to confront local Arab gangs over their attacks on Palestinian Jews. Realizing that they could not rely on the British administration for protection from these gangs, the Jewish leadership created the Haganah to protect their farms and Kibbutzim. In addition to guarding Jewish communities, the role of the Haganah was to warn the residents of and repel attacks by Palestinian Arabs. In the period between 1920–1929, the Haganah lacked a strong central authority or coordination. Haganah “units” were very localized and poorly armed: they consisted mainly of Jewish farmers who took turns guarding their farms or their kibbutzim. Following the Arab massacres of 1929, the Haganah’s role changed dramatically. It became a much larger organization encompassing nearly all the youth and adults in the Jewish settlements, as well as thousands of members from the cities. It also acquired foreign arms and began to develop workshops to create hand grenades and simple military equipment, transforming from an untrained militia to a capable underground army
Despite the 1939 White Paper which deeply angered the Zionist leadership in Palestine, Ben-Gurion, then chairman of the Jewish Agency, set the policy for the Zionist relationship with the British: We shall fight the war against Hitler as if there were no White Paper, and we shall fight the White Paper as if there were no war. The Irgun, however took a more extreme stance starting in 1944 and began bombing British installations.
In the first years of World War II, the British authorities asked Haganah for cooperation again, due to the fear for an Axis breakthrough in North Africa. After Rommel was defeated at El Alamein in 1942, the British stepped back from their all-out support for Haganah. In 1943, after a long series of requests and negotiations, the British Army announced the creation of the Jewish Brigade Group. While Palestinian Jews had been permitted to enlist in the British army since 1940, this was the first time an exclusively Jewish military unit served in the war under a Jewish flag. The Jewish Brigade Group consisted of 5,000 soldiers and was deployed in Italy in September 1944. The brigade was disbanded in 1946.
All in all, more than 30,000 Palestinian Jews served in the British army during the war.
On May 19, 1941 the Haganah created the Palmach (an acronym for Plugot Mahatz—strike companies), an elite military-like section which focused on providing training to youngsters. It was never large — by 1947 it amounted to merely five battalions (about 2,000 men) — but its members had received not only physical and basic military training, but also acquired leadership skills that, in retrospect, would allow them to take up command positions in Israel’s future army.
