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According to the historian Ritchie Ovendale, it was the Exodus episode, which "aimed at wearing down the British moral", that finally convinced the Labour government to surrender the Mandate and withdraw British forces from Palestine.

The Haganah organised a massive illegal immigration operation that was to culminate in July 1947 in the Exodus affair. The storming at sea of this immigrant blockade-runner, its capture after a violent hand-to-hand struggle in which three Jews were killed, and the forcible deportation of its 4554 refugee passengers back to camps in Germany, of all places, was a propaganda disaster of the first order, a tremendous embarrassment to the British.

British Counterinsurgency

From Palestine to Northern Ireland John Newsinger

At War with Zion

http://www.palgrave.com/pdfs/0333793854.pdf

When the Second World War finally came to an end, the British found themselves confronted by a challenge from the Yishuv, the small Zionist settlement in Palestine. This challenge, tacitly supported by the United States, was to compromise the British Empire’s overall position in the Middle East and thereby begin the process of its dissolution in the region. This failure to overcome the Zionist challenge is one of the most humiliating episodes in immediate postwar British history. How was it that the Yishuv was able to inflict such a defeat on a British military establishment fresh from its victories over Germany and Japan?

Exercising the Mandate

At the time the challenge was mounted, the British considered Palestine to be a territory of vital strategic importance, providing a military base from which to dominate the rest of the Middle East. In this way oil supplies and oil profits could be secured and any threat from the Soviet Union could be countered. Such was the region’s importance that in the event of war with the Russians the British planned a hurried withdrawal from continental Europe but intended to defend the Middle East at all costs, according the area a priority second only to the defence of the British Isles themselves. With war imminent in Europe, the British felt the need to conciliate Arab opinion.

The White Paper limited Jewish immigration, restricted Jewish settlement and promised independence to an Arab Palestine within ten years. This commitment was condemned at the time by British Zionist sympathisers, among them Winston Churchill, as a betrayal of the Balfour Declaration and was, of course, bitterly opposed by all elements of the Yishuv.

By this time it was clear that the Allies were winning the war and that the Yishuv was no longer under direct threat from the Nazis. The impact of the Holocaust was also changing attitudes, with a growing number of people convinced that British refusal to allow Jewish refugees into Palestine had sentenced them to death. Britain was from this point of view an accessory to the Holocaust. Together these factors contributed to the revival of the Revisionist paramilitary formations.

The Zionist movement was divided in its response to the White Paper, with the Jewish Agency and the rival Revisionist movement taking very different stands. The Agency was sympathetic to the British Empire, which was still regarded as a friend and protector, and rallied to the British war effort against Nazi Germany, the enemy of all Jews. Settlers were encouraged to enlist in the British armed forces and an attempt was made to persuade the British to establish a distinct Zionist army brigade. Altogether some 32 000 settlers served in the British armed forces, fighting in Greece, North Africa and Italy.

In July 1945, with the election of a Labour government ostensibly committed to abandoning the White Paper policy, establishing a Zionist state and allowing unrestricted immigration. David Horowitz has recalled the ‘jubilant atmosphere’ that gripped the Yishuv when news of the election result arrived. This joy was short-lived. It soon became clear that the new government regarded the need to maintain good relations with the Arabs, thereby safeguarding the British Empire’s strategic position in the Middle East, as a more vital interest than any sentimental attachment to Zionist ideals. This turnabout on the part of Labour was, once again, according to Horowitz, ‘the greatest disappointment and disillusionment suffered in the history of Zionism’. A wave of bitterness swept through the colony: ‘Disappointment, anxiety, despair and restlessness spread through the Yishuv’. This sense of betrayal was to be compounded by the continued refusal of the British to allow the survivors of the death camps into Palestine.

The Jewish revolt
In these changed circumstances the Jewish Agency decided that a show of strength was necessary in order to force the British to accede to Zionist demands. They had to demonstrate that the maintenance of the British position required their support and that this would only be possible if the British agreed to honour the Balfour Declaration. Their strategy had three aspects to it. Ernest Bevin, the British Foreign Secretary, was left unmoved by the United Resistance Movement’s explosive demonstration of its capabilities on the night of 31 October. He had already been informed by intelligence sources that such an event was planned and had warned Weizmann, a staunch Anglophile, that if ‘you want a fight you can have it’.

At the same time his statement also made quite clear that Labour’s commitment to Zionism when in opposition was a thing of the past and that Labour in government was not prepared to antagonise Arab opinion. Bevin followed this up with a press conference at which he warned that if Jewish refugees wanted to get to the head of the queue for resettlement then they risked the ‘danger of another anti-Semitic reaction’. This crass and offensive allegation of queue-jumping outraged Jewish opinion, both Zionist and non-Zionist.

The honeymoon with the Labour government was over.That same day the report of the Anglo-American Commission was published. While it rejected the establishment of a Jewish state and recommended the continuation of British control over Palestine, it also called for the entry of 100 000 Jewish refugees. This last proposal was immediately given public endorsement by President Truman. Both Attlee and Bevin were outraged by what they regarded as Truman’s undermining of the British position for domestic political reasons.Was this an opportunity missed? Was the Anglo-American Commission’s report a way out of the predicament in which the Labour government found itself? It has been argued that this was indeed the case.

Mr. Bevin was already disturbed by a howl of anger from the U.S. which followed a remark of his at Bournemouth: that the U.S. wanted the 100,000 Jews in Palestine "because they did not want too many of them in New York."

In his study of the revolt Bowyer Bell provides an excellent account of the situation that confronted the new High Commissioner, Lieutenant General Sir Alan Cunningham: By 1946 the Mandate was an armed camp... Security regulations ran on for over fifty densely-printed paragraphs, including the death penalty for any member of a group whose other members had committed one of several crimes... The Mandate became a garrison state under internal siege, and the garrison, despite its size, equipment, and determination, proved ineffectual and self-defeating.


This account has so far neglected one important aspect of the conflict that is not directly relevant to the counterinsurgency campaign in Palestine but was, nevertheless, a tremendous embarrassment to the British. The Haganah organised a massive illegal immigration operation that was to culminate in July 1947 in the Exodus affair. The storming at sea of this immigrant blockade-runner, its capture after a violent hand-to-hand struggle in which three Jews were killed, and the forcible deportation of its 4554 refugee passengers back to camps in Germany, of all places, was a propaganda disaster of the first order.

How was it that the British suffered such a humiliating defeat? It is important not to exaggerate the scale of the conflict despite the violence involved. The security forces were never in danger of military defeat at the hands of the few thousand guerrillas, and throughout the entire conflict they suffered only 338 fatalities. Rather it was their failure to crush the Zionist underground that was to be a major factor in Britain’s political defeat at the hands of the Jewish Agency and its supporters in the United States, and in this way contributed to Britain’s eviction from a territory that the Chiefs of Staff regarded as essential for the security of the Empire.