Anonymous Soldiers: The Struggle for Israel, 1917-1947

Hoffman (The Failure of British Military Strategy in Palestine, 1939%E2%80%9347), director of the Center for Security Studies at Georgetown University, covers the activities of the Jewish underground, particularly the Irgun and Stern Gang, during the revolt against the British rule of Palestine between February 1944 and the U.N. partition resolution of November 1947. He shows that the Jewish guerilla war, unlike the Arab revolt of 1936%E2%80%9339, was largely urban, and notes that the Jewish Agency and the Haganah, the mainstream Zionist political and military bodies, usually acquiesced to and sometimes openly cooperated with the Irgun, as in the crucial July 1946 bombing of the King David Hotel. Hoffman is particularly good at showing how the British advantage was eroded by vacillating strategies and policies toward the Yishuv (Jewish settlement), which viewed British soldiers and police as "an unpopular, repressive occupation force," despite British soldiers and police outnumbering Jewish underground members by 20 to 1 in the mid-1940s. The British attempt to bring the revolt to heel was also undermined by woefully inadequate intelligence on the Jewish underground. Drawing on prodigious research and employing fine narrative pacing, Hoffman has produced a first-rate work on the "endgame" in the Zionist struggle to establish a Jewish state. (Mar.)