Quotes About Yishuv

By the eve of World War II the Yishuv—the Jewish community of Palestine—had grown to almost half a million and had won broad international admiration for creating egalitarian agricultural communities and flourishing modern towns and cities in an impoverished land long neglected under Turkish sovereignty.

The non-Jewish Arab population of mandate Palestine, initially twice the size of the Yishuv, supported by Muslims throughout the Middle East, strongly resisted the Jewish intrusion into what they perceived as their nation.

The Yishuv covered itself with glory. Just as in World War I the British glorified the Arab revolt—so they tried to hide the efforts of the Yishuv in World War II. No country gave with so much vitality to the war. But the British Government did not want the Jews to use this as a bargaining point for their homeland aspirations later on. Whitehall and Chatham House kept the Yishuv's war effort one of the best secrets of the war.

They often unfavorably compared Holocaust victims to the new, powerful Jews of the Yishuv who dislodged the British and fought off the Arabs with strength and military might. Tellingly, "[t]hose killed in the Holocaust were said to have 'perished,' while Jews who died fighting in Palestine had 'fallen.'"27 Tommy