Quotes About Haganah

At the age of 16 I immigrated to Palestine from Europe, where I became a member of the Haganah, the main underground army of the Jews.

In Jerusalem, as elsewhere in Palestine, the Haganah's basic strategy reflected a philosophy propounded by David Ben-Gurion. What the Jews had, they must hold. No Jew was to leave his home, his farm, his kibbutz, his office without permission. Every outpost, every settlement, every village, no matter how isolated, was to be clung to as though it were Tel Aviv itself.

Yitzhak Sadeh was the spiritual father of the Haganah and the founder of its elite striking force, the Palmach.

The man had been the head of the postwar European operation called Aliyah Bet, the clandestine resettlement of the Jewish remnant of the Holocaust in Palestine. He had come to this position as a senior member of the Palmach, the fighting arm of the Haganah, which was the underground Jewish Army in Palestine, under the British Mandate.

The concept of "purity of arms" was forged by the Haganah, meaning that combatants' weapons shouldn't be soiled by hurting civilians, women, children or unarmed enemy soldiers.