YANKS in the IDF
In 1945, amid revelations about Hitler’s Final Solution for Europe’s Jews, many Holocaust survivors emigrated to the United States. Others, convinced of the need for a Jewish homeland, clamored to go to Palestine. That region, bounded by Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, and Trans-Jordan, comprised most of the biblical Holy Land. The Muslim conquest of Palestine in the 7th century had left the population largely Arab. In the 1880s, however, Jews from across Europe, weary of persecution and embracing Zionism, a movement espousing the restoration of a Jewish nation, began settling in Palestine.
Over millennia, many nations had controlled Palestine. Since the 1920s, under a mandate from the League of Nations, Britain had been administering the region, trying to maintain peace between Arab and Jew.
In 1948 Jews in Palestine declared a land of Israel there. War broke out as adjoining Arab states arrayed their armies against the new state. The fledgling Israel Defense Forces, which came to total nearly 118,000 troops, included some 1,250 Americans, mostly World War II veterans.
Palestine had been a cultural and political powder keg, with British authorities constantly snuffing fuses lit by Arabs, the region’s majority, and Zionist militias—the , or Stern Gang, the , and the . The first two were rough-and-tumble guerrilla fighters, the last a more mainstream creation of the Jewish Agency, the unofficial government of Jewish Palestine. In 1939,, or “plan B”, that recruited American volunteers. World War II interrupted that flow, which resumed in 1945, with the Royal Navy intercepting most vessels before they could land. In Palestine, the Stern Gang, the Irgun, and the Haganah were conducting irregular operations against British forces and Arab opponents.
