Free 1948: A History of the First Arab-Israeli War by Benny Morris Page A

an insoluble problem; the United Nations would flounder and fail, and Britain would be reempowered to stay on, on its own terms, without UN or US interference.4
    Other historians (myself included) have taken the British decision at its face value: Bevin and his colleagues had truly had enough of Palestine; passing the ball to the United Nations was their only recourse. In the aftermath of world war, Britain was too weak and too poor to soldier on. IZL and LHI veterans and their political successors have since claimed that it was mainly their terrorist campaigns that ultimately persuaded Bevin and the British public to abandon Palestine. Others have pointed to the large-scale Haganah operations of 1945-1946 (the railway line and bridge demolitions) as being decisive: these portended an eventual full-scale British-Haganah clash that Whitehall was unwilling to contemplate. Also, the struggle against the Haganah's illegal immigration campaign was a headache of major proportions. Most historians agree about the importance of the growing Anglo-American rift, the DPs, and the pressure from Washington in the British government's decision-making: given the Cold War context and Britain's financial insolvency, Whitehall could ill afford to alienate Washington over a highly emotional issue that, when all was said and done, was not a vital interest.
    The British decision of February 1947 was firmed up over the following months by bloody events on the ground, in Palestine, in the Mediterranean, and in Britain itself; Jewish provocations and British reprisals spiraled almost out of control. British efforts to block and punish Jewish terrorism and illegal immigration took on new, bloody dimensions-though, it must be added, British officials and troops by and large displayed restraint and humanity in face of Jewish excesses.-' By the end of 1947, with evacuation only months away, Britain appeared no longer capable of properly governing Palestine and had lost the will to continue. The violence of the IZL and LHI underlined the moderate Zionists' argumentation in Washington and London that, in the absence of a solution-that is, a Jewish state-Jewish desperation would approach boiling point.
    Without doubt, Britain's decision to withdraw heightened the terrorists' expectations; they sensed that the enemy was on the run. The British had almost a hundred thousand troops in Palestine, almost five times as many as had been used to crush the Arab Revolt of 1936-1939 (a tribute, perhaps, to the greater efficiency and lethality of the Jewish terrorists). Against the backdrop of the Holocaust and the scrutiny in Washington and the world press of every British action, there were strict limits to what Attlee and Bevin could allow themselves in pursuit of effective counterterrorism.
    On i March 1947, IZL gunmen killed more than twenty British servicemen, twelve of them in a grenade attack on the British Officers Club in Tel Aviv. On 31 March the LHI sabotaged the Haifa oil refinery; the fire took three weeks to put out. And on 4 May, IZL gunmen penetrated the British prison in Acre: two dozen IZL members were set free (as, unintentionally, were some two hundred Arab prisoners), but nine of the attackers were killed and eight were captured. The captured men were tried, and on 8 July death sentences were confirmed against three of them.
    In a repeat of the "whipping" cycle (when the IZL had flogged a British officer after the British had flogged several IZL men), on 12 July the IZL abducted two British sergeants and threatened to hang them if the British hanged the IZL men. The British-despite a widespread dragnet and Haganah help-failed to locate the sergeants and went ahead with the hangings, on 29 July. The IZL hanged the sergeants the next day-and boobytrapped their bodies. A British captain was injured when they were cut down.6 "The bestialities practiced by the Nazis themselves could go no further," commented the Times of London.7 The "hanging of the