Jewish Resistance and British Policy in the Palestine Mandate Outrage, Violence, and Imperial Strategy

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Jewish Resistance and British Policy in the Palestine Mandate

Outrage, Violence, and Imperial Strategy

Peter Bergamin

History / World

Jewish Resistance and British Policy in the Palestine Mandate offers a new interpretation of the final years of British rule by examining how Jewish paramilitary resistance shaped governance, imperial strategy, and ultimately the decision to withdraw. Situating the study within wider debates on non-state actors and late imperial decline, it analyses how underground organisations – including the Irgun, Lehi, and, at key moments, the Haganah – used violence, coercion, and political pressure to influence British administration. Drawing on extensive archival research, Peter Bergamin shows how these campaigns affected the day-to-day functioning of the Mandatory government and, more significantly, how they altered British perceptions of governability, legitimacy, and imperial cost at a moment when global pressures, shifting strategic priorities, and the erosion of Britain's wider imperial position were already straining the Mandate system.

Focusing on the period from the Irgun's declaration of revolt in February 1944 to Britain's appeal for assistance towards a successful resolution of the Palestine Mandate to the United Nations in April 1947, the book provides the first systematic catalogue of Jewish anti-British 'outrages' recorded in the High Commissioner's near-daily telegrams to London. Reorganised into a chronological calendar, this material reveals the scale, intensity, and strategic coordination of militant activity, highlighting its cumulative impact on British capacity and willingness to pursue a viable political settlement. Rather than offering a comprehensive history of British policy across the entire Mandate, Bergamin illuminates the decisive role of Jewish resistance in the final phase of British rule and argues that it was the impossibility of countering this sustained campaign that ultimately undermined Britain's ability – and resolve – to fulfil its Mandatory obligations.

Peter Bergamin is Lecturer in Oriental Studies at Mansfield College, University of Oxford, and Visiting Scholar of the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies. He has published in European Jewish Studies and gained his DPhil. in Oriental Studies from the University of Oxford (2016). His current research looks at Britain's withdrawal from the Palestine Mandate.

Publication Date: 07 January 2027
Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
Imprint: Bloomsbury Academic
ISBN-13: 9781350666900
Format: Hardback
Page Count: 288
Weight (oz): 16.0

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