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Volume 9, No.1 Fall1990 101 become a network of single-purpose and multi-purpose "authorities" to do the business of the Jewish people as a whole in such a way that threatened neither the political sovereignty of the State of Israel nor the local loyalties of diaspora Jewish citizens of other states, but that is a story for the next volume . In the contemporary world, new diasporas are sprouting as a result of the recent revolutions in transportation and communication. The Jewish people is playing a pioneering role in the generation of appropriate forms of state-diaspora relations. Not the least of that role is in the development of institutional frameworks for such relations, of which JAFI is the prime example . We owe Dr. Stock a debt of gratitude for having so well advanced the exploration of this phenomenon. Daniel 1. Elazar Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs and Bar-Ilan University The British Army and Jewish Insurgency in Palestine, 1945-1947, by David A. Charters, foreword by General Sir Nigel Bagnall. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1989. 287 pp. $45.00. This book dates back to the era of "counter-insurgency studies," that is, the 1960s and early 1970s. In fact, it originated in the first military history seminar offered at the University of New Brunswick in 1970-71 and was originally submitted as a doctoral dissertation in the War Studies Department , King's College, London, in 1980. It takes as its major theme Clausewitz 's famous dictum that "the first, the supreme, the most far-reaching act of judgement that the statesmen and commanders have to make is to establish ... the kind ofwar on which they are embarking; neither mistaking it for, nor trying to turn it into, something that is alien to its nature." With this focus, the author tries to discover how well the British army adapted to the new challenges of what he calls the "Palestine campaign," specifically the period between May 1945 and the British government's decision to withdraw from Palestine in September 1947. If campaign it was, and at its highpoint the British army, including the militarized Palestine Police and "imperial forces" such as the Transjordian Frontier Force, deployed over 100,000 men, not including naval elements blockading the coast, it was a campaign the British lost. In his conclusion, the author quotes Maurice Tugwell, a "Palestine Veteran" and later a historian , that "the Jews had the highest quality of terrorists the British army faced in the post-war period" (p. 176). If one removes the objectionable term 102 SHOFAR "terrorist" and includes these operations under the Israeli heading as the opening stages of the War of Liberation in which all the three resistance groups involved, the Haganah, the Irgun Zvai Leumi, and the Lochmei Heruth Israel, participated as fighters, it becomes the first victorious operation conducted by the Israel Defence Forces, as they came to be known after May 1948. Still, this study is only marginally concerned with the insurgent groups, and among them more with the smaller, if more deadly, Irgun and the Lochmei Heruth Israel. Above all it focuses on actions taken and lessons learned on the British side, especially those that had applicability to later counter-insurgency operations in Malaya, Kenya, Aden, and the many other places from which the British retreated in the decades following World War II. Specifically the volume sets out to address two issues. The first is whether, and to what degree, the British army adapted to the problems created by the Jewish insurgency, and the second issue is how much the military operations contributed, in conjunction with the other security forces and governmental policies, including propaganda and intelligence activities, to the eventual outcome of this conflict. The questions and issues are discussed in six chapters. The first looks at the nature of insurgency, low-intensity conflict in the current military jargon, and its military and political implications. In the second chapter the political setting of the campaign is discussed, touching briefly on the place of Palestine in British Middle East policy, the history of the conflict between Jewish and Arab aspirations, and the desire of the British government to maintain a base...

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