Anonymous Soldiers

Starred review from February 23, 2015
Hoffman (The Failure of British Military Strategy in Palestine, 1939â47), director of the Center for Security Studies at Georgetown University, covers the activities of the Jewish underground, particularly the Irgun and Stern Gang, during the revolt against the British rule of Palestine between February 1944 and the U.N. partition resolution of November 1947. He shows that the Jewish guerilla war, unlike the Arab revolt of 1936â39, was largely urban, and notes that the Jewish Agency and the Haganah, the mainstream Zionist political and military bodies, usually acquiesced to and sometimes openly cooperated with the Irgun, as in the crucial July 1946 bombing of the King David Hotel. Hoffman is particularly good at showing how the British advantage was eroded by vacillating strategies and policies toward the Yishuv (Jewish settlement), which viewed British soldiers and police as "an unpopular, repressive occupation force," despite British soldiers and police outnumbering Jewish underground members by 20 to 1 in the mid-1940s. The British attempt to bring the revolt to heel was also undermined by woefully inadequate intelligence on the Jewish underground. Drawing on prodigious research and employing fine narrative pacing, Hoffman has produced a first-rate work on the "endgame" in the Zionist struggle to establish a Jewish state.

Starred review from December 1, 2014
How Jewish terrorists defeated British rule.Terrorism scholar Hoffman (Security Studies/Georgetown Univ.; Inside Terrorism, 2006, etc.) draws on British, Israeli and American archives, uncovering much new material, in this history of Zionists' determination to oust the British from Palestine. Terrorism, carried out by two rival groups-Irgun and the more extreme Lehi-resulted, after 30 years of violence, in British withdrawal and the creation of Israel. Britain's presence had been authorized by the Mandate of Palestine, a consequence of the defeat of the Ottoman Empire in World War I. By 1929, despite improvements to infrastructure and standard of living, both Arabs and Jews were seething with resentment. "The situation was...like the Wild West," one British commander remarked. And it worsened: In the 1930s, hundreds of thousands of Jews fleeing the Nazis pressed for permission to immigrate, incensed over Britain's quota; Arabs, threatened by an increase in population, formed marauding guerrilla bands. With British soldiers fighting the war, the police force was inadequate and demoralized. In 1938 alone, 5,708 terrorist incidents occurred. Of more than 90 protagonists in this teeming drama, Menachem Begin emerges as one of the most violent, the mastermind behind the horrific bombing of the King David Hotel in 1939. "We fight, therefore we are!" he exclaimed. British leaders, some openly anti-Semitic, vacillated as terrorists fulfilled their mission to make Palestine ungovernable. Never, a statesman said ruefully, would the region be a place "in which Jew and Arab would settle down together...." Winston Churchill, with considerable understatement, admitted that Britain's Mandatory administration had been "a thankless, painful, costly, laborious, inconvenient task." Hoffman concludes that the "rise of Israel was the product of many powerful forces in addition to terrorism." But the Irgun's success, he chillingly notes, laid the groundwork for today's globalized terrorism. An authoritative, sweeping, important history that shows how terrorism "is neither irrational nor desperate but instead entirely rational and often carefully calculated and choreographed."

COPYRIGHT(2014) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

January 1, 2015

Hoffman (director, security studies program, Georgetown Univ.; senior fellow, U.S. Military Academy's Combating Terrorism Ctr.; Inside Terrorism: The Failure of British Military Strategy Within Palestine, 1939-1947) argues--contrary to the pronouncements of political leaders and other scholars--that terrorism does, in fact, work toward political and cultural change. The author illustrates his thesis in this exhaustive detailed history of British Mandate Palestine. Drawing on research in recently declassified documents, as well as memoirs, contemporaneous letters, diaries, and newspaper reports, Hoffman demonstrates how both the Palestinian community (1936-39) and the Jewish community (1945-48) were able to influence British government policy through terrorism. While Patrick Bishop's The Reckoning uses some of the same sources to focus on the mandate-era founder of the terrorist Stern Gang and the police inspector who ultimately eliminated him, Hoffman's study examines the thoughts and actions of all of the major players including Winston Churchill, Menachim Begin, and Yitzhak Shamir--in addition to the common people dealing with the British struggle to make good on conflicting commitments to Arabs and Jews in Palestine over the 30-year mandate. VERDICT A must-read for anyone interested in the origins of the State of Israel.--Joel Neuberg, Santa Rosa Junior Coll. Lib., CA

Copyright 2015 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

January 1, 2015
Mahmoud Abbas, the head of the Palestinian Authority, consistently rejects terrorism and armed struggle as the way to gain an independent Palestinian state. He asserts that terrorism is both morally wrong and ineffective. Indeed, the evidence shows that terrorism by Hamas and associated groups has helped accelerate the rightward shift in Israel and hardened resistance to Palestinian aspirations. But Hoffman, who has studied and written extensively on terrorism in the Middle East, asserts that terrorist activities by the Jewish underground played an essential role in forcing Britain to abandon its mandate in Palestine, leading to the establishment of Israel in 1947. In this well-researched and highly detailed work, Hoffman follows the strategies and activities of two underground groups, the Irgun and Lehi; both groups used attacks on British political and military individuals and facilities over at least a decade. Hoffman certainly makes the case that this terrorism influenced British desire to leave Palestine, but he often neglects or minimizes the role of above-ground nonviolent Zionist leaders who consistently and effectively lobbied in Europe and the U.S. for an independent state. Still, his account is thorough and well argued, and could have important implications in developing tactics to fight so-called nonstate actors.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2015, American Library Association.)