Five Leaves Publications
£9.99
ISBN 978 1 905512 32 4
Review by Tim Llewellyn
25 Feb 2026
Reader, try to put yourself back 83 years or so. Ask: was there ever a moment when at least some Arabs and some Jews thought there was still a chance of their sharing Palestine on equal terms? And were the Second World War years the last of those years?
It is hard. Knowing what we know now it is difficult to give room to such optimism. Even at the height of that world war, when global attentions were elsewhere, such aspirations inside Palestine were rare. But they did exist. This contemporary account of life in Mandate Palestine during those fraught years of 1943-44 highlights the hopes that existed of an Arab-Jew rapprochement, while, at the same time, illustrating the compelling forces that were to make compromise impossible.
Barbara Board was a formidable reporter, writing for newspapers in Britain and Canada, who tried hard not to take sides. She was only 26 when she arrived in Palestine in 1943 (she had visited earlier, in the mid-Thirties) yet combined youthful vigour and hope with a mature sense of the realities. She had been a reporter on a provincial English newspaper, in Weymouth, in Dorset, when her coverage of a local woman condemned to hang for murderer launched her on to the national stage. Board was soon in the Middle East, reporting from Palestine as the 1936 Arab Revolt began and seven years later after Britain had in 1939 imposed its policy of limiting Jewish immigration to 75,000 for a period of five years.
This policy understandably outraged the Zionists, as Jews fled the Nazis and Western doors were closed to them. It put them at loggerheads with the British, who had the Palestinian Arabs and the Arab and Islamic world to consider. This was to be the backdrop to Board’s troubled life and her reportorial journeys round Palestine, to Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, to Jewish settlements and colonies; and to beleaguered Arab villages and homes.
Arab Palestinians were equally despairing of a British policy that would create a ‘Jewish homeland’, in reality a state, within an independent Arab majority state. The Arabs knew the reality. Whatever the British said, whatever second thoughts the British in Palestine might be having, what the Government in London had done was to give prime position in Palestine, since 1919, to Jewish political, social, civil and military institutions. In Britain, in the United States, the most powerful politicians were mobilising behind the Zionists. The template for Israel had been devised and put in place.
As for the Palestinian Arabs, by the summer of 1939 the British had brutally suppressed their rebellion against the Mandate forces and they had been rendered divided and leaderless.
Board’s focus was on the Jews, among whom she lived, first in the coastal outpost of Hadera, a Jewish settlement going back some 50 years, about 30 miles south of Haifa and 10 miles west of what is now the Israel-occupied West Bank. I detect no deliberate bias towards the Jews’ case in her reporting, but she has more access to them than to the Arabs and almost certainly finds it easier to converse with them.
Take Lilly, who encapsulates for Barbara and for us the growing difficulties for Jews who have no political ambition or Zionist sympathies but who, fugitives from the horrors of Europe, just want a refuge where they can live.
Lilly was a Berlin Jewess whose fiancé had died in a Nazi labour camp and whose family the Germans had deported to Poland. Her new, RAF pilot fiancé, who she met in Palestine, had been killed in action. In a Jewish colony, Lilly tells Board, she met “wives, sisters, daughters…they’ve got relatives or intimate friends who they know are involved in militant activities…” One woman’s husband has joined the Irgun Zwai Leumi (the National Military Organisation, a militant or terrorist group, depending on one’s sympathies). “She is expected to go to the authorities and betray her husband…it isn’t natural. It isn’t human.”
It is pressures such as these, and the inevitable and increasingly harsh responses of the British Mandate police, backed by the British Army, that Board sees squeezing all the Jews, whatever their inclinations, into the Zionist camp. This is particularly true of Jewish children. She notes their delight in guns and uniforms—most children like to play soldiers. But these see real guns and real bombs in their homes and underground caches, and their model elders, teenage boys and girls in uniforms, on joyous, strutting parade. These kids are soon teenagers themselves, anxious to fight. Board notes that their appetite for violence is even greater than that of the adults.
Jewish settlements and colonies who wish for a quiet life—they exist—are soon terrorised into submission and co-operation by Jewish terrorist groups such as the Irgun or the Lehi (Lohamey Heruth Israel, Fighters for the Freedom of Israel), better known as the Stern Gang, after its leader Avraham Stern.
Board reports widely the editorial views of the Hebrew Press, which was quick to condemn yet at the same time whinge and deflect when Jewish armed gang attacks rendered into war zones and no-go areas the streets of Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, Jaffa and Haifa, and many smaller communities. The Zionists who killed and wounded civilians, police, officials, British, Jews and Arab alike, were after all pursuing the same objective as the Jewish Agency (the Jewish government-in-waiting), whose views the Zionist media reflected.
On it went. A police chief was shot dead in a Jerusalem street. Scores were killed and injured by random bombs, grenades and mortars. City-wide curfews were enforced but usually had little effect. For example, after the High Commissioner, Sir Harold MacMichael, was wounded in a Stern Gang attack on his car near Jerusalem, the Jewish Agency (Israel’s government-in-preparation) was quick to condemn such an outrage…but primarily, as Board reports, as ”irreparable harm done to the political aims of the builders of Eretz Israel…”.(My italics)
When Sir Harold broadcast a message to Palestine a few days before leaving for England at the end of his tour of duty, he talked of “political fanaticism which has been deliberately inculcated among the younger generation”, and of that “same impious will to power which reared its ugly head in Germany.” The Hebrew newspapers immediately saw this is as an attack on the Zionist-Jewish leadership. The Palestine Post’s headline on the original assassination attempt was, lapidarily, “Attempt on High Commissioner Fails’, one which non-Zionists thought could well have disguised a hidden wish.
Barbara did not draw, in 1943-45, the conclusions that many of us do now and many British and Arabs…and Jews…in Palestine drew then: that the Zionist establishment in Palestine, or much of it, was more than content for the Jewish gangs to hasten the end of a Mandate rule that was no longer following closely enough Zionist intention.
Board tried to see hope ahead. At times she seems almost to draw the conclusions we all draw now, but her faith in human nature and the country she has come to love keeps aglow.
Amidst growing organised military attacks by the Irgun and the Stern Gang, and sympathisers, however, and implacable statements from Zionist leaders like Moshe Shertok (later Israel Prime Minister Moshe Sharett) that Palestine should, indivisibly and unpartitioned, be the Jewish state; and equal firmness from the leading Arabs of Palestine that, likewise unpartitioned, the land should be an Arab Palestinian state and all Jewish immigration must end, Board’s ideal world is crashing about her.
“I believe Palestine could become both a refuge and a home for stateless and Zionist Jews, while at the same time continuing to support its present Arab population [but] it must be achieved quickly,” she writes. In vain.
This is a warm, excitingly written and well observed book by someone who tried at an increasingly desperate time to report the facts objectively and bring alive the ordinary people of Palestine amid their disasters. She also searched for the best in those people: all races and religions.
It helps to fill a large gap: wartime Palestine is not as well chronicled as other periods: those of life under the British rule of1918-1939 and of 1945-48, and during the succession of horrors still unfolding since Israel was created and most Palestinian Arabs were killed or displaced.
Tim Llewellyn is a former BBC Middle East Correspondent and editor of the Britain Palestine Project website.