Grandma's army

  THE ORIGINS OF “GRANDMA’S ARMY” - III Arab riots in Palestine in 1920 and 1921 strengthened the view that it was impossible to depend upon the British mandate. The Palestinian Jews felt the necessity to create an independent defense force completely free of foreign authority. In June 1920, the Haganah , as an underground military organisation, was founded. During the first nine years of its existence, the Haganah was a loose organization of local defense groups, in the large towns and several of the settlements. The Arab riots in 1929  brought about a complete change in the Haganah’s status: It became a large organization, encompassing nearly all the youth and adults in the settlements, as well as several thousand members from each of the cities. It initiated a comprehensive training program for its members, and ran officers’ training courses. Established central arms depots into which a continuous stream of light arms flowed ...

  THE ORIGINS OF “GRANDMA’S ARMY” - II Once World War I came to an end, the British gained control over the Land of Israel as part of the Sykes–Picot Agreement, which divided the Middle East between the British and French. By the beginning of 1919, the three   Jewish battalions numbered over 5,000 men After the victorious end of the Palestine campaign, the name "Royal Fusiliers" was changed to " Judean Regiment ". Its insignia became a menorah  with the Hebrew  word " kadimah " (“forward”), and all officers and men at the front wore a Magen David on their sleeves. The actual strength of the Legion could have been more than twice as large. Applications for enlistment came from several countries; 1,500 volunteered in Salonika; in Italy 2,000, Transylvanian prisoners of war applied to be enlisted; the "Mountain Jews" from Dagestan in the Caucausus sent emissaries offering all their youth. The number of those who were allowed to actuall enlis...

After the outbreak of WWI,  Zeev Jabotinsky and Joseph Trumpeldor submitted a resolution to the commander of British forces in Egypt, asking him to form a Jewish Legion, and propose to England its usefulness in Palestine. The commander told his Zionist visitors: "Under the law I am not entitled to accept foreigners into the British army. I can offer you only one thing: to form a mule transport unit from your young people and send it to a different Turkish front". In April 1915  “the Zion Mule Corps ”, so named by its commander Colonel John Henry Patterson, sailed from Egypt to Gallipoli. It consisted of 562 mostly Palestinian Zionists, five British officers, eight Jewish officers and 750 mules. As the Zion Mule Corps was the only transport unit on the peninsula, it was soon involved in transporting water, ammunition, food and other supplies to the front lines - under heavy fire. Probably, this was the first purely Jewish fighting corps that went into action since Jerusal...