Polish refugees in Palestine during the Arab-Jewish Civil War (November 1947-May 1948)

In the years 1940–1948 Palestine was an important centre of the Polish “independence” emigration. In 1945 approximately seven thousand war refugees were staying there. When, towards the end of 1947, a civil war broke out in Palestine, the Poles’ situation became more complicated. There were suspicions that they were involved in the Arab-Jewish conflict and supported one side or the other. This article is an attempt to present how these events unfolded and to identify their roots. The author discusses the following factors: (1) the character of the settlement patterns of the Polish community, which concentrated both in Jewish (Tel-Aviv) and Arab (East Jerusalem, Jaffa) centres; (2) the atmosphere of suspicion, characteristic of every war; (3) the agitation carried out by agents of the Warsaw government, which claimed that the Polish expatriate community was ‘fascist’; (4) the presence of criminal elements among the émigrés. The analysis is based on archival materials from the collections of the Polish Institute and Sikorski Museum in London, the Polish Library POSK in London, and the Archive of the Institute of National Remembrance in Warsaw. The author also used newspapers published in Palestine and in centres of Polish emigration.