Editors Note: This is excerpted from Days Of Fire: The Secret Story of the Making of Israel, published in 1968 by W. H. Allen, London (pp 109-111). It had been published in Hebrew in Israel two years earlier.

I spent many hours with Begin in the little room in the Oppenheimer apartment [where Begin lived concealed from the British authorities hunting him down]. I told him of what I had seen and heard and done in Europe, of the repercussions and undertones in London after the Rome attack [on the British embassy in Rome, a blow against the center of British operations against immigration].

Together we examined and analyzed the show of British power and its weaknesses. These were becoming more sharply defined. Our task was clear: to intensify the struggle, increase its scope. It was essential to bring home to the British people the strength of our purpose, to expose the growing and ultimately crippling price they would have to pay, in prestige, in material, and in human resources for their continued alien presence in Palestine. The struggle for them was senseless. The fiercer our onslaught, the faster would this understanding be achieved.

To the threats of martial law we published and broadcast a laconic response:

“We have a simple reply to the threats of the British terrorists. You will not frighten us…Even in the most difficult circumstances we shall find ways of hitting at the enemy.”

These words were backed by the knowledge of the plans even then being made to broaden the immediate scope of operations. They sprang from the constant weighing of the contending forces in the struggle and from the concepts central to the Irgun’s strategy from the outset: that the ending of British rule was within our power, that the British could be forced to leave Palestine.

Of course the British could physically crush the Jewish population of Palestine. But we knew something far more important: that there were limits of oppression beyond which the British government dared not go. She could not apply the full force of her power against us. Palestine was not a remote hill village in Afghanistan which could be bombed into submission. Palestine was a glass house watched with intent interest by the rest of the world. The British Government had discovered in 1945 that their behavior toward the Jews was an important factor in American attitudes and policies. American good will and American economic aid were vital to Britain’s hopes and plans for revival from the ravages of the war and for the social reforms of the Labor Government.

The countries of Europe, still reeking of the gas chambers, were also a potential restraining influence. Europe, beginning to recover from the nightmare of German Occupation, would see excesses against the Jews as a British resumption of Hitler’s work. Such a hostility might be of little practical significance; but it could not be disregarded by the British Government.

Less obvious but of a certain and, as we saw it, ultimately decisive force, was the climate of opinion in Britain itself. Only a deep and violent hatred could tolerate the kind of war their government would have to wage in order to crush the Jews. No such hatred existed.

The British had not been outraged by their government’s efforts to liquidate Zionism and to subject the Jews of Palestine to its will. Foreign policy altogether was an area in which it was generally assumed that the government of the day knew best what it was about. If they had been convinced that it was a vital national interest they might even have tolerated and accepted, with distaste and some protest, severe military measures in Palestine. But they had no such conviction. On the contrary: for a generation they had been told that Britain’s task in Palestine was one of mediation and supervision, that she was fulfilling an altruistic role: ensuring justice, holding the peace, keeping Jews and Arabs from each other’s throats. The elimination of the Jews “for the benefit of the Arabs,” in a military campaign which could not be brief and which no censorship could conceal, was not a policy which could appeal to the British people.

The Irgun was now concentrating on attacking British military transport. It forced the suspension of railway traffic. Day after day roads were mined; jeeps, trucks and armored cars were blown up. A new type of mine and a flame-thrower, both the products of the ingenious brain of the Chief of Operations, Amihai Paglin (“Giddy”), were used with great effect.

In those January days the difference between our outlook and that of the Jewish Agency was clear. The Weizmann school of frank defeatism had indeed been rejected at the Zionist Congress, and Dr. Weizmann had been forced into retirement. Weizmann honestly believed that to fight Britain was inconceivable; Ben-Gurion spoke of “resistance” but believed it was impossible, we were too weak, the British too strong. His view, expressed at the Zionist Congress in December, was that “we must not overestimate our strength.”