During World War II, some 20,000 Jews, 6 percent of the country’s overall Jewish population, served in Britain’s Royal Air Force (RAF), of whom 900 gave their lives. The proportion of Jews among those who fought in the Battle of Britain—the epic aerial confrontation in which the RAF successfully repelled Germany’s efforts to bomb the United Kingdom into submission—was twice Jews’ proportion in the total population. But, notes Robert Philpot, the story of Anglo-Jewry’s contribution to the war efforts is little known:

After the major conflicts of the 20th century, the United Nations and its predecessor organizations sought to resettle millions of refugees in new homes. But, as Adi Schwartz and Einat Wilf explain in The War of Return, the UN has taken a different approach to those Arabs who fled their homes during Israel’s War of Independence, seeking instead to keep them and their descendants in a permanent state of a homelessness. Matti Friedman writes in his review: