In 1937, the Peel Commission—appointed by London in response to the Arab riots that had begun in Palestine the year beforehand—introduced a plan for partitioning the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean. The plan granted a third of the territory to the Jews, and the rest to the Arabs. While Zionist leaders accepted the plan, Arab leaders responded with more violence. Britain later rejected the proposal with the notorious White Paper of 1939, which sharply restricted further Jewish immigration and the Jews’ ability to purchase land. Yaakov Lappin, drawing on his own archival research, argues that this effective betrayal of the Balfour Declaration resulted from fears of an Arab-Nazi alliance:

On December 20, a Palestinian waited in a wooded area near a Jewish village in northern Israel in the hope of encountering a victim. Soon enough he spotted Esther Horgan walking home from an evening jog and killed her by beating her with a rock. He later told the police that he did the deed to avenge the death of Kamal Abu Wa’er, a terrorist in Israeli custody. Itamar Marcus explains: