After the end of WWII, between October 1945 and the beginning of the War of Independence in December 1947, the Haganah was the largest and most important Jewish military force that operated against the British. Its acting chief of staff, Yitzhak Sadeh, was the most senior and most authoritative personality in the "Jewish resistance movement."
The Haganah carried out anti-British military operations - liberation of interned immigrants from the Atlit camp; the bombing of the country's railroad network ("Night of the Trains"); sabotage raids on radar installations and bases of the British police mobile force; sabotage of British vessels that engaged in deporting clandestine immigrants and destruction of all road and railroad bridges on the borders ("Night of the Bridges"). It was also the Haganah, under Shaul Avigur (Meirov), that operated the mass clandestine, illegal immigration from Europe and North Africa in 1944-1948, on the escape (Beriha) trails and maritime routes, as well as overland from Middle Eastern countries.
Furthermore, the Haganah provided military protection for the country-wide Jewish settlement enterprise, which took place in defiance of the constraints imposed by the British land laws. One such operation was the establishment of eleven settlements in the Negev on the night after Yom Kippur 1946, under the command of the deputy chief of staff of the Haganah, Yosef Avidar (Rokhel).
The Etzel and Lehi were, of course, also active in the resistance movement, their many operations focusing mainly on individual terrorism and guerrilla warfare against the British. Examples are the bombing of the British government and military headquarters at the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, raids on British air force bases at Qastina and near Kfar Syrkin, liberation of Jewish prisoners from the prison in Acre, and sabotage of the railroad repair workshop near Haifa.
...Avraham Stern, a 1920s Zionist and charter member of the Haganah, then a loose-knit Jewish militia organized as a self-defense mechanism against Arab violence. Finding the Haganah insufficiently proactive in realizing the goal of a Jewish state that would encompass "both sides of the River Jordan," erstwhile Mussolini follower and early-day ultra-nationalist Ze'ev Jabotinsky broke with the militia and formed the Irgun, which devoted itself to terrorist operations against the British. Once an enthusiastic Irgunist, Stern was appalled when the Irgun decided to make common cause with the British against the Nazis, and created the even more underground and more violent Lehi (Lohamei Herut Yisrael, or Fighters for the Freedom of Israel), also known as the Stern Gang, which held there was no greater threat to the Jews of Palestine than the mandate's British administrators.
To this end, Stern actually made overtures to the Axis powers; September 1940 found him in dialogue with an emissary from Il Duce in Jerusalem, and in January 1941 he dispatched an agent to Vichy-controlled Beirut with instructions to convey a letter to representatives of the Reich. In it, Stern held that the "establishment of the historical Jewish state on a national and totalitarian basis, and bound by a treaty with the German Reich, would be in the interest of a maintained and strengthened future German position of power in the Near East. Proceeding from these considerations, [the Lehi] in Palestine, under the condition [that] the above-mentioned national aspirations of the Israeli freedom movement are recognized on the side of the German Reich, offers to actively take part in the war on Germany's side."
The Germans declined to take Stern up on the offer, but Stern held out hope as his organization continued to engage in terrorism against the British. After Stern died in a shoot-out with British police in 1942, his mantle was picked up by future Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Shamir. Still, the Israeli underground focused on the British as the greatest of all evils, and on November 6, 1944, Lord Moyne, the British minister for Middle East affairs, was assassinated in Cairo by Eliyahu Beit-Tzuri and Eliyahu Hakim - both members of the Lehi, who were later arrested, convicted, and hanged.
Source: Jason Vest: "From the Irv Rubin Bust to the Stern Gang - the Rich History of Jewish Terrorism" (The Village Voice, 21 December 2001)
