Chapter 823: Between Israel, Judea and Palestine
The Allied Position in the Mandatory Palestine remained under British rule via the League of Nations mandate system was not a easy one. During the war, Palestine was a location of hostilities, a staging area for the Allies, a source of troops and a breeding ground for internal insurgencies and rebellions. From 1940 onward the Axis Central Powers had started bombing Tel Aviv, Haifa and other coastal cities. By 1941 to 1940 Turkish-Ottoman and German forces stood at the Syrian border eager to drive the British out of the region they had conquered during the First Great War. The Jewish Opinion was split, as the British had limited Jewish immigration to the Palestine Mandate, while the Ottomans, still angered about the Arab Betrayal during the last Great War, alongside their German Allies outright declared to install a Jewish Province with internal autonomy, maybe even a fully independent Jewish State in the region. Because of growing Jewish support for this idea, the British kept influential Irgun ("The National Military Organization in Israel") Zionist Leaders in their prisons and rather supported the Arabs, while still unwilling to promise them anything and choosing one group over the other, leading to even a few Arab groups to joining the Axis Central Powers as well in hopes of convincing the Germans and Ottomans to form a Arab autonomous province instead. The Lehi, or so called Stern Gang because of their founder Avraham Stern was formed as a separatist group as well having more fascist royalist and national monarchist tendencies and dreaming of a rebirth of the Jewish Kingdom. During the 1941 – 1942 Turkish-Ottoman and German Campaign along the Syria–Lebanon-Palestine Border, many volunteers from Palestine, especially Arab militias participated in the fighting, including units that had been directly attached to allied troops. On the other side many Jewish militias fought for the Axis Central Powers alongside Ottoman-Turkish and German forces, it was during this campaign that Moshe Dayan, attached to the Ottoman Mameluke Cavalry Division, lost an eye, requiring him to wear what would become his trademark eye-patch.
Hoping desperately to maintain the status quo ante bellum between the Jews and the Arabs, the British at first had instated a policy of equal recruitment from both groups to the Palestine Regiment. However, due to the events of the 1936–1939 Arab revolt in Palestine and the alliance of exiled former Grand Mufti of Jerusalem Hajj Mohammad Amin al-Husayni with the German Empire, as well as the Jewish alliance with the Ottomans, the British had a difficult time as they started to distrust either group, even if there were more Arab volunteers for their cause then Jewish ones by now, as the Arabs feared to be completely expelled by the Ottomans and the Allies at least promised them half of the region for themselves, maybe even all of it if the Jews continued to rally so heavily behind the Axis Central Powers promises. In the End the Allies would form two Arab and two Jewish battalions that hated each other so much that fighting between them broke out, leaving the Allies little choice but to send them to Egypt in North Africa and the Persian Caucasus region and Iraq, instead of using this enthusiastic volunteers to defend their own homeland region. It would take till 1944 that the Allies, mainly the British had become so desperate that they would change this policy, allowing the Arabs and Jewish volunteers to fight the Axis Central Powers directly as the Arab Brigade and the Jewish Brigade. By then however the Mufti's Mohammedan forces, increased by Bosnian Mohammedans in the Balkans, Azerbaijani Mohammedans in the Caucasus would fight Orthodox Serbians Christians in the Balkans alongside Catholic Croatians and Armenian (and partly also Georgian) Orthodox Christians under the Ottoman-Turks in the Caucasus. At the same time Axis Central Power agents and spies had formed the Templers out of German and other Axis Central Power ethnic minorities (mainly Germans) in the conquered Palestine region that would help build up Yehudah (Judea, Judah, or Yehud, better known as the Neo-Ottoman autonomous province of the Kingdom of Israel) and form based on the Axis Central Powers European orders their own local Templer Order made up by Germans, Jews and Ottomans and ensure that in the new State, Jews, Mohammedans and Christians would have free trade, traveling, pilgrimage and preaching rights to all their major Holy Sites without any restrictions or fear from any of the other groups.