Alon Kadish's study of the British army's role in the final six months of the Palestine Mandate, The British Army in Palestine and the 1948 War: Containment, Withdrawal and Evacuation, will be essential reading for historians concerned with the 1948 war. This was the crucial period, from December 1947 to the end of the Mandate in May 1948, in which the conflict between Arabs and Jews in Palestine developed into a full-scale intercommunal war. The part played by the British administration and military forces in those fateful months, whether as active participants or passive observers, has been the subject of intense polemics and historical inquiry. Great attention has naturally been paid to the decision makers in London, the Palestine administration, and the army's high command. Kadish's original contribution is his emphasis on the men “on the ground” (3): middle- and low-ranking officers, noncommissioned officers, and soldiers, busy at regimental and battalion level doing their best—or not—to enforce Britain's shrinking authority. His sources include previously untapped memoirs, diaries, newsletters, and regimental journals preserved in British military archives. These give a fresh look “from below” (2) at the British army's policies, actions, and experiences in these dramatic events.

Mostly arranging his chapters according to the geography of Palestine, Kadish explores the army's vain efforts to contain the rising levels of intercommunal violence unleashed by the gradual withdrawal of British forces from the country. While both Arabs and Jews claimed at the time (and since) that the British were partial toward their opponents, Kadish largely reaffirms the accepted wisdom that the military and administration favored neither: they were determined above all not to suffer any further loss of life in a land they were soon to leave. Having been long targeted by armed Jewish attacks but now challenged occasionally by aggression from both sides, the common attitude that emerged among the troops was “a plague on both your houses” (278).

The British administration was formally committed, not least by its international obligations, to keep the peace until its departure. Yet due to the continuous withdrawal of troops, the British army was unable by spring 1948 to quell the mounting violence, even where and when it wanted to. It was ultimately the Arabs who were on the receiving end of increasing British inaction. In April and May 1948, Arab Palestinian society in the mixed towns and rural areas of northern Palestine collapsed under the force of intensified Jewish attacks. The resulting mass flight of refugees from areas under British military control probably remains the most controversial aspect of British rule at the end of Mandate. Convinced that they were powerless to act, and fearing greater bloodshed and massacres, local British commanders offered to assist the evacuation from fighting zones of threatened civilian communities: Jews in Safad (who opted not to leave) and Arabs in Tiberias and Haifa (190–96, 211–12). It might have seemed a humane solution, and certainly no British commander at the time could have known that the Arabs could never return. However, the army, as Kadish demonstrates, proved that it could intervene to halt Jewish advances where its own interests were at stake, such as at the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood of Jerusalem (160–62). Yet even its half-hearted intervention at Jaffa, primarily compelled by Arab protests, was too late to halt the exodus of Arab refugees from the city and its vicinity.

An expert on the Jewish side in the 1948 war, throughout the book Kadish often elaborates on Jewish strategy, activities, and views. Admittedly, there are fewer available Arab archival sources (though some confiscated material survives in Israeli archives). However, contemporary Arab press reports and published memoirs could have provided a more complete picture of the military's relationship with the Arab community. Another area to which Kadish draws less attention is the huge organizational effort required by the evacuation of the vast military (and naval) infrastructure that the British had built up in Palestine over three decades, and a recent World War. Kadish only touches here and there upon the evacuation of this vast materiel, or the disposal and distribution between Arabs and Jews of the infrastructure and equipment left behind. More than thirty fortifications and police posts—reminders of Britain's past military authority—serve to this day the authorities in Israel/Palestine.

With The British Army in Palestine and the 1948 War, Kadish, however, contributes much more to existing scholarship than an assessment of the British role in the Arab-Jewish conflict. His subject, after all, is the British army itself, and in a lengthy and important first chapter, “Soldiering in Palestine,” he seeks to grasp the entire experience of those British soldiers stationed in Palestine in 1947–48. Kadish discusses their attitudes, perceptions, camp life, discipline, training, pet keeping, and vast array of leisure activities on and off camp. His fascinating subsection, “Hunting, Riding and Shooting”—mostly for the officers, of course—could actually serve as an intriguing opening shot for studying the British army's impact on Palestine's wildlife rather than on its people (a subject discussed by researchers in other areas of the empire, but not as yet in Palestine.) One can easily overlook just how significant such leisure activities were for the army in what was essentially for them a low-intensity conflict. Kadish reminds the reader from time to time that there was plenty of boredom when soldiers were not engaged in road patrols, short battles, and bagpipe marches.

Sporting activities, as always, played a role in these circumstances, and to the end, they played a particularly large part in regimental life and morale. Indeed, in one of Kadish's many rich anecdotes one learns that on 16 May, a day after the British mandate had officially ended—with convoys of Arab refugees heading north from nearby Acre, and in the midst of a full-scale war between the new state of Israel and neighboring Arab states—the 2nd Middlesex enjoyed a great day of cricket at Haifa airfield with the noncommissioned officers and privates defeating the officers (224). They had been left behind with several other battalions to safeguard, for six more weeks, the laborious task of evicting further shiploads of military equipment from Haifa harbor. Palestine, however, was already somebody else's problem.