[7] Soon after, a British district commissioner, Lewis Yelland Andrews, known for his repressive measures was assassinated by militant followers of Izz ad-Din al-Qassam outside an Anglican church.
[11] In July 1938 alone two such Irgun bombs planted in Haifa’s central market accounted for 74 Arab dead and 129 wounded, leading to a generalized cycle of reprisal between the two groups.
[12] The mainstream Zionist approach to the insurgency, set forth by David Ben-Gurion, was to avoid reprisal and rather prioritize the strengthening of defenses in Jewish areas, a policy of Havlagah (lit.
It was dominated by activists who had originally identified with Ze'ev Jabotinsky’s Betar movement, which had been founded in 1923, and eventually evolved into the core of Zionist Revisionism.
The Irgun, adopted a policy change from passive defense to active aggression, and considered terrorism against Palestinians a form of deterrence against Arab attacks.
[14][15] In July 1937, Jabotinsky met with Robert Bitker, Moshe Rosenberg and Avraham Stern, the future leader of Lehi, in Alexandria and underwrote, despite his personal reservations, the proposal to have recourse to retaliatory action.
on the morning of 14 November, 2 Arab pedestrians were shot on Aza Street in Rehavia, a neighbourhood in Jerusalem, by Joseph Kremin and Shlomo Trachtman.
Despite official shock at these incidents, the tactic of a defensive response underwent reexamination, was found to be ineffective, with the result that the Haganah command began to set up field companies to engage in ambushes.
Orde Wingate's night squads and Yitzhak Sadeh's mobile military units (plugot ha'Sadeh), established in December of that year,[15] also exercised an influence on the creation of such clandestine forces.