This rare collection was purchased by the Princeton University Library in 2017 because it captures a pivotal moment in the fight to establish a Jewish state, the later years of the British Mandate and the very early months after the British Mandate ended, from the early 1940s through 1948. Most of the documents were produced by the Irgun Tsevaʼi Leʼumi (Irgun, also known as Etzel) and Lohamei Herut Israel (LEHI, also known as the "Stern Gang"), the more militant underground military groups operating in British Mandate Palestine, associated with Revisionist Zionism. A few documents in the collection were produced by the Haganah, the more mainstream defense organization, affiliated with Labor Zionism.

The items in this collection document a complex situation, challenging polarizing narratives often applied to the history of Zionism, the State of Israel, and the Arab-Israeli conflict. The materials here do not lend themselves to simplistic narratives, but on the contrary, they document communities and groups managing violent conflicts, both internal and external, all as a full understanding of the magnitude of the Holocaust is coming into focus along with the desperate situation of the Jews trapped in Europe after the war.

Notably, conflict between Jews and Arabs is not the primary concern of these groups at this moment. Rather, the main issue consuming the fighters and activists who produced these documents is the fight against the British, to expel them from Palestine. The tone of many of the documents is quite angry, often referring to the British as the Nazi-British, in Hebrew: ha-Natso-Briṭi. From the perspective of the Irgun and LEHI fighters, the British are a colonial power, and their fight against the British is an anti-colonial fight.

These documents also reveal significant fissure and fracture within the Jewish community itself. The Irgun and LEHI have profound disagreements with the mainstream Jewish leadership in Eretz Israel (the Jewish Agency, the Haganah, Chaim Weitzmann, David Ben-Gurion, etc.), rarely hesitating to condemn the leadership in the strongest terms for failure to effectively fight the British, and for compromising too quickly in discussions over the U.N. Partition Plan. The mainstream leadership did not hesitate to fire back, condemning the violence committed by the Irgun and LEHI, even describing it as terrorism.

Understandably, the Irgun and LEHI reject the terrorism label strenuously. There are several documents in this collection that explain the groups’ reasons for attacking British military targets, distinguishing between targeting the British military and civilians. There are documents in the collection intended to warn civilians about possible attacks, to minimize civilian casualties. There are even examples of documents in which the Irgun offers to refrain from attacking the British military, should it cease harassing the Jewish community. Still, this collection also provides examples where these humane practices failed to avoid civilian casualties, or were not employed in the first place. The debate over military tactics between the Haganah on one side and the Irgun and LEHI on the other, is far from clear cut in this collection.

And what about the conflict between the Jews and the Arabs? In earlier documents in this collection, that conflict seems tertiary. The fight against the British seems more important to the Irgun and LEHI, as do the differences within the Jewish community. However, in the later documents, especially after the U.N. Partition vote in November 1947, the attention of these groups appears to shift, looking to the war between the soon-to-be established Jewish state and the Arabs, which all foresee coming.

These documents capture a fascinating moment in Jewish history, a turmoil-filled “interregnum” of sorts, between the destruction of European Jewry in World War II and the establishment of Israel: the violent fight against the British, efforts to rescue Jewish refugees in Europe and smuggle them into Eretz Israel, diplomatic maneuvering over the end of the British Mandate, the proposed partition of Palestine, and anticipation of a war with the Arab world. But this collection does more than merely capture this moment. It adds nuance and layers to a dominant discourse that too often suffers from overly simplified, ahistorical, and context-free narratives.