Following the 1948 U.S. arms embargo on Israel leading up to the Israeli War of Independence, Harry Levine and 18 other American Jews accepted David Ben-Gurion’s plea and began a secret and extremely complicated operation to smuggle weapons overseas to the Hagana. This operation was possibly the most organized global joint effort the Jewish people had ever made.

00:00 Intro
00:49 UN Palestine Partition Plan
01:15 Israel War of Independence
01:52 British rule over Palestine
02:17 Jewish defiance of British law
02:35 Illegal immigration of Holocaust refugees to Palestine
03:15 The 3 Jewish underground militias
03:36 State of the Hagana's weaponry
04:04 David Ben Gurion appeals to American Jews
04:35 Who was Harry Levine?
05:27 19 American Jews agree to help
05:48 US arms embargo on Israel
06:37 How they obtained and smuggled the weapons
09:19 How to build an illegal army
09:58 How does the story end?

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Image and footage credits:
Israeli Government Press Office, Fritz Cohen, Zoltan Kluger, Hans Pinn
©IWM WOY 290, WPN 217
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy of Schaja and Pnina Klein
Israel Archive Network project (IAN), accessible thanks to the collaborative efforts of the Yehoshua Nessyahu Technion Historical Archive, the Ministry of Jerusalem and Heritage and the National Library of Israel
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Executive Producer:
— Barry Skolnick
Co-Executive Producer:
— Shmuel Katz
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Translation credits:
Portuguese: Saymon Pires, www.livrariasafra.com.br, @safralivraria

About Explainers: From ancient Jewish traditions to the modern State of Israel, we explain it all. Diving into anything and everything related to Jewish culture, history, and even religion.
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