In 1943, the British Colonial Office initiated a far-reaching process of arrangements to prepare plans for detailed reconstruction in the territories subject to British control. Reconstruction as a concept, a tendency and an action plan was basically directed at building and constructing that which had been destroyed in the war, based on a plan thought out in advance. This article explores the struggle between the British plan for the reconstruction of Mandatory Palestine and the Jewish

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... tation that the main aim of their steps is to implement the White Paper policy of May 1939. After six months of confrontation, the British intention to promote economic steps while presenting them as separate from the political tension over Palestine's political future and the Jewish-Arab confrontation proved to be a false assumption. In a radio address given by the British high commissioner for Palestine, Harold MacMichael, on 23 March 1943, the British Mandatory government placed on the political agenda a plan for the reconstruction of Mandatory Palestine. MacMichael indicated that the likelihood of its implementation depended on two main conditions. The first was the soundness of the planning of the schemes and the second was 'the degree of cooperation and goodwill which all are willing to contribute to the work to be carried out' . 1 Cooperation and goodwill were the two things which David Ben-Gurion, chairman of the Jewish Agency Executive, did not even vacillate over giving MacMichael and his plan. The years of the Second World War were marked in Palestine by a lengthy series of frictions, confrontations and crises over the local Jewish community's relations with the Mandatory authorities, focusing primarily on the areas of immigration and