The year 1939, three years after Fuchs stepped off a boat in Tel Aviv, was a watershed for Palestine.

Palestine in 1939 was a gritty little country -- about the size of New Jersey -- with not much more than a rich history to recommend it. The holy places of Jews, Christians and Muslims had lain crumbling for centuries. Much of the land sat idle, grazing grounds for Bedouin sheep and goat herds. Arabs lived in impoverished towns that hadn't changed much since Bible times. Jews lived in settlements they scrabbled from the stony ground. The British military made the rules.

For half a century, Zionist pioneers had been flooding in to reclaim what they considered their ancestral home. Between the two world wars, from 1918 to 1939, the number of Jews in Palestine had grown tenfold. One-third of the population was Jewish by the time Eric Weiss arrived.

At first, the Arabs hadn't paid much attention. In fact, both sides tell stories of peaceful coexistence in the early years. Most of the Arabs were fellahin, peasants who farmed the land of a small number of Muslim landowners. But with every wave of Jewish immigration, fears grew that they would engulf the land and displace the Arabs. Off and on for years, fighting erupted between fellahin and Jewish settlers.

Britain had taken control of Palestine after World War I. The British, in a sense, tried to be evenhanded with Jews and Arabs in their authority. Evenhandedness eventually became ambiguity.

Over the years, the British supported the Arabs in an attempt to form a Middle East alliance with their nations. But the British also signed -- and later waffled on -- the 1917 Balfour Declaration, which said Jews should have a homeland in Palestine. In 1921, the British split the land into two countries. One, then called Transjordan, they ceded to an Arab prince, Abdullah. The other, Palestine, the British continued to govern themselves. The boundary between the two countries was the River Jordan. Most Jews lived in the towns and cities along the Mediterranean.

Elderly Jews still bristle at the creation of Transjordan, saying it separated them from vast tracts they still consider to be part of the true, ancestral Land of Israel.

For the British, Palestine was a headache. In 1917, there were 55,000 Jews in Palestine; by 1939, there were 550,000. The 700,000 Arabs, alarmed by the rising tide of Jewish immigration, waged a three-year campaign from 1936 to 1939 against the Jews and the British with the help of volunteers from other Arab countries. They called general strikes, burned Jewish crops, cut telephone wires, shot settlers.

Groping for a solution to what they called "the Palestine problem," the British in 1939 said Jewish immigration would be halted after 75,000 more people settled in Palestine. They barred land sales to Jews except in predominantly Jewish areas, and proposed that an Arab majority government take over Palestine after a transition period.

By 1939, with World War II brewing, Britain's political ambivalence toward Palestine had nurtured a tangle of alliances and animosities and the Jews had a dilemma: If they harassed the British, they risked weakening the war effort against the Germans. So, as one historian said, they decided to fight the war as though there were no British plan for the Arabs to control Palestine afterward, and to fight the plan as though there were no war.

Jewish soldiers, intelligence operatives, housewives and children worked with the British authorities by day and against them at night, as members of an underground called the Haganah.

Eric Weiss, newly arrived, joined the British Army -- and, like most Jews in Palestine old enough to hold a gun, also the Haganah.

The Haganah (Hebrew for defense) was formed in 1909 as the authority for Jewish settlements in Palestine. By 1939, the Haganah functioned as a police force and a militia to defend Jewish settlers. Its stated objective was "hit only the one hitting you; never initiate."

The Haganah wasn't the Jews' most fanatical military organization during the war years. Haganah members operated nominally within a framework of cooperation with the British; another clandestine group, the Irgun, sabotaged the British at every turn and sired an even more extreme group, Lehi, better known as the Stern Gang.

At the Haganah Museum in Tel Aviv is a display showing how volunteers were led into a small secret room, empty except for a table around which three men sat in straight chairs. On the table were a kerosene lamp, a pistol and a Bible. The volunteer took the oath knowing it could lead to imprisonment. There were no boot camps, no uniforms, no compensation.

Frances Mayer, Eric's sister, who now lives in Seattle, remembers being led into a room by herself. A bright light blinded her, keeping her from identifying those behind the table administering the oath. Eric Weiss remembers being given a gun, a few days training in the courtyard of a school, and status in the Jewish community.

Meanwhile, the British army gave Weiss a rank of staff sergeant and put him to work as an undercover intelligence agent. He was assigned to duty in the North Africa desert and, later, to Rome. There, he interrogated captured Nazi soldiers and their families in a tiny dressing room in an appropriated movie studio, the Cinecitta.

Weiss says he didn't engage in anti-British acts during the war, as some Haganah members did. There are reports of Jewish troops building bridges by day and helping to blow them up by night.

"I did my duty," he says, "nothing else."

Copyright © 1998 The Seattle Times Company