Jewish Brigade

Jewish Brigade
Insignia and sleeve patch of the Jewish Brigade
Active	1944–1946
Country	United Kingdom
Branch	British Army
Type	Infantry
Size	Brigade group, 5,000 volunteers
Commanders
Notable commanders	Ernest Benjamin

The Jewish Infantry Brigade Group, more commonly known as the Jewish Brigade Group or Jewish Brigade, was a military formation of the British Army composed of Jews from the Yishuv in Mandatory Palestine commanded by British-Jewish officers that served in Europe during World War II. The brigade was formed in late 1944, and its personnel fought the Germans in Italy. After the war, some of them assisted Holocaust survivors to emigrate illegally to Mandatory Palestine as part of Aliyah Bet.

After World War I, the British Empire and the French empire replaced the Ottoman Empire as the pre-eminent powers in the Middle East. This change brought closer the Zionist movement's goal of creating a Jewish state. During the war, the British government issued the Balfour Declaration of 1917, indicating that government's support for the creation of a Jewish homeland in Palestine, which signified the first official support for Zionism's aims and led to a surge of Jewish emigration in 1918–1921, known as the "Third Aliyah". The League of Nations incorporated the Declaration in the British Mandate for Palestine in 1922. Jewish immigration continued through the 1920s and 1930s, and the Jewish population expanded by over 400,000 before the beginning of the Second World War.

However, in the White Paper of 1939, the British government under Neville Chamberlain abandoned the idea of establishing a Jewish Commonwealth. When the Second World War began in September 1939, David Ben-Gurion, the head of the Jewish Agency, famously declared: "We will fight the White Paper as if there is no war, and fight the war as if there is no White Paper."