Polk had a lot of the details right . . . and some wrong. Irgun broke with the Haganah and the Jewish agency, to the point where in 1948 the Haganah fired on the Altalena, a ship bringing arms into Palestine in direct opposition to a Ben-Gurion directive. Even after independence Menachem Begin, the head of the Irgun and subsequently the Herut Party, and David Ben Gurion never reconciled. Ben Gurion in fact refused to acknowledge Begin's existence.
As to comparative force size, that's a more difficult question, though as Polk says a lot of it had to do with both the intra-national politics of the Arab states, but also the class composition of Palestinian society in 1948. A good source is Meron Benvenisti's 2000 book "Sacred Landscape" which covers the period in admirable detail. For relations between Irgun and the Jewish Agency, a good source, though perhaps difficult to find now is Ehud Sprinzak's book, "Likud: the Road to Power."
Polk had a lot of the details right . . . and some wrong. Irgun broke with the Haganah and the Jewish agency, to the point where in 1948 the Haganah fired on the Altalena, a ship bringing arms into Palestine in direct opposition to a Ben-Gurion directive. Even after independence Menachem Begin, the head of the Irgun and subsequently the Herut Party, and David Ben Gurion never reconciled. Ben Gurion in fact refused to acknowledge Begin's existence.
As to comparative force size, that's a more difficult question, though as Polk says a lot of it had to do with both the intra-national politics of the Arab states, but also the class composition of Palestinian society in 1948. A good source is Meron Benvenisti's 2000 book "Sacred Landscape" which covers the period in admirable detail. For relations between Irgun and the Jewish Agency, a good source, though perhaps difficult to find now is Ehud Sprinzak's book, "Likud: the Road to Power."