John Maxwell (British Army officer)

The majority of the Palestine Refugees' Committee, under the encouragement of Ze'ev Jabotinsky and Joseph Trumpeldor, endorses a resolution calling for the formation of a military unit from Russian Jewish deportees from Palestine that would participate in the British effort to seize Palestine from the Ottoman Empire.

A small committee in Alexandria approves the plan in February 1915.

Trumpeldor, a Russian Jew from Piatygorsk who had joined the Russian army in 1902 and served in the Russian-Japanese war two years later, had lost his left arm during the siege of Port Arthur and had been taken prisoner, receiving a high Tsarist order of merit for his gallantry and zeal.

He subsequently settled in Palestine in 1912 and for a while lived at Deganya, but had been expelled from Palestine following the outbreak of the war and his refusal to take Ottoman citizenship.

Joseph Trumpeldor succeeds in forming the six hundred and fifty-strong Zion Mule Corps, considered to be the first all-Jewish military unit organized in close to two thousand years, and the ideological beginning of the Israel Defense Forces.

Trumpeldor had earlier joined the Allied war effort, but the British military command opposes the participation of Jewish volunteers on the Palestinian front.

John Maxwell, the commanding general in Egypt, had said he was unable, under the Army Act, to enlist foreign nationals as fighting troops, but that he could form them into a volunteer transport Mule Corps, and suggested the volunteers serve as a detachment for mule transport on some other sector of the Turkish front

Ze'ev Jabotinsky had rejected the idea and left for Europe to seek other support for a Jewish unit, but Trumpeldor had accepted it and had begun recruiting volunteers from among the local Jews in Egypt and those who had been deported there by the Ottomans in the previous year.

By the end of March 1915, the five hundred Jewish volunteers from among the Yishuv deportees in Egypt have started training.