Throughout the decade, the British rulers of Palestine moved from supporting the Zionist movement, to having reservations about it, to rejecting it outright. This was given expression in the White Paper of 1939. Relations with the British by the end of the 1930s were extremely poor. It came as no surprise then when Jewish Agency chairman David Ben-Gurion declared the end of the period of political Zionism and the beginning of a period of "fighting Zionism" against Britain.