The 200 days of dread (Hebrew: מאתיים ימי חרדה) [may-ah-tie-yim ye-may kha-ra-da] was a period of 200 days in the history of the Yishuv, from the spring of 1942 to November 3, 1942, when the German Afrika Korps under the command of General Erwin Rommel was heading east toward the Suez Canal and Palestine.
The question of whether the Yishuv would need to defend itself against a possible German invasion rose twice during the Second World War. The first major threat was a German invasion from the north, from the pro-Nazi Vichy regime in control of Syria and Lebanon. This danger ended after Operation Exporter, the allied invasion of these countries on June 8, 1941 and their liberation from Vichy control.
In 1942 a more serious threat emerged as the Afrika Korps, under the command of Erwin Rommel, threatened to overrun British possessions in the Middle East. The "200 days of dread" ended with the Allied victory in the Second Battle of El Alamein.
In archival research in 2006, it emerged that the SS "Einsatzgruppe Ägypten" (Einsatzgruppe Egypt) was deployed to Athens for attachment to the Afrika Korps in the expected conquest of Mandatory Palestine. According to the historians Klaus-Michael Mallmann and Martin Cuppers, the word "Palestine" is not mentioned in the archival documents; however, the researchers state that that unit's objective was to continue in Palestine their systematic mass murder of Jews.
The Hebrew term "200 days of dread" was coined only later by the contemporary journalist Haviv Canaan, as taken from the title of his 1974 book on this period. In 1941-42 the Haganah was preparing a last stand in the event that the British would retreat from the German army as far as Syria and Iraq. The "Plan of the North" was also called "Masada on the Carmel", and "Haifa-Masada-Musah Dag". (The British plan was called Palestine Final Fortress.)