Chapter 7. The Ten Days and After
"At the end of the First Truce, Israel was in a belligerent mood. It was still reeling from the impact and losses of the pan-Arab invasion. The country’s feeling was encapsulated in David Ben-Gurion’s statement in the Cabinet on 11 July: “I would like [the war] to continue for at least another month, because the war must end in the conquest of Shechem [Nablus], and I believe it is possible; the war must end with such a bombing of Damascus, Beirut, and Cairo, that they will no longer have a desire to fight us, and will make peace with us. Our goal is peace, what will happen if at the end of the war there will [still] be enmity around us [I don’t know]. . . . If we do not blow up [that is, bomb?] Cairo, they will think, that they can blow up [that is, bomb] Tel Aviv and that we are powerless. . . . [If we bomb them] then they will respect us, I want it [to end] this way, and not by coercion by the UN in the middle of the war, [which will] enable the Arabs to say, [‘]had not England and America intervened, we could have destroyed the Jews.[’] It is better that they see that this is not so.”1"
The north: Considering Christian relations
"Emboldened by its successes and the weak ALA resistance, Northern Front decided to take the town of Nazareth, al-Qawuqji’s headquarters since the start of the First Truce.32 Al-Qawuqji had prepared for the Ten Days by trying to mobilize auxiliaries for the ALA from the surrounding villages (most young adult males seem to have been reluctant)33 and by ordering the villagers to move out their women and children and/or sleep outside their villages.34 Bedouin were ordered to pack up and moved out of the area.35 According to the IDF, many of the townspeople were unhappy with the ALA, “who had behaved tyrannically toward them . . . especially toward the Christians.”36"
"The day before, Ben-Gurion had instructed the army—taking account of Nazareth’s importance to the world’s Christians39—to prepare a task force to run the town smoothly, to avoid the looting that had characterized most previous conquests, and to avoid violating “monasteries and churches” (mosques were not mentioned). Attempts at robbery “by our soldiers should be met mercilessly, with machineguns,” he instructed.40 Carmel duly warned his troops not to enter or violate “holy sites.”41"
"But the following afternoon, Carmel and Laskov ordered the town’s new military governor, Seventh Brigade OC Colonel Ben Dunkelman—a Canadian volunteer with armored experience from World War II—to expel the inhabitants.52 Dunkelman refused.53 Laskov appealed to Ben-Gurion: “Tell me immediately, in an urgent manner, whether to expel [leharhik] the inhabitants from the town of Nazareth. In my opinion, all should be removed, save for the clerics.”54 Ben-Gurion backed Dunkelman.55 Perhaps he was moved by possible world Christian reactions; perhaps he thought the idea objectionable as Nazareth’s inhabitants had not resisted. Orderly administration was imposed under the new governor, Major Elisha Sulz. IDF troops—except those serving in the military government—were barred from the town,56 and normal life was rapidly restored. Indeed, Nazareth soon filled with returning locals and refugees from surrounding villages.57"
Central Front
The raid on Ramla and Lydda
"Although substantial battles took place in the south and north, the IDF’s major effort during the Ten Days was in the Central Front. Ben-Gurion was still anxious about the fate of West Jerusalem—militarily under threat by Jordan and politically endangered by Count Bernadotte and the UN partition resolution—and the road to it (despite the Burma Road bypass). After the repeated debacles at Latrun, he continued to hold the Arab Legion in deep respect.72 And the Arab towns of Ramla and Lydda, which Ben-Gurion regarded as “dangerous in every respect”73 and as “two thorns”74 in Israel’s side, sat astride the old main road and posed a constant threat to Tel Aviv, a bare ten miles away. They had to be “destroyed,” he obsessively jotted down in his diary.75 The IDF (wrongly) believed that the Legion intended to use the towns as a springboard for an offensive against Tel Aviv—and vastly overestimated the Jordanian force in the area. On 26 June, the IDF believed that the two towns were manned by 1,150–1,500 Legionnaires; in reality, there were about 150.76"
"the first days of the operation prompted Ben-Gurion to remark that, until then, he had believed that the Israelis’ “secret weapon” was their spirit. But, in fact, it “was the Arabs: they are such incompetents, it is difficult to imagine.”83"
"The raid lasted forty-seven minutes.84 The troops appear to have shot at everyone in their path. One participant, “Gideon,” later recalled: “[My] jeep made the turn and here at the . . . entrance to the house opposite stands an Arab girl, stands and screams with eyes filled with fear and dread. She is all torn and dripping blood. . . . Around her on the ground lie the corpses of her family. . . . Did I fire at her? . . . But why these thoughts, for we are in the midst of a battle, in the midst of conquest of the town. The enemy is at every corner. Everyone is an enemy. Kill! Destroy! Murder! Otherwise you will be murdered and will not conquer the town.”85"
"The battle for the two towns appeared to be over. But things abruptly turned sour. At around noon, 12 July, a squadron of Legion armored cars drove into Lydda, either to reconnoiter or to look for a stranded officer.88 They came up against surprised Third Battalion troopers, who thought the town had been pacified. A firefight ensued, and locals joined in, sniping from windows and rooftops. The jittery Palmahniks responded by firing at anything that moved, throwing grenades into houses and massacring detainees in a mosque compound; altogether, “about 250” townspeople died, and many were injured, according to IDF records.89 Ben-Gurion then authorized Allon to expel the population of Lydda, which had “rebelled,” and Ramla. From the first, Ben-Gurion and the IDF commanders had thought in terms of depopulating the two towns.90 Already on 10 July, the relevant units had been ordered “to allow the speedy flight from Ramla of women, old people, and children.”91 Just after noon, 12 July, Allon’s operations officer, Yitzhak Rabin, issued the orders. Yiftah was instructed that “the inhabitants of Lydda must be expelled quickly without attention to age. They should be directed toward Beit Nabala”;92 a similar order reached Kiryati regarding Ramla93—despite the surrender instrument that implicitly allowed Ramla’s inhabitants to stay (it stated: those “who wish may leave”)94—though the brigade was instructed to take “all army-age males” prisoner.95 Yiftah and Kiryati troops methodically expelled that day and the next the towns’ fifty thousand inhabitants, and the refugees encamped in them—though, to be sure, many, having endured battles, a massacre, and Israeli conquest, were, by then, probably eager to leave for Arab-controlled areas"
Palestinian anger at the Legion
"Alec Kirkbride later graphically described the events in Amman on 18 July: “A couple of thousand Palestinian men swept up the hill toward the main [palace] entrance . . . screaming abuse and demanding that the lost towns should be reconquered at once. . . . The king appeared at the top of the main steps of the building; he was a short dignified figure wearing white robes and headdress. He paused for a moment, surveying the seething mob before, [then walked] down the steps to push his way through the line of guardsmen into the thick of the demonstrators. He went up to a prominent individual, who was shouting at the top of his voice, and dealt him a violent blow to the side of the head with the flat of his hand. The recipient of the blow stopped yelling . . . [and] the King could be heard roaring: ‘so, you want to fight the Jews, do you? Very well, there is a recruiting office for the army at the back of my house . . . go there and enlist. The rest of you, get the hell down the hillside!’ Most of the crowd got the hell down the hillside.”110
Glubb and Kirkbride regarded the Palestinians as ungrateful. The Legionnaires, at that very moment doing battle “from Latrun to Deir Tarif,” had suffered one in four dead or wounded of those who had crossed the river on 15 May—and here were the Palestinians maligning them as “traitors.”111"
Genital mutilation
"In place they found the bodies of sixteen Alexandroni troopers left behind when the Legion took the position two days before. One Israeli report read, “On most of them were signs of severe mutilation: stab wounds, some had had their genitals cut off, some were missing ears. One body was cut into many bits with its genitalia stuffed in its mouth. Without doubt some of the dead fell into Arab hands while alive and were killed subsequently. . . . Their trousers [and] shoes were missing.”123"
Second Truce: Expansion of armies, negotiating refugees
"As with the First Truce, the Second Truce benefited the Israelis more than the Arabs. True, the Arab armies, like Israel’s, expanded during the three months of quiet. By early September, according to Yadin, the Egyptian expeditionary force numbered “12,000” soldiers, with a 30 percent increase in armor and artillery and a supplement of three Saudi Arabian battalions and thousands of local auxiliaries; the Legion had recruited additional manpower so that its regiments now had “full complements”; and the Iraqi force had grown to sixteen battalions. All the Arab armies had improved their fortifications.155"
"During the truce, the Arabs and Bernadotte pressed Israel to agree to a return of all or some of the refugees. But the Zionist leaders had decided against this. By late summer 1948 a consensus had formed that the refugees were not to be allowed back during the war, and a majority—led by Ben-Gurion and Shertok—believed that it was best that they not return after the war either. The Israelis argued that a discussion of refugee repatriation must await the end of hostilities: in wartime, returnees would constitute a fifth column. But, in private, they added that after the war, too, if allowed back, returnees would constitute a demographic and political time bomb, with the potential to destabilize the Jewish state."
"The Arabs, for their part, began to speak of a refugee return as a precondition to opening peace talks. The Arab leaders argued that elementary justice demanded that the refugees be allowed to return to the homes from which they had fled or been ejected. In pressing this demand, they were also aware of the political and military harm to Israel that would attend a mass refugee return; it wasn’t simply a matter of “justice.”
The development of anti-return policy
The Israeli decision to bar a refugee return had consolidated between April and August. The April exodus from Haifa and Jaffa had brought the matter into focus. Initially, the leadership was of two minds. During April, when the Yishuv switched to the offensive, local military and civilian leaders gradually shifted to a “good-bye and good riddance” approach. For months, the Arabs had attacked settlements and traffic; once gone, it was felt, it was best that they not return. The switch in policy among Alexandroni’s Arab affairs advisers, as recorded in the minutes of their meetings in late March and early April, is indicative.159"
"On the political plane, though, no policy decision had yet been taken. In early May, after a visit to Haifa, Golda Myerson (Meir), the powerful acting director of the Jewish Agency Political Department, noted the “dreadful” exodus of the town’s Arabs and how they had left “the coffee and pita bread” on the tables. She told her colleagues, “I could not avoid [thinking] that this, indeed, had been the picture in many Jewish towns [that is, in World War II Europe]. . . . [Should the Jews] make an effort to bring the Arabs back to Haifa, or not [?] We have decided on a number of rules, and these include: we won’t go to Acre and Nazareth to bring back [Haifa’s] Arabs. But, at the same time, our behavior should be such that if, because of it, they come back—[then] let them come back. We shouldn’t behave badly with the Arabs [who have remained] so that others [who fled] won’t return.”160
This was all pretty vague. But during the following weeks the leaders were compelled to take the bull by the horns as Arab leaders began to press the refugees to return and refugee spokesmen began to press Bernadotte to facilitate it.161 Without doubt, the pan-Arab invasion of 15 May hardened Israeli hearts toward the refugees. The onslaught of the armies, which threatened to destroy the Yishuv, left the Israelis with little room for error or humanitarian misgivings. As one local official put it: “There are no sentiments in war. . . . Better to cause them injustice than that [we suffer] a disaster. . . . We have no interest in their returning.”162 A powerful anti-return lobby galvanized, consisting of local officials, army commanders, and senior executives in the national bureaucracies. Jewish leaders from Safad, the Mount Gilboga area, and Western Galilee wrote or traveled to Tel Aviv to demand that a return of refugees to their area be prevented.163 The head of the IDF Intelligence Department wrote, “There is a growing movement by the Arab villagers . . . [to] return now. . . . There is a serious danger that they will fortify themselves in their villages . . . and with the resumption of warfare, will constitute at least a [potential] Fifth Column.”164"
"The Cabinet discussed the issue on 16 June. In speech after speech, with Ben-Gurion and Shertok setting the tone, the ministers spoke against refugee repatriation. “I believe . . . we must prevent their return at all costs,” said Ben-Gurion, adding, “I will be for them not returning also after the war.” Shertok agreed: “Had anyone arisen among us and said that one day we should expel all of them—that would have been madness. But if this happened in the course of the turbulence of war, a war that the Arab people declared against us, and because of Arab flight—then that is one of those revolutionary changes after which [the clock of] history cannot be turned back. . . . The aggressive enemy brought this about and the blood is on his head . . . and all the lands and the houses . . . are spoils of war. . . . All this is just compensation for the [Jewish] blood spilled, for the destruction of [Jewish property].”"
"No vote was taken on 16 June—though orders immediately went out to all front-line units to bar refugee infiltration “also with live fire.”171 Within weeks the consensus turned into government policy, partly in response to Bernadotte’s growingly persistent appeals to allow refugee repatriation. On 28 July the Cabinet formally resolved, by nine votes to two, that “so long as the war continues there is no agreement to the return of the refugees.”172 The decision was augmented in September: “A final solution to the refugee problem [would be reached] as part of a general settlement when peace comes.”173 During the following weeks, the Cabinet repeatedly reendorsed this position. But peace never came—and the refugees never returned."
Policy on demolition of villages and opposition
"The reasoning behind the demolitions was simple: the Haganah lacked troops to garrison every empty village and feared that, should they be left intact, they would be reoccupied by Arab irregulars, who would again cut off the road to Jerusalem, or be used as bases by the Arab armies when they invaded."
"And from summer 1948, immediate and long-term political calculations came to the fore: the villages had to be destroyed to prevent a return in order to obviate the rise of a fifth column, to keep down Arab numbers, and to maintain Arab-free areas the Jewish state intended to coopt."
"But a more powerful, and ultimately effective, source of opposition arose inside the Yishuv that summer: the Finance Ministry. Seen from an economic perspective, and against the backdrop of the massive Jewish immigration that began to flood the country, the destruction of rural and urban housing made no sense in terms of the new state’s problems. The abandoned houses were needed for the new immigrants (olim). At the least, urged Yitzhak Gvirtz, director of the Arab (or Absentee) Property Department, the houses should be stripped of reusable assets such as doors, window frames, and tiles before being demolished.198"
"Between May 1948 and December 1951 Israel absorbed some seven hundred thousand Jewish immigrants—or slightly more than its total Jewish population at the dawn of statehood. A small proportion was settled in moshavim. The vast majority were installed in the abandoned Arab neighborhoods of the big towns, in the depopulated small towns, and, when the housing ran out, in vast transit camps (magabarot) on the peripheries of the towns (from which, after months or years, the immigrants were relocated to the towns once housing had been constructed)."
Conditions of Arab refugees
"The condition of many of the four hundred thousand Arabs displaced by midsummer 1948 was “appalling.”213 They were temporarily housed in public buildings in towns and under trees on the outskirts of villages or in abandoned British army camps in the countryside (most of which became refugee camps) in Arab-held areas of the country. Some received local or international food aid; others did not. Except for Jordan, the Arab states did little for them, except make “unfulfilled promises,” in King gAbdullah’s phrase.214 The aid that came arrived mainly from the West, through groups such as the International Committee of the Red Cross and the Quakers. Western observers feared the outbreak of epidemics before or with the onset of winter. The new US special representative (later ambassador) to Israel, James McDonald—in the 1930s he had served as League of Nations high commissioner for German refugees—estimated that “100,000 old men, women and children,” “who are shelterless and have little or no food,” would die when the rains came.215 (Such jeremiads were to prove groundless. There were no major epidemics, and few refugees died that winter. The Palestinians, a largely agricultural people and used to the outdoors, proved hardy.) Bernadotte organized immediate relief. He had Trygve Lie send Sir Raphael Cilento, the Australian director of the UN Division of Social Activities, to investigate. Bernadotte solicited aid from dozens of governments and organizations and set up a Disaster Relief Project (later called the Refugee Relief Project), naming Cilento as its head, to coordinate the contributions and their distribution. But corruption and mismanagement in the distribution centers (Beirut, Damascus) left most of the aid—such as thousands of tents donated by Britain—in warehouses. The Red Cross reported at the end of September that, despite the “hullabaloo,” the “tragic fact is that substantially nothing in food or goods have reached refugees.”216 Lie next appointed Stanton Griffis, US ambassador to Cairo, to head up a newly created body, the UN Relief for Palestine Refugees in the Near East, effectively replacing Cilento. A year later, in December 1949, this organization was succeeded by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), which continues today to provide food, education, and other aid to the refugees and their descendants"
Bernadotte's new proposal
"The plan called for a straightforward partition of Palestine between Israel and Jordan (with no “Union” between them). Israel was to get the whole of the Galilee and the Mediterranean coastline and Jordan all the Negev, south of the Majdal-Faluja line, as well as the West Bank (including Lydda and Ramla). Jerusalem was to be internationalized under UN control, with separate communal autonomy for its Arab and Jewish communities. Lydda and Haifa were to be “free ports.” The Palestinian refugees were to enjoy a right of return or, if they chose, to receive compensation for their lost property instead. The plan was to be implemented by a “Conciliation Commission,” which was to replace the UN mediator (Bernadotte, frustrated and tired, had already decided to quit and return to the Swedish Red Cross)."
"Bernadotte’s plan was submitted to the UN General Assembly and published by Trygve Lie immediately after his death. The assassination effectively placed Israel in the dock and should have paved the way for the assembly’s adoption of the plan. But it didn’t. Secretary of State Marshall may have been persuaded that it offered “a fair basis for a settlement”226 (though, to be sure, the White House, on the eve of the elections, could never have endorsed it in face of Israeli opposition)—yet both Israel and the Arabs immediately rejected it, for much the same reasons that they had opposed the first Bernadotte “plan.” The Arabs were still unwilling to accept or recognize Israel’s existence. Lebanese prime minister Riad al-Sulh told a British diplomat “not for the first time, that it had taken the Arabs over a century to expel the Crusader[s] but they had succeeded in the end”;227 and Egyptian foreign minister Ahmed Muhammad Khashaba said: “No Arab government could accept a settlement of this kind. . . . In due course [the Arabs] would be strong enough to accomplish what was at present impossible owing to their military weakness.”228 The Israelis, for their part, opposed anything less than the 1947 partition resolution borders and, indeed, now wanted better ones, which they knew to be militarily within reach. The General Assembly, at Arab urging, repeatedly postponed a debate on the plan."
"In any case, the plan was quickly overtaken by events—principally the IDF offensive against the Egyptian expeditionary force that began on 15 October and the offensive against the ALA in the Galilee two weeks later. The resultant Israeli conquest of the northern Negev and Central Galilee killed any thought of a trade-off between the Negev (to the Arabs) and the Galilee (to the Jews), which was the core of the Bernadotte plan. So the assassination, as one historian has put it, “does not belong to . . . [those] which have ‘changed history.’ . . . The struggle for Palestine was decided elsewhere.”229"
Secret Egyptian meetings for peace
"Be that as it may, King Farouk—bypassing Foreign Minister Khashaba— hurriedly dispatched Kamil Riyad, a court official, to Paris to sound out the Israelis secretly about terms for a separate peace. Farouk appears to have feared that the United Nations would adopt the Bernadotte plan, which awarded the Negev to Jordan; he was loath to see further Hashemite aggrandizement. Indeed, the Hashemite-Egyptian rift only burgeoned in the months following the invasion. Egyptian and Jordanian officers and officials, and their local Palestinian supporters, were forever quarreling over control of the Bethlehem-Hebron area, where large Egyptian formations coexisted alongside smaller Jordanian units. Both sides had appointed military governors, though for the time being, the Jordanians pretended to accept Egyptian dominance. The two sides even bickered over the size of the flags their units flew in the towns, the Egyptians complaining to the United Nations that the Jordanians’ was a couple of inches larger than their own.230"
"Now the Egyptians were interested, and Riyad’s overture seemed promising. At their first meeting, Riyad described Egypt’s worries, not least of which was the fractious Arab attitude toward the Palestine problem, and asked Sasson to submit “a basis” for a separate Israeli-Egyptian settlement.232 Sasson formulated a fourteen-point proposal. It included Egyptian agreement to regard the establishment of Israel as a fait accompli and to withdraw its troops from Palestine. Israel would not occupy the areas vacated and agreed that the Palestinians could determine whether they wanted an independent state or preferred annexation by one or other of the Arab states.233"
Shertok prefers an independent Palestine over Jordanian annexation
"There were political considerations. King gAbdullah had for years been the only Arab leader willing to talk peace with the Yishuv; Ben-Gurion believed that the man really wanted peace. On the other hand, he had joined the invasion and engaged the Jews in battle around and in Jerusalem, giving the Haganah and IDF a trouncing. The question was whether an enlarged Jordanian kingdom, with its army poised along Israel’s borders near West Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, was really an optimal situation. Would it not be better, perhaps, to push the Legion back across the river and help set up an Arab puppet state or autonomous area in the heartland of Palestine? This, at least, was how Shertok and some of his aides were leaning in summer 1948. As the foreign minister put it, “Without completely removing from the agenda the possibility of Transjordanian annexation of the Arab part of Western Palestine, we should prefer the establishment of an independent [Palestinian] Arab state in Western Palestine. In any event, we should strive to clarify this possibility and emphasize that it is preferable and desirable on our part as opposed to [Jordanian] annexation.” He was thinking of Palestine Arab Opposition politicians figuring prominently in such a polity.239"
Considering striking the Jordanians
"There were good military reasons to strike eastward: the situation of Jewish Jerusalem was still precarious. Jordanian gunners sitting in East Jerusalem and along the southern and northern edges of the corridor from Hulda to the city were a perpetual threat, as was the Iraqi deployment in the northern West Bank, from whose western edges—Qalqilya-Tulkarm—it was a bare ten miles to the Mediterranean. The Jordan River was always seen as the country’s “natural” defensible, strategic border. In addition, a Jordanian West Bank might eventually host British bases—and the British were seen as hostile. There were also good historical-ideological reasons: the West Bank, with Jerusalem’s Old City at its center, was, after all, the crucible of Judaism, the historic heartland of the Jewish people. A renascent Jewish state without Hebron, Bethlehem (birthplace of King David), Bethel, Shechem (Nablus), and, above all, East Jerusalem, with the Wailing Wall, Temple Mount, and the necropolis to its east, was felt by many, and not only on the Revisionist Right, to be incomplete.
"On the other hand, the West Bank and East Jerusalem had not been earmarked by the United Nations for the Jewish state; the bulk of the Negev had been. Taking the Negev would enjoy at least a measure of international legitimacy. The northern Negev settlements had to be relieved. And, last, the large—potentially the strongest—Arab army a mere 18 miles from Tel Aviv, was a standing mortal threat. If the war ended with the Egyptians still at Isdud, who knew what might happen ten or twenty years hence? This was the situation the status quo and the Bernadotte plan threatened to perpetuate."
"As to the center of the country, it is not completely clear whether Ben-Gurion wanted the IDF to conquer the whole of the West Bank or only a large part of it, with or without East Jerusalem. In the course of the 26 September meeting, he said different things. But the thrust of his thinking was probably embodied in the following passage: “We have [that is, there are] two sorts of goyim [non-Jews], Arabs and Christians. I don’t know who are better. If I had to choose, I would choose the Christian world. But I have no choice. The Land of Israel is in this part of the world, surrounded by Arabs. And we will have to, to the extent it is up to us, to find a way to [coexist with] the Arabs—[find] a way to an agreement, to a compromise. . . . We are now full of bitterness toward the Arab world, but they are here and will remain here. And we must look to the future.” Ben-Gurion seemed to be saying that the IDF should conquer the western edges of the West Bank, thus widening the Jewish-held Coastal Plain, and expand the Israeli-held Jezreel Valley southward, perhaps as far as Nablus, but leave in Arab hands the hilly spine from Nablus through Ramallah to East Jerusalem. He preferred that the Arabs retain East Jerusalem and Israel West Jerusalem rather than that all the city become a Christian-ruled international zone"
"But the majority of the Cabinet opposed an offensive in the West Bank. Justice Minister Pinhas Rosenblueth (Rosen) reacted by saying: “I heard Ben-Gurion’s words with dread, but also amazement.” Renewing the war would result in the bombing “of our airfields, the bombing of Tel Aviv.” He quoted Ben-Gurion as saying, only a few days before, that Bernadotte’s assassination prevented an Israeli renewal of hostilities. Health Minister Haim Moshe Shapira argued that one could also lose in war. “We tried to conquer Latrun six times, and who knows what will happen on the seventh try.” And renewing the war would hurt Israel’s international position. Transport Minister David Remez said, “Both to murder Bernadotte and to defy UN decisions—that is a bit much.”"
"Ben-Gurion was adamant. He said, “Were it possible to achieve the minimum through an agreement with the Arabs—I would do it, because I am full of fear and dread of the militarization of the youth in our state. I already see it in the souls of the children, and I did not dream of such a people and I don’t want it.” He pressed his proposal to attack Latrun; the attack on Position 219 could not be left unanswered.
But the Cabinet voted seven to five against.242 The ministers seem to have been motivated by the Bernadotte assassination and its repercussions on Israel’s international standing; by fears that an attack in the West Bank would frustrate a deal with gAbdullah; and by the possibility that the defeat of the Legion might suck in the British (via their mutual defense pact with Jordan) and/or result in the incorporation of hundreds of thousands of additional Arabs, resident in the West Bank, by Israel."