Chapter 11. Some Conclusions

Ben-Gurion understands the Arab perspective

"David Ben-Gurion well understood these contradictory perspectives. As he told his colleagues, against the backdrop of the Arab Revolt of 1936– 1939: “We must see the situation for what it is. On the security front, we are those attacked and who are on the defensive. But in the political field we are the attackers and the Arabs are those defending themselves. They are living in the country and own the land, the village. We live in the Diaspora and want only to immigrate [to Palestine] and gain possession of [lirkosh] the land from them.”2 Years later, after the establishment of Israel, he expatiated on the Arab perspective in a conversation with the Zionist leader Nahum Goldmann: “I don’t understand your optimism. . . . Why should the Arabs make peace? If I was an Arab leader I would never make terms with Israel. That is natural: We have taken their country. Sure, God promised it to us, but what does that matter to them? Our God is not theirs. We come from Israel, it’s true, but two thousand years ago, and what is that to them? There has been anti-Semitism, the Nazis, Hitler, Auschwitz, but was that their fault? They only see one thing: We have come here and stolen their country. Why should they accept that?”3"

Role of Islamic hatred of Jews in the conflict

"To be sure, while mentioning “God,” Ben-Gurion—a child of Eastern European social democracy and nationalism who knew no Arabic (though, as prime minister, he found time to study ancient Greek, to read Plato in the original, and Spanish, to read Don Quixote)—had failed fully to appreciate the depth of the Arabs’ abhorrence of the Zionist-Jewish presence in Palestine, an abhorrence anchored in centuries of Islamic Judeophobia with deep religious and historical roots. The Jewish rejection of the Prophet Muhammad is embedded in the Qurhan and is etched in the psyche of those brought up on its suras.4 As the Muslim Brotherhood put it in 1948: “Jews are the historic enemies of Muslims and carry the greatest hatred for the nation of Muhammad.”5"

"Such thinking characterized the Arab world, where the overwhelming majority of the population were, and remain, believers. In 1943, when President Franklin Roosevelt sent out feelers about a negotiated settlement of the Palestine problem, King Ibn Sagud of Saudi Arabia responded that he was “prepared to receive anyone of any religion except (repeat except) a Jew.”6 A few weeks earlier, Ibn Sagud had explained, in a letter to Roosevelt: “Palestine . . . has been an Arab country since the dawn of history and . . . was never inhabited by the Jews for more than a period of time, during which their history in the land was full of murder and cruelty. . . . [There is] religious hostility . . . between the Moslems and the Jews from the beginning of Islam . . . which arose from the treacherous conduct of the Jews towards Islam and the Moslems and their prophet.”7 Jews were seen as unclean; indeed, even those who had contact with them were seen as beyond the pale. In late 1947 the Al-Azhar University gulema, major authorities in the Islamic world, issued a fatwa that anyone dealing with “the Jews,” commercially or economically (such as by “buying their produce”), “is a sinner and criminal . . . who will be regarded as an apostate to Islam, he will be separated from his spouse. It is prohibited to be in contact with him.”8

This anti-Semitic mindset was not restricted to Wahhabi chieftains or fundamentalist imams. Samir Rifahi, Jordan’s prime minister, in 1947 told visiting newsmen, “The Jews are a people to be feared. . . . Give them another 25 years and they will be all over the Middle East, in our country and Syria and Lebanon, in Iraq and Egypt. . . . They were responsible for starting the two world wars. . . . Yes, I have read and studied, and I know they were behind Hitler at the beginning of his movement.”9"

"The evidence is abundant and clear that many, if not most, in the Arab world viewed the war essentially as a holy war. To fight for Palestine was the “inescapable obligation on every Muslim,” declared the Muslim Brotherhood in 1938. Indeed, the battle was of such an order of holiness that in 1948 one Islamic jurist ruled that believers should forego the hajj and spend the money thus saved on the jihad in Palestine.12 In April 1948, the mufti of Egypt, Sheikh Muhammad Mahawif, issued a fatwa positing jihad in Palestine as the duty of all Muslims. The Jews, he said, intended “to take over . . . all the lands of Islam.”13 Martyrdom for Palestine conjured up, for Muslim Brothers, “the memories of the Battle of Badr . . . as well as the early Islamic jihad for spreading Islam and Salah al-Din’s [Saladin’s] liberation of Palestine” from the Crusaders.14 Jihad for Palestine was seen in prophetic-apocalyptic terms, as embodied in the following hadith periodically quoted at the time: “The day of resurrection does not come until Muslims fight against Jews, until the Jews hide behind trees and stones and until the trees and stones shout out: ‘O Muslim, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him.’”15"

"The jihadi impulse underscored both popular and governmental responses in the Arab world to the UN partition resolution and was central to the mobilization of the “street” and the governments for the successive onslaughts of November–December 1947 and May–June 1948. The mosques, mullahs, and gulema all played a pivotal role in the process. Even Christian Arabs appear to have adopted the jihadi discourse. Matiel Mughannam, the Lebanese-born Christian who headed the AHC-affiliated Arab Women’s Organization in Palestine, told an interviewer early in the civil war: “The UN decision has united all Arabs, as they have never been united before, not even against the Crusaders. . . . [A Jewish state] has no chance to survive now that the ‘holy war’ has been declared. All the Jews will eventually be massacred.”16 The Islamic fervor stoked by the hostilities seems to have encompassed all or almost all Arabs: “No Moslem can contemplate the holy places falling into Jewish hands,” reported Kirkbride from Amman. “Even the Prime Minister [Tawfiq Abul Huda] . . . who is by far the steadiest and most sensible Arab here, gets excited on the subject.”17"

Complexity of Arab war aims

"The immediate trigger of the 1948 War was the November 1947 UN partition resolution. The Zionist movement, except for its fringes, accepted the proposal. Most lamented the imperative of giving up the historic heartland of Judaism, Judea and Samaria (the West Bank), with East Jerusalem’s Old City and Temple Mount at its core; and many were troubled by the inclusion in the prospective Jewish state of a large Arab minority. But the movement, with Ben-Gurion and Weizmann at the helm, said “yes.”

The Palestinian Arabs, along with the rest of the Arab world, said a flat “no”—as they had in 1937, when the Peel Commission had earlier proposed a two-state solution. The Arabs refused to accept the establishment of a Jewish state in any part of Palestine. And, consistently with that “no,” the Palestinian Arabs, in November–December 1947, and the Arab states in May 1948, launched hostilities to scupper the resolution’s implementation. Many Palestinians may have been unenthusiastic about going to war—but to war they went. They may have been badly led and poorly organized; the war may have been haphazardly unleashed; and many able-bodied males may have avoided service. But Palestinian Arab society went to war, and no Palestinian leader publicly raised his voice in protest or dissent.

The Arab war aim, in both stages of the hostilities, was, at a minimum, to abort the emergence of a Jewish state or to destroy it at inception. The Arab states hoped to accomplish this by conquering all or large parts of the territory allotted to the Jews by the United Nations. And some Arab leaders spoke of driving the Jews into the sea19 and ridding Palestine “of the Zionist plague.”20 The struggle, as the Arabs saw it, was about the fate of Palestine/ the Land of Israel, all of it, not over this or that part of the country. But, in public, official Arab spokesmen often said that the aim of the May 1948 invasion was to “save” Palestine or “save the Palestinians,” definitions more agreeable to Western ears.

The picture of Arab aims was always more complex than Zionist historiography subsequently made out. The chief cause of this complexity was that flyin-the-ointment, King gAbdullah. Jordan’s ruler, a pragmatist, was generally skeptical of the Arabs’ ability to defeat, let alone destroy, the Yishuv, and fashioned his war aim accordingly: to seize the Arab-populated West Bank, preferably including East Jerusalem. No doubt, had his army been larger and Zionist resistance weaker, he would have headed for Tel Aviv and Haifa;21 after all, for years he had tried to persuade the Zionist leaders to agree to Jordanian sovereignty over all of Palestine, with the Jews to receive merely a small, autonomous zone (which he called a “republic”) within his expanded kingdom. But, come 1948, he understood the balance of forces: the Jews were simply too powerful and too resolute, and their passion for self-determination was not to be denied.

Other Arab leaders were generally more optimistic. But they, too, had ulterior motives, beyond driving the Jews into the sea or, at the least, aborting the Jewish state. Chief among them was to prevent their fellow leaders (especially gAbdullah) from conquering and annexing all or too much of Palestine and to seize as much of Palestine as they could for themselves. This at least partly explains the diffusion of the Egyptian war effort and the drive of its eastern arm through Beersheba and Bethlehem to the outskirts of Jerusalem. It is possible that the commanders of the main, western wing of the Egyptian Expeditionary Force, advancing up the coast from Rafah, were instructed to halt, at least for a time, at Isdud, the northernmost point of the southern portion of Palestine allotted by the United Nations for Arab sovereignty. But had the Israelis offered minimal resistance and had the way been clear to push on to Tel Aviv, I have no doubt that the Egyptians would have done so, in line with their public rhetoric. Their systematic destruction of all the Jewish settlements along the way—a phenomenon that was replicated by the Arab armies in the West Bank and Jordan Valley—is indicative of the mindset of the armies and governments involved.

The Yishuv’s war aim, initially, was simpler and more modest: to survive; to weather the successive onslaughts, by the Palestinian Arabs and the Arab states. The Zionist leaders deeply, genuinely, feared a Middle Eastern reenactment of the Holocaust, which had just ended; the Arabs’ public rhetoric reinforced these fears. But as the war progressed, an additional aim began to emerge: to expand the Jewish state beyond the UN-earmarked partition borders. Initially, the desire was to incorporate clusters of Jewish settlements in the state. West Jerusalem, with its hundred thousand Jews, figured most prominently in the Zionist leaders’ imagination. But as the war progressed, a more general expansionist aim took hold: to add more territory to the minuscule state and to arm it with defensible borders. By September, some spoke of expanding as far eastward as the Jordan River, seen as a “natural” frontier (both the UN partition borders and the new lines created by the May–July 1948 hostilities were a strategist’s nightmare), while incorporating the historic heartland of the Jewish people, Judea and Samaria, in the new state. A third and further aim—which emerged among some of the political leaders, including Ben-Gurion and Moshe Shertok, and in the military, after four or five months of hostilities—was to reduce the size of Israel’s prospective large and hostile Arab minority, seen as a potential powerful fifth column, by belligerency and expulsion."

Lack of Palestinian organisation and preparation

"The Palestinian Arabs, with well-established traditions of disunity, corruption, and organizational incompetence, failed to mobilize their resources. They even failed to put together a national militia organization before going to war. Their leaders may have talked, often and noisily, about the “Zionist threat,” but they failed to prepare. Perhaps, by the late 1940s, they had come to rely on foreign intervention as the engine of their salvation. Much as, throughout their history, the Palestinian Arabs displayed a knee-jerk penchant to always blame others—the Ottomans, the British, Europe, the United States, the Jews—for whatever ailed them, so, from the mid-1930s on, they exhibited a mindless certainty that, whatever they did or whatever happened, someone—the United Nations, the Great Powers, the Arab states—would pull their chestnuts out of the fire.

The Palestinians (like the surrounding Arab states) had a socioeconomic elite with no tradition of public service or ethos of contribution and sacrifice (typical was the almost complete absence of sons of that elite among the fighters of 1936–1939 and 1948); for many, nationalism was a rhetorical device to amass power or divert resentments rather than a deeply felt emotion. The Palestinian Arabs suffered from a venal leadership and a tradition of imperial domination as well a sense of powerlessness and fatalism. These combined to neuter initiative.

When war came—at their instigation—the Palestinians were unprepared: they lacked a “government” (indeed, almost all the members of the AHC, and many, if not most, NC members were outside the country for most of the civil war), and they were short of arms and ammunition. All told, the eight hundred Arab villages and dozen or so towns of Palestine, in December 1947, may have possessed more light arms than the Yishuv. But they were dispersed and under local control and not standardized, and most of them probably never saw a battlefield. The Palestinians lacked the economic or organizational wherewithal to import arms and ammunition in significant quantities once the hostilities commenced, and the Arab states were niggardly with material support"

"Between early April and mid-May, Palestinian Arab society fell apart and was crushed by a relatively poorly armed and, in many ways, ragtag Jewish militia. One day, when the Palestinians face up to their past and produce serious historiography, they will probe these parameters of weakness and responsibility to the full (as well as the functioning of their leadership and society in the months and years before 1948). Among the things they will “discover” will be how few young men from the Hebron, Ramallah, and Nablus areas—largely untouched by the war—actually participated in 1948’s battles and how few of them died in the fighting in Jaffa, Haifa, Jerusalem, and the Jezreel and Jordan Valleys. The Yishuv had fought not a “people” but an assortment of regions, towns, and villages. What this says about the Palestinian Arabs, at the time, as a “people” will also need to be confronted."

Role of foreign powers in the war - Embargos and ceasefires

"The Great Powers and the United Nations affected the course of the war in a number of significant ways. One was by way of armaments and the asymmetrical effects on the belligerents of the international arms embargos. The Americans imposed an arms embargo on the region starting in December 1947. The United Nations imposed a wider embargo in late May 1948, crucially affecting supplies to the Arab states, which had traditionally received their weapons and ammunition (on credit) from their former colonial masters, Britain and France. The embargo, to which Britain and France were obedient, at a stroke cut off the Arabs from almost all sources of weaponry, ammunition, and spare parts. And they lacked the agility, networks, knowledge, and funds to switch horses in midstream and begin procurement from alternative sources. In effect, the Arab states had to fight the war with what they had in stock, a stock they had failed to build up adequately in the preceding years and that rapidly diminished as the hostilities progressed.

It was otherwise with the Yishuv. The Yishuv had never bought or received arms from states and had developed no prewar dependencies. Instead, it had bought arms in the international black market. It had entered the war with experienced clandestine procurement networks and with the financial backing of American Jewry. In preparation for the war, the Haganah purchased arms or “civilian” equipment convertible to war purposes in the United States (including machine tools needed to produce arms) and in the world’s black markets. Once the fighting began, the Yishuv/Israel discovered another, major source of equipment. The Americans and, by and large, the Western European states refused to sell the Haganah arms. But the Soviet Union and Czechoslovakia, for a combination of reasons—financial, political (anti-British), and ideological-humanitarian (many Czechs saw the Jews as fellow sufferers)—were willing to ignore the United Nations and sell arms to the Yishuv. (The Syrians also made some purchases from the Czech Skoda Arms Works, but they were meager—and they proved unable safely to transport them to Syria. Indeed, Israeli naval commandos twice managed to interdict these shipments in European waters.) From late March 1948 onward, Czech arms—and additional arms from black and gray market sources— poured into Palestine/Israel, enabling the Yishuv to neutralize the Palestinian Arab militias, go over to the offensive, parry the Arab armies’ invasion, and, eventually, win the war."

"The United Nations’ embargo-enforcing machinery, from the start, was inadequate and ineffective. Israel proved adept at circumventing it; the Arabs, except in the matter of dispatching additional manpower to the fronts, never really tried. In terms of importing militarily professional manpower, the Yishuv also “beat” the Arabs. The Yishuv/Israel managed to attract and hire expert foreign military personnel—(mostly Christian) air- and ground crews, naval personnel, communications experts—and deploy them effectively. It was not primarily a matter of salaries: many came for the adventure, but most because of the Holocaust and sympathy for the beleaguered new state; for some, it was a repeat of the (tragic failed) effort to save the Spanish Republic. Of the Arab states, only the Jordanians, who increased their roster of Britons during the war, managed to recruit and deploy foreign military experts to any real effect. The handful of ex-Nazi Germans or Bosnian Muslims recruited by Syria, Egypt, and the Palestinian Arabs proved of little significance."

"But, thereafter, the Western Great Powers (the Russians usually took Israel’s side), acting both through the United Nations and often directly and independently, significantly cramped the IDF’s style and curtailed its battlefield successes in a series of cease-fire and truce resolutions. Whereas the imposition of the First Truce, which started on 11 June, favored both sides— both needed a respite, though the resulting four weeks of quiet were better used by Israel to regroup and rearm—all the subsequent international interventions clearly and strongly favored the Arabs. Thus it was on 18 July, at the end of the Ten Days, when IDF troops were victorious in the Galilee and the Lydda-Ramla area, and even more tellingly in October and November, when IDF advances had brought the Egyptian forces in the south to the verge of defeat. The UN–Great Power interventions in December 1948 and early January 1949, after Israel had invaded the Sinai Peninsula, quite simply saved the Egyptian army from annihilation. The IDF had twice been on the verge of closing the trap, first at El gArish, and then at Rafah, when the United States and Britain ordered it to pull back—the British bluntly threatening direct military intervention—and Ben-Gurion complied. From July 1948 on, the IDF General Staff planned all its campaigns with an eye to a UN-imposed time-limit or intervention that might snatch victory from the jaws of victory and compelled the Israelis repeatedly to cheat and “steal” extra days of fighting to achieve or partially achieve objectives

Henceforward, Israel received a well-earned reputation for bamboozling or hampering the functioning of UN observers. But this was largely a consequence of the inequitable and unfair rules of engagement: the Arabs could launch offensives with impunity, but international interventions always hampered and restrained Israel’s counterattacks.

As in subsequent wars—in October 1973 and in June 1982—the successive UN cease-fire–standstill resolutions prevented a clear Israeli victory and saved the Arabs from ever greater humiliations. And it was Great Power and UN pressure and intercession that afforded the Egyptians and Syrians facesaving terms in the armistice agreements of 1949. Without these intercessions, it is likely that the talks both with Egypt and with Syria would have broken down and hostilities would have been renewed, ending in further Arab defeats and loss of territory. As it was, the agreements eventually reached assured the Arab states of the retention of some territory inside Palestine (the Gaza Strip) and of demilitarized strips in which neither side was sovereign.

Taken together, these events left Israel with a permanent resentment toward and suspicion of the United Nations, which was only reinforced down the decades by the emergence of the automatic Arab–Muslim–Third World–Communist block–voting majorities against Israel, whatever the merits of each problem brought before the General Assembly and, occasionally, the Security Council."

Arab and Jewish war crimes

"Like most wars involving built-up areas, the 1948 War resulted in the killing, and occasional massacre, of civilians. During the civil war half of the war, both sides paid little heed to the possible injury or death of civilians as battle raged in the mixed cities and rural landscape of Palestine, though Haganah operational orders frequently specifically cautioned against harming women and children. But the IZL and LHI seem to have indulged in little discrimination, and the Palestinian Arab militias often deliberately targeted civilians. Moreover, the disorganization of the two sides coupled with the continued presence and nominal rule of the Mandate government obviated the establishment by either side of regular POW camps. This meant that both sides generally refrained from taking prisoners. When the civil war gave way to the conventional war, as the Jewish militias—the Haganah, IZL, and LHI—changed into the IDF and as the Arab militias were replaced by more or less disciplined regular armies, the killing of civilians and prisoners of war almost stopped, except for the series of atrocities committed by IDF troops in Lydda in July and in the Galilee at the end of October and beginning of November 1948.

After the war, the Israelis tended to hail the “purity of arms” of its militiamen and soldiers and to contrast this with Arab barbarism, which on occasion expressed itself in the mutilation of captured Jewish corpses. This reinforced the Israelis’ positive self-image and helped them “sell” the new state abroad; it also demonized the enemy. In truth, however, the Jews committed far more atrocities than the Arabs and killed far more civilians and POWs in deliberate acts of brutality in the course of 1948. This was probably due to the circumstance that the victorious Israelis captured some four hundred Arab villages and towns during April–November 1948, whereas the Palestinian Arabs and ALA failed to take any settlements and the Arab armies that invaded in mid-May overran fewer than a dozen Jewish settlements.

Arab rhetoric may have been more blood curdling and inciteful to atrocity than Jewish public rhetoric—but the war itself afforded the Arabs infinitely fewer opportunities to massacre their foes. Thus, in the course of the civil war the Palestinian Arabs, besides killing the odd prisoner of war, committed only two large massacres—involving forty workers in the Haifa oil refinery and about 150 surrendering or unarmed Haganah men in Kfar gEtzion (a massacre in which Jordanian Legionnaires participated—though other Legionnaires at the site prevented atrocities). Some commentators add a third “massacre,” the destruction of the convoy of doctors and nurses to Mount Scopus in Jerusalem in mid-April 1948, but this was actually a battle, involving Haganah and Palestine Arab militiamen, though it included, or was followed by, the mass killing of the occupants of a Jewish bus, most of whom were unarmed medical personnel.

The Israelis’ collective memory of fighters characterized by “purity of arms” is also undermined by the evidence of rapes committed in conquered towns and villages. About a dozen cases—in Jaffa, Acre, and so on—are reported in the available contemporary documentation and, given Arab diffidence about reporting such incidents and the (understandable) silence of the perpetrators, and IDFA censorship of many documents, more, and perhaps many more, cases probably occurred. Arabs appear to have committed few acts of rape. Again, this is explicable in terms of their general failure to conquer Jewish settlements. Altogether, the 1948 War was characterized, in relative terms, by an extremely low incidence of rape (as contrasted with, for example, the Soviet army’s conquest of Prussia and eastern Germany in 1945 or the recent Balkan wars)

In the year long war, Yishuv troops probably murdered some eight hundred civilians and prisoners of war all told—most of them in several clusters of massacres in captured villages during April–May, July, and October–November 1948. The round of massacres, during Operation Hiram and its immediate aftermath in the Galilee and southern Lebanon, at the end of October and the first week of November 1948 is noteworthy in having occurred so late in the war, when the IDF was generally well disciplined and clearly victorious. This series of killings—at gEilabun, Jish, gArab al-Mawasi, Saliha, Majd al-Kurum, and so on—was apparently related to a general vengefulness and a desire by local commanders to precipitate a civilian exodus

In general, from May 1948 onward, both Israel and the Arab states abided by the Geneva convention, took prisoners, and treated them reasonably well. Given that the first half of the war involved hostilities between militias based in a large number of interspersed civilian communities, the conquest of some two hundred villages and urban centers, and the later conquest of two hundred additional villages, 1948 is actually noteworthy for the relatively small number of civilian casualties both in the battles themselves and in the atrocities that accompanied them or followed (compare this, for example, to the casualty rates and atrocities in the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s or the Sudanese civil wars of the past fifty years)."

"In the 1948 war, the Yishuv suffered 5,700–5,800 dead23—one quarter of them civilians. This represented almost 1 percent of the Jewish community in Palestine, which stood at 628,000 at the end of November 1947 and 649,000 in May 1948.24 Of the dead, more than five hundred were female (108 in uniform).25 The Yishuv suffered about twelve thousand seriously wounded."

"Palestinian losses, in civilians and armed irregulars, are unclear: they may have been slightly higher, or much higher, than the Israeli losses. In the 1950s, Haj Amin al-Husseini claimed that “about” twelve thousand Palestinians had died.26 Egyptian losses, according to an official Egyptian announcement made in June 1950, amounted to some fourteen hundred dead and 3,731 “permanently invalided.”27 The Jordanian, Iraqi, and Syrian armies each suffered several hundred dead, and the Lebanese suffered several dozen killed."

Arab and Jewish expulsionist aims

"The war resulted in the creation of some seven hundred thousand Arab refugees.28 In part, this was a product of the expulsionist elements in the ideologies of both sides in the conflict. By 1948, many in the Zionist leadership accepted the idea and necessity of transfer, and this affected events during the war. But this gradual acceptance was in large part a response to the expulsionist ideology and violent praxis of al-Husseini and his followers during the previous two decades.

Both national movements entered the mid-1940s with an expulsionist element in their ideological baggage. Among the Zionists, it was a minor and secondary element, occasionally entertained and enunciated by key leaders, including Ben-Gurion and Chaim Weizmann. But it had not been part of the original Zionist ideology and was usually trotted out in response to expulsionist or terroristic violence by the Arabs. The fact that the Peel Commission in 1937 supported the transfer of Arabs out of the Jewish state-to-be without doubt consolidated the wide acceptance of the idea among the Zionist leaders.

Although, from Theodor Herzl onward, Zionist leaders and proponents had occasionally suggested transfer, only in the mid-1930s and in the early 1940s did Zionist leaders clearly advocate the idea—in response to the Arab Revolt, which killed hundreds of settlers and threatened to destroy the Yishuv, and Nazi anti-Semitism, which threatened to destroy German, and then European, Jewry. The Zionist leaders believed that a safe and relatively spacious haven was an existential necessity for Europe’s hounded Jews, and that this haven could only be found in Palestine—but that to achieve safety and create the necessary space, some or all Palestinian Arabs, given their unremitting belligerence, would have to be transferred. Arab support for a Nazi victory and Haj Amin al-Husseini’s employment by the Nazis in World War II Berlin also played a part in this thinking. Zionist expulsionist thinking was thus at least in part a response to expulsionist, or murderous, thinking and behavior by Arabs and European Christians

Nonetheless, transfer or expulsion was never adopted by the Zionist movement or its main political groupings as official policy at any stage of the movement’s evolution—not even in the 1948 War. No doubt this was due in part to Israelis’ suspicion that the inclusion of support for transfer in their platforms would alienate Western support for Zionism and cause dissension in Zionist ranks. It was also the result of moral scruples

During the 1948 War, which was universally viewed, from the Jewish side, as a war for survival, although there were expulsions and although an atmosphere of what would later be called ethnic cleansing prevailed during critical months, transfer never became a general or declared Zionist policy. Thus, by war’s end, even though much of the country had been “cleansed” of Arabs, other parts of the country—notably central Galilee—were left with substantial Muslim Arab populations, and towns in the heart of the Jewish coastal strip, Haifa and Jaffa, were left with an Arab minority. These Arab communities have since prospered and burgeoned and now constitute about 20 percent of Israel’s citizenry. At the same time, the Arabs who had fled or been driven out of the areas that became Israel were barred by Israeli government decision and policy from returning to their homes and lands."

"In January 1937, for example, in his testimony before the Peel Commission, al-Husseini was asked: “Does his eminence think that this country can assimilate and digest the 400,000 Jews now in the country?”

Al-Husseini: “No.”

Question: “Some of them would have to be removed by a process kindly or painful as the case may be?”

Al-Husseini: “We must leave all this to the future.”

On which the commissioners commented: “We are not questioning the sincerity or the humanity of the Mufti’s intentions . . . but we cannot forget what recently happened, despite treaty provisions and explicit assurances, to the Assyrian [Christian] minority in Iraq; nor can we forget that the hatred of the Arab politician for the [Jewish] National Home has never been concealed and that it has now permeated the Arab population as a whole.”30

Al-Husseini was to remain consistent on this point for the rest of his life. During the war, al-Husseini’s rhetoric was considerably upgraded. In March 1948 he told an interviewer in a Jaffa daily Al Sarih that the Arabs did not intend merely to prevent partition but “would continue fighting until the Zionists were annihilated and the whole of Palestine became a purely Arab state.”31 In 1974, just before his death, he told interviewers: “There is no room for peaceful coexistence with our enemies. The only solution is the liquidation of the foreign conquest in Palestine within its natural frontiers and the establishment of a national Palestinian state on the basis of its Muslim and Christian inhabitants and its Jewish [inhabitants] who lived here before the British conquest in 1917 and their descendants.”32

Haj Amin was nothing if not consistent. In 1938, Ben-Gurion met Musa Husseini in London. Musa Husseini, a relative and supporter of the mufti (he was executed in 1951 by the Jordanians for his part in the assassination of King gAbdullah), told Ben-Gurion that Haj Amin “insists on seven per cent [as the maximal percentage of Jews in the total population of Palestine], as it was at the end of the World War.” In 1938 the Jews constituted 30 percent of the country’s population. How Haj Amin intended to reduce the proportion from 30 to 7 percent Musa Husseini did not explain.33 (It is not without relevance that this objective was replicated in the constitution of the Palestine Liberation Organization [PLO], the Palestine National Charter, formulated in 1964 and revised in 1968. Clause 6 states: “The Jews who had normally resided in Palestine before the beginning of the Zionist invasion will be considered Palestinians.” This “beginning” is defined elsewhere as “1917” or the moment of promulgation of the Balfour Declaration [2 November 1917].)

Such sentiments translated into action in 1948. During the “civil war,” when the opportunity arose, Palestinian militiamen who fought alongside the Arab Legion consistently expelled Jewish inhabitants and razed conquered sites, as happened in the gEtzion Bloc and the Jewish Quarter of Jerusalem’s Old City. Subsequently, the Arab armies behaved in similar fashion. All the Jewish settlements conquered by the invading Jordanian, Syrian, and Egyptian armies—about a dozen in all, including Beit Hagarava, Neve Yagakov, and gAtarot in the Jordanian sector; Masada and Shagar Hagolan in the Syrian sector; and Yad Mordechai, Nitzanim, and Kfar Darom in the Egyptian sector—were razed after their inhabitants had fled or been incarcerated or expelled.

These expulsions by the Arab regular armies stemmed quite naturally from the expulsionist mindset prevailing in the Arab states. The mindset characterized both the public and the ruling elites. All vilified the Yishuv and opposed the existence of a Jewish state on “their” (sacred Islamic) soil, and all sought its extirpation, albeit with varying degrees of bloody-mindedness. Shouts of “Idbah al Yahud” (slaughter the Jews) characterized equally street demonstrations in Jaffa, Cairo, Damascus, and Baghdad both before and during the war and were, in essence, echoed, usually in tamer language, by most Arab leaders...Without doubt, Arab expulsionism fueled Zionist expulsionist thinking during the 1930s and 1940s"

Nakba as a consequence of war and manipulation by Arab states

"As it turned out, it was Palestinian Arab society that was smashed, not the Yishuv. The war created the Palestinian refugee problem. Looking back, Israel’s Foreign Minister Moshe Shertok said, “There are those who say that we uprooted Arabs from their places. But even they will not deny that the source of the problem was the war: had there been no war, the Arabs would not have abandoned their villages, and we would not have expelled them. Had the Arabs from the start accepted the decision of 29 November [1947], a completely different Jewish state would have arisen. . . . In essence the State of Israel would have arisen with a large Arab minority, which would have left its impress on the state, on its manner of governance, and on its economic life, and [this Arab minority] would have constituted an organic part of the state.”36"

"Shertok, of course, was right: the refugee problem was created by the war—which the Arabs had launched (though the Arabs would argue, then and subsequently, that the Zionist influx was, since its beginning, an act of aggression and that the Arab launch of the 1947–1948 war was merely an act of self-defense). And it was that war that propelled most of those displaced out of their houses and into refugeedom. Most fled when their villages and towns came under Jewish attack or out of fear of future attack. They wished to move out of harm’s way. At first, during December 1947–March 1948, it was the middle- and upper-class families who fled, abandoning the towns; later, from April on, after the Yishuv shifted to the offensive, it was the urban and rural masses who fled, in a sense emulating their betters. Most of the displaced likely expected to return to their homes within weeks or months, on the coattails of victorious Arab armies or on the back of a UN decision or Great Power intervention. Few expected that their refugeedom would last a lifetime or encompass their children and grandchildren. But it did

The permanence of the refugee problem owed much to Israel’s almost instant decision, taken in the summer of 1948, not to allow back those who had fled or been expelled. The Zionist national and local leaderships almost instantly understood that a refugee return would destabilize the new state, demographically and politically. And the army understood that a refugee return would introduce a militarily subversive fifth column. Again, it was Shertok who explained: “We are resolute not to allow anyone under any circumstances to return. . . . [At best] the return can only be partial and small; the solution [to the problem] lies in the resettlement of the refugees in other countries.”37

But the Arab states refused to absorb or properly resettle the refugees in their midst. This, too, accounts for the perpetuation of the refugee problem. The Arab states regarded the repatriation of the refugees as an imperative of “justice” and, besides, understood that, in the absence of a return, maintaining the refugees as an embittered, impoverished community would serve their anti-Israeli political and military purposes. As a tool of propaganda, the existence of the refugee communities, many of them in dilapidated “camps,” bit into Israel’s humane image. And the refugees and their descendants provided a ready pool for recruitment of guerrillas and terrorists who could continuously sting the Jewish state. Besides, many refugees refused permanently to resettle in the host countries because it could be seen as, and could promote, an abandonment of the dream of a return. Hence, the Middle East is dotted with large concentrations of Palestinian refugees—so-called camps that, in reality, are suburban slums, on the peripheries of large Arab towns (Beirut, Damascus, Amman, Nablus, and so on)—living on international handouts this past half-century while continuously stoking the Israeli-Arab conflict, one intifada following hard on the heels of its predecessor

The Palestinian Arabs, backed by the wider Arab and Muslim worlds, continue to endorse the refugees’ right of return and demand its implementation. Many Arabs no doubt view the return as a means of undermining Israel’s existence. The Arabs are united in seeing the refugees as a standing reminder of their collective humiliation at the hands of the Yishuv in 1948 and as a token of the “injustice” perpetrated on the Arab world by Israel’s creation (with Western backing). Israel, for its part, has quite logically persisted ever since in resisting the demand for a return, arguing that it would lead instantly, or over time, to its demise. Without doubt, the refugees constitute the most intractable, and explosive, of the problems left by the events of 1948.

The Jewish refugee problem

The war indirectly created a second, major refugee problem. Partly because of the clash of Jewish and Arab arms in Palestine, some five to six hundred thousand Jews who lived in the Arab world emigrated, were intimidated into flight, or were expelled from their native countries, most of them reaching Israel, with a minority resettling in France, Britain, and the other Western countries. The immediate propellants to flight were the popular Arab hostility, including pogroms, triggered by the war in Palestine and specific governmental measures, amounting to institutionalized discrimination against and oppression of the Jewish minority communities."

"The outbreak of hostilities triggered wide-ranging anti-Jewish measures throughout the Arab world, with the pogroms in Aden—where seventy-six Jews were killed and seventy-eight wounded—and Aleppo—where ten synagogues, five schools, and 150 houses were burnt to the ground—only the most prominent. Anti-Semitic outbreaks were reported as far afield as Peshawar, in Pakistan; Meshed-Izet and Isfahan, in Iran; and Bahrain.40 An atmosphere of intimidation and terror against Jews was generated by antiZionist and anti-Semitic propaganda in the generally state-controlled media. Prime Minister Mahmoud Nuqrashi of Egypt explained to the British ambassador: “All Jews were potential Zionists [and] . . . anyhow all Zionists were Communists.”41 From the start of the clashes in Palestine, the Jewish communities were coerced into making large financial “contributions” to the Arab forces.42

In Egypt, the start of the conventional war in mid-May 1948 was accompanied by the promulgation of martial law and the suspension of civil rights, the prevention of Jews from leaving the country, mass detentions (and occasional torture) without charge (the British Jewish Board of Deputies in early June 1948 alleged that “2,500” Jews had been arrested; the Egyptians admitted to about “600”)43 in internment camps,44 and the confiscation of Jewish property. Bomb attacks in the Jewish Quarter of Cairo killed dozens.45 The summer of 1948 was characterized by sporadic street attacks on Jews (and foreigners). The National-Zeitung of Basel reported that “at least 50” persons, “most of them Jews,” were killed in a series of incidents in Egypt during the week of 18–25 July. The mob attacks and knifings, according to the newspaper, were at least partly orchestrated by the government in order to divert popular attention—and anger—away from Egypt’s acceptance of the Second Truce. Cairo, the newspaper reported, “was entirely given over to the terror of the Arab mob . . . which roamed about the streets, howling and screaming gYahudi, Yahudi’ (Jews). Every European-looking person was attacked. . . . The worst scenes passed off in the Jewish Quarter, where the mob moved from house to house . . . killing hundreds of Jews.”46 On 23 September a bomb exploded in the Jewish Quarter, killing twentynine people, “mostly Jews.”47

Jews were arrested (the Iraqi government admitted to “276” Jews detained and “1,188” non-Jews),48 and Jewish property was arbitrarily confiscated. Jewish students were banned from high schools and universities. Some fifteen hundred Jews were dismissed from government positions, the Iraqi Ministry of Health refused to renew the licenses of Jewish physicians or issue new ones, Jewish merchants’ import and export licenses were canceled, and various economic sanctions were imposed on the Jewish community.49 In January 1949, Prime Minister Nuri Sa’id threatened “that all Iraqi Jews would be expelled if the Israelis did not allow the Arab refugees to return to Palestine.”50 A new “wave of persecution” was unleashed against the 125,000-strong community in early October 1949, with about two thousand being packed off to jails and “concentration camps” and vast amounts of money being extorted in fines on various pretexts.51 But the Iraqi government kept a tight leash on the “street.”"

"Elsewhere in the Arab world, mobs were given their head. In April 1948, Arabs ransacked Jewish property and attacked Jews in Beirut,52 and in June, a mob rampaged in British-administered Tripoli, Libya, killing thirteen.53 That month, in Oujda and Djerada, in French-ruled Morocco, Arab mobs killed dozens of Jews, including some twenty women and children.54 Because of this atmosphere of intimidation and violence and oppressive governmental measures—though also because of the “pull” of Zionism (which before 1948 and the establishment of the State of Israel had had little purchase among the Jews of the Islamic world) and Zionist “missionary” efforts—the Jewish communities in the Arab world were propelled into emigration.

The first to leave were Yemen’s Jews, the only Oriental Jewish community with a tradition of (religious) Zionism. (About sixteen thousand Yemeni Jews had emigrated to Palestine in the decades before 1948.) Between May 1949 and August 1950, some forty-three thousand of the forty-five-thousand-strong community packed their bags and trekked to Aden, from where they were airlifted, in Operation Magic Carpet, to Israel. In 1968 there were only two hundred Jews left in Yemen

Iraq’s Jews—a relatively prosperous and well-educated community—began leaving in 1948, even though emigration was illegal. By early 1950, thousands had crossed the border into Iran. In March 1950, the Iraqi government legalized emigration, though the departees had to forfeit their citizenship and property. Between May 1950 and August 1951, the Israeli authorities, assisted by international welfare organizations, airlifted the remaining eighty to ninety thousand Iraqi Jews to Israel. A small number of Iraqi Jews eventually settled in Britain and Brazil.

Four-fifths of Egypt’s sixty-five thousand Jews were not Egyptian citizens (they held assorted European passports). About twenty-five thousand left in 1948–1950. The bulk of the remainder left under duress or were deported, with their property confiscated, in 1955–1957, immediately before and after the Sinai-Suez War. By 1970, only about a thousand remained. These, too, subsequently departed.

Most of Syria’s fifteen thousand Jews left, illegally, in the wake of the Aleppo pogrom of December 1947 and the declaration of Israeli statehood in May 1948. Palestinian refugees were often installed in their former homes in Damascus and Aleppo. The remainder trickled out during the following decades, as Syria intermittently allowed emigration. All forfeited their property.

The bulk of Libya’s forty thousand Jews left the country in 1949–1951, mostly for Israel. Most of Morocco’s, Algeria’s, and Tunisia’s Jews left in the mid-1950s and the 1960s. Apparently, despite the Moroccan pogroms of June 1948, these communities felt relatively safe under French rule. In Morocco, which had the largest of the Maghrebi communities, the sultan, Muhammad V, also afforded the Jews protection. But with the onset of independence, almost all of Morocco’s Jews moved to Israel; the elite immigrated to France. A pogrom in Mazagan (El Jadida), near Casablanca, in which eight Jews died and forty houses were torched in August 1955, acted as an important precipitant. Around sixty thousand—of the community’s pre1948 total of about three hundred thousand—left in 1955–1956. A second major wave followed hard on the heels of Muhammad V’s death in 1961. Today Morocco’s approximately four thousand Jews are the largest Jewish community in the Arab world."

"The experience of discrimination and persecution in the Arab world, and the centuries of subjection and humiliation that preceded 1948, had left the emigrant Sephardi communities with a deep dislike, indeed hatred, of that world, which, in the internal Israeli political realm, translated into Arabophobia and hard-line, right-wing voting patterns, both among the first generation of émigrés and among their descendents. This, too, was an indirect by-product of the 1948 War. Israel’s leaders, already in 1948, by way of rebuffing Arab efforts to achieve repatriation of the Palestinian refugees, pointed out that what had taken place was a double exodus, or an unplanned “exchange of population,” more or less of equal numbers, with a similar massive loss of property affecting both the Palestinian refugees and the Jewish refugees from Arab lands. These canceled each other out, went the argument, in both humanitarian and economic terms. The Israeli leaders usually added that the Palestinian refugees had brought their demise on themselves by initiating the war on their Jewish neighbors, which resulted in their dispossession and exile, whereas the Jews of the Arab lands had by and large done nothing to offend or aggress and had nonetheless been driven out. And one last difference: the Jewish refugee problem quickly disappeared as Israel absorbed them; the Palestinian refugee problem persisted (and persists), as the Arab states largely failed to absorb their refugees, leaving many of them stateless and languishing in refugee camps and living on international charity"

Unreasonableness of Arab street

"It can be—and has been—argued that with all three countries, but especially with Jordan, Israel could and should have been more forthcoming and that had it assented to the concessions demanded, peace could have been reached and concluded. I have my doubts. Would the gulema of Al-Azhar University have agreed? Would the “street” have acquiesced? Would gAbdullah’s fellow leaders have resigned themselves to such a breaking of ranks? Given the atmosphere prevailing in the postwar Arab world, it seems unlikely that any leader could have signed and delivered real, lasting peace, whatever concessions Israel made. The antagonism toward a Jewish state, of any size, was deep and consensual; peace with Israel was seen as treasonous. And the only Arab leader who had seriously conducted peace negotiations was, in fact, murdered (King gAbdullah in 1951)—as, in fact, was the next Arab leader who dared (President Anwar Sadat of Egypt in 1981).

In addition, a question arises about the reasonableness, justice, and logic of the concessions Israel was being asked to make. After all, the Arab states had attacked Israel, collectively aiming at Israel’s destruction or, at the least, truncation. They had failed. But in the process, they had caused grievous losses and destruction to the new state, which was minute by any standards, even with the additional territory won in the war (some two thousand square miles were then added to the six thousand square miles originally allocated for Jewish statehood in the UN partition resolution). And many Arab leaders continued during the following years to speak quite openly of a necessary “second round” and of uprooting the “Zionist entity.” Was it reasonable to expect Israel to make major concessions to its would-be destroyers? Would any leader, anywhere, but especially in the semiarid Middle East, have been prepared to give up half of his country’s major water resources (the Sea of Galilee and Jordan River) or a large part of its territory (the Negev) in exchange for assurances of peace? Who would have guaranteed the Arabs’ continued adherence to their peaceful undertakings after they had swallowed the Israeli concessions?"

Lausanne Conference

"But by April 1949, they had achieved nothing. They decided on a giant gamble: they convoked a full- scale peace conference at Lausanne, Switzerland. The Arabs refused to meet with the Israelis, and made any progress on the major issues—borders, recognition, Jerusalem—contingent on Tel Aviv’s agreement to full-scale refugee repatriation. The Arabs also demanded that Israel accept the November 1947 partition borders as the basis for negotiation. Israel refused. A belated Israeli offer, in July, to take back one hundred thousand refugees (actually sixty-five thousand plus those who had already illegally or legally returned to Israeli territory) if the Arab states agreed to settle the rest on their territory, was rejected out of hand. Israel, for its part, turned down an American proposal that it take in about 250,000 refugees. Nothing happened, and in September the delegations went home. The next bout of serious Israeli-Arab peace-making occurred almost thirty years later, after Sadat’s astonishing visit to Jerusalem in November 1977."

Arab assassinations

"He was pretty close. A string of assassinations were directly or indirectly linked to the war. Egyptian prime minister Nuqrashi was killed by Muslim Brotherhood gunmen on 28 December 1948 while his troops were still battling the IDF in eastern Sinai. Riad al-Sulh, the Lebanese prime minister, was murdered in Amman more than a year later; and, of course, King gAbdullah was assassinated in 1951"

Refusal of Arab world to accept Israel

"But the dimensions of the success had given birth to reflexive Arab nonacceptance and powerful revanchist urges. The Jewish state had arisen at the heart of the Muslim Arab world—and that world could not abide it. Peace treaties may eventually have been signed by Egypt and Jordan; but the Arab world—the man in the street, the intellectual in his perch, the soldier in his dugout—refused to recognize or accept what had come to pass. It was a cosmic injustice. And there would be plenty of Arabs, by habit accustomed to think in the long term and egged on by the ever-aggrieved Palestinians, who would never acquiesce in the new Middle Eastern order. Whether 1948 was a passing fancy or has permanently etched the region remains to be seen."