1948 The First Arab-Israeli War

![[Prof. Benny Morris - 1948_ A History of the First Arab-Israeli War-Yale University Press (2008).pdf]]

Palestine was never recognised as an independent region under Ottoman Rule - Page 2

"But neither before the twelth-century defeat of the crusaders at the hands of the Muslim general Saladin nor after it was Palestine administered or recognised as a distinct and seperate province by any of its muslim rulers. The Ottoman Empire, which controlled the area from the early sixteenth century, divided Palestine into two or three subdistricts (sanjaks) that were ruled from the provincial capital of Damascus. From the 1860's, the southern half of Palestine, from a line just north of Jaffa and Jerusalem southward, was constituted as an independent sanjak (or mustasaraflik) and ruled from Istanbul, while the northern parts of the country, the sanjaks of Nablus and Acre were ruled from the provincial capitals of Damascus and, from the 1880's Beirut."

Palestinians were considered Arabs - Page 5

"For most of Palestine's impoverished, illiterate inhabitants at the end of the nineteenth century, "nationalism" was an alien, meaningless concept. They identified themselves simultaneously as subjects of the (multinational) Ottoman Empire and as part of the (multinational) community of Islam; as Arabs, in terms of geography, culture, and language; as inhabitants of this or that region and village o a vaguely defined Palestine; and as members of this or that clan or family. There was no Arab national movement and not even a hint, in 1881, of a separate Palestinian Arab nationalism."

Opposition began early - Page 6

"Indeed, by 1899 the Mufti of Jerusalem, Taher al-husseini, was proposing that all Jews who had settled the country after 1891 be harrassed into leaving or expelled."

They acknowleged the right to the land of the Jews - Page 6

"In this sense, Yusuf Dia al-Khalidi, Jerusalems Mayor, was highly unusual. In a letter to Zadok Kahn, the chief rabbi of France, he wrote that the Zionist idea was , in theory, "natural, fine and just... Who can challenge the rights of the Jews to Palestine? Good Lord, historically it is really your country."

King Faisal endorsed Zionism - Page 10

"Moreover, the primary agents of Arab independence during the war, the Hashemite leaders of the desert revolt, appeared not to be averse to Jewish rule over Palestine. When Weizmann met Faisal...in 1918, the two men got on famously - and Faisal, interest in Zionist support for Hashemite ambitions, endorsed Zionist colonisation of Palestine."

Arab nationalists not united - Page 12-13

"Palestines Arabs exhibited little "national" solidarity, neither in 1920 nor in 1947. In the years between, few Palestinians proved eager, or even willing, to sacrifice life or purse for the national cause...Muslims suspected Christians of collaborating with the "enemy" and secretly hoping for continued (Christian) British rule or even Zionist victory. The suspicions were expressed in slogans, popular during the revolt, such as "After saturday, Sunday" - that is, that the muslims would take care of the Christians after they had "sorted out" the Jews. This probably further alienated the Christians from Muslims political aspirations, though many, to be sure, kept up nationalist appearances. "The Christians had participated in the 1936-1937 disturbances under duress and out of fear of the Muslims. The Christian's hearts now and generally are not with the rioting," reported the Haganah Intelligence Service (HIS). A Haganah list from the mid-1940s of Arabs with a "tendency to cooperation with the Jews" included "many...Christians" but few muslims.

Arabs more than willing to sell land - Page 14

"Throughout the Mandate, the leading Arab families, including Husseinis and Opposition figures, sold land to the Zionists, despite their nationalist professions. Jewish landholding increased between 1920 and 1947 from about 456,000 dunams to about 1.4 million dunams. The main brake on Jewish land purchases, at least during the 1920's and 1930's, was lack of funds, not any Arab indisposition to sell"

Arabs preferred to be poor than allow a Jewish state which develops the economy - Page 15

"Ben-Gurion argued that the Jewish influx would better the condition of the Arabs as well as the Jews. Musa al-'Alami, a leading Palestinian moderate and assistant Mandate attorney general, countered: "I would prefer that the country remain impoverished and barren for another hundred years, until we ourselves are able to develop it on our own."'"

Jews developed economically and devloped democratic institutions - Page 15-16

"The net domestic product of the Palestine Arab community in 1922 had been 6.6 million pounds sterling; in 1947 it was 32.3 million. During the same period, the Yishuv's had rocketed from 1.7 million pounds sterling to 38.5 million. The net product of the Jewish community in the manufacturing sector had jumped from 491,000 pounds sterling in 1922 to 31 million in 1947 (the Palestinian Arab equivalent was 539,000 pounds sterling to 6.7 million in 1945).

...Perhaps most significantly, the Jews managed to forge internal, democractic governing institutions, which in 1947-1948 converted more or less smoothly into the agencies of the new state of Israel...In 1925 - with a population of about 150,000 - the Jews established their first university,, the Hebrew university of Jerusalem. By comparison, Palestine's Arabs established universities (in the west bank and the gaza strip) only in the 1970's (ironically, while under Israeli military occupation)."

Population transfer recognised as legitimate strategy by Jews, Arabs, and Brits in Peel Commission meetings - Page 18-19

"Interestingly, senior British officials and Arab leaders, including Emir 'Abdullah and Nuri Sa'id, Iraq's premier politician, (the same Nuri Sa'id who in July 1939 called for the destruction of Zionism), shared this view. All understood that for a partition settlement to work and last, the emergent Jewish state would have to be ridded of its large and potentially or actively hostile Arab minority. As 'Abdullah's Prime Minister, Ibrahim Pasha Hashim, put it in 1946: "The only just and permanent solution lay in absolute partition with an exchange of populations; to leave the Jews in an Arab state or Arabs in a Jewish state would lead inevitably to further trouble between the two peoples"

Arabs reject 1939 white paper, despite promise of independent state and limit of Jewish immigration - Page 20

"Simply put, London sought to appease the Arabs to assure quiet in the Middle East...In May 1939 Whitehall issued a new paper. It promised Palestine's inhabitants statehood and independence within ten years; severely curtailed Jewish immigration, limiting it to fifteen thousand entry certificates per year for five years, with all further Jewish immigration conditional on Arab approval...and significantly limited Jewish land purchase.

...The Palestinian street was overjoyed. But al-Husseini - as was the Palestinian's wont - managed to pluck defeat from the jaws of victory. Instead of welcoming the British move...al-Husseini and his colleagues rejected the white paper. They flatly demanded full cessation of Jewish immigration, immediate British withdrawal, and immediate independence."

Arab public opinion in favour of Nazi's - Page 21

"One of the first public opinion polls in Palestine, conducted by al-Sakini's son, Sari Sakakini, on behalf of the American consulate in Jerusalem, in February 1941 found that 88 percent of the Palestinian Arabs favored Germany and only 9 percent Britain."

Truman did not support Jews - Page 25

"In 1944, Truman had pointedly declined to support his party's pro-zionist platform. And he reportedly told his cabinet in July 1946 that he had "no use for them (the Jews) and didn't care what happened to them.""

Arabs manipulation Palestinian cause - Page 27

"The establishment of the Arab League at once strengthened the Palestinian cause and weakened the voice of Palestinian nationalism. On one hand, the Arab states collectively weighed in behind Palestinian Arab demands. But at the same time, the pact gave the member states the right to select who would represent the Palestinian Arabs in their councils, so long as Palestine was not independent. Couple with the continued factional deadlock within Arab Palestine, this assured, in the words of one historian, that "the initiative in Palestine Arab politics thus passed to the heads of the Arab states" and "major political decisions on the organisation of Arab resistance to Zionism were thereafter taken not at Jerusalem but at Cairo"

Number of soldiers in Haganah - Page 28

"...in mid 1942, SIME, the Middle Eastern arm of Britain's Secret Intelligence Service, MI6, had estimated, fairly accurately, that the Haganah had thirty thousand members, with arms for 50-70 percent of them. The IZL could field another thousand trained men, with several thousand supporters."

Irgun and Stern Gang revolts - Page 29-30

"The LHI...continued to view the British, not the Germans, as the Jewish people's main enemy; it was the British who were preventing Jews from escaping Europe, reaching Palestine, and attaining independence."

"The LHI's minute size, Haganah and IZL tip-offs, and effective British clampdowns saw to that. LHI operations were limited almost completely to thefts of weaponry and bank robberies. In one payroll heist, in January 1942, LHI gunmen shot dead two Histadrut officials."

"The mainstream Zionist leadership and press roundly condemned the dissidents' attacks. The Irgun members were labeled "misguided terrorists," "young fanatics crazed by the sufferings of their people into believing that destruction will bring healing." Under Zionist mainstream pressure, the LHI suspended its attacks in November 1944"

"The Haganah declared an "open hunting season" against the IZL, and Haganah intelligence and Palmah teams systematically assaulted and incarcerated IZL members, confiscated their weapons caches, and occasionally handed them or their names and addresses to the British."

Anglo-American Committee - Page 33-34

"The committee found that the displaced Jews in Poland lived in an "atmosphere of terror," with "Pogroms...an everyday occurence." (Indeed some fifteen hundred Jews were slaughtered by anti-Semitic Poles in the year following the end of World War II.)"

"At Riyadh, King Ibn Sa'ud told them: "The Jews are our enemies everywhere. Wherever they are found, they intrigue and work against us...We drove the Romans out of Palestine...How, after all this sacrifice, would a merchant (that is, Jew) come and take Palestine out of our hands for money?"

"The contrary realities of Zionist and Arab existence left an abiding impression. After visiting Kibbutz Mishmar Ha'emek, at the western edge of the Jezreel Valley, Crossman wrote: "I've never met a nicer community anywhere." By contrast, two hundred yards down the road, he later reported, was "the stenchiest Arab village I have ever seen."

"And Aydelotte later wrote: "I left Washington pretty strongly anti-Zionist...but when you see at first hand what these Jews have done in Palestine...the greatest creative effort in the modern world. The Arabs are not equal to anything like it and would destroy all that the Jews have done... This we must not let them do."

"The Arabs rejected everything. They demanded immediate independence for an Arab-ruled Palestine, not "binationalism," whatever that might mean, and called for an immediate cessation of immigration. One Foreign Office cable, in the wake of the report, spoke of Arab hatred of Jews as being greater than that of the Nazis...In a follow-up interview with British High Commissioner Sir Alan Cunningham, Husseini declared his willingness "to die" for the cause. When Cunningham responded that this didn't really trouble him and that what worried him was the welfare of "the ordinary Arab population," Husseini rejoined that "they were prepared to die too."

"At least one Baghdad newspaper called for Jihad: "The Arabs must proclaim a crusade to save the Holy Land from western gangs which understands only the language of force." Another called on the Arabs to "annihilate all European Jews in Palestine."

Terrorism - Page 39

"In a repeat of the “whipping” cycle (when the IZL had flogged a British officer after the British had flogged several IZL men), on 12 July the IZL abducted two British sergeants and threatened to hang them if the British hanged the IZL men. The British—despite a widespread dragnet and Haganah help—failed to locate the sergeants and went ahead with the hangings, on 29 July. The IZL hanged the sergeants the next day—and boobytrapped their bodies. A British captain was injured when they were cut down."

UNSCOP and partition - Page 41-72

"In general, foreign observers noted the relatively uneven quality of UNSCOP’s composition and the members’ relative unpreparedness for their mission, in terms of prior experience in similar positions, language skills, and knowledge about the Middle East. The brilliant American academic and diplomat Ralph Bunche, a member of UNSCOP’s secretariat, privately remarked that this was “just about the worst group I have ever had to work with. If they do a good job it will be a real miracle.”"

"The AHC announced its intention to boycott UNSCOP and failed completely to prepare for its visit. Palestine’s Arabs greeted UNSCOP with a one-day general strike. The AHC charged that UNSCOP was “pro-Zionist” and accompanied the committee’s deliberations with uncompromising radio broadcasts (“all of Palestine must be Arab”). Opposition figures were warned that they would pay with their lives if they spoke to UNSCOP."

"The committee first toured the country, visiting towns and villages. As had happened with the AAC, the face-to-face encounters in the settlements and villages were persuasive. The members were warmly welcomed by their Jewish hosts, often with flowers and cheering crowds, and the Jewish Agency made sure that they met with settlers who spoke their languages (Swedish, Spanish, Persian, and so on). The Arabs, in contrast, displayed sourness, suspicion, or aggressiveness"

"Everywhere the Arabs refused to answer the committee’s questions: in a school in Beersheba, the teachers continued with their lessons when UNSCOP entered the classrooms, and the pupils were instructed not to look at the visitors; in the Galilee village of Rama, the inhabitants evacuated the village, and UNSCOP was “greeted only by a delegation of children who . . . cursed them.”19 The committee was impressed by the cleanliness and development in the Jewish areas and, conversely, by the dirt and backwardness of the Arab villages and towns. They were particularly horrified at the (common) sight of child labor and exploitation in Arab factories and workshops.20 By contrast, the Jewish settlements struck the committee as “European, modern, dynamic . . . a state in the making”;21 the Jews palpably were making the desert bloom.22 As the Persian member, Entezam, was overheard (by a Persian-speaking HIS agent) telling his deputy: “What asses these Arabs are. The country is so beautiful and, if it were given to the Jews, it could be developed and turned into Europe.”23 UNSCOP’s members may have felt that the Zionists often indulged in overkill, but the message proved effective."

"Weizmann from the first played the “good cop,” focusing on past Jewish suffering, present Zionist moderation, and the future benefits of Zionism for all the Middle East. He posited partition, with the Jews receiving the Galilee, the Coastal Plain, and the Negev. He seems to have been instrumental in persuading UNSCOP to support this solution."

"On 23 July, at Sofar, the Arab representatives completed their testimony before UNSCOP. Faranjieh, speaking for the Arab League, said that Jews “illegally” in Palestine would be expelled and that the future of many of those “legally” in the country but without Palestine citizenship would need to be resolved “by the future Arab government.” UNSCOP tried to get other Arab representatives to soften or elucidate this answer but got nowhere— which led Mohn to conclude in his memoirs that “there is nothing more extreme than meeting all the representatives of the Arab world in one group . . . when each one tries to show that he is more extreme than the other.”"

"During the first year of independence the inhabitants of each state desiring to move to its neighbor would be free to do so. As it stood, the Jewish state, according to UNSCOP, was to have half a million Jews and 416,000 Arabs, along with some ninety thousand bedouins who were not counted as permanent residents.57 The corpus separatum of Jerusalem-Bethlehem was to have a population of two hundred thousand, half Jewish and half Arab. The Arab state was to have some seven hundred thousand Arabs and eight thousand Jews. The proposed arrangement was described as the “most realistic and practical” possible."

"The UNSCOP majority arrived at their recommendations mainly because they could see no better alternative.59 The Zionists saw things more positively. They regarded the majority recommendations as a “giant achievement” or, in Ben-Gurion’s words, “the beginning, indeed more than the beginning, of [our] salvation.”60 The Arab reaction was just as predictable: “The blood will flow like rivers in the Middle East,” promised Jamal Husseini. Haj Amin al-Husseini went one better: he denounced also the minority report, which, in his view, legitimized the Jewish foothold in Palestine, a “partition in disguise,” as he put it. The Arab states, too, expressed dismay and negativity concerning the majority recommendations; “No Arab Government,” Lebanese prime minister Riad al-Sulh told a British diplomat, “would dare to accept recommendations of U.N.S.C.O.P. Public opinion was now highly incensed and the Government[s] were forced to take some action . . . or be swept away.”61 According to Musa al-gAlami, the Arab population of Palestine would rise up against both the majority and minority reports."

"It was Subcommittee One that translated the UNSCOP majority recommendations into the proposals that were approved by the General Assembly, as Resolution 181, on 29 November 1947. The prospective minorities in each state posed a major problem. The Zionists feared that the Arab minority would prefer, rather than move to the Arab state, to accept the citizenship of the Jewish state. And “we are interested in less Arabs who will be citizens of the Jewish state,” said Golda Myerson (Meir), acting head of the Jewish Agency Political Department. Yitzhak Gruenbaum, a member of the Jewish Agency Executive and head of its Labor Department, thought that Arabs who remained in the Jewish state but were citizens of the Arab state would constitute “a permanent irredenta.” Ben-Gurion thought that the Arabs remaining in the Jewish state, whether citizens of the Arab or Jewish state, would constitute an irredenta—and in the event of war, they would become a “Fifth Column.” If they are citizens of the Arab state, argued Ben-Gurion, “[we] would be able to expel them,” but if they were citizens of the Jewish state, “we will be able only to jail them. And it is better to expel them than jail them.”"

"The British and the State Department made vigorous efforts to consign the Negev—which the UNSCOP majority had earmarked for the Jews—to Arab sovereignty. The personal intervention of Weizmann with Truman, on 19 November, was required—as well, perhaps, as Truman’s perception that the Negev represented for the Jews what “the Frontier” had represented for the Americans a century before78—to save the bulk of the desert for the Jews,79 though they had to give up Beersheba and a strip of territory along the Sinai-Negev border. In addition, Jaffa was removed from the prospective Jewish state and awarded to the Arabs as a sovereign enclave"

"Britain itself decided to abstain117—and indeed, in the final days before the vote instructed its diplomats to refrain from influencing other countries one way or another. But without doubt British diplomats around the globe, and especially in New York, “privately” advised various countries on the best course of action."

"The key, of course, was in Washington. Early on, Zionist officials commented, “Everything depends upon which way they decide to turn it.”124 Or, as AHC representative Jamal Husseini put it: “America is our greatest enemy.”125 But Washington’s behavior, until the final seventy-two hours, was “never satisfactory” and “at times [downright] disheartening,” reported one Zionist official. The Americans had waited weeks before publicly endorsing the UNSCOP majority report and in the Ad Hoc subcommittees “were the delegation most insistent on changes to our detriment.” At the General Assembly, the American refusal to pressure other countries “did us great damage.” The climax of this “policy of indifference” was on 26 November, when Greece, the Philippines, and Haiti, all “completely dependent on Washington—suddenly came out one after another against its declared policy.” It was only then, after frantic Jewish lobbying, that Washington “exerted itself to rally support and the situation improved. . . . It was only in the last 48 hours . . . that we really got the full backing of the United States.”"

"1 Down to 25 November, the Americans declined to twist arms. Part of the explanation is that almost all the relevant State Department officials were either critical of or opposed partition. But it was also a matter of policy. As late as 24 November, Truman instructed Lovett not “to use threats or improper pressure of any kind on other Delegations to vote for the majority report.”1"

"But following the Ad Hoc Committee vote of 25 November, the Zionist officials became desperate. Only a direct order from Truman, it was understood, could move the State Department—its officials in Washington and New York and its diplomats abroad—to exert real pressure. Weizmann, the Zionist big gun, was wheeled out. Twice he cabled Truman that he was beset by “grave anxiety lest [the partition] plan fail” to obtain the two-thirds majority and he reminded the president of his past “assurances” that the United States would “rally necessary support for UN endorsement partition plan.” Specifically, he asked Truman to see what could be done about “France, China, Greece, Turkey, India, Siam, Philippines, Liberia, Ethiopia, Mexico, Cuba, Honduras, Nicaragua, Haiti, Paraguay, Colombia, El Salvador, Ecuador.” Without at least some of these states, the resolution would not pass, he warned.135 Weizmann also appealed directly to Secretary of State Marshall.136 Weizmann’s intervention was probably a major contributor to the lastminute policy switch in Washington. In addition, the White House and various officials were bombarded with “letters, telegrams and telephone calls” from the American public.137 Truman later recalled that he had never been subjected to “as much pressure and propaganda . . . as I had in this instance”;138 it had all left him “very upset.”1"

"But the Arabs had failed to understand the tremendous impact of the Holocaust on the international community—and, in any event, appear to have used the selfsame methods, but with poor results. Wasif Kamal, an AHC official, for example, offered one delegate—perhaps the Russian—a “huge, huge sum of money to vote for the Arabs” (the Russian declined, saying, “You want me to hang myself?”).145 But the Arabs’ main tactic, amounting to blackmail, was the promise or threat of war should the assembly endorse partition. As early as mid-August 1947, Fawzi al-Qawuqji—soon to be named the head of the Arab League’s volunteer army in Palestine, the Arab Liberation Army (ALA)—threatened that, should the vote go the wrong way, “we will have to initiate total war. We will murder, wreck and ruin everything standing in our way, be it English, American or Jewish.”146 It would be a “holy war,” the Arabs suggested, which might even evolve into “World War III.”"

"The League demanded independence for Palestine as a “unitary” state, with an Arab majority and minority rights for the Jews. The AHC went one better and insisted that the proportion of Jews to Arabs in the unitary state should stand at one to six, meaning that only Jews who lived in Palestine before the British Mandate be eligible for citizenship.171"

"At Inshas and Bludan, as in the get-togethers that were to follow, the Arab leaders were driven by internal and interstate considerations as well as by a genuine concern for the fate of Palestine. All the regimes, none of them elected, suffered from a sense of illegitimacy and, hence, vulnerability. All the leaders, or almost all (Jordan’s gAbdullah was the sole exception), lived in perpetual fear of the “street,” which could be aroused against them by opposition parties, agitators, or fellow leaders, claiming that they were “selling out” Palestine. As Shertok quoted the Syrian UN delegate Faris al-Khouri as saying in October 1947, the Arab states know they “may be heading for a disaster but they have no choice. They are committed up to the hilt vis-à-vis their own public. The position of all these governments was very weak. They were all tottering; they were all unpopular.” They had no choice but to adopt a “firm, unequivocal, uncompromising attitude” on Palestine.172"

"The interstate feuding was in large measure fuelled by expansionist ambitions and real or imagined fears of others’ expansionist ambitions. Throughout his reign, Prince, later King, gAbdullah had sought to establish a “Greater Syria” (comprising today’s Israel–Palestine, Lebanon, Syria, and Jordan) under his aegis. The heads of the newborn Republic of Syria also hoped to establish a similarly contoured “Greater Syria”—but ruled from Damascus. The Lebanese Christians lived in perpetual fear of a Muslim, and Syrian, takeover (as, in fact, gradually occurred after summer 1976). gAbdullah (and the Hashemite royal house of Iraq) also harbored a deep-seated grudge, and expansionist ambitions, vis-à-vis King Ibn Sagud, who had supplanted the Hashemites in Hijaz. Moreover, gAbdullah often talked of “uniting” Jordan and Iraq (again, under his tutelage). For their part, the Saudis regarded Jordan covetously, as did the Egyptians Sudan and, occasionally, southern Palestine."

"All the Arab leaders distrusted and, in some cases (notably King gAbdullah), hated AHC leader Haj Amin al-Husseini and opposed the establishment of an al-Husseini-led Palestinian Arab state; al-Husseini was seen as an inveterate liar and schemer. The mufti, for his part, reciprocated gAbdullah’s feelings and distrusted the other Arab leaders, suspecting them of seeking to partition Palestine among themselves."

"In another secret decision, the committee instructed the League’s members “to open the gates . . . to receive children, women and old people [from Palestine] and to support them in the event of disturbances breaking out in Palestine and compelling some of its Arab population to leave the country.”177 The Political Committee’s decisions were then endorsed by the Arab heads of state, meeting as the League Council, at Aley, in Lebanon, in the second week of October. (The idea of a mass evacuation from Palestine may already have been doing the rounds among Arab decision-makers more than a year before. gAzzam reportedly [or mis-reportedly] declared in May 1946 that “Arab circles proposed to evacuate all Arab women and children from Palestine and send them to neighbouring countries, to declare ‘Jehad’ and to consider Palestine a war zone.”)178"

"Meanwhile, the Military Committee, consisting of representatives of Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, and the AHC, began functioning under the chairmanship of Ismail Safwat...He recommended that the Arab states immediately mobilize, equip, and train volunteers, deploy forces along Palestine’s borders, and set up a “general Arab command” that would control all the Arab military forces inside and around Palestine; supply the Palestinian Arabs, as a first stage, with “no less than 10,000 rifles,” and machine guns and grenades; and give the Military Committee one million pounds and provide it with officers and noncommissioned officers who could train the volunteers. He also recommended that the Arab states purchase additional weapons for the forces that would be engaged in Palestine.180"

"ple wish to conquer and displace.”198 In some Arab states, the regimes—while issuing inflammatory statements—kept the mobs in check. But where the reins were loosed, or where the police joined the rioters, there was bloody mayhem. In pogroms in British-ruled Aden and the Sheikh Othman refugee camp outside the city, seventy-five Jews were murdered, seventy-eight were wounded, and dozens of homes, shops, and synagogues and two schools were torched during 2–4 December by Arabs and local Yemeni levies before British troops restored order.199 Dozens of Jewish homes and a synagogue were also destroyed or looted, one woman was killed, and sixty-seven Jews were injured in rioting on 2 December in Bahrain.200 In Aleppo, Syria, there was widespread antiJewish rioting on 30 November and 1 December, with dozens of houses, including the town’s synagogues and Jewish schools, being torched. It is unclear how many Jews, if any, were injured or killed;201 three thousand reportedly fled to Beirut.202 In Damascus, Jews were set upon, as were nationals of Western states identified with the UN decision.203 In Egypt, mobs torched the British Institute in Zagazig and attacked the British consulate general and Anglican cathedral in Cairo.204"

"6 The clear-eyed prime minister of Lebanon, Riad al-Sulh, reportedly “very depressed,” told British diplomats that “public opinion in Arab countries was so strong that it would be impossible for any Government to prevent volunteers coming to assist the Arabs [in Palestine] once serious fighting had begun.”207 The Egyptian foreign minister, Khashaba Pasha, said the same—but added, perhaps with a touch of humor, that the “elements who would volunteer [for Palestine] were those among whom excitability was greatest and it was better for the sake of law and order in Egypt that they should be out of the country.”2"

"In the end, the Arab League proved unable to agree on a clear goal for the unofficial war or to define a strategy by which it might be won. Instead, the leaders decided on something more modest. The League vowed, in very general language, “to try to stymie the partition plan and prevent the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine,”"

"British observers commented that although some Arab leaders were eager to avoid conflict, “popular feeling” was such that they were “convinced, probably with considerable justification, that if they accepted [a compromise] solution, their positions, and possibly in some cases their lives, would be most insecure.”"

First stage of the Civil War - Page 76-81

Partition is passed

"Ben-Gurion, was also gloomy, but for another reason: “I could not dance, I could not sing that night. I looked at them so happy dancing and I could only think that they were all going to war.”"

"In describing the first, civil war half of the war, it is necessary to take account of three important facts. One, most of the fighting between November 1947 and mid-May 1948 occurred in the areas earmarked for Jewish statehood (the main exception being Jerusalem, earmarked for international control, and the largely Arab-populated “Corridor” to it from Tel Aviv) and where the Jews enjoyed demographic superiority...Two, the Jewish and Arab communities in western and northern Palestine were thoroughly intermingled...And three, the civil war took place while Britain ruled the country and while its military forces were deployed in the various regions. The British willingness and ability to intervene in the hostilities progressively diminished as their withdrawal progressed, and by the second half of April 1948 they rarely interfered, except to secure their withdrawal routes. Nonetheless, throughout the civil war, the belligerents had to take account of the British presence and their possible reaction to any initiative. Down to mid-April, this presence seriously affected both Arab and Jewish war-making"

"Through the war, each side accused the British of favoring the other. But in fact, British policy—as emanating both from Whitehall and from Jerusalem, the seat of the high commissioner—was one of strict impartiality, generally expressed in nonintervention in favor of either side while trying to maintain law and order until the end of the Mandate. Both Whitehall and Jerusalem were eager to keep British casualties down. But at the same time Whitehall was bent on quitting Palestine with as little loss to its power and prestige in the Middle East as possible"

"The military’s guidelines were explicit: “Our forces would take no action except such as was directed towards their own withdrawal and the withdrawal of our stores; i.e., they would not be responsible for maintaining law and order (except as necessary for their own protection).”"

"Cunningham put it this way: “It is our intention to be as impartial as is humanly possible. . . . [But] we wish to protect the law-abiding citizen.”15 This meant that the British would try to protect those attacked."

"British military interventions down to mid-March 1948 tended to work to the Yishuv’s advantage since during the war’s first four months the Arabs were generally on the offensive and the Jews were usually on the defensive. British columns repeatedly intervened on the side of attacked Jewish settlements and convoys. And the British regularly supplied escorts to Jewish convoys in troubled areas, such as the road to Jerusalem. This led to Arab accusations that the British were pro-Zionist. But strategically speaking, during this period the massive British military presence and Haganah suspicions that the British in fact favored the Arabs— “there is a sort of secret coalition between gAzzam Pasha and Bevin,” said Ben-Gurion17—tended to inhibit Haganah operations. The Haganah could not contemplate large-scale operations, of which it became growingly capable as the war advanced, or conquest of Arab territory, out of fear of British intervention; and it understandably shied away from fighting the British while its hands were full with the Palestinian Arab militias and their foreign auxiliaries (though, to be sure, the IZL and LHI were far less cautious). Until April 1948, the Haganah operated under the assumption that the British military would block or forcefully roll back large-scale operations"

"The guideline of impartiality, authorized by British cabinet decision on 4 December 1947, translated during the following months into a policy of quietly assisting each side in the takeover of areas in which that side was demographically dominant...This policy sometimes occasioned a more radical expression—British advice or urging to specific threatened or defeated communities to evacuate. For example, on 18 April 1948 the British urged the Arab inhabitants of Tiberias to evacuate the town; a week later they proffered the same advice in Balad ash Sheikh, an Arab village southeast of Haifa"

"British troops did not always abide by the guideline of impartiality. Occasionally they indulged in overt anti-Jewish behavior (usually immediately following LHI or IZL attacks on them). During the war’s first months British troops occasionally confiscated arms from Haganah units protecting convoys or manning outposts in urban areas (the British argued that they also seized arms from Arab militiamen).18 And on a number of occasions British units disarmed Haganah men and handed them over to Arab mobs and “justice.” For example, on 12 February 1948 a British patrol disarmed a Haganah road block and arrested its members on Jerusalem’s Shmuel Hanavi Street. The four men were later “released” unarmed into the hands of an Arab mob, which lynched them and mutilated their bodies.19A similar incident occurred a fortnight later, on 28 February, when British troops disarmed Haganah men at a position in the Hayotzek Factory near Holon. Eight men were “butchered.”20 (The next day, LHI terrorists blew up a British troop train near Rehovot, killing twenty-eight British troops and wounding dozens more.) Moreover, Whitehall’s fears that the circumstances of the withdrawal from Palestine might subvert Britain’s standing in the Middle East occasioned a number of major, organized British interventions against the Jewish militias, or noninterventions in face of Arab attack, in the dying days of the Mandate (see below for the cases of Jaffa and the gEtzion Bloc in April and May)."

THE RELATIVE POWER OF THE TWO SIDES - Page 82-91

"For the average Palestinian Arab man, a villager, political independence and nationhood were vague abstractions: his affinities and loyalties lay with his family, clan, and village, and, occasionally, region"

"And a giant question mark hangs over the “nationalist” ethos of the Palestinian Arab elite: Husseinis as well as Nashashibis, Khalidis, Dajanis, and Tamimis just before and during the Mandate sold land to the Zionist institutions and/or served as Zionist agents and spies"

"The contrast with Zionist society is stark. No national collective was more self-reliant or motivated, the Holocaust having convincingly demonstrated that there was no depending for survival on anyone else and having implanted the certainty that a giant massacre would as likely as not be the outcome of military defeat in Palestine. By the late 1940s, the Yishuv was probably one of the most politically conscious, committed, and organized communities in the world. It was also highly homogeneous: close to 90 percent Ashkenazi and 90 percent secular; only about 3 percent of the Yishuv was ultra-Orthodox and anti-Zionist."

"Hesitantly during the Ottoman years, and with increasing intensity during the beneficent Mandate, as Jewish numbers swelled, the Yishuv fashioned the infrastructure of a state-within-a-state or a state-in-embryo. By 1947, in addition to the Haganah, the Yishuv had a protogovernment—the Jewish Agency for Palestine—with a cabinet (the JAE), a foreign ministry (the agency’s Political Department), a treasury (the agency’s Finance Department), and most other departments and agencies of government, including a well-functioning, autonomous school system, a taxation system, settlement and land reclamation agencies, and even a powerful trades union federation, the Histadrut, with its own health service and hospitals, sports organization, agricultural production and marketing agencies, bank, industrial plants, and daily newspaper and publishing house. Unlike the Palestinian Arabs, the Yishuv had a highly talented, sophisticated public service–oriented elite, experienced in diplomacy and economic and military affairs. Most of the twenty-six to twenty-eight thousand Palestinian Jews who had served in the Allied armies during World War II were, or became, Haganah members"

"In an emergency fundraising tour of the United States in January–March 1948, Golda Myerson raised fifty million dollars for the Haganah, twice the sum that Ben-Gurion had asked her to bring back—“a brilliant success,” in the words of Abba Hillel Silver, who praised her “eloquence and persuasion.”26 In a second whirlwind tour of American Jewish communities in May and June, she raised another fifty million dollars.27 These funds paid for the Czech arms shipments that proved decisive in the battles of April through October 1948."

"Theoretically, the Palestinians had the whole Arab world to fall back on. But that world, less organized and less generous than world Jewry, gave them little in their hour of need in money and arms. More robust was the contribution in terms of volunteers. But in this sphere, too, the pan-Arab contribution was actually meager in all but bluster. There appears to have been great reluctance to actually go and fight, especially among the more prosperous and educated. As one British intelligence official put it in December 1947: “Among the younger men . . . there is a great deal of temporary enthusiasm and exhibitionism, especially in Egypt, but very many of the youths who have so bravely smashed the windows of defenseless [Jewish] shopkeepers have little intention of undertaking anything so hazardous and uncomfortable as warfare in the stark Judean hills.”"

"Several dozen Britons, most of them former British army or police officers (by mid-March 1948 some 230 British soldiers and thirty policemen had deserted),32 also served in Palestinian Arab ranks,33 as did some volunteers from Yugoslavia and Germany. The Yugoslavs, possibly in their dozens, were both Christians, formerly members of pro-Axis Fascist groups, and Bosnian Muslims;34 the handful of Germans were former Nazi intelligence, Wehrmacht, and SS officers.3"

"The Yishuv entered the civil war with one large militia and two very small paramilitary or terrorist organizations: the Haganah, the military arm of the mainstream Zionist parties, especially the socialist Mapai and Mapam, with thirty-five thousand members; and the IZL, the military arm of the Revisionist movement and its youth movement, Betar, and the LHI, which was composed, somewhat unnaturally, of breakaways from the IZL and left-wing revolutionaries who regarded the British Empire as their chief enemy. The IZL had between two and three thousand members and the LHI some three to five hundred. During the civil war, the three organizations occasionally coordinated their operations and did not clash with one another."

"The Yishuv’s military capabilities improved significantly during the immediate postwar years. One element was the establishment of a clandestine arms industry. The plants were usually built under cowsheds and other agricultural installations. The industry was based on machine tools purchased in the United States by Haganah representatives in 1944–1946. By the end of 1947, the Haganah’s arms factories were producing two- and three-inch mortars, Sten submachine guns, and grenades and bullets in large numbers. Their contribution was not insignificant. Between 1 October 1947 and 31 May 1948 the secret plants produced 15,468 Sten guns, more than two hundred thousand grenades, 125 three-inch mortars with more than 130,000 rounds, and some forty million 9 mm (Sten gun) bullets.40"

"The Futuwwa was founded at the end of 1935 by Jamal Husseini as the Arab Party’s youth corps; the Nazi Party or the Hitlerjugend appear to have been his model.44"

"The largest and best-organized Arab formation fighting in Palestine until the pan-Arab invasion of May 1948 was the ALA, consisting mainly of volunteers from Syria, Iraq, and Palestine mustered by the Arab League in Syria. The volunteers were trained in Syrian army camps in Qatana, near Damascus, beginning in November 1947, and the ALA was officially established on 1 January 1948, with Fawzi al-Qawuqji at its head. Al-Qawuqji told his volunteers that “they were going off to Jihad to help the persecuted Arabs of Palestine. . . . We must expel the Jews from the Arab part of Palestine and limit them in that small area where they live and they must remain under our supervision and guard. Our war is holy. Women, children and prisoners must not be harmed.”50"

"Many villages tried to stay out of the fray, and some even preferred to assist the Jews out of a deep-seated antagonism toward their neighbors or because they believed that the Jews would win. By the beginning of summer 1948, the Druze villages of the Carmel and Western Galilee had thrown in their lot with the Jews. A few weeks later, the IDF set up a Druze unit, which participated in its offensives.55"

THE FIRST PERIOD OF THE CIVIL WAR - Page 94-111

"The fighting had deepened the traditional Muslim-Christian rift. In Jerusalem, the Christians were eager to leave, but the Muslims threatened to confiscate or destroy their property.64 Outside the town, Muslim villagers overran the monasteries at Beit Jimal and Mar Saba, in the former “robbing and burning property,” in the latter “murdering [monks] and robbing.”65 The daughter, living in England, of one middle-class Muslim, identified as “Dr. Canaan”—possibly Tawfiq Canaan, a well-known physician, political writer, and folklorist—of Musrara (Jerusalem), wrote to her father: “Yes, daddy, it is shameful that all the Christian Arabs are fleeing the country and taking out their money.”66"

"Within twenty-four hours of the start of the (still low-key) hostilities, Arab families began to abandon their homes in mixed or border neighborhoods in the big towns. Already on 30 November 1947 the HIS reported “the evacuation of Arab inhabitants from border neighborhoods” in Jerusalem and Jaffa"

"By the end of March 1948 most of the wealthy and middleclass families had fled Jaffa, Haifa, and Jerusalem, and most Arab rural communities had evacuated the heavily Jewish Coastal Plain; a few had also left the Upper Jordan Valley. Most were propelled by fear of being caught up, and harmed, in the fighting; some may have feared life under Jewish rule. It is probable that most thought of a short, temporary displacement with a return within weeks or months, on the coattails of victorious Arab armies or international diktats. Thus, although some (the wealthier) moved as far away as Beirut, Damascus, and Amman, most initially moved a short distance, to their villages of origin or towns in the West Bank or Gaza area, inside Palestine, where they could lodge with family or friends. During this period Jewish troops expelled the inhabitants of only one village—Qisariya, in the Coastal Plain, in mid-February (for reasons connected to Jewish illegal immigration rather than the ongoing civil war)—though other villages were harassed and a few specifically intimidated by IZL, LHI, and Haganah actions (much as during this period Jewish settlements were being harassed and intimidated by Arab irregulars). Altogether some seventy-five thousand to one hundred thousand Arabs fled or were displaced from their homes during the first stage of the civil war, marking the first wave of the exodus"

"But the AHC appeared far less worried about inhabitants moving from one part of Palestine to another than by flight out of the country. The National Committees, in contrast, were simply worried about departure from their towns. Already on 9 December, Haifa’s NC “comprehensively discussed” the problem and inveighed against the “cowards” who were leaving the town. It resolved to appeal to the AHC to “prohibit departure.”74 A week later, the NC published a communiqué blasting the would-be fleers, who were “more harmful than the enemy.”75 In January 1948, militiamen in Jerusalem prevented flight and the local NC punished departing families by burning their property or confiscating their homes.76 In February, the Tulkarm NC ordered the inhabitants to “stay in their places” in the event of Jewish attack.77"

"Anti-exodus AHC and NC “orders” were not always obeyed and were themselves often subverted by contrary AHC and NC “orders” and behavior. The fact that almost all AHC and NC members were either out of the country before the outbreak of hostilities or fled Palestine with their families in the first months of the war undermined the remaining officials’ ability to curb the exodus. And perhaps even more tellingly, the AHC, local NCs, and various militia officers often instructed villages and urban neighborhoods near major Jewish concentrations of population to send away women, children, and the old to safer areas. This conformed with Arab League secretarygeneral gAzzam’s reported thinking already in May 1946 (“to evacuate all Arab women and children from Palestine and send them to neighboring Arab countries,” should it come to war)80 and the Arab League Political Committee resolution, in Sofar in September 1947, that “the Arab states open their doors to absorb babies, women and old people from among Palestine’s Arabs and care for them—if events in Palestine necessitate this.”"

"Almost from the start of hostilities frontline Arab communities began to send away their dependents. For example, already on 3–4 December 1947 the inhabitants of Lifta, a village on the western edge of Jerusalem, were ordered to send away their women and children (partly in order to make room for incoming militiamen).82 Dozens of villages in the Coastal Plain and Jezreel and Jordan Valleys followed suit in the following months. The cities, too, were affected. In early February, the AHC ordered the removal of women and children from Haifa,83 and by 28 March about 150 children had been evacuated, at least fifty to a monastery in Lebanon.84 On 4–5 April 1948, a fifteen-vehicle convoy left Haifa for Beirut; on board were children and youths from the Wadi Nisnas neighborhood.85"

"Of course, the Arab exodus was not propelled only by the war-making and direct Arab and Jewish policies or actions. The changing economic circumstances also contributed...By early March 1948, commerce in Jaffa was reported at a standstill and fuel was scarce; speculation and acts of robbery were rife (though there was no food shortage).87 By early April, flour was in short supply in Jaffa and Haifa (and Acre).88 Unemployment soared. The flight of the Arab middle class, which resulted in the closure of workshops and businesses, contributed to unemployment, as did the gradual shutdown of the British administration. All the Arab banks had closed by the end of April."

"Going into the civil war, Haganah policy was purely defensive or, as Yisrael Galili, BenGurion’s deputy in the political directorate of the organization, put it: “Our interest . . . is that the hostilities don’t expand over time or over a wide area.” There should be Haganah retaliation, but preferably in the area in which the Yishuv had been hit and against perpetrators. “The Haganah is not built for aggression, it does not want to subjugate, it values human life, it wants to hit only the guilty . . . [it] wants to douse the flames.”"

"During the first ten days of disturbances, the Haganah desisted almost altogether from retaliation, and Ben-Gurion instructed that only property, not people, be hit.108 But with the Jews, as Cunningham (somewhat unfairly) put it, in a “state of mixed hysteria and braggadocio,”109 the Haganah decided, on 9 December, to shift from pure defense to “active defense, [with] responses and punishment.”110 The following month, the HGS decided to target individual Husseini military and political leaders111—though only one, Muhammad Nimr al-Khatib, of Haifa, was actually attacked (and badly wounded) in the civil war. One consideration behind this shift to a policy of limited retaliation was that the Arabs would interpret inaction as a sign of weakness; another, that the international community would stop supporting Jewish statehood in the belief that the Jews would “not be able to hold out.”112 The Haganah informed its members: “There is no thought of returning to the policy of restraint [havlaga] that seemingly existed during the disturbances of 1936–39.”"

"The Haganah still refrained from aggressive operations in areas not yet caught up in the conflagration. The policy was to “hit the guilty” and to avoid harming nonbelligerent villages, “holy sites, hospitals and schools,” and women and children.117 The following instruction is indicative: “Severe disciplinary measures will be taken [against those] breaching [the rules of] reprisals. It must be emphasized that our aim is defense and not worsening the relations with that part of the Arab community that wants peace with us.”118 Though Haganah reprisals increased in size and frequency during the following months, the organization remained strategically on the defensive until the end of March 1948.

This was reflected in Haganah policy toward specific villages. Orders went out to the field units that villages interested in quiet or in formal nonbelligerency agreements were to be left untouched.119 Flyers were distributed calling on villagers to desist from hostilities.120 During February and March 1948 the HGS attached “Arab affairs advisers” to each brigade and battalion to advise the commanders on the “friendliness” or “hostility” of specific villages in their zones of operation.121 As late as 24 March 1948, Galili instructed all Haganah units to abide by standing Zionist policy, which was to respect the “rights, needs and freedom,” “without discrimination,” of the Arabs living in the Jewish State areas.1"

"But this description of Zionist policy requires several caveats. From the first, the IZL and LHI did not play along. Almost immediately, they responded to Arab depredations with indiscriminate terrorism (to the ire of the Haganah chiefs).1"

"the mainstream Zionist leaders, from the first, began to think of expanding the Jewish state beyond the 29 November partition resolution borders. As Shertok told one interlocutor already in September 1947, if the Arabs initiate war, “we will get hold of as much of Palestine as we would think we can hold.”131 He seemed to be referring particularly to the clusters of Jewish settlements left by UNSCOP outside the partition borders, such as that in Western Galilee, from which, even before 29 November, there was growing pressure on the Yishuv leadership for inclusion in the Jewish state.1"

"Much of the fighting in the first months of the war took place in and on the edges of the main towns—Jerusalem, Tel Aviv–Jaffa, and Haifa. Most of the violence was initiated by the Arabs. Arab snipers continuously fired at Jewish houses, pedestrians, and traffic and planted bombs and mines along urban and rural paths and roads"

"Like most intercommunal wars, this one, too, was marked by cycles of revenge. On the morning of 30 December, an IZL squad threw bombs from a passing van into a crowd of casual Arab laborers at a bus stop outside the Haifa Oil Refinery, killing eleven and wounding dozens. In a spontaneous response inside the plant, Arab refinery employees (reinforced by laborers from outside), using “sticks, metal bars, stones, etc.,” turned on their Jewish coworkers, mostly white-collar employees, and, in an hour-long rampage, butchered thirty-nine and wounded another fifty. Several Arab employees protected Jews. The British refinery executives and security officers refused to intervene or give the Jews arms from the plant’s armory, though a number of British workers saved Jews. The massacre was halted by the arrival of British forces, who then allowed the Arabs to be bussed out. No one was arrested. The subsequent investigation by leading Haifa Jewish figures found that the massacre was spontaneous and triggered by the earlier IZL attack and that the Arabs had not planned the outbreak.136 But the HGS felt that the massacre could not go unpunished, whatever its trigger, and targeted the large village of Balad ash Sheikh and its satellite village, Hawasa, southeast of Haifa. Many of the refinery workers lived there. Indeed, an HIS report immediately named three Balad ash Sheikh villagers who had participated in the massacre.137 On the night of 31 December–1 January, the Haganah sent in a Palmah company and several independent platoons. The orders were to “kill as many men as possible”—or, alternatively, “100” men—and “destroy furniture, etc.,” but to avoid killing women and children. The raiders moved from house to house, pulling out men and executing them. Sometimes they threw grenades into houses and sprayed the interiors with automatic fire. There were several dozen dead, including some women and children. During the raids, nearby British and Arab Legion units fired from afar at the raiders. The Haganah suffered three dead and two wounded.138 Mapam leaders criticized the indiscriminate nature of the retaliation. Ben-Gurion responded that “to discriminate [in such circumstances] is impossible. We’re at war. . . . There is an injustice in this, but otherwise we will not be able to hold out.”"

"The Haganah made other mistakes. On the night of 5–6 January 1948, a squad of sappers penetrated West Jerusalem’s Katamon neighborhood and blew up part of the Semiramis Hotel, suspected of housing an Arab irregulars headquarters. Twenty-six civilians died, including the Spanish deputy consul, Manuel Allende Salazar y Travesedo. The explosion triggered the start of a “panic exodus” from the prosperous Arab neighborhood.145 Jewish sources later claimed that one or two of the dead were irregulars.146 Several JAE members criticized the Haganah,147 and the British were irate, calling in Ben-Gurion for a dressing down. He subsequently removed the officer responsible, Mishael Shaham, from command.148 But generally Haganah retaliatory strikes during December 1947–March 1948 were accurately directed, either against perpetrators or against their home bases or hostile villages and militiamen. Relatively few women and children were killed. In mid-May, HIS summarized the results of the Jewish reprisals of December 1947–March 1948: “The main effect of these operations was on the Arab civilian population . . . [leading to] economic paralysis, unemployment, lack of fuel and supplies because of the severance of transport. They suffered from the destruction of their houses and psychologically their nerves were badly hit, and they even suffered evacuations and wanderings. . . . [All this] weakened the Arab rear areas and made the operations of the militiamen more difficult, and also led to clashes between the Arab population that was hurt and the Arab combatants whom the civilian inhabitants saw as the source of the disaster. The Jewish attacks forced the Arabs to tie down great forces in protecting themselves. . . . The [reprisals also caused] . . . doubt about their own strength. This war of nerves had great value in undermining to a large extent the confidence of the enemy. But these are phenomena suffered by each side in the conflict and they did not yet reach the extent of decisively affecting the staying power of the Arabs and their morale.”"

"The occupants of one vehicle committed suicide with dynamite rather than fall into Arab hands. (Jews captured in convoy battles were normally put to death and mutilated.)"

The Second Stage of the Civil War, April–mid-May 1948 - Page 113-126

"Surprisingly, the first to get cold feet were the Americans. Already on 2 December 1947, Truman was gently cautioning the Zionists and their supporters: “The vote in the United Nations is only the beginning and the Jews must now display tolerance and consideration for the other people in Palestine with whom they will necessarily have to be neighbors.”2 A few weeks later, Secretary of State George Marshall put it more starkly when he reportedly told his staff that “he thought US Government may have made a mistake supporting partition.”3"

"But by February, the State Department seemingly had won over the president who, somewhat equivocally, informed Marshall that he approved “in principle this basic position”—that is, given the failure of a peaceful partition, to place Palestine under UN trusteeship.8 Inching toward trusteeship, Warren Austin, the US representative to the United Nations said that the Security Council was obliged to preserve peace, not force partition on the Arabs.9 The State Department may even have envisioned London remaining in control, with the British “keeping their troops in Palestine until a final and peaceful settlement is achieved,” in the words of James Reston of the New York Times.10 The Policy Planning Staff of the State Department argued that “the maintenance . . . of a Jewish state” was contrary to the American “national interest” or “immediate strategic interests.”11 During the following weeks, Truman may still have been wavering, but Marshall was under the impression that the president had plumped for trusteeship. He authorized Warren Austin to proceed with the formal announcement.12 Austin himself was somewhat reluctant13 but in the end acceded14 and on 17 March formally broached the possibility at the Security Council.15"

"The Arabs were jubilant. The Jewish Agency rejected Austin’s proposal as “a shocking reversal of [the US] position. . . . We are at an utter loss to understand the reason.” It was apparently a capitulation to Arab violence, said Abba Hillel Silver, a spokesman for American Zionism.18 The Soviets supported the Zionists. Truman himself appears to have been genuinely shocked and unhappy with Austin’s announcement. “The State Department pulled the rug from under me today,” he jotted down. “The State Department has reversed my Palestine policy. The first I know about it is what I see in the papers! Isn’t that hell? I am now in the position of a liar and a double-crosser.”19 But Marshall and the State Department later maintained that Truman had approved the Austin statement.20 Clearly there had been some crossed wires—but also, it appears, some crass insubordination. Truman’s strong reaction may also have been influenced by the immediate, adverse American press responses to Austin’s speech.21 In any event, Truman quickly reassured the Zionists that he stood by partition."

"Until the end of March, Haganah policy had been to defend the existing Jewish settlements and protect the convoys supplying them. Occasionally, its troops carried out retaliatory strikes against Arab militia units and bases. But no territory was conquered and no village—with two exceptions over December 1947–March 1948 (gArab Suqreir and Qisariya)—was destroyed. But henceforward, Haganah policy would be permanently to secure roads, border areas, and Jewish settlements by crushing minatory irregular forces and destroying or permanently occupying the villages and towns from which they operated. The Arab militias and their ALA reinforcements had to be crushed; the main roads had to be permanently secured; and the Haganah’s brigades had to be freed to deploy along the borders to fend off the expected pan-Arab invasion. In addition, the world, and particularly the United States, had to be persuaded that the Yishuv could and would win and establish its state. Victory over the Palestinian Arabs would assure the world community’s continued adherence to the decision to partition Palestine and establish a Jewish state"

"Glimmers of the prospective change in strategy were apparent in the first months of 1948. In January, planning in the Haganah Jerusalem District provided for “the destruction of villages . . . dominating our settlements or endangering our communications routes.”33 And in Tel Aviv, one senior officer recommended destroying Jaffa’s water reservoir “to force a large number of Arabs to leave the town.”34 But such suggestions or “plans” were not, in fact, activated before the implementation of Plan D in April and May. And Plan D itself was never launched, in an orchestrated fashion, by a formal leadership decision. Indeed, the various battalion and brigade commanders in the first half of April, and perhaps even later, seemed unaware that they were implementing Plan D. In retrospect it is clear that the Haganah offensives of April and early May were piecemeal implementations of Plan D. But at the time, the dispersed units felt they were simply embarking on unconcerted operations geared to putting out fires in each locality and to meeting particular local challenges (the siege of Jerusalem, the cutoff of the Galilee Panhandle from the Jezreel Valley, and so on). The massive Haganah documentation from the first half of April contains no reference to an implementation of Plan D, and only rarely do such references appear in the Haganah’s paperwork during the following weeks.

Plan D called for securing the areas earmarked by the United Nations for Jewish statehood and several concentrations of Jewish population outside those areas (West Jerusalem and Western Galilee). The roads between the core Jewish areas and the border areas where the invading Arab armies were expected to attack were to be secured. The plan consisted of two parts: general guidelines, distributed to all brigade OCs, and specific orders to each of the six territorial brigades (gEtzioni [Jerusalem], Kiryati [(Tel Aviv], Givgati [Rehovot-Rishon Lezion], Alexandroni [the Coastal Plain], Carmeli [Haifa], and Golani [Jezreel Valley]). The preamble stated: the aim “of this plan is to take control of the territory of the Jewish State and to defend its borders, as well as [defend] the blocs of settlement and the Jewish population outside these borders against a regular enemy, semi-regular[s] [that is, the ALA], and irregulars.”"

"The plan called for the consolidation of Jewish control in and around the big Jewish and mixed towns (Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, Haifa), the sealing off of potential enemy routes into the country, the consolidation of a defense line along the borders, and the extension of Haganah protection to Jewish population centers outside the UN-sanctioned borders. In doing this, the plan called for the securing of the main interior roads, the siege of Arab towns and neighborhoods, and the conquest of forward enemy bases. To achieve these objectives, swathes of Arab villages, either hostile or potentially hostile, were to be conquered, and brigade commanders were given the option of “destruction of villages (arson, demolition, and mining of the ruins)” or “cleansing [of militiamen] and taking control of [the villages]” and leaving a garrison in place. The commanders were given discretion whether to evict the inhabitants of villages and urban neighborhoods sitting on vital access roads"

"Plan D has given rise over the decades to a minor historiographic controversy, with Palestinian and pro-Palestinian historians37 charging that it was the Haganah’s master plan for the expulsion of the country’s Arabs. But a cursory examination of the actual text leads to a different conclusion. The plan calls for securing the emergent state’s territory and borders and the lines of communication between the Jewish centers of population and the border areas. The plan is unclear about whether the Haganah was to conquer and secure the roads between the Jewish state’s territory and the blocs of Jewish settlement outside that territory. The plan “assumed” that “enemy” regular, irregular, and militia forces would assail the new state, with the aim of cutting off the Negev and Eastern and Western Galilee, invading the Coastal Plain and isolating Tel Aviv and Jewish Haifa and Jerusalem. The Haganah’s “operational goals” would be “to defend [the state] against . . . invasion,” assure “free [Jewish] movement,” deny the enemy forward bases, apply economic pressure to end enemy actions, limit the enemy’s ability to wage guerrilla war, and gain control of former Mandate government installations and services in the new state’s territory. The plan gave the brigades carte blanche to conquer the Arab villages and, in effect, to decide on each village’s fate—destruction and expulsion or occupation. The plan explicitly called for the destruction of resisting Arab villages and the expulsion of their inhabitants. In the main towns, the brigades were tasked with evicting the inhabitants of resisting neighborhoods to the core Arab neighborhoods (not expulsion from the country). The plan stated: “[The villages] in your area, which have to be taken, cleansed or destroyed— you decide [on their fate], in consultation with your Arab affairs advisers and HIS officers.” Nowhere does the document speak of a policy or desire to expel “the Arab inhabitants” of Palestine or of any of its constituent regions; nowhere is any brigade instructed to clear out “the Arabs.”"

"At al-Qastal, between 3 and 9 April, the Israelis had lost seventy-five men. The Arabs had lost ninety, but they included the Palestinian Arabs’ foremost military commander. And they had lost a crucial battle and a vital strategic position on the road to Jerusalem. The original operational order of 2 April for the conquest of al-Qastal had forbidden the Haganah troops from razing the village. In the same spirit, Yadin had initially instructed the Nahshon commanders to “occupy [sites], if possible, near villages and not to conquer them.”51 But the follow-up order, of 8 April, to recapture al-Qastal, specifically ordered the destruction of its houses. This was indicative of the radical change of thinking in the HGS. In line with Plan D, Arab villages were henceforward to be leveled to prevent their reinvestment by Arab forces; the implication was that their inhabitants were to be expelled and prevented from returning"

Deir Yassin p126-128

"When the battle for al-Qastal erupted, the Jerusalem Haganah command asked the IZL for assistance. The IZL chiefs declined, saying they wanted to launch an independent operation. In the end, they proposed to conquer Deir Yassin, and David Shaltiel, the Jerusalem Haganah OC, agreed. But he demanded that the IZL afterward hold the site permanently. The prospective operation loosely meshed with the Nahshon objective of securing the western approaches to Jerusalem. In planning their attack, the IZL and LHI commanders agreed to expel the inhabitants; a proposal to kill all captured villagers or all captured males was rejected. According to Yehuda Lapidot, the IZL deputy commander during the battle, the troops were specifically ordered not to kill women, children, and POWs."

"In a follow-up report, Levy said that LHI participants later charged that IZL troops had “raped a number of girls and murdered them afterwards (we [that is, the HIS] don’t know if this is true).”54 The mukhtar’s son, who had been a Haganah agent, was among those executed. The IZL and LHI troopers systematically pillaged the village and stripped the inhabitants of jewelry and money.55 Altogether, 100–120 villagers (including combatants) died that day56—though the IZL, Haganah, Arab officials, and the British almost immediately inflated the number to “254” (or “245”), each for their own propagandistic reasons. Most of the villagers either fled or were trucked through West Jerusalem and dumped at Musrara, outside the Old City walls. The atrocities were condemned by the Jewish Agency, the Haganah command, and the Yishuv’s two chief rabbis, and the agency sent King gAbdullah a letter condemning the atrocities and apologizing57 (which he rebuffed, saying that “the Jewish Agency stands at the head of all Jewish affairs in Palestine”).58

But the real significance of Deir Yassin lay, not in what had actually happened on 9 April, or in the diplomatic exchanges that followed, but in its political and demographic repercussions. In the weeks after the massacre the Arab media inside and outside Palestine continuously broadcast reports about the atrocities—usually with blood-curdling exaggerations59—in order to rally Arab public opinion and governments against the Yishuv.60 Without doubt, they were successful. The broadcasts fanned outrage and reinforced the Arab governments’ resolve to invade Palestine five weeks later. Indeed, gAbdullah was to point to the massacre at Deir Yassin as one of the reasons he was joining the invasion and why he could not honor his previous assurances of nonbelligerency vis-à-vis the Yishuv (see below).61

The most important immediate effect of the media atrocity campaign, however, was to spark fear and further panic flight from Palestine’s villages and towns. The broadcasts may, in part, have been designed to reinforce Palestinian Arab steadfastness. Yet their effect was quite the opposite: hearing of what the Jews had done tended to sap morale and precipitate panic. Indeed, the IZL immediately trotted this out in justification of the original attack: Deir Yassin had promoted “terror and dread among the Arabs in all the villages around; in al-Maliha, Qaluniya, and Beit Iksa a panic flight began that facilitates the renewal of [Jewish] road communications . . . between the capital [that is, West Jerusalem] and the rest of the country.”62 “In one blow we changed the strategic situation of our capital,” boasted the organization.63 Menachem Begin, the leader of the IZL, who denied that a massacre had taken place, was later to argue that “the legend [of Deir Yassin] was worth half a dozen battalions to the forces of Israel. Panic overwhelmed the Arabs.”64

The IZL commanders, then and later, may have had an interest in exaggerating the impact of Deir Yassin. But they weren’t far off the mark. HIS officers around the country immediately reported on the fear- and flight-sowing impact of Deir Yassin.65 Ben-Gurion himself noted—probably not unhappily—that Deir Yassin had propelled flight from Haifa.66 British intelligence commented that “the violence used [at Deir Yassin] so impressed Arabs all over the country that an attack by [the] Haganah on [the Arab village of] Saris met with no opposition whatsoever.”67 Mapam’s leaders later assessed that Deir Yassin had been one of the two pivotal events (the other was the fall of Arab Haifa) in the exodus of Palestine’s Arabs.68 The HIS-AD, in summarizing the Arab flight to the end of June 1948, pointed to Deir Yassin as a “decisive accelerating factor.”6"

The Second Stage of the Civil War, April–mid-May 1948 -p128-129

"But Deir Yassin was also, in an immediate, brutal sense, to harm the Jews. On the morning of 13 April, hundreds of militiamen from Jerusalem and surrounding villages, taking revenge for Deir Yassin and the death of gAbd alQadir, descended on the road running through the East Jerusalem neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah, which linked Jewish Jerusalem and Mount Scopus, and ambushed a ten-vehicle Haganah convoy carrying mostly unarmed Jewish lecturers, students, nurses and doctors on their way to the mountaintop Hadassah Hospital–Hebrew University campus. Ironically, the convoy was also carrying two IZL fighters wounded at Deir Yassin. During the previous months, the Arabs had left these convoys—which were often accompanied by British armored cars—alone. But on 13 April there was no British escort. Perhaps, as they later claimed, the British were shorthanded; perhaps they regarded revenge for Deir Yassin as fitting. It was a classic ambush: at 9:30 AM a large mine blew a hole in the road, halting the convoy. The attackers then let loose with light weapons and grenades. The six smaller, lighter vehicles managed to turn around and flee back to West Jerusalem. But the two armor-plated buses, packed with medical staff and students, and the two escort vehicles, were caught, able neither to advance nor to turn back. For hours the Haganah guards kept the attackers at bay while Haganah HQ pleaded with the British to intervene.

The government reacted lackadaisically if not with utter cynicism. As a Jewish Agency official put it, “British soldiers witnessed at close quarters university professors, doctors and nurses being shot down or roasted alive in the burning vehicles without doing anything.”70 Ben-Gurion was to define the event as “an English massacre. They were there, didn’t lift a finger and prevented others from helping.”71 At around noon, a British officer, Major Jack Churchill, possibly on his own initiative, drove up but was unable to cajole any of the passengers to leave the buses and run for it to his armored car and an accompanying pickup; they preferred to await Haganah rescue. But the Haganah was warned off by the authorities and, in any case, lacked an effective relief force. Three Palmah armored cars that reached the area were hit and driven back by the ambushers. Distant Haganah outposts intermittently let loose with machine guns and mortars but to little effect."

THE BATTLES OF MISHMAR HAGEMEK AND RAMAT YOHANAN -p133-136

"He demanded the kibbutz’s surrender and a handover of arms. When the Haganah brushed this aside, he proposed to withdraw—provided the Jews promised to desist from attacking the neighboring villages, which had served as his bases. The kibbutz responded with bravado: al-Qawuqji should compensate the kibbutz for the damage he had inflicted and must wheel his artillery pieces into the kibbutz and destroy them.93 More realistically, the local leaders said that they would have to consult Tel Aviv. Meanwhile, they “agreed to nothing,” as a Golani Brigade transmission put it.94

On 8 April, the ALA announced that Mishmar Hagemek had been conquered and that “the Arab flag” was now flying above its water tower.95 This was pure fantasy. Indeed, that day (or the next) a delegation of the settlement’s members, probably including Yagakov Hazan, Mapam’s coleader, traveled to Tel Aviv and pleaded with Ben-Gurion—according to Ben-Gurion—to order the Haganah “to expel the Arabs [in the area] and to burn the villages. . . . They said that they were not sure [the kibbutz could hold out] if the villages remained intact and [if] the Arab inhabitants were not expelled.” Ben-Gurion agreed. He recalled: “They faced a cruel reality . . . [and] saw that there was [only] one way and that was to expel the Arab villagers and burn the villages.”"

"A wide swath around Mishmar Hagemek was cleared of Arab inhabitants. Most simply fled, disheartened by al-Qawuqji’s defeat or demoralized by Jewish attack. The remainder were expelled, toward Jenin.104 A few prisoners were executed. The villages were then systematically leveled. According to the Mishmar Hagemek logbook, by 15 April “all the villages in the area as far as the eye can see [had] been evacuated.”105 The flight and expulsion of inhabitants around Mishmar Hagemek radiated panic farther afield, leading to flight from villages in the Hills of Ephraim and the Hefer Valley.106"

Haifa -p140-146

"Tens of thousands of the city’s original seventy thousand Arabs had fled during the previous months, and the Haganah had originally intended to occupy the Arab parts only when the Mandate ended. The Yishuv’s leaders were keenly aware of Haifa’s importance to the British—it was their main point of exit from Palestine—and realized that a premature offensive could result in Jewish-British clashes. In any case, once the British left, the town’s Arab neighborhoods, by then probably demoralized, would surrender or fall in short order."

"The constant mortar and machine gun fire, as well as the collapse of the militias and local government and the Haganah’s conquests, precipitated mass flight toward the British-held port area. By 1:00 PM some six thousand people had reportedly passed through the harbor and boarded boats for Acre and points north.

A Palmah scout (disguised as an Arab) who had been in the Lower City during the battle later reported: “[I saw] people with belongings running toward the harbor and their faces spoke confusion. I met an old man sitting on some steps and crying. I asked him why he was crying and he replied that he had lost his six children and his wife and did not know [where] they were. I quieted him down. . . . It was quite possible, I said, that the wife and children had been transported to Acre, but he continued to cry. I took him to the hotel . . . and gave him £P22 and he fell asleep. Meanwhile, people arrived from Halissa.”139"

"Haifa’s Arab notables were ferried to the town hall in British armored cars. The meeting convened at 4:00 PM. The Jewish leaders, who included Mayor Shabtai Levy, Jewish Agency representative Harry Beilin, and Haganah representative Mordechai Makleff, were, in Stockwell’s phrase, “conciliatory,” and agreed to further dilution of the truce terms. “The Arabs haggled over every word,” recorded Beilin.146 The final terms included surrender of all military equipment (initially to the British authorities); the assembly and deportation of all foreign Arab males and the detention by the British of “European Nazis”; and a curfew to facilitate Haganah arms searches in the Arab neighborhoods. The terms assured the Arab population a future “as equal and free citizens of Haifa.”147 Levy reinforced this by expressing a desire that the two communities continue to “live in peace and friendship.”

But the Arab delegation, headed by Sheikh gAbdul Rahman Murad, the local Muslim Brotherhood leader, and businessmen Victor Khayyat, Farid Sagad, and Anis Nasr—a mixture of Muslims and Christians—declined to sign on and requested a break, “to consult.” The Arabs were driven to Khayyat’s house, where they tried to contact the AHC and, possibly, the Arab League Military Committee; they wanted instructions. Israeli officials were later to claim that the notables made contact and that the AHC had instructed them to refuse the surrender terms and to announce a general evacuation of the city.148 But there is no credible proof that such instructions were given, and it seems unlikely.149 Indeed, a few weeks later, Victor Khayyat told an HIS officer: “There are rumors that the Mufti, the Arab Higher Committee, ordered the Arabs to leave the city. There is no truth to these rumors.”150 It appears that beyond Syrian and Lebanese efforts to persuade the British to intervene, no response was forthcoming from the AHC or Damascus to the notables’ appeal.

When the notables reassembled at the town hall at 7:15 PM, they appear to have had no guidance from outside Palestine and were left to their own devices. The Arabs—now all Christians—“stated that they were not in a position to sign the truce, as they had no control over the Arab military elements in the town and that, in all sincerity, they could not fulfill the terms of the truce, even if they were to sign. They then said as an alternative that the Arab population wished to evacuate Haifa . . . man, woman and child.”151 Without doubt, the notables were chary of agreeing to surrender terms out of fear that they would be dubbed traitors or collaborators by the AHC; perhapsthey believed that they were doing what the AHC would have wished them to do. One Jewish participant at the meeting, lawyer Yagakov Solomon, was later to recall that one of the Arab participants subsequently told him that they had been instructed or browbeaten by Sheikh Murad, who did not participate in the second part of the town hall gathering, to adopt this rejectionist position.1

Be that as it may, the Jewish and British officials were flabbergasted. Levy appealed “very passionately . . . and begged [the Arabs] to reconsider.” He said that they should not leave the city “where they had lived for hundreds of years, where their forefathers were buried, and where, for so long, they had lived in peace and brotherhood with the Jews.” The Arabs said that they “had no choice.”153 According to Carmel, who was briefed, no doubt, by Makleff, his aide de camp, Stockwell, who “went pale,” also appealed to the Arabs to reconsider: “Don’t destroy your lives needlessly.” According to Carmel, the general then turned to Makleff and asked: “What have you to say?” But the Haganah representative parried: “It’s up to them [the Arabs] to decide.”

During the following ten days, almost all of the town’s remaining Arab inhabitants departed, on British naval and civilian craft to Acre and Beirut, and by British-escorted land convoys up the coast or to Nazareth and Nablus. By early May, only about five thousand Arabs were left

As the shooting died down, the Haganah distributed a flyer cautioning its troops not to loot Arab property or vandalize mosques.156 On 25 April, Haganah troops clashed with IZL men, who had moved into the (largely Muslim) neighborhood of Wadi Nisnas and were harassing the locals and looting, and ejected them. Two days before, several Haganah officers went down to Wadi Nisnas and Abbas Street and appealed to the inhabitants to stay,157 as, on 28 April, did a flyer issued by the Haifa branch of the Histadrut: “The Haifa Workers Council advises you for your own good to stay in the city and return to regular work.”158 American diplomats and British officials and officers, at least initially, reported that the Jews were making great efforts to persuade the Arabs to stay, whether for economic reasons (the need for cheap Arab laborers) or to preserve the emergent Jewish state’s positive image.1"

Jaffa -p147-163

"Palestine’s largest Arab city, Jaffa, was assaulted and largely depopulated a few days after Arab Haifa (though it finally passed into Jewish hands only on 13–14 May). Tens of thousands of Jaffans had fled during the preceding months, and by April, the remaining inhabitants were “insecure . . . and hopeless.”162 The town suffered from a multiplicity of militia groups, with no unified command. By mid-April, most of the local leaders had left.163 But at least two-thirds of the original seventy to eighty thousand inhabitants were still in place."

"One gold jeweler . . . curs ed the leaders and said that they had abandoned the Palestinians to stand alone against the Jews. . . . It were better to have accepted the partition agreement peacefully and not to surrender to the enemy in war.”"

"But, following Haifa (and Tiberias and Deir Yassin), Whitehall was seriously alarmed about Britain’s position in the Middle East. And the army was worried about the safe completion of the withdrawal from Palestine along routes that passed through Arab-populated territory;182 increased Arab antagonism might result in attacks. These considerations resulted in forceful British intervention in Jaffa. Here the British could stop the erosion of their image and position in the Middle East. Here they could vigorously demonstrate that they were not “pro-Zionist.”

When news of the IZL attack reached London, Bevin “got very excited . . . and [instructed] the CIGS . . . to . . . see to it that the Jews did not manage to occupy Jaffa or, if they did, were immediately turned out.”183 The British rejected Arab demands to allow Arab Legion units to help the embattled town184—or, more widely, to allow Arab armies to cross into Palestine to defend its Arab inhabitants. But they immediately dispatched reinforcements—in all, more than four battalions of infantry, armor, and naval commandos, from Cyprus, Libya, Egypt, Malta, and Iraq185—to Palestine, despite the general evacuation that was under way. The troop reinforcement was geared to freeing units already in Palestine to deploy in Jaffa (and, more generally, to facilitate the evacuation, which required covering infantry, air, and armored units).186 Such was Bevin’s fear of a reenactment of Haifa that he bypassed normal channels (the defense minister and the high commissioner) in prodding the army to act"

"The killing of the prisoners was not unusual. Until April, neither side generally took prisoners, partly because they had no adequate facilities to hold them. The British, the country’s nominal rulers, would not have countenanced Haganah or Arab militia POW camps, certainly not in areas under their control. In practice neither side, after capturing enemy positions, houses, or traffic, kept prisoners. Captured combatants were usually shot out of hand or, less frequently, after a brief incarceration and interrogation, freed.198 During the first stage of the civil war, Jews probably killed more POWs than vice versa simply because Jews overran more Arab positions.

April and May were characterized by confusion and inconsistency. From the start of April onward, the Haganah captured villages and Arab urban neighborhoods and towns; and Arab combatants fell into Jewish hands in growing numbers, especially in Haifa. HGS ordered the brigades to set up temporary detention centers, and a number were established. But some units continued to shoot POWs or to release them for lack of holding facilities. Noncombatants almost invariably were freed.

In effect, prisoners were incarcerated in orderly fashion only from 26 May, when the Haganah set up a central POW camp in the abandoned village of Jalil al-Qibliya (Gelilot), just north of Tel Aviv. By 12 June, the camp held more than four hundred prisoners. From the Arab side, Jews captured before 15 May were often executed, though the large batch of POWs taken in the gEtzion Bloc by the Arab Legion (see below) were transferred to a camp in Jordan. After 15 May, POWs usually ended up in detention camps in Arab states, though a few were murdered before they reached them."

"1 Electricity, water, and fuel were in short supply, and the recently arrived ALA and irregulars, mostly Iraqis, subjected the dwindling number of locals to robbery and rape, and systematically plundered the abandoned houses, shops, and warehouses—a task that “was completed by British troops. All is permitted as there is no government.”202 One Arab commentator later wrote that, as daily convoys of refugees were departing for Gaza, the ALA troops “acted as if the town was theirs, and began to rob people and loot their houses. People’s lives became worthless and women’s honor was defiled.”203 Mayor Heikal fled on 4 May or just before, as did most of the other remaining notables."

"Jaffa’s agony ended on 14 May, when Haganah troops, accompanied by token IZL units, drove into the almost empty town; only about four thousand inhabitants remained. Ben-Gurion visited four days later and commented: “I couldn’t understand: Why did the inhabitants . . . leave?”205 The Haganah’s peaceful entry followed two days of negotiations between Kiryati Brigade OC Michael Ben-Gal and a handful of Jaffa notables. The Haganah promised that there would be “no military trials and acts of vengeance” and that peace-minded inhabitants who had fled would be allowed to return.206 In the formal agreement signed on 13 May, the Jaffa notables promised to hand over arms and keep the peace and the Haganah, to abide by the Geneva conventions and allow the return of women, children, and, after a security screening, males."

"Observers understood the grim logic behind the Haganah operations: the Jews, complained Arab League secretary-general 'Azzam, were “driving out the inhabitants [from areas] on or near roads by which Arab regular forces could enter the country. . . . The Arab armies would have the greatest difficulty in even entering Palestine after May 15th.”274 He was right."

"The inhabitants fled the village as the Haganah troops entered; on the road out to Qalqilya the ALA extorted five Palestine pounds from each fleeing refugee.2"

Tantura -P164

"Somewhat belatedly, on the night of 22–23 May the Thirty-third Battalion also conquered the large fishing village of Tantura, which lay northwest of Zikhron Yagakov along the Tel Aviv–Haifa coast road. The village had spurned Haganah demands to surrender. During the nightlong battle, the villagers put up stiff resistance, killing thirteen Alexandroni troops and a sailor before giving up. More than seventy villagers died. In the 1990s Arab journalists charged that the Israeli troops had carried out a large-scale massacre of disarmed militiamen and villagers in the hours after Tantura fell, a charge expanded in a master’s thesis by an Israeli student, who, on the basis of Arab oral testimony (and the distortion of testimony by Alexandroni veterans), argued that up to 250 villagers had been systematically murdered.280 Although some Alexandroni veterans hinted at dark deeds, most flatly denied the massacre charge. Documentary evidence indicates that the Alexandroni troops murdered a handful of POWs—and expelled the inhabitants—but provides no grounds for believing that a large-scale massacre occurred.281"

"Some officers suggested that Acre’s inhabitants be expelled.295 But this was never acted on. Four soldiers of Carmeli’s Twenty-second Battalion raped an Arab girl and murdered her father (they were later sentenced to three years in jail).296 Otherwise, the Israeli military government rapidly reorganized the town’s services and a substantial population stayed put, becoming Israeli citizens"

"Elsewhere, at a number of sites, Haganah Home Guard units readied for the prospective invasion by disarming or clearing out neighboring villagers. They feared that the villages would help the invaders and serve as bases for attack. Thus, on 13–14 May gEin-Gev, an isolated kibbutz on the eastern shore of the Sea of Galilee, demanded that neighboring Arab Argibat (Nuqeib), whom the Jews had earlier persuaded to stay put, accept Jewish rule and hand over their weapons. But the villagers opted for evacuation, probably fearing Arab charges of treachery if they stayed. The kibbutzniks demolished their houses.301 A fortnight later, the kibbutz evicted the Persian Zickrallah family, who owned a large farm just south of the kibbutz, along with their thirty Arab hands. “In war, there is no room for sentiment,” explains the gEinGev logbook. The Zickrallahs were later resettled in Acre.302"

Kfar Etzion -P170-171

"The bulk of the defenders, more than a hundred men and women, assembled in an open area at the center of Kfar 'Etzion. Arab soldiers “ordered [us] to sit and then stand and raise our hands. One of the Arabs pointed a tommy gun at us and another wanted to throw a grenade. But others restrained them. Then a photographer with a kaffiya arrived and took photographs of us. . . . An armored car arrived. . . . When the photographer stopped taking pictures fire was opened up on us from all directions. Those not hit in the initial fusillade . . . ran in various directions. Some fled to the [central] bunker. Others took hold of weapons. A mass of Arabs poured into the settlements from all sides and attacked the men in the center of the settlement and in the outposts shouting wildly ‘Deir Yassin.’”318 Almost all the men and women were murdered. All witnesses agree that the militiamen who poured into the settlement looted and vandalized the buildings, “leaving not one stone upon another.”319 (Afterward, they did the same in the three other settlements: they apparently were driven by a desire for revenge and “a desire to prevent the Jews’ return to the bloc.”)320 Not all the Legionnaires participated in the massacre. Indeed, the Legion subsequently variously denied that there had been a massacre or ascribed the slaughter to the local militiamen.321 One officer saved and protected “Aliza R.,” a Haganah radiowoman who had jumped into a trench during the initial fusillade. Two Legionnnaires who heard her scream pulled her out and took her aside and (apparently) tried to rape her. A Legion officer shot the two with his tommy gun and led her to an armored car and safety.322 In all, only a handful of the defenders survived: three were saved by Legion officers; another managed to reach Massugot Yitzhak, still in Jewish hands. The rest, 106 men and twenty-seven women, died in the battles that day or were murdered in the slaughter that followed. Another twenty-four defenders had been killed on the first day.323 In the two-day battle, the Legionnaires apparently suffered twenty-seven dead and the local militiamen, forty-two dead"

"On the morning of 14 May, as the leaders in Tel Aviv were putting lastminute touches to the new state’s Declaration of Independence, a Red Cross convoy reached the bloc. The Legion had pulled back a few hundred yards. But thousands of militiamen surrounded the three settlements. Firefights broke out; a number of disarmed Jews were murdered. Another massacre loomed. But the Red Cross representatives, aided by Arab policemen from Jerusalem, negotiated the entry of small Legion units into the settlements to effect an orderly submission. Revadim, then gEin Tsurim, then Massugot Yitzhak surrendered. At each site the arms were handed over to the Legion, and the defenders were loaded onto trucks. Firefights broke out between the Legionnaires, bent on protecting the Jews, and the militiamen, who wanted to kill and loot. In the end, the Legionnaires loaded 357 POWs onto trucks and ferried them to Transjordan, where they remained until war’s end. The Legion violated the surrender agreement by not releasing the females and the wounded, who were to have been transported to Jewish Jerusalem. But Chaim Herzog, the senior Haganah liaison officer with the British, reported that “the behavior of the Arab Legion vis-à-vis the prisoners from the gEtzion Bloc was exemplary [hayta lemofet]. They displayed great civility and obstructed the Arab mob’s attempts to harm them.”325"

Trusteeship and truce -P172-177

"As the struggle for dominion between the Haganah and the Palestine Arab militias was winding down, the political and diplomatic struggle over the emergence of the Jewish state was reaching a crescendo. Following Warren Austin’s Security Council declaration calling for a “temporary trusteeship” for Palestine, the Americans engineered a UN Security Council resolution on 1 April 1948 calling for (1) a truce in Palestine and (2) the convocation of a “special session” of the General Assembly to discuss “the future government of Palestine.”

Both the Arab states, egged on by Palestine’s Arabs—who were “vehemently opposed to even a temporary solution on these lines”326—and the Zionists rejected trusteeship. To be sure, many Arabs regarded the American proposal as “a considerable victory.”327 But this did not translate into support of the idea. The Arabs sought immediate independence and sovereignty over all of Palestine, not a prolongation of international rule, as embodied in an open-ended trusteeship; the Zionists were focused on declaring state hood on the termination of the Mandate, in line with the November 1947 partition resolution. They submitted a series of detailed rebuttals of trusteeship and mobilized for diplomatic battle. One overeager Jewish Agency official in New York, Dorothy Adelson, proposed to Shertok that a number of “brown, black or even coffee-colored Jews (the hue of an Egyptian could do)” be added to the Zionist delegation to the General Assembly, where the “non-white group” had nineteen votes, some of which could be mobilized to vote against trusteeship. This would “provide a visible answer to the canard that we are ‘white aggressors,’ that we are the servants of white imperialism, or that we are currying favor with the western world by hiding our dark-skinned oriental component.”328 It is unlikely that Shertok acted on the advice."

"From the last week of April, the State Department focused on obtaining a deferment of a Jewish declaration of statehood, arguing that the declaration would precipitate an invasion. The consensus in the US government departments was that the Arab states would attack the Jewish state and persist in a guerrilla war for as long as it took: “It is extremely unlikely . . . that the Arabs will ever accept a Zionist state on their doorsteps.” Without “diplomatic and military support” from at least one Great Power, the Jewish state would go under within “two years,” they believed. Their advice against American intervention in support of a Jewish state was unequivocal.3"

"“The Thirteen,” as the People’s Administration was called—and only ten were present that day (two were stuck in besieged Jerusalem and one was in New York)—then turned to the questions of the truce and the declaration of statehood. Most spoke out against both the general truce proposals and a limited truce in Jerusalem alone. The matter was decided by a vote of six to four.346 As to declaring statehood, Ben-Gurion was adamant about not defining the new state’s borders, arguing that if “our strength proves sufficient,” the Yishuv will conquer Western Galilee and the length of the Tel Aviv—Jerusalem road—and, it was implied, coopt West Jerusalem—“and all this will be part of the state. . . . So why commit [ourselves to a smaller state?]”347 By a vote of five to four it was decided not to define the borders; the name, “Israel,” was decided by seven votes to zero. The text of the declaration was approved unanimously. No vote was apparently taken on a postponement; it was clear that Ben-Gurion, backed by Shertok, enjoyed majority support"

The Pan-Arab Invasion, 15 May–11 June 1948, THE ARAB STATES DECIDE TO INVADE -P180-198

"Motto: “He said that the Arabs were not afraid of our expansion. They resented our very presence as an alien organism. . . . ‘Politics were not a matter for sentimental agreements; they were resultants of contending forces. The question is whether you can bring more force for the creation of a Jewish State than we can muster to prevent it. If you want your State, however, you must come and get it. It is useless asking me for the Negev. . . . You can only get your Negev by taking it. If you are . . . strong enough to do this, or if you enlist strong partners—Britain, America . . . —you may well succeed. If you cannot, then you will fail.’” — 'Azzam Pasha, secretary-general of the Arab League, September 1947"

"But the invasion, propelled by the combined momentum of their own rhetoric and pressure from below, went ahead. (As General John Bagot Glubb later recalled: “The Arab statesmen did not intend war. . . . But in the end they entered [Palestine] and ordered their commanders to advance as a result of pressure of public opinion and a desire to appease the ‘street.’”)3 The American Legation in Damascus described the mechanism thus: “Government appears to have led public opinion to brink of war and now unable to retreat. Demand for war led by students, press and Moslem religious leaders. . . . Manifestos of students and ulemas . . . alike uncompromising.”"

"Yet the momentum of Jewish victories, Palestine Arab defeats, and the minatory rumblings of the Arab street proved inexorable. Public opinion was “all in favor of the war, and considered anyone who refused to fight as a traitor.”13 As Muhsin al-Barazi, Syria’s foreign minister, put it in April: “[The] public’s desire for war is irresistible.”14 By May, Syrian leaders were hysterical; public opinion, they said, was “very excited,” and there was talk—at least for the benefit of Western diplomatic ears—that “the whole country might go Communist and . . . our [that is, Britain’s] friends would be swept away.”15 The same considerations applied in Baghdad, where the leaders looked both downward, at a turbulent politically involved middle class and an excitable “street,” and sideways, at fellow Arab leaders; a failure of militancy would enhance the position of the anti-Hashemite bloc (Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Syria) in inter-Arab jockeying and rile the masses to the point of dangerous disturbances or worse.16 None could ignore the Palestinian Arab tales of massacre and exodus. Nor could the Arab leaders, especially Egypt’s, remain indifferent to the pressure of the Muslim religious establishment’s call for “the liberation of Palestine [as] a religious duty for all Moslems without exception, great and small."

"Around the Arab world, flights of fancy and boastful militant rhetoric were given their head. By the start of May, the Arab leaders, including gAbdullah, found that they were trapped and could do no other—whatever the state of their armies. “The politicians, the demagogues, the Press and the mob were in charge—not the soldiers. Warnings went unheeded. Doubters were denounced as traitors,” Glubb recalled.40 In most Arab states the opposition parties took a vociferous, pro-war position, forcing the pace for the generally more sober incumbents. From late November 1947 until mid-May 1948 the streets of Cairo, Alexandria, Beirut, Damascus, and Baghdad were awash with noisy “pro-intervention” demonstrations, organized at least in part by the governments themselves. The press, too, both reflecting and fashioning opinion, chimed in with belligerent rhetoric, growing in stridency as 15 May approached. The leaders found themselves ensnared in their own rhetoric and that of their peers. By 15 May, not to go to war appeared, for most, more dangerous than actually taking the plunge. gAzzam Pasha put it in a nutshell: “[The Arab] leaders, including himself, would probably be assassinated if they did nothing.”4"

"What was the goal of the planned invasion? Arab spokesmen indulged in a variety of definitions. A week before the armies marched, gAzzam told Kirkbride: “It does not matter how many [Jews] there are. We will sweep them into the sea.”42 Syrian president Shukri al-Quwwatli spoke of the Crusades: “Overcoming the Crusaders took a long time, but the result was victory. There is no doubt that history is repeating itself.”43 Ahmed Shukeiry, one of Haj Amin al-Husseini’s aides (and, later, the founding chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization), simply described the aim as “the elimination of the Jewish state.”4"

"At the last minute, Lebanon decided not to participate in the invasion. The decision, taken on 14 May, no doubt shook the Syrians. But even more unsettling for the whole Arab coalition was Jordan’s last-minute announcement of changed intentions and objectives. That day Jordan informed its partners that its army was heading for Ramallah, Nablus, and Hebron, to take over the area later known as the West Bank; it had no intention of thrusting northwestward, toward Afula, or of driving westward, to the sea. The goal of the Arab Legion—the Arab world’s best army, as all acknowledged and as it emerged—was the (peaceful) takeover of the core Arab area of Palestine, not war with the Jews. As a result, Syria’s (and Egypt’s) war plans were, a t the last minute, radically and unilaterally altered.

From the first, King gAbdullah recognized Jewish strength and the limitations of his efficient but small army; and he knew, and despised and feared, his fellow Arab leaders and belittled their military capabilities. gAbdullah did not want Afula and did not really want his army operating in conjunction with the Syrians and Egyptians; he distrusted them. He wanted the West Bank, if possible including East Jerusalem. On 13 May, unilaterally changing plans, he instructed Glubb (and informed his Hashemite Iraqi allies) that the West Bank was the objective. He probably approved the one element in Mahmud’s plan that remained intact, the prospective Iraqi assault across the Jordan into Israel at Gesher, in the Jordan Valley."

"gAbdullah’s last-minute change of plans was not whimsical. It was deeply rooted in history—in decades of frustrated geopolitical hopes and in months of secret negotiations with the British and the Jewish Agency. Since arriving in the small village of Amman—population two thousand—in November 1920, the young Hashemite prince, son of Hussein Ibn gAli, the sharif of Mecca and king of Hijaz, had sought to rule a vast and important domain. Transjordan, awarded him by Colonial Secretary Winston Churchill in March 1921, was always too small for his britches. He wanted, at the least, to be king of “Greater Syria,” encompassing present-day Syria, Lebanon, Israel/Palestine, and Jordan. But the French, the British, and assorted Arab politicians were forever frustrating his expansionist ambitions. Then, in 1937, a way forward at last seemed to open up, as embodied in the Peel Commission partition recommendations, which posited the union, under gAbdullah, of Transjordan and the bulk of Palestine (side by side with a minuscule Jewish state in the remaining 20 percent of the country). If he couldn’t get “Greater Syria,” perhaps he could at least have a “Greater Transjordan.” But the Palestinian Arabs, backed by the rest of the Arab world, objected, and nothing came of the proposal. gAbdullah, however, remained enchanted with the idea of annexing Palestine, or parts of it, to his emirate; Palestine would accord his godforsaken desert realm some import and prestige."

"Of course, gAbdullah preferred to coopt all of Palestine, with the Jews receiving an “autonomous” zone (a “republic,” he called it) inside his expanded kingdom. He repeatedly offered this to the Jewish Agency. But the Jews wanted a sovereign state of their own, not minority status. So partition it would have to be. This was agreed in principle in two secret meetings in August 1946 in Transjordan between gAbdullah and Jewish Agency emissary Eliahu (Elias) Sasson.61 (Incidentally, gAbdullah and his prime minister, Ibrahim Hashim, believed—as had the Peel Commission—that such a partition, in order to be viable and lasting, should be accompanied by a transfer of the Arab inhabitants out of the area of the Jewish state–to-be.)62"

"There matters stood until UNSCOP proposed partition—but between Palestine’s Arabs and Palestine’s Jews—as the preferred solution. Neither gAbdullah nor the Jewish Agency wanted a Husseini-led Palestinian Arab state as their neighbor; both preferred an alternative partition, between themselves. On 17 November 1947, twelve days before the passage of the partition resolution, Golda Myerson (Meir), acting head of the Jewish Agency Political Department, secretly met gAbdullah at Naharayim (Jisr alMajami), to reaffirm the agreement in principle of August 1946. gAbdullah at first vaguely reiterated his preference for incorporating all of Palestine in his kingdom, with the Jews enjoying autonomy. Meir countered that the Jews wanted peaceful partition between two sovereign “states.” The Jews would accept a Jordanian takeover of the West Bank as a fait accompli and would not oppose it—though, formally, the Jewish Agency remained bound by the prospective UN decision to establish two states. gAbdullah said that he, too, wanted a compromise, not war. In effect, gAbdullah agreed to the establishment of a Jewish state in part of Palestine and Meir agreed to a Jordanian takeover of the West Bank (albeit while formally adhering to whatever partition resolution the General Assembly would adopt). Both sides agreed not to attack each other. The subject of Jerusalem was not discussed or resolved. The assumption was that the holy city would constitute a corpus separatum under UN jurisdiction, in line with the UNSCOP recommendation. Or, simply, the subject was too sensitive and complex to resolve.63"

"Already in August 1947 Christopher Pirie-Gordon, the acting British minister in Amman, endorsed the attachment to Transjordan of “the Arab areas of Palestine. The advantages to Transjordan . . . are obvious” and it would “immensely strengthen [Britain’s] Hashemite Alliance.”64 In October, Kirkbride, the British minister, told visiting journalists that gAbdullah wanted “to rule Nablus and Hebron” and that “in his own view it was the logical solution” for the Palestine problem. Glubb also thought it was “the obvious thing” to do.65 Both men lobbied Whitehall directly and vigorously: “strategically and economically Transjordan has the best claim to inherit the residue of Palestine and. . . the occupation of the Arab areas by Transjordan would lessen the chances of armed conflict between a Jewish state and the other Arab states. . . . A greater Transjordan would not be against our interests, it might be in their favour,” argued Kirkbride.66 And Glubb, at a meeting with Britain’s director of military intelligence, Major-General C. D. Packard, laid out the Jordanian intentions more concretely: “The main objective of the invading force would be Beersheba, Hebron, Ramallah, Nablus and Jenin, with forward elements in Tulkarm and the area just south of Lydda.”67 gAbdullah was also keen on annexing the Negev or a large part of it, arguing that he “could not possibly agree to the Jewish State . . . cutting off Transjordan from Egypt” and, more widely, “the Arabs of Africa from . . . the Arabs of Asia.”68 In addition, Jewish possession of the Negev would threaten gAqaba, Transjordan, and the West Bank and would block the pilgrimage route to Mecca.69"

"Bevin, describing the meeting, said that, indeed, he had not replied, save for warning the Jordanians against any attempt to invade the Jewish-designated areas of Palestine. (Abul Huda had agreed.)71 The Jordanian understood, as Bevin had meant him to, that his silence signaled consent. But Glubb later recalled, possibly inaccurately, that Bevin’s response had gone beyond mere silence. Bevin, he wrote, had replied: “[Occupying the West Bank] seems the obvious thing to do. . . . [Bevin] expressed his agreement with the plans put forward.”72 Following the meeting, Abul Huda cabled gAbdullah: “I am very pleased at the results.”73 There was a green light. Jordan had won British consent to occupy of the West Bank with the termination of the Mandate—so gAbdullah, Abul Huda, and Glubb believed—and nothing the British did or said thereafter was to contradict this impression."

"It is clear that gAbdullah was far from confident of Arab victory and preferred a Jewish state as his neighbor to a Palestinian Arab state run by the mufti. “The Jews are too strong—it is a mistake to make war,” he reportedly told Glubb just before the invasion.79

gAbdullah’s aim was to take over the West Bank rather than destroy the Jewish state—though, to be sure, many Legionnaires may have believed that they were embarked on a holy war to “liberate” all of Palestine.80 Yet down to the wire, his fellow leaders suspected gAbdullah of perfidy (collusion with Britain and/or the Zionists). gAzzam reportedly told Taha al-Hashimi on 13 May that he “smells a rat in the policy of King gAbdullah. So he [gAzzam] will go to him and spur him on, saying . . . ‘Either you will attack the Jews like Saladin attacked the Crusaders, or the curse of the world will fall upon you.’”81"

"From the start, the invasion plans had failed to assign any task whatsoever to the Palestinian Arabs or to take account of their political aspirations. Although the Arab leaders vaguely alluded to a duty to “save the Palestinians,” none of them seriously contemplated the establishment of a Palestinian Arab state with Husseini at its head. All the leaders loathed Husseini; all, to one degree or another, cared little about Palestinian goals, their rhetoric notwithstanding. It was with this in mind that Jordan, on the eve of the invasion, ordered the ALA out of the West Bank83 and subsequently disarmed the local Arab militias."

"It was all farce. Responding with alacrity in Amman, gAbdullah on 30 September convened the “First Palestinian Congress” as a counterweight; indeed, the “Congress” immediately denounced the Gaza “Government.” The Egyptians, for their part, on 6–7 October bundled Haj Amin back to Cairo. In reality, the Gaza “Government” and “Council” did not long outlast his departure. Though most Arab governments rapidly recognized the hastily put-together, skeletal administration, it carved out no real fiefdom. Under tight Egyptian military administration, it had no real powers or funds and ruled no lands. Moreover, most of the small territory nominally under its control (that is, the area of Palestine occupied by the Egyptian army) in midOctober was overrun by the Israel Defense Forces in Operation Yoav. The Arab Legion, meanwhile, disarmed the Arab militiamen in the West Bank. The Egyptians hastily sent the few “ministers” left in Gaza back to Cairo. Within weeks, the farce was over, the Palestinian “government’s” only achievement having been to print fourteen thousand Palestinian passports (which no one recognized). The “All-Palestine Government” maintained a paper existence as a subdepartment within the Arab League until 1959, when Nasser disbanded it.85"

"If Arab war aims were disparate, the Yishuv’s initial goal was clear and simple: to survive the onslaught and establish a Jewish state. This was the chief aim both when Palestine’s Arabs attacked and when the Arab states invaded. But gradually, from December 1947 onward, one and possibly two aims were added. The first is unarguable and clear: to expand the new state so that it emerge from the war with more defensible borders and additional territory. The second was, at least among some of the leadership, to reduce the number of Arabs resident in the Jewish state"

"The Yishuv’s expansionism was driven at first by survivalist, military considerations. The key problem was West Jerusalem, with its hundred-thousand-strong Jewish community. As the war unfolded, the community came under siege and mortal threat, and the historic attachment to Jerusalem—religious and nationalist—came to the fore. By April, the Haganah, while trying to lift the siege, was in fact pushing to attach the city to the Coastal Plain.

The Zionist leadership initially was chary about violating the UN partition borders, lest this bolster the Arabs’ more general desire to overturn the resolution or give offense to the international community. The Zionist shift from unreserved adherence to the UN borders to expansionism was slow and hesitant. The pan-Arab invasion of mid-May ended the hesitancy: if the Arabs were defying the United Nations and were bent on destroying the Jewish state, the Jews would take what was needed for survival, and perhaps a little more. As Moshe Shertok put it on 16 June 1948: “It is clear that it would be good if we could achieve two things: (A) Not to give up an inch of the land within the borders of 29 November [1947]. . . . (B) To add to this territory those areas we have captured and not out of a desire merely to expand, but under pressure of bitter necessity. That is, those areas that bitter experience has taught us that we must dominate in order to provide the state with protection . . . (Western Galilee, the road to Jerusalem and Jerusalem itself).”8"

THE YISHUV PREPARES -P201

"During 1947–1948 the Haganah scoured the globe for arms. It was a massive effort, involving locating the needed arms, purchase (and, in the case of aircraft, training the crews), and shipment to Palestine (before 15 May circumventing the British blockade and after 29 May in defiance of the UN embargo). The effort involved Haganah agents and networks of Zionist officials and sympathizers, subterfuge and chicanery, dummy companies and counterfeit letters of authorization and accreditation, and large sums of money. The world was awash with decommissioned armaments from World War II. The arms were bought from both states and private dealers.

In the United States, Ben-Gurion in 1945 had secretly recruited eighteen Jewish millionaires, organized as, and misleadingly titled, the Sonneborn Institute, to help provide the Haganah’s needs in money and equipment, including machine tools needed for the Haganah’s embryonic arms industry. The group hired dozens of experts for the acquisition or transport of equipment or for establishing particular contacts (with Latin American dictators or underworld dealers). Many of the group’s activities were illegal; it operated outside the framework of the official Zionist organizations. The Institute created and used dummy companies, such as the New England Plastic Novelty Company. But much of the equipment it purchased failed to reach Palestine because of intervention by the American authorities, who on 14 December 1947 imposed an embargo on all arms shipments to the Middle East. Thereafter, the Federal Bureau of Investigation regularly arrested Institute and Haganah agents and impounded purchases. The Institute’s most ambitious project, handled by Haganah agent Yehuda Arazi, was the purchase of the decommissioned aircraft carrier Attu—for $125,000—on which Arazi hoped to load hundreds of armored vehicles, artillery pieces, and aircraft and convey them en masse to Palestine. The plan fell through, for reasons of expense and American interference, and the carrier was sold as scrap metal. The Institute’s major successes were providing the Haganah with machine tools for making ammunition and with field communications equipment that became the backbone of the brigades’ communications from May 1948; and (through Al Schwimmer, a Trans World Airlines engineer) the provision of a cluster of C-46 Commando cargo planes, four B-17 bombers, several Harvards, and a lone serviceable Mustang, and more than five hundred thousand gallons of (also embargoed) aviation fuel.96"

THE BALANCE OF MILITARY FORCES -P203-207

"Just as the Arabs tended to exaggerate Jewish strength, the Jews tended to exaggerate Arab strength—and Yishuv strategy cannot be understood without taking account of this. Jewish fears of defeat and possible annihilation were very real, and they began to dissipate only after the Arab armies proved to be much smaller and, by and large, less competent than anticipated.111 On paper, according to Haganah estimates, the Arab states possessed"

"Following the invasion, both sides substantially increased their forces, the Israelis handily winning the manpower race. In 1948, twenty-to-forty-fouryear-old males constituted a full 22 percent of the Jewish population. In the end, Israel proved able to put 13 percent of its population into uniform.120 By mid-July, the IDF was fielding sixty-five thousand troops; by October, eighty-eight thousand; by January 1949, 108,000.121The Arab armies, joined by contingents from Yemen, Morocco, Saudi Arabia,122 and Sudan, probably had forty to fifty thousand troops in Palestine and Sinai by mid-July and sixty-eight thousand in mid-October,123 the numbers perhaps rising slightly by the end of winter."

"A major reason for the relative decline in Arab strength in the course of the war and the concomitant increase in Israeli strength, which by September and October 1948 resulted in clear Israeli superiority, was the Israeli “victory”—and Arab “defeat”—in the handling of the international arms embargo. In line with the UN Security Council decision, the international community imposed a blanket arms embargo on all the combatants from 29 May 1948 until 11 August 1949. (This followed the unilateral American embargo, imposed already from 14 December 1947, and the British curtailment of arms and munitions exports to the Middle East that began in February 1948.)124 The embargo was applied with great rigor by the United States, as well as by Britain, the traditional supplier of Egypt, Iraq, and Jordan, and France, the traditional supplier of Syria and Lebanon. As it turned out, the embargo had an asymmetrical effect—badly hurting the Arabs but hurting the Yishuv only minimally. This was a major factor in the gradual, steady decline of Arab military power and the relative, steady increase in Israeli military power.

The Arab states had not expected the embargo and had failed to prepare large stockpiles of weaponry, ammunition, and spare parts before 15 May. Nor had they nurtured alternative sources of supply from Eastern Europe or from private arms dealers or an independent capability to buy and ship arms to the Middle East clandestinely. Once the UN embargo was imposed, the Arab states, for lack of funds and an appropriate procurement apparatus, proved by and large unable to purchase weapons, munitions, and spare parts. And, after expending vast quantities of munitions in the invasion weeks of May and June, the Arab armies, from July onward, increasingly found themselves short of war matériel. For example, in October 1948 the Egyptian air force, which nominally had thirty-six fighters and sixteen bombers, was able to fly less than a dozen fighters and only three or four bombers, and these with ill-trained aircrews and inadequate munitions.125

The embargo also had a dire psychological effect on the Arab world. As gAzzam put it, “The Arabs [felt that they] were in fact without a friend in the world.”126

By contrast, the Haganah,—an underground organization well versed in the clandestine arts—fashioned secret arms procurement networks in Europe and the Americas during 1947 and early 1948. Yishuv fundraisers managed to raise some $129 million, in cash and pledges, from Jews abroad to bankroll the war effort. The Yishuv spent some $78.3 million of this on arms purchases between October 1947 and March 1949.127 As we have seen, these networks concluded a series of deals with Czechoslovakia, which was hungry for American dollars, and with private dealers, and shipments began to arrive in Palestine from the end of March 1948, the bulk of the arms, including heavy weaponry, arriving after Israel’s declaration of statehood. The arrival of the Czech light weapons in March through May and of artillery pieces and armored vehicles in May through July proved crucial to the Haganah/IDF victories both over the Palestinian Arabs and the invading armies. Obversely, the failure of the Arab states to obtain additional armor, aircraft, guns, and ammunition, particularly for its artillery and mortars, proved crucial in the Arab shift after May and June to the defensive and to the subsequent Arab defeats. Similarly, the embargo-violating arrival in Israel of thousands of trained Jewish and non-Jewish volunteers from abroad, including hundreds of air and ground crew, was not matched by a similar increase in expert military personnel in the Arab armies. (More than three hundred Americans and Canadians—mostly with World War II experience—served in 1948 in the IAF, 198 of them aircrew.)128 By the last months of 1948, the IAF had far more trained aircrew than were needed; the Arabs had far too few. Thus, in October 1948 the Israel Air Force, flying only a dozen or so fighters, proved able to gain immediate air superiority against the Egyptians, flying in Operation Yoav some 240 missions to the Egyptians’ thirty to fifty missions. The surfeit of experienced personnel and the availability of spare parts and munitions made all the difference."

THE JORDANIAN FRONT -P207

"The army the Yishuv (rightly) feared most was the Arab Legion. The Jews had come to respect it during the months its units had served with the British army in Palestine. It was professional and efficient. Its strength in May 1948 was around nine thousand, of whom some twelve to thirteen hundred were tribal auxiliaries.129 The Legion was highly mechanized, with effective service units, and was led by a complement of some fifty to seventy-five experienced British officers and noncommissioned officers, mostly seconded from the British army or mercenaries.130 They included Glubb, the Legion’s commander, and most of the senior staff—his deputy, Norman Lash, the brigade commanders Teal Ashton and Desmond Goldie, and most battalion OCs. The Legion—officially renamed the Jordan Arab Army—had a highly professional artillery arm"

"The Legion was short of ammunition, especially for its artillery and mortars, and suffered severely from the British arms embargo.135 A large, lastminute supply of artillery shells and mortar bombs—altogether some 350 tons—was confiscated by the Egyptians at Suez on 22 May.136 But during the initial weeks of the invasion, the Legion’s officers, perhaps unaware of the supply problem, were profligate in their use of artillery and mortars. On 30 May, the Fourth Battalion, fighting in Latrun, ran out of artillery shells.137 During the following months, especially in the fighting in mid-July, Glubb pleaded with Whitehall for resupply, only to be rebuffed with the argument that if Britain violated the embargo, the Americans would do likewise and supply arms and ammunition to Israel in even more significant quantities. Nonetheless, during September and October Britain surreptitiously supplied the Legion with limited quantities of spare parts and ammunition, including artillery shells.139"

"Captain Mahmud al-Ghussan, a staff officer in the Legion’s Fourth Regiment, for example, later recalled that the inhabitants of Amman had virtually ignored the troops as they passed through on their way to Palestine “in order to save it from the Zionists and the West.”142 But others came away with different recollections. Magan Abu Nowar, another young officer, recalled that “emotions ran high. . . . I remember my father and mother among the crowd. . . in Amman. As I was passing by in my GMC light armoured car, my mother shouted: ‘God be with you, my son. Don’t come back. Martyrdom my son.’ I was shocked, not because my mother wished me to be killed . . . but because her head and face were bare. . . . In Jordan, conservative and devout women like her did not usually appear in public without a scarf covering their heads and faces.”143"

"The fears of the quarter’s inhabitants proved groundless; the Legion had learned its lesson from Kfar gEtzion. The Legionnaires deployed in force and protected the Jews from the wrath of the gathering Arab mob. The soldiers shot dead at least two Arabs and wounded others as they guarded the Jews. One POW recalled: “We were all surprised by the Legion’s behavior toward us. We all thought that of the soldiers [that is, Haganah men] none would remain alive. . . . [We feared a massacre. But] the Legion protected us even from the mob, they helped take out the wounded, they themselves carried the stretchers. . . . They gave us food, their attitude was gracious and civil.”193

The Legionnaires took prisoner 290 healthy males, aged fifteen to fifty— two-thirds of them, in fact, noncombatants—and fifty-one of the wounded. The other wounded and twelve hundred inhabitants were accompanied by the Legionnaires to Zion Gate and freed.194 The quarter was then systematically pillaged and razed by the mob.195 The fall of the Jewish Quarter, an important national site, dealt a severe blow to Yishuv morale."

THE EGYPTIAN INVASION -P232

"By the end of that first day, one Negev Brigade officer, Haim Bar-Lev (IDF chief of general staff, 1968–1971), concluded that “the outcome of the war had been settled, because if 45 defenders had withstood about 1,000 [sic] Egyptians, who were aided by fighter aircraft, artillery, and armor, and beat them—then the whole Yishuv would hold out in the war.”255"

"The Egyptians prevented their local auxiliaries from massacring the POWs. One hundred and five Israelis surrendered.291 Three or four were subsequently murdered by the Egyptians or irregulars. Among them were Avraham Schwarzstein, the settlement OC, and his radiowoman, Mira Ben-Ari. The two, carrying a white flag, had left their bunker and walked toward a group of Egyptian officers. One Egyptian, gAbd al-Mungim Khalif, drew a pistol and emptied it into Schwarzstein. Ben-Ari shot Khalif dead, and the other Egyptians then shot Ben-Ari.292"

THE INVASIONS IN THE NORTH The Iraqis -P245

"Apart from helping to crush the Jewish state, the Iraqis appeared interested in reaching Haifa, on the way conquering the area on either side of the length of the Iraq Petroleum Company pipeline that conveyed oil from fields near Mosul through the Lower Galilee to Haifa.300"

The Syrians -P251

"The Syrian invasion got off to a poor start because of the last-minute change in the Arab war plan and because of the army’s low “work standards” (as one Israeli observer was to put it: “The Syrians would generally fight in the morning. During the afternoon they would take a light siesta, and at night they would go to sleep in orderly fashion”).322"

"Back in February, Syrian politicians apparently told the visiting Palestinian leader Musa al-gAlami—in line with traditional “Greater Syria” ambitions— that they were interested in gaining control of “all Palestine” or at least its “Arab areas.”324 But by mid-May, their ambitions appear to have been reduced substantially. On 18 May, the British minister in Damascus reported that the “combined Syrian-Iraqi objective is Tiberias.”325 To judge from the Syrians’ actions, he may have been right (at least as regards Syria)."

The First Truce, 11 June–8 July 1948, the International Community, and the War -P264

"Meanwhile, the UN Security Council on 22 May had called for a truce, to begin forty-eight hours later—while, under British threat of veto, avoiding branding the Arab states the “aggressors.” The Israelis agreed immediately. But the Arabs demurred, their generals still hoping for victory or at least to overrun more of Palestine. The British were unhappy: their Jordanian wards had occupied the territory agreed upon, more or less, in the February meeting between Prime Minister Tawfiq Abul Huda and Foreign Secretary Bevin but were now enmeshed in a war with the Jews that they might well lose. And the advance of the other Arab armies had bogged down—indeed, all were threatened with defeat, which the world might interpret as a British defeat and the Arab world as a fruit of British perfidy (the Arabs never tired of portraying the British as Zionism’s patron and ally—much as leading Zionists never relented in depicting the British as the Arabs’ patron and backer). Last, against the backdrop of the pan-Arab assault, the British feared that Zionist pressure on Washington would persuade the Americans to lift their embargo and arm the Israelis, with dire consequences for Arab arms and Anglo-American amity"

"The problem was the Arab side: all the regimes were fearful of the “street,” and each leader feared his peers; agreement to cease fire would immediately be interpreted, and vilified, as weakness if not cowardice or complicity with the enemy. The publics believed what their newspapers and leaders had told them since 15 May—that the expeditionary forces were beating the Jews and driving on Tel Aviv and Haifa. They would not understand agreement to a ceasefire. As Lebanese prime minister Riad al-Sulh—who “invited himself to tea” on 27 May with the British minister in Beirut, Houstoun Boswall—put it: “Any Arab leader who had accepted the ceasefire appeal unconditionally . . . would, in the present state of public opinion, have done so at the risk of his life. (Iraqi Director General for Foreign Affairs has told me the same thing.) Result of anything that could be interpreted by peoples as weak would be chaos with students and workmen assuming the function of government in the Arab states.” Moreover, the Arab leaders understood that a truce “would be more to the advantage of the Jews than it could be to the Arabs.”6"

"The Arabs violated the truce by reinforcing their lines with fresh units and by preventing supplies from reaching isolated Israeli settlements; occasionally, they opened fire along the lines. Above all, the situation of Jewish Jerusalem remained precarious—because of the military threat by the Arab Legion, the shortage of supplies, and the political separation from the Jewish state, which weighed heavily on the population—and the Israeli Cabinet anticipated mass flight from the town during the truce. Ben-Gurion declared, “We must prevent panic flight with all the means at our disposal.”15 The Israelis, for their part, also moved additional troops to the fronts. But they dramatically changed the strategic situation in their favor by systematically violating the arms and military personnel embargoes, bringing in both clandestinely by air and sea."

"At the start of the truce, a senior British officer in Haifa predicted that the four weeks “would certainly be exploited by the Jews to continue military training and reorganization while the Arabs would waste [them] feuding over the future division of the spoils.”16 He was right. As one British official subsequently put it: “The Arabs lost the initiative throughout Palestine during the four weeks and the Jews were able to re-equip themselves.”17 In his memoirs, Nasser highlighted this by recalling the situation on his front, around Isdud: the Israeli side “buzzed with activity” while on the Egyptian side there was lethargy, “laxity,” and “laughter.”18 In addition, the Israelis exploited the truce for raiding and occupying sites along the lines that would give them advantage when and if fighting resumed."

"During the invasion weeks and the First Truce, the Yishuv managed to convert its pre-state “national institutions” rapidly into the agencies and offices of a full-blown state. Nowhere was this more apparent than in the military domain. The Haganah quickly made the transformation from a semilegal underground/militia into a full-fledged army and by the end of the truce was far stronger, in terms of command and control, manpower, and weaponry. The IDF’s manpower almost doubled between 15 May and 9 July, the number in uniform rising from some thirty to thirty-five thousand to sixtyfive thousand. Perhaps as many as four thousand of the new recruits were veterans of the Allied armies (British, American, Canadian, Czech) of World War II who came from abroad to help out. Most went home after the war. These veterans included specialists in the crucial specialized branches— sailors, doctors, tank men, logistics and communications experts, air- and ground crews."

"On 26 June the mediator set his signature to “preliminary” proposals—a “basis [for] . . . further discussion”—for a settlement. He recognized three basic facts: that (1) Israel existed (or as he put it a few weeks later: “It is there. It is a small state, precariously perched on the coastal shelf with its back to the sea, defiantly facing a hostile Arab world”);27 (2) that the Jordanian takeover of the core area of the proposed Palestinian Arab state—the West Bank—was irreversible; and (3) that the partition borders were dead. But he misread the military situation. He still believed that there was a “military balance” between Israel and the Arab states, which he could capitalize on—whereas in reality, the balance had already shifted and would progressively shift further in Israel’s favor.28 Bernadotte finessed the November 1947 UN decision to establish a Palestinian Arab state (alongside Israel) and proposed that a (vague) “Union” be established between the two sovereign states of Israel and Jordan (which now included the West Bank); that the Negev, or part of it, be included in the Arab state and that Western Galilee, or part of it, be included in Israel; that the whole of Jerusalem be part of the Arab state, with the Jewish areas enjoying municipal autonomy; and that Lydda Airport and Haifa be “free ports”—presumably free of Israeli or Arab sovereignty.29 He also asserted that the refugees have the “right to return home without restriction and to regain possession of their property.”30 The proposals were transmitted to the two sides on 27 June."

"The core idea, of reducing the size of the Jewish state by transferring the Negev to the Arabs while compensating Israel with (the much smaller) Western Galilee, was rooted in the British desire that the Arabs—preferably Jordan—hold the Negev so that territorial continuity between the eastern and western Arab lands—and between Britain’s bases in Egypt and Iraq—would be maintained. This would have the added advantage of giving Jordan, Britain’s most loyal regional client, an outlet, in Gaza-Majdal, to the Mediterranean.31 Moreover, the “exchange” (roughly) reflected the military status quo, following Israel’s conquest of Western Galilee in Operation Ben-gAmi and Egypt’s (partial) conquest of the Negev. The Israelis and Soviets believed that Bernadotte’s ideas emanated from the Foreign Office, but this is not clear from the available documentation."

"A week later, the Israelis rejected the Bernadotte “plan,” especially offended by the award of Jerusalem, with its majority Jewish population, to the Arabs. But they agreed to an extension of the truce by a month. The Arabs rejected both the plan, which included, of course, acceptance of the Jewish state, and a truce extension."

"But the other Arab governments, having failed to attain their territorial objectives or the destruction of the Jewish state, and believing that the truce had favored the Jews, and egged on by opposition charges of weakness or treachery, pressed for a resumption of warfare. This or that Arab leader may have fathomed the real balance of forces—Syrian prime minister Neguib Armenazi, for example, was “personally convinced that the Arab States will all have to concede the existence of a Jewish State,” reported one British interlocutor32—but none except the Jordanians were able to translate this into policy. As IDF intelligence explained, probably quoting an (unnamed) Arab agent: “The Arab states must continue the war for reasons of national pride, otherwise there is a danger of the collapse of their political regime[s].”33 The Arabs were certain to renew the war at the end of the truce, “and possibly even before then,” concluded Israeli intelligence.34"

The “Ten Days” and After -P274

"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

"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

"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"

"n. 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"

"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"

"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"

"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 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."

"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)."

"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"

"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"

"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"

"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"

"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."

Operations Yoav and Hiram -P319

The South

"For political reasons, the Israeli plan called for the Egyptians to fire the first shots; Israel must not be branded the aggressor. As Ben-Gurion told the Cabinet: “A giant effort must be made [to show?] that the initiative and the responsibility come from the Arab side or at least that the whole question of the initiative and responsibility will be blurred.”12"

"Israel dragged its feet for two days. On 21 October it informed the United Nations of its readiness to comply. On 22 October Acting Mediator Ralph Bunche ordered the two sides to cease fire at 12:00 GMT that day. Israel’s interior minister, Yitzhak Gruenbaum, concluded: “I have a feeling, that each time we succeed—someone stops us and prevents us from exploiting the situation to the end, and we do what that ‘someone’ wants. On the other hand—when the Arabs are winning—no one ever stops them.”36"

"Allon had taken note of the Egyptians’ impressive stamina in defense. He explained: “It emerged that the Egyptian command had instilled into their troops the belief that the Jews do not take prisoners, but rather kill the prisoners. Thus every position saw itself compelled to fight to the death. . . . Though we tried to circulate handbills and information [to the contrary] and to create bad blood between officers and men and between [Arab] locals and the [Egyptian] army, we failed to persuade them that we take prisoners and are hospitable [to POWs].”37 (Ben-Gurion, incidentally, thought simply that “the Egyptians had fought with great courage”—on Hill 113, at Huleikat, and especially at gIraq Suweidan.)38"

"Ben-Gurion also feared Christendom’s ire were Israel to assault Bethlehem.48"

"Al-Muwawi was particularly concerned about his northernmost brigade, the Second, dug in around Majdal and Isdud. After the fall of Beit Hanun, Egyptian engineers rapidly laid down wire matting on the dunes along the Mediterranean shore, creating a makeshift bypass route from Gaza to Majdal. But it was built for retreat, not advance. In the fortnight after 22 October, al-Muwawi, in nightly convoys, gradually pulled back his northerly units, starting with Isdud, which was evacuated on 26–27 October. Most of the Palestinian population fled southward along with the Egyptians. IAF reconnaissance reported: “A giant stream of refugees, with cattle, sheep, mules, and carts is seen streaming along the whole shoreline between Isdud and Gaza.”57 At the same time, to the east, the Legion, fearing the spread of panic, was doing its best to bar the way to refugees fleeing eastward from Beit Jibrin–Tarqumiya toward Hebron.58

In most places, the IDF did not have to resort to expulsion orders. The inhabitants, with or without Egyptian advice, fled as the Israelis approached or let loose with mortars and machine guns. Most villages were found abandoned or almost completely empty when the IDF entered. The few remaining inhabitants—those left behind, because of handicap, carelessness, or age—were usually expelled. In some places, inhabitants initially removed themselves only a few hundred yards to wait and see what the IDF intended and only later moved on or were pushed toward the Gaza Strip. Elsewhere, with fleeing inhabitants infecting neighboring villages with panic, in a domino effect, the refugees moved directly toward the Gaza Strip. Without doubt, Allon wanted empty villages and towns behind the shifting front line and probably let his subordinates understand this (though explicit written expulsion orders from Southern Front to its subordinate units are rare)."

"The next day, the Eighty-ninth Battalion captured al-Qubeiba and the dominant position atop Tel Lachish (site of the Israelite town besieged and conquered by Sennacherib, king of Assyria, in 701 BCE). The Egyptians had fled both locations without a fight. The Egyptian command asked the Fourth Brigade, trapped in the pocket and complaining of lack of “fuel and food and ammunition, and [with] a multiplicity of wounded,” whether it could break out through al-Qubeiba.65 It couldn’t.

On 29 October the Eighty-ninth Battalion assaulted neighboring Dawayima, a village of four thousand. Three days before, Southern Front had warned all units “not to harm the population” (and to desist from looting and to safeguard “holy sites”).66 But things turned out differently at Dawayima. A reduced company, mounted on seven half-tracks, advanced on the village from three directions, all guns blazing. The attackers believed that the villagers had participated in the conquest of the gEtzion Bloc, “the blood of whose slaughtered soldiers calls for revenge.”67 The Israelis encountered only light resistance, and as the half-tracks approached, “the plain [eastward] was covered with thousands of fleeing Arabs.” The half-tracks pursued the villagers with their machine guns.68 Subsequently, the troops rounded up dozens of villagers and executed them in one or two batches. A Mapam activist later wrote a complaint, quoting an officer who had reached the village a day or so later: “The first [wave] of conquerors killed about 80 to 100 [male] Arabs, women and children. . . . One commander ordered a sapper to put two old women in a certain house . . . and blow it up. The sapper refused. . . . The commander then ordered his men to push in the old women and the evil deed was done. One soldier boasted that he had raped a woman and then shot her.”69

Pressure by Mapam ministers resulted in a number of investigations. One investigator, Isser Beheri, head of the IDF Intelligence Service, concluded in November that about eighty villagers had been killed during the battle and another “22” afterward. Arab reports, which reached UN observers, exaggerated, speaking of “500” or even “1,000” victims. United Nations investigators were unable to find evidence of a massacre (though they tended to believe the survivors who reached Hebron who spoke of atrocities).70"

"Under a flag of truce, Taha met Allon on 11 November in Kibbutz Gat, in Israeli-held territory. The conversation took place in English, at Taha’s insistence, and not in Arabic, as Allon, who knew Arabic well, had proposed. It went as follows:

Allon: Colonel, may I express my admiration for your brave soldiers’ fighting abilities. The conquest of the gIraq Suweidan fort and half the ‘Pocket’ took a great effort, though not many casualties.

Taha: Many thanks, sir. I must say that your soldiers, who excelled in bravery, put us in quite a difficult situation.

Allon: Is it not tragic that both sides, who in fact have no reason to quarrel, are killing each other mercilessly?

Taha: Yes, it is tragic; but that is the way of the world. It is fate, sir, and one cannot evade it. Allon: I hope you have noted that the war was forced upon us, as it is being fought on our land and not in Egypt. I believe the battle has already been decided and it is best to speed up the end of hostilities. Taha: It is true. But I am an officer . . . and I must carry out orders.

Allon: It is best that you take note that while most of your army is pinned down in a hopeless war in Palestine, in your country the British army, which we have just gotten rid of, rules. Don’t you think that you have fallen prey to a foreign imperialist plot . . . ?

Taha: You did well to throw out the British. It won’t be long before we expel them from Egypt.

Allon: But how will you expel them if all your army is stuck here, after a big defeat and on the eve of an even bigger defeat? Isn’t it better for you to return to Egypt and take care of your own business, instead of being entangled in an adventure in a foreign land?

Taha responded that he would do what he was ordered. Allon pointed out that the pocket’s position was hopeless and offered Taha “surrender with honor . . . with the possibility of an immediate return home.” But Taha refused to lay down his arms. Indeed, he immediately cabled his superiors: “We have made contact with the Jews and it is now clear . . . that they insist on unconditional surrender. They will not allow us to withdraw until all the Egyptian army withdraws from Palestine. If you don’t solve the problem in the [next] 24 hours, I am sorry to say, I will no longer control the situation.” Taking leave of Allon, Taha said that he hoped that the IDF would respect the cease-fire, as it had not when capturing gIraq Suweidan. Allon responded that he would obey international law but that such law did not protect an army that had invaded another country"

Hiram

"The Lebanese units and villages along the border had earlier been showered from the air with leaflets warning against intervention. If they stayed out, they would not be harmed, the IDF promised.116 The Carmeli Brigade, held in reserve for the first two days, on 30 October pushed up the slopes westward and northward from Yiftah and Manara and took Sheikh gAbd, abandoned by the ALA without a fight. Around midnight 30–31 October, Carmeli crossed the frontier into southern Lebanon and occupied a string of fifteen (mostly Shigite) villages between the Panhandle’s western border and Wadi Duba (Wadi Saluki), from Aalmane and Deir Siriane, along the Litani River, in the north to Qanntara and al-Qussair in the west to Meis al-Jabel and Blida in the south. The Lebanese Army faded away and the villagers welcomed the Israelis, some of them signing surrender instruments, others asking to be annexed by Israel.117 Indeed, “many villages” west of Wadi Duba contacted the IDF and asked to surrender.118 Early on 31 October Israel agreed to a ceasefire, which went into effect at 11:00 AM. 119"

"During the takeover of the Lebanese border strip, Carmeli troops committed a major atrocity in the village of Hule. On 1 November, after conquest, they rounded up local males and POWs, crowded them into a house, shot them, and then blew up the building. Altogether thirty-four to fiftyeight persons died. The company commander involved was tried, convicted, and sentenced by an Israeli court to a seven-year prison term, which he never actually served.122

Hule was just one of a series of atrocities committed by the Golani, Seventh, and Carmeli Brigades, and auxiliary units, in the course of Hiram and in its immediate aftermath. Altogether, some two hundred civilians and POWs were murdered in about a dozen locations. There is no evidence that the killings were instigated or ordered by Northern Front HQ (indeed, Carmel subsequently condemned them) or that they were part of a policy designed to facilitate a civilian exodus from the conquered areas. Indeed, the haphazardness of the killings (Christians as well as Muslims were murdered; in some sites two or four persons were killed; in others, fifty or eighty) and the fact that in most of the villages, the atrocities were not followed by an expulsion would seem to undermine this conjecture. But, given the number and concentration of the atrocities and the diversity of the units involved, there are grounds for suspecting that the field commanders involved believed that they were carrying out an authorized policy probably designed to precipitate flight."

"Hiram apparently precipitated the flight, mostly to Lebanon, of about thirty thousand local inhabitants and refugees resident in the “pocket.”125 But at least as many, both Christians and Muslims, remained (today they and their descendants constitute the core of Israel’s 1.3-million-strong Arab minority). As we have seen, no directive of expulsion was included in the main operational order by Northern Front to its brigades and other units issued before Hiram, and no such order was issued while the Galilee was being conquered. Indeed, a senior Israeli Foreign Ministry official, who later toured the Galilee, spoke with commanders and assessed the demographic denouement of the operation, wrote: “From all the commanders we talked to we heard that during the operations . . . they had had no clear instructions, no clear line, concerning behavior towards the Arabs in the conquered areas— expulsion of the inhabitants or leaving them in place . . . discrimination in favor of Christians or not.”126 And: “The attitude toward the Arab inhabitants of the Galilee and to the refugees [there] . . . was haphazard [mikri] and different from place to place in accordance with this or that commander’s initiative. . . . Here [inhabitants] were expelled, there, left in place; . . . here, [the IDF] discriminated in favor of the Christians, and there [the IDF] behaved toward the Christians and the Muslims in the same way.”127 And although the official, Yagakov Shimoni, had favored expelling the refugees camped out in the Galilee, and perhaps many of the permanent inhabitants as well, this had not been conveyed in time to the IDF and had not been the army’s policy"

"But on the morning of 31 October, rising early, Ben-Gurion drove up to Safad, Northern Front HQ, where he met Carmel. What exactly was said is unknown, but Ben-Gurion jotted down in his diary that he (or Carmel) expected “additional Arabs” to flee the area, above and beyond those who had already fled or been expelled,129 and Carmel promptly—while Ben-Gurion was still with him or hard on the heels of the Old Man’s departure—instructed all his units: “Do all in your power for a quick and immediate cleansing [tihur] of the conquered areas of all the hostile elements in line with the orders that have been issued[.] The inhabitants of the areas conquered should be assisted to leave.”130 Ten days later Carmel reiterated: “[We] should continue to assist the inhabitants who wish to leave the areas we have conquered. This matter is urgent and should be expedited quickly.”131 To this order Carmel had added that “a 5-kilometer-deep strip behind the border line between us and Lebanon must be empty of [Arab] inhabitants.”132

But it is one thing to instruct units before they set out to conquer villages, or while conquering them, to expel the inhabitants; it is quite another to tell them, after they have conquered the villages and moved on, to go back and expel the inhabitants who have already been neutralized. The fact that the UN cease-fire had gone into effect at 11:00 AM on 31 October may also have contributed to the nonexpulsive behavior of most IDF units following their receipt of the expulsion directive, radioed to the units only an hour before.

Besides, the order was couched in very unimperative language. Carmel had pointedly avoided using the word “expel” (legaresh), perhaps hinting at his moral unease.

As a result, Carmel’s units by and large failed to expel the inhabitants who had remained in place after Hiram had washed over them. And, indeed, Carmel later punished neither commanders who had expelled communities nor commanders who had failed to expel."

Operation Horev, December 1948–January 1949 -P350

"David Ben-Gurion was still powerfully drawn to Judea and Samaria by historical-ideological and strategic considerations,1 but international diplomatic considerations dictated caution and restraint. Besides, the Jordanians had made it abundantly clear that they were out of the fight, and the Israelis still feared British military intervention should hostilities with Jordan be renewed. Zvi Ayalon, the Central Front OC, assured Ben-Gurion that it would take only “5 days” to conquer the West Bank or large parts of it. But Israel’s representatives at the General Assembly meeting in Paris, Abba Eban and Reuven Shiloah, weighed in firmly against.2

But the south was another matter. The UN Security Council resolution of 4 November calling on the IDF to withdraw to the positions of 14 October in the south vaguely undermined Israel’s geopolitical claims. The new resolution may have been illogical—it called for Israeli withdrawal from territory awarded to Israel by the United Nations, territory that had been conquered by Egypt in defiance of the United Nations, and then recaptured by Israel— but there it was."

"Since the 1930s, a deep pessimism underlay Ben-Gurion’s attitude toward the Arab world. Despite King gAbdullah’s real interest in peace and the (dubious) Egyptian overtures, Ben-Gurion, like many Israelis, was not hopeful, at least in the short and medium terms. Even signing a formal peace agreement with an Arab state, he feared, might not have a lasting or broader significance. “One must look not at decisions and documents but at the historical reality. What is our reality: The Arab peoples were beaten by us. Will they forget this quickly? 700,000 people beat 30 million. Will they forget this humiliation? One must assume they have feelings of honor. . . . Is there any assurance that they will not want revenge?”12 he asked. And the Arab states continue to reject the idea and reality of a Jewish state in their midst, he could have added."

"Gruenbaum also proposed that Israel formally declare Jerusalem part of Israel. Lastly, taking issue with Moshe Shertok, Gruenbaum opposed the establishment of a Palestinian Arab state in the West Bank. It would be ruled by the mufti or his allies and “would be a permanent enemy of the State of Israel” and a major obstacle to peace between the Jewish state and the Arab world. “All the aspirations and ideals of this [Palestinian] state would be directed against the State of Israel,” and it would always strive to expand westward— “against us.” Gruenbaum, like Ben-Gurion, preferred Jordanian annexation of the West Bank"

"The Negev Brigade had been sent on its way by Ben-Gurion, who arrived at the Ninth Battalion’s assembly area at Halutza after adventurously trudging through rain-filled wadis with Yigael Yadin for two hours when their jeep convoy stuck in the mud west of Beersheba.29 A small flying column of the battalion’s troops, maintaining radio silence (they used carrier pigeons for communications), infiltrated south of the Egyptian lines and occupied two unoccupied positions at Mashrafa (the site of the Nabatean town of Shivta), midway between Bir Asluj and gAuja. Simultaneously, the bulk of the Ninth and Seventh battalions attacked and took, after a seesaw battle, the cluster of Egyptian positions at Bir Tamila, southwest of Bir Asluj. At one point in the battle, the “French Commando,” many of them ex–Foreign Legionnaires and Moroccan Jews, retreated from one of the conquered positions under heavy Egyptian fire, leaving behind, under a railway bridge, a handful of wounded. When they retook the position a half-hour later, they found that all the wounded had been murdered, with their genitals mutilated and their penises stuck in their mouths. Some had been blinded with burning cigarettes. The troops drew their knives and murdered a number of Egyptian POWs. Southern Front reacted by disbanding the French Commando.30"

Al Arish

"Abu Ageila was not Allon’s real objective, though. He was after bigger game: El gArish. Its fall would close the trap on the bulk of the Egyptian army, in the Gaza Strip, and, no doubt, augur that army’s collapse—and Allon wasn’t going to allow diplomats or Yadin to stop him. Allon sent his deputy, Yitzhak Rabin, to tell Yadin that what was happening at Abu Ageila was a “raid.” Rabin did not mention El gArish. As he later phrased it in his memoirs: “I had neglected to specify our entire plan and confined myself to the capture of Abu Ageila. I had reason to believe that if I were to reveal the whole plan, including the capture of El gArish, the General Staff might suspect we had gone mad.”4

...At Bir Lahfan, as Allon contemplated the final push northward, a telegram from Yadin reached him and Rabin, stating: “I have learned from the [IDF] Intelligence Service and from [IAF] aerial reconnaissance that our forces have moved toward El gArish. . . . You are herewith ordered to halt all movement of your units without prior approval from me.” A follow-up cable read: “What is happening here? Stop the advance!” And a third cable: “I repeat and emphasize that I forbid you to carry out any operation north of Abu Ageila without my permission.”44

Allon boarded a plane for Tel Aviv. He hoped to persuade Yadin and BenGurion to let him take El gArish. Perhaps he assumed that by the time the deliberations in Tel Aviv were ended, the Eighth and Twelfth Brigades would have taken the town.45

The meeting with Yadin, at home in bed, around midnight 29–30 December was stormy. Yadin refused to budge. Allon said that his forces could and would take El gArish and then turn eastward, attacking Rafah from the rear. Yadin demanded that the brigades return to Abu Ageila. Allon radioed his staff officers: “It’s no use. Withdraw from El gArish.”46

It is possible that Yadin feared that Allon’s forces were too small to take and hold El gArish. More likely, he was moved by expectations of international pressure. Whatever the case, Yadin forced a withdrawal. But he agreed to allow Allon an alternative, to push from Abu Ageila toward Rafah along the international frontier, which could assure the envelopment of the Gaza Strip without taking El gArish

Nonetheless, Allon made one last effort: the following morning he met with Ben-Gurion (and Yadin) and pleaded that they reconsider. But BenGurion, too, refused to budge. Indeed, he went one better: if the British actually deployed forces threatening the IDF, Allon was ordered to withdraw back to gAuja, across the frontier.47 As the prime minister told the Cabinet: “There is a consideration that has guided us from the start of the operation: through all the war we have been careful not to face off with the British army.”48 The Israelis remained genuinely fearful of British intervention, given—as they saw things—Foreign Secretary Bevin’s “irrational” anti-Israeli “bias.”49

It is not altogether clear why Yadin (and Ben-Gurion) were so adamant on late 29 December and early 30 December about pulling back from El gArish; international pressure had barely been unleashed. But ongoing diplomatic moves—and premonitions of worse to come—doubtless played a key role. Following the IDF thrust across the international frontier, the Egyptians, on 28 December, had demanded the immediate convening of the Security Council to halt what they—with brazen chutzpah—called Israeli “aggression.” Previously, Bunche had submitted to the council reports condemning Israel for the impasse in the Negev as resulting from its intransigence over the Faluja Pocket. Now Britain submitted a resolution calling for Israeli compliance with the resolution of 4 November, which had called for withdrawal to the 14 October line. Egyptian War Minister Muhammad Haidar had informed London that the Israelis were “now within six miles of El gArish.”50 On 29 December the Security Council called for an “immediate ceasefire” and implementation of the 4 November resolution.

By morning 30 December, the Eighth and Twelfth Brigades were back in Abu Ageila. But by then, London was frenetic, breathing down Truman’s neck. Pressed by Cairo, Britain was insistent on saving the Egyptian army— and understood that the IDF had to be prevented from completing its encirclement. The Egyptians were panic-stricken and transmitted the panic to London via the British embassy in Cairo. Egypt’s leaders were “begging [Ambassador Sir Ronald Campbell] for war material.” They even asked that “British aircraft, tanks and guns with British crews but with Egyptian markings” be sent to attack the Israelis.51 Campbell opined that an Egyptian defeat would lead to grave instability in Egypt and that Britain’s position in the Middle East in general would be imperiled, especially if Britain rebuffed Egyptian pleas for help. The assassination of the Egyptian prime minister, Mahmud Fahmi Nuqrashi, two days earlier did not help. He was murdered by a young veterinary student and Muslim Brotherhood member, gAbdel Meguid Ahmad Hassan, disguised as a police lieutenant, in the Ministry of Interior building in Cairo, days after he had outlawed the organization. The defeat in Palestine was one of the reasons later cited by the assassin.52

In a series of almost hysterical telegrams, Campbell strongly urged London to authorize arms shipments to Egypt and to launch limited military intervention against Israel. Campbell hoped that this would force the IDF out of Sinai or even back to “the positions they occupied in [the] Negeb on October 14th.” Such action could restore Britain’s position in the Middle East, he argued.53 Britain’s minister to Beirut, Houstoun Boswall, concurred.54

But Britain’s willingness to help Egypt was hampered by a lack of information about the true state of affairs in Sinai; its own reconnaissance aircraft had not yet supplied clear photographs, and the Egyptians could not be trusted to tell the truth. As Bevin put it (somewhat censoriously) to Campbell on 30 December: “We cannot understand the Egyptian reports of the fighting. Public statements from Cairo represent the battles as Egyptian victories. At the same time we receive [private] appeals for help. The public here will not understand. Is it not better for the Egyptian Government to give the true facts?”55 Bevin agreed only to allow Egyptian aircraft to use Britain’s Suez Canal–side bases for refueling.

But he sensed that the Egyptians were on the verge of defeat. He instructed his ambassador in Washington to “inform [the] State Department . . . that if Jewish forces are in fact attacking Egyptian territory our obligations under the Anglo-Egyptian [Defense] Treaty would of course come into play.”56 And he followed this up with something still firmer: “I trust that it may be possible for the United States Government to act on the Jews as to make any military action by us on Egyptian territory unnecessary. . . . This can only be ensured if the Jews immediately withdraw from Egyptian territory. . . . In view of the aggressive use to which the Jews had put arms obtained from Soviet satellite countries we shall no longer be able to refuse to carry out British contracts to the Arab countries.”57 The cat was now among the pigeons.

At first, Israel denied that it had invaded Egyptian territory. But under the barrage of appeals and threats from London, Washington was propelled into action. At lunchtime on 31 December, McDonald, the US representative in Tel Aviv, was instructed to tell Israel to get out of Sinai. Shertok was summoned and told to inform Ben-Gurion and Weizmann that Britain had threatened that, unless the IDF withdrew from Sinai, London would be compelled to “take action” under the terms of the Anglo-Egyptian Defense Treaty. Washington, for its part, regarded the invasion of Sinai as “illadvised” and as jeopardizing “the peace of the Middle East.” This might require “reconsideration” of America’s “relations with Israel.” (By the way, the United States also criticized Israel’s “threatening” attitude toward Jordan.)60 As Shertok jotted down McDonald’s statement, “his fingers tightened around his pen, and his face was white with tension,” the American later recorded.61

By morning 2 January 1949, “not an Israeli hoof remained in Egypt”;64 the IDF was back in gAuja. But Israel was both alarmed and annoyed by the diplomatic démarche that had forced its retreat. It was being pilloried as an aggressor—and threatened with British military intervention—when it was Egypt (and its fellow Arab states) who were the aggressors, who had clearly violated the UN Charter and a UN decision by invading Palestine and attacking the State of Israel (and the British, to judge from their internal correspondence, clearly understood this);65 and all the Israelis had been doing since 15 May 1948 was attempting to drive out the invaders. Israel failed to understand Britain’s threats of intervention or to lift its arms embargo or, for that matter, America’s support of these threats. This was the gist of letters sent by Shertok to McDonald and Weizmann to Truman. The Israelis invoked the right of “hot pursuit” in defense of their penetration of Sinai and decried the inequitable treatment by the Security Council and the Great Powers of the two “invasions.” And, to add insult to injury, the United States and Britain were sponsoring Egypt for a Security Council seat while Israel was being denied UN membership!66"

"Ben-Gurion was unhappy that yet again the IDF had, at the last minute, been prevented from demolishing the Egyptian army. But he viewed the Egyptian démarche to end the state of belligerency within the wider Middle Eastern context; Jordan and the other Arab states, he was sure, would follow suit.70 Moreover, he was keenly attuned to Washington—where opinion was “dangerously tense, almost hostile” to Israel and where Truman was beginning to perceive Israel as a “trouble-maker.” Israel’s representative in Washington strongly urged acceptance of the cease-fire.71 On 7 January Tel Aviv responded positively and ordered Allon to pull all his forces out of Egyptianheld territory by 10 January. The fighting was to have ended at 2:00 PM, 7 January, but went on for a few more hours as local Egyptian commanders tried, to no avail, to reopen the route to El gArish."

The Armistice Agreements, January–July 1949 -P375

"Entering the talks, Israel’s negotiating position was based on the military realities on the ground and the fact of Egyptian defeat; the Egyptian position, on the pre-Yoav and pre-Horev front lines and on the UN Security Council resolutions, which had called on Israel to withdraw to the 14 October lines. The withdrawal-promoting Security Council resolution of 4 November was buttressed by a memorandum by Bunche defining and endorsing the truce lines of 14 October.6

Israel initially demanded that Egypt withdraw from the areas its troops still occupied in Palestine—that is, the Gaza Strip and the Bethlehem area—and that the future armistice boundary between the two countries be based on the old international Egypt-Palestine frontier, agreed between the British Empire (effectively governing Egypt) and the Ottomans (ruling Palestine) in 1906. The Egyptians initially sought what amounted to sovereignty over the central and southern Negev—partly in order to restore the historic territorial contiguity of the Arab and Islamic worlds—and demanded that Israel withdraw from the areas of Beersheba, Bir Asluj, and gAuja. The southern Negev and Beersheba, they said, could be demilitarized. The Egyptians also demanded that Israel allow the evacuation of the Faluja Pocket—“which weighed on them most heavily of all,” as one Israeli delegation member put it7—before anything else was discussed or settled. Israel refused."

"The Israeli-Lebanese armistice talks, held in no-man’s-land on the border near Rosh Haniqra (Ras al-Naqurah) on the Mediterranean coast, were a shorter and less disputatious affair. From the start, there was a friendly atmosphere. Indeed, as the Israelis reported, “the Lebanese [delegates] pretend/ say that they are not Arabs and that they were dragged into the adventure [that is, the war] against their will. They maintain that, for internal reasons, they cannot openly admit their hatred for the Syrians.”11"

"Ben-Gurion—and, to a somewhat lesser degree, the Zionist movement as a whole—had for decades been obsessed with the Negev and its southern maritime outlet, the coastline of the Gulf of gAqaba. The empty wasteland was seen as the country’s only relatively large stretch of land available for the absorption of a mass of immigrants, and many suspected that it harbored mineral riches. Ben-Gurion had visited what the Bible (occasionally) and he called “Eilat” (or “gEtzion-Gaver”) at least three times in the 1920s and 1930s. In 1935 he had written to the pro-Zionist US Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis of Eilat’s “great significance,” quoting the relevant biblical passage (1 Kings 9:26). “It is of the greatest economic and political importance that a Jewish settlement be established there as soon as possible, in order to create a political fait accompli.”17"

"In the background, throughout, hovered the threat and possibility, in the absence of an agreement, of unilateral Israeli military action to alter the front lines—already roughly hinted at by gUvda, launched three days after the start of the formal negotiations, and by the Israeli occupation in mid-March of a series of positions in the foothills of western Judea.28 In mid-March the IDF had been poised to conquer part of the West Bank but had been halted by Ben-Gurion in part because of warnings by Abba Eban about Washington’s possible reaction.29 Israel threatened to conquer the western foothills of Samaria if Jordan did not agree to cede them through diplomacy. At one point, Israel presented a twenty-four-hour ultimatum.30 gAbdullah feared that if the IDF reopened hostilities, Israel would take the whole of the West Bank, not merely the strip of territory on its northwestern periphery. He made a last-minute effort to mobilize British and American support. But neither power was willing to guarantee the existing lines as international frontiers or, indeed, Jordanian control of the West Bank.31 Britain was unwilling to extend its defense pact guarantee beyond the East Bank."

"Officers such as Allon, OC Southern Command, felt that the IDF during the war had missed the opportunity to establish a secure, natural frontier along the Jordan River. Allon, bypassing channels, took the unusual step, a moment before the conclusion of the Israeli-Jordanian armistice agreement, of urging Ben-Gurion to order the conquest of the West Bank. He wrote (saying he was conveying the thinking of “most of the army’s senior officers”): “There is no need for a perfect military education to understand the permanent danger to the peace of Israel from the presence of large hostile forces in the western Land of Israel—in the [Jenin-Nablus-Tulkarm] Triangle and the Hebron Hills.” The area could be conquered easily and “relatively quickly,” given the balance of forces. And gaining the first line of foothills peacefully, through the prospective armistice agreement, “cannot be seen as a solution to the problem.” Israel needed territorial “depth,” argued Allon. He feared the long-term possibility of a Jordanian-Iraqi lunge, perhaps assisted by British troops stationed in the West Bank, across Israel’s narrow waist to the sea, which would cut the state in half. Israel’s strategic border should be along the Jordan River. Such a line, he argued, would also give Israel the added benefit of hydroelectric power, which could be derived from the river, and additional water for the development of the Negev. Britain, he assured Ben-Gurion, would not intervene to safeguard any area west of the river. “Time is working against us,” he cautioned. Allon expected that “a large part” of the West Bank’s population, refugee and permanent, would flee eastward across the river in the event of such an onslaught.35"

Some Conclusions -P393

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 yearlong 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."