1948 -49

The 1948 War between, first the Palestinian Arabs and Jews, then the Palestinian Jews and the Arab armies of Egypt, Jordan, Syria, and Iraq (Lebanon did not take part in that war) actually started in late 1947 and ended in mid 1949, although most of the fighting occurred in 1948.

Unlike the civil war in Lebanon which started in 1975 and lasted for 15 years, the Palestinian War was definitely not a Black Swan – it was building for decades (see my blog essay Black Swans for an explanation of a Black Swan). Small pitched battles and clashes between Palestinian Arabs and Jews started in the decades of the late 19th century and continued sporadically into the 1910’s, 1920’s, 1930’s and late 1940’s.

One of the best histories of this 1948 war may be the 2008 book 1948 – A history of the First Arab-Israeli War by Benny Morris. Morris is a professor of history in the Middle East Studies Department of Ben Gurion University, Beersheba, Israel. One might presume a certain amount of bias on the part of Professor Morris, yet I did not perceive any. For example Morris states that the Jews committed more atrocities and massacres against the Arabs than did the Arabs against the Jews. The reason for this was logical in that the Jews overran many more Arab towns, villages, and settlements than vice-versa on the order of several hundred versus a couple dozen. None-the-less this is an indication to me that Professor Morris is a historian first and an Israeli second.

In 1958 when I was working in Libya, North Africa for Mobil Oil, I met several young Palestinian men in Tripoli who said that in 1948 their families were given 24 hours to leave their homes in Palestine. All were allowed to take as much of their personal and household effects as they could with them, but they had to leave. Their hatred of Palestinian Jews in particular and all Jews in general was palpable. As a child in June 1948 Lidia witnessed Jews in Tripoli being stoned by Arab mobs in reaction to the war between the Palestinian Arabs and Jews (according to Professor Morris 13 Jews were killed in Tripoli). At that time Libya was under United Nations jurisdiction with the British police and military on the ground as the UN representatives. The British did not intervene in the mayhem for 24 hours. What could have motivated the British for their non action? The answer must lie in what happened in Palestine prior to the 1948 war. Palestine was a British mandate so that the British were charged with administering the area and providing security. The Jews wanted the British military out of Palestine and toward the end of the mandate resorted to committing act of terrorism to drive them out. Among the terrorism acts was the bombing of the King David Hotel (July 1946) in Jerusalem where civilians as well as British military personnel were killed.

In 1948 the Jewish population of Palestine was circa 750,000 and the Arab population almost twice that. The surrounding Arab countries which went to war had a combined population of about 40 million. How on earth could such a relatively small population beat a so much larger one? And make no mistake; although the Jews lost a few battles, they overwhelmingly won the war. There are rational reasons why this was so as I shall endeavor to explain later, with no little credit to Professor Morris.

In 1881 the population of Palestine was made up of approximately 450,000 Arabs – 90% Muslim and the rest Christian and 25,000 Jews. From 1882 to 1903 the first wave of Zionist settlers – some 30,000 Jews came to Palestine. Zionism is an international political movement that supported the reestablishment of a homeland for the Jewish people in Palestine. The word Zionism was derived from Mount Zion, a mountain near Jerusalem. The Arabs were wary of these new Jewish settlers whom they regarded as inexplicable, foolish, strange infidels, and vaguely minatory. The Jews in turn thought the Arabs devious, dirty, untrustworthy, simple, and lazy. Nothing like two peoples getting off to a good start in the Holy Land. The mantra of the Zionists was, “A land without people for a people without land.” The Jewish settlers must have been blind if they did not notice there were plenty of people in the land already.

Until around 1908-09 there were few acts of violence except of the common criminal kind. In 1909, David Ben-Gurion, who would become the first president of Israel in May 1948, was waylaid by an Arab with a knife, bent on robbery. Ben-Gurion suffered a wound to his arm and an abiding suspicion of Arabs thereafter. From 1909-1914 violence increased and took on a more nationalistic fervor – that is a more Arab vs. Jew connotation. The 1st World War from 1914 to 1919 diminished the Arab-Jew confrontations as Palestine, then part of the Ottoman Empire, which in turn was part of the Central Powers, was allied with Germany and the Austro-Hungarian Empire as concentration on the wider war was the order of the day.

On November 29, 1947 the United Nations put Resolution 181, which called for the partition of Palestine into two sovereign states – one Jewish and one Arab, to a vote. When the tally was finished, 33 UN member countries voted “yes” and 13 voted “no” with 10 abstentions. The resolution barely achieved the necessary 2/3 vote with only two votes to spare. One of the two Palestinian protagonists was jubilant and the other was angry and morose. Guess which was which. The countries voting in the affirmative were the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Western Europe, the Soviet Bloc, and most of Latin America. The nays were the Arab and Muslin countries, Greece, Cuba, Chile, and India. Strangely, among the abstainers was Great Britain; perhaps motivated by allegiance to both the Arabs and the Jews. The acts of sabotage and terrorism in Palestine by the Jews against the British may have been a major contributing factor. As can well be imagined the lobbying by both the Arabs and the Jews in the months leading up to the vote was intense. Especially contested by both sides were Latin America and Asia.
North America, Western Europe, and the Soviet Bloc (that was to change a few years later) were firmly in the Jewish camp while Africa, a couple of Latin American countries and of course the Middle East sided with the Palestinian Arabs.

The Civil War between the Palestinian Arabs and Jews began in earnest on November 30, 1947. The Arab world called this the First Palestine War and the Jews called it the War of Independence. The war was to have two distinct phases: The civil war which began on November 30, 1947 and ended on May 14, 1948 and a conventional war beginning when the Arab armies of the surrounding states of Egypt, Iraq, Syria, and Jordan invaded Palestine on May 15, 1948 and ending with armistice agreements with the Arab countries (Egypt on February 24, 1949, Jordan on April 3, 1949, Syria on July 20, 1949. Iraq refused to enter into armistice negotiations). There were several temporary truces intermixed during this interval where both the Arab and Israeli sides tried to derive advantages.

After 5 ½ months of fighting the Palestinian Arabs, the Yishuv, as the Jewish community in Palestine called themselves, won a decisive victory. The Jewish leaders, headed by the homunculus in stature, but leviathan in achievement, David Ben-Gurion, went to Tele Aviv on May 14, 1948 and, to the roar of approval and celebration of the crowd, declared the establishment of the State of Israel. The United States immediately recognized this new state and was followed quickly by the Soviet Union.

Where did the Yishuv get its arms to fight the war? Though money (and volunteers mostly Jewish, but some non-Jews as well) poured in from various places around the world, a large percentage came from North America and Europe. Interestingly enough, initially the Skoda Arms Works in Czechoslovakia supplied much of the military hardware. The motivation for the Checks was hard currency rather than ideology. They also sold arms to the Arabs, but considerably fewer. Other sources were also utilized by Jewish arms buyers around the world. Some few hundreds of the Jewish officers and enlisted men gained military experience fighting for the British, Canadian, Australian, New Zealand, and American armed forces during WWII.

The Israelis were highly motivated to win this war because not to do so was to risk another Holocaust. The Arab soldiers from the other countries, on the other hand, knew that if they should lose they could always go back to their home countries. There are other factors which favored the Israelis. Not only were they more highly motivated, had superior coordination of their forces, and knew the terrain better than the invading Arabs armies, but the Israelis had one objective – to win. The various Arabs countries had a variety of objectives which were seldom conductive to defeating the Jews. Three of the Arab countries which invaded Palestine were kingdoms, Abdullah in Jordan, Farouk in Egypt, and Prince Abdul al-Llah who served as regent for the underage Faisal II in Iraq. Only Syria had an elected president, the nationalist Shukri al-Quwwatli, who had led the opposition to French rule after WWII. These Arab leaders were not as rabidly anti-Israel as the current leaders of those countries today. Although they opposed the partition of Palestine into Arab and Jewish states, of greater concern for them and their military commanders was their suspicion of the other invading Arab armies whom they thought were trying to carve up Palestine to their own advantage. Then, as now, the virulently anti-Israeli “Arab street” was a major factor which had to be taken under consideration else their regimes might be overthrown. Still this mistrust and reluctant or non-existent cooperation between the various governments and armies caused a significant diminution of battle effectiveness which accrued to the advantage of the Israelis. Not that the Jews did not have some divisions within their ranks, but they were not of the same magnitude as the Arabs. At the start of the civil war the main Jewish force was called the Haganah. A much smaller and more militant group was called the Irgun Zvai Luemi (IZL), also called the Irgun. After a showdown between forces of the Haganah and the IZL in one battle where both sides fired on one another, peace was made between them and the IZL was absorbed into the Haganah, thereafter called the Israel Defense Forces (IDF). Before the start of the first phase of the civil war when British forces were still in Palestine, Acts of sabotage and terrorism were committed by the Irgun against the British. The Haganah opposed the wanton acts of terrorism by the Irgun including murder of British military personnel and civilians. This situation was recounted in the 1960 movie Exodus based on the book of the same name by Leon Uris.

Professor Morris stated that Arab sources claim that 900,000 to one million Palestinian Arabs were displaced from their homes in Palestine. A better estimate might be on the order of 750,000 or approximately ½ of the Arab population before the war. Was there a deliberate and formulated policy by the Jews to expel the Arabs from Palestine? This charge has been made over the years, yet there is no credible evidence to support it. What is undeniably factual is that as the war went on, the Jews, both government officials and military commanders in the field, increasingly chose to expel the Arabs from their towns and settlements by direct orders or intimidation rather than trying to subjugate and control them, but leave them in place. The thinking of the Jews on this issue turned on the considerations that Arabs left in Jewish territory might become a “Fifth Column” to surreptitiously work against the Jewish occupiers. A further factor, strongly argued by Ben-Gurion, was that after the war if a sufficient number of Arabs remained in Israel then by demographics the Jews might become a minority and could conceivably lose control of their own country through the democratic process.

The other side of this logical, but tarnished nodus is the 500,000 to 600,000 Jews who emigrated, were intimidated into leaving, or were expelled from Arab lands in the years immediately after 1948. In Yemen 43,000 Jews left; in Iraq 80,000 to 90,000 who mostly went to Israel; in Syria the number was 15,000; in Libya it was 40,000; in Morocco 60,000 out of the pre-1948 total of 300,000 with a second major wave leaving in 1961 after the death of the sultan Mohammed V such that now there are only about 4000 Jews left in the country – still the largest Jewish community in the Arab world; and lesser numbers in Iran, Algeria and Tunisia. A number of Jews in these various countries did not leave – they were killed; hundreds in Iraq, 76 or so in Aden, 13 in Libya, and dozens more in other Arab countries. Everyone knows that hundreds of thousands of Palestinians became refugees after the 1948 war. What is not so well known, in fact hardly known at all, is that a half million or so Jews were forced, one way or another, to leave their home countries in the Middle East often being required to leave their money and personal property behind. Where is the outrage from the likes of Jimmy Carter, who is oh so sympathetic to the Palestinian Arab cause, but is silent on the injustices which were done to Jewish civilians in the Middle East after 1948?

Apart from being interesting history in itself, what is the significance of familiarity with the 1948 Arab/Israeli War? Factoring in the 1967 war (the so called “Six Day War”) between Israel and the trio of Egypt, Jordan, and Syria as well as the 1973 war (The Yom Kippur War) between Israel and the duo of Egypt and Syria there are lessons to be learned and hopefully profited from. The Arab world was humiliated in 1948, again in 1967, and to a lesser extent in 1973. Given the more than 1000 years of suspicion, rivalry, and contempt between Arabs and Jews and the establishment of Israel in the middle of the Arab world along with the aforementioned wars, what is there to be surprised about at the level of animosity and bitter hatred of Muslims toward Jews today? Another lesson from the 1948 war is the jealousy, distrust, and duplicity between the various Muslim or Arab countries and also within the countries themselves with their disparate social and religious (Sunni, Shiite, Coptic, Druze, Christian, etc.) makeup. Any country such as the United States or collection of countries, such as the UN or EU, who wants to “nation build” in the Middle East, should fully understand from a historical perspective what the difficulties, not to say impossibilities are. Bring peace between the Jews and Muslims just might take a thousand years or the complete destruction of one side or the other. Certainly the ill-feelings today between the two protagonists are greater than ever since the imbroglio of 1948.

There are criticisms and petty bickering among religious groups, e.g. Baptists, Methodists, Catholics, etc. in the United States and elsewhere , but I do not hear of them strapping on explosive vests and blowing themselves and others to kingdom come. Can the same be said of Muslin fanatics? Of course only a small minority of Muslims does this, yet the number of Muslims who do not unqualifiedly condemn these acts is not small. And even a minuscule number of people from other religions are not bent upon such extreme violence.