1948: A History of the First Arab-Israeli War (77 page)

But through November 1947-May 1948 the Great Powers failed to intervene in the civil war and force partition down the Arabs' throats and failed again, in May and June 1948, when the Arab states launched a war of aggression, in defiance of the UN resolution, against the Yishuv. The international community refrained from intervention, barring hesitant expressions of verbal displeasure.

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 r r June, favored both sidesboth 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 Arish, 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.

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 iso surrendering or unarmed Haganah men in Kfar `Etzion (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 Arab regular armies committed few atrocities and no large-scale massacres of POWs and civilians in the conventional war-even though they conquered the Jewish Quarter of the Old City of Jerusalem and a number of rural settlements, including Atarot and Neve Ya`akov near Jerusalem, and Nitzanim, Gezer, and Mishmar Hayarden elsewhere.

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 re ported 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 `Eilabun, Jish, Arab al-Mawasi, Saliha, Majd al-Kurum, and so on-was apparently related to a general vengef ilness 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 199os or the Sudanese civil wars of the past fifty years).

In the 1948 war, the Yishuv suffered 5,700- 5,8oo dead23-one quarter of them civilians. This represented almost i percent of the Jewish community in Palestine, which stood at 628,ooo at the end of November 1947 and 649,000 in May 1948.24 Of the dead, more than five hundred were female (io8 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 195os, 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.

The war resulted in the creation of some seven hundred thousand Arab refugees." 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-19405 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 Herz1 onward, Zionist leaders and proponents had occasionally suggested transfer, only in the mid-193os and in the early 194os 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.

By contrast, expulsionist thinking and, where it became possible, behavior, characterized the mainstream of the Palestinian national movement since its inception. "We will push the Zionists into the sea-or they will send us back into the desert," the Jaffa Muslim-Christian Association told the I ing-Crane Commission as early as 1919.29

For the Palestinians, from the start, the clash with the Zionists was a zerosum game. The Palestinian national movement's leader during the 19zos, 193os, and 194os, Haj Amin al-Hussein, consistently rejected territorial compromise and espoused a solution to the Palestine problem that posited all of Palestine as an Arab state and allowed for a Jewish minority composed only of those who had lived in the country before 19i4 (or, in a variant, 1917). Thus he marked out all Jews who had arrived in the country after World War I and their progeny for, at the very least, noncitizenship or expulsion-or worse. In Arabic, before Arab audiences, he was often explicit. With Westerners, he was usually evasive, but one cannot doubt his meaning. 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?"