The Lemon Tree: An Arab, A Jew, and the Heart of the Middle East (45 page)

A more recent source for the disconnection between the Arab states' words and their private interests is Rogan and Shlaim's
The War for Palestine: Rewriting the History of 1948,
a collection of essays by Arab, Israeli, and Western scholars. Shlaim, an Israeli scholar and Oxford professor, also details Abdullah's November meeting with Golda Meir, representative for the Jewish Agency, in his book,
The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World.
Shlaim writes (p. 30):

Abdullah began by outlining his plan to preempt the mufti, to capture the Arab part of Palestine, and to attach it to his kingdom, and he asked about the Jewish response to this plan. Mrs. Meir replied that the Jews would view such an attempt in a favourable light, especially if Abdullah did not interfere with the establishment of a Jewish state, avoided a military confrontation, and appeared to go along with the United Nations.

Jon and David Kimche essentially confirm this account.

The text of United Nations General Assembly Resolution 181, better known as the "partition resolution," is printed in its entirety in volume 37 of
The Rise of Israel,
a thirty-nine-volume collection of original documents edited by Michael J. Cohen. The UN minority report, completed on November 11, 1947, is printed in
From Haven to Conquest,
pp. 645-95, with the key provisions on pp. 694-95. The map for this proposed federal state can be found on the interleaf between pp. 204 and 205 in
Report
on Palestine: Report to the General Assembly by the United Nations Special Committee on Palestine.

The British intent to quit Palestine on May 15, 1948, is confirmed in
Palestine and Transjordan Administration Reports, Vol. 16,
p. 490.

Many accounts, citing the 44 percent of historic Palestine that was set aside for an Arab state, calculate that therefore the remaining 56 percent was for the Jewish state. However, 1.5 percent of the land would have been set aside for the city of Jerusalem and the immediate surrounding area, including Bethlehem, under a demilitarized international trusteeship administered by the UN. (See
Report on Palestine,
pp. 187-91, for the Jerusalem proposal.)

The citrus and grain percentages were calculated by Harvard scholar Walid Khalidi and printed in
Before Their Diaspora,
p. 305. The figures on Jewish population and land ownership come from John Chappie,
Jewish Land Settlement in Palestine,
referenced in
From Haven to Conquest,
p. 843. Population figures for Arabs and Jews in the proposed states are listed in
Report on Palestine,
p. 181.

The UN vote was the result in part of an intense lobbying effort by Zionists from the United States and Palestine to secure the necessary support. In a memo to his Foreign Office (
The Rise of Israel, Vol. 37,
p. 213), British diplomat Harold Beeley describes the "active" Zionist lobbyists who persuaded the United States to "use its influence with Governments which were for one reason or another dependent on it, and which if left to themselves would either vote against partition or abstain," including Haiti, the Philippines, and Liberia, all of which voted for partition after previously announcing their intention to oppose it.

According to a secret U.S. State Department memo dated December 15, 1947, Gabriel Dennis, the Liberian secretary of state and UN delegate, complained of a "high-pressure electioneering job, in which . . . the Liberian Minister at Washington had received a warning that unless Liberia voted with the American Delegation in favor of partition, the minister could expect no further favors for his country from Congress"
{Rise of Israel, Vol. 37,
p. 197). The UN representative of the Philippines reported receiving a radiogram from his president instructing a vote in favor of partition. The diplomat found the incident "exceedingly unpleasant," especially in light of the public stance against partition that he had already taken
{From Haven to Conquest,
pp. 723-26).

The chief advocate for the Arab side was Sir Muhammad Zafrulla Khan, who was described admiringly by Michael Comay, a prominent Zionist leader, as "a powerful champion . . . undoubtedly one of the ablest and most impressive delegates present from any country." Comay, head of the New York office of the Jewish Agency and later Israel's UN delegate, wrote in a "strictly confidential" letter that Khan "and some of the other Arab spokesmen were badly hampered by the refusal of the Palestine Arabs to consider making any concessions or talking in conciliatory terms. But for this we may have had an even more difficult time as many delegations supported the partition scheme with the greatest reluctance. . . ."

A crucial factor in swaying the reluctant parties toward partition, Comay wrote, had been a delay in the vote over the Thanksgiving holiday, during which time "an avalanche descended upon the White House" (
The Rise of Israel, Vol 37,
pp. 185-192). President Harry Truman would write later in his memoirs: "I do not think I ever had as much pressure and propaganda aimed at the White House as I had in this instance"
{Fallen Pillars: U.S. Policy Towards Palestine and Israel Since 1945,
p. 50).

Rejection of the plan by the Arab states is mentioned in numerous sources, including on p. 8 of Maan Abu Nowar's
The Jordan-Israeli War, 1948-1951.
Walid Khalidi, the Palestinian scholar, writes on pp. 305-06 of
Before Their Diaspora:

The Palestinians failed to see why they should be made to pay for the Holocaust . . . why it was not fair for the Jews to be a minority in a unitary Palestinian state, while it
was
fair for almost half of the Palestinian population—the indigenous majority on its ancestral soil—to be converted overnight into a minority under alien rule in the envisaged Jewish state according to partition.

To Jews around the world, on the other hand, the vote "was Western civilization's gesture of repentance for the Holocaust, that the establishment of the state of Israel in some way represented the repayment of a debt owed by those nations that realized they might have done more to prevent or at least limit the scale of Jewish tragedy during World War II"
{Palestine and the Great Powers,
p. 292). The celebrations of Dalia's relatives following the UN vote are described by her cousin Yitzhak Yitzhaki. Victor Shemtov, a Bulgarian Jew who would later become a member of the Israeli Knesset, recalls dancing in the streets of Haifa, even though his political party, the leftist Mapam, had professed its support for a single binational state.

The proposal for a "Jewish commonwealth," known as the "Biltmore Program," had called for "the establishment after the war of a Jewish state in Palestine that would stretch from the river Jordan to the Mediterranean"
{Palestine and the Great Powers,
p. 8). However, Benny Morris writes in
Righteous Victims
(pp. 168-69) that with Biltmore "the possibility that the state would be established in only part of Palestine was implicit."

Ben-Gurion's "stable basis" quote comes from his
War Diary, Vol. 1,
p. 22, and is cited in
Expulsion of the Palestinians,
p. 176.

Ben-Gurion's remarks may appear to some as a precursor to a policy of expulsions. One could also argue that he simply meant that many more Jews would have to be brought into the new Jewish state to increase the percentage of the Jewish majority; indeed, the Zionist leader promoted the aliyah of millions of European and later Middle Eastern Jews after World War II. Expulsion and aliyah are not mutually exclusive concepts, however, and Ben-Gurion's own support for forced "transfer" is perhaps most clearly understood in his memorandum "Outlines of Zionist Policy" from October 1941, when he wrote: "Complete transfer without compulsion—and ruthless compulsion at that—is hardly imaginable"
{Righteous Victims,
pp. 168-69).

Yitzhak Yitzhaki, the cousin of Dalia's mother, Solia, recalled the events of November 29 and 30, 1947, in an interview. The bus attacks in Ramla and the three-day strike are mentioned in Yoav Gelber's
Palestine 1948,
p. 17; Walid Khalidi's chronology of events in 1947 and 1948 from
Before Their Diaspora,
p. 315, includes the strike as well as Arab plans to mobilize troops. Khalidi's chronology can be searched onlineat
www.qudsway.com/Links/English_Neda/PalestinianFacts/Html_Palestinian/
hpf8.htm.

Egypt's boast about occupying Tel Aviv is from
The War for Palestine: Rewriting the History of 1948,
p. 155. The book outlines other prewar promises, including the Iraqi prime minister's call for a coordinated Arab military campaign and the specter of an oil embargo against the Western powers (p. 131), which the Saudis opposed
{Clash of Destinies,
pp. 79-80).

The Kimche brothers describe the arrival of recruits fresh from the DP camps and their determination to fight for a new state
{Clash,
pp. 13-14) and refer to a "new Zionism emotionally supercharged by catastrophe" (p. 20) as an underrated factor in the war to come. The Haganah battle plans, including the establishment of regional field commands and mobile brigades, coalesced in Plan Dalet (Hebrew for the letter D), which is described in detail in Chaim Herzog's
The Arab-Israeli Wars,
pp. 32-34. Israeli historian Uri Milstein, in his multivolume
History of Israel's War of Independence,
writes that an objective of Plan D "was control over Jewish settlement blocs beyond the borders. This constituted one stage in the execution of the secret plan, the final phase of which would be all of
Eretz-Yisra'el
[including at least all of historic Palestine] as a Jewish state"
{Vol. IV,
p. 185). Part of Plan D stated:

These operations can be carried out in the following manner: either by destroying villages (by setting fire to them, by blowing them up, and by planting mines in the debris). . . . In case of resistance, the armed force must be wiped out and the population expelled outside the borders of the state.

[This is printed in Y. Slutzky's 1972 book,
The Book of Hagana
(Hebrew), vol. 3, pp. 1955-559, and is cited in Israeli "new historian" Ilan Pappe's article "Were They Expelled?" and on the pages of MideastWeb.org, an Israeli organization promoting coexistence between Arabs and Jews:
www.mideastweb.organization
promoting coexistence between Arabs and Jews:
www.mideastweborg/pland.htm
.]

Ben-Gurion's quote on the boundaries of the state comes from his memoirs. The violence described in the "early 1948" paragraph is chronicled in Michael J. Cohen's
Palestine and the Great Powers,
pp. 300-10, and Khalidi's
Before Their Diaspora,
pp. 316-18. During this same time, Zionist leaders continued to fight on the political front in Washington. Chaim Weizmann, who would become the first president of Israel, met with President Truman in the days following the vote when U.S. support for implementing the partition plan appeared to be wavering; indeed, Zionist leaders thought Truman was preparing to reverse U.S. policy. Weizmann said, "The choice for our people, Mr. President, is between statehood and extermination"
{From Haven to Conquest,
pp. 737-43).

The attack on Hassan Salameh's headquarters was described by Israeli historian Uri Milstein on pp. 263-64 of
History of Israel's War of Independence, Vol IV;
Spiro Munayyer, an Arab native of Lydda, in "The Fall of Lydda,"
Journal of Palestine Studies
(Summer 1998): 80-98; and Khanom Khairi. Milstein mentions seventeen deaths; Munayyer, an eyewitness, recalled thirty dead and "bits of human anatomy hanging from trees." Khanom recalls going to the site the next day with her nationalist teacher in solidarity with the ex-mufti's fighters, most of whom were Iraqi.

The death of Abd al-Qader al-Husseini, the ex-mufti's other main commander in Palestine, was perhaps the Arabs' most devastating single loss in the fighting, and it marked a turning point for the official war to come. The fall of the charismatic Husseini, the "bravest and most aggressive leader" on the Arab side
{Clash of Destinies,
p. 98), at the hill at Qastal (or Castel, or Kastel) is described in detail in Milstein's
Vol.
IV on
pp. 306-10.

The massacre by Irgun and Stern Gang militias at Deir Yassin, in the minds of Palestinians, is the most infamous of the entire conflict. Michael J, Cohen, on pp. 33738 of
Palestine and the Great Powers,
describes "the atrocity of Deir Yassin":

The village had made a nonaggression pact with the Hagana and had abided by it strictly. The Hagana had intended to take over the village in any case, later, to prevent it falling into the hands of irregular bands. But on April 9, an IZL-Lehi [Irgun-Stern Gang] force attacked the village and reduced all resistance, ruthlessly and indiscriminately. The result was the massacre of some 245 villagers, men, women and children, many of whom were first paraded through the streets of Jerusalem, then taken back to the village and shot.

Reports of rape at Deir Yassin are quoted by Morris
{Righteous Victims,
p. 208). The report of Assistant Inspector General Richard Catling, the British officer who investigated the Deir Yassin massacre, declares, "There is . . . no doubt that many sexual atrocities were committed by the attacking Jews. Many young school girls were raped and later slaughtered. Old women were also molested. Many infants were also butchered and killed . . . I also saw one woman who gave her age as one hundred and four who had been severely beaten about the head with rifle butts. Women had bracelets torn from their arms and rings from their fingers, and parts of some of the women's ears were severed in order to remove earrings."
Report of the Criminal Investigation Division,
Palestine Government, No. 179/110/17/GS, 13, 15, 16 April, 1948, as cited by Hirst
{The Gun and the Olive Branch,
p. 250).

Numerous sources describe how this massacre induced many Palestinians to flee their homes and villages, with the understanding they would return in weeks or at most months. Benny Morris, in
Righteous Victims,
p. 209, quotes Israeli military intelligence as saying Deir Yassin was "a decisive accelerating factor" in the flight of the Arabs. Gelber, in
Palestine 1948,
p. 116, and Nur Masalha, author of
The Expulsion of the Palestinians,
in an interview with me, each said that the massacre was important but less of a factor than others have estimated. In my view, after a decade of interviewing dozens of refugees in the UN camps in the West Bank, Gaza, and Lebanon, it is clear that Deir Yassin had a tremendous impact in creating panic and inducing flight in the spring of 1948. Many refugees, especially those in Haifa and the Galilee who fled north into Lebanon, believed they would be coming back "within fifteen days."