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Modern History

Home > Modern History > International Studies in Peace and Conflict > The Arab-Israeli Conflict 1948-1996 > 1948: A year of myth or miracle?

Outcomes
Key features and issues
Overview
Setting the scene
The effect of the creation of Israel
UN-sponsored truces
What the sources say
Bibliography

Outcomes:

• describe the role of key features, issues, individuals, groups and events of selected twentieth-century studies (H1.1)
• analyse and evaluate the role of key features, issues, individuals, groups and events of selected twentieth-century studies (H1.2)

Key features and issues:

• Origins and development of the conflict
• Changing Palestinian and Israeli responses to the conflict

Overview

From this tutorial you will learn about the origins of tension and related key events and significant issues, in particular the creation of the State of Israel and the "War of Independence" or "The Disaster", 1948–49, as well as different perspectives and interpretations offered by the sources.

Setting the Scene

The United Nations (UN) vote for the partition of Palestine, conducted on 29 November 1947, illustrates well the public and private faces of Israeli policy during the period 1947–49. As the relieved and joyous crowds danced in the streets of Tel Aviv, there was talk of the hand of God miraculously delivering his people. On a more terrestrial level, the success of the Zionist enterprise can be attributed to the work of seasoned political in-fighters such as Golda Meir, Abba Eban and, above all, David Ben Gurion.

Lobbying for the vote in favour of partition of Palestine

Two examples serve to show how the establishment of the Jewish state was not left to chance or divine whim. As the date for the UN vote neared, the Arabs showed their naivety by eschewing the back-room deals and corridor meetings that are part and parcel of Western diplomacy. Not so the Zionists. Sustained and encouraged by the personal sympathy of President Truman of the United States of America and the powerful Jewish lobby of the eastern American seaboard, they began a process of intense behind-the-scenes lobbying to maximise the vote in favour of partition. Pressure was placed on the ambassadors of less committed small countries, such as Cuba, Haiti and Liberia, whose votes would help to determine the decision. In the case of Liberia, the owner of the American Firestone Rubber Company, which held large economic interests in the African country, was enlisted to pressure the Liberians to vote for partition.

Away from the corridors of the UN, Golda Meir met secretly with King Abdullah of Transjordan on 17 November 1947 and, in return for Abdullah's agreement not to interfere with the establishment of the Jewish state, committed Israel to turning a blind eye to Abdullah's ambition to annex that Arab part of the partitioned Palestine known today as the West Bank.[1]

The partitioning of Palestine was not welcomed by all Jews. Significant among the dissenters were the leaders of the Irgun, a terrorist group formed in the 1930s and led by Menachem Begin (prime minister of Israel,1977–83). The tension between Begin and Ben Gurion was to surface with dramatic effect in mid-1948.

The U.N vote in favour and subsequent violence

Violence began almost as soon as the UN vote became known. Armed Arab gangs killed 80 Jews in the 12 days following the vote, looting Jewish shops and attacking civilian buses. The first Arab house was blown up by the Haganah on 7 December in a reprisal raid, following the shooting deaths of several Jews near Jaffa.

Debate over the nature of Israeli policy towards Arab villages

That both sides committed acts of violence is clear. In the light of the subsequent events of 1948, historians continue to debate the nature of Israeli policy towards the Arab villages. Benvenisti rejects Palestinian historiography, which depicts the destruction of the Palestinian landscape as a single, continuous process, planned from the start by the Zionist leadership. He cites a meeting of the Jewish leaders on 1–2 January 1948 to create guidelines for the execution of reprisal raids. The decision to launch such raids only in reaction to Arab attacks was "an indication that in the early stages of the 1948 war there was no policy of ethnic cleansing... as claimed by the Palestinian scholars."[2]

Plan D (Dalet) - the deliberate expelling of the Arab inhabitants of Palestine and subsequent attacks and reprisals

As fighting intensified, the Haganah High Command met on 10 March to approve Plan D (Dalet), so called because it was the fourth in a series of strategic plans that the Haganah had compiled since 1941. Plan Dalet superseded the principles agreed in January and saw the commencement of a deliberate policy of expelling the Arab inhabitants of Palestine.

It was in this context that the attack on the Arab village of Deir Yassin took place on 9 April 1948. Fighting had centred on the road from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, as the Jews tried to defeat Arab attempts to besiege the ancient capital. Deir Yassin, close to Jerusalem, was attacked by forces of the Irgun and the Stern Gang. Benvenisti categorises their actions in the village as a "barbaric act of ethnic cleansing".

The events of Deir Yassin served only to intensify the violence. Five days later a Jewish convoy of supplies and civilians going to Hadassah hospital and the Hebrew University, both on Mount Scopus in East Jerusalem, was attacked, killing 78 and wounding 24. On 13 May the Jewish settlement of Kfar Etzion surrendered and white flags were waved. All defenders were assembled, photographed and then killed. The wounded were finished off with knives, their murderers shouting "Deir Yassin". Of the 133 inhabitants of the settlement, 129 were killed.

The Effect of the Creation of Israel

The next day, at 4 pm, David Ben Gurion proclaimed the state of Israel, and the armies of Egypt, Transjordan, Lebanon, Syria and Iraq crossed the borders of Palestine in a bid to extinguish the new creation. (King Abdullah found it impossible to stand against the tide of Arab opinion, despite his undertaking of the previous November and last-minute attempts by Golda Meir on 11 May to obtain a promise of neutrality.)

A simple calculation of the populations of the countries involved in the war has led to the numbers myth, perpetuated by the Israeli government in its educational literature. A typical publication, A Perspective through Time, speaks of the newly-formed Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) as being "poorly armed and vastly outnumbered", making its subsequent victory even more miraculous. In fact, as Avi Shlaim points out, this was no David and Goliath struggle. In mid-May 1948, the Arab forces numbered under 25 000 against the IDF's 35,000. By mid-July the IDF had 65 000 fighters and by December 96 441. The Arabs also increased in numbers, but not at the same rate, and by the final stage of the war, the ratio was 2:1 in favour of the Israelis.[3] In the 1948 war, as in most wars, the stronger side prevailed. In addition to troop numbers, the Israelis had made use of the first UN-sponsored truce, which lasted from 11 June to 8 July, to import quantities of arms from Czechoslovakia to consolidate their advantage over the Arabs.

Ben Gurion's internal challenges with the Irgun

In addition to the crisis with the Arabs, Ben Gurion faced challenges from within his own ranks. As mentioned above, the Irgun had never accepted that the new Jewish state should have anything less than the borders of the old Palestine mandate and provided an extremist challenge to the policies of Ben Gurion who, while trying to increase the territory of the infant state, accepted the necessity of some form of partition.

In mid-June, during the truce, the freighter Altalena arrived off the coast of Israel carrying a cargo of arms for the Irgun, purchased in France. Ben Gurion saw the arrival of the Altalena as a challenge to his government's authority. After an initial stand-off, the ship was blown up by Haganah forces, and leading Irgun activists were arrested. Nineteen Jews were killed and dozens wounded in the action against the ship. Begin, who had been on the ship and narrowly escaped with his life, drew back from challenging Ben Gurion's authority. Ben Gurion called for the winding-up of the Irgun.

UN-sponsored truces and Count Folke Bernadotte

The UN-sponsored truces (the second lasted from 18 July to 15 October) were the work of the official UN mediator, Count Folke Bernadotte. He had been a representative of the International Red Cross during the Second World War and had, on his own initiative, helped to save some 30 000 Jews from the concentration camps. A respected diplomat, he had begun his mission in Palestine with sympathy for the Zionists, but he became disillusioned by what he saw as their "arrogance and hostility" and particularly their "hardness and obduracy" towards the Arab refugees.[4] He made recommendations to revise the partition boundaries, mostly favourable to the Arabs, and in so doing incurred the hostility of the Zionists.

On 17 September 1948 Bernadotte and an aide were travelling in their car when they were ambushed and shot. After heavy international pressure, the Israelis arrested two men, who were tried and released by a military court. Forty years later it emerged that the order to kill Bernadotte had come from the three joint leaders of the Stern Gang, one of whom was Yitzhak Shamir (prime minister of Israel 1983–84 and 1986–92). It was after the assassination that the Stern Gang and the Irgun were effectively wound up at Ben-Gurion's insistence.

Bernadotte's observations about the Israeli treatment of the Palestinian population were not without substance. The Israeli Declaration of Independence of May 1948 had promised to "uphold the full social and political equality of all its citizens, without distinction of race, creed or sex" and called upon the Arab inhabitants to "play their part in the development of the state, with full and equal citizenship." However, the reality was that the Israeli government had decided that the Arabs, once driven from their villages, were not to be allowed to return. To allow them to do so would conflict with Israel's vital interests, as Ben Gurion's government defined them: to secure an absolute Jewish majority, to settle Jewish refugees on the abandoned land, and to ensure the country's internal security.

During the second truce and thereafter, the IDF pursued a policy of cleansing strategic areas of their Arab populations. In the south, the vast majority of the Palestinian inhabitants were expelled, while in the north the situation was more arbitrary, depending on the whim of the local commander.

What the sources say

The Israeli historian Benny Morris describes what happened when the village of al-Dawayima, on the western slopes of the Hebron highlands, was captured on 29 October 1948:

The occupying forces indiscriminately killed between 80 and 100 male villagers, blew up houses together with their occupants, murdered women and children, and committed rape. These acts were committed not in the heat of battle and inflamed passions, but out of a system of expulsion and destruction. The fewer Arabs who remained, the better.[5]

With the passage of years, Israeli government propaganda has emphasised the "voluntary" nature of the Palestinian exodus, embellished with tales of government ministers begging the Palestinians to go back to their homes as they had nothing to fear. In reality, as Benvenisti outlines, "These atrocities, which fifty years later are regarded as libel, invented by the enemies of Israel... were, at the time they took place, known to ministers in the Israeli government, military commanders, and even the general public."[6]

Fighting finally stopped on 7 January 1949, when both sides accepted the Security Council's call for a cease-fire. Armistice agreements followed between Israel and Egypt (24 February), Lebanon (23 March), Jordan (3 April) and Syria (20 July).

Each of the armistice agreements stated that its purpose was "to facilitate the transition from the present truce to a permanent peace in Palestine." A final myth to be exposed in recent historiography is the question of why no peace agreements were made. The traditional Zionist answer has been to blame Arab intransigence. Israel's leaders, it is argued, strove for peace, but the Arabs would not respond.

Revisionist Israeli historians believe that it was the Israelis who were intransigent. The official records of the Israeli Foreign Ministry hold plentiful evidence of Arab readiness to negotiate with Israel from September 1948 onwards. The key figure on the Israeli side was Ben Gurion. His main priorities after the war were concerned with the building of the Jewish state and not the making of peace with his neighbours. He felt that the armistice agreements met Israel's needs for recognition, security and stability.[7] He did not feel the need to rush into peace agreements because he thought time was on Israel's side. Given time, Israel's position on all the major issues:­ borders, refugees and Jerusalem, would be accepted by the world community.

Feeling that Israel's bargaining position could only improve with time, Ben Gurion rejected Egypt's peace feelers in September 1948 and Syria's in the spring of 1949. The consolidation of the Israeli state began, and the number of Jewish settlements founded in the period 1948–1950 equalled the number that had been established from 1882 to 1948. The establishment of settlements along the armistice lines was regarded as an effective barrier to a potential Arab invasion.

Looking back on the events from the UN partition resolution of 1947 to the conclusion of the War of Independence (or "Catastrophe" to the Palestinians), Benny Morris wrote:

After 1948, many tended to regard those days of greatness and salvation as a kind of personal Golden Age, a moment of youthful grace that must not be defiled in any way. This feeling, which conflated [fused together] national fate with personal biography, was expressed in a kind of untrammelled commitment to and awe at the Zionist enterprise as a whole and especially that wondrous moment of national rebirth... From documents of the period (that have now been declassified) it has become clear that much of what was told to this People—to the youth in the schools and to adults in the new media, memoirs, and history books—was distorted at best and in many other cases, simply lies and concealment of facts... A complex situation came to light, in which the Yishuv and its leaders had behaved as have many nations at times of war and statelessness: with wisdom and fortitude combined with insensitivity, rigidity, cruelty, and inequity.[8]

Notes

1 A. Shlaim, The Iron Wall. New York, 2000, p. 30.
2 M. Benvenisti, Sacred Landscape. San Francisco, 2000, p. 104.
3 Shlaim, op. cit. p. 35.
4 D. Bowman, Inexperience, Fatigue, or Bias?, Australian Society (November 1988), p. 10.
5 B. Morris, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem. Tel Aviv, 1991, p. 296.
6 Benvenisti, op. cit., p. 153.
7 Shlaim, op. cit., p. 51.
8 Ha'aretz Weekend Supplement, 1 July 1994, quoted in Benvenisti, op. cit., p. 245.

Bibliography

Benvenisti, Meron. Sacred Landscape. San Francisco: University of California Press, 2000.

Bowman, David. "Inexperience, Fatigue, or Bias?" Australian Society (November 1988).

Morris, Benny. The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem. Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 1991.

Shlaim, Avi. The Iron Wall. New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2000.

A documentary study of the events at Deir Yassin can be found in the chapter "The Arab-Israeli Conflict 1948–1996" in B. Dennett and S. Dixon, Key Features of Modern History. Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 2000.