1948: A History of the First Arab-Israeli War (17 page)

THE WAR BEGINS

David Shaltiel, the commander of the HIS, wrote on the night of 29 November: "None of us knows what may happen tomorrow."' For months, the Yishuv had vaguely expected war, but at some ill-defined point in the future. The prevalent view in the HIS was that the Arab states were disunited and the Arabs of Palestine unprepared; they would not go to war on the passage of the partition resolution.2

The night of 29-3o November passed in the Yishuv's settlements in noisy public rejoicing. Most had sat glued to their radio sets broadcasting live from Flushing Meadow. A collective cry of joy went up when the two-thirds mark was achieved: a state had been sanctioned by the international community. The young poured into the streets and danced and celebrated around bonfires through the night. In the National Institutions compound in Jerusalem, Golda Myerson (Meir), acting director of the JA Political Department (Moshe Shertok was in New York), addressed the crowd from the balcony: "For two thousand years we have waited for our deliverance. Now that it is here it is so great and wonderful that it surpasses human words. Jews, mazel toy [good luck]."3

But some, like Yosef Nahmani, a veteran of Hashomer and a Tiberias city councilor, were more sober. That night, the celebrants carried him aloft through the streets of the lakeside town. But in his diary he jotted down: "In my heart there was joy mixed with sadness: joy that the peoples [of the world] had at last acknowledged that we were a nation with a state, and sadness that we lost half the country, Judea and Samaria, and, in addition, that we [would] have [in our state] 4oo,ooo Arabs."4 Nahmani's friend from the Second Aliya, 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."5

Not far from each celebrating throng was an Arab village or neighborhood. There the mood was grim. What the Palestinian Arab national movement, backed by the surrounding Arab societies and states, had for decades tried to stymie, what Palestine's Arabs had most feared, had now come to pass.

At 8:zo am on 3o November 1947, an eight-man Jaffa-based armed band, led by Seif al-Din Abu Kishk, ambushed a Jewish bus in the Coastal Plain near Kfar Syrkin, killing five and wounding others. Half an hour later the gunmen let loose at a second bus, southbound from Hadera, killing two more. Later that morning, Arab snipers began to fire from Jaffa's Manshiya neighborhood into southern Tel Aviv, killing at least one person. These were the first dead of the 1948 War. Shots were also fired at Jewish buses in Jerusalem and Haifa.

It is almost certain that the two fatal roadside ambushes were not ordered or organized by the AHC, and it remains unclear whether the gunmen were, in fact, reacting to the UN resolution. One HIS report says that the attacks "were planned in a coffee shop in Yahudiya on the night of 29 November after hearing the news [from New York]" but that "the aim was robbery under cover of a response to the UN resolution."6 But the majority view in the HIS-supported by an anonymous Arab flyer posted almost immediately on walls in Jaffa-was that the attackers were driven primarily by a desire to avenge an LHI raid ten days before on a house near Ra'anana belonging to the Abu Kishk bedouin tribe.7 The raiders had selected five males of the Shubaki family and executed them in a nearby orange groves The raiders believed (apparently mistakenly) that the Shubakis a few days earlier had informed the authorities about an LHI training session nearby. This had led to a British raid in which five Jewish youngsters were killed..

Be that as it may, there was also a clear, organized Palestinian Arab response to the UN resolution. Guided by Hussein from Cairo, the AHC on i December declared a three-day general strike in Palestine to begin the following day. On z December a large Arab mob, armed with clubs and knives, burst out of Jerusalem's Old City and descended on the New Commercial Center at Mamilla Street, attacking Jewish passersby and shops. A number of people were injured, one seriously, and the district was set alight. The mob then proceeded up Queen Mary Street and into Jaffa Street. Haganah intelligence identified two AHC officials, Muhammad Ali Salah and Mahmoud `Umari, as leading the crowd.10 Small Haganah units fired above and into the mob as Mandate police and troops generally looked on. Indeed, several policemen joined in the vandalizing and looting, though others helped evacuate the Jewish wounded.ll The mob eventually turned back and dispersed. But the war had begun.

Yet that day, and for the next few weeks, no one really understood this. For most, the sporadic violence appeared to be just another wave, akin to the Arab outbreaks of 1920, 1921, and 1929; it would pass. This view affected both sides. The Palestinian notable Hikmat al-Taji al-Faruqi told an HIS agent two months after the start of hostilities: "When the business began ... we did not expect it to begin. More accurately, we were not at all sure that it would develop and take on the dimensions of a war.... So we armed ourselves with stones, sticks, rented rifles and pistols."" But the violence was gradually to snowball into full-scale war, in which Palestinian Arab society would be shattered and the Arab world traumatized and humiliated.

THE CIVIL WAR: 3o NOVEMBER 1947-14 MAY 1948

The 1948 War-called by the Arab world the First Palestine War and by the Palestinians al-nakba (the disaster), and by the Jews the War of Independence (milhemet ha`atzma'ut), the War of Liberation (milhemet hashihrur) or the War of Establishment (milhemethakomemiyut)-was to have two distinct stages: a civil war, beginning on 3o November 1947 and ending on 14 May 1948, and a conventional war, beginning when the armies of the surrounding Arab states invaded Palestine on 15 May and ending in 1949. The civil (or ethnic or intercommunal) war between Palestine's Jewish and Arab communities, the latter assisted by a small army of volunteers from the wider Arab world, was characterized by guerrilla warfare accompanied by acts of terrorism. The subsequent conventional war, which ended officially only in July 1949 but in fact stopped, in terms of hostilities, the previous January, saw the armies of Syria, Egypt, Transjordan, and Iraq, with contingents from other Arab countries, attacking the newborn State of Israel and its army, the Haganah, which on i June 1948 became the Israel Defense Forces.

The civil war can roughly be divided into two parts or stages. From the end of November 1947 until the end of March 1948, the Arabs held the initiative and the Haganah was on the strategic defensive. This stage was characterized by gradually expanding, continuous, small-scale, small-unit fight ing. There was terrorism, and counterterrorist strikes, in the towns and ambushes along the roads. Arab armed bands attacked Jewish settlements, and Haganah units occasionally retaliated. It was formless-there were no front lines (except along the seams between the two communities in the main, mixed towns), no armies moving back and forth, no pitched battles, and no conquests of territory. Then, in early April, the Haganah went over to the offensive, by mid-May crushing the Palestinians. This second stage involved major campaigns and battles and resulted in the conquest of territory, mainly by the Jews. At its end emerged clear front lines, marking a continuous Jewish-held piece of territory, with the areas beyond it under Arab control.

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. Almost no fighting occurred in the almost exclusively Arab-populated central and upper Galilee and Samaria, and the hostilities in the hill country south of Jerusalem were confined to the small `Etzion Bloc enclave and the road to it.

Two, the Jewish and Arab communities in western and northern Palestine were thoroughly intermingled. In the main cities and in some towns-Haifa, Jaffa-Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, Safad, Tiberias-the populations were mixed, with Arabs often sitting astride routes to the Jewish areas and Jews dominating the routes to and from Arab neighborhoods. In the countryside, Jewish and Arab settlements flanked most of the roads, enabling each side to interdict the other's traffic. This meant that Jewish settlers could cut off Arab villagers and the villagers, equally, could cut off and besiege Jewish settlers.

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.

This implied a number of contradictions. The most important related to nonintervention versus the maintenance of law and order. Maintaining law and order often necessitated intervention. Moreover, intervention almost inevitably led to British casualties, and this ran afoul of the desire and intent to avoid them.

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)."'3 But the high commissioner, Alan Cunningham, was also interested in leaving behind him as orderly a country (and reputation) as he could, and this required the maintenance of law and order for as long as possible. His boss, Colonial Secretary Arthur Creech Jones, had told the House of Commons on 3 December 1947 that "the British Government must remain responsible for law and order" for as long as it administered Palestine.14 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." 1s This meant that the British would try to protect those attacked.

In practice, British troops intervened in the fighting quite frequently from November 1947 down to March 1948, and occasionally in April as well. This was one reason for the precipitous increase in British casualties during the Mandate's last five months. (Another was attacks on British troops by LHI and IZL gunmen, usually triggered by Arab attacks on Jews in which Britons were known to have assisted.) In all of 1947, British forces in Palestine suffered sixty dead and 189 wounded; in the period i January-14 May 1948, British losses were 114 dead and 230 wounded. 16

The further contradiction, between strict impartiality and a desire to maintain Britain's standing in the Middle East, which required a pro-Arab tilt, led to inconsistent behavior, causing confusion among British officials and officers and among many Arabs and Jews.

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.