1948: A History of the First Arab-Israeli War (54 page)

But the main Egyptian thrusts, by the Fourth Brigade (Second and Ninth battalions) from Majdal, supplemented by the Sixth Battalion, were partially successful. The poorly prepared attack by the Sixth Battalion on Julis was repulsed; Nasser emerged from it "in a state of revolt against everything ... in revolt against the smooth, closely-shaven chins and the smart and comfortable offices at General HQ, where no one had any idea what the fighting men in the trenches felt or how much they suffered from orders sent out at random."1a Nasser was lightly wounded in the chest: "I was not particularly frightened nor sorry for myself nor sad.... `Is this the end?'[he asked himself.] I was not even upset by this question ... for the first time since my arrival in Palestine I remembered my little daughters, Huda and Muna.... I then suddenly remembered my men." 14 But the Second and Ninth battalions took and held the vital crossroads of the Majdal-Faluja-Julis-Kaukaba roads southwest of Negba and Hill 113, which overlooked the crossroads, and the villages ofKaukaba and Huleikat.is

The IDF counterattacked that night, 8-9 July, unleashing Operation AnFar. The Negev Brigade's Seventh Battalion, commanded by Uzi Narkiss, supported by additional platoons, failed to take the `Iraq Suweidan police fort, southeast of Negba, held by elements of the Egyptian First Battalion, and Giv'ati briefly took, and then abandoned, the villages of `Iraq Suweidan, east of the police fort, and neighboring Beit Affa. But a company of the Fifty-third Battalion, supported by a platoon from the Fifty-fourth, striking from Negba, took the Ibdis position and village, north of Negba, and then on 9-io July beat off determined counterattacks by the Egyptian Second Battalion, which enjoyed air support. The Fifty-first Battalion, striking southward from Kflr Menahem, took the village of Tel al-Safi. Giv'ati's daily "combat pages," written by Abba Kovner, were headed "Death to the Invaders!" and were phrased in emotive language, such as "Killer dogs-their fate is blood [that is, death]" (echoing the language of Soviet broadsheets from the Eastern Front in World War II). Kovner enjoined the troops not to be deterred-"the more you run over bloody dogs, the more you will love the beautiful, the good, and liberty." 16

After regrouping, the Egyptians, on 12 July, launched their most determined counterattack, using the Fourth Brigade. With diversionary assaults by elements of the Sixth and Second battalions at Julis and Ibdis, the main Egyptian force-the Ninth Battalion, commanded by Lieutenant Colonel Rahmani-struck at Kibbutz Negba itself, the hinge of the Israeli line. About a hundred kibbutzniks and Giv`ati soldiers defended Negba. Beginning at dawn, repeated infantry assaults-"wave after wave," 17 backed by ar mor and artillery-failed to breach the perimeter fences, and by sunset the Egyptians retired, leaving behind dozens of dead as well as a disabled tank and four Bren gun carriers. Kovner, his mind always dominated by his experiences in Eastern Europe during World War II, was to dub the steadfast settlement "Negbagrad." The Egyptians had poured some four thousand artillery and mortar rounds into the kibbutz, but the defenses had held. Negba suffered five dead and sixteen wounded; Egyptian losses were some two to three hundred dead and wounded (roughly half the Ninth Battalion). A battery of 65 mm guns had assisted the defenders.18 Following the defeat, General al-Muwawi dismissed Fourth Brigade OC Mohammed Neguib, though he reinstalled him later at the head of another brigade. In his memoirs, Neguib castigated al-Muwawi but admitted that he had been insubordinate.19 The battle proved to be the turning point of the Ten Days in the south.

In the following days, the initiative lay almost wholly with the IDF. One reason was the growing Egyptian lack of ammunition.20 On 13 -14 July the Fifty-fourth Battalion took Hill io5, just north of Negba. The following nights, other Giv`ati units raided Egyptian positions at Beit Affa, Hatta, and Beit Jibrin. And on 16-i8, in Operation Death to the Invaders (mivtza mavet lapolshim), both Giv ati and the Negev Brigade mounted a series of operations designed to expand their areas of control. Giv`ati's Fifty-first Battalion took a swath of villages around Kibbutz Kfar Menahem, including Zeita, Mughallis, Idnibba, Kheima, Jilya, and Qazaza, and "expelled their inhabitants, [and] blew up and burned a number of houses; the area is now clear [naki] of Arabs."21 The Fifty-fourth Battalion occupied Beit Affa; the Fifty-second Battalion took Hatta; and Moshe Dayan's Eighty-ninth Battalion, diverted from the center to the south, with support from the Fifty-third Battalion, took Karatiya, just east of `Iraq Suweidan, while elements of the Negev Brigade tried but failed to take Kaukaba and Huleikat.22

The Egyptians, for their part, attacked the kibbutzim Gal-On (14 July) and Be'erot Yitzhak (15 July)23 but failed, as did their counterattack, led by half a dozen tanks, on 18 July against the Fifty-third Battalion entrenched at Karatiya. A lone PIAT operator managed to knock out a tank and the others took flight, the infantry following.24 At 7:00 PM, 18 July, the renewed or Second Truce, ordered by the UN Security Council, went into effect. "Dirty, red-eyed from lack of sleep, with torn clothes, deathly tired," the Israeli and Egyptian troops, who had slogged it out for ten days, emerged from their foxholes.25

The upshot, in the south, had been indecisive, but the IDF had retained a slight edge. The Giv'ati and Negev Brigades had captured territory along the peripheries of their former holdings but had failed both to establish a perma nent link-up or corridor between the core of Jewish territory ending at Negba with the Jewish settlements enclave of the northern Negev and, for that matter, to cut off the Egyptian concentrations along the coast (the Gaza Strip-Isdud) from their right wing in the Hebron Hills. The capture of Karatiya had briefly disrupted traffic along the Majdal-Beit Jibrin road, but the Egyptians established a bypass road immediately to the south. And yet, the Egyptians had failed to conquer additional Jewish territory or settlements (except for Kibbutz Kfar Darom, whose situation as a lone, isolated outpost along the Egyptians' main route of march had become untenable; its defenders managed to slip out during the night of 8 - 9 July and reach Israeli lines) or to roll back Givati from Negba, which threatened their north-south communications along the coast, or to widen their corridor. At the end of the Ten Days, al-Muwawi "summarized the military situation in very gloomy terms." He pointed to the shortage of weaponry and ammunition, to the lack of coordination between the Arab armies, to the (politically dictated) overextension of the Egyptian lines, and to the low morale of his troops.26 He was gravely worried about the future.

THE NORTH

In contrast with the south, in the northern and central theaters of operation the initiative lay wholly with the IDF: it was the Israelis who renewed battle in the Galilee and the Jordan Valley (as well as in the Lydda-Ramla area).

The main IDF offensive in the north was mivtza dekel (Operation Palm Tree), designed to surround and destroy the ALA and to expand the Jewishheld coastal strip of Western Galilee eastward into the mountains and to capture Nazareth and the surrounding area, in which much of the ALA was concentrated. The order stated that the units were to "completely root out [bi ur] the enemy from the villages" around Nazareth.27 The operation was also geared toward preempting a presumed offensive by Fawzi al-Qawvugji against Afiila.28

Northern Front (later, "Northern Command"), headed by Moshe Carmel, deployed a force equivalent to two undersized brigades, consisting of the Seventh Brigade's Seventy-first (Armored) Battalion and the Seventyninth (Infantry) Battalion, Carmeli's Twenty-first Battalion and Golani's 13th Battalion. Colonel Haim Laskov commanded the operation. Facing these forces was a considerably smaller and weaker force of two ALA battalions (the Mahdi Salah "Brigade," consisting of the Hittin and Mahdi battalions), probably mustering about a thousand troops in all, backed by a small number of local irregulars dispersed in the town and villages. (The ALA at this time probably numbered altogether some three to four thousand troops, divided into three "brigades," each consisting of two battalions, and an additional independent Alawite battalion).29 The desertion of most of the Druze irregulars further weakened the Arab side. Those from Syria returned home, and the bulk of the local, Galilee Druze had, soon after the Battle of Ramat Yohanan, covertly decided to throw in their lot with what they saw as the stronger side. This assured, during Dekel, the bloodless conquest of (partly Druze) Shafa-Amr (Shfar-`Am) and a string ofDruze villages in Western Galilee.30

Operation Dekel, Galilee, July 1948

Setting out a few hours before the official expiry of the First Truce, a company of the Twenty-first Battalion on the night of 8-q July assaulted and took the village of Kuweikat. A few miles to the south, the Seventy-first Battalion took a series of positions just west of Majd al-Kurum. The following night, the Twenty-first Battalion took the village of `Amga. Crucial in this series of successes was the IDF's use of field artillery and mortars, which laid down preliminary barrages, generally putting the defenders to flight. The Druze villages of Kafr Yasif, Abu Sinan, and Yarka-defined in IDF orders as "liaison base[s]" rather than enemy strongholds3'-surrendered without a shot on to July. ALA counterattacks that day and the next were half-hearted and ineffective.

These speedy successes persuaded Dekel HQ to mount a deeper push into ALA-held territory to the south. On the night of 13 -i4 July elements of the Twenty-first, Seventy-first, and Seventy-ninth battalions captured the large mixed village of ShafaAmr. Representatives of the village's minority Druze population the day before had secretly met and worked out the details of the "conquest" with IDF officers. The IDF first mortared the village's Muslim neighborhoods. The next day, the Seventy-ninth Battalion took the village of Ibillin, to the northeast.

Emboldened by its successes and the weak ALA resistance, Northern Front decided to take the town of Nazareth, al-Qawugji's headquarters since the start of the First Truce.32 AI-Qawugji had prepared for the Ten Days by trying to mobilize auxiliaries for the ALA from the surrounding villages (most young adult males seem to have been reluctant)33 and by ordering the villagers to move out their women and children and/or sleep outside their villages.34 Bedouin were ordered to pack up and moved out of the area.35 According to the IDF, many of the townspeople were unhappy with the ALA, "who had behaved tyrannically toward them ... especially toward the Christians.1136

In part, the IDF push on 13 -14 July was motivated by a desire to reduce alQawuqji's pressure on Ilaniya (Sejera) (see below). On i5 July, Golani Brigade units captured the villages of Malul and al-Mujeidil, to the west of Nazareth, and that night took the village of 'Ilut (where apparently two massacres of civilians took place during the following days),37 while an armored column of the Twenty-first and Seventy-ninth battalions drove straight down the road from Shafa-`Alnr, taking Saffuriya (Tzipori), a large village northwest of Nazareth. The inhabitants of Nazareth and its ALA garrison were instantly demoralized. Indeed, already on IS July Israeli intelligence had predicted or reported that "the inhabitants were unwilling to fight. ".38

The day before, Ben-Gurion had instructed the army-taking account of Nazareth's importance to the world's Christians39-to prepare a task force to run the town smoothly, to avoid the looting that had characterized most previous conquests, and to avoid violating "monasteries and churches" (mosques were not mentioned). Attempts at robbery "by our soldiers should be met mercilessly, with machineguns," he instructed.'() Carmel duly warned his troops not to enter or violate "holy sites."41

Against the backdrop of ALA demoralization and disintegration and the flight of Husseini-supporting families, Israeli agents maintained continuous contact with Nazareth's notables about a quiet surrender.42 Nazareth, with its Christian majority, had traditionally been nonbelligerent toward the Yishuv (though sometime in June or early July some locals had murdered a Jewish farmer and dragged his body through the streets behind a motorcycle, to the cheers of bystanders),43 and the IDF had no reason to unleash its firepower on the town.

Nazareth fell on i 6 July, almost without a fight. Thousands of inhabitants, most of them Muslims, streamed out, in cars and by foot,44 with many of the Fahoum clan, including town mayor Yusuf Fahoum, in the lead.45 The twobrigade (Carmeli and Seventh) column had encountered an ALA squadron of nine armored cars at the entrance to town and brushed them aside with their 20 mm cannon. The column then drove into town. There was some sniper fire, but for all effects and purposes the fight was over.46 Al-Qawugji and the ALA had fled. The Israelis suffered one soldier wounded, the Arabs, sixteen dead. "A wave of true happiness passed over the town, joy mixed with dread in expectation of what was to come. The inhabitants really were joyful that they were rid of the regime of tyranny and humiliation of the [ALA] Iraqi [troops] who used to hit, curse, shoot, and jail the quiet inhabitants without reason. The dread stemmed from [fear] lest the reports they had received about Jewish behavior in previously occupied areas should prove true; they especially feared incidents of rape about which they had heard terrible stories from Acre and Iamla," reported the IDF Intelligence Service.47 At 6: 15 PM, "a delegation of town notables appeared bearing a flag of surrender";4s a few hours later, an instrument of surrender was signed .4' The IDF troops behaved unobjectionably. "Soon the [inhabitants] became aware that they were being well-treated and not being harmed," reported the Intelligence Service.-'10 (Nonetheless, in the following weeks Muslim families steadily left the town, according to Israeli reports.)"'