The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (23 page)

The Arab decision as to how much to intervene and assist was directly affected by developments on the ground. And on the ground they watched – politicians with growing dismay, intellectuals and journalists with horror – the beginning of a depopulation process unfolding in front of their eyes. They had enough representatives in the area to be fully aware of the intent and scope of the Jewish operations. Few of them were in any doubt at that early stage, in the beginning of 1948, of the potential disaster awaiting the Palestinian people. But they procrastinated, and postponed, for as long as they could, the inevitable military intervention, and then were only too happy to terminate it sooner rather than later: they knew full well not only that the Palestinians were defeated, but also that their armies stood no chance against the superior Jewish forces. In fact, they sent troops into a war they knew they had little or no chance of winning.

Many of the Arab leaders were cynical about the looming catastrophe in Palestine, and few were genuinely concerned. But even the latter needed time to assess, not so much the situation as the possible implications of any involvement on their precarious positions back home. Egypt and Iraq were embroiled in the final stages of their own wars of liberation, and Syria and Lebanon were young countries that had just won independence.
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Only when the Jewish forces intensified their actions and their true intentions became fully exposed did Arab governments design some sort of a coordinated reaction. In order not to be sucked into a whirlwind that could undermine their already shaky standing in their own societies, they transferred
the decision to their regional outfit, the Arab League Council, made up, as mentioned above, of the Arab states’ foreign ministers. This was an ineffective body as its decisions could be rejected, freely misinterpreted or, if accepted, only partly implemented. This body dragged out its discussions even after the reality in rural and urban Palestine had become too painfully clear to be ignored, and only at the end of April 1948 was it decided that they would send troops into Palestine. By then a quarter of a million Palestinians had already been expelled, two hundred villages destroyed and scores of towns emptied.

It was in many ways al-Qawqji’s defeat in Marj Ibn Amir that convinced the Arab leaders they would have to send regular forces. Al-Qawqji had failed to occupy Kibbutz Mishmar Ha-Emeq after ten days of fighting which had begun on April 4, the only Arab offensive action before May 1948.

Before the final decision to enter was taken, on 30 April, responses from the Arab states varied. All were asked by the Council to send arms and volunteers, but not all complied with the request. Saudi Arabia and Egypt pledged small-scale financial help, Lebanon promised a limited number of guns, and it seems that only Syria was willing to engage in proper military preparations, also persuading its Iraqi neighbour to train and send volunteers into Palestine.
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There was no lack of volunteers. Many people in the surrounding Arab countries came out and demonstrated against their governments’ inaction; thousands of young men were willing to sacrifice their life for the Palestinians. Much has been written about this strong outpouring of sentiment but it remains an enigma – classifying it as pan-Arabism hardly does it justice. Perhaps the best explanation one can offer is that Palestine and Algeria became models for a fierce and bold anti-colonialist struggle, a confrontation that inflamed the national fervour of young Arabs around the Middle East, whereas in the rest of the Arab world national liberation came about through drawn-out diplomatic negotiations, always far less exciting. But I stress again, this is only a partial analysis of the willingness of young Baghdadis or Damascenes to leave everything behind for the sake of what they must have regarded as a sacred, though by no means a religious, mission.

The odd man out in this matrix was King Abdullah of Transjordan. He used the new situation to intensify his negotiations with the Jewish Agency over a joint agreement in post-Mandatory Palestine. While his army had
units inside Palestine, and some of them were, here and there, willing to help the villagers protect their houses and lands, they were largely restrained by their commanders. Fawzi al-Qawqji’s diary reveals the ALA commander’s growing frustration with the unwillingness of the Arab Legion units stationed in Palestine to cooperate with his troops.
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During the Jewish operations between January and May 1948, when around 250,000 Palestinians were driven by force from their homes, the Legion stood idly by. In fact, it was in January that the Jordanians and the Jews had cemented their unwritten agreement. In early February 1948 the Jordanian prime minister had flown to London to report on the conclusion of their tacit alliance with the Jewish leadership over the partition of post-Mandatory Palestine between the Jordanians and the Jewish state: the Jordanians were to annex most of the areas allocated to the Arabs in the partition resolution, and in return would not join the military operations against the Jewish state. The British gave the scheme their blessing.
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The Arab Legion, the Jordanian army, was the best trained in the whole Arab world. It matched, and in some areas was even superior to, the Jewish troops. But it was confined by the King and his British General Chief of Staff, John Glubb Pasha, to act only in those areas the Jordanians deemed theirs: East Jerusalem and the area now known as the West Bank.

The final meeting that determined the limited role the Legion was to play in the rescue of Palestine took place on 2 May 1948. A top-ranking Jewish officer, Shlomo Shamir, met with two senior Legion officers, British, as most of them were: Colonel Goldie and Major Crocker. The Jordanian guests brought a message from their king saying he recognised the Jewish state, but wondered whether the Jews ‘wanted to take the whole of Palestine?’ Shamir was candid: ‘We could, if we wanted to; but this is a political question.’ The officers then explained where the Jordanians’ main apprehensions lay: they had noticed that the Jewish forces were occupying and cleansing areas that were within the UN-designated Arab state, such as Jaffa. Shamir responded by justifying the Jaffa operation as necessary for safeguarding the road to Jerusalem. Shamir then made it clear to the emissaries from Jordan that, as far as the Zionsts were concerned, the UN designated Arab state had shrunk to include only the West Bank, which the Israelis were willing to ‘leave’ for the Jordanians.
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The meeting ended with an abortive attempt by the Jordanian officers to come to an agreement over the future of Jerusalem. If the Jewish Agency
were willing to partition Palestine with the Jordanians, why not apply the same principle to Jerusalem? As Ben-Gurion’s faithful proxy, Shamir rejected the offer. Shamir knew the Zionist leader was convinced his army was strong enough to take the city as a whole. An entry in his diary a few days later, on 11 May, shows that Ben-Gurion was aware the Legion would fight fiercely over Jerusalem and, if necessary, for its overall share in post-Mandatory Palestine, that is, the West Bank. This was duly confirmed two days later when Golda Meir met King Abdullah in Amman (on 13 May), where the king seemed more tense than ever before because of the double game he was playing in his effort to come out on top: promising the member states of the League to head the military effort of the Arab countries in Palestine on the one hand, and striving to reach an agreement with the Jewish state on the other.
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At the end of the day, the latter became decisive for the course of action he would take. Abdullah did everything he could to be seen to be taking a serious part in the overall Arab effort against the Jewish state, but in practice his main objective was to secure Israeli consent for the Jordanian annexation of the West Bank.

Sir Alec Kirkbride was the British representative in Amman, a position that combined those of Ambassador and High Commissioner. On 13 May 1948, Kirkbride wrote to Ernest Bevin, Britain’s foreign secretary:

There have been negotiations between the Arab Legion and the Hagana which have been conducted by British officers of the Arab Legion. It is understood that the object of these top secret negotiations is to define the areas of Palestine to be occupied by the two forces.

Bevin replied:

I am reluctant to do anything that might prejudice the success of these negotiations, which appear to aim at avoiding hostility between the Arabs and the Jews. The implementation of this agreement depends on the British officers of the Legion. That is why we should not withdraw the Legion officers [from Palestine].
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But Ben-Gurion never took for granted that the Jordanians would stick to the limited role he had set aside for them, which reinforces the impression that he felt confident the new state had enough military power to
successfully confront even the Legion while simultaneously continuing the ethnic cleansing.

At the end of the day, the Legion had to fight for their annexation, notwithstanding Jordan’s collusion with Israel. At first the Jordanians were allowed to take over the areas they wanted without a shot being fired, but a few weeks after the end of the Mandate the Israeli army tried to wrest parts of it back. David Ben-Gurion seemed to regret his decision not to exploit the war more fully in order to enlarge the Jewish state even beyond the seventy-eight per cent he coveted. The general Arab impotence seemed to give the Zionist movement an opportunity that was too good to be missed. However, he underestimated the Jordanian determination. Those parts of Palestine that King Abdullah was adamant were his, the Legion successfully defended until the war was over. In other words, the Jordanian occupation of the West Bank at first came about thanks to a prior agreement with the Jews, but it remained in Hashemite hands thereafter due to the tenacious defensive efforts of the Jordanians and the Iraqi forces that helped repel Israeli attacks. It is possible to see this episode from a different angle: by annexing the West Bank, the Jordanians saved 250,000 Palestinians from being ousted – until, that is, they were occupied by Israel in 1967 and subjected – as they still are – to new waves of expulsion, be they more measured and slow. The actual Jordanian policy in the very last days of the Mandate is detailed in the next chapter.

As for the Palestinian leadership, what remained of it was fragmented and in total disarray. Some of its members left hurriedly and, they hoped in vain, temporarily. Very few of them wished to stay and confront the Jewish aggression in December 1947 and the onset of the cleansing operations in January 1948, but some did stay behind, and remained official members of the national committees. Their activities were supposed to be coordinated and supervised by the Arab Higher Committee, the unofficial government of the Palestinians since the 1930s, but half of its members had by now also left and those remaining found it difficult to cope. For all their failings in the past, however, they stood alongside their communities almost to the bitter end, although they could easily have opted to leave. They were Emil Ghori, Ahmad Hilmi, Rafiq Tamimi, Mu’in al-Madi and Husayn al-Khalidi. Each of them was in contact with several local national committees and with al-Hajj Amin al-Husayni, chairman of the Arab Higher Committee, who followed events with his close associates Shaykh Hasan Abu Su’ud and Ishaq
Darwish, in Cairo, where he now resided. Amin al-Husayni had been exiled in 1937 by the British. Would he have been able to return in those days of chaos and turmoil, given the British presence in the land? He never tried to go back so the point is moot. His relative, Jamal al-Husayni, acting chairman of the Arab Higher Committee in his absence, left in January for the US to try to initiate a belated diplomatic campaign against the UN resolution. The Palestinian community for all intents and purposes was a leaderless nation.

In this context, Abd al-Qadir al-Husayni should be mentioned once more since he tried to organise a paramilitary unit from among the villagers themselves to protect them. His army, the ‘Holy War Army’, a rather grand name for the shaky outfit he headed, held on until 9 April, when it was defeated and Abd al-Qadir was killed by the Hagana forces that outnumbered them with their superior equipment and military experience.

A similar effort was attempted in the Greater Jaffa area by Hasan Salameh, whom I have already mentioned, and Nimr Hawari (who later surrendered to the Jews and became the first Palestinian judge in 1950s Israel). They tried to transform their scouts’ movements into paramilitary units, but these, too, were defeated within a few weeks.
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Thus, prior to the end of the Mandate, neither the Arab volunteers from outside Palestine nor the paramilitary troops on the inside put the Jewish community at any serious risk of either losing the battle or being forced to surrender. Far from it; all that these foreign and local forces tried, but were unable, to do was to protect the local Palestinian population against Jewish aggression.

Israeli, and in particular American, public opinion, however, succeeded in perpectuating the myth of potential destruction or a ‘second Holocaust’ awaiting the future Jewish state. Exploiting this mythology, Israel was later able to secure massive support for the state in Jewish communities around the world, while demonising the Arabs as a whole, and the Palestinians in particular, in the eyes of the general public in the US. The reality on the ground was, of course, almost the complete opposite: Palestinians were facing massive expulsion. The month that Israeli historiography singles out as the ‘toughest’ actually saw the Palestinians simply attempting to be saved from that fate, rather than being preoccupied with the destruction of the Jewish community. When it was over, nothing stood in the way of the cleansing troops of Israel.

On the face of it, from the Palestinian point of view, the situation seemed to improve towards the second half of April 1948. Abdullah informed his Jewish interlocutors that the Arab League had decided to send regular armies into Palestine: the events in Palestine in the months of March and April left the leaders of the Arab world no other choice. They now began to prepare in earnest for a military intervention. Then from Washington came the unexpected news that the State Department was pushing towards a novel American approach. US representatives on the ground were by now fully aware of the expulsions that were going on and had suggested to their chiefs back home to halt the implementation of the partition plan and try to work towards an alternative solution.