1948: A History of the First Arab-Israeli War (10 page)

On i4 February 1947, the British cabinet decided to wash its hands of Palestine and dump the problem in the lap of the United Nations. Ernest Bevin was later to say: "The Arabs, like the Jews, [had] refused to accept any of the compromise proposals which HMG had put before both parties."i The military chiefs of staffwere unhappy with the decision; it would open the door to Soviet penetration and subvert the morale of the troops in Palestine. But Clement Attlee and Bevin had already decided, in principle, in a tete-atete on 27 December 1946, that in the new, postwar circumstances, Britain could give up Palestine and Egypt (as well as Greece),' and the cabinet stood firm: Britain had made what it saw as a series of reasonable offers and no one was interested. And the United States, far from expressing a willingness to shoulder or share responsibility, was continuously subverting Britain's efforts.

"We have decided that we are unable to accept the scheme put forward either by the Arabs or by the Jews, or to impose ourselves a solution of our own.... The only course now open to us is to submit the problem to the judgment of the United Nations," Bevin told the House of Commons on 18 February 1947, adding that Britain would not recommend to the United Nations "any particular solution."3 The international community would have to take up the burden and chart a settlement. During the London conference, the Arabs had not been averse to the problem going before the United Nations, where they anticipated a favorable outcome. Conversely, the Zionist delegates had been wary. This may have affected Bevin's decision.

Historians have since argued about Britain's reasons. Some have suggested that Bevin and the cabinet had not been entirely straightforward: by threatening the two sides with the prospect of the unknown and the unpredictable, Britain's intention had been to force the Jews and/or the Arabs to accept the latest set of Whitehall proposals or to agree to a continuation of the Mandate. Certainly David Ben-Gurion, then and later, believed that the move was a ploy designed to prolong British rule: Bevin would hand the United Nations an insoluble problem; the United Nations would flounder and fail, and Britain would be reempowered to stay on, on its own terms, without UN or US interference.4

Other historians (myself included) have taken the British decision at its face value: Bevin and his colleagues had truly had enough of Palestine; passing the ball to the United Nations was their only recourse. In the aftermath of world war, Britain was too weak and too poor to soldier on. IZL and LHI veterans and their political successors have since claimed that it was mainly their terrorist campaigns that ultimately persuaded Bevin and the British public to abandon Palestine. Others have pointed to the large-scale Haganah operations of 1945-1946 (the railway line and bridge demolitions) as being decisive: these portended an eventual full-scale British-Haganah clash that Whitehall was unwilling to contemplate. Also, the struggle against the Haganah's illegal immigration campaign was a headache of major proportions. Most historians agree about the importance of the growing Anglo-American rift, the DPs, and the pressure from Washington in the British government's decision-making: given the Cold War context and Britain's financial insolvency, Whitehall could ill afford to alienate Washington over a highly emotional issue that, when all was said and done, was not a vital interest.

The British decision of February 1947 was firmed up over the following months by bloody events on the ground, in Palestine, in the Mediterranean, and in Britain itself; Jewish provocations and British reprisals spiraled almost out of control. British efforts to block and punish Jewish terrorism and illegal immigration took on new, bloody dimensions-though, it must be added, British officials and troops by and large displayed restraint and humanity in face of Jewish excesses.-' By the end of 1947, with evacuation only months away, Britain appeared no longer capable of properly governing Palestine and had lost the will to continue. The violence of the IZL and LHI underlined the moderate Zionists' argumentation in Washington and London that, in the absence of a solution-that is, a Jewish state-Jewish desperation would approach boiling point.

Without doubt, Britain's decision to withdraw heightened the terrorists' expectations; they sensed that the enemy was on the run. The British had almost a hundred thousand troops in Palestine, almost five times as many as had been used to crush the Arab Revolt of 1936-1939 (a tribute, perhaps, to the greater efficiency and lethality of the Jewish terrorists). Against the backdrop of the Holocaust and the scrutiny in Washington and the world press of every British action, there were strict limits to what Attlee and Bevin could allow themselves in pursuit of effective counterterrorism.

On i March 1947, IZL gunmen killed more than twenty British servicemen, twelve of them in a grenade attack on the British Officers Club in Tel Aviv. On 31 March the LHI sabotaged the Haifa oil refinery; the fire took three weeks to put out. And on 4 May, IZL gunmen penetrated the British prison in Acre: two dozen IZL members were set free (as, unintentionally, were some two hundred Arab prisoners), but nine of the attackers were killed and eight were captured. The captured men were tried, and on 8 July death sentences were confirmed against three of them.

In a repeat of the "whipping" cycle (when the IZL had flogged a British officer after the British had flogged several IZL men), on 12 July the IZL abducted two British sergeants and threatened to hang them if the British hanged the IZL men. The British-despite a widespread dragnet and Haganah help-failed to locate the sergeants and went ahead with the hangings, on 29 July. The IZL hanged the sergeants the next day-and boobytrapped their bodies. A British captain was injured when they were cut down.6 "The bestialities practiced by the Nazis themselves could go no further," commented the Times of London.7 The "hanging of the two young sergeants struck a deadly blow against British patience and pride," Arthur Creech Jones, Britain's colonial secretary, was to comment thirteen years later.8 But bestiality was by no means a monopoly of the Jewish terrorists. On the evening of 30 July, responding to the hangings, British troops and police in Tel Aviv went on the rampage, destroying Jewish shops and beating up passersby. In one area, the berserk security men sprayed Jewish pedestrians and coffee shops with gunfire, killing five and injuring ten. High Commissioner Sir Alan Cunningham, in a cable to London, explained what had happened-in the process highlighting the sorry state of his force's morale: "Most of them are young ... they have had to work in an atmosphere of constant danger and increasing tension, fraught with insult, vilification and treachery; and it can be understood that the culminating horror of the murder of their comrades ... in every circumstance of planned brutality, should have excited them to a pitch of fury which momentarily blinded them to the dictates of principle, reason and humanity alike. "9

Nor was this all. In London, Manchester, Liverpool, Newcastle, Gates head, and Holyhead there were anti-Semitic demonstrations; Jewish shopand synagogue windows were smashed.

In Palestine, several policemen were fired-though no criminal proceedings were ever instituted against anyone. In Parliament, in special session on is August, there was an all-party consensus to quit Palestine, quickly; "no British interest" was served by soldiering on, said Churchill.

On a April the British had asked the UN secretary-general to convene a special session of the General Assembly, which duly met in New York on z8 April-9 May. The General Assembly resolved to set up the United Nations Special Committee on Palestine (UNSCOP) to recommend a solution to the Palestine conundrum.

The Arab delegations opposed UNSCOP's appointment and sought, instead, a fiill-scale General Assembly debate and decision on immediate independence for an Arab-dominated "united democratic ... Palestinian state." 10 They were handily defeated, the majority of the fifty-five UN members preferring to leave debate and decision until after the committee had examined the problem. The Arabs then tried to restrict the committee's terms of reference to Palestine and Palestinian independence. The Zionists, for their part, sought to include the problem of Europe's Jewish DPs-of whom there were more than four hundred thousand. i 1 Again, the Arabs lost.

The final terms, hammered out in the General Assembly's First (Political) Committee, authorized UNSCOP to recommend a solution on the basis of an investigation in the country and "anywhere" else it saw fit, an allusion to the DP camps. Holland, Sweden, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Canada, Australia, India, Iran, Peru, Guatemala, and Uruguay were asked to send representatives. UNSCOP included no Zionist, Arab, or Great Power members.

Zionist officials were not enamored with this composition, given the membership of three Muslim, or partly Muslim, states (Iran, India, and Yugoslavia) and two Dominions (Canada and Australia) that, it was feared, would automatically defer to London.

The Arabs were not overly concerned about the ultimate upshot in the General Assembly. With five member states and a handful of reflexive Islamic and third world supporters, they expected an easy victory. They came to the assembly cocky and disorganized and remained so until the bitter end. They failed to appreciate the significance of Soviet deputy foreign minister Andrei Gromyko's General Assembly speech of 14 May 1947, a speech that stunned almost all Western and Zionist observers (though almost no one understood its full purport). Hitherto, Soviet policy on Palestine had been anti-British and pro-Arab. Now, while criticizing the British, Gromyko spoke of "the Jewish people['s] ... exceptional [and `indescribable'] sorrow and suffer ing" during the Holocaust and of the survivors' suffering as DPs across Europe since then; asserted the Jews' right to self-determination; and suggested that if a unitary state proved impracticable, then Palestine should be partitioned into Jewish and Arab states. l2 Moscow had announced a pro-Zionist tack-and sent UNSCOP off to the Middle East with a clear message.

What led to this unheralded Soviet volte-face remains uncertain. AntiBritish considerations probably predominated; in all likelihood, Moscow was intent on causing a rift between London and Washington. But the Soviets, at some level, to judge from Gromyko's speech, which devoted a full three paragraphs to Jewish suffering, were also moved by the horrors of the Holocaust and by a sense of camaraderie with fellow sufferers at Nazi hands.

Sensitivity to Jewish suffering also appears to have played a part in the proZionist leanings of a number of UNSCOP members, including Paul Mohn, the committee's Swedish deputy chairman, Justice Ivan Rand, the chief Canadian member, Jorge Garcia Granados, the Guatemalan ambassador to the United States and United Nations, and Enrique Rodriguez Fabregat, the Uruguayan former minister of education. But other members, including those representing India (Judge Sir Abdur Rahman), Iran (Nasrollah Entezam, former minister of foreign affairs), Australia, and Holland, came to the committee with pro-Arab or at least pro-British outlooks. 13 In general, foreign observers noted the relatively uneven quality of UNSCOP's composition and the members' relative unpreparedness for their mission, in terms of prior experience in similar positions, language skills, and knowledge about the Middle East. The brilliant American academic and diplomat Ralph Bunche, a member of UNSCOP's secretariat, privately remarked that this was "just about the worst group I have ever had to work with. If they do a good job it will be a real miracle." n4

With the Swedish judge Emil Sandstrom-religious, "sly as a fox," 15 "dry and colorless"`-in the chair, UNSCOP began work in New York on 26 May and spent five summer weeks in Palestine. In private, the British tended to dismiss as unimportant the work and prospective recommendations of the committee; they trusted that, when the committee's work was done, the General Assembly would see its way independently and wisely,'7 and they took care not to try overtly to influence its decisions. The Zionists, by contrast, fully appreciated the committee's significance and made every effort to persuade the committee to see the light.'8 The Jewish Agency attached to UNSCOP as liaison three capable officials-Aubrey (Abba) Eban, later Israel's legendary foreign minister; David Horowitz, later governor of the Bank of Israel; and Spanish-speaking Moshe Toff (Tov), the head of the Latin American Division in the Jewish Agency Political Department. The Zionists and the British surrounded the committee with spies and bugging devices to monitor its internal deliberations.

The AHC announced its intention to boycott UNSCOP and failed completely to prepare for its visit. Palestine's Arabs greeted UNSCOP with a one-day general strike. The AHC charged that UNSCOP was "pro-Zionist" and accompanied the committee's deliberations with uncompromising radio broadcasts ("all of Palestine must be Arab"). Opposition figures were warned that they would pay with their lives if they spoke to UNSCOP.

The committee first toured the country, visiting towns and villages. As had happened with the AAC, the face-to-face encounters in the settlements and villages were persuasive. The members were warmly welcomed by their Jewish hosts, often with flowers and cheering crowds, and the Jewish Agency made sure that they met with settlers who spoke their languages (Swedish, Spanish, Persian, and so on). The Arabs, in contrast, displayed sourness, suspicion, or aggressiveness. Everywhere the Arabs refused to answer the committee's questions: in a school in Beersheba, the teachers continued with their lessons when UNSCOP entered the classrooms, and the pupils were instructed not to look at the visitors; in the Galilee village of Raina, the inhabitants evacuated the village, and UNSCOP was "greeted only by a delegation of children who ... cursed them." 9 The committee was impressed by the cleanliness and development in the Jewish areas and, conversely, by the dirt and backwardness of the Arab villages and towns. They were particularly horrified at the (common) sight of child labor and exploitation in Arab factories and workshops.20 By contrast, the Jewish settlements struck the committee as "European, modern, dynamic ... a state in the making";21 the Jews palpably were making the desert bloom.22 As the Persian member, Entezam, was overheard (by a Persian-speaking HIS agent) telling his deputy: "What asses these Arabs are. The country is so beautiful and, if it were given to the Jews, it could be developed and turned into Europe."23 UNSCOP's members may have felt that the Zionists often indulged in overkill, but the message proved effective.