1948: A History of the First Arab-Israeli War (11 page)

After the tours in the countryside came oral testimony (accompanied by a veritable flood of written depositions, thirty-two tons of material in all).24 The Zionist spokesmen first set out the case for a Jewish state in all of Palestine, then in private conversations agreed to accede to a partition, in which part of the country would be earmarked for Jewish statehood while the rest would be united with Jordan under Hashemite rule.'-' Ben-Gurion said that separating the Jews and the Arabs would lead to "fertile cooperation between the two states."26 Throughout, he vilified British rule and policy and had only bad words for the Palestinian Arab national movement. Chaim Weizmann from the first played the "good cop," focusing on past Jewish suffering, present Zionist moderation, and the future benefits of Zionism for all the Middle East. He posited partition, with the Jews receiving the Galilee, the Coastal Plain, and the Negev. He seems to have been instrumental in persuading UNSCOP to support this solution.27

Sandstrom and his aides secretly met with the commanders of the Haganah and IZL. The Haganah men-Yisrael Galili, Yigael Yadin, Yosef Avidar, and Ehud Avriel-appeared to Sandstrom self-assured, capable, and resolute. They grossly exaggerated the Haganah's strength ("go,ooo" members) and asserted that it would be able to repel any Arab attack, including by the Arab states. Sandstrom met separately with Menachem Begin. Begin predicted that were it come to war, the Arabs would be soundly defeated. He rejected partition, arguing that "one is not allowed to make commerce with a motherland"-but said that he would not fight the majority if that is what it accepted. Sandstrom came away from these meetings and, more generally, his sojourn in Palestine with a certainty that the Yishuv would beat the Arabs and emerge from a war with most of Palestine under its control.28

Without doubt, UNSCOP's members were heavily influenced by two affairs that occurred during their watch-the mutual British-IZL hangings and the Exodus Affair. The hangings underlined the unviability of the Mandate and the barbarism to which the two sides were being driven by the situation.29

The Exodus Affair had an even greater impact. Since August 1946, the British had been sending captured illegal immigrants to detention camps in Cyprus. But soon there was no room left in the island's camps, which held some twelve thousand prisoners. During summer 1947, the British tightened the screws. Clandestinely, Britain's M16 unleashed a campaign of sabotage against the Haganah's ships in European ports: the Vrisi was sunk in Genoa harbor on ii July; the Pan Crescent, another immigrant ship, was damaged and grounded near Venice on the night of 30-31 August.30

Overtly, Whitehall resolved to send captured illegal immigrants back to Europe. On 12 July, the converted American ferry President Warfield, renamed by the Mossad Le'aliya Bet Exodus from Europe-1947, set sail for Palestine from Sete, in southern France, with forty-five hundred DPs aboard. The Haganah-Mossad command dispatched the Exodus in mid-July for technical and operational reasons, not out of a political desire to splice the journey with the work of UNSCOP. But the Zionist leaders were not unaware of the political benefits that might accrue from such a coincidence.31 And certainly they were quick to exploit the affair politically once the Exodus reached Palestine waters.

Shadowed across the Mediterranean by the Royal Navy, on 18 July the Ex odus was intercepted and boarded by Royal Marines some 19 miles off Palestine, opposite Gaza. In contrast with past policy, the Haganah decided, in advance, to resist, with an eye to highlighting Jewish weakness and suffering and British brutality.32 The boarding was opposed, and a "battle" raged through the night. The British, occasionally using live fire, gradually overcame the defenders, who brandished clubs, metal bars, screws and bolts, bottles, and tomatoes. Three passengers were killed and twenty-eight seriously wounded,33 and the point-illustrating the desperate plight of the DPs and linking their fate to that of Palestine-was convincingly articulated. As if to help Zionist propaganda, the British towed the stricken vessel to Haifa and transferred almost all the passengers to three ships, which then departed for France.

But the French refused to cooperate. L'Humanite described the three boats containing the Exodus transportees as "a floating Auschwitz." Most of the passengers refused to disembark, and the French refused to accept passengers offloaded by force. The British, maneuvered into a corner of their own making, set sail for Hamburg, where the army on 8 September forcibly disembarked the passengers and shipped them to hastily prepared camps. Jews, this time escorted by British troops, had been returned to the land of their annihilators. The ordeal of the Exodusseemed to symbolize contemporary Jewish history and British insensitivity. Nothing could have done more to promote the Zionist cause. The affair, and the British acts of sabotage in Mediterranean harbors, as well as behind-the-scenes British diplomatic pressures, had a negative effect on Mossad Le'aliya Bet operations. But the Zionists had engineered a major propaganda coup.

The disembarkation in Haifa of the Exodus passengers, including dozens of injured, took place with Judge Sandstrom and the Yugoslav UNSCOP member, Vladimir Simitch, looking on, a bevy ofjournalists in tow. They had been "invited" to the port by Jewish Agency Political Department director Moshe Shertok.34 Sandstrom and Simitch spent two hours on the pier and spoke with passengers, and came away shaken. The Yugoslav was quoted as saying: "It is the best possible evidence we have."35

The following day the two men recounted what they had seen to other committee members, and together, all of them heard the testimony of an American cleric, Stanley Grauel, who had disembarked from the Exodus.36 The affair had also indirectly cast light on the IZL's motives in hanging the British sergeants.

Despite the boycott of UNSCOP, the Arab cause did not go unrepresented. Committee members privately met, through Bunche or British mediation, several Arab officials and intellectuals. The most important conversation apparently took place at a festive dinner, on 16 July, on the eve of the committee's departure from Palestine. Sandstrom and two aides spoke at length with Hussein al-Khalidi, a member of the AHC and mayor of Jerusalem. A1-Khalidi argued that the Jews had always been a minority and had no "historic rights" in Palestine and that the Arabs should not have to suffer because of Hitler and the DPs in Europe. The Jews, he said, had always enjoyed a pleasant life in Arab lands-until they demanded a sovereign state. A1-Khalidi rejected both partition and a binational state and called for a democratic unitary state with an Arab majority.37

Sandstrom also met several intellectuals at the Government Arab College in Jerusalem. Ahmed Khalidi, the college head (and Hussein al-Khalidi's brother), complained that the Jewish education system in Palestine was "chauvinistic." Musa Nasser, headmaster of the Bir Zeit secondary school, advocated a unitary state, in which the Arabs would remain a majority and Jewish immigration would be severely curtailed; perhaps the Jews would eventually receive "autonomous pockets."38 The committee also received a string of memoranda from Palestinian Arab advocates (including, apparently, from Musa al-'Alami and Cecil Hourani).39

The AHC boycott in one way worked in the Palestinians' favor: it enabled the Indian member, 'Abdur Rahman-who privately complained that the boycott was having "a disastrous effect on his colleagues"-to persuade the committee to hear outside Arab leaders.'() On 21 July UNSCOP traveled to Lebanon, meeting Prime Minister Riad al-Sulh. The following day they met Foreign Minister Hamid Faranjieh. Echoing the Arab League consensus, the Lebanese leaders called for an end to Jewish immigration and the establishment in Palestine of an independent, democratic Arab government. The Zionists, they charged, had territorial ambitions beyond Palestine, encompassing Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon.

On 23 July, at Sofar, the Arab representatives completed their testimony before UNSCOP. Faranjieh, speaking for the Arab League, said that Jews "illegally" in Palestine would be expelled and that the future of many of those "legally" in the country but without Palestine citizenship would need to be resolved "by the future Arab government." UNSCOP tried to get other Arab representatives to soften or elucidate this answer but got nowherewhich led Mohn to conclude in his memoirs that "there is nothing more extreme than meeting all the representatives of the Arab world in one group ... when each one tries to show that he is more extreme than the other."41 The Iraqi foreign minister, Muhammad Fadel Jamali, compared the Zionists to the Nazis. On the other hand, in private meetings outside Sofar, leading Maronite figures, including the patriarch, Antoine Pierre Arida, and former Lebanese president Emile Edde, told UNSCOP that Lebanon's Christians supported partition and the establishment of a Jewish state. The Maronite archbishop of Beirut, Ignatius Mubarak, even disputed the Arab claims to Palestine and Lebanon.42

From Lebanon, half the UNSCOP team, including Sandstrom, Simitch, Entezam, and Buache, flew to Amman for a series of "unofficial" meetings. King Abdullah was less than forthright: he spoke ambiguously and carefully of the "difficulty" the Arabs would have in accepting a Jewish state in any part of Palestine. But he did not completely rule out partition. The DPs, the Jordanians argued in a twelve-page memorandum, could be settled outside Palestine. Jordanian prime minister Samir Rifa'i said that the Jews of Palestine would enjoy frill minority rights and all would receive citizenship.',' Privately, Abdullah was "enthusiastic" about partition but hinted that the Arab parts of Palestine should be joined to Transjordan.44 But the Jewish Agency was disappointed with Abdullah's statement; its officials had expected fiillthroated support for partition.

UNSCOP then flew to Geneva. Sandstrom pressed for a visit to the DP camps. A heated debate within UNSCOP was resolved by a vote of six to four in favor of visiting the camps, which all understood augured a pro-Zionist tilt on the core issue.

On 8 August an UNSCOP subcommittee began a weeklong visit to DP camps in the American and British zones of control in Germany and Austria. "That night I was in hell," recalled Fabregat, after a visit to the Rothschild Hospital in Vienna, which treated four thousand hungry, mostly tubercular, patients. At the DP camp at Hahne, a mile from Bergen-Belsen, "one hundred per cent" of the Jewish DPs wanted to immigrate to Israel, reported John Hood, the Australian member. This was what all the members on the tour heard from the mostly randomly chosen DPs; and this was what some of the Western officers, including General Lucius Clay, the military governor of the American Zone in Germany, also told them .415

Back in Geneva, UNSCOP hammered out its report.46 Its work was accompanied by continuous Arab, Zionist, and British pressures as well as espionage. The Lebanese politician Camille Chamoun, the Arab League liaison to the committee, submitted a memorandum warning that any solution not acceptable to the Palestinian Arabs would result in catastrophe;47 Musa al- A1ami lobbied vigorously with Donald MacGillivray, the British liaison officer to UNSCOP.41 The British, for their part, submitted a last-minute memorandum that, by suggesting that partition was a possible option and outlining ways partition could be fashioned, unwittingly appear to have helped consolidate the (eventual) pro-partition majority.49

The most vigorous lobbyists were the Zionists, who bombarded UNSCOP with memoranda and wined and dined its members.S" They recruited Cross man, who had become a fervent pro-Zionist during his days with the AAC, to come to Geneva and "work" on the committee. He argued for partition, with a Jewish state consisting of the Galilee, the Coastal Plain, and the Negev.si Another Zionist asset in Geneva was the Palestinian Opposition figure `Omar Dajani (codenamed by HIS "the Orphan"), whose father had been murdered by the Husseinis in 1938. He advocated a Jewish -Transj ordanian partition.52

From the start of the deliberations in Geneva, there was unanimity in UNSCOP about the need to terminate the Mandate. As for the rest, there was dissension. But by the end of August, a clear majority emerged in favor of partition into two states, one Jewish, the other Palestinian Arab-or as Sandstrom defined it, "Partition with Economic Union," with an international trusteeship for the Jerusalem-Bethlehem area, where Christendom's holy sites, as well as Judaism's and Islam's, were concentrated. The demarcation of the borders, left until the last days of the deliberations, was largely the work of Mohn, the Swedish deputy member, who was relatively expert in the demography and geography ofPalestine.53 The guiding principle was demographic-that the Jewish state should include as few Arabs as possible and the Arab state as few Jews. But Mohn and his colleagues also accounted for the concrete needs of the two states-to-be, including contiguity and immigrant absorptive capacity (the latter with respect to the Jewish state). Little attention was paid to physical features and natural contours, such as hills and streams, in defining the borders. Mohn spent a great deal of time persuading UNSCOP that all of the Negev should be Jewish.

Mohn's map, accepted by the UNSCOP majority on 3o August, was based on dividing Palestine into seven parts-one part (Jerusalem-Bethlehem) under international control, and six roughly triangular areas to constitute the Jewish and Arab states (with three triangles each). Each threesome was to be contiguous, with two overlapping "kissing" or "kiss" points (near Afula and near Gedera), where the Jewish and Arab triangles would meet (with bridges or tunnels providing the continuity). The kiss points were to be under international supervision. The Jews were to get 62 percent of Palestine (most of it desert), consisting of the Negev (including Beersheba), the Coastal Plain from just north of Haifa down to Rehovot (including Tel Aviv and the Arab town of Jaffa), and eastern Galilee (including largely Arab Safad and the mixed town of Tiberias), and the Arabs about 35 percent of the country, consisting of Judea (including Hebron), Samaria (including Nablus and Jenin), and central and western Galilee (including the Arab towns of Acre and Nazareth and the Jewish town of Nahariya). The members signed the report and map just before midnight, 31 August. In the antechamber in the Palace of the Nations stood Eban, Horowitz, and MacGillivray; no Arabs were pres ent. An UNSCOP member darted out of the committee room and said: "Oh, here are the expectant fathers," then darted back in. Then, at midnight, UNSCOP filed out. "Fabregat approached and embraced me," recalled Horowitz. "'It's the greatest moment in my life,' he [Fabregat] said with tears in his eyes."S4 Sandstrom commented a few days later: "Seldom have so many had so much trouble for so little a country."SS