1948: A History of the First Arab-Israeli War (18 page)

But strategically speaking, during this period the massive British military presence and Haganah suspicions that the British in fact favored the Arabs "there is a sort of secret coalition between Azzam Pasha and Bevin," said Ben-Gurion 17-tended to inhibit Haganah operations. The Haganah could not contemplate large-scale operations, of which it became growingly capable as the war advanced, or conquest of Arab territory, out of fear of British intervention; and it understandably shied away from fighting the British while its hands were full with the Palestinian Arab militias and their foreign auxiliaries (though, to be sure, the IZL and LHI were far less cautious). Until April 1948, the Haganah operated under the assumption that the British military would block or forcefully roll back large-scale operations.

To a lesser extent, however, the British presence also inhibited Palestinian Arab attack at certain times. Moreover, the British military presence, and continued sovereignty over the country, certainly deterred the regular Arab armies from crossing the frontiers and interfering in the fighting before 15 May. The Arab leaders' periodic threats to this effect during the civil war remained empty bluster.

The guideline of impartiality, authorized by British cabinet decision on 4 December 1947, translated during the following months into a policy of quietly assisting each side in the takeover of areas in which that side was demographically dominant. In practice, this meant the handover, as the British successively withdrew from each area (Tel Aviv in December 1947, Gaza in February 1948, and so on), of Mandate government installations-police forts, military camps, utilities-to the majority community's control. The police forts and camps in the hill country of Judea, Samaria, and Galilee generally were turned over to Arab militia commanders; installations in the Coastal Plain and the Jordan and Jezreel Valleys went to the Haganah. This policy sometimes occasioned a more radical expression-British advice or urging to specific threatened or defeated communities to evacuate. For example, on 18 April 1948 the British urged the Arab inhabitants of Tiberias to evacuate the town; a week later they proffered the same advice in Balad ash Sheikh, an Arab village southeast of Haifa. In the course of January through May 1948, the British periodically urged the small Jewish communities north of Jerusalem (Neve Yaakov and Atarot) to clear out, as they did the inhabitants of the four kibbutzim of the `Etzion Bloc, south of Bethlehem.

British troops did not always abide by the guideline of impartiality. Occasionally they indulged in overt anti-Jewish behavior (usually immediately following LHI or IZL attacks on them). During the war's first months British troops occasionally confiscated arms from Haganah units protecting convoys or manning outposts in urban areas (the British argued that they also seized arms from Arab militiamen).18 And on a number of occasions British units disarmed Haganah men and handed them over to Arab mobs and "justice." For example, on iz February 1948 a British patrol disarmed a Haganah road block and arrested its members on Jerusalem's Shmuel Hanavi Street. The four men were later "released" unarmed into the hands of an Arab mob, which lynched them and mutilated their bodies.'9 A similar incident occurred a fortnight later, on 28 February, when British troops disarmed Haganah men at a position in the Hayotzek Factory near Holon. Eight men were "butchered.""' (The next day, LHI terrorists blew up a British troop train near Rehovot, killing twenty-eight British troops and wounding dozens more.)

Moreover, Whitehall's fears that the circumstances of the withdrawal from Palestine might subvert Britain's standing in the Middle East occasioned a number of major, organized British interventions against the Jewish militias, or noninterventions in face of Arab attack, in the dying days of the Mandate (see below for the cases of Jaffa and the `Etzion Bloc in April and May).

THE RELATIVE POWER OF THE TWO SIDES

At the start of the civil war, Whitehall believed that the Arabs would prevail. "In the long run the Jews would not be able to cope ... and would be thrown out of Palestine unless they came to terms with [the Arabs]," was the considered judgment of the Chief of the Imperial General Staff (CIGS).21 And indeed, the battle between the Yishuv and the Arab community seemed, at least on paper, extremely unequal. The Palestinian Arabs enjoyed a rough two-to-one population advantage-i.z or 1.3 million to 630,ooo-and physically populated more of the country's surface than did the Jews. They also generally enjoyed the advantage of the high ground, whereas the Jews lived principally in the lowlands. Moreover, they benefited from a vast hinterland of neighboring, sympathetic states, which could supply them with volunteers, supplies, and safe havens. The Zionists' "hinterland"-Jewish and Zionist groups in the Diaspora-lay hundreds and thousands of miles away, and supplies and volunteers to the embattled Yishuv had to penetrate the British naval and air blockades of Palestine.

These factors aside, however, the Yishuv enjoyed basic advantages over the Palestine Arabs in major indexes of strength: "national" organization and preparation for war, trained military manpower, weaponry, weapons production, economic power, morale and motivation, and, above all, command and control. Moreover, despite the general demographic tilt, the Yishuv had a disproportionate number of army-age males (twenty- to forty-four-yearolds)22 as, during the 193os and 194os, the Zionist leadership had taken care, as a matter of policy, to ship to Palestine, legally and illegally, young, fit males-deemed "good pioneering material."

Facing off in 1947-1948 were two very different societies: one highly mo tivated, literate, organized, semi-industrial; the other backward, largely illiterate, disorganized, agricultural. For the average Palestinian Arab man, a villager, political independence and nationhood were vague abstractions: his affinities and loyalties lay with his family, clan, and village, and, occasionally, region. Moreover, as we have noted, Palestinian Arab society was deeply divided along social and religious lines. And, among the more literate and politically conscious, there was a deep, basic fissure, going back to the 19zos, between the Husseinis and Nashashibis.

The 1936-1939 revolt had both irreparably deepened this divide (the rebellion ended with something like civil war between the two factions) and left Palestine Arab society largely decapitated, politically and militarily. The years of the Husseinis' anti-Opposition terrorism-which continued into 1946-194723-had driven the Nashashibis and many of their allies out of political life altogether; come 1948, they abstained from joining the fight against Zionism. At the same time, the British suppression of the revolt had left many Husseini stalwarts and activists dead, wounded, or in exile. A general weariness of armed struggle had set in. The rebellion had also devastated the Arabs economically, though the war years had seen the economy bounce back. But in general, Palestinian Arab society had failed to overcome the trauma of the rebellion years.

During the Mandate, the Arab community had periodically tried, but failed, to develop self-governing institutions, and not because of British obstructionism. The community's sole veteran executive body was the Supreme Muslim Council, which dealt with religious affairs. The AHC, dominated since its inception in 1936 by the Husseinis, was unelected and unrepresentative; in its remodeled form, during 1946-1948, it completely sidelined the Opposition. Although it possessed a large network of supporters and agents in the localities and to some degree oversaw the workings of the local National Committees, which were resurrected with the start of the hostilities, the AHC failed to establish working national "governmental" structures.

The AHC theoretically functioned as a cabinet, with the exiled Haj Amin al-Husseini as president and Jamal Husseini as his deputy. Other committee members were responsible for particular areas of interest (Sheikh Hassan Abu Saud-the establishment of the National Committees) or localities (Rafik Tamimi-Jaffa; Mu`ein al-Mahdi-Haifa). In 1946-1947, the AHC had six "departments"-lands, finances, economics, national organization, prisoners and casualties, and press-which, according to the HIS, made "theoretical sense" but, "in truth, there was chaos [andralmusiya] in most of" them. At the end of 1947, the AHC restructured the departments to face the challenges of war and statehood. But according to the HIS, by early 19+8, only the Finance Department (or "Treasury") remained. The national organization, economic and prisoners and casualties departments had merged to become the Emergency Committee (lajnatal-tawari), composed ofSa`ad al-Din Aref (a nephew of Aref al-Aref) and Ghaleb al-Khalidi (brother of Hussein Fakhri al-Khalidi, Jerusalem's mayor and a member of the AHC). The functional borders between the AHC, which theoretically managed the war on the national level, and the Emergency Committee were blurred. The HIS described the members and officials of the Emergency Committee as "murderers," "swords for hire," and "thieves" but, paradoxically, rated the committee itself as efficient. However, the members all took part in the various activities, with no lines of demarcation between them ("all buy weapons, all deal with supplies ... all hand out military and civil instructions-and the confusion is great" ).24

By the start of the war, the AHC had signally failed. A major reason, as in 1936-1939, was its inability to raise funds. Palestine's Arabs were generally poor, and the wealthy-many of them identified with the Opposition and, disproportionately, Christian-were reluctant to part with their money. The AHC's chief fund-raising agency was the Treasury Department, headed by `Izzat Taunus. But Taunus's crash effort, starting in June 1947, to assemble funds, through taxation (one mil per packet of cigarettes, five mils per bus ticket) and "voluntary" contributions from the more prosperous, was a dismal failure. The department was also tainted by corruption. By 1 November it had managed to raise only twenty-five thousand Palestine pounds.25

The Palestinian leadership during the 193os and 1940S may have talked often and loudly about "independence," but it had done little in terms of nutsand-bolts preparations for self-government. The reasons were historical, cultural, and sociological. The centuries of Ottoman rule had failed to instill in the a`yan a tradition of public service; rather, the wealthy vied for personal wealth, land, and power. Decades of cooperation with the Ottomans had rendered the a`yan corrupt and venal. Under the British, it appeared easier to rely on the Mandatory institutions, which functioned efficiently, than to embark on the pioneering, difficult task of creating their own. Few Arabs acquired governmental or military experience during the Mandate. And a giant question mark hangs over the "nationalist" ethos of the Palestinian Arab elite: Husseinis as well as Nashashibis, Khalidis, Dajanis, and Tamimis just before and during the Mandate sold land to the Zionist institutions and/or served as Zionist agents and spies. In addition, during 1936-1947, the Palestinians developed a political and psychological reliance on the Arab states to pull their chestnuts out of the fire.

The contrast with Zionist society is stark. No national collective was more self-reliant or motivated, the Holocaust having convincingly demonstrated that there was no depending for survival on anyone else and having implanted the certainty that a giant massacre would as likely as not be the outcome of military defeat in Palestine. By the late 194os, the Yishuv was probably one of the most politically conscious, committed, and organized communities in the world. It was also highly homogeneous: close to 9o percent Ashkenazi and 9o percent secular; only about 3 percent of the Yishuv was ultra-Orthodox and anti-Zionist. Hesitantly during the Ottoman years, and with increasing intensity during the beneficent Mandate, as Jewish numbers swelled, the Yishuv fashioned the infrastructure of a state-within-a-state or a state-in-embryo. By 1947, in addition to the Haganah, the Yishuv had a protogovernment-the Jewish Agency for Palestine-with a cabinet (the JAE), a foreign ministry (the agency's Political Department), a treasury (the agency's Finance Department), and most other departments and agencies of government, including a well-functioning, autonomous school system, a taxation system, settlement and land reclamation agencies, and even a powerful trades union federation, the Histadrut, with its own health service and hospitals, sports organization, agricultural production and marketing agencies, bank, industrial plants, and daily newspaper and publishing house.

Unlike the Palestinian Arabs, the Yishuv had a highly talented, sophisticated public service-oriented elite, experienced in diplomacy and economic and military affairs. Most of the twenty-six to twenty-eight thousand Palestinian Jews who had served in the Allied armies during World War II were, or became, Haganah members.

The Yishuv also enjoyed the effective backing of the World Zionist Organization, which had powerful branches in the United States. The Zionist movement had grown by leaps and bounds, and acquired popular support, during and after World War II, as a result of the Holocaust. At crucial junctures, the Zionists were able to tap the goodwill and political and financial resources of the large Diaspora Jewish communities. In an emergency fundraising tour of the United States in January-March 1948, Golda Myerson raised fifty million dollars for the Haganah, twice the sum that Ben-Gurion had asked her to bring back-"a brilliant success," in the words ofAbba Hillel Silver, who praised her "eloquence and persuasion."26 In a second whirlwind tour of American Jewish communities in May and June, she raised another fifty million dollars.27 These funds paid for the Czech arms shipments that proved decisive in the battles of April through October 1948.

Theoretically, the Palestinians had the whole Arab world to fall back on. But that world, less organized and less generous than world Jewry, gave them little in their hour of need in money and arms. More robust was the contribution in terms of volunteers. But in this sphere, too, the pan-Arab contribution was actually meager in all but bluster. There appears to have been great reluctance to actually go and fight, especially among the more prosperous and educated. As one British intelligence official put it in December 1947: "Among the younger men ... there is a great deal of temporary enthusiasm and exhibitionism, especially in Egypt, but very many of the youths who have so bravely smashed the windows of defenseless [Jewish] shopkeepers have little intention of undertaking anything so hazardous and uncomfortable as warfare in the stark Judean hills. "28