1948: A History of the First Arab-Israeli War (19 page)

Nonetheless, six to eight thousand volunteers reached Palestine, mainly from Iraq, Syria, and Egypt, and served alongside the local Arab militia units in the towns, with the Arab Liberation Army, and in the Muslim Brotherhood contingents in the south. But although the call for "jihad" reverberated through the Arab world, the frontline states, essentially poor and badly organized, proved unable to accommodate or deploy many of the volunteers. Indeed, the thousands who poured into Egypt and British-ruled Tripolitania-Cyrenaica from the Maghreb (Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia) from early May were seen as "restive and argumentative" and, vaguely, a threat to the regimes-and most were incarcerated and then deported home. In mid-June the Egyptians, under British and French prodding, closed their borders to further Maghrebi volunteers.29 More successftil in penetrating Palestine were the hundreds of Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood volunteers, who entered the Gaza District in March-April 194830 and fought alongside local militiamen. They were superficially trained by the Egyptian army in camps in Marsa Matruh and Hakstap.31

Several dozen Britons, most of them former British army or police officers (by mid-March 1948 some 23o British soldiers and thirty policemen had deserted),32 also served in Palestinian Arab ranks,-3-3 as did some volunteers from Yugoslavia and Germany. The Yugoslavs, possibly in their dozens, were both Christians, formerly members of pro-Axis Fascist groups, and Bosnian Muslims;-3' the handful of Germans were former Nazi intelligence, Wehrmacht, and SS officers.35

The Yishuv was reinforced, mostly after mid-May, by "more than 4,ooo" volunteers, Jewish and non-Jewish, from abroad. Most were idealists who supported the Zionist cause; a few came for the pay and adventure. Almost all had served in the Allied forces in World War II. A fair number were pilots and navigators, air force ground personnel, sailors, and experts in communications and armored warfare. A large contingent, of about eight hundred, arrived from South Africa; many came from North America. Of the IAF's 193 pilots in the 1948 War, 171 were foreign volunteers, about a hundred of them Americans.

The case of Milton M. Rubenfeld, "Captain USAAF Reserve, 0-940081 Serial Number," was not unusual. In early December 1947 he contacted the Jewish Agency, writing: "In 1939 I enlisted in the Royal Air Force (UK) and fought for England because I thought I was helping the cause of the Jews. I desire to do the same thing now.... I could fly thousands of Jews into Palestine a month." He also suggested buying mothballed American fighter aircraft. "If the US Gov. refuses permission to fly these [aircraft] to Palestine ... I will do so anyway," he wrote.36

Much of the senior staff of the Haganah/IDF Seventh (Armored) Brigade, including its commanding officer, Ben Dunkelman, and two of his battalion commanders (Joe Weiner and Baruch Friedman-Erez), were AngloSaxon volunteers. One American volunteer, David (Mickey) Marcus, of Eisenhower's staff in World War II, briefly served as an adviser to BenGurion and on the IDF General Staff, with the rank of general, before being accidentally killed by an Israeli sentry in June 1948. (He is the only American soldier who died serving in a foreign army to be buried at West Point.) About 20 percent of the IDF Medical Corps at the end of 1948 were foreign volunteers.37

The Yishuv entered the civil war with one large militia and two very small paramilitary or terrorist organizations: the Haganah, the military arm of the mainstream Zionist parties, especially the socialist Mapai and Mapam, with thirty-five thousand members; and the IZL, the military arm of the Revisionist movement and its youth movement, Betar, and the LHI, which was composed, somewhat unnaturally, of breakaways from the IZL and left-wing revolutionaries who regarded the British Empire as their chief enemy. The IZL had between two and three thousand members and the LHI some three to five hundred. During the civil war, the three organizations occasionally coordinated their operations and did not clash with one another.

The Haganah, which as of 1 June 1948 was renamed the Israel Defense Forces, was the organization that counted. During the first months of the civil war, while defending the Jewish settlements and lines of communication, it reorganized. In a sense, the reorganization-from an amateur, territorially based militia into a relatively professional army-was carried out behind the shield provided by the Palmah, the Haganah's strike force. In November 1947 the Palmah had twenty-one hundred soldiers, with a thousand reservists. During the following months, while battling the Palestinian Arabs and suffering severe losses, it expanded into a force of six thousand troops, subdivided into three brigades.

Before the war, the Haganah fielded territorially based infantry companies in the Yishuv's towns and settlements. There was a skeletal General Staff, with specialized branches (intelligence service, manpower, logistics, medical corps, and so on) and an embryonic "Air Service." The reorganization and expansion of November 1947-May 1948 resulted in the creation and deployment of twelve brigades, three of them Palmah and two armored.

The Haganah's chief of operations, Yigael Yadin, had formulated the reorganization order 01 17 November 1947. Its preamble read: "The danger of an attack on the country by the armies of the neighboring states ... necessitates a different structure and deployment. Opposite regular armies there is a need to deploy with a trained, [ regular] military force, armed and built along [regular] military lines. "3s

The seeds of the transformation were planted already in December 1946, when Ben-Gurion, the JAE's chairman (effectively the Yishuv's prime minister), took over the agency's defense portfolio. During the following months he studied the Yishuv's defense needs. Unlike others in the Zionist leadership, Ben-Gurion understood early on that the decisive battle for Jewish statehood would be waged not against the British or in the international arena but on the ground, against the Arabs, inside Palestine and along its borders. He realized that the Palestinian Arabs would not constitute a major military threat, but he feared the armies of the Arab states. As he told the Twenty-second Zionist Congress: "Until recently there was only the problem of how to defend [the Yishuv] against the Palestinian Arabs.... But now we face a completely new situation. The Land of Israel is surrounded by independent Arab states that have the right to purchase and produce arms, to set up armies and train them.... Attack by the Palestinian Arabs does not endanger the Yishuv, but there is a danger, that the neighboring Arab states will send their armies to attack and destroy the Yishuv."3°

The Yishuv's military capabilities improved significantly during the immediate postwar years. One element was the establishment of a clandestine arms industry. The plants were usually built under cowsheds and other agricultural installations. The industry was based on machine tools purchased in the United States by Haganah representatives in 1944-1946. By the end of 1947, the Haganah's arms factories were producing two- and three-inch mortars, Sten submachine guns, and grenades and bullets in large numbers. Their contribution was not insignificant. Between i October 1947 and 31 May 1948 the secret plants produced 15,468 Sten guns, more than two hundred thousand grenades, 125 three-inch mortars with more than 130,000 rounds, and some forty million 9 mm (Sten gun) bullets.40

Another element was planning. Before 1946, the Haganah General Staff (HGS) had prepared plans for resisting a renewed Arab rebellion-with the Haganah seen as an auxiliary to the British military. In May 1946, the HGS formulated tochnitgimel (Plan C or the May Plan), addressing the possibility of mass, organized Arab attacks on the Yishuv. The plan included guidelines for Haganah retaliation against Arab leaders, villages, and urban districts; ad denda, from October and December 1946, related to possible British assistance to the Arabs. In doctrinal terms, the Haganah from this point on took on sole responsibility for the defense of the Yishuv.41

During the countdown to x948, a behind-the-scenes struggle for dominance in the reorganizing defense apparatus raged between the veteran Haganah commanders and the regular Allied-mostly British-army veterans who had returned from Europe. Ben-Gurion preferred the army veterans, arguing that the impending war would be mainly a conventional war while the Haganah brass had trained for a guerrilla struggle against irregulars. But the incumbent Haganah commanders effectively resisted "the Old Man," and although some former British army officers received important commandssuch as the brigadiers Haim Laskov and Shlomo Shamir-the HGS and the brigade and battalion headquarters were manned predominantly by Haganah veterans, with Palmah officers (Yigal Allon, Yitzhak Rabin, Yitzhak Sadeh, and Shimon Avidan) figuring prominently.

At the end of November 1947 the Haganah's armory consisted of io,66z rifles, 3,830 pistols, 3,662 submachine guns, 775 light machine guns, 157 medium machine guns, sixteen antitank guns, 670 two-inch mortars, and eighty-four three-inch mortars. Much of the weaponry was dispersed among the settlements, where it was needed for self-defense. In addition, the Jewish Settlement Police, officially under British command but in fact loyal to the Haganah, had some 6,8oo rifles and forty-eight machine guns. Most Jewish settlements entered the war with well-prepared trench works, bunkers and bombproof shelters, with barbed wire perimeter fences and lighting, and minefields. The z5o-odd rural settlements doubled as small fortified encampments. But the Haganah had no artillery or tanks, used makeshift armored cars (essentially trucks with steel plating), and had no combat aircraft, only light spotter planes. Ammunition was in short supply (some fifty rounds per rifle and six to seven hundred rounds per machine gun). The IZL and LHI together had another thousand or so light arms.

The Palestinian Arabs had nothing comparable to the Haganah. During its brief existence, the Palestinian national movement failed to establish a national militia, but not for want of trying. On paper, the Palestinian Arabs in 1946-1947 had two paramilitary youth organizations, the Najjada and the Futuwwa. Their chief activity consisted of noisy parades in town squares; little, if any, military training took place.

The Najada was founded in Jaffa in November-December 1945 by Muhammad Nimr al-Hawari, a Nazareth-born lawyer of bedouin origin who had served in the Mandate administration and had broken with the Husseinis in the early 194os. Its founding proclamation declared that the Zionist Movement was "the most heinous crime known to history" and defined the organization's aims as instilling national consciousness and discipline in Palestine's youth. Al-Hawari tried to model the Najjada on the Haganah.42 By mid-1946 it had, on paper, "8,ooo" members.43

The Futuwwa was founded at the end of 1935 by Jamal Husseini as the Arab Party's youth corps; the Nazi Party or the Hitlerjugend appear to have been his model.44 It was disbanded during the Arab Revolt and resurrected by Husseini in early 1946 as a counterweight to the Najjada.45 Kamal Erikat, a retired Mandate police officer, was its commander. The two organizations vied for recruits. The Husseinis then tried to take over the Najjada. Hawari resisted but, fearing assassination, fled to Jordan at the end of 1947. By the start of the war, neither the Futuwwa nor the Najjada in effect existed. The Palestinians entered the war without a national military organization.

Rather, the Arabs followed the pattern set at the start of the 1936 revolt. A number of large, organized armed bands, which the Jews called "gangs," sprang up in December 1947 in more or less spontaneous fashion. As in 1936 -1939, they were most active in the hill country of Judea, Samaria, and Galilee and consisted largely of local peasants. The most important bands were 'Abd al-Qadir al-Husseini's "al-Jihad al-Muqqadas," which operated in the hills around Jerusalem; Hassan Salame's group, based in the villages around Lydda and the Judean foothills to the east; and the band led by Abu Ibrahim al-Sghir, in lower Galilee. Each band had a hard core of two to five hundred fighters, who moved about the countryside quartering in successive villages. Some villages refused to host them, for fear of Jewish retribution. The bands were lightly armed, their heaviest weapons running to two- and three-inch mortars and medium machine guns. Each band was able to call on varying numbers of local volunteers for short, specific engagements. The Haganah's opinion of the bands' abilities was low, as was al-Qawugji's; he reportedly described them as "unreliable, excitable and difficult to control and in organized warfare virtually unemployable."46 The bands in fact often fought with tenacity and skill, but they rarely cooperated with one another and tended, by high-handed and often brutal behavior, to alienate the villagers among whom they "swam," in Mao Tse-tung's phrase. From the first, the bands encountered great reluctance among the villagers to volunteer or help, and occasionally villages refused them entry.47 The unwillingness to join in the hostilities, out of fear, was occasionally matched by secret, specific ceasefire agreements between Arab villages and neighboring Jewish settlements.41 This led one historian to conclude that "Palestinian society ... during this period did not have that national spirit, which Benedict Anderson said constituted a `fraternity that makes it possible ... for so many millions of people not so much to kill, as willingly to die.' . . . One can conclude that Arab nationalism in Palestine was expressed in the existence of national con sciousness and national emotions, but without the readiness to act or sacrifice. "4`'

The largest and best-organized Arab formation fighting in Palestine until the pan-Arab invasion of May 1948 was the ALA, consisting mainly ofvohuiteers from Syria, Iraq, and Palestine mustered by the Arab League in Syria. The volunteers were trained in Syrian army camps in Qatana, near Damascus, beginning in November 1947, and the ALA was officially established on i January 1948, with Fawzi al-Qawugji at its head. Al-Qawugji told his volunteers that "they were going off to Jihad to help the persecuted Arabs of Palestine.... We must expel the Jews from the Arab part of Palestine and limit them in that small area where they live and they must remain under our supervision and guard. Our war is holy. Women, children and prisoners must not be harmed."50