1948: A History of the First Arab-Israeli War (20 page)

Syria initially supplied the money and arms. But during the following months the other Arab states contributed to the ALA's upkeep. At its height, in April and October 1948, the ALA had four to five thousand troops and could call on the services of hundreds of local volunteers in its areas of operation. The bulk of the army's officers were retired or seconded Syrian and Iraqi army personnel, with a sprinkling of Jordanians, Lebanese, Egyptians, and Bosnians.S 1

Company- and battalion-sized ALA formations entered Palestine from Lebanon and Jordan starting in December 1947-January 1948 and fanned out in the mixed towns, to bolster local Palestinian militia contingents, and in the hill country of Samaria and Judea. They were equipped with a diverse collection of light weapons, light and medium-sized mortars, and a number of 75 mm and io5 mm guns, with a small stock of shells. In mid-May, with the invasion of Palestine by the regular Arab armies, the ALA withdrew to Qatana to reorganize. During the following weeks the army returned to Palestine, this time to the Galilee, now armed with additional mortars and field pieces and a handful of antiquated armored cars.52 On paper, in October 1948, the ALA consisted of eight "battalions" (Yarmuk 1, Yarmuk 2, Yarmuk 3, Ajnadin, Husayn, Qadisiya, Hittin, and the Druze Battalion). But in reality it mustered no more than three to four more or less regular-sized battalions (the three Yarmuk battalions and possibly the Hittin Battalion). The other "battalions" were in effect company-sized units that, before 15 May, were posted in towns to reinforce local militias.-3 Though nominally part of an "army," each ALA battalion usually operated on its own. The ALA was crushed and finally ejected from Palestine at the end of October.

In the main, Palestinian Arab military power was based on the separate local militias in the country's seven to eight hundred Arab villages and towns. Of these, only some four hundred were involved in the war. The remainder, almost all in the territory that became the West Bank, were untouched by hostilities and barely contributed to the war effort. Each village had its own "militia" of ten or fifty or a hundred able-bodied men with pistols or rifles and a small stock of ammunition. The weapons were of diverse makes and ages, sometimes obsolete. Usually, each village militia was on its own. There was no "national" framework. At best, neighboring villages might help each other. Occasionally, the militias of a cluster of villages would mount a joint attack, usually as appendages of an armed band or an ALA unit, on a Jewish convoy or settlement. The firefight over, the militiamen would disperse to their homes until the next faz`a (summons). The faza might last a few hours or a day or two. In defense, each village was almost always on its own; when the Haganah went on the offensive, it was able to pick the villages off one at a time.54

Many villages tried to stay out of the fray, and some even preferred to assist the Jews out of a deep-seated antagonism toward their neighbors or because they believed that the Jews would win. By the beginning of summer 1948, the Druze villages of the Carmel and Western Galilee had thrown in their lot with the Jews. A few weeks later, the IDF set up a Druze unit, which participated in its offensives.55

All the Palestinian forces-armed bands, ALA, and village militias-suffered from acute supply problems. Especially badly off were the villages. In terms of food, they were largely autarchic. But they needed guns, ammunition, fuel. Yet most received no outside supplies of any kind during the war: the ALA and the bands had no supplies to spare, and when the Arab states or the Arab League Military Committee sent arms and ammunition, they almost invariably ended up in the hands of the bands or ALA; some arms reached the larger urban militias. Through the civil war, the villages sent purchasing missions to nearby towns or to Arab states to acquire a machine gun or a few rifles. But it was all a drop in the bucket.

The ALA, the bands, and the urban militias relied on supplies from neighboring Arab countries. But these states were poor, corrupt, badly organized, and not particularly generous, and the Military Committee, which "supervised" the war effort, and the AHC leaders in exile proved unable to raise the necessary funds or to organize the dispatch of war materiel to those in need. Haganah/IDF intelligence files are littered with intercepted messages from Palestinian towns and villages, from the bands, and from ALA units desperately calling upon this or that state, the Military Committee, or the AHC to rush supplies. Almost invariably the response was: "Soon, God willing."

According to one report, by 23 March 1948 the Arab states had sent 9,800 rifles and almost four million rounds of ammunition to Palestine.s6 But the bulk of the weaponry reached the ALA; a small part was distributed among the urban militias and the bands; the villages got nothing or almost nothing.

Much of the weaponry in or reaching Palestine between November 1947 and 14 May 1948 was of different types and calibers, and many of the rifles were unusable (particularly decrepit were the Saudi contributions). Only the ALA enjoyed the benefit of fairly standardized weaponry and ammunition. The arms shipments, which were illegal, had to get around British patrols and check posts. Moreover, the Haganah, well informed, occasionally interdicted arms convoys-as happened to a large shipment from Beirut heading for Haifa, near Kiryat Motzkin, on 17 March. A dozen Arabs were killed, including Haifa's militia commander, the Jordanian Muhammad bin Hamad al-Huneiti, and most of the arms and ammunition were destroyed.57

More critical than the supply problem was that of command and control. There were simply too many diverse Arab units and too many bodies pulling the strings from outside. There were the ALA units, some of them semiindependently garrisoning towns, the armed bands, and the individual village militias. The larger towns each had a number of militias (Jaffa had three or four), owing allegiance to different political controllers-the local National Committee, the AHC, a nearby armed band, the ALA, the Military Committee in Damascus, or even specific Arab governments. The Jordanians, for example, sent a number of large bedouin volunteer contingents that were directly controlled by Amman; the Muslim Brotherhood contingents were loosely managed from Cairo. The nominal coordinator of this disparate war effort, the Military Committee, beyond loosely controlling the ALA (alQawuqji was never particularly obedient), proved incapable of coordinating the different military groups. Indeed, the committee itself spent much of its time fending off challenges from the AHC, which sought to supplant it in the direction of the war. Inside Palestine, the ALA and most of the local National Committees rebuffed AHC efforts at intrusion or control, fearing that AHC directives could embroil them in unwanted or premature hostilities with the British or the Jews.

Aware of the problem, the Military Committee, ALA leaders, Haj Amin al-Husseini, and Palestinian band leaders met in Damascus, under the chairmanship of Syrian president Shukri al-Quwwatli, on S February 1948 to sort out the mess. A plan, providing for cooperation and a division of Palestine into zones of responsibility, was hammered out: Galilee and Samaria were placed under al-Qawugji (ALA); the Jerusalem District under Abd al-Qadir al-Husseini; the Lydda area under Salame; and the South under an Egyptian commander. The Military Committee was nominally given overall charge and the mufti was effectively sidelined-but the problem of the rival militias, especially in the big towns, and the rival interests of the patron Arab states, was left unresolved." And the death of Abd al-Qadir in early April left the crucial Jerusalem area bereft of central command for the crucial remaining five weeks of the civil war. In effect, through February until 14 May, the various bands and militias and the ALA fought separately and without real coordination. This was probably the most important factor in the eventual Palestinian defeat and in the Haganah's relative ease in accomplishing it.

THE FIRST PERIOD OF THE CIVIL WAR

The civil war half of the 1948 War, which ended with the complete destruction of Palestinian Arab military power and the shattering of Palestinian society, began on 3o November 1947 and ended on 14 May 1948, by which time hundreds of thousands of townspeople and villagers had fled or been forcibly displaced from their homes. But the disintegration of Arab Palestine, which underlay the military collapse, began well before the Haganah went on the offensive in early April 1948; indeed, there were telling signs even before the UN partition vote and the start of the accelerated British evacuation. The trigger appears to have been the UNSCOP partition proposals and Britain's announced intention to leave. Already in early November 1947, an official reported chaos in the largely Arab-staffed Nazareth District administration; the offices had ceased to function. The Christians, who manned the senior posts, were "living in fear for their property and lives (in this order).... The Husseini terror has increased lately and large sums of money are extorted from the Christians. Christians with means are trying to flee the country, especially to Lebanon and the United States."s9

At base, many Palestinians entered the war knowing that they would lose-though, to be sure, some trusted that the Arab world, once mobilized, would ultimately overcome the Jews as it had the medieval Crusader kingdoms.60 "The fellah is afraid of the Jewish terrorists.... The town dweller admits that his strength is insufficient to fight the Jewish force and hopes for salvation from outside.... The ... majority ... are contused, frightened. ... All they want is peace, quiet," reported one HIS agent.6'

Though the Arabs had initiated the violence, they were quickly evincing signs of demoralization. "In general there is fear in the Arab public of the Jews and this is one of the reasons for the depression and quiet in many areas," stated a Haganah report. "This fear is prominent among the Arabs in places hit by the dissident [that is, IZL and LHI] terrorist actions. Many areas, especially near Jewish population concentrations, are being evacuated out of fear of Jewish reprisals. On the other hand, there is a lack of confidence in the existing Arab leadership and their organizational abilities, especially because of their inability to deal with the masses of refugees and economic problems."62 In Jaffa by early February, there was no "housing for the refugees and no hospitalization for the wounded, and commerce was paralyzed.... In Jerusalem there was complete chaos."63 The fighting had deepened the traditional Muslim-Christian rift. In Jerusalem, the Christians were eager to leave, but the Muslims threatened to confiscate or destroy their property.64 Outside the town, Muslim villagers overran the monasteries at Beit Jimal and Mar Saba, in the former "robbing and burning property," in the latter "murdering [monks] and robbing."65 The daughter, living in England, of one middle-class Muslim, identified as "Dr. Canaan"-possibly Tawfiq Canaan, a well-known physician, political writer, and folklorist-of Musrara (Jerusalem), wrote to her father: "Yes, daddy, it is shameful that all the Christian Arabs are fleeing the country and taking out their money."66

Flight was the earliest and most concrete expression of Palestinian demoralization. Within twenty-four hours of the start of the (still low-key) hostilities, Arab families began to abandon their homes in mixed or border neighborhoods in the big towns. Already on 3o November 1947 the HIS reported "the evacuation of Arab inhabitants from border neighborhoods" in Jerusalem and Jaffa.67 Arabs were also reported leaving the area around the Jewish Quarter of Safad (the town was predominantly Arab) and fleeing the villages of Jammasin and Sheikh Muwannis, bordering Tel Aviv.68 By 9 December, the HIS was reporting that "Arab refugees were sleeping in the streets [of Jaffa]" and "wealthy families were leaving the [coastal] citiesheading inland. [Many initially fled to the family's village of origin.] Rich people are emigrating to Syria, Lebanon, and even Cyprus."69 In one or two sites, there was deliberate Jewish intimidation of Arab neighbors to leave.70

Despite the haphazard efforts of some Arab local authorities, the following months were marked by increasing flight from the main towns and certain rural areas. By the end of March 1948 most of the wealthy and middleclass families had fled Jaffa, Haifa, and Jerusalem, and most Arab rural communities had evacuated the heavily Jewish Coastal Plain; a few had also left the Upper Jordan Valley. Most were propelled by fear of being caught up, and harmed, in the fighting; some may have feared life under Jewish rule. It is probable that most thought of a short, temporary displacement with a return within weeks or months, on the coattails ofvictorious Arab armies or international diktats. Thus, although some (the wealthier) moved as far away as Beirut, Damascus, and Amman, most initially moved a short distance, to their villages of origin or towns in the West Bank or Gaza area, inside Palestine, where they could lodge with family or friends. During this period Jewish troops expelled the inhabitants of only one village-Qisariya, in the Coastal Plain, in mid-February (for reasons connected to Jewish illegal im migration rather than the ongoing civil war)-though other villages were harassed and a few specifically intimidated by IZL, LHI, and Haganah actions (much as during this period Jewish settlements were being harassed and intimidated by Arab irregulars). Altogether some seventy-five thousand to one hundred thousand Arabs fled or were displaced from their homes during the first stage of the civil war, marking the first wave of the exodus.71

Through the civil war there was no clear Arab "policy" regarding the exodus. Almost from the start of hostilities, the AHC and the National Committees evinced ambivalence concerning the movement of Arabs out of battle zones or potential battle zones. This ambivalence was to characterize their thinking and behavior down to mid-May 1948. Advice and orders changed from month to month and place to place. In general, the AHC and some of the National Committees were annoyed and, as the months passed, increasingly alarmed, by the exodus and repeatedly instructed particular communities to curb it. In late December 1947, the AHC apparently issued a general, secret directive "forbidding all Arab males capable of participating in the battle to leave the country. "71 In late January 1948, British intelligence reported that the mufti had ordered departees to return home.73