1948: A History of the First Arab-Israeli War (25 page)

On 31 March Ben-Gurion summoned his military and political aides for a nightlong series of meetings. Yadin pointed to the Haganah's difficulties in different parts of the country. But Ben-Gurion's mind remained focused: "The fall of Jewish Jerusalem could be a deathblow to the Yishuv, and the Arabs understand this and will concentrate great forces to interdict traffic [to the city]." He demanded that the HGS scrape together a large force and send it to the besieged city.26

Yadin tried to calm the Old Man. Jerusalem was not in dire peril; the reports, perhaps, were exaggerated. In any case, the Haganah could not afford to deplete other sectors. As a compromise, he proposed mustering five hundred additional troops for Jerusalem.

Ben-Gurion: "Why not 5,ooo"?

Yadin: The Haganah hasn't that many available, or arms, to spare.

The argument grew heated.

Ben-Gurion: "We'll take men, arms, and mortars from the settlements."

Yadin: "I can't agree that someone [that is, Ben-Gurion] who's never seen a mortar in action, who doesn't know how many mortars there are ... can give an order to send them."27

But in the end, Yadin caved in. The HGS spent the following hours organizing what was to be known as Operation Nahshon, geared to pushing one or more large convoys to the city and clearing the road of enemy bases, meaning the villages on either side that served as the militia assembly and jump-off points. Fifteen hundred men-three battalions-were mustered and placed under the command of Shimon Avidan, the Giv'ati Brigade's officer in command.

At the time, Ben-Gurion and the HGS believed that they had initiated a one-shot affair, albeit with the implication of a change of tactics and strategy on the Jerusalem front. In fact, they had set in motion a strategic transformation of Haganah policy. Nahshon heralded a shift from the defensive to the offensive and marked the beginning of the implementation of tochnit dalet (Plan D)-without Ben-Gurion or the HGS ever taking an in principle decision to embark on its implementation.

But the Haganah had had little choice. With the Arab world loudly threatening and seemingly mobilizing for invasion, the Yishuv's political and military leaders understood that they would first have to crush the Palestinian militias in the main towns and along the main roads and the country's borders if they were to stand a chance of beating off the invading armies. And there was an ineluctable time frame. The Palestinians would have to be defeated in the six weeks remaining before the British departure, scheduled for i May.

An additional reason for the start of implementation and the shift from de fense to offense was the calculation that British military power had been, by early April, so depleted and British resolve, with eyes riveted on the impending withdrawal, so weakened that intervention against the Haganah was highly unlikely. By i April, British troop numbers in Palestine had diminished to 27,6oo.28

No doubt, too, the Haganah switched to the offensive in early April also, simply, because it could. For four months, under continuous Arab provocation and attack, the Yishuv had largely held itself in check, initially in the hope that the disturbances would blow over and, later, in deference to international-particularly British-sensibilities. In addition, the Haganah had lacked armed manpower beyond what was needed for defense. But by the end of March, recruitment and the reorganization of the militia in battalion and brigade formations were fairly well advanced. And Czech arms at last began to arrive.

The first shipment-of two hundred rifles, forty MG-34 machine guns, and 16o,ooo bullets-secretly landed during the night of 31 March - i April at a makeshift airfield at Beit Daras in a chartered American Skymaster cargo plane." A second and far larger shipment, covered with onions and potatoes-of forty-five hundred rifles and two hundred machine guns, along with five million bullets-arrived at Tel Aviv port aboard the Nora on a April. When the equipment was offloaded and reached the units, "some of the boys couldn't restrain themselves and kissed the guns, which were still coated with grease," Yisrael Galili recorded.-() (A third shipment-consisting of ten thousand rifles, 1,415 machine guns, and sixteen million roundsreached the Yishuv by sea on z8 April.)3'

Before this, the Haganah high command had had to "borrow" weapons from local units for a day or two for specific operations, and the units (and settlements) were generally reluctant to part with weapons, quite reasonably arguing that the Arabs might attack while the weapons were on loan. Now, at last, the Haganah command had at hand a stockpile of thousands of weapons that it could freely deploy. The two shipments proved decisive. As Ben-Gurion put it at the time, "After we have received a small amount of the [Czech] equipment ... the situation is radically different in our favor."32 Without doubt, of all the shipments that subsequently reached the Yishuv, none was to have greater immediate impact or historical significance.

Until the end of March, Haganah policy had been to defend the existing Jewish settlements and protect the convoys supplying them. Occasionally, its troops carried out retaliatory strikes against Arab militia units and bases. But no territory was conquered and no village-with two exceptions over Dc comber 1947-March 1948 (`Arab Sugreir and Qisariya)-was destroyed. But henceforward, Haganah policy would be permanently to secure roads, border areas, and Jewish settlements by crushing minatory irregular forces and destroying or permanently occupying the villages and towns from which they operated. The Arab militias and their ALA reinforcements had to be crushed; the main roads had to be permanently secured; and the Haganah's brigades had to be freed to deploy along the borders to fend off the expected pan-Arab invasion. In addition, the world, and particularly the United States, had to be persuaded that the Yishuv could and would win and establish its state. Victory over the Palestinian Arabs would assure the world community's continued adherence to the decision to partition Palestine and establish a Jewish state.

Plan D, formulated in early March and signed and dispatched to the Haganah brigade commanders on io March, was Yadin's blueprint for concerted operations on the eve of the final British departure and the pan-Arab invasion that was expected to follow hard on its heels. It was scheduled to be implemented in the first half of May, as the British convoys were due to converge on Haifa and Rafah on their way out and as the Arab states' armies deployed for invasion along the frontiers. The Haganah brigades were expected to move more or less simultaneously in the various sectors.

But a variety of factors, chief of which were the debacle on the roads, the specific threat to West Jerusalem and the American retreat from partition, persuaded Ben-Gurion and the HGS to launch this series of campaignswhich, in retrospect, can be seen as the implementation of Plan D-prematurely and in piecemeal fashion. Operation Nahshon was the first step.

Palestinian Arab strengths and weaknesses were well suited to the nature of the early months of the war, when fighting was dispersed, disorganized, small-scale, and highly localized. The moment the Haganah switched to the offense and launched large-scale, highly organized, and sustained operations, the Arab weaknesses came to the fore-and their militias, much like Palestinian society as a whole, swiftly collapsed, like a house of cards.

But in analyzing the war, and especially its course in the months December 1947-May 1948, it is well to remember that the Yishuv's leaders had failed fully to grasp the weakness of Palestinian society and were for the most part (pleasantly) surprised, even astonished, by the ease of the Haganah victories and by the swiftness of the collapse.

The Haganah shift of strategy was decided on incrementally during the first half of April: each decision appeared to be, and in large measure was, a response to a particular, local challenge. But by the end of the period it was clear that a dramatic conceptual change had taken place and that the Yishuv had gone over to the offensive and was now engaged in a war of conquest. That war of conquest was prefigured in Plan D.

Glimmers of the prospective change in strategy were apparent in the first months of 1948. In January, planning in the Haganah Jerusalem District provided for "the destruction of villages ... dominating our settlements or endangering our communications routes."33 And in Tel Aviv, one senior officer recommended destroying Jaffa's water reservoir "to force a large number ofArabs to leave the town."34

But such suggestions or "plans" were not, in fact, activated before the implementation of Plan D in April and May. And Plan D itself was never launched, in an orchestrated fashion, by a formal leadership decision. Indeed, the various battalion and brigade commanders in the first half of April, and perhaps even later, seemed unaware that they were implementing Plan D. In retrospect it is clear that the Haganah offensives of April and early May were piecemeal implementations of Plan D. But at the time, the dispersed units felt they were simply embarking on unconcerted operations geared to putting out fires in each locality and to meeting particular local challenges (the siege of Jerusalem, the cutoff of the Galilee Panhandle from the Jezreel Valley, and so on). The massive Haganah documentation from the first half of April contains no reference to an implementation of Plan D, and only rarely do such references appear in the Haganah's paperwork during the following weeks.

Plan D called for securing the areas earmarked by the United Nations for Jewish statehood and several concentrations of Jewish population outside those areas (West Jerusalem and Western Galilee). The roads between the core Jewish areas and the border areas where the invading Arab armies were expected to attack were to be secured. The plan consisted of two parts: general guidelines, distributed to all brigade OCs, and specific orders to each of the six territorial brigades (`Etzioni [Jerusalem], Kiryati [(Tel Aviv], Giv`ati [Rehovot-Rishon Lezion], Alexandroni [the Coastal Plain], Carmeli [Haifa], and Golani [ Jezreel Valley] ). The preamble stated: the aim "of this plan is to take control of the territory of the Jewish State and to defend its borders, as well as [defend] the blocs of settlement and the Jewish population outside these borders against a regular enemy, semi-regular[s] [that is, the ALA], and irregulars."

Previous Haganah master plans had referred either to the British or the Palestinian Arab militias or a combination of the two, possibly aided by Arab volunteers from outside, as the possible enemy. Plan D was geared to an invasion by regular Arab armies. It was to be activated when "the forces of the [British] government in the country will no longer be in existence"-meaning that it was to be activated somewhere in the hiatus between the British withdrawal and the Arab invasion. When it emerged that no such hiatus would exist, the HGS prepared to activate the plan during the last week or two of (by then largely nominal) British rule.

The plan called for the consolidation of Jewish control in and around the big Jewish and mixed towns (Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, Haifa), the sealing off of potential enemy routes into the country, the consolidation of a defense line along the borders, and the extension of Haganah protection to Jewish population centers outside the UN-sanctioned borders. In doing this, the plan called for the securing of the main interior roads, the siege of Arab towns and neighborhoods, and the conquest of forward enemy bases.

To achieve these objectives, swathes of Arab villages, either hostile or potentially hostile, were to be conquered, and brigade commanders were given the option of "destruction of villages (arson, demolition, and mining of the ruins)" or "cleansing [of militiamen] and taking control of [the villages]" and leaving a garrison in place. The commanders were given discretion whether to evict the inhabitants of villages and urban neighborhoods sitting on vital access roads.--' The individual brigades were instructed in detail about which British police stations and army camps they were to occupy, the particular roads they were to secure, and the specific villages and towns they were to conquer and either depopulate, destroy, and mine or garrison.a6

Plan D has given rise over the decades to a minor historiographic controversy, with Palestinian and pro-Palestinian historiansa7 charging that it was the Haganah's master plan for the expulsion of the country's Arabs. But a cursory examination of the actual text leads to a different conclusion. The plan calls for securing the emergent state's territory and borders and the lines of communication between the Jewish centers of population and the border areas. The plan is unclear about whether the Haganah was to conquer and secure the roads between the Jewish state's territory and the blocs of Jewish settlement outside that territory. The plan "assumed" that "enemy" regular, irregular, and militia forces would assail the new state, with the aim of cutting off the Negev and Eastern and Western Galilee, invading the Coastal Plain and isolating Tel Aviv and Jewish Haifa and Jerusalem. The Haganah's "operational goals" would be "to defend [the state] against ... invasion," assure "free [ Jewish] movement," deny the enemy forward bases, apply economic pressure to end enemy actions, limit the enemy's ability to wage guerrilla war, and gain control of former Mandate government installations and services in the new state's territory.

The plan gave the brigades carte blanche to conquer the Arab villages and, in effect, to decide on each village's fate-destruction and expulsion or oc cupation. The plan explicitly called for the destruction of resisting Arab villages and the expulsion of their inhabitants. In the main towns, the brigades were tasked with evicting the inhabitants of resisting neighborhoods to the core Arab neighborhoods (not expulsion from the country). The plan stated: "[The villages] in your area, which have to be taken, cleansed or destroyedyou decide [on their fate], in consultation with your Arab affairs advisers and HIS officers." Nowhere does the document speak of a policy or desire to expel "the Arab inhabitants" of Palestine or of any of its constituent regions; nowhere is any brigade instructed to clear out "the Arabs."38