1948: A History of the First Arab-Israeli War (39 page)

Bevis, describing the meeting, said that, indeed, he had not replied, save for warning the Jordanians against any attempt to invade the Jewish-designated areas of Palestine. (Abul Huda had agreed.)71 The Jordanian under stood, as Bevin had meant him to, that his silence signaled consent. But Glubb later recalled, possibly inaccurately, that Bevin's response had gone beyond mere silence. Bevin, he wrote, had replied: "[Occupying the West Bank] seems the obvious thing to do.... [Bevin] expressed his agreement with the plans put forward."72

Following the meeting, Abul Huda cabled Abdullah: "I am very pleased at the results."7s There was a green light. Jordan had won British consent to occupy of the West Bank with the termination of the Mandate-so 'Abdullah, Abul Huda, and Glubb believed-and nothing the British did or said thereafter was to contradict this impression.

But the months of intercommunal fighting, capped by the Jewish victories and the refugee exodus of April and early May, bit severely into the Jewish Agency-Hashemite understanding. "Tremendous public pressure is being brought to bear on the King [Abdullah] and on the [Iraqi] Regent [Abd alIlah] to intervene with troops in Palestine immediately. The fact that Amman is crowded ... with Palestinian refugees ... does not make matters any easier," Kirkbride reported.74 But Abdullah (and the Iraqis) resisted the pressure; invading Palestine while the British were still there was simply not an option. Yet not to invade immediately after they left also receded as an option: increasingly desperate Palestinian Arab appeals, the threat of Haganah conquest of the West Bank and East Jerusalem, the demands of Arab honor, and the temptation of territorial aggrandizement, as well as the beckoning lights of Jerusalem, the site of his father's tomb and Islam's third holiest shrine, combined to leave the king little choice.

Thus it was that when Golda Meir, disguised in an Arab robe, arrived on the night of io-ii May in Amman for her second secret meeting with Abdullah, the previous months' understanding about a peaceful JewishHashemite partition was not reaffirmed. On the contrary. Abdullah, cordial as always but "tired and depressed," now asked Meir to reconsider his original proposal, of an autonomous Jewish canton within a Hashemite kingdom. Why this rush toward statehood? he asked. Meir countered that back in November, they had agreed on a partition with Jewish statehood. Why not abide by the agreement? Abdullah replied that the situation had changed. There had been Deir Yassin, and he was now only one of a coalition of five war-bound Arab rulers, no longer a free agent. "He is going to this business [that is, war] not out of joy or confidence, but as a person who is in a trap and can't get out," Meir later explained.75

She returned from the meeting depressed. Her aides were impressed that a clash between the Yishuv and Jordan was unavoidable. Or at least, as Ya'akov Shimoni, of the Arab Division of the Jewish Agency Political Dc partment, put it, Abdullah would choose a middle course: "[He] will not remain faithful to the zq November [UN Partition] borders, but [he] will not attempt to conquer all of our state [either]."76

But Abdullah's bellicose tone and Meir's gloomy report notwithstanding,77 the king had decided-as became clear from the Legion's subsequent actions-to move into Arab Palestine while trying to avoid war with the Yishuv and refraining from attacking the territory of the UN-defined Jewish state.

This actually emerged from an earlier secret meeting, in Naharayim on 2 May, at Glubb's behest, between the Legion's Colonel Desmond Goldie, OC First Brigade, and Shlomo Shamir and Nahum Spiegel, two senior Haganah officers. Goldie had stressed the Legion's desire to avoid conflict with the Haganah as it deployed in the West Bank.78 At the Meir- Abdullah meeting a week later, the king, while making no promises, had likewise affirmed his wish to avoid an all-out clash and implied that the Legion would not invade Jewish territory.

It is clear that Abdullah was far from confident of Arab victory and preferred a Jewish state as his neighbor to a Palestinian Arab state run by the mufti. "The Jews are too strong-it is a mistake to make war," he reportedly told Glubb just before the invasion.79

Abdullah's aim was to take over the West Bank rather than destroy the Jewish state-though, to be sure, many Legionnaires may have believed that they were embarked on a holy war to "liberate" all of Palestine.80 Yet down to the wire, his fellow leaders suspected Abdullah of perfidy (collusion with Britain and/or the Zionists). Azzam reportedly told Taha al-Hashimi on 13 May that he "smells a rat in the policy of King Abdullah. So he [Azzam] will go to him and spur him on, saying . . . `Either you will attack the Jews like Saladin attacked the Crusaders, or the curse of the world will fill upon you."'sI

Abdullah took no notice. But once he had radically restricted the planned Jordanian (or Jordanian-Iraqi) contribution to the war effort, the other invasion participants had felt compelled to downgrade their own armies' objectives. The Syrians shifted their point of invasion from Bint Jbail to the southern tip of the Sea of Galilee, which forced the Syrian expeditionary force to spend 14 May driving from southern Lebanon to the southwestern edge of Syria, opposite al-Hama. The shift secured the northern (or right) flank of the Iraqi thrust across the Jordan at Gesher. The Lebanese army appears to have been affected to the extent of moving its point units from Ras al-Naqurah to the central and eastern sectors of south Lebanon-though with defense, not offense, in mind.

But the chief change occurred in the south. The altered Hashemite dispositions and intentions posed a dilemma for King Farouk: he was not about to allow his archrival, Abdullah, to make off with the West Bank (and possibly East Jerusalem) while completely avoiding war with the Israelis (something, incidentally, that all along he had suspected `Abdullah intended). The Egyptian response was to change the planned single-prong offensive up the coast road into a two-pronged offensive. Now the left prong would proceed up the coast road toward Majdal and Isdud, and perhaps toward Tel Aviv, while a newly added right prong would veer eastward, via Beersheba, and occupy as much as possible of the southern West Bank, perhaps as far northward as Jerusalem. The Egyptians would thereby ensure that Abdullah would not get all of the West Bank and that they themselves would emerge from the war with a substantial and important part of central Palestine (Hebron and Bethlehem) under their control.82

Thus, in the days before and after 15 May the war plan had changed in essence from a united effort to conquer large parts of the nascent Jewish state, and perhaps destroy it, into an uncoordinated, multilateral land grab. As a collective, the Arab states still wished and hoped to destroy Israel-and, had their armies encountered no serious resistance, would, without doubt, have proceeded to take all of Palestine, including Tel Aviv and Haifa. But, in the circumstances, their invasion now aimed at seriously injuring the Yishuv and conquering some of its territory while occupying all or most of the areas earmarked for Palestinian Arab statehood.

From the start, the invasion plans had failed to assign any task whatsoever to the Palestinian Arabs or to take account of their political aspirations. Although the Arab leaders vaguely alluded to a duty to "save the Palestinians," none of them seriously contemplated the establishment of a Palestinian Arab state with Husseini at its head. All the leaders loathed Husseini; all, to one degree or another, cared little about Palestinian goals, their rhetoric notwithstanding. It was with this in mind that Jordan, on the eve of the invasion, ordered the ALA out of the West Bank" and subsequently disarmed the local Arab militias.

The Arab states' marginalization of the Palestinian Arabs was in some measure a consequence of their military defeats of April and the first half of May. These had also rendered them politically insignificant. 8' But the Jordanian occupation of the West Bank and the other invaders' early defeats (see below) marginally changed thinking vis-a-vis the Palestinian Arabs, especially in Cairo. Through the first half of 1948, the Arab League had consistently rejected al-Husseini's appeals to facilitate the establishment of a Palestinian Arab government in exile. But in mid-September 1948, under strong pressure from Egypt, which feared complete Hashemite dominance of the Palestinian Arabs, the Arab League Political Committee authorized the establishment of a Palestinian Arab "government." Ahmad `Abdul Baqi Hilmi, a Sidon-born Palestinian Arab banker, was named "prime minister," to head a "Cabinet" of twelve, which included Jamal Husseini as "Foreign Minister" and Raja al-Hussein as "Defence Minister." On 22 September the AHC proclaimed the establishment, in Egyptian-ruled Gaza, of the "All-Palestine Government," and on 30 September a constituent assembly, the "Palestine National Council," with some eighty delegates, was convened in the town. Momentarily escaping his Egyptian "protectors," Haj Amin managed to reach Gaza and was named "President" of the council.

It was all farce. Responding with alacrity in Amman, 'Abdullah on 30 September convened the "First Palestinian Congress" as a counterweight; indeed, the "Congress" immediately denounced the Gaza "Government." The Egyptians, for their part, on 6-7 October bundled Haj Arnin back to Cairo. In reality, the Gaza "Government" and "Council" did not long outlast his departure. Though most Arab governments rapidly recognized the hastily put-together, skeletal administration, it carved out no real fiefdom. Under tight Egyptian military administration, it had no real powers or funds and ruled no lands. Moreover, most of the small territory nominally under its control (that is, the area of Palestine occupied by the Egyptian army) in midOctober was overrun by the Israel Defense Forces in Operation Yoav. The Arab Legion, meanwhile, disarmed the Arab militiamen in the West Bank. The Egyptians hastily sent the few "ministers" left in Gaza back to Cairo. Within weeks, the farce was over, the Palestinian "government's" only achievement having been to print fourteen thousand Palestinian passports (which no one recognized). The "All-Palestine Government" maintained a paper existence as a subdepartment within the Arab League until 1959, when Nasser disbanded it.85

If Arab war aims were disparate, the Yishuv's initial goal was clear and simple: to survive the onslaught and establish a Jewish state. This was the chief aim both when Palestine's Arabs attacked and when the Arab states invaded. But gradually, from December 1947 onward, one and possibly two aims were added. The first is unarguable and clear: to expand the new state so that it emerge from the war with more defensible borders and additional territory. The second was, at least among some of the leadership, to reduce the number of Arabs resident in the Jewish state. As David Ben-Gurion obliquely put it in February 1948, after a visit to West Jerusalem: "From your entry to Jerusalem through Lifta-Romema ... there are no strangers [that is, Arabs]. One hundred per cent Jewish.... I do not assume that this will change.... What has happened in Jerusalem ... could well happen in great parts of the country-if we [the Yishuv] hold on.... And if we hold on, it is possible that in the coming six or eight or ten months of the war there will take place great changes ... and not all of them to our detriment. Certainly there will be great changes in the composition of the population of the country."86

The Yishuv's expansionism was driven at first by survivalist, military considerations. The key problem was West Jerusalem, with its hundred-thousand-strong Jewish community. As the war unfolded, the community came under siege and mortal threat, and the historic attachment to Jerusalem-religious and nationalist-came to the fore. By April, the Haganah, while trying to lift the siege, was in fact pushing to attach the city to the Coastal Plain.

The Zionist leadership initially was chary about violating the UN partition borders, lest this bolster the Arabs' more general desire to overturn the resolution or give offense to the international community. The Zionist shift from unreserved adherence to the UN borders to expansionism was slow and hesitant. The pan-Arab invasion of mid-May ended the hesitancy: if the Arabs were defying the United Nations and were bent on destroying the Jewish state, the Jews would take what was needed for survival, and perhaps a little more. As Moshe Shertok put it on 16 June 1948: "It is clear that it would be good if we could achieve two things: (A) Not to give up an inch of the land within the borders of z9 November [1947].... (B) To add to this territory those areas we have captured and not out of a desire merely to expand, but under pressure of bitter necessity. That is, those areas that bitter experience has taught us that we must dominate in order to provide the state with protection ... (Western Galilee, the road to Jerusalem and Jerusalem itself)."87

On the eve of the pan-Arab invasion, each side enjoyed strategic advantages and disadvantages. The Arabs held the initiative and could count on a measure of strategic and tactical surprise: they would be striking first, and when and where they chose, and could expect to enjoy at least temporary local superiority, in manpower and weaponry. The planned simultaneity of the assaults, across a number of borders, boosted the advantage of the initiative and surprise. Moreover, from the beginning, the invaders held much of Palestine's high ground: the Arab-populated and controlled hill country of Galilee, Samaria, and Judea. Jewish concentrations and control, on 14 May, were largely limited to the lowlands: the Coastal Plain and the Jezreel and Jordan Valleys. The Arabs also had an overwhelming preponderance in heavy weapons: artillery, armor, and combat aircraft.

Counterweighing these Arab advantages, the Haganah enjoyed a superi ority in both quality and quantity of manpower, unity of command, and relatively short lines of communications that facilitated, at least theoretically, resupply and the rapid shift of forces and weapons from front to front to meet successive threats. By and large, the Haganah had better trained, more capable commanders-though the Arab Legion's (mostly British) senior officers were probably as good, if not better. Initially on the defensive, the Haganah enjoyed the home court advantage, consisting of greater familiarity with the terrain and the morale-boosting stimulus of fighting for one's own home and fields and in defense of one's loved ones. Moreover, as during the civil war, the Jews felt that the Arabs aimed to reenact the Holocaust and that they faced certain personal and collective slaughter should they lose. Most Haganah troops had lost relatives in the Holocaust, a loss fresh in their minds, and they were imbued with boundless motivation and a measure of fury ("once more we are under attack and threat of annihilation").