1948: A History of the First Arab-Israeli War (40 page)

The soldiers of the Arab armies were less motivated. Though keen on defeating the Jews-seen as religious infidels and political usurpers-and helping their Palestinian "brothers"-they did not view the war as an existential proposition. Their states, villages and towns, and families were not under real threat; in defeat, they could still return to hearth and home. The Arab soldiers were invaders fighting a long way from home for a remote and somewhat abstract cause. This gap in motivation was to tell on the battlefield, especially in May and June, when small Jewish units with rifles and Molotov cocktails staved off far larger Arab forces backed by armor and artillery (as in Kibbutz Nirim and Kibbutz Degania Aleph).

Last, the Haganah enjoyed an unquantifiable though very real advantage because of its victory in the civil war. In crushing the Palestinian militias, it had gained combat experience and self-confidence. Conversely, the Arab armies had no such victory under their belts, no tangible reason for selfconfidence, and good reason to fear the Haganah.

THE YISHUV PREPARES

A month before the invasion, Ben-Gurion told his colleagues, "We are [still] quite far from having the force we need to meet the i5th of May. We lack almost half the necessary manpower, we lack 8o% of the transport, and we lack the rest of the [necessary] equipment in no small measure.... There is no food, there is no fuel, and a thousand other things."nx

The mobilization of the Yishuv for the invasion was a giant and fateful undertaking; its existence hung in the balance, as all realized. But some had understood earlier than others, and Ben-Gurion was among the first. Back in December 1946, when taking over the Security (or Defense) Department of the Jewish Agency, he told the Twenty-second Zionist Congress, meeting in Basel: "We now face a completely new situation. Palestine is surrounded by independent Arab countries.... [They] can buy and produce weapons, establish armies and train them.... An attack by the Arabs of Palestine does not endanger the Yishuv. But there is a danger that the neighboring Arab states will send their army [sic] to attack the Yishuv and destroy it.... We must prepare immediately.... This in my opinion is the primary task of Zionism."89 (Already a decade earlier, against the backdrop of the Arab Revolt and the gathering storm of World War II, Ben-Gurion had jotted down in his diary: "The danger we face is not riots-but destruction. Because the attackers will not be only the Arabs of Palestine but perhaps [also] Iraq and Saudi [Arabia], and they have aircraft and artillery. And we must draw a political and military conclusion [from this].")90

Ben-Gurion understood that the political struggle against Britain would be won; and it was a matter of months, not years. The British would leave, and the Yishuv would face a pan-Arab onslaught. Yet the Yishuv, perturbed by daily economic, political, and military problems, failed to begin preparing in time.

Ben-Gurion spent much of 1947 learning the Yishuv's defense problems and pondering a reorganization of the Haganah. The organization had to be expanded and restructured in order to change from a collection of locally based, albeit centrally controlled, militias into an army. Its command structure needed to be reorganized and manned with experienced professionals (in Ben-Gurion's eyes meaning mainly by veterans of the Western armies of World War II), and it had to acquire the arms necessary for waging conventional war (tanks, artillery, aircraft, armored personnel carriers, gunboats).

But the key steps to achieving this reorganization and rearmament were set in train only at the end of 1947. The Haganah had some thirty-five thousand members, but only two thousand-organized in the Palmate-were full-time soldiers. The mobilization of members for full-time service and the recruitment and training of additional manpower began in late 1947. A mobilization committee was established in October, and recruitment offices were set up and began to operate in the towns in November and December.9' By the end of December, some seventy-five hundred men were under arms (twenty-five hundred of them Palmahniks); byApril, twenty-four thousand; by mid-May, about thirty thousand, about half of them veteran Haganah members; by early July (by then the Haganah had become the Israel Defense Forces), about sixty-four thousand.92

Alongside the start of mobilization, the Haganah began to reorganize structurally. Initially, there was talk of establishing a fourteen-battalion army. On 7 November 1947, Yaakov Dori, the chief of general staff, and his political superior, Yisrael Galili, head of the Haganah National Staff, issued "the Order for a National Structure." It stated: "The danger of an attack on the country by the armies of the neighboring Arab countries ... necessitates a different structure and deployment. Opposite regular armies it is imperative to prepare in a military [as distinct from militia] force-trained, armed, and structured along military lines." The order called for the establishment of four brigades, with fifteen battalions, based on the existing Palmah battalions and newly formed Haganah units. The brigades were seen as administrative rather than operational frameworks.93 But the restructuring took on a life of its own, fueled by the spread of the hostilities that began at the end of November and the prospect of pan-Arab invasion, and by March 1948 nine brigades had begun to form, with expanding brigade and battalion HQs, recruitment centers, training camps, logistical services, and armories. It was a race against time, and everything was in flux; in every sphere there were shortages. In mid-February one of the Golani Brigade's incipient battalions reported that it had "195" soldiers with "ioo" personal weapons, "one pickup truck and five motorcycles," and eight rented cars." In late April, the `Etzioni Brigade, responsible for Jerusalem, still had only one fully operational battalion; in late May one of the Tel Aviv area Kiryati Brigade's battalions, the Forty-third, had no personal weapons.'-' The organization and equipping of the brigades was hampered by the continuous operational burdens to which each was subjected by the ongoing war against the Palestinian Arab militias-though participation in combat also provided the units and soldiers, most of them new recruits, with experience and self-confidence. By May the Haganah had reorganized into nine fully operational if underequipped brigades-three of them Palmah-each with two to five battalions, with a small territorial Home Guard defending the towns and rural settlements to the rear. By the end of April into early May, some battalions had participated in brigade-size operations.

(During the following six weeks, the Haganah General Staff established three additional brigades, two of them designed to serve as a strategic reserve. The order to establish the semiarmored Seventh Brigade was issued on 14 May. It was hastily assembled and equipped and, within days, thrown into battle at Latrun. Two weeks later, HGS began the again hasty establishment of a second semiarmored brigade, the Eighth-initially with one armored battalion, the Eighty-second-under the command of the founder and first commander of the Pahnah, Yitzhak Sadeh. The brigade, as a frilly operational unit, first saw action in mid-July. During June the IDF also set up, in the Galilee, the Oded Brigade, the last established of the twelve Israeli brigades that fought the 1948 War. By July, almost all IZL and LHI members had been inducted into the IDE)

During 1947-1948 the Haganah scoured the globe for arms. It was a massive effort, involving locating the needed arms, purchase (and, in the case of aircraft, training the crews), and shipment to Palestine (before i5 May circumventing the British blockade and after 29 May in defiance of the UN embargo). The effort involved Haganah agents and networks of Zionist officials and sympathizers, subterfuge and chicanery, dummy companies and counterfeit letters of authorization and accreditation, and large sums of money. The world was awash with decommissioned armaments from World War II. The arms were bought from both states and private dealers.

In the United States, Ben-Gurion in 194$ had secretly recruited eighteen Jewish millionaires, organized as, and misleadingly titled, the Sonneborn Institute, to help provide the Haganah's needs in money and equipment, including machine tools needed for the Haganah's embryonic arms industry. The group hired dozens of experts for the acquisition or transport of equipment or for establishing particular contacts (with Latin American dictators or underworld dealers). Many of the group's activities were illegal; it operated outside the framework of the official Zionist organizations. The Institute created and used dummy companies, such as the New England Plastic Novelty Company. But much of the equipment it purchased failed to reach Palestine because of intervention by the American authorities, who on 14 December 1947 imposed an embargo on all arms shipments to the Middle East. Thereafter, the Federal Bureau of Investigation regularly arrested Institute and Haganah agents and impounded purchases. The Institute's most ambitious project, handled by Haganah agent Yehuda Arazi, was the purchase of the decommissioned aircraft carrier Attu-for $125,ooo-on which Arazi hoped to load hundreds of armored vehicles, artillery pieces, and aircraft and convey them en masse to Palestine. The plan fell through, for reasons of expense and American interference, and the carrier was sold as scrap metal. The Institute's major successes were providing the Haganah with machine tools for making ammunition and with field communications equipment that became the backbone of the brigades' communications from May 1948; and (through Al Schwimmer, a Trans World Airlines engineer) the provision of a cluster of C-46 Commando cargo planes, four B-17 bombers, several Harvards, and a lone serviceable Mustang, and more than five hundred thousand gallons of (also embargoed) aviation fuel.96

Haganah agents purchased a variety of weapons, some of them useless, in Western Europe during 1947-1948. Most important were the purchases in France or with French assistance of thirty 65 mm guns, twelve 120 mm mor tars, and 75 mm antitank and field artillery pieces, as well as ten H-35 Hotchkiss light tanks (which served from summer 1948 as the core of the Seventh Brigade). The Yishuv's first "artillery" pieces were a batch of Hispano-Suiza zo mm antiaircraft cannon (purchased from Switzerland), the first twelve reaching Tel Aviv by sea on 23 April.97

The Arab Division of the Jewish Agency Political Department had carefully monitored the Arab League's deliberations during 1947 and early 1948 with one question in mind: Were the Arab states going to invade?Abdullah and Iraq's leaders repeatedly told British diplomats from autumn 1947 that they would march: Abdullah, delimiting the message, spoke of a takeover (by the Legion, with or without Iraqi support) of "the Arab part of Palestine"; the Iraqis, led by Prime Minister Salih Jabr, spoke of occupying "the whole (repeat the whole) of Palestine."98 And, occasionally, Jordanian leaders, such as Prime Minister (until December 1947) Samir Rifa'i, also spoke of "the whole of Palestine."99 When, in the second half of April 1948, the die was cast, the Yishuv's intelligence executives took note. Or, as Shertok told the UN Security Council (a little presciently) in mid-April: " The Governments of the Arab League ... are now reliably reported to be preparing plans for the occupation of the whole area of Palestine by their armies, which would cross its frontiers from north, east and south immediately after the termination of the ... Mandate."100

King Abdullah's "declaration of war" on the Yishuv of 26 April (which was followed by a formal endorsement by the Jordanian National Assembly on 6 May of the prospective Legion invasion)"" were public gestures that, if somewhat premature, quickly registered with HIS-and were interpreted as an exertion of pressure on the other Arab states to fall into line.'02 In early May Azzam told the London DailY Telegraph that intervention by the Arab states was "inevitable"; Lebanese interior minister Camille Chamoun told a press conference in Beirut on 7 May, after returnnlg from a meeting with Syrian president Shukri al-Quwwatli, that "all the Arab armies will invade Palestine."103

In the last weeks of April and the first weeks of May, invasion was palpably in the air. But, down to the last moment, the Yishuv's leaders did not know which armies would invade (would Egypt really participate?), when they would attack, what their military objectives would be, what routes they would take, and how many troops would participate and how effectively. As late as 7 May, Ben-Gurion jotted down in his diary: "Will the neighboring states fight [that is, invade]?"'()' The Haganah appears to have gotten word of the "plan" put together by the Military Committee in Damascus and of its core goal, to cut off Eastern Galilee and the Jezreel Valley from the Coastal Plain and an advance on Haifa. HIS also understood, or guessed, that the armies would meet up before jointly assaulting Haifa. It was also clear, or at least likely, that the invasion would begin on 15 May. 105

But that was it. By 12-13 May, that there would be an invasion was certain. But the aims, participants, and routes were all uncertain: "I can only summarize feelings, not authoritative reports," HIS and Jewish Agency Political Department official Shimoni told his colleagues. He said that there would certainly be a Legion invasion, assisted by the Iraqis. He also believed the Syrians would invade, "and something symbolic [would be contributed by] Lebanon." As to Egypt, Shimoni was uncertain whether it would go beyond monetary contributions "and advice." He also assessed that Jordan would "not try to conquer all of our state." However, he noted that "French intelligence officers" had told the Jewish Agency a day or two before that the armies of Egypt, Jordan, Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon would all invade on 15 May, with the aim of occupying all of Palestine, "and their arrows would be directed at Tel Aviv" 106

THE BALANCE OF MILITARY FORCES

The civil war had ended with the Haganah in control of two continuous, connected north-south strips of Palestine, which were more or less contiguous with the Jewish settlement concentrations. The shorter strip consisted of the Galilee Panhandle and the Jordan and Beit Shean Valleys. The longer one, along the Mediterranean coast, ran from the Lebanese border at Rosh Haniqra (Ras al-Naqurah) through Western Galilee, Haifa, and Tel Aviv-Jaffa, and ended around Rehovot. The two strips were thinly linked by the Jewish-held Jezreel Valley. In addition, two Jewish-held appendages jutted out of the southern end of the Jewish-held Coastal Plain. A thin strip of land ran, from west to east, to Jewish-held Western Jerusalem; and in the south there was the larger appendage of the northern Negev settlement bloc, running from Gvar`Aln in the north to Nirim in the southwest to Alumim in the south, connected to the Jewish-dominated coastal area by a sliver of land around Negba.