1948: A History of the First Arab-Israeli War (55 page)

But the following afternoon, Carmel and Laskov ordered the town's new military governor, Seventh Brigade OC Colonel Ben Dunkelman-a Canadian volunteer with armored experience from World War II-to expel the inhabitants.52 Dunkelman refused.53 Laskov appealed to Ben-Gurion: "Tell me immediately, in an urgent manner, whether to expel [leharhik] the inhabitants from the town of Nazareth. In my opinion, all should be removed, save for the clerics."54 Ben-Gurion backed Dunkelman.55 Perhaps he was moved by possible world Christian reactions; perhaps he thought the idea objectionable as Nazareth's inhabitants had not resisted. Orderly administration was imposed under the new governor, Major Elisha Sulz. IDF troops-except those serving in the military government-were barred from the town,56 and normal life was rapidly restored. Indeed, Nazareth soon filled with returning locals and refugees from surrounding villages.57

During the following two days, exploiting their success, Operation Dekel's battalions took a swathe of territory to the north, northeast, and northwest of Nazareth, including the villages of Mash-had, Kafr Kanna, Sha'b, Rummana, `Uzeir, Bu'eina, Tur`an, al-Ruweis, Iksal, Dabburiyya, and Tamra.58 Elsewhere, a thrust eastwards from Western Galilee toward Sakhnin ended in an ALA counterattack, with the Israelis withdrawing.

The speed of the IDF advance had been facilitated by al-Qawugji's illtimed diversion of most of the ALA's offensive energies and firepower to Eastern Galilee. On the night of 9 -io July, units of the Golani Brigade took Kafr Sabt, west of the Sea of Galilee. In response, al-Qawugji mounted a series of counterattacks, amounting to a rolling offensive, to take Ilaniya (Sejera), which constituted a Jewish promontory deep in ALA territory. As with the attacks on Yehiam, Tirat Zvi, and Mishmar Ha'emek during the civil war, al-Qawugji appears to have been driven by a desire to conquer at least one Jewish settlement to have something to show for his efforts. He deployed infantry, armored cars, and a battery of 75 mm artillery. Again he fell short. The ALA suffered from a shell shortage.-59 Repeated ALA assaults during iir6 July failed to break the Golani Twelfth Battalion defenses; al-Qawugji's men took heavy losses.60 Indeed, his forces were so spent and demoralized after these failures and the fall of Nazareth that the battle ended on 18 July with Golani's capture, just before the Second Truce, of Lubiya, the large Arab village that was the ALA's main base in Central Eastern Galilee.61 Northern Front, for its part, failed to take the large Western Galilee villages of Tarshiha and Mi'ilya.62

The upshot of Dekel and its appendages was the IDF conquest of a swathe of Western Galilee along with Nazareth and its satellite villages. The blow to the ALA was immense. Al-Qawugji removed his HQ from Palestine to `Eitaroun in southern Lebanon. And the flight of tens of thousands of townspeople and villagers into the interior of the Galilee, northern Samaria, and Lebanon aggravated the refugee problem. In Bint Jbail, in southern Lebanon, the joke was that refugees were "renting the shade of a fig tree for £P25."` For those who fled or were driven out there would be no return. As the terms of surrender dictated by Northern Front and accepted by the remaining inhabitants of `Ein Mahal, an all-Muslim satellite village of Nazareth, put it: "[For] all the inhabitants ... who have fled the village, [re-]entry . . . is forbidden, and they will be considered aliens, all their property will be confiscated, and if they are caught in the village they will be killed." As to those who had stayed put and behaved themselves, they "would enjoy the Government of Israel's protection."64

Following the Ten Days, the army carried out punitive operations in the newly captured villages. In Dabburiyya, three houses belonging to persons alleged to have murdered two Jewish girls at the start of the war were demolished.6's The troops systematically disarmed the villages (Druze villagers were allowed to keep weapons) and rounded up and incarcerated adult males believed to have fought alongside, or helped, Qawugji.66 After the reinstitution of the truce, IDF units extended their areas of control and took over a string of Galilee villages (among them, Kabbul, Damoun, and Mi`ar) on the periphery of the areas captured in Dekel.67

To the northeast, the IDF launched a brigade-sized effort, mivtza brosh (Operation Cypress), to destroy the Syrian bridgehead around Mishmar Hayarden.61 Carmeli and Oded brigade units had concentrated in the area toward the end of the truce. The Syrians were estimated to be holding the three-mile-deep enclave ,vest of the Jordan, about six miles from north to south, with a reinforced brigade, with more than three thousand troops, backed by artillery and a twelve-plane air force.69

The plan, based on a strategy of indirect approach (which was to characterize many of the IDF's operations during the following decades), was to send two battalions (the Twenty-third and Twenty-second) across the Jordan and Lake Hula into Syria, around the enclave's right flank, and then to veer southward towards the Bnot Ya`akov-Quneitra road, cutting it off from Syria. The two battalions would then attack the enclave from the rear, from Syrian territory. At the same time, two battalions (the Twenty-fourth and Oded's Eleventh) would assault the enclave frontally, from the east.

But the Israelis had underestimated the power of the Syrian force, which had used the truce well. The Syrians had constructed a series of hilltop forti fications the length of the enclave's perimeter. The IDF offensive kicked off on the morning of 9 July when a company of the Twenty-third Battalion, surprising the Syrians, crossed Lake Hula to the small Israeli settlement of Dardara (later renamed Kibbutz Ashmora) on its eastern shore and, encountering only light resistance, during the night took a hill overlooking Dardara and Khirbet Jalabina, just across the frontier inside Syria. The battalion's two other companies pushed down the southwestern shore of the lake and took additional positions, Tel Ma`abara and-fording the river in small boatsKhirbet al-Dureijat.

Operation Brosh, attacking the Syrian bridgehead at Mishmar Hayarden, 9-12 Jule 1948

The Twenty-second Battalion, programmed to exploit the Twenty-third's successes, was to have crossed the Jordan in its wake and captured the Syrian base at the Customs House on the escarpment east of the Bnot Yaakov Bridge, astride the road to Quneitra. But the engineers accompanying Carmcli tailed to assemble the necessary pontoon bridge. The Twenty-second's troops began to cross over slowly and laboriously in rowboats, a squad at a time. But the battalion could not hope to reach its objective by dawn and was ordered to abandon its mission and return.

Meanwhile, on the night of 9-io July, the Eleventh and Twenty-fourth battalions attacked the enclave head-on, from west to east, taking a series of hilltop positions. The Syrian ground forces, backed by aircraft, counterattacked the following morning. Syrian tanks repeatedly attacked Carmeli troops on Tel Ma`abara but were driven off by Molotov cocktails, artillery, PIAT, and machine gun fire. But the tel was abandoned during the night. The Syrians retook Khirbet al-Dureijat but were driven off by Carmeli at Khirbet Jalabina (which was subsequently, nonetheless, abandoned) and Dardara. At the western edge of the enclave a determined Syrian attack briefly resulted in the capture of Khirbet Yarda, but the position was retaken that night by a fresh company from Golani's Thirteenth Battalion.

Both sides had taken casualties in the seesaw battle. But the Syrians recovered first. At first light on i6 July they counterattacked with armor and infantry at the northern and western edges of the enclave. They took the Khouri Grove, at the southern end of the Hula Lake, and, briefly, Khirbet Yarda, but Carmeli Brigade troops recaptured the position,70 which then remained in I1F hands until the end of the war.

The upshot of the Ten Days was that the IDF, while slightly reducing the size of the enclave, had failed to uproot the Syrian bridgehead, which was to remain in Arab hands until their withdrawal as part of the Israeli-Syrian armistice agreement of July 1949. In Operation Cypress, IDF casualties were ninety-five dead and some two hundred wounded; the Syrians, according to IDF estimates, lost twice those numbers.71

THE CENTRAL FRONT

Although substantial battles took place in the south and north, the IDF's major effort during the Ten Days was in the Central Front. Ben-Gurion was still anxious about the fate of West Jerusalem-militarily under threat by Jordan and politically endangered by Count Bernadotte and the UN partition resolution-and the road to it (despite the Burma Road bypass). After the repeated debacles at Latrun, he continued to hold the Arab Legion in deep respect.72 And the Arab towns of Ramla and Lydda, which Ben-Gurion regarded as "dangerous in every respect"73 and as "two thorns"74 in Israel's side, sat astride the old main road and posed a constant threat to Tel Aviv, a bare ten miles away. They had to be "destroyed," he obsessively jotted down in his diary.75 The IDF (wrongly) believed that the Legion intended to use the towns as a springboard for an offensive against Tel Aviv-and vastly overestimated the Jordanian force in the area. On 26 June, the IDF believed that the two towns were manned by r,ISo-r,Soo Legionnaires; in reality, there were about 15o.76

Mivtza dani (Operation Dani, named after Dani Mass, the Palmah commander of the "35" killed on the way to the `Etzion Bloc in January) targeted Lydda-Ramla-but had a wider scope. It was geared to clearing all the remaining Arab-held sections of the Tel Aviv-Jerusalem road and the controlling ridge of hills to its north, stretching from Latrun to Ramallah. This meant taking on the Arab Legion.

Planning for the operation had begun in May. The operational order was finalized during the First Truce, initially called mivtza larla"r (Operation Larla"r-an acronym of Lydda-Ramla-Latrun-Ramallah), with General AlIon in command. Dated z6 June, it read: "To attack in order to destroy the enemy forces in the area of the bases Lydda-Ramla-Latrun-Ramallah, to capture these bases and by so doing to free the city of Jerusalem and the road to it from enemy pressure."77

The IDF enjoyed superior numbers and firepower, concentrating its largest force ever: two Palmah brigades, Harel and Yiftah (together five battalions), the Eighth Brigade (Eighty-second and Eighty-ninth battalions), and several battalions of Kiryati and Alexandroni infantrymen, backed by some thirty artillery pieces.

"From the very beginning of hostilities, I had told both the King and the government [of Jordan] that we could not hold Lydda and Ramla ... and had secured their consent to the principle that Lydda and Ramla would not be defended," Glubb recalled.78 He reasoned that his main priority was defending the core hill area of the West Bank and (with faulty logic) that the IDF would have the advantage in a full-scale, mobile battle in the Lydda Ramla plain. So he positioned only a token force in the two towns. Aside from the Legion company divided between the towns' two police forts and a further company stationed to the north, at Beit Nabala, Lydda and Ramla were defended by ragtag militias, consisting of hundreds of armed locals79 bolstered by several hundred Jordanian tribal irregulars. But large additional forces were close by. Late on io July, the Legion's strategic reserve, the (overstrength) First Regiment, with forty armored cars, half of them mounting cannon, and a battery of twenty-five-pounders and a battery of 4.z-inch mortars, joined the fight. The Legion's Third Brigade, consisting of the Second and Fourth regiments, held the Latrun area to the west but only marginally influenced the battle. Glubb refused to throw it in to defend the two towns, fearing for Latrun, the pivot of the Legion's hold on the West Bank.8"

Glubb's unwillingness to fight for Lydda and Ramla was indicative of a more general Jordanian posture: Abdullah did not want to renew hostilities. He had achieved his territorial ambitions in the invasion's first weeks; now the task was to hold onto his gains. Renewed warfare would endanger them.

The Arab League's decision on 6 July to renew the war formally obligated Abdullah, yet he still hoped to stay out. Just before the start of the Ten Days, lie secretly informed Israel "that he does not wish to fight and that we should not touch him." But, Ben-Gurion informed the Cabinet, "we could not accept his proposal [as] Lydda and Ramla were [still] in his hands."'

'Abdullah ordered the Legion "to assume a defensive role." On io July, Glubb toured his forward units, as he put it, "to make ... arrangements for a phony war."82 The Legion would not attack and would try to minimize hostilities. No doubt, Abdullah-and Glubb-were also motivated by their army's acute shortage of ammunition and by British pressure to avoid any display of belligerency.

The initial stage of the IDF offensive, a two-brigade pincer movement to surround Lydda and Ramla and the rural hinterland to their east, kicked off in the early morning hours of io July. The Eighth Brigade, assisted by the Thirty-third Battalion (Alexandroni) and the Forty-fourth Battalion (Kiryati), advanced southward from Kfar Syrkin and eastward from Kafr Ana, and took the villages of Qula, al-Tira, Rantiya, al-Yahudiya, and Wilhehna, and Lydda International Airport, south ofYahudiya. The Yiftah Brigade, advancing from al-Bariya northward, took the villages of al-Kunaiyisa, `Innaba, Kharruba, Jimzu, Daniyal, and Khirbet al-Dhuheiriya, and linked up with the Jewish boarding school compound of Ben Shemen, east of Lydda, which had been under siege since mid-May. The Israelis encountered only light resistance. Indeed, the ease with which the IDF conquered Arab territory in the first days of the operation prompted Ben-Gurion to remark that, until then, he had believed that the Israelis' "secret weapon" was their spirit. But, in fact, it "was the Arabs: they are such incompetents, it is difficult to imagine."83