1948: A History of the First Arab-Israeli War (59 page)

From early August, the Agriculture Ministry and the JNF began leasing the abandoned fields to settlements, usually for six to twelve months. The political and territorial situation was still unclear; the state might yet be forced to absorb returnees. It was also uncertain, in the flux of war and with manpower mobilized, how much additional land each settlement could handle after the expected demobilization. Besides, the settlement agencies wanted to retain their freedom to plan the country's agricultural futureand they needed to leave open their options, as between the expansion of existing settlements and the establishment of new ones, while taking account of the claims of the various political parties and their affiliated settlement associations. Indeed, during and immediately after the war there were repeated feuds-between established and new settlements, between private farmers and collective settlements, and among the settlement associations-over the confiscated lands. Kibbutzim usually fared better than private farmers and moshavim (cooperative villages), established settlements better than new ones.2o4

In 1949, Weitz was to summarize the agrarian revolution: "A great change has taken place before our eyes. The spirit of Israel, in a giant thrust, has burst through the obstacles, and has conquered the keys to the land, and the road to fulfillment has been freed from its bonds and its guardians-enemies [that is, the British]. Now, only now, the hour has cone for making carefully considered [regional development] plans.... The abandoned lands will never return to their absentee owners."205

A major facet of this revolution was the establishment of new settlements. About 18o were set up in the course of 1948 and 1949, most on confiscated Arab lands. A handful were established on the actual sites of Arab villages (usually where the houses were of stone, rather than clay or mud, and deemed adequate for renovation and Jewish habitation).

Setting up settlements was a matter both of ideology and of strategy. Zionism from inception had held that agricultural settlement was the chief means by which the Jewish people would "return to the soil," fashion the "new Jew," and again become productive members of the family of nations. Settlement was also the means by which the Land of Israel would be "redeemed" from its centuries-old desolation and usurpation by foreigners. Last, the settlement grid would determine the envisioned state's contours and frontiers. Militarily speaking, the settlements, most of them kibbutzim, had proved their worth: they had successfully rebuffed Palestinian Arab assault and subsequently were a principal obstacle in the path of the invading Arab armies.

During the war's first, critical months Zionist energies were directed at defending the Yishuv. But in mid-April, within days of the strategic switch to the offensive, the national institutions began to establish new settlements, not only to assure control of the main roads linking the Yishuv's concentrations of population and the border areas but also to consolidate its hold on newly conquered territory. Initially, the new outposts were set up on Jewishowned land within the November 1947 Jewish state partition borders. Kibbutz Brur Hayil, the first settlement, was established on Jewish land near the Arab village of Bureir in the northern Negev on 18 -19 April.

Within months, though, such niceties were thrown to the wind, and settlements were established on Arab-owned land and outside the partition borders. This change can be traced to July, just after the Ten Days, when Weitz and his colleagues submitted to Ben-Gurion a plan for twenty-one settlements in Western Galilee and the Ramla-Lydda area, mostly on Arabowned land outside the partition borders. Even so, in principle, the plan called for the establishment of the settlements outside actual village sites, so that the "houses and trees" would remain available for returning fellahin.206

The idea of leaving aside "surplus land" for returning villagers was pressed by Mapam, which supported a refugee return. But this was an exemplary case of having your cake and eating it: the idea allowed Mapam's affiliated kibbutzim (organized in two associations, the Kibbutz Artzi and Kibbutz Meuhad) to partake of the newly acquired Arab lands while maintaining their ideological principles. The three dozen settlements-almost all kibbutzim-that went up between September 1948 and January 1949 were mostly on Arab-owned land along the new state's borders.

This did not solve the problem of the now-empty areas in the interior of the state, captured and still to be captured-principally in the Galilee, Jerusalem Corridor, and northern Negev approaches. In September, Weitz proposed setting up "iso" settlements in these areas. The plan was honed over the following weeks and resubmitted by Weitz, Yehoshua Eshel, the IDF's settlement officer, and Haim Gvati of the Agricultural Center, as a ninety-six-settlement plan. The plan embodied a new principle: "Wherever conditions make it necessary, the new settlement should be established [on the site of] the existing village." The idea of keeping, or leaving aside, "surplus" land for returnees was now abandoned.207 Senior Mapam figures and Kaplan registered objections. Weitz, annoyed, dryly commented: "Many of the ministers were worrying more about [re]settling the Arabs than settling the Jews."208 But Ben-Gurion effectively terminated the argument about setting aside "surplus lands" when he said, in December, "Along the borders, and in each village we will take everything, as per our settlement needs. We will not let the Arabs back."209 Most of the hundred or so settlements established in 1949 were immigrant moshavim.

Between May 1948 and December 1951 Israel absorbed some seven hundred thousand Jewish immigrants-or slightly more than its total Jewish population at the dawn of statehood. A small proportion was settled in moshavim. The vast majority were installed in the abandoned Arab neighborhoods of the big towns, in the depopulated small towns, and, when the housing ran out, in vast transit camps (ma`abarot) on the peripheries of the towns (from which, after months or years, the immigrants were relocated to the towns once housing had been constructed).

The accommodation of immigrants in abandoned urban housing began hard on the heels of the Arab exodus from the various sites. Already in January 1948 Ben-Gurion had ordered Shaltiel, the Jerusalem District commander, "to settle Jews in every house in abandoned, half-Arab neighborhood[s], such as Romema [in West Jerusalem]."210 During the following months, abandoned urban houses were often settled by Jewish refugees from Palestine's war zones (altogether some seventy thousand Jews had been displaced from rural and urban settlements during the war). By early May 1948, eighteen thousand Jewish "refugees" were living in the greater Tel Aviv area.211

But it was Weitz's Transfer Committee that first suggested as a matter of policy-with the main aim ofpreventing an Arab refugee return-the settlement of new Jewish immigrants in abandoned Arab housing. The first Arab town to be settled by olim was Jaffa, occupied by the Haganah in mid-May; the first batch of settlers moved into its "German Colony" in early July. By September, twenty-four hundred Jewish families, most of them immigrants, had moved into the town, while the remaining Arabs-some five thousand souls-had (during August) been concentrated in part of the central Ajami neighborhood. The concentration facilitated the settlement of Jewish families elsewhere in town and provided for the safety of the Arabs (who had become targets of intimidation and robbery by Jewish criminals). Certain IDF units also laid hold of Jaffa properties in which to house the homeless families of soldiers and officers.

By August, twelve to thirteen thousand olim had been settled in Haifa's empty neighborhoods (after the town's four thousand remaining Arabs had been concentrated in the Wadi Nisnas neighborhood and `Abbas Street). The Arab quarters of West Jerusalem were first settled in February and March 1948 with Jewish refugees from the town's front-line districts; new olim were settled in the abandoned districts beginning in September.

The settlement of the smaller towns began a little later. They initially lacked the infrastructure-running water, electricity, a sewage system-that allowed swift settlement. New ohm were first settled in Acre, which still had a substantial Arab population, in early October 1948; Ramla and (the abandoned Arab districts of) Safad were settled in November; Beersheba in February 1949; and Beisan in April.212

Taken together, the destruction of the villages and parts of the Arab urban neighborhoods; the confiscation of Arab fields, orchards, and groves and their cultivation by Jews; the establishment of settlements on Arab lands and, occasionally, on Arab village sites; and the settlement of the Arab urban districts by Jewish immigrants all contributed to a vast revolution in Palestine's human and physical landscape, a revolution that was to continue and consolidate during the following years. By the early i9Sos, the former Arab areas of the territory that had become Israel bore little resemblance to what they had looked like in '947 (except for the handful of picturesque villages preserved more or less intact by the new owners, such as `Ein Karim, outside Jerusalem, and 'Ein Hod, south of Haifa).

The condition of many of the four hundred thousand Arabs displaced by midsummer 1948 was "appalling."213 They were temporarily housed in public buildings in towns and under trees on the outskirts of villages or in abandoned British army camps in the countryside (most of which became refugee camps) in Arab-held areas of the country. Some received local or international food aid; others did not. Except for Jordan, the Arab states did little for them, except make "unfulfilled promises," in King Abdullah's phrase.214 The aid that came arrived mainly from the West, through groups such as the International Committee of the Red Cross and the Quakers. Western observers feared the outbreak of epidemics before or with the onset of winter. The new US special representative (later ambassador) to Israel, James McDonald-in the 193os he had served as League of Nations high commissioner for German refugees-estimated that "ioo,ooo old men, women and children," "who are shelterless and have little or no food," would die when the rains came.215 (Such jeremiads were to prove groundless. There were no major epidemics, and few refugees died that winter. The Palestinians, a largely agricultural people and used to the outdoors, proved hardy.)

Bernadotte organized immediate relief. He had Trygve Lie send Sir Raphael Cilento, the Australian director of the UN Division of Social Activities, to investigate. Bernadotte solicited aid from dozens of governments and organizations and set up a Disaster Relief Project (later called the Refugee Relief Project), naming Cilento as its head, to coordinate the contributions and their distribution. But corruption and mismanagement in the distribution centers (Beirut, Damascus) left most of the aid-such as thousands of tents donated by Britain-in warehouses. The Red Cross reported at the end of September that, despite the "hullabaloo," the "tragic fact is that substantially nothing in food or goods have reached refugees."216 Lie next appointed Stanton Griffis, US ambassador to Cairo, to head up a newly created body, the UN Relief for Palestine Refugees in the Near East, effectively replacing Cilento. A year later, in December 1949, this organization was succeeded by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), which continues today to provide food, education, and other aid to the refugees and their descendants.

The tilt in the balance ofpower in Israel's favor, the continuation of the no war, no peace, situation-with continuous truce infringements by both sides-and the grave strain the continued mobilization put on Israel's society and economy gradually persuaded the Israelis that they must act. "It is doubtful if we can hold up in this situation [for long] from a financial perspective," Ben-Gurion told his Cabinet colleagues on i August. "[And] our international position will be increasingly undermined.... The invaders must be forced to make peace or leave the country, or we ourselves will expel them.... In my opinion, the end ofAugust or maximum the middle of September is the [deadline].... If until then there isn't peace ... and the invading armies haven't left the country, we ourselves will drive them out."217 American Secretary of State George Marshall defined Israel's mood as growingly "chauvinistic and imperialistic."218 Ben-Gurion put it bluntly: faced with a choice of the Palestine problem being resolved diplomatically, involving major territorial losses for Israel, or militarily, "I am for a decision by war.... Otherwise, we will be defeated," he told his Cabinet colleagues.21°

But the Israelis were undecided about where to strike. Ben-Gurion, with his Jerusalem-centric perspective, generally focused on the West Bank, to safeguard Jerusalem and drive out or destroy the Legion. Other ministers, and the IDF General Staff, preferred a blow against the Egyptian army, regarded as the Arabs' most powerful and geopolitically most threatening force (its troops were on the outskirts of Jerusalem and, at Isdud, some twenty miles from Tel Aviv).

After the Ten Days, however, the Israeli populace seems to have lapsed into political torpor. The feeling was rife that Israel had won and the war had ended. As the weeks passed, this feeling, that Israel had assured its survival, deepened. Or as Yadin put it: "The impression has emerged among the public [that] ... from a military perspective we are already `on top' [al hasus, literally on the horse].... This impression has been created by, on the one hand, the exaggeration of divisions of opinion, as it were, on the Arab side ... and, on the other hand, the occasional exaggeration of our army's successes while hiding its defeats."220

Ben-Gurion and the military understood that the situation, with much of Israel's adult male population indefinitely mobilized and the Arab armies at the gates of Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, was untenable. On 9 September BenGurion summoned the editors of the dailies "to explain that the war was not yet over, and that most difficult tests were, perhaps, still before us.... In the Yishuv there was no dread of the situation, no austerity, no readiness to bear the burden. There was a feeling of relief, that we have established a state and won and overcome the anarchy. But we are far from secure-and let us not underestimate the enemy's power or desire to win." The editors queried the military censorship, the continued "persecution" of the dissidents (the IZL and LHI), and wastefulness at IDF headquarters. Ben-Gurion responded that the war was a struggle of "the Jewish people against the whole world, and also against the history of the Dispersion, and if the newspaper editors felt this, they would know what not to write and what to write, and how."221