1948: A History of the First Arab-Israeli War (60 page)

Matters hung fire through August and the first half of September. The IDF was not yet ready, and in any case, Israel could not strike before the Arabs offered a gross, clear provocation. Meanwhile, the American and British foreign ministries worked on a solution to supersede the partition resolution. They agreed that partition was now a fait accompli. But it had to be between a smaller Israel and the Arab states rather than the Palestinians. The foreign ministries of the Anglo-Saxon powers hammered out a rough plan. The Negev should go to Jordan (or Egypt) and Jerusalem should be internationalized.222 But the Americans wanted to move slowly and covertly; presidential and congressional elections, in which the Jewish vote and America's generally pro-Israeli public opinion would play a part, were scheduled for early November. The new thinking was coordinated with Bernadotte-and its Anglo-American authorship was carefully concealed.

American and British representatives-Robert McClintock and Sir John Troutbeck, head of the British Middle East Office-in the second week of September separately and secretly flew to Rhodes, where Bernadotte was drafting proposals. Each came with his own nation's version of the plan.223

What emerged was the forty-thousand-word "Progress Report of the United Nations Mediator for Palestine," known as Bernadotte's "second plan." It was largely drafted and completed by Ralph Bunche on i6 September. Bernadotte was off to Israel and had signed blank pages for Bunche to fill in. Bernadotte fully trusted his deputy. 224 The mediator, who flew out of Rhodes early on 17 September, never actually saw the full, final text; by the afternoon he was dead.

The plan called for a straightforward partition of Palestine between Israel and Jordan (with no "Union" between them). Israel was to get the whole of the Galilee and the Mediterranean coastline and Jordan all the Negev, south of the Majdal-Faluja line, as well as the West Bank (including Lydda and Ramla). Jerusalem was to be internationalized under UN control, with separate communal autonomy for its Arab and Jewish communities. Lydda and Haifa were to be "free ports." The Palestinian refugees were to enjoy a right of return or, if they chose, to receive compensation for their lost property instead. The plan was to be implemented by a "Conciliation Commission," which was to replace the UN mediator (Bernadotte, frustrated and tired, had already decided to quit and return to the Swedish Red Cross).

Before the Israelis and Arabs could react, Bernadotte was assassinated in West Jerusalem by four LHI gunmen. The assassination, which had been authorized by the LHI high command or "Center" (composed of Yitzhak Shamir, Natan Yelin-Mor, and Israel Eldad), overshadowed all responses to the plan. It caught the Israeli government and security forces completely by surprise and was vastly embarrassing. Without doubt, however, the assassination was in part the upshot of the anti-Bernadotte, anti-UN atmosphere generated by the government and its spokesmen through the summer against the backdrop of continued truce violations along the front lines and restrictions on immigration and the supply of the Jewish Negev settlements. The Israeli populace increasingly viewed the UN-engineered truce as serving Arab interests and as an obstacle to an Israeli victory and an end to the war. By September, Bernadotte was seen as anti-Israeli, indeed anti-Semitic (despite his World War II reputation as a "savior" of Jews) and as a pawn of the (pro-Arab) British Foreign Office. One Israeli newspaper even ran an article titled "the Monster in Rhodes."225

The assassination triggered a massive Israeli crackdown on the LHI (and IZL) in Jerusalem. The police never found the actual killers; Ben-Gurion probably did not want them found for internal political reasons. But the two organizations ceased to exist. The IZL, which had already disbanded over May and June in the rest of the country, converted into a political party, Herut. The LHI, most of its troopers inducted into the army at the end of May, vanished altogether.

Bernadotte's plan was submitted to the UN General Assembly and published by Trygve Lie immediately after his death. The assassination effectively placed Israel in the dock and should have paved the way for the assembly's adoption of the plan. But it didn't. Secretary of State Marshall may have been persuaded that it offered "a fair basis for a settlement"226 (though, to be sure, the White House, on the eve of the elections, could never have en dorsed it in face of Israeli opposition)-yet both Israel and the Arabs immediately rejected it, for much the same reasons that they had opposed the first Bernadotte "plan." The Arabs were still unwilling to accept or recognize Israel's existence. Lebanese prime minister Riad al-Sulh told a British diplomat "not for the first time, that it had taken the Arabs over a century to expel the Crusader[s] but they had succeeded in the end";227 and Egyptian foreign minister Ahmed Muhammad Khashaba said: "No Arab government could accept a settlement of this kind.... In due course [the Arabs] would be strong enough to accomplish what was at present impossible owing to their military weakness."228 The Israelis, for their part, opposed anything less than the 1947 partition resolution borders and, indeed, now wanted better ones, which they knew to be militarily within reach. The General Assembly, at Arab urging, repeatedly postponed a debate on the plan.

In any case, the plan was quickly overtaken by events-principally the IDF offensive against the Egyptian expeditionary force that began on 15 October and the offensive against the ALA in the Galilee two weeks later. The resultant Israeli conquest of the northern Negev and Central Galilee killed any thought of a trade-off between the Negev (to the Arabs) and the Galilee (to the Jews), which was the core of the Bernadotte plan. So the assassination, as one historian has put it, "does not belong to ... [those] which have `changed history.' . . . The struggle for Palestine was decided elsewhere."229

Although Bernadotte's murder may have briefly delayed the launch of Israel's long-contemplated offensive to break the logjam created by the truce-Israel could not politically afford to violate the truce immediately after the killing-the plan itself almost certainly assured that the offensive would be directed against the Egyptians in the south rather than the Jordanians in the center of the country. The plan threatened to award the Negev to the Arabs; the IDF offensive in the south led to the conquest of the northern Negev and the link-up between Israel and the isolated settlement enclave, significantly reducing the possibility of an eventual transfer of the Negev to the Arabs through diplomacy.

In August and September Egyptian intelligence picked up hints of the IDF's preparations for an offensive. And the Egyptians may have understood that the plan's award of the Negev to the Arabs might well trigger an IDF offensive to produce a preemptive fait accompli.

Be that as it may, King Farouk-bypassing Foreign Minister Khashabahurriedly dispatched Kamil Riyad, a court official, to Paris to sound out the Israelis secretly about terms for a separate peace. Farouk appears to have feared that the United Nations would adopt the Bernadotte plan, which awarded the Negev to Jordan; he was loath to see further Hashemite aggrandizement. Indeed, the Hashemite-Egyptian rift only burgeoned in the months following the invasion. Egyptian and Jordanian officers and officials, and their local Palestinian supporters, were forever quarreling over control of the Bethlehem-Hebron area, where large Egyptian formations coexisted alongside smaller Jordanian units. Both sides had appointed military governors, though for the time being, the Jordanians pretended to accept Egyptian dominance. The two sides even bickered over the size of the flags their units flew in the towns, the Egyptians complaining to the United Nations that the Jordanians' was a couple of inches larger than their own.230

On 21 September, Riyad met Elias Sasson, the Israeli Foreign Ministry's chief Arabist, for four hours. Sasson had been sent to Paris by Shertok in early July specifically to meet Arab leaders and diplomats to try to initiate peace negotiations. He had written letters to Arab leaders and diplomats, but nothing came of them. The Arabs did not appear keen on direct negotiations, let alone peace.231

Now the Egyptians were interested, and Riyad's overture seemed promising. At their first meeting, Riyad described Egypt's worries, not least of which was the fractious Arab attitude toward the Palestine problem, and asked Sasson to submit "a basis" for a separate Israeli-Egyptian settlement.232 Sasson formulated a fourteen-point proposal. It included Egyptian agreement to regard the establishment of Israel as a fait accompli and to withdraw its troops from Palestine. Israel would not occupy the areas vacated and agreed that the Palestinians could determine whether they wanted an independent state or preferred annexation by one or other of the Arab states.233

The palace and Egyptian officials in Paris looked over the draft and offered comments. Their language was a tad obscure. Shertok believed that the Egyptians were ready implicitly to recognize Israel and withdraw from UNearmarked Israeli territory but that they also demanded retention of the Rafah-Isdud coastal strip and all the Negev or at least the Palestine-Egypt border area east of Sinai.234 Sasson and Riyad met again on 30 September. The Egyptians wanted the southern part of Arab Palestine. They opposed a Jordanian takeover of the area and feared that the British would establish bases there. They also opposed Jewish control of the holy sites in Jerusalem and sought assurances about future Jewish immigration and guarantees against future Israeli expansionism and economic domination. The Egyptians were also worried about communist penetration of the region via Israel.','-' Israel responded with clarifications: it rejected any "formal linmitation" on Jewish immigration and was willing to rule jointly with "the neighboring Arab State" over Jerusalem's Old City or allow "international rule" and to provide free transit for goods through Haifa port. The future Israeli-Egyptian border could be negotiated.236

The talks came to naught. It is probable that they were merely an Egyptian stratagem designed to stave off the expected Israeli offensive, as Ben-Gurion suspected, and that Cairo never seriously intended to negotiate peace, let alone make peace, with the Jewish state. Still, the Egyptians, for the first time, had talked with Israel.

The Israelis did not allow the talks to hamstring their military planning. During late September and early October the plans matured. The post-Ten Days situation, with Israel's Negev settlements enclave and the Negev Brigade, along with the uninhabited remainder of the Negev to the south and east, cut off from the coastal heartland and effectively besieged by the Egyptians, was unbearable. During the truce the Israelis had had to supply the Negev by air, mostly at night, stretching the IAF's resources. With winter approaching, weather conditions would hobble the airlifts.2az And Israel could not indefinitely sustain the no war, no peace situation, with its manpower mobilized (unlike the Arabs, for whom the war-making required only a sliver of their populations). Last, Bernadotte's "award" of the Negev to the Arabs augured a permanent loss, with international endorsement, of the territory.

From August into early October, the Israeli leadership debated where and when to strike. As the truce dragged on and the likelihood that diplomacy could lead to an Arab withdrawal from Palestine decreased, the pressure to renew hostilities grew. The Israelis waited for an opportune moment.

But for months they wavered on the "where." Galili put it in a nutshell: "The choice is hard: [it is] between the center of gravity in the south ... to capture the whole of the Negev, and the center of gravity in the Center vis-avis the Jordanians and Iraqis-to redeem Jerusalem completely and to move the eastern border as far as possible eastward. Each of our front commanders recommends and preaches to mount the offensive on his front."gas

There were political considerations. King Abdullah had for years been the only Arab leader willing to talk peace with the Yishuv; Ben-Gurion believed that the man really wanted peace. On the other hand, he had joined the invasion and engaged the Jews in battle around and in Jerusalem, giving the Haganah and IDF a trouncing. The question was whether an enlarged Jordanian kingdom, with its army poised along Israel's borders near West Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, was really an optimal situation. Would it not be better, perhaps, to push the Legion back across the river and help set up an Arab puppet state or autonomous area in the heartland of Palestine? This, at least, was how Shertok and some of his aides were leaning in summer 1948. As the foreign minister put it, "Without completely removing from the agenda the possibility of Transjordanian annexation of the Arab part of Western Pales tine, we should prefer the establishment of an independent [Palestinian] Arab state in Western Palestine. In any event, we should strive to clarify this possibility and emphasize that it is preferable and desirable on our part as opposed to [ Jordanian] annexation." He was thinking of Palestine Arab Opposition politicians figuring prominently in such a polity239

There were good military reasons to strike eastward: the situation of Jewish Jerusalem was still precarious. Jordanian gunners sitting in East Jerusalem and along the southern and northern edges of the corridor from Hulda to the city were a perpetual threat, as was the Iraqi deployment in the northern West Bank, from whose western edges-Qalqilya-Tulkarm-it was a bare ten miles to the Mediterranean. The Jordan River was always seen as the country's "natural" defensible, strategic border. In addition, a Jordanian West Bank might eventually host British bases-and the British were seen as hostile. There were also good historical-ideological reasons: the West Bank, with Jerusalem's Old City at its center, was, after all, the crucible of Judaism, the historic heartland of the Jewish people. A renascent Jewish state without Hebron, Bethlehem (birthplace of King David), Bethel, Shechem (Nablus), and, above all, East Jerusalem, with the Wailing Wall, Temple Mount, and the necropolis to its east, was felt by many, and not only on the Revisionist Right, to be incomplete.