Arabs (55 page)

The massacre at Dayr Yasin provoked a mass exodus of Palestinian Arabs that continued right up to the British withdrawal on May 15. As word of the killing spread, al-Arif explained, people across Palestine “began to flee their homes, carrying with them different accounts of Jewish atrocities which left people shuddering in horror.” The political leadership only exacerbated fears by publishing accounts of Dayr Yasin and other atrocities in the Arab press. Although the Palestinian leaders hoped to force the Arab states to intervene by playing on the humanitarian crisis, their reports only served to reinforce the fear and encourage villagers to abandon their homes.
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Time and again, contemporary accounts make reference to townspeople and villagers across Palestine taking their loved ones and abandoning their homes and possessions out of fear of another Dayr Yassin.

Palestinians had already begun fleeing the territory earlier in the spring. Between February and March 1948, some 75,000 Arabs had left their homes in the towns that were the center of fighting, such as Jerusalem, Jaffa, and Haifa, for the relative
safety of the West Bank or neighboring Arab states.
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That April, after Dayr Yasin, the stream of refugees became a flood.

 

Some Palestinians chose to fight horror with horror. Four days after the massacre at Dayr Yasin, on April 13, Palestinian fighters ambushed a Jewish medical convoy heading to Mount Scopus on the edge of Jerusalem. The two ambulances were clearly marked with medical insignia, and the passengers were in fact doctors and nurses of the Hadassah Hospital and employees of the Hebrew University. There were 112 passengers in the convoy. Only 36 survived.

The brutality of the ambush was captured in a series of grisly photographs in which the attackers posed in triumph next to the bodies of their victims. These barbaric photographs were sold commercially in Jerusalem, as if to demonstrate to the Arabs of Palestine that they could destroy the Jewish threat. Yet photographs of atrocity could not dispel the air of defeat that permeated the towns and countryside of Palestine in April 1948.

Palestinian morale had been shattered, and the massacre of Jewish civilians at Mount Scopus only heightened fears of further atrocity and Jewish retribution. Sensing the collapse in public morale, the Haganah stepped up its operations in line with a military plan known as Plan D for the depopulation and destruction of Palestinian towns and villages deemed necessary to establish a viable Jewish state.

 

Haifa fell to Jewish forces on April 21–23, sending another shock wave through Palestine. Haifa was the economic heart of Palestine, thanks to its port and oil refinery. The total Arab population came to more than 70,000. It was also the administrative center of Northern Palestine.

Because Haifa had been allocated to the Jewish state by the UN Partition Resolution, Jewish forces had been planning to take the city for months. Haifa had first come under attack by Jewish forces in mid-December 1947. “The attacks set off a fearsome emigration from the city,” wrote Rashid al-Hajj Ibrahim, a municipal leader in Haifa. “A large part of the population saw the danger that threatened them, as Jewish preparedness revealed how much the Arabs lacked to defend themselves, which drove them to flee their homes.”
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Hajj Ibrahim, chairman of the Haifa National Committee, worked with his colleagues in the municipality to restore calm and restrain the attacks by local and foreign irregulars, many of them ALA volunteers. But their efforts were in vain. Violent exchanges between Arab irregulars and Haganah fighters continued through the winter months and into the spring. By early April, between twenty and thirty thousand residents had left Haifa.

The final onslaught began on April 21. As British troops were withdrawing from their positions in Haifa, the Haganah launched a massive attack to take the city. Over
the next forty-eight hours Jewish forces pounded Arab neighborhoods relentlessly with sustained mortar attacks and gunfire. On Friday morning, April 23, Jewish aircraft attacked the city, “provoking terror among the women and children,” Hajj Ibrahim wrote, “who were very influenced by the horrors of Dayr Yasin.”
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They flooded to the waterfront, where ships were waiting to evacuate the terrified civilians of Haifa.

Hajj Ibrahim described the tragedy he witnessed on the Haifa waterfront: “Thousands of women, children and men hurried to the port district in a state of chaos and terror without precedent in the history of the Arab nation. They fled their houses to the coast, barefoot and naked, to wait for their turn to travel to Lebanon. They left their homeland, their houses, their possessions, their money, their welfare, and their trades, to surrender their dignity and their souls.”
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By the beginning of May, only three to four thousand Arabs, of an original population exceeding 70,000, remained in Haifa to live under Jewish rule.

Once Haifa had been secured, Jewish forces concentrated on the rest of the coastline that had been awarded to the Jewish state by the United Nations. The Irgun, working independently of the Haganah, initiated hostilities to capture the other major Arab port town of Jaffa, next to the Jewish city of Tel Aviv. Its offensive began at dawn on April 25. Armed with three mortars and twenty tons of bombs, the Irgun took the northern Manshiyya quarter of Jaffa on April 27. From its new position, the Irgun subjected the downtown areas of Jaffa to relentless bombing over the next three days.

The attacks shattered public morale and the resistance of the townspeople of Jaffa. The fact that it was the Irgun attacking raised fears of another Dayr Yasin massacre. The fall of Haifa only a few days earlier had left most of the city’s 50,000 remaining residents (already by April some 20,000 residents had sought refuge outside their city) with little hope that Jaffa would withstand the attack. Panic swept the city as its residents fled in a mass exodus. Municipal leaders sought ships to evacuate townspeople to Lebanon, and they negotiated for others to withdraw from the city to the Gaza Strip through Jewish lines. By May 13, there were only 4,000–5,000 inhabitants left to surrender their city to Jewish forces.

With time running out before the British withdrawal would be finalized, Jewish forces concentrated their attacks to secure the northeastern territories conceded to the Jewish state by partition. Safad, a town of 12,000 Arabs and 1,500 Jews, was attacked by elite Palmach units of the Haganah and fell on May 11. Beisan, a town of 6,000, was conquered on May 12 and its inhabitants expelled to Nazareth and Transjordan. At the same time, Haganah operations led to mass evacuations and expulsions of villagers from the Galilee region, the coastal plain, and the Tel Aviv–Jerusalem road. The roads of Palestine were filled with streams of homeless refugees, with only
the possessions they could carry, fleeing the terrors of war. One Arab eyewitness described the human misery of the refugees: “People left their country dazed and directionless, without homes or money, falling ill and dying while wandering from place to place, living in niches and caves, their clothing falling apart, leaving them naked, their food running out, leaving them hungry. The mountains grew colder and they had no one to defend them.”
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By the end of the war, the Jews of Palestine had secured the main towns of the coastal plain and the Galilee panhandle. In the process, they had driven between 200,000 and 300,000 Palestinians from their homes. The Palestinian refugees intended to return when peace had been restored. They were never allowed back. As David Ben-Gurion told his cabinet in June 1948, “We must prevent at all costs their return.”
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The civil war ended on the last day of the British mandate. The Jews of Palestine declared their statehood on May 14, 1948, and would henceforth be known as Israelis. The defeated Arabs had no state to dignify their Palestinian identity. They placed their trust in their Arab neighbors, whose armies were massing on Palestine’s borders, awaiting the final British withdrawal.

On May 14, as they had promised, the British played the “Last Post,” took down their flag, and boarded ship, turning their backs on the disaster they had made of Palestine.

T
he day after the British withdrew from Palestine, the armies of the surrounding Arab states invaded. On May 15, 1948, the civil war between Palestinian Arabs and Jews was over, and the first Arab-Israeli war had begun. The governments of Egypt, Transjordan, Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon each committed their armies, ostensibly to defend Arab Palestine and defeat Israel. In fact, the Arab League only decided to commit the regular armies of the Arab states two days before the British withdrawal from Palestine, on May 12, 1948. Had their intervention enjoyed a modicum of coordination and advance planning, a glimmer of trust and common purpose, the Arab forces might have prevailed. Instead, the Arabs entered Palestine more at war with each other than with the Jewish state.

The Arab states were in complete disarray on the eve of the first Arab-Israeli War. The conflict in Palestine had gone worse than anyone had predicted. For all his bluster, Fawzi al-Qawuqji had proved a disaster on the battlefield, his ill-trained and undisciplined troops forced to retreat from every action against the Haganah. The Arab Liberation Army was by all accounts more of a burden than a relief to the beleaguered Palestinians, and the strategy of relying on Arab volunteers had proven an utter failure. As the date of British withdrawal neared, the neighboring Arab states
came to recognize that they would have to commit their regular armies to prevent Jewish forces from conquering all of Palestine.

The Arab states all faced a serious dilemma. They saw the conflict in Palestine as an Arab cause and felt a moral obligation to intervene to protect fellow Arabs in Palestine. This was only reinforced by the fact that the Arab states met under the aegis of the Arab League to coordinate common action. However, the individual Arab states each had their own national interests—they entered the war as Egyptians, Jordanians, and Syrians rather than as Arabs. And they brought their inter-Arab rivalries to the battle field.

The Arab League convened a cycle of meetings in autumn 1947 and winter 1948 to address the Palestine crisis. The conflict of interests between the new Arab states became increasingly apparent. Each Arab country had its own concerns, and none of the Arab states placed great trust in the others. King Abdullah of Transjordan provoked the most suspicion among his Arab brethren. His support for partition revealed his ambition to annex the Arab territories of Palestine to aggrandize his own state. This earned him the hatred of Palestinian leader Hajj Amin al-Husayni, the rivalry of Egyptian King Farouq, and the suspicion of the Syrians. In Syria, President Shukri al-Quwwatli struggled to contain the threat of the “monarchist movement” among some of his officers, who supported King Abdullah of Transjordan and his call for a Greater Syria, uniting Syria and Transjordan under Hashemite rule. Much of what Syria did in the resulting war was calculated to contain Transjordan. The Arab states ultimately went to war to prevent each other from altering the balance of power in the Arab world, rather than to save Arab Palestine.

The cynicism of Arab leaders was lost on Arab citizens, who applauded their governments’ intervention to protect Arab Palestine from the Zionist threat. The Arab public, and the soldiers fighting in the Arab armies, were moved by the rhetoric and believed in the justice of their cause. Public disenchantment with their politicians in the aftermath of defeat would lead to great upheaval in the Arab world following the “loss” of Palestine.

 

In May 1948 the armies of the Arab states were not ready for war, in large part because most of those states had only just secured independence from their colonial rulers. France had retained control over the armed forces of Syria and Lebanon until 1946 and had left little behind in the way of arms and ammunition when its forces grudgingly withdrew. Britain had a monopoly on the supply of weapons to the armed forces of Egypt, Transjordan, and Iraq. The British guarded the flow of supplies to their semi-independent allies to ensure their national armies never posed a threat to British forces in the region.

The Arab armies were also quite small at the time. The whole of the Lebanese army probably did not exceed 3,500 soldiers, and their weapons were hopelessly out
of date. The Syrian army did not exceed 6,000 men and was more of a threat than an asset to President al-Quwwatli—hardly a month had passed in 1947 without rumors of a plotted military coup. In the end, the Syrians committed fewer than half their total military strength—perhaps 2,500 men—to the struggle in Palestine. The Iraqi army contributed 3,000 men. The Transjordanian Arab Legion was the best trained and most disciplined army in the region, but it could only commit 4,500 of its total strength of 6,000 men at the outset of the war. The Egyptians had the largest force and sent 10,000 troops into Palestine. Yet in spite of these constraints, Arab war planners were predicting a swift victory over Jewish forces within eleven days. If sincere, such an estimate confirms how little the Arab side appreciated the seriousness of the conflict that lay ahead.