On 14 May 1948, the State of Israel was established when David Ben-Gurion, then leader of the Jewish Agency and later Israel’s first Prime Minister declared, “the establishment of a Jewish state in Eretz-Israel, to be known as the State of Israel.”[1]

The declaration was made a day before the expiration of the British Mandate, which sought to establish separate Jewish and Arab states in the land of Palestine.

On 15 May 1948 the armies of Egypt, Syria, Transjordan and Iraq invaded what had been Mandatory Palestine.

According to one version of events, the war began when the Arab armies, intent on the total destruction of the newly-founded Jewish state, invaded. The counter-argument claims that the Arabs were acting in response to Israeli aggression against the Palestinians and that they invaded to prevent further bloodshed.

Zionism vs Palestinianism

According to the historian Benny Morris in 1948: A History of the First Arab-Israeli War, a book which provides an in-depth look into the events surrounding the creation of the State of Israel, albeit slanted towards an Israeli interpretation, the war started at the end of November of 1947:

“At 8:20 am on 30 November 1947, an eight-man Jaffa-based armed band, led by Seif al-Din Abu Kishk, ambushed a Jewish bus in the Coastal Plain near Kfar Syrkin, killing five and wounding others. Half an hour later the gunmen let loose at a second bus, southbound from Hadera, killing two more. Later that morning, Arab snipers began to fire from Jaffa’s Manshiya neighborhood into southern Tel Aviv, killing at least one person. These were the first dead of the 1948 War.”[2]

However, in the following paragraph, Morris goes on to state that the attack was almost certainly not ordered or organised by the by the AHC (Arab Higher Committee)[3], while it is unclear whether the gunmen were reacting to the United Nations resolution that recommended to divide the British Mandate of Palestine into separate Jewish and Arab States. The view among Israel’s pre-state intelligence Service, the Hagenah, was that the attack took place in response to a raid committed by the LHI[4], a Zionist paramilitary organisation, on a house belonging to the Abu Kishk Bedouin tribe:

“The raiders had selected five males of the Shubaki family and executed them in a nearby orange grove. The raiders believed (apparently mistakenly) that the Shubakis a few days earlier had informed the authorities about an LHI training session nearby. This had led to a British raid in which five Jewish youngsters were killed.”[5]

That is not to say that the LHI raid was the start of the war. To trace the start of the war to one single incident, or act of violence, means looking at an incident before that and in turn one before that until one is forced to look at the wider picture.

In fact, Morris himself claims, that the war was the “almost inevitable result” of decades of Arab-Jewish friction that began with the arrival of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe in the early 1880s.[6]

It was around this time in Europe that national consciousness as we understand it today, in terms of statehood, was beginning to take root. It was against this backdrop, as well as massive Jewish persecution in Europe, that the ideology of Zionism was born – the nationalist movement of the Jewish people that sought the establishment “for the Jewish people a publicly and legally assured home in Palestine.”[7]

This idea of national consciousness also found its way to the Middle East, then under the rule of the Ottoman Empire, via commerce, tourists, missionaries, books and newspapers. This saw the rise of various national identities throughout the region, including a Palestinian one.

“With the rise of nationalist movements in the late nineteenth century, Palestinians began producing newspaper articles, books, papers, speeches, popular songs, poetry, and art that asserted their ‘Palestinianness’ and their indigenous right to the land .”[8]

Although talk had been going on between the British cabinet and Jewish leaders about establishing a Jewish national home in Palestine for some years, British assistance was made public on November 2, 1917 in the Balfour Declaration – a letter from the United Kingdom’s Foreign Secretary Arthur James Balfour to Baron Rothschild, a leader of the British Jewish community, for communication to the Zionist Federation of Great Britain and Ireland. The letter stated:

“His Majesty’s government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.”

However, the Balfour Declaration apparently contradicted an earlier understanding between the British and Faysal Ibn Husayn, the Sharif and Amir of Mecca, that the British would grant Arabs independence should they revolt against the Ottoman Empire. The Arabs did revolt and aided the British in their defeat of the Ottomans during World War I.

Flowing World War I the former colonies of the Ottoman Empire were divided up into Mandates by the League of Nations pending their establishment as independent nations. France was awarded the Mandate for Syria (and later Lebanon), while the British took those of Mesopotamia (Iraq), Transjordan (Jordan) and Palestine.

Thus, the scene was set for a conflict between two competing nationalism on the same territory. A conflict that the international community was not able to abate, and the belligerents, largely unwilling to.

The war of words

Amid rising tensions between Jewish immigrants, Palestinians and the British, and a refusal from Zionist and Arab leaders to agree on anything, the United Nations stepped in and took over from the British in February of 1947. Seven months later, the United Nations Special Committee on Palestine (UNSCOP) put forward a plan for the partition of Mandatory Palestine into separate Jewish and Arab states, with Jerusalem to be under ‘permanent trusteeship’ of the international community.

It was in reaction to the UNESCOP plan that saw Arab rhetoric against Jewish statehood heighten with prominent Palestinian nationalist Musa Alami claiming that the Arab population in Palestine would “rise-up” against the UNSCOP report.[9] From the wider Arab world, Lebanese Prime Minister, Riad al-Sulh stated that due to public opinion, “No Arab government would dare accept the recommendations of UNSCOP” and that these governments would be “forced to take action … or be swept away”.[10] The Arab League secretary general, Abdul Rahman Azzam, remarked, “They will never recognise it, and they will never make peace”.[11]

However, the apparent talk of war was not taken entirely seriously by some Jewish leaders. Jewish Agency Political Department director, Moshe Shertok, told Zionist leaders that:

“There is a very great deal of bluff in it … These countries have much more serious worries in their own homes than to start hazardous military operations … [in] Palestine. [And] the Arabs of Palestine are extremely unwilling to engage in any new adventure.”[12]

Not long after the UNSCOP recommendation for Palestine was made public, the American Zionist Emergency Council issued a four-page memorandum analysing, and discounting, the threats posed by the Arabs:

“The military potential of the different Arab-speaking states is notoriously weak. … Saudi Arabia’s troops are picturesque horsemen. … It is inconceivable that any of these forces could interfere in Palestine without the consent and active cooperation of Great Britain. … Ridiculous is the assumption that an armed conflict between Arabs and Jews … would lead to World War III.”[13]

The strength in numbers of the various Arab armies combined (around 160,000 regulars, plus a further 15,000 – 18,000 volunteers) is often quoted to present the conflict as an Arab Goliath vs. a Jewish David. However, due to the precarious position of the respective Arab regimes at home, they were unable to commit such forces to an invasion abroad. Indeed, throughout the war it was the Israeli side that consistently fielded more troops than the Arabs.[14]

Did the war start in April?

So, why did the Arab armies invade what had been Mandatory Palestine? Was it for the protection of the Palestinians, or did they seek the destruction of the newly founded State of Israel?

While Arab rhetoric in the build-up to the war threatened Israeli statehood, so did Zionist rhetoric against the Palestinians. Not forgetting that the Balfour Declaration promised that “nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine”, things didn’t transpire so.

Because Arabs had been living in most of Palestine prior to plans to divide it in two, this meant that land allotted to the Jewish State would contain a number of non-Jewish Arabs. Prominent Zionists feared that the Arab population living within the territory of the Jewish state, as proposed by UNSCOP, would prefer to stay where they were and accept citizenship of the Jewish state rather than move to the Arab one. The general feeling among Zionist leaders was that the fewer Arab citizens in the Jewish state, the better.[15] Most notably, David Ben-Gurion viewed the Arabs that would remain in the Jewish state as a “Fifth Column”, remarking that it would be better to expel them.[16]

In the few years leading up to expiration of the British Mandate in Palestine, the Haganah drew up several plans of action to be implemented once the British had left. The most controversial of these was named Plan Delat (or Plan D). While previous plans (A, B and C) detailed punitive actions to ‘deter’ Arab attacks against Jewish settlements, as well as in retaliation for any actual attacks[17], Plan D represented a shift in tact, from defensive to offensive. Israel’s so-called war of independence became a war of conquest.

Although apologists argue that Plan D was never implemented by any direct order, what remain undeniable are the military operations that took place corresponding to the main aim of Plan D: “To gain control of the Hebrew state and defend its borders. It also aims to gain control of the areas of Jewish settlements and concentration which are located outside the borders [of the Hebrew state]”[18]

Six weeks prior to the Arab invasion, Hanganah forces launched a full scale invasion of Palestine, conducting eight military operations in territory allotted to the Arab state between 1 April and 14 May 1948. If it is argued that the war started when the Arab armies left their territory and invaded another, then couldn’t the war have begun when Zionist forces did the same?

While Plan D pretends to notions of security and defense, Benny Morris provides an insight into the tactics used within and without the borders of the Jewish state as proposed by the United Nations:

“To achieve these objectives, swathes of Arab villages, either hostile or potentially hostile, were to be conquered, and brigade commanders were given the option of “destruction of villages (arson, demolition, and mining of the ruins)” or “cleansing [of militiamen] and taking control of [the villages]” and leaving a garrison in place. The commanders were given discretion whether to evict the inhabitants of villages and urban neighbourhoods sitting on vital access roads.”[19]

According to a report by the Israeli Defense Forces Intelligence Service Analysis, between December 1947 and May 1948 approximately 390,000 Palestinian Arabs were displaced from their homes either by expulsion or fear of expulsion.[20] The report goes on to detail that the main factor behind the Arab exodus from Palestine were the operations carried out by the Haganah intelligence service and the LHI and Irgun paramilitary groups.[21]

To be sure, the claim that Zionist armed forces entered the Arab state in anticipation of an incoming wider Arab invasion still persists. This is indeed true, an Arab invasion was expected once the British Mandate had expired. However, considering what the Haganah, and the LHI and Irgun had been doing to the Palestinians in the months prior to the invasion, the argument that the Arabs entered the former British Mandate to protect the Arab population must also be considered. There is also reason to believe that the invading Arab armies were not acting in the interests of the Palestinians nor totally against the State of Israel. While Egypt had designs on Gaza, Transjordan’s King Abdullah had a tacit agreement with the Zionists to carve up Palestine between themselves.[22]

In typical fashion, unable to fully please either side, the United Nations didn’t blame either one for initiating the fighting. However, it also didn’t accept that Israel was acting in self-defense or that the Arabs were the aggressors.[23]

By the end of the war approximately 750,000 Arab inhabitants of Palestine had been displaced and were now refugees in their own land with what should have been an independent Palestinian state now occupied by Egyptian, Israeli and Jordanian forces.

Footnotes

[1] https://mfa.gov.il/mfa/foreignpolicy/peace/guide/pages/declaration%20of%20establishment%20of%20state%20of%20israel.aspx

[2] Benny Morris (2008: 76) 1948: The First Arab-Israeli War

[3] The Arab authority in Palestine at the time.

[4] LHI is an acronym for the Hebrew, Lohamei Herut Yisrael, which translates as Freedom Fighters of Israel. LHI was also known as the Stern Gang.  

[5] Benny Morris (2008: 76) 1948: The First Arab-Israeli War

[6] Ibid., 1

[7] This quote is a translation from the terms adopted during the First Zionist Congress in Basel on 31 August 1897

[8] Rochelle A. Davis (2011: 11) Palestinian Village Histories: Geographies of the Displaced

[9] Benny Morris (2008: 50) 1948: The First Arab-Israeli War

[10] Ibid., 50

[11] Ibid., 50

[12] Ibid., 62

[13] Ibid., 62

[14] Ibid., 206

“By mid-July, the IDF was fielding sixty-five thousand troops; by October, eighty-eight thousand; by January 1949, 108,000. The Arab armies, joined by contingents from Yemen, Morocco, Saudi Arabia, and Sudan, probably had forty to fifty thousand troops in Palestine and Sinai by mid-July and sixty-eight thousand in mid-October, the numbers perhaps rising slightly by the end of winter.”

[15] Golda Meir, acting head of the Jewish Agency Political Department at the time, remarked, “we are interested in less Arabs who will be citizens of the Jewish state.” Eli’ezer Kaplan, treasurer of the Jewish Agency, proclaimed “Our young state will not be able to stand such a large number of strangers in its midst.”

The above two quotes are referenced by Benny Morris (2008: 52) in 1948: The First Arab-Israeli War

[16] Ibid., 52

[17] According to Ilan Pappe (2006: 28) in The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, such measures included:

• Killing the Palestinian political leadership
• Killing Palestinian inciters and their financial supporters
• Killing Palestinians who acted against Jews
• Killing senior Palestinian officers and officials [in the Mandatory System]
• Damaging Palestinian transportation
• Damaging the sources of Palestinian livlihoods: water wells, mills, etc.
• Attacking nearby Palestinian villages likely to assist in future attacks
• Attacking Palestinian clubs, coffee houses, meeting places, etc.

[18] Taken from the text of Plan Delat, which can be found in the Appendix of Plan Dalet: Master Plan for the Conquest of Palestine by Walid Khalidi: http://pbble.com/doc/Khalidi-Plan-Dalet.pdf

[19] Benny Morris (2008: 120) 1948: The First Arab-Israeli War

[20] Victor Kattan (2009: 194) From Coexistence to Conquest: International Law and the Origins of the Arab-Israeli Conflict, 18919 – 1949

[21] Ibid., 195

[22] Ibid., 186

[23] Ibid., 180