©2010 Daniel A. Brown
As the world reacts in revulsion to Israel’s latest ham-fisted tactics against the Palestinians trapped in Gaza, it might be a good time to revisit 1948, the year that created both the State of Israel and the Palestinian Diaspora. Both sides have generated a fair share of self-serving myths, but there are truths and falsehoods in each account.
The events leading up to this critical impasse are far too many to relate here. During World War I, with the Middle East a critical battleground, the British were exploiting the nationalistic goals of both the Jews and Arabs in order to defeat the Ottoman Turks. Of course, when the war ended, the Brits and the French carved up the former empire into several new countries and maintained their own level of control over puppet leaders. And as Jewish immigration picked up, the native Palestinian population became more restive and resentful, a resentment that exploded in the Arab Revolt of 1936-1939.
This revolt was pressed by Haj Amin al-Husseini, the spiritual leader of the Palestinian majority (who then spent World War II in Berlin supporting the Nazis). The British crushed it so thoroughly that Palestinian social, military and governmental infrastructures were all but ruined, consequences that have a great deal of bearing on the events of 1948. The Jewish community, meanwhile, was quietly crafting their own nation-in-waiting which allowed them to be better organized and prepared.
A year earlier, the now-famous UN Resolution 181 had divided the British Mandate into two separate homelands for the Jews and the Palestinians. However, both sides made it clear either secretly or openly that they would not be satisfied with this solution.
The Arab nations invaded the day after the Jews declared independence. Contrary to what American peace activists believe, the United States did not arm the Israelis (they wouldn’t in earnest until 1970 as part of the Cold War chess game with the Soviet Union). The US declared an arms embargo against all combatants and stuck to it. Israel got almost all of its weapons from Czechoslovakia and whatever they could finagle on the vast post-WWII surplus arms market. Still, according to various CIA reports, no one in the American government expected the Jews to win.
Oddly enough, most of the leaders of the invading Arab nations expected to lose. They knew that the Jewish fighters were better armed, organized, and most importantly, motivated, but after years of agitating the Arab Street against “Zionist aggression”, they couldn’t back down.
If you need a villain in this piece, the unlikely candidate is King Abdullah of Jordan. The center of gravity of this conflict has mostly been the West Bank, which was mandated as part of the new Palestinian homeland. Abdullah decided that he’d rather conquer it himself and therefore engaged in secret negotiations with both the Israelis and the British. The Israelis agreed for obvious reasons. Better to have one less enemy at your throat. The British went along because they wanted Jordan to remain a client state especially if the newly emerging Cold War with the Soviets got hotter. With this arrangement in place, the Arab Legion, Jordan’s superb British-trained army, swept into the West Bank thus allowing Jordan to control it until 1967.
The other Arab armies were equally interested in grabbing chunks of Palestine for themselves instead of helping their Palestinian “brothers”, an attitude of neglect and exploitation that holds to this very day. They didn’t succeed. As history records, the Jews won but at the cost of 1% of their population. That doesn’t sound like much until you realize that 1% of the United States translates as three million dead Americans.
One contentious issue of the 1948 war involves who practiced ethnic cleansing and committed atrocities. The answer is that both parties were equally guilty of massacres, rapes and the blatant murder of prisoners. Who did more is irrelevant, due to the mutually vicious nature of the struggle. The Israeli process of ethnic cleansing depended more on the whims of local commanders than as a national policy as evidenced that there are still major Arab population centers in Israel today. There were also several anarchic paramilitary units that operated separately from the main Israeli army, one of which, the Irgun, committed the infamous Deir Yassin massacre.
But Palestinian sympathizers choose to forget that not only did their friends commit their own share of atrocities in 1948 (the mass murder of the Etzion Bloc, for one) but had they won, the Jews would have been the ones ethnically cleansed out of their homeland. One wonders whether these activists would be expressing the same moral outrage if it were the Jews being oppressed today in Gaza or Ramallah. I think not.
The Israelis cynically believe that the world has a better opinion of Jews when they allow themselves to be exterminated (an observation recently validated by Helen Thomas). Needless to say, such a fate is not an option. But having proved to the world that they can defend themselves, the Israelis now must demonstrate a willingness to live peacefully with their Palestinian neighbors. At some point, when the religious and nationalist extremists on both sides are invalidated, perhaps that day might come about.
For further reading on this topic, I suggest, “1948” by Israeli revisionist historian, Benny Morris.
As the world reacts in revulsion to Israel’s latest ham-fisted tactics against the Palestinians trapped in Gaza, it might be a good time to revisit 1948, the year that created both the State of Israel and the Palestinian Diaspora. Both sides have generated a fair share of self-serving myths, but there are truths and falsehoods in each account.
The events leading up to this critical impasse are far too many to relate here. During World War I, with the Middle East a critical battleground, the British were exploiting the nationalistic goals of both the Jews and Arabs in order to defeat the Ottoman Turks. Of course, when the war ended, the Brits and the French carved up the former empire into several new countries and maintained their own level of control over puppet leaders. And as Jewish immigration picked up, the native Palestinian population became more restive and resentful, a resentment that exploded in the Arab Revolt of 1936-1939.
This revolt was pressed by Haj Amin al-Husseini, the spiritual leader of the Palestinian majority (who then spent World War II in Berlin supporting the Nazis). The British crushed it so thoroughly that Palestinian social, military and governmental infrastructures were all but ruined, consequences that have a great deal of bearing on the events of 1948. The Jewish community, meanwhile, was quietly crafting their own nation-in-waiting which allowed them to be better organized and prepared.
A year earlier, the now-famous UN Resolution 181 had divided the British Mandate into two separate homelands for the Jews and the Palestinians. However, both sides made it clear either secretly or openly that they would not be satisfied with this solution.
The Arab nations invaded the day after the Jews declared independence. Contrary to what American peace activists believe, the United States did not arm the Israelis (they wouldn’t in earnest until 1970 as part of the Cold War chess game with the Soviet Union). The US declared an arms embargo against all combatants and stuck to it. Israel got almost all of its weapons from Czechoslovakia and whatever they could finagle on the vast post-WWII surplus arms market. Still, according to various CIA reports, no one in the American government expected the Jews to win.
Oddly enough, most of the leaders of the invading Arab nations expected to lose. They knew that the Jewish fighters were better armed, organized, and most importantly, motivated, but after years of agitating the Arab Street against “Zionist aggression”, they couldn’t back down.
If you need a villain in this piece, the unlikely candidate is King Abdullah of Jordan. The center of gravity of this conflict has mostly been the West Bank, which was mandated as part of the new Palestinian homeland. Abdullah decided that he’d rather conquer it himself and therefore engaged in secret negotiations with both the Israelis and the British. The Israelis agreed for obvious reasons. Better to have one less enemy at your throat. The British went along because they wanted Jordan to remain a client state especially if the newly emerging Cold War with the Soviets got hotter. With this arrangement in place, the Arab Legion, Jordan’s superb British-trained army, swept into the West Bank thus allowing Jordan to control it until 1967.
The other Arab armies were equally interested in grabbing chunks of Palestine for themselves instead of helping their Palestinian “brothers”, an attitude of neglect and exploitation that holds to this very day. They didn’t succeed. As history records, the Jews won but at the cost of 1% of their population. That doesn’t sound like much until you realize that 1% of the United States translates as three million dead Americans.
One contentious issue of the 1948 war involves who practiced ethnic cleansing and committed atrocities. The answer is that both parties were equally guilty of massacres, rapes and the blatant murder of prisoners. Who did more is irrelevant, due to the mutually vicious nature of the struggle. The Israeli process of ethnic cleansing depended more on the whims of local commanders than as a national policy as evidenced that there are still major Arab population centers in Israel today. There were also several anarchic paramilitary units that operated separately from the main Israeli army, one of which, the Irgun, committed the infamous Deir Yassin massacre.
But Palestinian sympathizers choose to forget that not only did their friends commit their own share of atrocities in 1948 (the mass murder of the Etzion Bloc, for one) but had they won, the Jews would have been the ones ethnically cleansed out of their homeland. One wonders whether these activists would be expressing the same moral outrage if it were the Jews being oppressed today in Gaza or Ramallah. I think not.
The Israelis cynically believe that the world has a better opinion of Jews when they allow themselves to be exterminated (an observation recently validated by Helen Thomas). Needless to say, such a fate is not an option. But having proved to the world that they can defend themselves, the Israelis now must demonstrate a willingness to live peacefully with their Palestinian neighbors. At some point, when the religious and nationalist extremists on both sides are invalidated, perhaps that day might come about.
For further reading on this topic, I suggest, “1948” by Israeli revisionist historian, Benny Morris.
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