In Israel

I always thought Israeli history in the 1950s was a bit dull – no exciting wars, just the Suez Crisis, which sounds like a bit of a pointless mess. But actually, it was when Israel started grappling with the questions of how to deter terrorist attacks from neighboring states.

There were continual skirmishes and retaliations. On the border with Syria and the Egyptian Sinai, the fighting was between army units, each side trying to assert control over areas that were supposed to be demilitarized. On the border with Jordan and Egyptian Gaza, Israel was trying to deter unofficial infiltration.

Infiltrations and retaliation

In the early 1950s, there were 10 to15 thousand illegal infiltrations into Israel each year. They were mainly Palestinian refugees trying to return from Jordan or Egypt to collect relatives or possessions, or to harvest their old fields. But there were also large numbers who came to steal crops, animals and other property from Israeli settlements. These raids cost Israel huge sums replacing damaged or stolen property, and far more paying guards to protect the settlements. A small proportion of the infiltrators attacked, murdered or raped Israelis – about 40 Israelis a year were killed. People living in the border settlements were very fearful, and some were abandoned.

Infiltration was a dangerous business; Israeli border guards would shoot without question, killing thousands of infiltrators, and the army deported many more, plus the families who sheltered them. It was the murders that really provoked Israel, but the problem was how to punish the killers who disappeared back across the border.

The army’s solution was to simply attack the nearest village. For example, an Israeli woman was found raped and murdered, so the army responded by blowing up a couple of houses in the village they thought the attacker came from, killing perhaps 10 people in the process. The aim of the retaliations was to exert pressure on Jordan and Egypt to curb the infiltrations themselves. Jordan did try, but found it difficult to control the long meandering border, and local officials tended to be sympathetic to the Palestinian infiltrators. The reprisals only seemed to reduce infiltrations for about a month at a time.

Members of the Israeli government disagreed over whether the retaliations were ethical or effective. They were under pressure from the army and the public to react whenever an Israeli was killed, but over half the reprisals planned were delayed or cancelled, and they often chose to respond severely after the accumulation of several murders rather than retaliating for every incident. I don’t envy the position of the decision-makers: it’s unethical to attack innocent civilians; it’s unethical not to protect your own citizens. But it’s infuriating to realize how little Israel’s overall tactics have evolved from the 50s: set a high price on Israeli lives by hitting back, hard, at the most obvious target. A strategy of clumsy deterrence, because its not possible to prevent all the attacks or punish the actual perpetrators.

Escalation

In 1953, Israel stepped up the intensity of its raids under the command of Major Ariel Sharon. The murder of a women and her two children prompted a particularly heavy-handed reprisal against Kibya village, where 70 people were killed. In the face of international condemnation, the Israeli Prime Minister, David ben Gurion, tried to claim that Israeli vigilantes had carried out the attack instead of the army! Jordan managed to tightened its control of the border for a couple of years, and future Israeli reprisals started to shift from targeting villages to police stations and army outposts. However, on the Gaza border, reprisals against Egyptian army posts angered Egypt so much that they began sponsoring organized incursions into Israel from Jordan and Lebanon as well as Egypt to ambush Israeli units and lay mines

Some of the incidents in the mid 1950s were farcical in their pettiness: the fuss generated when a flock of Israeli sheep went missing was nick-named Operation Bo Peep by UN staff. Others were shocking in their audacity: when an Israeli spy ring was captured in Syria, Israel hijacked a Syrian plane, hoping to exchange the passengers for their agents. Israel also planned bombs in a cinema in Egypt to make the British think the country was unstable and change their mind about pulling their troops out. This plot and several of the most brutal retaliations were carried out without the knowledge of the Prime Minister, Moshe Sharett, who was consistently undermined by his gung-ho army leaders.

My ipod has gone on strike. It’s my fault, really. I tried to play Time after Time on the flight out and it just crashed in protest and refused to start up since.

So I’ve had to rely on the radio. Fortunately I’ve found a good station, called GalGalatz. It’s one of the most popular in Israel and it’s run by the army. Seriously, one option for army service is helping run the radio station - unsurprisingly it’s a very popular option, which serves as an effective springboard for anyone who wants a career in radio, so you have to pull a few strings to spend your army service this way. It broadcasts mainly pop music and traffic updates - I don’t think there’s anything actually army related.

There are also short news updates, which to me just sound like “Blahblahblah blahblah Olmert blah blahdiblahblah Falastini blahblah blah mifgash [meeting] blahdiblah blah Livni“, which is really frustrating. But the music’s good: about half the songs are in English, and the Israeli songs are replayed so often, I’m starting to recognise some of them. Some of the UK/US music is recent, but they play loads of great tracks I haven’t heard for years. It’s like someone raided my 90s record collection - I think I mean mix tapes! There’s plenty of Guns and Roses, Chilli Peppers, Radiohead and that great Cake cover of “I Will Survive”.

One Israeli song I’ve come to recognise is by the most recent winner of Israel’s Pop Idol. You can listen here: I was convinced this is a woman singing, but it’s actually a 19-year-old guy. The song is the one he sang in the final of the competition, and he wrote it himself. I think it’s about his experience of changing from a very religious lifestyle to a secular one, and coping with life on his own now that he’s alienated from his family. They played a sped-up version with a beat in a club and everyone went mad to it!

Many of the olim from Iraq and Yemen were airlifted out of those countries by Israel. The mission to bring over the Yemenites was soon nick-named Operation Magic Carpet. (Incongruously, it was Alaska Airlines that provided the planes!) It took 380 flights over the course of a year to bring nearly 50,000 Yemenite Jews to Israel.  Most of the passengers had never seen a plane before. The experience must have been terrifying, yet also exciting - especially for those who believed they were fulfilling a messianic prophecy for the exiles to be returned to Israel “on eagles’ wings”.

The reality waiting was bitterly disappointing. Israel was in economic chaos after the war, and hadn’t yet built the houses needed to home all the new immigrants. Many thousands of olim lived in transit camps with poor amenities for the first few years. Or they were housed in isolated or dangerous areas: new ‘development towns’ or emptied Arab villages close to the borders, which were often raided or attacked; or abandoned Arab neighbourhoods in Jerusalem - some in range of Jordanian sniper fire. Up to a thousand babies became separated from their parents in the chaos of the transit camps; many were adopted by Ashkenazi families instead and their disappearance is still controversial in Israel today.

Most of the Mizrahi families arrived in Israel with nothing. Those who were wealthy, had their property and assets confiscated by the countries they left; others had little to leave. They were offered menial jobs in farming, factories, construction or road-laying, whereas they were more likely to have been merchants or tradesmen before. They came from very traditional religious and patriarchal communities, but the Israeli authorities expected them to shed their heritage and conform to Israel’s socialist, secular norms. 

The original Zionist pioneers had rejected the poverty, religiousness and submissiveness of their own ancestors in Eastern Europe in favour of the brave, resilient ‘new Jew’ of Israel. These old-timers were often insensitive and arrogant towards the new arrivals, whom they saw as backward and illiterate. Also, given Israel’s relations with Arab states, I think there was greater pressure for Mizrahi olim to ignore their Arab heritage, whereas recent olim are better supported in maintaining the language and culture of their ancestors.

And now?

There remained a huge social gap between Ashkenazi and Mizrahi/Sephardi Jews until in the 70s and 80s, when Mizrahi politicians and military leaders emerged, and their music, tradition and customs have moved more mainstream. Sixty percent of Mizrahi have moved up into the middle-class and inter-marriage is common. However, there are still less Mizrahi at university and in highly-paid professions, and more in low-paid jobs. As in England, social mobility has slowed down compared to the 70s, and Israelis born in the poorer devlopement towns are less likely to find well-paid jobs than those whose parents went to university.

I’ve mentioned ‘olim’ a couple of times: it’s the name for Jewish immigrants - what most of my friends here are. If I moved here, I’d be an ‘olah’, whereas a guy would be an ‘oleh’. And the process of moving to Israel is called making ‘aliyah’, which means to ‘rise up’ (not dissimilar to how it’s common to say you’re going up to Cambridge, even if you’re travelling from Manchester).

The whole point of establishing Israel was to allow any Jewish person to live here if they want to - an opportunity to ‘gather the exiles’ scattered around the world from the original nation of Israel based here two millennia ago. The ‘Law of Return’ gives a legal right to anyone who can prove that their mother is Jewish to immigrate (with a little proviso against anyone engaged in criminal activity that could endanger public welfare or state security!). In the first few years after the state was established, Israel absorbed 685,000 people - doubling its population. Since then its taken in between 20,000 and 200,000 a year.

Why do they come?

Many olim came to Israel to escape anti-semitism or economic hardship - most of the mass intakes have been for these reasons. However there’s also a small, but steady, stream from tolerant, affluent Western countries. Most of my friends accepted a drop in living standards to move here, compared to how they’d be able to live in the UK or the USA. I’ve met people who’ve come for many different reasons: some feel an obligation to help shape the country, some wanted to live where it’s easier to practice Judaism, some were bored with the smaller Jewish community in which they grew up, some had always felt an emotional bond to the country, some just wanted to try life in a different place for a few years.  The Israeli government tries to make it as easy as possible for olim: they’re welcomed on a free flight and given intensive Hebrew lessons for 5 months and various tax breaks for the first few years.

Where did all the olim come from?

Ashkenazi: Most of pre-1948 olim were Ashkenazi, which means they came from Russia, Poland, Germany, Lithuania or Hungary. In fact, most Jews in English-speaking countries are also Ashkenazi, and so this is the most stereotypical Jewish culture represented in films - think Fiddler on the Roof. Because Ashkenazi Jews were the first to arrive, they came to dominate Israeli society - in politics, the army, business and the media; they also brought European culture - establishing concert halls and theatres.

Large Jewish communities had survived WW2 in Poland and Romania, but most left in the 1950s to escape communist regimes. There were also waves of mass immigration from Russia in the 1970s and 1990s (more about this later).

Sephardi: Sephardi Jews trace their ancestors back to Spain and Portugal, but few arrived in Israel directly from those countries. Jews were expelled from Spain in 1492 by the Catholic monarchy, who conquered the country from Muslim rule. Many communities settled in North Africa or the Ottoman Empire; some ended up in Northern Europe, especially the Netherlands, and some in the Americas. Many of their religious customs and prayer melodies are different from Ashkenazi Judaism. 

There have been lots of olim from France and Argentina in the past 10 years, many of whom are from Sephardi communities. Jewish communities in Algeria went to France after Algerian independence in 1962. However, there has been a marked increase in anti-Jewish violence since 2000, generally by young Muslim immigrants, also from North Africa, which has increased the number of French Jews making aliyah. A financial crisis in Argentina ten years ago prompted many families to decide to start over in Israel. 

Mizrahi: Jews from the ‘East’ (Arab countries, India, Georgia and Turkey) are called ‘Mizrahi’, although the difference between Mizrahi and Sephardi is sometimes blurred, because many Arab Jewish communities absorbed Sephardi refugees in the sixteenth century and adopted their religious customs. 

The earliest Mizrahi communities to move to Israel came from Yemen in the 1890s. When Israel declared independence, there were over 800,000 Jews living in Arab countries. There are now less than 8,000 and about 75% ended up in Israel. Most of those from Iraq, Libya, Yemen and Morocco arrived in the first few years after Israel’s independence, while those from Egypt and Tunisia came in waves, after later Arab-Israeli wars. Iranian Jews left after the 1979 revolution.

Historically, Jewish communities in Muslim countries were treated better than those in Christian Europe, but it varied a lot between different countries and centuries. Even in the most tolerant countries, they were still second-class citizens: they paid higher taxes, sometimes they were forced to live in ghettos, and occasional violence broke out. The increasing tension between Zionism and Arab nationalism in Palestine fuelled anti-Jewish feeling in many Arab countries, which grew into pogroms and riots in the 1940s. After 1948, some governments encouraged emigration: Iraqi Jews were asked to sign an anti-Zionism statement or given one year to leave; while other governments banned it. It is still very difficult for Syrian Jews to leave - they can only travel abroad if they leave large sums of money and family members to guarantee their return.

There are two opposing claims about how 700,000 Arab Palestinians came to be refugees living outside the new Israeli state in 1949:

• Israeli claim: other Arab countries ordered them to leave; Israel benefited from this exodus, but didn’t cause it.
• Palestinian claim: the Jewish leadership had always intended to expel the Arab population, and deliberately forced them to leave at the first opportunity.

Finding a reliable account of what really happened isn’t easy (see the post below), but - as ever - the most likely reality is more complicated than either popular version.

Hopes and intentions

The first British commission to suggest a two-state solution for Palestine (Peel Commission 1937) also suggested that some ‘population transfer’ would be needed. The Jewish leadership was quietly excited by this idea, for it would free them from living with a large minority violently opposed to Jewish political rule. Jewish leaders had thought up several ways to promote voluntary movement - e.g. buying land for them in Transjordan, or offering Iraq a resettlement fund to absorb people - but they also realised that force may be necessary in the end, and hoped this might be one of Britain’s responsibilities as the Mandate power.

Context

So why did the Jewish leadership think that forced transfer of the Arab communities was morally OK?  Population transfers have been illegal under international law since 2002, and are seen as part of the process of ethnic cleansing, rarely occurring without significant massacres. However, the international community previously endorsed and even encouraged population transfers if they were likely to avoid ethnic violence: the population swap of two million Greeks and Turks in 1922 was perceived as successful; and millions of Germans, Poles and Ukranians were resettled after WW2. Some Jewish leaders argued that organised transfer would allow whole communities to move together to Transjordan, Iraq or Syria - countries with plenty of space to absorb them, and that the shared culture, language and religion would allow them to integrate quickly.

However, I’m not convinced the Jewish leaders ever fully believed it was really OK; they were never very outspoken about the idea in public and once the exodus started, Ben-Gurion (first prime minister and pre-state leader) was careful to give only vague encouragement for expulsions rather than explicit instructions. I think many saw it as a necessary wrong: that the new state wouldn’t survive with nearly half its citizens hostile, if not violent, towards its government and other citizens. By the time the fighting started in December 1947 and the Arab Liberation Army publicly pledged to “eliminate any remains of Zionism”, the perception was that it was a case of “us or them”.

The exodus

Soon after the fighting broke out, a gradual trickle of the wealthier Arab families started leaving - those who could afford to stay in hotels abroad or whose relatives had large enough homes to take them in. By March 1948, about 70,000 people had left (expecting it to be a temporary departure). The remaining population was left without most local leaders and professionals - clinics, schools and businesses closed, and unemployment and poverty worsened.

‘Plan D’  for the Jewish offensive in April only set loose guidelines for gaining control of militarily-strategic areas containing hostile Arab communities. If the troops didn’t encounter resistance, they were to take up tactical positions within the town or village and confiscate all weapons and vehicles. If they encountered resistance, they should fight and kill the attackers and expel the rest of the population. And if the village was continuously difficult to control, the buildings should be destroyed to prevent people returning. Jewish forces were often surprised by how quickly Arab civilians fled from areas of fighting, not realising how much the atrocities at Deir Yessin had shaken morale. Once they realised how easy it was to provoke the Arab families to leave, they started to encourage it, sometimes by shelling their neighbourhoods or by advising evacuation of the old and young.

If a policy of expulsion developed, the orders were couched in softer terms: to “clear all hostile elements” and ”continue assisting the inhabitants wishing to leave the area”. This left individual officers with a lot of discretion over how much ‘assistance’ to provide in each village and the result was a very haphazard pattern: sometimes people were ordered to leave, others fled during fighting, some non-strategic villages were left intact. In many cases, civilians were intentionally intimidated, maybe by house-to-house searches and temporary detentions, maybe by shooting 5 or 20 men.

There’s no evidence of Arab radio broadcasts encouraging the exodus, but occasionally Arab forces advised evacuation of individual villages in advance of a planned offensive in the area. They soon switched to trying to persuade people to stay put. However, a large part of the reason that people were so ready to leave was that thy expected they’d be able to return again once the Arab armies defeated the Jewish forces. Suprisingly, as Israeli troops became more deliberate in their intimidations in late 1948, Arab civilians became more resistant, only leaving if directly forced to. By this time they realised Israel was likely to win the war and knew that other refugees weren’t being allowed to return.

No return

A key aspect of the situation is not just how and why the Arab Palestinians left - it’s also the fact that Israel wouldn’t let them return. Despite the Israeli army’s attempts to prevent them, about 30,000 refugees did manage to sneak back across the new borders in 1949, joining the 100,000 that never left; and many more returned briefly to gather or sell their abandoned belongings. But, in many cases this wasn’t possible, because Israel had destroyed their houses or quickly installed new Jewish immigrants in their place.

During the post-armistice attempts at peace negotiations, Israel eventually agreed to the return of 100,000 refugees (under pressure from the USA), but this was rejected by the Arab states as too little - they insisted that all 700,000 refugees had a right to return to their old homes. Israel argued that they wouldn’t accept back a population that had initiated civil war against its Jewish citizens, and that most had become refugees as a result of the war that the Arab countries initiated, and therefore those countries had the responsibility of resettling them.

Accepting that the 1948 war was not won cleanly - that there were unnecessary murders of civilians, and other atrocities - is difficult. Even if expulsions had occurred without killing anyone, they would obviously still be a crime: the sudden loss of a family home, many possessions, and the whole structure of a community is a traumatic personal and communal experience. Similar experiences are remembered within Jewish history - expulsions from Spain, from England, from Israel - which makes it all the worse that we’ve inflicted it on another people.

The problem is that, while I can genuiney say I wish it hadn’t happened in that way, I’m kept back from wholeheartedly wishing it didn’t happen at all, because of worries about what would have happened if the Arab communities had stayed. Would it have changed the outcome of the war? Given the stated intentions of the invading armies and the violent anger expressed in the 20s and 30s, I think the result of a Jewish defeat would have been large scale massacres. Murder and expulsion aren’t morally equivalent, and there was a self-protective logic behind the refusal to allow the refugees to return.  What’s so unfair is that that many of the refugees must have had nothing to do with the violence, and paid the price for others’ aggression.

It’s been hard to find a trustworthy source of information about 1948. The story you get from an Israeli historian depends very much on when it was written. The 1980s were a major turning point in Israeli historiography (I’ve learned a new long word!), when the ‘new historians’ began to challenge the traditional narratives of Israeli history. This happened partly because of the archives that had recently become available (like many other countries there’s a 30 year delay), and partly because of a growing critical attitude towards the establishment in the wake of the Lebanon war.

I tried reading some Palestinian sources too, but found they focused more on pinning blame on others than describing what happened, and even the more dispassionate accounts ignored glaring facts. There isn’t yet a wave of Palestinian ‘new historians’ - and for two good reasons: While Israeli society now feels secure enough to criticise itself and challenge its earlier myths, the Palestinians are stuck in the more insecure pre-state stage and aren’t ready to pull apart the narrative that helps hold their society together.  Also, they don’t have access to the same quality of historical records to draw from. Many documents were destroyed in the wars with Israel, while most archives held by other Arab governments aren’t open to the public.

So I’ve relied on the Israeli ‘new historians’, and I particularly like Benny Morris. He seems to have done painstaking research into every battle fought and every village abandoned during the war, and clearly summarises the trends and debates how likely the explanations he offers are. I like his confident refutation of attacks from both pro-Israeli and pro-Palestinian critics - anyone who can piss off both sides seems bound to be on the right track!

Unfortunately, it seems that in the last few years he’s turned into a right wing nutter. He gave an infamous interview in 2004, where the opinions he expresses become progressively more extreme. At first it’s amusing to see him voicing some slightly un-PC views and to read the poor interviewers’ evermore increduous questions - he can’t believe what he’s hearing from a man once so left-wing that he preferred to serve a prison sentence than do reserve duty in the Palestinian territories. But then he passes a line and moves into offendingly racist territory, and I’ve lost my new hero of history.

I’m not sure to what extent he was just bitterly sounding off (there was a particularly deadly wave of suicide bombings in 2004) or whether the interview represents more deeply-held views since his disillusionment with the failed peace process… or even before? And does it affect his reliability as a historian? So do I just stick to those books he wrote before 2000, or accept that everyone writing about Israel is biased?

While on the subject of cemeteries, this one is probably the most difficult to get into in the world. It helps if you’re very rich and/or very important and/or very pious. Being the head of a yeshiva or Chief Rabbi of a country would improve your chances.

The problem is that 150,000 people got there before you, including some very heavyweight rabbis over the last few hundred years.  And the reason that it’s so popular is that this is where the Messiah is supposed to appear and start bringing the dead back to life, so by being buried here you’d be first in the queue to rejoin the party.

There are a few other good reasons to come here: several important episodes in Jesus’s life took place on this hillside and there are a number of churches built to commemorate them and to honour Mary; it’s also a great spot for looking back west to the Old City for the famous view of the Dome of the Rock.

One of the historians in the Shared Histories project (Moshe Amirav) summarised the opening story from a book he’s written about Ein Kerem, an outlying suburb of western Jerusalem:

I have lived in an Arab house in Ein Kerem for many years, and I wrote a book about this village, which started with a small story about a trip I took to Bethlehem to find a Palestinian refugee from the village. I brought him back with me, along with his son, his grandson and his great-grandson, so he could tell me his story of Ein Kerem.

We went to see his house. We knocked on the door and a Morroccan woman opened it. She recognized me, and I explained I was writing a book and that this Palestinian man used to live here. I told her that he wants to see his house, that he wants to tell the story of the house to his son, grandson and great-grandson, and that I am giving him the opportunity. I asked her if she would agree.

She was white-faced, but told us to come in. And then this old guy started telling the story about the trees and the house, and this was where he was born, and he talked on and on. And when he ended his story, we could all feel the tension in the air. He thanked me, we left, I told him I would write his story, and I took him back to Bethlehem. Then I asked him where he came from before Ein Kerem, and he told me he was one of the village’s four sheikhs, and that his family originated in Granada, Spain, and in the 16th century, moved from there to North Africa, and then to Ein Kerem.

I wrote his story, and then I went back to the Moroccan woman and apologized and asked her to tell me her story. She said: “We are a Moroccan family from Fez. We came here in 1951, and were put in this house in Ein Kerem. I didn’t know who had been here before.” Then I asked her where she came from before Fez. She told that they had come from Granada in 1492. Maybe her ancestors and the old man’s were even on the same ship that sailed to North Africa.

Perhaps it’s a bit morbid to list a cemetery as one of my favourite places in Israel, but I can’t think of a nicer place to be laid for eternal rest than this peaceful pine-clad hillside. Except that the price of earning a spot here is much too high. The majority of graves here belong to soldiers who died during one of Israel’s wars. It is also the burial site of many of Israel’s political leaders: Yitzhak Rabin, Golda Meir, and the site’s namesake: Theodore Herzl.

But it’s the simple graves of the ordinary soldiers that make it a pleasant place to be: the plots look like comfortable beds, covered over with green blankets and plain reclining headstones for pillows. Most follow this uniform design, but sometimes there are special symbols carved onto the headstones, like the little parachutist seen on the paratroopers’ headstones. There are also some terror victims buried here, whose families have been allowed more freedom in choosing different flowers instead of the clipped green hedge.

Each headstone records the age and birthplace of the soldier, the names of his parents and in what battle he was killed. My Hebrew’s not good enough to interpret all of them, but the ages are clear: most of them are younger than me, many were 16 to 18 - I saw one who was just 14; but there are also men who were in their 30s and 40s. Some were born in Jerusalem; many were from Poland, Hungary or Germany.

Sometimes many men from one unit are buried together, surrounding a tree. There are special monuments for those who died fighting for the Old City; those on board the Dakar submarine, whose wreckage lay missing for 30 years; and those who fought in WW2, whether with the Allies, the Red Army or the Polish Army.

Walking around in the cool shade, there’s hardly anyone else here, except the gardeners watering the flowers. The section with soldiers who fell in the Yom Kippur war shows more signs of recent visitors - in a few days it will be 35 years since these men died. One family was visiting while I was there, on other graves there are freshly-cut flowers or a candle still burning.

It’s not really traditional for Jewish families to bring flowers to gravestones. Most of the flowers here are planted in soil, so they won’t die quickly. It’s more common to place a small stone on the grave as a lasting sign that it has been visited and the person is not forgotten. It’s also customary to light a candle that burns for 24hrs on each anniversary of the death of a close relative. Each grave here has a little lantern to protect a candle should the family want to light one when they visit.

A few more photos are in this album towards the end.

On May 14 1948, Israel declared its independence as a new state. The next day, five Arab countries declared war on it, vowing to drive the Jews into the sea. Little Israel fought tooth and nail to survive and, miraculously, David succeeded against Goliath.

This is the founding myth of Israel, and unpicking it reveals several very different stages of the war, as described in the post below. This myth was born out of genuine feelings at that time - legitimate fears that the Arab countries were capable of defeating the Jewish forces.  But in retrospect it’s easy to identify a few simple reasons why Israel won - no divine intervention needed:

1. Military strength. When they initiated fighting in 1947, the Arab Palestinians were in the majority, forming two-thirds of the population, and Arab villages were sited along the most strategic roads. They had at least 5,000 guerrilla fighters from the 1936 revolt, and were soon joined by 5,000 Arab Liberation Army volunteers, and expected reinforcement from the regular Arab armies. But the Jewish community had 4,000 regular Haganah fighters, who’d also had valuable experience as auxillary police during the revolt, plus about 11,000 trained reservists, and 4,000 in the other armed militias. They immediately started training the rest of the adult population, but only had enough guns to arm 15,000 people.

When the Arab regular armies invaded, they only committed 25,000 troops, so that even with the existing ALA they had less than the 35,000 Israelis who were trained by that time. Both sides expanded their armies during the war, but by the end, the Arab forces were about 60,000 against 115,00 in the Israeli army, swelled by the rapid immigration of Holocaust survivors.

2. Leadership. The Arab leadership in Palestine had refused to form political bodies on principle, as part of their protest against the Mandate. Meanwhile, the Jewish community had organised its own self-governing institutions. There was a clear chain of command between the formal leadership and the Haganah. Much of the Arab leadership had been deported or assassinated by Haj Amin’s supporters during the revolt, and the majority of the middle- and upper-classes left as soon as fighting broke out in 1947, leaving the remaining people demoralised. The attack by the national Arab armies was poorly coordinated, with Transjordan changing tactics at the last minute and each country mistrusting the others’ real ambitions.

3. Motivation. With the European genocide fresh in their minds, the Jewish community took the Arab leaders seriously when they made statements like “This will be a war of extermination and a momentous massacre” (Secretary of the Arab League) or “Kill Jews wherever you find them. This pleases God, history, and religion. This saves your honor.” (Haj Amin), and fought desperately for survival. While the Arab forces were mainly professional soldiers in a foreign country, Israel relied on its entire adult population defending the settlements they’d built, with their families nearby and the feeling that there was nowhere else to go if they couldn’t defend their positions.

4. Timing and preparation. The Arab Palestinian leadership launched a war they hadn’t prepared for against the Jewish community who had been preparing since the Arab revolt, when they realised that outright war would be likely at some stage. The delay of the other Arab countries’ involvement allowed the Jewish forces six months to focus just on the local guerrillas and the ALA, gaining experience and consolidating positions before facing the stronger Arab armies.

Miracles and ‘what if’s

With the above factors in mind, it could be viewed that an Israeli win was inevitable. But there are many ways that history could have turned out very differently…

• If the Arab Palestinians hadn’t staged the 1936 revolt, they’d have had a much stronger leadership remaining in 1947 - either to more effectively direct Arab forces, or to moderate the violence and lead public opinion towards accepting a Jewish state and building a new Arab state alongside it.
• If WW2 hadn’t broken out in 1939, the Jewish community may have launched a full-scale revolt of its own, which would probably have been suppressed just as harsly as the Arab revolt, leaving the Jewish leadership and resources much weaker in 1947.
• Israel is lucky that there was international support for partition in 1947 - this wavered almost immediately after the UN vote, and was influenced by the beginnings of the Cold War and international sympathy after the Holocaust.
• If the regular Arab armies had joined the fighting straight away in 1947, or been more committed and unified in 1948, they would probably have defeated the Jewish forces.
• The Palestinian leadership tried at least twice to declare the independence of their own state, both in February and June of 1948, but the Arab League refused to support it.

There are many ‘if’s that could have resulted in the Jewish people failing to secure a state. There are many ‘if’s that could have resulted in the Palestinians establishing a state instead of, or alongside, the Jewish one. The unlikely combination of events that led to the creation of Israel are truly miraculous from a Jewish perspective, and a tragic catastrophe for Palestinians.