1948: A History of the First Arab-Israeli War (15 page)

The UN General Assembly partition plan, 29 November 1947

On 2 December the `ulema, or council of doctors of theology and sacred law, of Al-Azhar University in Cairo-one of Islam's supreme authoritiesproclaimed a "worldwide jihad in defense of Arab Palestine." 164 The Arab UN delegates denounced the resolution and declared that any attempt to implement it would lead to war. Bevin described the Arab reactions to the vote as "even worse than we had expected." A particular worry of Bevin's was the safety of the hundreds of thousands Jews scattered around the Arab world, and particularly the hundred thousand Jews of Baghdad, who were at "risk of having their throats Cut. 11165

Ben-Gurion, too, believed that war would ensue. But still, he argued: "I know of no greater achievement by the Jewish people ... in its long history since it became a people." 166 Though the Arabs could not, or refused to, see it, Resolution 181, besides geopolitically redesigning a sliver of eastern Mediterranean coastline, was an emphatic ethical statement, one of those crossroads in history where morality and realism come together. Or as one Jewish historian later put it: "[It was] Western civilization's gesture of repentance for the Holocaust ... the repayment of a debt owed by those nations that realized that they might have done more to prevent or at least limit the scale of Jewish tragedy during World War 11. 11167 Viewed in the longer span, the vote represented humanity's amends for two thousand years of humiliation and persecution-both by the Christian and Islamic worlds-of the Jews, the world's eternally stateless people, the world's eternal minority. This was the point made by the Jews of Rome when they celebrated the UN decision on i December beside Titus's Arch, "the symbol of our destruction 1877 years ago.,, 168 The Zionists had managed to obtain an international warrant for a small piece of earth for the Jewish people; it remained to translate the warrant into statehood.

When the Arab UN delegates threatened war if partition was endorsed they knew what they were talking about.

In May 1946, a summit of Arab heads of state at Inshas, Egypt, resolved that Palestine must remain "Arab" and that Zionism "constituted a threat not only to Palestine but to the other Arab states and to all the peoples of Islam." 169 The following month, at the special Arab League meeting at Bludan, Syria, the delegates, alongside a public rejection of the recommendations of the Anglo-American Committee and a demand for the cessation of all Jewish immigration to Palestine, secretly decided to help the Palestinian Arabs with funds, arms, and volunteers should it come to an armed struggle.170 The League demanded independence for Palestine as a "unitary" state, with an Arab majority and minority rights for the Jews. The AHC went one better and insisted that the proportion of Jews to Arabs in the unitary state should stand at one to six, meaning that only Jews who lived in Palestine before the British Mandate be eligible for citizenship. 171

At Inshas and Bludan, as in the get-togethers that were to follow, the Arab leaders were driven by internal and interstate considerations as well as by a genuine concern for the fate of Palestine. All the regimes, none of them elected, suffered from a sense of illegitimacy and, hence, vulnerability. All the leaders, or almost all (Jordan's 'Abdullah was the sole exception), lived in perpetual fear of the "street," which could be aroused against them by opposition parties, agitators, or fellow leaders, claiming that they were "selling out" Palestine. As Shertok quoted the Syrian UN delegate Faris al-Khouri as saying in October 1947, the Arab states know they "may be heading for a disaster but they have no choice. They are committed up to the hilt vis-a-vis their own public. The position of all these governments was very weak. They were all tottering; they were all unpopular." They had no choice but to adopt a "firm, unequivocal, uncompromising attitude" on Palestine. 172

The interstate feuding was in large measure fuelled by expansionist ambitions and real or imagined fears of others' expansionist ambitions. Throughout his reign, Prince, later King, 'Abdullah had sought to establish a "Greater Syria" (comprising today's Israel-Palestine, Lebanon, Syria, and Jordan) under his aegis. The heads of the newborn Republic of Syria also hoped to establish a similarly contoured "Greater Syria"-but ruled from Damascus. The Lebanese Christians lived in perpetual fear of a Muslim, and Syrian, takeover (as, in fact, gradually occurred after summer 1976). Abdullah (and the Hashemite royal house of Iraq) also harbored a deep-seated grudge, and expansionist ambitions, vis-a-vis King Ibn Saud, who had supplanted the Hashemites in Hijaz. Moreover, 'Abdullah often talked of "uniting" Jordan and Iraq (again, under his tutelage). For their part, the Saudis regarded Jordan covetously, as did the Egyptians Sudan and, occasionally, southern Palestine. In general, the postwar Arab Middle East was divided into two loosely aligned and antagonistic blocs, one comprising Egypt, Syria, and Saudi Ara bia, the other Jordan and Iraq. The internal Arab League arguments during 1946-1948 tended to follow this coalitional divide (though, on Palestine, the lines of demarcation often blurred, with Iraq and Syria usually taking a harder tack and Egypt and Saudi Arabia pressing for caution). 173

All the Arab leaders distrusted and, in some cases (notably King Abdullah), hated AHC leader Haj Amin al-Husseini and opposed the establishment of an al-Husseini-led Palestinian Arab state; al-Husseini was seen as an inveterate liar and schemer. The mufti, for his part, reciprocated Abdullah's feelings and distrusted the other Arab leaders, suspecting them of seeking to partition Palestine among themselves.

With the approach of the UN General Assembly deliberations in autumn 1947, Arab thinking grew more focused and military. The League's Political Committee met in Sofar, Lebanon, on 16-19 September, and urged the Palestine Arabs to fight partition, which it called "aggression," "without mercy." The League promised them, in line with Bludan, assistance "in manpower, money and equipment" should the United Nations endorse partition. Indeed, warned the committee, the Arab states themselves "would be forced to take decisive action"; the governments, explained the committee, "would be unable to suppress the turbulent passions of their people resulting from the wrong that would be done them [by the passage of the partition resolution] and sit still."174 (The fear of the Arab "street" would figure prominently in the decision-making of most of the Arab regimes as they inched toward the invasion of May 1948.) Secretly, the Political Committee recommended-at Iraq's urging175-that a "technical committee," immediately renamed the Military Committee, be established by the League to oversee the material assistance to the Palestinians. A million pounds were earmarked for the Palestinian Arabs' struggle. 176 In another secret decision, the committee instructed the League's members "to open the gates ... to receive children, women and old people [from Palestine] and to support them in the event of disturbances breaking out in Palestine and compelling some of its Arab population to leave the country."177 The Political Committee's decisions were then endorsed by the Arab heads of state, meeting as the League Council, at Ales, in Lebanon, in the second week of October. (The idea of a mass evacuation from Palestine may already have been doing the rounds among Arab decision-makers more than a year before. Azzam reportedly [or mis-reportedly] declared in May 1946 that "Arab circles proposed to evacuate all Arab women and children from Palestine and send them to neighbouring countries, to declare `Jehad' and to consider Palestine a war zone.") 178

Meanwhile, the Military Committee, consisting of representatives of Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, and the AHC, began functioning under the chairmanship of Ismail Safwat, an out-of-work Iraqi general described (somewhat unfairly) by the British ambassador in Baghdad as a "typically ... old-fashioned Turkish officer, extremely brave and unutterably stupid." 171 Safwat submitted a prescient preliminary report to the League Council on 9 October. He asserted that the Zionists in Palestine were well organized politically, administratively, and militarily, and well armed, and the poorly organized and poorly equipped Palestinians "could not withstand them." The 350,000 Arabs living "in isolated villages and pockets" in the areas earmarked for Jewish sovereignty were facing "destruction." He recommended that the Arab states immediately mobilize, equip, and train volunteers, deploy forces along Palestine's borders, and set up a "general Arab command" that would control all the Arab military forces inside and around Palestine; supply the Palestinian Arabs, as a first stage, with "no less than io,ooo rifles," and machine guns and grenades; and give the Military Committee one million pounds and provide it with officers and noncommissioned officers who could train the volunteers. He also recommended that the Arab states purchase additional weapons for the forces that would be engaged in Palestine.',()

The Arab states failed to set up a "general command" to run the prospective war, leaving the supervision of the assistance to the Palestinians in the hands of the Military Committee. But in line with the committee's recommendations, the League Council secretly resolved that the member states "take military measures," meaning mass troops along the frontiers to intimidate and deter the United Nations and the Great Powers from endorsing partition.is1 During late October-November the Syrians and Egyptians duly deployed several thousand soldiers near the borders, the Syrian "exercises" along the Jaulan (Golan) slightly alarming the British; indeed, a small Syrian force actually crossed the border near Dan, probably inadvertently, on 20 October and was promptly driven back by British troops (without casualties). 182

More significantly, the council endorsed the Military Committee's recommendations regarding the mobilization and training of volunteers and the equipping of the Palestinians. Registration offices were set up in the Arab states under the auspices of local committees "for the defense of Palestine," and a training camp was organized by the Syrian army at Qatana, near Damascus. In November, hundreds of volunteers, mainly from Syria, Iraq, and Palestine, arrived. During the following weeks, some of the trainees, organized in platoon and company formations, were sent off to Palestine's towns to bolster local militias. But most of the volunteers were organized as an embryonic "army," the Arab Liberation (or Salvation) Army (al-Jaish alInqadh)-a name apparently coined by Syrian president al-Quwwatli, the army's patron and founder-to be commanded by Fawzi al-Qawugji. Al Quwwatli was driven at least partly by a desire to offset a prospective Hashemite takeover of Palestine, suspecting that this would be only a stage in realizing King Abdullah's vision of a "Greater Syria" with Amman as its capital. Egypt and the Saudis, too, were no doubt driven to support alQawuqji's appointment and the formation of the ALA from similar anti-Jordanian considerations.'ss

The Tripoli-born al-Qawugji had served as an officer in the Ottoman army, had participated in the Druze revolt against the French Mandate authorities in 1925 -1927, and in 1936 had led a band of several hundred volunteers, mainly from Iraq and Syria, who assisted the Palestine Arabs in their revolt against the British Mandate. He had well-established anti-imperialist credentials. In 1941 he had resurfaced in Rashid 'Ali al-Kilani's Iraqi rebellion against the British and, with the rebellion's demise, had removed to Berlin, where he had sat out the war serving the Nazis by recruiting Muslim volunteers and broadcasting German propaganda. After the war, he returned to Syria and, early in December 1947, was appointed to command the ALA. The appointment was endorsed by the League at its meeting in Cairo in the second week of December-though, somewhat contradictorily (probably to appease the Iraqis and Jordanians), the League also designated Safwat "commander of the national forces," meaning all the local Arabs and foreign volunteers fighting in Palestine.ls4 In effect, al-Qawuqji ended up in full command of the ALA-its training and operations-and the local Palestinian Arab commanders (Abd al-Qadir al-Husseini, Hassan Salame, and others) ended up commanding the various local militias. Safwat was left with a more or less nominal role advising the Arab League on the progress of the war.

Haj Amin al-Husseini was forever turning up uninvited at Arab League summit meetings. Through September-November 1947 he had demanded that the League establish a Palestinian government-in-exile with himself at its head. The League, advised by veteran Palestinian activists (including `Izzat Darwaza and Subhi al-Khidra, sometime members of Saf vat's Military Committee),1ss rebuffed him, as it did his demand that his cousin, Abd alQadir al-Husseini, be appointed overall commander of forces in Palestine. Haj Amin had bitterly opposed al-Qawugji's appointment, mindful of 1936, when al-Qawtugji had contested his leadership of the revolt. In Berlin, the mufti had apparently vilified al-Qawugji as a "British agent."1s' The two hated each other, and the continuing animosity was significantly to contribute to undermining the Palestinian Arab war effort in 1948.187 The militia forces raised by, and aligned with, the Husseinis during the first months of the 1948 War were to operate without coordination with, and often at crosspurposes to, the ALA.

During the League deliberations of September-October 1947, the Iraqis appear to have been the most militant of the member states, "breathing brimstone for home consumption."iss They called for the Arab states to intervene in Palestine even before the Mandate ended. The Egyptians and Saudis led the moderate camp, reluctant to get involved in a war for which they were unready and whose outcome was unpredictable. i'9 They also suspected that a Jordanian or Jordanian-Iraqi invasion would be geared to territorial aggrandizement and nothing else. The League took no operational decisions.

The UN vote on 29 November changed all that. The Arab leaders were now called upon-each by his conscience and his peers and all by internal opposition factions and the "street"-to put their money where their mouths were. Already before the UN vote, Arab politicians had warned that "if a satisfactory solution of the Palestine case was not reached, severe measures should be taken against all Jews in Arab countries." 190 On 24- November the head of the Egyptian delegation to the General Assembly, Muhammad Hussein Heykal, said that "the lives of i,ooo,ooo Jews in Moslem countries would be jeopardized by the establishment of a Jewish state." 191