1948: A History of the First Arab-Israeli War (8 page)

And indeed, it was to be at the initiative of the Arab League that in November 1945 the AHC was reestablished as the supreme executive body of the Palestine Arab community. Months of haggling between the factions had failed to produce agreement. A twelve-member AHC was appointed, with five Husseini representatives, two independents, and five other members, including Gharib Nashashibi, representing the other (now resurrected) pre1939 parties.ss But the return to the Middle East of the mufti's cousin, Jamal Husseini, and renewed Husseini-Opposition quarreling precipitated the disbandment, in March 1946, of the reestablished AHC. The Opposition set up its own organization, the Arab Higher Front, and Jamal reconstituted an AHC manned only by Husseini family members and affiliates. In June, to break the stalemate, the Arab League foreign ministers intervened and, nominally replacing both the AHF and the new AHC, imposed upon the Palestinians a new leadership body, the Arab Higher Executive (AHE), with Haj Amin al-Husseini as (absent) chairman and Jamal Husseini as vice-chairman. The Husseinis were now firmly back in the saddle, this time with the imprimatur of the Arab League. Haj Amin now returned to the Middle East from his temporary refuge in France and began directing Palestinian Arab affairs from Cairo. In January 1947, the nine-member AHE was renamed the AHC.54 The Palestinian Arabs appeared once more to have a relatively unified, if not particularly representative, leadership.

THE YISHUV RISES

But viewed against this political shadowboxing, developments in the Zionist camp proved to be far more significant. If the outbreak of the world war had put an almost immediate brake on Jewish resistance to the white pa per, its approaching end opened the floodgates. No longer was there need to close ranks in the fight against the Nazis; the Third Reich was finished. Moreover, Europe was awash with hundreds of thousands of Holocaust survivors, desperate to rebuild their lives away from the killing fields and, if it was up to the Zionists, to resettle in Palestine. But Britain-meaning the cabinet in London, the Royal Navy in the Mediterranean, and the security forces in Palestine-stood between the DP camps and the Promised Land. On 27 September 1945 the Zionist leadership proclaimed that the blockade was "tantamount to a death sentence upon ... those liberated Jews ... still languishing in ... Germany."ss A revolt that had been postponed for six years was now about to break out.

Already in May 1943 Field Marshal Harold Alexander, commander of Britain's forces in the Middle East, had warned London that there was a "probability" of an anti-British revolt by the Yishuv at war's end: "[The] Jews mean business and are armed and trained."'e A year earlier, in mid-194z, SIME (Secret Intelligence Middle East), the Middle Eastern arm of Britain's Secret Intelligence Service, MI6, had estimated, fairly accurately, that the Haganah had thirty thousand members, with arms for 50-70 percent of them. The IZL could field another thousand trained men, with several thousand supporters.57

The Yishuv had not wasted the war years. More than twenty-six thousand of its men and women had joined the British army and acquired a measure of military training;58 arms had been stolen or illegally purchased, and Haganah numbers had increased. Most significantly, in May-June 1941 the Haganah-with British assistance, as mentioned earlier-had established a small, permanent strike force, the Palmah (an abbreviation of plugot mahatz, or shock companies), headed by Yitzhak Sadeh, the veteran Red Army soldier and Haganah commando leader. The Yishuv leadership regarded the Palmah as both an instantly available crack force to fend off Arab attacks and as a commando unit to be used against the Nazis should the Afrika Korps conquer Palestine.

As it turned out, the Germans failed to break through the Allied defenses in Egypt. Nonetheless, the Palmah saw some action. In June 1941, it provided forty scouts and sappers who accompanied the Allied units that invaded Vichy-controlled Lebanon and Syria. (It was at Eskandelion [Iskenderun], in southern Lebanon, that, leading one reconnaissance squad, Moshe Dayan lost his eye to a Vichy sniper). And during 1943-1945, the Palmah provided the British with some two dozen saboteurs and radio operators who were parachuted into Nazi-occupied Europe to link up with partisan units and threatened Jewish communities.

From 1942, the Palmah constituted a small, standing army, its platoons dispersed among several dozen kibbutzim and two or three towns. The recruits put in a fortnight each month working in the fields (to cover their upkeep) and devoted the rest of their time to training. By war's end, the Palmah had grown to some two thousand men and women.

But another group first disturbed the calm in Palestine. Already in the war's first months, British installations were periodically attacked by the LHI (Lohamei Herut Yisrael or Freedom Fighters of Israel, dubbed "the Stern Gang" by the British). The organization was established in 1939-1941 by several dozen breakaway IZL members who opposed the truce with the British. The LHI-led initially by Avraham ("Yair") Stern-continued to view the British, not the Germans, as the Jewish people's main enemy; it was the British who were preventing Jews from escaping Europe, reaching Palestine, and attaining independence.

At the end of 194o, the LHI tried to establish an "alliance" with Nazi Germany for the "common" struggle against Britain. An operative named Naftali Lubinczik was sent to Beirut, where he made contact with Otto Werner von Hentig, a German Foreign Ministry official and intelligence officer, and explicitly offered "military, political and intelligence" cooperation. But Berlin was uninterested. Lubinczik returned to Palestine, where the British jailed him. But Stern was not easily deterred. At the end of 1941, some months after the beginning of the Holocaust, with the Afrika Korps at the gates of Egypt, Stern tried again. He dispatched one of his deputies, Natan Friedman-Yelin, to make contact with German officials in Turkey, with instructions to propose that Germany allow out hundreds of thousands of Balkan Jews. What he was to offer the Nazis in return is not clear. In any event, he got only as far as Aleppo, where Allied police picked him up.59

Nor did the LHI's campaign in 1940-1943 in Palestine amount to much. The LHI's minute size, Haganah and IZL tip-offs, and effective British clampdowns saw to that. LHI operations were limited almost completely to thefts of weaponry (sometimes from Jewish caches rather than British military stockpiles) and bank robberies. In one payroll heist, in January 1942, LHI gunmen shot dead two Histadrut officials.

But starting in 1944, the British faced a far more serious challenge. On i February, several days after Menachem Begin, a leader of the Revisionist movement in Poland and an ex-Polish army soldier, took over command of the organization, the IZL announced the resumption of the armed struggle. The war in Europe was near its end, and Britain was still barring the door to Palestine. The IZL, like the LHI and some senior mainstream Zionist leaders, felt that the Arabs were insignificant: the main battle for Jewish statehood would have to be fought against the British. During February, IZL squads New up government immigration and income tax offices; in March, they attacked a series of police buildings. On 17 May, IZL squads raided the British radio station in Ramallah and, on 22 August, attacked the British police headquarters in Tel Aviv-Jaffa. On 27 September, the organization attacked police stations in Beit Dajan, Qalqilya, Haifa, and Qatra. On 8 August, the LHI tried to assassinate the high commissioner in Palestine, Harold MacMichael.60

The mainstream Zionist leadership and press roundly condemned the dissidents' attacks. The Irgun members were labeled "misguided terrorists," "young fanatics crazed by the sufferings of their people into believing that destruction will bring healing .1161 Under Zionist mainstream pressure, the LHI suspended its attacks in November 1944, after its members assassinated the British minister of state in the Middle East, Lord Moyne, in Cairo. But the IZL defied the JAE and continued its attacks. The Haganah declared an "open hunting season" (in Zionist historiography, the "Saison") against the IZL, and Haganah intelligence and Palmah teams systematically assaulted and incarcerated IZL members, confiscated their weapons caches, and occasionally handed them or their names and addresses to the British. The Saison lasted from November 1944 to March 1945.62

But the changed international situation and growing activist rumblings within the Haganah eventually issued in a radical change of tack. The end of the war in Europe triggered the reopening of the struggle against the white paper by mainstream Zionism. In June, a Jewish Agency memorandum demanded that Britain allow a hundred thousand immigrants into Palestine immediately;6a the DPs could not be allowed open-endedly to languish in Europe "among the graveyards of the millions of their slaughtered brethren," Ben-Gurion declared.64

Churchill wondered whether Britain could cast off the burden of Palestine: "I do not think we should take the responsibility upon ourselves of managing this very difficult place while the Americans sit back and criticize," he wrote on 6 July. "I am not aware of the slightest advantage which has ever accrued to Great Britain from this painful and thankless task. Somebody else should have their turn now."65 But Churchill never got the chance. In the general elections that month he was swept from office and a Labour government, headed by ClementAttlee, took over. Ernest Bevin, no friend of Zionism, became foreign secretary. In August Bevin proposed that immigration to Palestine be limited to fifteen hundred per month. Weizmann and BenGurion demurred, and so, within weeks, would Truman.

Truman had sent Earl G. Harrison, the US representative on the Intergovernmental Committee on Refugees, to visit the European DP camps, many of them run and financed by the American occupation authorities. Harrison found that the DPs wanted to immigrate to Palestine and recommended that Britain immediately issue one hundred thousand additional entry certificates. Truman forwarded the recommendation to Attlee with an in-principle endorsement. In mid-October 1945, ignoring a British request for discretion, Truman publicly supported the "ioo,ooo" recommendation. London was furious.

This diplomatic drama played out against the background of increasing anti-British violence in Palestine. The IZL and LHI, who had continued to attack police stations, telephone poles, and banks, were joined in early October by the Haganah, nonplussed by the result of the British elections and Labour's abandonment (or betrayal) of the Zionist cause (the year before, the Labour Party Executive had even advocated the transfer ofArabs out of the prospective Jewish state). The three armed groups negotiated a formal accord, known as the Hebrew Rebellion Movement (tnu`athameri ha`ivri), and on the night of 9-io October several Palmah squads raided the British detention camp at Atlit and freed 2o8 incarcerated illegal immigrants.''' What followed was even more dramatic: on the night of i November Palmah sappers blew up railway tracks at 153 points around Palestine and, a few days later, destroyed a patrol vessel and two British coast guard stations, at Giv`at Olga and Sayidna Ali. The British reacted byraiding a handful of kibbutzim, which were suspected of housing illegal immigrants, and panicky troops killed nine civilians and wounded sixty-three. Anti-British emotions crested. Bombings of British installations continued through the winter and spring, culminating in the spectacular simultaneous destruction by Palmah sappers, on the night of 17 June 1946, of eleven bridges connecting Palestine to Transjordan, Syria, Lebanon, and Egypt.

Meanwhile, the Haganah renewed its illegal immigration campaign. Boats were intercepted by the Royal Navy and their passengers interned. But others got through. Between August 1945 and 14 May 1948, some 70,700 illegals landed on Palestine's shores. The Zionist leadership understandably used the plight of the DPs to further Zionist goals, even occasionally risking and sacrificing lives to further the movement's ends.67 As the leaders understood, Britain's dilemma was stark: to stick to its guns and flatly reject Truman's "ioo,ooo" proposal would jeopardize the cornerstone of British foreign policy, the Anglo-American alliance-at a time when American goodwill was vital on a broad front of political, military, and economic issues (containing Soviet expansionism, keeping the British pound afloat, and so on). But to allow the hundred thousand into Palestine would enrage the Arab world and invite renewed rebellion in Palestine and, possibly, general turbulence in the Middle East. A foretaste was provided on 2 November 1945, when Arab mobs rioted across the Middle East and North Africa, burning Jewish shops, homes, and synagogues in Alexandria, and slaughtering about a hundred Jews in British-governed Tripolitania (Libya).68

Whitehall chose the path of least resistance-the establishment of yet another committee of inquiry, this time jointly with the Americans. At the very least it would buy a few months; and perhaps it would result in mobilizing Washington to share costs and/or responsibility. The British wanted the committee to focus on the DPs, with "Palestine" to be omitted from the terms of reference. Washington objected. The appointment of the AngloAmerican Committee (AAC) was announced on 13 November. The threat of an Anglo-American rupture was averted, and the Haganah briefly suspended its attacks to enable the inquiry to go forward in an atmosphere of relative calm.

The twelve-man committee was instructed "to examine political, economic and social conditions in Palestine as they bear upon the problem of Jewish immigration and settlement therein" and "to examine the position of the Jews in those countries in Europe where they have been victims of Nazi and Fascist persecution, [to assess how they might be reintegrated in those countries,] ... and to make estimates of those who wish or will be impelled by their conditions to migrate to Palestine or other countries outside Europe."6'9

The AAC-the "twelve apostles," as they were dubbed-was chaired by a British judge, Sir John Singleton, and included the American Quaker Frank Aydelotte, director of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, James McDonald, former League of Nations high commissioner for Refugees from Germany, Pulitzer Prize-winner Frank W. Buxton, a former editor of the Boston Herald, and lawyer Bartley Crum; and British Labour Party MP and assistant editor of the New Statesman and Nation Richard H. S. Crossman; Conservative Party MP Reginald E. Manningham-Buller; and Labour's Lord Robert C. Morrison.