Reviews of 1948: A History of the First Arab-Israeli War
Foreign Affairs Review
New York Times Review
Boston Globe Review
This history
of the foundational war in the Arab-Israeli conflict is groundbreaking,
objective, and deeply revisionist. A riveting account of the military
engagements, it also focuses on the war's political dimensions. Benny
Morris probes the motives and aims of the protagonists on the basis of
newly opened Israeli and Western documentation. The Arab side where the
archives are still closed is illuminated with the help of intelligence
and diplomatic materials.
Morris
stresses the jihadi
character of the two-stage Arab assault on the Jewish community in
Palestine. Throughout, he examines the dialectic between the war's
military and political developments and highlights the military impetus
in the creation of the refugee problem, which was a by-product of the
disintegration of Palestinian Arab society. The book thoroughly
investigates the role of the Great Powers Britain, the United States,
and the Soviet Union in shaping the conflict and its tentative
termination in 1949. Morris looks both at high politics and general
staff decision-making processes and at the nitty-gritty of combat in
the successive battles that resulted in the emergence of the
State of
Israel and the humiliation of the Arab world, a humiliation that
underlies the continued Arab antagonism toward Israel.
Benny
Morris is professor of history in the Middle East Studies Department of
Ben-Gurion University, Israel. He is the leading figure among Israel's
"New Historians," who over the past two decades have reshaped our
understanding of the Israeli-Arab conflict. His books include Righteous
Victims: A History of the Zionist-Arab Conflict, 1881-2001; Israel's
Border Wars, 1949-1956; and The Birth of the Palestinian
Refugee Problem Revisited.
Confirmed
as alternate for History Book Club/Military Book Club; July brochure,
which announces 5/22/08. Club will print 2,000 copies
From Foreign Affairs, September/October 2008
1948: A History of the First Arab-Israeli War.
Benny Morris. Yale University Press, 2008, 544 $32.50
Summary: Israel should pull back settlements and give up its '67
gains in order to secure its '48 victory.
Shlomo Ben-Ami was Israel's Foreign Minister in 2000-2001. He is Vice
President of the Toledo International Center for Peace, in Spain, and
the author of Scars of War, Wounds of Peace: The Israeli-Arab Tragedy.
For 60 years, both the Israelis and the Palestinians have used the
past to illuminate the present and confer legitimacy on their nations'
respective founding myths. Of course, Zionists and Palestinian
nationalists were not the first to embellish the stories of their
nations' births or make excuses for their tragedies. Throughout
history, nations have been born in blood and frequently in sin. This is
why, as the French philosopher Ernest Renan wrote, they tend to lie
about their pasts.
The birth of the state of Israel in 1948 has long been the subject of
self-congratulatory historiography by the victorious side and
grievance-filled accounts by disinherited Palestinians. To the
Israelis, the 1948 war was a desperate fight for survival that was
settled by an almost miraculous victory. In the Arab world, accounts of
the war tend to advance conspiracy theories and attempt to shift the
blame for the Arabs' defeat. In both cases, the writing of history has
been part of an uncritical nationalist quest for legitimacy.
Refusing to admit that the noble Jewish dream of statehood was stained
by the sins of Israel's birth and eager to deny the centrality of the
Palestinian problem to the wider conflict in the Middle East, the
Israelis have preferred to dwell on their struggle for independence
against the supposedly superior invading Arab armies. But the war
between the indigenous Palestinian population and the Yishuv, the
organized Jewish community of Palestine, was arguably the fiercest
phase of the conflict. It was during this period -- between November
30, 1947, and May 15, 1948 -- that the fate of the nascent Jewish state
really seemed to hang by a thread. Nevertheless, the popular notion
cultivated since then has repressed the memory of this fighting and
focused instead on the heroic stand of the tiny Yishuv against the
invading Arab armies during the second phase of the war, from May 15,
1948, to the spring of 1949. When the war was over, the Palestinian
problem practically disappeared from Israeli public debate, or it was
conveniently defined as one of "refugees" or "infiltrators." It was as
if there were no Israeli-Palestinian conflict or Palestinian people. As
Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir famously put it in 1969, "They did
not exist."
LONG REVISION
During the 1980s, a group known as the new historians began to
challenge the Zionist mythology surrounding Israel's birth. These
Israeli revisionist scholars -- Simha Flapan, Ilan Pappé, and Avi
Shlaim, among others -- unearthed documents that challenged the
conventional view of the war as a clash between a Jewish David and an
Arab Goliath. They also argued that the war was really the story of
Arab states betraying the Palestinian cause and showed that there was
collusion between some Arabs and the Jews -- as when Trans-jordan and
the Yishuv conspired to prevent the creation of a Palestinian state. In
other cases, the new historians argued, Arab states rushed to grab land
at the expense of the Palestinians or their own rivals in the Arab
coalition.
But it was Benny Morris who addressed the most sensitive issue of all:
the refugee crisis. His book The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee
Problem, 1947-1949, published in 1987, remains the single most
important work on the thorniest moral and political issue underlying
the Israeli-Palestinian conundrum. It recounts the often violent
expulsion of 700,000 Arabs as Jewish soldiers conquered villages and
towns throughout Palestine. For bravely and masterfully advancing a new
narrative of Israel's birth, he paid a heavy personal price. Denounced
as an "anti-Zionist" after the publication of his 1987 book, Morris was
denied tenure by practically every department of history in the
country. It was not until 1996, when then President Ezer Weizman
summoned Morris to his office and asked him to affirm his belief in
Israel's right to exist that Morris was given a job at Ben-Gurion
University of the Negev.
More than any other revisionist, Morris has singled himself out by
drawing a line between his views as a historian and his views as a
citizen, between his pathbreaking interpretation of the past and his
controversial and politically incorrect views about the present. Once a
peacenik with impeccable credentials -- he went to jail for refusing to
serve as an Israeli army reservist in the occupied territories during
the first intifada, in 1987 -- Morris has gradually drifted, together
with most Israelis, toward a position vehemently critical of the
Palestinians. He has blamed Palestinian leaders for the collapse of the
Oslo peace process and the al Aqsa intifada, which began in September
2000.
In January 2004, Morris famously lamented that the architects of
Israel's 1948 war strategy had not more thoroughly purged the Jewish
state of its Arab population. Morris told the Haaretz journalist Ari
Shavit, "If [David] Ben-Gurion [Israel's first prime minister] had
carried out a large expulsion and cleansed the whole country -- the
whole Land of Israel, as far as the Jordan River . . . he would have
stabilized the State of Israel for generations. . . . If the end of the
story turns out to be a gloomy one for the Jews, it will be because
Ben-Gurion did not complete the transfer in 1948." His statement
shocked many of his old admirers and fellow revisionist scholars. But
even if his left-wing critics consider him a controversial citizen of
the present, Morris remains an honest and superbly professional student
of the past.
The ability to engage in a sober inquiry into the past is an essential
test of free societies and truly democratic academic institutions, and
the challenges that the new historians have posed to traditional myths
surrounding the birth of Israel represent a major contribution to both
historiography and the country's identity. The revisionists' work has
had political consequences as well: the Israeli-Palestinian peace
process of the 1990s was nurtured by their reshaping of the national
Zeitgeist in Israel. The introduction of powerful new arguments about
1948 has influenced the views of politicians and peace negotiators,
too, whether they admit it or not. (The speech I gave as head of the
Israeli delegation during the 1992 multilateral talks on Palestinian
refugees in Ottawa, Canada, was profoundly influenced by Morris' work.)
No such new history has yet emerged in the Arab world, nor have any
Arab archives been opened to allow for such a fresh perspective. Most
Arab historians continue to absolve their countries' militaries of all
responsibility for the defeat. By exonerating the Arab armies and
attributing their failure to the treachery and incompetence of
conservative civilian elites, such scholars provided legitimacy for the
revolutionary military regimes that took power across the Arab world
after 1948.
REWRITING THE CREATION
Morris' latest book, 1948, is likely to become the most definitive
study of the first Arab-Israeli war. On each and every facet of the
conflict -- military strategy, human rights abuses, the refugee crisis,
diplomacy, and propaganda -- it is an extraordinary tour de force.
Exhaustive, although at times exhausting, it is a meticulous and
authoritative narrative.
Morris' scholarship spares no Israeli founding myth, especially not
the notion of Israel's "purity of arms" (one element of the Israel
Defense Force's code of ethics, which dictates that force be used only
in the pursuit of soldiers' missions), an idea that remains central to
the nation's self-image as morally superior to its enemies. Morris
supports his arguments with vast numbers of primary sources and always
places his findings in their proper context. The atrocities and
evictions suffered by Arab communities took place sometimes in the
storm of battle, sometimes as the Yishuv's forces sought to secure
roads linking Jewish settlements, and frequently in response to
explicit orders from generals on the battlefield. Morris shows that the
Zionists committed more massacres than the Arabs, deliberately killed
far more civilians and prisoners of war, and committed more acts of
rape. The Arabs, he claims, were responsible for only two large
massacres: the December 1947 killing of 39 Jewish workers at the Haifa
oil refinery and the Kfar Etzion slaughter of 150 Jews in May 1948.
With painstaking detail, Morris exonerates the Arab side for what
others have called a massacre: the destruction of a convoy of doctors
and nurses on Mount Scopus in April 1948. According to Morris, this
incident was simply a battle.
In 1948, Morris transcends the arithmetic approach -- with its emphasis
on the number of troops on the ground -- that characterizes so many
other revisionist accounts of the 1948 war. Certainly, the
organizational capacity of the Yishuv was formidable; it managed to
mobilize 13 percent of the Jewish population in the name of protecting
the nation's precarious existence, a level of mobilization practically
unknown in the annals of military history. Yet as Morris rightly points
out, battlefield strength was never the Zionists' only concern; even
more troubling was the fact that the Yishuv was encircled by large,
hostile Arab states whose armies could easily retreat, recover, and be
ready for the next round. Accounts that focus on the number of troops
on the ground ignore the traumatic memory of the destruction of
European Jewry, the Yishuv's deep sense of insecurity, and its tendency
to see every battle in apocalyptic terms. Even today, Israel has not
overcome the legacy of the Holocaust; its status as a regional power
has not diminished its existential fears.
The Palestinian Arabs' war against the Yishuv in 1947-48 may have
been disorganized and spontaneous, but the Palestinians almost
succeeded in causing the United States to reverse its support for a
Jewish state. The White House backed partition, but the State
Department opposed it for fear of alienating Arab states. Zionist
leaders were convinced that if the Yishuv appeared to be losing, the
State Department's position would gain sway in Washington. Morris makes
the compelling argument that the Yishuv's shift from a defensive stance
to an offensive strategy in early April 1948 stemmed not only from
signs of an impending Arab invasion but also from its fear that the
superpowers would abandon their commitment to partition. The Yishuv's
military doctrine -- as it had been conceived by the Jewish militias in
the 1930s and was masterfully put into practice in the spring of 1948
-- was essentially one of offensive defense. The leaders of the Yishuv
understood that crushing the Palestinian militias and securing control
of the main roads were vital to repelling the imminent Arab invasion
and convincing the international community to maintain its commitment
to an independent Jewish state. And the victories they won as a result
helped demarcate the boundaries of the new state.
The notorious Plan D, a controversial measure adopted by Ben-Gurion in
March 1948, was part of this offensive strategy. Morris' impressive
treatment of this phase of the war demonstrates that Plan D was not, as
is commonly believed, a master design for the complete occupation of
Palestine and the massacre or forceful eviction of its Arab population.
Rather, it was a push to extend the frontiers of the future Jewish
state beyond the partition lines by linking Jewish population hubs to
outlying settlements. The armistice lines were determined later, after
the Arab front collapsed, Jewish forces won unexpected victories, and
the Yishuv's leaders seized the opportunity to occupy more and more
land. As Arab villages, towns, and then entire regions fell to Jewish
forces, the Yishuv sought to bolster its claim to statehood by creating
facts on the ground.
THE PALESTINIAN EXODUS
In many ways, the Arabs of Palestine had already lost the 1948 war
-- or the nakba (catastrophe), as it is also known -- ten years
earlier, during the Arab revolt of 1936-39. That revolt, which sought
to limit Jewish immigration to Palestine and halt the Zionists'
acquisition of Arab land, reflected rage and blind despair more than
organization or careful strategy. As Morris, the Palestinian American
historian Rashid Khalidi, and others have shown, the Palestinian Arabs
suffered a crippling defeat that left them in a state of fatalistic
disarray. During the years that followed, the Palestinian community was
so dismembered that when it faced the challenge of partition and war in
1947 and 1948, it was no longer master of its own destiny. Outsiders
from neighboring Arab states had begun to play an increasingly central
role in determining its fate.
By intervening in May 1948, the Arab states sought to kill the
partition plan, acquire new territory, and placate public opinion at
home. The Arab leaders constantly blundered due to their penchant for
belligerent rhetoric and their deeply held view that the Jewish
presence in Palestine was merely transitory -- a repetition of the
crusaders' failed experiment to put down roots in the Holy Land. Their
defeat in 1948 underscored what would be the central paradoxes of Arab
politics for years to come: How would Arab leaders reconcile their
proclaimed intention to do away with the Jewish state with their fear
of its military power? How would they placate and control the "Arab
street," which they had themselves incited with bellicose language? And
how would they demonstrate their support for the liberation of
Palestine while advancing their own particular agendas at the
Palestinians' expense?
Israel's leaders were not blind to the evolving Palestinian tragedy.
It was Ben-Gurion's profound awareness that a monumental disaster had
befallen the Palestinians that eventually turned the prime minister
into an incorrigible pessimist about the prospects for Arab-Israeli
peace. The hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees who flooded
surrounding Arab countries during the 1948 war were not evicted under
instructions from the Israeli cabinet. Still, the lack of explicit
government directives does not absolve the Israelis of responsibility.
In an update to his earlier study on the subject, Morris found that far
more Palestinians were expelled on explicit orders from commanders in
the field than fled for fear of military attacks. And in some cases,
Ben-Gurion personally authorized such orders without informing his
government.
This is not surprising given that the idea of population transfers
had a long and solid pedigree in Zionist thought. The evictions of 1948
stemmed from an ideological predisposition in the Jewish community and
a cultural and political environment that made military commanders feel
comfortable initiating or encouraging the mass eviction of Arabs.
Zionist leaders differed on many issues, but they generally agreed, as
Morris points out, on the benefits of "transfer" -- a euphemism for
"expulsion." The idea of forced transfer was explicitly endorsed by the
British government's 1937 Peel Commission on Palestine, and Jewish
forces began to implement it in the storm of battle in 1948. In October
of that year, on the eve of Operation Hiram, which led to the expulsion
of many of the Arabs of the northern Galilee region, Ben-Gurion
declared, "The Arabs of the Land of Israel have only one function left
to them -- to run away." And they did; panic-stricken, they fled in the
face of massacres in Ein Zeitun and Eilabun, just as they had done in
the wake of an earlier massacre in Deir Yassin. Operational orders,
such as the instruction from Moshe Carmel, the Israeli commander of the
northern front, "to attack in order to conquer, to kill among the men,
to destroy and burn the villages," were carved into the collective
memory of the Palestinians, spawning hatred and resentment for
generations.
There are only two points on which Morris' splendid analysis falters.
He is unconvincing in his attempt to pardon some of Israel's original
sins by creating an awkward symmetry between the Palestinian refugee
crisis and the forced emigration of 600,000 Jews from Arab countries
and Iran, which Morris quotes Israeli leaders as calling "an unplanned
'exchange of population.'" Regimes hostile to Israel were not alone in
getting Jews to leave; envoys from the Mossad, Israel's intelligence
agency, and from the Jewish Agency were working underground in several
Middle Eastern countries to encourage Jews to go to Israel. More
important, for many Jews in the region, the very possibility of
immigrating to Israel was the culmination of millenarian dreams. It
represented the consummation of a quest to take part in Israel's
resurgence as a nation. No matter how painful the memory of their
eviction or how humiliating their second-class status in Israel, these
new Israelis never sought to return to their lands of origin. By
contrast, the Palestinian refugees were forced into the wilderness of
exile with no guarantee of a new national home and no prospect of
returning to their native land. The yearning for return thus became the
Palestinians' defining national ethos.
Morris' characterization of the conflict of 1948 as an Islamic jihad
against Jewish-Western infidels in Palestine is also unpersuasive. It
is true that the figurehead of Palestinian nationalism at the time was
the fanatically religious and viscerally anti-Semitic mufti of
Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini. And Arab discourse during 1948 was
occasionally peppered with the rhetoric of holy war: the Syrian author
Vadi'a Talhuq's book A New Crusade in Palestine, published on the eve
of the Arab invasion, compared the war to the liberation of Palestine
from the crusaders. Yet Israel in 1948 was no tool of the West. On the
contrary, it could not have won the war without arms shipments from the
Soviet bloc. The socialist nature of Israeli society at the time
prompted Egypt's prime minister, Mahmud al-Nuqrashi, to define Israel
as an agent of "atheism and nihilist Communism." And the Zionists' Arab
enemies were hardly under the control of Islamic movements. They were
all ruled by decadent conservative elites who paid nothing more than
lip service to Islamic values and the religious hysteria on the Arab
street. Broadcasters and agitators rallied the masses under the banner
of a holy war against the nascent Jewish state. But the Muslim
Brotherhood sent only one battalion to fight in Palestine. It was
ill-trained conventional armies, not Hezbollah-style guerrilla units,
that led the Arab assault in 1948. After the defeat, rather than
pursuing jihad against Israel, the conservative Arab regimes signed an
armistice agreement granting legitimacy to Israel's 1948 borders. And
between 1949 and 1952, they all attempted to reach permanent peace
agreements with the Jewish state.
THE ZIONIST TIME WARP
The past still casts its shadow on the present in disturbing ways.
Morris' scrupulous research shows how the 1948 expulsion of the
Palestinian Arabs was in no small measure driven by a desire for land
among Israeli settlers, who grabbed it and then actively pressured the
Israeli government to prevent the Arab refugees from returning to their
villages. In 1967, a powerful group of settlers in the Galilee region
pressured the government to take over the Golan Heights. The hunger for
land persists to this day, as settlers lobby politicians to allow the
expansion of outposts in the West Bank. The redemption of the land of
Israel by settling it -- which was encouraged just as enthusiastically
by Labor Zionists as by those on the right -- was always central to the
Zionist enterprise. So, too, was the creation of strategic settlements
along the state's borders that could serve as its defensive shield in
the case of an invasion. These border kibbutzim served their purpose
during the 1948 war, curtailing Palestinian assaults and obstructing
the path of the invading Arab armies.
Unfortunately, Zionist thinking got fossilized at that point. What had
worked in 1948 was no longer useful during the Yom Kippur War of 1973,
when the Golan Heights settlements had to be evacuated to give the
Israeli army proper freedom of movement. And in today's era of
long-range ballistic warfare, the belts of Jewish settlements in the
West Bank along the Jordan River and the old Green Line offer Israel no
military advantage whatsoever. The Zionist tradition of support for
settlements should be challenged on political grounds as well; after
all, a normal state is not supposed to occupy land beyond its
legitimate borders. The Zionist movement created a state that was
admitted to the United Nations and aspires to have orderly relations
with the international community. Yet this state continues to behave as
if it were the old Yishuv bent on outsmarting a colonial occupier and
the local Arab population. And the complex web of settlements it has
spread across the West Bank now make negotiating a two-state solution a
logistical nightmare.
This geographic puzzle has prompted certain observers to call for a
binational state. Some, such as the British historian Tony Judt, are
disillusioned former Zionists. Others, such as Pappé, believe that
exposing the lies of the past requires reversing the course of history:
undoing the Jewish state and going back to the supposedly happy days of
Arab-Jewish coexistence in a binational community. The notion of
returning to a peaceful paradise lost is not new, but it has never been
practical. It was severely damaged during the Arab revolt of 1936-39
and then shattered by the 1948 war, when Arab-Jewish fighting over the
same piece of land and for demographic superiority deflated lofty
dreams of coexistence. As Morris describes both in his previous book
Righteous Victims and in 1948, separation became a logical goal for the
Zionists after the Arab revolt. But the idea was never natural for the
Palestinian national movement. Many Palestinian nationalists wanted an
Arab state with a Jewish minority; it was Yasir Arafat who eventually
imposed the two-state solution on them. Now that he is dead, there is
no one left to lend it legitimacy.
Morris' somber concluding chapter is fatalistic about the chances
for peace, because the catastrophe of 1948 still haunts the Arab world.
Yet the 1990s did offer some glimmers of hope. The irrational
all-or-nothing politics that dominated both sides after the 1948 war
faded as the Arab-Israeli conflict went through an unmistakable process
of secularization. The same Arafat who had joined the Muslim
Brotherhood's battalion in 1948 in its holy war against the Jews in
Palestine accepted the idea of two separate states in 1988 and led his
people into the Oslo process in 1993. The pragmatic peace agreements
that Israel concluded with Egypt and Jordan, Israel's peace
negotiations with Syria's secular Baathist regime, and its signing of
the Oslo accords with Arafat's Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO)
all reflected a sober drive to transform the conflict from an
apocalyptic clash into a soluble political dispute.
However, the collapse of the Oslo process damaged the popularity of the
two-state solution. The failure of the Camp David talks in the summer
of 2000 left the al Aqsa intifada in its wake, and Israel's persistent
policy of expanding the settlements has severely undermined the
Palestinians' trust in the two-state idea. Arafat's exiled PLO
leadership (the "outsiders") had imposed its rule on young local
leaders committed to resistance (the "insiders"). So long as Arafat was
alive, he managed to control these detractors. But after his death, in
2004, insiders in both Fatah and Hamas returned in full force to
challenge the decrepit Oslo-era clique led by Arafat's nominal
replacement, Mahmoud Abbas. Secular nationalism in the Palestinian
territories, and throughout the Arab world, is now in decline. It is
being swept away by Islamic fundamentalism. Everywhere, loyalty to the
state and the nation is being superseded by loyalty to Islam.
Palestinians are moving away from Arafat's pragmatic nationalism toward
revolutionary and maximalist positions on issues such as the return of
refugees and the liberation of prepartition Palestine.
It is worth remembering that Arab armies did not invade Palestine in
1948 for the sake of the Palestinians; it was their war against the
Jews that drew Arab governments into the Palestinian question. Still,
any future resolution of the broader Arab-Israeli conflict will depend
on a final settlement of the Palestinian question. Israel has already
managed to force the entire Arab world to accept the legitimacy of its
1967 borders prior to the Six-Day War -- as evidenced by the peace plan
offered by the Arab League in 2002. It must now belatedly seize this
unique opportunity and negotiate peace agreements with Syria, Lebanon,
and the Palestinians for a return to the June 4, 1967, lines --
essentially the same borders established in the aftermath of Israel's
crushing 1948 victory.
A failure to do so, coupled with rapidly shifting demographic trends
-- namely, a higher birthrate among Arabs than among Jews -- will
permanently destroy the credibility of the two-state solution, allowing
the binational model to gain sway among the Palestinians as they become
a majority. A binational state would lead to a situation resembling the
old South Africa, with two classes of citizens possessing vastly
different political and civil rights. Worse, such a development would
not lend itself to a peaceful South African-style solution, because
Israel, with its superior might, would never concede power to a
Palestinian majority as white South Africans eventually did to the
black majority in 1994. The only alternative scenario would be Israel's
unilateral disengagement to lines determined by the separation barrier,
which annexes about eight percent of the West Bank. And this would, in
all probability, leave a Hamas state on Israel's borders.
To avoid these disastrous scenarios, Israel must admit once and for
all that the territorial phase of Zionism has ended, dismantle most of
the West Bank settlements, and help create a viable Palestinian state
as soon as possible. This is Israel's only chance to seal its 1948
victory -- which has been constantly challenged ever since -- before
the swelling tide of Islamic fundamentalism drowns the existing Arab
regimes and dooms the prospects of an enduring Arab-Israeli peace.
___
Copyright 2002--2008 by the Council on
Foreign Relations. All rights reserved.
Endless War
Associated Press. Arab refugees in northern Israel
on the road to Lebanon, November 1948.
By DAVID MARGOLICK
It was not one of the celebrated moments of what the Israelis call
the War of Independence and the Palestinians call Al
Nakba, the Catastrophe. But it is one of the more arresting ones.
In late August 1948, during a United Nations-sanctioned
truce, Israeli soldiers conducting what they called Mivtza Nikayon
Operation Cleaning encountered some Palestinian refugees just north
of the Egyptian lines. The Palestinians had returned to their village,
now in Israeli hands, because their animals were there, and because
there were crops to harvest and because they were hungry. But to the
Israelis, they were potential fighters, or fifth columnists in the
brand new Jewish state. The Israelis killed them, then burned their
homes.
As much as in any other scene in this meticulous,
disturbing and frustrating book, the ineffable tragedy of Israelis and
Palestinians resides in that brutal, heartbreaking image. On the one
hand, the Jews were fighting for a safe haven three years after six
million of them had been murdered. Undoubtedly some of those soldiers
on patrol that day were survivors themselves, who'd lost their entire
families in Europe and been handed rifles after washing ashore in Haifa
or Tel Aviv.
And then there were the Palestinians, who had
watched in horror over the past 75 years as these aliens first
trickled, then poured, into their homeland. Were he an Arab leader,
David Ben-Gurion once confessed to the Zionist official Nahum Goldmann,
he, too, would wage perpetual war with Israel. Sure, God promised it
to us, but what does that matter to them? he asked. There has been
anti-Semitism, the Nazis, Hitler, Auschwitz, but
was that their fault? They only see one thing: We have come here and
stolen their country.
The
history of the 1948 war desperately needs to be told, since it's so
barely understood or remembered and since so many of the issues that
plague us today had their roots in that struggle. Much of that history
is military: how the dramatically outnumbered Jews managed to defeat
first the Arabs of Palestine, then the combined armies of Egypt,
Jordan, Iraq and Syria, along with a smattering of Sudanese, Yemenites,
Moroccans, Saudis, Lebanese and others. But arguably even more
important than the soldiers are the civilians, specifically the 700,000
Palestinians who fled as the war raged. To understand the Palestinians
who now fire rockets from Gaza or become suicide bombers from Nablus,
it helps to know how their fathers and grandfathers wound up in Gaza or
Nablus in the first place.
No one is better suited to the task
than Benny Morris, the Israeli historian who, in previous works, has
cast an original and skeptical eye on his country's founding myths.
Whatever controversy he has stirred in the past, Morris relates the
story of his new book soberly and somberly, evenhandedly and
exhaustively. Definitely exhaustively, for 1948 can feel like 1948:
that is, hard slogging. Some books can be both very important and very
hard to read.
On Nov. 29, 1947, the United Nations General Assembly
approved a plan to split Palestine into Jewish and Arab states. The as
yet unnamed Jewish state or, as they say in Arabic, Zionist entity
would be tiny and divided: nearly half its citizens would be Arabs.
Still, the Jews danced the hora that day on the streets of Tel Aviv.
Ben-Gurion, who'd spent 40 years working toward that end, didn't join.
I could only think that they were all going to war, he said.
Within
hours, he was right. Through the following May, when the British
Mandate expired, civil war raged in Palestine. On paper and on the
ground, the Palestinians had the edge: there were twice as many of
them, they occupied the higher altitudes and they had friendly regimes
next door. But isolated and outnumbered as they were, the Jews were far
better organized, motivated, financed, equipped and trained than their
adversaries, who were so fragmented by geography and tradition and
clan that the term Palestinian was either unwarranted or at least
premature. The war became a rout once the Jews took the offensive, and
the Palestinian refugee crisis began (if crisis can be used to
describe anything so chronic). On all this, Morris excels.
Transfer
or expulsion or ethnic cleansing was never an explicit part of the
Zionist program, even among its more extreme elements, Morris observes.
The first Arabs who left their homes did so on their own, expecting to
return once the Jews lost or the fighting stopped. The Jewish mayor of
Haifa begged Arab residents to stay; Golda Meir, then head of the
Jewish Agency Political Department, called the exodus dreadful and
even likened it to what had befallen the Jews in Nazi-occupied Europe.
While Jewish atrocities notably, the infamous massacre at Deir Yassin
were very real, apocalyptic Arab broadcasts induced further flight
and depicted as traitors those who chose to stay behind.
But once the Palestinian exodus began, Jewish leaders, struck by their
good fortune, first encouraged it, then coerced it, then sought to make
it stick. After all, the country needed room for Hitler's victims, as
well as for those Jews fleeing Arab countries. And it also had to
protect itself against insurrectionists in its midst. The Arabs, it was
said, had only themselves to blame for the upheaval: they'd started it.
And, Morris notes, the Jews were only emulating the Arabs, who'd always
envisioned a virtually Judenrein Palestine.
Matters took another turn in May 1948, when the British left, Israel
declared statehood and the armies of Egypt, Jordan, Syria and Iraq
marched in. Again, for all their numerical superiority, the Arabs were
ill-equipped, inexperienced, unprepared. Some Arab leaders knew they
were in over their heads. But given the anger over the Jewish state on
their streets and their own tenuous hold on power, not to invade was
even more perilous.
Within five and a half months, they were
crushed, militarily and psychologically. But for international
intervention, their defeat would have been still worse; the Egyptian
army would have been annihilated. Only King Abdullah of Jordan, with
the best (British-trained) army and limited objectives (not to destroy
the Jewish state, but to annex the West Bank), got what he wanted.
Meanwhile, Israel grew beyond the partition lines, gained more
defensible borders and by destroying Arab villages further reduced
the Palestinian population.
The Israelis, Morris says,
committed far more atrocities than the Arabs, but this was partly a
function of success: they had far more opportunities. But had the
Israelis committed systematic ethnic cleansing, he argues, there would
not be 1.4 million Arabs in Israel today. Of course, by promptly
driving out their own Jews, the vanquished Arab leaders became the
greatest Zionist recruiters of all.
Deep inside Morris's book
is an authoritative and fair-minded account of an epochal and volatile
event. He has reconstructed that event with scrupulous exactitude. But
despite its prodigious research and keen analysis, 1948 can be
exasperatingly tedious. The battlefield accounts, dense with obscure
place names and weapons inventories, are so unrelenting, and
unrelentingly dry, that you are grateful for the full-page maps (which
themselves are hard to follow). The narrative cries out for air and
anecdote and color.
Even Ben-Gurion himself isn't much
illuminated, apart from occasional parenthetical potshots. (It seems
the guy was megalomaniacal and hyperbolic.) But Morris shares
Ben-Gurion's bleak outlook on the Israeli-Palestinian future. If
anything, in fact, his views are even darker. Whether 1948 was a
passing fancy or has permanently etched the region remains to be seen,
he concludes. In other words, by whatever name you call it, the 1948
war has yet to end and the winner is still not clear.
David Margolick is a contributing editor at Portfolio magazine.
First blood
The initial Arab-Israeli struggles and their troublesome legacy
Israeli soldiers during the 1948-49 conflict. The Israelis enjoyed a
decisive edge in military power and organization.
(Associated Press)
1948: A History of the First Arab-Israeli War
By Benny Morris
Yale University, 524 pp., illustrated, $32.50
When
it comes to interpreting the history they shared in 1947-49, Arabs and
Israelis subscribe to two radically different narratives. Arabs, and
especially Palestinians, remember that period as "The Catastrophe."
Israelis have enshrined the same period as their war of independence.
One of the many achievements of this admirable book is to help readers
understand why each narrative commands such authority and why they
remain so stubbornly irreconcilable.
The
issue is of more than academic interest, as Benny Morris, one of
Israel's most prominent revisionist historians, fully understands. In
the Middle East, memory shapes politics and pervades the most
fundamental questions: What is justice and to whom is it owed? One
purpose of "1948" is to expose the untruths that the competing Arab and
Israeli narratives perpetuate while also insisting that the
contradictory claims advanced by both sides deserve recognition.
Although
political and strategic considerations hover in the immediate
background, "1948" is first and foremost an operational history, thick
with details of campaigns and battles. It recounts not one but two
distinct yet intimately related conflicts. The first, occurring between
November 1947 and May 1948, was a civil war between Jews and Arabs
living within the confines of British-controlled Palestine. The second,
beginning hard on the heels of the first and extending into early 1949,
was an armed struggle pitting the newly created state of Israel against
several Arab nations that vowed to destroy it.
Morris offers an
evenhanded if somewhat unbalanced rendering of these events. He goes
out of his way to be fair to both sides, neither demonizing the Arabs
nor letting Israelis off the hook, especially when confronting evidence
of looting, rape, murder, and other atrocities. Yet whereas Morris
draws on an array of Israeli archival material, he enjoyed limited
access to Arab sources. As a consequence, he tells his story from a
largely Israeli perspective. The intentions or calculations of Arab
leaders, not to mention the experiences of Arab fighters, tend to get
short shrift.
In each of the two conflicts that Morris describes,
Israel emerged triumphant, first crushing the Palestinian resistance
while shattering Palestinian society and then decisively defeating the
armies of Egypt, Syria, Iraq, and Transjordan. Morris offers a simple
explanation for this outcome: From the outset the Zionists knew what
they wanted and demonstrated a remarkable single-mindedness in pursuing
their goals; in contrast, the Arabs struggled to define their purpose
and struggled even more to organize themselves.
What the Zionists
wanted above all was land. If, for Israelis, the twin conflicts of
1947-49 were wars of survival, they were also wars of conquest. Even
before serious fighting had begun, Moshe Shertok, soon to become
Israel's first foreign minister, made plain the Zionists' intentions:
"We will get hold of as much of Palestine as we would think we can
hold." The creation of a viable Jewish state required not only
expansion but also expulsion - seizing territory to acquire strategic
depth and facilitate national development while removing as many
Palestinians as possible to make room for Jewish immigrants and prevent
the emergence of a potential fifth column.
Arab leaders also coveted territory. Yet they never came close to
forging a workable plan to achieve their aims. Even as they declared
their common enmity for the Jews, they warily eyed one another as
rivals. Absent trust, unity of effort remained elusive.
Yet
the Arabs had a further problem: They never possessed anything like
adequate military means. From Cairo, Damascus, and Baghdad came
blustery promises to drive the Jews into the sea. In private, however,
Arab politicians and generals lamented the weakness of their armies.
In
contrast, the leadership of the Jewish Agency (as of May 14, 1948, the
government of Israel) displayed a clear sense of purpose, augmented by
flexibility and considerable ruthlessness. The Zionist security
apparatus, the Haganah and the Palmah (as of June 1, 1948, the Israel
Defense Forces), initially complemented by Jewish terrorist
organizations such as Irgun and the Stern Gang, almost immediately
gained the initiative. The Israelis acted; the Arabs reacted, usually
ineffectually. It's not that Arab soldiers were cowardly or unwilling
to fight. They simply lacked functioning equipment, adequate training,
and above all competent leaders.
When it came to generating
effective military power, the Zionists enjoyed a decisive edge. God
sided with the bigger battalions. Apart perhaps from the earliest
phases of the civil war, the Israelis fought from a position of
relative strength, mobilizing a far greater proportion of their
population. They also raised lots of cash (much of it from American
Jews), which they used to acquire an impressive arsenal.
In the
end, however, this aptitude for improvising fighting power fostered
unrealistic expectations. The IDF's prowess convinced Israeli leaders
that they could simply coerce their neighbors into accepting the Jewish
state. As David Ben-Gurion, the first Israeli prime minister, put it:
"The war must end with such a bombing of Damascus, Beirut, and Cairo,
that they will no longer have a desire to fight us, and will make peace
with us" -- succinctly summarizing a strategic principle to which
Israel would return time and again.
In point of fact, coercion
did not hold the key to peace. Instead, humiliated by defeat, the Arabs
refused to negotiate. For their part, intoxicated by victory, Israelis
felt little need to do so. Each side embraced its own mythic version of
what had occurred in this first Arab-Israeli war - thereby laying the
foundation for more wars to come.
Andrew J. Bacevich is
professor of history and international relations at Boston University.
His new book, "The Limits of Power," will be published later this year.
© Copyright 2008 Globe Newspaper Company.
