The Meaning of Limited War
by Robert McClintock
The diplomacy of force and the force of diplomacy
under the Pax BallisticaCHAPTER 5
Limited War for National Independence:
The Israeli-Arab War, 1947-1949
1.
WE NOW enter upon the study of three exercises in limited war which had no direct Communist connotation. These three episodes - the Israeli War for independence against the Arabs, the Israeli-Franco-British attack at Sinai and Suez, and the American landings in Lebanon - have one element of unity in that they all took place in the neuralgic area of the Middle East. In the sense of world strategy, these limited wars jeopardized the only tri-continental position on the globe. This is the land and sea crossroads between Europe, Africa and Asia which runs from the Bosporus along the Levant to Suez, linking Asia, Europe and Africa and, via the Persian Gulf and the Red Sea, the Indian Ocean and the further East.
This area of the world is the exchange point through which people, their belongings and, above all, their ideas, have transited throughout 5000 recorded years of history. In addition, in the era of hydrocarbon energy, it is the depository of the world's largest resource of oil. The birthplace of three world religions, the precepts of the Bible, Koran and Talmud signally failed to mitigate the fierce struggle between the Semitic cousins, Arab and Jew, which resulted from the birth of Israel.
To write of the war in Palestine is difficult because perhaps no limited war has awakened such violent emotions and has exerted such a worldwide tug on feeling as the bitter struggle between Arab and Jew which resulted in the establishment of the Jewish State of Israel. For the author the story is more easy and at the same time more difficult to tell because for two years he was totally involved as a minor participant in the diplomatic effort of the United States to see that justice was done, that the United Nations should be upheld, and that peace should eventually be restored to the tri-continental crossroad.
In the course of these two years of intimate connection with the war in Palestine the author had personal acquaintance of the main protagonists. On the Jewish side there was Dr. Chaim Weizmann, the elder statesman of the Zionist movement and the first President of Israel; Shertok (who changed his name later to Sharett), the Foreign Minister of Israel; Abba Eben, the brilliant representative of Israel at the United Nations and later Ambassador in Washington; Elishu Elath (then called Epstein), the Jewish expert on the Arabs, who was the first Ambassador of the Provisional Government of Israel in Washington; and Dr. Judah Magnes, President of the Hebrew University, who was not a Zionist and who had grave misgivings as to the ultimate prospects for the new Jewish State.
On the Arab side the author knew Faris el Khoury, the Prime Minister of Syria; Farid Zenneddin, the Ambassador of Syria to the United States; the Iraqi Foreign Minister, Jamali; the Secretary General of the Arab League, Abdul Razzam Pasha; Mahmoud Fawzi, the Foreign Minister of Egypt; and the Arab military leaders whom he knew after the war: General Naguib, Gamal Abdul Nasser, Hakim Amer, and the Commander in Chief of the Lebanese forces and later President of Lebanon, General Fuad Chehab.
On the British side, in addition to the diplomatic contingent at the United Nations, there were Sir Michael Wright in the Foreign Office in London, Sir John Troutbeck, the British Minister for Middle Eastern Affairs stationed at Cairo, and the legendary Brigadier Clayton, the Oriental expert of the British diplomatic arm in the Near East, with his inevitable horsehair flywhisk, cross between swagger stick and scepter.
On the American side, as Special Assistant to Dean Rusk, who was then head of the Office of United Nations Affairs in the Department of State, the writer worked directly for him, Under Secretary of State Robert Lovett, and Secretary of State General George Marshall. As for the U.N. itself there was on needed occasion almost daily contact with Dr. Ralph Bunche, with the Secretary General, Trygve Lie, and on the distant Island of Rhodes, with Count Folke Bernadotte, the United Nations Mediator, whom the author had known on a previous tour of duty in Sweden.
2.
The Palestine problem as between Arab and Jew has been vexed ever since the beginning of World War I. At that time the British, to gain advantage in the war against the Ottoman Empire, made seeming promises to the Arab leaders which were at sharp variance with a subsequent promise made in 1917 to the Jews of the world in the Balfour Declaration.
An exchange of letters in Arabic from July 14 to October 24, 1915, between the Sharif of Mecca, Hussein * (Later King of the Hejaz, father of King Abdullah of Jordan and King Feisal I of Iraq), and Sir Henry McMahon, the British High Commissioner in Egypt, apparently promised to the Arabs the lands to the west of the "districts" (Wilayat) of Aleppo, Hama, Homs and Damascus.(1) In the next year to the Sykes-Picot Agreement of 1916, which was later joined into Imperial Russia, drew up zones of interest and influence in the Turkish Near East in early anticipation of the carving up of the Ottoman Empire. In these days of "sovereign equality" among the new nations, it is interesting to see that most of Western Anatolia was divided into an area of "Italian influence" and an outright "Italian Zone" while the Levant, including all of Syria and much of Turkey, was to be a French Zone abutting on a Russian area extending along the Black Sea. There was to be in the region of Iraq and Jordan an "Arab State under French influence" and also in Iraq, Saudi Arabia and Sinai an "Arab state under British guidance." In consequence the Allies' faces were red when in 1917 the Bolshevik Government published the Russian Foreign Office archives and the Arabs learned of this exercise in non-self-determination.(2)
However, a true bombshell for the Arabs was the Balfour Declaration of November 2, 1917, which as one authority has correctly stated "was carefully and deliberately constructed to tread the finest rail on the fence of political indecision."(3) Although the Balfour Declaration was ostensibly addressed to British Zionists through the medium of Lord Rothschild, actually it was a declaration to the Jews of the world and in particular to those in America, Russia and Germany because of their potential influence on the attitude of their respective governments in World War I. World wars seem to produce a spate of promissory notes on the Near East. The essential paragraph of the declaration read as follows:
His Majesty's Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a National Home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavors to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by the Jews in any other country.
It should be noted that before the Balfour Declaration was enunciated by the British Government it had been approved by President Wilson. It was written into the League of Nations' Mandate for Palestine, had been approved by the Vatican, and unanimously sanctioned by both Houses of the U.S. Congress.(4)
World War II found little difference in the equivocal attitude of the Great Powers. Faced with a life and death struggle, and this time with German forces actually in Arab lands in North Africa, and with the Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin Husseini, practically a house-guest of Hitler, the beleagured Allies sought of necessity to maintain friendly relations with the Arab governments. At the same time the world revulsion of feeling at the extermination of the Jews in Hitler's gas chambers predisposed public opinion in Britain, the United States, France and elsewhere in favor of the Zionist cause. It seemed reasonable to ask why indeed the Jews, who had been trying for a generationi to establish a national home in Palestine, should not be permitted to do so. The result was a continuance of the World War I practice of saying one thing to one side and another thing to the other. President Roosevelt was the protagonist of this confusing policy.
For example, on May 26, 1943, a confidential note was sent ot King Ibn Saud of Saudi Arabia asserting that no decision affecting the basic situation in Palestine would be reached "without full consultation with both Arabs and Jews." (5) In the next year, in February 1944, the Arab states protested against resolutions of the U.S. Congress calling for unlimited postwar Jewish immigration into Palestine;(6) but at the Chicago Convention in 1944 the Democratic Party declared,"We favor the opening of Palestine to unrestricted Jewish immigration and colonization and such a policy as to result in the establishment there of the free and democratic Jewish Commonwealth."(7) Roosevelt supported this policy and added the personal commitment that "if re-elected I shall...help bring about its realization."
However, in the year 1945 President Roosevelt had met privately on an American cruiser in the Suez Canal with King Ibn Saud and had given assurances that "he would take no action which...might prove hostile to the Arab people." The author has since talked with the sole interpreter present at this interview, which took place aboard the USS Quincy, anchored in the Great Bitter Lake (appropriate spot!), February 12, 1945. This was the late Colonel William Eddy, USMC, then American Naval Attaché at the Embassy in Cairo, born in Sidon, who spoke native Arabic. Colonel Eddy insisted in his recollection that no matter how carefully Roosevelt chose his words, King Ibn Saud emerged from the audience with the conviction that so long as Roosevelt was President of the United States there would be no establishment of a Jewish Commonwealth in Palestine.*
(*
This is borne out in a memorandum addressed to President Truman by Acting Secretary of State Joseph C. Grew, in which he wrote,"In his meeting with King Ibn Saud, early in 1945, Mr. Roosevelt promised the King that as regards Palestine he would make no move hostile to the Arab people and would not assist the Jews against the Arabs."[8] )
3.
With the end of the war in 1945 the question of what to do about Palestine, already surcharged with political emotion, became ever more burning bright. In May 1946 the Anglo-American Commission of Inquiry established by the United States and United Kingdom governments published its report, which was rejected out of hand by both the Zionists and the members of the Arab League. Its principal recommendations were that 100,000 Jewish refugees from Europe should be admitted into Palestine over a period of over two years and that sale of land to Jews should no longer be restricted. It was prophetic that the British Chiefs of Staff thought that implementation of the report would lead to an Arab-Jewish War; and the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff thought that implementation of the report would invite repercussions beyond the control of British troops in the Middle East, but that it would be unwise to send U.S. troops to Palestine.(9) On the point of Arab hostility to any increase in Jewish influence in Palestine, Glubb Pasha, the commander of the Arab Legion of Transjordan, has testified to the hot resentment of the Arabs to ask why, if the U.S. and U.K. were so anxious to help the Jewish refugees, they did not take them into their own countries rather than send them to an Arab land.(10)
The Arab governments met twice to consider their line of action after the publication of the Anglo-American Commission's report. The first conferences of Arab heads of state met on June 2, 1946, at Inchass, one of King Farouk's country houses; but the more important conference of Arab leaders took place shortly afterward at Bludan in Syria. Here it was decided publicly to reject the Anglo-American Commission's recommendation on Palestine, while secretly the Arab delegates agreed that if the Zionists sought to achieve the Jewish State in Palestine by force this would be met by Arab force. In other words, the Bludan Conference was the beginning of an official Arab attitude which led within two years to war.(11)
We thus find the lines clearly drawn between both sides, Arab and Jew, with the big powers in some cases on the periphery and in others, as in the case of Britain and the United States, in the middle. In the forthcoming contest of will and of objectives the Jews had two immense advantages. First, they were united by millennia of oppression and by the recent searing experiences of World War II. This persecution of the Jews by the Nazis had likewise solidified behind the Zionists a vast and influential bulk of non-Jewish world opinion. Secondly, the Jews were prepared to devote their resources worldwide to the support of the Jewish Agency in Palestine. In contrast, although the Arabs burned with a feelling of grievance and felt that the most monumental injustice in the world was on the point of perpetration in ousting Arabs from an Arab land to make way for alien intruders, the Arab governments were unable to work in unison. At no time in the war which ensued was there a joint doctrine or combined military operations or any effective coordination of Arab effort. This is cited because in the conduct of limited war the side which knows what it wants and how to achieve that objective has a great advantage over the other side which may know what it wants but not how to achieve it.*
(*
On this point Glubb Pasha makes a trenchant observation: "The Jews went from strength to strength, securing one partial concession after another, and every time growing more powerful. The Arabs always demanded all or nothing - and obtained nothing. If the Arabs had been as skillful as the Jews, the tragedy of the Arab refugees need never have occurred." [12])We now enter into a period where, concentrated by the burning glass of destiny, all the elements of history entered into sharp focus on the map of Palestine. Events henceforth moved with the ineluctable cadence of a Greek tragedy.
This was the period of what Churchill once described as "the clattering down of the British Empire." We have already seen how British power at the end of World War II was so attenuated that in the case of the Greek Civil War the United Kingdom Government felt itself obliged almost to give an ultimatum to the United States in turning over its responsibilities for Greece to the stronger partner. So, too, it was with the liquidation of empire. Under the new Labour Government independence was granted to Burma and India. The increasing frustrations of Palestine urged a remorseless logic that this unrewarding stewardship be relinquished. Finally, Britain decided to turn the whole muddle over to the United Nations.
Speaking in the House of Commons on February 18, 1947, Foreign Secretary Bevin said the Government had
been faced with an irreconcilable conflict of principles. There are in Palestine about 1,200,000 Arabs and 600,000 Jews. For the Jews, the essential point of principle is the creation of a sovereign Jewish State. For the Arabs, the essential point of principle is to resist to the last the establishment of Jewish sovereignty in any part of Palestine. The discussions of the last months have quite clearly shown that there is no prospect of resolving this conflict by any settlement negotiated between the parties...We have, therefore, reached the conclusion that the only course now open to us is to submit the problem to the judgment of the United Nations...We shall then ask the United Nations...to recommend a settlement of the problem. We do not intend ourselves to recommend any particular solution...(13)
On April 2, 1947, Britain formally requested a special session of the U.N. General Assembly, which promptly convened. On May 15, 1947, the Assembly established a special Committee on Palestine, dubbed UNSCOP, made up of Australia, Canada, Czechoslovakia, Guatemala, India, Iran, the Netherlands, Peru, Sweden, Uruguay, and Yugoslavia. After months of taking testimony in Palestine, as had previously commissions of inquiry, the majority report of UNSCOP proposed the partition of Palestine into Jewish and Arab states to be bound by economic union. The map describing this Solomon's solution gave the new Jewish state the coast of Palestine from Haifa to below Tel Aviv, all of Western Galilee, and the triangular salient of the desert Negev. The Arabs were to have Eastern and Northern Galilee and the central plains and hills of Palestine plus the Gaza Strip. In addition, Jerusalem was to be internationalized with its population of 100,000 Jews and 105,000 Arabs. Although the Zionists would have wished more from this solution, following the tactic acutely described by Glubb Pasha they opted for the policy of half a loaf being better than no bread, while the Arabs, true to character, violently rejected the entire scheme. Ultimately, on November 29, 1947, the United Nations General Assembly voted for the partition of Palestine as recommended by UNSCOP by a vote of 33 in favor, 13 against, the other U.N. delegations abstaining. Both the U.S. and U.S.S.R. voted in the affirmative. The British Government announced that its administration would be withdrawn from Palestine by May 15, 1948, and its troops by August 1. Both sides now began to prepare for war, although on the Jewish side few except Ben Gurion seemed to take seriously the Arab threat of action, and the Arabs on their side were divided yet dangerously over-confident.
4.
The Arab League held numerous meetings of chiefs of government and at times heads of state. It met in Cairo on March 23, 1947, in Sofar in Lebanon on September 16, and at Aley, again in Lebanon, in October of 1947, at which time, on paper at least, there was established an Arab General Headquarters. Most of these meetings developed more disagreement than concord. Typical was the meeting of the Arab Prime Ministers in Cairo on December 12, 1947, which ended as usual in disagreement, with the Egyptians and Saudis hanging back while King Abdullah of Transjordan again indicated his intention of intervening with the Arab Legion once the British Mandate ended.(14) Abdullah, in fact, had already made his own preparations.
The King of Transjordan as early as November 1947 secretly met in his palace in Amman with Golda Myerson of the Jewish Agency (later Mrs. Meir) to discuss prospects. The King told the future Israeli Foreign Minister that he would take over the Arab part of Palestine and then conclude a treaty with the new Jewish State.(15) Early in the next year Abdullah revealed the same intention to Foreign Minister Bevin. He sent his Prime Minster, Tewfik Pasha Abu Huda, with Glubb serving as translator. According to Glubb's account, Abdullah "proposed to send the Arab Legion across the Jordan when the British Mandate ended, and to occupy that part of Palestine awarded to the Arabs which was contiguous with the frontier of Trans-Jordan." Bevin replied,"It seems the obvious thing to do." He added, however,"But do not go and invade the areas allotted to the Jews."(16)
Abdullah was playing a farsighted and realistic game with the great advantages of knowing what he wanted, having a striking force upon which he could count, Al Jeish al Arabi, the Arab Legion, and the additional advantage of geographic propinquity to his objective. Above all, he coveted being King of Jerusalem. In this his arch-rival was the former Mufti, Haj Amin Husseini, the recent collaborator with Hitler. Another rival to Abdullah's ambition was Egypt, which had no desire to find the formerly insignificant Transjordan becoming a major Arab power.
While the Arabs debated and their hastily contrived General Headquarters drew up a war plan and conferred the title of Commander in Chief on an Iraqi General, Nur ad-Din Mahmoud, the Jews were busily and secretly preparing for war. They had an instrument at hand in the Haganah, the armed militia, whose striking force was the elite Palmach brigades. In addition, Ben Gurion took steps to secure arms and munitions. Emissaries were sent to France, Czechoslovakia, Canada and the United States to buy arms or at least, as in the case of the United States, to raise several million dollars in contributions from American Zionists to acquire the heavy machinery necessary for creating an armaments industry in the new Jewish State. After an agreement had been reached between Shertok and Gromyko in New York in January 1948 the Jewish Agency got the approval of the Czechoslovakian Government to sell arms. These were smuggled into Palestine disguised as tractors, foodstuffs, and other imports despite the fact that the Security Council in its resolution of April 17, 1948 had imposed a general arms embargo as well as a ban on the bringing in of potential fighting personnel to Palestine.(17)
Here a word might be said of the strenuous effort made by the U.S. Government to live up to the requirements of the Security Council's arms embargo. The zealous Zionists in the united States sought by every stratagem to accumulate arms for the forthcoming conflict. The author well remembers how one enterprising group even went far as to attempt to purchase a surplus escort aircraft carrier from the U.S. Navy! As President Truman reports in his memoirs,"I do not think I ever had as much pressure and propaganda aimed at the White House as I had in this instance. The persistence of a few of the extreme Zionist leaders - actuated by political motives and engaging in political threats - disturbed and annoyed me."(18) In fact, the steadfastness with which the United States Government throughout sought to support the United Nations and sustain its actions in an effort, first to keep the peace, and second to restore the peace, goes far to refute the heated Arab claims that the United States was always subservient to the "Zionists."
5.
For months before the termination of the Mandate on May 15 extensive fighting had gone on between Arabs and Jews in Palestine with the British only rarely intervening to maintain an increasingly precarious state of security. By March 1958 the so-called Arab "Liberation Army"* (*
One of the Arab Legion interpreters translated this as "the Salvation Army." [19]) numbered some 4000 men inside of Palestine. Its leader was a Lebanese freebooter named Fawsi el Kaukji who was later to reappear murkily and briefly in the Lebanese Civil War of 1958. This band later grew to some 7000 men, but their inept handling by Kaukji and the determined counterattacks of the Haganah and Palmach forces reduced the "Liberation Army" to a disorganized rabble. More stern fighting took place on the access routes to Jerusalem as both sides fought for control of the means of communication.
Fierce fighting broke out in Haifa from April 20-22, 1948, with the Haganah speedily gaining the upper hand. At a conference between the leaders of the Arabs and Jews, the Jewish Mayor of Haifa said the Jews did not want a single inhabitant of the city to leave and stressed that the Arabs could remain as equal citizens in every way. However, the Arab leadership spurned this request and asked that the Arab population should be permitted to leave the city. Thus began the pattern which led to the still unresolved problem of the Arab refugees, wards of the United Nations, unwanted by Jew and Arab alike.
Elsewhere, as the fighting raged around isolated communities, the Arab population had already begun to flee Palestine. Although technically this exodus was an Arab initiative, the deliberate terrorists acts of the Irgun and Stern gangs undoubtedly contributed to the stampede of the Arabs who were to spend the remainder of their lives as refugees. For example, the massacre of the entire population of Deir Yassen, where 250 dead bodies of men, women and children were thrown down the village well, was calculated to strike terror in the hearts of the Arab population of Palestine.(20) Against such acts of outrage the prim map of partition painted by UNSCOP became incarnadined with blood.
6.
On the eve of the end of the Mandate, as of May 14, in rough fashion there had already taken place the division into Jewish and Arab portions of Palestine as outlined by the General Assembly's resolution of November 29, 1947, with the exception of Western Galilee, where fighting still went on, and Jerusalem, which was still in Arab hands. According to one authority the line-up of opposing forces on the morning of May 15 was as follows:
The total strength of the invading armies was approximately 24,000, divided up in this way:Egypt........................10,000
Arab Legion................4,500
Syria..........................3,000
Iraq............................3,000
Lebanon......................3,000 (including 2000 men of the Arab Liberation Army)
Along the principal fronts the line-up reflected the same trend. This was the picture on the morning of May 15th:
Israelis Arabs
South 5,000 5,000 Egyptians
Deep south and Hebron 1,500 4,000 Egyptians
Jerusalem and corridor 4,500 4,000 Arab Legions
1,000 Egyptians
Central front: Tel Aviv
Natanya 3,000 3,000 Iraqis
North 5,000 3,000 Syrians
1,000 Lebanese
2,000 A.L.A.
_______ ________________
Total 19,000 23,000 (21)
Glubb gives identical figures for the Arab forces. (22)
The Arabs who had their last "summit meeting" at Amman, April 30, 1948, were on the surface united in their resolve to destroy the Jews but secretly remained divided. Years later the then President of Lebanon, General Fuad Chebab, who had been Commander in Chief of the Lebanese armed forces at the time of the Israeli War, confided to the author the vast disarray of intent and capability among the Arab military leaders, which was merely a reflection of a similar division among the Arab politicians.
The Arab leadership can probably be divided into three categories: those who definitely intended to intervene, such as King Abdullah and the ex-Mufti of Jerusalem and possibly the Syrians; those who might be called "pseudo-interventionists," in which category would certainly come the Lebanese and the Iraqis; and finally those who did not want to intervene at all despite their fervored speeches. In this category were definitely Saudi Arabia and, possibly at the beginning, Egypt. Later, however, as events proved, Egypt decided to intervene, probably to forestall Abdullah's ambition.
On the Jewish side there was the great advantage of unity of purpose and one objective, the independence of the new State of Israel. On May 14, the day before the Mandate officially expired, the Jewish National Council proclaimed the establishment of the State of Israel. On the same day President Truman gave
de facto recognition to the Provisional Government of Israel.(23)
7.
The official war in Palestine was not long in coming. The Egyptian Government on May 15 formally advised the Secretary General of the United Nations that its troops were crossing the Palestine border "to restore order." Early on the morning of that day three Egyptian Spitfires came out of the sun over Tel Aviv and bombed the power station. Attack on Arab initiative was exactly what the Israelis wanted.
The remainder of the war can be described briefly. It consisted of an initial struggle between the Israelis, the Egyptians and the Transjordian Arab Legion which ended with the Security Council Truce of June 11 when both sides were breathless and badly needed respite; a brief, fierce nine-day period of renewed fighting early in July, when the Israelis took a thousand square kilometres of Arab-held territory, including a corridor from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem and the important Arab towns of Lydda and Ramle; to be followed by another cease-fire effective July 18. This uneasy truce was broken in October by a determined Israeli drive into the Negev, the obliging Egyptians once more affording a pretext by attacking a convoy which moved under a U.N. safe-conduct. The fighting in the Negev was interrupted by another Security Council cease-fire resolution effective October 22; and the final action terminated with the Israeli "Operation Horev," launched on December 23, which cut off the Egyptians in the Gaza Strip. In other words, the fighting in Palestine was a seesaw motion, punctuated by brief periods of respite when both sides found it convenient to obey the dictates often Se+curity Council to stop fighting. During these breathing spells both sides industriously sought to improve their Sidon in materiel and weapons.*
*
This is most graphically shown by the following table on the changes which had taken place in the armament of the Israeli Army between May 15 and October 12.
May 15th, 1948 October 12, 1948
Men........................................................................85,000 80,000
Guns................................................................................4 250
120 mm. mortars...................................................none 12
6-inch mortars.......................................................none 88
3-inch mortars........................................................105 889
2-inch mortars.......................................................682 618
Davidka mortars....................................................16 22
PIATS and anti-tank rifles...................................75 675
Machine guns....................................................1,550 7,550
Rifles................................................................22,000 60,000
Sub-marine guns..........................................11,000 21,300 (24)
In addition the Israelis had created a piebald air force, ranging from a few renegade Flying Fortresses to Spitfires and Messerchmitts. They had no lack of ex-World War II pilots. On the Arab side their initial superiority in the British 25-pounder gun was at last counterbalanced by the Israeli ingenuity in imports.
Meanwhile the Security Council had appointed a Mediator in the hope that a single dispassionate neutral man could intervene between these fiercely warring Semite factions. The Mediator chosen was Count Folke Bernadotte, a scion of the royal house of Sweden who had distinguished himself, not only as head of the Swedish Red Cross, but in playing a significant role in the negotiations with Himmler at the end of World War II. He and his Deputy, Dr. Ralph Bunche, arrived at their headquarters on the Island of Rhodes just before the truce of June 11 became effective. The Mediator worked tirelessly and with painstaking devotion to attempt to devise a solution which would be acceptable to both side. He failed and his "Bernadotte Plan" was rejected by both Jew and Arab. Count Bernadotte likewise paid for his devotion with his life. On September 17, in the streets of Jerusalem while traveling under an official Israeli
laisser passer he was assassinated by members of the Stern gang.*
(*
The writer, who had been on consultation with Count Bernadotte three days before in Rhodes, made the following note: "Count Bernadotte was murdered in Jerusalem on the afternoon of Friday the 17th by five members of the Stern Gang who placed a jeep across the path of his three cars, which were traveling in the Jewish-held Katamon District of the City and were under an official Israeli safe conduct. They jumped out, ran to his car, which was last in line, and shot him through the heart with a Sten gun. He and a senior French U.N. military observer, Colonel Serot, who was sitting beside him, were killed instantly." The author subsequently sent Countess Bernadotte, born the American Estelle Manville, the last photograph taken of her husband on the Island of Rhodes.)The end of the Arab-Israeli War came clearly in sight with the successful Israeli thrust into the Negev which began in mid-October. Although the Egyptians put up a valiant resistance and defended themselves well in fixed points, their line of communications was cut. One of the young officers who fought most bravely with the Egyptian Brigade Group surrounded at Faluja was Major Gamal Abdul Nasser. His Achates fideles, Major Hakim Amer, had fought with equal courage under Colonel Naguib in the earlier thrust toward Tel Aviv.
The fighting in the Negev ended pursuant to another Security Council cease-fire effective October 22. On the 11th of November the Council called for a permanent armistice to replace its frequently riddled truces, but Egypt refused even a truce. On this pretext the Israelis launched their final drive, "Operation Horev," on December 23, which resulted in cutting the line of communications of the Egyptian forces in the Gaza Strip, thus isolating the Gaza army from the rest of Egypt. This was on January 3, 1949. On the 6th the Egyptian Government announced its readiness to enter into armistice negotiations at the headquarters of Dr. Bunche, the Acting U.S. Mediator at Rhodes. On January 7 all firing ceased on the southern front and the war between Israel and Egypt had come to an end.(25)
The Egyptian-Israeli general armistice agreement was signed at Rhodes on February 24, 1949. On March 23, an armistice was concluded with Lebanon and on July 20 with Syria. When on March 20 Israeli troops had reached the Gulf of Aqaba, Transjordan signed a cease-fire agreement on Rhodes. The armistice negotiations with Jordan were then secretly transferred to King Abdullah's winter palace at Shuna near the Dead Sea. After almost a week of negotiations, at last a map was drawn up by Brigadier Coker, Glubb's operations officer, and approved by King Abdullah. On April 3 an armistice incorporating this agreement was formally signed in the presence of Dr. Bunche.(26)
Although it was believed at the time that these armistice agreements were merely temporary arrangements to be speedily supervened by permanent peace treaties, this did not transpire. Instead, the armistice agreements have become a sort of
de facto peace between Israel and the Arab States, supervised by the United Nations. Nevertheless, because they are armistice agreements and not peace treaties a pretext has been given to the Arab governments for maintaining that they are "still at war with Israel." In the event, however, since the armistice agreements have so long endured and a sort of peace has been more or less preserved (with the punctuation of border skirmishes and the one week's war in Sinai in 1956), the historian may be content with the French phrase
,"Il n'y a que le provisoire qui dure."8.
In conclusion of this account of one of the most dramatic and emotionally surcharged limited wars which have taken place in the twentieth century, it first of all can be stated that both sides knew what they wanted. The Jews wanted to establish a state in Palestine for their national home and the Arabs, fearful of the Jews' drive, intelligence, and worldwide resources, were determined to oppose this to "the death." Also the Arabs felt an irremediable sense of injustice that in a country where the ratio of Arabs to Jewish inhabitants was two to one, the Arabs should be cast out to make room for aliens from over the sea.
Although both sides knew what they wanted, one side knew better how to achieve its objectives. The Jews mobilized their resources totally, not only their human and material assets in Palestine, but throughout the world and especially in the United States, where not only was popular sentiment largely in favor of the establishment of Israel but also private Jewish monetary resources of great magnitude were available.
The Arabs, despite the universality of their hatred, mobilized only partially. In Palestine, their human resources were critically demoralized and a vast exodus of refugees took place. In the Arab world, although armies were got together, there was no central coordination of the war and rivalries between one government and another were all too evident. Furthermore, in contrast to the Jews, who had mobilized world opinion largely on their side, there was no equally effective marshaling of Moslem opinion and aid on the Arab side.(27)
Although the Jewish total objective was the establishment of a Jewish State, Israel, the Jews were content to fix their eyes on limited objectives and inch by inch to get as much as they could by military and diplomatic means, retaining the fruits of their victory with the blessing of the United Nations.
While this was a limited war by the confines of the area and the forces involved, in another sense it was an almost unlimited war by virtue of external Jewish support for Israel and the European and American interest in establishing European Jewish refugees conveniently in a "national home" far from American and European shores. No other state so depends as does Israel on external support and private financing.
One consequence has been the unanimous Arab opinion that United States policy is controlled by Jews. That this is not the case does not prevail against Arab emotions; and in the Arab East the silhouette profile of "Uncle Sam" protrude a Semitic nose.*
(*A brief illustration will suffice. In 1960 the Moslem Prime Minister of Lebanon, Saeb Salem, went to New York City to head his delegation to the United Nations. He was invited by the Overseas Writers Club to address that body at a luncheon, but when the next day he looked in the New York papers for the report of his speech it was nowhere to be found. To this day the Prime Minister is convinced that Jewish influence on the American press forced deletion of any reference to his address. That this was not the fact is well known to New York editors, but nothing will shake Saeb Salem's convictions on this point. Therefore the Arab article of faith that American policy is controlled by Jews is a political fact, whether or not it is an historical one.)Despite this conviction of the Arabs, the war in Sinai in 1956 forced a rude awakening on the government of Israel. Ben Gurion and his counselors had planned that the amphibious landings at Port Said should take place on the very day of the American presidential elections on the fond hypothesis that President Eisenhower, who was a candidate for reelection, would be too preoccupied to react adversely to what was happening at Suez. This massive miscalculation and the world reaction to the fiasco at Suez may have shown the Israeli leaders that they cannot draw indefinitely on an imagined credit of good will in the Free World.
Nevertheless, the lessons of the American landings in Lebanon in 1958 indicated that the United States would support small independent nations of the Near East who sought to defend their integrity from attack. This lesson has not been lost either upon Arab leaders or those of Israel. Both the Suez and Lebanese aspects of limited war will be the subject of the next two chapters.
Current problems include the intent of Israel to take what it regards to be its fair share of the waters of the River Jordan and the equal Arab determination to frustrate this ambition. It is a tragedy that the equitable technical recommendations of the Eric Johnston report on a fair sharing of the Jordan waters, although once accepted by the Arab engineers, were rejected by the Arab politicians.
The problem of the Arab refugees remains a festering wound on the conscience of the world. Although the Israelis are technically correct in saying that the refugees put themselves into their present condition by stampeding and fleeing under fire from Palestine, the fact remains that many stampeded because of Jewish acts of terrorism, and Israel has done practically nothing to contribute to the amelioration of the lot of these wretched former residents. The Arab governments, for their part, have done little other than to offer acreage in their countries upon which the refugees have been sustained in camps by the United Nations UNRWA with a majority of U.S. financial support. Ultimately, the solution will probably be in technical training of the second generation of the refugees and readiness by the Arab governments to accept these skilled people into their respective economies. In fact, the trend is now discernible: today only about 40 per cent of the refugees drawing full or partial UNRWA support live inside camps.
Danger remains in the escalation of armed forces on both sides and the increasingly lethal character of these forces. In the case of Israel, French Mystere jets replace older aircraft and are balanced on the Egyptian side by newer editions of the Russian MIG. Eventually, the world will have to take a close look at the possibility of nuclear proliferation. The Israelis undoubtedly have the scientific capacity and modern reactor at Dimona. However, the Egyptians have had expert German scientific advice in rocketry.
In the long run the one unifying emotion among the Arabs has been their hatred and fear of Israel. This may over the years result in some more constructive form of unity. Israel continues to exist as an independent colony of West and East, an enclave behind barbed wire on the coast of the Arab world. Yet over the years time heals all wounds and a new generation of Semites, Arabs and Jews may come to see the advantages of working together. They may even recall Voltaire's observation that "One should not always be harping upon the small differences which separate us but on the great qualities which unite us."
Although one of the characteristics of limited war in the last half of the twentieth century is the widespread use of surrogate forces, in the war for Israeli independence there was a direct confrontation of Arab versus Jew. In a wider sense, however, from the aspect of the world balance of power as between the U.S.S.R. and the United States, it might be argued that the Soviet Union abetted the play of surrogate forces on the theory that any conflict breeding trouble in the Near East over a period of decades might be useful from the Communist point of view. Certainly, it was for this reason that the U.S.S.R. voted affirmatively on the U.N. resolution of November 29, 1947, and, by the Gromyko-Shertok Agreement early in 1948, made it possible for Czechoslovakia to furnish arms and munitions to the Jewish Agency, thus in large measure underwriting the success of the war against the Arabs. Subsequent Soviet military assistance to the U.A.R. likewise via Czechoslovakia, insured that the Arab side would in future have a military counterweight to Israel and thus underwrite the prospect of continuing turmoil in the neuralgic tri-continental crossroads of the Middle East.
That trouble was yet in store on the tri-continental bridge was revealed in 1956, in Sinai and Suez.
Footnotes
1. Polk, Stamlos and Asfour:
Backdrop to Tragedy: The Struggle for Palestine. Beacon Press, Boston, 1957, p. 58. Henceforth cited as Polk, etc.
2. Polk, etc.,
op. cit., p. 61.
3.
Ibid., p. 61.
4.
Ibid., p. 64.
5.
Foreign Relations of the United States 1943. Vol. IV, pp. 786-787.
6. Polk, etc.,
op. cit., p. 185.
7.
Ibid., p. 184.
8. Harry S Truman:
Memoirs, Vol. II,
Years of Trial and Hope, Doubleday, Garden City, N.Y., 1956, p. 133. See also Robert E. Sherwood:
Roosevelt and Hopkins, An Intimate History. Harper, New York, 1948, pp. 871-872.
9. Jon and David Kimche:
Both Sides of the Hill: Britain and the Palestine War. Secker and Warburg, London, 1960, pp. 45-46.
10. Sir John Bagot Glubb:
A Soldier with the Arabs. Harper, New York, 1957, p. 58.
11. Kimche, op. cit., pp. 47, 50, 51.
12. Glubb,
op. cit., p. 45.
13. Quoted in The Political History of Palestine Under British Administration (Memo for UNSCOP), Jerusalem, 1947.
14. Kimche,
op. cit., pp. 55, 56, 57, 60, 79.
15.
Ibid., p. 60.
16. Glubb,
op. cit., pp. 63-66.
17. Kimche,
op. cit., pp. 66, 76.
18. Truman,
op. cit., p. 158.
19. Glubb,
op. cit., p. 79.
20.
Ibid., p. 81.
21. Kimche,
op. cit., p. 162.
22. Glubb,
op. cit., p. 94.
23. Truman,
op. cit., p. 164.
24. Kimche,
op. cit., p. 248.
25. Kimche,
op. cit., pp. 243-253, 256, 260-262. For a description of the U.N. Truce and mediation machinery, see David Brook:
Preface to Peace; The United Nations and the Arab-Israel Armistice System. PUblic Affairs Press, Washington, 1964.
26. Kimche,
op. cit., pp. 266-271. B. Walter Eyten:
The First Ten Years: A Diplomatic History of Israel. Simon and Schuster, New York, 1958, pp. 28-48. Glubb, op. cit., pp. 233-237.
27. Musa Alami:
Ibrat Falastin. Beirut, 1949. Condensed as "The Lesson of Palestine" in
Middle East Journal, October 1949, Vol. 3, No. 4, Washington, pp. 373-405. See also Constantine Zurayk:
Ma'na al Nakbah (The Meaning of the Disaster). Kashaf Press, Beirut, 1948, 87 pp. For a highly readable account of the military operations, see also Edgar O'Ballance,
The Arab-Israeli War 1948. Praeger, New York, 1957, 220 pp.
