1948: A History of the First Arab-Israeli War (64 page)

The IDF reduced and tightened the noose around the Faluja Pocket. That day the Eighty-ninth Battalion, Eighth Brigade, took Beit Jibrin and its police fort, following the Giv`ati Brigade's failed attempt during the previous two days. The Egyptian and Sudanese troops apparently withdrew following the Giv'ati attack. Yet after taking the fort (with relative ease) and entering the village, the Eighty-ninth Battalion troopers-many of them LHI veterans-were attacked by a squadron of seven or eight Arab Legion armored cars that had ventured down the road from Hebron to Tarqumiya to scout out the situation. A firefight developed, with the Israelis pouring machine gun and mortar fire on the armored cars. But the Israelis were outgunned and took casualties in and around the village. "In the center of the village there was a small furry donkey, quietly cropping the grass, evidently not at all disturbed by the battle raging around him," recalled one British Legion officer. The battle was decided when Israeli antitank rockets hit two of the lead Jordanian armored cars: the Jordanians about-faced and withdrew up the road to Tarqumiya, leaving behind several stricken vehicles and three charred bodies. The Israelis had suffered three dead and fifteen wounded. This was to be the war's last serious clash between Jordan and Israel .61 The battle had been a giant misunderstanding: the Israelis believed the Jordanians were attempting to retake Beit Jibrin; the Arabs, that the Israelis were headed for Hebron. "This gallant little action saved the city"-or, even more grandly, "an area of some six hundred square miles"-Glubb later recorded.61 (Interestingly, half a year later, when Jordan and Israel were about to sign the armistice agreement-in which Jordan ceded a strip of land around TulkarmQalqilya to Israel-formally ending their war, King 'Abdullah pleaded with Yadin: "Give me Beit Jibrin!" Yadin said "no." )ba

The capture of Beit Jiibrin and the repulse of the Jordanian column defini tively ended all hope of withdrawal eastward, or help from the Legion, for the Faluja Pocket's defenders. But the Egyptian commanders refused to surrender, the commander of the `Iraq al-Manshiya fort responding to an Israeli overture that his "soldiers would fight to the last man."64

The next day, the Eighty-ninth Battalion captured al-Qubeiba and the dominant position atop Tel Lachish (site of the Israelite town besieged and conquered by Sennacherib, king of Assyria, in 701 BcE). The Egyptians had fled both locations without a fight. The Egyptian command asked the Fourth Brigade, trapped in the pocket and complaining of lack of "fuel and food and ammunition, and [with] a multiplicity of wounded," whether it could break out through al-Qubeiba.65 It couldn't.

On 29 October the Eighty-ninth Battalion assaulted neighboring Dawayima, a village of four thousand. Three days before, Southern Front had warned all units "not to harm the population" (and to desist from looting and to safeguard "holy sites").66 But things turned out differently at Dawayima. A reduced company, mounted on seven half tracks, advanced on the village from three directions, all guns blazing. The attackers believed that the villagers had participated in the conquest of the `Etzion Bloc, "the blood of whose slaughtered soldiers calls for revenge."67 The Israelis encountered only light resistance, and as the half-tracks approached, "the plain [eastward] was covered with thousands of fleeing Arabs." The half-tracks pursued the villagers with their machine guns.68 Subsequently, the troops rounded up dozens of villagers and executed them in one or two batches. A Mapam activist later wrote a complaint, quoting an officer who had reached the village a day or so later: "The first [wave] of conquerors killed about 8o to ioo [male] Arabs, women and children.... One commander ordered a sapper to put two old women in a certain house ... and blow it up. The sapper refused.... The commander then ordered his men to push in the old women and the evil deed was done. One soldier boasted that he had raped a woman and then shot her. "69

Pressure by Mapam ministers resulted in a number of investigations. One investigator, Isser Be'eri, head of the IDF Intelligence Service, concluded in November that about eighty villagers had been killed during the battle and another "22" afterward. Arab reports, which reached UN observers, exaggerated, speaking of "Soo" or even "i,ooo" victims. United Nations investigators were unable to find evidence of a massacre (though they tended to believe the survivors who reached Hebron who spoke of atrocities) .711

The IDF also slowly nibbled at the Egyptian positions in the west, despite the UN cease-fire directive. On 28 October Israeli troops occupied Isdud and the devastated site of Kibbutz Nitzanim, to the south and on 4-S November, took Majdal, without battle. The Egyptians had already withdrawn to Gaza, most of the region's inhabitants accompanying them. Some Egyptian officials bewailed the Palestinian penchant for flight: "Why do I see the people confused in their thoughts, packing to leave, wandering long distances to countries that are not theirs ... ?" wrote Mustafa al-Sawaf, a local Egyptian administrator. 71 But other Egyptians had urged the local inhabitants to flee with them.

At Isdud, originally a town of five thousand inhabitants, the Israelis found a few hundred people, who greeted them with white flags and asked for permission to stay. Permission was granted, and a sergeant-one Sasson Gottlieb-was appointed governor. But Southern Command then reversed itself and ordered the inhabitants to leave.72 A similar pattern seems to have been followed at Hamama, a large, refugee-filled village to the south. But Giv ati behaved inconsistently. A week later, at Majdal, the conquering Giv`ati unit found in place fewer than a thousand of the town's original ten thousand inhabitants; the rest had fled. Their elders asked to surrender and stay. And here, contrary to precedent, inexplicably, the troops allowed the population to remain, even hanging on the walls posters cautioning soldiers against looting and improper behavior. The IDF sent patrols to the surrounding dunes and groves to beckon those hiding there to return home.73 Hundreds streamed back to town. But during the following weeks, about five hundred nonlocal refugees were identified and expelled. By 1950, the town contained more than two thousand Arabs (alongside Jewish settlers who had begun to move in during 19.+9).71 On 5 November Israeli troops occupied the ruins of Yad Mordechai, where they came to a halt. An old Arab woman told the Israelis that the area's inhabitants had fled "because fear of the Jews had fallen upon" them.75

By early November the Arab leaders understood that the Egyptian army "was 'broken. "'76 Apparently, the Egyptian high command agreed. Despairing of the royal court, it launched a devious initiative designed to achieve a diplomatic exit from its predicament. Kirkbride reported that the Egyptian liaison officer in Amman delivered an oral message to 'Abdullah from the Egyptian defense minister asking the Jordanian king to suggest to King Farouk "that the time has now come to negotiate a settlement of the Palestine problem." The Jordanians "realized" that the Egyptian army wanted negotiations with Israel-but while being "able to meet public criticism in Egypt by blaming Transjordan for taking the initiative." (At the same time, the Iraqi military told 'Abdullah that the Iraqi prime minister was "anxious for a settlement.")77

But the Israelis still regarded the Egyptian army as very much in the field. And the Faluja Pocket was a thorn in their side. On the night of 8-q November the Eighth Brigade assaulted and at last took "the Monster on the Hill," as the Israelis dubbed the `Iraq Suweidan police fort, with Giv`ati taking the neighboring `Iraq Suweidan village.78 The ring around the Faluja Pocket, commanded by Colonel Said Taha, had further tightened: some three to four thousand Egyptian troops, of the First, Second, and Sixth battalions, were isolated in the enclave, which was now less than four miles from east to west and two and a half miles from north to south. On i i November Taha cabled his superiors: "The situation of our forces has grown much worse because of the siege from all directions, because we are in range of light weapons, because of the cessation of supplies and the paucity of ammunition ... because of lack of fuel for the vehicles ... because of air attacks by heavy bombers and the lack of anti-aircraft weapons.... Our wounded are suffering and dying for lack of means to carry out operations." The Egyptian command permitted Taha to decide whether to hold on or agree to an orderly withdrawal, under UN supervision. It even implied that he could surrender.79 Under a flag of truce, Taha met Allon on ii November in Kibbutz Gat, in Israeli-held territory. The conversation took place in English, at Taha's insistence, and not in Arabic, as Allon, who knew Arabic well, had proposed. It went as follows:

Allon: Colonel, may I express my admiration for your brave soldiers' fighting abilities. The conquest of the `Iraq Suweidan fort and half the `Pocket' took a great effort, though not many casualties.

Taha: Many thanks, sir. I must say that your soldiers, who excelled in bravery, put us in quite a difficult situation.

Allon: Is it not tragic that both sides, who in fact have no reason to quarrel, are killing each other mercilessly?

Taha: Yes, it is tragic; but that is the way of the world. It is fate, sir, and one cannot evade it.

Allon: I hope you have noted that the war was forced upon us, as it is being fought on our land and not in Egypt. I believe the battle has already been decided and it is best to speed up the end of hostilities.

Taha: It is true. But I am an officer ... and I must carry out orders.

Allon: It is best that you take note that while most of your army is pinned down in a hopeless war in Palestine, in your country the British army, which we have just gotten rid of, rules. Don't you think that you have fallen prey to a foreign imperialist plot ... ?

Taha: You did well to throw out the British. It won't be long before we expel them from Egypt.

Allon: But how will you expel them if all your army is stuck here, after a big defeat and on the eve of an even bigger defeat? Isn't it better for you to return to Egypt and take care of your own business, instead of being entangled in an adventure in a foreign land?

Taha responded that he would do what he was ordered. Allon pointed out that the pocket's position was hopeless and offered Taha "surrender with honor ... with the possibility of an immediate return home." But Taha refused to lay down his arms.

Indeed, he immediately cabled his superiors: "We have made contact with the Jews and it is now clear ... that they insist on unconditional surrender. They will not allow us to withdraw until all the Egyptian army withdraws from Palestine. If you don't solve the problem in the [next] 24 hours, I am sorry to say, I will no longer control the situation."

Taking leave of Allon, Taha said that he hoped that the IDF would respect the cease-fire, as it had not when capturing `Iraq Suweidan. Allon responded that he would obey international law but that such law did not protect an army that had invaded another country.

Farouk sent the pocket's defenders a letter of encouragement and promoted Taha to brigadier general.80

The cease-fire was effectively restored after the fall of `Iraq Suweidan. But Southern Front continued operations geared to assuring that the area it had just conquered remained clear of Arabs. Its units periodically scoured the villages. The Lower Coastal Plain District HQ's order of 25 November to the Home Guard battalions under its command was typical: "[We] are aware of the movement of Arab civilians from Gaza northwards as far the village of Majdal. The Arabs have [re-]settled in a number of villages." The units were ordered to expel "the Arab refugees from the above-mentioned villages and to prevent their return by destroying the villages." The units were ordered to search Hamama, Jura, Khirbet Khisas, Ni iiya, al-Jiya, Barbara, Beit Jirja, and Deir Suneid, round up inhabitants, and expel them to Gaza. The villages were then to be "burned and razed." The units were enjoined to "carry out the operation with resolution, accuracy, and energy but any unwanted deviation [from norms] ... was to be restrained."8'

The operation took place five days later: the villages were scoured and hundreds of inhabitants and refugees were expelled to Gaza; some of the villages were torched." The expulsion from Khirbet Khisas was to serve Israeli novelist Yizhar Slnilansky ("S. Yizhar") as the basis for his short story "The Story of Khirbet Hiz`a," one of the fewpieces of dissentient fiction published in Israel in the wake of the 1948 War.

Side by side with driving or keeping out Arabs, Yoav also had appendages involving the consolidation of Israeli rule through further conquest. On a3 - 25 November the Negev Brigade, unopposed, enlarged Israel's holdings when two of its battalions, led by the brigade reconnaissance unit, pushed, in Operation Lot-named after Abraham's nephew, whose wife, according to the Bible, had turned into a pillar of salt some thirty-five hundred years earlier-from Beersheba to Sodom on the Dead Sea and to 'Ein Husub and Bir Maliha in the parched Arava. Both areas had been earmarked for Jewish sovereignty in the UN partition scheme. Sodom, the site of major chemical works, had been held through the civil war by Jewish troops, but the Jordanian invasion had cut it off from the Jewish heartland, and since May, it had been supplied only by air. The linkup now extended Israeli territory through the northern Negev to the southern sector of the Dead Sea.

Ben-Gurion had had his eye on Tin Husub since October, when he said that it had "the biggest spring in the Negev." "It is clear to me," he told his Cabinet colleagues, "that a settlement could be established there." Always aware of historical roots, he also noted Tin Husub's proximity to King Solomon's copper mines, some miles to the south, at Timna. At Kurnub, between Beersheba and Sodom, Ben-Gurion thought "30 thousand" families could be settled. Abba Eban, he said, had telegraphed from New York urging immediate settlement, to facilitate the perpetuation of Israeli rule in the area.83 (In fact, the area was settled only in the r95os. )

The limited defeat of the Egyptian army had political repercussions, as Ben-Gurion had intended and as he noted even before the fall of Beersheba: Israel had registered "an important political victory in the world."84 Soldering together the northern Negev settlements enclave to Israel "proper" while also cutting off the Egyptian force in the Hebron-Bethlehem hills from the main body of the expeditionary force along the coast all but buried Count Bernadotte's proposed cession of the Negev to the Arabs. In general, Israel's stock soared.