1948: A History of the First Arab-Israeli War (65 page)

The Egyptians, through diplomacy, tried to salvage what they could-or at least ward off a new IDF offensive. Kamil Riyad, of Farouk's court, renewed contact with Elias Sasson and offered an "armistice." It was not clear whether he was actually speaking for the king or, indeed, enjoyed the support of Prime Minister Nuqrashi. The Egyptians asked Israel to withdraw from all territory in the south earmarked by the partition resolution for the Palestinians (Beit Hanun to Isdud) and to agree to Egypt's continued retention of the territory from Beit Hanun south to Rafah and the land in the northwestern Negev adjacent to the old Egypt-Palestine international border. Riyad no longer demanded, as he had in September, all of the Negev. But neither was he offering Israel "peace" in exchange for these concessions, Moshe Shertok said.ss The Egyptians assured Israel that if the deal was struck, they would remain neutral should hostilities be renewed between Is rael and the other Arab states. They hinted that "political" talks might follow an armistice.86

On 4 November Shertok outlined the Egyptian proposal to the Cabinet. Israel responded-through Sasson-that it "tended not to agree to the attachment of the Gaza area to Egypt," fearing future Egyptian aggression, though it agreed to Egyptian retention of the northwestern Negev (an area allocated to the Palestinians in the 1947 partition resolution).87

Nothing came of all this. Yet the idea of an armistice was now in the air, as it had not been at any point since May. But the Egyptians were not quite there. The Security Council cease-fire call of r9 October had implied an Israeli return to the pre-r5 October lines. Israel parried with reservations, clarifications, and queries-but, in practice, refused to budge. A new Security Council resolution, on 16 November, finessed the call for withdrawal and posited the opening of Israeli-Egyptian armistice negotiations. The Egyptians demurred. A British effort to bypass American objections and persuade the General Assembly to adopt the Bernadotte plan was defeated in behindthe-scenes maneuvering. But elements of the plan persevered. On i i December, the assembly, in Resolution i94, formally adopted a number of Bernadotte's proposals, including recognition of the refilgees' right of return and the establishment of the Palestine Conciliation Commission (PCC).

HIRAM

Back in 1937 the British Peel Commission had earmarked all of the Galilee for Jewish sovereignty. The commission had taken account both of Jewish history-for much of the first millennium BCE the area had been Jewish, and it had played a prominent part in the Great Revolt against Rome in the first century CE-and of contemporary needs. If emptied of Arab inhabitants by an agreed or compulsory transfer, the area could accommodate masses of Jewish immigrants. But the partition resolution of 1947 had earmarked Western and Central Galilee, largely populated by Arabs, for Palestinian Arab sovereignty. Subsequently, in the battles of May and July, Western Galilee had fallen under Jewish control. But upper central Galilee, from the Sakhnin`Arabe-Deir Hanna line through Majd al-Kurum up to the Lebanese border, remained under Arab, specifically ALA, control. The Israelis wanted the area. As Shertok had told Andrei Vyshinskii, the Soviet deputy foreign minister, and Iakov Malik, the Soviet representative on the Security Council, the border in the Galilee "was a very plunging decollete.... [In] its current state it is impossible to defend, and the line has to be righted [that is, pushed north to the old Palestine-Lebanon international border]."88

Much as the Egyptians had supplied the pretext for Operation Yoav, so al Qawuqji supplied the justification for Operation Hiram, in which the IDF overran the north-central Galilee "pocket" and a strip of southern Lebanon. IDF Northern Front OC Moshe Carmel was later to write that al-Qawugji's provocation had been like "a match that ignited ... [the] fire ... in a dry, yellow field ... but the fire quickly rose ... [and] turned on him and he was unable to douse it. "89

In truth, as with Yoav, Operation Hiram had been long in the planning.90 Already in mid-May, Ben-Gurion had spoken of conquering southern Lebanon up to the Litani (which presupposed the prior conquest of central Galilee). Northern Front's operations officer, Mordechai Makleff (IDF chief of general staff, 1952-1953) , had told Ben-Gurion during the Second Truce that it would take the army only two to three days to take the central Galilee "pocket."'1 Ben-Gurion clearly hoped that it would fall into Israeli handsand "empty of Arabs," as he put it to the Cabinet on 26 September92-and Northern Front had meticulously planned the operation. In early September it had formulated an early draft of "Hiram," defining the operation's objective as "the clearing of central Galilee and the destruction of the enemy forces in it."'-' And on 6 October, at the IDF General Staff meeting, Carmel had pressed for authorization.94 But the Cabinet held back.

The Arabs were shortly to give him his chance. Before dawn on zz October, in defiance of the UN Security Council cease-fire order, ALA units stormed the IDF hilltop position of Sheikh 'Abd, just north of, and overlooking, Kibbutz Manara, a new settlement in the hills west of the Hula Valley. The Home Guard garrison was caught by surprise and fled. Manara was imperiled. It is possible that the attack was launched by al-Qawugji in direct or indirect response to Egyptian importunings that the other Arab armies relieve the pressure on them.'-' But he had acted without the support or agreement of the Lebanese government.

Ben-Gurion initially rejected Carmel's demand to launch a major counteroffensive. He was chary of antagonizing the United Nations so close on the heels of its cease-fire order. He agreed only to the relief of Manara.` 11 But the hasty efforts by the Carmeli Brigade on 22-24 October to reinforce Manara and take back Sheikh Abd failed, with heavy loss of life (thirty-three IDF dead, forty wounded). Indeed, ALA units strengthened their hold on the hilltops along the Yiftah-Manara road, knocking out an IDF armored column.`» The kibbutz was now besieged, and the main south-north road through the Panhandle to Metulla was also under threat. During the z4-z5 October ALA troops regularly sniped at Manara and at traffic along the main road. In contacts with UN observers, al-Qawugji demanded that Israel evacuate neighboring I ibbutz Yiftah-that had been established two months before-and thin out its forces in Manara. The IDF demanded the ALA's withdrawal from the captured positions and, after a "no" from al-Qawugji, informed the United Nations that it felt free to do as it pleased. Sensing what was about to happen, the Lebanese army "ordered" al-Qawugji to withdraw from Israeli territory-but to no avail.98

Al-Qawugji's provocation at Sheikh Abd made little military sense, considering that his "army" consisted of three undersized "brigades," each, in tact, amounting to a battalion, totaling some three thousand troops, who were backed by two to three companies of regular Syrian troops and several hundred local militiamen and foreign Moroccan volunteers. At the end of October the Syrians sent two battalions to reinforce the ALA, perhaps with an eye to eventual Syrian annexation of central Galilee.99 But only one of these, the Ninth, ended up in Galilee, fighting the Israelis. Al-Qawugji's troops suffered from acute shortages of supplies, especially ammunition; on z5 October one battalion informed him that it was down to seventeen rounds per rifle and lacked food. 1()0

The impending conquest of central Galilee was obliquely debated in the Israeli Cabinet-though never actually put to the vote (unlike Operation Yoav). Shertok had earlier argued that the "pocket" was crowded with Arabs, many of them refugees from the areas of Eastern Galilee that had fallen to the Israelis in April and May, and if it appeared that it would become part of Israel, still more refugees would pour into it from Lebanon and Syria. He implied that, for demographic reasons, he was averse to conquering central Galilee. 101

But the defense establishment, including Ben-Gurion, was eager to take the "pocket." As Carmel later put it, "There were among us those who were happy with [al-Qaw;aigji's] move, as they believed that his crass violation of the cease-fire gave us just cause, politically, to embark on a large-scale offensive."102 Without doubt, Bernadotte's legacy (with its proposed trade-offs between the Negev and the Galilee), and the IDF successes in the south in the third week of October, helped Ben-Gurion make up his mind. He may have feared that the conquest of the Negev might induce the international community to "compensate" the Arabs with the Galilee or parts of it. Establishing a fait accompli in the north, in "Hiram," would remove the threat.

On 16 October, a week before the attack on Sheikh Abd, Carmelprompted by the start of the IDF onslaught against the Egyptians the day before-had pressed Ben-Gurion to be allowed "to begin in the Galilee." BenGurion had refused. 103 But on 24-25 October he gave the green light, 104 and on z8 October, wielding four brigades (Carmeli, Golani, the Seventh, and Oded, just rushed up from the south), Carmel unleashed "Hiram," named after the biblical king of Tyre, an ally of King Solomon. The aim, stated the final version of the operational order, was "to destroy the enemy in the central Galilee `pocket,' to take control of the whole of the Galilee and to establish a defense line on the country's northern border." 105

The order made no mention of the prospective fate of the civilian inhabitants of, and refugees in, the "pocket." But an earlier order, produced six weeks before the start of Hiram by Haifa District HQ, one of Northern Front's units, spoke of "evicting" the inhabitants from the conquered villages.106 This would have been in line with Ben-Gurion's stated expectation that the "pocket" would be "empty [reik]" of Arab villagers after conquest.

The offensive began with air attacks just before dusk on 28 October by a lone B-17, Dakotas, Rapides, and Austers on key villages and ALA HQs at Tarshiha, Sukhmata, Mughar, Jish, and Sasa.107 They were not particularly effective, though they "greatly encouraged" the IDF ground troops who were about to set off. 108 During the previous nights the four brigades had quietly mustered on the edges of the "pocket" (while maintaining normalcy along the roads during daylight hours). The ALA was caught completely off guard. On the night of 28-29 October the Golani, Seventh, and Oded brigades simultaneously stormed the "pocket" from west and east.

The offensive was designed as a pincer movement, with the Seventh (armored) Brigade attacking from the east and the Ninth (Oded) Brigade attacking from the west, with feints and minor help from Golani and Carmeli. The operation was conducted in mountainous terrain, with dirt tracks and narrow roads linking the various objectives. The key and decisive battle was fought on the first night, 28-29 October, between units of the Seventh Brigade and the ALA's Second Yarmuk "Brigade." Pushing northwestward from its bases in Safad-Tin Zeitim, the Seventh stormed the key villages of Meirun, Safsaf, and Jish, with the newly organized IDF Circassian Company first occupying Qaddita. At all three sites the ALA fought with determination before being overpowered. On the morning of 29 October the brigade beat off a counterattack by Syrian and ALA units at Jish.109 "The [Syrian] troops, well-dressed and well-equipped, ran hither and thither between the houses and in the alleyways and in the nearby fig groves, alone and in groups, and tried to fire back.... Qawuqji's troops fled in the direction of the Jermak.... We captured two ... armored vehicles taken from us in the Yehiam Convoy and now decorated with the symbol of the ALA, a bent dagger dripping blood, stuck in the heart of a Shield of David.... Later the POWs started to reach us, broken-spirited Qawuqji men and frightened Syrian officers and men who stood and looked on us with bewildered eyes. A young Syrian officer muttered continuously in English: `I was in the Military Academy for two years."'110

By permission of Carta Jerusalem

Operation Hiram, Northern Front, 27-31 October 194.8

The other arm of the pincer, the Ninth Brigade, which set out from Kabri, did not fare as well. Its Ninety-second Battalion was stymied on z8 -zq October on the road to Tarshiha, despite enjoying effective artillery support, and its auxiliary Druze Company was set upon by an ALA unit and local militiamen (in violation of a prior surrender agreement) inside the village of Yanuh and forced to retreat, suffering heavy losses (fourteen dead-eleven Druze soldiers and three Jewish officers).'"1

But the Ninth Brigade renewed its assault the following evening. Tarshiha fell early on 30 October. The inhabitants and the ALA had been thoroughly demoralized by the bombing raids, in which twenty-four persons had died and sixty were buried under the rubble.''2 The brigade then pushed eastward (and northwestward toward Fassuta and Deir al-Qasi), taking Sukhmata and Hurfeish and linking up with the Seventh Brigade at Sasa, which the Seventh had taken, without a fight, earlier that day, ALA HQ having just before ordered a retreat. At the same time, Golani units pushed northward from Lubiya and took the villages of `Eilabun, Mughar, and Rama, joining up with the Ninth Brigade at Sukhmata. Seventh Brigade units later that day advanced northeastward along two axes, reaching the border with Lebanon and taking Kafr Bir`im and Saliha, and Ras al-Ahmar, Reihaniya, and Deishum. They completed their push at dawn on 31 October by taking Malikiya, from which the Lebanese and ALA defenders had fled hours earlier.113