1948: A History of the First Arab-Israeli War (76 page)

An honest appraisal of the balance of strength in the war requires a reassessment of the components of a state's or a society's strength and weakness and necessarily extends the discussion beyond the narrow parameters of military manpower and weapons rosters. The organization and unity of purpose of armies and the effectiveness of their command and control systems is of paramount importance. Measurable categories, such as financial resources, as well as less quantifiable elements, such as levels of motivation and morale, must also be considered. So, too, must details regarding types of weaponry and stockpiles of given types of ammunition and spare parts at different points in time in a protracted struggle as well as the combat experience and training of officers and men. A clear understanding of these and other factors goes a long way to explaining the Yishuv's victory.

In rough demographic and geopolitical terms, without doubt, the Arabs were far, almost infinitely, stronger than the Yishuv. The Palestinian Arabs outnumbered Palestine's Jews by a factor of two to one. And the surrounding Arab states mustered a total population of forty million, with an additional, vast demographic hinterland stretching into the Arabian Peninsula and across North Africa to the Atlantic Ocean, as compared with the Yishuv's paltry population of 65o,ooo. The Yishuv, to be sure, received a small stream of volunteers from Diaspora Jewry (and the Christian West). But the Palestinian Arabs and the Arabs of the confrontation states, who both also enjoyed the services of foreign volunteers, were incomparably stronger in demographic terms. And the disproportion in terms of land mass and economic resources, or potential economic resources, was, if anything, even greater.

But the Yishuv had organized for war. The Arabs hadn't. The small, com pact Jewish community in Palestine was economically and politically vibrant, a potential powerhouse if adequately organized and directed. And it enjoyed a unity of purpose and a collective fear-of a new Holocaust-that afforded high levels of motivation (as well as magnetizing international support). The fact that the Yishuv was the victim of aggression and that each Jewish soldier was almost literally defending hearth and home added to the motivational edge. This edge was amply demonstrated in places where a handful of poorly armed defenders beat back massive Arab assaults, as at Nirim and Degania in May 1948.

The Palestinian Arabs, with well-established traditions of disunity, corruption, and organizational incompetence, failed to mobilize their resources. They even failed to put together a national militia organization before going to war. Their leaders may have talked, often and noisily, about the "Zionist threat," but they failed to prepare. Perhaps, by the late i94os, they had come to rely on foreign intervention as the engine of their salvation. Much as, throughout their history, the Palestinian Arabs displayed a knee-jerk penchant to always blame others-the Ottomans, the British, Europe, the United States, the Jews-for whatever ailed them, so, from the mid-1930s on, they exhibited a mindless certainty that, whatever they did or whatever happened, someone-the United Nations, the Great Powers, the Arab states-would pull their chestnuts out of the fire.

The Palestinians (like the surrounding Arab states) had a socioeconomic elite with no tradition of public service or ethos of contribution and sacrifice (typical was the almost complete absence of sons of that elite among the fighters of 1936-1939 and 1948); for many, nationalism was a rhetorical device to amass power or divert resentments rather than a deeply felt emotion. The Palestinian Arabs suffered from a venal leadership and a tradition of imperial domination as well a sense of powerlessness and fatalism. These combined to neuter initiative.

When war came-at their instigation-the Palestinians were unprepared: they lacked a "government" (indeed, almost all the members of the AHC, and many, if not most, NC members were outside the country for most of the civil war), and they were short of arms and ammunition. All told, the eight hundred Arab villages and dozen or so towns of Palestine, in December 1947, may have possessed more light arms than the Yishuv. But they were dispersed and under local control and not standardized, and most of them probably never saw a battlefield. The Palestinians lacked the economic or organizational wherewithal to import arms and ammunition in significant quantities once the hostilities commenced, and the Arab states were niggardly with material support.

The Palestinian militias performed moderately well, when they were on the offensive, between late November 1947 and the end of March 1948 (though they, and their ALA reinforcements, never conquered a single Jewish settlement). But once the Yishuv went over to the offensive, it was all over. From early April, the Haganah was able to concentrate forces and pick off Arab towns, villages, and clusters of villages in succession and in isolation; villages failed to assist their neighbors, and clusters of villages, neighboring clusters of villages. Almost no villagers came to the aid of townspeople and vice versa. In effect, each community was on its own. And the incompetent and small ALA, though deploying some heavy weapons, failed to make a difference.

Between early April and mid-May, Palestinian Arab society fell apart and was crushed by a relatively poorly armed and, in many ways, ragtag Jewish militia. One day, when the Palestinians face up to their past and produce serious historiography, they will probe these parameters of weakness and responsibility to the full (as well as the functioning of their leadership and society in the months and years before 1948). Among the things they will "discover" will be how few young men from the Hebron, Rarnallah, and Nablus areas-largely untouched by the war-actually participated in 1948's battles and how few of them died in the fighting in Jaffa, Haifa, Jerusalem, and the Jezreel and Jordan Valleys. The Yishuv had fought not a "people" but an assortment of regions, towns, and villages. What this says about the Palestinian Arabs, at the time, as a "people" will also need to be confronted.

As to the conventional war, which began with the pan-Arab invasion of 15 May 1948, the Arab states were infinitely larger and more populous than Israel and possessed regular armies, with heavy weapons. Hence, they were "stronger." But Israel nonetheless won, and this requires explanation.22 After the war, Arab commentators and leaders argued that the Arab states, too, were essentially "weak," given the "newness" of their state structures, their corrupt ruling classes, and the fractious heritage of colonialism. The aim was to score propaganda points in debates in the international arena as well as to "justify" what had happened in the face of criticism by the "street" or opposition parties. The Israelis, for their part, also intent on retaining the image of the underdog, trotted out maps of the Middle East, which highlighted the Yishuv's small size, and tables of comparative heavy weapons strengths, which underlined Israeli weakness. Often, Israeli spokesmen and commentators indulged in statistical acrobatics to prove their point.

But there was a large element of truth in the Israeli claim, certainly in mid1948, to "weakness." The newborn state was assailed simultaneously from various directions, and Israeli troops in many sectors did end up battling far larger Arab contingents. And in the weeks before 15 May, the Yishuv's lead ers could not know or guess how poorly the Arabs would organize for war or how incompetently and disunitedly their armies would perform. The Yishuv was genuinely fearful of the outcome-and the Haganah chiefs' assessment on 12 May of a "fifty-fifty" chance of victory or survival was sincere and typical.

Egypt, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, and Jordan had all achieved independence (or semi-independence) a few years before, and most had new armies with inadequate training and no experience of combat. Their populations consisted largely of illiterate peasants for whom religion, family, clan, and village were the cores of identity and loyalty. They were relatively untouched by the passions of modern nationalism (though were easily swayed by Islamic rhetoric) and lacked technological skills, which bore heavily on the functioning of air and naval forces, artillery, intelligence, and communications. The states themselves were all poor and poorly organized and led by self-serving politicians of varied abilities and ethics; all, except Lebanon, were governed by shambling autocracies, and none, except perhaps Jordan's, enjoyed popular legitimacy or support.

Their armies were all small and poorly equipped. Come 1948, they-except Jordan-failed to mobilize properly, owing to a combination of inefficiency, lack of resources, and overconfidence. And their populations were more easily inclined to rowdy street demonstrations than actually to going off to fight in the harsh hills of Palestine.

In May 1948 all, except Jordan, found it prudent, when dispatching expeditionary forces to Palestine, to leave behind large units to protect the regimes or counter rebellious minorities (such as the Kurds in northern Iraq). Nonetheless, the four armies that invaded on 15 May were far stronger than the Haganah formations they initially encountered, if not in manpower-where they were roughly evenly matched-then in equipment and firepower. The invaders had batteries of modern twenty-five-pounders, tanks, dozens of gun-mounting armored cars, and dozens of combat aircraft. The Haganah had virtually no artillery and initially made do with mortars, no tanks, and no combat aircraft (until the end of May), and its improvised armored car fleet was inferior in every respect.

But the Haganah enjoyed home court advantages-internal lines of communication, higher motivation, familiarity with the terrain-and managed to hold on, even going over to the counterattack, albeit abortively, within days of the invasion. During the following weeks, owing to effective mobilization, the Haganah/IDF gradually overtook the Arab states' armies in terms of manpower. By war's end, the IDF outnumbered the Arab armies engaged in Palestine by a factor of almost two to one. Once the Yishuv had weathered the initial onslaught, the war, in effect, was won. All that re mained was to see how much of Palestine it could conquer (or be allowed to hold by the Great Powers) and how severely the invaders would be trounced.

The Great Powers and the United Nations affected the course of the war in a number of significant ways. One was by way of armaments and the asymmetrical effects on the belligerents of the international arms embargos. The Americans imposed an arms embargo on the region starting in December 1947. The United Nations imposed a wider embargo in late May 1948, crucially affecting supplies to the Arab states, which had traditionally received their weapons and ammunition (on credit) from their former colonial masters, Britain and France. The embargo, to which Britain and France were obedient, at a stroke cut off the Arabs from almost all sources of weaponry, ammunition, and spare parts. And they lacked the agility, networks, knowledge, and funds to switch horses in midstream and begin procurement from alternative sources. In effect, the Arab states had to fight the war with what they had in stock, a stock they had failed to build up adequately in the preceding years and that rapidly diminished as the hostilities progressed.

It was otherwise with the Yishuv. The Yishuv had never bought or received arms from states and had developed no prewar dependencies. Instead, it had bought arms in the international black market. It had entered the war with experienced clandestine procurement networks and with the financial backing of American Jewry. In preparation for the war, the Haganah purchased arms or "civilian" equipment convertible to war purposes in the United States (including machine tools needed to produce arms) and in the world's black markets. Once the fighting began, the Yishuv/Israel discovered another, major source of equipment. The Americans and, by and large, the Western European states refused to sell the Haganah arms. But the Soviet Union and Czechoslovakia, for a combination of reasons-financial, political (anti-British), and ideological-humanitarian (many Czechs saw the Jews as fellow sufferers)-were willing to ignore the United Nations and sell arms to the Yishuv. (The Syrians also made some purchases from the Czech Skoda Arms Works, but they were meager-and they proved unable safely to transport them to Syria. Indeed, Israeli naval commandos twice managed to interdict these shipments in European waters.) From late March 1948 onward, Czech arms-and additional arms from black and gray market sourcespoured into Palestine/Israel, enabling the Yishuv to neutralize the Palestinian Arab militias, go over to the offensive, parry the Arab armies' invasion, and, eventually, win the war.

The United Nations' embargo-enforcing machinery, from the start, was inadequate and ineffective. Israel proved adept at circumventing it; the Arabs, except in the matter of dispatching additional manpower to the fronts, never really tried. In terms of importing militarily professional manpower, the Yishuv also "beat" the Arabs. The Yishuv/Israel managed to attract and hire expert foreign military personnel-(mostly Christian) air- and ground crews, naval personnel, communications experts-and deploy them effectively. It was not primarily a matter of salaries: many came for the adventure, but most because of the Holocaust and sympathy for the beleaguered new state; for some, it was a repeat of the (tragic failed) effort to save the Spanish Republic. Of the Arab states, only the Jordanians, who increased their roster of Britons during the war, managed to recruit and deploy foreign military experts to any real effect. The handful of ex-Nazi Germans or Bosnian Muslims recruited by Syria, Egypt, and the Palestinian Arabs proved of little significance.

The Great Powers and the United Nations significantly affected the course and outcome of the war in other ways. From the start, the Yishuv enjoyed an immense moral advantage stemming from the overwhelming international support, which included the United States and Soviet Union, for partition and Jewish statehood. Without doubt this affected both the Palestinians and the Arab states in their political and military decision-making. Throughout, the Arab leaders were constrained by the thought that they were defying the will of the international community and that, should the Yishuv face defeat and massacre, the Great Powers might well intervene on its behalf. This certainly helped persuade King 'Abdullah on the eve of the invasion that it was pointless to seek the Yishuv's destruction.