1948: A History of the First Arab-Israeli War (78 page)

Al-Husseini: "We must leave all this to the future."

On which the commissioners commented: "We are not questioning the sincerity or the humanity of the Mufti's intentions ... but we cannot forget what recently happened, despite treaty provisions and explicit assurances, to the Assyrian [Christian] minority in Iraq; nor can we forget that the hatred of the Arab politician for the [Jewish] National Home has never been concealed and that it has now permeated the Arab population as a whole."a0

Al-Husseini was to remain consistent on this point for the rest of his life. During the war, al-Husseini's rhetoric was considerably upgraded. In March 19+8 he told an interviewer in a Jaffa daily Al Sarih that the Arabs did not intend merely to prevent partition but "would continue fighting until the Zionists were annihilated and the whole of Palestine became a purely Arab state."31 In 1974, just before his death, he told interviewers: "There is no room for peaceful coexistence with our enemies. The only solution is the liquidation of the foreign conquest in Palestine within its natural frontiers and the establishment of a national Palestinian state on the basis of its Muslim and Christian inhabitants and its Jewish [inhabitants] who lived here before the British conquest in 1917 and their descendants."32

Haj Amin was nothing if not consistent. In 1938, Ben-Gurion met Musa Husseini in London. Musa Husseini, a relative and supporter of the mufti (he was executed in 1951 by the Jordanians for his part in the assassination of King 'Abdullah), told Ben-Gurion that Haj Amin "insists on seven per cent [as the maximal percentage of Jews in the total population of Palestine], as it was at the end of the World War." In 1938 the Jews constituted 30 percent of the country's population. How Haj Amin intended to reduce the proportion from 30 to 7 percent Musa Husseini did not explain.33 (It is not without relevance that this objective was replicated in the constitution of the Palestine Liberation Organization [PLO], the Palestine National Charter, formulated in 1964 and revised in 1968. Clause 6 states: "The Jews who had normally resided in Palestine before the beginning of the Zionist invasion will be considered Palestinians." This "beginning" is defined elsewhere as "1917" or the moment of promulgation of the Balfour Declaration [2 November 1917].)

Such sentiments translated into action in 1948. During the "civil war," when the opportunity arose, Palestinian militiamen who fought alongside the Arab Legion consistently expelled Jewish inhabitants and razed conquered sites, as happened in the `Etzion Bloc and the Jewish Quarter of Jerusalem's Old City. Subsequently, the Arab armies behaved in similar fashion. All the Jewish settlements conquered by the invading Jordanian, Syrian, and Egyptian armies-about a dozen in all, including Beit Ha arava, Neve Yaakov, and Atarot in the Jordanian sector; Masada and Sha'ar Hagolan in the Syrian sector; and Yad Mordechai, Nitzanim, and Kfar Darom in the Egyptian sector-were razed after their inhabitants had fled or been incarcerated or expelled.

These expulsions by the Arab regular armies stemmed quite naturally from the expulsionist mindset prevailing in the Arab states. The mindset characterized both the public and the ruling elites. All vilified the Yishuv and opposed the existence of a Jewish state on "their" (sacred Islamic) soil, and all sought its extirpation, albeit with varying degrees of bloody-mindedness. Shouts of"Idbah al Yahud" (slaughter the Jews) characterized equally street demonstrations in Jaffa, Cairo, Damascus, and Baghdad both before and during the war and were, in essence, echoed, usually in tamer language, by most Arab leaders. We do not have verbatim minutes of what these leaders said in closed inter-Arab gatherings. But their statements to Western diplomats, where caution was usually required, were candid enough. "It was possible that in the first phases of the Jewish-Arab conflict the Arabs might meet with initial reverses," King Farouk told the American ambassador to Egypt, S. Pinckney Tuck, just after the passage of the UN General Assembly partition resolution. "[But] in the long run the Arabs would soundly defeat the Jews and drive them out of Palestine."34 A few weeks earlier, that other potentate, King Ibn Saud of Saudi Arabia, had written to President Truman: "The Arabs have definitely decided to oppose [the] establishment of a Jewish state in any part of the Arab world. The dispute between the Arab and Jew will be violent and long-lasting.... Even if it is supposed that the Jews will succeed in gaining support for the establishment of a small state by their oppressive and tyrannous means and their money, such a state must perish in a short time. The Arab will isolate such a state from the world and will lay siege to it until it dies by famine.... Its end will be the same as that of [the] Crusader states."35 The establishment of Israel, and the international endorsement that it enjoyed, enraged the Arab world; destruction and expulsion were to be its lot. Without doubt, Arab expulsionism fueled Zionist expulsionist thinking during the 193os and 194os.

As it turned out, it was Palestinian Arab society that was smashed, not the Yishuv. The war created the Palestinian refugee problem. Looking back, Israel's Foreign Minister Moshe Shertok said, "There are those who say that we uprooted Arabs from their places. But even they will not deny that the source of the problem was the war: had there been no war, the Arabs would not have abandoned their villages, and we would not have expelled them. Had the Arabs from the start accepted the decision of 29 November [1947], a completely different Jewish state would have arisen.... In essence the State of Israel would have arisen with a large Arab minority, which would have left its impress on the state, on its manner of governance, and on its economic life, and [this Arab minority] would have constituted an organic part of the state. "36

Shertok, of course, was right: the refugee problem was created by the war-which the Arabs had launched (though the Arabs would argue, then and subsequently, that the Zionist influx was, since its beginning, an act of aggression and that the Arab launch of the x947-1948 war was merely an act of self-defense). And it was that war that propelled most of those displaced out of their houses and into refugeedom. Most fled when their villages and towns came under Jewish attack or out of fear of future attack. They wished to move out of harm's way. At first, during December 1947-March 1948, it was the middle- and upper-class families who fled, abandoning the towns; later, from April on, after the Yishuv shifted to the offensive, it was the urban and rural masses who fled, in a sense emulating their betters. Most of the displaced likely expected to return to their homes within weeks or months, on the coattails of victorious Arab armies or on the back of a UN decision or Great Power intervention. Few expected that their refugeedom would last a lifetime or encompass their children and grandchildren. But it did.

The permanence of the refugee problem owed much to Israel's almost instant decision, taken in the summer of 1948, not to allow back those who had fled or been expelled. The Zionist national and local leaderships almost instantly understood that a refugee return would destabilize the new state, demographically and politically. And the army understood that a refugee return would introduce a militarily subversive fifth column. Again, it was Shertok who explained: "We are resolute not to allow anyone under any circumstances to return.... [At best] the return can only be partial and small; the solution [to the problem] lies in the resettlement of the refugees in other countries."37

But the Arab states refused to absorb or properly resettle the refugees in their midst. This, too, accounts for the perpetuation of the refugee problem. The Arab states regarded the repatriation of the refugees as an imperative of "justice" and, besides, understood that, in the absence of a return, maintaining the refugees as an embittered, impoverished community would serve their anti-Israeli political and military purposes. As a tool of propaganda, the existence of the refugee communities, many of them in dilapidated "camps," bit into Israel's humane image. And the refugees and their descendants provided a ready pool for recruitment of guerrillas and terrorists who could continuously sting the Jewish state. Besides, many refugees refused permanently to resettle in the host countries because it could be seen as, and could promote, an abandonment of the dream of a return. Hence, the Middle East is dotted with large concentrations of Palestinian refugees-so-called camps that, in reality, are suburban slums, on the peripheries of large Arab towns (Beirut, Damascus, Amman, Nablus, and so on)-living on international handouts this past half-century while continuously stoking the Israeli-Arab conflict, one intifada following hard on the heels of its predecessor.

The Palestinian Arabs, backed by the wider Arab and Muslim worlds, continue to endorse the refugees' right of return and demand its implementation. Many Arabs no doubt view the return as a means of undermining Israel's existence. The Arabs are united in seeing the refugees as a standing reminder of their collective humiliation at the hands of the Yishuv in 1948 and as a token of the "injustice" perpetrated on the Arab world by Israel's creation (with Western backing). Israel, for its part, has quite logically persisted ever since in resisting the demand for a return, arguing that it would lead instantly, or over time, to its demise. Without doubt, the refugees constitute the most intractable, and explosive, of the problems left by the events of 1948.

The war indirectly created a second, major refugee problem. Partly because of the clash of Jewish and Arab arms in Palestine, some five to six hundred thousand Jews who lived in the Arab world emigrated, were intimidated into flight, or were expelled from their native countries, most of them reaching Israel, with a minority resettling in France, Britain, and the other Western countries. The immediate propellants to flight were the popular Arab hostility, including pogroms, triggered by the war in Palestine and specific governmental measures, amounting to institutionalized discrimination against and oppression of the Jewish minority communities.

Already before the war, Iraq's prime minister had warned British diplomats that if the United Nations decided on a solution to the Palestine problem that was not "satisfactory" to the Arabs, "severe measures should [would?] be taken against all Jews in Arab countries."38 A few weeks later, the head of the Egyptian delegation to the United Nations, Muhammad Hussein Heykal, announced that "the lives of i,ooo,ooo Jews in Moslem countries would be jeopardized by the establishment of a Jewish State. ",39

The outbreak of hostilities triggered wide-ranging anti-Jewish measures throughout the Arab world, with the pogroms in Aden-where seventy-six Jews were killed and seventy-eight wounded-and Aleppo-where ten synagogues, five schools, and iso houses were burnt to the ground-only the most prominent. Anti-Semitic outbreaks were reported as far afield as Peshawar, in Pakistan; Meshed-Izet and Isfahan, in Iran; and Bahrain.4' An atmosphere of intimidation and terror against Jews was generated by antiZionist and anti-Semitic propaganda in the generally state-controlled media. Prime Minister Mahmoud Nuqrashi of Egypt explained to the British ambassador: "All Jews were potential Zionists [and] . . . anyhow all Zionists were Communists."41 From the start of the clashes in Palestine, the Jewish communities were coerced into making large financial "contributions" to the Arab forces.42

In Egypt, the start of the conventional war in mid-May 1948 was accompanied by the promulgation of martial law and the suspension of civil rights, the prevention of Jews from leaving the country, mass detentions (and occasional torture) without charge (the British Jewish Board of Deputies in early June 1948 alleged that "z,5oo" Jews had been arrested; the Egyptians admitted to about "6oo")4s in internment camps,44 and the confiscation of Jewish property. Bomb attacks in the Jewish Quarter of Cairo killed dozens.45 The summer of 1948 was characterized by sporadic street attacks on Jews (and foreigners). The National-Zeitung of Basel reported that "at least So" persons, "most of them Jews," were killed in a series of incidents in Egypt during the week of 18 -z5 July. The mob attacks and knifings, according to the newspaper, were at least partly orchestrated by the government in order to divert popular attention-and anger-away from Egypt's acceptance of the Second Truce. Cairo, the newspaper reported, "was entirely given over to the terror of the Arab mob ... which roamed about the streets, howling and screaming `Yahudi, Yahudi' (Jews). Every European-looking person was attacked.... The worst scenes passed off in the Jewish Quarter, where the mob moved from house to house ... killing hundreds of Jews. 1146 On 23 September a bomb exploded in the Jewish Quarter, killing twentynine people, "mostly Jews."47

In Iraq, following the May 1948 declaration of martial law, hundreds of Jews were arrested (the Iraqi government admitted to "276" Jews detained and "i,i88" non-Jews),48 and Jewish property was arbitrarily confiscated. Jewish students were banned from high schools and universities. Some fifteen hundred Jews were dismissed from government positions, the Iraqi Ministry of Health refused to renew the licenses of Jewish physicians or issue new ones, Jewish merchants' import and export licenses were canceled, and various economic sanctions were imposed on the Jewish community.49 In January 1949, Prime Minister Nuri Sa'id threatened "that all Iraqi Jews would be expelled if the Israelis did not allow the Arab refugees to return to Palestine."S0 A new "wave of persecution" was unleashed against the 125,ooo-strong community in early October 1949, with about two thousand being packed off to jails and "concentration camps" and vast amounts of money being extorted in fines on various pretexts.51 But the Iraqi government kept a tight leash on the "street."

Elsewhere in the Arab world, mobs were given their head. In April 1948, Arabs ransacked Jewish property and attacked Jews in Beirut,52 and in June, a mob rampaged in British-administered Tripoli, Libya, killing thirteen.53 That month, in Oujda and Djerada, in French-ruled Morocco, Arab mobs killed dozens of Jews, including some twenty women and children.54