1948: A History of the First Arab-Israeli War (79 page)

Because of this atmosphere of intimidation and violence and oppressive governmental measures-though also because of the "pull" of Zionism (which before 1948 and the establishment of the State of Israel had had little purchase among the Jews of the Islamic world) and Zionist "missionary" efforts-the Jewish communities in the Arab world were propelled into emigration.

The first to leave were Yemen's Jews, the only Oriental Jewish community with a tradition of (religious) Zionism. (About sixteen thousand Yemeni Jews had emigrated to Palestine in the decades before 1948.) Between May 1949 and August 1950, some forty-three thousand of the forty-five-thousand-strong community packed their bags and trekked to Aden, from where they were airlifted, in Operation Magic Carpet, to Israel. In 1968 there were only two hundred Jews left in Yemen.

Iraq's Jews-a relatively prosperous and well-educated community-began leaving in 1948, even though emigration was illegal. By early 19So, thousands had crossed the border into Iran. In March 195o, the Iraqi government legalized emigration, though the departees had to forfeit their citizenship and property. Between May 195o and August 1951, the Israeli authorities, assisted by international welfare organizations, airlifted the remaining eighty to ninety thousand Iraqi Jews to Israel. A small number of Iraqi Jews eventually settled in Britain and Brazil.

Four-fifths of Egypt's sixty-five thousand Jews were not Egyptian citizens (they held assorted European passports). About twenty-five thousand left in 1948 -1950. The bulk of the remainder left under duress or were deported, with their property confiscated, in 1955 -1957, immediately before and after the Sinai-Suez War. By 1970, only about a thousand remained. These, too, subsequently departed.

Most of Syria's fifteen thousand Jews left, illegally, in the wake of the Aleppo pogrom of December 1947 and the declaration of Israeli statehood in May 1948. Palestinian refugees were often installed in their former homes in Damascus and Aleppo. The remainder trickled out during the following decades, as Syria intermittently allowed emigration. All forfeited their property.

The bulk of Libya's forty thousand Jews left the country in 1949-1951, mostly for Israel. Most of Morocco's, Algeria's, and Tunisia's Jews left in the mid-195os and the 196os. Apparently, despite the Moroccan pogroms of June 1948, these communities felt relatively safe under French rule. In Morocco, which had the largest of the Maghrebi communities, the sultan, Muhammad V, also afforded the Jews protection. But with the onset of independence, almost all of Morocco's Jews moved to Israel; the elite immigrated to France. A pogrom in Mazagan (El Jadida), near Casablanca, in which eight Jews died and forty houses were torched in August 1955, acted as an important precipitant. Around sixty thousand-of the community's pre1948 total of about three hundred thousand-left in 1955-1956. A second major wave followed hard on the heels ofMuhammad V's death in 1961. Today Morocco's approximately four thousand Jews are the largest Jewish community in the Arab world.

The Arab governments and societies were generally glad to be rid of their Jewish communities. At base, there was the traditional religious alienation, unease, and animosity. And against the backdrop of the Palestine war, there was vengefulness and genuine fear of the Jews' potential subversiveness; the Jews were identified with Zionism and Israel. As well, the Arab states derived massive economic benefit from the confiscations of property that accompanied the exodus, though the wealthier emigres, from Baghdad and Egypt, managed to take out some of their assets. But the vast majority, most of them poorly educated or illiterate, lost everything or almost everything. They arrived in Israel penniless or almost penniless. They were immediately granted citizenship and accommodation. But Israel was poor, most of the immigrants knew no Hebrew, and many-especially from the Maghrebwere unsuited to the rigors and demands of life in postwar Israel. There was also a measure of discrimination against the new immigrants. The travails of absorption created a "Sephardi" problem and a cultural divide that wrenched Israeli society in the following decades.

The experience of discrimination and persecution in the Arab world, and the centuries of subjection and humiliation that preceded 194.8, had left the emigrant Sephardi communities with a deep dislike, indeed hatred, of that world, which, in the internal Israeli political realm, translated into Arabophobia and hard-line, right-wing voting patterns, both among the first generation of emigres and among their descendents. This, too, was an indirect by-product of the 1948 War.

Israel's leaders, already in 1948, by way of rebuffing Arab efforts to achieve repatriation of the Palestinian refugees, pointed out that what had taken place was a double exodus, or an unplanned "exchange of population," more or less of equal numbers, with a similar massive loss of property affecting both the Palestinian refugees and the Jewish refugees from Arab lands. These canceled each other out, went the argument, in both humanitarian and economic terms. The Israeli leaders usually added that the Palestinian refugees had brought their demise on themselves by initiating the war on their Jewish neighbors, which resulted in their dispossession and exile, whereas the Jews of the Arab lands had by and large done nothing to offend or aggress and had nonetheless been driven out. And one last difference: the Jewish refugee problem quickly disappeared as Israel absorbed them; the Palestinian refugee problem persisted (and persists), as the Arab states largely failed to absorb their refugees, leaving many of them stateless and languishing in refugee camps and living on international charity.

Economically, the war had done limited harm to Israel, in terms of manpower destroyed, houses and fields trashed, and production impeded. But this was largely offset by the massive influx of Jewish immigrants and the financial contributions sent by world, especially American, Jewry and by the grants and loans that soon began to arrive from Western governments. A giant demographic and agrarian revolution took place that, within five years, led to the doubling of the Jewish population and of the number of settlements, with all that this implied in terms of agricultural productivity and demographic expansion and dispersion. To some degree, the war had also been beneficial to Israel's fledgling industrial sector.

For the Arab combatants, the war had notched up only economic losses. Their in any case weak economies were further undermined by an increase in foreign debts. And all (save Iraq), to one degree or another, were forced to cope with Palestinian refugees-though by and large this failed to harm them economically as the advent of UNRWA and a steady flow of Western relief capital more than compensated for any losses they may initially have incurred. The major economic harm inflicted by the war on the Arab side was largely to the Palestinians, who lost much of their property, especially land and houses, to the victors.

The war formally ended with the signing of the armistice agreements. Each had included a preamble defining the accord as a step on the road to a comprehensive peace. But none of the agreements had any such immediate issue. During the 195os and i96os, with the humiliation of 1948 fresh on its mind, the Arab world was unwilling to make peace with the Jewish state that had arisen in its midst; indeed, the Arab world was not ready for peace. This was demonstrated by the fate of the series of bilateral contacts Israel held during the following years with Egyptian, Syrian, and Jordanian officials and leaders. Occasionally, the Egyptians hinted at the possibility of nonbelligerency or even "peace" in return for an Israeli cession of all or much of the Negev (something the Egyptians probably knew the Israelis would never agree to); Syria's president, Hosni Za'im, during summer 1949 spoke of peace in exchange for an Israeli cession of half the Sea of Galilee and all of its eastern shoreline, and half the Jordan river (again, something it is unlikely he believed Israel would or could concede). Israel's response to both-as well as to the demands that it accept the repatriation of the refugees (the Arabs usually said they numbered nine hundred thousand to a million persons) and withdraw to the 1947 partition borders-was a resounding "no."

The most serious and protracted negotiations were with Jordan's King 'Abdullah, who appeared sincerely interested in peace (he was largely motivated by the fear that, in the absence of peace, Israel would gobble up the West Bank-which it eventually did, in 1967). But he, too, demanded territory and a substantial measure of refugee repatriation-and, in the end, proved unable to overcome the resistance to peace of his "street" and minis ters. When presented with something less than full peace, a five-year nonbelligerency draft agreement, already initialed by his prime minister, he at the last minute balked and declined to sign.

It can be-and has been-argued that with all three countries, but especially with Jordan, Israel could and should have been more forthcoming and that had it assented to the concessions demanded, peace could have been reached and concluded. I have my doubts. Would the `ulema of Al-Azhar University have agreed? Would the "street" have acquiesced? Would Abdullah's fellow leaders have resigned themselves to such a breaking of ranks? Given the atmosphere prevailing in the postwar Arab world, it seems unlikely that any leader could have signed and delivered real, lasting peace, whatever concessions Israel made. The antagonism toward a Jewish state, of any size, was deep and consensual; peace with Israel was seen as treasonous. And the only Arab leader who had seriously conducted peace negotiations was, in fact, murdered (King 'Abdullah in 195 i)-as, in fact, was the next Arab leader who dared (President Anwar Sadat of Egypt in 1981 ).

In addition, a question arises about the reasonableness, justice, and logic of the concessions Israel was being asked to make. After all, the Arab states had attacked Israel, collectively aiming at Israel's destruction or, at the least, truncation. They had failed. But in the process, they had caused grievous losses and destruction to the new state, which was minute by any standards, even with the additional territory won in the war (some two thousand square miles were then added to the six thousand square miles originally allocated for Jewish statehood in the UN partition resolution). And many Arab leaders continued during the following years to speak quite openly of a necessary "second round" and of uprooting the "Zionist entity." Was it reasonable to expect Israel to make major concessions to its would-be destroyers? Would any leader, anywhere, but especially in the semiarid Middle East, have been prepared to give up half of his country's major water resources (the Sea of Galilee and Jordan River) or a large part of its territory (the Negev) in exchange for assurances of peace? Who would have guaranteed the Arabs' continued adherence to their peaceful undertakings after they had swallowed the Israeli concessions?

So much for the bilateral tracks. But, simultaneously, the international community tried, in the wake of 1948, to inaugurate a multilateral negotiation: perhaps what each Arab leader was afraid to do alone he might be induced to pursue together with his peers? United Nations General Assembly Resolution 194 of December 1948 provided for the creation of the Palestine Conciliation Commission, which began operating, under American chairmanship, early the following year. The members shuttled between the Middle East's capitals in search of the contours of a settlement.

But by April 1949, they had achieved nothing. They decided on a giant gamble: they convoked a fullscale peace conference at Lausanne, Switzerland. The Arabs refused to meet with the Israelis, and made any progress on the major issues-borders, recognition, Jerusalem-contingent on Tel Aviv's agreement to full-scale refugee repatriation. The Arabs also demanded that Israel accept the November 1947 partition borders as the basis for negotiation. Israel refused. A belated Israeli offer, in July, to take back one hundred thousand refugees (actually sixty-five thousand plus those who had already illegally or legally returned to Israeli territory) if the Arab states agreed to settle the rest on their territory, was rejected out of hand. Israel, for its part, turned down an American proposal that it take in about 250,000 refugees. Nothing happened, and in September the delegations went home. The next bout of serious Israeli-Arab peace-making occurred almost thirty years later, after Sadat's astonishing visit to Jerusalem in November 1977.

Negotiating peace with Israel was not the only thing that undermined the legitimacy of Arab leaders. The war itself, and its outcome, had done this as well. The war seriously damaged the ancien regimes of the Arab world. All tottered; some fell within a few years. The Lebanese foreign minister had predicted such consequences a fortnight before the pan-Arab invasion, as the British minister to Beirut reported: "I found His Excellency very depressed.... The state of affairs in Egypt and Iraq filled him with gloom. He felt that if the Arabs were defeated in Palestine the Governments of Egypt, Iraq and Syria would tumble like a house of cards, with repercussions which would be felt throughout the Arab world."55

He was pretty close. A string of assassinations were directly or indirectly linked to the war. Egyptian prime minister Nuqrashi was killed by Muslim Brotherhood gunmen on 28 December 1948 while his troops were still battling the IDF in eastern Sinai. Riad al-Sulh, the Lebanese prime minister, was murdered in Amman more than a year later; and, of course, King 'Abdullah was assassinated in i9Si.

But the war's repercussions went far deeper. In March 1949, shortly before Damascus entered into the armistice negotiations with Israel, the civilian regime was overthrown by a coup d'etat engineered by the army's chief of staff, Hosni Za`im. Za`irn himself was overthrown-and murdered-by fellow officers, in August, less than five months after taking power. As it turned out, these events inaugurated two decades of tumultuous military governments, one coup following another, until the accession to power of Hafiz alAssad in 1970-1971.

And Egypt, too, fell into the hands of the colonels. King Farouk was overthrown by a junta of young officers, led by Colonel Garnal 'Abdel Nasser, the veteran of the Faluja Pocket, in July 1952. General Neguib, his fellow veteran, was installed as the first president of the republic. Farouk and his coterie were vilified as the men who had lost, or betrayed, Palestine. The military dictatorship installed that summer for all intents and purposes continues to rule down to the present day (current President Hosni Mubarak, an air force general, inherited the mantle from his mentor, Colonel Anwar Sadat, who was a member of the original revolutionary junta).