1948: A History of the First Arab-Israeli War

A History of the First Arab-Israeli War

Copyright © 2008 Benny Morris
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-300-12696-9

Staking Claims: The Historical Background

The War of 1948 was the almost inevitable result of more than half a century of Arab-Jewish friction and conflict that began with the arrival in Eretz Yisrael (the Land of Israel), or Palestine, of the first Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe in the early 1880s. These "Zionists" (Zion, one of Jerusalem's hills, was, by extension, a biblical name for Jerusalem and, by further extension, a name for the Land of Israel) were driven both by the age-old messianic dream, embedded in Judaism's daily prayers, of reestablishing a Jewish state in the ancient homeland and by European anti-Semitism, which erupted in a wave of pogroms in the czarist empire. The nineteenth-century surge in national consciousness, aspiration, and development in Italy and Germany, Poland, Russia, and the territories of the multinational Austro-Hungarian Empire provided an intellectual backdrop, inspiration, and guide to Zionism's founders.

The Jewish people was born in the Land of Israel, which it ruled, on and off, for thirteen centuries, between 1200 BCE and the second century CE. The Romans, who conquered and reconquered the land and suppressed successive Jewish revolts in the first and second centuries CE, renamed theland Palaestina (derived from the country's southern coastal area, named Pleshet, in Hebrew, or Philistia, in Latin, after its second millennium BCE inhabitants, the Philistines) in an effort to separate the Jews, many of whom they exiled, from their land. Among the Gentiles, the name Palestine stuck.

By the early nineteenth century, after centuries of Byzantine rule and successive Persian, Arab, Crusader, Arab, and Ottoman conquests, Palestine was an impoverished backwater. But it had religious cachet for the three monotheistic faiths: it was the divinely "promised land" of the biblical "chosen people," the Jews; Jesus was born, preached, and died there; and the Muslim prophet Muhammad, according to an early interpretation of a line in the Qur'an, had begun his nighttime journey to heaven from Jerusalem, though the land was conquered for Islam only by his mid-seventh-century successors. Jews and Christians and, later, some Muslims, especially those living in Palestine, designated the country "the Holy Land."

But neither before the twelfth-century defeat of the Crusaders at the hands of the Muslim general Saladin nor after it was Palestine administered or recognized as a distinct and separate province by any of its Muslim rulers. The Ottoman Empire, which controlled the area from the early sixteenth century, divided Palestine into two or three subdistricts (sanjaks) that were ruled from the provincial capital of Damascus. From the 1860s, the southern half of Palestine, from a line just north of Jaffa and Jerusalem southward, was constituted as an independent sanjak (or mutasaraflik) and ruled from Istanbul, while the northern parts of the country, the sanjaks of Nablus and Acre, were ruled from the provincial capitals of Damascus and, from the 1880s, Beirut.

In 1881, Palestine had about 450,000 Arabs-about 90 percent Muslim, the rest Christian-and twenty-five thousand Jews. Most of the Jews, almost all of whom were ultra-Orthodox, non-nationalist, and poor, lived in Jerusalem, the country's main town (population thirty thousand). About 80 percent of the Arabs lived in seven to eight hundred agricultural villages, the rest in about a dozen small towns, including Gaza, Hebron, Nablus, Tiberias, Jaffa, Haifa, and Acre. Many rural inhabitants, especially in the lowlands, were tenant farmers, their lands owned-in a semifeudal relationship-by wealthy urban landowners, or effendis.

The first wave of Zionist immigrants-the First 'Aliya (literally, ascent)-brought to Palestine's shores between 1882 and 1903 some thirty thousand Jewish settlers. Their aim was to establish a gradually expanding core of productive Jewish towns and agricultural settlements that would ultimately result in a Jewish majority and the establishment of an independent, sovereign Jewish state in all of Palestine (defined usually as the ten-thousand-square-mile area lying between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River but occasionally-in line with the Bible and subsequent Jewish conquests in the second century BCE-as also encompassing the north-south mountain ridge just east of the river, the biblical lands of Golan, Gilead, Moab, and Edom).

The Zionists planned to purchase land either piecemeal, dunam (a fourth of an acre) after dunam, or outright in bulk from the Ottoman sultan, who was always strapped for cash. But the sultan, who regarded Palestine, like all his territories, as sacred Islamic soil and whose vast empire was under increasing nationalist assault in the Balkans and European imperialist threat elsewhere, declined to part with the land. So the Zionists generally maintained discretion about their objective. In private correspondence, however, the settlers were often forthcoming: "The ultimate goal ... is, in time, to take over the Land of Israel and to restore to the Jews the political independence they have been deprived of for these two thousand years.... The Jews will yet arise and, arms in hand (if need be), declare that they are the masters of their ancient homeland." The nineteenth-century poet Naftali Hertz Imber, who later penned the lyrics for what was to become Israel's national anthem, "Hatikva" (the hope), wrote:

If you long to inherit the land of your birth, Buckle on the sword and take up the bow, And go in the footsteps of your fathers. With weeping and tearful pleadings Zion will not be won. With sword and bow-hark ye! Jerusalem will be rebuilt.

Of course, the integrity of the Ottoman imperial domain was not the only obstacle to Jewish statehood. There were also the native inhabitants, the Arabs. Often, the Zionists depicted Palestine as a "land without a people" awaiting the arrival of the "people without a land," in the British philo-Zionist Lord Shaftesbury's phrase from July 1853. But once there, the settlers could not avoid noticing the majority native population. It was from them, as two of the first settlers put it, that "we shall ... take away the country ... through stratagems[,] without drawing upon us their hostility before we become the strong and populous ones."

By "stratagems," of course, they meant purchase; buying land occasionally required "stratagems" since the Ottoman authorities were generally ill disposed toward Jewish land acquisition. But the purchase of Palestine proceeded at a snail's pace. And it was not mainly a problem of an effendi reluctance to sell. Most of the world's Jews were non-Zionists, and most, simply, were poor, especially in the Zionist movement's Eastern European heartland. And the rich, concentrated in Central and Western Europe, by and large refused to help. So, gathering a ruble here and a ruble there, the initially uncoordinated Zionist associations-Hovevei Zion, or Lovers of Zion-bought the odd tract of land for settlement and then sent out small groups of individuals or families to fulfill the dream.

The bulk of the settlers, of both the first and second waves of immigration (the Second 'Aliya was from 1904 to 1914), planted roots in the lowlands of Palestine-in the Coastal Plain, the upper Jordan Valley (from the southern end of the Sea of Galilee to the northern tip of the Galilee Panhandle), and the Jezreel Valley connecting them. These were the less crowded areas of Palestine, often swamp-infested and vulnerable to bedouin depredation, and owned largely by effendis. (The peasants of the hilly Judean, Samarian, and Galilean heartland tended to own their lands and were rarely willing to sell.) But the gradual Jewish population of these lowlands in fact competed with and trumped the natural expansion into them, ongoing since the early nineteenth century, of spillover Arabs from the relatively thickly inhabited hill country. In hindsight, what was effectively a demographic-geographic contest for the lowlands, between 1881 and 1947, was won by the Zionist movement and gave the Zionists the territorial base for statehood.

The new settlers, beset by an unwonted and difficult climate, unfamiliar diseases, and brigandage, viewed the native inhabitants as, at best, unwanted interlopers from Arabia and, at worst, as rivals for mastery of the land and potential enemies. But they had to be appeased at least temporarily, given their numerical superiority and their kinship with the Muslim Ottoman rulers. Like most European colonists in the third world, the settlers saw the locals as devious and untrustworthy and, at the same time, as simple, dirty, and lazy. Most did not bother to learn Arabic, and some mistreated their Arab workers, as the famous Russian Jewish essayist Ahad Ha'am reported after a visit in February-May 1891.5 The natives, in turn, regarded the foreign influx as inexplicable and the settlers as strange, foolish, infidel, and vaguely minatory.

Initially, the Zionist settlement enterprise was haphazard and disorganized. But in the mid-1890s, at last, an organizer-and prophet-arose. He was an unlikely savior. Theodor Herzl was born in Budapest in the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1860 to an assimilated, German-speaking Jewish family. He was a doctor of law but quickly changed professions and became a successful journalist, feuilletonist, and playwright. The coffee shops, theaters, and salons of Vienna were his milieu. Herzl knew no Hebrew, Yiddish, Russian, or Polish and had no contact with the poor masses of Eastern Europe. The pogroms and the anti-Semitic discrimination in the czar's empire may have niggled at his conscience. But the eruption of the Dreyfus Affair in France in 1894 converted Herzl to Zionism. He was then the Paris correspondent of the Neue Freie Presse, a liberal Viennese daily. Alfred Dreyfus was an (assimilated) Jewish army captain on the French General Staff when he was wrongly convicted of spying for Germany and sent to Devil's Island. A number of French intellectuals protested and were shouted down as unpatriotic. Right-wing crowds flooded the streets of Paris shouting, "Down with the Jews!" Herzl was shocked-and quickly persuaded that popular anti-Semitism was not restricted to the backward czarist empire but was the patrimony of the entire Gentile world, including its refined French core, the heartland of liberalism, socialism, and democracy. Herzl reached a dismal conclusion: There was no hope and no future for the Jews in Europe; it could not and would not assimilate them. And in the large, multiethnic Continental empires, Jews would eventually face the hostility of the various minorities bent on self-determination. Ultimately, the Jews of Europe faced destruction. The solution was a separate, independent Jewish state to be established after a mass migration of Jews out of Europe.

Herzl dashed off a political manifesto, The Jews' State (1896), and spent his remaining years organizing the "Zionist" movement. He unsuccessfully canvassed Europe's potentates, including Sultan Abdulhamid II of Turkey, to grant the Jews a state. But the sultan, unwilling to relinquish any part of his steadily diminishing empire, rebuffed Herzl, a master bluffer, who had promised the Ottomans billions (which he did not have and probably could not have raised). And although some of Europe's leaders, notably Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany, were interested in getting rid of their Jews, none was enthusiastic enough to challenge Ottoman rule in Palestine or to vouchsafe any of their own imperial domains for a Jewish purpose. Herzl was equally unsuccessful with Europe's Jewish financial barons. The Rothschilds and their ilk were wary of the wild-eyed prophet or of seeming to engage in an activity that smelled of dual loyalty. Herzl died (possibly of syphilis) in 1904, a broken man at the head of a poor, unsuccessful movement.

But Herzl's was a success story. He had generated enough noise to place the Jewish problem, and his preferred "Zionist" solution, on the international agenda and to hammer together the rudiments of a world-embracing Zionist organization. In Basel, in 1897, the First Zionist Congress, organized by Herzl, had resolved to establish a "publicly and legally secured home [Heimstätte]" for the Jewish people in Palestine. The delegates had avoided the words state and sovereignty for fear of alarming or antagonizing Gentiles, including the sultan, or Jewish magnates. But that was what the Zionists intended.

However, of course, Palestine was part of the Ottoman Empire-which was hostile to Zionism both because it was a Jewish enterprise (Islam had little respect for or empathy with the Jews, who were "sons of apes and pigs," in the Qurhan's unfelicitous phrase) and because it promised to reduce still further the sultan's domain-and it was inhabited. For most of Palestine's impoverished, illiterate inhabitants at the end of the nineteenth century, "nationalism" was an alien, meaningless concept. They identified themselves simultaneously as subjects of the (multinational) Ottoman Empire and as part of the (multinational) community of Islam; as Arabs, in terms of geography, culture, and language; as inhabitants of this or that region and village of a vaguely defined Palestine; and as members of this or that clan or family. There was no Arab national movement and not even a hint, in 1881, of a separate Palestinian Arab nationalism.

But European ideas had begun to penetrate the Levant, via commerce, tourists, missionaries, and books and newspapers. Nationalism began to touch the minds of a thin crust of the better educated and rich in Damascus, Beirut, and Baghdad. And Palestine's notable families, collectively known as the a'yan, from whom sprang the country's doctors and lawyers and municipal and religious leaders, were not completely immune. Perhaps the first expressions of their dawning Arab national consciousness are to be found in their, at first hesitant, later vociferous, appeals to Istanbul, from 1891 on, to halt the Zionist influx. They warned that Zionist immigration and settlement threatened to undermine the country's "Arab" character and perhaps, ultimately, to displace its inhabitants. "The Jews are taking all the lands out of the hands of the Muslims, taking all the commerce into their hands and bringing arms into the country," complained a group of Jerusalem notables. They called on the sultan to halt Jewish immigration and to bar Jewish land purchases. Indeed, by 1899 the mufti of Jerusalem, Taher al-Husseini (the father of Muhammad Haj Amin al-Husseini, the future leader of the Palestinian national movement), was proposing that all Jews who had settled in the country after 1891 be harassed into leaving or expelled.

These petitioners sensed that the initial trickle of settlers was but the thin edge of the wedge and would be followed by masses of European Jews who, backed by the Jews' reputed legendary wealth, would Judaize the country. They were vaguely aware of the anti-Semitism that was propelling the Jews to Palestine (indeed, some of them shared the prejudice). But they saw no reason why they should host Europe's expellees or pay any price for the plight of Europe's Jews. And they failed to acknowledge the Jews' historic ties to the land, denying these Russian-speaking, strangely appareled immigrants any innate rights or just claims.

In this sense, Yusuf Dia al-Khalidi, Jerusalem's mayor, was highly unusual. In a letter to Zadok Kahn, the chief rabbi of France, he wrote that the Zionist idea was, in theory, "natural, fine and just.... Who can challenge the rights of the Jews to Palestine? Good lord, historically it is really your country." But in practice, he was as opposed to Zionism as the rest of the Palestine notables. The land was already inhabited, and Zionist immigration would spark resistance; Palestine could be reclaimed only by the sword. Better that the Jews reestablish themselves elsewhere. "In the name of God, let Palestine be left in peace," he wrote in March 1899. Kahn passed on al-Khalidi's letter to Herzl, who replied on 19 March. Herzl reassured al-Khalidi that the Zionists, with their vast wealth, expertise, and initiative, would bring benefit to all of Palestine's inhabitants, Arab and Jew. The Jews, he averred, were not "warlike," and there was no reason to fear their influx.

But al-Khalidi and his fellow notables were not persuaded. Indeed, in 1905 an exiled anti-Semitic Lebanese Arab nationalist, Negib gAzoury, voiced what was probably on the minds of Palestine's politically conscious notables when he wrote that the Jews were bent on reconstituting their ancient state in the whole territory stretching from Mount Hermon to the Arabian Desert in the south and the Suez Canal in the west. The Jews, he added, were destined to clash, in a fight to the finish, with the emergent Arab national movement.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from 1948 by Benny Morris Copyright © 2008 by Benny Morris. Excerpted by permission.
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