THE WAR OF 1948
The first stage of the intercommunal war was marked by the initiative and relative superiority of local Palestinian forces, reinforced by volunteers, mainly from Syria and Egypt. Some of these volunteers were absorbed into the Arab League-sponsored “Arab Liberation Army.” The Arab forces attacked Jewish traffic between the settlements and struck at some Jewish urban centers. Through January 1948, about 400 Jews were killed. Jewish convoys seeking to reinforce and supply the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and some of the rural and urban settlements (Yihiam, Hartuv, the Etzion Bloc, and even Jerusalem) were destroyed. From April on, however, Jewish forces regained the initiative. On April 8, the most charismatic and promising of the Palestinian military commanders, Abd al-Qadir al-Husseini, was killed in the battle for the road to Jewish Jerusalem. On April 18 and 22, Jewish military forces overran the Arab neighborhoods of Haifa and Tiberias. The most decisive event was the capture of the center of Palestinian society—the proud city of Jaffa—on May 13. In fact, the entire intercommunal war can be seen as the battle between Jewish Tel Aviv and the older city of Jaffa. It was almost self-evident that if Tel Aviv should fall, the entire Jewish will would collapse, and if Jaffa surrendered, the modern and urban part of Palestinian society would disappear.
The Jewish military forces operated according to the so-called Plan D, whose major aim was to ensure control over the territories designated by the United Nations for the Jewish state and over free movement between Jewish settlements on the roads controlled by Arab villages. The plan also took into consideration the inability of the Jews to spread their forces among hundreds of Arab villages, the logical consequence of which was the destruction of almost all conquered Arab villages and the banishment of their inhabitants beyond the borders of the presumed Jewish state. The conquered Arab villages were often found empty, or half empty, because Arabs had fled after hearing news and rumors of Jewish atrocities (such as the massacre of about 125 villagers of Deir Yassin on April 9). Once Arabs had left the country, they were not permitted to return. Thus, a de facto ethnic cleansing was carried out. At the end of the 1948 war, the number of Palestinian refugees was estimated to be between seven and nine hundred thousand.12 Most of their villages, towns, and neighborhoods had been destroyed or were repopulated by veteran or newly immigrated Jews. Refugee camps were established in all of the surrounding Arab lands, slowly creating a Palestinian exile, or ghurba. In Palestinian historiography, the events of 1947 and 1948 came to be called al-Nakba, the Catastrophe (or even Holocaust). Palestinian society ceased to exist for many years as a distinct social, economic, and political entity. The Jews called this war the War of Independence.
In the aftermath of the war of 1948, the remaining local Arab community was mostly rural, located in the central mountain area—in what later became known as the West Bank (of the Jordan River) or “Judea and Samaria.” The next and subsequent Arab-Israeli wars, excluding the 1982 war in Lebanon, were conducted without the independent participation of the Palestinians. In fact, tacit agreements existed between Israel and several Arab countries, especially the Hashemite kingdom of Transjordan, based on mutual interest, to “de-Palestinianize” the Palestinians. Transjordan's King Abdullah ibn Hussein wanted to incorporate the remaining territory and Arab population of Palestine into his country and to present himself as the inheritor of the Arab Palestinian state never established following the UN resolution. Both countries inherited substantial portions of the territories of Arab Palestine. Whereas the Jewish state was to have received only 5,000 square kilometers under the 1937 partition plan, and 14,000 square kilometers under the UN partition proposal, 21,000 square kilometers fell under the state of Israel's control after the signature of all the armistice agreements in 1949. In the narrow and overpopulated Gaza Strip, which remained under Egyptian control, Amin al-Husseini launched a failed attempt to establish an independent Palestinian government.
The war of 1948 was a relatively costly one for Jewish Israelis in terms of casualties, with about 1 percent of the total Jewish civilian and military population killed. Military units from Egypt, Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, and Yemen took part in the war, but the best trained and equipped Arab military force, the Transjordanian Arab Legion, hardly participated. When it did, Transjordan's role was mainly passive, with the defensive aim of preventing Jewish occupation of important regions designated by the partition resolution as Arab or international. Only the eastern neighborhoods of Jerusalem and the Etzion Bloc, the sole Jewish enclave in the central mountain area, were captured by the Arab Legion. The relative passivity of the Arab Legion in the war of 1948 reinforced the tacit agreement between Abdullah and the Zionist leadership to share the territory of Arab Palestine.
After several initial successes, the relatively small and poorly equipped Arab forces were defeated on the northern front (in an offensive lasting from November 9 to July 19). In October, the newly created Israeli army conquered the Negev desert, driving southward to the Gulf of Aqaba, and gained an outlet to the Dead Sea, an area that contains the country's largest concentrations of potassium and uranium. Several generals tried to persuade Ben-Gurion to conquer the whole of Palestine (as was done in 1967); however, he resisted, arguing that the world would not allow Israel to hold on to such an excessive amount of territorial gain. In addition, he argued that with the remaining Arab territory, the country would include “too many Arabs.” Indeed, when the Israelis took over the Sinai Peninsula, they were forced to withdraw, mainly as the result of U.S. pressure. Between January and July 1949, on the island of Rhodes, armistice negotiations were conducted and concluded between Israel and all its immediate Arab neighbors.
THE ISRAELI STATE AND PALESTINIAN NATIONALISM: THE EARLY YEARS
Already during the war of 1948, the Israeli state opened its gates to Jewish immigration. One of the most important laws passed by the Knesset, the Israeli parliament, was the Law of Return (see chapter 6), which almost indiscriminately allowed every Jew in the world to immigrate to Israel without restriction (see chapter 3). This law was considered the true embodiment of Zionism—the creation of a Jewish nation-state that would be a terre d'asile for any Jew in the world, whether persecuted or not. By 1954, the Jewish population of Israel more than tripled, reaching approximately two million. Jewish refugees flooded the country from Europe, Iraq, Kurdistan, Yemen, Egypt, Libya, Morocco, Tunisia, and Algeria. Often Jewish emigration from these countries was sparked by pogroms and other oppressive actions taken against Jews as the result of frustration engendered by the Arab defeat in Palestine.
On the other side of the demographic coin, the Palestinians were segmented into four major groupings:
1 In Israel, there remained approximately 150,000 Palestinians, who received Israeli citizenship and, at least formally, equal rights as a recognized minority.
2 On the West Bank, the Palestinians received Jordanian citizenship. This group was divided into two major classes—the original population of the region, living in villages and towns such as Nablus, Hebron, and Bethlehem, and the refugees who settled in the camps. Segments of these groups eventually moved to the East Bank of the Jordan, and part of them, mainly the old notable families, were absorbed into the Jordanian ruling oligarchy, merchant class, and newly established civil service. In all cases, they were kept far away from the most important power focus of the country, the military, which remained intact as representative of the Bedouin warrior class.
3 In the Gaza Strip, the Palestinians received