Efraim Karsh - The Arab-Israeli Conflict: The Palestine War 1948

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The Arab-Israeli Conflict

The Palestine War 1948

Efraim Karsh

On 29 November 1947, the United Nations General Assembly passed a resolution calling for the partition of Palestine into two independent states one Jewish, the other Arab linked in an economic union. The City of Jerusalem was to be placed under an international rgime, with its residents given the right to citizenship in either the Jewish or the Arab states. Thirty-three UN members supported the resolution, 13 voted against and 10 abstained, including Great Britain, which had ruled Palestine since the early 1920s under a League of Nations Mandate.

For Jews all over the world this was the fulfilment of a millenarian yearning for national rebirth in the ancestral homeland. For Arabs it was an unmitigated disaster, an act of betrayal by the international community that surrendered an integral part of the Arab world to foreign invaders. In Tel-Aviv, crowds were dancing in the streets. In the Arab capitals there were violent demonstrations. We are solidly and permanently determined to fight to the last man against the existence in our country of any Jewish state, no matter how small it is, Jamal al-Husseini, Vice-President of the Arab Higher Committee (AHC), the effective government of the Palestinian Arabs, told the General Assembly as it was about to cast its vote. If such a state is to be established, it can only be established over our dead bodies. And an AHC circular was even more outspoken. The Arabs have taken into their own hands the final solution of the Jewish problem, it read. The problem will be solved only in blood and fire. The Jews will soon be driven out.

Thus began the Palestine War, probably the most important Middle-Eastern armed confrontation since the destruction of the Ottoman Empire and the creation of a new regional order on its ruins in the wake of the First World War. It was to be divided into two distinct phases. The first began on 30 November 1947, the day after the adoption of the Partition Resolution, and ended on 14 May 1948 with the termination of the British Mandate. It was essentially a civil war, conducted under the watchful eye and occasional intervention of the British Mandatory authorities, in which the Palestinian Arab community, assisted by a sizeable pan-Arab irregular force, sought to prevent its Jewish counterpart from laying the foundation of statehood in line with the UN resolution. The second phase started on the night of 1415 May 1948, a few hours after the proclamation of the State of Israel, and involved a concerted attack by the armed forces of Egypt, Syria, Iraq, Transjordan, Lebanon, as well as a Saudi contingent, on the nascent Jewish state. It ended on 20 July 1949 with the signing of the last of the armistice agreements between Israel and its Arab neighbours.

By the time the fighting was over, Israel, albeit at the exorbitant human cost of 1 per cent of its population, had survived the Arab attempt to destroy it at birth and had asserted its control over wider territories than those assigned to it by the UN Partition Resolution. The Palestinian Arab community was profoundly shattered, with about half of its population becoming refugees in other parts of Palestine and the neighbouring Arab states. The political implications of what would come to be known in Arab political discourse as al-Nakba, the catastrophe, would reverberate throughout the Middle East for decades. Already before the end of hostilities the president of Syria was overthrown by a military coup, while the king of Egypt followed suit in the summer of 1952. Within two years of the end of the Palestine War, King Abdallah of Jordan, the foremost Arab combatant during the conflict, was assassinated, as were the prime ministers of Egypt and Lebanon. For decades inter-Arab politics would be dominated by the problem of Palestine as the Arab states and the Palestinians sought to undo the consequences of the Palestine War and bring about Israels demise by military, political and economic means. Palestine and the self-respect of the Arabs must be recovered, the prominent Palestinian leader Musa Alami wrote in 1949. Without Palestine there is no life for them.