by Ilan Pappe
The final meeting that determined the limited role the Legion was to play in the rescue of Palestine took place on 2 May 1948. A top-ranking Jewish officer, Shlomo Shamir, met with two senior Legion officers, British, as most of them were: Colonel Goldie and Major Crocker. The Jordanian guests brought a message from their king saying he recognised the Jewish state, but wondered whether the Jews ‘wanted to take the whole of Palestine?’ Shamir was candid: ‘We could, if we wanted to; but this is a political question.’ The officers then explained where the Jordanians’ main apprehensions lay: they had noticed that the Jewish forces were occupying and cleansing areas that were within the UN-designated Arab state, such as Jaffa. Shamir responded by justifying the Jaffa operation as necessary for safeguarding the road to Jerusalem. Shamir then made it clear to the emissaries from Jordan that, as far as the Zionsts were concerned, the UN designated Arab state had shrunk to include only the West Bank, which the Israelis were willing to ‘leave’ for the Jordanians.76
The meeting ended with an abortive attempt by the Jordanian officers to come to an agreement over the future of Jerusalem. If the Jewish Agency were willing to partition Palestine with the Jordanians, why not apply the same principle to Jerusalem? As Ben-Gurion’s faithful proxy, Shamir rejected the offer. Shamir knew the Zionist leader was convinced his army was strong enough to take the city as a whole. An entry in his diary a few days later, on 11 May, shows that Ben-Gurion was aware the Legion would fight fiercely over Jerusalem and, if necessary, for its overall share in post-Mandatory Palestine, that is, the West Bank. This was duly confirmed two days later when Golda Meir met King Abdullah in Amman (on 13 May), where the king seemed more tense than ever before because of the double game he was playing in his effort to come out on top: promising the member states of the League to head the military effort of the Arab countries in Palestine on the one hand, and striving to reach an agreement with the Jewish state on the other.77
At the end of the day, the latter became decisive for the course of action he would take. Abdullah did everything he could to be seen to be taking a serious part in the overall Arab effort against the Jewish state, but in practice his main objective was to secure Israeli consent for the Jordanian annexation of the West Bank.
Sir Alec Kirkbride was the British representative in Amman, a position that combined those of Ambassador and High Commissioner. On 13 May 1948, Kirkbride wrote to Ernest Bevin, Britain’s foreign secretary:
There have been negotiations between the Arab Legion and the Hagana which have been conducted by British officers of the Arab Legion. It is understood that the object of these top secret negotiations is to define the areas of Palestine to be occupied by the two forces.
Bevin replied:
I am reluctant to do anything that might prejudice the success of these negotiations, which appear to aim at avoiding hostility between the Arabs and the Jews. The implementation of this agreement depends on the British officers of the Legion. That is why we should not withdraw the Legion officers [from Palestine].78
But Ben-Gurion never took for granted that the Jordanians would stick to the limited role he had set aside for them, which reinforces the impression that he felt confident the new state had enough military power to successfully confront even the Legion while simultaneously continuing the ethnic cleansing.
At the end of the day, the Legion had to fight for their annexation, notwithstanding Jordan’s collusion with Israel. At first the Jordanians were allowed to take over the areas they wanted without a shot being fired, but a few weeks after the end of the Mandate the Israeli army tried to wrest parts of it back. David Ben-Gurion seemed to regret his decision not to exploit the war more fully in order to enlarge the Jewish state even beyond the seventy-eight per cent he coveted. The general Arab impotence seemed to give the Zionist movement an opportunity that was too good to be missed. However, he underestimated the Jordanian determination. Those parts of Palestine that King Abdullah was adamant were his, the Legion successfully defended until the war was over. In other words, the Jordanian occupation of the West Bank at first came about thanks to a prior agreement with the Jews, but it remained in Hashemite hands thereafter due to the tenacious defensive efforts of the Jordanians and the Iraqi forces that helped repel Israeli attacks. It is possible to see this episode from a different angle: by annexing the West Bank, the Jordanians saved 250,000 Palestinians from being ousted – until, that is, they were occupied by Israel in 1967 and subjected – as they still are – to new waves of expulsion, be they more measured and slow. The actual Jordanian policy in the very last days of the Mandate is detailed in the next chapter.
As for the Palestinian leadership, what remained of it was fragmented and in total disarray. Some of its members left hurriedly and, they hoped in vain, temporarily. Very few of them wished to stay and confront the Jewish aggression in December 1947 and the onset of the cleansing operations in January 1948, but some did stay behind, and remained official members of the national committees. Their activities were supposed to be coordinated and supervised by the Arab Higher Committee, the unofficial government of the Palestinians since the 1930s, but half of its members had by now also left and those remaining found it difficult to cope. For all their failings in the past, however, they stood alongside their communities almost to the bitter end, although they could easily have opted to leave. They were Emil Ghori, Ahmad Hilmi, Rafiq Tamimi, Mu’in al-Madi and Husayn al-Khalidi. Each of them was in contact with several local national committees and with al-Hajj Amin al-Husayni, chairman of the Arab Higher Committee, who followed events with his close associates Shaykh Hasan Abu Su’ud and Ishaq Darwish, in Cairo, where he now resided. Amin al-Husayni had been exiled in 1937 by the British. Would he have been able to return in those days of chaos and turmoil, given the British presence in the land? He never tried to go back so the point is moot. His relative, Jamal al-Husayni, acting chairman of the Arab Higher Committee in his absence, left in January for the US to try to initiate a belated diplomatic campaign against the UN resolution. The Palestinian community for all intents and purposes was a leaderless nation.
In this context, Abd al-Qadir al-Husayni should be mentioned once more since he tried to organise a paramilitary unit from among the villagers themselves to protect them. His army, the ‘Holy War Army’, a rather grand name for the shaky outfit he headed, held on until 9 April, when it was defeated and Abd al-Qadir was killed by the Hagana forces that outnumbered them with their superior equipment and military experience.
A similar effort was attempted in the Greater Jaffa area by Hasan Salameh, whom I have already mentioned, and Nimr Hawari (who later surrendered to the Jews and became the first Palestinian judge in 1950s Israel). They tried to transform their scouts’ movements into paramilitary units, but these, too, were defeated within a few weeks.79
Thus, prior to the end of the Mandate, neither the Arab volunteers from outside Palestine nor the paramilitary troops on the inside put the Jewish community at any serious risk of either losing the battle or being forced to surrender. Far from it; all that these foreign and local forces tried, but were unable, to do was to protect the local Palestinian population against Jewish aggression.
Israeli, and in particular American, public opinion, however, succeeded in perpectuating the myth of potential destruction or a ‘second Holocaust’ awaiting the future Jewish state. Exploiting this mythology, Israel was later able to secure massive support for the state in Jewish communities around the world, while demonising the Arabs as a whole, and the Palestinians in particular, in the eyes of the general public in the US. The reality on the ground was, of course, almost the complete opposite: Palestinians were facing massive expulsion. The month that Israeli historiography singles out as the ‘toughest’ actually saw the Palestinians simply attempting to be saved from that fate, rather than being preoccupied with the destruction of the Jewish community. When it was over, nothing stood in the way of the cleansing troops of Israel.
TOWARDS THE ‘REAL WAR�
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On the face of it, from the Palestinian point of view, the situation seemed to improve towards the second half of April 1948. Abdullah informed his Jewish interlocutors that the Arab League had decided to send regular armies into Palestine: the events in Palestine in the months of March and April left the leaders of the Arab world no other choice. They now began to prepare in earnest for a military intervention. Then from Washington came the unexpected news that the State Department was pushing towards a novel American approach. US representatives on the ground were by now fully aware of the expulsions that were going on and had suggested to their chiefs back home to halt the implementation of the partition plan and try to work towards an alternative solution.
Already by 12 March 1948, the State Department had drafted a new proposal to the UN, which suggested an international trusteeship over Palestine for five years, during which the two sides would negotiate an agreed solution. It has been suggested that this was the most sensible American proposal ever put forward in the history of Palestine, the like of which, alas, was never repeated. In the words of Warren Austin, the US ambassador to the United Nations: ‘The USA position is that the partition of Palestine is no longer a viable option.’80
Member states of the UN coming together in Flushing Meadows, New York, where the UN was located before it moved to its current high rise in Manhattan, liked the idea. It made a lot of sense to conclude that partition had failed to bring peace to Palestine and, in fact, was breeding more violence and bloodshed. However, while logic was one aspect to take into consideration, the wish not to antagonise a powerful domestic lobby was another, and in this case a superior one. Had it not been for highly effective pressure by the Zionist lobby on President Harry Truman, the course of Palestine’s history could have run very differently. Instead, the Zionist sections of the American Jewish community learned an important lesson about their ability to impact American policy in Palestine (and later beyond, in the Middle East as a whole). In a longer process that continued through the 1950s and early 1960s, the Zionist lobby succeeded in sidelining the State Department’s experts on the Arab world and left American Middle Eastern policy in the hands of Capitol Hill and the White House, where the Zionists wielded considerable influence.
But the victory on Capitol Hill was not easily won. The ‘Arabists’ in the State Department, reading more carefully the reports from the New York Times than the President’s men, desperately tried to convice Truman, if not to substitute partition with trusteeship, at least to allow more time for rethinking the partition plan. They persuaded him to offer the two sides a three month armistice.
On 12 May, a Wednesday afternoon, the ordinary meeting of the Matkal and the Consultancy was postponed for a crucial meeting in a new body, the ‘People’s Board’, which was three days later to become the government of the State of Israel. Ben-Gurion claimed that almost all those present supported the decision to reject the American offer. Historians later claimed he had a difficult time passing the resolution, which meant not only rejecting the American plan but declaring, three days later, a state. This was not such an important meeting after all, as the Consultancy was already pushing ahead with its ethnic cleansing operations, which Ben-Gurion would not have allowed others in the Zionist political elite to halt, who were not privy in the past to the vision and the plan. The White House then went on to recognise the new state and the State Department was pushed again to its back bench on US policy on Palestine.81
On the last day of April, the Arab world had appointed the man most of its leaders knew had a secret agreement with the Jews to head the military operations against Palestine. No wonder that Egypt, the largest Arab state, waited until the failure of the last American initiative before deciding to join the military effort, something its leaders knew would end in a fiasco. The decision passed in the Egyptian Senate on 12 May left the Egyptian army with less than three days to prepare for the ‘invasion’, and its performance on the battlefield testified to this impossibly short period of preparation.82 The other armies, as we shall see later, did not fare any better. Britain remained the last hope in those days of April and May, but nowhere in its Empire did Albion demonstrate such perfidious behaviour.
British Responsibility
Did the British know about Plan Dalet? One assumes they did, but it is not easy to prove. Highly striking is that after Plan Dalet was adopted, the British announced that they were no longer responsible for law and order in the areas where their troops were still stationed, and limited their activities to protecting these troops. This meant that Haifa and Jaffa and the whole coastal region between them were now one open space where the Zionist leadership could implement Plan Dalet without any fear of being thwarted or even confronted by the British army. Far worse was that the disappearance of the British from the countryside and the towns meant that in Palestine as a whole law and order totally collapsed. The newspapers of the day, such as the daily Filastin, reflected the people’s anxiety about the rising level of such crimes as theft and burglary in the urban centres and looting around the villages. The withdrawal of British policemen from the cities and towns also meant, for example, that many Palestinians could no longer collect their salaries in the local municipalities: most of the governmental services were located in Jewish neighbourhoods in which they were likely to be assaulted.
No wonder one can still hear Palestinians say today: ‘The main responsibility for our catastrophe lies with the British Mandate,’ as Jamal Khaddura, a refugee from Suhmata near Acre, put it.83 He bore this sense of betrayal with him throughout his life and re-articulated it in front of a joint British parliamentary Middle East commission of inquiry on the Palestinian refugees established in 2001. Other refugees who gave testimonies to this commission echoed Khaddura’s bitterness and accusations of blame.
Indeed, the British avoided any serious intervention as early as October 1947, and stood idly by in the face of attempts by the Jewish forces to control outposts; nor did they try to stop small-scale infiltration by Arab volunteers. In December, they still had 75,000 troops in Palestine, but these were dedicated solely to safeguard the eviction of the Mandatory soldiers, officers and officials.
The British sometimes assisted in other, more direct, ways in the ethnic cleansing, by providing the Jewish leadership with ownership deeds and other vital data, which they had photocopied before destroying them, as was quite common in their decolonization process. This inventory added to the village files the final details the Zionists needed for the massive depopulation. Military force, and a brutal one at that, is the first requirement for expulsion and occupation, but bureaucracy is no less important for efficiently carrying out a huge cleansing operation that entails not only dispossession of the people but also the repossession of the spoils.
UN Betrayal
According to the Partition Resolution, the UN was to be present on the ground to supervise the implementation of its peace plan: the making of Palestine as a whole into an independent country, with two distinct states that were to form one economic unity. The resolution of 29 November 1947 included very clear imperatives. Among them, the UN pledged to prevent any attempt by either side to confiscate land that belonged to citizens of the other state, or the other national group – be it cultivated or uncultivated land, i.e., land that had lain fallow for about a year.
To the local UN emissaries’ credit, it can be said that they at least sensed things were going from bad to worse and were tying to push for a re-evaluation of the partition policy, but they took no action beyond watching and reporting the beginning of the ethnic cleansing. The UN had only limited access to Palestine, since the British authorities forbade an organised UN outfit to be present on the ground, thereby ignoring that part of the Partition Resolution that demanded the presence of a United Nations committee. Britain allowed the cleansing to take place, in front of the eyes of its soldiers and officials, during the Mandate period, which came to an end at midnight on 14 May 1948, and hampered the UN efforts to i
ntervene in a way that might have saved a number of Palestinians. After 15 May, there was no excuse for the way the UN abandoned the people whose land they had divided and whose welfare and lives they had surrendered to the Jews who, since the late nineteenth century, wished to uproot them and take their place in the country they deemed as theirs.
Chapter 6
The Phony War and the Real War Over Palestine: May 1948
I have no doubt a massacre took place in Tantura. I did not go out into the streets and shout it about. It is not exactly something to be proud of. But once the affair was publicized, one should tell the truth. After 52 years, the state of Israel is strong and mature enough to confront its past.
Eli Shimoni, senior officer in the Alexandroni Brigade,
Maariv, 4 February 2001
Within weeks of the end of the Mandate, the Jewish troops had reached the vast majority of the isolated Jewish settlements. Only two of these were lost to the Arab Legion because they were in the area that both sides, prior to May 1948, had agreed Jordan would occupy and annex, i.e., the West Bank.1 The Jordanians also insisted they should have at least half of Jerusalem, including the Old City that incorporated the Muslim sanctuaries, but also the Jewish quarter, but since there was no prior agreement on this they had to fight for it. They did so bravely and successfully. It was the only time the two sides were engaged in battle, and stands in complete contrast to the inaction the Arab Legion displayed when their units were stationed near Palestinian villages and towns the Israeli army had begun occupying, cleansing, and destroying.
