Israel's Wars

A History Since 1947

Ahron Bregman

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317296379
• Edición: 4
• Categoría: Historia
• Categoría: Historia del mundo

Israel's Wars is a fascinating and essential insight into the turbulent history of this troubled country which, since its foundation, has endured almost constant violence. Bringing its coverage up to date with recent conflicts, this fourth edition includes a new chapter on the Gaza wars from 2007-2014, a new preface and an updated concluding chapter.

From the 1947-8 Jewish-Palestinian struggle for mastery of the land of Palestine to the Al-Aqsa intifada, the second Lebanon war and the Gaza wars, Bregman exposes hitherto unknown facts, including details of secret Soviet involvement in inciting the 1967 Six Day War, Israeli bombing of the American warship the USS Liberty, and Israeli assassinations of leading Palestinians in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank.

Illustrated throughout with maps and photographs, this new edition is valuable reading for students of Arab-Israeli conflicts over the last seventy years.

1

The 1947–9 war

A conflict is born

‘Some years’, J. K. Galbraith once wrote, ‘like some poets and politicians and some lovely women, are singled out for fame far beyond the common lot’.¹ For the Middle East in general, and for the people of Palestine in particular, 1948 was clearly such a year. It was the year in which the British Mandate for Palestine terminated, a Jewish state called Israel was established, thousands of Arab Palestinians became refugees, and regular armed forces of Transjordan, Egypt, Syria and other Arab countries entered Palestine-Israel and clashed with Israeli forces. Thus begun the first all-out Arab–Israeli war which – like the civil war which preceded it – revolved around land.

The ancient land of Palestine – small in size, covering some 10,000 square miles – formed a narrow strip stretching along the Levant. In the south it was separated from Egypt by the dunes of the Sinai desert, in the east it was bordered by the Syrian Arabian desert, and in the north it was marked by the city of Dan. Although described in the Bible as ‘a land of milk and honey’, Palestine was in fact a barren, rocky, neglected and inhospitable land with malaria-infested swamps. Nevertheless its strategic importance was immense, for it provided a bridge from Asia to Africa – a junction for traffic crossing from the south (Egypt) to the north (the highlands of Hittite Anatolia), to the east (Mesopotamian Anatolia) and to the west (Cyprus). Because of its strategic importance, Palestine had been, throughout its history, the battleground for military campaigns and invasions by the pharaohs, the kings of Assyria, Babylon and Persia, Alexander the Great, the emperors of Byzantium, the Arabs, the Crusaders, the Mamelukes and the Turks. Finally, British forces during the First World War had taken it from the Turks, who had ruled this land ever since Sultan Selim I occupied it in 1517.

It was under the British rule, which lasted from 1917 to 1948, that the struggle between Jew and Arab for the mastery and possession of the land of Palestine reached an unprecedented peak. A modus vivendi between the two peoples in Palestine had been always hard to achieve, because here was a clash of rights – the claim of two races to one land – and thus any solution could be found only on the lines of least injustice. In their struggle to win the argument and the land, the Jews claimed that the rocky land of Palestine which they called Eretz Yisrael was their traditional and spiritual home, one promised by God to Abraham and ‘to [his] posterity’. But the Arabs of Palestine also regarded Palestine as their rightful home, for ‘posterity’, as they saw it, also included themselves, since they were the descendants of Ishmael, Abraham’s son by his concubine Ketirah. But it was more than a conflict between two rights, for the Jews felt that Eretz Yisrael was their only safe haven after years of persecutions and endless pogroms in their native countries. The Arabs of Palestine, on the other hand, resented the idea that they, the majority of whom were Muslims with no tradition of anti-Semitism, had to pay the price for evils committed against the Jews by others, often within European Christendom. They also argued that in contrast with the Jews, who had been moving in and out of Palestine and had always been the minority in this land, they – the Arabs – had never abandoned the land, and had for hundreds of years constituted the majority of its population. This was true, but as the years passed and Jews continued to arrive in Palestine, the demographic scales tilted steadily in their favour. There were Jews who had come to Palestine to die and be buried in the Holy Land, others who had immigrated to Palestine to escape persecution, and there were also Zionists who had immigrated to Palestine in order to build a new Hebrew society which they wished would be, as Dr Chaim Weizmann, a Zionist and chemist at Manchester University, put it, ‘as Jewish as England is English or America is American’.

Scrutinizing the speeches and writings of Zionist leaders of the late nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, one comes to the inevitable conclusion that some of the Zionist leaders did truly believe that Palestine was derelict and empty – ‘A land without a people waiting for a people without a land’ as the Anglo-Jewish writer Yisrael Zwangwill put it. This, it is worth noting, was not an unusual thought, for some early Zionists suffered from the common Eurocentric illusion that territories outside Europe were in a state of political vacuum. But there were also Zionists who did realize that an Arab community existed in Palestine – that people married, brought up children, quarrelled, loved and died – however, they took it for granted that the native Arabs would welcome the new arrivals, whose zeal and skill and, of course, money would help develop the barren land for the benefit of all of its inhabitants. Theodor Herzl, a Budapest-born Viennese journalist and the father of modern Jewish nationalism (Zionism), who in 1896 had published an 86 page book called The Jewish State, knew, as emerges from his writings, that Palestine was not an empty land. But he thought that the Jews could buy the land from Arab landlords and spirit the ‘penniless [Arab] population [living on this land] … across the border by procuring employment for [the Arab population] … while denying [them] any employment in our country’.² It is easy with hindsight to criticize this way of thinking, but we should bear in mind that such thinking was not unusual in the age of colonialism, when the rights of indigenous inhabitants were often ignored.

Persecuted, and often encouraged by their leaders to leave their native countries, Jews began pouring into Palestine. From 1882 to 1903, some 20,000–30,000 Jews arrived to join the small Jewish community, mostly religious, living especially in Tiberias, Jerusalem and Safed; and in the short period between 1904 and the beginning of the First World War another 35,000 Jews were added. It is estimated that in 1917 about 85,000 Jews lived in Palestine alongside 600,000 Arabs. Jewish immigration to Palestine was relatively restricted under Ottoman rule because the authorities suspected that the Jews were being used as cat’s-paw by the West, but with the defeat of the Turks during the First World War, Jewish immigration to Palestine increased. From the end of the war to 1923 another 35,000 Jews came mainly from Russia, and in the second half of the 1920s the flow of Jews increased, with 82,000 arriving between 1925 and 1930. Troubles in Europe, notably the rise of Nazism in Germany, meant that immigration to Palestine gathered momentum, with 200,000 arrivals between 1932 and 1938. Here it is worth remarking that many of these Jewish immigrants would have preferred to go elsewhere, especially to America, one of the most sought-after destinations for immigrants, but the gates to America were half-shut. Among other reasons, this was because the leaders of the Zionist movement exerted all the influence they could muster to make sure that the US did not open up immigration to these Jews for the simple reason that they wanted to herd these same Jews to Palestine.

The mounting influx of Jewish refugees had quite dramatically changed the demography of Palestine, and the balance had begun to shift remarkably in favour of the Jews. Jews, who comprised only 4 per cent of the total Palestinian population in 1882, formed 13 per cent in 1922, 28 per cent in 1935 and about 30 per cent in 1939. By 1947 there were 608,230 Jews in Palestine compared with about 1,364,330 Arabs. Not all the Jews remained in Palestine, where harsh living conditions were hard to bear, and there were periods where more Jews actually left Palestine than entered. But of those who did remain there emerged the future Jewish-Israeli leadership: David Ben Gurion (Gruen), who had arrived from Poland in 1906 and later became the first Prime Minister of Israel; Levi Eshkol (Shkolnik) who had arrived from the Ukraine in 1909 and later became the third Prime Minister; and Golda Meir (Meyerson), who had arrived from America in 1921 and would succeed Eshkol to the premiership.

Demographic modification aside, a geographical transformation was also under way in Palestine; for Jews not only poured into the country but also bought large tracts of its land. For this purpose, The Jewish National Fund (Keren Ha’Kayemet in Hebrew) was established in 1901 with the task of buying land in Palestine, and in 1908 the economist and agronomist Arthur Ruppin set up at Jaffa the first Zionist office, which bought land from Arab landlords. So successful was the Jewish policy of purchasing land, that in 1935 the quasi-religious politician and leader of the Arab Palestinians, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Hajj Amin al-Husseini, had to issue a fatwa, which is a decree or a religious order, defining Arabs who sold land to Jews as apostates to be denied burial in Moslem cemeteries. This was to no avail, even though the growing demand led to the value of property in Palestine soaring, Jews had mustered the money and bought large tracts of it. It is estimated that between 1920 and 1939 Jews acquired 845,198 acres in Palestine, most of which belonged to absentee landowners, and towards the end of the 1930s they possessed around 1,533,400 acres. From a modest fifty-five Jewish settlements in 1920, the number had rocketed to 218 in 1939.

It perhaps deserves mention that the Jews did not, as is sometimes alleged, ‘rob’ the Arabs or ‘steal’ their land, but rather they bought it from them for hefty sums of money. As for the Arab aristocracy of landowners who had sold the land to the Jews, they did so voluntarily and with open eyes, and they must have known that for the Arab peasants who had been living on their lands for generations this would be a devastating blow. Indeed it proved to be so, for when the new owners of the land voluntarily became hewers of wood and drawers of water and worked the land themselves (they called it: Avoda Ivrit, ‘Jewish work’) – as a means of recovering contact with nature and also disproving the slander of their detractors that they were fit only for commerce and not for labour – they inevitably deprived Palestinian labourers of employment.

What made matters far worse and increased the anxieties of the Arabs of Palestine, was the fact that the massive influx of Jews and their purchase of large tracts of land in Palestine was accompanied by a gradual commitment of the British government to the idea of establishing a ‘national home’ for the Jews in Palestine. Most notable was the Balfour Declaration, approved by the British cabinet and enshrined in a letter dated 2 November 1917, which was sent by the British Foreign Secretary Arthur James Balfour to a prominent member of the Jewish community in England, Lord Rothschild. In this short but most significant letter the British minister expressed the support of His Majesty’s Government for the idea of establishing a ‘national home’ – a term undefined by international law and a complete novelty – for the Jewish people. The subsequent commitment that this should not ‘prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine’ did little to dispel the fear of the Arabs for their own future. Indeed, it angered them, for they, who were referred to in this 117-word letter as the ‘existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine’, formed at this time the overwhelming majority of the population – they made up around 87 per cent of the total population while the Jews were only 13 per cent – and the land of Palestine was theirs in the generally accepted sense of the word. What the Arabs feared, and with hindsight we know that they were right, was that as soon as a large Jewish population had built up in Palestine, the idea of a Jewish ‘national home’ would turn into that of a Jewish state. The Arabs, though, found some comfort in the joint Anglo-French declaration which was issued simultaneously in Palestine, Syria and Iraq on 7 November 1918, stating that ‘The goal envisaged by France and Great Britain … is the complete and final liberation of the peoples who have for so long been oppressed by the Turks … and the setting up of national governments’. This was taken by the Arabs as a pledge for Arab independence in Palestine.

The British promise to the Jews of a ‘national home’ in Palestine was turned into an international commitment when the League of Nations, on 24 July 1922, reiterated the British pledge in a document which assigned a mandate of Palestine to Britain. On this Arthur Koestler commented in Promise and Fulfilment: ‘The League requisitioned Palestine from its [Arab] owners to provide the Jews with a permanent abode, and appointed Britain to act as billeting officer’.³ The promise to the Arabs expressed in the joint Anglo-French declaration of 7 November 1918 was all but forgotten. For the Jews the pledge of the international community was a significant political victory, for after all, the Balfour Declaration was without legal force because Britain had no sovereign rights over Palestine, had no authority to dispose of the land and thus her declaration was no more than a statement of its intentions. But now with the Balfour Declaration incorporated into the Palestine mandate, the British promise had received explicit international recognition. One can only be puzzled by how little thought was devoted to the Arab Palestinians, who were the overwhelming majority in Palestine, and by how much was promised to the Jews, who were the minority, by both the British and later the international community in issuing, respectively, the 1917 Balfour Declaration and the 1922 British Mandate. The explanation seems to be that those who endorsed these critical documents and sealed the future of the two communities, had all been nurtured on biblical reminiscences of the eternal bond between the children of Israel and their promised land, and that they knew next to nothing of the Arab community of Palestine.

It is ironic that in their growing opposition to the Jews, the Arabs of Palestine were now led by prominent Palestinian clans and families who had sold their lands to the Jews through middlemen at high profits, and thus visited on the Palestinians the very problems which were now causing such tensions with the Jews. In fact, tensions between the two peoples had already risen dangerously in the early 1920s. On 3 April 1920, for example, which was the first day of Passover, Arabs attacked Jews in the old town of Jerusalem – these were called the Nebi Mussa disturbances – and on 1 May 1921, disturbances in Jaffa led to the killing of nearly 200 Jews and 120 Arabs. A few quiet years followed, but then on 23 August 1929, Jews and Arabs clashed in Jerusalem and the next day Arabs killed fifty-nine men, women and children in Hebron. Arab dissatisfaction reached its peak between 1936 and 1939, a period known as ‘The Arab Rebellion’, when they began a general strike which soon turned into clashes, mainly with the British who had allowed Jews to enter Palestine, purchase land and establish the infrastructure for a future state.

The British authorities, the caretakers of Palestine, crushed the revolt, but overall they failed to calm the situation in Palestine, because their tendency to veer first one way and then the other, and their policy of appeasement which in practice meant endorsing the claims of the stronger invited even more violence from the parties involved. Thus when the British had allowed Jewish immigrants to enter Palestine they a...