Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, November 1987, pages 3-5

Page 65

November 1947 Palestine Partition Launched 40 Years of Warfare

By Richard Curtiss

"Just as I do not see the proposed Jewish state as a final solution to the problems of the Jewish people, so I do not see partition as the final solution of the Palestine question."—David Ben-Gurion, 1937.

"Israel's ostensible acceptance of the resolution remained its most important propaganda weapon, even as it violated one section of that document after another."—Simha Flapan, The Birth of Israel, Pantheon, 1987.

Warfare between Jews and Arabs in Palestine did not begin with the arrival of Zionists in the Ottoman Turkish-ruled Holy Land in the late 19th century, nor in outbreaks of Arab-Jewish rioting in the 1920s under the British Mandate. Even the heavy fighting of 1936 was mostly between British troops and Arab Palestinians who felt Britain was giving in to pressure to establish a Jewish state on their land. Similarly, the bloody guerrilla warfare there during and after World War II was mostly between British troops and Jewish extremists, who felt the British were giving in to Arab pressure against such a state.

Nor did the warfare begin on May 14, 1948, with the proclamation of the state of Israel, or on the following day with withdrawal of British forces and the entrance into Palestine of Egyptian, Iraqi, and Jordanian army units. By then, the shooting was well underway, triggered by the debate that led to the November 29, 1947, United Nations resolution to partition Palestine between more than 1,300,000 Arabs, who owned 90 percent of the land, and 600,000 Jews, who owned seven percent of the land. The resolution gave 53 percent of the land and 497,000 Arabs living in it to the Jewish state and the remainder of the land, in which 10,000 Jews were living among 900,000 Muslim and Christian Arabs, to the Palestinian Arab state. That masterpiece of gerrymandering set off fighting all over the Holy Land.

The statistics cited explain the injustice that might have prompted Palestinian Arabs to fight. In fact, however, Jewish militias initiated the warfare, as they sought to link together the territories they had been awarded, clear as many Arabs as possible out of the Galilee, and occupy Arab towns and villages along the road connecting coastal areas of the future Jewish state to Jerusalem, which the partition resolution envisioned keeping under international control.

How was it that an international organization established to preserve world peace could pass a resolution, 40 years ago this month, sure to set Muslim and Christian Arabs against Jews in Palestine, although nearly every American Middle East specialist warned against it? Remarkably, it was their own US government which lobbied the partition resolution past the objections of virtually every other country in the world.

The arm twisting began right after World War II, when President Harry Truman pressed the British to allow 100,000 Jewish refugees into Palestine. They would join 43,000 Jewish and 10,000 Arab soldiers who had returned to that tortured land after serving with the victorious British forces in World War II. The Jewish soldiers had kept the structure and even some of the arms caches of their own Palestinian Brigade intact because, midway in World War II, their leader, David Ben-Gurion, had openly called for establishment of a Jewish state. The surrounding Arab states had become increasingly alarmed that the beleaguered British would eventually give in, and exacted promises from Truman's predecessor, Franklin Roosevelt, that the US would not support Jewish claims without consulting the Arabs first.

Historians may argue over how much President Truman was influenced by the plight of the European Jewish refugees who had survived Hitler's death camps, and how much by concern about American Jewish support for Democratic Party candidates. Truman himself left little doubt, however, when on Nov. 10, 1945, he told a group of American diplomats who had warned him of the long-term consequences of US support for a Jewish state in Palestine:

"I'm sorry, gentlemen, but I have to answer to hundreds of thousands who are anxious for the success of Zionism; I do not have hundreds of thousands of Arabs among my constituents."

When Britain set May 15, 1948, as the date for its withdrawal from Palestine, Truman supported the partition plan despite virtually unanimous opposition from State Department and military experts. When it became clear that the plan could not obtain the necessary two-thirds vote in the UN General Assembly, both official and unofficial Americans began to lobby for it.

Twenty-six American senators sent a telegram advocating the plan to the newly-independent government of the Philippines, which was totally dependent upon US aid to rebuild its economy, shattered by almost four years of war and Japanese occupation. The Philippine delegate to the UN, General Carlos Romulo, who had fought side-by-side with General Douglas MacArthur against the Japanese, returned to his country rather than vote to give land that belonged to Palestinian Arabs to European Jews. His government, nevertheless, cast its vote for the plan. The same letter from 26 senators is said to have switched votes by four other impoverished Third World countries. In Europe, powerful American friends of Israel were also privately lobbying. America's former wartime allies would fare better individually under the Marshall Plan to rebuild war-shattered Europe, influential American Jews hinted, if those countries voted for the Palestine partition plan.

The final vote was 33 to 13 in favor of a plan to give between 53 and 54 percent of the country to 33 percent of its inhabitants, many of whom had been there for less than a decade.

In The Birth of Israel: Myths and Realities, published posthumously this year, Israeli editor Simha Flapan documents the shrewd political moves that followed the vote and made possible subsequent Israeli military actions:

"By some twist of vision, historians have generally taken Ben-Gurion's acceptance of the idea of a Jewish state in less than the whole of Palestine as the equivalent of an acceptance of the entire UN resolution. Yet, as we have seen, Ben-Gurion had always viewed partition as the first step toward a Jewish state in the whole of Palestine, including Transjordan, the Golan Heights, and southern Lebanon...In short, acceptance of the UN partition resolution was an example of Zionist pragmatism par excellence. It was a tactical acceptance, a vital step in the right direction—a springboard for expansion when circumstances proved more judicious."

The day after the resolution was adopted, the future Israeli army, the Haganah, called up all Jews aged 17 to 25 to register for military service. After the Haganah initiated armed actions, it was soon supported by the two Jewish underground terrorist gangs that had been fighting the British, the Irgun Zvai Leumi, led by future Prime Minister Menachem Begin, the the Lehi—or Stern Gang—led by a triumvirate that included future Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir. The attacks were carried out according to Plan Dalet, officially adopted by the Haganah on March 10, 1948, which dealt in detail with the "expulsion over the borders of the local Arab population in the event of opposition to our attacks and...the defense of contiguous Jewish settlements in Arab areas including the 'temporary' capture of Arab bases on the other side of the border."

By contrast, although the Palestinian Arabs overwhelmingly rejected partition, few were prepared to fight against it. Arab delegates in New York walked out of the UN General Assembly upon passage of the partition resolution. A week later, Palestinian Arabs began a three-day strike to protest it. Only gradually, as fighting broke out all over the Holy Land, were Palestinian military units formed. When some 3,000 foreign Arab volunteers were mobilized in Syria by Fawzi al Qawukji's Arab Liberation Army, only about 1,000 Palestinians joined them there. Another 3,000 Palestinians were serving in the militia of Jamal Al-Husseini, Mufti of Jerusalem. Al-Husseini's goal of an Arab state was the mirror image of Ben-Gurion's goal of a Jewish state, but whereas Ben-Gurion guardedly accepted partition as the first step toward a Jewish state in all of Palestine, Husseini angrily rejected partition as he called for an Arab state in all of Palestine. The contrasting tactics gave world opinion the false impression that Palestinians rather than Israelis were doing most of the shooting. In fact, most of the armed Palestinians were enrolled in the defense units of individual towns and villages, nearly all of which had entered into non-aggression pacts with the Jewish settlements closest to them. This tendency for each Arab village to think in terms of its individual defense made it easier for well-trained Jewish forces to choose the time and place for each attack.

One of the most savage of these attacks was the massacre by a combined Irgun-Lehi force, supported by the Haganah, on April 9, 1945, of 250 men, women, and children—one-third the population of Deir Yasin, a village overlooking the Tel Aviv-Jerusalem road, which had sought to remain neutral in the fighting. Subsequently, Haganah forces developed a standard tactic of surrounding Arab villages on three sides, reminding villagers by loudspeaker of the fate of those who had remained in their homes at Deir Yasin, and advising villagers there was still time to escape unharmed before the attack began. Thousands fled and often their homes or whole villages were obliterated almost immediately.

Yigal Allon, leader of the elite Israeli Palmach strike force, has described how, five days before declaration of the state of Israel, "we looked for means which would not obligate us to use force in order to get the tens of thousands of sulky Arabs who remained in Galilee to flee." He spread a rumor that all villages in the Lake Huleh area would be burned and that Arab inhabitants should flee while they could. Yitzhak Rabin has also recorded the horror expressed by some of his younger soldiers as they forced Arab families out of their homes and marched them at gunpoint to Arab-controlled territory. By May 15, 1948, when the British withdrew forces from Iraq, Jordan, and Egypt entered Palestine, some 300,000 Arabs already were homeless.

Nevertheless, the November 29, 1947, "acceptance" by Israel of the partition resolution, and the May 15, 1948, "invasion" by Arab states, were both used by Israel to justify its refusal to evacuate the territories it seized beyond those allotted to it by the UN resolution. The Arab states, by contrast, see their 1948 armed action not as an invasion following rejection of the resolution, but as a desperate, ill-prepared, and uncoordinated attempt to halt the Jewish attacks which had driven tens of thousands of Palestinians from their homes.

By June 1, only two weeks after proclamation of the state of Israel, 370,000 Arabs had fled or been forced out of the country. By July 1949, when armistice agreements were signed, between 600,000 and 700,000 Palestinian Arab refugees living outside Israel's expanded boundaries had been denied permission to return to their homes. Nearly 400 Christian and Muslim towns and villages have been absorbed or totally obliterated by Jewish settlements since 1947.

It is customary, in reviewing the tragic events triggered by the partition resolution, to ascribe the massacres of Arab palestinians to Jewish extremists like Begin and Shamir, and the forcible expulsions to the harsh, pragmatic orders of David Ben-Gurion, carried out by coolly efficient Israeli officers like Allon and Rabin. In fact, however, the expulsion policy was almost universally accepted by Israeli civilian and military authorities. Moshe Sharett, later to be Ben-Gurion's successor and Israel's first "moderate" prime minister, wrote during a July 1948 ceasefire:

"We are determined to be adamant while the truce lasts. Once the return tide starts, it will be impossible to stop it, and it will prove our undoing. As for the future, we are equally determined...to explore all possibilities of getting rid, once and for all, of the huge Arab minority that once threatened us."

Thus, 40 years ago, the downward spiral was set in motion by political opportunists in the United States and racist adventurers in Israel. The consequences were understood even then by thoughtful leaders in both countries. General George C. Marshall, America's highest-ranking military man in World War II, was US secretary of state when President Truman revealed on May 12, 1948, that he planned to recognize Israel, without waiting for it to define its borders, something it has refused to do to this day. Marshall wrote:

"I said bluntly that if the president were to follow (domestic political adviser Clark) Clifford's advice (to recognize Israel and garner Jewish support for the 1948 presidential election campaign), and if in the election I were to vote, I would vote against the president."

Only a month later, in Jerusalem, leftist Minister of Agriculture Aharon Zisling warned in a June 16, 1948, Israeli cabinet meeting:

"We are embarking on a course that will most greatly endanger any hope of a peaceful alliance with forces who could be our allies in the Middle East...Hundreds of thousands of Arabs who will be evicted from Palestine...will grow up to hate us. The Arab sons of this country didn't fight. Foreigners did. Now the native sons of this country will...carry the war against us."

Simha Flapan, in his 1987 book, has the last word:

"The Jewish state was finally established, but through a costly and disastrous war. The Palestinians, instead of winning national independence, became a people of refugees. Subsequently, the conflict grew deeper and wider, transforming the Middle East into a region of instability, violence, and war. In different ways, both peoples are still paying the price of this failure."

Richard Curtiss, a retired Foreign Service officer and author of A Changing Image: American Perceptions of the Arab-Israeli Dispute, is chief editor of the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs.