Violence came to Palestine within hours of the UN vote on partition. In the early hours of 30 November 1947 as Jewish revellers were making their way home after the previous night’s celebrations, an ambulance en route to the Hadassah Hospital on Mount Scopus came under fire. A few hours later a group of Arabs ambushed a Jewish bus bound from the coastal town of Netanya to Jerusalem, killing five of its passengers and wounding several others. They then attacked another bus travelling from Hadera to Jerusalem, killing two more passengers.
Meanwhile, in Tel-Aviv’s Carmel Market, on the fault line between the Jewish city and what was Arab Jaffa, a Jewish person was murdered. In the country’s main gaol, in the northern town of Acre, Arab prisoners attacked Jewish inmates, who barricaded themselves in their cells until the British authorities managed to restore calm. In Haifa, shots were fired at Jews passing through Arab neighbourhoods, while Jewish vehicles were stoned throughout the country.
The next day saw no reduction in violence. Shooting, stoning and rioting continued apace. The consulates of Poland and Sweden, both of which had voted for partition, were attacked. Bombs were thrown into cafés, killing and maiming, molotov cocktails were hurled at shops, a synagogue was set on fire. Scores of young Arabs flooded the offices of the local national committees demanding weapons. To inflame the situation further, the AHC proclaimed a three-day nationwide strike to begin the following day. It enforced the closure of all Arab shops, schools and places of business and organised and incited large Arab crowds to take to the streets to attack Jewish targets.
The main such attack took place in Jerusalem on Tuesday 2 December, when a crowd of several hundred Arabs ransacked the new Jewish commercial centre, lying opposite the Old City’s walls, looting and burning shops and stabbing and stoning whoever they happened upon. A Hagana platoon that was rushed to the area to protect civilians was peremptorily stopped and disarmed by the British police, with 16 of its members arrested for illegal possession of weapons. Some of the confiscated weapons were later found on killed and captured Arab rioters.
From the commercial centre, the mob proceeded to the City Hall, where they attempted to lynch several Jewish municipal workers and to plunder nearby stores. ‘For a long time the police did not interfere with this little mob,’ recollected the city’s British mayor, Richard Graves, ‘and it was heartbreaking to see these young hooligans being given a free hand to destroy the products of man’s labours ... I remonstrated with the police [who] told me that they had orders not to interfere till they were reinforced.’
On 4 December, some 120–150 armed Arabs attacked kibbutz Efal, on the outskirts of Tel-Aviv, in the first large-scale attempt to storm a Jewish settlement. Four days later a more audacious assault was launched when hundreds of armed Arabs attacked the Hatikva quarter in south Tel-Aviv. They were followed by scores of women, bags and sacks in hand, eager to ferry off the anticipated spoils. ‘The scene was appalling,’ recalled one of the Jewish defenders. ‘Masses of Arabs were running towards the neighbourhood. Some of them carried torches while others fired on the fly. Behind them we saw flashes of fire from machine guns covering them as they ran amok.’ By the time the British troops arrived at the scene, the Arabs had been forced into a hasty retreat, leaving behind some 70 dead.
This failure notwithstanding, the Hatikva attack constituted a watershed in the general deterioration to war. Planned and executed by Hasan Salame, the Mufti-appointed commander of the Lydda front, and including an unspecified number of fighters who had arrived from Nablus to this end, the operation inaugurated a trend that was to gain momentum in the coming weeks, transforming the conflict from mob rioting and local clashes to a more orderly guerrilla campaign aimed at achieving specific objectives. Indeed, two days after the abortive Hatikva assault, yet another concerted Arab attack was rebuffed – this time on the Jewish Quarter of Jerusalem’s Old City.
Violence was by no means confined to Palestine. Throughout the Arab world, Jewish communities were singled out for attack. In British-ruled Aden, 82 Jews were slaughtered by rioting mobs, while another 130 Jews were massacred in Tripolitania. In Beirut, Cairo, Alexandria and Aleppo Jewish houses and businesses were ransacked and synagogues desecrated.
Between 8 and 17 December the heads of the Arab states met in Cairo for a series of meetings, under the auspices of the Arab League, to discuss the Palestine situation. The gathering defined the overarching Arab objective as ‘obstructing the partition plan, preventing the creation of a Jewish state, and preserving Palestine as an independent unified Arab state’. To this end, the Arab states would contribute one million Egyptian pounds to the Palestine war effort (on top of the same amount promised three months earlier by another Arab League summit in the Lebanese town of Sofar), would place some 10,000 rifles at the disposal of the League’s military committee and would make the necessary arrangements for the recruitment of 3,000 volunteers for the ALA that was being established in Syria. They also reaffirmed the decision, taken at the Alei summit of October 1947, to deploy their forces along the Palestine border so long as the British remained in the country, in order to extend active support for the ALA’s operations within Palestine.
The outbreak of Arab violence did not take the Yishuv by surprise. Since assuming the defence portfolio in December 1946, in addition to the chairmanship of the Jewish Agency, David Ben-Gurion had been labouring under the assumption that upon the termination of the Mandate the Yishuv would have to confront the full military might of the Arab world, rather than that of the Palestinian Arabs alone. Consequently, in late 1947 and early 1948 the Hagana underwent a major structural change, aimed at transforming its semi-mobilised units into a national army based on compulsory conscription that would be able to resist an invasion by the regular Arab armed forces. Most notably, the Hish was restructured into five regional brigades: Levanoni in the northern part of the country (it later developed into two separate brigades – Carmeli and Golani); Alexandroni, with responsibility for the central sector; Givati in southern Palestine; and the Etzioni brigade in the Jerusalem area.
Nor did the actual pattern of the Palestinian violence come as a surprise. A month before the passing of the UN Resolution, Israel Galili, the Hagana’s Chief of staff estimated that:
As far as we know, it is the Mufti’s belief that there is no better way to ‘start things off’ than by means of terror, isolated bombs thrown into crowds leaving movie theatres on Saturday nights. That will start the ball rolling. For no doubt the Jews will react, and as a reaction to a reaction there will be outbreak in another place ... [until] the whole country will be stirred up, trouble will be incited, and the neighbouring Arab countries will be compelled to start a ‘holy war’ to assist the Palestinian Arabs.
To prevent this scenario from becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy, the Hagana’s initial response to the outbreak of violence was essentially defensive, trying to strike a delicate balance between the need to create a credible deterrence and the desire to prevent the cycle of violence from spiralling to uncontrollable peaks. It was only on 9 December, as Arab attacks on Jewish transportation across the country began to have a palpable effect, that the Hagana’s head of operations, Yigael Yadin, ordered commanders to respond in kind so as to curtail the Arab campaign against Jewish transportation.
In addition, the Hagana began to carry out retaliatory actions against specific targets, such as known perpetrators of violence, bases of armed gangs, and villages or localities serving as springboards for anti-Jewish attacks. One such action took place in Ramle on 11 December, when a Palmach squad managed to infiltrate the town and to set fire to 15 Arab vehicles in a parking lot. On another instance, an infantry platoon entered the southern village of Karatiya, which had been used as a base for attacks on Jewish traffic in the area, and blew up a building after evacuating its residents. A similar operation, in the Galilee village of Khasas went terribly wrong, as sappers miscalculated the amount of explosives needed for demolishing a building, causing the collapse of a neighbouring house and killing eight people.
While the Hagana did its utmost to avoid attacks on innocent civilians, the smaller Jewish underground organisations had no such scruples: if Jews were to be indiscriminately attacked throughout the country, so too would Arabs. Thus, hours after the Arab attack on the Jerusalem commercial centre on 2 December, the Irgun set fire to a Jerusalem cinema house frequented by Arabs. Ten days later, on 12 December, it placed a car bomb opposite the Damascus Gate of the Old City, killing 20 people and wounding another five. Lehi used the same method to blow up the headquarters of the Jaffa national committee on 5 January 1948.
On 30 December, a group of Irgun members threw a bomb at a group of Arab workers waiting outside the Haifa oil refinery, killing six people and wounding others. Within hours the Arab workers at the plant turned on their Jewish colleagues, slaughtering 39 of them and injuring many more. In response, the Hagana raided the village of Balad al-Sheikh, from where many of the rioters came, killing and wounding some 60 people.
By the end of 1947, then, Palestine was in flames as Arabs and Jews were fighting each other in its towns, villages and on its roads. From the passing of the Partition Resolution on 29 November 1947 to the beginning of the new year, some 207 Jews and 220 Arabs were killed, according to official British figures, while several hundred others were wounded.