7

1945–1949

‘Immigrants of ours will come to this Khirbet what’s-its-name, you hear me, and they’ll take this land and work it, and it’ll be beautiful here.’

S. Yizhar, Khirbet Khiza1

OPENING SHOTS

On Sunday, 30 November 1947 armed Arabs ambushed a Jewish bus at Kfar Sirkin en route from Netanya to Jerusalem, killing five passengers. This incident, just hours after the United Nations voted to partition Palestine, is generally regarded as marking the start of Israel’s war of independence and the Palestinian Nakba or ‘catastrophe’. The motives of the perpetrators were said to be clannish and criminal rather than ‘national’, though the distinction was either lost or ignored at the time and has been forgotten since.² Later that day another bus was attacked on the road from Hadera, leaving one Jew dead and several injured. Other attacks marked the descent into all-out conflict that was driven by an accelerating cycle of retaliation and revenge.

On 13 December a teenage Palestinian boy watched in horror as a black car stopped outside the Damascus Gate to Jerusalem’s Old City and ‘the occupants rolled two cylinders with burning wicks into the milling crowd’. Twenty people died.³ Two weeks later, fighters of the Lehi underground – the ‘Stern Gang’ to the British – targeted a coffee house in Lifta, killing six. On 30 December Irgun men threw grenades into a crowd of Arab workers outside Haifa’s oil refinery, once notable for its cross-community trade union co-operation: eleven died. In the ensuing fury thirty-nine Jewish employees were killed by Arabs wielding metal bars, knives and hammers. Six Arabs were also killed. On the first morning of 1948 Haganah units raided nearby Balad al-Sheikh – burial place of Sheikh Izzedin al-Qassam. Several dozen people, including women and children, lost their lives. Local incidents fuelled a country-wide crisis. Full-scale war seemed inevitable as the new year dawned.

Escalation on the ground matched the intensifying pace of international diplomacy over Palestine after the end of the Second World War. In October 1945 the Haganah and Irgun launched a co-ordinated rebellion against British rule by sabotaging the railway system. In April 1946 the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry recommended that the country be governed under ‘bi-national’ principles and called for the immediate entry of 100,000 Jewish refugees. However, that failed to bring London and Washington to a common position. In June another Haganah operation destroyed all the bridges connecting Palestine to its neighbouring countries, ‘the crowning act of the organised struggle against the White Paper administration’, in the words of one Zionist official.4 The British mounted a massive search and arrest operation (‘Operation Agatha’) in which 2,700 Jews were detained, including most of the Jewish Agency leaders and a large part of the Haganah command, on a day dubbed ‘Black Sabbath’. Three weeks later the Irgun blew up a wing of Jerusalem’s King David Hotel, headquarters of the British civil and military administration, by smuggling milk churns packed with explosives into the basement. That killed ninety-one people, nearly a third of them Jews, and was immediately condemned by the Jewish Agency. News of this spectacular atrocity echoed around the world; it fuelled growing outrage in Britain and accelerated the end of the Mandate. In December David Ben-Gurion took over the Jewish Agency’s defence portfolio. It seemed clear that a peaceful solution to the Palestine conflict was not attainable.

By February 1947 the Labour government in London had effectively given up an increasingly unpopular burden that was costing the lives of British troops and police in a ‘senseless, squalid war’, as Winston Churchill, now in opposition, put it.⁵ It decided to submit the Palestine question to the UN and in May the fledgling world body established a Special Committee on Palestine (UNSCOP). During their visit to the country the committee’s members witnessed the so-called ‘Exodus affair’, when 4,500 Holocaust survivors on board an old American passenger ship were detained as illegal immigrants and deported back to Europe. The favourable publicity that ensued for the Jewish cause went some way to offsetting revulsion at Jewish terrorism. That peaked the day the Exodus arrived in France, when two abducted British sergeants were hanged in retaliation for the execution of Irgun fighters. In a grisly sequel, their booby-trapped corpses were blown apart as they were being cut down in an orange grove near Netanya. The Arabs boycotted UNSCOP – their ‘cold malevolence’, as a Jewish official put it, in sharp contrast to the ‘warm reception by the Yishuv’.6

In September, seven of the UN committee’s ten members recommended partition into two states, with international status for Jerusalem. The minority (India, Iran and Yugoslavia) proposed a federal state with Jerusalem as its capital. The Arab Higher Committee expressed ‘amazement and disbelief’ as this was ‘contrary to the UN charter and to the principles of justice and integrity’.⁷ Britain announced that it would leave Palestine in six months’ time if no settlement was reached. No one seriously imagined that it would be. On 29 November 1947 the UN General Assembly voted to partition Palestine into Jewish and Arab states, leaving Jerusalem under UN supervision as a ‘corpus separatum’. Intense Zionist lobbying secured a majority of thirty-three to thirteen with ten abstentions – a close-run thing since a two-thirds vote was required. UN Resolution 181 was backed, crucially, by both the US and USSR – the world’s great powers in the early days of the Cold War. It was opposed by the Palestinians and by Arab and Muslim states infuriated by American susceptibility to the Zionists. The proposed Jewish state was to consist of 55 per cent of the country, including the largely unpopulated Negev desert. Its population would comprise some 500,000 Jews and 400,000 Arabs – a very substantial minority. Jews, at that point, owned just 7 per cent of Palestine’s private land. The Arab state was to have 44 per cent of the land and a minority of 10,000 Jews. Greater Jerusalem was to remain under international rule. The mufti, Haj Amin al-Husseini, declared the UN vote ‘null and void’. Jamal al-Husseini, vice-president of the Arab Higher Committee, had already warned that it was ‘the sacred duty of the Arabs of Palestine to defend their country against all aggression’. Now he rejected the proposed border as a ‘line of blood and fire’.8 The Palestinian view was that ‘partition did not involve a compromise but was Zionist in conception and tailored to meet Zionist needs and demands’.⁹

Arab anger was matched by Jewish jubilation. Hours after the vote at Lake Success, the UN’s first home, Ben-Gurion stood on the balcony of the Jewish Agency building in Jerusalem. ‘He looked slowly and solemnly around him – to the roof tops crammed with people, to the throngs that stood solid in the courtyard below him’, one witness recorded.

He raised his hand: an utter silence waited for his words. ‘Ashreynu sheh zachinu la yom ha zeh.’ [Blessed are we who have been privileged to witness this day.] He concluded with ‘Tchi ha Medina ha Ivrith’ [Long Live the Hebrew State – it didn’t have a name yet] and called for Hatikvah.fn1 A solemn chant rose from all sides. The moment was too big for our feelings. There were few dry eyes and few steady voices. Ben-Gurion tossed his head back proudly, tenderly touched the flag that hung from the railing and charged the air with electricity when he shouted defiantly, ‘WE ARE A FREE PEOPLE.’¹⁰

Later that day, the Palestinian leadership proclaimed a general strike in protest while the Haganah called on Jews aged between seventeen and twenty-five to register for military service. The UN decision and reactions to it were replays of what had happened a decade earlier, when the Peel Commission recommended partition as a way round the ‘irreconcilable aspirations’ of Jews and Arabs. Again the Jews accepted the decision, though not without misgivings. The Arabs rejected it, refusing to cede sovereignty over any part of Palestine and insisting that the UN had no right to enforce its wishes in the face of the opposition of the majority of the population. Palestinians believed that ‘the country was exclusively theirs and an inseparable part of the great Arab homeland. Any diminishing of this ideal was perceived as a conspiracy, mu’amara in Arabic, by those who would shift the Jewish problem from European shoulders to the Arabs and at their expense.’11 But conditions were now very different from 1937. The partition decision had the weight of international opinion behind it, despite Arab legal, moral and political objections that were overlooked both then and since.¹² Even more significantly, within months the British would be leaving for good, no longer willing or able to ‘hold the ring’. No other solution was on offer. The two peoples of Palestine were to be left to fight it out.

PREPARING FOR THE FIGHT

On the eve of war the Jews were far better prepared, militarily and politically, than the Arabs, in Palestine or beyond. Their leaders had a high level of confidence that they would prevail if it came to a fight, as they assumed it would.¹³ The Haganah had a centralized command. It could field 35,000 men, including the 2,500-strong Palmah. The ‘dissidents’ of the Irgun and Stern Gang accounted for a few thousand more, in total making up an extraordinarily large percentage of the adult Jewish population. Approximately 27,000 Jews had enlisted with British forces during the war. In addition, the institutions of the Yishuv exercised national discipline. ‘The Jewish Agency … is really a state within a state with its own budget, secret cabinet, army, and above all, intelligence service’, observed Richard Crossman, the British Labour MP who had visited Palestine as a member of the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry. ‘It is the most efficient, dynamic, toughest organisation I have ever seen.’¹⁴ If it came to war, he predicted, the Haganah would trounce the Arabs. Crossman’s was an astute assessment (and at odds with the view of the British military).¹⁵ Still, his confidence was not widely shared. ‘We knew that 635,000 Jews were facing hundreds of millions of Arabs: “the few against the many” ’, Uri Avnery, a young German-born Jew, wrote shortly afterwards. ‘We knew: if we surrender, we die.’¹⁶ Volunteering was the norm among Jewish youth: Tikva Honig-Parnass, a seventeen-year-old Hebrew University student, enlisted in the Haganah in November 1947. ‘It was well-known on campus who was a member’, she recalled.

Most students were members and enlisting was the culmination of everything I had been brought up to believe in. We had fought to achieve what we had, it was now in danger and it was up to me to protect it. In that discourse there was no notion of attacking or being the aggressors, only defending ourselves and what we had built.17

In the wake of the Holocaust, which was seen by many as the ultimate moral vindication of the Zionist quest for a homeland, the Jews also enjoyed wide international sympathy – a crucial factor which many Arabs underestimated or ignored, continuing to believe ‘that people entirely innocent of the crime had been forced to pay for it’.¹⁸

No one now doubted that the fate of Palestine was at stake from a combination of the end of British rule and growing Zionist assertiveness. Jewish determination to win was a powerful if intangible motivating factor. Independence for the neighbouring French Mandate territories of Syria and Lebanon in 1946 had underlined the painful fact that Palestine, trapped in its ‘iron cage’, was still nowhere near to achieving self-government under its Arab majority and that the Palestinians were still unable to develop their own national institutions and identity.¹⁹ It was a debilitating weakness.

The Arab Higher Committee, outlawed back in 1937, had been revived under the exiled mufti’s leadership. In May 1946 Haj Amin al-Husseini arrived in Egypt (after avoiding prosecution in France) under the protection of King Farouk and sent a wave of excitement through Arab Palestine. ‘Men smiled, shook hands and embraced each other while the women ululated and offered songs of praise; fires of celebration burnt in every courtyard of every village. Brooding despair gave way to a desire to fight, for the Mufti, for all his colossal faults, embodied the Palestinian Arabs’ will to resist.’²⁰ But factionalism still held sway, a legacy of old rivalries and of the events of 1936–39. The Arab National Fund had not succeeded in halting land sales. Nor had calls to boycott Jewish produce been heeded. The AHC’s critics saw it as a partisan body which covered up the failings – even treacherous ones – of its own members. ‘For twenty years we have heard talk against land brokers and land sellers, yet here they sit in the front rows of every national gathering’, one anti-Husseini figure (himself in clandestine contact with the Jewish Agency) complained at a rally in Jaffa – before the loudspeakers were turned off to silence him.21 Haj Amin’s pro-Axis wartime role was exploited in Zionist propaganda: photographs of him posing with Hitler or Bosnian Muslim SS volunteers were worth thousands of words and did grave damage to the Palestinian cause.²² (In May 1947, during a UN debate, the AHC secretary, Emile Ghouri, objected to a Zionist reference to the mufti’s presence in Germany: ‘The Jews are questioning the record of an Arab spiritual leader,’ he said. ‘Does this properly come from the mouth of a people who have crucified the founder of Christianity?’²³) The AHC was divided between Jerusalem, Beirut and Damascus, hampering effective communication, and its influence was dwarfed by that of the recently created League of Arab States, whose seven membersfn2 had their own agendas – the majority being opposed to King Abdullah of Transjordan, whose ambitions in Palestine were well known.²⁴ All this meant that the Palestinians were spectacularly ill-prepared for what has been called the ‘bitter endgame’ of the Mandate.²⁵

The AHC faced ‘the colossal task of building up Palestinian Arab military strength virtually from scratch, under severe handicaps’.²⁶ Nothing on the Palestinian side matched the resources and organization of the Haganah. No master plan existed for fighting the Jews, whose capabilities were simultaneously underestimated and exaggerated. The Arab effort was also beset by rivalry: it was not until January 1947 that two existing paramilitary groups, the Futuwwa and the Najada, were combined into a single Arab Youth Organization.²⁷ Veterans of the Arab rebellion had military experience but only a few thousand had joined the British army, and many had been discharged or had deserted.²⁸ In December the AHC set up the Jaysh al-Jihad al-Muqaddas (Army of the Holy Jihad, AHJ) under Abdul-Qader al-Husseini (the son of Musa Kazem) and ‘the ablest and most courageous of the Arab commanders’.²⁹ National committees were formed in villages and towns as they had been during the rebellion.³⁰ Weapons were purchased in neighbouring countries and Europe, but it proved difficult to distribute arms and fighters as needed. Volunteering was not common; Hisham Sharabi, from a well-to-do Jaffa family, reflected later on how he and other privileged young Palestinians had gone abroad to study without thinking about the looming conflict:

There were people, we assumed, who would fight on our behalf. They were those who had fought in [the] 1936 rebellion and would fight again in the future. They were peasants who were not in need of specialized higher education in the West. Their natural place was here, on this land; as for us intellectuals, our place was at another level. When we fought, we fought at the front of thought. We engaged in bitter battles of the mind.31

The initial Arab military effort focused on Jewish communications and transport, especially main roads and access routes to isolated settlements in Galilee and the Negev. Jewish quarters in the mixed towns of Haifa, Jaffa, Tiberias and Jerusalem came under attack. Leadership, though, remained essentially local. Abdul-Qader complained of a shortage of weapons, explosives and ammunition. Defence was a weak point. The lack of medical care meant that treatable wounds often ended in amputations. Non-Palestinian forces were deployed by the Arab Liberation Army (ALA or Jaysh al-Inqadh al-Arabi), set up by the Arab League’s Damascus-based military committee. It was made up of 5,000 volunteers and seconded Syrian and Iraqi military personnel commanded by Fawzi al-Qawuqji, ‘a popular Garibaldian officer of Lebanese origin’,³² in northern Palestine, where Qawuqji had also fought in 1936. It was plagued by low morale, bad discipline and poor logistics.³³ Qawuqji and the mufti were also at loggerheads.³⁴ Fighters from the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood entered the country from the south as well. Overall co-ordination of these disparate forces was extremely poor and ‘probably the most important factor in the eventual Palestinian defeat and in the Haganah’s relative ease in accomplishing it’.³⁵ In some towns garrisons answered to the Arab League, in others to the AHC. The Arab states behaved in a ‘patronising and … contemptuous manner’ towards the Palestinians. Residents of Jaffa were appalled at the conduct of fighters from Hama in Syria, who arrived in March, ‘went on a rampage of robbery and looting, and then quickly left’.³⁶ ALA officers accused Palestinians of being ‘traitors, cowards, spies and speculators in land’. Indeed, many Palestinians did not want to fight, had secret non-aggression pacts with their Jewish neighbours, opposed the Husseinis or refused to harbour foreign forces.37

FATEFUL YEAR

Violence intensified after the New Year’s Day Haganah raid on Balad al-Sheikh. In Jerusalem, on the rainy night of 5 January 1948 the Haganah blew up the Semiramis Hotel in Qatamon, killing twenty-six civilians it mistakenly believed were Arab ‘irregulars’, including the Spanish consul-general. Sir Alan Cunningham, the high commissioner, called it ‘an offence to civilization’ and asked Ben-Gurion how the Jews ‘expected to defend themselves against world opinion for the crime of blowing up innocent people’. Ben-Gurion replied that the attack was unauthorized.³⁸ The effect was electrifying: ‘All day long you could see people carrying their belongings and moving from their houses to safer ones in Qatamon or to another quarter altogether’, wrote Hala Sakakini, a local resident.

People were simply panic-stricken. The rumour spread that leaflets had been dropped by the Jews saying that they would make out of Qatamon one heap of rubble. Whenever we saw people moving away we tried to encourage them to stay. We would tell them: ‘You ought to be ashamed to leave. This is just what the Jews want you to do; you leave and they occupy your houses and then one day you will find that Qatamon has become another Jewish quarter.³⁹

Everyone in the neighbourhood felt ‘vulnerable and alone’, recalled Ghada Karmi. ‘The men decided to put up barricades at both ends of the roads and to have them manned. But only five people had guns and the rest did not know how to use weapons.’ The effort lasted until Jewish gunmen shot and killed the man on duty.⁴⁰ Two days later Irgun fighters threw bombs at the Jaffa Gate, this time with a death toll of twenty-five. Haganah attacks followed on Arab areas on the western side of town – Sheikh Badr, Lifta and Romema. On 31 January Ben-Gurion ordered the Haganah to settle Jewish refugees who had been displaced from the Shimon haTsadik area in east Jerusalem in newly abandoned Arab homes in the west. The next day Palestinians and British army deserters bombed the offices of the Palestine Post, the Zionist English-language daily newspaper, killing twenty Jewish civilians.

The situation was deteriorating everywhere. In the first week of January Lehi operatives wearing British uniforms detonated a truck bomb outside the Grand Serail in Clock Square in Jaffa, HQ of the local Arab national committee. It killed twenty-eight Arabs. On 8 January the first contingent of 330 ALA volunteers arrived in the north. The following day saw an attack on Kibbutz Kfar Szold from across the Syrian border, in retaliation for a deadly Palmah assault on the nearby village of Khisas. The second half of the month saw fighting at Gush Etzion, the Jewish settlement bloc south of Jerusalem, where the entire thirty-five-strong Palmah force sent to relieve the defenders was wiped out. It was a devastating blow, but the ‘Lamed-Hay’ (Hebrew for ‘thirty-five’) became a byword for youthful sacrifice, which was still remembered decades later.41 The Haganah attacked Salama village near Jaffa. Hundreds more ALA men crossed the frontiers from Syria, Lebanon and Transjordan.

Palestinian civilians began to flee from the start of the hostilities. In early December 1947 the Haganah reported that wealthy Arabs were moving temporarily to winter residences in Syria, Lebanon and Egypt.⁴² Others left for inland villages. Around 15,000 Arab residents, a fifth of Jaffa’s population, had left by mid-January.⁴³ By late January, 20,000 Haifa residents were estimated to have abandoned their homes. Residents of Arab villages adjoining Jewish areas of Jerusalem left too.⁴⁴ The Arab Higher Committee tried to stem these departures by radio broadcasts, by appealing to neighbouring governments not to grant entry to fleeing Palestinians and by ordering local commanders to stop people leaving.⁴⁵ From Cairo, the mufti urged the national committees to halt ‘desertion from the field of honour and sacrifice’.⁴⁶ But the effort was confused and advice often contradictory. Fear of attack, as in any war, was the main reason for the flight of civilians, at least at this stage, and it did not go unnoticed by the Jewish leadership. In early February Ben-Gurion remarked pointedly on the departure of Arabs from West Jerusalem: ‘From your entry to Jerusalem through Lifta-Romema … there are no strangers [Arabs],’ he told Mapai colleagues. ‘One hundred per cent Jewish. I do not assume that this will change. What has happened in Jerusalem … could well happen in large parts of the country – if we hold on.’47

Until the end of February Jewish forces remained largely on the defensive, partly out of fear of a possible British reaction. An ALA attack on an isolated settlement near Beisan was repulsed, with the Arabs suffering heavy casualties. But there were significant exceptions. On 15 February, Palmah units attacked Sasa in northern Galilee, killing sixty villagers and destroying twenty houses. The Palmah blew up Arab homes in Caesarea and expelled their residents. In Jaffa houses were dynamited with people still inside them.⁴⁸ The degree to which these actions were authorized by the Haganah national command and political leadership, or were the result of initiatives on the ground, is unclear. Their outcome, however, is not in doubt.

DALET FOR DEFENCE?

On 10 March 1948, Haganah commanders meeting in Tel Aviv looked ahead to the next stage of the war in a document known as Tochnit Dalet (Plan D). The plan was designed to secure control of Jewish-held territory – within and beyond the UN partition borders – ahead of the approaching British departure. In case of resistance, Arabs were to be expelled. If there was no resistance, they could stay under military rule. Decades later opinions still differed sharply as to whether this constituted a master plan for expulsions or ‘ethnic cleansing’ – a term borrowed from the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s and the title of an influential work by the anti-Zionist Israeli historian Ilan Pappé.⁴⁹ Israeli and pro-Zionist scholars had traditionally described Plan D as defensive and the Palestinian exodus as unexpected. Walid Khalidi, the leading Palestinian historian, took the opposite view.⁵⁰ Benny Morris, the pioneering ‘new’ Israeli historian of this crucially formative period, argued that Plan D was implemented, but only in piecemeal fashion. The Palestinian refugee problem, in Morris’s much-quoted assessment, was ‘born out of war, not by design’.⁵¹ Still, a predisposition to population ‘transfer’ and tactical military considerations in fast-moving circumstances inclined Haganah commanders towards removing Arabs, given the opportunity. The language employed was certainly highly suggestive. The Hebrew word ‘tihur’ (‘purifying’) was used repeatedly in internal documents. The codenames chosen for operations – Matateh (Broom) and Biur Chametz (Passover Cleaning) seemed inspired by this mindset.52 Pappé and others have argued that the record shows that the removal of Palestinians was ‘more premeditated, systematic and extensive’ than Morris acknowledged – even in the face of his own evidence.⁵³ No high-level Jewish political discussion is known to have been held to explicitly discuss expelling Arabs, but many expulsions unquestionably took place. And the results, in the end, mattered far more than intentions – and the nuances of later historiographical controversy.

In the ebb and flow of events, each side experienced periods of crisis. On 23 March the Iraqi head of the Arab League military committee, General Ismail Safwat (‘old fashioned … extremely brave and unutterably stupid’⁵⁴), warned that the Arab garrisons in Jaffa, Jerusalem and Haifa were on the defensive, with the initiative in the hands of Zionist forces held back ‘only by their fear of the British’.⁵⁵ Indeed, by the end of the month many of the wealthy and middle-class Arab families of those three cities had gone – for good. Simultaneously, Arab attacks took a heavy toll on Jewish convoys: forty-six Jews were killed on the road to Yehiam near the Arab village of Kabri. Other losses were incurred in convoys at Hulda and Nabi Daniel.

April was the turning point of the first phase of the war. As the British departure neared and supplies of food and water ran dangerously low in Jewish areas of Jerusalem, the Haganah went on to the offensive, capturing more territory that was not earmarked for the Jews under the UN plan. It mounted Operation Nachshon to get relief convoys past Bab al-Wad and through to the city, taking the hill-top Arab village of Qastel – the first to be conquered by Jewish forces – expelling its inhabitants and destroying its houses. Husseini, the commander of the AHJ, was killed there on 8 April and buried the next day amid emotional scenes at the al-Aqsa mosque alongside his father and Sharif Hussein of Mecca. It was a crushing blow to Palestinian morale and a harbinger of wider defeat.⁵⁶ Husseini was and remains one of the few heroic figures of the Arab war effort.57 Poor logistics were also an increasingly obvious disadvantage for the Arabs: in the course of the battle for Qastel a taxi arrived in Ramallah with fighters who bought bullets on the streets to re-supply their comrades at the front.⁵⁸ ALA forces suffered another serious setback with the failure of an attack on Mishmar haEmek, the kibbutz overlooking the road from Jenin to Haifa, despite using field artillery for the first time in the war. That allowed the Haganah to occupy several nearby Arab villages, which were razed after their inhabitants fled or were expelled to the Jenin area.

On 12 April Qaluniya, near Qastel, fell to Palmah fighters. ‘Scouts went ahead and more … were on the hilltops’, reported an accompanying journalist.

Everyone wore green camouflaged uniforms. They carried a medley of weapons, Sten guns, rifles, machine guns and hand grenades; a few carried ‘walkie talkies’. They moved like wraiths down the wadi … Suddenly the village seemed to erupt. Our mortars started it, and at once came a bedlam of answering fire … Suddenly an explosion that seems to rip the hillside; shrieks of terror. Our shock troops and sappers had reached the houses … Arab resistance, feeble from the start, soon crumbled. In half an hour it was over.⁵⁹

These were fateful days. On Friday, 9 April, the day of Husseini’s funeral, the massacre of Deir Yassin played a decisive role in fuelling Palestinian fear and flight. Residents of the stone-quarrying village on the western edge of Jerusalem believed they were safe because of a non-belligerency agreement their mukhtar had signed with the neighbouring Jewish quarter of Givat Shaul – one of several such pacts.⁶⁰ ‘There was an agreement that if any of their people attacked Deir Yassin, the Jews would stop them and catch them’, recalled Muhammed Arif Sammour, a teacher. ‘If anyone from Deir Yassin attacked Givat Shaul, the Arabs would stop him.’⁶¹ Deir Yassin did not directly overlook the Tel Aviv road and it had not sheltered Arab forces fighting for Qastel. It was not a priority for the Haganah, though the district commander gave ‘reluctant approval’ for the attack.⁶² It was mounted by a joint 120-strong Irgun–Lehi force, but when the ‘dissidents’ encountered heavier than expected resistance a Palmah platoon was despatched with a mortar and machine gun. Most residents fled, but survivors described executions, rapes and looting. ‘The conquest of the village was carried out with great cruelty’, Haganah intelligence reported. ‘Whole families – women, old people, children – were killed … Some of the prisoners moved to places of detention, including women and children, were murdered viciously by their captors.’63 Prisoners were paraded on trucks through the centre of Jerusalem before being released. For many years, based on the original Red Cross figures, the generally accepted death toll was 240–250. In the 1980s Palestinian researchers revised the number of fatalities to 107, closer to what was described in contemporary Jewish testimony.⁶⁴

Even at the time, though, the precise figures barely mattered. Immediately afterwards Arab press and radio reported repeatedly on the massacre, fuelling panicked flight from nearby villages and echoing far beyond. As the Irgun commander Menachem Begin – who always denied that a massacre had taken place – wrote later: ‘The legend was worth half a dozen battalions to the forces of Israel.’ The psychological impact can hardly be overestimated. David Kroyanker, a young Jewish Jerusalemite, recalled the effect on the Arabs of Talbiyeh, adjacent to his home in Rehavia. ‘The Arabs were scared to death. They left their meals on the tables and the Haganah requested people in our neighbourhood to clean the houses so that Jews could move into them.’⁶⁵ Deir Yassin remains a byword for Zionist brutality that has resonated down the decades and remains a rallying cry for the Palestinian cause. Shortly afterwards, news came through of another massacre, this time of twenty-two villagers in Khirbet Nasser ed-Din, south-west of Tiberias on the shore of the Sea of Galilee.⁶⁶ That was described as ‘a second Deir Yassin’.⁶⁷

Revenge was not long in coming: on 13 April Arab fighters ambushed a convoy of trucks, ambulances, buses and armoured cars heading to the Jewish enclave on Jerusalem’s Mount Scopus, home of the Hebrew University. Seventy-eight lecturers, students, nurses and doctors as well as their Haganah escorts, were killed as British forces looked on without intervening. The attack caused disquiet among Arab doctors.⁶⁸ The fighting intensified a gathering Palestinian exodus from Jerusalem, with the evacuation of the southern suburbs of Baqaa, Qatamon and the German Colony, the roads clogged with lorries loaded with household goods.69 Petrol shortages meant that the cost of travel to Amman and Damascus soared so that it was manageable only for the better-off and for government employees who had received redundancy payments. Hundreds more Palestinians fled to Bethlehem, Nablus and Jericho, which were still considered safe.⁷⁰

Over the next few weeks the war was effectively won by the Jews as Haganah units continued offensive operations, helped by the arrival of rifles, machine-guns and ammunition purchased from Czechoslovakia. Tiberias fell on 18 April, its 5,000-strong Arab population, which was used to relatively good relations with the Jewish residents, fleeing with people from nearby villages terrified by the fate of Khirbet Nasser ed-Din. British forces helped organize a relatively orderly evacuation.⁷¹ Haganah forces then looted the Arab quarters.⁷²

Haifa – home to Palestine’s main port and second-largest Arab community – was taken after a sudden British withdrawal from positions between Arab and Jewish quarters; it had originally been thought that the British would remain for three months after the end of the Mandate. Sporadic fighting had taken place for two months: on consecutive days in March car-bomb attacks caused mass casualties on both sides. Wealthier Arab families had long gone. On 22 April Palestinians fled in their thousands to the port and boarded boats to take them north to Acre and Beirut. In the ensuing panic, worsened by Haganah mortar fire, some vessels became overcrowded and sank with their terrified passengers. ‘We suddenly heard that the British Army in the harbour area was prepared to protect all who took refuge there’, a local man recalled.⁷³

Thus we all flooded the lanes that were still in our hands toward the harbour. It was a terrible thing to try and make a passage for oneself. Hundreds of people blocked the narrow lanes and pushed and heaved against one another, each trying to save himself and his children. Many children, women, and old men fainted and were trampled by the surging crowds. It was like Judgment Day … A rumour spread that the Jews had cut off the roads … We turned about in utter terror. People around me were shouting, cursing, sobbing, and praying. In an instance another rumour spread that the road was clear. Once again we began pushing in the direction of the harbour … At the entrance British policemen helped to carry our children. But there was a wild rush for the boats and many people were drowned in the process.

Shabtai Levy, the Jewish mayor, urged the Arab members of an emergency committee to stay put. But they declined to sign truce terms – perhaps fearing the opprobrium of surrender – and opted instead to evacuate the city. Golda Meir of the Jewish Agency, sent to Haifa to persuade Arabs to remain, found a ‘dead city’ with Arab women, children and the elderly waiting to leave and empty homes where coffee and bread were still on the table. She was reminded of Jewish towns in Europe during the war.74 Inspecting abandoned apartments in Wadi Nisnas with a Haganah commander, she encountered an elderly Arab woman who burst into tears; Meir wept too. Ben-Gurion made clear a few weeks later, however, that he did not want the refugees to return until hostilities were over.⁷⁵

Haifa’s loss quickly swept up other nearby Arab communities. Jaffa suffered a similar fate. Irgun fighters led the offensive on 25 April with an attack on Manshiyeh, now surrounded by Tel Aviv. Mortar fire rained down while Haganah units attacked nearby villages from the east and south. Refugees fled south by road towards Gaza, and again by sea. Salah Khalaf recalled the panic he felt as a fifteen-year-old boy: ‘I was overwhelmed by the sight of this huge mass of men, women, old people and children, struggling under the weight of suitcases or bundles, making their way painfully down to the wharfs of Jaffa in a sinister tumult. Cries mingled with moaning and sobs, all punctuated by deafening explosions.’⁷⁶ Another man, named Fayiz, left his home the day the Irgun assault began:

Everyone was wailing and weeping and there was total chaos. My brother and I ran all over the town trying to find a truck but there weren’t any. They were all either full of people or burned out. There were many dead donkeys too, with their trailers still attached to them, lying in the road. Next we went to the sea but clearly there was no chance of escape there. In the end we found a truck and our family with three others climbed on. We had one suitcase with us: everything else was left at home … It took us seven hours to get to Majdal [nearly 30 miles away] where we slept the night. Early next morning we travelled on to Gaza. There we were: us and a suitcase.77

Shafiq al-Hout, a sixteen-year-old, crowded onto the deck of a Greek ship bound for Beirut. ‘I remember watching Jaffa disappear from sight until there was nothing but water all around,’ he reminisced. ‘It never occurred to me that I would never see it again.’⁷⁸ By 14 May, when Haganah units entered Jaffa, only 3,000–4,000 residents remained. The city was not conquered, but rather surrendered. At first victorious Irgun fighters ‘pillaged only dresses, blouses and ornaments for their girlfriends. But this discrimination was soon abandoned. Everything that was movable was carried from Jaffa – furniture, carpets, pictures, crockery and pottery, jewellery and cutlery. The occupied parts of Jaffa were stripped … What could not be taken away was smashed. Windows, pianos, fittings and lamps went in an orgy of destruction.’⁷⁹ Even though Arab Jaffa had relatively strong local institutions, social tensions undermined their effectiveness in the panicky and traumatic circumstances of all-out war.⁸⁰

Safad, in eastern Galilee, was the next ‘mixed’ town to go, conquered by 10 May, its Arab neighbourhoods emptied as their inhabitants were driven out in their thousands, Piper Cub planes bombing the surrounding wadis to hasten the exodus. The fighting there was ‘an especially good example of the state of weakness, anarchy, breakdown, and collapse that generally prevailed among the Palestinians’.⁸¹ Yigal Allon, commanding the Palmah, organized a ‘whispering campaign’ to frighten Palestinians into leaving the area, telling local Jewish mukhtars to warn their Arab contacts to flee while they still could before Jewish reinforcements arrived. The ploy worked: tens of thousands left their homes and abandoned villages were burned. In Beisan the remaining inhabitants were expelled across the Jordan or to Nazareth. Acre, besieged and demoralized by the fate of Haifa, fell too, its defenders divided between supporters and opponents of the mufti. Only 3,000 of its 13,400 residents remained, and others left after the conquest.⁸² Hava Keller, a young Polish-born woman serving with the Haganah, went into an Arab apartment that had just been abandoned and was disturbed to see a pair of baby shoes, which made her wonder about the child’s fate years later.⁸³

The Haganah took the offensive and made other gains in areas across the country where the armies of the neighbouring Arab states were expected to invade when the British left. In the south, on 11 May, the Givati brigade raided Beit Daras and the residents fled to nearby Isdud. In an adjacent village the mukhtar’s house was blown up and four people were executed. ‘Now it is a mass psychosis and an all-out evacuation’, Haganah intelligence reported. ‘Arabs have abandoned hamlets before the Jews took any action against them, only on the basis of the rumours that they were about to be attacked.’84 By mid-May, 250,000–300,000 Palestinians had already fled or been expelled from their homes.

INVASION, INDEPENDENCE, CATASTROPHE

The second stage of the war began on 15 May. It was then, according to plan, that the British finally quit. High Commissioner Cunningham departed by launch from Haifa harbour, the formality of the occasion masking what was an ignominious departure after thirty years, the country already engulfed in war. The previous evening at a ceremony in the Tel Aviv museum, the sovereign state of Israel was solemnly proclaimed – the crowning achievement of the Zionist movement half a century after its founding congress – as David Ben-Gurion read out the declaration of independence on behalf of the provisional government, prompting feelings of ‘elation’, recalled his colleague David Horowitz, ‘mingling with dread’.⁸⁵ The new Jewish state was recognized within hours by both the US and the USSR. Ben-Gurion was declared prime minister and minister of defence.

Units of four Arab armies began to invade, having waited scrupulously for the Mandate to end. The collapse of the Palestinians, the failure of the ALA and swelling refugee flows had left the Arab states little choice but the intervention by Jordan, Iraq, Syria and Egypt was chaotic in conception and execution, the gap between rhetoric and reality embarrassingly wide. Abdel-Rahman Azzam Pasha, the Egyptian head of the Arab League, had warned of a conflict that ‘would be a war of extermination and momentous massacre’, though his words were distorted or misquoted to occupy a prominent place in the Zionist narrative of the conflict.86 The Syrian president, Shukri al-Quwatli, invoked the memory of the long Arab struggle against the Crusaders. Egypt announced it was acting ‘to re-establish security and order and put an end to the massacres perpetrated by Zionist terrorist bands against Arabs and humanity’.⁸⁷ The Jews, with ‘no real knowledge of the Arabs’ true military capabilities … took Arab propaganda literally, preparing for the worst and reacting accordingly’.⁸⁸ In the aftermath of the Holocaust, the sense of existential threat was all too real.

Initial Arab plans focused on invading northern Palestine with a view to reaching Haifa. Lebanon had been expected to take part but opted out at the last minute. Far more significantly, King Abdullah announced that Jordanian forces would head for Ramallah, Nablus and Hebron on what later became known as the West Bank. This suggested that he was seeking to avoid war with the Jews by refraining from entering areas allotted to them by the UN such as Netanya and Hadera. It appeared to confirm suspicions about collusion between the Hashemites, British and Zionists and, in turn, caused a change of plan in Cairo. The Egyptians had originally planned to move forces up the coast towards Gaza, Isdud and perhaps to Tel Aviv. But now, concerned about Hashemite ambitions, they added a second invasion route that would take their forces, via Beersheba, east to the Hebron area – an obvious attempt to deny it to Abdullah. By the end of May, however, they had run out of steam on both axes. The Israelis encountered only Iraqi and Syrian forces in the Jordan Valley – also outside the area allotted the Jewish state by the UN – but no Egyptians at this stage. Iraqi units based in Qalqilya did nothing, telling puzzled Palestinians who asked why: ‘maku awamir’ – Iraqi Arabic dialect for ‘we have no orders’.⁸⁹ Token Saudi and Yemeni forces were also deployed.

Palestinian fighters were helped in Jerusalem by the arrival on 19 May of Jordanian Arab Legion forces, who were greeted by jubilant crowds. Armoured cars negotiated the alleys of the Old City and strengthened its defences. Following the destruction of two of the Jewish Quarter’s ancient synagogues, the Jews surrendered. The Haganah fighters were taken as prisoners of war to Transjordan and the civilians were released. Looting ensued. ‘The bombardment had destroyed the houses … what was left was still plundered, swarms of Arab children and women came into the quarter, most of them from the surrounding villages and tore out window shutters, half-burned doors, railings etc. and took them away either to sell them in the Arab market or out of the city to their villages.’90

In Jerusalem and elsewhere the Arab invasion posed difficult challenges for Jewish forces. But it did not save the Palestinians. On the contrary, it worsened their plight because more territory was lost and more Arabs became refugees. Understanding of the war has deepened as archives have opened and old narratives have been challenged, but it is hard to better the conclusion reached by the British author Christopher Sykes in the mid-1960s: ‘The unpreparedness, disunity and even mutual hostility of the Arab forces, in contrast with the single-mindedness of their enemies, ruled out the possibility of their victory.’⁹¹ Musa al-Alami, Ben-Gurion’s Palestinian interlocutor from the 1930s, put it even more succinctly: ‘It was obvious that our [Arab] aims in the battle were diverse, while the aim of the Jews was solely to win it.’⁹² In the words of the Palestinian scholar Bayan Nuwayhid al-Hout: ‘While the Jewish forces fought, dreaming of their state, the Arab leaders ordered their armies to fight a limited war, dreaming of and praying for a ceasefire.’⁹³

Israeli forces conquered more territory. In the month after 15 May the Alexandroni Brigade cleared more than sixty Arab villages on the coastal plain between Tel Aviv and Haifa.⁹⁴ In Tantura on the 22nd, fourteen Israelis and more than seventy villagers were killed.⁹⁵ Later accounts reported summary executions, with one researcher claiming that up to 225 Palestinians had been murdered.⁹⁶ On the 31st, the death of Ali Hassan Salameh, who had replaced Husseini as commander of the AHJ, was another blow to Palestinian morale.

On 10 June a four-week UN-supervised truce began.⁹⁷ The next stage of the fighting – dubbed the ‘Ten Days war’ – took place in mid-July. By then there were 65,000 men under arms in the newly named Israel Defence Forces (IDF), which had absorbed the Haganah and Palmah as well as the ‘dissidents’ of the Irgun and Lehi in the wake of the Altalena affair (this had involved IDF troops firing on a ship that was delivering weapons to the Irgun off Tel Aviv, resulting in the deaths of nineteen men). Ben-Gurion was hailed for this brief but brutal assertion of power in the very first weeks of the new state.

The Israelis made new conquests in Galilee and in the Tel Aviv– Jerusalem ‘corridor’ that the UN had allocated to the Arabs. In the north, Palestinians who had fled were told they could not return to their villages. Nazareth was taken on 16 July, though its inhabitants were not expelled, probably because of Ben-Gurion’s sensitivity about its Christian holy places. Saffuriyah, a large village nearby, fell the day before, its frightened population swollen by refugees who had arrived from Shafa Amr to the west. Its inhabitants were to long remember their terror when the Israelis dropped bombs from two Auster crop-dusting planes.98 In Aylut, Israeli forces blew up houses where weapons were found and killed sixteen young men in the olive groves.⁹⁹

The most significant event of this period was ‘Operation Dani’. This was intended to capture the Arab towns of Lydda and Ramle – allotted to the Arab state – in the centre of the country, as well as to clear the last Arab-held parts of the adjacent Tel Aviv–Jerusalem road. In Lydda on 12 July, Israeli forces who had believed that the battle was over encountered a small Arab Legion force entering the town, triggering what looked like an armed uprising. During the ensuing firefight about 250 Palestinians sheltering in a mosque compound were killed by men of the IDF’s Yiftah Brigade. It was ‘a sign of panic, of a lack of confidence in the troops’ ability to hold the town, of their inexperience in governing civilians’.¹⁰⁰ Later eyewitness accounts by Israeli participants ensured that the incident gained lasting notoriety.¹⁰¹ It was the biggest atrocity of the war.

Equally notorious was the subsequent expulsion of 50,000 Palestinians on Ben-Gurion’s orders to the Israeli commander, Yitzhak Rabin, who later described how the prime minister gestured with his hand and said brusquely: ‘Remove them.’¹⁰² Ramle’s residents were bussed out, but their neighbours from Lydda were forced to walk miles in punishing summer heat, in the middle of the Ramadan fast, to the front lines, where the Arab Legion struggled to provide shelter and supplies. Unknown numbers of refugees died from exhaustion or dehydration. George Habash, a medical student from Lydda’s Greek Orthodox community, never forgot what he witnessed: ‘Thirty thousand people walking, crying, screaming with terror … women carrying babies on their arms and children clinging to their [skirts], with the Israeli soldiers pointing their weapons at their backs … some people fell by the wayside, and some did not rise again. It was terrible.’103 Rabin wrote in his memoirs (which were initially censored, though the original version was subsequently leaked):

‘Driving out’ is a term with a harsh ring. Psychologically, this was one of the most difficult actions we undertook. The population of Lod did not leave willingly. There was no way of avoiding the use of force and warning shots in order to make the inhabitants march the 10 to 15 miles to the point where they met up with the legion.¹⁰⁴

It is estimated that a further 100,000 Palestinians became refugees in the course of those ten days alone.¹⁰⁵ ‘The feeling was bad but we deceived ourselves, thinking we would be back next week’, recalled Abu Naim, from Ijzim, south of Haifa.

We did not feel as bad as we should have because we thought we would be back in a week or two. What happened? People imagined that this was temporary, as if it was an outcome of rain or flood. We will move for a week and then the flood will be over. This was the feeling that led to this catastrophe.¹⁰⁶

Under UN pressure, a new, open-ended truce came into effect on 18 July. Israel continued to launch operations but claimed they were not violations of this truce. Several more ‘clusters’ of Arab population were expelled in late August. In September the Israelis faced international embarrassment when the Stern Gang – still operating independently from the IDF on the grounds that Jerusalem was not part of Israel – assassinated the UN mediator, the Swedish Count Folke Bernadotte, during a visit to the city, which under his plan, as in the original partition scheme, was to remain under international supervision.

THIRD ROUND

In a third round of fighting, from October 1948 to January 1949, Israel expelled Egyptian forces from Isdud and Majdal on the coast and in the northern Negev, and conquered more territory in Galilee. In the south Palestinians fled along with the retreating Egyptians. Many had already left Isdud but Zarifa Atwan and her family stayed until Israeli forces arrived:

It was so sad to see men, women, old people and children hurrying away, carrying everything they could in handcarts or cloth bundles … Suddenly we heard a lot of trucks coming into the village and the sound of shots being fired into the air. We could hear loudspeakers and we rushed to the village square to see what was going on. It was the Israelis and they were saying in Arabic, ‘Leave your homes and go to Gaza where you will be safe. If you don’t leave we will kill you.’ People started to panic. Nobody knew what to do … Then we heard the gunshots – the Israelis had killed two men from our village at point blank range. They were lying dead on the ground in a pool of blood and their women and children were hysterical. The villagers were herded into the Israeli trucks like cattle, the killings had made them silent and obedient, everyone was in a state of complete shock. We got in the trucks too. We didn’t have time to pack, all we had were the clothes we were wearing, and all around us was the sound of women wailing and the explosions of Israeli mortar fire.107

Israeli eyewitness accounts of expulsions of Palestinians are rare. Strikingly, one of the most vivid is in a work of fiction, Khirbet Khiza, by the writer S. Yizhar, who served as an IDF intelligence officer and presented an emblematic version of the capture of a village near Majdal and the expulsion of women, children and the elderly.¹⁰⁸ ‘Two thousand years of exile,’ the narrator reflects in brusque, colloquial Hebrew. ‘The whole story. Jews being killed. Europe. We were the masters now.’ It was a short story that left a long trail of impassioned controversy.¹⁰⁹ In later years, as taboos were eroded, other veterans of 1948 went public and described their own real experiences. Uri Avnery, who also fought on the southern front at this time, reflected later on how ‘we moved from village to village without thinking about the people who lived there hours or days before, their lives, their past … Bayt Daras, Bayt Affa … for us they were all the same, poor, dirty alien villages.’¹¹⁰

Beersheba fell to the Israelis on 21 October, its remaining residents expelled to Gaza, which now teemed with refugees huddled under trees and sheltering in schools and mosques.¹¹¹ Villages were abandoned before any fighting or were emptied by firing a few mortar or machine-gun rounds to trigger an exodus. Expulsions took place, though written orders were rare.112 Refugees who fled in October but returned home in November were rounded up and expelled, their villages burned and razed. At Dawamiya in the Hebron hills, Israeli forces massacred eighty to a hundred Palestinians, including women and children, at the end of October, prompting a flurry of inconclusive internal inquiries. Israeli documents leave little doubt about the fact of the atrocity, though Arab sources claimed far higher figures. It was the worst mass killing of the final stage of the war.

‘Operation Hiram’ saw new Israeli conquests in eastern Galilee – allotted to the Arab state by the UN – in fighting against now demoralized ALA forces. Several villages across the border in Lebanon were also occupied. In Huleh, Israeli troops killed dozens of local men. Atrocities in Eilabun, Safsaf and Jish helped precipitate the flight of about 30,000 more Palestinians, mostly to Lebanon. It may not have been formal policy to expel Arabs, but many were ‘encouraged’ to go, especially after a meeting between Ben-Gurion and the local IDF commander, who then instructed his units: ‘Do all in your power for a quick and immediate cleansing of the conquered areas of all the hostile elements in line with the orders that have been issued. The inhabitants of the conquered areas should be assisted to leave.’¹¹³

Outcomes varied according to local circumstances, including the nature of relations with neighbouring Jewish settlements: Jisr al-Zarka and Faradis had long supplied workers for the vineyards of Zichron Yaakov and Binyamina and were not depopulated. Druze villages were all spared, while Christians were generally treated better than Muslims. Abu Ghosh near Jerusalem, known for links to the Haganah, was left largely unscathed while other nearby villages were emptied. Fassuta in Galilee surrendered without resistance. Its residents handed over their weapons to the IDF and may have been saved from expulsion by the intervention of a Jew who worked for a cigarette company and wanted to continue buying the local tobacco crop. Neighbouring Deir al-Qasi, by contrast, was completely deserted.¹¹⁴ In the Nazareth district, the inhabitants of twenty out of twenty-four villages were able to stay put; around Safad and Tiberias the majority did not. Overall Palestinian casualties, complied by different sources, are estimated to have been 13,000; the Egyptians 1,400, and the Iraqis and Jordanians several hundred. Israeli fatalities were 4,000 soldiers and 2,400 civilians, around 1 per cent of the entire Jewish population.115

Israelis felt little regret for the departure of the Palestinians whether they were driven out or fled for their lives. Mordechai Bar-On, an IDF company commander who fought on the Egyptian front that autumn, described watching from a distance as thousands of refugees trudged across sand dunes near Gaza, out of range.

Nevertheless, I positioned a machine gun on one of the hills and emptied a whole belt of bullets in their direction. Nobody could have been hurt, not did I intend to hurt anyone. It was a symbolic act, a message to the Palestinians: now that you have left there is no way back, you will have to stay away.¹¹⁶

The fate of the Palestinians in 1948 was a hotly disputed issue from the start, entangled in propaganda, polemics and white-hot anger. But the facts about the central event of the Nakba are less contested than ever, with figures ranging from 700,000 to 750,000 for the number of Palestinians who were expelled or fled. According to one modern study, relying largely on oral testimony, expulsions took place in 225 localities.¹¹⁷ In many cases frightened residents left believing that their absence would be temporary. In the south the mukhtar of Kibbutz Negba advised the villagers of neighbouring Bayt Affa to fly white flags. The mukhtar of Bayt Affa refused and the village was then attacked and depopulated.¹¹⁸ No evidence has been found to support the long-standing Israeli claim that the invading Arab states called on the Palestinians to flee, in radio broadcasts or otherwise.¹¹⁹ ‘In general, throughout the war, the final and decisive precipitant to flight in most places was [Jewish] … attack or the inhabitants’ fear of imminent attack’, Morris concluded.¹²⁰ Even at the time, some Jews rejected the official claim that the Palestinians were entirely responsible for their own fate, and pointed to decisions made by the Israeli government. ‘Arabs remained in Nazareth and in Majdal Ashkelon because we wanted them to stay’, observed Eliezer Peri, editor of al-Hamishmar, the newspaper of the Marxist-Zionist Mapam movement. ‘And if they didn’t stay put in other places, supporters of the idea of transfer played a significant role – enough said.’121 In an important sense, though, the precise circumstances do not alter the big picture of what had become a zero-sum conflict by 1948. In Bar-On’s words:

Beyond the details on the manner in which Palestinians had to leave this or that village, one must simply acknowledge that the tragedy would not have occurred had the Zionists never arrived in Palestine. If the Jews at the end of the nineteenth century had not embarked on a project of reassembling the Jewish people in their ‘promised land’, all the refugees languishing in the camps would still be living in the villages from which they fled or were expelled. Second, one must realise that when people flee out of fear and terror their flight is hardly voluntary.¹²²

The key decision, however, was and remains the Israeli government’s flat refusal to allow the refugees to return to their homes and land. That was the defining characteristic of the 1948 war and its aftermath.

By July 1949, when Israel signed armistice agreements with Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon and Syria, it controlled 78 per cent of Mandatory Palestine – a considerable improvement on the 55 per cent it had been allocated by the UN twenty months previously. The West Bank, including East Jerusalem with its Jewish, Muslim and Christian holy places, was occupied by Jordan. The ceasefire line, marked in green ink on UN maps, became known as the ‘green line’. The Gaza Strip was administered by Egypt. Palestinian political divisions and social and military weakness, at this desperately low point, were exacerbated by the increasingly open rivalry between these two Arab states: King Farouk backed the short-lived All-Palestine government run by the mufti in Gaza, while King Abdullah convened the Jericho Congress to call for the unification of the West and East banks of the Jordan. The map of the Middle East had changed. Israel was a reality. Arab Palestine was no more.