Meanwhile anti-British operations, including in particular some daring prison escapes, continued. During a single week in July 1947, LECHI claimed to have carried out no fewer than twenty-two operations in places as far apart as Jerusalem and Haifa.47 At about the same time, a crescendo of hatred was reached when the British started hanging captured ETSEL members. In retaliation Begin and his men kidnapped two British sergeants (one of whom later turned out to be part Jewish). They were hanged in defiance of world opinion as well as the Yishuv’s own leadership. For example, Golda Meir claimed to be “shocked” by the ETSEL action; as was her wont on such occasions, however, she did nothing. In a macabre touch the corpses were suspended from trees in a nearby grove. The ground between them was booby-trapped, and a British policeman was severely injured when he tried to cut them down.48
This is hardly the place to inquire which of the two principal paramilitary forces—Hagana with its organization and bloodless operations or ETSEL with its acts of terrorism—did more to drive out the British. Since ETSEL developed into Likud and Hagana was run by the Labor Party, the echoes of this question continue to influence Israeli politics to the present day. Nor can we examine the relative roles played by military, political, and diplomatic events in Palestine, London, and the world arena, where decolonization and the Cold War had just begun.49 Suffice it to say, facing determined opposition the authorities’ will to resist was broken. The turning point probably came in December 1946, when Britain’s Labor government, having failed to reach agreement with the Palestinian Arabs, decided to submit the question of Palestine to the United Nations (UN). On November 29, 1947, after an investigating committee (UNSCOP) had come and gone, the UN voted to partition the country. Next day the British announced they would evacuate by August 1948, a date later moved up to June 30. This was only four years after ETSEL and LECHI resumed the struggle and three since the assassination of Lord Moyne. Counting all forces combined, at bottom it was the handiwork of a few thousand activists armed with little more than high courage and their people’s near-unanimous support. Taking advantage of the international situation as well as Britain’s own domestic crisis during the postwar years, they took on and defeated one of the most powerful empires the world has known.
When it was all over the usual analyses emerged, and excuses for failure were sought and found:50 The Palestine insurgency had caught the British armed forces amid the post-World War II demobilization, with the result that there was very great personnel turbulence, and stability could not be achieved. This factor affected operational readiness and training, which in turn caused troops and commanders to resort to repetitive, often routinized and unimaginative tactics. Instead of acting, the British forces reacted—sometimes so slowly that they took an entire night to decide whether or not to mount a search after a police station had been attacked.51 In doing all this they suffered from inadequate intelligence, which in turn resulted from insufficient familiarity with the country, its language, and its culture. Although the police and especially the CID were better at gathering intelligence than the army, cooperation between them was defective, owing to the latter’s reluctance to study and adopt police methods. There was a lack of political guidance from above, which led to the division and duplication of effort; it also prevented the authorities on the spot from developing an effective counterpropaganda line. The need to operate in full view of British and world media constituted another handicap, since it compelled the forces to forego the use of the harshest (and presumably most effective) methods. And so on, and so on, ad infinitum if not ad nauseam.
In retrospect, each of these very different explanations probably contained an element of truth. Yet each overlooks the critical factor, namely, that war is a moral and physical struggle by means of the latter.52 Physically speaking, British losses in the struggle were so small as to be almost negligible. From summer 1945 to summer 1947 British losses amounted to a little less than 400, including 125 dead and 259 wounded53—far fewer than those claimed by a single day of battle during World War II or a single night of bombardment during the Blitz. In any event, it was precisely the “victories” won by the security forces that ended up working against them. Perhaps most damaging to the British was the repeated spectacle of immigrants, many of them former concentration camp inmates with numbers still tattooed on their arms, being manhandled, wounded, and sometimes killed by troops who sought to transfer them to prison camps or else to other ships prior to internment. As early as 1942 the train of events that led to the sinking of Struma had been called “stupid, callous, and inhuman” in the House of Lords.54 Now the unedifying events in Palestine were being displayed all over the world by newspapers and newsreels. Some stories were deliberately spread by the Jewish Agency as part of a well-coordinated propaganda campaign, whereas others were produced by journalists sent to cover the events.55
The outcome was a public-relations disaster that could not but affect the British people and the troops themselves. To watch five fast destroyers escort a rickety, 420-ton steamer, Chayim Arlozoroν, until it hits a rock and sinks is bad enough (the occupants were rescued); to have to board the ships and fight it out with their miserable human cargoes is worse. As one soldier remembered, “When you went alongside they were out of control ... you used to get badly attacked.... Some of the blokes got knocked on the ground and women put knitting needles into their testicles, so we had pads. They used to bombard us with tins of fruit ... and everybody used to grab them.”56 As humiliation followed humiliation even Winston Churchill, an acknowledged expert on such matters, accused the British troops of not knowing how “to behave like men.”57 At one point ETSEL kidnapped and flogged a number of British officers in retaliation for the flogging of its own men. Thereupon a French newspaper published a cartoon showing a member of His Majesty’s forces holding his tin hat behind him. The caption explained that since “the threatened area” had moved from the head to the buttocks the salute too should be similarly transferred.
The British government was learning that under certain circumstances and given sufficient time Thucydides’s words in the Melian dialogue may become inverted. It is not always “they who are strong do what they can, they who are weak suffer what they must.”58 Instead, and no less frequently, it is the weak who do what they can, the strong who suffer what they must. Though much weakened by World War II, the British at the time still constituted a world empire. As such they found themselves “fighting” the weak, the helpless, the pregnant, and the semistarved. They were damned if they “lost” and twice damned if, as usually happened, they “won” and “succeeded” in restoring order, arresting suspects, and even stopping immigrants from reaching their destination. Although their lives were seldom in very great danger—the more so because they tended to spend a growing part of their time on base—the British troops found the experience “repugnant” and “frustrating”; the struggle ended by taking away their self-respect, whereupon they turned tail and left. It was a lesson that others, not least the Israelis themselves, were destined to learn later and to their cost.
CHAPTER 5
AT WAR FOR INDEPENDENCE
DESPITE THE considerable roles that ETSEL and LECHI played in ejecting the British, both were strictly underground organizations with extremely limited capacities for overt military action. This was much less true of Hagana, which, thanks in part to the semilegal status it had enjoyed during various periods of its existence, was already preparing to wage a conventional war against the Arabs even as it was struggling against the British. In PALMACH it possessed a strike force of exceptional quality; in CHISH and CHIM it possessed at least a pool of trained or semitrained personnel, most of whom, however, were not yet formed into units let alone assembled and exercised. Accordingly the period between 1945 and 1948 was one of large-scale military construction and organization.
No sooner had V-E Day arrived (May 8, 1945) than Ben Gurion went to the United States.1 Within weeks he succeeded in getting together a committee of twen
ty Jewish millionaires who were willing to help—“the best Zionist meeting ever” he noted in his diary.2 Funds, now already measured in millions of dollars per year, were made available and put at the disposal of Hagana agents such as Teddy Kollek, who later was to become mayor of Jerusalem and was destined to make his early mark in this field. Since many countries had laws against the export of arms to the Middle East, ruses had to be used, including one occasion when light bombers (Beauforts) were purchased under the pretext of making a movie. Some of the arms were shipped to Erets Yisrael, as already related. However, most were stored abroad in anticipation of the day when the British mandate would end.
As those components of Hagana not engaged in the day-to-day task of defending against the Arabs or fighting the British expanded, it became necessary to set up an office that would coordinate its now very far-flung and multitudinous activities. With war clearly approaching, Ben Gurion wanted to have his hand firmly on the helm. Accordingly, late in 1946 he created a defense portfolio in the Jewish Agency with himself at its head. The chain of command now went from Ben Gurion as head of the Agency to Ben Gurion as minister of defense (although, as he used to say later on, with him it was often the prime minister who went to see the minister of defense instead of vice versa). Next in line was Yisrael Galili, a Hagana veteran and a representative of the kibbuts movement who had taken over from Sneh as rosh mifkada artsit and who in turn commanded Yaakov Dori as chief of the General Staff.
At War for Independence: Hagana members defending Kibbuts En Charod, February 1948.
In April 1948, Ben Gurion, using Hagana’s failure to break the siege of Jerusalem as his excuse, pointed out that two Jewish Agency representatives in charge of defense were one too many.3 Galili, a political rival, was fired. So was Sadeh, the founder of PALMACH and thus the natural candidate for the job (however, the previous year he had displeased Ben Gurion—who sometimes acted as a tin-pot dictator—by penning an article where he denied the need for unconditional obedience under all circumstances).4 While Sadeh was sidetracked to command a brigade, Galili became an eitses geber (Yiddish for adviser), a position that as leader of a left-wing party and member of several cabinets (and, later, as Golda Meir’s reputed lover) he retained on and off for the next twenty-five years. From then on the minister of defense for the Jewish Agency dealed directly with the chief of staff or, since the latter was ailing, with his deputy, Yigal Yadin. Later, when the Agency’s executive turned itself into the government of Israel, that arrangement remained in force.
At a lower level, these reforms were followed by the construction of a proper general staff. Various blueprints were submitted, mainly by former members of the British armed forces. Another key figure was Yisrael Beer, a Russian-born, horse-toothed veteran of the Spanish civil war with a reputation as a theoretician (he claimed to have earned a Ph.D. in military history) who acted as Ben Gurion’s personal military adviser. The fundamental choice was between the Franco-American model and the German model, which, earlier in the century, had been transmitted to Britain by way of military writer Spencer Wilkinson.5 The former system united operations, intelligence, training, and doctrine in a single division, known as the General Staff Division; the latter had one division each for operations, intelligence, personnel, and supply. By adopting the Anglo-German model the IDF thus put much greater emphasis on operations as opposed to the other two divisions, namely, personnel (comprising manpower administration, discipline, and justice) and supply (which took care of stocks and armaments as well as financial matters). Over the years these arrangements have often been modified in detail, but the basic idea—where the head of the General Staff Division unites operations, intelligence, training, and doctrine and acts as a primus inter pares under the chief of staff (COS)—still persists.
Actual preparation for conscripting manpower and building an army got under way in late 1947. A decree for military registration was issued on November 28; by the middle of 1948 a total of almost 50,000 men and women aged seventeen to thirty-five had been called up. Besides 27,000 previous Hagana members, they included perhaps 7,000-10,000 recent immigrants who, as they were being concentrated in transit camps in various European countries, had been mustered even before they reached their new homeland. As the figures indicate, so long as the British presence continued, the response made by members of the Yishuv was modest, and indeed there was much talk about “deserters” and “shirkers.” Once they left, it became possible to put state authority behind the mobilization process, however, and the numbers it produced became much larger. By the end of 1948 almost 200,000 persons, of whom 164,000 were male, had been registered for service.6
The task of classifying the conscripts, organizing them in units, issuing them equipment, training them, and preparing them for battle was enormous—the more so since it had to be carried out by beginners. (In the entire Yishuv there was probably not one person who had commanded as much as a battalion in action, and the British did in fact comment on the “amateurishness” of the organization.)7 Moreover, so far from obtaining any breathing space, it was already engaging in hostilities with the Palestinians.
During the last months of 1947 the other side too had been making preparations for the conflict. The Arab population living west of the River Jordan must have numbered 900,000-1.2 million; the higher estimate is probably the most accurate. Of those, rather fewer than 10,000 had some kind of formal training, having served with various British units, mainly police. Organization was still limited to bands, that is, loose associations based either on the village or, on a slightly larger scale, the clan; in the towns there also were a number of jihadias (associations of holy warriors). The largest jihadia was centered in Jaffa and may have counted perhaps 2,000-3,000 men.8 Here and elsewhere, the warriors brought along their own arms, complete with fifty to seventy rounds of ammunition. However, they did not possess heavy weapons or a logistic infrastructure, let alone the kind of bureaucratic organization that is the backbone of any modern army. The “arms industry” was limited to the manufacture of primitive bombs.
These “modest”9 forces were joined by several thousand more who had infiltrated from the neighboring countries—according to the British authorities, by March 1948 their number reached 5,000.10 Known somewhat grandiloquently as the Arab Salvation Army, they were divided into several bands that are best described as paramilitary. The largest band was poised to enter Palestine from southern Syria. The troops were much better armed than their Palestinian brethren, being provided with militarytype vehicles as well as some artillery originating in the Arab armies and paid for by the Arab League. Their commander was Fauzi al Kauji, who gained fame during the 1936-1939 uprising. In May 1941 he had taken part in the abortive Rashid Ali uprising against the British; driven into exile, he had somehow contrived to reach Germany where he attended the Berlin war academy. He was also said to have done rather well out of the previous episode and may have hoped to repeat the experience.
Another force to reckon with was the Arab Legion, that strange amalgam of army cum police force that the British had established in Transjordan. During 1936-1939 some of its units had been sent to help put down the third Arab uprising, a task that they carried out with considerable brutality and also a certain gusto.11 Paid for by the British Treasury and commanded by fifty or so British officers, during most of its history it took orders more from the British ambassador to Amman than from the Hassemite king, Abdullah. In 1946, Transjordan was granted its independence, however, and in any case bringing as much of Palestine as possible under the control of King Abdullah, as an imperial ally, was an objective over which he and his British paymasters could see eye to eye. Of its 20,000 men, slightly under half were available for duty in the war. Unlike the Palestinian levies, moreover, this was a regular force provided with a proper organization as well as artillery and armored cars. It also turned out to be better trained and motivated than all the rest.12
During the final months of the mandate some of the Arab Legi
on forces were already deployed in the Arab part of Palestine where they formed part of the British garrison. This fact may have encouraged King Abdullah of Transjordan to open negotiations with the Yishuv. Since Moshe Shertok (Sharet), the head of the Agency’s political department, was working with the United Nations at Lake Success, New York, the person on the spot was the formidable Ms. Meir. Trying to stop the authorities in Haifa from deporting illegal immigrants, she had once slapped a British officer in full view of the world press; in November 1947, dressed as a man, she went to Naharayim on the River Jordan. No written agreement was produced, but the Jewish side came away with the distinct impression that the king, who of all the Arab leaders was the most peacefully inclined (and also most in need of Jewish capital and know-how to develop his desert kingdom), agreed not to join an eventual Arab-Israeli war. In return, the agency promised to favor the king’s occupation of the Arab part of Palestine, that is, the area corresponding roughly to the West Bank.13
Assuming continued peaceful relations between the Yishuv and Abdullah, the agreement made excellent sense. Apart from the four villages composing Gush Etsion, about twelve miles southwest of Jerusalem, there were no Jewish settlements in this mountainous, densely inhabited, and, on the whole, not very fertile area. (Hence Hagana, whose strike forces were only just being formed, would probably have been unable to defend it anyhow.) But should war develop between the two sides then enemy troops would be positioned on the hills within a few miles of the Mediterranean, putting Israel in an impossible strategic situation. One way or another, probably no other single event did as much to shape the state’s borders and, with them, the fate of the holy land as a whole. Nevertheless all the negotiations were kept secret, to the point that they were still not mentioned when the IDF’s official history of the 1948 war was published in 1959 (not that this is unusual in a country where censorship serves mainly to prevent its own citizens from learning what everybody else already knows).
The Sword And The Olive Page 10