The Sword And The Olive

by van Creveld, Martin

  With the stage thus set, the show could get under way. In its early phases it took the shape of riots (in Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, and Haifa during the first week of December). Whereas these outbreaks were easily met by the local Hagana organizations, their place was soon taken by less spectacular but more effective forms of attack such as car bombs, sniping, and small-scale assaults on outlying neighborhoods—a task made easier by the fact that all over the country Jews and Arabs often lived close to one another. As will happen when fighting is conducted at extremely close quarters, both sides soon found themselves wading in blood and gore; still, and thanks largely to small company-sized PALMACH and CHISH units being rushed about like firehoses, none seems to have led to the loss, on a temporary or permanent basis, of a Jewish neighborhood. From November to March, attacks were mounted against outlying settlements all over the country, which too held out and were not lost. They included, from north to south, Kfar Szold, Tirat Tsvi, and Gesher in the upper Jordan Valley (the latter two came under attack by Kauji and the Arab Salvation Army), Nve Yaakov and Har Tuv in the vicinity of Jerusalem, and Nistanim, Kfar Darom, Revivim, Nvatim, and others in the Negev (see Map 6.2).

  From December 1947 on, LECHI, ETSEL, and Hagana responded in kind—as Israeli accounts have it—by raiding Arab neighborhoods throughout the country. The almost purely Arab town of Jaffa was attacked by ETSEL, Arab villages in Galilee by Hagana; the latter also blew up a number of bridges in the northern part of the country with the objective of slowing down the arrival of additional volunteers from the neighboring countries. Nor were the Jewish organizations less inclined than their enemies to bomb Arab civilian targets such as markets, movie theaters, buses, and the like. The largest “operation” of this kind took place in Haifa. On January 15 a party of Hagana members disguised themselves as British soldiers. They took a truck into a street described as housing “the headquarters of the local bands” and blew it up with great loss of life.14

  As would happen in other similar conflicts—Bosnia is a good recent example—these skirmishes resulted in heavy casualties. In the first four months 1,200 Jews lost their lives; the number of Arab dead is unknown but must have been at least as high and probably much higher. However, the skirmishes did little if anything to upset the balance or promote strategic objectives. Arab attacks on Jewish communications arteries, uncoordinated though they may have been, did threaten to gradually cut the Yishuv into several disparate parts. Then as now the real Jewish heartland was in the southern half of the Plain of Sharon between Tel Aviv and Chadera. Throughout winter 1948 the roads leading from there north to Haifa, northeast to Lake Tiberias and Galilee, and south toward the Negev Desert came under sporadic attack. In any event the northern part of the country was never completely cut off, there being always the alternative road or bypass. Not so in the south, where repeated attacks by bands centering on Majdal (modern Ashkelon) caused all traffic to be suspended from March 26 on and where communications with the settlements in the Negev could be maintained only by light aircraft.

  With or without strategic intent, from late January on, the Battle of the Roads, as it was later called, tended to coalesce along the highway from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. Particularly vulnerable were the Ramla-Lyddia area, which, although almost purely Arab, could be bypassed to the south; and the fifteen-mile-long mountain stretch from Shaar Ha-gai to the city for which, as the name indicates, there was no alternative and which accordingly saw some of the heaviest fighting. Except for a handful of settlements—desperately poor kibbutsim and moshavim—Jerusalem itself was isolated in the hills. It was entirely dependent on outside supplies, having no agricultural hinterland to speak of and barely enough water to sustain the population. Moreover many of its almost 100,000 Jews were orthodox and thus all but useless for any purpose but praying. Hence the Hagana organization in the city was exceptionally weak—just a few dozen men, as the PALMACH operations officer responsible for the area, twenty-five-year-old Yitschak Rabin, bitterly wrote in his memoirs.15

  From January 1948 on, conditions along the road deteriorated to the point where Jerusalem could be accessed only by convoys of trucks—some of them with homemade armor—under armed escort provided by PALMACH. Climbing the hills of Judaea, the convoys were likely to encounter roadblocks made of stones, manned by hundreds of Arabs with rifles and grenades (and, later, also booby-trapped); the same applied to the return journey. Ben Gurion, who traveled the road on December 23, 1947, noted in his diary that they got through only at the cost of four wounded and a wrecked bus.16 All this took place right under the noses of British garrisons that were using the road to evacuate Jerusalem. Depending on the whims of local commanders and the way they interpreted their instructions, British behavior was inconsistent. On some occasions they confiscated Hagana’s arms, leaving the escorts defenseless. On others they intervened and extricated the occupants of beleaguered convoys, albeit usually on condition that they surrender their armored cars.

  On February 23, 1948, the British withdrew from the area, leaving the two sides to fight it out. This is hardly the place to follow every twist and turn in the Battle for Bab al Wad (the Arab name for the road to Jerusalem), which lasted from late February to the end of April and has since given rise to much controversy in Israel.17 Conducted almost solely with the aid of small arms—the heaviest weapons at Hagana’s disposal at this time were a number of self-manufactured 3-inch (81 mm) mortars—it claimed a comparatively large number of casualties; even worse, the armored cars were being lost at an unacceptable rate. An early attempt to temporarily occupy some villages near the road in order to secure it was made at the end of March but ended in failure owing to bad planning and insufficient coordination. By that time, one of the darkest periods in the entire war, it looked as if the battle was being lost as two large convoys tried to get through but failed.

  Yet the continuing British evacuation finally enabled Hagana to start operating in the open. In the first days of April, three battalions totaling 1,500 men—an enormous force for an organization that had never used more than a company in action—were concentrated in kibbutsim to the south and west of Shaar Ha-gai. Since the Yishuv remained desperately short of arms, 200 rifles and four light machine guns were flown in from Czechoslovakia aboard an American-piloted Constellation aircraft that landed at an improvised airstrip. It was the kind of operation that, however primitive the conditions under which it took place, perfectly illustrates the Yishuv’s advantage over Palestine’s Arab population at the time: Here were two communities, one backward and one modern, locked in mortal combat. Economically speaking, the Yishuv, though small and poor by Western standards, was far ahead of the Arabs. For example, out of a total of 59.5 million pounds in bank deposits, 50.2 million belonged to Jews and only 9.3 million to Arabs.18 A Jewish municipality of comparable size had ten times the budget of its Arab counterpart.19 Man for man the Jews were better armed, better led, and, something that proved decisive, possessed countrywide organization, both political and military. Scant wonder they came out on top, albeit the price they paid for learning often proved exceptionally heavy both on individual occasions and for the war as a whole.

  “Operation Nachshon” (named after a biblical hero) opened on April 6. Its commander was Shimon Avidan, who like the rest had been trained by Sadeh. Its objective was to permanently occupy the villages on both sides of the road—the first time such an objective had been set to any Hagana unit and thus representing a new phase in the war. Proceeding from west to east the troops easily took the hills flanking the first few miles of road, occupying villages (most were found empty) and blowing up the houses in them so as to open fields of fire for the subsequent defense. Farther along the road, however, heavy fighting developed. Attacks and counterattacks centered on Mount Kastel, a commanding position that blocked the road and passed from hand to hand several times. In one of those attacks the leader of the local band, Abd-al Kadr al Hussayni, was killed. His death signaled the end of the beginning. Whatever organizat
ion the Arabs possessed disintegrated (having occupied Kastel for the last time they simply went home in order to celebrate a wedding, as legend has it). From the middle of the month on, this final stretch of the road to Jerusalem was definitely open—no more convoys failed to get through—although much more fighting was needed to keep it open.

  Around Jerusalem proper much had changed. On April 9 the local branch of ETSEL stormed Dir Yassin, an Arab village near the city’s western outskirts that had long served as a departure base for the local bands (from Dir Yassin to Mount Kastel it was less than three miles as the crow flies). As Begin later recounted the episode, a pickup truck carrying a loudspeaker went ahead of the troops to warn the population;20 as at the King David Hotel, however, ETSEL’s warnings had a way of going unheeded. When the village was entered its houses were found to be occupied, the inhabitants ready for defense. In the subsequent heavy fighting, ETSEL men, penetrating the narrow alleyways, systematically demolished houses with explosives. When the day ended some 100-200 people, including many women and children, were dead. Four days later the Arabs committed their share of atrocities by attacking a Jewish convoy to Mount Scopus, Jerusalem. As the British troops in the area looked on, seventy-seven people were killed and another twenty wounded. Most of them were Hebrew University faculty and medical personnel on their way to work in the Hadassa hospital.

  Whereas news of the Mount Scopus attack merely reinforced Jewish determination—after all, Jews had nowhere to go—the effect of the Dir Yassin attack among the Palestinians was just the reverse. Previously only a trickle of well-to-do Arabs had been leaving the country for neighboring ones, many hoping to return when hostilities ended; now the news of the atrocity triggered a mass flight. These events seem to have taken the Jewish leadership by surprise. Although there had long been some vague talk about the possibility of changing the “demographic balance,” up to this point there had been scarcely any offensive plans—holding out and retaliating was all that Hagana had prepared for—and consequently no detailed schemes for dealing with any noncombatant Arab population that might come under Jewish rule. Needless to say, once the mass flight got under way it was almost always welcomed. Often, as in Lyddia and Ramla later in the war, it was assisted by any means, including the most brutal. Over the next six months or so the result was the uprooting of perhaps 600,000-760,000 people from their homes. This was 75-85 percent of the non-Jewish population in the area that later became part of Israel.21

  Not to be outdone, Hagana for its part followed up on “Operation Nachshon” by reinforcing its hold over the road to Jerusalem and the city itself by clearing Arab villages in the area. The task was entrusted to a newly established PALMACH brigade, Harel; its commander was the newly promoted Yitschak Rabin. Like the rest, Rabin had gained considerable experience in small-unit and underground operations; with Dayan he helped spearhead the British invasion of Syria in 1941. Like the rest, too, he had never gone through anything more advanced than a platoon commander’s course conducted under somewhat irregular conditions. To the last night of his life he would recall “the good-looking boys” with whom he had fought in this area, and so many of whom had died.

  During April 19-22 Rabin’s men passed four major convoys into Jerusalem, though the last one was attacked and badly mauled. These reinforcements were used in “Operation Yevusi” (after the biblical, pre-Israelite inhabitants of the area) in order to extend the Jewish-controlled part of Jerusalem north and south. Fighting, conducted almost exclusively with small arms and at very close quarters, was heavy; in the south the dominating monastery of Saint Simon, held by a company that counted among its ranks two future chiefs of staff (David Elazar and Refael Eytan), came within a hair of being overrun.22 The follow-up on “Operation Yevusi” was “Operation Kilshon (Pitchfork),” which opened during the first half of May and extended the Jewish hold on the western part of the city.

  Even so, not all objectives were achieved. In particular, the overlooking hill of Nebi Samuel and the Arab neighborhood that links Jerusalem with Hebrew University on top of Mount Scopus could not be secured, the former because the attack on it failed and the latter because the British, in one of their last acts, made Hagana return it to the Arabs (in whose hands it remained until 1967). More serious, Hagana did not succeed in breaking the siege of the Jewish Quarter of the Old City. Surrounded by walls that proved impregnable to available weapons, fewer than 2,000 Jews were fighting for their lives against an Arab population ten times as large. The latter were assisted by a battalion of the Arab Legion, some 600 strong with artillery, which, contrary to the understanding achieved in the previous year, had joined the fighting.23

  Although ultimately successful in securing West Jerusalem, more or less, Hagana was unable to hold on to Gush Etsion, which fell to the Arab Legion on May 12 after several attempts to reinforce it failed.24 The next month would witness continued fighting in the city proper and in the corridor leading to it. The latter could be extended to a maximum width of perhaps twenty miles, but in the former no further progress was made by either side. Although casualties were heavy, geographically speaking the scale of the fighting may be gauged from the fact that one “major” Transjordanian armored advance was halted a few hundred yards from its starting point at Nablus Gate. The surrender to the Legion of the Jewish Quarter (May 28) marked the hardening of the battlelines. After that there would be no more great changes until the conclusion of the armistice agreements later in the year, the Legion being content to hold their positions.

  Not so in the rest of the country, where there was usually less dependence on individual roads, much greater room for maneuver, and, in most places, no well-organized and well-commanded Arab Legion to limit what Hagana and its PALMACH spearhead could do. Calling in reservists, PALMACH was expanded to eight battalions, although not all of them were as well trained and cohesive as the original force. During the second week of April some of these forces underwent their baptism of fire by taking on Kauji’s forces in the Valley of Esdraelon. Having been repulsed at Tirat Tsvi and Gesher, Kauji crossed the Jordan farther south and, finding himself unopposed, moved into his old stomping ground of Nablus, Tul Karem, and Jenin. From there he moved west toward Mishmar Ha-emek, a strategically positioned kibbuts in the Valley of Esdraelon. Next he may have planned to continue to Haifa in a pincer movement on both sides of Mount Carmel (at any rate that is what strategy would dictate).

  Sadeh commanded the opposition, an assortment of PALMACH companies and local Hagana forces totaling between two and three battalions. He used the kind of flexible tactics that would become PALMACH’s specialty: In the face of Kauji’s superiority in artillery his men abandoned positions by day but reoccupied them by night, thus holding their own at comparatively low cost. A battle of attrition developed that lasted for a few days—strangely enough under the eyes of the British, who at first tried to mediate but later threw in the towel. It ended when Sadeh ambushed a major advance by Kauji’s forces (April 11-12), outflanked him from the south, and, by threatening to cut him off from his base near Jenin, forced him to retreat northeast toward Nazaret. At the time these events took place neither the Syrians nor the Lebanese regular forces had as yet entered the war. With the British withdrawal continuing apace, practically the only obstacle standing between the Jews and full control over the northern part of the country was the local Palestinians.25

  Even more so than in the area around Jerusalem, Palestinians who were on their own were in no position to withstand the onslaught of the much stronger Hagana forces. The first town to come under attack was Tiberias, which fell on April 17-18, its 2,000 Arab inhabitants (facing perhaps three times as many Jews) being evacuated by the British. Next was Haifa, where the two sides had been sniping and car-bombing each other for months; on April 21 it became clear that the British were going to evacuate their positions early, opening the door to a Hagana offensive. Five CHISH companies made their way down the mountain from the Jewish neighborhoods into the Arab ones below, ca
using all but 3,000 of the Arab inhabitants to flee.

  Next, one PALMACH and one CHISH battalion were concentrated in the upper part of the Jordan Valley (north of the Sea of Galilee); fighting all the way, they made their way west into the mountains toward Safed. Here the local militias were assisted by a part of the Arab Salvation Army, which had infiltrated from Lebanon. Its commander, Adib Shishakli, was a Syrian regular army officer who later rose to become his country’s dictator. Like those of Kauji farther to the south, his troops wore uniforms (they even carried gas masks)26 and were provided with vehicles and artillery.

  The fighting for Safed lasted about a week; in terms of casualties suffered by both sides it was one of the most bitter chapters in the war. Concentrating all available forces for a single blow—even at the risk of denuding the Jewish settlements in the area27—Yigal Allon used his PALMACH battalion to outflank the town from the north, thus interposing his forces between Shishakli and the Lebanese border. With Hagana’s homemade mortars in support, he stormed the city on the night of May 10-11, an operation that culminated in hand-to-hand fighting in the vaults of the ancient citadel. Almost simultaneously, other forces advanced north from the area east of the Gilboa Mountains to Bet Shean, which they took. The last northern city to fall was Acre; on May 17-18 it came under attack by a force that drove north some eight miles from Haifa. Here, however, the Arab population was not forced to flee, and once the first few chaotic days were over it was able to continue life in comparative security.