Arriving at Chalutsa on December 27 after a grueling march, Allon’s leading force—a battalion from the Negev brigade riding jeeps—crossed the border into the Sinai. There it easily overran the local Egyptian positions at Abu Ageila and captured a military airfield. Next, in classic “expanding torrent” fashion, the offensive split. One brigade drove north-northwest toward Rafah, at the southern extremity of the Gaza Strip. There, however, it met with stout resistance; the Egyptians not only held their own but counterattacked with tanks and machine gun carriers, thus showing they still had plenty of fight.
Whether or not it had been planned in this way, the reverse caused the center of gravity to shift to Allon’s other brigade. Advancing northwest from Abu Ageila, by December 29 it had reached Al Arish on the Mediterranean, thus cutting the road from Rafah back to Port Said. It was a classic “indirect approach” operation carried out against little opposition and with barely any loss. However, when the British government presented an ultimatum and threatened to intervene, Ben Gurion decided to retract this particular horn.43 The order to retreat was given, and by December 31 the “armored” brigade that had carried out the move was on its way back to Chalutsa.
During the next week, last-ditch attempts to capture the Gaza Strip by means of renewed attacks from the south and east failed as the Egyptians, though surrounded from all directions, held on by the skin of their teeth. An armistice with Egypt was concluded on January 7, 1949, but not before five British Spitfires, sent out as a warning to the IDF to desist from its attempts to reduce the Egyptians, had been shot down by the Israel Air Force (IAF). All that remained was to send a brigade due south from Beer Sheva to occupy Elat on the shores of the Red Sea, a move justified by the fact a formal armistice with Jordan had not yet been signed. Encountering weak opposition, the brigade reached its objective on March 10. Lacking a proper Israeli flag, the men painted a sheet with ink and hung it from a mast planted in a barrel. This patriotic act is a fitting metaphor for a war that, from beginning to end, was conducted with much improvisation against a background of inadequate means.
CHAPTER 7
THE ACHIEVEMENT AND THE PRICE
WHEN THE WAR of Independence ended in 1949, less than a year had passed since Hagana had fully emerged from the underground—even as late as May 1948 its available striking forces only numbered around 16,000 men.1 Its successor, the IDF, was no more than seven months old and had to organize itself amid the most intense hostilities. Yet it had already proved itself more than a match not only for the Palestinian Arabs, who after the middle of May 1948 were little more than hapless victims of much stronger forces, but also for the combined regular armies of the neighboring countries.
Their starting positions located in the north, far from Israel’s demographic centers, the Lebanese and the Syrian forces never presented much of a threat. Both were beaten back, if not exactly with ease then at any rate before they could advance very far from the borders—meaning, in the Syrian case, perhaps a mile or two west of the River Jordan. The Egyptian expeditionary force, thanks mainly to the absence of opposition in the comparatively large, virtually empty area of the Negev Desert, had penetrated much deeper. However, cooperation between its eastern and western arms was always deficient if not nonexistent; when the western arm came under attack from October on, the eastern arm, sitting in the hills, did not stir. In the end the latter force was also defeated and had its lines of communications cut. But for Ben Gurion’s decision to heed the UN Security Council resolution and let it go, it would have been annihilated.
As the last armistice agreements were signed in July 1949 only the Iraqi expeditionary forces and the Arab Legion remained intact. Even more so than the Egyptians, who at least had to overrun a couple of settlements that stood in their way, both owed their presence in Erets Yisrael to the fact that they had entered unopposed—the former as part of the British imperial forces and the latter in an area where there were no Jewish settlements after its disgraceful failure at Gesher. The armistice found them in occupation of the West Bank, including not least the salient of Latrun. Isolated and far from home, the Iraqis withdrew by their own accord without further fight (though Iraq refused to sign an armistice and is thus technically still at war with Israel). As for Abdullah’s Arab Legion, it had fought better than any other Arab force. Yet on scarcely any occasion had the Arab Legion attempted to conquer territory allocated to the Jews by the partition plan, preferring to stay on the defensive. By the end of the war it remained where it did solely on sufferance and could have been kicked out at any time had Ben Gurion been willing to issue the order.
The Achievement and the Price: knocked-out Syrian tank, 1948.
Then as later, much of this achievement was the result as much of Arab weakness as of Israeli strength. Poor, underequipped, and unorganized, the Palestinian irregulars did what they could, threatening to close the roads and inflicting many casualties between December 1947 and April 1948. Theirs, however, was little more than a loose association of locally based bands; once the British withdrawal was more or less complete and Hagana had the opportunity to flex its muscles, the jihadias did not stand a chance against the Jewish steamroller with its companies, battalions, and brigades. As the failure at Mount Kastel in particular indicated, the Palestinian Arabs, following a centuries-old tradition, were capable merely of ambushing and raiding. By contrast the Jews, who from April 1948 on were waging a modern war, overran and conquered (after which, seeking to create fields of fire, they invariably demolished).
Though the Arab armies were better organized and equipped, they also suffered from weaknesses. Hardy, abstemious, and seldom inclined to independent action, Arab troops generally fought quite well as long as they were made to occupy fixed positions and told to defend them to the death—situations in which their superiority in artillery (often the case) could be exploited.2 Their weaknesses came to the fore when they tried, or were forced, to maneuver; indeed in the majority of cases they could hardly be made to advance without cover from artillery and tanks. As the fall of Beer Sheva in particular shows, the more rapid the pace of operations the more inclined they were to lose their balance and fall apart. During the next twenty-five years these weaknesses resurfaced time and again.
The Arab armies also labored under other problems. Perhaps the most important was a crippling shortage of ammunition, owing to the international arms embargo—which they were unable to overcome for lack of preparation—as well as, in the case of the Egyptians and the Iraqis, long lines of communications.3 For example, after February 25, 1948, the Arab Legion received no new ammunition for its 20mm guns. Some of the ammunition used by the Iraqi artillery was more than thirty years old; the Syrians had no ammunition for their heavy 155mm guns.4 Whereas Jewish stockpiles were growing all the time, enemy stocks were so depleted they stole ammunition shipments earmarked for each other. In addition they were ill-coordinated, technically incompetent, slow, ponderous, badly led, and unable to cope with night operations that, willy-nilly, constituted the IDF’s expertise.
As might be expected in a situation so unevenly matched, shortcomings in the air and at sea were more apparent than on land. On paper the Arab air forces, having been formed before the war, outnumbered the nascent Israeli one considerably. In practice, however, poor maintenance meant the great majority of Arab aircraft were unserviceable, and the role they played after the first few weeks of war was all but negligible. With the Israelis, too, maintenance left something to be desired; near the end of the war only four out of eleven transports, and thirteen out of twenty-four fighters, were serviceable. 5 However, as the clash with Britain’s Royal Air Force proved, aircraft that did take to the air were flown by first-class pilots, either foreign volunteers (the majority) or members of the Yishuv who had somehow managed to find the necessary training. Having put an end to the Egyptian attacks on Tel Aviv and gained air superiority over Erets Yisrael, their most important contribution was perhaps maintaining contact with isolated areas, such a
s the Negev, at times when no other communications existed. During the last months of the war they also bombed and strafed almost unhindered, though operations were seldom decisive due to lack of numbers.
These are technicalities, as events proved. Perhaps most decisive was the fact that the Zionist attempt to cast away Jewish history and create a new race that would be distinguished by its fighting qualities had proved a brilliant success. The IDF’s conduct of the War of Independence was certainly anything but perfect. However, as far as can be determined, the blunders often committed, and the unnecessary casualties sometimes suffered, almost always resulted from lack of training and inexperience rather than from cowardice. To quote Ariel Sharon, “There was so much we did not know.”6 In Ben Gurion’s words, “Our men in the Army are good Zionists but they have yet to become soldiers.”7 These problems were evident during the attempts to pass convoys into Jerusalem and assist the isolated settlements at Gush Etsion; the same is true in regard to the desperate but ill-starred fighting for Latrun. There, in the face of a disciplined, well-commanded, and well-positioned enemy, one failure followed another until the IDF threw in the towel and, in typical fashion, simply bypassed the problem.
At the heart of the difficulty was a persistent inferiority in firepower. From the time of Mishmar Ha-emek (April 1948) on, this factor forced the Israelis to operate in a dispersed manner, flexibly, and at night so as to close the range between its weapons and those of the enemy. Such operations require good coordination, however, and it was here that command experience, or its lack, was absolutely critical. Thus, a vicious cycle: The very means that were used to overcome one weakness led to another. As time went on and these problems were overcome, operations tended to become better organized and bolder. After several failures, the final attack on Iraq Suedan was as well orchestrated as available means permitted. The occupation of Beer Sheva was like a stroke of lightning, whereas Allon’s subsequent drive into the Sinai represented a brilliant if small-scale copy of the 1940 German breakthrough at Sedan, France. As we shall see, this boldness—the most important quality needed by any army—often made up for deficient training, lax discipline, and the sometimes imperfect command-and-control and communications systems. Such boldness would keep the IDF in good stead for perhaps three decades. After that, the situation changed.
From a different perspective, though, the determination to develop a new kind of Jew was carried out at the cost of the cultural blight of an entire generation. Ben Gurion, Ben Tsvi, and many lesser-known comrades—including, in spite of his rough exterior, Yitschak Sadeh—had been remarkably literate. Ben Gurion knew his Bible, collected books, studied ancient Greek, and dabbled in Plato (imagining himself the philosopher king, no doubt). Ben Tsvi was an acknowledged expert on things Arabic and wrote extensively on the history and geography of Erets Yisrael. Sadeh not only knew several modern languages—having been home-tutored by an important early-twentieth-century Jewish intellectual, Hillel Zeitlin—but also had a surprisingly good understanding of art history that resulted from his lifelong habit of collecting reproductions of great artists. He certainly knew how to pull heartstrings; when he published his memoirs, Ha-pinkas Patuach (The Notebook Is Open), in the early fifties, they became a best-seller.
Among their juniors, Moshe Dayan had a poetic soul, as his memoirs and other writings show. A few such as Shimon Peres—who for that very reason never quite made it in Israeli elections8—were even interested in learning. This did not apply to their contemporaries, the young generation of Israeli-bred or sabra soldiers. Inside they may have been soft, as the cliché told; but on the outside they were prickly and not seldom boorish. Many were raised on farms (like Sharon) or attended agricultural boarding schools (like Rabin). Some, like Refael Eytan, grew up in extreme poverty among the chicken coops of a godforsaken moshav—of which he once said that, unlike ears, they did not have to be cleaned every day. Others spent their youth not with their parents but in the communal dormitories of the kibbutsim. Prevailing economic conditions dictated spartan living; even clothes were owned in common, laundered in the communal laundry, and distributed on a first-come, first-wear basis. Children bathed in cold water year-round, slept on wooden boards, and underwent courses in wrestling and hand-to-hand fighting in a deliberate and, as it turned out, only too successful attempt to instill them with hardihood and courage.9
In this generation, wrote Arthur Koestler in 1946, “the humanistic hormones of the mind are absent.”
Their parents were the most cosmopolitan race of the earth—they are provincial and chauvinistic. Their parents were sensitive bundles of nerves with awkward bodies—their nerves are whip-cords and their bodies those of a horde of Hebrew Tarzans roaming in the hills of Galilee. Their parents were intense, intent, over-strung, over-spiced—they are tasteless, spiceless, unleavened and tough. Their parents were notoriously polyglot—they have been brought up in one language which had been hibernating for twenty centuries before being brought artificially back to life.... They speak no European language except a little English on the Berlitz school level; the not too numerous and not too competent translations of world classics strike no chords in them.... As against this they know all about fertilizers and irrigation and rotation of crops; they know the names of birds and plants and flowers; they know how to shoot, and fear neither Arab nor devil.10
Others held a somewhat different view: “Pacifism is a pipe dream.... No human conflict has ever been solved by debates and reasoning.... Never did a people voluntarily surrender their country, or rights, or property.... No conflict has been solved without a real struggle.” This was not some reactionary adherent of Bismarck ranting about history being made by iron and blood; it was Yitschak Tabenkin, renowned socialist leader and the principal ideologue of the Achdut-Ha-avoda Party, as far back as 1942. Addressing teachers on the topic of “School and the War,” he urged them not to “look down upon it” but to include it in their program of studies.11 Whatever the differences between the Israeli right and left at this time, they shared a feeling of contempt for the learned—yet supposedly unmartial and cowardly—“diaspora Jew.” They combined this with the absolute determination to fight and bleed for the “state on the way.” The outcome was a unique blend of belligerence and insouciance that was carried over into the IDF, and, owing to the latter’s influence as perhaps the single most important institution in the country, to much of Israeli society at large.
Meanwhile the price paid for this bellicosity was heavy indeed. The number who died in the war approached 6,000 (5,682 to be exact)12—far more than in any other of Israel’s subsequent wars and amounting to almost one-third of all those killed since the end of 1947 to the present day. Of those 5,682, 2,000 or so fell between November 1947 and May 1948, 1,200 in the period May 15-June 10, 1948, and the rest between July 1948 and January 1949. Allowing for the size of the Yishuv’s population and the duration of hostilities, the blood bath was more intense than that undergone by either Britain or Germany in 1914-1918 and did not fall far short of the demographic disaster experienced by France during the same years (although it is true that, starting already during the war itself, massive immigration more than compensated for the losses).
As is probably true of all wars, those aged eighteen to thirty were overrepresented (64.8 percent of the dead compared to 47.1 of the general population). Six percent of those aged seventeen to twenty and more than 5 percent of those aged twenty-one to twenty-five died; this served as the theme for a famous poem, “Magash Ha-kessef” (“The Silver Platter”), which honored the “boys and girls” who had given their lives. Two other groups were also somewhat overrepresented: the well educated (high school and over) and those with proven leadership capabilities (officers and NCOs). Contrary to the subsequent legend of the “lost generation,” these excess losses were not serious enough to justify talk of the serious blow to the “quality” of Israeli society. Yet the casualties may indicate the forces’ high fighting power and their willingness to sacrifice
their lives.13
The total of 5,682 dead includes 4,520 military personnel (79.5 percent) and 1,162 civilians (21.5 percent). Of 5,213 male dead, 801 were civilians (15 percent); of 469 female dead, 361 were civilians (76.9 percent). Though women constituted 10.6 percent of the armed forces in December 1948, 108, or 2.4 percent of the above-mentioned 4,520, were killed. Among the 383 IDF members who died during the attacks on Latrun were three women; one was a wireless operator, the other two were nurses.14 It is thus clear that, relative to their share of the population, far fewer women died than men. Moreover, female casualties were greatly overrepresented among civilians and greatly underrepresented among the military. This of course is not to disparage the heroism displayed by women—who were killed weapon in hand (there were a few, including an American-trained pilot), died while on active service or while defending their settlements against attack, or carried out the no less important and no less difficult tasks of ordinary life in a time of total war.
Statistics, however, cannot fully convey the pain and the sorrow of this war, by far the most difficult fought by the state of Israel and the only one in which it may have come close to defeat, if not physical extinction. As in the United States after the Civil War and in Britain after World War I, war became the formative experience for entire age groups. For years thereafter myths were woven around the dead, poems composed in their honor, and books published in their memory (by 1953, there were at least 320).15 As any casual visitor will notice, the Israeli countryside is packed with war memorials. Some are old, some new, but all are decorated with lists of names (many overlapping, as different organizations commemorated their fallen ones without waiting for authorization from above). Generations of warriors have made their mark, not seldom leaving more than one family member behind as fathers, husbands, brothers, sons, and nephews visited and revisited the same battlefields. Perhaps poet Uri Tsvi Greenberg says it best in remembering one casualty, a former LECHI member (my translation):Mourn, oh daughters of Israel
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