301. Gaza: The First Arab-Israeli War & The Creation of The Gaza Strip (Part 11)

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0:28Hello and welcome to Empire with me, Anita Arnand. And me, William de Rimpol. And we continue our Gaza series. And once again, we're very lucky to be in the company of Eugene Rogan, Professor of Modern Middle Eastern History at the University of Oxford. He is the author of The Arabs, A History, and The Fall of the Ottomans. He is also a friend of this show. He's also one of the very few voices. He was hugely respected by both sides of the debate. A rare quality. Yes, it is. And thank you very much for taking the time for us. Willie, just remind us where we left off last time with Eugene. Well, we were plowing through the most contentious episodes in probably the entire history of the Middle East.

1:10These are all deeply sensitive issues. Almost every one of these episodes at this point in 1948 is interpreted differently by both sides. There's no conflict I know of where it's like looking through two completely different lenses of the binoculars. On one side, you see a triumph of the Jewish people, the creation of the state of Israel, the return after 2000 years of exile. On the other side, you see exile, dispossession, homelessness, a future in refugee camps. And so it's a really complicated landscape that Eugene has been helping us negotiate through. So just to recap, there's a UN partition plan.

1:47The UN comes in, the British throw up their hands, say they can't cope anymore. The UN comes in and it offers a partition. Now, the partition that is offered is rejected by the Arabs. They say that they can't see why they have to give up this land that they've always had, and they think that far too much has been given away to the other side. But Ben Gurion accepts it. And then the fighting breaks out. On the 8th of April, 1948, the Palestinians lose their most outstanding commander when Abdul Qadr is killed in the Battle of Castel, an incredibly strategic hilltop controlling access to Jerusalem.

2:20them. As his funeral is underway, news begins to filter through of the Ergun and Sterngan attack on Deir Yassin, a peaceful Arab village which had had a non-combat relationship with the neighboring Jewish settlements, but over 100 people are killed, including women and children. There's no armed resistance, and the survivors are paraded as war trophies. Now, this is condemned, of course, by Ben-Gurion, but it has a dramatic effect on the Palestinians. They all think they're going to be rounded up and killed in the same way. And people begin to flee. There's real fear now, there's real terror. And Palestinians begin to clear out.

2:55There's also, of course, retaliatory killings on Jewish non-competents. 74 are killed, doctors and medical personnel. And so as the British pull out, there is hundreds and thousands of villagers and townspeople on the move. The Arab side have proved themselves much less well-armed, much less well-organized than the Jewish militias. And on the 14th of May 1948, the last British High Commissionist, Alan Cunningham, left Jerusalem to board a waiting ship in Haifa. Later that day, in a museum in Tel Aviv, the leader of the Yeshuv Ben-Gurion proclaimed the birth of the State of Israel. Eugene, just tell us, what does he say and how does he mark this day?

3:48For David Ben-Gurion, the withdrawal of British forces was chronicle of a retreat foretold. And so I think for the community of Jews in Palestine known as the Yeshuv, there was no further any barrier to them achieving their longstanding dream of statehood, independent statehood. With the withdrawal of the British, Ben-Gurion on live radio broadcasts the creation of a Jewish state without declaring the firm boundaries of that territory, that he was mobilizing the people of the new state of Israel to defend their territory and promised that the new state of Israel would be at peace with all neighbors that accepted it in peace.

4:29But of course, it was the verge of a war in which peace was not an option. So you did say in the previous episode that actually while the British were there, the neighboring Arab countries held back. They didn't do anything. But now that they've gone, now that they've upped sticks and pulled up anchor and they've sailed away, what is their immediate reaction to that departure? For the Arab world, this was a crisis that they were simply unprepared for. So if we talk about a chronicle of a retreat foretold, the Arabs could see the impending departure date of the British with mounting concern. They knew that their first solution, the Arab Liberation Army, an entirely volunteer force of irregulars, was unable to stop the advance of Jewish forces working through the territory of Palestine, and that they would themselves have to respond.

5:19But they did so with a level of mistrust in each other that compromised their war efforts almost from the outset. But the one thing they could agree on is that at dawn, on the 15th of May, their troops would move into Palestine, into those territories allocated to the Arab state and to try and drive the Israeli forces back, even from those lands that had been guaranteed to a new Jewish state. Now, Eugene, when this is discussed, and this is one of the most written about moments, in a sense, Israeli historians always point to this, that all the local Arab countries invade this new state of Israel.

5:57Now, is this a militarily serious incursion? Are these well-armed armies with tanks and modern weapons coordinating with each other, or what is the military situation? So really, of the five neighboring states that usually are listed as the antagonists in the First Arab-Israeli War, two heavyweights, Egypt and Transjordan, both were armed and trained by their British imperial masters, as was Iraq. But Iraq, of course, was further away and was slower to reach the battlefield and was to be less actively engaged in the war. Syria and Lebanon, both recently out of French mandate, had smaller armies.

6:38One of the big struggles in the independence bit of Syria in particular was to gain control over its national army. And so it was a small and unprepared national army that was slow to take to the battle. But the ones that really mattered on the 15th of May were Egypt and Transjordan, and both moved in with thousands of men and with tanks. And if there was any stage in the war where I think Israel was at risk, it would have been in those opening weeks of the first Arab-Israeli conflict. And give us a picture of the young IDF, the state forces that arranged against them, because it's a remarkable victory that is won.

7:15I mean, they appear to be well coordinated, well armed, and it's an astonishing victory that surprises the world. Yes, I think it would have been easy to have underestimated what the new army of Israel would be capable of. It's true there were members of their armed forces who had benefited from training by the British and had participated in combat operations in the Second World War. The Haganah was, in a sense, an army in the making, but it never really had the opportunity to train and drill to the extent that a national army normally would, and then to be sent directly into war. With a large number of undertrained volunteers.

7:54Yes, they were able to secure arms and ammunition through a very effective network of supporters in the diaspora. Particularly from Czechoslovakia, isn't that right? Well, this was going to be the real game changer for the Israeli armed forces, is that they had a supply line that would remain open through the war through Czechoslovakia, while the rest of the world was really closing down the armed supply on the Arab armies, most notably the British. They refused to resupply Egypt and Transjordan as a way of trying to stop the war from developing further. Can I ask you one very contested piece of history in this period of time?

8:32Is that Arab radio broadcasts were issued that told local Palestinians to get out to flee. The Palestinians say that's not true. That did not happen. I mean, what do you know to be true of this? We know very little about radio broadcasts at the time, Anita. The story is circulated that Arab leaders told the civilians of Palestine to leave, promising to deliver their homelands back to them safe and sound. But we don't really have transcripts or recordings of those broadcasts to confirm the point. It's been circulating and questioned ever since, I mean, it would be normal for responsible leaders to have told civilians to flee a battlefield.

9:15And one only needs to look at those wars that we've seen in the end of the 20th and the 21st century to realize that civilians do flee combat zones. As war comes to your neighborhood, you withdraw. And that's been true in the breakup of Yugoslavia, as it is today in Ukraine. Most civilians have tried to leave the areas most directly implicated in the battlefield with Russia. But was there a deliberate statewide policy? No, there's no evidence that, let us say, Syria, Lebanon, Transjordan, and Egypt conspired to depopulate Palestine. It's just what happens in a war. Eugene, I think the generation of Israeli new historians, which your colleague Abiy Shlaim in Oxford is a very prominent member, have discounted those radio broadcasts.

10:01But a matter which I think divides these new historians is the whole question of Plan D or Plan Dela, this question of whether Ben-Gurion actually had a master plan to get rid of the Palestinians, that there was a coordinated central idea that the Palestinians should be cleared out to create the new Jewish state, or whether this was just contingent on local operations, local commanders, local circumstances, and indeed the question of people fleeing as armies approach, as they do, as you say, everywhere in the world. Well, Plan Dalit, without doubt, is a contingency plan. And it's one of many contingency plans that the IDF drew up.

10:38being Plan Dalit, the fourth letter of the Hebrew alphabet, you know there was a Plan Aleph, a Plan Bet, and a Plan Gimel before you got to Plan Dalit. The word that I suppose the Palestinians use is master plan. And I think that's where Israeli historians will contest that. Benny Morris will push back against the idea that Plan Dalit was a blueprint for the ethnic cleansing of Palestine, something that, say, a historian like Ilan Pape has put forward strongly. Ilhan Pape actually calls his book The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, doesn't he? Exactly. He's very strong on this. No, and Morris and Pape debate this point.

11:16And I think what Pape is looking for is just evidence on the ground that there was a consistent pattern of depopulation that conformed to Plan Dalit. And then circumstances would confirm the importance of the plan. Morris is a real archives historian. and he's looking for a document that says implement Plan Dalet, an order given to pursue Plan Dalet to its logical conclusion. And no such document has been found. I think for our purposes, we can see that the Israelis were thinking about how to achieve a Jewish state that would be secure without large numbers of Palestinians surviving in the territory as a sort of threat to the security of Israel, and that they were active in driving Palestinians out of areas that they wished to claim for the future state that they were building.

12:05Do we have an idea of numbers of how many Palestinians left their homes at this time? Well, Anita, the standard number for those displaced in the course of the 1948 war is about 750 ,000 Palestinians. That's quite widely accepted, isn't it? That's not a really disputed figure. No, and the roundness of the figure tells you it's an estimate, but it seems to be a best estimate that given the numbers that were to flee the war into the territory of Lebanon, Syria, the West Bank, and into the Gaza Strip, that we would be able to account for about 750 ,000 people displaced by the war. Now, the other great matter of dispute, which is, I think, the focus of one of the early works of your colleague, Abiy Shlaim at Oxford, is the question of how far the Jordanians were playing a different game.

12:54They were after their own self-agandlesment. They had formed, he says, what is the word you use it? Something across the Jordan. Collusion. A collusion across the Jordan. That's right. Tell us about that whole historiography. Transjordan was suspected by all of the Arab parties of having interests in this 1948 war, that it was going to use the war as a way of expanding the frontiers of their state. And there were good grounds to mistrust the intentions of King Abdullah of Transjordan. In 1937, the British first raised the idea of partitioning Palestine between Arabs and Jews. And the idea would be that the Arab state would be annexed to Transjordan.

13:32This is in 1937. And the only Arab leader to accept that plan was King Abdullah, or then Amir Abdullah of Transjordan. So his Arab fellow leaders saw him as an interested party. And Abdullah, whether to advance the peace or advance his own interest, was secretly in dialogue with leading members of the Jewish executive in Palestine. He was sending letters, he was organizing meetings to try and come to terms in advance of Britain's withdrawal on the 15th of May, such that the Jordanian forces would be allowed to enter into the territories of Palestine allocated for the Arab state without going to war with the Israelis.

14:16Try and conclude a non-aggression pact that could lead to a peaceful handover rather than a war on the 15th of May. And it's the terms of this secret agreement that has people debating whether there was in fact a collusion or indeed whether it was an attempt to negotiate a handover to avoid war. What we do know is that the Transjordanian army, the Arab Legion, genuinely went to war against Israel. In that, no collusion was to withstand the actual onset of the war. Just circling back to those 750 ,000 estimated Palestinians who leave, where are they leaving from and where are they going to? They must be just going with what they can carry.

15:02What situation are they facing? Anita, you'll have seen the heartbreaking photographs of dirt roads thronged with people carrying their few possessions on their heads, the misery of refugee status that they were confronting, and to be true, live with today, from that day till now. And really, where you went depended on where you lived. So for those people living in Haifa and points north, they went to Lebanon. Those in the sort of Galilee and the the panhandle, went towards Syria. Those in the central areas of Palestine tried to cross the Arab legions lines on the West Bank to the safety of an Arab army protected territory.

15:50And for those who were around Jaffa, Ramla, places to the south, their refuge was to try and seek security behind Egyptian lines around the area of the Gaza Strip. So this is an exodus which has many memoirs attesting to it, we could talk about, for example, Salah Khalaf, if I'm pronouncing that right, who's fleeing south towards Gaza as a 15-year-old boy. He writes, I was overwhelmed by the sight of this huge mass of men, women, old people, and children struggling under the weight of suitcases and 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.

16:35Another record we have is a man called Faiz who left his home the day the assault began on Jaffa. 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 burnt 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.

17:12It took 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 single suitcase. Well, let's take a break there with this exodus of humanity crossing lines of invading fire as the Jordanians, the Egyptians and the Iraqis close in and Israel pushes out. Join us then.

17:46welcome back so we're now going to look at july when operations resume after a break and in lidda on the 12th of july israeli forces who believed the battle was over encountered a small arab legion force entering the town triggering what looked like armed uprising during the ensuing firefight, about 250 Palestinians sheltering in a mosque compound were killed by the men of the IDS Yifta Brigade. It was a sign of panic, a lack of confidence in the troops, the ability to hold the town, of their inexperience in governing civilians, according to one account. Later, eyewitness accounts by Israeli participants ensured that the incident gained lasting notoriety.

18:29It was the biggest atrocity of the war. Another notorious incident was the expulsion of 50 ,000 Palestinians on Ben-Gurion's orders to the Israeli commander Yitzhak Rabin. And I'm sure you know this, but Yitzhak Rabin would go on to be Prime Minister of Israel, serving two terms in office. In fact, the first Prime Minister to have been born in mandatory Palestine. A man we'll be hearing more about in the years to come, who later described how the Prime Minister gestured with his hand and brusquely said, remove them. What's going on here, Eugene? Well, you know, really, the cliche has it that war is hell.

19:07And the conduct of the Palestine War validated that aphorism in a level of inhumanity that I think certainly shocked the people of Palestine. But it comes for the international community in the aftermath of the far greater horrors of the Second World War. It's almost as though in the shadow of atrocious war that killed millions. What was going on in the quote-unquote holy land was a smaller scale event. There was a lot of sympathy for an Israeli drive to secure statehood, but there was also a great deal of sympathy for Palestinian civilians who were at the blunt end of a murderous war machine.

19:47But between these two initiatives, I think the international community was completely paralyzed and their inability to act through the United Nations to try and bring the war to an end, which the international community was determined to do. You briefly rushed over a ceasefire that had been brokered by the UN. And this is now the second round of fighting in the war. But the international community was completely incapable of stopping this drive for statehood by Israel. And this paralysis, I mean, is it partially, who knows the psychology of these things, but we can try and think about it. The psychology of paralysis, is that partly guilt-driven that the Holocaust happened on their watch, that it was allowed to happen on European soil, that there wasn't an intervention earlier?

20:33I mean, is all of that stuff also in the wind, even at these United Nations conversations that are going on? I think that there was a broad support for the Jews of Palestine, Jews now of Israel, the Israelis, to have their state of their own. But I wouldn't confuse it with the kind of Holocaust guilt that would be a defining feature of Europe's relations to Israel in the 1950s and 60s. I think at this early point, it was something different. It wasn't as strongly shaped or articulated. It took an educating of Western opinion for people to really grasp the magnitude of the horror of the Shoah. And I don't think that that education had taken place in the 1940s yet, but it doesn't mean that the images of the liberation of the camps shocked the conscience of the world, for sure.

21:24Margaret Bourne-White's photographs and all those. Yes. So, you know, I think there was a lot of sympathy for the desperate bid for statehood by the new state of Israel. And the fact that both the Soviets and the Americans recognized Israel within minutes of Ben-Gurion's declaration of statehood tells you everything you need to know about the international community's sympathies on the eve of the first Arab-Israeli war. Carrying on into now the end of July, so many people who will be major figures in the years to come have memoirs from this period from both sides. So we have, for example, George Habash, who becomes a major leader of one of the Palestine factions, the PLFP.

22:02He is, at this point, a medical student from Lydda's Greek Orthodox community. He's a Palestinian Christian. And he writes in his memoirs, he never forgot what he witnessed at this point in July. 30 ,000 people walking, crying, screaming with terror, women carrying babies in their arms, and children clinging to their skirts, and Israeli soldiers pointing their weapons at their backs. Some people fell by the wayside, and some did not rise again. It was terrible. And then we get against that Rabin, who in his memoirs, which were initially censored, though the original version subsequently leaks out, writes, driving out is a term with a harsh ring.

22:41Psychologically, this is one of the most difficult actions we undertook. The population of Lod did not leave willingly. There was no way 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 Arab Legion. And then there's other accounts. It's estimated that a further 100 ,000 Palestinians at this point become refugees in the course of those next 10 days alone. The feeling was bad, but we deceived ourselves that we would be back next week. We're called Abu Naim from Idjizm, 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.

23:19What happened? People imagined this was temporary, as if it was an outcome of rain or a flood. We will move for a week and then the flood will be over. This was the feeling that led to this catastrophe. Eugene, what's going on with the Egyptian forces that you talked about, the Trans-Jordanian forces, the Iraqi forces? I mean, where are they in all this time and what What are they doing? So immediately after the British withdrawal on the 14th of May 1948, Arab forces by prearranged consultation entered into the territory of Mandate Palestine. The Jordanians crossed the Jordan River. The Egyptians came in through the Sinai Peninsula for the southern frontiers of Palestine.

24:01The Iraqis came to reinforce Jordanian positions in the West Bank, taking the northern territories of the West Bank. And in the course of the war, small numbers of Syrian and Lebanese troops would make brief incursions into the north, but they were not adequately prepared to really make a sustained campaign against the new state of Israel. And the first goal of the entering Arab armies was to secure the territory that had been allocated to the Arab state of Palestine by the 1947 partition plan. So the Egyptians move up the Gaza Strip and in towards the area around Beersheba in the sort of southern reaches of Palestine in a long, broad front to try and push Israeli forces back in that part of southern Palestine.

24:48The Jordanians secure their positions in the West Bank of Palestine, but immediately find themselves being appealed to by the people of the old city of Jerusalem, which was under siege. Israeli forces, the IDF, were determined to try and relieve the Jewish quarters of the old city of Jerusalem, which was sealed off by the Arab communities. And the people of Jerusalem appealed to the Arab Legion to enter the city and to protect their positions before they fell. The thing that held Amir Abdullah back was his pledge to the British, who were still very influential in Jordan, that the Arab Legion would only be deployed to the territories allocated to the Arab state of Palestine.

25:31The city of Jerusalem itself had, by the partition plan, been left international. And so it was not to fall to either the Jewish or the Arab states. And Abdullah hesitated, but after three days of prevarication, he committed his troops. And the Arab Legion enters Jerusalem, they force the security of the city, and the city of Jerusalem is divided along east-west lines, with West Jerusalem becoming part of the emerging Jewish state, and East Jerusalem remaining in the West Bank under Jordanian rule. But just circling back again to all of those people who are on foot trying to find somewhere safe, they do find their way to Gaza, because Gaza is under the control of a young staff officer from Alexandria, whose name you might remember from our Suez episode.

26:20His name is Gamal Abdel Nasser, who will become the future president of Egypt during that Suez crisis. And what does he do? I mean, he must be a relatively young man at this age where thousands are pouring into Gaza, looking to him for safety. Well, we have Nasser's own account of his war experiences, and they were not distinguished. He was deeply frustrated and felt betrayed by his top command and his government, who sent the army of Egypt into war without properly supplying them with modern munitions and adequate ammunition. Was this a deliberate thing, or was it just they didn't have the munitions, that they were disorganized?

27:04The situation's complicated, Willie. On the one hand, Egypt, like Transjordan and Iraq, had been under British domination, and Iraq and Transjordan having been mandates, their militaries were supplied uniquely by Britain. Britain had a monopoly there on the provision and the training of their militaries. Egypt was as well. What this meant was that Britain could turn the tap off on the supply of hardware, and these countries had no alternate source at their disposal to provide for their militaries. In the aftermath of the war, jumping ahead a bit, there was to be a huge scandal in Egypt over the failure of Egyptian armies in Palestine.