History of the Jews (93 page)

The extent of the risks depended to some extent on the two superpowers, America and Russia. In both cases the Zionists benefited from what might be called luck or divine providence, according to taste. The first was the death of Roosevelt on 12 April 1945. In his last weeks he had turned anti-Zionist, following a meeting with King Ibn Saud after the Yalta Conference. The pro-Zionist presidential assistant, David Niles, later asserted: ‘There are serious doubts in my mind that Israel would have come into being if Roosevelt had lived.’
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F.D.R.’s successor, Harry S. Truman, had a much more straightforward commitment to Zionism, part emotional, part calculating. He felt sorry for Jewish refugees. He saw the Jews in Palestine as underdogs. He was also much less sure of the Jewish vote than Roosevelt. For the coming 1948 election, he needed the endorsement of Jewish organizations in such swing-states as New York, Pennsylvania and Illinois. Once the British renounced their mandate, Truman pushed for the creation of a Jewish state. In May 1947 the Palestine problem came before the
UN
. A special committe was asked to submit a plan. It produced two. A minority recommended a federated binational state. The majority produced a new partition plan: there would be Jewish and Arab states, plus an international zone in Jerusalem. On 29 November 1947, thanks to Truman’s vigorous backing, it was endorsed by the General Assembly, 33 votes to 13, with 10 abstentions.

The Soviet Union and the Arab states, followed by the international left in general, later came to believe that the creation of Israel was the work of a capitalist-imperialist conspiracy. But the facts show the reverse. Neither the American State Department nor the British Foreign Office wanted a Jewish state. They foresaw disaster for the West in the area if one were created. The British War Office was equally strong in opposition. So was the US Defense Department. Its Secretary, James Forrestal, bitterly denounced the Jewish lobby: ‘No group in this country should be permitted to influence our policy to the point where it could endanger our national security.’
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The British and American oil companies were even more vehement in opposing the new state. Speaking for the oil interests, Max Thornburg, of Cal-Tex, said that Truman had ‘extinguished the moral prestige of America’ and destroyed ‘Arab faith in her ideals’.
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It is impossible to point to any powerful economic interest, in either Britain or the United States, which pushed for the creation of Israel. In both countries, the overwhelming majority of her friends were on the left.

Indeed, if there was a conspiracy to create Israel, then the Soviet Union was a prominent member of it. During the war, for tactical reasons, Stalin suspended some aspects of his anti-Semitic policies. He even created a Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee.
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From 1944, for a brief period, he adopted a pro-Zionist posture in foreign policy (though not in Russia itself). His reason seems to have been that the creation of Israel, which he was advised would be a socialist state, would accelerate the decline of British influence in the Middle East.
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When Palestine first came before the
UN
in May 1947, Andrei Gromyko, the Soviet Deputy Foreign Minister, caused surprise by
announcing that his government supported the creation of a Jewish state, and by voting accordingly. On 13 October Semyon Tsarapkin, head of the Soviet delegation to the
UN
, offered members of the Jewish Agency the toast, ‘To the future Jewish state’, before voting for the partition plan. At the decisive General Assembly vote on 29 November the entire Soviet bloc voted in the Israeli interest, and thereafter the Soviet and American delegations worked closely together on the timetable of British withdrawal. Nor was this all. When Israel declared its independence on 14 May 1948 and President Truman immediately accorded it
de facto
recognition, Stalin went one better and, less than three days later, gave it recognition
de jure
. Perhaps most significant of all was the decision of the Czech government, on Stalin’s instructions, to sell the new state arms. An entire airfield was assigned to the task of air-lifting weapons to Tel Aviv.
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Timing was absolutely crucial to Israel’s birth and survival. Stalin had the Russian-Jewish actor Solomon Mikhoels murdered in January 1948, and this seems to have marked the beginning of an intensely anti-Semitic phase in his policy. The switch to anti-Zionism abroad took longer to develop but it came decisively in the autumn of 1948. By this time, however, Israel was securely in existence. American policy was also changing, as the growing pressures of the Cold War dissolved her mood of post-war idealism and forced Truman to listen more attentively to Pentagon and State Department advice. If British evacuation had been postponed another year, the United States would have been far less anxious to see Israel created and Russia would almost certainly have been hostile. Hence the effect of the terror campaign on British policy was perhaps decisive to the entire enterprise. Israel slipped into existence through a fortuitous window in history which briefly opened for a few months in 1947-8. That too was luck; or providence.

However, if Begin’s ruthlessness was responsible for the early British withdrawal, it was Ben Gurion who brought the state into being. He had to take a series of decisions each of which could have produced catastrophe for the Jewish people of Palestine. Once the
UN
partition vote was taken the Arabs were bent on destroying all the Jewish settlements and began to attack them immediately. Azzam Pasha, secretary-general of the Arab League, said on the radio: ‘This will be a war of extermination and a momentous massacre.’
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The Jewish commanders were confident but their resources were small. By the end of 1947 the Haganah had 17,600 rifles, 2,700 sten-guns, about 1,000 machine-guns and between 20,000 and 43,000 men in various stages of training. It had virtually no armour, heavy guns or aircraft.
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The Arabs had collected a Liberation Army of considerable size but with a divided leadership. They also had the regular forces of the Arab states: 10,000 Egyptians, 7,000 Syrians, 3,000 Iraqis, 3,000 Lebanese, plus the 4,500-strong Arab Legion of Transjordan, a formidable force with British officers. By March 1948 over 1,200 Jews had been killed, half of them civilians, in Arab attacks. The Czech arms were beginning to arrive and were deployed over the next month. The British mandate was not due to end until 15 May. But early in April Ben Gurion took what was probably the most difficult decision in his life. He ordered the Haganah on to the offensive to link up the various Jewish enclaves and to consolidate as much as possible of the territory allotted to Israel under the
UN
plan. The gamble came off almost completely. The Jews occupied Haifa. They opened up the route to Tiberias and the eastern Galilee. They took Safed, Jaffa and Acre. They established the core of the state of Israel and in effect won the war before it started.
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Ben Gurion read out the Scroll of Independence on Friday 14 May in the Tel Aviv museum. ‘By virtue of our national and intrinsic right,’ he said, ‘and on the strength of the resolution of the United Nations General Assembly, we hereby declare the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine, which shall be known as the State of Israel.’ A provisional government was formed immediately. Egyptian air raids began that night. The next day, simultaneously, the last British left and the Arab armies invaded. They made little difference, except in one respect. King Abdullah’s Arab Legion took the Old City of Jerusalem for him, the Jews surrendering it on 28 May. This meant that Jewish settlements east of the Holy City had to be evacuated. Otherwise the Israelis made further gains.

A month’s truce was arranged on 11 June. During it the Arab states heavily reinforced their armies. But the Israelis secured great quantities of heavy equipment, not only from the Czechs but from the French too, who provided it chiefly to anger the British. When the fighting resumed on 9 July, it quickly became apparent that the Israelis were in control. They took Lydda, Ramleh and Nazareth and occupied large areas of territory beyond the partition frontiers. The Arabs agreed to a second truce within ten days. But there were occasional outbreaks of violence, and in mid-October the Israelis launched an offensive to open the road to the Negev settlements. It ended in the capture of Beersheba. By the close of the year the Israeli army was 100,000-strong, and properly equipped. It had established a military paramountcy in the area it has never since lost. Armistice talks were opened in Rhodes on 12 January 1949 and were signed with Egypt (14 February), Lebanon (23 March), Transjordan (3 April) and
Syria (20 July). Iraq made no agreement at all, and the five Arab states remained in a formal state of war with Israel.

The events of 1947-8, which established Israel, also created the Arab-Israeli problem, which endures to this day. It has two main aspects, refugees and frontiers, best considered separately. According to
UN
figures, 656,000 Arab inhabitants of mandatory Palestine fled from Israeli-held territory: 280,000 to the West Bank of the Jordan, 70,000 to Transjordan, 100,000 to Lebanon, 4,000 to Iraq, 75,000 to Syria, 7,000 to Egypt, and 190,000 to the Gaza Strip (the Israelis put the total figure rather lower, 550,000-600,000). They left for four reasons: to avoid being killed in the fighting, because the administration had broken down, because they were ordered to or misled or panicked by Arab radio broadcasts, and because they were stampeded by an Irgun-Stern Gang massacre at the village of Deir Yassin on 9 April 1948.

The last merits scrutiny because it is relevant to the moral credentials of the Israeli state. From 1920 until this point, the Jews had refrained from terrorist attacks on Arab settlements, though the innumerable Arab ones had sometimes provoked heavy-handed reprisals. When the fighting began in the winter of 1947-8, Deir Yassin, an Arab quarrying village of less than 1,000 people, made a non-aggression pact with the nearby Jerusalem suburb of Givat Shaul. But two Jewish settlements nearby were overrun and destroyed, and the Jewish desire for revenge was strong. The Stern Gang proposed to destroy Deir Yassin to teach the Arabs a lesson. A senior Irgun officer, Yehuda Lapidot, testified: ‘The clear aim was to break Arab morale and raise the morale of the Jewish community in Jerusalem, which had been hit hard time after time, especially recently by the desecration of Jewish bodies which fell into Arab hands.’
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Begin agreed to the operation but said a loudspeaker van must be used to give the villagers a chance to surrender without bloodshed. The local Haganah commander also gave his reluctant approval, but laid down further conditions. There were eighty Irgun and forty Sternists in the raid. The loudspeaker van fell into a ditch and was never used. The Arabs chose to fight and were actually stronger and better armed. The Irgun-Sternists had to send for a regular platoon with a heavy machine-gun and 2-inch mortar, and it was these which ended Arab resistance.

It was at this point that the raiding force moved into the village and went out of control. A Haganah spy who was with them described what followed as ‘a disorganized massacre’. The raiders took twenty-three men to the quarry and shot them. An Arab eye-witness said ninety-three others were killed in the village, but other accounts put
the figure of those killed as high as 250. Begin, before he knew the details of the battle, sent out an order of the day in the spirit of the Book of Joshua: ‘Accept my congratulations on this splendid act of conquest…. As at Deir Yassin, so everywhere, we will attack and smite the enemy. God, God, thou hast chosen us for conquest.’
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News of this atrocity, in exaggerated form, spread quickly and undoubtedly persuaded many Arabs to flee over the next two months. There is no evidence that it was designed to have this effect. But in conjunction with the other factors it reduced the Arab population of the new state to a mere 160,000. That was very convenient.

On the other hand, there were the Jews encouraged or forced to flee from Arab states where, in some cases, Jewish communities had existed for 2,500 years. In 1945 there were over 500,000 Jews living in the Arab world. Between the outbreak of the war on 15 May 1948 and the end of 1967, the vast majority had to take refuge in Israel: 252,642 from Morocco, 13,118 from Algeria, 46,255 from Tunisia, 34,265 from Libya, 37,867 from Egypt, 4,000 from Lebanon, 4,500 from Syria, 3,912 from Aden, 124,647 from Iraq and 46,447 from the Yemen. With a total of 567,654, Jewish refugees from Arab countries were thus not substantially smaller in number than Arab refugees from Israel.
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The difference in their reception and treatment was entirely a matter of policy. The Israeli government systematically resettled all its refugees as part of its national-home policy. The Arab governments, with the assistance of the
UN
, kept the Arab refugees in camps, pending a reconquest of Palestine which never came. Hence, as a result of natural increase, there were more Arab refugees in the late 1980s than there had been forty years before.

This contrasting attitude towards refugees itself sprang from a fundamentally different approach towards negotiations. The Jews had been for two millennia an oppressed minority who had never possessed the option of force. They had therefore been habitually obliged to negotiate, often for bare existence, and nearly always from a position of great weakness. Over the centuries they had developed not merely negotiating skills but a philosophy of negotiation. They would negotiate against impossible odds, and they had learned to accept a negotiated status, however lowly and underprivileged, knowing that it could later be improved by further negotiations and their own efforts. The paramountcy of settlement, as opposed to force, was built into their very bones. That was one reason they found it so difficult, even when the evidence became overwhelming, to take in the magnitude of Hitler’s evil: it was hard for them to comprehend a man who wanted no settlement at all with them, just their lives.