Read Modern Times: The World From the Twenties to the Nineties Online
Authors: Paul Johnson
Tags: #History, #World, #20th Century
With Haganah preoccupied, the gangs flourished, egged on by the
rabid elements in the American press. Typical was what Ruth Gruber wrote in the
New York Post
of the Palestine police:
These men who loathed the idea of fighting their friends, the Nazis, embraced with passion the idea of fighting Jews. They walked around the streets of Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, the city built by Jews, singing the
Horst Wessel Song.
They marched into crowded markets giving the
Heil Hitler
salute.
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On 22 July 1946 Irgun blew up Jerusalem’s principal hotel, the King David, killing forty-one Arabs, twenty-eight British, seventeen Jews and five others. Part of the hotel was a British government office and Begin claimed that the object of the bomb was to destroy secret records. But in that case, as Haganah pointed out, the bomb should have been exploded outside office hours. Begin claimed a warning was given: in fact it reached the phone-operator two minutes before, and as he was telling the hotel manager the bomb went off.
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This crime became the prototype terrorist outrage for the decades to come. The first to imitate the new techniques were, naturally, the Arab terrorists: the future Palestine Liberation Organization was an illegitimate child of Irgun.
Jewish terrorism was counterproductive in other respects. On 30 July 1947 two captured British sergeants were murdered in cold blood, and their bodies booby-trapped. The Jewish Agency called it ‘the dastardly murder of two innocent men by a set of criminals’.
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There were anti-Semitic riots in Manchester, Liverpool, Glasgow and London; in Derby a synagogue was burnt down. But the effect of this particular episode, coming on top of others, was to turn the British Army anti-Jewish. As in India, Britain had used too little severity. The figures show that, from August 1945 to 18 September 1947 (leaving out the King David deaths), 141 British died, forty-four Arabs, twenty-five Jewish non-terrorists; in addition thirty-seven Jewish terrorists were killed in gun-fights but only seven executed (two committed suicide in prison).
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The British troops knew they were being unjustly judged. As a result, when the evacuation took place, officers and men conspired to hand over weapons, posts and supplies to the Arabs. The military consequences were very serious. In effect, Jewish terrorism cost the Jewish state the Old City of Jerusalem and the West Bank of the Jordan, which were not taken until 1967, and then without legal title.
Terrorism led Britain to wash her hands, like Pilate, of the Palestine problem. Ernest Bevin, in charge from July 1945, was an old-fashioned working-class anti-Semite, though not a vicious one. He told the Labour Party congress in 1946 that the American idea for another 100,000 immigrants in Palestine was proposed from ‘the purest motives – they did not want too many Jews in New York’.
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Terrorism made him bitter. He thought that if Britain pulled out the Jews would all be massacred, and that British troops were being murdered by those
whose lives they were protecting. But by the beginning of 1947 he had had enough. The fuel crisis tipped the balance in favour of scuttle. On 14 February – the same month Attlee decided to get out of India straight away and hand over responsibility for Greece and Turkey to America – Bevin had the Jewish leaders into his office and told them he was transferring the problem to the
UN.
There was no electricity; only candles. Bevin joked, ‘There’s no need for candles as the
Israelites
are here.’
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The second factor was the impingement of America. David Ben-Gurion visited the US in 1941 and felt ‘the pulse of her great Jewry with its five millions’.
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For the first time he sensed that, with the help of America’s Jews, Zionism could be achieved in the immediate future, and thereafter he hustled Weizmann along towards this object. Whether it was right to turn the concept of a Jewish national home into a state is still a matter of argument. Weizmann had the magnanimity to recognize that the cost to the Arabs must be heavy. He told the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry set up after the war that it was not a choice between right and wrong but between greater and lesser injustice. Ben-Gurion took a deterministic view: ‘History had decreed that we should return to our country and re-establish here the Jewish state.’
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But this was to speak with the voice of Lenin or Hitler. There is no such person as History. It is human beings who decree.
The truth is, during the war years the American Jewish community first developed its collective self-confidence and began to exert the political muscle its numbers, wealth and ability had created. In the immediate post-war it became the best-organized and most influential lobby in America. It was able to show that it held the voting key to swing states like New York, Illinois and Pennsylvania. Roosevelt had a strong enough political base to ignore this pressure. With characteristic frivolity, he seems to have turned anti-Zionist when, on returning from Yalta, he had a brief meeting with the King of Saudi Arabia, ‘I learned more about the whole problem’, he told Congress,’… by talking with Ibn Saud for five minutes than I could have learned in an exchange of two or three dozen letters.’
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David Niles, the passionately pro-Zionist presidential assistant, testified: ‘There are serious doubts in my mind that Israel would have come into being if Roosevelt had lived.’
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Truman was politically much weaker. He felt he had to have the Jewish vote to win the 1948 election. He was genuinely pro-Zionist too, and distrusted the Arabism of ‘the “striped-pants boys” in the State Department’.
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In the event it was his will which pushed the partition scheme through the
UN
(29 November 1947) and recognized the new Israeli state which Ben-Gurion declared the following May. There were vast
forces against it. Max Thornburg of Cal-Tex, speaking for the oil interests, wrote that Truman had ‘prevailed upon the Assembly to declare racial and religious criteria the basis of political statehood’ and thereby ‘extinguished’ the ‘moral prestige of America’ and ‘Arab faith in her ideals’.
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The State Department prophesied ruin. Defence Secretary Forrestal was appalled: ‘no group in this country’, he wrote bitterly of the Jewish lobby, ‘should be permitted to influence our policy to the point where it could endanger our national security.’
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It is likely, indeed, that if the crisis had come a year later, after the Cold War had really got into its stride, the anti-Zionist pressures on Truman would have been too strong. American backing for Israel in 1947–8 was the last idealistic luxury the Americans permitted themselves before the Realpolitik of global confrontation descended. The same time-scale influenced Russia. It backed Zionism in order to break up Britain’s position in the Middle East. It not only recognized Israel but, in order to intensify the fighting and the resultant chaos, it instructed the Czechs to sell it arms.
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These considerations would not have prevailed a year later, when the rush for Cold War allies was on. Israel slipped into existence through a crack in the time continuum.
Hence the notion that Israel was created by imperialism is not only wrong but the reverse of the truth. Everywhere in the West, the foreign offices, defence ministries and big business were against the Zionists. Even the French only sent them arms to annoy the British, who had ‘lost’ them Syria. The Haganah had 21,000 men but, to begin with, virtually no guns, armour or aircraft. It was the Communist Czechs, on Soviet instructions, who made Israel’s survival possible, by turning over an entire military airfield to shuttle arms to Tel Aviv.
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Virtually everyone expected the Jews to lose. There were 10,000 Egyptian troops, 4,500 in Jordan’s Arab Legion, 7,000 Syrians, 3,000 Iraqis, 3,000 Lebanese, plus the ‘Arab Liberation Army’ of Palestinians. That was why the Arabs rejected the
UN
partition scheme, which gave the Jews only 5,500 square miles, chiefly in the Negev Desert. By accepting it, despite its disadvantages (it would have created a state with 538,000 Jews and 397,000 Arabs), the Zionists showed they were willing to abide by the arbitration of international law. The Arabs chose force.
It was a small-scale, heroic struggle. Like the Trojan War, it involved many famous personalities: General Neguib, Colonel Nasser, Hakim Amir, Yigal Allon, Moshe Dayan. At the heart of the Arab failure was the hatred between their field commander, Fawzi al-Qawukji, and the Mufti and his gruesome family. The Mufti accused Qawukji of ‘spying for Britain… drinking wine and running after women’.
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The Iraqis and the Syrians had no maps of Palestine. Some of the Arab armies had good equipment, but all were badly
trained except for the Jordanians, and King Abdullah of Jordan only wanted Old Jerusalem, which he got. He had no desire to see an Arab Palestinian state with the Mufti in charge. As he told Golda Meir at a secret meeting: ‘We both have a common enemy – the Mufti.’
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In retrospect it is clear that the only chance the Arabs had was an overwhelming success in the first days of the war. Ben-Gurion took this from them by a pre-emptive strike in April 1948, the most important decision of his life, which he was able to carry through with Czech Communist weapons.
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Thereafter, despite anxious moments, Israeli power increased steadily: by December it had a properly equipped army of 100,000 and had established a military ascendency it retained into the 1980s.
The creation of Israel finally ended European anti-Semitism, except behind the Iron Curtain. It created the Arab refugee problem. This was the work of extremists, on both sides. The Arab population of Palestine was 93 per cent in 1918, when the Balfour Declaration first began to take effect, and 65 per cent in 1947, when the crisis broke. The Arabs could then have had their independent state, plus a major share in the running of Israel. But by then the Mufti and his assassination squads had done their work. On 14 October 1947, when Azzam Pasha, Secretary-General of the Arab League, met the Jewish negotiator Abba Eban in London, he told him bluntly that the time for reason was past: if he accepted the partition he would, he said, be ‘a dead man within hours of returning to Cairo’.
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Here we see a classic case of the evil which political murder brings. For by the beginning of the actual fighting, Azzam himself was speaking the language of horror on the radio: ‘This will be a war of extermination and a momentous massacre’, he announced.
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Even before the fighting began, 30,000 mainly well-to-do Arabs had left Palestine temporarily, expecting to return in triumph. They included the muhktars, judges and caids. With no administration to protect them, many poor Arabs fled. When the Jews captured Haifa, 20,000 Arabs had gone and most of the remaining 50,000 left afterwards despite Jewish pleas to remain. Elsewhere the Arab League ordered the Arabs to remain in their homes; there is no evidence to justify Jewish claims that Arab governments were responsible for the flight of the refugees.
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The Arab exodus was undoubtedly assisted by the fearful massacre carried out by the Irgun at the village of Deir Yassin on 9 April 1948, right at the start of the fighting. About 250 men, women and children were murdered. An Irgun spokesman said on the evening of this atrocity: ‘We intend to attack, conquer and keep until we have the whole of Palestine and Transjordan in a greater Jewish state …. We hope to improve our methods in future and make it possible to spare women and children. ‘
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The Irgun units were thrown out of the Israeli Army during the June
truce in the middle of the fighting; and it was the honourable soldiers of the Haganah who, for all practical purposes, created and saved Israel.
By then the damage had been done. When the smoke cleared there were over half a million Arab refugees (the
UN
figure was about 650,000; the Israeli figure 538,000).
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To balance this, 567,000 Jews in ten Arab countries were forced to flee in the years 1948–57.
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Nearly all went to Israel and all who did had been resettled by 1960. The Arab refugees might likewise have been resettled, as were comparable numbers of refugees, on both sides, after the Greek-Turkish conflicts of 1918–23. Instead the Arab states preferred to keep the refugees in the camps, where they and their descendants remained, as human title-deeds to a Palestinian reconquest, and the justification for further wars in 1956, 1967 and 1973.
Granted Abdullah’s willingness to compromise, the Arab-Israeli conflict might have been quickly resolved. He had the best historical title to leadership of the Arab cause. But his country had only 300,000 indigenous inhabitants and an income of less than £1,200,000. It was the British who, to assist their war effort, had encouraged the Arabs to create a League; and since they directed the war from Cairo, and since Egypt was the largest country in the area, the League had become an essentially Egyptian and Cairene institution. Hence Egypt led the pack against Israel. This was both an anomaly and a tragedy. For geographical reasons, Egypt and Israel were natural allies; and in antiquity they had been so. The ‘pure’ Arabs of the Hejaz, like Abdullah, did not regard Egyptians as Arabs at all: he said they were poor, miserable and backward Africans. Egypt’s playboy king, Farouk, aroused his particular contempt: when he mentioned his name to visitors, Abdullah would spit into the corner of his carpeted tent.
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The Egyptians, by contrast, saw themselves as the inheritors of the oldest civilization in the world and the natural leaders of the Arab cause: Farouk had a vision of Egypt as an authoritarian Muslim state embracing gradually all Arabs, even all Muslims. Hence he identified the continuing campaign against Israel with Egypt’s own self-respect and aspirations for leadership in the region. From this essentially frivolous set of notions sprang the tragedy which turned Egypt into Israel’s bitter enemy for a quarter-century.