THE WAR OF INDEPENDENCE - INTRODUCTION

The Jews were at a disadvantage from the outset, not only in numbers but also in equipment. At their disposal were only about 15,000 rifles, a few light and medium machine-guns and mortars, hand-grenades and locally manufactured explosives. The British Administration did nothing to restore peace and order, in a few cases it helped the Arabs to attack Jewish settlements, it helped them to acquire arms and, on a number of occasions, British soldiers, or deserters from the British forces, fought actively alongside the Arabs or took part in acts of sabotage against Jews, while doing everything possible to intercept arms shipped to the Jews from abroad. Yet, in general, the Jews stood their ground. No Jewish village was conquered by Arabs or abandoned by the Jews before May 1948.

The Arabs were more successful in the battle for the roads. Soon, Jewish Jerusalem and the Negev settlements were under effective, almost uninterrupted, siege; their supplies of food, water and arms became very precarious. During the first four months of the fighting, the Jews were clearly on the defensive and suffered heavy casualties. The leadership was anxious not to give up any settlement or be drawn into a military confrontation with British forces.

The situation altered when, at the beginning of April 1948, the Jewish forces took the initiative in a comprehensively planned offensive to gain control over the whole area allotted to the Jewish State. The first objective was to open the road to Jerusalem, achieved by mid-April but lost again towards the end of the month. There was an abortive attempt of the Arab Liberation Army, early in April, to take the Jewish settlement of Mishmar Ha-emek as a first stage in an offensive for the seizure of the Haifa area. The initiative in the north passed to the Jewish forces, which took Tiberias on 18 April, Haifa on 21-22 April and Safed on 10 May. Jaffa was encircled by the end of April and surrendered on 13 May. Arabs fled in panic from the areas occupied by the Jews: their leaders advised them to quit the battle zone temporarily until they could return triumphantly within a few weeks; the appeal of the Jewish authorities to them to stay went unheeded.

The panic spread when, on 9 April, Jewish dissident fighter groups attacked the village of Deir Yassin on the outskirts of Jerusalem, killing over 100 Arabs. Four days later, Arabs attacked a convoy to the Hadassah Hospital on Mount Scopus, killing 77 Jews, most of them doctors and nurses. In Jerusalem, by then beleaguered, the Jewish forces overran several quarters in the southern and western parts of the New City, but came under heavy pressure in the Old City and could not break its encirclement. On 4 May, local Arab bands, supported by the Trans-Jordan Arab Legion under British officers, attacked the Etzion bloc of four Jewish villages in the neighbourhood of Hebron, south of Jerusalem. After resisting resolutely for ten days and suffering heavily, the handful of defenders had to surrender, on the very day of the establishment of the Jewish State.

Throughout, the United Nations was ineffectual in preventing hostilities. The Security Council did not try to enforce the Partition Resolution and merely issued a call to the parties on 1 April to agree to a cease-fire (Document 1). On 23 April, it appointed a Truce Commission composed of the consular representatives residing in Jerusalem (Document 4); this body was instrumental in making some local arrangement but, on the whole, was of no avail.

The second phase of the War of Independence began on 15 May, when the armies of Egypt, Iraq, Lebanon, Syria and Trans-Jordan, and a Saudi Arabian contingent, invaded Palestine with the avowed purpose of destroying the nascent Jewish State (Document 5). Israel, attacked from all sides by regular and fully equipped troops, was in a perilous predicament. In the north, the Syrians and Iraqis crossed into Israel south of Lake Kinneret (Sea of Galilee), intending to overrun the Jewish settlements in the Jordan Valley and thrust forward through Arab-held Lower and Central Galilee towards Haifa. After initial successes, the Syrians were repelled at Degania and the Iraqis at Gesher and Belvoir, south of Tiberias, and withdrew; they had to give up their plans and made no further attack in that sector, but concentrated their efforts in Upper Galilee, where, early in June, they captured the bridgehead of Mishmar Ha-yarden, west of the Jordan River. The Iraqis moved their troops to the mountainous territory of Samaria, inhabited by Arabs only and assigned to the Arab State. They failed in a push on Netanya on the Mediterranean to bisect Israel in the narrow central part of the country, but drove back Israeli forces from Jenin and forestalled their penetration of Samaria. The Lebanese had some local successes in Upper Galilee but were pre-empted on the western front by the Israeli forces, which raced out of Haifa northwards and within a few days had conquered the whole of Western Galilee. In the south, the Egyptian forces moved rapidly from the Sinai desert along the sea road through the south of Palestine. Three Jewish settlements fell, or were evacuated, others were beset and lost heavily. The offensive was brought to a halt at the Ashdod Bridge, to the north of the village (now city) of that name, only 20 miles south of Tel Aviv. Another Egyptian column advanced to the east, by way of Beersheba, Hebron and Bethlehem to the southern outskirts of Jerusalem, where they were stopped at Ramat Rahel. But the Israeli forces could not open the road to the Negev, which remained cut off from the heartland of the country.

The fiercest battles were fought in and around Jerusalem. The Jewish Quarter in the Old City fell to the Jordanians on 28 May. To raise the siege of the New City, it was necessary for Israel to gain control of Latrun, a vital cross-road at the entrance to the Judaean Hills, and there, and at Jerusalem itself, the fighting was bitter and unavailing. When the first truce came into effect, the Jordanians controlled the Old City and all of East Jerusalem but had failed to conquer the New City. During the operations, the Israelis clandestinely built a reserve access, a dirt track that was named the "Burma Road": finished on the eve of the first truce, it forged an alternative link between Jerusalem and the plain, and the siege was at an end.

The Security Council issued several calls for a cease-fire, but the Arabs ignored them (Document 8). Even after a strongly-worded Resolution of 29 May ordering a four-week cease-fire (Document 9), they went on fighting, and it took lengthy negotiations by the UN Mediator to bring the truce into force on 11 June. Towards the end of the four weeks, the Council appealed to the parties to prolong the truce (Document 13). Israel responded, but the Arabs did not, and hostilities were resumed on 9 July. On the southern front, the Egyptians resumed hostilities one day before the expiry of the truce.

During the truce, both sides had strengthened their positions and reorganised their forces. When the fighting began again, Israel soon had the upper hand. In the north, a substantial part of Central and Lower Galilee, including Nazareth, came under its control. In the south, it captured the villages of Hatta and Karatiyya on the Majdal Faluja road and thus established a land-link, albeit a narrow one, with the Negev. The main Israeli offensive was delivered on the central front where Lod (Lydda) and Ramla were taken. On 15 July, the Council ordered a new truce, of unlimited duration, to become effective at 7:00 p.m. on 18 July (Document 15). This time the Arabs, badly pressed, consented. So did Israel, although the truce shattered any hopes of conquering Latrun and, perhaps, the Old City of Jerusalem and Ramallah. This second truce was frequently violated on all fronts, at the outset most often by Jordan in the Jerusalem area, but the local area commanders eventually reached an understanding and, on 30 November, signed a "sincere cease-fire" agreement. The Egyptians, in their violation, again blocked entry to the Negev. On 15 October, after an Egyptian attack on an Israeli convoy, the Israel Defence Forces, supported by aircraft, launched a counteroffensive, opened the way to the Negev and expelled the Egyptians from most of it. Beersheba was taken on 21 October. In the coastal belt, the Egyptians retreated from Ashdod to Majdal and thence to Gaza, but held on in the Faluja "pocket"; on the eastern front, they evacuated the Hebron-Bethlehem area where Jordanian troops replaced them. A cease-fire was arranged by the UN (Document 18). In the north, the Arab Liberation Army, not considering itself bound by the truce, sought to profit from Israel's preoccupation in the south and started an attack in Galilee. But a 60-hour Israeli counter-attack drove it back across the Lebanese border and gained control of the whole of Galilee, with the exception of Mishmar Ha-yarden. In their pursuit, one or two Israeli detachments crossed into Lebanon, took a number of villages and reached the Litani river.

On 16 November, the Security Council called on the parties to enter into armistice negotiations (Section III, Document 1). Israel responded affirmatively, but the Arabs did not and Egypt, in particular, was still in the mood for war, attacking Israeli communications, sabotaging water pipe-lines, in an effort to improve its military position. On 22 December, the Israel Defence Forces opened an offensive to drive the Egyptians across the border: in a bold movement, they pushed forward from Beersheba to Auja el-Hafir, entered Sinai, occupied Abu-Ageila, 30 miles west of the international border, and took the airfield of El-Arish. The Egyptians now faced a total rout. On 31 December, Britain asked the United States to inform Israel that it would invoke its military treaty of 1936 with Egypt unless Israeli forces withdrew to the international border. Israel consented to do so by 2 January 1949. Egypt, as it turned out, was not too eager to be thus rescued by Britain, probably considering the British evacuation of the Suez Canal Zone a more important desideratum. On 6 January, Egypt notified the Council of its readiness to enter into armistice negotiations with Israel under UN auspices. A cease-fire became effective on the afternoon of 7 January, which meant that Israel was unable to occupy the Rafa-Gaza area, which remained under Egyptian control (it was afterwards to be known as the Gaza Strip). A few hours before the cease-fire became operative, five British fighter planes flying over the battle, area were shot down by Israeli aircraft.

The cease-fire of 7 January signified the end of the fighting. It remained for Israel to establish effective control over the southern part of the Negev, allotted to the Jewish State under the Partition Plan. This was accomplished ill early March 1949, when Israeli forces, without fighting, reached Eilat on the shores of the Red Sea, and Ein Gedi on the western shore of the Dead Sea.

The War of Independence was formally terminated on 20 July 1949 with the signing of the Israel-Syria armistice agreement.

Israel had scored an outstanding success. Not only had it withstood the concerted onslaught of its neighbours, but it had considerably improved its territorial situation compared with the original Partition map, in size and in compactness alike. Still, its geographical, strategic, and geopolitical situation was to remain difficult. It had to pay a heavy price in life and limb, about six thousand killed - approximately four thousand soldiers and two thousand civilians - and many thousands more of disabled and wounded. But the establishment of the State of Israel was now an irreversible fact.