Posted on June 16, 2008 by Steve Pollak
The Yishuv suffered about 6,000 dead in the 1948 Arab-Israeli War and historian Benny Morris appears to have attempted to account for every last one of them in his new book, 1948: The First Arab-Israeli War.
Arab casualty figures are more difficult to ascertain and the best Morris can say is that Palestinian losses in the 1948 war may have been "slightly higher, or much higher, than the Israeli losses." It's also hard to come by solid data on the Egyptian, Jordanian, Iraqi, Syrian and Lebanese losses.
Nevertheless, Morris tells us what he knows about the war, its origins, its aftermath and its costs. As I indicated in my lead, he goes into the minutiae of war statistics, tallying not only the number of dead and injured but also the weaponry and supplies on each side. He is not sentimental or wishy-washy about his subject. He writes in a sober, staid tone and delivers a cold assessment of what happened in the 1948 war. And let me tell you this: the picture he paints ain't pretty. But, to Morris' credit, he provides context so that readers will understand that civilian murders, rapes and expulsions occur in almost every armed conflict. In comparison to say, the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s or the Sudanese civil wars of the last 50 years, the behavior of the Israelis and the Arabs in the 1948 war looks tame.
Even so, Morris' work undermines the common Israeli belief that its fighters were characterized by a "purity of arms." Israeli forces killed innocent Palestinian civilians, expelled villagers from their homes and, in at least a dozen cases, raped Arab women. The Arabs committed those same types of atrocities when they had the opportunity but Morris notes that the Palestinian side suffered more killings, rapes and expulsions because the Israelis had a superior military and were more often in a position to commit such acts. All told, the Yishuv troops murdered approximately 800 civilians and prisoners of war, Morris writes. The most notorious among these incidents was the massacre at Deir Yassin where, according to Morris, 100 to 120 Palestinian villagers died and the ensuing panic sparked a massive flight of refugees from other Palestinian villages and towns.
Like I said, the other side engaged in similar behavior when they had the chance. The Palestinian Arabs, besides killing the odd prisoner of war, murdered 40 Jewish workers at the Haifa oil refinery on December 30, 1947 and killed about 150 surrendering or unarmed Haganah men in Kfar 'Etzion on May 13, 1948. There also was a mass killing of unarmed occupants of a Jewish bus in mid-April 1948 although Morris notes that this massacre occurred during or immediately after a battle involving Haganah and Palestinian Arab militiamen. I'm not sure why he noted the battle unless he wanted to hint that some of the occupants of the bus may have been killed in the crossfire and therefore the incident was not an actual massacre.
When the Arab regular armies joined the fight in May of 1948, Morris says, they committed few atrocities and no large-scale massacres of POWs or civilians.
The refugee problem
Over the course of his career, Morris has become known for writing about the Palestinian refugee problem and he devotes a fair amount of space in this book to analyzing the issue. As he has stated in his previous books and in several interviews, Morris concludes that the Israelis never maintained an official policy directing troops to rid Palestine of its Arab inhabitants. But, he argues, most of the 700,000 Palestinian Arabs who did flee left "when their villages and towns came under Jewish attack or out of fear of future attack." Some, especially the upper and middle-class Palestinian Arabs, abandoned their homes voluntarily in the early days of the conflict in the belief that they would be able to return after the Arab armies defeated the Jews. Israeli soldiers did expel villagers in several cases but Morris says he cannot find any order or systematic logic to the expulsions to indicate that there was an overarching, organized effort to cleanse the Palestinians from the land. At the same time, the emerging Jewish state would not have been possible unless some or all of the Palestinian Arabs were transferred elsewhere. Morris writes:
The Zionist leaders believed that a safe and relatively spacious haven was an existential necessity for Europe's hounded Jews, and that this haven could only be found in Palestine — but that to achieve safety and create the necessary space, some or all Palestinian Arabs, given their unremitting belligerence, would have to be transferred.
It's not an easy idea to embrace, especially given the fact that the Jews themselves had been on the receiving end of such treatment so many times in history. But, as Morris indicates, the events of 1947 and 1948 grew into an us-or-them situation and the army had to do what was necessary to win the war.
He goes into detail on the controversial Plan Dalet or "Plan D," which was the Haganah's master plan drawn up in March of 1948 for countering the impending invasion by the Arab armies and contains language giving Israeli brigade commanders carte blanche to occupy, expel and destroy Palestinian villages. The plan, according to Morris, "called for the Haganah to consolidate Jewish control in and around large Jewish and mixed population towns as well as the sealing off of enemy routes into the country, the consolidation of a defense line along the borders and the extension of Haganah protection to Jewish population centers outside the UN-sanctioned borders." In order to achieve the objectives, "swathes of Arab villages, either hostile or potentially hostile, were to be conquered," Morris writes. Once conquered, the commanders would decide the fate of the village in consultation with their Arab affairs advisors and Haganah officers.
While many Palestinian and pro-Palestinian historians charge that the document demonstrates the Haganah's plan to expel the country's Arabs, Morris says that "a cursory examination of the actual text leads to a different conclusion." The commanders were given carte blanche to do whatever was necessary to ensure the future security of the nascent state but Morris differentiates that from an actual order calling for the expulsion of the Arabs from Palestine: "Nowhere does the document speak of a policy or desire to expel 'the Arab inhabitants' of Palestine or of any of its constituent regions; nowhere is any brigade instructed to clear out 'the Arabs.'"
In contrast, Morris notes that, "expulsionist thinking and, where it became possible, behavior, characterized the mainstream of the Palestinian national movement since its inception." If anything, that thinking among Arab leaders contributed to the endorsement of expulsionist ideas by Jewish leaders, many of whom saw no other alternative to solving the problem of a potential fifth column in their midst.
Of course, it should also be noted that the war created a second refugee problem whereby approximately 800,000 Jews living in Arab nations fled or were forced to leave their homes. The majority of these refugees — more than 500,000 — ultimately made their way to Israel.
A continuing conflict?
Morris (pictured right), a professor of history at Ben-Gurion University and former diplomatic correspondent for the Jerusalem Post, writes in the book that the 1948 war was "a milestone in a contest between two national movements over a piece of territory." But, he goes on to say, "it was also — if only because that is how many if not most Arabs saw it (and see it today) — part of a more general, global struggle between the Islamic East and the West, in which the Land of Israel/Palestine figured, and still figures, as a major battlefront."
Morris, who has garnered headlines over the years for the things he's said as much as for the things he's written, seems to have settled into a belief that the 1948 war was the start of a continuing conflict between the Jews and the Arabs. In this continuing conflict, the Arab leadership carries most of the blame for preventing peace, he has said.
He didn't always appear to be so pro-Zionist. As a charter member of the New Historians school, he has disputed many of the traditional views of Israeli history. For that, he was embraced by the radical left and boycotted by the Israeli academic establishment. In addition, he refused to perform reserve duty in the West Bank in 1988.
But, more recently, he's been saying things that resonate with the conservative right. Case in point: four years ago he told a Ha'Aretz interviewer that David Ben-Gurion didn't go far enough with the Arab transfers and that Israel would be a more peaceful place today if he did.
If anything, these recent statements in the press demonstrate that Morris has given up hope for peace in the Middle East. This book echoes those sentiments in its casual observation of how the Arab world has refused to recognize or accept the outcome of the 1948 war. Indeed, Morris warns that the weight of Israel's success in the war needs to be balanced against the deep-seated hate and humiliation that haunts — and continues to haunt — the other side.
"Whether 1948 was just a passing fancy or has permanently etched the region remains to be seen," he writes.
1948: The First Arab-Israeli War is published by Yale University Press (544 pages).
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