1948: The First Arab-Israeli War by Benny
Morris, 524pp, Yale, £19.99
“Getting its history wrong is part of being a nation,”
wrote Ernest Renan, the 19th-century French philosopher. Israel is no
exception. Nineteen forty-eight was a seismic year in the history of the Jewish
people and that of the modern Middle East. It witnessed the birth of Israel and
its first war with the Arabs. Israelis call it “the war of independence”; Arabs
call it the nakba or the catastrophe. The literature on this conflict by
Zionist and pro-Zionist writers is vast, but it also incorporates a number of
myths. Like most nationalist versions of history, this literature tends to be
one-sided, selective, demonising of the enemy, and self-congratulatory.
The conventional Zionist account of the 1948 war goes
roughly as follows. The conflict between Jews and Arabs in Palestine came to a
head following the passage, on November 29 1947, of the United Nations
partition resolution which called for replacing the British mandate with two
states, one Jewish and one Arab. The Jews accepted the UN plan despite the
painful sacrifices it entailed, but the Palestinians, the neighbouring Arab
states and the Arab League rejected it. The United Kingdom did everything in
its power to frustrate the establishment of the Jewish state envisaged in the
UN plan. With the expiry of the mandate and the proclamation of the state of
Israel, five Arab states sent their armies into Palestine with the firm
intention of strangling the Jewish state at birth.
The subsequent struggle was an unequal one between a
Jewish David and an Arab Goliath. The infant Jewish state fought a desperate,
heroic and ultimately successful battle for survival against overwhelming odds.
During the war, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians fled to the neighbouring
Arab states, of their own accord or in response to orders from their leaders.
After the guns fell silent, the story continues, Israeli leaders sought peace
with all their heart and all their might, but there was no one to talk to on
the other side. Arab intransigence alone was responsible for the political
deadlock that persisted until President Anwar Sadat’s visit to Jerusalem 30
years later.
For many years, this standard Zionist rendition of
the Arab-Israeli conflict remained largely unchallenged outside the Arab world.
In the late 1980s, however, Israeli scholars, using official Israeli documents,
began to challenge many of the cherished national myths. The small group of “new
historians” included Simha Flapan, Ilan Pappé and the present author. Benny
Morris was a leading member of the group. He had impeccable left-wing
credentials as a kibbutznik, as a journalist and as an IDF reservist who spent
three weeks in jail for refusing to serve on the West Bank during the first
intifada. His book The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1947-1949 was
a milestone in scholarship on this acutely sensitive subject. He concluded
that, while there was no masterplan for expulsion, the IDF played a significant
part in precipitating the flight of more than 700,000 Palestinians from
Palestine. The Birth was followed by half a dozen books that helped to
consolidate Morris’s reputation as a rigorous revisionist historian.
Following the outbreak of the Al-Aqsa intifada in
September 2000, Morris’s thinking about the Arab-Israeli conflict and its
protagonists changed radically. He suddenly veered from the leftwing to the
rightwing end of the political spectrum and placed all the blame for the
collapse of the Oslo peace process and the return to violence at the door of
the Palestinian Authority. Morris even co-authored an article with Ehud Barak
pinning responsibility for the failure of the Camp David summit on Yasser
Arafat alone and propagating the myth that there is no Palestinian partner for
peace. The destroyer of national myths became the manufacturer of new myths
that portrayed the Israelis as “righteous victims” (to use the title of one of
his books) and the Palestinians as Muslim fanatics with unlimited aims.
The language used by Morris was particularly shocking
for its racist undertones. In a 2004 interview with Ha’aretz, he described the
Arab world as “barbarian” and the Palestinians as wild animals who had to be
locked up in “something like a cage”. Morris’s personal journey is interesting
to note because it mirrors the journey of Israeli society at large from the
heady days of the Oslo accords to the dark pessimism of the second intifada.
Against this background, I must confess, I had low
expectations of Morris’s new book on the 1948 war. I expected it to be history
with a political agenda, to display prejudice against the Arabs and partiality
towards the Jews. But I was in for a pleasant surprise. This is Benny Morris at
his best: immensely well informed, thorough, careful in the use of evidence,
thoughtful and thought-provoking. While the entire book is underpinned by
formidable scholarship and 72 pages of meticulous endnotes, it is presented in
a fluent and readable style. Morris has used the full panoply of secondary and
primary sources to produce a lively, absorbing and fast-moving narrative
history of the war. All in all, it is a most impressive achievement of original
research and synthesis.
The account proceeds chronologically, dividing the
conflict into two distinct phases: the civil war and the inter-state war. The
first phase lasted from the day after the UN vote in favour of partition to the
expiry of the British mandate over Palestine and the proclamation of the state
of Israel on May 14 1948. The second phase began with the pan-Arab invasion of
Palestine on May 15 and lasted, with two UN-decreed truces in between, until
the ceasefire of January 7 1949. The first phase was between the two local
communities; the second was between the army of the newly born state and the
regular armies of all the neighbouring Arab states. Most accounts of the war
concentrate on the second phase, but the early one was more critical. During
the first five months of fighting, the irregular Palestinian forces were
crushed, Palestinian society was pulverised, and the first wave of refugees was
set in motion.
It was the collapse of Palestinian society which
forced the Arab states, loosely organised in the Arab League, to commit their
regular armies to the war for Palestine. But the regular Arab armies fared no
better than the Palestinian militias. Conventional Zionist historiography
attributes to the invaders a monolithic war aim: to throw the Jews into the
sea. Morris recognises that the Arab coalition facing Israel was bitterly
divided, disorganised and poorly led and that the inability of the Arabs to
coordinate their diplomatic and military strategy went a long way towards
explaining their defeat on the battlefield.
David Ben-Gurion, the diminutive, 62-year-old,
tough-as-a-cob war leader, used to believe that the “secret weapon” of the
Israelis was their spirit. But the second round of fighting persuaded him that,
in fact, it “was the Arabs: they are such incompetents, it is difficult to
imagine”. The incompetence of the Arab leaders had been revealed even earlier,
during the four-week truce in June-July. The Israelis exploited the truce for
recruitment and reorganisation, and for importing heavy arms and ammunition
from eastern Europe in violation of the UN arms embargo. Their enemies wasted
the four weeks feuding over the future division of the spoils. When the
fighting was renewed, the Israelis seized the initiative and retained it until
the end of the war.
Morris subjects the conflicting national narratives
of the 1948 war to rigorous scrutiny in the light of the evidence and he
discards all the notions, however deeply cherished, that do not stand up to
such scrutiny. One example is the tendency of Israelis to hail the “purity of
arms” of their soldiers and to contrast this with Arab “barbarism”. “In truth,
however,” writes Morris, “the Jews committed far more atrocities than the Arabs
and killed far more civilians and PoWs in deliberate acts of brutality in the
course of 1948.” A contemporary Israeli official implicitly conceded the charge
but pointed out that “There are no sentiments in war.”
The only major departure from the evidence, and from
common sense, is the stress on the jihadi character of the two-stage Arab
assault on the Jewish community in Palestine. Echoing Samuel Huntington’s silly
and superficial notion of a “clash of civilisations”, Morris depicts the 1948
war as “part of a more general, global struggle between the Islamic east and
the west”. The empirical evidence for this view is utterly underwhelming,
consisting as it does of a collection of random quotes. The bulk of the evidence
presented in the book suggests that the first Arab-Israeli war was essentially
a contest between two national movements over a piece of territory. Despite
this one serious lapse of judgment, the book is likely to stand out for many
years as the most detailed, dispassionate and comprehensive account we have of
the war for Palestine.
Avi Shlaim is a professor of international relations
at the University of Oxford and the author of Lion of Jordan: King Hussein’s
Life in War and Peace
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