Werzit

Intel - History
1948 Arab-Israeli War

"In God we trust.
All others we monitor."

• On 29 November 1947 the United Nations General Assembly approved a plan, UN General Assembly Resolution 181, to resolve the Arab-Jewish conflict by partitioning Palestine into two states, one Jewish and one Arab.
• Each state would comprise three major sections, linked by extraterritorial crossroads; the Arab state would also have an enclave at Jaffa. With about 32% of the population, the Jews would get 56% of the territory, an area that then contained 499,000 Jews and 438,000 Palestinians, though this included the inhospitable Negev Desert in the south.

• The Palestinians would get 42% of the land, which then had a population of 818,000 Palestinians and 10,000 Jews.
• In consideration of its religious significance, the Jerusalem area, including Bethlehem, with 100,000 Jews and an equal number of Palestinians, was to become a Corpus Separatum, to be administered by the UN.

• During the period beginning in December 1947 and ending in January 1948, it was estimated that nearly 1,000 people were killed and 2,000 people were injured.
• By the end of March, the figure had risen to 2,000 dead and 4,000 wounded.

• These figures correspond to an average of more than 100 deaths and 200 casualties per week; in a population of 2,000,000.

Abd al-Qadir al-Husayni led
the Army of the Holy War

• He moved to Egypt in 1946, but secretly returned to Palestine to lead the Army of the Holy War in January 1948
• Abd al-Qadir al-Husayni came from Egypt with several hundred men of the Army of Holy War.
• He was killed during hand-to-hand fighting for control of Qastal Hill on the Tel Aviv-Jerusalem road, on 8 April 1948.

• His forces captured Qastal from the Haganah, which had occupied the village at the start of Operation Nachshon six days earlier with a force of about 100 men.
• Having recruited a few thousand volunteers, al-Husayni organized the blockade of the 100,000 Jewish residents of Jerusalem.

• To counter this, the Yishuv authorities tried to supply the city with convoys of up to 100 armoured vehicles, but the operation became more and more impractical and more and more died in this process.
• By March, Al-Hussayni's tactic had paid off. Almost the entirety of Haganah's armoured vehicles had been destroyed, the blockade was in full operation, and hundreds of the Haganah members who tried to bring supplies to the city were killed.

• Up to 100,000 Palestinians, chiefly those from the upper classes, left the country to seek refuge abroad or in Samaria.

• This situation caused the U.S. to retract their support for the Partition plan, thus encouraging the Arab League to believe that the Palestinians, reinforced by the Arab Liberation Army, could put an end to the partition plan.

• The British, on the other hand, decided on 7 February 1948 to support the annexation of the Arab part of Palestine by Jordan.

• Ben-Gurion assigned Yigael Yadin the responsibility to come up with a plan in preparation for the announced intervention of the Arab states.

• The result of his analysis was Plan Dalet, which was put in place from the start of April onwards.
• The adoption of Plan Dalet marked the second stage of the war, in which Haganah passed from the defensive to the offensive.

• The first operation, named Operation Nachshon, consisted of lifting the blockade on Jerusalem.
• Fifteen hundred men from the Haganah's Givati Brigade and the Palmach's Harel brigade went about freeing the route to the city between 5 April and 20 April.

• The operation was successful, and enough foodstuffs to last two months were shipped to Jerusalem and distributed to the Jewish population.

Massacre of 254 Arab civilians at Deir Yassin

• During this time, and beyond the command of Haganah or the framework of Plan Dalet, troops from Irgun and Lehi massacred more than 100 Arabs, mostly civilians, at Deir Yassin, a move that had an important impact on the Palestinian population, and one that was criticised and lamented by all the principal Jewish authorities of the day.

• Contemporary reports, originating apparently from a commanding officer in Jerusalem of one of the irregular forces involved (the Irgun), Mordechai Ra'anan, gave an initial estimate of 254 killed. The size of the figure had a considerable impact on the conflict in creating panic and became a major cause of the 1948 Palestinian exodus.

• Egypt was to pay for 42% of the costs, Syria and Lebanon 23%, Saudi Arabia 20%, and Iraq the remaining 15%.
• At the same time, the first large-scale operation of the Arab Liberation Army ended in a debacle, having been roundly defeated at Mishmar Ha'emek[42] and having lost their Druze allies through defection.

Abdullah I bin al-Hussein, King
of Jordan(1882 – July 20, 1951)

• Golda Meir, disguised in an Arab robe, met King Abdullah in Amman on May 10-11, the second such meeting between them. During their first, Abdullah had agreed to a partition of Palestine to include a Jewish state. Now, he retracted, suggesting instead a Jewish canton within a Hashemite kingdom. Deir Yassin had changed things, he said. Meir reported later that Abdullah was approaching war "as a person who is in a trap and can't get out." The Arab invasion began at midnight on May 14, when Abdullah fired a symbolic shot in the air and shouted the word "forward."

Arab Legion poses with three Jewish prisoners

• On 13 May, the Arab Legion, backed by irregulars, attacked and took Kfar Etzion, where 127 out of the 131 Jewish defenders were killed and the prisoners massacred.
• The kibbutzim held off the attacks for ten days until Kfar Etzion fell and was subject to what became known as the Kfar Etzion massacre on May 14th, in which all but four of the defenders were summarily executed by Arab Legion and irregular forces.

• The other three kibbutzim surrendered and their residents were taken prisoners of war and released nine months later.

David ben Gurion

• On 14 May 1948, David Ben-Gurion declared the independence of the state of Israel, and the 1948 Palestine war entered its second phase, with the intervention of several Arab states' armies the following day.

• The new Israeli Defense Forces warned Palestinian Arabs that if they did not immediately flee the Jewish State of Israel they would be slaughtered.
• With Deir Yassin in mind, roughly 800,000 Arabs fled in a panic.

• The poorly equipped Arab states of Transjordan, Egypt, Syria, and Iraq launched an assault on the new State of Israel