The Armies That Came Too Late

A note for parents and teachers. Like chapter seven, this chapter describes massacres, including people killed inside a mosque and prisoners shot after surrendering. It is written plainly and without exaggeration, and it is not gentle. If you are reading it with a younger child, read it yourself first.

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14 May 1948. A Friday afternoon in Tel Aviv.

In a small museum hall, David Ben-Gurion stood up and read out a piece of paper announcing that a new country now existed.

On the wall behind him hung a painting of Theodor Herzl, the man who had first drawn up the plan for a Jewish state, back in chapter one.

The name of the new state was the State of Israel.

Reading it out took him about seventeen minutes. Thirty-seven people signed their names at the bottom. An orchestra played, everybody stood up, people cried, and outside the crowds poured into the streets.

Stop here, and let that moment be what it really was for them.

These were people who had just watched one out of every three Jews alive murdered in Europe. People who had spent two thousand years being told there was nowhere on earth they belonged.

For them, this was survival. That joy was earned.

Eleven minutes later, the United States announced that it accepted the new country as real. President Harry Truman decided that himself, against the advice of his own experts, who had warned him it would cause wars in that part of the world for fifty years to come.

That same night, at midnight, British rule over Palestine ended.

The last British governor walked out past a line of soldiers standing straight and still to salute him. He climbed into a plane at Haifa and flew away to the island of Cyprus.

Britain had run this country for thirty-one years.

It left without handing the job to anybody. It left no working government behind. And it did nothing at all for the 350,000 people who had already lost their homes because of a promise Britain made in a letter back in 1917.

The armies come in

On 15 May 1948, armies from Egypt, Transjordan, Syria, Iraq and Lebanon crossed into Palestine.

This is the moment most people think of as the start of the war. Tiny Israel, they say, surrounded by five Arab countries.

So look at what actually turned up.

Between all five countries, about 25,000 to 30,000 Arab soldiers in total.

Israel had around 30,000 men armed and ready on that very same day. By the middle of July it had 65,000. By December it had nearly 100,000.

For almost the whole war, Israel had more fighters than all five Arab armies put together.

And those five armies were not really one army at all. Nobody was in charge of all of them.

Egypt did not trust Transjordan. Transjordan did not trust Syria. And none of them trusted the Palestinians.

And think about where everything they needed had to come from. Food, bullets, spare parts, all of it had to be carried hundreds of miles across the desert from their own capital cities.

Those capitals were not completely free either. Britain still had a great deal of say in them. So Britain could slow those supplies down whenever it wanted to. Some of the soldiers were even carrying rifles the British had sold them.

And the biggest, best trained Arab army of them all had a British officer in command of it.

That is not a mistake in the writing. It is the most important fact in this chapter.

The deal nobody was supposed to see

You met the Arab Legion in chapter six. It was Transjordan’s army, and it was genuinely good. Its commander was a British officer called Glubb, with more than forty other British officers serving under him, and Britain paid most of its bills.

Now here is what happened twelve days before Britain left.

On 2 May 1948, in London, the Prime Minister of Jordan sat down with the British minister whose job was dealing with other countries. Glubb sat between them, turning the Arabic into English and back again.

The British minister asked what Jordan was planning to do. The Jordanian Prime Minister said the Arab Legion would go into Palestine and hold the Arab part of it. The British minister said that sounded sensible. Then he added the sentence that decided everything afterwards.

Do not go into the part that has been given to the Jews.

That was the whole conversation. Two men and a translator, in a room in London. Glubb wrote it all down afterwards, which is how we know.

Later that same day, some of those forty British officers from the Arab Legion sat down with their maps and worked out what that one sentence meant in real life. Remember who they were. They wore Arab Legion uniforms, they took Arab Legion pay, and they were British.

They drew a line showing exactly where the Jordanian army would stop, so that it never once crossed into the land meant for Israel.

A line drawn on a map, in a room in London, by British officers, in May 1948. Now go and look at a map of the West Bank today. It is the same line.

Now, who did that army actually belong to?

The Arab Legion was the army of King Abdullah, the ruler of Transjordan. The Prime Minister who flew to London worked for him. That deal in the London room was really the king’s deal.

And for years, in secret, King Abdullah had been talking to the Jewish leaders as well.

Golda Meir was one of those leaders. She once travelled to meet the king dressed as an Arab woman, so that nobody would know who she was.

So he was not simply a king going to war against them. He was also a king making secret deals with them.

So the strongest Arab army of all walked into Palestine having already agreed, in advance, where it was going to stop.

It fought hard for two things. The walled Old City of Jerusalem, with Al-Aqsa standing inside it. And the hills that people now call the West Bank. It held on to both of them.

Anywhere else, it mostly did not go.

Now go back to those Arab Legion officers and their maps.

There was one thing they could not sort out that day, and it is the reason Jerusalem is still being argued over today.

They spent that whole day trying to work out what should happen to the city. Some special arrangement. An agreed way of splitting it down the middle. Anything at all.

Every single idea fell apart. The Jewish leaders would not accept them. The Arab leaders would not accept them. And their own governments would not accept them either.

So on 15 May, Jerusalem was the one place in the country with nothing agreed about it at all.

And Jerusalem is exactly where the Legion did its real fighting, street by street through the Old City. Everywhere else, it stopped precisely where those London maps said it would.

So here was an army that fought for real in one city, and only pretended to fight everywhere else. That was not cowardice. It was not bad soldiering.

That was the deal.

Years later, Glubb described the whole of 1948 with two words that have stuck to it ever since. He called it a phoney war. Phoney means fake. He was saying that much of the Arab war for Palestine was only pretending to be a war.

Now look at Glubb himself for a moment.

People usually tell his story like this. He was only a soldier. He happened to be British, and he happened to end up in charge of an Arab army, and none of it was really his doing.

Historians who have studied what he actually did describe a very different man. Not really a soldier at all, but somebody very good at politics. A man who used an Arab army to make Britain’s plan happen, and it was Arabs who lost everything because of it.

Glubb was not a man caught in the middle. He was one of the people making the arrangements.

Palestinians had spent months being told to wait. The armies are coming, they were told. Do not bother organising your own defence, because real soldiers will handle it.

The armies came. And they stopped exactly where Britain had told them to stop.

The Arab states did not save Palestine. Several of them divided it up.

Lydda and Ramla

Then came July, and two towns that show what this war really was more clearly than anywhere else.

Lydda and Ramla stood on the flat land between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, about fifteen kilometres apart. Both were Arab towns. The UN plan had given both of them to the Arab state. And both were now crowded with families who had already run there from the coast. By July there were somewhere between 50,000 and 70,000 people in them.

The man who should have been defending them was already dead. You met Hassan Salama in chapter four, one of the commanders of the great revolt, who had held this exact stretch of country against the British. In the spring of 1948 he was fighting over the same ground all over again. He was badly wounded in battle on 2 June and died soon afterwards, five weeks before the towns fell.

From 10 to 13 July, Israeli forces bombed the two towns from the air and then came in on the ground. Yigal Allon was in charge. Moshe Dayan, the young man Wingate had trained ten years earlier, led a column of armoured vehicles straight through the middle of Lydda, firing as it went.

The Arab Legion had a small force in the town. It pulled back and did not defend it.

And one more thing you should hold in your mind while you read the rest. It was Ramadan. The fasting month had begun only days before. The people of Lydda and Ramla were fasting through all of this.

The mosque

On 12 July, a few Legion armoured cars appeared near Lydda, and the townspeople thought rescue had finally come. There was a burst of shooting.

What followed was killing in the streets. And as it spread, people ran for the one building they believed nobody would ever fire into.

They ran to the Dahmash Mosque.

A mosque is a house of God. It is where you go to pray, and in every one of the wars in this book, it is where people go when they think the world outside has stopped making sense. Old men, women and children crowded inside and waited.

Israeli soldiers fired into the mosque. They used an anti-tank weapon, a gun built to punch through the steel armour of a tank, on a building full of families.

Everyone inside was killed.

Nobody agrees on the exact number, and the honest range is from about 70 to more than 170. The figure given most often is over a hundred.

Across those two days in Lydda, somewhere between 250 and 400 Palestinians were killed, and most of them were not fighting anybody.

The order

Then came the order.

At a meeting, Ben-Gurion was asked what should be done about all the people living in the two towns. Accounts of exactly what he said do not match. But the note somebody wrote at the time records a wave of his hand, and one word.

Expel them. Drive them out.

The written order went out with Yitzhak Rabin’s signature on it. The people of Lydda were to be removed quickly, and it said plainly that their age did not matter.

So on 13 July 1948, in the heat of a Palestinian summer, in the first week of Ramadan, between 50,000 and 70,000 people were marched out of Lydda and Ramla on foot, heading east towards the Arab Legion’s lines.

They were given no lorries and no water. Some were searched at the edge of town and had their jewellery and their money taken off them.

The road climbed uphill into the hills around Ramallah. It was over thirty degrees. Families carried small children and old people on their backs. The water they had brought ran out on the first day.

People died on that road. Old people and small children, mostly from thirst and exhaustion. Their bodies were left where they fell, because nobody had the time or the strength left to bury them. Between about 350 and more than 500 people are thought to have died on the walk.

Palestinians call it the Lydda Death March.

Israeli soldiers who were on that road wrote about it afterwards, and some of them never got over what they had seen. Israeli writers put the killings and the march on the public record decades later, and that is a large part of how we know.

One last thing about Lydda. The town had an airport, and the people of Lydda had been proud of it.

That airport is now the main airport of Israel. Almost every visitor to the country lands on it. Almost none of them are ever told whose town this was in July 1948.

Tantura, and an argument that is still going

Tantura was a fishing village on the coast south of Haifa. It surrendered to the Alexandroni Brigade on the night of 22 to 23 May 1948.

In 1998 an Israeli university student named Teddy Katz spent a long time recording interviews with two sets of people. Israeli soldiers who had been at Tantura, and Palestinians who had survived it. Then he wrote up what they told him and handed it in to his university.

His conclusion was that after the village had already given up, around 200 men were killed.

What those people told him is very specific, and this is the hardest part of this chapter to read.

The coast was sealed off first by Israeli naval boats, so that nobody could get away by sea. Then the men of the village were taken down onto the beach.

One of the old soldiers Katz interviewed, a man who went on to become a respected lawyer, described walking down that line with a pistol in his hand, asking each man where his rifle was.

A man who admitted he had one was tied with a rope and taken away to go and fetch it.

A man who said he had no rifle was shot in the head, right there, on the sand.

Other accounts describe the men of fighting age being marched up to the village cemetery and set to digging. Long trenches, in rows. As each row finished its stretch of digging, that row was shot, and fell into the trench it had just dug.

Pappé takes something out of stories like this one that goes far beyond a single village.

The men in charge, he says, never once had to worry about whether ordinary young soldiers would understand what was wanted of them on that beach. Nobody had to write it down in an order. And the reason nobody had to write it down is that a whole generation had already been taught to see Palestinians as not quite people. That teaching had been going on for years before any of these attacks began.

So the groundwork for that beach was not laid in March 1948, when Plan Dalet was written. It was laid much earlier, in how those young men had been taught to look at the men standing in that line.

The old soldiers took Katz to court. Under enormous pressure, and in bad health, he signed a paper taking back what he had written. The next day he tried to take the paper back. The court would not let him. His university took away his degree, and his career was over.

Then in 2022, a film called Tantura went back to the original tapes Katz had recorded, and found some of those soldiers still alive, and filmed them talking. Several of them, very old men now, described the killings again. One of them said where the bodies had been put.

Since then, scientists have used machines that look underneath the ground without digging it up. They have found what looks very much like a mass grave, underneath what is today a car park next to the beach.

Israel’s official answer is still that nobody has proved a massacre at Tantura. A number of Israeli historians now accept that something close to what Katz described really did happen.

This is being put in front of you unfinished on purpose. Real history has arguments in it that nobody has settled, and you deserve to be told which parts those are, instead of being handed a tidy story.

The rest of 1948

The war did not stop in July. Twice the UN got both sides to agree to pause the fighting for a few weeks. Israel used those pauses to bring in more weapons and train more men. The Arab armies mostly did not. So when the fighting started again, Israel simply moved forward, and kept moving.

In October, Israeli forces pushed south into the desert and drove the Egyptians back into Gaza.

Then, in late October, they took the whole of the upper Galilee in about sixty hours. During those days, Israeli soldiers killed people in several villages.

At Safsaf, prisoners were shot and buried in a pit, and women were raped.

At Eilabun, a Christian village that had already surrendered, men were taken outside and shot.

And at al-Dawayima, near Hebron, on 29 October, one of the very worst massacres of the whole war took place. Nobody knows the true number. The estimates run from around 80 people to several hundred.

Some of them were killed inside the village mosque. Others had hidden in a cave, and were killed there.

Read those three villages together. A Christian village and two Muslim ones, in the same week, by the same army. Whatever Palestinians prayed, it made no difference at all to what happened to them.

The armistices, and one last piece of land

The fighting stopped one border at a time, and it stopped through an American.

The UN had sent a man to try to make peace, and he had been murdered for it. You will read how, and by whom, in the next chapter.

The man who replaced him was an American called Ralph Bunche. Through 1949 he got everybody onto the island of Rhodes and worked on them one country at a time until each of them signed.

Egypt in February 1949. Lebanon in March. Jordan in April. Syria in July.

These were not peace agreements, and the difference matters enormously.

What they signed was an armistice, which only means this. The shooting stops along this line. It does not end the war. It does not agree where the border is. And it says nothing whatsoever about the hundreds of thousands of people who had been driven out of their homes.

Those 1949 lines got a name. People call them the Green Line, because of the colour of the pencil used to draw them on the map that day. They are still not an agreed border, all these years later.

Bunche was given the Nobel Peace Prize for his work.

And inside the Jordanian armistice, one last piece of Palestine changed hands without a shot being fired over it.

In the April agreement, King Abdullah handed Israel a strip of good farming land around Tulkarm and Jenin. Not empty land. Villages, with families living in them, going about their lives. Israeli forces had never captured those villages and had not been able to. The king gave them away at a table. Palestinians call that area the Little Triangle. The handover was finished on 10 May 1949.

Israel was accepted as a member of the United Nations on 11 May 1949.

Put those two dates side by side. The day before Israel took its seat among the countries of the world, an Arab king signed away a handful of Palestinian villages that he had come to protect.

The families in them woke up in a different country without having moved a single step.

By early 1949 the fighting was over, and the shape of the land had changed completely.

The UN plan had given the Jewish state about 56 percent of Palestine. Israel now held about 78 percent.

Egypt held the Gaza Strip. Jordan held the West Bank and East Jerusalem, and annexed them in 1950.

The Arab state that Resolution 181 had promised did not exist, and no Palestinian anywhere governed a single square metre of Palestine.

Now count what it cost.

There had been about 1.4 million Palestinians. Roughly 750,000 of them were now outside the borders of their own country. More than 13,000 had been killed. More than 30,000 were wounded.

Between 400 and 530 villages stood empty, and most of those were then knocked down so that nobody could go back. And eleven Palestinian towns and cities had lost every single one of their Arab inhabitants.

The war was finished. The problem it made was not.