The Armies That Came Too Late

14 May 1948. A Friday afternoon in Tel Aviv.

In a small museum hall, under a portrait of Theodor Herzl, David Ben-Gurion stood at a microphone and read out a declaration establishing the State of Israel. It took about seventeen minutes. Thirty-seven people signed it. The orchestra played, everyone stood, and people wept, and outside the crowds went into the streets.

You should let that moment be what it was for them. For a people who had just watched a third of their entire number murdered in Europe, and who had spent two thousand years being told they belonged nowhere, this was survival. The joy was earned.

Eleven minutes after the declaration took effect, the United States recognised the new state. President Harry Truman signed off on it personally, over the objections of his own State Department, which had warned him it would set the region on fire for a generation.

At midnight, the British Mandate ended. The last High Commissioner, Sir Alan Cunningham, inspected an honour guard, boarded a plane in Haifa, and flew to Cyprus.

Britain had been in charge for thirty-one years. It left without handing power to anybody, without a functioning administration in place, and without doing anything at all for the 350,000 people who were already homeless because of a promise Britain had made 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 the old story treats as the start of the war, with tiny Israel surrounded by five Arab nations. So let’s look at what actually arrived.

Roughly 25,000 to 30,000 Arab soldiers, in total, from five countries. Israel had around 30,000 under arms on 15 May, and by the middle of July it had about 65,000, and by December close to 100,000. Israel had more men in the field than the Arab side for almost the entire war.

The Arab armies were also not one army. They had no joint command worth the name. Egypt did not trust Transjordan. Transjordan did not trust Syria. Nobody trusted the Palestinians. Their supply lines ran back across deserts to capitals that were themselves half controlled by Britain, and several of them were using rifles their British advisers had sold them.

And the biggest, best-trained Arab force on the field was commanded by an Englishman.

The deal nobody was supposed to see

The Arab Legion of Transjordan was a genuinely good army. Its commander was Lieutenant General Sir John Bagot Glubb, known as Glubb Pasha, a British officer, with more than forty British officers serving under him, paid for largely by Britain.

On 2 May 1948, in London, the Jordanian Prime Minister Tawfiq Abu al-Huda met the British Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin. Glubb was in the room and translated.

Glubb wrote down afterwards how it went, and it was short.

Bevin asked what Jordan planned to do. Abu al-Huda said the Arab Legion would go in and hold the Arab part of Palestine. Bevin said that sounded like the sensible thing, and then added the sentence that shaped everything after it. Do not go into the part given to the Jews.

That was the whole negotiation. Two men and a translator, in a room in London, thirteen days before the Mandate ended.

Later that same day, British officers serving inside the Arab Legion sat down over maps and worked out the practical version of it. Exactly where the Jordanian advance would stop, so that it never crossed into the territory allotted to the Jewish state.

Lines settled at a table in London by British officers, in May 1948. Now go and look at a map of the West Bank today. Those are the lines.

King Abdullah of Transjordan had been in quiet contact with the Jewish Agency for years, including a famous meeting with Golda Meir, who travelled to see him in disguise.

So the strongest Arab army entered Palestine having broadly agreed in advance where it would stop. It fought hard for Jerusalem’s Old City and for the ridge that is now the West Bank, and it held those, and outside them it largely did not go.

There was one thing nobody managed to settle on 2 May, and it is the reason the map has a hole in the middle of it.

British officers inside the Arab Legion spent that day trying to work out some arrangement for Jerusalem before the Mandate ran out. A special status, an agreed division, anything. It collapsed. Nobody could get the two sides, or their own governments, to a formula that would hold.

So Jerusalem went into 15 May as the one place with nothing agreed about it at all. And that is precisely where the Legion did its real fighting, street by street in the Old City, while along the whole rest of its front it halted exactly where the maps in that London room said it would.

An army that fought like it meant it in one city and went through the motions everywhere else. That was not cowardice and it was not incompetence.

That was the deal.

Glubb himself later described what happened in 1948 with a phrase that has stuck to it ever since. He called it a phoney war.

And Glubb is worth seeing clearly, because he usually gets painted as a plain soldier who happened to be British and happened to command an Arab army. Historians who have gone through what he actually did describe somebody else entirely: a very capable politician, who used an Arab army to impose Britain’s partition on the Arabs.

He was not a man caught in the middle of this. He was one of the people arranging it.

Palestinians had spent months being told to wait, that the armies were coming, that they should not organise their own defence because the regular soldiers would handle it. The armies came. And the borders those armies stopped at in 1949 are, almost exactly, the borders of the West Bank today.

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

Lydda and Ramla

Then came July, and the two towns that make the clearest case in the whole war.

Lydda and Ramla sat on the plain between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, about 15 kilometres apart, both Arab towns, both assigned to the Arab state under the UN plan, both swollen with refugees from the coast. Around 50,000 to 70,000 people were in them by July.

The man who should have been commanding their defence was already dead. Hassan Salama, the revolt commander from chapter four who had held the Jaffa, Lydda and Ramla sector against the British, had spent the spring of 1948 fighting over the same ground a second time. He was mortally wounded at Ras al-Ein on 2 June and died soon after, five weeks before the towns fell.

Operation Danny, 10 to 13 July 1948. Israeli forces bombed the towns from the air and then moved in. Yigal Allon commanded the operation and Moshe Dayan led an armoured column that drove straight through Lydda firing as it went. The Arab Legion, which had a small force there, pulled back and did not defend the towns.

On 12 July there was a burst of shooting in Lydda after some Legion armoured cars appeared and townspeople thought rescue had come. In the fighting and killing that followed, people took shelter in the Dahmash Mosque. Israeli troops fired into it, including with an anti-tank weapon, and killed everyone inside. Estimates for the dead in the mosque run from about 70 to more than 170, and the figure most often given, including in the Al Jazeera film this series is built on, is over a hundred. Across the two days in Lydda, somewhere between 250 and 400 Palestinians were killed, most of them not fighters.

Then came the order.

Ben-Gurion was asked, at a meeting, what should be done with the population of the two towns. Accounts of exactly what he said differ, but the surviving note of the meeting records a hand gesture and the word expel. The written order that went out over Yitzhak Rabin’s signature instructed that the inhabitants of Lydda be removed quickly, without regard to age.

So on 13 July 1948, in the middle of a Palestinian summer, between 50,000 and 70,000 people were marched out of Lydda and Ramla on foot, east towards the Arab Legion lines. They were told to go and given no transport and no water. Some were searched at the edge of town and had their jewellery and money taken.

The road went uphill into the Ramallah hills. It was over 30 degrees. Families carried children and old people. Water ran out on the first day.

People died on that road. Old people, and small children, mostly of dehydration and exhaustion. The bodies were left where they fell because there was no time and no strength to bury them. Estimates of the dead on the march run from about 350 to over 500.

Palestinians call it the Lydda Death March. Israeli soldiers who were there wrote about it afterwards, and some of them never got over it. The Israeli writer Aryeh Itzhaki and others put the killings and the march on the record decades later.

Lydda’s airport, which the town had been proud of, is now Ben Gurion International Airport. Every visitor to Israel lands on it. Almost none of them are 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 graduate student named Teddy Katz submitted a master’s thesis at Haifa University based on interviews with Israeli veterans and Palestinian survivors. He concluded that after the village surrendered, around 200 men were killed.

The testimony he gathered is specific, and this is the part of the chapter that is hardest 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 veterans Katz interviewed, a man who went on to a respectable career as a lawyer, described walking along that line with a 9mm pistol, asking each man where his rifle was. A man who admitted having one was tied with a rope and taken off to fetch it. A man who said he had no rifle was shot in the head, 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 draws something out of testimony like this that reaches well past one village. The leadership, he argues, never had to worry about whether ordinary young soldiers would understand what was expected of them on that beach. It did not need spelling out in an order, because the Palestinians had already been emptied of their humanity in Zionist thinking, years before any of these operations began.

The groundwork was not laid in March 1948. It was laid in how a generation had been taught to see the men standing in that line.

The veterans sued him. Under enormous pressure, and in poor health, Katz signed a retraction, then tried to withdraw the retraction the next day. The court would not let him. His degree was revoked and his career was finished.

Then in 2022 a documentary film called Tantura went back to Katz’s original audio tapes and interviewed surviving veterans again on camera. Several of them, now very old men, described killings. One described where the bodies were put. Geophysical survey work has since indicated a probable mass grave under what is today a beach car park.

Israel’s official position remains that no massacre at Tantura has been proven. A number of Israeli historians now accept that something close to what Katz described took place.

This is put in front of you unfinished on purpose. Real history has arguments in it that are not settled, and you are old enough to be told which parts those are instead of being handed a clean story.

The rest of 1948

The war did not end in July. Israel used the UN truces to rearm, and the Arab armies mostly did not, and the last months were an Israeli advance.

Operation Yoav, October, cleared the south towards the Negev and pushed the Egyptians back to Gaza.

Operation Hiram, late October, took the upper Galilee in about sixty hours. During it, Israeli forces carried out killings 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 out and shot. At al-Dawayima near Hebron on 29 October, one of the worst massacres of the war took place, with estimates of the dead ranging from around 80 to several hundred, including people killed inside the village mosque and in a cave where they had hidden.

The armistices, and one last piece of land

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

Ralph Bunche had taken over as UN mediator after Bernadotte was murdered, and through 1949 he got the parties onto the island of Rhodes and worked 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 treaties, and the difference matters. An armistice says the shooting stops along this line. It does not end a war, it does not agree a border, and it says nothing at all about the people who had been driven out. Those 1949 lines are the Green Line, and they are still not an agreed border today.

Bunche was given the Nobel Peace Prize for it.

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

Under the April agreement, King Abdullah handed Israel a strip of good farming country in the Tulkarm and Jenin districts. Villages, with people living in them, that Israeli forces had never taken and had not been able to take. Palestinians call that area the Little Triangle. The handover was completed on 10 May 1949.

Israel was admitted to the United Nations on 11 May.

Read those two dates in order. The day before Israel took its seat among the nations of the world, an Arab king signed away a set of Palestinian villages he had come to protect, and the people living in them woke up in a different country without having moved.

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 the cost of it.

Out of about 1.4 million Palestinians, roughly 750,000 were outside the borders of their own country. More than 13,000 had been killed. More than 30,000 were wounded. Somewhere between 400 and 530 villages had been emptied, most of them then destroyed, and eleven Palestinian towns and cities had lost their Arab populations altogether.

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