The War Before the War

Ask most people when the 1948 war started and they will say May.

They are about six months out, and those six months are where the Nakba actually happened.

From 30 November 1947 to 14 May 1948 there was no invasion, no Arab army, and no declared war. There was a civil war inside Palestine between the Zionist forces and the Palestinians, with the British still technically in charge and mostly standing to one side watching the clock run down on their departure.

By the time that phase ended, around 300,000 Palestinians had already lost their homes. Roughly two hundred villages were already empty. Jaffa, Haifa, Tiberias, Safed and West Jerusalem had already fallen.

All of it before a single Egyptian or Jordanian soldier crossed a border.

What the Arab world did about the vote

The reaction outside Palestine was loud, and it was mostly useless.

Arab newspapers printed the list. All 33 countries that had voted to cut Palestine in half, set out by name on the front page, so everybody could see exactly who had done it. General strikes followed across the Arab world, and there were furious crowds in Cairo, Damascus and Baghdad.

Then the Arab League did something more concrete, and it tells you how the next six months were going to go. It sent about 3,000 volunteers to training camps inside Syria. Not into Palestine. Into camps, in another country, to be trained at somebody else’s pace.

At the same time, groups of young Palestinian men were travelling to Damascus and Beirut and Cairo under their own steam, carrying whatever money their families and villages had managed to scrape together, trying to buy rifles.

Mostly they came home without any.

Hold those two pictures side by side. On one side of the border, an Arab government carefully training volunteers it controlled, in its own time. On the other side, Palestinians going round arms dealers with a bag of cash.

And from Lebanon, where he had been living in exile since 1937, the Grand Mufti Hajj Amin al-Husseini was telling people publicly that it would come out all right. The Palestinians had the Arab nations behind them. Partition would not stand.

He was the recognised leader of the Palestinian people, and he was saying this from another country, with no army, no treasury, and no real way of knowing what was or was not happening in those camps in Syria.

It is easy to be hard on him from where we are sitting. It is also worth remembering that he was telling frightened people the thing they needed to hear, which is something leaders do, and that the honest alternative was to stand up and tell them they were finished.

Count the two sides

You cannot understand what follows without the numbers, so here they are, and they are not close.

The Haganah could put roughly 35,000 to 40,000 organised fighters into the field by spring 1948, and it grew fast after that. It had a command structure, a general staff, radio communications, mortars, armoured vehicles, workshops making its own weapons, and a steady flow of rifles and machine guns arriving from Czechoslovakia. It had thousands of veterans who had served in the British army in the Second World War, men who had fought at Tobruk and in Italy and knew how a real war worked. On top of it sat the Palmach, its elite strike force, and beside it the Irgun and Lehi, smaller and harder.

The Palestinians could field around 2,500 to 3,000 irregulars. Village men, mostly. Old rifles, often one between two, and a shortage of ammunition so bad that fighters were rationed to a handful of bullets each. No artillery. No aircraft. No radios worth the name. No general staff and no unified command, because the leadership had been destroyed in 1939 and never rebuilt.

There was also the Arab Liberation Army, about 4,000 volunteers from Syria, Iraq and elsewhere, led by Fawzi al-Qawuqji. They were brave and poorly equipped and answered to Arab governments who did not trust the Palestinians and did not entirely trust each other either.

And there was an international arms embargo, which sounds neutral. It was not. The Zionist forces had already built a supply line through Europe that got around it. The Palestinians had nothing to get around it with.

Roughly ten trained, armed, coordinated fighters against one.

Bombs in the new year

The first weeks were street fighting, snipers, and bombs in crowded places, and both sides did it.

4 January 1948. Lehi fighters drove a truck packed with explosives into the old Ottoman government building, the Saraya, in the middle of Jaffa. It was being used as a headquarters, and it stood beside a children’s welfare centre. The building came down. Around 26 people were killed, most of them civilians.

5 January 1948. Haganah men blew up the Semiramis Hotel in the Katamon neighbourhood of Jerusalem, a comfortable Arab district. They said there were militia commanders inside. There weren’t. Around 24 to 26 civilians died. Seven of them were from one family, the Aboussouans. The Spanish vice-consul died. So did the young son of the man who owned the place. Whole families were dug out of the rubble.

The British called it the wholesale murder of innocent people, and they meant it.

What happened next is the interesting part. The documentary turned up records at Oxford of a meeting the very next day, 6 January, between the British High Commissioner and David Ben-Gurion, in which the High Commissioner put the bombing to him directly. Ben-Gurion deflected. Two days later, according to those records, he wrote back accepting that the Haganah had done it.

The wider record fits. Ben-Gurion sacked the Haganah officer responsible for Jerusalem operations over the Semiramis and put David Shaltiel in his place. The organisation’s public line was that it had acted on bad information about the building.

You are allowed to notice how thin that sounds when the building was a hotel full of families.

The effect on Katamon was immediate. Well-off Arab families who could afford to leave started leaving, which is the point worth noticing. The wealthy went first, and they went early, and when the professional class of a city goes, the doctors and lawyers and teachers, the city loses its ability to organise itself. By the time the poor needed defending, the people who might have led the defence were in Beirut.

There was another technique in use in these weeks, and it is worth knowing about because it comes back later in the story. The Zionist forces ran undercover operatives called the Mista’arvim, from an Arabic-derived word meaning to make yourself an Arab. Jewish fighters, usually from families out of Arab countries, who spoke the dialect, wore the clothes, and could stand in an Arab crowd without being spotted. They moved through Arab districts gathering information, planting bombs and carrying out killings.

That is why some of these attacks felt to Palestinians like they were coming from inside. Sometimes they were.

Palestinian and Arab fighters bombed too. A car bomb in Ben Yehuda Street in Jerusalem in February killed around 50 people. Convoys were ambushed on the roads. In the Kfar Etzion area, a Haganah convoy was wiped out.

This was not one side shooting at nothing. It was a war. But it was a war between a state and a village.

Caesarea, February

On 15 February 1948, Haganah and Palmach units attacked the coastal village of Caesarea, drove out more than a thousand people, and then demolished the houses. The young officer reported to have commanded on the ground was Yitzhak Rabin, later Prime Minister of Israel, later a Nobel peace laureate, later shot dead by an Israeli who thought he had given too much away.

And Caesarea was not chosen at random. It was one of a cluster of five villages on the coastal plain cleared that month, and the point of doing five was to find something out. Would the British, still legally running the country, lift a finger to stop it? Could a village be emptied without the population fighting back hard enough to matter?

The answers came back yes it can be done, and no they will not stop you.

Ben-Gurion’s own written instruction in this period, in his diary, was blunt about what an operation should look like. Hit hard enough that the houses come down and the people leave.

Look closely at that date. It is three months before Israel exists, three months before any Arab army arrives, and it is not a battle. There was barely any resistance. The village was emptied and then flattened so that there would be nothing to return to.

Caesarea was not a one-off. It was a rehearsal.

Plan Dalet

On 10 March 1948, a group of senior Zionist commanders met in Tel Aviv and finalised a document known as Plan D, or in Hebrew, Plan Dalet.

Dalet is the fourth letter of the Hebrew alphabet. There had been Plans A, B and C before it. This was the one that mattered.

Plan Dalet set out how the Haganah should take and hold the territory of the coming Jewish state, plus areas outside the UN partition lines, once the British left. And it included instructions on what to do with Arab villages in and near that territory.

The instructions, in the plan’s own careful military language, were to destroy villages by setting fire to them, blowing them up, and planting mines in the rubble, and to expel the population, if those villages resisted or could not be permanently controlled.

Now, historians argue hard about what Plan Dalet proves, and you should hear both sides properly.

Ilan Pappé, an Israeli historian, argues that Plan Dalet is the smoking gun. He says it is a master plan for deliberate ethnic cleansing, and that combined with the village files it shows the removal of the Palestinians was designed, not accidental.

His strongest card is the calendar. Pappé’s research points to a small inner group of Zionist political and military leaders, an advisory circle he calls the Consultancy, meeting steadily from early 1947 through to February 1948. Not once in a crisis. Regularly, week after week, for about a year, working on what to do about the Arab population.

Plan Dalet, on this reading, was not a plan drawn up in March 1948 because a war had broken out. It was the finished output of a year of meetings, and the village files were its reference library.

Now set that year of meetings beside what the Jewish Agency was saying in public at exactly the same time.

Testifying at the United Nations partition hearings, the Agency gave its word that a Jewish state would not be a racial state and would not be a religious one. It would rest on full equality of rights for every inhabitant, whatever their religion or race, with no “domination or subjugation” of anybody.

That was said on the record, to the body that was about to hand over half a country on the strength of it.

Whether the men saying it believed it is something you can weigh up for yourself. What is not in question is that the promise was made, and that within six months of it 300,000 people had been driven out of their homes.

Benny Morris, also an Israeli historian and the man who did more than anyone to document what actually happened village by village, disagrees on that specific point. He argues there was no single written order to expel all Palestinians. He says Plan Dalet gave commanders wide discretion, that a war atmosphere plus that discretion plus a shared unspoken preference for fewer Arabs produced expulsion after expulsion, and that the result was ethnic cleansing even without one master order.

Notice what they are not arguing about. Neither of them disputes that villages were emptied by force, that massacres happened, that houses were destroyed to prevent return, or that 700,000 people ended up refugees. The argument is about how much of it was planned in advance versus decided on the ground.

For the family walking out of a burning village, that difference was not visible.

The commander who went for guns

Six days after Plan Dalet was signed off, Haifa lost the man who was organising its defence.

Muhammad al-Hunayti was a young lieutenant in the Arab Legion who resigned his commission so he could volunteer, and in December 1947 Haifa’s Arab National Committee made him the city’s military commander. He was good at it. He took a national guard of about 75 men and built it up to around 350, pulling in sporting club members and men who had served with the British in the world war. He carved the city into ten defence zones, each with its own commander reporting in to him.

What he did not have was weapons. So in March he went to Lebanon to fetch some.

On 17 March 1948 he was killed on the road back, in an ambush, with the convoy.

Palestinians remember that day as the moment Haifa was lost, and you can see why. But Walid Khalidi, who has studied the fall of Haifa more closely than anyone, is more careful than that, and the careful version is worth having. Al-Hunayti’s death hurt badly, and the replacement who came in brought only thirty or forty men. Yet Haifa’s Arab quarters sat at the bottom of Mount Carmel with Jewish neighbourhoods looking down on them from the high ground, the defenders’ rifles were such a mixed collection that ammunition for one would not fit another, and every road a reinforcement might come in on ran past a Zionist settlement.

Al-Hunayti was not the difference between Haifa holding and Haifa falling. He was the difference between falling slowly and falling in three days.

The man who sold his grandfather’s land

The most respected Palestinian commander of the war was Abd al-Qadir al-Husseini, who had fought the British in the revolt, been badly wounded, and come back.

He commanded the Jerusalem region, and he had almost nothing to command with. In early April 1948 he travelled to Damascus to beg the Arab League’s military committee for weapons. He laid out what he needed. He was refused, and he was reportedly told to go back and manage.

The story Palestinians tell is that he told them, to their faces, that they were traitors and that history would record they had lost Palestine. Then he went back to Jerusalem, sold land he had inherited from his grandfather, and bought rifles with his own money.

That is the level we are at. The commander of Jerusalem, funding his front out of the family inheritance.

Al-Qastal, 8 April

Al-Qastal was a village on a hill west of Jerusalem, sitting right over the road that carried food and supplies up to the city. Whoever held that hill controlled whether Arab Jerusalem ate.

The Haganah took it. Abd al-Qadir came back from Damascus and threw everything he had at retaking it.

On the night of 7 April into the morning of the 8th, his fighters got up the hill. And in the dark, in the confusion, Abd al-Qadir walked towards a position he believed his own men had captured. It was still held by Haganah troops.

He was shot dead there.

His men took the hill back the next morning in a fury, and then almost all of them came down off it, because they went to Jerusalem to carry his body. Something like thirty thousand people came to the funeral at Al-Aqsa. It was enormous, and it was grief on a national scale.

While they were burying him, the Haganah walked back up onto the empty hill and took al-Qastal for good.

The road to Jerusalem was open, and the best commander the Palestinians had was in the ground.

The next day

Abd al-Qadir al-Husseini was buried on 8 April 1948.

On 9 April 1948, about eight kilometres from that funeral, fighters from the Irgun and Lehi walked into a small quiet village that had signed a non-aggression pact with its Jewish neighbours and had gone to some trouble to stay out of the fighting.

The village was called Deir Yassin.