The War Before the War

Ask most people when the 1948 war started, and they will tell you May.

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

Between 30 November 1947 and 14 May 1948, no army invaded Palestine. No Arab country declared war. What happened instead was a civil war, which means a war fought inside one country between the people who already live there. On one side, the Zionist forces. On the other, the Palestinians.

Britain was still in charge on paper. In practice, British soldiers mostly stood to one side and counted the days until they could go home.

By the time those six months were over, around 300,000 Palestinians had already lost their homes. About two hundred villages stood empty. Jaffa, Haifa, Tiberias, Safed and the western half of Jerusalem had already fallen.

Every bit of that happened before one 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, named on the front page, so that everybody could see exactly who had done it. Shops shut across the Arab world in protest, and angry crowds filled the streets of Cairo, Damascus and Baghdad.

Two years earlier, seven Arab countries had joined together into one group so that they could act as one. Egypt, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Transjordan, Saudi Arabia and Yemen. They called it the Arab League, and when Palestine needed help, the Arab League was who was supposed to give it.

So the Arab League did something, and what it did tells you how the next six months were going to go.

It found about 3,000 men who were willing to go and fight. That sounds like a real answer, until you look at where those men were sent.

Not into Palestine.

They were sent to training camps inside Syria, the country next door. Officers there would decide what the men learned, and how fast, and when they were finally allowed to leave.

Think about what that meant.

Those fighters did not belong to the Palestinians. They belonged to the Arab governments. The governments could send them in, or hold them back, or leave them sitting in a camp for as long as they liked, and the Palestinians could do nothing about any of it.

And Palestine could not wait. The fighting there had already started.

Meanwhile, young Palestinian men were making their own way to Damascus and Beirut and Cairo, carrying whatever money their families and their villages had been able to scrape together, trying to find somebody who would sell them rifles.

Most of them came home with nothing.

Put those two pictures next to each other. On one side of the border, Arab governments training their own volunteers carefully, in their own time. On the other side, Palestinians knocking on doors with a bag of cash, looking for guns.

And from Lebanon, where he had been living since 1937 because the British would not let him back into Palestine, the Grand Mufti Hajj Amin al-Husseini kept telling people in public that everything would come out all right.

The Arab nations were behind the Palestinians, he said. The plan to cut the country in two would never happen.

He was the man Palestinians looked to as their leader. And he was saying all of this from another country, with no army, no money of his own, and no real way of knowing what was or was not happening in those camps in Syria.

It is easy to blame him now, sitting where we sit. Remember two things before you do. He was telling frightened people the thing they needed to hear, which is what leaders have always done. And the only honest thing he could have said instead was that it was hopeless.

Count the two sides

Before you read what happened, you need to know what each side actually had. The two lists are not close.

By the spring of 1948 the Haganah could send 35,000 to 40,000 trained fighters into battle, and the number kept climbing. It had generals and officers giving orders from the top down. Radios, so that one group could talk to another. Guns big enough to shell a village from far away. Armoured vehicles. Its own workshops making weapons. And a steady supply of rifles and machine guns arriving by ship from Czechoslovakia.

It also had thousands of men who had fought in the Second World War as British soldiers, in the deserts of North Africa and in Italy. They had been through a real war already, and they knew exactly what one looks like.

Inside the Haganah was a smaller group called the Palmach. These were its best and quickest fighters, the ones sent to do the hardest jobs.

And fighting alongside them were the Irgun and Lehi, the two groups you already met.

The Palestinians could send 2,500 to 3,000 fighters. They were not an army. They were village men who picked up a gun, with nobody above them giving orders to everybody at once. Their rifles were old, and there were often not enough to go round, so two men shared one. Bullets were so scarce that a fighter might be handed a small handful and told to make them last. No big guns. No aeroplanes. No radios worth the name.

The reason there was nobody in charge of them all is the reason you already know. Their leaders had been killed, hanged or driven out of the country in 1939, and nobody had ever managed to replace them.

There was also the Arab Liberation Army, about 4,000 volunteers from Syria, Iraq and other Arab countries. They were brave, they were badly equipped, and they took their orders from Arab governments who did not trust the Palestinians and did not much trust each other either.

And one more thing, which sounds fair and was not. The countries of the world agreed to stop selling weapons to anybody in Palestine. That is called an arms embargo, and it was supposed to treat both sides the same. It did the opposite. The Zionists had already built a secret chain of people across Europe who could get guns in anyway. The Palestinians had no such chain, so for them the ban was real.

Add it all up. Roughly ten trained, armed, organised 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. Remember the lorry bomb in Haifa from the last chapter? Here it is again, pointed somewhere new.

Lehi fighters drove a lorry full of explosives into the old government building in the middle of Jaffa, which the Palestinians were using as their headquarters. Next door to it was a centre that looked after small children. The whole building came down. Around 26 people were killed, and most of them were ordinary people who had nothing to do with any fighting.

5 January 1948. The next night, Haganah men blew up the Semiramis Hotel in Jerusalem, in a quiet, comfortable Arab neighbourhood called Katamon.

They said afterwards that Arab fighters had been using it. There were none. Around 25 people died, all of them ordinary people. Seven were from one single family. So was a small boy, the son of the man who owned the hotel. Rescuers dug whole families out of the rubble.

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

Then something happened that is worth knowing about. The very next day, the most senior British official in Palestine sat down with David Ben-Gurion and asked him straight out whether his people had done it. Ben-Gurion talked his way around the question. Two days later he wrote back and admitted it. The Haganah had.

The rest of the record fits. Ben-Gurion removed the Haganah officer in charge of Jerusalem over the Semiramis and put a new man in. In public, the Haganah said only that it had been given wrong information about the building.

Think about how thin that sounds, when the building was a hotel full of sleeping families.

What the bomb did to Katamon happened almost straight away, and it is a pattern you should watch for, because it repeats all over Palestine that year.

The Arab families with money began to leave. They could afford to. And when the people with money go, a neighbourhood loses its doctors, its lawyers, its teachers, the people who know how to organise things and make plans. So by the time the poorer families needed somebody to lead them, the people who might have done it were already safe in Beirut.

There was something else going on in those weeks, and you need to know about it because it comes back later.

The Zionist forces had a special group of fighters called the Mista’arvim, a word that means to make yourself into an Arab. They were Jewish men, usually from families who had lived in Arab countries, so they spoke Arabic exactly the way a Palestinian speaks it. They wore the same clothes. They could stand in an Arab market and nobody would look at them twice.

They walked through Arab neighbourhoods listening, planting bombs, and killing people.

So when a bomb went off in an Arab street, nobody could be sure who had left it there. The man who did it might have looked like a neighbour, and sounded like one too.

Palestinians began to feel that the danger was coming from inside their own streets.

They were right. It was.

And the Palestinians and Arab fighters bombed too, and you should know that as well. In February a car full of explosives was set off in Ben Yehuda Street in Jerusalem, in a Jewish part of the city, and around 50 people were killed, most of them ordinary Jewish families. Jewish lorries carrying food and supplies had to drive in long lines along the roads, and Arab fighters hid and waited for them and attacked. Near Jerusalem, a whole group of Haganah men trying to get through to one of their settlements was caught in the hills, and every single one of them was killed.

So this was not one side shooting and the other side standing still. It was a war.

But it was a war between a state and a village.

Caesarea, February

On 15 February 1948, Haganah and Palmach fighters attacked a village by the sea called Caesarea. They drove more than a thousand people out of their homes. Then they knocked the houses down.

The young officer said to have led the attack that day was Yitzhak Rabin.

Rabin went on to become Prime Minister of Israel. He was given the Nobel Peace Prize. And in the end he was shot dead by an Israeli who thought he had given the Palestinians too much.

Caesarea was not picked by accident.

It was one of five villages emptied along that same stretch of coast in the same month. Doing five of them, one after another, was a way of testing two questions.

Could a village really be emptied, without its people putting up a fight big enough to matter?

And would the British, who were still the ones legally in charge of the country, do anything at all to stop it?

Both answers came back. Yes, it can be done. And no, nobody will stop you.

Around this time, Ben-Gurion wrote in his own diary what he thought one of these attacks ought to look like. Hit hard enough that the houses come down and the people leave.

Now look at that date once more. 15 February 1948.

Israel did not exist yet, and would not for another three months. No Arab army had crossed any border, and none would for another three months. And this was not even a battle. Almost nobody fought back.

The village was emptied. Then it was flattened, so that there would be nothing left to come home to.

Caesarea was not a strange one-off event. It was a practice run.

Plan Dalet

On 10 March 1948, the top Zionist commanders met in Tel Aviv and finished writing a plan. In Hebrew they called it Plan Dalet.

Dalet is simply the fourth letter of the Hebrew alphabet, so the name means nothing more than Plan Four. There had been a Plan One, Two and Three before it. This was the one that changed everything.

Plan Dalet explained what the Haganah should do the moment the British went home. Take the land the Jewish state was to be built on, and hold on to it.

But it did not stop at those borders. It also covered land the UN had given to the Arab state.

And it gave instructions about the Arab villages standing on all of it.

According to the plan, a village could be destroyed for two reasons.

One. The village fought back.

Two. The village was hard for soldiers to keep watch over.

If either one was true, this is what the soldiers were told to do. Burn the houses. Blow them up. Bury bombs in the broken stones, so that nobody could ever build there again. And push every single person out of the village.

Now read that second reason once more.

A village did not have to do anything wrong. It did not have to fight. It did not have to shoot at anybody. It did not have to help anybody.

It only had to be hard to keep watch over.

That was enough to destroy it.

It was a plan for ethnic cleansing. That means deliberately emptying a country of one kind of people, so that another kind can live there instead.

Look at the dates, because the dates tell you everything.

From early 1947 right through to February 1948, a small group of the most important Zionist leaders had been meeting quietly. Not once, in a rush, when war broke out. Week after week, for a whole year, talking about what to do with the Arabs living in Palestine.

So Plan Dalet was not written in March 1948 because fighting had started. It was the finished result of that year of meetings, and the folders full of village secrets were what they worked from.

Now put those meetings next to what the Jewish Agency was telling the world at exactly the same time.

Standing in front of the United Nations, the Agency gave its word. A Jewish state would not be a state where one race ruled, or one religion. Everybody living in it would have exactly the same rights, whatever they believed. Nobody would be ruled over by anybody.

Within six months of that promise, 300,000 people had been driven out of their homes.

And that was only the start of it.

By the time the fighting finally stopped, villages had been emptied by force. Massacres had happened. Houses had been knocked down so that the families could never come back. Seven hundred thousand people had no home to go back to at all.

The commander who went for guns

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

Muhammad al-Hunayti was a young officer in the Arab Legion, the army of Transjordan next door. That army matters later in this story. It was run by a British commander, with dozens of British officers under him, and Britain paid most of its costs.

Al-Hunayti walked away from all of it. He gave up his rank and his pay so that he could go and defend Haifa. In December 1947 the Palestinians of the city made him their commander.

He was good at it. He started with about 75 men and built that up to around 350, bringing in young men from the sports clubs and older men who had fought in the world war. He split the city into ten areas, each with its own leader reporting back to him.

The one thing he could not find was guns. So in March he went to Lebanon to buy some.

On 17 March 1948, on the road home, fighters were waiting for him. He was killed there, along with the lorries full of weapons he was bringing back.

Palestinians remember that day as the day Haifa was lost, and you can understand why.

Losing al-Hunayti did hurt badly. But Haifa was going to fall sooner or later anyway.

A Palestinian historian who has studied that city closely gives the reasons.

The Arab part of the city sat at the bottom of a mountain. The Jewish part sat above it, looking straight down on every street.

The defenders’ rifles had come from all over the world, and bullets made for one rifle would not fit another.

And every single road that help could have arrived on went right past a Jewish settlement.

He could not have saved Haifa. But without him it would have fallen far sooner than it did.

The man who sold his grandfather’s land

You met Abd al-Qadir al-Husseini back in chapter four. He fought the British during the great revolt, was badly wounded, and came back to fight again. By 1948 he was the commander Palestinians trusted more than any other.

He was in charge of the whole Jerusalem area. And he had almost nothing to be in charge of. A few hundred village men. Old rifles. Hardly any bullets.

So in early April 1948 he travelled to Damascus to ask the Arab League for weapons. He stood in front of those men and explained exactly what he needed.

They said no. Go back, they told him, and manage with what you have.

Palestinians tell what happened next like this. He looked at those men and called them traitors to their faces. He told them that one day people would remember them as the men who lost Palestine.

Then he went home to Jerusalem. He sold a piece of land his grandfather had left him. And he used his own money to buy rifles.

Stop and think about that. The man defending Jerusalem was paying for the war out of his own family’s land.

Al-Qastal, 8 April

Al-Qastal was a village on a hilltop just west of Jerusalem, and that hill stood directly over the road that carried food up to the city.

So whoever held the hill decided whether Arab Jerusalem ate, or went hungry.

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

Through the night of 7 April and into the morning of the 8th, his fighters climbed and fought their way up. Then, in the dark, Abd al-Qadir walked towards a house he believed his own men had already captured.

They had not. Haganah soldiers were still inside it.

He was shot dead there, on that hill, defending the road to Jerusalem. Palestinians have called him a shaheed ever since.

The next morning his men took the hill back in a fury.

And then almost every one of them walked straight back down off it again. They were going to Jerusalem to carry his body.

Something like thirty thousand people came to the funeral at Al-Aqsa. He was buried inside the walls of the compound, in the holy ground around the mosque. There was almost no greater honour Palestine could give a man.

This was not one family crying. It was a whole people.

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

So the road to Jerusalem lay open. And the best commander the Palestinians had was dead.

The next day

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

The very next day, 9 April 1948, about eight kilometres away from that funeral, fighters from the Irgun and Lehi walked into a small, quiet village.

There is one thing you need to know about that village before you turn the page.

Its people had tried very hard to stay out of this war. They had even signed an agreement with the Jewish villages nearby. A written promise, from both sides, that neither one would attack the other.

The village was called Deir Yassin.