Israel/Hamas War Superthread

[Bengalzona]

Dill Wrote:Yo B! I'll start here by addressing the bolded, especially as it frames Jewish settlers in the Arab Partition as without choice, while Palestinians in the Jewish Partition had "a viable option." 

Remember that in '47, The Jewish Agency proposed to the UN its plan for converting the mandate into a Jewish state; the Arab Higher Committee representing Palestinian Arabs proposed a single state, but one based on ethnic equality. The original Partition plan was a compromise which proposed that Arabs in the Jewish state would automatically be citizens thereof, same for Jews in the Arab state. 

Neither side liked this. The Jewish Agency approved it nevertheless, since it gave them the majority of the Mandate and Palestinian-owned land. But so far as I can tell, their leadership had no intention of allowing a 47% Arab majority in a Jewish state. E.g., Ben Gurion, in Dec. '47, stated that a 60% Jewish state was not viable; it needed to be at least 80%. The AHC rejected a plan which gave the majority of Arab-owned land to immigrants from Europe. 

Okay, so far.

Quote:I agree with you that Jews in the Arab Partition faced "violence and recriminatory actions." But the historical record we now have suggests that violence against Jews then was largely spontaneous, unorganized and retaliatory.*  In contrast, violence against Arabs in the Jewish Partition was systematic from Dec. '47 on, and by March '48, planned and organized with the goal of "cleansing" (Ben-Gurion's term) the Arab population, first from the Jewish Partition, then from the remainder of the Mandate. Ben-Gurion and the Jewish Agency's higher committee determined which regions were to be depopulated, using lists of villages with numbers of inhabitants, which had been compiled earlier. Having observed in December how Palestinian civilians fled from attacks on villages, the Hagenah command hit on the idea of using terror systematically to depopulate areas (called Plan Dalet).


In the countryside, this meant assaulting villages from three sides, allowing them to flee through the open one. This morphed into a serious terror when accompanied by rape and massacre.  The 2nd ed. of Benny Morris' The Origin of the Palestinian Refugee problem lists 20 village massacres. Probably the most well known was at Deir Yassin (04/09/48), in which some 90+ villagers were summarily executed, including 30 babies, and after a number of women were raped. 

Cities were besieged and the inhabitants driven out. E.g., Haifa fell on 23 April 48; 70,000 Arabs were expelled, Jaffa fell on 13 May, '48. It had been defended by about 1500 fighters, including German colonists (Templars) who had settled there in the 19th century. 5,000 Hagenah overwhelmed them and expelled 50,000.  By the time of the declaration of independence, some 250,000 had fled the Jewish Partition in terror, and another 400+ thousand would be driven from the Arab Partition by Nov. '48. 


You may ask how it was that some Arabs remained to become the 1.6 million current Arab citizens of Israel? In some cases, villages were spared at the request of nearby Kibbutzim who needed the labor.  When Haifa fell, 4,000 were allowed to remain, relocated to a poorer section of the city, their homes and furnishings given to Jewish settlers. That remainder was eventually "offered citizenship" as you say above.

Despite that remainder, it seems to me that the majority of Palestinians in the designated Jewish state did not, in practice, have an "option" to stay and become citizens should they want to. The mass were systematically driven out by violence and terror until the needed 80% Jewish goal was reached.

*E.g., the oil refinery massacre you mentioned, in which 39 Jewish workers were killed by a mob, was triggered by an Irgun terror attack which killed six Arabs.

First, kudos for the reference to Benny Morris and "The Origin of the Palestinian Refugee problem". I am familiar with Benny and the "New Historians" and think this is a good wellspring for our conversation. (For anyone reading this who is unfamiliar here is an online excerpt: https://ismi.emory.edu/documents/Readings/Morris,%20Benny%20Origins.pdf. It is worth the read!). I would also caution that Benny's views are as complex and as evolving as the Israeli-Palestinian conflict itself. In other words, some views and terms that he wrote about 35 years ago may not be the same views he holds today (see 
http://larryjhs.fastmail.fm.user.fm/The%20Birth%20of%20the%20Palestinian%20Refugee%20Problem%20Revisited.pdf) . But you are probably already aware of that.

But I'm going to get away from Benny for a moment and discuss a different view that I believe links back in to his writings that can help make sense of some of the things going on in the Mandate in 1947-1948. I'm sure you are very familiar with the My Lai (Son My) massacre in Vietnam in 1968. In my generation, it was a required reading part of the ethics and UCMJ training for officer cadets (and hopefully sill is). There are obvious parallels to that situation and the Deir Yassin massacre. At My Lai, a battalion-sized task force was ordered to close in on the village, burn the houses, kill the livestock, destroy food supplies, and poison the wells in order deny the enemy (VC 48th Local Force Battalion) access and refuge at the village (the village was suspected of supporting the VC).

I'll pause here for a moment to note that, as distasteful as this may sound to some folks, this (so far) is a military procedure. Clearing a village and then destroying it in order to deny the enemy access has been standard operating procedure for just about every army in the world at some point for the past several hundred years. The Soviets evacuated and razed thousands of miles of the entire western portion of their own country when they retreated from the Germans in 1941. In World War II, the order was often as simple as "clear the village". Nowadays, we also include it in our counter-terrorism/asymmetrical warfare playbook.

Skipping back to My Lai. Things went afoul, obviously. A stressed-out company which had just suffered 28 casualties due to mines and booby-traps in the prior weeks before was led into an orgy of murder and rape by a "dumber-than-a-hoe-handle" butterball lieutenant and vague operation orders from his equally dumbass captain. In the aftermath, the story got publicized and some people back in the U.S. felt bad about it. 2LT Calley was the only soldier court martialed for the massacre, but the sentence was commuted by Nixon. The U.N. police never showed up to arrest soldiers and hold war crimes trials a la Nuremburg or Kosovo. Funny how that works, eh.

So, let us look at Plan Dalet. Plan Dalet was the final part of a four-part plan by the Haganah to accommodate their goal of securing a Jewish state and began on April 2, 1948. In late 1947, Jewish and non-Jewish populations were inter-mixed. The main concept of the plan was a plan to link up command. communications, and support between Jewish majority areas for mutual protection from a promised offensive by regional Arab forces. To create those link-ups and secure them, it was realized that a large number of villages with primarily Arab occupants would need to be addressed. These villages fell into two main categories: villages which were along the defensive fortification system and villages which were not, but were within the partition plan border or in a strategic position just outside the border (see Plan Dalet, Section 3 (b) for reference). In the former category, a search and control operation would be mounted, the population expelled, and the village destroyed. In the latter category (the majority of villages, the procedure was to first determine if there was any resistance. If there was resistance, then any armed resistance would be destroyed and the villagers expelled. If there was no resistance, the the village would be searched and a garrison would be temporarily left, eventually transitioning to the village's own administration with a just a regional Jewish liason officer.  



This looks to me like pretty straight forward military plan to occupy an area and prepare for its defense, the type of plan with the same logic and military procedures we have been using here in the U.S. for decades. And I don't see this as a plan of mass expulsion or ethnic cleansing. As Benny Morris wrote:

"The essence of the plan was the clearing of hostile and potentially hostile forces out of the interior of the territory of the prospective Jewish State, establishing territorial continuity between the major concentrations of Jewish population and securing the future State's borders before, and in anticipation of, the invasion [by Arab states]. The Haganah regarded almost all the villages as actively or potentially hostile." - Benny Morris, "The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited", p.164

I'll get back to Benny in a moment. As Yoav Gelber wrote:

"Although it provided for counter-attacks, Plan Dalet was a defensive scheme and its goals were (1) protection of the borders of the upcoming Jewish state according to the partition line; (2) securing its territorial continuity in the face of invasion attempts; (3) safeguarding freedom of movement on the roads and (4) enabling continuation of essential daily routines." - Yoav Gelber, "Palestine, 1948: War, Escape and the Emergence of the Palestinian Refugee Problem",

But this was just the plan. And as we have seen from My Lai, the implementation of the plan can dramatically vary from the intent, eh. I'd like to circle back to Deir Yassin. The massacre at Deir Yassin occurred on April 9, 1948 when members of the extremist Zionist military groups Irgun and Lehi (terrorist organizations, IMO) killed over 100 Palestinian Arabs, including women and children. The groups were located in and around Jerusalem, where approximately 100,000 Jews were encircled and blockaded by the Arab Liberation Army at the time. The village was to be seized as part of Haganah Operation Nachson, an effort to break through the blockade. Operation Nachson was a seperate plan from Plan Dalet. Ostensibly, Irgun and Lehi were to operate together (for the first time since Lehi split from Irgun in 1940) and in their first operation under the orders of Haganah. Haganah issued the order for the two groups to seize the town and expel the population. Per accounts from members of Irgun and Lehi, the leadership of Lehi decided to commit the murders. The Lehi commander Ben-Zion Cohen later reportedly stated "had there been three or four more Deir Yassins,.. not a single Arab would have remained in the country", which I believe succinctly shows the intent of the Lehi groups' thinking. The leader of the Irgun group, Menachim Begin, reportedly objected to the murders and ordered his troops not to participate. In any event, they did not intervene. As far as the rapes, that may have occurred or it may not have occurred. And if it did, how many victims would also be unknown. My take on it is, it wasn't Lehi's modus operandi... but I wouldn't put it past the sick f**ks. In the aftermath, Haganah and the Jewish Agency condemned the murders and Arab leaders decried it. And that was about the extent of it. No U.N. police showed up to arrest the perpetrators. In fact, most of the world ignored it. That is, except for the Arab nations, some of whom now felt compelled to support a fight against the Jewish state. Sadly enough, the Lehi group correctly predicted how this evil act would impact things (and I really hate that fact).


If I were to refer to the recent Hamas attack in Israel as a "a massacre conducted by the Palestinians", I think you and quite a few others would find that phrasing unacceptable. Some might even want to correct me and say that it was an attack by the Hamas group and not an attack by all of the Palestinian people. It would be kind of like saying the My Lai massacre was the fault of all of the Americans. So, why would some people find it acceptable to attribute the massacre at Deir Yassin on the Haganah and Jewish leadership of that time? Especially since the Lehi group openly and proudly announced that they had done it. If someone is not bothered by the varying subjectivity of views, perhaps they might do very well in a career at Fox News, eh.

So, back to Plan Dalet. Here is what Benny Morris had to say on its implementation:

"The plan was neither understood nor used by the senior field officers as a blanket instruction for the expulsion of 'the Arabs'. But, in providing for the expulsion or destruction of villages that had resisted or might threaten the Yishuv, it constituted a strategic-doctrinal and carte blanche for expulsions by front, brigade, district and battalion commanders (who in each case argued military necessity) and it gave commanders, post facto, formal, persuasive cover for their actions. However, during April–June, relatively few commanders faced the moral dilemma of having to carry out the expulsion clauses. Townspeople and villagers usually left their homes before or during battle, and Haganah rarely had to decide about, or issue, expulsion orders." - Benny Morris, "The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited", p.165

Quote:Well, an independent state of Palestine was declared in Gaza in Sept. of '48 too, but the critical difference here is not dates and declarations so much as the military force and territorial control behind the claims. So I'd say the critical difference between the sides was, from the get go, the imbalance of forces. 

The Jewish Agency had been, in effect, a para-state during the Mandate, with a parallel control over public works in many places, educational institutions and its own diplomatic core. This was because the British intended to create a "national home" for the Jews in Palestine, and did not intend to ask the Arab population what they thought about that. In Nov. '47, the JA could easily operate as a centralized,  independent government. The Palestinians had nothing comparable to that centralized organization, which had been forbidden them during the Mandate, and the majority of their political leaders had been deported in '36-37.  Critically, also, the Jewish Agency had outside resources--money from America and modern arms from Czechoslovakia. The Palestinians only foreign resources were those which could be mustered from poor, newly liberated and relatively disorganized Arab countries. One of them, as you've noted, collaborating with the JA to grab Palestinian land.

In Jan. '48, on the ground for the civil war phase of the "war for independence," the Hagenah had about 50,000 armed men at its disposal, at least 20,000 trained in the British Army. The Palestinians had about 7,000 armed men--mostly scattered in defense of villages, plus another 1,000 from Iraq which arrived in February, plus a few hundred other volunteers from Egypt and Syria. No centralized command.

So from a historical distance, one can certainly see "both sides" dispensing with international law and maneuvering for position and murdering each other, but up close it is something rather different--a settler society, with the blessing and help of European powers, who did not want Jews in their own countries, and the US, displacing an indigenous population resisting that displacement. 

Anyway B, I'll address the second part of your post on Sunday.  Meantime, I'm curious to get your take on all this. Perhaps the discussion should turn to sources as well. 

*International Humanitarian Law does apply to stateless actors, yes.

- The All-Palestine Government was viewed by many as being Egyptian construct/puppet, since Gaza was under Egyptian control. Some saw it as a political tool by Egypt to foil Transjordan's effort to annex the West Bank (the All-Palestine Government control over all of the Palestinian Mandate, including the West Bank). Sure, Egypt renounced its claim to Gaza. But then Nasser came along with Pan-Arabism and shelved any notions of Palestinian self-rule. Besides, the nations in the rest of the world (as represented by the U.N.) were not going to accept a independent Palestinian state which did not recognize the partition plan.

- When you say the leaders were deported in '36-'37 you must mean Sheikh Iss ad-Din al-Qassam, the Black Hand, Amin al-Husseini, and the Arab Higher Committee, the ones who led a terrorist campaign against Jewish settlers (which led to formation of Irgun as a reaction, btw) and led an open and declared insurrection against the British. Funny, but that sounds an awful lot like how Lehi was operating for the Jews (i.e. a terrorist organization) rather than a group seeking to openly and legally seek to better their people and form a nation state. It seems to me that their mandate was merely, "We don't like those new guys! Let us kill them!"

- I think when you say "money from America" that you must mean money and equipment donated from private donors in America. Heck, less than ten years earlier, we were kicking them away from our shores because the administration was afraid of anti-Semitic backlash. Until 1967, the U.S. government really didn't want anything to do with Israel (from 1967 to 1977, we found them to be useful as a proxy in the Cold War). And it wasn't just Israel. The U.S. focus after WWII was on Europe and east Asia. Outside of Iran (which proved to be quite useful in the Cold War), we didn't care much about the whole Middle East. Southwest Asia either. We saw it as more of a 'European problem' for the British and French to deal with. 

- I'm not sure where you are getting the "modern arms from Czechoslovakia". Both sides in the 1948 Arab-Israeli War conflict were using whatever WWII surplus equipment they could scrounge. And kinda crappy stuff for 1945 standards, even. There was an arms embargo against Israel in 1948. The Czech's did send small arms (mostly their knockoffs of the WWI-era German Karabiner 98k rifle), 25 Avia S-199 fighter (Czech knock-offs of the German Messerschimtt BF-109G, outdated by 1943) and 16 Submarine Spitfire Mk. IX fighters (also outdated by 1943). That doesn't constitute modern for that time. The Transjordanians and Egyptians also had Submarine Spitfires.

- In January 1948, Haganah had 9 brigades with approximately 27,000 soldiers. But not all of the force could by operational at any one time has they only averaged 1 rifle per every three soldiers. This is where the importance of the Czech small arms shipments came into play (i.e. it wasn't because they were modern, it was merely because they were arms of any kind). The first two shipments arrived on 4/1 and 4/2 1948, just before the start of Plan Dalek. The Jewish force increased to 35,000 in April and 88,000 at the end of 1948 due to mobilization and increasing immigrants.

Estimates vary on the number Palestinians and volunteers at the start. But the meager Palestinian force was not what the Jewish forces were preparing for. Their main concern was preparing to defend against the the forces sent by Transjordan (@10,000) and Egypt (also @10,000 initially), both trained and equipped by the British (The Jordanian Arab League included 48 former British officers) and also had sizeable armored contingents.

The biggest problem for the Arab forces was, as you noted, their disorganization. The Palestinians themselves were mostly just a simple agrarian people. I think you have characterized that correctly.

- As I noted before, the U.S. (either officially or unofficially) did not want anything to do with the situation. Yes, they voted for the partition plan and the state of Israel. And if the Palestinians had approached the U.N. with a state plan that was within the partition, they would have agreed to that too. They were far more concerned with potential Soviet aggression in Western Europe and the fall of China at that time.

I suppose that you could look at the British as bad guys in this. After all, they 'bit off more than they could chew' by taking on the mandate in the first place. Even in the 20's and 30's they were overstretched and could not do much to assist the development of the locals even if they cared to (and I'm not really sure they ever did). But I can see the British in the late 40's looking for a way out (not only of Palestine, but also in many other places) and seeing a highly organized group of immigrants as being a possible salvation for them. I imagine they felt it was a lot easier to deal with the Jordanians, as well.

Hope you had safe travels and good holidays!