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Summary
Summary
This history of the foundational war in the Arab-Israeli conflict is groundbreaking, objective, and deeply revisionist. A riveting account of the military engagements, it also focuses on the war's political dimensions. Benny Morris probes the motives and aims of the protagonists on the basis of newly opened Israeli and Western documentation. The Arab side--where the archives are still closed--is illuminated with the help of intelligence and diplomatic materials.
Morris stresses the jihadi character of the two-stage Arab assault on the Jewish community in Palestine. Throughout, he examines the dialectic between the war's military and political developments and highlights the military impetus in the creation of the refugee problem, which was a by-product of the disintegration of Palestinian Arab society. The book thoroughly investigates the role of the Great Powers--Britain, the United States, and the Soviet Union--in shaping the conflict and its tentative termination in 1949. Morris looks both at high politics and general staff decision-making processes and at the nitty-gritty of combat in the successive battles that resulted in the emergence of the State of Israel and the humiliation of the Arab world, a humiliation that underlies the continued Arab antagonism toward Israel.Author Notes
Benny Morris is professor of history in the Middle East Studies Department of Ben-Gurion University, Israel. He is the leading figure among Israel's "New Historians," who over the past two decades have reshaped our understanding of the Israeli-Arab conflict. His books include Righteous Victims: A History of the Zionist-Arab Conflict, 1881-2001 ; Israel's Border Wars, 1949-1956 ; and The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited .
Reviews (4)
New York Review of Books Review
IT was not one of the celebrated moments of what the Israelis call the War of Independence and the Palestinians call Al Nakba, the Catastrophe. But it is one of the more arresting ones. In late August 1948, during a United Nations-sanctioned truce, Israeli soldiers conducting what they called Mivtza Nikayon - Operation Cleaning - encountered some Palestinian refugees just north of the Egyptian lines. The Palestinians had returned to their village, now in Israeli hands, because their animals were there, and because there were crops to harvest and because they were hungry. But to the Israelis, they were potential fighters, or fifth columnists in the brand new Jewish state. The Israelis killed them, then burned their homes. As much as in any other scene in this meticulous, disturbing and frustrating book, the ineffable tragedy of Israelis and Palestinians resides in that brutal, heartbreaking image. On the one hand, the Jews were fighting for a safe haven three years after six million of them had been murdered. Undoubtedly some of those soldiers on patrol that day were survivors themselves, who'd lost their entire fami lies in Europe and been handed rifles after washing ashore in Haifa or Tel Aviv. And then there were the Palestinians, who had watched in horror over the past 75 years as these aliens first trickled, then poured, into their homeland. Were he an Arab leader, David Ben-Gurion once confessed to the Zionist official Nahum Goldmann, he, too, would wage perpetual war with Israel. "Sure, God promised it to us, but what does that matter to them?" he asked. "There has been anti-Semitism, the Nazis, Hitler, Auschwitz, but was that their fault? They only see one thing: We have come here and stolen their country." The history of the 1948 war desperately needs to be told, since it's so barely understood or remembered and since so many of the issues that plague us today had their roots in that struggle. Much of that history is military: how the dramatically outnumbered Jews managed to defeat first the Arabs of Palestine, then the combined armies of Egypt, Jordan, Iraq and Syria, along with a smattering of Sudanese, Yemenites, Moroccans, Saudis, Lebanese and others. But arguably even more important than the soldiers are the civilians, specifically the 700,000 Palestinians who fled as the war raged. To understand the Palestinians who now fire rockets from Gaza or become suicide bombers from Nablus, it helps to know how their fathers and grandfathers wound up in Gaza or Nablus in the first place. No one is better suited to the task than Benny Morris, the Israeli historian who, in previous works, has cast an original and skeptical eye on his country's founding myths. Whatever controversy he has stirred in the past, Morris relates the story of his new book soberly and somberly, evenhandedly and exhaustively. Definitely exhaustively, for "1948" can feel like 1948: that is, hard slogging. Some books can be both very important and very hard to read. On Nov. 29, 1947, the United Nations General Assembly approved a plan to split Palestine into Jewish and Arab states. The as yet unnamed Jewish state - or, as they say in Arabic, "Zionist entity" - would be tiny and divided: nearly half its citizens would be Arabs. Still, the Jews danced the hora that day on the streets of Tel Aviv. Ben-Gurion, who'd spent 40 years working toward that end, didn't join. "I could only think that they were all going to war," he said. Within hours, he was right. Through the following May, when the British Mandate expired, civil war raged in Palestine. On paper and on the ground, the Palestinians had the edge: there were twice as many of them, they occupied the higher altitudes and they had friendly regimes next door. But isolated and outnumbered as they were, the Jews were far better organized, motivated, financed, equipped and trained than their adversaries, who were so fragmented -by geography and tradition and clan - that the term "Palestinian" was either unwarranted or at least premature. The war became a rout once the Jews took the offensive, and the Palestinian refugee crisis began (if "crisis" can be used to describe anything so chronic). On all this, Morris excels. Arab refugees in northern Israel on the road to Lebanon, November 1948. Transfer - or expulsion or ethnic cleansing - was never an explicit part of the Zionist program, even among its more extreme elements, Morris observes. The first Arabs who left their homes did so on their own, expecting to return once the Jews lost or the fighting stopped. The Jewish mayor of Haifa begged Arab residents to stay; Golda Meir, then head of the Jewish Agency Political Department, called the exodus "dreadful" and even likened it to what had befallen the Jews in Nazi-occupied Europe. While Jewish atrocities - notably, the infamous massacre at Deir Yassin - were very real, apocalyptic Arab broadcasts induced further flight and depicted as traitors those who chose to stay behind. But once the Palestinian exodus began, Jewish leaders, struck by their good fortune, first encouraged it, then coerced it, then sought to make it stick. After all, the country needed room for Hitler's victims, as well as for those Jews fleeing Arab countries. And it also had to protect itself against insurrectionists in its midst. The Arabs, it was said, had only themselves to blame for the upheaval: they'd started it And, Morris notes, the Jews were only emulating the Arabs, who'd always envisioned a virtually Judenrein Palestine. Matters took another turn in May 1948, when the British left, Israel declared statehood and the armies of Egypt, Jordan, Syria and Iraq marched in. Again, for all their numerical superiority, the Arabs were ill-equipped, inexperienced, unprepared. Some Arab leaders knew they were in over their heads. But given the anger over the Jewish state on their streets and their own tenuous hold on power, not to invade was even more perilous. Within five and a half months, they were crushed, militarily and psychologically. But for international intervention, their defeat would have been still worse; the Egyptian army would have been annihilated. Only King Abdullah of Jordan, with the best (British-trained) army and limited objectives (not to destroy the Jewish state, but to annex the West Bank), got what he wanted. Meanwhile, Israel grew beyond the partition lines, gained more defensible borders and - by destroying Arab villages - further reduced the Palestinian population. The Israelis, Morris says, committed far more atrocities than the Arabs, but this was partly a function of success: they had far more opportunities. But had the Israelis committed systematic ethnic cleansing, he argues, there would not be 1.4 million Arabs in Israel today. Of course, by promptly driving out their own Jews, the vanquished Arab leaders became the greatest Zionist recruiters of all. Deep inside Morris's book is an authoritative and fair-minded account of an epochal and volatile event. He has reconstructed that event with scrupulous exactitude. But despite its prodigious research and keen analysis, "1948" can be exasperatingly tedious. The battlefield accounts, dense with obscure place names and weapons inventories, are so unrelenting, and unrelentingly dry, that you are grateful for the full-page maps (which themselves are hard to follow). The narrative cries out for air and anecdote and color. Even Ben-Gurion himself isn't much illuminated, apart from occasional parenthetical potshots. (It seems the guy was megalomaniacal and hyperbolic.) But Morris shares Ben-Gurion's bleak outlook on the Israeli-Palestinian future. If anything, in fact, his views are even darker. "Whether 1948 was a passing fancy or has permanently etched the region remains to be seen," he concludes. In other words, by whatever name you call it, the 1948 war has yet to end - and the winner is still not clear. Were he an Arab leader, Ben-Gurion once confessed, he, too, would wage perpetual war with Israel. David Margolick is a contributing editor at Portfolio magazine.
Choice Review
Morris (history, Ben-Gurion Univ.) is the author of numerous books and articles on the evolution and interpretation of the Arab-Israeli struggle for the same land (e.g., Righteous Victims: A History of the Zionist-Arab Conflict, 1881-1998, CH, Mar'00, 37-4059). In this new book, he describes in lengthy and documented detail the realistic and often brutal course of the 1948 war, as both Arabs and Israelis sought with whatever means available to protect and expand their territorial control. Partisans with preconceived views will not find this agreeable reading, but the footnoted evidence and the author's efforts at overall balance and perspective strongly qualify this book for all libraries and for those who truly want to see what really happened in the first Arab-Israeli war. In the final chapter, "Some Conclusions," Morris offers his own retrospective analysis of the conflict, which will spark further debate among ideologues. In terms of his more recent pessimism, he concludes that "Whether 1948 was passing fancy or has permanently etched the region remains to be seen." It's not over yet! Summing Up: Highly recommended. All levels/libraries. B. Harris Jr. Occidental College
Guardian Review
"Getting its history wrong is part of being a nation," wrote Ernest Renan, the 19th-century French philosopher. Israel is no exception. Nineteen forty-eight was a seismic year in the history of the Jewish people and that of the modern Middle East. It witnessed the birth of Israel and its first war with the Arabs. Israelis call it "the war of independence"; Arabs call it the nakba or the catastrophe. The literature on this conflict by Zionist and pro-Zionist writers is vast, but it also incorporates a number of myths. Like most nationalist versions of history, this literature tends to be one-sided, selective, demonising of the enemy, and self-congratulatory. The conventional Zionist account of the 1948 war goes roughly as follows. The conflict between Jews and Arabs in Palestine came to a head following the passage, on November 29 1947, of the United Nations partition resolution which called for replacing the British mandate with two states, one Jewish and one Arab. The Jews accepted the UN plan despite the painful sacrifices it entailed, but the Palestinians, the neighbouring Arab states and the Arab League rejected it. The United Kingdom did everything in its power to frustrate the establishment of the Jewish state envisaged in the UN plan. With the expiry of the mandate and the proclamation of the state of Israel, five Arab states sent their armies into Palestine with the firm intention of strangling the Jewish state at birth. The subsequent struggle was an unequal one between a Jewish David and an Arab Goliath. The infant Jewish state fought a desperate, heroic and ultimately successful battle for survival against overwhelming odds. During the war, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians fled to the neighbouring Arab states, of their own accord or in response to orders from their leaders. After the guns fell silent, the story continues, Israeli leaders sought peace with all their heart and all their might, but there was no one to talk to on the other side. Arab intransigence alone was responsible for the political deadlock that persisted until President Anwar Sadat's visit to Jerusalem 30 years later. For many years, this standard Zionist rendition of the Arab-Israeli conflict remained largely unchallenged outside the Arab world. In the late 1980s, however, Israeli scholars, using official Israeli documents, began to challenge many of the cherished national myths. The small group of "new historians" included Simha Flapan, Ilan Pappe and the present author. Benny Morris was a leading member of the group. He had impeccable left-wing credentials as a kibbutznik, as a journalist and as an IDF reservist who spent three weeks in jail for refusing to serve on the West Bank during the first intifada. His book The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1947-1949 was a milestone in scholarship on this acutely sensitive subject. He concluded that, while there was no masterplan for expulsion, the IDF played a significant part in precipitating the flight of more than 700,000 Palestinians from Palestine. The Birth was followed by half a dozen books that helped to consolidate Morris's reputation as a rigorous revisionist historian. Following the outbreak of the Al-Aqsa intifada in September 2000, Morris's thinking about the Arab-Israeli conflict and its protagonists changed radically. He suddenly veered from the leftwing to the rightwing end of the political spectrum and placed all the blame for the collapse of the Oslo peace process and the return to violence at the door of the Palestinian Authority. Morris even co-authored an article with Ehud Barak pinning responsibility for the failure of the Camp David summit on Yasser Arafat alone and propagating the myth that there is no Palestinian partner for peace. The destroyer of national myths became the manufacturer of new myths that portrayed the Israelis as "righteous victims" (to use the title of one of his books) and the Palestinians as Muslim fanatics with unlimited aims. The language used by Morris was particularly shocking for its racist undertones. In a 2004 interview with Ha'aretz, he described the Arab world as "barbarian" and the Palestinians as wild animals who had to be locked up in "something like a cage". Morris's personal journey is interesting to note because it mirrors the journey of Israeli society at large from the heady days of the Oslo accords to the dark pessimism of the second intifada. Against this background, I must confess, I had low expectations of Morris's new book on the 1948 war. I expected it to be history with a political agenda, to display prejudice against the Arabs and partiality towards the Jews. But I was in for a pleasant surprise. This is Benny Morris at his best: immensely well informed, thorough, careful in the use of evidence, thoughtful and thought-provoking. While the entire book is underpinned by formidable scholarship and 72 pages of meticulous endnotes, it is presented in a fluent and readable style. Morris has used the full panoply of secondary and primary sources to produce a lively, absorbing and fast-moving narrative history of the war. All in all, it is a most impressive achievement of original research and synthesis. The account proceeds chronologically, dividing the conflict into two distinct phases: the civil war and the inter-state war. The first phase lasted from the day after the UN vote in favour of partition to the expiry of the British mandate over Palestine and the proclamation of the state of Israel on May 14 1948. The second phase began with the pan-Arab invasion of Palestine on May 15 and lasted, with two UN-decreed truces in between, until the ceasefire of January 7 1949. The first phase was between the two local communities; the second was between the army of the newly born state and the regular armies of all the neighbouring Arab states. Most accounts of the war concentrate on the second phase, but the early one was more critical. During the first five months of fighting, the irregular Palestinian forces were crushed, Palestinian society was pulverised, and the first wave of refugees was set in motion. It was the collapse of Palestinian society which forced the Arab states, loosely organised in the Arab League, to commit their regular armies to the war for Palestine. But the regular Arab armies fared no better than the Palestinian militias. Conventional Zionist historiography attributes to the invaders a monolithic war aim: to throw the Jews into the sea. Morris recognises that the Arab coalition facing Israel was bitterly divided, disorganised and poorly led and that the inability of the Arabs to coordinate their diplomatic and military strategy went a long way towards explaining their defeat on the battlefield. David Ben-Gurion, the diminutive, 62-year-old, tough-as-a-cob war leader, used to believe that the "secret weapon" of the Israelis was their spirit. But the second round of fighting persuaded him that, in fact, it "was the Arabs: they are such incompetents, it is difficult to imagine". The incompetence of the Arab leaders had been revealed even earlier, during the four-week truce in June-July. The Israelis exploited the truce for recruitment and reorganisation, and for importing heavy arms and ammunition from eastern Europe in violation of the UN arms embargo. Their enemies wasted the four weeks feuding over the future division of the spoils. When the fighting was renewed, the Israelis seized the initiative and retained it until the end of the war. Morris subjects the conflicting national narratives of the 1948 war to rigorous scrutiny in the light of the evidence and he discards all the notions, however deeply cherished, that do not stand up to such scrutiny. One example is the tendency of Israelis to hail the "purity of arms" of their soldiers and to contrast this with Arab "barbarism". "In truth, however," writes Morris, "the Jews committed far more atrocities than the Arabs and killed far more civilians and PoWs in deliberate acts of brutality in the course of 1948." A contemporary Israeli official implicitly conceded the charge but pointed out that "There are no sentiments in war." The only major departure from the evidence, and from common sense, is the stress on the jihadi character of the two-stage Arab assault on the Jewish community in Palestine. Echoing Samuel Huntington's silly and superficial notion of a "clash of civilisations", Morris depicts the 1948 war as "part of a more general, global struggle between the Islamic east and the west". The empirical evidence for this view is utterly underwhelming, consisting as it does of a collection of random quotes. The bulk of the evidence presented in the book suggests that the first Arab-Israeli war was essentially a contest between two national movements over a piece of territory. Despite this one serious lapse of judgment, the book is likely to stand out for many years as the most detailed, dispassionate and comprehensive account we have of the war for Palestine. Avi Shlaim is a professor of international relations at the University of Oxford and the author of Lion of Jordan: King Hussein's Life in War and Peace . To order 1948 for pounds 18.99 with free UK p&p call Guardian book service on 0870 836 0875. Caption: article-shlaim.1 The language used by [Benny Morris] was particularly shocking for its racist undertones. In a 2004 interview with Ha'aretz, he described the Arab world as "barbarian" and the Palestinians as wild animals who had to be locked up in "something like a cage". Morris's personal journey is interesting to note because it mirrors the journey of Israeli society at large from the heady days of the Oslo accords to the dark pessimism of the second intifada. Morris subjects the conflicting national narratives of the 1948 war to rigorous scrutiny in the light of the evidence and he discards all the notions, however deeply cherished, that do not stand up to such scrutiny. One example is the tendency of Israelis to hail the "purity of arms" of their soldiers and to contrast this with Arab "barbarism". "In truth, however," writes Morris, "the Jews committed far more atrocities than the Arabs and killed far more civilians and PoWs in deliberate acts of brutality in the course of 1948." A contemporary Israeli official implicitly conceded the charge but pointed out that "There are no sentiments in war." The only major departure from the evidence, and from common sense, is the stress on the jihadi character of the two-stage Arab assault on the Jewish community in Palestine. Echoing Samuel Huntington's silly and superficial notion of a "clash of civilisations", Morris depicts the 1948 war as "part of a more general, global struggle between the Islamic east and the west". The empirical evidence for this view is utterly underwhelming, consisting as it does of a collection of random quotes. The bulk of the evidence presented in the book suggests that the first Arab-Israeli war was essentially a contest between two national movements over a piece of territory. Despite this one serious lapse of judgment, the book is likely to stand out for many years as the most detailed, dispassionate and comprehensive account we have of the war for Palestine. - Avi Shlaim.
Library Journal Review
Morris (history, Ben-Gurion Univ.) offers a study of Israel's war of independence, effectively debunking many of the myths surrounding it. He divides that war into phases: civil war between Palestinian Arabs and Jews, begun in November 1947, followed by a Pan-Arab (i.e., Egypt, Syria, Jordan, Iraq) invasion in May 1948. The Arab defeat in the civil war resulted in hundreds of thousands of Palestinian Arabs fleeing, most expecting to return behind a triumphant Arab invasion force. Although outnumbered, the Israelis had spent months after the UN partition resolution in 1947 preparing for war, while their opponents spent more time calling for jihad against the Jews, which naturally inspired Jewish fear of a second Holocaust. The Israelis had a unified command system, internal lines of communication, and the ideological fervor that came from defending their homes. The invaders (the author's term), meanwhile, lacked coherent leadership and a unified strategy, so by the fall of 1948 the Israelis had achieved local military supremacy. Morris disputes the assertion that Israel had an overall policy of ethnically cleansing the Palestinians. He meticulously documents the expulsions and atrocities that occurred on both sides. His work demonstrates that passion, not polemic, about this controversial era leads to good history. Recommended for all libraries.--Frederic Krome, Univ. of Cincinnati, Clermont Coll. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Table of Contents
| Acknowledgments | p. ix |
| Abbreviations | p. xi |
| List of Maps | p. xiii |
| 1 Staking Claims: The Historical Background | p. 1 |
| 2 The United Nations Steps In: UNSCOP and the Partition Resolution | p. 37 |
| 3 The First Stage of the Civil War, November 1947-March 1948 | p. 75 |
| 4 The Second Stage of the Civil War, April-mid-May 1948 | p. 113 |
| 5 The Pan-Arab Invasion, 15 May-11 June 1948 | p. 180 |
| 6 The First Truce, 11 June-8 July 1948, the International Community, and the War | p. 264 |
| 7 The "Ten Days" and After | p. 273 |
| 8 Operations Yoav and Hiram | p. 320 |
| 9 Operation Horev, December 1948-January 1949 | p. 350 |
| 10 The Armistice Agreements, January-July 1949 | p. 375 |
| 11 Some Conclusions | p. 392 |
| Notes | p. 421 |
| Bibliography | p. 493 |
| Index | p. 507 |
