A War to Start All Wars
Will Israel Ever Seal the Victory of 1948?
Article Summary
Israel should pull back settlements and give up its '67 gains in order to secure its '48 victory.
Shlomo Ben-Ami was Israel's Foreign Minister in 2000-2001. He is Vice President of the Toledo International Center for Peace, in Spain, and the author of Scars of War, Wounds of Peace: The Israeli-Arab Tragedy.
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1948: A History of the First Arab-Israeli War
Yale University Press
2008
544 pp.
9780300126969
$32.50
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An annotated Foreign Affairs syllabus on the Middle East peace process.
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The ability to engage in a sober inquiry into the past is an essential test of free societies and truly democratic academic institutions, and the challenges that the new historians have posed to traditional myths surrounding the birth of Israel represent a major contribution to both historiography and the country's identity. The revisionists' work has had political consequences as well: the Israeli-Palestinian peace process of the 1990s was nurtured by their reshaping of the national Zeitgeist in Israel. The introduction of powerful new arguments about 1948 has influenced the views of politicians and peace negotiators, too, whether they admit it or not. (The speech I gave as head of the Israeli delegation during the 1992 multilateral talks on Palestinian refugees in Ottawa, Canada, was profoundly influenced by Morris' work.)
No such new history has yet emerged in the Arab world, nor have any Arab archives been opened to allow for such a fresh perspective. Most Arab historians continue to absolve their countries' militaries of all responsibility for the defeat. By exonerating the Arab armies and attributing their failure to the treachery and incompetence of conservative civilian elites, such scholars provided legitimacy for the revolutionary military regimes that took power across the Arab world after 1948.
REWRITING THE CREATION
Morris' latest book, 1948, is likely to become the most definitive study of the first Arab-Israeli war. On each and every facet of the conflict -- military strategy, human rights abuses, the refugee crisis, diplomacy, and propaganda -- it is an extraordinary tour de force. Exhaustive, although at times exhausting, it is a meticulous and authoritative narrative.
Morris' scholarship spares no Israeli founding myth, especially not the notion of Israel's "purity of arms" (one element of the Israel Defense Force's code of ethics, which dictates that force be used only in the pursuit of soldiers' missions), an idea that remains central to the nation's self-image as morally superior to its enemies. Morris supports his arguments with vast numbers of primary sources and always places his findings in their proper context. The atrocities and evictions suffered by Arab communities took place sometimes in the storm of battle, sometimes as the Yishuv's forces sought to secure roads linking Jewish settlements, and frequently in response to explicit orders from generals on the battlefield. Morris shows that the Zionists committed more massacres than the Arabs, deliberately killed far more civilians and prisoners of war, and committed more acts of rape. The Arabs, he claims, were responsible for only two large massacres: the December 1947 killing of 39 Jewish workers at the Haifa oil refinery and the Kfar Etzion slaughter of 150 Jews in May 1948. With painstaking detail, Morris exonerates the Arab side for what others have called a massacre: the destruction of a convoy of doctors and nurses on Mount Scopus in April 1948. According to Morris, this incident was simply a battle.
In 1948, Morris transcends the arithmetic approach -- with its emphasis on the number of troops on the ground -- that characterizes so many other revisionist accounts of the 1948 war. Certainly, the organizational capacity of the Yishuv was formidable; it managed to mobilize 13 percent of the Jewish population in the name of protecting the nation's precarious existence, a level of mobilization practically unknown in the annals of military history. Yet as Morris rightly points out, battlefield strength was never the Zionists' only concern; even more troubling was the fact that the Yishuv was encircled by large, hostile Arab states whose armies could easily retreat, recover, and be ready for the next round. Accounts that focus on the number of troops on the ground ignore the traumatic memory of the destruction of European Jewry, the Yishuv's deep sense of insecurity, and its tendency to see every battle in apocalyptic terms. Even today, Israel has not overcome the legacy of the Holocaust; its status as a regional power has not diminished its existential fears.
The Palestinian Arabs' war against the Yishuv in 1947-48 may have been disorganized and spontaneous, but the Palestinians almost succeeded in causing the United States to reverse its support for a Jewish state. The White House backed partition, but the State Department opposed it for fear of alienating Arab states. Zionist leaders were convinced that if the Yishuv appeared to be losing, the State Department's position would gain sway in Washington. Morris makes the compelling argument that the Yishuv's shift from a defensive stance to an offensive strategy in early April 1948 stemmed not only from signs of an impending Arab invasion but also from its fear that the superpowers would abandon their commitment to partition. The Yishuv's military doctrine -- as it had been conceived by the Jewish militias in the 1930s and was masterfully put into practice in the spring of 1948 -- was essentially one of offensive defense. The leaders of the Yishuv understood that crushing the Palestinian militias and securing control of the main roads were vital to repelling the imminent Arab invasion and convincing the international community to maintain its commitment to an independent Jewish state. And the victories they won as a result helped demarcate the boundaries of the new state.
