A new book recounts how Israel was born out of a war for land, a conflict it has never overcome

On May 14, 1948, David Ben-Gurion proclaimed the birth of the new State of Israel, “a Jewish state established by and for the Jewish people.” The next day, armed forces from Syria, Iraq, Transjordan, and Egypt entered Palestine. Consequently, the State of Israel was born in war and its first aim was survival.

Israel’s War of Independence, as it is known in Israel, was to consist of three phases of fighting, interspersed by UN-sponsored ceasefires.

In the south, an Egyptian army of ten thousand men crossed the border near the coast and attacked some isolated Jewish settlements in what was deemed to be part of the new Arab state. In the north, Syrian forces crossed the border but were resisted by Jewish settlers and Haganah forces, the latter now formed into the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF). Most of the invaders were compelled to withdraw. They lacked ammunition and were the least experienced of the Arab forces.

The major conflict was the battle for Jerusalem, just as it had been in the final days of the British Mandate. Abdullah of Transjordan moved his Arab Legion to defend the Old City, the mostly Arab East Jerusalem. It was his army that the Israelis wanted most to defeat, for two main reasons: first, they wanted to gain control of the Old City in order to protect the Jewish holy places and the Jewish minority that lived there; and, second, the Israelis knew that the Arab Legion was the most effective and best-trained Arab army – if they could defeat it, then the other Arab armies would collapse.

However, the Israelis were not able to overcome the Arab Legion, although they did gain control of West Jerusalem and were able to feed and protect the Jewish population in that part of the city. The Arab inhabitants fled or were forced out.

On June 10, the UN persuaded the warring parties to agree to a ceasefire. During the lull, the Israelis secured fresh supplies of weapons from Eastern Europe, mainly from the Czechs. (Britain had previously been the main supplier of arms to Egypt, Jordan, and Iraq but complied with the UN embargo on supplying arms to the warring sides.) The Israelis also used the ceasefire to recruit more men and reorganise and rearm themselves. This gave them a significant advantage, and when the Egyptians broke the truce, the Israelis went on the offensive and seized the initiative from the Arab forces.

In the second phase of fighting, the Israeli priority was to try to widen the corridor leading to Jerusalem, taking land allocated to the Arabs in the process. They were particularly eager to control this territory to forestall any UN peace plan that might force them back to the borders that had been drawn in the 1947 partition plan. They were largely successful and, although the Arab Legion held the Old City of Jerusalem, it did not attempt to seize land allocated to the Jewish state.

In the south, the Israelis resisted further Egyptian advances in the Negev, while they took Nazareth in the north and several other Arab towns in the centre. In the ten days of fighting during this second phase of the war, Israel improved its position and kept the upper hand for the rest of the war.

During the second truce, in September, Count Bernadotte, the special UN mediator from Sweden, produced a peace plan. It gave added land to the Arabs in the south and more land to the Israelis in the north, but Jerusalem was still to be an international city under UN control, and the Arab refugees were all to have the right to return home.

The next day, Bernadotte was assassinated by the Stern Gang. The new Israeli government wanted to maintain international support and ordered the dissolution of the Stern Gang and Irgun. Some of their members were then incorporated into the IDF.

In mid-October, the Israelis broke the ceasefire and concentrated on defeating the Egyptians in the south. This they did, even pursuing the Egyptian Army over the border. Under US pressure, they agreed to withdraw from Egyptian territory, but they remained in complete control of the Negev Desert.

Meanwhile, in the north, Israeli forces completed their capture of the Galilee region, and according to Benny Morris, “IDF forces carried out at least nine massacres of Palestinian civilians and prisoners of war.” This followed the instructions of the local commander, who, after a meeting with Ben-Gurion, ordered his men to implement “a quick and immediate cleansing of the conquered areas.”

A final ceasefire was arranged in January 1949. The new Israeli nation had lost six thousand lives, almost one per cent of the entire Jewish population. However, the Israelis now controlled 78 per cent of what had been the British Mandate of Palestine rather than the 55 per cent allocated to the new state by the UN.

Furthermore, four hundred thousand Palestinian Arabs had fled between May 1948 and January 1949. Most ended up in Gaza or on land bordering the west bank of the Jordan River. This flight and the events of 1947–49 have become known in Arabic as the Nakba, the catastrophe or disaster.

For the Israelis, this had been the war of national liberation. They had survived their first great test and were confident of their future as an independent nation. An American Zionist, Nahum Goldmann, wrote of the psychological effects of the Israeli victory:

It seemed to show the advantages of direct action over negotiation and diplomacy. . .The victory offered such a glorious contrast to the centuries of persecution and humiliation, of adaptation and compromise, that it seemed to indicate the only direction that could possibly be taken from then on. To tolerate no attack . . . and shape history by creating facts so simple, so compelling, so satisfying that it became Israel’s policy in its conflict with the Arab world.

The lessons that Israel had learned, especially of the advantages of “direct action over negotiation and diplomacy” and to “shape history by creating facts,” were to become particularly evident in Israeli policy in the years ahead.

Excerpted with permission from The Shortest History of Israel and Palestine: From Zionism to Intifadas and the Struggle for Peace, Michael Scott-Baumann, Pan MacMillan.