===> "After all, I can’t imagine anyone actually WANTING to be a Jew." <===
Imagine being surrounded by hundreds of thousands of vicious, violent, bloodthirsty Arab forces, very well armed, and your side had very little to defend itself with.
That was the situation when the badly armed, badly trained Jewish fighters were faced with overwhelming Arab forces in 1948.
Yet the small number of brave Jews defeated the combined Arab armies! A miracle, right! It was impossible, yet the Jews of Israel won. You bet I am proud!
Now that you brought up the subject of Jewish pride, here is an extract from an article about Israel's 1948 war.
jewishvirtuallibrary.org
The Arabs had no difficulty obtaining all the arms they needed. In fact, Jordan's Arab Legion was armed and trained by the British, and led by a British officer. At the end of 1948 and beginning of 1949, British RAF planes flew with Egyptian squadrons over the Israel-Egypt border. On January 7, 1949, Israeli planes shot down four of the British aircraft.16
The Jews, on the other hand, were forced to smuggle weapons, principally from Czechoslovakia. When Israel declared its independence in May 1948, the army did not have a single cannon or tank. Its air force consisted of nine obsolete planes. Although the Haganah had 60,000 trained fighters, only 18,900 were fully mobilized, armed and prepared for war.17 On the eve of the war, chief of operations Yigael Yadin told David Ben-Gurion: "The best we can tell you is that we have a 50-50 chance."18
The Arab war to destroy Israel failed. Indeed, because of their aggression, the Arabs wound up with less territory than they would have had if they had accepted partition.
The cost to Israel, however, was enormous. "Many of its most productive fields lay gutted and mined. Its citrus groves, for decades the basis of the Yishuv's [Jewish community] economy, were largely destroyed."19 Military expenditures totaled approximately $500 million. Worse yet, 6,373 Israelis were killed, nearly one percent of the Jewish population of 650,000.
Had the West enforced the partition resolution or given the Jews the capacity to defend themselves, many lives might have been saved. |
