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Politics : Middle East Politics -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: maceng2 who wrote (639)	1/23/2002 6:03:47 PM
From: Nadine Carroll	Respond to of 6945

Thanks for the comment. I wondered of course what happened after that.. You had the Israeli War of Independence (if you're Jewish), or Al Nakba (if you're Arab). War broke out in numerous places between the Nov 47 partition vote and May 48, when the British left. I'm reading O Jerusalem by Collins and Lapierre, a very good history of the the war for Jerusalem in 47-48. By all conventional measures, the Arabs should have won. They had more men and friendly neighbors who could buy arms openly and easily smuggle them over the border. Not to mention the fact that Syria, Iraq, Transjordan and Egypt had real British-trained armies, with heavy guns and armor. Transjordan's Arab League army even had a British general, Glubb Pasha. The Hagannah was an underground militia. Til the end of the Mandate the British blockaded the coast, destroying all arms they found and imprisoning the people in camps on Cyprus. Ben Gurion was able to raise money abroad, but it's not easy to smuggle in heavy artillery. When the British left, the Hagannah did not have any heavy guns nor a single tank, except for 5 guns they convinced a British sympathizer to steal for them. What they did have was Ben Gurion, organization, intelligence (both the military and human kind), careful planning, technical knowhow, Zionist funding, and total commitment. It was win or die for them. The Arabs were disunited. No one trusted the Mufti or would supply his guerillas with adequate arms. The Mufti's organization had bypassed the middle-classes, relying on village fighters. The middle classes all left Palestine for safer places (about 200,000 left before the end of the Mandate). The Mufti's Arab fighters were long on bravely rushing into battle, but short on planning, logistics, or tactics. The Zionists nearly always had better intelligence; for example, they made it their business to find out the exact minute when the British planned to pull out of each location, and took over the buildings before the Arabs arrived. The Mufti's cousin Abdul Khader Husseini, who was the one charasmatic leader in Palestine (the Mufti stayed in Syria) nearly managed to starve Jewish Jerusalem by cutting the road from the coast. Ambushing convoys was perfectly suited to the fighting style of his fighters. But the Hagannah and the Irgun broke the siege by attacking the villages along the road to deprive the guerillas of their bases (the massacre at Deir Yassin happened in one such village). Abdul Khader was killed in one of the fights, depriving the Arabs of unified leadership (the biggest shortcoming of Mufti-style leadership is that you have no bench depth). So the Palestinian Arabs failed to beat the Zionists. I'm just getting to point of the book where the British leave and the 5 Arab armies attack. The Arab leaders had emitted great spouts of rhetoric but did very little planning, they were so sure it would be a cakewalk. They also had no unified command and very different aims. Egypt and Syria wanted to annex Palestine for themselves. King Abdullah of Transjordan was actually okay with the Partition of Palestine (though he couldn't admit it to his fellow Arabs), but he wanted to make sure that the Arab part of the Partition wound up in his control (it did).