On May 20, 1948 – six days after the Jewish State of Israel declared independence – Syrian troops attacked the nation’s oldest communal settlement, or kibbutz, Degania. The Syrians had eight tanks and 10 armored cars. The settlers had homemade machine guns and some bombs.
As one of the tanks rolled in, two Molotov cocktails struck it from a nearby trench, reported Arthur Koestler, a foreign correspondent for The Guardian.
“One was thrown by Shalom Hochbaum,” Koestler wrote, “who arrived two years ago .ñ.ñ. after spending altogether five years in 13 different concentration camps, including Belsen. The second was thrown by Yehuda Sprung of Cracow, 12 years in Degania, before that a student of law at Cracow University. He is a thin, timid little man who looks like a tailor. Neither of them had seen a tank before in his life.”
It took weeks, but this group of tailors, refugees and Holocaust survivors fought off the Syrians and a 2,000-year-old wish – “next year in Jerusalem” – was fulfilled. Out of fire and desire, a country was born.
By reading through the newspaper reports of the time, from correspondents and the local Palestine Post, one sees how fragile those first months were. The Israeli fighters were a ragged bunch, many just off the boat from Europe, handed a rifle at the port of Haifa. But they learned early the importance of training; that everyone, no matter their profession, would have to learn the ways of war.
In the New Republic, writer Lawencer Lader wrote about the rise of the Palmach – young men and women of the kibbutz who were trained as an elite strike force. The commander of one of these brigades, Moshe Kellman, told Lader: “None of us is a soldier by profession. Most of us have come from the kibbutzim. Our purpose to go back and someday start new kibbutzim of our own. The Palmach grew out of the kibbutzim because from 1941 on, we realized that it was more important for a boy of 17 to devote his full time to defending his home and people than to plow the fields or tend the vineyards.”
THE PRELUDE
Israel was a dream, since the time of Moses, yes, but given urgency by the work of Hungarian journalist Theodor Herzl, who in 1897 called for “normalizing” the Jewish condition by a return to the homeland.
From the 1880s to the 1930s, the movement to establish the Jewish State proceeded in two ways: Practical settlement and political advocacy. The Jewish population of Palestine grew from about 25,000 in 1882 to between 85,000 and 100,000 just prior to World War I, while political advocacy on behalf of the establishment of a Jewish state met with mixed results. The Ottoman empire controlled the area until 1919 and allowed land to be purchased for Jewish settlement, while refusing to grant any specific Jewish claim to the land.
After WWI, dominion over Palestine passed from the Turks to the British, who established a Mandate over the territory. Jewish political fortunes looked brighter. After all, it was the British Lord Balfour who declared in 1917 that the British government “view with favor” the establishment in Palestine of “a national home for the Jewish people.”
The Mandate period (1920-48) was marked by growing Jewish immigration into Palestine, while demands for further immigration grew with Hitler’s rise to power in Europe. The British authorities, meanwhile, tried to manage Jewish political aspirations while also attempting to quell majority Arab unrest at the growing Jewish presence. Deadly Arab riots against Jews in 1920, 1929 and 1936-39 convinced Jews that self-defense, military service and self-reliance was their only option.
Jewish self-defense evolved as the settlements grew. Initially, immigrants were hired to guard Jewish settlements for an annual fee. After the 1920 Arab riots, a Jewish military, or Haganah, was formally organized and established. For those young men and women living on communal farms, military training became part of the residency requirements.
From 1939-1945, the Jews of Palestine fought on two fronts – alongside the British against Hitler, and at home defended themselves against Arab attacks. In an effort to save the Jews of Europe, the Haganah organized the transport of hundreds of thousands of them into Palestine on illegal ships, since the British had banned further immigration. After the war, the British began looking for a way out of Palestine, finally opting for the newly formed United Nations to vote on a plan to partition Palestine into two states – one Jewish and one Arab – on November 29, 1947.
The Jews were elated, the Arabs defiant and the fight for Israel’s independence had begun.
EARLY DEFEAT
Hostilities began as a series of attacks and counter attacks between Arabs, Jews and the British Mandate authorities that continued from December 1947 until May 1948. The day after Israel’s declaration of independence, May 15, five Arab armies invaded: Syria, Egypt, Transjordan, Iraq and Lebanon.
But one of the worst Jewish defeats came before the state was even officially at war, in early May at the settlements of Gush Etzion, 20 kilometers southwest of Jerusalem, on the hills between Hebron and Bethlehem. The series of four settlements were strategically located on the road used by the Arabs to transport weapons and supplies to Jerusalem.
On May 4 and again on May 12, poorly-armed Jewish settlers, reinforced by better-trained Haganah and Palmach fighters, were attacked over several days by Arab Legionnaires commanding thousands of Arab irregulars.
After three days of fighting, 30 Jewish fighters had been killed and the remaining settlers surrendered. Polish-born, Palmach fighter Eliza Feuchtwanger radioed Jerusalem. “The Arabs are in the Kibbutz. Farewell.”
The Arab Legion commander, Abdullah Tell, later admitted that the Jews “fought with incredible bravery.”
Following the surrender, the Arabs entered the settlement, looted the buildings and massacred 127 men and women. Only five Jews survived. Slaughtered bodies, both men and women, remained in place for a year and a half before Transjordanian authorities allowed Israel to retrieve the corpses.
VICTORY IN THE GALILEE
Israel’s fortunes started to turn in the settlements in the Galilee region.
Correspondent Koestler described the Syrian military’s uneven advance on Degania as an example of how the settlers were getting the upper hand.
“The Syrians advanced in a hesitating and undecided sort of way. They sent out several waves of infantry which as soon as they came within range of automatic fire, turned tail and swarmed back instead of digging in.” Then “eight tanks arrive at the outer fence of the settlement. The first one, on the flank nearest the lake was incapacitated by a Molotov-cocktail which hit its caterpillar chain .ñ.ñ. The third broke through the fence, reached the slit trench .ñ.ñ. then slowly veered south as if to progress parallel to the trench.”
In the New Republic, Lader wrote of how until May 10, “the city of Safed which controls the Upper Galilee valley was considered one of the impregnable strongholds of the Arabs in Palestine.”
Not for the Palmach fighter, however. They spent a week prior to May 10 quietly bringing supplies and ammunition each night through the valley below the city. “Then a force of 200 men, each armed with only 50 rounds of ammunition,” Lader recounts, “attacked at night, taking the Arabs by surprise. Another Palmach unit fought for 11 hours in the police station, and after three hours rest, stormed the remainder of the city. By noon, the supposedly impregnable Safed was safe in Palmach hands.”
BATTLE FOR JERUSALEM
Jerusalem was the center of major confrontations before and after the formal declaration of war. Indeed, the old city was under siege for five-and-a-half months ending finally on May 19, 1948.
As Mordechai Chertoff reported in The Palestine Post, “instead of breaking their spirit, the siege had turned the residents of the [Jewish] Quarter into soldiers.”
In an effort to win control of Jerusalem, Judaism’s holiest city, the Israeli forces fought a long battle along the single roadway to the city. One of the fiercest fighting took place 15 kilometers west of Jerusalem, at Latrun. As British troops departed the police fort on May 14, Arab Legionnaires tried to take it over and fighting broke out for the strategic outpost.
One report from Jon Kimche in the Palestine Post on June 1, 1948 captures the intensity of the fighting. “By 4 o’clock the attacking force has reached the perimeter of the police station from which heavy fire was directed at them. With a sudden rush in the face of a strong searchlight shining on the attackers, one group of Jews set fire to the building while another group attacked .ñ.ñ. with small arms. A number of Arabs escaped from the inferno, but for the majority there was no getaway.
“By dawn, the operation was completed and the Jews withdrew to their previous positions. The Arabs remained in possession of Latrun, but it had again been destroyed.”
But even with some relief in May, the Arab stranglehold over Jerusalem remained a serious problem for the Jews. With no other way of getting supplies, food and arms to the Jewish resident of the city, the newly established Israeli Defense Forces took on the task of digging a new road into Jerusalem. On June 14, writer I.F. Stone was the first reporter to be taken into the city by military convoy on the new “Burma” road.
“The hastily improvised new road,” he reported in the Palestine Post, “rough-hewn by bulldozer and tractor across trackless fields, hills and valleys is one of the engineering feats of the Jewish war of independence. Even more impressive are the working men from the docks of Haifa and the workshops of Tel Aviv willing to serve as coolies and human mules over dark and hazardous mountain trails in order to turn the flank of the Jerusalem siege and bring up badly needed supplies.”
THE NORTHERN FRONT
“From the GI’s point of view this war seems about like any other war,” reported The Chicago Sun-Times’ Keith Wheeler who was with the Haganah on the Lebanese border, June 14, 1948, “99 percent griping and waiting and one percent action.”
“One discovers,” Wheeler observed, “that the Jewish soldier resembles any other soldier. He loves to brag. He holds his enemy in vast contempt. He collects souvenirs as ardently as a United States marine. On the slightest provocation he whips out snapshots of children, wives and sweethearts. He is hospitality personified.”
On the other hand, as Wheeler observed there were some serious differences between Israeli GIs as compared, say, to their American counterparts. The Jewish soldier “doesn’t want his name in the papers. By habit of many years he yearns almost pathologically for anonymity. He is completely without rank consciousness and if so moved, never hesitates to call a company commander ‘fathead’ in his presence. There is no ‘brass’ in the Haganah .ñ.ñ. Nobody salutes anybody and nobody wears any insignia of rank .ñ.ñ. ‘The only difference is authority, and that is never questioned,’ the commander of an outfit on the border told me.”
THE SOUTHERN FRONT
Kenneth Bilby of the International Herald Tribune was another witness to Jewish ingenuity and resourcefulness. He was taken first by transport plane (flown by a “youthful American pilot”) and then by jeep to relieve the Egyptian siege of isolated Jewish settlements in the Negev Desert. “The Israel air-transport service provides one of the Jewish answers to the Egyptian effort to besiege and throttle Jewish settlements in the Negev,” he reported on Aug 8. “With Egyptians menacing the sole supply route to the Negev .ñ.ñ. the Jews rely on their air force as much as the Western powers in Berlin.”
THE BATTLE FINALLY OVER
Throughout 1949, armistice agreements were signed between Israel and Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon and Syria,, ending the Independence War. These agreements temporarily put an end to hostilities and established armistice lines between Israel and Jordan on the West Bank of the Jordan River – known until the Six Day War in June 1967 as the Green Line.
What Israel could not achieve diplomatically, it achieved through force of arms. Instead of three non-contiguous areas of Jewish sovereignty, as declared by the UN partition plan of 1947, the newly established state controlled one single territory bordering Syria and Lebanon in the North, Transjordan to the East and Egypt to the southwest. The country’s capital, Jerusalem would remain divided between Israel and Jordan for proceeding 19 years, with Jews cut off from their religion’s holiest site, the Western Wall, until 1967’s Six Day War.
Abby Wisse Schachter is working on a book about Israel’s war of independence.