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ISRAELI HISTORY How the war was won By Ina Friedman Tags: War of Independence  1948: A History of the First Arab-Israeli War, by Benny Morris Yale University Press, 524 pages., $32.50/19.99 pounds An eerie irony is embedded in a long-forgotten statistic noted early in "1948," Ben-Gurion University Prof. Benny Morris's chronicle of the first Arab-Israeli war. The three, flimsily connected sections of Palestine earmarked in the November 1947 UN partition resolution to become a Jewish state were populated by 500,000 Jews and 450,000 Arabs. Had their weak and fractious leadership but mustered the strategic smarts to accept partition, however begrudgingly, Palestinian Arabs might soon have secured majority status within the Jewish state and cancelled via the ballot box what their irregular forces and the armies of their sovereign neighbors catastrophically failed to achieve with bullets. In resorting to force of arms, they actually did the Yishuv (Jewish community of Palestine) a service, for the war they started dramatically improved both the geographic and demographic contours of the Jewish state, rendering it a going concern. Advertisement Though Israel's victory was hardly a foregone conclusion -- on May 12, 1948, Yigael Yadin, the underground Haganah's chief of operations, put the odds of the nascent Jewish state surviving the onslaught by the Arab armies at 50-50 -- Morris' analysis brings us to understand that neither was it an amazing one. Over the years Israel has assiduously cultivated its image as the underdog in the 1948 David-and-Goliath redux. Certainly the Yishuv, which was able clandestinely to manufacture only small arms and ammunition and had to await independence to receive weaponry suitable for facing down full-fledged armies, had reason to fear the worst. But by citing a broad constellation of factors that comprise "strength" -- from the contrasting degrees of national organization and social solidarity obtaining in the Yishuv and Palestinian-Arab society to the command-and-control abilities of their respective fighting forces, the poor preparation and ordnance of the Arab armies that invaded Palestine on May 15, 1948, and the latter's inability to replenish their arsenals -- Morris shows why the Haganah and subsequently the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) effectively enjoyed the upper hand. A Cambridge-educated journalist-turned-historian, Morris is an excellent candidate to probe the soft underbelly of entrenched doctrines. Twenty years ago, with the publication of his seminal work "The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1947-1949," he earned a salient place in Israeli historiography as one of the leading myth-busting, revisionist scholars dubbed the "new historians." In the present work he also offers insights as a military analyst. For example, during the first four months of the fighting that raged from November 1947 to May 15, 1948 -- which Morris characterizes as a civil war conducted by irregular forces -- the Haganah fought on the defensive against the Palestinian militias, which Morris assesses as having "performed moderately well." But once the Yishuv changed its strategy and went over to the offensive, in April 1948, "it was all over," Morris writes -- not least because the Jewish forces were fighting against "not a ?people,'" but an "assortment of regions, towns, and villages." Similarly, in describing the war's second stage, fought by regular armies (May 15, 1948-January 1949), Morris concludes that once the Yishuv had weathered the initial onslaught of the Arab invasion, ending with the first truce on July 11, "the war, in effect, was won." All that remained, he adds, was to see how much of the whole of mandatory Palestine the IDF could conquer, "and how severely the invaders would be trounced." That the Yishuv was not more confident of its advantages (it feared, we're told, a second Holocaust) was due to the shortcomings of the Haganah Intelligence Service (HIS), which excelled at reporting the mood among Palestinian Arabs but failed to assess how poorly the armies of the Arab states were prepared, equipped and motivated. As matters unfolded, the Lebanese army, for example, essentially shrank from entering the fray at all. After clashing unsuccessfully with Israeli units in the Jordan Valley and the coastal plain near Netanya at the end of May, the Iraqi army "hunkered down" in the northern West Bank for the rest of the war. Only Syria's and Egypt's forces gained any foothold in territory assigned to the Jewish state. Yet the Syrians managed only to nibble at its edge ?(in the Galilee panhandle?), and the Egyptians made the error of stringing out half their force on an axis from the northern Negev to the southern West Bank, where a chunk of it was surrounded in the so-called Faluja pocket. Neither did the Yishuv's leaders trust that Transjordan's King Abdullah would dispatch his British-trained-and-commanded Arab Legion -- the army most feared by the Hanagah/IDF -- only into the part of Palestine earmarked for the Arab state (as he had intimated to Golda Meir during a secret meeting in Amman on May 10), for his sole intent was to conquer the West Bank and annex it to his kingdom. True, the Legion's presence in Latrun, commanding the road to Jerusalem and blocking the passage of supply convoys, rendered the city's 100,000 Jewish residents under siege. But after suffering heavy casualties in three abortive battles to capture Latrun, the Israelis paved a bypass around it (the Burma Road). And by July, the Legion was so wary of clashing with the IDF that it did not come to the defense of Ramle and Lydda (today Lod) -- two large Arab towns in the sector under its control -- which quickly fell to the Israelis. The punishing aftermath of that particular debacle was the IDF's expulsion eastward of the 50,000 inhabitants of Ramle and Lydda. Orders to drive Arab villagers out of their homes also featured in Operation Hiram, mounted in the autumn of 1948 to conquer the central Galilee. But as in his earlier work, Morris ascribes the genesis of the Arab refugee problem, beginning during the civil war, primarily to the panicked flight of the poorly led, socially weak and demoralized Palestinian population. Without question, fear of outright massacre -- after the atrocities committed by dissident Irgun Zvai Leumi and Lohamei Herut Yisrael forces in the village of Deir Yassin on April 9 -- only fueled the exodus. Yet Morris also blames the Arab media for this result. By continuously broadcasting reports about the atrocities, "usually with blood-curdling exaggerations," he writes, it aggravated the stampede out of Palestine's villages and towns. As the country's Jewish and Arab neighborhoods and settlements were geographically intermingled, an exchange of populations was perhaps to be expected as part of the partition process. In fact, the 1937 British commission of inquiry headed by Lord Peel, which first recommended the partition of Palestine, advised that the 300,000 Arabs then living in the territory it designated for a Jewish state be "transferred, voluntarily or under compulsion," to the Arab part of Palestine, alongside a move in the reverse direction of 1,250 Jews. But the UN failed to address the demographic pitfall in its plan. And it wasn't until December 1948 that the General Assembly even acknowledged the displacement crisis, establishing in Resolution 194 the refugees' right to return to or receive compensation for their property. Yet that was already very late in the game. On July 28, the Israeli government had already resolved to bar the repatriation of refugees -- and issued directives to burn their fields and demolish their abandoned villages to secure this policy. Under orders to "cleanse" the central Galilee late in October, IDF soldiers did not shrink from committing atrocities to spur villagers to flight, though Morris concludes such actions were contrary to official policy. Incidentally, while both sides demonized the other as bloodthirsty barbarians, overall, Morris informs us, more atrocities were committed by Jews than by Arabs in this conflict, accounting for the deaths of some 800 Arab civilians and POWs and roughly a quarter as many Jews. No frills narrative "1948" is not an easy read. Perhaps to reassure us of his academic detachment, Morris has penned a cogent but studiously no-frills narrative that chronicles primarily the unfolding of events on the battlefield. Only sparingly does he convey the perspective of participants or observers in their own words by quoting transcripts of government meetings; of letters, diaries and memoirs; or of reports of conversations between foreign diplomats and Arab interlocutors (his primary sources come from Israeli, British and American archives, as he had no access to those of Arab countries). Unfortunately, we also get precious few thumbnail sketches of key dramatis personae, while the detailed descriptions of battles are often numbing even when accompanied by maps -- and unfathomable when they are not. Israel's first war was also its longest, extending over a year, and its most costly. By its close, the Yishuv had suffered close to 6,000 dead (1 percent of its population, which today would translate into 60,000 people), and 700,000 Palestinians had been reduced to a state of homeless and mostly stateless wretchedness. Yet except for the rendition of a few episodes -- the fall of Kibbutz Kfar Etzion, the ambush of the convoy carrying Jewish medical personnel to Mount Scopus, and the expulsion from Ramle and Lydda -- readers of "1948" are left to tax their imaginations and wring their hearts to conjure any semblance of the drama, terror, pain and loss reflected so sharply in the historical memories of two peoples that battled for Palestine. But then, rather jarringly, the dispassionate tone of the historical narrative gives way to a trenchant, almost strident pitch in Morris' final chapter, entitled "Some Conclusions." Perhaps this shift should not come as a surprise, for following the failure of the 2000 Camp David negotiations, and the outbreak of the second intifada, Morris, an avowed leftist, began giving out signals of volte-face in his views on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Indeed, he veritably shocked many readers when, in January 2004, he told Haaretz interviewer Ari Shavit that Ben-Gurion would have saved his country untold grief had he only "carried out a large expulsion [of Palestinian Arabs in 1948] and cleansed the whole ... Land of Israel, as far as the Jordan River." The sentiments wafting out of his pronouncements at the close of "1948" similarly suggest that Palestinians deserved what they got for conducting their opposition to the Zionist enterprise as a zero-sum game in which they absolutely insisted, every step of the way, on having it all. Morris even attributes the unsavory "expulsionist thinking" of Yishuv leaders to Palestinian sins, explaining it as a response to the jihadi rhetoric, "expulsionist ideology" and "violent praxis" of Haj Amin al-Husseini, the notoriously extreme mufti of Jerusalem. In a particularly telling passage, he quotes David Ben-Gurion's straightforward grasp of the Palestinian perspective, as expressed in a conversation with Zionist leader Nahum Goldman: "We [the Zionists] have taken their country. Sure, God promised it to us, but what does that matter to them? Our God is not theirs. ... There has been anti-Semitism, the Nazis, Hitler, Auschwitz, but was that their fault? They see only one thing: We have come here and stolen their country. Global struggle Yet Morris immediately dismisses this take as Ben-Gurion's failure to appreciate "the depth of the Arabs' abhorrence of the Zionist-Jewish presence in Palestine ... anchored in centuries of Islamic Judeophobia... " In a judgment that seems heavily colored by the post-9/11 spirit, he speaks of the 1948 war as a slice of the "general, global struggle between the Islamic East and the West." And because of what he calls "reflexive Arab nonacceptance and powerful revanchist urges," the final pages of his book are suffused with pessimism. Indeed, Morris posits, albeit in guarded language, that even now, 60 years after the event, when Israel is deemed a regional power, we cannot take its continued existence for granted. "Whether 1948 was a passing fancy or has permanently etched the region," he writes, "remains to be seen." Whether or not one subscribes to these judgments, "1948" stands as an instructive and particularly timely work, given calculations that the Arab and Jewish populations between the Jordan and the Mediterranean are fast approaching parity while the prospects of achieving a two-state solution are rapidly receding. Drawing a direct comparison between 1948 and 2008 is of course facile. Yet since the same players remain locked in a revised version of the same struggle, there's value in exploiting the opportunity to review what transpired back then and consider what lessons both the triumph and the tragedy may hold for us today. Ina Friedman, a correspondent for the Dutch daily Trouw, is co-author of "Murder in the Name of God: The Plot to Kill Yitzhak Rabin." Haaretz Books Supplement, August 2008 Bookmark to del.icio.us   'Material girl' turns 50 Pop icon and kabbalah enthusiast Madonna celebrates her 50th birthday. Barak vs. The Treasury Defense Minister says budget cuts foolish in light of the threats Israel facing.

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