The first Arab wars with Israel, which took place after the end of the British Mandate on Palestine and the declaration of the establishment of Israel, in mid-May 1948, took the lives of thousands of soldiers on both sides, and ended with the defeat of the Arabs, so they called it the "Nakba" war.
The causes of the war
The Jews' pursuit of a homeland in Palestine was a major reason for this war. They sought - with the help of Western countries - to empty Palestine of its Arab population and establish the state of Israel, which was confirmed by former Israeli Knesset member Yeshayahu bin Fort, who said, "There is no Jewish state without the evacuation of Arabs." From Palestine and the confiscation and fencing of their lands. "
The Jewish settlement has adopted a philosophy based on the seizure of Palestinian lands, after expelling its original inhabitants with religious and historical arguments and claims, and promoting the saying "a land without a people for a people without a land."
In the second half of the nineteenth century, the "Zionist movement" sought to control the largest area of Palestinian lands. American missionaries also called on Jews to return to the Land of Zion (Palestine), and the first of them was the pastor of the Evangelical Church, Rev. John MacDonald in 1914.
The period of the Ottoman Empire witnessed the first stages of settlement, especially after the London Conference in 1840. This phase continued until the year 1882, and some called it “Rothschild settlement” in reference to the British Jewish millionaire Lionel de Rothschild, who undertook the establishment of settlements during this period, until There are 39 settlements inhabited by 12,000 Jews.
Although the Ottoman state did not welcome the Jewish settlement in Palestine, the land acquisition system in Palestine during the Ottoman era helped to expand it, as international Jewish organizations took advantage of all circumstances to intensify settlement and deport the world's Jews to Palestine.
After the Balfour Declaration was issued in 1917, which provided for the establishment of a national home for the Jews in Palestine and the entry of Palestine under the British Mandate, Zionist institutions became active, and the Mandate government played a major role in enabling the Jews to control large areas of Palestinian lands.
The period of the British Mandate is considered the golden stage of settlement, as Britain entered Palestine while committed to the Balfour Declaration, and thus the Jewish settlement became carried out under the supervision of a superpower that worked to support and support it.
At this stage, the settlements were subject to political and strategic considerations. Settlements were established in strategic areas, and they were in the form of closed "ghetto" societies.
With the issuance of the White Paper in 1930, which approved the division of the two states and determined the number of Jews permitted to emigrate during the following four years, the Zionist Organization decided to accelerate the settlement process in areas that were not inhabited by Jews, to include the widest possible geographical area in the event of a division of Palestine.
The settlement policy during the Mandate period was characterized by the strategic distribution of agricultural settlements on the borders of the Arab countries bordering Palestine, as 12 settlements were established on the borders of Jordan, the same on the borders of Lebanon, and eight settlements were established on the borders of Egypt, and seven on the borders of Syria.
In the years preceding the establishment of Israel, the Zionist Organization intensified settlement in the coastal plain between Haifa (northwest of Jerusalem) and Jaffa (to the west). It also acquired large areas in the northern part of Palestine, especially in the Hula Plain, and to the south of Lake Tiberias along the Jordan River and at its mouth.
The property of the Jews expanded in the Jerusalem area, and in the suburbs of Beersheba, the northern Negev and the Gaza region. In the period between 1939-1948, 79 settlements were built on an area of more than two million dunams.
The Palestinians and Arabs realized the dangers of settlement and Jewish immigration, and sought to confront this scheme at an early date, so they established a number of parties and groups to resist Jewish immigration, and an association was established in Beirut under the name of “Nablusi Youth”, which in turn formed the “Al Farouq” Association, which was based in Jerusalem. It aimed to uncover and confront the Zionist threat in the region.
However, the Palestinian and Arab vigilance did not prevent the increase in immigration, because the position of the national movement at the time was betting on the possibility of changing the position of the British government in support of the Zionist project on the one hand, and the Palestinian political parties were experiencing a struggle over leadership that weakened their role in facing the Judaization scheme.
Jewish organizations
During the settlement phases, Jews worked to form organizations to secure settlers and train them to fight. Among the most prominent of these organizations were (Haganah, Palmach, Irgun, Stern).
The
Haganah
is considered the first nucleus of the Israeli army, and it was established in Jerusalem in 1921 to defend the Jews and their property, and to train those who joined it to fight, and the outcome of its work was the establishment of fifty Jewish settlements in various places in Palestine, and the help in the illegal displacement of a large number of Jews.
Upon its founding, it was joined by a large number of members of the Jewish Legion, which was disbanded by the British Mandate authorities in 1921, after having fought alongside it in the Balkans in 1917 and 1918 during the First World War.
- The
Irgun
was formed in 1931 from a group of defectors from the Haganah led by the Russian Abraham Tihome, who was indignant about the British restrictions imposed on the Haganah in its dealings with the Palestinian rebels, and this organization carried out more than sixty military operations against the Palestinian Arabs in addition to attacking the British occupation forces.
The Irgun received covert support from Poland starting in 1936, due to the Polish government's desire to encourage the immigration of Jews to Palestine.
In 1931, the British government placed it on the lists of terrorist organizations, and in 1943 Menachem Begin, who later became Prime Minister of Israel, took over the leadership of the organization, which was dissolved with other military organizations to form the IDF.
-
Alstehrn
Jewish foundations of the
Polish Avraham Stern in 1940 , a
group called "warriors for the
freedom of
Israel ,
" known as the
"Stern" attributed to
him.
Stern and his followers wanted to work independently outside the purview and directives of the World Zionist Organization, and away from the Haganah umbrella.
He also saw the necessity to fight the British mandate in Palestine to end it and establish the state of Israel, and the movement’s members refused to join the ranks of the British army.
Stern is one of the most famous and fierce organizations, and it tended to ally with Nazi Germany rather than Britain.
This organization launched a number of attacks on British forces and blew up a number of its camps, and its founder was killed by British forces in 1942. It also participated in the massacre of Deir Yassin, west of Jerusalem, which took place in 1948.
The organization melted into the Israeli army, and the Israeli government gave pensions to its members and granted some of them the badges of "state warriors."
The
Palmach
The Palmach (Soldiers of the Storm) began its activity on May 19, 1941, and was the mobile strike force of the Haganah.
This organization played an important role in the establishment of Israel, through the bombing of railway lines and lightning raids on Palestinian villages, before Ben-Gurion incorporated them into the IDF forces.
The Palmach comprised nine teams whose members received arduous training in the acts of blowing up, sabotage and lightning attacks to terrify the Palestinian population and force them to leave their cities and villages, and to carry out actions against the British mandate forces if they were an obstacle to the realization of the dream of establishing Israel.
One of its early founders was Yitzhak Sadie, a former officer in the Tsarist Russian army, along with Moshe Dayan (who became Minister of Defense), Yitzhak Rabin (who became Prime Minister), Yigal Allon (who became Deputy Prime Minister), and Ezra Weizmann (former President of Israel).
The Palmach had well-organized intelligence that, with its help, was able to infiltrate some German prisoners of war camps for espionage purposes, and many of them disguised themselves in Arab uniforms and settled in Syria and Lebanon for the same purpose.
The Palmach forces worked against the British Mandate after the end of World War II, and played a major role in the 1948 war in the Galilee, the Negev, Sinai and Jerusalem.
The warnings of war
Before announcing the end of the British mandate over Palestine, the United Nations General Assembly approved on November 29, 1947 the decision to partition Palestine into a Jewish state (56% of the total area of Palestine), an Arab state (43% of the area) Palestinian and the internationalization of the Jerusalem area (1% of the area).
While the Jews welcomed the decision, the Arabs and the Palestinians declared their rejection of it, and formed a "Salvation Army" led by the Syrian officer, Fawzi al-Qawuqji, to expel the Jewish groups from Palestine.
With the Arabs announcing their intention to intervene in Palestine, the Israeli army's assistant commander-in-chief, Yigal Yadin, was tasked with developing a plan to counter this intervention, known as the plan (Dal).
In the middle of the night between 14 and 15 May 1948, the British government ended its presence in Palestine, and hours before the end of the mandate, the Jewish Council in Tel Aviv declared the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine as soon as the mandate ended, without declaring borders for this state.
The Salvation Army
In September 1947, the Arab League tried to provide for the needs of the Palestinians, so it formed a "technical military committee" to assess the military situation. The committee affirmed that the Palestinians did not have the strength or organization that would enable them to confront the Jews, and called on the Arab states for full mobilization.
The head of the technical committee, Major General Ismail Safwat, had warned that overcoming the Jewish forces with irregular forces was impossible, and that the Arabs would not endure a long war.
In the period between December 8- 17, 1947, the Arab countries declared the partition of Palestine illegal, and in a first step to confront the establishment of Israel, they placed the sum of one million pounds sterling, ten thousand rifles, and three thousand volunteers, including about 500 Palestinians, at the disposal of the Military Committee Technical, in what was known as the Salvation Army, then it sent armies from five Arab countries to go to war.
The Arab armies
Egypt participated in this war with ten thousand soldiers under the command of Major General Ahmed Ali Al-Mawawi, and the number of soldiers increased to about twenty thousand.
These forces consisted of five infantry brigades, one automatic brigade, a brigade equipped with 16 caliber 25 artillery, a brigade equipped with eight caliber 6 guns, and a brigade equipped with a medium automatic cannon.
The Arabs did not have bombers. Major General Pilot Engineer Abdel-Hamid Mahmoud worked during the war to convert transport aircraft into bombers to contribute to the war. He also repaired a squadron of "commandos" that the Americans left at Cairo Airport in 1945, and turned them into bombers. The Air Force has an entire squadron of aircraft.
The Jordanian army consisted of four regiments that included about eight thousand soldiers, whose number rose to 12,000 during the war, and its center was in the city of Zarqa (northeast of Amman).
It was commanded by an English officer named John Bagot's Globe (Globe Pasha).
As for the field command, located in Nablus (in the northern West Bank), it was assumed by the British Brigadier General Norman Lash.
The Jordanian force housed two artillery batteries, each containing four British-made 25-pound cannons.
Iraq sent a military force led by Brigadier General Muhammad Al-Zubaidi, which included 3000 personnel to Transjordan, and the number of this force later rose to 15 thousand.
As for Syria, it sent 2,000 soldiers, under the command of Colonel Abdul Wahhab Al-Hakim, who later arrived at 5,000.
On its southern borders, Lebanon mobilized two infantry battalions, each of which had three rifle companies, and each company consisted of three platoons, and one battalion included 450 soldiers, a mortar artillery platoon, machine guns, and an artillery battery of four 105 mm cannons.
It also sent four armored vehicles and four light tanks, and these forces were under the command of Brigadier General Fouad Shehab.
The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia participated in this war with about 3,200 fighters, led by Colonel Saeed Baik al-Kurdi and his agent, Commander Abdullah bin Nami, and fought alongside the Egyptian forces.
The Israeli forces, by the
end of 1947, the number of the Haganah organization had reached about 45 thousand and three hundred individuals, including 2,200 Palmach, according to official Israeli sources, and after the partition decision, about thirty thousand Palestinian Jews joined them, and twenty thousand European Jews, until the establishment of a state Israel.
When the war broke out, the Haganah numbers rose in the first week of June 1948 to about 107,000.
The start of the war
The Arab armies attacked the Jewish settlements in Palestine, and the Egyptian army also attacked the "Kfar Darom and Nirim" communities in the Negev region.
On May 16, three Jordanian army brigades crossed the Jordan River into Palestine, then a fourth brigade and a number of infantry battalions crossed during the war.
At that time, the Jordanian-Israeli front was the strongest and most important front, due to the high training and tactics of the Jordanian army that enabled it to wage three major battles (Bab al-Ward, Latrun, and Jenin).
The Arab armies suffered from severe weakness in making critical decisions at the tactical level, and were unable to carry out tactical maneuvers.
The Jordanian army included about fifty British officers, inflicted heavy losses on the Israelis, and kept Jerusalem and the West Bank completely until the end of the fighting.
As for the Iraqi army, it fought fierce battles in the city of Jenin in the northern West Bank with the support of Palestinian fighters, and was able to remove all the Jewish forces from it, led by the Haganah forces in 1948. It also came close to liberating the city of Haifa (northwest of Jerusalem) after it besieged it, but it stopped due to the refusal of the leadership. Political in Baghdad, give him an order to liberate more lands.
The Palestinians immortalized the memory of the Iraqi dead, by building a cemetery for the Iraqi martyrs (The Martyrs Triangle) in a village in the city of Jenin.
In turn, the Lebanese regular forces seized the villages of al-Malikiyah and Qadas in the Upper Galilee, south of the Lebanese border (the northern battlefront), and continued fighting until the Security Council imposed a ceasefire on Lebanon on June 10, 1948, and banned the supply of weapons to the parties to the conflict, in pursuit of a peaceful solution.
The Egyptian army (the largest Arab army in this war) suffered from organizational problems and a shortage of weapons, although it fought hard in the Battle of Faluja, which was its most important battle, until Israeli forces surrounded it.
The late Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser and his defense minister, Field Marshal Abdel Hakim Amer, were among those trapped. Members of the Muslim Brotherhood from Egypt, Syria, Jordan, Iraq and Palestine also participated in the war.
Corrupt weapons The
issue of corrupt weapons is one of the most famous issues associated with the defeat of Egypt in the Palestine War in 1948, and was promoted because it was one of the reasons for the Free Officers Group's July 1952 revolution against King Farouk I.
King Farouk decided to enter the war two weeks before the end of the British mandate over Palestine, and then the Egyptian parliament approved entering the war only two days before.
The lack of armaments and the lack of time prompted the Egyptian leadership to form a committee for "the needs of the army" on May 13, 1948, granting it wide powers to purchase weapons and determine their sources and types, as soon as possible, without supervision.
With the Security Council banning the sale of weapons to the belligerent countries in Palestine, in order to limit the ability of the Arab countries to fight, the Egyptian government resorted to concluding deals with arms companies under the cover of the names of Egyptian and foreign intermediaries, to circumvent the decision.
The State Audit Bureau issued a report in 1950, which contained grave financial irregularities that marred the arms deals for the army that took place in 1948 and 1949.
Those responsible for these deals were brought to trial, after great pressure, but they all obtained their innocence on June 10, 1953 (after the king was overthrown), except for two defendants who were sentenced to a fine of one hundred pounds each, namely, Maqam Abd al-Ghaffar Othman and al-Bakbashi Hussein Mustafa. Mansoor.
Many testimonies of soldiers and officers indicate that the corrupt weapons had no effect in the course of the 1948 war.
When the Army Needs Committee found that the time was very short to obtain the weapons the army needed for the war, it decided to resort to many sources, including quick and unsecured sources for supplying weapons, which were to collect weapons and equipment from World War II remnants in Western Sahara, choose the best from them and send them to the army, and their use led A number of them are due to the deaths of soldiers.
It should be noted that the Army Needs Committee succeeded in supplying many other advanced weapons that saved the Egyptian army from the most horrific defeat, and from more deaths than what happened.
The cessation of fighting
After the United Nations Security Council imposed a ceasefire resolution on Lebanon on June 10, 1948 and prohibited the supply of weapons to any of the parties to the conflict, the fighting between the Israeli army and the regular Arab armies stopped, while the Salvation Army continued its military operations in the Galilee region.
A truce was set for a period of four weeks, and despite the prohibition of arming or sending any new forces to the fighting fronts, Israel did not abide by this condition, and sought to compensate for its losses, and was heavily bombarded with weapons, especially aircraft.
Under the eyes of the United Nations, Israel violated the armistice, and crawled south towards Fallujah (where the Egyptian forces were) to expand the territory it occupied and encircle the Egyptian army stationed there, and weaken the southern front that was approaching Tel Aviv.
On July 8, 1948, the Israeli army resumed fighting on all fronts, despite UN attempts to extend the truce.
With the end of the truce, the battles took a different course, and the Arab forces suffered a series of defeats that enabled Israel to extend its control over large areas of historic Palestine.
On July 21, the fighting stopped after threats from the UN Security Council to impose harsh sanctions on both sides of the battle.
The Arabs accepted a second truce, and this acceptance was tantamount to admitting defeat.
On January 7, 1949, the fighting ended after the Israeli army captured most of the Negev region and surrounded the Egyptian forces that were present around Fallujah in the northern Negev.
Then negotiations began on the Greek island of Rhodes, where the United Nations mediated between Israel on one side, and Egypt, Jordan, Syria and Lebanon on the other side.
In the period between February 24 and July 20, 1949, the four armistice agreements were signed, in which the Green Line was defined. On March 7, 1949, the Security Council recommended that Israel accept a full member of the United Nations.
On May 11, 1949, the United Nations General Assembly approved this recommendation.
Causes of defeat
Historians refer to military and political reasons why the Arabs were defeated in this war.
As for the military, the most prominent of which is the existence of a big difference in the combat experience, number and armament between Arabs and Jews.
Some decisions also contributed to the defeat, including:
The withdrawal of the Jordanian forces from their positions by order of its political leadership, which caused the loss of large lands that were allocated to the Arab state according to the division of Palestine, including the Upper Galilee and the Negev, and led to the discovery of Egyptian sites and their siege by the Israelis.
- The difference in military experience, number, and equipment between the Egyptian army and the Haganah Jewish army. The Egyptian army command had no previous experience in leading any war battles. The last wars the Egyptian army fought were led by Ibrahim Pasha in the Levant in 1839, and since then the Egyptian army did not participate in Any warship battles.
On the other hand, the Jewish Haganah army participated in the Jewish Legion in the First World War, then in the Second World War, so the Jews gained great experience in these multi-front wars.
Military historians reported that the Israeli forces outnumbered the Egyptian forces by 2 to 1, and the percentage of Israeli forces' superiority over the Egyptian forces in terms of quantity and quality was 3 to 1.
The weakness of the Palestinian resistance teams, and their lack of armaments and organizational experience.
As for the political reasons, which are considered the biggest factor for this defeat, they were:
Supporting England, the United States and France to establish a Jewish state in Palestine, by encouraging the immigration of Jews in large numbers to Palestine, supplying them with weapons and ammunition, and training them, and preventing all of this from the Arabs.
Although England agreed to the Arab countries entering the war with its armies, it knew that the Arab forces, with their armament and their ability, would not achieve a victory over the forces of the Jews, and it also exercised great pressure on the governments of Arab countries to ensure the establishment of a Jewish state in the lands allocated to them under the partition decision.
- The absence of a clear strategy for the political leadership in Egypt that did not have political, military and historical studies on Palestine and the seriousness of the Jewish plan, and the nature, causes and dimensions of Western support for the establishment of this entity on Arab land.
The withdrawal of the Jordanian forces from their positions on the orders of their political leadership, which led to the loss of large territories that were allocated to the Arab state according to the division of Palestine, namely the Upper Galilee and the Negev desert.
Also, the Jordanian withdrawals led to the discovery of the Egyptian sites and their siege by the enemy forces, as happened in the Fallujah.
War casualties The
official Palestinian statistics estimate Palestinian dead in this war at about 15,000, while the number of dead in other Arab armies is estimated at between 3,700 to 7,000 soldiers.
According to Israeli statistics, the number of Jews killed in this war reached about 5,600.