End of the British Mandate and Civil War
Troops searching a Jewish immigrant ship, Haifa, 1948.
As Zionist resistance to the British Mandate continued into1947, a war-weary British public had became tired of military expeditions in Asia. Although the larger Hangenah militia had withdrawn from the insurgency after the deadly bombing at the King David Hotel, the Etzel and Lehi factions were still actively engaged. The British had lost 103 civilian and military personnel to the Jewish insurgency since the end of the war, and in April,1947, the British government formally referred the matter to the newly-formed United Nations General Assembly. The United Nations Special Committee on Palestine (UNSCOP) was formed with representatives from “neutral” countries in Europe, Asia and the Americas to recommend a transition plan. Arriving to the Land in June, the committee travelled from Acre to Beersheva, encountering starkly different receptions from Palestinian residents. While jubilant crowds greeted the delegation in Jewish towns and settlements, the streets of Arab towns were mostly empty, and their inhabitants uncooperative with the committee members. In addition to the Jewish Agency, the committee also met secretly with the Hagenah, and even Etzel commanders, including Menachem Begin. Most Arab organizations boycotted the effort entirely, considering it biased in favor of the Zionists, although some Arab leaders met privately and off-the-record with committee members. British mandate officials were also interviewed in addition to the Zionists. Within a month, the committee had more than 30 tons of documents, including informal interviews, depositions and testimonials.
While the UNSCOP was gathering testimony and evidence for its report during the summer of 1947, the Berichah movement was continuing to smuggle European Jews into Palestine illegally. On July 18, a ship named Exodus 1947 approached Haifa port. It was commanded by Yossi Harel, a native Jerusalemite who had joined the Hagenah at age 15, become a leader in the Berichah soon afterward. His mission was the safe passage of 4,515 Jewish men, women and children, all survivors of the Holocaust. It was the largest movement of Jewish refugees after the war, and it was no secret. British ships had accompanied the Exodus from it port of origin in France, intercepting it just 20 nautical miles away from Haifa port. British troops confronted the ship’s crew and passengers, which led to a physical altercation, and then a larger brawl. Tear gas was deployed, and three Jewish travelers were killed, along with dozens wounded. The Exodus’ passengers went ashore in Haifa under supervision and were transferred to another ship, a process which was witnessed by members of UNSCOP. Returning to France, the would-be olim refused to disembark and declared a hunger strike which lasted for more than three weeks. British authorities were anxious to end the ordeal, rerouting the ship to the British-occupied zone of West Germany. After women and children voluntarily went ashore, most of the adult male passengers were forcibly disembarked by British soldiers, after which all 4500 refugees were taken to a displaced persons camp. Despite its apparent success, the incident was a public relations fiasco for Britain. News of British soldiers forcing Jewish Holocaust survivors into German camps sparked an international scandal. As a result, Britain stopped returning Jewish refugees to Europe, instead interning them on the island of Cyprus, just 400 kilometers from the Palestinian shore. A sub-committee of UNSCOP later toured the displaced person camps in France and Germany, finding a strong desire among a majority of Jewish survivors to emigrate to Palestine. It became clear that the status quo was not sustainable. The momentum had clearly shifted in favor of the well-organized Zionists and their unrelenting efforts to ferry their fellow Jews to their homeland.
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Violence also continued to escalate between militant Jews and Arabs in the summer of 1947. Etzel and Lehi refused demands by Zionist leadership for a ceasefire during UNSCOP’s deliberation. The extremist groups favored dynamite attacks against British and Arab targets, leading to a sensational bombing in August that killed a prominent Palestinian Arab and his family. The attacks led the Jewish Agency and Hagenah to turn against their compatriots in Etzel and Lehi once again, actively working to subvert their operations, although they did not cooperate with British authorities as before. Then in October, UNSCOP finished its committee work and unanimously endorsed the end of the British Mandate for Palestine. Another committee in the UN General Assembly was convened to devise a solution to the “Question of Palestine.” A majority of its members endorsed a a plan to partition the Promised Land into Jewish and Arab States, similar to the Peel Report’s recommendation in 1937. The WZO and other Zionist leaders began lobbying UN assembly members heavily in November for passage of a resolution endorsing the plan. On November 29, 1947, the UN General Assembly voted 33-13 in favor of Resolution 181, which ordered the British Mandate to be terminated by August 1, 1948, and which included the following language:
“Independent Arab and Jewish States and the Special International Regime for the City of Jerusalem, set forth in Part III of this Plan, shall come into existence in Palestine two months after the evacuation of the armed forces of the mandatory Power has been completed but in any case not later than 1 October 1948.”
Sixty-seven years after the First Aliyah began reaching the shores of Jaffa in 1880, and fifty-two years after Theodore Hertzl published his Zionist treatise Der Judenstaat, the dream of a modern Jewish state in the ancient Jewish homeland was officially endorsed by the nations. But the dream was still far from realized.
Arab militant groups in Palestine immediately reacted to the adoption of UN Resolution 181 with a “wind of violence.” On the same day that the partition plan was announced, terrorists ambushed two buses carrying Jewish passengers, killing seven and wounding many more. Arab snipers also targeted more buses in Jewish communities. Etzel and Lehi retaliated with a bombing attack against a gathering of Arab civilians on the streets of Haifa in December, killing and wounding almost fifty. Angry Arabs rioted, killing 39 Jewish residents of Haifa in revenge. Tit-for-tat attacks continued through the winter of 1947-48, growing into an increasingly militarized conflict that began to resemble civil war. Haj Amin al-Husseini, confidant of Adolf Hitler and architect of the Jewish pogroms of the1920’s, once again took center-stage in the anti-Zionist movement. Working with deserters from the British Army, al-Husseini’s Fedayeen bombed several Jewish targets in Jerusalem on February, 22, 1948, including the pro-Zionist Palestine Post, the Jewish Agency, and the Ben Yehuda Street Market. Eighty-eight people were killed in the attacks, and dozens more wounded. Lehi retaliated in March, bombing two separate trains carrying British troops and Arab civilians, killing 28 and 40, respectively. Amin al-Husseini’s militia then blockaded the Jewish communities in Jerusalem. Attempts by supply convoys to break the blockade resulted in heavy casualties and the loss of most of the Hagenah’s armored vehicles. Ingun and Lehi responded to the blockade by attacking the Arab village of Deir Yassin nearby in April 9, killing over 100 people, including women and children. By the end of March, 1948, over 2,000 Jews, Arabs and Brits had been killed and over 4,000 injured in a nation of just two million.
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The violence alarmed the international community. The US administration of Harry Truman withdrew its initial support for the partition plan, emboldening the Arab parties. The newly-formed Arab League, which included Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Iraq and Saudi Arabia, formed the Arab Liberation Army (ALA), enlisting at least 6,000 volunteers from its base in Damascus, Syria in the winter of 1948. A unit of European volunteers was also formed in the ALA, including former members of the German SS, the shock troops of the Holocaust, as well as Bosnians and other European Muslims who had enlisted in Hitler’s auxiliary formations during the war. Accompanied by the Syrian Army, the ALA led incursions into Palestine from Jordan, shelling Jewish communities and securing Arab territory. As hostilities dragged on in early 1948, Britain abandoned the idea of an independent Arab state, instead favoring the annexation of Palestinian Arab territory into the Kingdom of Jordan.
In response, David Ben-Gurion, chairman of the Jewish Agency, made service in the Hagenah compulsory for all fighting-age Jewish men and women, beginning a tradition that continues in the Israeli military to this day. The Hagenah was reorganized into six infantry divisions, transforming from a territorial militia into a national army. The 630,000 Jewish Yishuv were ordered to hold their ground at all costs, while hundreds of thousands of Arab civilians fled from population centers along the Mediterranean coast to Arab-majority areas in the East. Hard-pressed for funding and weapons, the Jewish Agency dispatched an envoy named Golda Meir to the United States to drum up support among sympathetic Americans. It was estimated that Meir would raise less than 8 million US dollars. She raised over 50 million. David Ben-Gurion later called Golda Meir the “Jewish woman who got the money which made the state possible." The Zionists also secured the support of Soviet premier Josef Stalin. With cash flowing in, a massive arms smuggling campaign named “Operation Balak” began in the spring of 1948. The ranks of the Hagenah swelled, and its well-organized and well-equipped units were able to counterbalance the support of the Arab powers for the ALA.
By the beginning of May, 1948, both the Jewish and Arab forces were organized, equipped, and ready for all-out war. The British government had announced an end to the Mandate for Palestine at midnight on May 14, 1948, and both sides were preparing for what would come next.
