The 1948 Arab–Israeli War (15 May 1948 – 10 March 1949), also known as the First Arab–Israeli War, followed the civil war in Mandatory Palestine (29 November 1947 – 14 May 1948) as the second and final stage of the 1948 Palestine war. The civil war became a war of separate states with the Israeli Declaration of Independence on 14 May 1948, the end of the British Mandate for Palestine at midnight, and the entry of a military coalition of Arab states into the territory of Mandatory Palestine the following morning. The war formally ended with the 1949 Armistice Agreements which established the Green Line.
Since the 1917 Balfour Declaration and the 1920 creation of the British Mandate of Palestine, and in the context of Zionism and the mass migration of European Jews to Palestine, there had been tension and conflict between Arabs, Jews, and the British in Palestine. On 29 November 1947, the United Nations General Assembly voted in favor of the United Nations Partition Plan for Palestine, proposing to divide the territory into an Arab state, a Jewish state, and an internationally administered corpus separatum for the cities of Jerusalem and Bethlehem. The land allocated to the Arab State included about 43% of Mandatory Palestine. The land allocated to the Jewish State, who constituted a third of the population, was 56% of Mandatory Palestine. While Jewish leaders in Palestine supported the plan, leaders of the Palestinian Arab community and in the broader Arab world did not. The following day, the conflict escalated into a civil war with attacks by Palestinian militias and mobs on Jewish areas. As the two communities battled, the British withdrew.
In April 1948, Zionist forces launched an offensive codenamed Plan Dalet, during which they conquered and depopulated cities, villages, and territories in Mandatory Palestine in preparation for the establishment of a Jewish state. Just before the expiration of the British Mandate for Palestine, Zionist leaders announced the Israeli Declaration of Independence on 14 May 1948. The following morning, Egypt, Transjordan, Syria, and expeditionary forces from Iraq launched an invasion into Palestine, taking control of the Arab areas and attacking Israeli forces and settlements. The 10 months of fighting took place mostly on the territory of the British Mandate and in the Sinai Peninsula and southern Lebanon, interrupted by several truce periods.
By the end of the war, the State of Israel controlled about 78% of the former territory of Mandatory Palestine: all of the area that the UN had proposed for a Jewish state, as well as almost 60% of the area proposed for an Arab state, including Jaffa, Lydda and Ramla (Ramle) area, Upper Galilee, some parts of the Negev, the west coast as far as Gaza City, and a wide strip along the Tel Aviv–Jerusalem road. Israel also took control of West Jerusalem, which was meant to be part of an international zone for Jerusalem and its environs. Transjordan took control of East Jerusalem and what became known as the West Bank, annexing it the following year. The territory known today as the Gaza Strip was occupied by Egypt.
Expulsions of Palestinians, which had begun during the civil war, continued during the Arab-Israeli war. Hundreds of Palestinians were killed in multiple massacres, such as occurred in the expulsions from Lydda and Ramla. These events are known today as the Nakba (Arabic for "the catastrophe") and were the beginning of the Palestinian refugee problem. A similar number of Jews migrated, fled, or were expelled from Arab states in the three years following the war, 260,000 of whom went to Israel.
Background
Since the 1917 Balfour Declaration and the 1920 creation of the British Mandate of Palestine, and in the context of Zionism and the mass migration of European Jews to Palestine, there had been tension and conflict between Arabs, Jews, and the British. British policies dissatisfied both Arabs and Jews. In 1920, the Arab leaders were very disappointed with Britain. In 1916, the British commander-in-chief in Cairo had made an agreement with the Emir of Mecca: if the Arabs rebelled against the Ottoman Empire, the British would provide them with arms and money and support the formation of an independent Arab state. Around 30,000 older rifles and a smaller amount of modern weapons were supplied by the British, and a very large area from the Red Sea to Damascus was conquered.
Britain backtracked from its promise that an independent Arab state would be formed. In 1920, Britain let French troops attack the Arab Kingdom of Syria, crushing its army and overthrowing its government. Arab opposition developed into the 1936–1939 Arab revolt in Palestine, while the Jewish opposition developed into the 1944–1947 Jewish insurgency in Palestine. On 29 November 1947, the United Nations General Assembly adopted a resolution recommending the adoption and implementation of a plan to partition the British Mandate of Palestine into two states, one Arab and one Jewish, and the City of Jerusalem.
The General Assembly resolution on Partition was greeted with overwhelming joy in Jewish communities and widespread outrage in the Arab world. In Palestine, violence erupted almost immediately, feeding into a spiral of reprisals and counter-reprisals. The British refrained from intervening as tensions boiled over into a low-level conflict that quickly escalated into a full-scale civil war.
From January onwards, operations became increasingly militarised, with the intervention of a number of Arab Liberation Army regiments inside Palestine, each active in a variety of distinct sectors around the different coastal towns. They consolidated their presence in Galilee and Samaria. Abd al-Qadir al-Husayni came from Egypt with several hundred men of the Army of the Holy War. Having recruited a few thousand volunteers, al-Husayni organised the blockade of the 100,000 Jewish residents of Jerusalem.
To counter this, the Yishuv authorities tried to supply the city with convoys of up to 100 armoured vehicles, but the operation became more and more impractical as the number of casualties in the relief convoys surged. By March, Al-Hussayni's tactic had paid off. Almost all of Haganah's armoured vehicles had been destroyed, the blockade was in full operation, and hundreds of Haganah members who had tried to bring supplies into the city were killed. The situation for those who dwelt in the Jewish settlements in the highly isolated Negev and north of Galilee was even more critical.
While the Jewish population had received strict orders requiring them to hold their ground everywhere at all costs, the Arab population was more affected by the general conditions of insecurity to which the country was exposed. Up to 100,000 Arabs, from the urban upper and middle classes in Haifa, Jaffa and Jerusalem, or Jewish-dominated areas, evacuated abroad or to Arab centres eastwards.
This situation caused the United States to withdraw its support for the Partition Plan, encouraging the Arab League to believe that the Palestinian Arabs, reinforced by the Arab Liberation Army, could put an end to the plan. However, the British decided on 7 February 1948 to support the annexation of the Arab part of Palestine by Transjordan.
Although doubt took hold among Yishuv supporters, their apparent defeats were due more to their wait-and-see policy than to weakness. David Ben-Gurion reorganised Haganah and made conscription obligatory. Every Jewish man and woman in the country had to receive military training. Thanks to funds raised by Golda Meir from sympathisers in the United States, and Stalin's decision to support the Zionist cause, the Jewish representatives of Palestine were able to sign very important armament contracts in the East. Other Haganah agents recovered stockpiles from the Second World War, which helped improve the army's equipment and logistics. Operation Balak allowed arms and other equipment to be transported for the first time by the end of March.
Ben-Gurion invested Yigael Yadin with the responsibility to come up with a plan of offence whose timing was related to the foreseeable evacuation of British forces. This strategy, called Plan Dalet, was readied by March and implemented towards the end of April. A separate plan, Operation Nachshon, was devised to lift the siege of Jerusalem. 1500 men from Haganah's Givati brigade and Palmach's Harel brigade conducted sorties to free up the route to the city between 5 and 20 April. Both sides acted offensively in defiance of the Partition Plan, which foresaw Jerusalem as a corpus separatum, under neither Jewish nor Arab jurisdiction. The Arabs did not accept the Plan, while the Jews were determined to oppose the internationalisation of the city, and secure it as part of the Jewish state. The operation was successful, and enough foodstuffs to last two months were trucked into Jerusalem for distribution to the Jewish population. The success of the operation was assisted by the death of al-Husayni in combat.
During this time, fighters from Irgun and Lehi massacred a substantial number of Palestinians at Deir Yassin. The attack was widely publicized and had a deep impact on the morale of the Palestinian population and contributed to generate the exodus of the Arab population.
At the same time, the Arab Liberation Army was roundly defeated at Mishmar HaEmek in its first large-scale operation, coinciding with the loss of their Druze allies through defection.
With the implementation of Plan Dalet, the Haganah, Palmach and Irgun forces began conquering mixed zones. The Palestinian Arab society was shaken as Tiberias, Haifa, Safed, Beisan, Jaffa and Acre were all captured and more than 250,000 Palestinian Arabs fled or were expelled.
The British had essentially withdrawn their troops. This pushed the leaders of the neighbouring Arab states to intervene, but they were not fully prepared, and could not assemble sufficient forces to turn the tide. The majority of Palestinian Arab hopes lay with the Arab Legion of Transjordan's monarch, King Abdullah I, but he had no intention of creating a Palestinian Arab-run state, since he hoped to annex as much of the territory of the British Mandate for Palestine as he could. He was playing a double game, being just as much in contact with the Jewish authorities as with the Arab League.
In preparation for the offensive, Haganah successfully launched Operations Yiftah and Ben-'Ami to secure the Jewish settlements of Galilee, and Operation Kilshon, which created a united front around Jerusalem. The inconclusive meeting between Golda Meir and Abdullah I, followed by the Kfar Etzion massacre on 13 May by the Arab Legion led to predictions that the battle for Jerusalem would be merciless.
On 14 May 1948, David Ben-Gurion declared the establishment of the State of Israel and the 1948 Palestine war entered its second phase with the intervention of the Arab state armies and the beginning of the 1948 Arab–Israeli War.
Armed forces
By September 1947, the Haganah had "10,489 rifles, 702 light machine-guns, 2,666 submachine guns, 186 medium machine-guns, 672 two-inch mortars and 92 three-inch (76 mm) mortars".
Importing arms
In 1946, Ben-Gurion decided that the Yishuv would probably have to defend itself against both the Palestinian Arabs and neighbouring Arab states and accordingly began a "massive, covert arms acquisition campaign in the West", and acquired many more during the first few months of hostilities.
The Yishuv managed clandestinely to amass arms and military equipment abroad for transfer to Palestine once the British blockade was lifted. In the United States, Yishuv agents purchased three Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress bombers, one of which bombed Cairo in July 1948, some Curtiss C-46 Commando transport planes, and dozens of half-tracks, which were repainted and defined as "agricultural equipment". In Western Europe, Haganah agents amassed fifty 65mm French mountain guns, twelve 120mm mortars, ten H-35 light tanks, and a large number of half-tracks. By mid-May or thereabouts the Yishuv had purchased from Czechoslovakia 25 Avia S-199 fighters (an inferior version of the Messerschmitt Bf 109), 200 heavy machine guns, 5,021 light machine guns, 24,500 rifles, and 52 million rounds of ammunition, enough to equip all units, but short of heavy arms. The airborne arms smuggling missions from Czechoslovakia were codenamed Operation Balak.
The airborne smuggling missions were carried out by mostly American aviators – Jews and non-Jews – led by ex-U.S. Air Transport Command flight engineer Al Schwimmer. Schwimmer's operation also included recruiting and training fighter pilots such as Lou Lenart, commander of the first Israeli air assault against the Arabs. Several Americans, including Schwimmer, were later prosecuted by the U.S. government for violating the Neutrality Act of 1939.
Arms production
The Yishuv also had "a relatively advanced arms producing capacity", that between October 1947 and July 1948 "produced 3 million 9 mm bullets, 150,000 Mills grenades, 16,000 submachine guns (Sten Guns) and 210 three-inch (76 mm) mortars", along with a few "Davidka" mortars, which had been indigenously designed and produced. They were inaccurate but had a loud explosion that demoralised the enemy. Much of the munitions used by the Israelis came from the Ayalon Institute, a clandestine bullet factory beneath kibbutz Ayalon, which produced about 2.5 million bullets for Sten guns. The munitions produced by the Ayalon Institute were said to have been the only supply that was not in shortage during the war. Locally produced explosives were also plentiful. After Israel's independence, these clandestine arms manufacturing operations were moved above ground. All of the Haganah's weapons-manufacturing was centralised and later became Israel Military Industries.
Manpower
In November 1947, the Haganah was an underground paramilitary force that had existed as a highly organised, national force, since the Arab riots of 1920–21, and throughout the riots of 1929, Great Uprising of 1936–39, and World War II. It had a mobile force, the HISH, which had 2,000 full-time fighters (men and women) and 10,000 reservists (all aged between 18 and 25) and an elite unit, the Palmach composed of 2,100 fighters and 1,000 reservists. These mobile forces could rely on a garrison force, the HIM (Heil Mishmar, lit. Guard Corps), composed of people aged over 25. The Yishuv's total strength was around 35,000 with 15,000 to 18,000 fighters and a garrison force of roughly 20,000.
There were also several thousand men and women who had served in the British Army in World War II who did not serve in any of the underground militias but would provide valuable military experience during the war. Walid Khalidi says the Yishuv had the additional forces of the Jewish Settlement Police, numbering some 12,000, the Gadna Youth Battalions, and the armed settlers. Few of the units had been trained by December 1947. On 5 December 1947, conscription was instituted for all men and women aged between 17 and 25 and by the end of March, 21,000 had been conscripted. On 30 March, the call-up was extended to men and single women aged between 26 and 35. Five days later, a General Mobilization order was issued for all men under 40.