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The Jews and World War II

In 1939, Huseini, Palestine's Grand Mufti in exile, fled to Germany, where he would spend most of World War II, broadcasting anti-British and anti-Jewish commentary for the Germans.

The British recruited 136,000 Jews from Palestine into their armed forces. Zionists and Jewish leaders in Palestine were upset over Britain's White Paper of 1939, but they put fighting Hitler first. In 1942, the British sent 1,500 specially trained Jewish Palestinian guerrillas against the Germans in Libya - training that would contribute to the creation of Haganah and the Israeli army.

Derelict ships were carrying Jews from German-controlled Europe, and the Haganah and other Palestinian Jews struggled to land the refugees while British and mostly Arab police worked to catch and deport the "illegals."

By May 1942, Hitler's death camps became common knowledge among the Zionists and Jews in Palestine. Zionists demanded that Britain's White Paper of 1939 be scrapped, that Palestine be opened to unlimited Jewish immigration and land purchase and that Palestine be divided into two separate states, one Jewish and one Arab.

In the late summer of 1943, Prime Minister Winston Churchill - who had been supporting the Jews against the advice of members of his cabinet - changed British policy, allowing several thousand Jewish refugees to enter Palestine. Anyone who could get to Turkey could proceed to Palestine, despite quotas. And, by 1944, Churchill was talking about a state in Palestine for the Jews, which added to hostility toward Churchill among Palestine's Arabs.

Among the Jews in Palestine was an underground army called the Irgun Zvai Leumi (IZL), or simply the Irgun. The Irgun wanted liberation from British rule and the establishment of a Jewish state, and they saw armed struggle as the only way to achieve these. The Irgun's leader, Menachem Begin, was a conservative from Poland who had been imprisoned in the Soviet Union. He arrived in Palestine in 1943, thanks to the British, for training with members of the Free Polish Army. He saw the Allied war against Germany as most important, and during that war he refrained from attacking British military installations, but he sent the Irgun against British police stations in search of weapons.

In September, 1944, Churchill announced the creation of a Jewish Brigade to be trained by the British, while Huseini was meeting with Himmler and advocating the creation of an Islamic army for Germany. Then, in November, two young extremist Jews from Palestine, reputed to be members of an organization that had broken from the Irgun, called the Stern Gang, assassinated Britain's minister-resident to Cairo, Lord Moyne. Churchill was outraged. So too were many Palestinian Jews. It was terror that accomplished nothing for the Jews.

The United States, Britain, Arabs, and Jews to Palestine

During World War II the United States wanted assurance from Saudi Arabia concerning supplies of oil needed to wage war. In February 1945, following the Yalta Conference with Stalin and Churchill, President Roosevelt and King ibn Saud met aboard a ship docked in the Suez Canal. There, Roosevelt and Saud concluded a secret agreement in which the U.S. would provide Saudi Arabia military security - military assistance, training and a military base at Dhahran in Saudi Arabia - in exchange for secure access to supplies of oil. Regarding Jews, Saud expressed sympathy for their plight, but he argued that a homeland for Jews in Palestine would be unfair to Palestinians. Roosevelt responded in April, just before he died, sending Saud a letter stating: "I will take no action which might prove hostile to the Arab people."

With the end of war in Europe in May 1945, Churchill's government was replaced by a Labour government led by Clement Atlee. The new foreign minister, Ernest Bevin, maintained a strict blockade against "illegal" entry of Jewish refugees from Europe. And Jews in Palestine stepped up their opposition to British rule.

The socialist-oriented Haganah was helping refugees run the British blockade and defending Jews from Arab attacks, and they were interested in acquiring "illegal" arms. Menachem Begin's Irgun made war on British rule in Palestine but took pride in giving warnings where innocent lives were endangered. The Stern Gang was too extreme to win financial backing from mainstream Jews. Instead they robbed banks and coerced Jews to support them financially, and they were careless about injury to civilians.

Between 1945 and May 1948, 70,000 Jews reached Palestine, including those on a ship called Exodus. They were part of what had been an increasing population in Palestine. Arabs had increased from 759,952 counted by the British in 1931 to around 1,360,000 - some of them  from surrounding Muslim lands attracted by economic opportunity. Jews between 1931 and 1948 increased from 175,006 to 806,000.  According to these figures, the increase was about the same Jews and Arabs: around 600,000 for the Arabs and 630,994 for the Jews.

Fighting between British soldiers and the Jewish underground grew bitter. The British cracked down on the Haganah for their support of blockade running. They hanged some Jewish underground fighters and deported some to a camp in Eritrea.

The Palestinian Arabs were also fighting the British. The British wanted to free themselves of the burden of rule in Palestine and took their problem to the United Nations. The UN drew up a plan to create two separate states in Palestine. The Arab state was to have 100,000 Jews and the Jewish state was to be equally divided between Jews and Arabs. Jerusalem was to be a free city under UN trusteeship. And the two states were eventually to be united economically. 

Palestinian communists officially accepted the plan. The official position among other Palestinian groups is reported to have been opposition, but there are claims that unofficially Palestinians accepted the independent Palestinian state that was part of the plan. But power lay with the Arab League. The Palestinians asked the Arab League to establish a Palestinian government on July 10, 1947, but the Arab League refused. The request would be repeated in February, 1948, and would again be refused. [note]

With strong support from President Truman - and little from the U.S. State Department - the UN's partition plan won a majority in the UN General Assembly. Truman had chosen the interests of Jews rather than give precedence to Saudi oil, and King Saud's second son, Prince Faisal, in New York for the vote, felt betrayed. He had been promised by one of Truman's top aides, General George Marshall, that the U.S. would vote against the plan.

On the day of the partition vote, November 29, 1947, an Arab "liberation army," aided by civilians, initiated  war against the Jews across Palestine. The Arab "liberation army" surrounded the old Jewish Quarter in Jerusalem, threatening the 1,700 people there with starvation. An on-again off-again war between Jews and Arabs that was to last through rest of the century and beyond had begun. And the Jews were not to go passively to their deaths as they had in Europe. 

British troops were scheduled to leave Palestine by August 1, 1948, and British policy was opposed to violence by either side. The British blocked the sending of arms that Jews could have used to defend themselves. This was the position also of the U.S. government. The United States had a vast reservoir of weapons left over from World War II but refused to allow any of it to be sent to the Jews of Palestine.

The War of Independence

Bands of Muslims from neighboring countries joined the Arabs fighting Jews in Palestine, and the Arabs attacked Jews in areas that the UN had designated as belonging to the Jews. To protected Jewish settlements, the Haganah pushed into areas designated by the UN as belonging to the Arabs.

The Jews fought to take supplies to their people in Jerusalem. They were blocked at the village of Deir Yassin, five miles west of Jerusalem. There the Arab Liberation Army had taken up positions in the middle of Muslim civilians. The Irgun and Stern Gang went against them. According to Menachem Begin, loudspeakers were used to warn the civilians that a heavy bombardment was about to begin. Perhaps the civilians did not hear the message because of noise of battle. There are claims that the Arab army did not want the civilians to move. An Arab account tells of  the Jews massacring 250 villagers - old men, women and children. A later Arab account, circa the year 2002, puts the number closer to 100. [note]

Word of what happened at Deir Yassin spread among Muslim civilians, and, encouraged by leading Arabs, a mass outpouring of civilians began to abandon their homes and move into surrounding Arab countries. From the north of Palestine some went to Lebanon, some to Iraq and some to Syria. Some went southward within the West Bank. Some Arabs from Jerusalem went to Transjordan. And from the more southern part of Palestine some went to the Gaza area and some went to Egypt. It was the beginning of Palestinian refugee camps. In Haifa, the Leftist Jewish mayor, Abba Hushi,  was concerned that a loss of skilled longshoremen would end the city as a major port, and he pleaded with the Arabs to stay, but to no avail. Some other Jews saw advantage in the Arabs leaving, and some used force to drive Arabs away.

On May 14, 1948, twenty-four hours before Britain's mandate to rule in Palestine was scheduled to end, Israel's first prime minister, David Ben Gurion, proclaimed the independence of the state of Israel. Truman extended U.S. recognition of Israel, and hours later so did Stalin. With Britain no longer blockading arms, weaponry started to flow to the Jews. Stalin at this time was not courting favor from the Muslims of the Middle East. He had been hostile to Zionism but he was hoping to win friends and influence people in Israel, and he sent to Israel arms from Czechoslovakia, as Syria, Egypt, Iraq and Transjordan were preparing to make war on Israel.

The rank and file of the forces from the various countries going to war against Israel lacked rudimentarily training, and they were poorly led. The Muslims, moreover, were in conflict with each other. There was territorial rivalry between Palestine's al-Huseini family and Transjordan's king, Abdullah. The Iraqis were at odds with the Syrians and the Jordanians, the Iraqis not wishing to advance the interests of either.

The Israelis were better organized, better disciplined and equipped than the armies sent against them, many of their officers having fought with the British in World War II. But they were not as formidable as the Arabs feared. Despite aide from abroad, they were barely equipped to fight a war.

In the north, at Deganya, the Israelis fired two 65 millimeter artillery guns at the Syrians - guns that had just arrived by ship and that had been rushed north from Tel Aviv temporarily. The advancing Syrians, with tanks and flamethrowers, panicked and fled. In the South, the Egyptians also panicked and fled. Egypt's airforce bombed some Israeli cities, but ineffectively.  What worked well for the Israelis was their determination. Unlike their enemies they were fighting for their survival as a nation.

Help from abroad increased. Volunteer combatants arrived, many of them veterans of World War II - around 1,500 from the United States and Canada, 1000 from Britain, 500 from South Africa, and around 30 from Finland. Some surplus tanks, still in Europe and with spiked guns, were purchased from the United States. Israel bought 1,100 automatic weapons from the U.S. and received a dozen "Flying Fortress" bombers. Fifty jeeps arrived, equipped with light machine guns. And Mexico sent high-octane aircraft fuel.

The British, still having power in Transjordan, encouraged King Abdullah to take control over those parts of Palestine that the UN in 1947 had allocated to the Arabs. During the war there were complaints from Palestinian Muslims of Israeli looting and unnecessarily destroying villages - a charge made by the UN's mediator, Count Folke Bernadotte. Every society has those whose passions trump wisdom. Yehoshua Cohen, a member of the Stern Gang, assassinated Bernadotte on September 17, 1948, because, he said, Bernadotte had proposed an Arab administration for Jerusalem. Cohen was following orders from Stern Gang leaders, one of which was Yitzhak Shamir, future rightwing Prime Minister of Israel. Ben-Gurion and most other Israelis were outraged, Ben-Gurion ordering the arrest of all Stern Gang members. Soon fighting took place between the Israeli army and the armies of the Irgun (still under Begin's leadership) and the Stern Gang, as Ben-Gurion was determined to end all independent and semi-independent forces in Israel and put all combatants within the discipline of his military.

On February 24, 1949, Israel signed an agreement with Egypt, ending their violence. On March 23 an agreement was signed with Lebanon, on April 3 with Syria, and on July 20 with Iraq, Iraq withdrawing its troops and transferring land it held to Transjordan. On the Arab side, the agreement was seen as merely an end to military hostilities. The Israelis, on the other hand, wanted it to represent peace and a permanent settlement. Transjordan was in possession of much of the West Bank, and Transjordan controlled all but western Jerusalem, held by the Israelis.

Jerusalem was to be a divided city for years to come. The old Jewish Quarter in Jerusalem, and its synagogues, was razed. Freedom of access to religious shrines for all worshipers had been agreed to at the signing of the end of the war, but Jordan did not keep its promise. No one was allowed to pray at the Kotel HaMaaravi (Wailing Wall), no Jew was allowed to visit the Tombs of the Patriarchs in Hebron. No Jews were allowed at the ancient cemetery on the mount of Olives in Jerusalem. Jordan built a highway across the cemetery that could easily have been built elsewhere. Tombstones were used by the Arabs as latrines. And where Jewish religious tradition held that the Messiah would arrive to give judgment, the Jordanians allowed construction by the Intercontinental Hotel Chain.

Jordan expelled Jews from the areas it controlled, and the Jews were unwilling to withdraw from areas they had gained militarily. Israelis saw the United Nations partition resolution of 1947 as having been annulled by the war made upon them by the various Arab states. And Israel was unwilling to allow Arabs who had abandoned their homes to return. Drawing from experience, the Israelis believed that the return of these refugees would create too great of a security risk.

Israel gave citizenship and rights to those Muslims who stayed behind. According to the Israelis, the only Arabs forced from their homes in the years just following the war of independence were those who posed an exceptional security risk and those occupying land where a new international airport was being built - at Lod.

None of the Arab countries wanted to recognize Israel. There were complaints that Zionists had driven Palestinians from their homeland. Egypt, Lebanon, and Iraq refused to integrate Muslim refugees, claiming that the refugees should return to what had been their homes in Palestine and that such a return was God's will. Together the Muslim countries held 99.9 percent of the land in what is called the Middle East. Israel comprised only 0.1 percent. The Muslims continued to believe that all of Palestine was a part of Islam's holy land.

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