The Making of Modern Israel 1948-1967 by Leslie Stein
Polity, £20
As extraordinary as it may seem to observers of the Middle East today, in the 19 years that followed the establishment of Israel in 1948 the Jewish state was viewed as the darling of liberal opinion. Not simply because it was one of the few enclaves of democratic socialism outside Western Europe but, having been almost strangled at birth, and faced with repeated threats of annihilation, devoid of a superpower alliance and occupying a minute area of land the size of Wales, Israel was seen as the underdog with only a marginal prospect of survival.
Leslie Stein, a senior research fellow at Macquarie University in Australia, explains in this eloquent, highly readable and well-researched study how the Israeli state overcame the threat to its existence and emerged as the most feared military power in the Middle East.
Ironically, it was the implacable hostility of Arab nationalism that convinced the Special UN Commission to recommend partition in 1947. Ferocious representations demanding an end to Jewish immigration to Palestine – Stein points out that Arab migration to Palestine from 1921 to 1939 was numerically greater – coupled with candid submissions by the Syrians that under an Arab Palestinian regime all Jews would be expelled, convinced the commission that Jews could not be expected to live under Arab domination. Israel’s Declaration of Independence was greeted with a co-ordinated and unprovoked attack by all of its neighbouring Arab states.
The Egyptian air force bombed Tel Aviv and seven Arab armies invaded Israel’s borders. Outgunned and outmanned, Yigal Yadin, director of Israeli military operations, said the new nation had only a 50 per cent chance of survival. The Arab forces were eventually repelled but the embers of that conflict still fuel the burning hatred between the antagonists.
Stein estimates that the victorious Israelis expelled half of the 800,000 Palestinians displaced. Israeli towns conquered by the invading Arab forces fared a lot worse. The Jewish inhabitants of Kfar Etzion, Kfar Darom, Yad Mordecai, Nitzarim and others were not ethnically cleansed – but massacred. The 1948 war also saw the expulsion of approximately 900,000 Jews from Arab lands. Most were compelled to leave after having their properties and belongings seized.
Diplomatic attempts to resolve the Palestinian refugee problem failed. Stein observes that Resolution 194, which demanded the return of the refugees or payment of compensation and implicitly called for the recognition of Israel, was rejected by every Arab state. A further offer by President Dwight Eisenhower in 1955, that the US would bear the full cost of resettling the refugees, was also spurned. The years leading up to the Sinai campaign in 1956 witnessed a gruesome escalation of terror and counter-terror.
Stein identifies the Egyptian regime as bearing responsibility for the carnage that followed. Government policy toward Israel was articulated in simplistic and murderous tones: “There will be no peace on Israel’s borders because we demand vengeance and vengeance is Israel’s death” and “even if Israel should consist of only Tel Aviv, we should never put up with that”. Terrorists were instructed to carry out fedayeen attacks against Israeli civilian targets.
Gamal Abdul Nasser, who lived up to his reputation as the Mussolini of the Arab world, even recruited 2,000 fugitive Nazi war criminals to train them. Men such as former Gestapo chief Erich Altern and Walter Baumann, who participated in the extermination of Jews in the Warsaw ghetto, were appointed military instructors in Egyptian administered Palestinian refugee camps. Similarly, SS Hauptsturmfuhrer Alois Brunner, Adolf Eichmann’s senior assistant and the man responsible for sending 140,000 Jews to the gas chambers, was recruited by Syria’s intelligence services to co-ordinate attacks on Israel’s northern border.
Atrocities committed in the 1950s included attacks on Israeli civilian buses and kibbutzniks were abducted and discovered horribly mutilated, often with their eyes gouged out. In one particularly gruesome incident, a Jewish mother and her 10-year-old daughter picking olives were targeted just outside Jerusalem. The young girl was murdered. Her attackers severed her hand and took it away as a souvenir. Stein points out that Israeli complaints to the United Nations concerning such blatant violations of earlier armistice agreements were routinely ignored as a result of the numerical superiority of the Arab/Muslim bloc at the UN. This theme is one that recurs throughout this study. The author argues that Israeli recourse to counter-terror operations was directly attributable to the diplomatic avenue being denied to them.
Participation in the attack on Egypt in 1956 had little to do with the nationalisation of the Suez Canal. Instead, Israel sought to curtail Egyptian sponsorship of terror attacks against its population. This it succeeded in doing and the state enjoyed several years of tranquillity on its borders.
Stein’s account of the events leading up to the 1967 war is one of the most masterly and lucid to appear in years. Too often we are absorbed by the war’s aftermath but neglect to appreciate its cause fully. On May 16, Nasser ordered the expulsion of the UN Emergency Force that acted as a buffer between the Egyptian and Israeli armies. Neither U Thant nor any member of the Security Council objected, despite full knowledge that their removal would lead to war. Cairo Radio made the position clear. The Arab world sought to wage a war that would result in the “final extermination of the Zionist existence”. PLO leader Ahmed Shukeiry, when asked what fate would befall the Jews of Israel in the event of an Arab victory, said: “Those who survive will remain in Palestine. But I estimate that none will survive.” The leaders of Syria and Jordan uttered similar genocidal threats.
Eighty thousand Egyptian troops poured into the Sinai desert and four Iraqi brigades were sent to Jordan with the objective of invading the central Israeli coastal city of Nethanya, thereby severing the country in two. Stein points out that not a single Western leader responded to Israeli requests for either diplomatic or military assistance. The Israelis struck first, wiping out the Egyptian, Syrian and Jordanian air forces. The subsequent occupation of the West Bank, Sinai and Golan Heights left Israel militarily secure. An offer to withdraw fully in exchange for a comprehensive peace settlement was once again rejected by the Arab League summit held in Khartoum the following year. Stein’s melancholy conclusion is that, whereas the conflict at that stage was territorial and capable of resolution, the Jihadi strain of Arab rejectionism today makes compromise inconceivable “and a fight to the finish theologically mandatory”.
Stein’s work is in many ways a partisan account of the early years of Israel’s existence. His arguments and the evidence adduced in support are, however, compelling. There is little doubt that his study will be viewed as an indispensible authority on one of the most intractable conflicts of our time.
David Harounoff
