The History of Israel in a Nutshell

The History of Israel in a Nutshell
7,817 words to bring you up to date on why Israel is the world's most controversial region.

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by Shimon Apisdorf/Jewsweek.com

Wasteland Israel
The land of Israel was once part of a great fertile region that produced an abundance of agriculture; and then came destruction. From the time of the Roman conquest, Palestine had been ruled by outsiders who had little interest in the well-being and productivity of the land. The Muslims conquered the land in 638 and never seriously developed the country. Later, wars between the Christian crusaders and the Muslims created a virtual wasteland. The Mongol invaders who arrived in 1260 destroyed many of the villages in Palestine. The Mamelukes who followed them burned and sacked towns and villages, uprooted orchards, and filled drinking wells. A vastly productive agricultural region had been reduced to swamps ruled by malaria-infested mosquitoes. In 1351, the Black Death ravaged Palestine and by 1500 its entire population declined to barely 200,000 people. Imagine Pennsylvania with only 200,000 people. Palestine was empty. As the winter of 1516 approached, Jerusalem was an impoverished city whose once mighty walls were a distant memory and whose citizens were at the mercy of disease and Bedouin raiders.

On December 1, 1516, the Turkish sultan Selim I and his army advanced on a defenseless Jerusalem. The Ottoman Empire had arrived. The Jewish population of Israel at the time was approximately 3,000 with the majority living in Safed, and only six to eight hundred of the most devoted Jews clinging to precious, poverty-riddled Jerusalem. Suleiman took great interest in Jerusalem, had its walls fully restored for the first time in centuries, and built large pools to provide water for the city. The majestic walls and gates of Suleiman still encircle the Old City of Jerusalem. By 1550, thanks to improved living conditions and Turkish control of the Bedouins, the Jewish population of Jerusalem rose to over 1,000 people. At the same time, the Jewish populations in Safed rose to approximately 5,000.

Suleiman's intense interest in Jerusalem proved to be an anomaly, with the prevailing Turkish attitude being largely one of indifference. For the most part, its primary interest was in the revenues that could be extracted from taxes levied on farmers and fees paid by pilgrims who made their way to Jerusalem. By the early 1800s, the Ottoman Empire was well on its way to decline, the economic situation in Palestine was in a shambles, and Bedouin robbers again had free reign to terrorize the population. At the turn of the century, there were about 6,000 Jews living in Palestine. The squalor and deplorable hygienic conditions that had returned to Jerusalem made it all but uninhabitable. It was only thanks to the beginnings of British influence in the region that conditions began to improve to the point that the Jewish population grew to 17, 000 by 1850. By 1890, there were 530,000 Muslims living in Palestine, 57,000 Christians, and 43,000 Jews.

As the nineteenth century was drawing to a close, the arrival of the British in the Middle East, the imminent collapse of the Ottoman Empire, anti-Semitism in Europe, and the stirrings of modern Zionism would all converge to pave the way for a new Middle East and the rejuvenation of the Jewish people in the land of Israel.

We're Back
Beginning in 1882 and continuing until 1903, 25,000 Jews moved from Europe to Palestine. These immigrants were motivated by a desire to reside in the Holy Land, by Zionism, and by the need to flee czarist Russia. Conditions in Palestine at the time were harsh, and not all the immigrants remained. Nonetheless, the modern return of the Jewish people to the land of Israel was under way. By 1900 some 50,000 Jews were living in Palestine. The population in Jerusalem at the turn of the century was 28.000 Jews and 17,000 Muslims and Christians. The rest of the Jews lived in Jaffa, Hebron, Haifa, and Safed, though 5,000 were living in newly established agricultural settlements. To many of the early Zionists, these agricultural settlements held the key to a large-scale return to the land of Israel. It was agricultural development that would bring the land back to life and create industry and infrastructure that could support large-scale immigration. For many, the idea of the Jew as a farmer and reclaimer of the land also represented the transformation of the Jews from European city dwellers into a new kind of rugged, pioneering Jew. Between 1905 and 1914, another 30,000 Jews, the majority of whom were Russians, set out for Palestine. These 30,000 Jews, most of whom were socialists who had abandoned their religious roots, would set the tone for the early development of the Jewish presence in Palestine, and eventually for the State of Israel.

"Their notion of pioneering was a kind of secular messianism. They had come, too, not merely to establish a Socialist commonwealth but to rebuild their nationhood, their very manhood, by the sweat of their brows."
Sachar, A History of Israel (73-74)

By the first decade of the twentieth century, Baron Rothchild was financing the establishment of agricultural settlements in Palestine, a bank had been founded to help finance Jewish development, and the Jewish National Fund began to purchase land in Palestine and to support the training of agricultural workers. The Turkish government was tolerant of Jewish immigration calculating that the Jews would bring money, investment, and development all of which would help line the pockets of the empire. By 1914, there were 85,000 Jews living in Ottoman Palestine, dozens of Jewish agricultural settlements dotted the landscape, and Jews had purchased over 400,000 dunams of land.

When World War I broke out at the end of 1914, the pieces were in place for the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine. The contours of a new society were quickly taking hold and the development of Palestine by the Jews in less than thirty years was unlike anything that had been seen there for, literally, over a thousand years.

So Who Was Balfour and What Did He Declare?
The British were fighting World War I with one eye on defeating the Turks and another on how to best position themselves in the Middle East after the war. In the fall of 1915, Shareif Hussein of Mecca-patriarch of the Hashemite family, and Arabia's most prestigious tribal leader-secretly committed the Hashemites to aid the English against the Turks. In return, it was expected that the Hashemite family would become the anointed rulers of the vast Arabic lands that the British would take from the Turks. The Hashemites would have their power and prestige and the British would have their proxy. It seemed like a good deal; but Great Britain wasn't finished dealing. A few months later, Great Britain entered into another secret agreement, this one with France and Russia. In the Sykes-Picot-Sazanov Agreement, Russia would get Turkey, France would get Syria (including Palestine and Lebanon) and part of Mesopotamia (Iraq), while Great Britain would get Transjordan and the other part of Mesopotamia. This is where Arthur James Balfour comes onto the scene.

Arthur Balfour was a prominent British politician who had a Jewish friend by the name of Chaim Weizman. Originally from Russia, Chaim Weizman was one of Great Britain's most highly regarded chemists, the leader of British Jewry and a devoted Zionist. At the beginning of the war, Weizman was asked by the British government to help develop new types of explosives. His success and notoriety positioned him to be able to influence people like future prime minister Lloyd George and future foreign secretary Arthur Balfour. Soon it would be time for another British deal.

As the war progressed, the British began looking for a way to undermine France's designs on Palestine, and the Jews were perfectly positioned to help out. With the British army advancing on Palestine, and with the Jews of Palestine prepared to accept some kind of autonomy under the umbrella of the British Empire, the table was set for the issuance of the Balfour Declaration. On November 2, 1917, on behalf of the British government, Foreign Secretary Balfour penned the following letter to Lord Rothschild, head of the British Zionist movement:

Dear Lord Rothschild,
I have much pleasure in conveying to you, on behalf of His Majesty's Government, the following declaration of sympathy with Jewish Zionist aspirations which had been submitted to, and approved by, the Cabinet: "His Majesty's Government view with favor the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavors to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done that may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country."

Jewish response to this brief letter was euphoric. People literally danced in the streets. In the blink of an eye, it seemed as if a two-thousand-year-old recurring dream was about to come true. Six weeks later, on December 11-the second day of Chanukah-General Allenby and his British forces entered Jerusalem. The fate of Palestine was now in the hands of the British.

The Decisive Years
We'll now take a look at the of defining events, moments, and decisions that unfolded in Palestine from the end of World War I until Israel achieved independence in 1948. These were the make-or-break years that would determine if Israel would come to be and if it would, how that would happen. This period would also have a seminal impact on the future conflict between Israel and the Arab nations, as well as the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

San Remo, Anybody?
Following the war, in April 1920, in San Remo, Italy, the British and the French were once again at the bargaining table dividing up the Middle East. This time, though France got to keep Syria, Great Britain received a mandate over Palestine. The borders of the Palestine Mandate included what is today Israel and Jordan, that is, both sides of the Jordan River. Over the course of the next year, events occurred that dramatically affected the Palestine Mandate and the whole future of the Middle East.

Without going into the details, here's what happened. France ended up dividing Syria into Syria and Lebanon, and in 1921 Great Britain divided Palestine into Transjordan and Palestine. Transjordan (later known as Jordan), occupied two-thirds of Palestine and was given to Prince Abdullah, the son of Sharif Hussein. Following the creation of Transjordan, Great Britain's commitment to a Jewish homeland would have to be realized in what was left of Palestine west of the Jordan River.

Though disappointed by the sudden truncating of Palestine, the Jews were still happy that their dream of a Jewish State might come true, if only in western Palestine. The Arabs of western Palestine, however, were less than thrilled with the prospects of a Jewish homeland at all.

From Lord Balfour to Lord Peel: When Push Came to Shove
The Balfour Declaration and the British mandate for Palestine opened the way for implementing the creation of a reborn Jewish state. At the time there were 600,000 Arabs and 85,000 Jews living in Palestine, and 90 percent of the potentially productive land lay fallow and undeveloped. The Zionist vision at the time looked like this: over the course of the coming decades, Jewish immigration would continually increase until the Jews were a majority in Palestine. At that point, the Jews would be able to create a uniquely Jewish country. It was generally assumed that there would be a substantial Arab community in Israel, that the Arabs would become citizens of the country, and that like the Jews, the Arabs would benefit greatly from the development of the country.

"The country's irrigable plains are capable of supporting a population of six million. It is on these lands that the Jewish people demands the right to establish its homeland. Both the vision of social justice and the equality of all peoples that the Jewish people has cherished for three thousand years, require absolutely and unconditionally that the rights and interests of the non-Jewish inhabitants of the country be guarded and honored punctiliously."
David Ben-Gurion (Gilbert Israel pp. 38)
Written during a 1918 trip to the United States to gain support for immigration to Palestine.

From 1920 to 1921, 16,000 Jews arrived in Palestine. In the Arab community at the time, there were those who saw the potential for mutual benefit in the arrival of the Jews and those who saw the Jews and their idea of establishing a state as anathema. To the latter, WORLD WAR I was akin to the Crusades, only worse. The Christians were back, and this time they were bringing the Jews with them.

Some Arab voices sounded like this: "The Arabs, especially the educated among us, look with deep sympathy on the Zionist movement. We will wish the Jews a hearty welcome home. Our two movements [Arab nationalism and Zionism] complete one another. The Jewish movement is nationalist and not imperialist. Our movement is nationalist and not imperialist, and there is room in Syria for both of us. Indeed, I think that neither can be a real success without the other. I look forward, and my people with me look forward, to a future in which we will help you and you will help us, so that the countries in which we are mutually interested may once again take their places in the community of civilized peoples of the world."
Emir Feisel Hussein, March, 1919
From a letter to Zionist leader and future supreme court justice Felix Frankfurter, following the emir's meetings with Chaim Weizman in Paris.

Other Arab voices sounded like this: "Remember that the Jew is your strong enemy, and the enemy of your ancestors. Do not be misled by his tricks, for it is he who tortured Christ and poisoned Muhammad. It is he who now endeavors to slaughter you, as he did yesterday."

This group, and other Arab nationalist groups, were guided by the teachings of Haj Amin al-Husseini. (Hist. Of JP Ben-Sasson pp. 1006)

"All the troubles started at Zurich, where the Jews held a conference in August and were assured the aid of the rich American Jews for building up Palestine. This made the Palestine Jews so arrogant that they thought they could start driving us out of our country."
Grand Mufti Haj Amin al-Husseini, 1929. A sarcastic comment on the deadly anti-Jewish riots that he himself had instigated. (Hazony, pp.210)

During the war, al-Husseini met with Hitler in Berlin to solicit his help against their common enemy, the Jews. Hitler assured the Mufti that when the hour arrived, Germany would assist in "the destruction of the Jewish element residing in the Arab sphere."

Unfortunately, it was the voice of Haj Amin al-Husseini and his followers that won the day. In 1921, al-Husseini, who viewed both the British and the Jews as infidels violating Muslim land, instigated deadly riots against the Jews. Arabs raided Jewish farms across the country and killed forty-seven people. After the British authorities restored calm, they took two steps in an effort to mollify the Arabs. First, they placed a temporary ban on Jewish immigration, and second they elevated al-Husseini to the position of Grand Mufti, thus making him the supreme religious authority in Palestine. It was hoped that these moves would soothe Arab feelings', in fact, they served to whet the Arabs' appetite for further action against the Jews.

"It is not clear whether a Jewish-Arab agreement to work together in Palestine would have been feasible even under sensible Arab leadership. But it became absolutely impossible once Haj Amin became grand Mufti. The Mufti was able to infect the Pan-Arab movement with his violent anti-Zionism. The somber achievement of the Grand Mufti was to open a chasm between the Jewish and Arab leadership."
Paul Johnson, A History of the Jews (pp.438)

Between 1922 and 1928, another 84,000 Jews arrived in Palestine. New Jewish farming settlements were established, Jewish industry was expanded, and Jewish shops and businesses were opened in the cities. At the same time, the voice of the Mufti persisted in stirring Arab anger and resentment. In 1929, terrible anti-Jewish riots again broke out across the country. The Jewish Quarter of Jerusalem was attacked, Jews were murdered and their homes torched in Safed, and in Hebron, sixty men, women, and children were butchered, including the rabbis and students of the famed Hebron yeshiva. In the end, 133 Jews were murdered and almost 400 more were wounded-many were women and children.

In 1933, Adolph Hitler came to power in Germany. That year, Jewish immigration jumped from 12,000 the year before to 37,000. Jews from Germany, Austria, and Czechoslovakia came to Palestine in unprecedented numbers. As the skies darkened for the Jews of Europe, more and more looked to Palestine. In 1934, 45,000 Jews arrived, and in 1935-the year that the Nuremberg Laws were enacted-66,000 arrived.

By the mid 1930's, the western Palestine Arabs were looking to independence, to putting an end to the prospect of a Jewish state, and to driving the British out of Palestine. The British, for their part, were seriously reassessing their position in Palestine, and the wisdom of the Balfour Declaration was beginning to look rather suspect.

The year 1936 proved to be the straw that broke the back of the British. In the spring, fresh Arab violence turned into widespread attacks on Jews and a revolt against the British. In addition to armed confrontation with the British, the Mufti called for a general strike of all Arab workers aimed at crippling the local economy. Six months after the revolt began, thousands of acres of Jewish farmland and orchards had been destroyed, 21 Jewish men, women, and children were dead, and 140 Arabs had been killed in fights with the British that left 33 British soldiers dead and many wounded.

It should be mentioned that the Jews were not completely defenseless. Though it was illegal for Jews to carry arms or organize any kind of militia, after the riots in the twenties, a clandestine self-defense organization-the Hagganah-was formed. The Hagganah made illegal arms purchases and provided secret training for Jewish men and women. Jewish casualties would have been even higher in 1936 if not for the existence of the Hagganah.

In 1936, Palestine was at a crossroads, and it would be left to Lord Peel to chart a future direction. Everything was about to change.

A Simple Piece of White Paper
When the fighting ended in the fall of 1936, the British had had enough. A commission of inquiry chaired by Lord Peel, was established to make a thorough study of the situation in Palestine. In July of 1937, the Peel Commission issued its recommendation that Palestine be partitioned into two countries, one Arab and one Jewish. Response from both communities was not long in coming. In August, the Zionist Congress voted to accept partition but with modified borders. This miniscule state about the size of Delaware was a far cry from what the Jews had envisioned twenty years earlier. Nonetheless, they were prepared to accept it. The following month, four hundred Arab delegates representing all the Arab states and Palestine met in Damascus. Their response to Lord Peel was a total rejection of partition, a rejection of the notion of a Jewish state, and the issuance of a virtual ultimatum to the British-"Choose between our friendship and that of the Jews."

The Arab rejection of partition eventually led to an even more drastic British policy. In March 1939, the British issued a White Paper that declared the following: (1) Jewish immigration would be limited to a total of no more than 75,000 over the next five years, (2) it would now be illegal for any more land to be sold to Jews in Palestine, and (3) in ten years time a state would be established in Palestine under the principle of majority rule. It was anticipated that the population in Palestine would by then stand at around one million Arabs and half a million Jews.

The British had made their choice, and their interests clearly lay with the Arabs. For the Jews, what had begun with a short letter and so much hope, now seemed to be ending with yet another piece of paper.

In September of 1939, the Germans invaded Poland. World War II was underway, and everywhere the Jewish people was faced with enemies. The British had virtually closed Palestine to the Jewish people; those Jews who were in Palestine were surrounded by hostile Arabs; and the Germans were about to begin shipping Jews to the crematoria of Auschwitz. Once again, both the Jews and the Arabs of Palestine had a choice to make. For Haj Amin al-Husseini, the choice was clear and can be summed up as follows: the enemy of my enemy is my friend. The Germans were at war with the British and were hell-bent on annihilating the Jews. What better friends could the Mufti seek out than the Nazis?

For the Jews, the choice was not so straightforward and was articulated by Ben Gurion as follows: "We will fight with the British against Hitler as if there were no white paper, and we will fight the white paper as if there were no war." In November 1941, the SS Strum set sail from Rumania for Palestine packed with 769 Jews who were fleeing a nightmare that would come to be known as the Holocaust. The Struma was barely seaworthy and had to stop in Istanbul for major repairs. The Jews aboard ship begged the Turkish to grant them asylum, while the Jews of Palestine beseeched the British to allow them to come to Palestine. Both requests were refused, and shortly after the Turks had the Struma towed out of their harbor, the ship sank, drowning all those aboard, including 269 women and 70 children. Throughout the war, the British tried to keep Jewish immigration to a bare minimum while the Jews did everything they could to bring Jews illegally into Palestine. At the same time, thousands of Jews fought in both the British and U.S. armies against the Nazis, and, in 1944 a Jewish Brigade was formed in Palestine to fight alongside the British. In 1945, the 3,000-member Jewish brigade was shipped to Italy for combat against the Germans. Their uniforms featured a blue-and-white Star of David. Many chose to also wear yellow armbands, like those that the Germans forced their fellow Jews to wear.

From Auschwitz to Independence
After the war, it was crystal clear to the Jews of Palestine that a sovereign Jewish state was an absolute imperative. The only question was how to deal with the British, and on this the community was split. Menachem Begin and his followers felt that if it would take a fight to get the British to leave so that the Jews could finally establish their state, then so be it. David Ben-Gurion and his followers were convinced that an armed conflict with the British would jeopardize further immigration and British support for a state and that diplomacy was the way to achieve their goal. Each followed his own course. This lead to a bitter split within the Jewish community and to Begin leading an underground Jewish militia beyond the purview of Ben Gurion and the Hagganah. (Footnote: This split actually pre-dates Ben Gurion and Begin and continues to echo in Israel today. People like Benjamin Netanyahu, Yitzchak Shamir, and Ariel Sharon have their roots in the Begin camp, while Shimon Peres, Yitzchak Rabin, and Ehud Barak look back to Ben Gurion for inspiration.) This force, the Irgun, launched numerous attacks against the British military in Palestine. It's most audacious of all acts was directed against the British military command headquarters located in the majestic King David Hotel. On July 22, 1946, the Irgun planted explosives in the basement of the hotel. Ignoring the Irgun's warning to evacuate the building, the ensuing blast killed 91 people and wounded 45.

By 1947, the British had finally had enough of Palestine and handed their headache over to the United Nations. The UN then created UNSCOP, the United Nations Special Committee on Palestine, to determine the fate of Palestine once and for all. UNSCOP, similar to the Peel Commission before it, concluded that partition was the only viable solution and proposed the following: 1. Palestine would be divided into two countries, one Arab and one Jewish. The Jewish state would have an Arab minority, and about 100,000 Jews would live in the Arab country. 2. Jerusalem would not be a part of either country and rather would have a special international status under UN auspices. 3. For the first two years, 150,000 Jews would be allowed to immigrate to the Jewish state, with the amount dropping to 60,000 annually after that. 4. An economic union between the two countries would be overseen by a nine-member board of three Jews, three Arabs, and three UN representatives. 5. The Jewish state would provide financial assistance to the Arab state.

Once again, the Jews and the Arabs responded very differently to the partition plan. The Jews chose to accept partition and the creation of two states in western Palestine. The Arabs convened an emergency meeting of the Arab League in Lebanon and voted to totally reject partition and to begin supplying men and weapons to fight for the creation of an Arab state in all of Palestine. It wasn't long before fighting broke out between Jewish and Arab forces in Palestine. Soon, Jerusalem was under siege and the Jewish residents and institutions in the city were cutoff from the rest of the Jews in Palestine.

On April 13, a convoy of homemade armored cars and buses carrying eighty civilians, most of them doctors and nurses, set out for Mount Scopus in Jerusalem, where Hebrew University and Hadassah Hospital were located. Arab forces ambushed the convoy just two hundred yards from a British military post. Despite requests to the British for help, they did nothing. The doctors and nurses were outgunned and surrounded. Most were killed in the shooting that lasted for over three hours. The survivors were burned alive in their buses.

On May 11, a diminutive Golda Meyerson - originally from Milwaukee, Wisconsin - disguised herself as an Arab woman and set out for a secret meeting with King Abdullah of Transjordan. The two had met before and established a congenial rapport. It was Mrs. Meyerson's perception, as well as the perception of other Jewish and Arab leaders, that King Abdullah believed that a way could be found for the Jews and the Arabs to live as neighbors. On that day in May, her mission was to dissuade the king from going to war. The king, for his part, told Mrs. Meyerson that it was impossible for him to break ranks with the other Arab leaders and urged the Jews to postpone their declaration of independence. The king also had his eye on Jerusalem.

"I firmly believe that Divine Providence has restored you, a Semite people who were banished to Europe and have benefited from its progress, to the Semite east, which needs your knowledge and initiative...I deplore the coming bloodshed and destruction. Let us hope we shall meet again and will not sever our relations. If you find it necessary to meet me during the actual fighting, do not hesitate to come and see me."
King Abdullah to Golda Meyerson, May 11, 1948

Golda Meyerson (who later became Prime Minister Golda Meir), returned to Tel Aviv and reported her failure to David Ben-Gurion. Ben Gurion remained convinced that the opportune moment had arrived and was determined to proceed with the declaration.

May 14, 1948, was set as the date when the British would complete their withdrawal from Palestine. On May 13, the text of Israel's Declaration of Independence was completed. It included a call for peace that said.

"We extend our hand in peace and neighborliness to all the neighboring states and peoples, and invite them to cooperate with the independent Jewish nation for the common good of all. The State of Israel is prepared to make its contribution to the progress of the Middle East as a whole."

Just after breakfast on May 14, the British left Jerusalem-their three decades in the Holy Land were finished. By lunchtime that same day, a full-scale invasion by all the surrounding Arab armies was under way. At five o'clock that afternoon, David Ben-Gurion rose in the hall of the Tel Aviv museum to announce the creation of the State of Israel and to read aloud its Declaration of Independence.

"The Land of Israel was the birthplace of the Jewish people. Here their spiritual, religious and national identity was formed ... Exiled from the Land of Israel the Jewish people remained faithful to it in all the countries of their dispersion, never ceasing to pray and hope for their return and the restoration of their national freedom. Jews strove throughout the centuries to go back to the land of their fathers and regain their statehood. In recent decades they returned in their masses. They sought peace, yet were prepared to defend themselves ... We hereby proclaim the establishment of the Jewish State in Palestine, to be called Medinat Yisrael (The State of Israel). The State of Israel will be open to the immigration of Jews from all countries of their dispersion; will uphold the full social and political equality of all its citizens, without distinction of religion, race, or sex; will guarantee freedom of religion, conscience, education and culture; will safeguard the Holy Places of all religions. We extend our hand in peace and neighborliness to all the neighboring states and peoples...Our call goes out to the Jewish people all over the world to rally to our side in the task of immigration and development, and to stand by us in the great struggle for the fulfillment of the dream of generations for the redemption of Israel. With trust in the Rock of Israel, we set our hand to this declaration, on this Sabbath eve, the fifth of Iyar, 5708, the fourteenth of May, 1948."

Surprise, Surprise - Israel Survives
If you think the U.S. victory over Russia for the gold medal in hockey shocked the world, that was nothing compared to what happened in 1948. Many thought the Jews of Palestine were doomed.

In 1948, the Jews of Israel were outnumbered, were undertrained, and had a deficiency of weaponry, almost no modern armored vehicles, and no air force. In many instances, concentration camp survivors who made their way to the fledgling state were given a weapon and rudimentary training and then sent to battle. The Arabs, though not the world's finest fighting force, were well-armed, possessed the armored weaponry and air force of a modern army, and had been trained by British officers. In many instances, British officers were on the ground to help guide the Arabs in their assault.

When the war ended, Israel emerged from battle wounded and battered but alive. Territorially, its borders exceeded what the partition plan had originally envisioned, and though still desperately vulnerable, it was slightly more defensible. In Jerusalem, the Jewish Quarter had been overrun by Jordanian forces, and the Old City, with all its Christian, Moslem, and Jewish holy places, was annexed by Jordan. That was the last Jews would see of the Western Wall for twenty years. (Footnote: John Phillips writing in the June 7, and 28 1948 issues of Life Magazine reported that on May 28, 1948 " Palestinian hangers-on burst in and reduced [the Jewish Quarter] to smoking ruin after the beaten Jews gave in. Had any Jew decided to remain in the Old City he would have probably dead by nightfall." Indeed, the Arabs blew-up almost every synagogue and school in the Jewish Quarter. Remaining synagogues were desecrated and subsequently used as horse stables and refuse dumps. Jews were permanently barred from entering the Old City and visiting the Western Wall, the ancient Mount of Olives cemetery or any other Jewish holy sites. The Jordanians also took gravestones from the Mount of Olives and used them in construction projects.) Throughout the war, the Israeli military had relied on flexibility, extensive night fighting, small, agile commando strikes, improvisation, bravery, and sheer will-not to mention divine assistance-to ensure Israel's survival. At war's end, 6,000 Jews had been killed. These deaths represented one percent of the population and was equivalent to the United States losing two and a half million people.

From February through July 1949, Israel negotiated separate armistice agreements with Egypt, Lebanon, Jordan, and Syria. These agreements were intended to be the forerunners of formal peace treaties, but the Arabs balked and this never came to be. Though the Jewish State of Israel had become a reality, for the next three decades the Arabs would insist that Israel lacked even the basic right to exist. Indeed, those three decades would be one long Arab effort to bring the Jewish state to its knees.

Before moving on to the ensuing three decades of war, we will first look at two highly contentious issues related to Israel's birth and the 1948 War of Independence. The first is the displacement of the Arab population of Palestine prior to the war, and the second is the refugee problem that was a result of the war.

This Town Ain't Big Enough for the Both of Us: The Big Myth
A myth has become accepted as common knowledge that goes like this: The Jewish effort to populate Palestine necessarily involved the depopulation of its age-old Palestinian Arab community. Thus, the more the Jews came, built, and developed, the more the Arabs were displaced, and the worse off they became.

1. When the Muslims first conquered Palestine in 638, the inhabitants of the land were primarily Christians and Jews. At that time, Arabs lived in Arabia (Saudi Arabia), and the conquest of Palestine was just one piece of a much broader series of conquests. Following the Muslim conquest, no attempt was made to impose an Islamic or Arab identity on Palestine, and no significant influx of Arabs into the land occurred.

"During the first century after the Arab conquest the caliph and governors of Syria and the land [Palestine] ruled almost entirely over Christian and Jewish subjects. Apart from the Bedouin, in the earliest days the only Arabs west of the Jordan were the garrison."
Reverend James W. Parkes (From Time Immemorial 151)

Over the centuries, Palestine's primary attraction was in terms of it being a place of pilgrimage. Christians from around the world came to see the holy sites of Christianity, and many ended up staying. For Muslims who were unable to make the hajj to Mecca, Jerusalem sometimes became a place of secondary pilgrimage. (Footnote: Muslims are required to make, once in their lives, a pilgrimage, or Hajj, to Mecca. Jerusalem is not considered to be a substitute destination and Islamic authorities often opposed pilgrimage to Jerusalem as a slight to Mecca.) Palestine, due to frequent invasions, coupled with it being a place of pilgrimage, became a land whose population reflected a vast mix of ethnic origins.

"Among the people who have long been counted as 'indigenous Palestinian Arabs' are Balkans, Syrians, Latins, Egyptians, Turks, Armenians, Italians, Persians, Kurds, Afghans, Sudanese, Algerians, and Tartars."
Joan Peters, From Time Immemorial (155-56)

2. In the year 1500, nine hundred years had passed since the first Arab conquest, and in all of Palestine there were only 49,000 families representing a total population of 200,000. (avneri 12) Two hundred thousand is not even a third of the population of Jerusalem today and less than a quarter of the present population of Amman, Jordan. When the Ottoman Empire arrived in 1517, it was then fifteen centuries since the destruction of the Temple and the dispersion of the Jews. Throughout that entire period, though Palestine became religiously significant to both Christianity and Islam, its population was always in a great state of flux, and no distinctly recognizable ethnic group considered the area of Palestine to be their natural or ancestral homeland. The closest anyone came to establishing any kind of independent presence in the land were European Catholics who established the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem during the crusader period.

3. The years 1800-1840 were a time of upheaval for the population of Palestine. During that period, Palestine was invaded by both Napoleon and the Egyptians. From 1831 to1840, Palestine was ruled by Muhammad Ali (no, not the boxer) of Egypt.

"The conquest did establish law and order in the country, but caused many old inhabitants to flee and new elements to settle in the land...the Egyptian settlers scattered to many urban and rural points, appropriated large tracts of land, and lent variety and numbers to the existing population...According to the British Palestine Exploration Fund regional map of Jaffa, most of the city was made up of Egyptian populated districts."
Arieh L. Avneri, The Claim of Dispossession (12-14)

Additionally, throughout the mid-1800s incessant little wars broke out between villages and rival clans in Palestine. It was often the case that one village would decimate another, destroy their property and cultivated acreage, and drive the inhabitants into exile.

"Very often villages passed from hand to hand. There really was not much difference between the fellah [resident or itinerant farmers] who regarded his land as his property and the Bedouin who pitched his tent on it for a brief stay and then moved on to another plot of land."
Abraham Granot, Land Possession in Israel (trans. of Hebrew)

4. The century from 1850 to 1948 is fascinating, significant, and telling. We have already looked at this period from the point of view of the development of Zionism, the return of the Jews to Israel, and the British mandate. We are now going to look at the population of Palestine during this pre-state century, and consider the implications that population had for the birth of Israel. First we'll look at the numbers, and then we'll explain them.

(Note: The figures for the Arab population include both Muslims and Christians. Christians were about 8-10 percent of the total, but for our purpose it's easier to just bunch them all together.)

From 1850 until 1948, the Arab population of Palestine doubled, while the Jewish population increased forty times. Leaving birthrates aside, the question is this: What transformed Palestine, for the first time in almost twenty decades, from a place of limited, unstable, and fluctuating population to the hottest new suburb in the Middle East? The answer for both the Jews and Arabs is the same: immigration. The stimulus for immigration, however, was drastically different. The Jews came to Palestine to rebuild their homeland, and the Arabs came because Jewish development (along with British development after World War I) created a whole new economic reality ripe with unprecedented opportunities. As the British and the Jews built new infrastructure in Palestine, as the business sector began to grow, and as the Jews developed an agricultural economy that went way beyond subsistence to export, Arabs flowed into the area in search of employment, stability, and opportunity. In addition to a surge in the agricultural sector, between 1917 and 1947 over 140,000 Arabs were employed by the British government in Palestine. Similarly, as the Jewish people further developed and modernized the economy and the country, the quality of life dramatically increased throughout Palestine.

"The Arab population of Palestine was small and limited until Jewish resettlement restored the barren lands and drew to it Arabs from neighboring countries...the Arab population in recent decades were recent newcomers-either late immigrants or descendants of persons who had immigrated into Palestine in the previous seventy years."
Dr. Carl Herman Voss, 1953, The Palestine Problem Today (peters 43); Voss was chairman of the American Christian Palestine Committee

"The Jewish-generated economic boom that prompted Arab in-migration and immigration into the Jewish settled areas of Western Palestine beginning in the 1870s and continuing throughout the British administration of Palestine until 1946 or 1947."
Joan Peters, From Time Immemorial (peters 263)

"During those twenty-four years [1922-1946] approximately 100,000 Arabs entered the country from neighboring lands. The influx could be traced in some measure to the orderly government provided by the British; but far more, certainly, to the economic opportunities made possible by Jewish settlement...by opening new markets for Arab produce and new employment opportunities for Arab labor."
Howard M. Sachar, A History of Israel (sachar 167)

"The most profitable branch in agriculture between the two World Wars was citriculture. The other branch of intensive agriculture in the expanding economy was the growing of vegetables. In 1922 Arab farmers cultivated 30, 000 dunam [10,000 acres] and produced 20,000 tons of vegetables. In 1944/45 Arabs farmed 239,733 dunam [80,000 acres] and supplied 189,804 tons of vegetables to the market. In 1931, there were 339 factories owned by Arabs and in 1942-1,558 factories. The rapid development of the Arab economy, with a concomitant rise in the standard of living, gave rise to demands for a higher quality of health and educational services. As a result, health facilities were expanded, and the scope and level of educational opportunities were also far beyond those prevailing in the neighboring Arab countries."
Arieh L. Avneri, The Claim of Dispossession (259-64)

For the sake of perspective, we should not forget the basic fact that from 1917 to 1948 the British kept tight controls over Jewish immigration to Palestine, while there were virtually no restrictions on Arab immigration.

The truth about Jewish emigration to Palestine is that not only did they not displace a large indigenous Arab population that had been there for millennia but that it was Jewish efforts to develop Palestine that directly resulted in a dramatic rise in Palestine's Arab population. It wouldn't be true to say that there weren't Jews who, as statehood approached-and particularly after the Arab riots in the twenties and thirties-didn't hope that a way could be found to establish a Jewish state that had as few as possible Arab citizens. Nonetheless, it was never a matter of policy or practice for the burgeoning Jewish community in Palestine to seek to drive the Arabs out of their homes.

As we have seen, the Arabs repeatedly rejected the option of living in peace with their Jewish neighbors and instead opted for war. This brings us to the issue of Palestinian refugees.

Will the Real Refugees Please Stand Up?
After the survival of Israel, the next major outcome of the war in '48 was the creation of hundreds of thousands of Arab refugees. The actual number of refugees is impossible to determine (estimates run from 400,000 to 800,000) and remains a question of historical debate. What isn't debatable, though, is the fact that those people who became refugees were not a unified people with a common sense of identity, rooted in a shared land, who shared a common history stretching back over the centuries. Rather, a huge proportion of the Arabs living in Palestine when the war began in 1948 were recent arrivals with no sense of distinctly Palestinian identity or nationhood.

"By 1947 much of the Palestinian Arab population had only an indistinct, if any, idea of national purpose and statehood. Most Palestinian Arabs had no sense of separate national or cultural identity to distinguish them from, say, the Arabs of Syria, Lebanon or Egypt.'
Benny Morris, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1947-1949 (18-19)

The fact that so many Arabs living in Palestine were recent immigrants was institutionalized by the UN when it created the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine (UNRWA) in 1949. Through the UNRWA, the UN dealt with (and continues to deal with) the Arab refugees much differently than it deals with all other refugees in the world. All other refugees are aided by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees-the UNHCR. Unlike the UNHCR, the UNRWA criteria used to determine who was or wasn't a refugee stated that anyone living in Palestine for two years before the war was a refugee. Nowhere else in the world has the UN lowered the defining threshold of a refugee so radically. Also, Arab refugees are the only people in the world whose children and grandchildren inherit refugee status. This explains why the Palestinians are the only refugee population in the world that increases in number from year to year. Additionally, all other refugee populations are defined as people who face "a well-founded fear of being persecuted," and no such fear can be applied to the Arabs who lived in Palestine.

Today, if you listen to media reports or to PLO demands for a Palestinian "right of return," you will hear that there are four to five million Palestinian refugees. What you don't hear is that if the Arabs were dealt with in the same way the UNHCR has dealt with tens of millions of other refugees, that less than a million of those-most of whom are in Syria and Lebanon-could truly be considered to be refugees.

"While I was examining United Nations data from 1948 onward, a seemingly casual alteration of the definition of what constitutes an Arab "refugee" from Israel caught my attention. In other cases the more or less universally used description of eligibility included those people who were forced to leave "permanent" or "habitual" homes. In the case of the Arab refugees, however, the definition had been broadened to include any persons who had been in Palestine for only two years before Israel's statehood in 1948."
Joan Peters, From Time Immemorial (4)

In a nutshell, here's what happened in Palestine between 1900 and 1948
Large numbers of Jews immigrated to Palestine and brought extensive economic development with them. As a result, Arabs also immigrated in large numbers and reaped the benefits of Jewish devotion to and development of the land. Eventually, the Arabs turned around and said to the Jews-"thanks for the new country, now get out of here." And then it happened again. In 1948, after the Jews refused to get out or even to be thrown out, the Arabs once again turned to the Jews and said, in effect, "You know, Palestine was really ours all along. Then you Jewish colonialists stole it and drove us out, and now we want it back." Go figure.

{ Shimon Apisdorf, a frequent contributor to Jewsweek, is the author of several books including The Rosh HaShanah/Yom Kippur Survival Kit and the Judaism In A Nutshell series. This has been excerpted from Apisdorf's forthcoming book entitled "Israel in a Nutshell" to be released next month. For more information, contact the Jewish Literacy Foundation at andrea@jewishliteracy.org. }