The Arab-Israeli Conflict: The Palestine War 1948
By Efraim Karsh
3.5/5
()
About this ebook
Efraim Karsh
Efraim Karsh is Professor of Political Studies at Bar-Ilan University and Professor Emeritus of Middle East and Mediterranean Studies at King's College London. A former director of the Middle East Forum, he is editor of Middle East Quarterly and Israel Affairs, and is writing A History of the Jewish People, published by Bloomsbury in 2018.
Read more from Efraim Karsh
Arafat's War: The Man and His Battle for Israeli Conquest Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Saddam Hussein: A Political Biography Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5The Iran–Iraq War 1980–1988 Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Tail Wags the Dog: International Politics and the Middle East Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratings
Related to The Arab-Israeli Conflict
Related ebooks
Balfour's Shadow: A Century of British Support for Zionism and Israel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5One Palestine, Complete: Jews and Arabs Under the British Mandate Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A History of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, Second Edition Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Biggest Prison on Earth: A History of Gaza and the Occupied Territories Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A State at Any Cost: The Life of David Ben-Gurion Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Israel and Palestine: Competing Histories Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsIrgun: Revisionist Zionism, 1931–1948 Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsSix Days: How the 1967 War Shaped the Middle East Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Israel: A Concise History of a Nation Reborn Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Children of the Nakba Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsZionism: The Real Enemy of the Jews, Volume 2: David Becomes Goliath Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A Half Century of Occupation: Israel, Palestine, and the World's Most Intractable Conflict Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Zionism: The Real Enemy of the Jews, Volume 3: Conflict Without End? Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Cracks in the Wall: Beyond Apartheid in Palestine/Israel Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Palestinian Delusion: The Catastrophic History of the Middle East Peace Process Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Palestine: From Balfour Declaration to Oslo Accords Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsPalestine, Palestinians and International Law Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsLegacy of Empire: Britain, Zionism and the Creation of Israel Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsGenesis: Truman, American Jews, and the Origins of the Arab/Israeli Conflict Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Invention of the Jewish People Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Plo: The Rise and Fall of the Palestine Liberation Organization Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsPreventing Palestine: A Political History from Camp David to Oslo Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Time We Went Too Far: Truth & Consequences of the Gaza Invasion Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Palestine Underground: The Story of the Jewish Resistance Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsWar over Peace: One Hundred Years of Israel's Militaristic Nationalism Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Israel: A History Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Waging Peace: Israel and the Arabs, 1948-2003 - Updated and Revised Edition Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsEurope Against the Jews, 1880-1945 Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Sabra and Shatila Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Palestinian Right of Return Under International Law Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5
Modern History For You
The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Anarchy: The East India Company, Corporate Violence, and the Pillage of an Empire Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Butchering Art: Joseph Lister's Quest to Transform the Grisly World of Victorian Medicine Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A Night to Remember: The Sinking of the Titanic Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Israel: A Simple Guide to the Most Misunderstood Country on Earth Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5The Fifties Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Midnight in Chernobyl: The Untold Story of the World's Greatest Nuclear Disaster Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Principles for Dealing with the Changing World Order: Why Nations Succeed and Fail Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Voices from Chernobyl Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Day the World Came to Town: 9/11 in Gander, Newfoundland Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/577 Days of February: Living and Dying in Ukraine, Told by the Nation’s Own Journalists Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Profiles in Courage: Deluxe Modern Classic Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Shakespeare: The World as Stage Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Story of the Trapp Family Singers Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Gaza: An Inquest into Its Martyrdom Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The God Delusion Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Dear America: Notes of an Undocumented Citizen Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Devil's Notebook Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/518 Tiny Deaths: The Untold Story of Frances Glessner Lee and the Invention of Modern Forensics Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Flu: The Story of the Great Influenza Pandemic of 1918 and the Search for the Virus That Caused It Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5My Mother, a Serial Killer Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Gulag Archipelago [Volume 2]: An Experiment in Literary Investigation Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Complete Titanic Chronicles: A Night to Remember and The Night Lives On Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Myth of Mental Illness: Foundations of a Theory of Personal Conduct Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5What Every Person Should Know About War Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5About Face: The Odyssey of an American Warrior Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5
Related categories
Reviews for The Arab-Israeli Conflict
2 ratings0 reviews
Book preview
The Arab-Israeli Conflict - Efraim Karsh
Introduction
On 29 November 1947, the United Nations General Assembly passed a resolution calling for the partition of Palestine into two independent states – one Jewish, the other Arab – linked in an economic union. The City of Jerusalem was to be placed under an international régime, with its residents given the right to citizenship in either the Jewish or the Arab states. Thirty-three UN members supported the resolution, 13 voted against and 10 abstained, including Great Britain, which had ruled Palestine since the early 1920s under a League of Nations Mandate.
For Jews all over the world this was the fulfilment of a millenarian yearning for national rebirth in the ancestral homeland. For Arabs it was an unmitigated disaster, an act of betrayal by the international community that surrendered an integral part of the Arab world to foreign invaders. In Tel-Aviv, crowds were dancing in the streets. In the Arab capitals there were violent demonstrations. ‘We are solidly and permanently determined to fight to the last man against the existence in our country of any Jewish state, no matter how small it is,’ Jamal al-Husseini, Vice-President of the Arab Higher Committee (AHC), the effective government of the Palestinian Arabs, told the General Assembly as it was about to cast its vote. ‘If such a state is to be established, it can only be established over our dead bodies.’ And an AHC circular was even more outspoken. ‘The Arabs have taken into their own hands the final solution of the Jewish problem,’ it read. ‘The problem will be solved only in blood and fire. The Jews will soon be driven out.’
Thus began the Palestine War, probably the most important Middle-Eastern armed confrontation since the destruction of the Ottoman Empire and the creation of a new regional order on its ruins in the wake of the First World War. It was to be divided into two distinct phases. The first began on 30 November 1947, the day after the adoption of the Partition Resolution, and ended on 14 May 1948 with the termination of the British Mandate. It was essentially a civil war, conducted under the watchful eye and occasional intervention of the British Mandatory authorities, in which the Palestinian Arab community, assisted by a sizeable pan-Arab irregular force, sought to prevent its Jewish counterpart from laying the foundation of statehood in line with the UN resolution. The second phase started on the night of 14–15 May 1948, a few hours after the proclamation of the State of Israel, and involved a concerted attack by the armed forces of Egypt, Syria, Iraq, Transjordan, Lebanon, as well as a Saudi contingent, on the nascent Jewish state. It ended on 20 July 1949 with the signing of the last of the armistice agreements between Israel and its Arab neighbours.
By the time the fighting was over, Israel, albeit at the exorbitant human cost of 1 per cent of its population, had survived the Arab attempt to destroy it at birth and had asserted its control over wider territories than those assigned to it by the UN Partition Resolution. The Palestinian Arab community was profoundly shattered, with about half of its population becoming refugees in other parts of Palestine and the neighbouring Arab states. The political implications of what would come to be known in Arab political discourse as al-Nakba, ‘the catastrophe,’ would reverberate throughout the Middle East for decades. Already before the end of hostilities the president of Syria was overthrown by a military coup, while the king of Egypt followed suit in the summer of 1952. Within two years of the end of the Palestine War, King Abdallah of Jordan, the foremost Arab combatant during the conflict, was assassinated, as were the prime ministers of Egypt and Lebanon. For decades inter-Arab politics would be dominated by the ‘problem of Palestine’ as the Arab states and the Palestinians sought to undo the consequences of the Palestine War and bring about Israel’s demise by military, political and economic means. ‘Palestine and the self-respect of the Arabs must be recovered,’ the prominent Palestinian leader Musa Alami wrote in 1949. ‘Without Palestine there is no life for them.’
Chronology