1948: A History of the First Arab-Israeli War (Hardcover)

~ Prof. Benny Morris (Author)
Key Phrases: first truce, second truce, light forces, West Bank, Tel Aviv, Palestinian Arab (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From The Washington Post

Reviewed by Glenn Frankel

In a zero-sum world, one side's gain must be exactly balanced by another's loss. In such a world, violence is inevitable, compromise is betrayal, neutral observers are enemies, and the only heroes are those willing to take the contest to its logical, lethal conclusion. And the only histories worth publishing are those that validate your own self-sustaining myths.

The remorseless, zero-sum conflict between the stateof Israel and the Palestinianshas been going on for three score years,and despite the sadly belated efforts of a lame-duck Bush administration, there is no end in sight.

The fault-line was clearly visible in mid-May: While Israelis sang "Happy Birthday" to themselves to celebrate the 60th anniversary of their independence, Palestinians were mourning 60 years of al-Naqba, "the Catastrophe."

Each side's narrative is self-contained and in total conflict with the other. In the Israeli version, Holocaust survivors redeemed their ancestral homeland against extraordinary odds by defeating bloodthirsty Palestinian terrorists and five Arab armies, while thousands of Arab civilians abandoned their homes under the directive of leaders who promised glory and spoils upon their return. The Arab counter-narrative depicts Palestinians as hapless victims of a vastly superior Jewish army, backed by the United States and Britain, waging a brutal campaign of ethnic cleansing according to a plan laid out before the first shot was fired.

Both accounts contain elements of truth. Neither one was constructed for the sake of veracity, however. Each was useful in mobilizing members of a particular tribe to sustain the conflict: Israelis in their beleaguered fortress-state; Palestinians in their refugee camps, some still fondling the keys to their lost homes. The narratives have nurtured their separate identities -- and their enduring grievances.

Benny Morris, born in 1948 on a kibbutz, is a charter member of a generation of Israeli historians who have challenged his country's founding narrative and deepened our understanding of the roots of the conflict. A former Jerusalem Post correspondent with a doctorate from Cambridge University, he first came to prominence with his 1988 book, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1947-1949, a ground-breaking, revisionist account of how Israeli forces uprooted and expelled hundreds of thousands of Palestinians during Israel's independence war. His new book is an ambitious, detailed and engaging portrait of the war itself -- from its origins to its unresolved aftermath -- that further shatters myths on both sides of the Israeli-Arab divide.

Morris splits the war into two distinct phases. The first was a civil war between Jewish and Palestinian militias that began in November 1947, when the United Nations General Assembly approved the partition of British-run Palestine into two countries, one dominated by Jews, the other by Palestinian Arabs. Despite early setbacks, the main Jewish military force, known as the Haganah, rolled up major victories and forced much of the Arab population to flee. The key moment, according to Morris, came in early April when the Haganah took the offensive and seized as much land as possible before the planned British military departure. "Palestinian Arab society fell apart and was crushed by a relatively poorly armed and, in many ways, ragtag Jewish militia," Morris writes.

The second phase was the Pan-Arab invasion by the armies of Egypt, Jordan, Syria and Iraq (Lebanon stayed largely on the sidelines) after Israel's declaration of independence on May 14, 1948. The Israelis won that struggle as well, expanding the territory of the new Jewish state well beyond the original partition lines and expelling hundreds of thousands more Palestinians in the process.

Along the way, Morris seeks to separate fact from legend. It's true, Morris notes, that the Arab states had a combined population of 40 million, while the Jewish community, known in Hebrew as the Yishuv, numbered a mere 650,000. But the Yishuv, led by the indomitable David Ben-Gurion, "had organized for war. The Arabs hadn't." Arab Palestine, lacking a great leader or unifying principle, amounted to a series of disparate towns, villages and clans rather than a coherent nation, and it succumbed readily to a spirit of powerlessness and fatalism.

As for the war that followed, the combined Arab militaries were far stronger than the Haganah, Morris argues, if not in manpower then certainly in equipment and firepower. But Israeli forces had some "home court advantages" over the four invading armies, such as a unified command, internal lines of communication, familiarity with the terrain and a commitment to protect their homes and families. By the end of the war, they outnumbered the Arab soldiers almost 2 to 1 and produced smashing victories on virtually every front.

Morris is remarkably even-handed when he sifts through the evidence of atrocities. During the civil-war phase, he says, neither side paid much heed to the possible injury or death of civilians, and both sides executed prisoners. In the more conventional fighting that followed, the killing of civilians and prisoners of war mostly stopped -- except for a series of atrocities committed by Israeli troops in the Palestinian town of Lydda in central Israel and in the Galilee. "In truth," writes Morris, "the Jews committed far more atrocities than the Arabs and killed far more civilians and POWs in deliberate acts of brutality in the course of 1948."

Morris doesn't attribute this to any greater morality on the Arab side but rather to the fact that the victorious Israelis captured some 400 Arab villages and towns, while the Arabs overran fewer than a dozen Jewish settlements. By his tally, Palestinians slaughtered some 190 Israelis in two large-scale massacres, while Israeli troops probably murdered some 800 Arab civilians and prisoners of war. But in comparison to modern slaughterhouses like Bosnia or the Congo, the atrocities were relatively limited. The 1948 war "is actually noteworthy for the relatively small number of civilian casualties," Morris concludes.

As for the 700,000 Palestinian refugees, he rejects the claims of other revisionist historians -- most notably Ilan Pappe in his 2006 book, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine -- that the expulsions were part of Plan D, drawn up by Zionist leaders and military officers in Tel Aviv in March 1948 and carried out with relentless precision. Morris contends that the plan called for the destruction only of villages that resisted conquest, not those that were quiescent. "Nowhere does the document speak of a policy or desire to expel 'the Arab inhabitants' of Palestine," he writes, adding that "nowhere is any brigade instructed to clear out 'the Arabs.' "

Why is all of this worth re-adjudicating six decades after the event? Because none of it has been resolved. For Israelis, 1948 is central to the legitimacy of the Jewish state. For Palestinians, it is an open wound; if the refugees were unfairly expelled, then they should be allowed to return.

One weakness of Morris's book is that he can offer little documentation of the Arab side. Most of the archives of countries like Egypt, Jordan, Iraq and Syria remain off-limits. Too often Morris ends up speculating about the perceptions and motives of Arab leaders because he lacks the documentation that enriches his treatment of the Israeli side.

Morris himself is a controversial figure in the conflict over the conflict. As an army reservist in 1988, he protested Israel's occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip by refusing to report for duty during the first Palestinian uprising; he spent three weeks in jail as a consequence. But after the second intifada broke out in 2000, he condemned Palestinian suicide bombers as "barbarians" and said the early Israelis were right to have expelled their Arab neighbors. "When the choice is between destroying or being destroyed, it's better to destroy," he told the Israeli daily newspaper Haaretz.

Despite his personal views, Morris strives to give a balanced view of the conflict. The collapse of the Arab military effort caused a chain reaction of coups and assassinations that brought down many of the old regimes. Leaders were killed or discarded in Egypt, Syria, Iraq and Jordan. "But 1948 has haunted, and still haunts, the Arab world on the deepest levels of collective identity, ego, and pride," Morris writes. "The war was a humiliation from which that world has yet to recover."

Copyright 2008, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

Review

"'Morris's account seems admirable, because he is unafraid of upsetting both camps... His commitment to the pursuit of historical truth deserves as much admiration as his dismay at Arab intransigence commands sympathy... Morris's book is no mere military narrative, but a crisp, vivid introduction to the historical tragedy of Palestine.' Max Hastings, Sunday Times 'Morris relates the story of his new book soberly and sombrely, evenhandedly and exhaustively... An authoritative and fair-minded account of an epochal and volatile event.' David Margolick, New York Times Book Review 'An ambitious, detailed and engaging portrait of the war itself - from its origins to its unresolved aftermath - that further shatters myths on both sides of the Israeli-Arab divide.' Glenn Frankel, Washington Post Book World" --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 544 pages
• Publisher: Yale University Press (April 21, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0300126964
• ISBN-13: 978-0300126969
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.2 x 1.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (17 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #161,071 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

27 of 29 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Vital Work on the 1948 Israeli-Arab War, May 5, 2008

By	Eric Maroney (Brooktondale, NY) - See all my reviews

In 1948 Benny Morris shows himself to be a first-rate historian with an accurate and detailed command of the events leading up to the first Arab Israeli War and the war itself. The book is primarily the military history of the conflict, and Morris is a well informed chronicler of military engagements. Morris, also considered one of the grandfathers of the "revisionist" school of Israeli historiography, here shows that he is not afraid to document both Jewish/Israel and Palestinian/Arab excesses and missteps in the war, opportunities missed or failed to be exploited. By and large Morris is very sympathetic to the Zionist enterprise in the Holy Land in this book. He views war in 1948 as inevitable given the demographic/strategic situation in Palestine since the arrival of the first Zionist settlers in the 1880s. This is in keeping with some of his more recent utterances about the Israeli Arab/Palestinian conflict. Given the pressure the Yishuv and early state of Israel were under, he states, conflict was unavoidable. In 1948 Morris seeks to show that calls for jihad against the Jews in Palestine was no mere bluster; that it was just as powerful (if not more so) source of Arab ire against Israel as the rising sense of Arab nationalism following WWII. It is here, I suppose, where Morris makes his most original contribution to the study of the 1948 war.

30 of 34 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The most important book on 1948, April 29, 2008

By	Seth J. Frantzman (Jerusalem, Israel) - See all my reviews (TOP 100 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

In tackling the controversial and important, but gigantic, subject of the 1948 war, the Nakba, the Israeli was of independence, Mr. Morris has come full circle from his original study The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1947-1949 (Cambridge Middle East Library). This journey was a process that has already involved one revision of that celebrated thesis on the Palestinian refugees. Undoubtedly it was inevitable that this book had to be written in order not only to show the context and the military side of 1948 but also to show the Jewish side, the fate of Jewish areas conquered by Arabs, the fate of Jewish refugees from Arab lands, and the agency, the decisions, made by Arab leaders and local Arabs that led to the war.

There have been other stand alone studies of the war by Gelber, Palestine 1948: War, Escape And The Emergence Of The Palestinian Refugee Problem and The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine and War in Palestine, 1948: Strategy and Diplomacy (Israeli History, Politics, and Society). But each has had its own weaknesses, either because it concentrates on the military aspects or because it is terribly biased.

Here, at last, is a full account that is not biased and is not overly focused on the military side and does not take for granted the conclusion that the Zionists would prevail and therefore all their actions should be judged as if they knew the results beforehand. Morris also sheds light on the fate of Christian Arab villages in the war and the many nuances of the war, including the very controversial issues of massacres and 'ethnic-cleansing'.

This book is a tour de force, a masterpiece of writing that should be read by anyone interested in the conflict, the Middle East, Israel, the Palestinians or the Holy Land. It strips away the clichés of 'conceived in sin' and the old narratives of right and wrong and heroism and suffering and presents a balanced historical view based on archival sources.

The organization of the book is first class. It is chronological and divides the war by phases, especially the civil war between November 29th, 1947 and May 15th, 1948. It gives the reader a complete understanding of the military situation and how the Jewish forces, which were composed originally of an underground militia and several smaller units, was able to gain mastery over not only Arab militias but also Arab armies that were supplied with modern European weaponry. How they overcame both the air forces, artillery and armour that was thrown at them and how they succeeded, using interior lines, to actually bring the war into the Sinai and Lebanon.

Seth J. Frantzman

26 of 29 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Beginning of the Cycle, April 27, 2008

By	Keith A. Comess - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Amazon Verified Purchase

Benny Morris, considered by many to be the"Dean" of Israeli Middle Eastern historians, is noted for "revisionist" works on the genesis of the Palestinian Arab refugee issue and rewriting of Israeli historical hagiography. This book, a comprehensive history of the dual-phase 1947-1948 war (civil war between Jews and Arabs antedating Partition, followed by invasion by a constellation of Arab professional militaries and various ad hoc militias) reviews the entire enterprise from both a military and political perspective.

The book can be divided into three segments: 1). an introductory section, which places in context the, 2). major middle-section, which exhaustively deals with military affairs and, 3). a summary/conclusion section, which presents the author's perspectives based on presently available evidence. As Arab archives have not been opened to researchers as of the 2008 publication date, this work cannot be considered "definitive", but certainly holds this status as of now.

There is one major shortcoming of this book: the lack of maps. The barrage of detail on virtually every military and paramilitary engagement becomes confusing and frustrating, as the reader cannot readily follow the strategy and tactics elaborated in the text. Further, many of the maps have inadequate legends, rendering the majority of them difficult to understand.

Morris attributes the Israeli military victories to a combination of better planning, better logistics, better preparation, better motivation, better training, fighting along "interior lines", internal cohesion in the form of communality of purpose and international sympathy. Surprisingly (at least for many readers) much of the initial political and military support came from the Soviet Union, later an ardent partisan of the Arab cause and foe of Israel. Czechoslovakian arms, supplementing those bought from international weapons dealers, helped turn the tide, in addition to the above factors. Conversely, lack of purpose, infighting, jockeying for advantage vis-a-vis rival regimes and cynical manipulation of Arab public opinion by Arab political elites did little to fashion a force capable of opposing the Jews. Heated rhetoric, in other words, did not serve as an adequate substitute for assiduous planning and training. Worse, innumerable inflammatory and "eliminationist" statements regarding the Jews tended to provoke, amplify and reinforce pre-existing reciprocal thoughts and statements in their enemies, hardening positions to the point of ossification; thus, the genesis of the current mess. The complexity of the situation is further enhanced by complicity of various Arabs in the acquisition of lands by the Jews. The branding of numerous Arabs as "traitors" by the mercurial Mufti of Jerusalem, Husseini, heightened internecine disputes, often with lethal consequences, not only for the "perpetrators", but also for the cause; this behavior continues to the present day.

As for presenting a "balanced" perspective on the "Middle East Problem", the author makes every effort to be scrupulously objective. Israeli military and paramilitary actions that resulted in war crimes against civilians were frankly acknowledged, as was the policy that underlay them, to wit, generally ad hoc, rather than the result of the product of Macheavellian scheming and malevolence. Whle Morris states that the Israelis committed more atrocities than did the Arabs, he notes that this was an accident of opportunity, rather than evidence of moral superiority of the Arabs and their fighters. His synopsis of the motivations of Zionist, British, Arab and Ottoman participants in the genesis of the modern Middle East is fair and bluntly accurate.

Certainly, one could conclude that the Zionist enterprise was not any more or less "fair" than the "Manifest Destiny" of the white invaders of the Americas (murdering, cheating, displacing and finally segregating the indigenous inhabitants into "reservations", where many continue to reside under rank and disgraceful conditions) or of the British in Australia, to cite but two examples. Similarly, the displacement of Arabs from their land is not much different from the massive population transfers that occurred after WW-II in, for example, the case of the German (civilian) expulsions from Poland and Czechoslovakia. Perhaps a better example would be the displacement/population exchange of millions of Hindus and Muslims during the Partition of India and Pakistan, which occurred around the same time (circa 1947). That division, accompanied by generally involuntary "repatriation" based on ethnic and religious affiliation, was accompanied by considerable violence, property damage/confiscation and left a residue of bitter inter-communal hatred, with intermittent terrorist attacks and threatened international war. These examples are not cited by Morris and are not offered by me as justifications; they merely illustrate a fundemental aspect of human nature.

In summary, this is an excellent history which would benefit from inclusion of more detailed maps to accompany the more important military engagements. It is objectively written, comprehensively referenced and the conclusions drawn by the author are buttressed by data and temperately drawn.