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Text | Lu Lijin
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On May 14, 1948, a war of unequal power broke out in Palestine, located on the eastern shore of the Mediterranean and known as the heart of the Middle East.
A coalition of Arab nations, including Syria, Egypt, Jordan, Iraq, and Lebanon, launched a new Israel
In a huge offensive, Israel is far inferior to the enemy in all respects except for a small numerical gap, with few tanks and artillery, and aircraft that are a quarter of the size of the Arab coalition, with little possibility of victory.
(Arab Coalition)
What is shocking is that in just over five months, Israel turned defeat into victory, greatly expanded its territory, and declared to the world that it was qualified to survive on earth with a hearty victory.
Decades later, there is much controversy over the nature of the war, which Jews see as the first Middle East war to reclaim a homeland that had been displaced for thousands of years, undoubtedly a battle for the establishment of a state belonging to Israel, while Arabs angrily see it as a just war for Arabs against Israeli aggression.
(Israeli troops raise the flag)
So, which statement makes sense, and what is the essence behind the first Middle East war? Are the West really supporting Israel?
The Battle for the Establishment of Israel or the Just War for the Arabs?
In the Bible, the area where Israel and Palestine are today is known as the land of "milk and honey," and around 1025 BC, the Jews established the first state in the history of the group, the Hebrew State, one of the oldest indigenous people in the region.
However, due to its geographical location at the crossroads of the Middle East, it has always been a place where soldiers must fight and has become the main battlefield for hegemony among major powers.
(Israel Wailing Wall)
From the Kingdom of Babylon to the Roman Empire, the Jews living in the land of Palestine suffered the tragic fate of exile due to repeated disobedience to the conquerors and repeated rebellions, and they were forcibly relocated around the world, far from their original homeland.
With the rise of Islam, the area of Israel was gradually occupied by a large number of migrating Arabs, and most of the indigenous people also converted to Islam.
But the rise of Western powers changed the fate of the land, and by the end of the 19th and early 20th centuries, a Zionist trend swept Western Europe and received initial support from the British Empire, and in 1917, British Foreign Secretary Balfour publicly issued a declaration supporting the establishment of their own national state by Jews in present-day Palestine.
in Balfour
At this time, the Ottoman Empire, which ruled Palestine, was dismembered in World War I, and the Middle East was divided between Britain and France, of which Palestine was controlled and occupied by Britain in the name of "Mandate".
Jews were able to move from all over the world to Palestine with British support, and in the 20 years between 1918 and World War II, the number of Jews in the land soared from 50,000 to more than 440,000, one-third of the number of native Arabs.
Subsequently, through a legitimate United Nations resolution, the Jews officially owned 14,000 square kilometers of land, while the more populous Arabs were allocated only the remaining 11,000 square kilometers.
(Palestinian-Israeli distribution plan in UN resolutions, yellow for Palestine)
On the surface, the Palestinian area has been the inherent homeland of the Jews since ancient times, and the Jews have a certain historical legal basis for this land, since the United Nations has made a partition resolution, then both sides must abide by it, and the Arabs should not wantonly tear up the agreement and take the initiative to go to war, so from a legal and historical point of view, it seems that the Israelis are more dominant.
But this view ignores a crucial fact: Arabs have been living in Palestine for nearly 2,000 years, and the Jewish migration was essentially carried out arbitrarily under the auspices of Western powers, and was strongly opposed by Arabs throughout.
Moreover, after moving to Palestine, the Jews resorted to a series of violent methods in the process of settling disputes with the local Arabs, including a large number of sensational acts of terrorism.
In the months leading up to the war, there were frequent firefights between the Israelis and local Arabs, killing 257 Arabs in March '48 alone.
When the war officially broke out, Israel even turned its guns on innocent and unarmed civilians, causing a series of horrific bloodshed.
(Dead man's pit inside Tel Aviv)
In 2013, a "dead man's pit" containing more than 200 bodies was accidentally excavated in Israel's Tel Aviv area, all of them Arabs buried during the first Middle East war, including unarmed elderly children, children and women, who showed many signs of violence before their deaths.
However, Israel's atrocities do not in turn prove the justice of the Arab coalition, in fact, in addition to the Palestinian aborigines, other Arab countries participating in the war have their own evil intentions, they ostensibly under the banner of expelling Israel and helping Arab brothers, but the real idea behind the scenes is to expand their territory and fish in troubled waters.
(Map of the First Middle East War)
It is not profitable to bear the early Arab coalition forces
The complexity of the war in the Middle East lies not only in Israel's ambitions, but also in the ill-will of the so-called like-minded Arab brothers towards Palestine.
In the case of Jordan, which is active in the coalition, the reason why this country is willing to enthusiastically send troops to the war is not a sincere desire to help Palestine establish a state, but has its own annexation plan.
(Palestine and Jordan)
It turns out that for most of history, Jordan and Palestine were originally the same area (Palestine was Inner Jordan, today's Jordan is Transjordan), and the inhabitants here mostly shared the same beliefs and customs.
Until the end of World War I, Inner and Outer Jordan, previously under Ottoman rule, became a British Mandate area, and the British decided to support an Arab state in this area in order to appease their Arab allies who had shed blood in World War I.
(Abdullah)
So in 1921, the Emirate of Transjordan was established and Abdullah became the ruler. However, the British thought that the situation in Palestine was dangerous and wanted to control it in their own hands, so they waved a large pen when demarcating the border, using the Jordan River as the boundary, and only gave the eastern Transjordan to Abdullah.
The Jordanians, hindered by the face of the British, did not take the initiative to claim back Inner Jordan, and when the British withdrew and Israel was established, the Jordanians finally found an opportunity and could not resist wanting to completely complete the "unification".
This is evidenced by the post-war arrangements made by Jordanians to Palestinians.
After Israel's victory, the Jordanians reached a ceasefire agreement with them, and captured more than 4,800 square kilometers of land including the West Bank, including Arab holy places such as East Jerusalem.
By 1950, the Jordanians, in defiance of United Nations resolutions, simply incorporated the land into their territory by legal means, granting equal citizenship rights to Palestinians in the country, and the West Bank and Jordan mainland each had the same 30 seats in Congress.
(West Bank Districts)
It was not until the Third Middle East War that Israel took the West Bank into its own hands. In other words, for more than 20 years, Jordanians regarded the West Bank as their own territory, and their troops were not for Palestinian independence, but for the annexation of land.
In addition to the Jordanians who want to annex Palestine, the Egyptians also have a lot of thoughts about this area, after the outbreak of the war, the Egyptians preemptively controlled an area of more than 200 square kilometers of the Gaza Strip, and took the initiative to accept the good after seeing the unfavorable situation on the battlefield, and withdrew their troops from the Gaza Strip to stop fighting.
As for the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, the Egyptians also did not want to give them the opportunity to establish an independent state, as a United Nations resolution, but only incorporated them into their own administrative divisions.
In addition, Lebanon, Syria and other countries just want to take advantage of the fire and robbery, fish in troubled waters, and make a piece of the meal in Palestine.
It is precisely because the Arab coalition has a ghost heart and has its own independent calculations that the Israelis have the opportunity to defeat each of them.
For example, in the early stages of the war, seeing that the Jordanians had obtained the most land, the red-eyed Egyptians turned to backstabbing allies, and even secretly withheld ammunition from foreign aid to the Jordanians, which led to the thwart of the Jordanian front-line army's offensive.
The Jordanians were furious about this, and when they heard that Israel turned its guns against the Egyptian army, the Jordanians gloated and watched the Egyptians be defeated, and soon Egypt was forced to sign an armistice with Israel alone, Jordan and other countries felt that their own strength was insufficient, so they ceased with Israel, and the first Middle East war ended in a sloppy manner.
(After the First Middle East War, Egypt received Gaza, Jordan to the West Bank)
In addition to the intrigue of the Arabs, from the perspective of the larger dimension and the supporting forces behind it, the first Middle East war can essentially be seen as a struggle between the old imperialist powers and the emerging imperialisms.
US-Soviet vs UK The battle between old and new imperialism
Whether it is Israel or the Arab countries, they are nothing more than pawns on the chessboard of the Middle East, and it is the big power chess players behind who really play a decisive role on the chessboard.
Unlike today's impression that the Soviet Union had always supported Arabs and Britain and the United States had supported Israel, there was a rare scenario of the United States and the Soviet Union joining forces against Britain in this war.
As mentioned earlier, the British initially supported Zionism, but in World War II, in order to maintain the traditional sphere of influence in the Middle East, the British turned to suppressing Jews, supporting Arabs, and constantly restricting Jewish immigration to the Middle East, so that they were violently attacked by Jewish extremists.
(In 1946, Jewish extremists attacked the British government in Palestine.)
Britain's strength declined significantly after World War II, and seeing that it could not personally prevent Israel's independence, it provided the Arabs with a steady stream of arms and officer training services, helping the Arabs achieve a series of victories in the early stages of the war.
In tandem with the British, the United States and the Soviet Union were surprisingly united in their support for Israel.
Needless to say, the predominantly Jewish United States supported Israel, but the Soviet Union's attitude was very intriguing.
As early as 1944, the Soviet Union diplomatically supported the Jewish idea of statehood, and three years later directly voted in favor of Israel's Palestinian-Israeli partition plan in a United Nations resolution, and by the third day after Israel's independence, the Soviet Union became the first country to recognize Israel at that time.
The Soviets not only helped diplomatically, but more importantly opened a back door to aid Israel's most scarce weapons. At that time, Israel's weapons were rudimentary, with only more than 20,000 rifles and machine guns of satisfactory quality.
(Israeli army using Czech machine guns)
Under Soviet arrangements, Czechoslovakia, a well-known arms exporter, produced and transported a considerable amount of advanced weapons and ammunition for distant Israel, including the latest Messerschmitt aircraft that made a splash in the war.
On the Arab side, on the other hand, valuable arms aid from Britain was interrupted under pressure from the United States and the Soviet Union (the United States forced the British to stop training weapons and personnel on the grounds of cutting off aid), and the Arab coalition lost the capital to fight for a long time, tilting the balance of victory to Israel's side.
Stalin's reason for wanting Israel to be established, like that of the United States, was to combat the power that the British had cultivated in the Middle East for many years and to eradicate the influence of old colonial empires in the Middle East.
(Gorda Meir, Israel's special envoy to the Soviet Union)
The Russian historian Leonid brilliantly argued that Stalin's purpose in supporting Israel was to drive the aging British out of the Middle East.
(Israeli army on the battlefield)
On the other hand, the introduction of the Jewish factor in the Middle East, keeping the region chaotic and infighting, actually helped to shift the attention of Westerners from Europe to the distant Middle East, easing the pressure of the USSR in the direction of Eastern Europe.
It was only because of Israel's fall to the United States after its establishment and the controversy over the settlement of the Jewish issue in the Soviet Union that the Soviet Union later abandoned Israel in favor of Arabs.
epilogue
In short, the first Middle East war was by no means a simple battle of patriotism and justice, and several characters on the battlefield were nothing more than marionettes.
In the final analysis, the war reflected a change in power between the two emerging superpowers of the United States and the Soviet Union and Britain, and the British could not twist their arms and the Arabs they supported lost to Israel.