Israel's Dirty War
Review of Israel's Border Wars, 1949-1956: Arab Infiltration, Israeli Retaliation and the Countdown to the Suez War, by Benny Morris. 241 pp., Clarendon Press Oxford, 1993.
Avi Shlaim
London Review of Books (August 8, 1994)
Benny Morris is one of the most original and prolific
contributors to the new or revisionist Israeli historiography of the
Arab-Israeli conflict. What distinguishes the new Israeli historians
most clearly from the traditionalist ones is a critical stance towards
the claims made by Israeli governments, claims which were turned into
national myths and as such continue to condition popular attitudes
towards the Arabs down to the present day.
So far the new historiography has focused mainly on
the 1948 Arab-Israeli war and on the `missed opportunity' for peace in
the immediate aftermath of that war. In two earlier works, The Birth of
the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1947-1949 and 1948 and After: Israel
and the Palestinians, Morris drove a coach and horses through the
official version which denied any Israeli responsibility for
Palestinian exodus. Israel's Border Wars is an impressive sequel to
these earlier works which carries the story down to the 1956 Suez War.
It is the story of Israel's dirty war because it was directed largely
against civilians, many of whom were refugees from the 1948 war.
Almost as soon as the guns fell silent and armistice
agreements were concluded between Israel and her neighbours in 1949,
voices began to be heard in the Arab world calling for a second round
against the newly born Jewish state. Faint echoes of these voices were
also heard on the Israeli side of the Arab-Israeli divide. Some
generals, notably Moshe Dayan, were dissatisfied with the outcome of
the first round and advocated a second round to crush the Arab armies
and `rectify' Israel's borders. After he became Chief of Staff in
December 1953, Dayan actively, deliberately and deviously pushed for
war. For nearly three years he kept chomping at the bit to have another
go at the Arabs. The long-awaited second round broke out in October
1956. It was initiated not be the Arabs but by Israel, in collusion
with Britain and France, against Egypt which had emerged in the
meantime as the standard bearer of radical Arab nationalism.
The period 1949-1956 may be seen simply as an
interregnum between the first and second rounds. But it was a critical
period in the history of the Arab-Israeli conflict, a period of
mounting hostility and escalating violence which set the pattern for
decades to come. Essentially the pattern is one low-intensity conflict
or dormant war which periodically erupts into full-scale war. In many
ways it is more instructive to study the periods of dormant war,
especially during this formative period, than the periods of full-scale
wars when the men with the guns take over: they can throw more light on
the motives and attitudes, hopes and fears, aims and methods of the
societies that remained locked into a bitter and bloody conflict.
Israel's Border Wars makes a major contribution to
the study of the Arab-Israeli conflict precisely because it deals with
a period of neither war nor peace. The main focus of the book, as its
sub-title indicates, is on Arab infiltration into Israel across the
armistice lines, the Israeli policy of military retaliation, and the
bloody countdown to the Suez War. As in previous books, Morris takes
the official versions of events, Arab as well as Israeli, and subjects
them to the most exacting and rigorous historical scrutiny. Important
elements of the official versions, especially the Israeli one, do not
survive his scrutiny. A much fuller, more nuanced, and more convincing
picture emerges from his book than from any previous book about the
endless chain of action and reaction which culminated in the tripartite
attack on Egypt in 1956.
The conventional view is that Palestinian
infiltration into Israel was aided and abetted by the Arab governments
following the defeat of their regular armies on the battlefield; that
it was a form of undeclared guerrilla warfare designed to weaken and
even destroy the infant Jewish state. Israel, on the other hand, is
portrayed as the innocent victim of Arab provocations and Arab
aggression while its own policy of military reprisals is depicted as a
legitimate form of self-defence.
Benny Morris challenges this conventional view at
three critical points: the character and causes of infiltration, the
attitude of the Arab governments towards this phenomenon, and the
motives and consequences of the Israeli response. His own account is
based on exceptionally thorough and painstaking research in Israeli,
British, American and UN archives. Arab governments, alas, do not, as a
rule, open their archives to research. So if the jury has to stay out
until the official Arab documents become available, it may have to wait
a very long time. A limited amount of these documents were captured by
Israel but these flatly contradict the official Israeli version about
the role of the Arab governments.
The evidence gleaned by Morris from the various
sources he consulted, suggests that infiltration into Israel was a
direct consequence of the displacement and dispossession of over
700,000 Palestinians in the course of the Palestine War and that the
motives behind it were largely economic and social rather than
political. Many of the infiltrators were Palestinian refugees whose
reasons for crossing the border included looking for relatives,
returning to their homes, recovering possessions, tending to their
fields, collecting their crops and, occasionally, exacting revenge.
Some of the infiltrators were thieves and smugglers; some were involved
in the hashish convoys; while others were nomadic Bedouins, more
accustomed to grazing rights than to state borders. There were
terroristic and politically-motivated raids, such as those organised by
the ex-Mufti, Hajj Amin al Husayni, and financed by Saudi Arabia, but
they did not amount to very much. In the period 1949-1956 as a whole,
90 per cent or more of all infiltrations, in Morris's estimate, were
motivated by economic and social concerns.
As the years went by, a certain overlap developed
between economic infiltration and political infiltration geared to
killing and injuring Israelis. The `free fire policy' adopted by the
Israeli army, border guard and police in dealing with suspects - a
policy of shooting first and asking questions later - contributed to
this overlap. Faced with trigger-happy Israeli soldiers, infiltrators
started coming in organized bands and to respond in kind. Altogether
between 2,700 and 5,000 infiltrators were killed in the period
1949-1956, the great majority of whom were unarmed.
In the second place, Morris shows that the
governments of the neighbouring Arab states were opposed to the
cross-border forays into Israel for most of the period under
discussion. Arab governments were caught on the horns of a dilemma: if
they openly intervened to stop infiltration, they risked alienating
their own passionately pro-Palestinian publics; if they were seen to
condone infiltration, they risked clashes with the Israeli army and the
possible loss of more territory.
Each government dealt with this problem in its own
way and with varying degrees of success. The Lebanese authorities
transferred many of the Palestinian refugees northwards, to camps in
Beirut, Tyre and Sidon, and effectively sealed the border with Israel.
Consequently there were no large-scale Israeli raids into Lebanon in
the period 1949-1956. The Syrian authorities also exercised strict
control over their border with Israel and cases of uncontrolled
infiltration were rare. But the Syrian army was allowed to cultivate
the demilitarized zones along the border with Israel and this provoked
recurrent clashes with the Israeli army.
Jordan had the longest and most complicated border
with Israel, with the largest number of civilians on both sides. The
upshot was massive infiltration, Israeli reprisals, countless Jordanian
proposals to improve the situation in the border areas, and a singular
failure to stem the tide of infiltration. Until his dismissal in March
1956, a British officer, Glubb Pasha, commanded Jordan's small army,
the Arab Legion. Glubb did his utmost to persuade the Israelis that
Jordan opposed infiltration and was doing everything in its power to
curb it. The Israelis did not doubt Glubb's sincerity but they piled
the pressure on Jordan to do more. Glubb suspected that the Israeli
authorities kept crying `the enemy is at the gates' for internal
reasons, in order to persuade their public to accept the rigours of
Israeli life. He also believed that the Israelis had a psychological
need to bully their weaker neighbours.
Whether or not out of a psychological need, bully
the weak Jordanians was what the Israelis did with a series of
well-planned ground raids against villages in the West Bank, beginning
in January 1951. The largest and most notorious of these raids was
directed against the Jordanian village of Qibya in October 1953. The
raid was carried out by Unit 101, a commando unit designed to give a
sharp edge to the policy of reprisals. This unit was commanded by an
unusually aggressive and an unusually devious young major named Ariel
Sharon. Sharon and his men blew up forty five houses and killed
sixty-nine Jordanians, the majority women and children. Sharon was
apparently well pleased with his handiwork, which in some quarters
earned him the title `the murderer of Qibya'.
The Qibya raid triggered serious civilian unrest in
Jordan and a storm of international protest against Israel. The Israeli
claim that the infiltrators from Jordan who provoked the raid were
sponsored and guided by the Arab Legion did not fool anybody. When Arye
Eilan, an official in the Foreign Ministry, asked Yehoshafat Harkabi,
the Deputy Director of Military Intelligence, for some clear
documentary proof of the Arab Legion's complicity, Harkabi answered
that `no proof could be given because no proof existed.' Harkabi added
that having personally made a detailed study of infiltrations, he had
arrived at the conclusion that `Jordanians and especially the Legion
were doing their best to prevent infiltration, which was a natural,
decentralized and sporadic movement.' To this clear-cut message Eilan
reacted by insisting that, whatever the truth of the matter, as
Israel's leaders had repeatedly gone on record asserting Jordanian
official complicity, Israeli spokesmen could not but continue to press
the same point. As he put it, `if Jordanian complicity is a lie, we
have to keep on lying. If there are no proofs, we have to fabricate
them.'
The charge of instigating and encouraging
Palestinian infiltration from the Gaza Strip and Sinai into Israel was
also pressed by Israel against the Egyptian authorities, again as part
of the propaganda war and without any documentary evidence. The
documents of the Egyptian military and civilian authorities in Gaza,
captured by Israel during the 1956 and 1967 wars, tell a very different
story. Ehud Ya'ari who was given access to these documents, published
in 1975 a short but highly important pamphlet in Hebrew entitled `Egypt
and the Fedayeen, 1953-1956.' Ya'ari found that the Egyptian
authorities had a clear and consistent policy of cubing private
incursions into Israel until the Gaza raid of February 1955 and that
this policy was reversed abruptly and as a direct consequence of this
devastating raid.
Morris agrees with Ya'ari that the Gaza raid marked
a watershed in Egypt's relations with the Palestinian fedayeen or
self-sacrificers. Before the raid Egyptian policy, with some minor
exceptions, had been to oppose and restrict infiltration; after the
raid, while continuing to oppose private initiatives, the Egyptian
authorities organized fedayeen units within the regular army and
employed them as an official instrument of warfare against Israel.
While Morris is more critical of the Egyptian authorities than Ya'ari,
especially for sending fedayeen squads into Israel in 1954 to gather
military intelligence or commit acts of sabotage, both recognize that
Israel's policy of reprisals played a major part in escalating the
border war with Egypt.
To absolve the Arab governments of responsibility
for sponsoring infiltration into Israel in the pre-1955 period is not
to deny that this infiltration posed a very serious problem for Israel
in general and the border settlements in particular. Many of the
inhabitants of the border settlements were new immigrants from Muslim
countries. Infiltration from across the border placed their lives at
risk, exacted a heavy economic price, and undermined their morale to
the point where wholesale desertion became a real possibility. An added
threat was that the infiltrators would try to re-establish themselves
in their former homes and villages inside Israel. Infiltration, in
short, posed a danger not only to the country's day-to-day security but
also to its territorial integrity.
To cope with this threat Israel adopted an anti-infiltration policy
that consisted of both passive and active measures. These measures
included the establishment of new settlements along the borders, the
destruction of abandoned Arab villages, the patrolling of the borders,
the setting of ambushes, mines and booby-traps, and the `free-fire'
policy towards infiltrators. Periodic search operations were also
mounted in Arab villages inside Israel to weed out infiltrators. The
soldiers who carried out these operations committed occasional acts of
chilling brutality like gang rape, the murder of innocent civilians,
and the dumping of 120 suspected infiltrators in the Arava desert
without water.
Israel's chief instrument for meeting the challenge of infiltration,
however, was the policy of military retaliation. This policy evolved in
stages. Until the Qibya raid, retaliation was directed mainly against
civilian targets; after Qibya it was directed mainly against military
targets. Throughout the 1950s Israeli governments came under pressure
from the public to respond forcefully to Arab provocations, to exact
`an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth' following the Biblical
injunction. The political climate was thus generally permissive
regarding the use of force. David Ben-Gurion, a peppery and combative
little fellow, best personified this militant national mood. His
instinct was to let the military have their head rather than rely on
the slow-moving machinery of the United Nations. In Hebrew the UN is
called oom, and Ben-Gurion showed his contempt for the world
organization by calling it oom-shmoom.
The policy of military retaliation was highly controversial inside
Israel. General E.L.M. Burns, Chief of Staff of the United Nations
Truce Supervisory Organisation, divided Israeli leaders into two
schools of thought, the school of retaliation and the school of
negotiation. Benny Morris divides them into activists and moderates.
The activist school was led by David Ben-Gurion, prime minister and
defence minister until his `temporary' retirement to the settlement of
Sdeh Boqer in the Negev at the end of 1953. It included Moshe Dayan and
Pinhas Lavon, who were appointed Chief of Staff of IDF and defence
minister respectively just before Ben-Gurion's retirement, and the
great majority of Israel's powerful defence establishment. The moderate
school was led by Moshe Sharett, foreign minister from 1948 until his
forced resignation in June 1956 and prime minister from December 1953
until November 1955. It included most of the officials in Israel's
largely powerless Foreign Ministry.
Military retaliation was the central issue in the debate between the
activists and the moderates. The activists believed that the Arabs were
not interested in peace but only in Israel's destruction; that they
understood only the language of force; that Israel could not rely on
the UN or Great Power guarantees for her security; and that in order to
survive, the State of Israel had to give repeated demonstrations of its
military power. The moderates were more sensitive to Arab feelings and
to world opinion; they wanted to create a climate that would be
conducive to exploring the possibilities of peaceful co-existence in
the Middle East; and they feared that frequent and excessive use of
force would further inflame Arab hatred of Israel and set back the
prospects of peace. Put starkly, `it was a struggle between hardliners
and softliners, security-centredness and diplomacy, intractability and
conciliation, the certainty of war and the chance for peace.'
Once in the saddle, Sharett tried to put his moderate views into
practice by pursuing a pragmatic, middle-of-the-road course. He
rejected the policy of automatic, massive, retaliation but he
reluctantly authorized certain limited reprisals when pressure from the
public and the army proved too powerful to contain. Sharett also
initiated a secret dialogue with the Egyptian President, Gamal Abdel
Nasser, through personal emissaries who met in Paris. Nasser apparently
respected Sharett for he referred to him as `an honest and moderate
man'. Morris only refers to these secret contacts in passing and
grossly underestimates their importance. About the content of the talks
he says next to nothing, ignoring the material that is available in the
files of the Israeli Foreign Ministry and in the extraordinarily
detailed and revealing diary which Sharett wrote from 1953 to 1957 and
which was published 1978 in eight volumes. Nor does Morris shed any
light on the part played by the activists in sabotaging Sharett's peace
efforts.
As prime minister Sharett experienced the greatest difficulty in
controlling the activists. Ben-Gurion had handed him a stacked deck
before going on to his desert retreat. His Chief of Staff was an avowed
expansionist and a fiercely hawkish man of action who had nothing but
contempt for what he called `Mr Sharett's policy of appealing here and
complaining there'. Pinhas Lavon, as defence minister, pushed the
activist line to such extremes that even the army officers came to
regard him as a dangerous man. The one thing that he minister and army
officers did agree on, was the need to overturn the prime minister's
policy of moderation.
In July 1954,without informing Sharett, the defence establishment
activated a Jewish spy ring in Cairo in an attempt to create bad blood
between Egypt and the Western Powers. The attempt backfired with
disastrous consequences for Israeli-Egyptian relations. Ben-Gurion
re-emerged from his desert retreat in the wake of `the mishap' to
assume the defence portfolio in the cabinet which was still headed by
the hapless Sharett. A week later, on 28 February 1955, Ben-Gurion
ordered the famous raid on the Egyptian army camp in Gaza city in which
thirty-eight Egyptian soldiers were killed and many others were wounded.
The Gaza raid sent a signal that the activists were back in charge and
served to boost Israeli morale. But it also put an end to the covert
Israeli-Egyptian peace contacts and launched the two countries on the
road to war. Badly shaken by the raid, Nasser retaliated by ordering
fedayeen attacks on Israel and by negotiating a major arms deal with
the Soviet Union to offset Israel's military preponderance.
Ben-Gurion, however, completely failed to understand the impact of the
Gaza raid on Egypt and on Nasser. At a caucus meeting of Mapai
ministers held on 17 May, with a general election in the offing, the
diminutive Ben-Gurion, raising his voice, said that Nasser had to be
taught a lesson or be overthrown: `It is certainly possible to
overthrow him and it is a blessed obligation [mitzva] to do so'. Who
does this `Nasser Shmasser' think he is?
After the Gaza raid it was downhill all the way. Israel resorted to
force along her borders ever more frequently and on an ever growing
scale. This resort to force did little to stem the tide of
infiltration. All it achieved was an escalation of the border war on
the Egyptian, the Jordanian and the Syrian fronts. In September 1955
Nasser obtained the Soviet arms he had been asking for through the
so-called Czech arms deal. This deal threatened to tip the military
balance against Israel. The activists resolved to confront and defeat
the Egyptian army before it had a chance to absorb the Soviet weapons.
By gradually escalating the level of violence along the borders,
Ben-Gurion and Dayan hoped to provoke an Egyptian counter-attack which
would provide the excuse for an all-out war. This was the thinking
behind the major retaliatory strikes of October-December 1955,
Kuntilla, al-Sabha and Kinneret.
The Kinneret raid was directed with devastating force against Syria,
which had recently signed a defence pact with Egypt, in order to draw
Nasser into war. It was launched on 11 December 1955 while Sharett, by
now only foreign minister, was in Washington, waiting for a reply to
his request for American arms which was promised for the following day.
The reply he got, following the Kinneret raid, was emphatically
negative. Sharett was dumbfounded. To his colleagues on Mapai's
Political Committee on 27 December, Sharett bitterly remarked that the
devil himself could not have thought up a better way to harm Israel. He
also came down firmly against the option of a pre-emptive war which was
rapidly gathering momentum within the defence establishment.
To clear the decks for what was always referred to as pre-emptive war
against Egypt and not simply as war, Ben-Gurion ousted Sharett from his
remaining post as foreign minister in June 1956. Sharett's successor
was Golda Meir - the only man in the cabinet as Ben-Gurion liked to
point out. With the help of his new foreign minister, Ben-Gurion
overcame the remaining obstacles along the road and in October 1956 the
Sinai Campaign against Egypt was launched in cahoots with France and
Britain.
The Sinai Campaign was the biggest reprisal raid of them all. Its
declared aims were to destroy the fedayeen bases and to open the
Straits of Tiran to Israeli shipping. Its undeclared - and unachieved -
aims were territorial expansion and the overthrow of Nasser Shmasser.
Israel's dirty little war thus ended in a very big war which involved
two big colonial powers who had their own reasons for wanting to knock
Nasser off his perch. Nasser not only survived the tripartite
aggression but succeeded in snatching a resounding political victory
from the jaws of military defeat. Israel, on the other hand, only
succeeded in stoking further the flames of Arab hatred. Force turned
out to be, in the final analysis, the only language that the activists
knew how to use in dealing with the Arabs. But it was a language which
the Arabs did not seem to understand. What a tragic story and how well
Morris tells it.
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