The Birth of a Nation: A Short History of the Founding of Modern Israel

Nations are forged through violence.  The birth of modern Israel holds the same historical fascination as the early Mormon church.  It is a window into antiquity, a glimpse, for those who do not flinch, into ugly and ancient parts of human nature.  Give the displaced barbarian tribes that vexed Rome steamships, machine guns, and near-universal literacy, and their story would be broadly similar to that of 1940s Israel.

In 1946, Europe had no place for Jews.  A Gallup Poll showed that 60% of Germans still supported Hitler’s final solution.  Pogroms in Poland killed hundreds of Jews, who survived concentration camps only to perish at the hands of their neighbors.  For good reason, European Jews wanted to leave.

Britain and the United States refused to permit large-scale Jewish immigration.  English-speaking countries accepted no more than 2% of Jewish Holocaust survivors, and a similar number went to Argentina.  For two years beginning in 1945, Holocaust survivors vegetated in displaced persons camps, forbidden from emigrating to Palestine, physically sustained by American agricultural abundance, yet idle and almost destitute. 

Unwelcome anywhere else, European Jews overwhelmingly wanted to emigrate to their ancient homeland in Palestine.  A poll conducted by the UN showed that 97% of Jews in displaced persons camps wanted to emigrate there.

However, the Arab world did not want more Jews in Palestine. After the fall of the Ottoman Empire in 1918, Palestine was administered by Britain, which permitted Jewish immigration until the mid-1930s.  The Jewish population in Palestine exploded, increasing from roughly 60,000 in 1918 to 449,000 in 1939.  Palestinian Arabs initiated pogroms throughout this period, and Jewish militia groups formed to protect Jewish lives and property.  Some, like Haganah, were sensitive to international opinion.  Others, like the Stern Gang and Irgun did not shrink from terrorist tactics. All were illegal under British law, and dozens of their members were executed by the British for sedition and terrorist activities.  Jewish militias did not honor the Geneva Convention and sometimes seized and killed hostages.  On occasion, Jewish militias attacked Arab civilians. 

At the end of World War Two, these militias were the only effective Jewish paramilitary organizations in the world and their members, though generally practical, boiled with Zionist fervor.  They were essential to the birth of Israel and provided both the nucleus of the Israeli army and Israel’s early political leadership, just as Revolutionary War generals and statesmen dominated American politics for a generation.

British authorities at first refused to permit significant Jewish emigration to Israel.  Jewish immigrants were interdicted at alpine border crossings, in Mediterranean ports, and on the open sea.  Those caught on the open sea were taken to concentration camps in British-administered Cyprus and detained under austere conditions.  British authorities were torn between restricting Jewish immigration to appease Arab opinion and permitting Jewish immigration to transfer a European problem to more distant shores.  Opening the floodgates might also balm British scruples about forbidding greater Jewish immigration immediately before the Holocaust. 

During and after World War Two, perhaps 100,000 Jews reached British Palestine in violation of British law.  The Jewish people of Palestine displayed an amazing level of ethnic solidarity and welcomed fellow Jews despite their own meager resources.  Jewish settlers wanted to increase their population for much the same reason France and Germany wanted to do so before the Great War.  They saw an Arab-Jewish war as likely or inevitable and wanted to field a big army that would win.  Everyone knew Britain, exhausted by war and unable to hold even India, would soon leave.  An ambitious Jewish stateman in 1946 Palestine would have become a militia member.  For many, this proved the path to power.

The United Nations of 1947 gave the Arab world only token inclusion.  On Palestinian matters, Arab nations were consistently outvoted by a block of European and Western nations.  The UN Partition plan of 1947 divided Israel into three zones.  A Jewish state, including the area around Tel Aviv and Haifa and most of the Negev desert, a Palestinian state including all the West Bank and Gaza Strip and other areas in the north, and a UN-administered area centered around Jerusalem.  In 1947, the “Jewish” portion had only a bare majority of Jews, roughly 498,000 Jews versus 407,000 Arabs.  However, everyone understood that immigration of European Jews would soon give them commanding majorities in the littoral Jewish state.  Very few Jews, only about 10,000, lived in the proposed Arab area, so Jews living near the Mediterranean coast were largely willing to sacrifice this group, welcoming them as refugees but abandoning their settlements to Arab interests.  Jews in Jerusalem were asked to defer their nationalist ambitions in exchange for a friendly and possibly powerful western neighbor as well as UN protection.  Many Jews held irridentist beliefs that sought territory well beyond the proposed Jewish state, but a majority supported the partition.  In doing so, they created a Jewish nation with sovereign authority and eventually a powerful army.  This nation has been committed since its birth to helping Jews beyond its borders.

The Muslim world overwhelmingly rejected the UN Partition Plan, with six Arab members as well as Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Turkey voting against it.  Britain abstained from the vote, but her former white dominions, the United States, most of the Americas, the Soviet Union, and much of the Soviet block voted for partition, and it passed 33-13.

The Arab world responded to the passage of the partition plan with racial violence.  In Tripolitania, 130 Jews were killed in a pogrom, 82 more were killed in Aden.   In Palestine itself, Arab militias attacked Jewish men, women and children.  Jews fought back and generally inflicted more deaths on their enemies than they sustained.  During a bloody six-week period in 1947, British statistics showed that 1,069 Arabs, 769 Jews and 123 Britons were killed in greater Jerusalem in what had become a race war.  The British paid a stiff price in soldiers’ lives trying to maintain order and were happy to depart.  Violence would decide control of Palestine.

Arab militias laid siege to outlying Jewish settlements. In a couple of instances, they stormed settlements and massacred the inhabitants.  Jews engaged in collective reprisals against Palestinian Arabs.  If an attack originated from an Arab village, all its inhabitants were deemed fair targets.  Still, most Jews showed a modicum of restraint.  Many Arab towns did not attack Jewish settlements and were spared.  Some remain in Israel to this day, which has roughly 2 million Arab citizens and gives them most of the civil rights accorded to Jews.  In this way, a vast Jewish territory was carved out even though the median Jewish settler was squeamish about ethnic cleansing.  Defense of Jewish settlements and collective reprisals against belligerent Arab towns provided both impetus and justification for territorial expansion.  There were always Jewish irridentist fanatics who would fight to occupy all the land between the river and the sea, but the founding fathers of Israel understood their nation would be surrounded by Arabs and curbed their ambitions to avoid total war.  Still, Jewish leaders doled out the spoils of conquest.  When an Arab town was depopulated, its land and whatever had been left behind were given to Jewish settlers.  Ben Gurion, who became Israel’s longest-serving prime minister, explained the process:

“From the entry of Jerusalem through [various neighborhoods] there are no Arabs left.  One hundred percent Jews.  Since Jerusalem’s destruction in the days of the Romans, it hasn’t been as Jewish as it is now.  In many Arab districts in the West- one sees not one Arab.”

Ben Gurion salivated over the results of ethnic cleansing but was cagey about the details.  In 1947, Jewish militias became increasingly brazen in their attacks on British soldiers.  The Stern Gang killed ten British soldiers after two British deserters participated in an attack on an outlying Jewish settlement.  British soldiers withdrew from Jewish areas, and Jewish militias filled this power vacuum even before the formal end of British rule.

The largest Jewish militia, Haganah, settled on Plan D, which sought “to gain control of the Hebrew State and defend its borders.”  This meant establishing a defensible, contiguous territory and required occupying Arab towns that blocked communications between Jewish settlements.  Plan D did not seek to control core Arab cities, only outlying settlements near existing Jewish communities.  Zionists around the world helped smuggle arms and ammunition into Palestine.

Venerable Arab towns west of Jerusalem bore the brunt of Zionist violence.  In this area, dense populations of Jews and Arabs lived in close proximity, creating a tinder box of racial animosity intensified by the religious and symbolic importance of Jerusalem.  In Deir Yassin, the last Arab village west of Jerusalem, 245 Arabs, many of them women and children, were murdered by the Stern gang and Irgun.  These actions were swiftly condemned by Haganah, though the land was never given back and none of the perpetrators were executed.  The leader of Irgun, Manachem Begin, later founded the Likud party and became the Prime Minister of Israel.  Extremists did the spade work of ethnic cleansing while moderates looked the other way and focused their own efforts on targeted reprisals.

After the Deir Yassin massacre, Arabs often fled when confronted by Jews.  Many fled out of fear before physical confrontation occurred.  In some cases, British units, loathe to fight but keen to prevent further massacres, escorted Arabs being driven from their homes.  Moderate Jews asked Arabs to stay calm and remain, Haganah even distributed leaflets to this effect.  However, Haganah could not or would not keep Arabs safe from militias determined to expel them from “Israel.”  Yosef Weitz, director of the Jewish National Fund’s Land Settlement Department, described the process:

“Our army is steadily conquering Arab villages and their inhabitants are afraid and flee like mice.  You have no idea what happened in the Arab villages.  It is enough that at night several shells will fly over them and they will flee for their lives.  Villages are steadily emptying, and if we continue this course, and we will certainly do so as our strength increases, then villages will empty of their inhabitants.”

Only a few Zionists stooped to outright slaughter.  Most were content to fire a few artillery shells over target villages and let fear and memory of exemplary massacres do the rest.  These tactics were effective.  Over 700,000 Palestinian Arabs became refugees.  Between May 15, 1947, and December 31, 1951, over 686,000 Jews entered Israel, almost a one-for-one displacement of the departed Arab population.  The Jewish population of Israel doubled in just over four years.

Israel could not have been born without organized racial violence and could not become a geographically coherent Jewish state without systematic ethnic cleansing.  The Arab population did not leave willingly.  It fled after exemplary massacres but before sustaining demographically significant casualties.  Rarely have conquerors driven so many refugees from their homes at such a small cost in human lives.  Zionists were somewhat like Vikings whose fearful reputation let them win kingdoms without large-scale violence, the main difference is that Israeli Jews brought women with them and rarely married natives.  Zionist violence was, by historical standards, restrained and efficient.  Israel exists because its founders had determination and shame in equal measure and let less principled cobelligerents do the dirty work.

Many early Israelis would have accepted a cohabitation like modern-day Canada.  Arabs would be dominant within their enclave and would have some influence over national politics.  However, they could never be a majority, lest the whole Zionist project founder.  Jews felt that only political power over a sovereign state could give them physical security.  The area west of the Green Line today is both bigger and more Jewish than that proposed in the 1947 UN partition plan.  The mass exodus of Arabs after the Deir Yassin massacre left behind too few Arabs for them to exercise much power through voting. Only once has an Arab party served in an Israeli government, and it was excluded from key ministries.

Like America’s founding fathers, early Israelis formed militias, threw off British rule, and established representative government.  Like America’s founding fathers, they were willing to drive off and sometimes murder other groups who interfered with their national ambitions.  Most early Israelis felt part of a racial mission.  Both Israeli and American patriots preferred to avoid outright massacre.  Israel is no better or worse than most other nations, though the scars of its founding are more apparent.