Chapter 9, Part 3: The Catastrophe of Palestine, 1947-1949

Section Two
The Catastrophe of Palestine

Many intertwined factors combined to cut off the land of Palestine and give it to the Jews, so that they could set up on it a state that the Western powers would sponsor and supply with the means of life and with arms.

Among the strongest of these factors were the historic hatred that the Christians of Europe have harbored for Islam and Muslims since the Crusades.. the sad weakness that ate away the body of the Muslim Ottoman state.. the penetration of Jewish money and influence into the powerful circles and among the decision-makers in Europe (England especially) and the United States, the biblical claims in which many Western leaders believe.. and the oil supplies on which the Arab Gulf region floats.. Add to this our scandalous failure to develop ourselves intellectually, and the weakness of our integration into world civilization, as the nations of the West and the East have done, such as Japan and its yellow neighbors.. Our eyes stayed fixed on the heritage that built and honored the past.. We slept on its sweet memories.. and contented ourselves with enjoying the trappings of the age: we used refrigerators, airplanes and cars, furnished our houses with sofas and armchairs.. and analyzed blood and tissue with the finest scientific instruments.. but we lowered a curtain of stagnation over the mind and refused to use its immense capacities.

On the effects of oil, Mangold wrote the following:

"Every member of the Western alliance depends directly or indirectly on Middle East oil, and so all these members are exposed to internal economic disruption if their oil supplies are cut off. It can be said that for many countries economic stability is a more pressing problem than military security. The use of Soviet aircraft in Egypt in 1970 carried ominous strategic consequences, but in reality it had no direct or inevitable effect on Europe, whereas the use of the oil weapon in 1973 caused widespread panic in government circles, and was felt by households throughout Europe, Japan and America."[1]

"And any conflict in the Middle East will take on the character of a confrontation between the two superpowers for which there is no solution."[2]

Israel was set up as the result of an international conspiracy, woven by Britain, for whom Palestine was a trust it had received as a mandate from the League of Nations, to prepare it for independence. Then the United States of America came and took over the task of bringing Israel into being in defiance of the international community, by exerting heavy pressure on the smaller states. The American President, Harry Truman, took an unjust personal stand against the Arabs on the question of the partition of Palestine. I quote here what Mangold wrote on this subject. He said:

"Truman's policy of supporting the creation of Israel had met opposition in 1948 from the State Department, the Defense Department and the Navy, and from the American Joint Chiefs of Staff, who feared that, in the event of a rapid depletion of American oil reserves, American policy would affect future oil supplies. They believed that the Arabs might turn to the Soviet Union as a result.

These fears proved far-sighted. The Arabs did in fact begin to turn to the Soviet Union seven years later, and America's attachment to Israel was primarily responsible for providing the Soviet Union with a military outlet in the region."[3]

When the vote took place on 29 November 1947 in the committee the United Nations had formed to study the Palestine question, the result was as follows:

25 votes in favor of partition, 12 against and 17 abstentions. If we add together those against and those abstaining, we find them more numerous than the supporters of partition. At that point America resorted to pressure on some states to change the situation, and it got what it wanted.

When the General Assembly of the United Nations voted on the partition plan, 33 states voted for it, led by the Soviet Union, the United States of America, France, Czechoslovakia, Belgium, Denmark, Canada and the Netherlands.. Ten states abstained, headed by Britain, which actually set up the state of Israel and equipped it with every instrument of evil before withdrawing from Palestine on 15 May 1948, together with China, Yugoslavia and Argentina. Siam was absent from the session.

Partition was opposed by the six Arab states, Syria, Lebanon, Egypt, Iraq, Saudi Arabia and Yemen, and by the Muslim states, Turkey, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iran, and it was also opposed by India, Cuba and Greece.[4]

Grief spread through the Arab world at the partition resolution, and the members of the Chamber of Deputies were stunned.

The members of the Constitutional Bloc met under their chairman al-Kikhya, discussed the matter and decided to record a stand condemning this conspiracy. Our bloc submitted the following proposal to the Chamber of Deputies:

"To charge the Foreign Affairs Committee with drafting a resolution containing the following points:

1. Condemnation of the resolution adopted by the General Assembly of the United Nations Organization on the partition of Palestine, and refusal to recognize it.

2. A message of thanks from the Chamber of Deputies to the non-Arab states that voted on the side of the Arab states.

3. To charge the (Syrian) government to contact the Arab states as quickly as possible, to put the resolutions adopted at previous conferences into practical form, to prepare the means and to take urgent measures to defeat and destroy the partition plan and to secure the independence of Arab Palestine.

4. To charge the government with finding a permanent source of funds to be devoted to saving Palestine, by means of a levy or tax to be paid jointly by all the Arab peoples.[5]

In those grim days, days of impotence, laxity and lost standards in fixing responsibility.. we turned with our hopes to international justice, but we were appealing to powers that were both judge and adversary.

Writing the history of that black period is not among the subjects of this book, which is limited by its subject and purpose, especially since rivers of ink have flowed from the pens of a number of historians.[6] But I would like to mention what took place on the night of 14-15 May 1948 in one of the halls of the Chamber of Deputies, the night on which the British army withdrew from Palestine and so ended Britain's mandate.

That night the government called the Foreign Affairs Committee, of which I was rapporteur, and the National Defense Committee to an urgent emergency meeting. The meeting, held in secret session, was attended by the President of the Chamber of Deputies, our teacher Faris al-Khouri, the head of the government, Jamil Mardam, and the Minister of National Defense, Ahmad al-Sharabati, for whom many deputies harbored a particular dislike and whom they did not trust, because his bad reputation had surrounded his political position with many questions.

The Minister of Defense explained the military situation and praised the important preparations his ministry had made. He said that the Syrian army stood ready to take part in the fighting with great efficiency whenever national duty required it to join in military action.. He was extremely cheerful and confident in what he said. The Prime Minister confirmed his minister's words, and we asked some questions. Among the things I said was:

These are our preparations; are they complete? The minister answered: our army does not lack so much as a bootlace for a soldier.. And I asked: how far does your information on the Jews' preparations go? The minister said: we have precise information on every settlement, the number of its soldiers, their weapons and their types.. and even the quantities of supplies they have.

We rose to go into the assembly hall, where a secret session of the Chamber of Deputies was held around midnight.. The Prime Minister was facing the presidential rostrum, almost in front of us.. When the hour hand closed over the minute hand at exactly midnight, Jamil Mardam stood up to announce that at that moment the Arab armies had entered Palestine to liberate it.

He made a short speech expressing his confidence in victory.. The deputies applauded, and some wept with emotion.. We went out into the night to our homes. The radios in the streets were broadcasting the address of the Sheikh of al-Azhar to the armed forces and to the Muslim Arabs, in which he cited the words of God Almighty:

"And do not think of those who have been killed in the cause of God as dead. Rather, they are alive with their Lord, receiving provision" [Al Imran: 169].

After that grave events took place, from which we learned that our army's preparation had been inadequate and that the Jews had leaked false plans of the state of their settlements to our intelligence, which our minister then used to back his statements at the Foreign Affairs Committee meeting "that we know everything about them".

The news of military "withdrawals" in Palestine had a sad echo in the country, and people were struck by an indescribable stupor.. Is what they are saying true? How can a hundred million Arabs and a billion Muslims "withdraw" before a handful of riff-raff from the ends of the earth? And what of the words of the deputy Abd al-Ra'uf Abu Tawq (deputy for Damascus for the Muslim Brotherhood) in a speech in the Chamber: "We are able to drown the Jews in Arab spit"?

Al-Kikhya spoke of the defeat in Palestine and of the Mardam government's promises of "serious" action to recover this precious land.. and said, denouncing it:

"We had millions in foreign currency (from the war years), and it would have been possible to keep them for this grim day when we needed them to buy arms abroad to save Palestine, and also to support our Syrian currency after its separation from the French currency".

But these millions leaked into the pockets of certain individuals, and the list containing the names of many of them is at the Ministry of Finance.. Some of them took the money out of the country and put it in foreign banks, and some disposed of it in ways that did not accord with the public interest. Those in authority were expected to bring these people to trial.. but so far we find no evidence that any measure has been taken to wipe out this stain.

This government is asking for the confidence of the Chamber, and there are only two phrases in its program:

Mobilizing the nation and saving Palestine.. ordinary words that anyone could say. But where is the plan the government has prepared?.. Syria cannot fight the battle of Palestine alone without agreement with the states of the Arab League. We had hoped that this League, after the catastrophe that befell Palestine, after its sons were driven out, after the dignity of the Arabs was violated, their property confiscated and their honor assaulted, would fight the battle of Palestine in a different way from before.. that it would announce to the world that the Arab armies had become a single army, unified in its command and methods, and that the foreign policy of the Arab countries had become a single, unified policy.. and that it would unify Arab currency too.. Only then could it be said that we will save Palestine.

I demand the formation of a committee of inquiry to question the Minister of Defense, Ahmad al-Sharabati, to establish the truth of the charges against him.."[7]

What happened is known to all. The seven Arab armies, which used to be called "the seven zeros",[8] retreated, and the great powers intervened in a matter that was proceeding as they had planned. They proposed a four-week truce to the Jews and the Arabs. Faris al-Khouri opposed it fiercely, but the Arabs accepted it, and it was signed on 11 June 1948 on the Greek island of Rhodes. Weapons, ammunition and men began pouring into Israel to fight in its ranks and to lift the siege of a hundred thousand Jews besieged in Jerusalem, and they joined the fighting after the truce period ended.. The balance was upset,[9] and the battles resumed on 7 July 1948. But the Arab armies failed on the battlefield, and the Arabs accepted a new truce, the second, from 18 July 1948 to 7/1/1949.

With it the noose was tightened around our necks.

The Lebanese Prime Minister, Riad al-Solh, declared:

"The truce with Israel is political shrewdness".

I remember answering him in a long article, in which I said:

"It is not political shrewdness, Your Excellency, but a sin for which tomorrow we shall all bite our hands in remorse for what we have let slip.. This truce will never bring the Arabs any good."[10]

Events, regrettably, proved this statement right.

In September 1948 a Palestinian government was formed under Ahmad Hilmi Pasha. But it did not win Arab recognition.[11]

For the record, I quote here what Mahmoud Riad, who became Egyptian Foreign Minister and then Secretary General of the Arab League, wrote in his memoirs:

"The negotiations began on the island of Rhodes on 13 January 1949, under the supervision of Dr. Bunche (an American national) representing the United Nations, between Egypt and Israel, and lasted 40 days.

Any study of the agreements the Arab states signed with Israel shows that they come close to the level of peace agreements. They provided that military force would not be used to settle the Palestine problem, and that the armed forces of neither party would commit any hostile act, or plan such an act or threaten with it the people or armed forces of the other party."[12]

And so Palestine was lost, as the result of a shameful international conspiracy and of the bad state of a divided and weak Arab world. Since the establishment of ill-omened Israel as a state, the whole Arab region has been plunged into a series of destructive wars, accompanied by a series of military coups and assassinations.. the decline of economies and the crows of humiliation.

Mariantoni (an Italian) and Oberson (an Austrian) wrote that: "the establishment of Israel was the cause of all the misfortunes of the Middle East, and without it rulers such as.. would not have been born, nor would dictatorships have been born in the Arab countries."[13]

As a lesson and for history, I think I should cite the words of two brilliant Syrian officers who took part in the Palestine war and knew secrets that no one has revealed.

The first is the pilot officer Rashed al-Kaylani, who spoke in his memoirs of those black days. Among the things he said about the 1948 war:

"Most of the Syrian army that Syria received from the French in 1946 had been demobilized by the Minister of Defense, Ahmad al-Sharabati. When it entered the war its strength was no more than 4,000 men, while this minister declared at the meeting of chiefs of staff in Amman on 3/5/1948 that it numbered 18,000. Al-Sharabati refused the French offer to supply the army with cheap French equipment and weapons.. on the advice of his British adviser, Colonel Fox.. The Jordanian army numbered six thousand well-trained men, the Iraqi forces fighting in Palestine five thousand, and the Egyptian forces ten thousand, while the Lebanese forces numbered one thousand five hundred men.

King Abd Allah insisted on taking command of the Arab armies, despite the reservations expressed about that insistence, because the commander of his army, Glubb, was English.[14]

Official British reports at the time estimated that the (Zionist) Haganah army exceeded 65 thousand and had 40 thousand reservists."[15]

The second is the officer Amir Shallash, who later became deputy chief of the general staff and was a battalion commander in the Palestine war with the rank of lieutenant colonel. He spoke to me in an interview on 30 September 1990 about those painful days, his heart bleeding. I quote from what he said:

"I was a lieutenant colonel, commanding a battalion of 600 soldiers and officers at the front. The Syrian army numbered about 3,600 men, divided into six battalions, and it had numbered around 25,000 when we received it from France in 1946. The Minister of Defense, Ahmad al-Sharabati, had demobilized most of its officers and men, on the pretext that Syria did not need a large army.. and one of doubtful loyalty.

Our army was badly armed and weak in fighting capacity.. We set off for the front with no maps of the military zones.. and we did not have enough ammunition for more than a few hours of decisive engagement.

I received orders to go to southern Lebanon to attack Galilee with the help of the Palestinian forces stationed there, and then to push on to join the Arab forces advancing from the east and the south.

Two days before the battle was due, that is, on 13 May 1948, I was surprised by an order from the command telling me to go at once to the area of Kafr Harib (near al-Hamma and Lake Tiberias).. on a new mission, the capture of Samakh. I took the battalion there almost on foot.. We had no vehicles, and the tank tracks wore out.. Only 180 men reached Kafr Harib with me!.. There our artillery concentrated on the Jewish settlements from the mountains overlooking them.. We had scarcely settled in when an order came from King Abd Allah to go down into the plain and move to capture the town of Samakh.. That was impossible to carry out, because the Jewish artillery, within whose range we were now exposed, killed or disabled eighty men.. So I was forced to withdraw with the few men I had left..

These testimonies, if they show anything, show how deep the hideous international conspiracy ran, how poor the Arab preparation was, and how far certain Arab notables were complicit in the Zionist scheme.

Much ink has been spilled on the subject of the establishment of Israel..

It is truly worthwhile to read two Zionist books that have been translated into Arabic:

The first: the diaries of the terrorist Menachem Begin, Dar al-Masira, Beirut 1983, translated by Ma'n Mahmud.

The second: the memoirs of Moshe Dayan, entitled "Fascism", Dar al-Masira (undated)..

I would like to end this section with the following remarks:

1. In January 1919 King Faisal ibn al-Hussein concluded an agreement with Chaim Weizmann, the two of them "mindful of the racial kinship and ancient bonds existing between the Arabs and the Jewish people", which stated:

A. Acceptance of the Balfour Declaration issued on 2 February 1917.

B. The need to encourage Jewish immigration into Palestine on a large scale.

C. In case of disagreement over the interpretation of this agreement, the two parties would refer it to the British government for arbitration.

2. When the attempts at Jewish settlement in Palestine began, thanks to the policies of Palmerston and Disraeli (the Jewish British Prime Minister) and the money of the millionaire Rothschild (a Jew), the number of Jews in Palestine was 8,000 people owning 5,000 feddans of land. When Herzl published his book on the Jewish state in Palestine in 1896, the number of Jews there did not exceed 25 thousand, owning 2% of its land.

The Arabs numbered 800 thousand and owned 98% of the land.

When the Balfour Declaration was issued in 1917, the Jews numbered around 48 thousand and owned 3.50% of the land, and the Arabs numbered 920 thousand.

When the partition resolution was issued in 1947, the Jews had come to number 300 thousand and owned only 6% of the land, and the Arabs numbered 1,100,000 people owning 94% of the land.

On the day the establishment of the Jewish state was announced in 1948, the Jews numbered no more than 400 thousand, and their land ownership did not exceed 7%.

Heikal comments:[16] "These statistics give the lie to the claims of Zionist propaganda that Palestine was a land without a people for a people without a land".

Heavy Jewish immigration began to pour into Palestine: in 1948 and 1949 alone more than 600 thousand Jewish immigrants arrived from every corner of the world.

It should be noted that a Jewish historian, Israel Shahak, reported in the foreword to his book "Jewish History, Jewish Religion",[17] written for him by Gore Vidal, that an American Jew presented candidate Truman, aboard the train in which he was traveling on his election tour, with a suitcase containing two million dollars. John Kennedy, who became President of the United States of America, told him this story. "And that is how we came to recognize Israel".

The author of the foreword adds: "and we used to laugh about it at Truman's expense, and about the reign of corruption in the world of American politics". "And that a religious minority of no more than 2% bought or intimidated seventy senators (members of the Senate).. and embezzled billions of dollars to build the so-called bastion (Israel) against communism.. and all we got for it was the loss of our friendship with the Arabs".

The international community realized the danger of Zionism when some of its aims were exposed to people, and on 10 November 1975 (30th session) the General Assembly of the United Nations adopted a resolution stating:

"Zionism is a form of racism and racial discrimination". This resolution was regarded as a rejection by the majority of the United Nations of the Zionist movement, whose supporters claimed "that it is the national liberation movement of the Jewish people".

Israel and its supporters paid no heed to this resolution, relying on its nuclear weapons and on the support of the United States, which knows no limit.

Regrettably, this resolution was later revoked under pressure from America and world Zionism.

Endnotes:

[1] In his book Superpower Intervention in the Middle East, translated by Adib Shish, Dar Tlass 1985, p. 167.

[2] Henry Kissinger, the (Jewish) American Secretary of State, at a press conference he held on 18 June 1974. From Peter Mangold, cited above, p. 90.

[3] The book cited above, p. 88.

[4] In 1999 a letter came to light that Pope John Paul XII had sent to President Roosevelt in June 1943, expressing his strong opposition to the establishment of a homeland for the Jews in Palestine and warning of possible international unrest (al-Baath, issue of 5/7/1999).

[5] See the minutes of the session of 1 December 1947, p. 294.

[6] See the study by Dr. Haytham al-Kaylani entitled "The Arab-Israeli Wars of Palestine in the Encyclopedia", vol. 5, Beirut 1990, pp. 477-753.

[7] Minutes of the session of 28 August 1948, p. 565.

[8] Mohamed Hassanein Heikal mentions in his book "al-Urush wa-l-Juyush" (Thrones and Armies) that Hajj Amin al-Husseini (the Grand Mufti of Palestine) sent him written testimony about the Palestine war, in which he said that he had been opposed to the Arab armies entering Palestine and had wanted its people to defend it with the help of the Arab states. A number of Egypt's leaders, such as Ismail Sidqi Pasha and al-Nuqrashi Pasha, opposed the Egyptian army's entry into this war.

[9] See Najah Muhammad, al-Haraka al-Qawmiyya al-Arabiyya fi Suriya (The Arab Nationalist Movement in Syria), vol. 1, p. 145.

[10] The Aleppo newspaper al-Hawadith, issue of 21 June 1948.

[11] Two authors, Mariantoni (an Italian) and Oberson, wrote in their book "What Has Not Been Said about the Arab-Israeli Conflict", Paris 1992, p. 78, the following:
"Had this government been recognized, everything would have changed. But not a single Arab state dared to recognize it, and had it been destined to live it would have taken the defense of Palestine before the world into its hands early on. But it died as soon as it was born."

[12] The memoirs of Mahmoud Riad on the years 1948-1978, al-Mu'assasa al-Arabiyya li-l-Nashr, Beirut 1981, p. 14.

[13] In their book, cited above, Le non-dit du conflit israélo-arabe, published in Paris in 1992, pp. 77 and 81.

[14] Adil Usayran mentions in his memoirs (Sabah al-Khayr, 2 January 2001) that King Abd Allah surprised him and Riad al-Solh by saying: "Do you want me to fight my cousins?".

[15] The memoirs, Damascus 1990, pp. 78 and 79.

[16] See Mohamed Hassanein Heikal, al-Mufawadat al-Sirriyya bayn al-Arab wa-Isra'il (The Secret Negotiations between the Arabs and Israel), Cairo 1996, vol. 2, p. 118.

[17] Published by La Vieille Taupe, Paris 1994.