Текст книги "The Arabs: A History"

Автор книги: Eugene Rogan

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Текущая страница: 22 (всего у книги 47 страниц)

In the aftermath of the Second World War, Britain had neither the resources nor the resolve to remain in Palestine. The differences between Jews and Arabs in Palestine were irreconcilable. If the British made concessions to the Jews, they feared the Arabs would start a revolt like that of 1936?1939. If they made concessions to the Arabs, it was now clear what the Jews would be capable of. British efforts to convene a meeting of Arab and Jewish leaders in London in September 1946 failed when both sides refused to attend. Subsequent bilateral meetings in London in February 1947 collapsed under the weight of contradictory Arab and Jewish demands for statehood. The British had reached an impasse, and the fallacy of the Balfour Declaration was now clear: Britain could not deliver a “national home for the Jewish people” without prejudice to “rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine.” The British government was out of solutions and had no more leverage over the disputing parties in Palestine. And so, on February 25, 1947, British Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin referred the Palestine question to the newly created United Nations in the hope that the international community might have more success in solving the problem. The United Nations assembled an eleven-nation Special Committee on Palestine, known by the acronym UNSCOP. Aside from Iran, none of the UNSCOP members had any particular interest in Middle Eastern affairs: Australia, Canada, Czechoslovakia, Guatemala, India, Iran, Mexico, the Netherlands, Peru, and Yugoslavia. Delegates spent five weeks in Palestine in June and July 1947. Arab political leaders refused to meet with the UNSCOP delegates, whereas the Jewish Agency took the opportunity to put the most persuasive case forward to the international community in support of the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine. While the UNSCOP delegates were in Palestine, waves of illegal Jewish immigrants were flooding from Europe into Palestine, with Jewish Agency assistance, in derelict steamers. The British authorities made every effort to bar entry to these refugees, most of whom were Holocaust survivors. The most famous of these ships was the Exodus, whose 4,500 passengers reached the port of Haifa on July 18. The ship’s passengers were denied entry to Palestine and shipped back to France the very next day for subsequent internment in German camps. Britain faced widespread international condemnation for its handling of the Jewish refugee crisis, and for the Exodus affair in particular. Violence between Britain and the Jewish community escalated while the UNSCOP delegates conducted their investigation. The British had condemned three Irgun men to death for terror crimes in July 1947. On July 12 the Irgun seized two British sergeants, Cliff Martin and Marvyn Paice, and held them hostage to prevent the British from hanging the Irgun men. When the British carried out the executions, the Irgun hanged Martin and Paice in retaliation, on July 29. The killers pinned a list of charges to the dead men’s bodies in a macabre parody of British legal jargon. Martin and Paice were “British spies” condemned for “criminal anti-Hebrew activities” such as “illegal entry into the Hebrew homeland” and “membership of a British criminal terrorist organisation known as the Army of Occupation.”⁵ Worse, the men?s bodies were booby-trapped to explode when cut down. The act was designed to provoke maximum outrage and undermine Britain?s will to continue the fight in Palestine. The hanging of the two sergeants made front-page news across Britain. Tabloids stirred anti-Jewish hostility with banner headlines screaming “Hanged Britons: Picture That Will Shock the World.” Instantly, a wave of anti-Jewish demonstrations gave way to riots that spread across England and Scotland and raged through the first week of August. The worst of the violence took place in the port city of Liverpool, where in the course of five days more than 300 Jewish properties were attacked and some eighty-eight townspeople arrested by the police. The Jewish Chronicle reported attacks on synagogues in London, Glasgow, and Plymouth, and threats to temples in other towns. Only two years after the liberation of the Nazi death camps, swastikas and slogans such as “Hang All Jews” and “Hitler Was Right” stained British cities.⁶ The UNSCOP delegates were thus all too aware of the complexity of the situation in Palestine by the time they drew up their findings for the United Nations in August 1947. The delegates were unanimous in calling for the end of the British mandate, and they recommended the partition of Palestine into Jewish and Arab states by a strong majority of eight to three. Only India, Iran, and Yugoslavia opposed partition, preferring a unified federal state of Palestine. The British did not even wait for the United Nations to debate the recommendations of the UNSCOP proposals. The Exodus scandal, the hanging of the British sergeants, the anti-Semitic riots that followed, and the UNSCOP report, all in quick succession, completely undermined Britain’s resolve to remain in Palestine. On September 26, 1947, the British government announced its intention to withdraw unilaterally from Palestine and entrust its mandatory responsibilities to the United Nations. The date for the British withdrawal was set for May 14, 1948. The terrorists had achieved their first objective: they had forced the British to withdraw from Palestine. Though their methods were publicly denounced by the leaders of the Jewish Agency, the Irgun and Lehi had played a key role in removing a major impediment to Jewish statehood. By using terror tactics to achieve political objectives, they also set a dangerous precedent in Middle Eastern history—one that plagues the region down to the present day.

The UNSCOP report was presented to the General Assembly for debate in November 1947. The terms of debate were shaped by the majority recommendation for the partition of Palestine into a Jewish and an Arab state. The Partition Resolution divided Palestine into a checkerboard of six parts, three Arab and three Jewish, with Jerusalem under international trusteeship. The plan allotted some 55 percent of the area of Palestine to the Jewish state, including all of the Galilee panhandle to the northeast of the country, as well as the strategic Mediterranean coastline from Haifa through Jaffa, and the Araba Desert down to the Gulf of Aqaba. Zionist activists lobbied UN members assiduously to secure the two-thirds majority required to carry the Partition Resolution and the promise of Jewish statehood. American Zionists played a major role in securing the Truman administration’s support for the resolution. In his memoirs, Harry Truman later recalled that he never “had as much pressure and propaganda aimed at the White House as I had in this instance.”⁷ In the eleventh hour, the United States reversed its position of nonintervention and actively pressured other members to lend their support to partition. On November 29, 1947, the Partition Resolution passed by a vote of 33 to 13, with 10 abstentions. Having secured international authorization for the creation of a Jewish state in at least part of Palestine, the Zionists had taken another major step toward achieving their goal of statehood. However, the Arab world generally, and the Palestinian Arabs in particular, remained implacably opposed to both partition and to Jewish statehood in Palestine. It is not hard to understand the Palestinian Arab position. By 1947 the Arabs of Palestine constituted a two-thirds majority with over 1.2 million people, compared to 600,000 Jews in Palestine. Many of the Palestinian cities designated as part of the Jewish state by the Partition Resolution, such as Haifa and Jaffa, contained large Arab majorities. Moreover, Arabs owned 94 percent of the total land area of Palestine and some 80 percent of the arable farmland of the country.⁸ Based on these facts, Palestinian Arabs refused to confer on the United Nations the authority to split their country and give half away. Jamal al-Husayni, a notable of Jerusalem, captured Palestinian frustrations in his response to the UNSCOP proposals in September 1947. “The case of the Arabs of Palestine was based on the principles of international justice; it was that of a people which desired to live in undisturbed possession of the country where Providence and history had placed it. The Arabs of Palestine could not understand why their right to live in freedom and peace, and to develop their country in accordance with their traditions, should be questioned and constantly submitted to investigation.” Al-Husayni, addressing his comments to the UN committee on the Palestinian question, continued: “One thing is clear, it was the sacred duty of the Arabs of Palestine to defend their country against all aggression.”⁹ No one had any illusions that partition would go unchallenged. The Jews in Palestine would have to fight for the lands allotted them by the UN’s Partition Resolution, not to mention any other territories designated for the Arab state to which they might aspire. The Arabs, for their part, would have to defeat the Jews if they hoped to prevent them from taking any part of Palestine. The morning after the Partition Resolution was announced, Arabs and Jews began to prepare for an inevitable war—a civil war between the rival claimants to Palestine.

For six months Arabs and Jews fought for their rival claims over Palestine. The Jewish community of Palestine was well prepared for battle. The Haganah had gained extensive training and combat experience during the Second World War. They had also stockpiled extensive arms and ammunition. The Palestine Arabs had made no such preparations and placed their trust in the justice of their cause and the support of neighboring Arab states. The controversial leader of the Palestinian Arab community was Hajj Amin al-Husayni, the exiled grand mufti of Jerusalem. Hajj Amin was a very divisive figure who provoked opposition both in Palestine and abroad. He was reviled by the British and other Western powers for his defection to Nazi Germany during World War II, and he was mistrusted to varying degrees by Arab heads of state. Hajj Amin’s leadership was contested by a number of Palestinian notables, dividing the Arab community just as it faced its greatest challenge. As he tried to lead the Palestinian movement from his exile in Egypt, Hajj Amin undermined the prospects for meaningful common action between the Palestinian Arabs themselves, and between the Palestinians and the other Arab states. The Arab states, many of which had only just gained independence from European colonial rule, were similarly divided and demoralized. They had just suffered their first diplomatic defeat with the passing of the UN Partition Resolution over their impassioned opposition. Faced with the decision to divide Palestine, inter-Arab rivalries rose to the surface. The only Arab country to support the idea of partition, since it was first mooted in 1937, was Transjordan. King Abdullah (the former amir had been crowned king in May 1946) welcomed the opportunity to append the Arab territories of Palestine to his own nearly landlocked kingdom. Abdullah’s support for partition provoked deep resentment from Palestinian political elites and the active hatred of the mufti, Hajj Amin. Abdullah’s isolation in the Arab world was almost complete. He could only count on a modicum of support from his Hashemite cousins in Iraq. He suffered the active mistrust of the Syrian government, who feared Abdullah’s ambitions in their own lands dating back to the early 1920s; the long-standing hostility of the Hashemites’ rivals in Arabia, the House of Saud; and the suspicions of the Egyptian monarchy, who feared any challenge to Egypt’s self-declared primacy in Arab affairs. Rather than coordinate their actions and commit their national armies, the neighboring Arab states preferred to call on irregular volunteers—Arab nationalists and Muslim Brothers determined to save Arab Palestine. Much as Americans and Europeans responded to the call to fight fascism in the Spanish Civil War, these Arab ?Lincoln Brigades? came to defeat Zionism. They were called the Arab Liberation Army (ALA), and their most famous commander was Fawzi al-Qawuqji.

Fawzi al-Qawuqji had never missed the opportunity to fight against European imperialism in the Arab world. His every battle had proved a glorious defeat. He was among the forces who retreated from Maysalun on the day the French defeated King Faysal’s Arab Kingdom in 1920. He led the revolt against the French in the Syrian town of Hama and played a key role in the Syrian revolt of 1925–1927. He was also a veteran of the Palestinian Arab Revolt of 1936–1939. He sided with the Iraqi military against the British in the Rashid Ali coup of 1941 and, when that movement was crushed, defected to Nazi Germany, where he married his German wife and waited out the rest of the war years. Al-Qawuqji was impatient to return from Europe to Arab politics. After Germany’s defeat, he fled to France, where he and his wife boarded a plane to Cairo under assumed identities with forged passports, in February 1947. That November he made his way to Damascus, where he was hosted by the Syrian government and paid a monthly allowance. For the Syrian government, al-Qawuqji was a godsend. Unwilling to commit their own small army to war in Palestine, the Syrians threw their full support behind the Arab Liberation Army, for which al-Qawuqji was the ideal commander. He enjoyed a hero’s reputation across the Arab world and possessed vast experience in commando warfare. Now aged fifty-seven, the grizzled commander set up camp in Damascus and busily recruited his irregular army. In February 1948, a Lebanese journalist named Samir Souqi published an interview with al-Qawuqji that captured the atmosphere in his Damascus headquarters during the lead up to war:This Arab leader, motivated by utmost resolve, has made of his home a military headquarters guarded by irregulars in American military uniform. Not an hour of the day passes without Bedouins, peasants and young men in modern clothes turning up on his doorstep, demanding to enlist as volunteers in the Arab Liberation Army. He also has headquarters in Qatanah, where volunteers are undergoing military training, waiting to be sent to Palestine.¹⁰

Working together in a new regional organization known as the Arab League, the Arab states hoped to rely on the ALA to defeat the Jewish forces in Palestine without having to send in their regular armies. They appointed the Iraqi general Ismail Safwat as commander in chief of the ALA and charged him with implementing a coordinated war plan for the volunteer irregular army. Safwat divided Palestine into three main fronts to coordinate operations according to a master plan. He placed al-Qawuqji in charge of the northern front and the Mediterranean coastline; the southern front would fall under Egyptian command. The central front?called the Jerusalem Front?was to be under Hajj Amin?s authority, who named the charismatic Abd al-Qadir al-Husayni to lead his forces. Though a member of the mufti’s Husayni family, Abd al-Qadir transcended the factional fighting and was held in respect by Palestinians from all walks of life. Educated in the American University in Cairo, he was a veteran of the Palestinian Arab Revolt, where he earned a reputation for bravery and leadership, and was twice wounded. Like al-Qawuqji, he later fought the British in Iraq in 1941. The greatest problem facing Arab commanders both in Palestine and the neighboring Arab states was the shortage of arms and ammunitions. Unlike the Jewish soldiers in the Haganah, who had enjoyed British training for over a decade and had gained combat experience fighting with the British in World War II, the Palestinian Arabs had not had the opportunity to build up an indigenous militia. Also, whereas the Jewish Agency had been smuggling arms and ammunition into Palestine, the Palestinian Arabs had no independent access to arms. With no source of resupply, it would not take long for Palestinian fighters to run out of the limited ammunition they held.

The logistical shortcomings did not constrain the Palestinian fighters, however. Sporadic attacks against Jewish settlements began on November 30, 1947, and spread from the cities to the countryside. Arab forces tried to cut roads leading to settlements and to isolate Jewish villages. For most of the winter months of 1948, the Haganah dug in and fortified its positions, working to secure the territory allotted to the Jewish state by the Partition Resolution in advance of the British withdrawal scheduled for mid-May. In late March 1948, Jewish forces went on the offensive. Their first target was the Tel Aviv–Jerusalem road. The Jewish quarter of Jerusalem was encircled and besieged by Arab forces. The Haganah was determined to open a supply line and relieve Jewish positions in Jerusalem. The Arab situation in Jerusalem was far weaker than the Jewish commanders realized. Palestinian fighters, commanded by Abd al-Qadir al-Husayni, did not have the weaponry to retain their positions. The Arabs held the strategic town of al-Qastal, which commanded the high ground on the Tel Aviv–Jerusalem road. As Jewish forces advanced toward al-Qastal, al-Husayni made an emergency visit to Damascus in early April to secure the arms his men needed to hold their ground. Inter-Arab disputes undermined al-Husayni’s mission from the outset. The Syrian government was hostile to the mufti, Hajj Amin al-Husayni, and refused all support to Abd al-Qadir, who was the mufti?s cousin. A bitter rivalry had developed between the Syrian-backed ALA and the local Palestinian forces headed by Abd al-Qadir al-Husayni that served to further divide Arab ranks. Al-Husayni found himself caught up in these inter-Arab politics as he met with Syrian and Arab League leaders in Damascus. While Arab leaders and commanders squabbled in Damascus, al-Qastal fell to the elite Palmach units of the Haganah on April 3. Arab attempts to retake the town had failed, and the Jewish forces were consolidating their defenses. Al-Qastal was the first Arab town to be captured by Jewish forces, and the news came as a shock to all those meeting in Damascus. From this strategic position, Haganah forces posed a real threat to Jerusalem. Yet the Arab League commanders remained incapable of meaningful action, seemingly confined to a fantasy world. General Ismail Safwat, the Iraqi commander in chief of the Arab Liberation Army, turned to Abd al-Qadir al-Husayni and said, “So al-Qastal has fallen. It is your job to get it back, Abd al-Qadir. And if you aren’t able to get it back, tell us so that we can entrust the job to [Fawzi] al-Qawuqji.” Al-Husayni was incensed. “Give us the weapons I have requested and we will recover the town. Now the situation has deteriorated, and the Jews have artillery and aircraft and men. I cannot occupy al-Qastal without artillery. Give me what I ask for and I guarantee you victory.” “What is this, Abd al-Qadir, you have no cannons?” Ismail Safwat retorted. He grudgingly promised the Palestinian commander whatever leftover guns and ammunition they had available in Damascus—105 outdated rifles, 21 machine guns, insufficient ammunition, and some mines—for later delivery. In essence, they sent al-Husayni home empty-handed. Al-Husayni exploded in anger and stormed out of the hall: “You are traitors. You are criminals. History will record that you lost Palestine. I will occupy al-Qastal, and I will die along with my brothers, the mujahidin.”¹¹

Abd al-Qadir al-Husayni left Damascus that very night, on April 6, and reached Jerusalem at dawn the following morning, accompanied by fifty ALA volunteers. After a short rest, he set off for al-Qastal at the head of a force of some three hundred Palestinians and four British soldiers, who had crossed ranks to fight with the Arabs.¹² The Arab counterattack on al-Qastal began at 11 P.M. on April 7. The Arab forces broke into detachments and approached the village in a three-pronged assault. One of the Arab detachments suffered heavy casualties and nearly ran out of ammunition. As their wounded leader retreated, al-Husayni led a small detachment to take their place and attempted to lay charges under the defenses erected by the Jewish forces. But al-Husayni and his men were pinned down by heavy fire from the Jewish defenders and soon found themselves surrounded by Jewish reinforcements from nearby settlements. As dawn broke on the morning of April 8, word spread like wildfire among the Arab fighters that al-Husayni and his men were surrounded by the enemy; the battle of al-Qastal looked certain to end in defeat. However, Arab reinforcements rallied to the call, and some five hundred men joined the besieged troops at al-Qastal. They fought through the day and managed to retake the town by the late afternoon. Their joy in recovering al-Qastal was shattered when the Arab fighters found the body of Abd al-Qadir al-Husayn on the eastern periphery of the town. The Palestinian fighters vented their rage by killing their fifty Jewish prisoners. On both sides, the civil war would prove a war of atrocity. Abd al-Qadir al-Husayni was buried the following day. Ten thousand mourners attended his funeral at the Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem. “The people wept for him,” recalled Arif al-Arif, a native of Jerusalem and historian of 1948. “They called him the hero of al-Qastal.”¹³ The Palestinians never fully recovered from the loss of Abd al-Qadir al-Husayni. No other local leader rose to command a national resistance to the Jewish forces in Palestine, and his death was a tremendous blow to public morale. Worse yet, his death proved entirely in vain. The demoralized Arab defenders left only forty men to hold al-Qastal. Within forty-eight hours, Jewish forces retook the town—this time for good.

The death of Abd al-Qadir al-Husayni and the loss of al-Qastal were overshadowed by the massacre of the Palestinian villagers of Dayr Yasin on April 9. The massacre, which took place on the same day as al-Husayni’s funeral, sent shock waves of fear across Palestine. From that day forward, the Palestinians had lost the will to fight. Dayr Yasin was a peaceful Arab village of some 750 residents located to the west of Jerusalem. It was a mixed village of farmers, masons, and merchants. There were two mosques and two schools, one for boys and one for girls, and a sporting club. It was the last village in Palestine to expect a Jewish attack, for the residents had concluded a nonaggression pact with the Jewish commanders in Jerusalem. The Irgun and Lehi gave no reason for their unprovoked attack on Dayr Yasin. Palestinian historian Arif al-Arif believed the Jewish terror organizations targeted the village “to give their own people hope and to fill the hearts of the Arabs with terror.”¹⁴ The attack on Dayr Yasin began in the predawn hours of April 9, 1948. With only eighty-five armed men facing a superior Jewish force supported by armored cars and aircraft, panic spread among the villagers. One peasant woman was breastfeeding her baby when the fighting erupted. “I heard the tanks and rifles, and smelled the smoke. I saw them coming. Everybody was yelling to their neighbours, ‘If you know how to leave, leave!’ Whoever had an uncle tried to get the uncle. Whoever had a wife tried to get the wife.? She ran for her life with her baby son in her arms, to the neighboring village of ?Ayn Karam.¹⁵ Though there were Arab Liberation Army units in Ayn Karam, and British police nearby, no one came to the villagers’ rescue. Eyewitnesses reported that the Jewish attackers gathered all of the armed Arab defenders and shot them. Arif al-Arif, the Palestinian chronicler, interviewed a number of survivors of Dayr Yasin soon after these events and catalogued the horrors of the day, naming names and detailing deaths. “Among the atrocities,” he recounted, they killed al-Haj Jabir Mustafa, a ninety-year-old man, and threw his body from the balcony of his home into the street. They did the same to al-Haj Isma‘il’Atiyya, an old man aged ninety-five, and killed his eighty-year-old wife and their grandchild. They murdered a blind youth named Muhammad Ali Khalil Mustafa and his wife, who tried to protect him, and her eighteen-month-old child. They murdered a school teacher who was tending to the wounded.¹⁶

In all, some 250 villagers were killed in Dayr Yasin. According to al-Arif ’s sources, the killing would have continued in Dayr Yasin had an older Jewish commander not given the order to stop. However, survivors were forced to march to the Jewish quarter of Jerusalem, where they were “publicly reviled before the Jewish people, as if they were criminals,” before they were finally released near the Italian hospital near Hayy al-Mismara.¹⁷ Between the massacre of innocent villagers and the brutal humiliation of survivors, Dayr Yasin provoked universal condemnation. The Jewish Agency denounced the atrocity and distanced its Haganah forces from the extremists of the Irgun and Lehi. The massacre at Dayr Yasin provoked a mass exodus of Palestinian Arabs that continued right up to the British withdrawal on May 15. As word of the killing spread, al-Arif explained, people across Palestine “began to flee their homes, carrying with them different accounts of Jewish atrocities which left people shuddering in horror.” The political leadership only exacerbated fears by publishing accounts of Dayr Yasin and other atrocities in the Arab press. Although the Palestinian leaders hoped to force the Arab states to intervene by playing on the humanitarian crisis, their reports only served to reinforce the fear and encourage villagers to abandon their homes.¹⁸ Time and again, contemporary accounts make reference to townspeople and villagers across Palestine taking their loved ones and abandoning their homes and possessions out of fear of another Dayr Yassin. Palestinians had already begun fleeing the territory earlier in the spring. Between February and March 1948, some 75,000 Arabs had left their homes in the towns that were the center of fighting, such as Jerusalem, Jaffa, and Haifa, for the relative safety of the West Bank or neighboring Arab states.¹⁹ That April, after Dayr Yasin, the stream of refugees became a flood.

Some Palestinians chose to fight horror with horror. Four days after the massacre at Dayr Yasin, on April 13, Palestinian fighters ambushed a Jewish medical convoy heading to Mount Scopus on the edge of Jerusalem. The two ambulances were clearly marked with medical insignia, and the passengers were in fact doctors and nurses of the Hadassah Hospital and employees of the Hebrew University. There were 112 passengers in the convoy. Only 36 survived. The brutality of the ambush was captured in a series of grisly photographs in which the attackers posed in triumph next to the bodies of their victims. These barbaric photographs were sold commercially in Jerusalem, as if to demonstrate to the Arabs of Palestine that they could destroy the Jewish threat. Yet photographs of atrocity could not dispel the air of defeat that permeated the towns and countryside of Palestine in April 1948. Palestinian morale had been shattered, and the massacre of Jewish civilians at Mount Scopus only heightened fears of further atrocity and Jewish retribution. Sensing the collapse in public morale, the Haganah stepped up its operations in line with a military plan known as Plan D for the depopulation and destruction of Palestinian towns and villages deemed necessary to establish a viable Jewish state.

Haifa fell to Jewish forces on April 21–23, sending another shock wave through Palestine. Haifa was the economic heart of Palestine, thanks to its port and oil refinery. The total Arab population came to more than 70,000. It was also the administrative center of Northern Palestine. Because Haifa had been allocated to the Jewish state by the UN Partition Resolution, Jewish forces had been planning to take the city for months. Haifa had first come under attack by Jewish forces in mid-December 1947. “The attacks set off a fearsome emigration from the city,” wrote Rashid al-Hajj Ibrahim, a municipal leader in Haifa. “A large part of the population saw the danger that threatened them, as Jewish preparedness revealed how much the Arabs lacked to defend themselves, which drove them to flee their homes.”²⁰ Hajj Ibrahim, chairman of the Haifa National Committee, worked with his colleagues in the municipality to restore calm and restrain the attacks by local and foreign irregulars, many of them ALA volunteers. But their efforts were in vain. Violent exchanges between Arab irregulars and Haganah fighters continued through the winter months and into the spring. By early April, between twenty and thirty thousand residents had left Haifa. The final onslaught began on April 21. As British troops were withdrawing from their positions in Haifa, the Haganah launched a massive attack to take the city. Over the next forty-eight hours Jewish forces pounded Arab neighborhoods relentlessly with sustained mortar attacks and gunfire. On Friday morning, April 23, Jewish aircraft attacked the city, ?provoking terror among the women and children,? Hajj Ibrahim wrote, ?who were very influenced by the horrors of Dayr Yasin.?²¹ They flooded to the waterfront, where ships were waiting to evacuate the terrified civilians of Haifa. Hajj Ibrahim described the tragedy he witnessed on the Haifa waterfront: “Thousands of women, children and men hurried to the port district in a state of chaos and terror without precedent in the history of the Arab nation. They fled their houses to the coast, barefoot and naked, to wait for their turn to travel to Lebanon. They left their homeland, their houses, their possessions, their money, their welfare, and their trades, to surrender their dignity and their souls.”²² By the beginning of May, only three to four thousand Arabs, of an original population exceeding 70,000, remained in Haifa to live under Jewish rule. Once Haifa had been secured, Jewish forces concentrated on the rest of the coastline that had been awarded to the Jewish state by the United Nations. The Irgun, working independently of the Haganah, initiated hostilities to capture the other major Arab port town of Jaffa, next to the Jewish city of Tel Aviv. Its offensive began at dawn on April 25. Armed with three mortars and twenty tons of bombs, the Irgun took the northern Manshiyya quarter of Jaffa on April 27. From its new position, the Irgun subjected the downtown areas of Jaffa to relentless bombing over the next three days. The attacks shattered public morale and the resistance of the townspeople of Jaffa. The fact that it was the Irgun attacking raised fears of another Dayr Yasin massacre. The fall of Haifa only a few days earlier had left most of the city’s 50,000 remaining residents (already by April some 20,000 residents had sought refuge outside their city) with little hope that Jaffa would withstand the attack. Panic swept the city as its residents fled in a mass exodus. Municipal leaders sought ships to evacuate townspeople to Lebanon, and they negotiated for others to withdraw from the city to the Gaza Strip through Jewish lines. By May 13, there were only 4,000–5,000 inhabitants left to surrender their city to Jewish forces. With time running out before the British withdrawal would be finalized, Jewish forces concentrated their attacks to secure the northeastern territories conceded to the Jewish state by partition. Safad, a town of 12,000 Arabs and 1,500 Jews, was attacked by elite Palmach units of the Haganah and fell on May 11. Beisan, a town of 6,000, was conquered on May 12 and its inhabitants expelled to Nazareth and Transjordan. At the same time, Haganah operations led to mass evacuations and expulsions of villagers from the Galilee region, the coastal plain, and the Tel Aviv–Jerusalem road. The roads of Palestine were filled with streams of homeless refugees, with only the possessions they could carry, fleeing the terrors of war. One Arab eyewitness described the human misery of the refugees: ?People left their country dazed and directionless, without homes or money, falling ill and dying while wandering from place to place, living in niches and caves, their clothing falling apart, leaving them naked, their food running out, leaving them hungry. The mountains grew colder and they had no one to defend them.?²³ By the end of the war, the Jews of Palestine had secured the main towns of the coastal plain and the Galilee panhandle. In the process, they had driven between 200,000 and 300,000 Palestinians from their homes. The Palestinian refugees intended to return when peace had been restored. They were never allowed back. As David Ben-Gurion told his cabinet in June 1948, “We must prevent at all costs their return.”²⁴ The civil war ended on the last day of the British mandate. The Jews of Palestine declared their statehood on May 14, 1948, and would henceforth be known as Israelis. The defeated Arabs had no state to dignify their Palestinian identity. They placed their trust in their Arab neighbors, whose armies were massing on Palestine’s borders, awaiting the final British withdrawal. On May 14, as they had promised, the British played the “Last Post,” took down their flag, and boarded ship, turning their backs on the disaster they had made of Palestine.