Israel at War Series

On November 29, 1947, after a hotly contested debate, the United Nations decided to partition British-ruled Palestine into two separate states, one for the Jews and one for the Arabs. After 2,000 years of exile and a mere three years after the Holocaust, the Jews would once again be a free nation in their ancient homeland. But having a claim to land was one thing, being able to keep it was another. The Jews were euphoric, but the Arabs were enraged. They swore to destroy the Jewish state before it could even be born. Arab armies, supplied with tanks, guns, and planes by Britain and France, were poised to attack the Jewish forces who were only lightly armed. It will be a war of annihilation, declared Azzam Pasha, Secretary General of the Arab League. And the threat was not idle. The war can be broken down into four phases. The first phase began immediately after the UN partition resolution in November 1947. Palestinian Arabs and irregulars from Syria, Lebanon, and Gaza attacked Jewish settlements. Arab forces also laid siege to Jerusalem, depriving 100,000 Jews of food and water. Repeated Jewish attempts to break the siege were repulsed. The situation was desperate. While frantically trying to procure weapons from abroad, Zionist leader David Ben-Gurion, fearful that the world would retreat from the partition resolution, refrained from ordering a counter-offensive. But the Arab attacks proved too devastating, forcing the Jews to strike back. In brutal battles, the Jews scored victories in Haifa, Safed, Jaffa, and Tiberias. Assuming these defeats were only temporary, tens of thousands of Arabs fled to neighboring states. The violence reached a pitch in April 1948, when Zionist forces attacked the Arab town of Deir Yassin, resulting in what the Arabs claimed was a massacre. Arab gunmen then ambushed a medical convoy to Hadassah Hospital in Jerusalem, killing 78 doctors and nurses. A month later, Arab forces overwhelmed the Jewish defenders of the Etzion. 127 men and women were slaughtered. By mid-May, when the state was set to come into being, its survival was far from certain. Laboring under an American arms embargo, the Jewish forces had only enough bullets to fight for one week. Jerusalem was cut off, and settlements throughout the country were isolated. Fearing a second Holocaust, Zionist leaders were divided over whether or not to even declare the state. Nevertheless, on Friday, May 14, Ben-Gurion entered the Tel Aviv Art Museum, chosen because its thick walls could withstand an anticipated Arab air attack. And there he proclaimed the independence of the reborn Jewish state to be known as the State of Israel. Eleven minutes later, President Harry Truman made the United States the first nation to recognize the Jewish state. The second phase of the war was about to begin, and Israel's situation was only to get worse. The Arabs had promised to invade the moment Israel declared its independence. And they did, their five armies conquering large parts of the Galilee in the north and the Negev in the south. Egyptian forces advanced to within 20 miles of Tel Aviv. In the old city of Jerusalem, Israeli fighters tried and failed to defend the ancient Jewish quarter, which was conquered and looted by the Arabs. Yet as bad as it was for the Jews, it was almost as bad for the Arabs. They had also suffered severe losses, and it seriously underestimated the strength of Israel's resistance. So when a UN truce was proposed on June 11, both sides agreed. Israel used the truce to procure more advanced weaponry and absorb tens of thousands of immigrants, many of them Holocaust survivors. These new arrivals were given guns and immediately sent into battle. The Egyptians broke the truce by attacking an Israeli village in the Negev. Israel responded by advancing on all fronts. The third phase of the war had begun. Among the cities taken by Israel were Lod and Ramle, whose Arab inhabitants either fled or were expelled. All told, nearly 700,000 Palestinians became refugees in what they still call today the Nakba, the disaster. Roughly an equal number of Jews were later expelled from Arab countries. Another truce was declared on July 18, and lasted until mid-October when the fourth and final phase of the war began. By now, the balance of power had shifted. Adequately armed, the Israel Defense Forces, the IDF, drove the invaders beyond the original partition lines. The last operation of the war took place in March 1949, when IDF troops raised a hand-painted Israeli flag over the Red Sea village of Umm al-Rashrash, soon to be renamed Eilat. Israel's war of independence ended with armistice agreements negotiated by American diplomat Ralph Bunch. He was the first black American to be awarded a Nobel Prize. The war was costly, resulting in the deaths of 6,000 Israelis, 1% of the population. Jerusalem was divided between Jewish West and Arab East, with the old city remaining in Jordanian hands. Nearly two decades would pass before Jews could once again pray at the Western Wall. The Palestinian refugee problem became a perennial source of Middle East instability and conflict. But the most momentous outcome of the war was the rebirth, after 2,000 years of exile, of a strong and sovereign Jewish state, the State of Israel. I'm Michael Oren, author of Six Days of War, for Prager University. Just before dawn on October 29, 1956, paratroopers of the Israel Defense Forces, led by the legendary commander Ariel Sharon, descended into Egypt's Sinai Desert. The paratroopers' goal was to conquer the strategically important Mitla Pass. But the broader objective was to eliminate the threat posed by the Soviet-armed Egyptian military and Egypt's strongman Gamal Abdel Nasser. Israel was not alone in seeking Nasser's defeat. Great Britain and France also wanted to intervene against Nasser, who had just nationalized the economically vital Suez Canal. They only needed a pretext. And Israel provided them with one, by attacking Egyptian forces in the Mitla Pass, 20 miles away from the canal. Thus began what is known as the Suez Crisis, the Second Arab-Israeli War. Where did it all begin? The war's origins can be traced to the end of Israel's War of Independence in 1949, when Israel signed armistice agreements with Jordan, Egypt, and Syria. Israel viewed these agreements as precursors to peace. But the Arabs saw them as temporary truces only, leading up to what they called the second round to attack and destroy Israel. Throughout the early 1950s, the Arabs acquired modern weapons, above all, fighter jets, which Israel, still laboring under a U.S. arms embargo, could not obtain. The Arab states also backed bands of Palestinian terrorists known as fidayeen, self-sacrificers, who launched raids against Israeli communities from the West Bank, which was then ruled by Jordan, as well as from the Gaza Strip, ruled by Egypt. In response, Israel formed paratrooper units under Ariel Sharon to retaliate against the fidayeen raids. Border tensions reached a fever pitch. Still, war seemed unlikely unless a leader emerged who could rally the Arab world and unite it against Israel. That leader was the charismatic Gamal Abdel Nasser, who electrified Arabic-speaking audiences with his fiery rhetoric against the West. After seizing power in July 1952, he portrayed himself as the hero of pan-Arabism, the notion that all Arab states should unite and form one powerful nation. Nasser also railed against the Zionist entity, he refused to call Israel by its real name, and pledged to fight it. He rejected repeated American and British attempts to broker a treaty with Israel, even though they offered him large pieces of Israel's Negev desert in return. Instead, he intensified fidayeen attacks and sought advanced weaponry from the West's paramount enemy, the Soviet Union. In September 1955, he succeeded, signing a massive arms deal with the Soviets that included not only hundreds of tanks and armored vehicles, but also modern fighter jets and bombers. Suddenly outgunned by Egypt, surrounded by threats on all sides, Israel's very existence hung in the balance. So believed Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion and IDF Chief of Staff Moshe Dayan. Israel sorely needed an ally, but no country was willing to aid the isolated Jewish state. That is until 1955, when Nasser started backing Algeria's struggle for independence from France, giving France and Israel a common enemy. Secretly at first, France started providing Israel with arms. A great many arrived, but for Ben-Gurion and Dayan, not fast enough. In another year at most, they estimated Egypt would be ready to strike. The opportunity to preempt that attack came in July 1956, when Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal. Britain and France, which largely owned the canal, were willing to take it back by force, but they needed a pretext. In a secret agreement, Israel committed to land its paratroopers in the Mitla Pass near the canal. This would set off a pre-planned chain of events. Britain and France would issue an ultimatum to both Egypt and Israel to cease threatening the waterway. Both presumably would reject the demand and so give an excuse for a joint Anglo-French expedition to invade Egypt and protect the canal. It was a wild scheme. One that was certain to anger U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower, who publicly opposed the use of force against Nasser. Which is why the French, the British, and the Israelis kept their plan a secret. Until October 29th, when the paratroopers landed in Mitla. At the same time, Israeli ground forces smashed through Egyptian lines in Sinai and Israel's French-made jets shot Egypt's Soviet-made MiGs out of the sky. Within 100 hours, all of Sinai down to the Suez Canal and all of Gaza lay in Israeli hands. The British and the French had their pretext and offered their ultimatum. Then they failed to act. Eisenhower, feeling betrayed, was furious and warned of serious repercussions if Britain and France went ahead with their scheme. Despite U.S. objections, they did, but only after dallying for five full days before invading Egypt. And even then, their progress was painfully slow. That gave the U.S. and the U.N. enough time to condemn the invasion and force the expedition to evacuate Egypt at once. The invading troops retreated in disgrace and both the British and the French governments fell. Israel too was pressured by the U.S. to withdraw its troops and a first of its kind United Nations peacekeeping force was deployed in Sinai and Gaza. But Israel had eliminated the immediate Egyptian threat and earned itself a decade of relative quiet. Ben-Gurion and Diane were national heroes and Israel could focus on absorbing more immigrants, building its economy, and fortifying the Israel Defense Forces to meet the far greater challenge that would come in 1967. I'm Michael Oren, author of Six Days of War, for Prager University. Few events in modern history were as dramatic as the Six Day War of June 1967, the war between Israel and four Arab nations, Egypt, Syria, Jordan, and Iraq. Among other things, it changed the nature of the Middle East and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict transferred control of the West Bank from Jordan to Israel and unleashed Islamic extremism. The origins of the war were complex. They began with the rise of Pan-Arabism, which sought to unite the countries, Syria, Iraq, and Jordan, created by the Europeans after World War I, and into a single Arab state. The question was, who would lead that state? In their efforts to claim that role, Arab rulers tried to outdo one another in attacking Israel. Foremost among them was Gamal Abdel Nasser, the charismatic leader of the most powerful Arab country, Egypt. To establish his leadership on May 16, 1967, Nasser evicted the UN peacekeepers who served as a buffer between Israel and Egypt in the Sinai Desert and the Gaza Strip, which was then under Egyptian control. Nasser marched his army into the Sinai and threatened to drive the Jews into the sea. He blockaded the Straits of Tehran at the entrance to the Red Sea, choking off Israel's vital southern port of Eilat. He made a military alliance with Syria and Iraq. He placed the Jordanian army under Egyptian command. By the first week of June 1967, Israel was surrounded. On its southern border, the army of Egypt. On its eastern border, the armies of Jordan and Iraq. On its northern border, the army of Syria. And on its western border, the Mediterranean Sea. And to make matters worse, Israel faced these threats virtually alone. It had a tenuous relationship with Europe and friendly ties with the United States, but not a strategic alliance. The Israeli Defense Forces, the IDF, fought with French arms, not American arms. And of course, the Soviets were antagonistic, having fully backed Nasser. The situation was life and death. The normally fractious political parties of the Jewish state formed a national unity government with the dour Levi Eshkol as Prime Minister and the famed one-eyed General Moshe Dayan as Defense Minister. The existential question of the moment for Israel's politicians and generals was this. Should Israel wait for the inevitable attack and react? Or should it strike preemptively? And if it did, what if that attack should fail? After much arguing and agonizing, Israel's leaders chose to attack. At 7.45 on the morning of June 5th, Israel launched one of the largest airstrikes in military history. The Egyptians were caught completely by surprise. In a matter of hours, Israeli planes wiped out three quarters of Egypt's air force, most of it on the ground. This gave Israel command of the skies a major tactical advantage. Then Israeli ground forces rushed into the Sinai. Their goal was to neutralize the Egyptian threat and by doing so, hopefully dissuade other Arab states from joining the fray. Israel repeatedly urged Jordan's King Hussein to stay out of it. It didn't work. In a matter of hours, Israel was fighting a three-front war. Jordanian forces fired thousands of artillery shells into West Jerusalem and the Tel Aviv area and attacked Israeli positions along the eastern border. Syria too, rained thousands of shells down onto Israeli towns and villages in the Galilee. Israel responded as if the nation's life depended on it. It did. In the open spaces of the Sinai desert, Israeli jets pulverized Egyptian forces from above, while Israeli ground troops and tanks sent the Egyptians reeling back toward the Suez Canal. Meanwhile, in the tight quarters of Jerusalem, Israeli paratroopers advanced into the eastern half of the city. By the third day of the war, the Jordanian and Egyptian armies were in full retreat. Israeli soldiers conquered all the Sinai up to the Suez Canal. Responding to the Palestinian attacks from Gaza, the IDF captured the strip as well. Most dramatically, on the morning of June 7th, Israeli paratroopers realized a 2,000-year-old Jewish dream of reuniting east and west Jerusalem and liberating the old city. The Temple Mount is in our hands, Commander Mota Gor reported as his troops danced in front of the Western Wall. Only the Syrian front remained. The Syrian artillery still pounding Israel's north. Though fearful the Soviets would enter the war in defense of their ally, Moshe Dayan determined that the opportunity of securing the high ground of Israel's northern border, the Golan Heights, could not be missed. Advancing under furious Syrian fire, Israeli forces achieved their objective. In six earth-shaking days, it was all over. Israel had defeated multiple Arab armies, convincing American leaders to ally with the Jewish state and provide it with arms. The world was stunned. A country of nearly 2.5 million people had defeated an Arab world of over 100 million. A country eight miles wide at its narrowest point before the war had quadrupled the territory under its control. But many challenges loomed, not the least of which was what to do with over a million Palestinians now under Israeli authority. That question would preoccupy Israeli political, diplomatic, and military thinking for many decades to come and still does to this day. I'm Michael Oren, author of Six Days of War for Prager University. The date was October 6, 1973, Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the Jewish year. Synagogues in Israel were filled with Jews fasting and praying. Then at precisely 2 p.m., air raid sirens started to blare. The prayers stopped. In their place came whispers, rumors of war. But they weren't rumors. In the south, an Egyptian force of 100,000 soldiers backed by 1,300 Soviet-made tanks was crossing the Suez Canal. They quickly overran a series of fortifications Israel had constructed along the canal following the 1967 Six Day War. Israeli fighter jets scrambled to meet the invading force, but the Egyptians were ready with the latest generation of Soviet-designed anti-aircraft batteries. Israeli tanks ran into a deadly barrage of anti-tank missiles. These were weapons Egypt didn't possess in 1967, and Israel wasn't prepared to deal with them. The Egyptians inflicted hundreds of casualties. But the Sinai Desert is deep and far from Israel's southern border. There was no such buffer in the north. Hundreds of Syrian tanks, outnumbering Israeli tanks 5 to 1, broke through Israeli defenses on the Golan Heights. That night, Israel's legendary defense minister, Moshe Dayan, appeared on Israeli television and broke down in front of the cameras, telling viewers that the Jewish state was in danger of total destruction. How did this disaster happen? There's one simple answer. Complacency. After winning a lightning victory in the Six Day War six years earlier, Israeli leaders assumed that the Arabs wouldn't dare to launch another war so soon. It was worse than that. Israeli leaders had credible intelligence that Egyptian President Anwar Sadat and Syrian dictator Hafez al-Assad were planning an attack. But they simply dismissed those reports as overwrought. Anyway, who would ever think that the Arabs would attack on the holiest day of the Jewish calendar? Only the day before, October 5th, with Egyptian and Syrian forces now massed on Israel's borders, did Prime Minister Golda Meir, Dayan, and other Israeli officials finally conclude that war was about to happen. Israel frantically called up its reserves. Golda Meir, meanwhile, phoned U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, asking for support to mount a preemptive strike. But Kissinger said no. If Israel attacked first, he explained, it would be seen as the aggressor. This hesitation cost Israel dearly. As enemy armies broke through Israel's defenses, tens of thousands of reservists rushed out of their synagogues. They didn't go home. They went straight to the front. The fighting in the north was brutal, often hand-to-hand. But within 48 hours, Israeli forces had halted the Syrian advance on the Golan Heights. In the south, it was a different story. The Egyptian Third Army repulsed Israel's counter-attack. The pressure on Golda Meir was overwhelming. Normally a five-pack-a-day smoker, she was up to nine. Just as the situation looked hopeless, Israeli General Ariel Sharon came up with an audacious plan. He would lead a combined division of tanks and paratroopers across the Suez Canal, cutting off the Egyptian Third Army from behind and surrounding it. The problem was how to get the pontoon bridges to the Suez Canal through heavily defended Egyptian lines. Some of the fiercest fighting of the war followed. But in the end, Israeli forces broke through and crossed the canal. Israel was back in control. The Egyptian Third Army, 20,000 men, now surrounded, faced obliteration. Enter the superpowers, the Soviet Union on the side of Egypt and Syria, the United States on the side of Israel. As fast as Egyptian and Syrian forces were losing planes, tanks, and missiles, the Soviet Union was resupplying them. And as fast as Israel was losing its armaments, the U.S. was resupplying Israel 22,000 tons of military aid authorized by U.S. President Richard Nixon. But then, to save the Third Army, the Soviets moved their nuclear-armed fleet to the eastern Mediterranean, where it went eyeball to eyeball with the U.S. Sixth Fleet. For the first time since the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, both superpowers went on nuclear alert. A regional conflict was threatening to become a world war. Kissinger had pressured Meir to stand down. Israel had successfully repelled the invasion, he argued. It was no longer in danger. The Soviets, in turn, convinced Sadat and Assad that a ceasefire would be better than having their armies annihilated. Negotiations between the warring parties soon followed. After three bloody weeks, the Yom Kippur War was over. Caught off guard on the first day, Israel rebounded and ended the war with its artillery within range of both Cairo and Damascus, a military feat still studied at West Point. Nevertheless, the Israelis, who lost over 2,600 men, considered the Yom Kippur War a disaster. The Egyptians, conversely, considered the October War, as they call it, a glorious victory. Even though they were defeated at the war's end and lost 15,000 men, they had given Israel a terrible shock. That belief made Sadat a hero in the eyes of his own people. He was the warrior who restored their national honor. Six years later, with this new credibility, Sadat joined with Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin and U.S. President Jimmy Carter in signing the peace treaty between Egypt and Israel that endures to this day. I'm Michael Oren, author of Six Days of War, for Prager University. At dawn on June 6, 1982, 60,000 Israeli troops, accompanied by 800 tanks, stormed across Israel's northern border into Lebanon. So began the Fifth Arab-Israeli War, a war that the Israeli government officially dubbed Operation Peace for Galilee, but the rest of the world called the Lebanon War. An old adage holds that everyone knows how wars begin, but nobody knows how they end. That was certainly true in Lebanon. The war's roots could be traced back to Israel's struggle for independence in 1948, when more than 100,000 Palestinians fled to Lebanon. They were kept in refugee camps, which became hotbeds of radicalism. Then, with the Palestinians' defeat in the Jordanian Civil War of 1970, another 200,000 Palestinians fled to Lebanon, along with numerous terrorist groups. Chief among these was the Palestine Liberation Organization, the PLO, under Yasser Arafat. The massive influx of armed Palestinians tipped Lebanon's delicate balance between Christians, Druze, and Muslims. It led, five years later, to the outbreak of civil war in Lebanon and hundreds of thousands of casualties. Syria exploited the conflict to occupy large parts of the country. The terrorists, meanwhile, turned their sights on Israel, firing rockets into the Galilee and attacking northern border communities. In March 1978, terrorists landed on a beach between Tel Aviv and Haifa and attacked the nearby highway, killing 38 civilians, many of them children. Israel responded by invading southern Lebanon. The Litani operation was succeeded in pushing the terrorists back from the border, but only temporarily. The PLO attacks continued, not only from Lebanon, the West Bank, and Gaza, but also against Jews and Israelis abroad. Israel struck back, hitting PLO bases. In addition, it formed an alliance with Bashir Jamail, the leader of the Lebanese Christian militia. Israeli Defense Minister Ariel Sharon believed that, together with the Christians, Israel could drive the PLO and the Syrians out of Lebanon and replace them with a pro-Western government that would make peace with Israel. The entire Middle East would be altered, Sharon asserted, and convinced Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin of the plan. Israeli forces were ready to strike. On June 3, 1982, Shlomo Al-Gov, Israel's ambassador to Great Britain, was shot in the head by a Palestinian terrorist and left permanently disabled. The next day, the Israeli government approved Operation Big Pines, designed to push the PLO 25 miles away from the border. But a secret part of the plan also provided for the possibility that the IDF would push further north to drive Syrian forces out of Lebanon. Two Israeli divisions crossed the border, one heading north along the coastal road, and the other heading east to outflank the Syrians. Between the two columns towered Bofort Castle, a medieval stronghold that served as the PLO's fort. It was taken after a bloody battle by Golani Brigade commandos. On both fronts, the fighting proved fierce. Yet everywhere, Israeli arms prevailed. The air force shot down 100 Syrian jets and helicopters without suffering a single loss. Bashir Jamail signed an historic peace agreement with Israel. By the end of June, Israel was besieging Beirut. Through American mediation, Syrian troops evacuated the area and some 6,500 PLO terrorists, most notably among them Yasser Arafat, boarded boats for Tunisia. Operation Big Pines appeared to be on the verge of an historic success. But it was not to be. On September 14th, Jamail was assassinated by a massive car bomb. Avenging his death, Christian militiamen entered the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps and slaughtered hundreds of civilians. The IDF, which failed to prevent the massacre, was accused of perpetrating it by much of the international community. Menachem Begin's response was, Christians kill Muslims and the world blames the Jews. Israel subsequently pulled back to what it called the security zone along its northern border. U.S. soldiers led by the Marines took the place of the Israelis in Beirut, fighting against Muslim and Druze militias. On October 23rd, 1983, a Shiite suicide bomber struck their headquarters, killing 241. The United States later withdrew from Lebanon as well. The Operation Big Pines succeeded in driving both the PLO and Syria from Lebanon. It failed to realize its vision of peace. Bashir, Jamail's brother, Amin, cut off ties with Israel. Begin resigned, and Ariel Sharon was forced from office. But the long-term effects of the Lebanon War would be felt for decades. The vacuum created by the withdrawal of the PLO and Syria from Lebanon was filled by an Iranian-backed Shiite militia, Hezbollah. Its repeated attacks on Israeli troops convinced the Israelis that the cost of remaining in Lebanon was too high. The IDF withdrew from Lebanon entirely in May 2000. But Hezbollah continues to threaten Israel to this day. Had Israel been able to make a peace agreement with Lebanon in the 1980s, it would have changed the Middle East for the better. But rather than bringing peace, the Lebanon War once again revealed the core cause of the Middle East conflict, the refusal to accept the Jewish state. As long as that refusal persists, there will be no peace. I'm Michael Oren, author of Six Days of War, for Prager University.