By Eric Lee
Palestinians and their supporters around the world refer to 15 May as “Nakba Day” — a day marking the anniversary of the creation of the State of Israel.
This year, the UK-based Palestine Solidarity Campaign is calling for a “workplace day of action” on 15 May. The proposed actions include:
“Organise a short stoppage or lunch-time walk-out in solidarity with Palestinians. Gather outside your workplace for a photo or organise a delegation to visit a nearby student encampment if there is one in your town or city. … Organise a lunch-time teach-in or film screening to educate colleagues about the Palestinian struggle for freedom.” And so on.
But what actually happened on 15 May 1948? As the PSC explains in one of their “factsheets”:
“1948: What Israel calls its ‘war of independence’, Palestinians call the Nakba (catastrophe) as Israel’s forces raze over 400 villages to the ground and drive more than 750,000 Palestinians from their homes.”
In the view of groups like the PSC, in 1948 the Jews arrived in Palestine for no obvious reason, launched brutal and unprovoked attacks on the innocent and defenceless civilian population among the Arab Palestinians, burned their villages to the ground and expelled hundreds of thousands of them. End of story.
Complicated
But it’s a bit more complicated than that.
Just three years before, the Second World War had ended. The German Nazi state had murdered over six million innocent Jews, including a million children. Thousands of survivors were trapped in displaced persons camps in Cyprus and elsewhere, desperate to come home to a country that would have them.
On 15 May 1945, the leadership of the Jewish community in British Mandatory Palestine proclaimed the creation of the first independent Jewish state in nearly 2,000 years.
Their leader was David Ben Gurion, the head of Mapai, Israel’s social democratic party. Ben Gurion had previously headed up the Histadrut trade union federation as well. Politics in the Jewish community in Palestine at that time was dominated by the moderate Left. The political party that eventually grew into Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud was then a fringe group, never winning an election during the first thirty years of the state’s existence.
A coalition of all the political parties from left to right rallied around the new state. Even Meir Vilner, the leader of the Palestine Communist Party, was one of the signatories of the Israeli Declaration of Independence.
The declaration made an appeal to the whole Arab world. “We extend our hand to all neighbouring states and their peoples in an offer of peace and good neighbourliness,” it said, “and appeal to them to establish bonds of cooperation and mutual help with the sovereign Jewish people settled in its own land.”
What happened next is not in dispute: The Arab countries had rejected the Partition Plan which had been adopted by the United Nations General Assembly the previous year. With the end of the Mandate and the withdrawal of the British forces on 14 May and the declaration of Israeli independence the following day, Egypt, Jordan, Syria and Iraq then launched a multi-front invasion of the newly-born Jewish state.
Tragedy
This rejection of Partition followed by the Arab invasion of Israel is the starting point for everything that followed. This is where the Palestinian tragedy begins.
But there is not a word about it on the PSC’s “factsheet”. It is unlikely to be discussed at the “lunch-time teach-ins” being organised as part of the “workplace day of action” this year.
The essential facts of the story — of the UN Partition Plan, its rejection by the Arab states, and the invasion which followed, triggering decades of conflict — are not in dispute. No reputable historian claims otherwise.
But maybe the Palestinians are right to refer to 15 May 1948 as “Nakba Day”. Because on that day, the reactionary, authoritarian leaderships of the Arab countries sought to crush the infant Jewish state before it could stand on its feet. Their failure to do so, and the surprising military victory of the Jewish forces against all odds, ensured that no independent Palestinian state emerged in 1948 or since.
That is the true meaning of “Nakba Day” for the Palestinians.
• Eric Lee is the founder editor of LabourStart, writing in the latest issue of Solidarity in a personal capacity
Martin Thomas adds:
15 May: no, nations do not have hereditary guilt
Above: Arab fighters win a skirmish with Jewish forces on the road to Jerusalem, 1948
May 15 is called Israel independence day, and also “Nakba” (catastrophe) day.
Some read off politics for now from attributing blame in 1948. Solidarity believes that policies today should look to a future of equal rights, not to revenge for events of 1948.
Eric Lee discusses 1948 in his personal opinion column (above). In my view none of what he says is wrong, but he omits a lot.
The Palestinian Jewish community fought a guerrilla war against British rule in 1945-8 for the usual reasons that small nations fight such wars. And for an extra reason: for freedom for Jews to flee to Palestine.
The Jewish survivors of the Holocaust were interned in camps across Europe or in British-ruled Cyprus.
By late 1947 Britain gave up. It started a troop withdrawal complete in May 1948. The United Nations had voted for a partition of Palestine into Jewish and Arab states. Neither Britain nor any outside force dared try to implement the delicate partition.
From late 1947 a new guerrilla war developed between Arab “irregulars”, the ALA, mostly coming from Syria, and the Jewish community.
The aim of the ALA, and of the Arab states in the full-scale war after May 1948, was minimally to block a Jewish state admitting refugees, maximally to “drive the Jews into the sea”.
Jordan, which had British officers commanding its army, wanted to (and largely did) take the Arab area of a partitioned Palestine.
The Palestinian Arabs mostly backed the ALA but had little autonomous voice. Their leaders had collaborated with the Nazis in World War 2 and were discredited; they could not even protest when after the 1948-9 war Egypt and Jordan extinguished the Palestinian state proposed by the UN.
There was no Arab-Jewish workers’ militia to combat the inflamed nationalists on both sides. In the conflict from December 1947 to March 1949, each of the heavily intermingled “sides” drove people from the “other side” out of their area. Jews were driven out of East Jerusalem, the Etzion Bloc, etc., and Arabs out of most areas which ended under Jewish control.
Because the Jews won the war, many more Arabs were driven out than Jews.
Tens of thousands of Arabs fled from Haifa from December 1947 as Jewish troops took control. The Arab notables of the city decided to lead the flight in consultation with the British forces.
Tens of thousands fled from Jaffa, following an attack on the municipal buildings by Jewish ultras. Arabs fled from West to East in Jerusalem, which had long been Jewish-majority.
From April 1948 the main driver became effort by the Jewish army, the Haganah, to secure lines of communication. They destroyed Arab villages on the route between the two main Jewish cities, Tel Aviv and Jerusalem.
On 9 April 1948 Jewish ultras massacred 100 to 120 villagers at Deir Yassin, near Jerusalem. It was condemned by the official Jewish forces, but the reports increased the flight.
Once the full-scale war had started, the Haganah drove out Arab populations in strategic areas. Fewer in the north, which remains the biggest concentration of Arab population in Israel to this day.
After the war, Israel imposed “military government” on the Arab areas and tried to prevent the return of Palestinians who had fled. The Arab states drove out (over time) almost all their Jewish populations and refused to integrate Palestinians.
No-one on the left backed the armies of the Arab states (then largely client states of Britain) in the 1947-9 wars. Some Trotskyists backed Israel (with much criticism) on grounds of national self-determination; others backed neither side. Israel’s misdeeds in 1948 should neither be omitted from history, nor treated as “proof” that grandchildren and great-grandchildren of the Israeli Jews of 1948 have no collective rights where they were born. A democratic way out requires equal rights for both peoples, Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs.
Shiraz Socialist (Second Run) 
Martin Thomas omits some very key information in his account of the events of the 1948 war. For one, while he concedes that the local Arab population supported the ALA, he leaves his readers with the impression that such support was perhaps discursive, say attending rallies, delivering speeches, or writing articles, but not violent, or militaristic. To that end he just happens to neglect mentioning that practically each local Arab village and township had their own combatants and militias and that it was local Arabs, not combatants from Syria, who initiated the war by murdering Yishuv members leading a convoy of Jewish trucks attempting to bring food and supplies from the coast to the Jewish population of Jerusalem in the interior. That attack was what began the 1948 war. Martin Thomas mentions Dar Yassin which is a highly contested battle, but which ultimately did lead to the killing of somewhere between 50 and over 100 Arabs, a substantial number of which were armed combatants and not unarmed civilians, but he neglects to mention similar in scale Jewish casualties in Jewish communities where local Arab and ALA combatants killed Jewish civilians and combatants alike in similar numbers as were killed in Dar Yassin. Martin neglects to mention that the Arab population of Haifa was repeatedly pleaded with by the leaders of the Haifa Jewish community not to leave their homes and instead to remain as their neighbours in peaceful coexistence, which the Arabs of Haifa chose to forego in favour of leaving en masse. Local Arab village militias situated along the highway from the coast to Jerusalem were for the first few months of the war attacked and killed any Jewish vehicle attempting to reach Jerusalem from the coast. In that way, the Jews of Jerusalem were able to be besieged by Arab forces attempting to starve them into defeat. It was for that reason alone that the Yishuv forces of the Hagana left it up to individual platoon leaders to decide whether or not to forcibly expel the Arab inhabitants of any Arab village along the road to Jerusalem that was attacking Jewish vehicles but which proved eager to resume attacks at the first opportunity even after they were defeated. And to that end, the inhabitants of two Arab communities, Lod and Ramla were forcibly expelled by Yishuv forces. But for the overwhelming majority of local Arab communities, there was no forced expulsions, but rather decisions were made to flee their homes even before encountering Jewish combatants, often with great encouragement from Arab leaders in the surrounding states to do so. By the end of the war a roughly equal number of Jews and Arabs had been killed and indeed because the Arabs lost the war, those Arabs who fled became refugees, as once the war had ended, the fledgling State of Israel regarded them as hostile and were not willing to allow them to return en masse. But contra, the popular narrative promoted by Palestinians and their antizionist supporters today, neither were the majority of local Arabs, agency-free, passive victims who took no part as combatants during the war and neither were the overwhelming majority of local Arabs forcibly expelled from their communities by Yishuv forces.
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Martin Thomas has sent this reply:
• Of course Palestinian support for the ALA, where active, was military
and logistical. I didn’t suggest otherwise.
• I mentioned the massacre of Jews in the Etzion Bloc, for example.
• I recorded that local Arab notables led the Arabs of Haifa to flee
when they could rely on protection from British forces. Yes, the Jewish
mayor of Haifa asked the Arabs to stay. Also, however, the flight
happened after the Haganah had seized control of Arab areas of Haifa,
and many accounts indicate that fear of Haganah violence (whatever the
mayor said) shaped the decision to flee.
• Israel tried to prevent return across the new border by any (not just
“en masse”) Arabs who had fled, even those who had fled simply to escape
the war zone. It also confiscated land from those who were allowed to
remain, and remained: see Hal Draper’s “Israel’s Arab minority”,
https://www.marxists.org/archive/draper/1956/xx/tragedy.html
• My conclusions remain as in the brief article: Israel’s misdeeds
around 1948 must be acknowledged; leftists in 1947-9 were right not to
support the Arab armies; a policy today must be based on equal rights in
future for living people, not on revenge.
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