← Empire: World History
Empire: World History
301. Gaza: The First Arab-Israeli War & The Creation of The Gaza Strip (Part 11)
00:48:26
Loading summary
Transcript87 lines
- [00:01]
William Dalrymple
If you want access to bonus episodes, reading lists for every series of Empire, a chat community discounts for all the books mentioned in the week's podcast ad, free listening, and a weekly newsletter, sign up to empire club@www.empirepoduk.com.
- [00:20]
Eugene Rogan
This episode is brought to you by Jack Daniels. Jack Daniels and music are made for each other. They share a rhythm in the craft of making something timeless while being a part of legendary nights. From backyard jams to sold out arenas, there's a song in every toast. Please drink responsibly. Responsibility.org, jack Daniels and Old no. 7 are registered trademarks. Tennessee whiskey, 40% alcohol by volume. Jack Daniel Distillery, Lynchburg, Tennessee.
- [00:47]
Anita Anand
At New Balance, we believe if you run, you're a runner, however you choose to do it. Because when you're not worried about doing things the right way, you're free to discover your way. And that's what running is all about. Run your way@newbalance.com running.
- [01:15]
Eugene Rogan
You know the words that dominate our news cycle? Private equity keeps investing capital gains, cap funds, America's shift move by market volatility. But do you truly understand how they impact your world and your wallet? In a world that skims the what, understand the why. Because context changes everything. Subscribe to Learn more@Bloomberg.com the global benchmark for business news.
- [01:51]
Anita Anand
Hello and welcome to Empire with me, Anita Arnand and me, William. And we continue our Gaza series. And once again, we're very lucky to be in the company of Eugene Rogan, professor of Modern Middle Eastern history at the University of Oxford. He is the author of the A History and the Fall of the Ottomans. He is also a friend of this show. He's also one of the very few voices. He was hugely respected by both sides of the debate.
- [02:18]
William Dalrymple
A rare quality.
- [02:19]
Anita Anand
Yes, it is. Yeah. And thank you very much for taking the time for us, Willy. Just remind us where we left off.
- [02:24]
Eugene Rogan
Thank you.
- [02:25]
Anita Anand
Last time with Eugene.
- [02:26]
William Dalrymple
Well, we were plowing through the most contentious episodes in probably the entire history of the Middle East. These are all deeply sensitive issues. Almost every one of these episodes at this point in 1948 is interpreted differently by both sides. There's no conflict I know of where. It's like sort of looking through two completely different lenses of the binoculars. On one side you see a triumph of the Jewish people, the creation of the state of Israel, the return after 2000 years of exile. On the other side, you see a exile, dispossession, homelessness, a future in refugee camps. And so it's a really complicated landscape that Eugene has been helping us negotiate through. So just to yeah, recap, there's UN partition plan. The UN comes in, the British throw up their hands, say they can't cope anymore. The UN comes in and it offers a partition. Now the partition that is offered is rejected by the Arabs. They say that they can't see why they have to give up this land that they've always had. And they think that far too much has been given away to the other side. But Ben Gurion accepts it. And then the fighting breaks out. On 8 April 1948 the Palestinians lose their most outstanding commander when Abdelkader is killed in the battle of Castel incredibly strategic hilltop controlling access to Jerusalem. As his funeral is underway, news begins to filter through of the Irgun and Sterngan attack on Deir Yassin, a peaceful Arab village which had had a non combat relationship with the neighboring Jewish settlements. But over 100 people are killed, including women and children. There's no armed resistance and the survivors are paraded as war trophies. Now this is condemned of course by Ben Gurion, but it has a dramatic effect on the Palestinians. They all think they're going to be rounded up and killed in the same way. And people begin to flee. There's real fear now, there's real terror and Palestinians begin to clear out. There's also of course retaliatory killings on Jewish non competence. 74 are killed, doctors and medical personnel. And so as the British pull out there is hundreds and thousands of villagers and townspeople on the move. The Arab side have proved themselves much less well armed, much less well organized than the Jewish militias. And on the 14th of May 1948 the last British High Commissioner, Alan Cunningham, left Jerusalem to board a waiting ship in Haifa. Later that day, in a museum in Tel Aviv, the leader of the Yishuv, Ben Gurion, proclaimed the birth of the State of Israel.
- [05:06]
Anita Anand
Eugene, just tell us what does he say and how does he mark this day?
- [05:10]
Eugene Rogan
For David Ben Gurion, the withdrawal of British forces was chronicle of a retreat foretold. And so I think for the community of Jews in Palestine known as the Yishuv, the there was no further any barrier to them achieving their long standing dream of statehood, independent statehood. With the withdrawal of the British, Ben Gurion on live radio broadcasts the creation of a Jewish state without declaring the firm boundaries of that territory, that he was mobilizing the people of the new State of Israel to defend their territory and promised that the new State of Israel would be at peace with all neighbors that accepted it in peace but of course, it was the verge of a war in which peace was not an option.
- [05:57]
Anita Anand
So you did say in the previous episode that actually while the British were there, the neighbouring Arab countries held back. They didn't do anything. But now that they've gone, now that they've upped sticks and pulled up anchor and they've sailed away, what is their immediate reaction to that departure?
- [06:12]
Eugene Rogan
For the Arab world, this was a crisis that they were simply unprepared for. So if we talk about a chronicle of a retreat foretold, the Arabs could see the impending departure date to the British with mounting concern. They knew that their first solution, the Arab Liberation army, an entirely volunteer force of irregulars, was unable to stop the advance of Jewish forces working through the territory of Palestine, and that they would themselves have to respond. But they did so with a level of mistrust in each other that compromised their war efforts almost from the outset. But the one thing they could agree on is that at dawn on 15 May, their troops would move into Palestine, into those territories allocated to the Arab state, and to try and drive the Israeli forces back, even from those lands that had been guaranteed to a new Jewish state.
- [07:07]
William Dalrymple
Now, Eugene, when this is discussed, and this is one of the most written about moments, in a sense, Israeli historians always point to this, that all the local Arab countries invade this new state of Israel. Now, is this a militarily serious incursion? Are these well armed armies with tanks and modern weapons coordinating with each other? Or what is the military situation?
- [07:31]
Eugene Rogan
So really, of the five neighboring states that usually are listed as the antagonists in the first Arab Israeli war, two are heavyweights, Egypt and Transjordan. Both were armed and trained by their British imperial masters, as was Iraq. But Iraq, of course, was further away and was slower to reach the battlefield and was to be less actively engaged in the war. Syria and Lebanon, both recently out of French mandate, had smaller armies. One of the big struggles in the independence bit of Syria in particular was to gain control over its national army. And so it was a small and unprepared national army that was slow to take to the battle. But the ones that really mattered on 15 May were Egypt and Transjordan. And both moved in with thousands of men and with tanks. And if there was any stage in the war where I think Israel was at risk, it would have been in those opening weeks of the first Arab Israeli conflict.
- [08:28]
William Dalrymple
And give us the picture of the young idf, the state forces that arranged against them, because it's a remarkable victory that is won I mean, they appear to be well coordinated, well armed, and it's an astonishing victory that surprises the world.
- [08:44]
Eugene Rogan
Yes, I think it would have been easy to have underestimated what the new army of Israel would be capable of. It's true there were members of their armed forces who had benefited from training by the British and had participated in combat operations in the Second World War. The Haganah was in a sense, an army in the making, but it never really had the opportunity to train and drill to the extent that a national army normally would, and then to be sent directly into war with a large number of under trained volunteers. Yes, they were able to secure arms and ammunition through a very effective network of supporters in the diaspora, particularly from.
- [09:25]
William Dalrymple
Czechoslovakia, isn't that right?
- [09:27]
Eugene Rogan
Well, this was going to be the real game changer for, for the Israeli armed forces is that they had a supply line that would remain open through the war through Czechoslovakia. While the rest of the world was really closing down the arms supply on the Arab armies, most notably the British, they refused to resupply Egypt and Transjordan as a way of trying to stop the war from developing further.
- [09:49]
Anita Anand
Can I ask you, one very contested piece of history in this period of time is that Arab radio broadcasts were issued that told local Palestinians to get out to flee. The Palestinians say that's not true. That did not happen. I mean, what do you know to be true of this?
- [10:08]
Eugene Rogan
We know very little about radio broadcasts at the time, Anita. The story is circulated that Arab leaders told the civilians of Palestine to leave, promising to deliver their homelands back to them safe and sound. But we don't really have transcripts or recordings of those broadcasts to confirm the point. It's been circulating and questioned ever since. I mean, it would be normal for responsible leaders to have told civilians to flee a battlefield. And one only needs to look at those wars that we've seen in the end of the 20th and the 21st century to realize that civilians do flee combat zones. As war comes to your neighborhood, you withdraw. And that's been true in the breakup of Yugoslavia, as it is today in Ukraine. Most civilians have tried to leave the areas most directly implicated in the, in the battlefield with Russia. But was there a deliberate statewide policy?
- [11:03]
William Dalrymple
No.
- [11:03]
Eugene Rogan
There's no evidence that, let us say Syria, Lebanon, Transjordan and Egypt conspired to depopulate Palestine. It's just what happens in a war.
- [11:14]
William Dalrymple
Eugene, I think the, the generation of Israeli new historians, which your colleague Abby Schlaim in Oxford is, is a very prominent member, have discounted those radio Broadcast. But a matter which I think divides these new historians is the whole question of Plan D or Plan Dela, this question of whether Ben Gurion actually had a master plan to get rid of the Palestinians, that there was a coordinated central idea that the Palestinians should be cleared out to create the new Jewish state, or whether this was just contingent on local operations, local commanders, local circumstances, and indeed the question of people fleeing as armies approach, as they do, as you say, everywhere in the world.
- [11:53]
Eugene Rogan
Well, Plan Dalit, without doubt, is a contingency plan. And it's one of many contingency plans that the IDF drew up being Plan Dalit, the fourth letter of the Hebrew Alphabet. You know, there was a Plan Aleph, a Plan Bet, and a Plan Gimel before you got to Plan Dalit. The word that I suppose the Palestinians use is master plan. And I think that's where Israeli historians will contest that Benny Morris will push back against the idea that Plan Dalit was a blueprint for the ethnic cleansing of Palestine. Something that, say, a historian like Ilan Pape has put forward strongly.
- [12:30]
William Dalrymple
Ilan Pape actually calls his book the ethnic cleansing of Palestine, doesn't he? He's very strong on this.
- [12:36]
Eugene Rogan
No. And Morris and Pape debate this point. And I think what Pape is looking for is just evidence on the ground that there was a consistent pattern of depopulation that conformed to Plan Dalit, and then circum would confirm the importance of the plan. Morris is a real archives historian, and he's looking for a document that says, implement Plan Dalit, an order given to pursue Plan Dalit to its logical conclusion. And no such document has been found. I think for our purposes, we can see that the Israelis were thinking about how to achieve a Jewish state that would be secure without large numbers of Palestinians surviving in the territory as a sort of threat to the security of Israel, and that they were active in driving Palestinians out of areas that they wish to claim for the future state that they were building.
- [13:27]
Anita Anand
Do we have an idea of numbers of how many Palestinians left their homes at this time?
- [13:32]
Eugene Rogan
Well, Anita, the standard number for those displaced in the course of the 1948 war is about 750,000 Palestinians.
- [13:39]
William Dalrymple
That's quite widely accepted, isn't it? That's not a really disputed figure.
- [13:43]
Anita Anand
No.
- [13:43]
Eugene Rogan
And the roundness of the figure tells you it's an estimate. But it seems to be a best estimate that given the numbers that were to flee the war into the territory of Lebanon, Syria, the West bank, and into the Gaza Strip, that we would be able to account for about 750,000 people displaced by the war.
- [14:04]
William Dalrymple
Now the other great matter of dispute, which is I think the focus of one of the early works of your colleague Abby Schlaim at Oxford, is the question of how far the Jordanians were playing a different game. They were after their own self agandizement. They had formed, he says. What is the word? He used it something across the Jordan.
- [14:22]
Eugene Rogan
Collusion.
- [14:23]
William Dalrymple
A collusion across the Jordan. That's right. Tell us about that whole historiography.
- [14:28]
Eugene Rogan
Transjordan was suspected by all of the Arab parties of having interests in this 1948 war. That it was going to use the war as a way of expanding the frontiers of their state. And there were good grounds to mistrust the intentions of King Abdullah of Transjordan. In 1937 the British first raised the idea of partitioning Palestine between Arabs and Jews. And the idea would be that the Arab state would be annexed to Transjordan. This is in 1937. And the only Arab leader to accept that plan was King Abdullah or then Amir Abdullah of Transjordan. So his Arab fellow leaders saw him as an interested party. And Abdullah, whether to advance the peace or advance his own interest, would was secretly in dialogue with leading members of the Jewish executive in Palestine. He was sending letters, he was organizing meetings to try and come to terms in advance of Britain's withdrawal on 15 May such that the Jordanian forces would be allowed to enter into the territories of Palestine allocated for the Arab state without going to war with the Israelis. Try and conclude a a non aggression pact that could lead to a peaceful handover rather than a war on the 15th of May. And it's the terms of this secret agreement that has people debating whether there was in fact a collusion or indeed whether it was an attempt to negotiate a handover to avoid war. What we do know is that the Transjordanian army, the Arab Legion, genuinely went to war against Israel. And in that no collusion was to withstand the actual onset of the war.
- [16:11]
Anita Anand
And just circling Back to those 750,000 estimated Palestinians who leave, where are they leaving from and where are they going to? I mean they must be just going with what they can carry. What situation are they facing?
- [16:27]
Eugene Rogan
Anita, you'll have seen the heartbreaking photographs of dirt roads thronged with people carrying their few possessions on their heads, the misery of refugee status that they were confronting and to, to be true, live with today from that day till now. And really where you went depended on where you lived. So for those people living in Haifa and Points north they went to Lebanon. Those in the sort of Galilee and the Panhandle went towards Syria. Those in the central areas of Palestine tried to cross the Arab legions lines on the west bank to the safety of an Arab army protected territory. And for those who were around Jaffa, Ramla, places to the south, their refuge was to try and seek security behind Egyptian lines around the area of the Gaza Strip.
- [17:22]
William Dalrymple
So this is an exodus which has many memoirs attesting to it. We could talk about, for example Salah Khalaf, if I'm pronouncing that right, who's fleeing south towards Gaza. As a 15 year old boy, he writes, I was overwhelmed by the sight of this huge mass of men, women, old people and children struggling under the weight of suitcases and bundles, making their way painfully down to the wharfs of Jaffa in a sinister tumult. Cries mingled with moaning and sobs, all punctuated by deafening explosions. Another record we have is a man called Faiz who left his home the day the assault began on Jaffa. Everyone was wailing and weeping and there was total chaos. My brother and I ran all over the town trying to find a truck, but there weren't any. They were all either full of people or burnt out. There were many dead donkeys too, with their trailers still attached to them, lying in the road. Next we went to the sea, but clearly there was no chance of escape there. In the end we found a truck and our family with three others climbed on. We had one suitcase with us. Everything else was left at home. It took seven hours to get to Majdal, nearly 30 miles away, where we slept the night. Early next morning we traveled on to Gaza. There we were, us and a single suitcase.
- [18:46]
Anita Anand
Well, let's take a break there. With this exodus of humanity crossing lines of invading fire as the Jordanians, the Egyptians and the Iraqis close in and Israel pushes out. Join us then.
- [19:03]
Eugene Rogan
Hi, it's Gary Lineker here and I want to tell you about a fantastic new quiz book from Goal Hanger, the team behind the smash hit podcast the Rest Is entertainment. The Rest is history. The Rest is politics. The Rest is classified. And of course, the Rest is football. The Rest Is Quiz is packed with over 1000 brilliant questions to test your trivia knowledge against your friends and family. And from 1st of October to the 31st, you'll be able to pre order a copy from Waterstones for half price using the code REST2025 REST2025 capital R that is pre order your copy of the Rest is Quiz by Goal Hanger. From Waterstone, using the code REST with a capital R 2020.
- [19:57]
William Dalrymple
Welcome back. So we're now going to look at July, when operations resume after a break. And in Lydda on 12 July, Israeli forces who had believed the battle was over, encountered a small Arab Legion force entering the town, triggering what looked like an armed uprising. During the ensuing firefight, about 250 Palestinians sheltering in a mosque compound were killed by the men of the IDF UN Yifta Brigade. It was a sign of panic, a lack of confidence in the troops ability to hold the town of their inexperience in governing civilians, according to one account. Later, eyewitness accounts by Israeli participants ensured that the incident gained lasting notoriety. It was the biggest atrocity of the war. Another notorious incident was the expulsion of 50,000 Palestinians on Ben Gurion's orders to the Israeli commander, Yitzhak Rabin.
- [20:50]
Anita Anand
And I'm sure you know this, but Yitzhak Rabin would go on to be Prime Minister of Israel, serving two terms in office. In fact, the first Prime Minister to have been born in Mandatory Palestine, a.
- [21:01]
William Dalrymple
Man we'll be hearing more about in the years to come, who later described how the Prime Minister gestured with his hand and brusquely said, remove them. What's going on here, Eugene?
- [21:12]
Eugene Rogan
Well, you know, Willie, the cliche has it that war is hell. And the conduct of the Palestine War validated that aphorism in a level of inhumanity that I think certainly shocked the people of Palestine. But it comes for the international community in the aftermath of the far greater horrors of the Second World War. It's almost as though in the shadow of an atrocious war that had killed millions. What was going on in the quote, unquote, Holy Land was a smaller scale event. There was a lot of sympathy for an Israeli drive to secure statehood, but there was also a great deal of sympathy for Palestinian civilians who were at the blunt end of a murderous war machine. But between these two initiatives, I think the international community was completely paralyzed. And their inability to act through the United nations to try and bring the war to an end, which the international community was determined to do, you briefly rushed over a ceasefire that had been brokered by the UN and this is now the second round of fighting in the war. But the international community was completely incapable of stopping this drive for statehood by Israel.
- [22:25]
Anita Anand
And this paralysis, I mean, partially, who knows the psychology of these things, but we can try and think about it. The psychology of paralysis is that partly guilt driven that the Holocaust happened on their watch, that it was allowed to happen on European soil that, you know, there wasn't an intervention earlier. I mean, is all of that stuff also in the wind, even at these United nations conversations that are going on?
- [22:50]
Eugene Rogan
I think that there was a broad support for the Jews of Palestine, Jews now of Israel, the Israelis, to have their state of their own. But I wouldn't confuse it with the kind of Holocaust guilt that would be a defining feature of Europe's relations to Israel in the 1950s and 60s. I think at this early point, it was something different. It wasn't as strongly shaped or articulated. It took an educating of Western opinion for people to really grasp the magnitude of the horror of the Shoah, And I don't think that that education had taken place in the 1940s yet.
- [23:26]
William Dalrymple
But.
- [23:27]
Eugene Rogan
But it doesn't mean that the images of the liberation of the camps shocked the conscience of the world, for sure.
- [23:34]
William Dalrymple
Margaret Bourn White's photographs and all those.
- [23:36]
Eugene Rogan
Yes. So, you know, I think there was a lot of sympathy for the desperate bid for statehood by the new state of Israel. And the fact that both the Soviets and the Americans recognized Israel within minutes of Ben Gurion's declaration of statehood tells you everything you need to know about the international community's sympathies. On the eve of the first Arab.
- [23:55]
William Dalrymple
Israeli war, carrying on into now the end of July, so many people who will be major figures in the years to come have memoirs from this period from both sides. So we have, for example, George Habash, who becomes a major leader of one of the Palestine factions, plfp. He is at this point a medical student from Lydda's Greek Orthodox community. He's a Palestinian Christian and he writes in his memoirs he never forgot what he witnessed at this point in July, 30,000 people walking, crying, screaming with terror, women carrying babies in their arms and children clinging to their skirts, and Israeli soldiers pointing their weapons at their backs. Some people fell by the wayside and some did not rise again. It was terrible. And then we get against that. Rabin, who, in his memoirs, which were initially censored, though the original version subsequently leaks out, writes, driving out is a term with a harsh ring. Psychologically, this is one of the most difficult actions we undertook. The population of Lod did not leave willingly. There was no way avoiding the use of force and warning shots in order to make the inhabitants march the 10 to 15 miles to the point where they met up with the Arab Legion. And then there's other accounts. It's estimated that a further 100,000 Palestinians at this point become refugees in the course of those next 10 days alone, the feeling was bad, but we deceived ourselves that we would be back next week, recalled Abu Naim from Ijizem, south of Haifa. We did not feel as bad as we should have because we thought we would be back in a week or two. What happened, people imagined this was temporary, as if it was an outcome of rain or a flood. We will move for a week and then the flood will be over. This was the feeling that led to this catastrophe.
- [25:40]
Anita Anand
Eugene, what's going on with the Egyptian forces that you talked about, the Trans Jordanian forces, the Iraqi forces? I mean, where are they in all this time and what are they doing?
- [25:50]
Eugene Rogan
So immediately after the British withdrawal on 14 May 1948, Arab forces, by prearranged consultation, entered into the territory of Mandate Palestine. The Jordanians crossed the Jordan River. The Egyptians came in through the Sinai Peninsula, through the southern frontiers of Palestine. The Iraqis came to reinforce Jordanian positions in the west bank, taking the northern territories of the West Bank. And in the course of the war, small numbers of Syrian and Lebanese troops would make brief incursions into the north. But they were not adequately prepared to really make a sustained campaign against the new State of Israel. And the first goal of the entering Arab armies was to secure the territory that had been allocated to the Arab State of Palestine by the 1947 partition plan. So the Egyptians move up the Gaza Strip and in towards the area around Beersheba in the sort of southern reaches of Palestine in a long broad front to try and push Israeli forces back in that part of southern Palestine. The Jordanians secure their positions in the west bank of Palestine, but immediately find themselves being appealed to by the people of the Old City of Jerusalem, which was under siege. Israeli forces, the IDF, were determined to try and relieve the Jewish quarters of the Old City of Jerusalem, which was sealed off by the Arab communities. And the people of Jerusalem appealed to the Arab Legion to enter the city and to protect their positions before they fell. The thing that held Amir Abdullah back was his pledge to the British, who were still very influential in Jordan, that the Arab Legion would only be deployed to the territories allocated to the Arab State of Palestine. The city of Jerusalem itself had by the partition plan been left international. And so it was not to fall to either the Jewish or the Arab states. And Abdullah hesitated. But after three days of prevarication, he committed his troops and the Arab Legion enters Jerusalem. They force the security of the city and the city of Jerusalem is divided along east west lines, with West Jerusalem becoming Part of the emerging Jewish state and East Jerusalem remaining in the west bank under Jordanian rule.
- [28:13]
Anita Anand
But just circling back again to all of those people who are on foot trying to find somewhere safe. They do find their way to Gaza because Gaza is under the control of a young staff officer from Alexandria whose name you might remember from our Suez episode. His name is Gamal Abdel Nasser, who will become the future president of Egypt during that Suez crisis. And what does he do? I mean, he must be a relatively young man at this age where thousands are pouring in to Gaza looking to him for safety.
- [28:47]
Eugene Rogan
Well, we have Nasser's own account of his war experiences and they were not distinguished. He was deeply frustrated and felt betrayed by his top command and his government, who sent the army of Egypt into war without properly supplying them with modern munitions and adequate ammunition.
- [29:08]
William Dalrymple
Was this a deliberate thing or was it just they didn't have the munitions, that they were disorganized?
- [29:14]
Eugene Rogan
The situation's complicated, Willi. On the one hand, Egypt, like Transjordan and Iraq, had been under British domination, and Iraq and Transjordan having been mandates, their militaries were supplied uniquely by Britain. Britain had a monopoly there on the provision and the training of their militaries. Egypt was as well. What this meant was that Britain could turn the tap off on the supply of hardware and these countries had no alternate source at their disposal to provide for their militaries in the aftermath of the war. Jumping ahead a bit, there was to be a huge scandal in Egypt over the failure of Egyptian armies in Palestine, and the government was accused of corruption, ended, having bought shoddy old ammunition and material. I think it might have been their attempt to try and get around the British limitations, to try and find an alternate supply. And in the 1940s, there wasn't really an arms industry after World War II with a lot of surplus for the Egyptians to tap.
- [30:18]
William Dalrymple
Is it fair to say that the only Arab army which in any way performs well in the war of 1948, Islam Pasha's Arab Legion, they prove themselves to be fairly competent, don't they?
- [30:30]
Eugene Rogan
To answer your question briefly, yes. The Transjordanian army, the Arab Legion, came out of the 1948 war better than any of the other Arab armies. I would just say a word in defense of Egyptian forces, however inadequately they were provided, and they very quickly found themselves surrounded by Israeli forces. Nasser himself spends much of his war experiences under siege by the Israelis in a place called Fallujah, and this features very prominently in his own writings about his wartime experiences.
- [31:00]
William Dalrymple
This is not the Fallujah in Iraq that we.
- [31:02]
Eugene Rogan
Not the Fallujah in Iraq, this is a Fallujah in. In. In southern Palestine. And for Nasser, that time under siege was a time to really think about what was wrong at home. And as he said then, we here, we were fighting in Palestine, but our real home front is Egypt. And he would turn from Palestine to focus on Egypt.
- [31:21]
Anita Anand
Right, but while his gaze is still on Palestine, while he is sort of, you know, sort of in charge, if you like, you see a population of Gaza which was 80,000 sort of double overnight and then continue to increase as people pour in. What are the conditions like in Gaza? Do we know at that time for a population that it never was meant to sustain?
- [31:41]
Eugene Rogan
I mean, the misery for refugees seeking safety in Gaza is hard for us to imagine. Although, to be fair, the situation for those undergoing the current war in Gaza, also no homelessness and lacks of sanitation, water. So we have a point of comparison. But for the Palestinians entering Gaza in 1948, they obviously went well beyond the absorptive capacity of the territory to provide food, water, sanitation, housing. And they had no tents. They literally had to try and fend for themselves in open skies with no support for the international community, with very limited aid from the Egyptian forces who were prosecuting a war. They were truly the neglected of 1948, and their experiences are heartbreaking.
- [32:33]
William Dalrymple
And then in October, there is a new Israeli offensive into the Negev. It's called operation yoav, or 10 plagues. And this sort of surrounds Gaza, doesn't it?
- [32:44]
Eugene Rogan
So the final phases of the war were all about Israel trying to consolidate a defensible landmass. The thing about the UN partition resolution was that it made a checkerboard out of Palestine, where the territories of Jewish and Arab states met at what were called kiss points, where the territory sort of hit at a crossroads. And these are strategically indefensible. And the Israelis never looked on the 1947 partition map as a viable state. So part of the 1948 war was to secure defensible borders. And the territory along the Sinai frontier was held by the Egyptians. But down towards the Red Sea, it was Arab Legion forces holding the terrain. But these are areas with very low populations, largely Bedouin, mobile people. And so the Arab Legion did not feel it was in a position or really that it was a priority to try and save, let us say, the southern reaches of the Arava Desert and the Negev. And for the Israelis, it was their drive down to the Gulf of Aqaba, where they seized a small village and a small stretch of the Gulf of Aqaba's territory which would become Eilat, and in that way completing the territory that the Israelis would claim for their state at the end of 1948, but leaving a strip of land along the Mediterranean coastline that had been designated for the Arab state, based around the city of Gaza, heading north to Masjid and Ashdod and heading southeast along the frontier with the Sinai Peninsula. All territories that would be lost to the expansion of Israeli forces except for the Gaza Strip.
- [34:29]
William Dalrymple
And then the final military maneuvers of the IDS before the ceasefire between Egypt and Israel kicks in in January 1949, causes an influx of a further 33,000 refugees into Gaza, whose population has already tripled in less than a year. And again, we've got accounts of this. Arlette Khoury Tadiyeh, the daughter of a senior Palestinian official in Gaza, described her feelings as a child with regard to these enormous number of displaced people. We saw thousands of people arrive, all looking exhausted. They didn't even ask for anything to eat or drink when we offered them food. Sometimes they even refused it. Sometimes they threw themselves on it as if starving. We've never seen anything like it. The streets, which were, in general empty, suddenly pullulated with vast crowds who seemed to wander aimlessly. No one knew where these people were going and from what or whom they were fleeing. The main street was packed with people going in both directions. Some came by sea, arriving by boat down the coast from Jaffa, while others came wearily on foot from places close by.
- [35:39]
Anita Anand
Eugene, I have a question. I mean, I know certain sort of missionary groups try to get aid to the refugees that, you know, ones that we've just heard about, our friends, the Quakers. The Quakers are very much involved. But what about the United Nations? It was set up for precisely this kind of reason to help the helpless, you know, to sort of step in when people didn't have food and water. In this kind of war crisis, was there any department in the United nations dealing with refugees? What was it doing?
- [36:07]
Eugene Rogan
So the United nations scrambled to try and meet the humanitarian crisis as it was unfolding at the same time that it was trying to deal with the diplomacy of trying to do peacemaking and sending commissions of inquiry and trying to find a neutral territory. But, of course, the means of the international agencies were limited. And we know that the International Committee of the Red Cross was there, that they were keeping track of the declining health situation of the infant mortality.
- [36:37]
Anita Anand
Oh, sure, because you've got disease, right? I mean, you must have outbreaks with this many people. In a place that's not built to sustain life for this many people.
- [36:45]
William Dalrymple
Yes, we actually have records. I mean, this, again, is stuff that people have researched and written up. And the International Committee of the Red Cross estimates at this point that about 10 children die each day from hunger, cold, or lack of care. There's somebody called Mustafa Abdul Shafi, the only doctor practicing. The entire region, from the south of Gaza to the Egyptian frontier, lost count of the number of children who died of gastroenteritis or acute pneumonia. A refugee from Beit AFA who lost two of his eldest children when they were of a young age tells how. And this is a quote, an epidemic of measles was declared, but there were no medicines and no heating in our villages. We knew how to deal with children's ailments, but we were unable to do anything while we were in tents. And in that situation, there was no doctor, no medicines, and most of the children who were still breastfeeding were carried off by the measles. That's dreadful. Absolutely dreadful circumstances.
- [37:40]
Anita Anand
And these dreadful circumstances don't improve until March 1949. When you have the Turkish government suddenly come in with a delivery of aid, what do they bring, and does it make much of a difference?
- [37:54]
Eugene Rogan
As I recall, Anita, it's something like 3,000 tents, which, given the numbers of refugees who have flooded the Gaza Strip, we're talking about more than 200,000 people. You know, it seems obviously a very generous. But it's a drop in the bucket. The need for mobilized international aid is one of the first, most obvious things about the Palestine War of 1948. And it would take ages to be organized. And as it was organized, you saw what was to become the entrenchment of a refugee population. And maybe this is one of the unspoken tragedies of the 1948 war. It starts with Israel declaring statehood. And so you have the state of Israel, but the Palestinians never declared statehood in response. They were nameless. They were Arabs and they were refugees. And these are the names, you know, the Arabs and the refugees will be the bywords for the people of Palestine for years to come. And it almost leads to their erasure from this history as a distinct national group.
- [39:04]
William Dalrymple
We've seen on the Israeli side remarkable leaders like David Ben Gurion on the civil side, and extraordinary soldiers like Yitzhak Rabin and Dayan leading the military side. But the Palestinians don't seem to have an equivalent leadership who can rally the people and create a state and declare statehood to match that of the. The new Israeli state. What's going on. Why is it such a mess?
- [39:29]
Eugene Rogan
I think that for the Palestinians, the whole experience of the British mandate had been an effort by the British colonial powers to deny them leadership. They wanted to deny them agency. If anything, the British, right through the years of the mandate, had been most concerned about nationalism emerging from the Palestinian side to threaten Britain's position in Palestine. And they work closely with the Jewish Agency and with the Jewish Executive because they saw the Yishuv as a kind of client community that would work with Britain to help manage this unruly mandate of Palestine. So there had been a real attempt to prevent the Palestinians from organizing under a leadership. And the one leader who really stood out for Palestinians, Haj Amin Al Husseini, was in exile at this point. And the leading notables of the major cities had joined those going into refugee status or exile rather than organizing a sort of militia or military. At that stage, it was too late. And I think that you had a total imbalance in terms of preparation between the Yishuv and the Palestinians. And one will emerge from the 1948 war as a recognized state, and the other was going to, in a sense, disappear from the map for years to come.
- [40:48]
William Dalrymple
Today we're recording this fairly soon after the British recognition of the state of Palestine. Was there any sensation at the time that, you know, there should have been a second recognition that there was another group of people who had not been granted statehood or in the suffering and the mess and the chaos and the division and exile of the leadership, was it simply not discussed? It wasn't even on the horizon.
- [41:12]
Eugene Rogan
Willi, I've never seen any intimation that any British official pressed for the Palestinians to declare statehood. And I think the way, again, in which Palestinians were referred to as Arabs made them generic. And the idea was the resolution to this crisis might very well be a separation of Arab and Jew, where the Arabs displaced by war would find their citizen rights in neighboring Egypt or Transjordan or Syria or Lebanon, and that in this way the Arab world could absorb the Arab population of Palestine and leave the rest of the territory to the plucky new state of Israel.
- [41:53]
Anita Anand
Was there ever a voice after 1947, when the partition plan was turned down at the United nations, was there ever a Palestinian voice that said, actually, can we have a look at this again? And we do want a state, we do want to have a state, absolutely.
- [42:07]
Eugene Rogan
But I think you would have found right through 1947 that all Palestinian leaders were unwilling to concede their territory for the creation of a Jewish state. So they opposed and resisted the UN partition plan from the very beginning. And I don't think that they grew more reconciled to it as the threat of war loomed over them. I think that they entered into the war 1948 on the full expectation that the small and disorderly band of fighters in the Yishuv would be no match for the combined armies of the surrounding Arab states. And the tragedy of 1948, from the Arab perspective is the way they underestimated their foe. They went to war thinking it would be a walkover against an armed force they dismissed as mere Jewish gangs. Instead, they found a well organized, motivated army that beat them in every front. And the victims of this were to be the Palestinians themselves.
- [43:01]
Anita Anand
Yeah. And just the rest of the world. I'm just sort of very interested in what the geopolitics of the time was. Did they just think, this will go away, it'll just sort itself out, we don't need to think about this anymore? Or was there an international reckoning that this is going to be a hot point forevermore?
- [43:20]
Eugene Rogan
I don't think anyone in 1948 had the foresight to see how long the Arab Israeli conflict, and specifically the Palestinian Israeli conflict, would run. We can forgive them for not anticipating eight decades of conflict emerging from this fateful war war. But you know, the Pathe newsreels were buzzing in the cinemas of Britain and America with images of this war. The United nations was really tied up with debates about how to prevent the escalation and how to resolve this conflict. This was seen as a test of the validity and the, the relevance of the United nations as an international body. And it fails this test singularly. But this doesn't mean that the international community was unconcerned or unaware. They were, they just were ineffectual.
- [44:05]
Anita Anand
And the etymology is very important at this time. Words matter. So for the Palestinians, this is the catastrophe. This is the Nakba. For the Israelis, this is the birth of their nation. This is the war of independence. When you look back at sort of the history of the time, do you see the forks in the road, paths that could have been taken, which would mean that today we would have a region that was happy for the greatest number of people?
- [44:34]
Eugene Rogan
I mean, the short answer is no, Anita, because Palestine was marked out to be a territory that would be fought over by two rival and incompatible national movements, the Zionist movement of the Jews and an Arab Palestinian national movement. And in a sense for both sides, it has been a zero sum game. It's winner takes all. And so I think the challenge that we today, in 2025 face is not to go back over history and try and find the point where we made the wrong turn, but to learn from the past, from this experience where, if in a sense, it was all about demography, who would get the majority population to control Palestine in 2025? You're dealing with Palestinian, Arab and an Israeli Jewish population that are at parity, about 7.3 million each. And so now the challenge is to transcend history in the goal of finding a resolution that allows for cohabitation, because expulsion is not going to happen and extermination will not be tolerated. So cohabitation is what we have to take away from the experience of the 1948 war, and we better find it on better terms than they did back then.
- [45:45]
William Dalrymple
Over the last Gaza episodes, we've seen the history of Gaza move from the period of Thutmose III in, what was it, 1400 BC. We've seen the rise of the kind of golden moments of Gaza, like the Byzantines, with its school of rhetoric and its sort of erotic literary festivals. We've seen the Umayyads come and go. We've seen the Fatimids, the Crusaders, the Mamluks, the Ottomans. But we leave this series in Gaza with the 80,000 inhabitants of the coastal strip joined by more than 200,000 refugees cast adrift by history. Now, those refugees remain a major issue in world geopolitics in the years to come, and we may well come back to the subject for the next extraordinary phases of the history of Gaza, when Gaza remains as this throbbing wound which will not heal. And we see every day on our newsreels the result of the failures of history to save and provide for those refugees who ended up there in 1948. Thank you so, so much, Eugene. You've been with us from the beginning of this podcast. You took us through Ottoman history, you've now taken us with incredible care and with wonderful learning and neutrality through this most contested and dangerous of historical territory, where almost every event and every fact has two interpretations. We could not be more grateful to you and we will love to have you back on the podcast again. If we do take the history of Gaza forward in future, till the next.
- [47:29]
Anita Anand
Time we meet, it's goodbye from me.
- [47:30]
William Dalrymple
Anita Arnand, and goodbye from me, William Durrymple.