Birth Pangs of Israel; A Difficult Birth Indeed and of Staying Alive

Nadene Goldfoot                                            

         UN's 1947 Partition Plan for Israel  74 years ago.  Notice that southern Israel is desert land.  

The pains were starting; contractions indicating that President Truman had to get on board to back the birth of Israel.  Eddie Jacobson, former Jewish business partner and friend of Truman's in the Haberdashery Business, followed the news carefully and knew what was happening to the Jews in Germany before and during World War II. 

                                                                            

                  Eddie Jacobson and Harry Truman in their Haberdashery store 

 After he heard about the post-war reports regarding the Nazi holocaust and its survivors, his talks with Truman were about how to help these Jewish people.   Jewish leaders stepped up and asked Jacobson to lobby Truman about them deserving the Jewish State which would be voted on in the UN.   Jacobson approached the White House on March 13, 1948  and persuaded Truman to meet with the leader of the Zionist movement, Dr. Chaim Weizmann.

                                                       

                                                  Truman and Weizmann    

The White House advisors were split.  Clark Clifford was for it,  but Secretary of State George Marshall was against it                                                                                                                                                               

      George Marshall   rose through the United States Army to become Chief of Staff under presidents Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry S. Truman, then served as Secretary of State and Secretary of Defense under Truman.   Marshall was a retired general and very much respected.  His reasoning, he explained was that it would look like he was pandering for Jewish votes.  Another reason was that it might endanger access to Arab oil.  He threatened Truman by saying that if Truman recognized the new state, then he would vote against him in the coming election.  The threat didn't work with Truman.  2 days later, Israel was born at the stroke of midnight, Jerusalem time.  The USA announced its recognition of the new nation 11 minutes later.  May 14, 1948 was the day that would go down in history.

 Clark McAdams Clifford was an American lawyer who served as an important political adviser to Democratic presidents Harry S. Truman, John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson, and Jimmy Carter.                                                                   

Truman was one hurdle, but the State Department did not want to provide the Jews with the means to defend themselves.  The US Undersecretary of State, Robert Lovett,  argued that "the Arabs might use arms of US origin against the Jews.  Jews might use them against Arabs.  So, on December 5, 1947, the US had imposed an arms embargo on the region.

State Department people saw the embargo as a means of obstructing partition.  Truman went along with it as a means to avert bloodshed.  Here he was being very naive since Britain's rejection of Lovett's request to suspend weapons shipments to the Arabs and subsequent agreements to provide additional arms to Iraq and Transjordan were in the works. Britain brazenly backed the Arabs.  They let Arabs in the land but kept Jews out.                                                                           

British Leaving Palestine on the day of the expiration of their 30 year mandate-- British troops, their families and the 6th Airborne Division embarking on the 'Franconia', leaving Palestine May 15, 1948 Israel Washington, National archives.  

They had left Palestine knowing that the Jews had no weapons.  They had made sure of that.  

The fact was that Arab had no difficulty obtaining all the arms they needed.  In fact, Jordan's Arab Legion was armed and trained by the British, and led by a British officer.  At the end of 1948 and beginning of 1949, British RAF planes flew with Egyptian squadrons over the Israel-Egypt border.  The odds were completely against Israel.  

The Jews were forced to smuggle weapons, principally from Czechoslovakia.  On May 14, 1948, the IDF didn't have a single cannon or tank.  Its air force consisted of 9 obsolete planes.  Although the Haganah, Israel's watchmen, had 60,000 trained fighters, only 18,000 were fully mobilized, armed and prepared for war.  

May 15, the day the British left, the armies of 5 neighbor Arab states invaded Israel.  They came from the north, east and south and were Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Egypt and Transjordan.  They tried to destroy the new-born state but failed.  Because of their cruel aggression, the Arabs wound up with less territory than they would have had if they had accepted partition. 

The newborn state was badly injured.  Many of its most productive fields lay gutted and mined.  Its orange and lemon groves, for decades the basis of the Yishuv's economy, were largely destroyed.  Military expenditures totaled about $500 million.  6,373  Jews were slaughtered, nearly 1% of the Jewish population of 650,000.                                                                   

Haganah (Defence) had succeeded Ha-Shomer in 1920 and existed until 1948. The British had not been defending Jews from Arab assaults, so the Jews were forced to defend themselves.  It strengthened itself after the 1929 serious attacks of Arab riots that resulted in British appeasement and backed the stronger side, the Arabs. 

The Jewish underground forces now united. The Haganah had resisted attacking the British as long as they were fighting Nazi Germany. Now their fighters allied themselves with Irgun and carried out several raids against the British. Stanley Goldfoot, our cousin,  was Chief of Intelligence of the Stern Group, led by Abraham Stern.  Stern Group was also called Lehi.  Used to conventional fighting in Europe, British troops found it difficult to deal with the violent actions of Irgun and LHI.                                                      

          David Ben Gurion and Albert Einstein 

Out of Haganah was created the Israel Defense Force (IDF) on May 26, 1948. They  included the other militant groups, Irgun and Lehi.  David Ben Gurion was the founder.   His first order was the formation of the IDF – The Israel Defense Forces.  The IDF was based on the personnel who had served in the Haganah and the Palmach and was declared as the only legal armed force in Israel. Another main source of manpower were the immigrants from Europe. Some of them Holocaust survivors and others veterans from World War II.

When the British Mandate of Palestine expired on 14 May 1948, and with the Declaration of the Establishment of the State of Israel, the surrounding Arab states—Egypt, Transjordan, Iraq and Syria—invaded what had just ceased to be Mandatory Palestine, and immediately attacked Israeli forces and several Jewish  towns. The conflict thus escalated and became the 1948 Arab–Israeli War.                               

    Jews just out of Prison-Detention-Death camps joined the 1948 War of Independence

In the initial phase of the war, the IDF was inferior in both numbers and armament. Invading Arab armies boasted 270 tanks, 150 field guns and 300 aircraft. The IDF had zero planes and three tanks. Due to a number of reasons, the Arabs never managed to exploit their superiority in numbers. The Israelis managed to successfully defend themselves in virtually all battlefields with the notable exception of East Jerusalem. After the first truce 11 June to 8 July, the Israelis managed to seize the initiative due to new troop enrollments and supplies of arms. Notable achievements of the IDF include the conquest of Eilat (Um Rashrash), Nazareth, and the capture of the Galilee and the Negev.

The war continued until 20 July 1949, when the armistice with Syria was signed. By then the IDF had managed to repel the Egyptians to the Gaza Strip while Jordan took over the West Bank, including East Jerusalem.

Following the Second World War, 250,000 Jewish refugees were stranded in displaced persons camps in Europe. Despite the pressure of world opinion - in particular the repeated requests of US President Harry Truman - the British refused to lift the ban on immigration and admit 100,000 Jews to Palestine.

Regardless of how many people denigrate Israel today because the death toll was not even, or, how much the US Senate "squad" pressures Biden to stop Israel from attacking Hamas terrorists in defense, I know what our people have been going through and I am just so darn proud of our Israel and know how much they have been keeping to their moral convictions-far more than any other country has.  Like they say, War is hell, so one shouldn't start one, should they!  It's a terrible lesson, but quit picking on Israel.  Israel is home to stay. They are not going away!   

Resource;

Eye to Eye by William Koenig

The New Standard Jewish Encyclopedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israel_Defense_Forces

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Israel_Defense_Forces