I'm pretty sure Memri went back and translated some of the calls from Arab political and religious leaders on radio which were nothing short of calls for absolute extermination. So do I think the Arab armies would've committed the massacres on the first pass through? Not if it risked their military goals. But based on the calls for Jihad as it was being directed, I would argue that the general Arab population as they moved into previously Jewish areas would have had little interest in getting them to boats so they could be safely re-settled elsewhere....
Would there be a mass genocide against Israelis if Israel lost the 1948 War?
- Thread starter THE KINGFISH
- Start date
Gigi Gold
Banned
In addition to what is said in the newest post about the radio broadcasts, even though they can genuinely fall down on things like the massacre, I would broadly trust the JVL as a source far more than someone like Khalidi (who tends to leave out how rich his family got selling land to zionist buyers in the years before 1948)
How many Jews survived from the settlements on what became the West Bank?
Especially as the experience of the Tutsis in the Rwandan Genocide, where 800,000 Tutsis were killed in 100 days with machetes, illustrate how gas chambers, artificial famines, or even firing squads are unnecessary for genocide. In many ways, the real horror of Rwanda was not just the international inaction over what happened but also because of how the method of genocide was the machete, not the gas chamber, with the genocide occuring over a hundred days.
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And just what do you think the rest of the world would do to stop it? Would the Jew hating Stalin act. No, he sold weapons to Israel because it served his interest at the time to frustrate the British in the broader ME, but as with the Spanish Republicans when they were defeated, he cut his losses. Truman recognized the Jewish State, but a military intervention. No way. The British washed their hands of the whole mess and expected the Jews to be wiped out. In 1948 France was tied down in the Indochina War. No one was going to do anything but talk.
This pretty much sums up what I think would have happened. The Jordanian Legion stopped violence in the areas they operated in, so while there probably would have been mass killings and violence the idea that every last Jew would die is a bit of a stretch (which isn't to say that what would have occurred if the Arabs won wouldn’t have been a crime against humanity. It absolutely would have been.)
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Memri has come under fire for mistranslating certain things, and has also downplayed/justified other war crimes, so I'm rather skeptical of them as a rule. There would have definitely been mass violence and ethnic cleansing but I honestly doubt that every last Jew would have been exterminated (especially since as mentioned the Jordanian Legion did stop mass killings).
It was pretty much a war where both sides were racist ethnic cleansing jerks (the Israelis only slightly edging out the invading Arab Armies, with the Palestinian civilians expelled being the most innocent).
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I don't think there would have been a genocide per-say, but there would have been severe and significant expulsions at the very least. The Palestinian militias who fought in that conflict weren't exactly popular with the Egyptians, Jordanians and Syrians, so attempts at reprisals would have occurred but probably not spread out given Egypt and Jordan were still British clients at this point. The Hashemites at this point might have probably tried to take charge of the situation since they had the most positive political relationship with Jewish mandate leaders and the most professional military.
Given this is still in the peak period of the United Nations, I'd be shocked if a peacekeeping force wouldn't have descended on the Mandate to protect the Jewish population once the full scope of the defeat was clear. Whether or not said peacekeeping force would have any role to play in insisting the Jewish settlers be allowed to remain in Israel-Palestine is another question. The Arab coalition would fall apart quickly in the case of victory, and realistically an independent Palestine with a sizeable Jewish minority isn't going to be a peaceful one. And the Arabs are going to have the ability to magnify and highlight any war crimes the Jews committed against Arab communities and will be able to hide Palestinian war crimes much better to obfuscate the whole situation.
The remaining Jews would immediately rearm and prepare for pogroms and the Palestinian leadership would have expanded their militias even before they established an actual government. I can't see the entire Jewish population (migrant or established) leaving because realistically there weren't a lot of countries open to them at the time, but I could see Latin America and South America as two destination possibilities.
I think a scenario where the Arabs win the war would ultimately have to lead to a compromise candidate in order to keep the Jews in the country and keep them and the Palestinians from killing each other. To me, that screams a Hashemite king. King Abdullah I of Jordan is the obvious candidate, since both his nephew Abd al-Illah (son of the las King of Hejaz) and his brother Zeid (only Hashemite brother not to receive a kingdom but later became claimant to Iraq and Syria) were serving in the Iraqi royal government.
Now, Israel-Jordan-Palestine sounds very convoluted, so there might be a Hashemite Kingdom of Palestine (and the Jews can grit their teeth about there being no Israel / Judea), there might be a unitary naming of the Hashemite Kingdom of Canaan (it covers most of the region), or the Hashemites might just stick with Jordan long enough to look at pursuing Syria again, which was blown up by the '48 war happening.
Given this is still in the peak period of the United Nations, I'd be shocked if a peacekeeping force wouldn't have descended on the Mandate to protect the Jewish population once the full scope of the defeat was clear. Whether or not said peacekeeping force would have any role to play in insisting the Jewish settlers be allowed to remain in Israel-Palestine is another question. The Arab coalition would fall apart quickly in the case of victory, and realistically an independent Palestine with a sizeable Jewish minority isn't going to be a peaceful one. And the Arabs are going to have the ability to magnify and highlight any war crimes the Jews committed against Arab communities and will be able to hide Palestinian war crimes much better to obfuscate the whole situation.
The remaining Jews would immediately rearm and prepare for pogroms and the Palestinian leadership would have expanded their militias even before they established an actual government. I can't see the entire Jewish population (migrant or established) leaving because realistically there weren't a lot of countries open to them at the time, but I could see Latin America and South America as two destination possibilities.
I think a scenario where the Arabs win the war would ultimately have to lead to a compromise candidate in order to keep the Jews in the country and keep them and the Palestinians from killing each other. To me, that screams a Hashemite king. King Abdullah I of Jordan is the obvious candidate, since both his nephew Abd al-Illah (son of the las King of Hejaz) and his brother Zeid (only Hashemite brother not to receive a kingdom but later became claimant to Iraq and Syria) were serving in the Iraqi royal government.
Now, Israel-Jordan-Palestine sounds very convoluted, so there might be a Hashemite Kingdom of Palestine (and the Jews can grit their teeth about there being no Israel / Judea), there might be a unitary naming of the Hashemite Kingdom of Canaan (it covers most of the region), or the Hashemites might just stick with Jordan long enough to look at pursuing Syria again, which was blown up by the '48 war happening.
Respectfully I think your being a romantic. There was no room for any of this. What countries were going to send peace keeping troops? That's what the British tried to do and failed. no one could or would stop the killing. Each Arab country would take the parts of Palestine they wanted leaving nothing for ether Jews or Palestinian Arabs. Jordan would end up with what it got plus Jerusalem. Galilei would go to Syria, and Lebanon. Egypt would get Gaza. If the Palestinians get anything it would be the coastal plain of what is now Israel, with Tel Aviv plowed under, and the Negev which no one wanted. I doubt if the Palestinians would accept a Hashemite king. They were too divided and radicalized for anything so reactionary.
This would be the same Jordanian legion that blew up EVERY synagogue in Hashemite occupied Jerusalem.
It's 1948, two years ahead of the Korean War and three years fresh off World War 2. Do you really think the Americans couldn't mobilize their assets in Europe and MENA under a UN command badge? The British bowed out of Israel-Palestine at a time of rapid decolonization after thirty years of trying to keep a lid on the conflict through policing actions. They couldn't afford to keep Mandate. The Americans easily could, and as one of the countries with the biggest and most influential Jewish voting bloc, are the most likely.
In regards to the Palestine split...
The Egyptians in OTL maintained a satellite government in Gaza known as the All-Palestine Government up until 1967 in opposition to the Jordanian annexation of the West Bank and their claim to Arab Palestine. They were supported in this anti-Jordanian effort by the Saudis and Syrians, while the Iraqis were somewhat more neutral. The Jordanians also had ambitions to reunify Greater Syria, with the Syrian government at the time actively concerned the Jordanian military and its own Druz population making an alliance to that effect.
The Egyptians and Syrians actively used the Palestinian cause as a lever against Hashemite ambitions in OTL, but in reality it took a long time for the Palestinian cause to separate itself from Hashemite paternalism. Not to mention, the Jordanians actually had some measure of support from the Americans (see the Jericho Conference) to absorb 'Arab Palestine' in OTL in 1948 and secure relations with Israel. Arab opposition to this decision delayed the annexation, but it didn't prevent it. Palestinian voices at the time were largely unopposed to a Hashemite kingship (outside of Husseini who was largely ignored after the disaster that was the '48 war and fled the West Bank for Egypt), with their major concerns being the Hashemites potentially ceding the rest of the Mandate rather than fighting on.
So where does that leave us? Jordan has the most professional military. It has control of Jerusalem. It has the best political relationship with the Jewish communities in the Mandate, dating back to 1919. It has the political support of the Americans and the British. It has the apathy, conditional support, full throated support or neutrality of most of the major Palestinian figures. In 1948, it's definitely not inconceivable that they can grab it all.
However, that's not pretending that everything is sunshine afterwards. It's in the wake of 1948, as time goes on and battle lines are drawn that something like the APG bodes poorly for the Hashemite regime. Iraq fell to revolution in 1958, and in this scenario we could get a much worse version of Black September much earlier in this scenario to mirror that, with this Palestinian Civil War ending up with an APG / HP merger under a United Arab Republic equivalent. That's the point / period where I'd be looking at for major problems for the Palestinian Jewish population, having been kept from boiling over for a decade since the 1948 War.
The population of Israel was only 806,000 at 1948, so I don't think that would be justified. The population increase really hit after 1948 when they could have unchecked immigration rather than deal with the British. The Jordanians and Palestinians combined would have 1.80 million (0.43 and 1.37), with only 60 thousand to 80 thousand of that in Gaza. Jordan does have reserved seating in Parliament though, so the Jews would have had their own reserved seats. IRL there's nine seats reserved for Christians, three are for Chechen and Circassian minorities, and fifteen for women out of 130 seats.
406 thousand of the Jewish population at that time had migrated to Palestine between 1919 and 1948, which is about half the population. How many of those would want to stay if Israel isn't a possibility / reality? And where do the 688,000 immigrants of 1948-1950 go, if they decide not to go to Palestine?
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Arab rhetoric towards Israel and Jews, then and to an extent now if you look at specifically anti-Israel political groups/states (obviously now there are Arabs who have accepted the existence of Israel) is very clear.
The stage for genocide was absolutely being set up, and most assuredly would have been attempted. As a rule the Holocaust is an exceptional case, and should generally not be used as an exemplar to measure "genocide." Basically, and I say this as someone of partial Jewish descent, that you don't get anywhere in studying genocide by comparing genocides other than the Holocaust, to the Holocaust. Not because it was "objectively the worst" or something like that, but simply because it's mechanics and context were unique enough that it is generally not analytically useful. It's difficult, and maybe pointless to argue about definitions of genocide in a case in which it genuinely just didn't end up happening in our timeline though, but whatever.
It seems likely that the Arabs would have massacred soldiers and civilians, perhaps not with industrial efficiency, but the Rwandan genocide's main tool was the machete. Nobody but an idiot or bad actor would argue that what happened in Rwanda wasn't a genocide. Using Bosnia as an example, to some (stupid) controversy from deniers like Chonsky, one can even primarily target military aged men and it still be genocide. Hell we have documents from Hitler which order significantly larger proportions of Jewish men to be eliminated first. If the Arabs just go about ""targeting the men"" it's still genocide.
Perhaps the British led Arab Legion, would protect civilians, but that's one military unit that can't be everywhere at once, or, as a matter of fact, many places at once.
Even if the western powers choose to intervene, it's too late, the war is over. They may step in and help with humanitarian relief but that's about it, and that's still a maybe. The perception at the time was that Israel was fighting for survival, and still nobody lifted a finger.
The stage for genocide was absolutely being set up, and most assuredly would have been attempted. As a rule the Holocaust is an exceptional case, and should generally not be used as an exemplar to measure "genocide." Basically, and I say this as someone of partial Jewish descent, that you don't get anywhere in studying genocide by comparing genocides other than the Holocaust, to the Holocaust. Not because it was "objectively the worst" or something like that, but simply because it's mechanics and context were unique enough that it is generally not analytically useful. It's difficult, and maybe pointless to argue about definitions of genocide in a case in which it genuinely just didn't end up happening in our timeline though, but whatever.
It seems likely that the Arabs would have massacred soldiers and civilians, perhaps not with industrial efficiency, but the Rwandan genocide's main tool was the machete. Nobody but an idiot or bad actor would argue that what happened in Rwanda wasn't a genocide. Using Bosnia as an example, to some (stupid) controversy from deniers like Chonsky, one can even primarily target military aged men and it still be genocide. Hell we have documents from Hitler which order significantly larger proportions of Jewish men to be eliminated first. If the Arabs just go about ""targeting the men"" it's still genocide.
Perhaps the British led Arab Legion, would protect civilians, but that's one military unit that can't be everywhere at once, or, as a matter of fact, many places at once.
Even if the western powers choose to intervene, it's too late, the war is over. They may step in and help with humanitarian relief but that's about it, and that's still a maybe. The perception at the time was that Israel was fighting for survival, and still nobody lifted a finger.
Again the JVL omits more (they lied about how the Yishuv conducted themselves or the fact they were planning ethic cleansing for decades). That’s worse.
So no, trusting what the JVL had to say on the 1948 war is folly.
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Yep.
Also, something many seems to forget/not taught well (not simply in this context, mind you) is that a large part of the Holocaust wasn't simply putting Jewish people in camps. It included death squads mass executing any Jews they could find. It included local collaboration forces gladly assisting in this.
As Rwanda was a genocide via machete, a significant part of the Shoah was death squads, bullets, knives, and bombs, just as much as it was of trains and gas chambers.
I'm sorry I don't. By the spring of 1948 the U.S. was dealing with the dual crisis of the Czech Coup, and the Berlin Blockade. The U.S. army had 10 understrength divisions with 3 in Europe, 4 in Japan, with troops in South Korea, that would be pulled out the next year. The USMC had the equivalent of 1 division. The Truman Administration had gutted the armed forces in the mistaken belief that they could save money on conventional forces because any future wars would be nuclear. Oddly the nuclear arsenal was also almost bare.
The decision to recognize Israel was the most divisive debate in the history of the Truman Administration. The dominant faction in the State Department opposed any support of Zionism because it would poison future relationships with the Arab World. A military intervention to save the Jews would create an even worse firestorm. Truman was a genuine pro Zionist, which made him an oddity in his own Government. The public had no appetite for that kind of humanitarian intervention, and most importantly there was no time to put anything together before it was too late anyway.
All that you say is true, but we don't know how the politics of the Arab World would change with a successful war against Israel. The Arab defeat of 1948 helped lead to a radicalization of Arab politics. The Egyptian monarchy was overthrown, and the country became a radical Socialist Arab Republic, opposed to the West, and the Hashemite kingdoms, and the Gulf States. Inter-Arab relations are always complex, and ever shifting. Any way you look at it the Palestinians would be pawns in the power struggles of the Arab States. No Arab State was really interested in what was best for the Palestinian People. Being in an endless war with Israel and having no real allies the Palestinians have always been screwed.