195670 Resource 152626 152857 152857 1201308735082 1201811322602 Controlled February-April 1948: Moving Toward an Independent Jewish State as Britain's Mandate Ends

Sixty years ago, events in Palestine set in motion an inevitable coming clash of Arabs and Jews over refugees and Jerusalem—Part Two

<p><table style="WIDTH: 23.07%; HEIGHT: 315px" cellspacing="5" cellpadding="5" align="right" border="1"><tbody><tr><td><img style="WIDTH: 346px; HEIGHT: 233px" height="233" alt="Jerusalem in 1948" hspace="0" src="http://i33.photobucket.com/albums/d71/gstepp525/soldier.jpg" width="346" align="baseline" border="0" /></td></tr><tr><td><font size="1"><p><font size="1">Jewish soldiers in an abandoned Palestinian house in Qatamoun, West Jerusalem, 1948. GPO/AIC photo</font>.</p></font></td></tr></tbody></table>In February 1948, Ben-Gurion gave orders to the Haganah (the Jewish underground) to take possession of more Arab areas in West Jerusalem and to populate them with Jews. </p><p>In March, the Haganah agreed on offensive actions (<a title="Plan D" href="http://www.mideastweb.org/pland.htm" target="_blank">Plan D[alet]</a>) against the Palestinians, including the expulsion of the population of entire Arab villages. </p><p>On March 31 Ben-Gurion met with Haganah leaders and ordered an attack on the Arab village of Kastel, which overlooked the Tel Aviv–Jerusalem road. Several weeks before the official British withdrawal, the plan became operational, with a view to opening a corridor from the coast to Jerusalem (Operation Nachshon), and annexing "as much of the city as possible to the Jewish state" (Michael Hudson, "Transformation of Jerusalem," 258). </p><p>Though Ben-Gurion later claimed that the Negev was his first priority (<em>Memoirs</em>, 136-7), based on interviews with Yigal Allon, Yigael Yadin and Ben-Gurion, foreign correspondent Dan Kurzman wrote: "The full impact of his lifelong obsession with the Bible struck with blistering force when it appeared that Jerusalem would fall to the Arabs and perhaps be lost forever to the Jewish state. Whatever happened to any other Jewish areas, the Holy City must be saved. It was the soul of the Jewish people, the fount of the light to be cast unto the nations. He had agreed that it be internationalized as a <em>temporary</em> concession. But an Arab flag over Jerusalem? Not for one minute!" (<em>Ben-Gurion</em>, 279). </p><p>The stage was set for a decades long clash over <a title="Jerusalem: The Fragile Mosaic" href="http://www.vision.org/visionmedia/article.aspx?id=367" target="_blank">Jerusalem</a> as well as the Palestinian refugee question. </p><p /><p /><p /><div style="MARGIN: 10px"><a href="http://www.naymz.com/search/david/hulme/1542979"><img title="Naymz Profile for Dr. David Hulme" alt="Naymz Profile for Dr. David Hulme" src="http://www.naymz.com/img/badge.gif" border="0" /></a></div> 10 application/xml false Ben Gurion British Mandate Independent Jewish State Kastel Operation Nachshon West Jerusalem Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 5.1; Avant Browser; SU 3.005; .NET CLR 1.0.3705; .NET CLR 1.1.4322; InfoPath.1; .NET CLR 2.0.50727) 127.0.0.1 127.0.0.1 dhulme 216.175.64.55 false true false false true 189433 false false true false false false true 152626 blog blogsite/VisionMagazine/web