The Liberation and The Catastrophe: The Deadly Founding of Israel, May 14, 1948

[Valin]

Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training

 

On May 15, 1948, the UK withdrew from Palestine. (It had been given a mandate over the territories after it defeated the Ottomans in World War I.) The evening before, David Ben-Gurion, President of the Jewish Agency for Palestine, declared Israel’s statehood and independence. This prompted the Syrian, Egyptian, Jordanian, Iraqi, and Saudi Arabian armies to invade Israel. Thus began the 1948 Arab-Israeli War. Despite being heavily outnumbered, the Israelis beat back all of their attackers and established Israel as a state. To this day the war is known as the War of Independence in Hebrew and The Catastrophe in Arabic. President Truman notably recognized the State of Israel eleven minutes after its founding, making the United States the first country to do so. Some of the heaviest fighting occurred in Jerusalem, and several American diplomats witnessed it firsthand. Ultimately, about 700,000 Jews immigrated to Israel, while some 700,000 Palestinian Arabs fled or were expelled and became refugees. Wells Stabler, at the time a vice consul and later an ambassador, had a few close calls with the violence that broke out and tragically watched several of his colleagues die, including Consul General Tom Wasson. In these excerpts, he tells of his experiences in Jerusalem at the beginning of the conflict. He was interviewed by Charles Stuart Kennedy in 1991.

 

The UK pulls out…

 

STABLER: Obviously everybody recognized there would be utter chaos and almost anarchy once the British left.… One can sympathize with the British because this had become an enormous burden to bear, extremely expensive in terms of money and lives with no returns, which they had been carrying on for a great many years. There was no way that they were going to be persuaded to stay on…. They may have considered it for a while, but by that time the Labour Government had come in and I think that they finally just realized that there was no way they could do it or really wanted to do it.

 

(Snip)

 

So, during that period we were pretty much holed up. You could get around and some people lived outside the Consulate General. I lived in the Consulate General and slept with a telephone and Tommy Gun [Thompson sub-machine gun] by my bed. We ate “Ten-in-One” rations that had been brought in before.

 

Q: Ten-in-One rations being a military combat type of ration.

 

STABLER: Yes, enough food for one man for ten days or for ten men for one day, something of that sort. The U.S. Air Force had flown in a supply from Germany, I recall, some days before the British left.

 

Q: I might add, not the greatest food in the world.

 

STABLER: Not the greatest, but it was the only food we had, because all the markets were closed.

 

Finally in mid-June 1948 the UN was able to arrange a 30-day ceasefire and Count Bernadotte, the UN Mediator, came to Jerusalem. The guns were silenced and people began to go out in the streets.