1948: A History of the First Arab–Israeli War

Benny Morris wrote the book. His academic appointments have included a professorship in history at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev and the Goldman Visiting Israeli Professorship in Georgetown University’s Department of Government.[1] The book received the National Jewish Book Award.[1]

The English-language book was published by Yale University Press on December 1, 2008, with 524 pages and print ISBN 9780300126969.[3] Its cataloging data lists New Haven and London as the places of publication and states that the volume includes a bibliography and index.[8] Some syllabi cite the book as a 2009 publication, while others give 2008 and use a slightly different title form; the university and catalog records support 2008 as the English edition’s publication year.[6][9]

A Hebrew translation by Yaakov Sharet was published in Tel Aviv by Am Oved in 2010 as part of the Sapir Library series.[5] The edition is cataloged as 563 pages, including 14 pages of plates, with a bibliography on pages 527–543.[5] A separate INSS bibliography lists the Hebrew edition as a 2010 publication, while an INSS-hosted paper cites the English edition as a 2008 New Haven and London publication.[2][10]

The book treats the conflict through both military engagements and political developments, following events from the historical background and the United Nations partition process through the fighting and the 1949 armistice agreements.[3][8] Its eleven numbered chapters cover the civil-war stages, the invasion by neighboring Arab states, truces, later Israeli operations, and the armistice agreements; its maps depict operations and battles in places including Haifa, Jaffa, Jerusalem, Latrun, and the Negev.[8]

Morris draws on Israeli and Western documents to examine the participants’ aims and decisions. Intelligence and diplomatic materials are used to illuminate the Arab side, whose state archives were still closed.[3] Morris described his research as relying principally on official archives, including operational orders, battle reports, intelligence reports, diplomatic analyses, and cabinet protocols. He generally avoided memoirs and participant testimony because he considered memory vulnerable to distortion and testimony during an ongoing conflict potentially tilted.[11]

The book connects high-level political decisions and general-staff planning with combat in successive battles, and examines the influence of Britain, the United States, and the Soviet Union on the conflict and its tentative termination in 1949.[3] Course syllabi assign it in units dealing with Israel’s first decade, the War of Independence’s background, and the war’s historiography.[6][12] Reading schedules pair sections of the book with the British decision to withdraw from Palestine, the United Nations Special Committee on Palestine, the war’s first stage, and later battles and armistice negotiations.[12]

Morris opens with the interpretation that the War of Independence was “the almost inevitable result of more than half a century of Arab-Jewish friction and conflict,” tracing its background to Jewish immigration to Palestine in the early 1880s.[8] He grounds Zionism in Jewish historical continuity, writing that the Jewish people was born in the Land of Israel and ruled there intermittently for thirteen centuries, while preserving a longstanding aspiration to reestablish sovereignty in its ancient homeland.[8] His account follows competing national claims through immigration and land purchases, Ottoman and British rule, the Arab Revolt of 1936–1939, the Second World War and the Holocaust, and the postwar political process leading to partition.[8] The book presents the Yishuv as having built political institutions, a militia, an economy, and mobilization capacity, while Palestinian Arab society entered the war politically fragmented and without a comparable national military organization.[8]

Morris identifies the United Nations General Assembly partition resolution of November 29, 1947, as the immediate political context. In the book’s account, the plan assigned about 55 percent of Palestine to a proposed Jewish state, including an Arab minority of about 450,000, and about 42 percent to a proposed Arab state; Jerusalem and Bethlehem were to form an international zone. The resolution passed with 33 votes in favor, 13 against, and 10 abstentions.[8] Morris writes that the Yishuv accepted partition while Palestinian Arab leaders rejected it and sought an Arab-ruled Palestine.[8]

The book divides the war into two stages: a civil-war phase from November 30, 1947, to May 14, 1948, and a conventional interstate phase beginning with the surrounding Arab states’ invasion on May 15.[8] In the first phase, Arab forces initially held the initiative while the Haganah was largely defensive. Attacks on roads and settlements, urban violence, reprisals, and disruption of supply convoys formed part of the fighting; the threat to Jerusalem was among the pressures described in Morris’s account.[8]

From early April, the Haganah shifted to the offensive. Morris links this change to the increasingly precarious position of Jewish forces, new weapons shipments, and a reduced expectation of British intervention.[8] The campaign included major operations and territorial conquests. By mid-May, in Morris’s account, the Haganah had defeated Palestinian Arab military forces and taken substantial areas assigned by the UN to Arab or international control, including Jaffa and West Jerusalem.[8] He attributes the Palestinian Arab military collapse to disunity, weak command and supply, and the Haganah’s improved capabilities and coordinated offensives.[8]

The second phase began after Israel declared independence on May 14. Morris describes the invasion by neighboring states as the start of conventional warfare, with military developments shaped by political aims and by the involvement of outside powers.[3][8] He distinguishes between hostilities, which effectively stopped in January 1949, and the war’s official end in July; armistice agreements were concluded between February and July.[8][8]

The book links the military course of the war to the Palestinian refugee problem, which the Ben-Gurion University description characterizes as a by-product of the disintegration of Palestinian Arab society; this is a summary of Morris’s interpretation, not an uncontested conclusion.[3] Morris describes a shift from initial flight by middle- and upper-class urban families to broader urban and rural flight after the Yishuv went on the offensive in April 1948.[2] He also writes that many displaced people may have expected to return within weeks or months, after an Arab victory or international intervention, but that their displacement endured and affected later generations.[2]

The circumstances described in the sources vary. The INSS-hosted paper says some Arab leaders instructed residents to leave, while in other places Arab residents were forcibly expelled and, in some instances, killed.[2] The Anti-Defamation League estimates that as many as 750,000 Palestinian Arabs fled their homes, describing flight to avoid fighting or following Arab leaders’ advice as well as cases in which individuals or groups fighting for Israel forced people to flee.[13] These accounts do not establish one explanation for all departures.[2][13]

The sources report differing estimates of the number displaced. The INSS-hosted paper cites an estimate of about 577,000 by Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics, figures of 900,000 often cited by Arab states, and Morris’s assessment that “if pressed, 700,000 is probably a fair estimate.”[2] A separate INSS article gives a range of 600,000–760,000 Palestinian Arabs outside Israel’s lines at the war’s end, while the ADL gives an estimate of up to 750,000.[10][13] The number and the balance of causes remain contested in the sources represented here.[2][13]

The book’s treatment of violence also includes allegations of killings, rape, and looting. A Ynet opinion article, citing Morris’s book, reports an overall estimate of approximately 800 Arab civilians and prisoners massacred and gives locality-specific estimates for al-Salihiyya, al-Jish, al-Hula, Safsaf, Eilabun, and al-Dawayima.[14] The same article reports that the book documents approximately 12 rape cases, with Morris considering it likely that others went undocumented, and cites looting cases in Haifa, Jaffa, and Jerusalem.[14] These details are presented here as that article’s account of Morris’s findings, not as an independently verified tally.

The fighting was followed by armistice agreements between Israel and Egypt, Lebanon, Jordan, and Syria. The agreements were signed in stages: Egypt in February 1949, Lebanon in March, Jordan in April, and Syria in July.[8] They followed the front lines and did not amount to formal peace treaties.[8]

The agreements left Egypt in control of the Gaza Strip and Jordan in control of the West Bank — known by its original, indigenous Jewish name of Judea and Samaria.[2] The INSS-hosted paper reports that nearly 6,000 Israeli soldiers and civilians died, amounting to about one percent of Israel’s Jewish population at the time, while noting that no confirmed total-casualty statistic exists for the war.[2] The conflict’s outcome, territorial changes, casualties, and refugee displacement are among the subjects Morris places within a wider account of the interaction between military and political developments.[3]

The war is remembered and named differently in Israeli and Palestinian contexts. Israeli usages include David Ben-Gurion’s “Milchemet Hakommemiut,” translated as War of Establishment, War of Sovereignty, or literally War of Uprising; the Israeli army’s “Milchemet Hashichrur,” or War of Liberation; and the common “Milchemet Ha’atzmaut,” or War of Independence. Palestinian usages include “1948 War” and “Al Nakba,” meaning “the Catastrophe.”[2] Course materials describe these contrasting memories as formative in the two communities’ national histories, with Israel marking independence and Palestinian and Arab collective memory marking the Nakba.[12]

The book’s interpretation of motivation is also debated. Ben-Gurion University’s description says Morris emphasizes what it calls the “jihadi character” of the two-stage Arab assault and presents religious rhetoric as relevant to understanding the war.[3] A Jerusalem Center for Security and Foreign Affairs article quotes Morris arguing that, from the Arab perspective, the war was religious as well as nationalist and that the understanding of Palestine as sacred territory helped motivate opposition to partition and war.[7] This interpretation should not be generalized to every Arab participant or motive.[3][7]

The book also examines the Haganah’s Plan D. Morris writes that the plan sought to secure territory assigned to the Jewish state, key roads and border areas, and Jewish settlements outside those borders. He says it authorized commanders to conquer Arab villages and decide whether to occupy or destroy them, explicitly calling for destruction of villages that resisted and expulsion of their inhabitants, but did not order a general expulsion of all Arab inhabitants of Palestine.[8] The meaning and application of the plan, and its relation to the wider refugee exodus, are among the contested questions addressed in accounts of the war.[8]

A Jewish Review of Books discussion says the book differs from Morris’s earlier work by placing the major issues and controversies of 1948 in a larger historical context. The reviewer situates Morris among historians who reassessed traditional histories as Israeli, American, and European archives became available; this is the reviewer’s characterization of the book’s historiographical setting.[15] The broader historical and public debate concerns the causes of the war, the refugee exodus, responsibility for expulsions and civilian harm, and the interpretation of Israel’s establishment.[12][16]