Israel's Early History

Immediately after the declaration of the new state of Israel, changes happened. The leading superpower leaders of U.S. President Harry S. Truman and Soviet leader Joseph Stalin recognized Israel. At the same time, the Arab League members of Egypt, Transjordan, Syria, Lebanon, and Iraq refused to accept the UN partition plan. They believed in the right of self-determination of the Arabic people throughout Palestine. The Arabic states marched their forces into what had until the previous day was the British Mandate for Palestine. In that way, the first Arabic-Israel War started in 1948. The Arabic states had mighty military equipment. They initiated the offensive. The Jewish forces were not a state before May 15th and they could not buy heavy arms. By May 29, 1948, the British initiated United Nations Security Council Resolution 50. This called an arms embargo on the region. Czechoslovakia violated the resolution by supplying the Jewish state with critical military hardware to match the mainly British heavy equipment and planes already owned by the Arabic states. By June 11, a month long UN truce was put into effect. After independence, the Haganah became the IDF or the Israel Defense Forces. The Plmach, Etzel, and Lehi were required to stop independent operations and join the IDF. During the ceasefire, the Etzel tried to bring the private arms shipment abroad a ship called “Altalena.” When they refused to hand the arms to the government, Ben-Gurion ordered that the ship be sunk. Several Etzel members were killed during the fighting. A large number of Jewish immigrants (many of them were World War II veterans and Holocaust survivors) began to arrive in the new state of Israel. Many of them joined the IDF. At first during the Arabic-Israel war, there was a loss of territory by the Jewish State. It was occupied by Arabic armies. From July, the tide gradually turned in the Israelis’ favor and they pushed the Arabic armies out. They conquered some of the territory that had been included in the proposed Arabic state. By the end of November, tenuous local ceasefires were arranged between the Israelis, Syrians and Lebanese. On December 1, 1948, King Abdullah announced the union of Transjordan with Arab Palestine west of the Jordan; only Britain recognized the annexation.



Many Palestinians were displaced by the war and many Palestinians were uprooted from their homes, which has been called by them as the Nabka or the catastrophe in Arabic. Israel signed armistices with Egypt on February 24, 1949, Lebanon on March 23, 1949, with Jordan on April 3, 1949, and with Syria on July 20, 1949. There was no actual peace agreement signed. This permanent ceasefire came into effect. Israel’s new borders were born being called the 1949 Green Line. These borders were not recognized by the Arabic states as internationally boundaries. The IDF overran Galilee, Jezreel Valley, West Jerusalem, the coastal plain, and the Negev. The Syrians remained in control of a strip of territory along the Sea of Galilee originally allocated to the Jewish state. The Lebanese occupied a tiny area at Rosh Hanikra. The Egyptians retained the Gaza Strip. They had forces surrounded inside Israeli territory. Jordanian forces remained in the West Bank where the British had stationed them before the war. Jordan annexed areas it occupied while Egypt kept Gaza as an occupied zone. After the ceasefire declaration, Britain released over 2,000 Jewish detainees it was still holding in Cyprus and recognized the state of Israel. By May 11, 1949, Israel was admitted as a member of the United Nations. Out of an Israeli population of 650,000, some 6,000 men and women were killed in the fighting, including 4,000 soldiers in the IDF. According to United Nations figures, 726,000 Palestinians had fled or were evicted by the Israelis between 1947 and 1949. Except in Jordan, the Palestinian refugees were settled in large refugee camps in poor, overcrowded conditions. In December 1949, the UN (in response to a British proposal) established an agency (UNRWA) to provide aid to the Palestinian refugees. It became the largest single UN agency and is the only UN agency that serves a single people.

The Knesset or the 120 Israeli Parliament met first in Tel Aviv and moved into Jerusalem after the 1949 ceasefire. In January of 1949, Israel held its first elections. The Socialist-Zionist parties Mapai and Mapam won the most seats (in 46 and 19 respectively). David Ben-Gurion was Mapai’s leader. He was appointed Prime Minister. He formed a coalition which didn’t include Mapam, who were Stalinist and loyal to the USSR (another Stalinist party non-Zionist Maki won 4 seats). The Knesset elected Chaim Weizmann as the first (largely ceremonial) President of Israel. Hebrew and Arabic were made the official languages of the new state. Coalitions existed in the government. No majority won a majority in the Knesset. From 1948 to 1977, all governments were led by Mapai and the Alignment, predecessors of the Labor Party. In those years, Labor Zionists (led initially by David Ben-Gurion) dominated Israeli politics and the economy was run on primarily socialist lines. From 1948 to 1951, immigration doubled the Jewish population. It left an impact in Israeli society. During this period, about 700,000 Jewish people settled in the land. About 300,000 arrived from Asian and North African nations as part of the Jewish exodus from Arabic and Muslim countries. The largest group from this exodus (in over 100,000) was from Iraq. The rest of the immigrants were from Europe, including more than 270,000 people who came from Eastern Europe. They mainly came from Romania and Poland (over 100,000 each). Nearly all the Jewish immigrants could be described as refugees, however only 136,000 who immigrated to Israel from Central Europe, had international certification because they belonged to the 250,000 Jewish people registered by the Allies as displaced after World War II (and living in Displaced persons camps in Germany, Austria, and Italy). The Law of Return was passed in 1950 by the Knesset. That granted to all Jewish people and those of Jewish ancestry (plus their spouses) the right to settle in Israel and gain citizenship. Israel in essence is an ethnocentric state.

By 1950, 50,000 Yemenite Jewish people (99% of them worldwide) were secretly flown to Israel. Iraqi Jewish people in 1951 were granted temporary permission to leave the country and 120,000 of them (over 90%) opted to move into Israel. Jewish people fled from Lebanon, Syria, and Egypt too. By the late 1960’s, about 500,000 Jewish people left Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia. Over the course of 20 years, about 850,000 Jewish people left from Arabic countries (99% of them) relocated to Israel (in about 680,000 people), France, and the Americas. The land and the property left behind by the Jewish people (much of it in Arabic city centers) is still a matter of some dispute. Today, there are about 9,000 Jewish people living in Arabic states, of whom 75% live in Morocco and 15% in Tunisia.  Between 1948 and 1958, the population of Israel rose from 800,000 to 2 million people. During that era, food, clothes, and furniture were rationed. It was called the Austerity Period (Tkufat haTesena).  Immigrants were mostly refugees. They had no money or possessions. They were housed in temporary camps called the ma’abarot. In 1952, over 200,000 immigrants lived in tenets or prefabricated shacks which were built by the government. America and other nations donated Israel aid. Ben-Gurion signed a reparations agreement with West Germany to gain more finances. There were 5,000 demonstrators gathered during the Knesset debate and riot police had to cordon the building. Israel received billions of marks in money in return to agree to have open diplomatic relations with Germany. By the end of 1953, Ben-Gurion retired to Kibbutz Sde Boker in the Negev. By 1949, all education was free and compulsory for all citizens until the age of 14. The state was funded by the party-affiliated Zionist education system. This new body was created by the Haredi Agudat Israeli Party. The remaining Palestinian-Arabic population was educated by a separate body. Many of the parties competed for immigrants to join their educational systems. The government banned the existing educational bodies from the transit camps and tried to mandate a unitary secular socialist education under the control of “Camp managers.”  These managers provided the immigrants with work, food, and housing.

Many in Israelis wanted to force orthodox Yemenite children to adopt a secular lifestyle by teachers. Many Yemenite children had their side curls cut by the teachers. This led to the first Israeli public inquiry called the Fromkin Inquiry. Later, the coalition ended and an election existed in 1951. There was little change in results. By 1953, the party affiliated education system was scrapped and replaced by a secular state education system. There was a state run Modern Orthodox system too. Agudat Israel was allowed to maintain their existing school system. In Israel’s early years, Israel wanted to have a non-Aligned position between the super powers. Later, in 1952, an anti-Semitic public trial was staged in Moscow. This was when a group of Jewish doctors were accused of trying to poison Stalin. A similar trial existed in Czechoslovakia (Slánský trial). This, and the failure of Israel to be included in the Bandung Conference(of non-aligned states), effectively ended Israel's pursuit of non-alignment. On May 19, 1950, Egypt announced that the Suez Canal was closed to Israeli ships and commerce. In 1952 a military coup in Egypt brought Abdel Nasser to power. The United States pursued close relations with the new Arabic states, particularly the Nasser-led Egyptian Free Officers Movement and Ibn Saud of Saudi Arabia. Israel's solution to diplomatic isolation was to establish good relations with newly independent states in Africa and with France, which was engaged in the Algerian War. In the January 1955 elections, Mapai won 40 seats and the Labour Party 10. Moshe Sharett became prime minister of Israel at the head of a left-wing coalition.

Between 1953 and 1956, there were intermittent clashes along all of Israel's borders as Arabic terrorism and breaches of the ceasefire resulted in Israeli counter-raids. Palestinian fedayeen attacks, often organized and sponsored by the Egyptians, were made from (Egyptian occupied) Gaza. Fedayeen attacks led to a growing cycle of violence as Israel launched reprisal attacks against Gaza. In 1954 the Uzi submachine gun first entered use by the Israel Defense Forces. In 1955 the Egyptian government began recruiting former Nazi rocket scientists for a missile program.  Archaeologist and General Yigael Yadin purchased the Dead Sea Scrolls on behalf of the State of Israel. The entire first batch to be discovered were now owned by Israel and housed in the Shrine of the Book at the Israel Museum. Sharett's government was brought down by the Lavon Affair, a crude plan to disrupt US–Egyptian relations, involving Israeli agents planting bombs at American sites in Egypt. The plan failed when eleven agents were arrested. Defense Minister Lavon was blamed despite his denial of responsibility. The Lavon affair led to Sharett's resignation and Ben-Gurion returned to the post of prime minister.


By Timothy