Countering Hasbara #1: Lies about 1948
"Six Arab Armies"
So often I read the same comments in YouTube and I wonder, are these actually IDF soldiers pretending to be real people, or real people who have so thoroughly accepted the hasbara that they can parrot it out on command? I suppose the answer doesn’t matter. What does matter, if you choose to engage (an often fruitless endeavor) is that you lead with facts and counter their lies. In this series we’ll try to deal with the usual lies one by one. Let’s start with the most frequently-repeated lie.
“Israel didn’t choose war. It was invaded by Six Arab Armies.”
Okay, firstly, Israel did choose war. It had trained and armed its people for years and even Zionist historian Benny Morris asserts that 300,000+ Palestinians were displaced prior to May 15, 1948, which was the soonest day that even one Arab army could have invaded “Israel” which did not even exist as a state until that day. The war prior to May 15 was exclusively a civil war within the British Mandate of Palestine. The British were still around in much of the country until late April, and these new states had no desire to tangle with the British, so they waited. The Israelis did not, and started making sure their new state was cleansed of Palestinians as quickly as possible, by intimidation, bombing, murder, and rape.
Learn more: The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited.
Most of the propagandists who repeat the above lie cannot even tell you what the six armies were, but you should know always know them cold, so as to embarrass them with facts:
the Arab Legion (Jordan)
the Iraqis (who fought under the Arab Legion)
The Arab Liberation Army (Syria)
The Lebanese Army
The Egyptian Army
The Saudis (who fought under the Egyptians)
Let’s start with the Saudis, who then, as now, have cared the least for the Palestinian cause. Numbers vary, but many estimates offer 1200 regular and 500 irregular troops committed by the House of Saud. The Saudis fought under the command of the Egyptians.
The Lebanese committed a similar number, roughly 1000, but their sole participation in the 1948 War was an incursion 700 meters across the border into the village of Malikiyya, which it held for roughly 10 days before the Israelis took it back. The Lebanese government was not opposed to the existence of the state of Israel, but public opinion forced the military’s hand, and this token engagement satisfied the demands of Arab honor north of the Litani.
The Arab Legion (4500) and the Iraqis (3000) were effectively under a single command structure, and they entered the war as the most experienced and formidable core of professional troops. However, that professionalism didn’t really have to be deployed as Jordan had done a secret deal with Israel which allowed Jordan to effectively annex the West Bank. Neither Israel nor Jordan wanted an independent Palestinian state, so they colluded to prevent it from happening. The only real clashes between the Arab Legion and the Israelis happened in and around Jerusalem, a city whose significance put a strain on the secret agreement.
The Egyptians, numbering 10,000, made an early thrust for Tel Aviv but were held up by well-trained and well-armed kibbutzim who had been told that surrender was not to occur under any circumstances. By the time of the first ceasefire the undisciplined Egyptians held a coastal strip but had poor supply lines and were thinly stretched.
President Quwwatli of Syria could not rid himself of the fears that dispatching the ALA (3000) would open up his country to invasion from the Hashemites, who held the thrones in Iraq and Jordan, who he believed could use the Palestinian crisis to seize his country on behalf of a “Greater Syria” project. Such fears were not idle fantasy, but they nevertheless kept the ALA mostly sitting on the border, even as the Haganah executed Operation Nachshon in April 1948, an ethnic cleansing operation focused on the Jaffa-Jerusalem road. Despite being mostly inactive, the ALA did manage to seize three small enclaves within Palestine that became demilitarized areas after the 1949 armistice.
If you add up those (estimated) numbers for the threatening-sounding “Six Arab Armies” (23,200), and also account for the fact that none of these armies were fighting under unified command-and-control (rather the opposite, Hashemite and anti-Hashemite factions helped ensure division and lack of coherence), and further, that they were outnumbered by 35,000 estimated Israeli regular and irregular troops (a number which more than doubled after the first truce), who were fighting under unified command-and-control, and unlike the Arab armies, were fighting with their backs to the wall, for what they considered was their own land, while the Arab armies were fighting for an intellectual cause of Arab brotherhood, not on their own land, you can see just how hollow and meaningless the “we were invaded by six Arab armies” trope is. But what do you expect from robots who receive and recite talking points but know no history, even that history they tell us they are so proud of?
Learn more: The War for Palestine.
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