Battle of Jerusalem
Arab and Jewish forces faced off as their bitter struggle refocused around control of the holy city
Years before the 1948 war, gunfire and terrorist bombings made life nearly unbearable in Jerusalem. The situation was worsened by British efforts at halting Jewish immigration to Palestine and the unrest this triggered between Arabs and Jews. In 1946 the Zionists blew up the east wing of the King David Hotel as retribution for British police tactics. The ensuing civil war meant Haganah and its extremist allies in LAHI, also known as the Irgun, got swept up in never-ending reprisals against their chosen foes: the occupying British and the belligerent Arabs.
Matters were unresolved on the cusp of Israel’s independence. Two weeks after Prime Minister David Ben Gurion’s radio message declaring the creation of a Jewish state on 15 May, the Jordanian Arab Legion completed its encirclement of Jerusalem – Arab militias aided the Legion when they blocked the roads, cutting off 100,000 Jewish residents. This action went against the United Nations’ painstakingly crafted Resolution 181 calling for separate Jewish and Arab homelands with Jerusalem governed as a neutral territory.
At the end of May the Arab Legion controlled the Old City encompassing the Temple Mount, upon which stood the sacred Al Aqsa mosque and the adjacent Dome of the Rock, along with the Wailing Wall below. All the important religious sites, whether Christian, Jewish, or Muslim, were under the Legion’s guns as well. The few Israeli forces still inside Jerusalem could not hold out for long against the Arab Legion and thousands of enemy militia.
Before starvation could take its toll on Jerusalem’s besieged residents, the Haganah launched a novel strategy to break the Arab stranglehold. With a sizable motor pool at its disposal a new route to the city was planned. The timing was a matter of life and death since the Palmach, for all their training, could not dislodge the Arabs holding the Latrun fortress that guarded the single highway connecting Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. In circumstances so ridiculous if not for their necessity, a team of Jewish scouts risked their lives on a trek finding a usable course over dirt paths and rugged hillsides in the Judean country. Evoking one of the Second World War’s more impressive logistical feats, the so-called ‘Burma Road’ was little more than a trail hastily carved out to fit so many trucks in short notice. Engineers spent weeks gouging and flattening a usable track for the convoys that saved the city’s Jewish residents in the middle of June. The plan worked and, remarkably, Arab forces did little to obstruct the operation.
What the Haganah, led by Colonel Moshe Dayan, did not count on was for the Arab
Legion to beat them in urban combat. Months of house-to-house fighting that endangered heritage sites and ancient monuments resulted in no credible gains until a ceasefire ended the war in March 1949. Revisionist accounts of the battle for Jerusalem still echo the biblical showdown between David and Goliath, except the roles are switched depending on the perspective. The Israel Defence Forces’ own history remembers it as a desperate tit-for-tat that pushed the beleaguered Haganah to its limits. The Jordanians and Palestinians, on the other hand, tend to exaggerate the strength of the Haganah and how well-equipped it was.
What is often lost in the retelling is how the Arab Legion had enough armoured cars and howitzers to block the Israeli counterattacks around the Old City – an advantage that disappeared in the following decade.
The Haganah at the time simply did not have the right equipment for large-scale conventional war. Two decades later the tables had turned. When Jerusalem’s Old City was seized by the IDF in the Six Day War of 1967, the Arabs, along with the rest of the Muslim world, bemoaned the defeat and still evoke the symbolic importance of an occupied Al Aqsa mosque as a nationalist rallying cry. Meanwhile, the events of 1967 are seen as a turning point in more than 2,000 years of Jewish history.