Now we come to the second phase of the war, and that is the invasion by the neighboring Arab states of Palestine. Initially the Arab States were hesitant to intervene and they hoped that just by the threat of intervening and the threat of invasion, that would elicit international pressure to prevent partition. And when they did invade in the end, in mid-May of 1948, it was not with all their forces either. The Arab states, for the most part, had to leave some of their forces at home to keep the peace in their own countries, to defend the regimes that were in power, they could not spare their entire armies for the most part. But, the Arab invasion was a great threat to the Israelis and the Israeli military leadership initially feared possible defeat. And the fear of defeat, even a repetition of the Holocaust, was not beyond the imagination of the Jewish leadership. And therefore, the motivation to fight to win at all costs. But as the war progressed, the Jewish side, doing rather well, saw possible expansion, and, in some cases, even to push out the Arab population. So, what did the different Arab states seek to achieve in the war? Of course, above all else, they were in theory at least, united in the objective of preventing the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine. But between the different Arab invading armies, there was very little cooperation and they all had their own separate agendas. The Jordanians, for example, operated under severe British constraints, they had an army that was commanded by British officers. And the Jordanians also had a measure of moderation in their position towards the Jewish state, essentially they restricted themselves. To taking over as much of the Arab state of Palestine as they possibly could, without actually invading the Jewish state. The Iraqi's had their own ideas about taking Haifa and taking control of the pipeline that led oil from Iraq to the port of Haifa at that time. As for the Egyptians, they were also very interested in blocking the other Arabs, that is the Hashimites, the kingdoms of Iraq and Jordan from doing too well in Palestine at the expense of the Palestinians. So the different Arab forces invading Palestine had different political agendas and very little actual operative cooperation. One of the questions that arises about the history of the war in 1948, was was this an instance of the few against the many, that is, the few Israelis against the many Arabs, who despite being the few, emerged victorious? It's a complicated answer to this question. On the one hand, there were 40 million Arabs in the surrounding Arab states versus 650,000 Jews in Palestine. Unquestionably, the Jews were the few fighting against the many. But in the field, the military forces a raid against one another, with more or less equal in numbers at first when the war began. The Arabs had an advantage in equipment, in armor, and in air power. But Israel had prepared and organized for the war, while the Arabs had not. Israel had a unity of purpose. The Arabs had, as we have seen, disparate objectives. And as the war progressed, the numbers and the equipment Changed in Israel's favor in all spheres. The first round of war took place between mid-May and mid-June, after which the first truce was introduced. There was another round of fighting for ten days in July, and by then the Israelis were much stronger. After the first truce, the Israeli forces increased, as did those on the Arab side, to about 50,000 to 60,000 each. But the Israelis were now better equipped than before, having succeeded in introducing into Israeli equipment that they had purchased before the creation of the state. And that was now brought into the country. By the end of the war, the Israelis actually outnumbered the Arabs, in men and material, with the Israelis eventually fielding a force of over 100,000 men when the war came to its conclusion. The second truce lasted from the the 19th of July until the 15th of October. And the later campaigns of the war that were fought in the north and south in late 1948 brought the war to its conclusion with the expulsion of the Arab forces from Palestine. The fate of Jerusalem is a question of great importance in and of itself. In the fighting between the Israeli forces and the forces of the Jordanian army in Jerusalem, the Israeli lost control of the Jewish quarter in the Old City of Jerusalem. The Israeli also lost control of the Wailing Wall and the Israeli military thinkers had to contend with two different kinds of considerations, the strategic versus the religious and the symbolic. And it is clear. But in the manner in which the Israeli leadership conducted the war over Jerusalem, it was the strategic that was uppermost in their minds, rather than the religious. The most important element of the struggle for the Jerusalem was to maintain the population of 100,000 safely in Israeli control. But the holy sites were not the most important objective that the Israelis had in mind. And actually, as the war progressed and Israel seem to be doing better as time went by, the Israelis had the capacity to take all of the city from the summer of 1948. And even though they could, they decided not to. And the question is, why not? It was preferable from the Israeli point of view, so the Prime Minister at the time, David Ben-Gurion thought it was preferrable to have the city partitioned between the Jordanians on the one hand and the Israelis on the other. The partition resolution according to the UN was to have Jerusalem internationalized and the fear of the Israelis was that if they took the whole city, they would end up with nothing. That would be huge international pressure on Israel to abandon all parts of Jerusalem in favor of internationalization. Whereas if the city was shared between the Israelis and the Jordanians, the international community would accept this partition between Jews on the one hand and Arabs on the other.
