The Ignored Heroes of 1948

By Steve Rodan

They came from all over the world, survivors of Hitler's Final Solution. After World War II, hundreds of thousands of these Jews arrived in the Land of Israel and many of them fought in the 1948 war of independence. They constituted about half of Israel's combat troops and suffered a third of all casualties during the year-long conflict against five British-trained and -equipped Arab armies.

For decades, the contribution of the survivors was ignored if not censored from Israel's narrative. Israel's poet laureate, Natan Alterman, didn't bother to mention them. Instead, Israel's state-controlled media often portrayed the refugees who fought for the state as cowards and collaborators of the Nazis.

The higher up the regime ladder, the worse the treatment meted out to the survivors. They were taken to the front as soon as they disembarked from their ships. After firing the World War I-issue guns, they were ordered into battle. Despite their bravery, the survivors were called "soap", "human debris" and "sheep to the slaughter." They and not Germany were blamed for the Holocaust.

Fights often erupted between the survivors and the native-born Israelis. Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion encouraged the abuse and agreed that the Jews had survived at the expense of Hitler's victims -- in other words they had probably collaborated or betrayed their co-religionists. [1]

When they ran out of bullets, many of the survivors were ordered to rush Egyptian and Jordanian tanks with firebombs, a throwback to the Warsaw ghetto. When the new Israeli army failed to defeat the Arabs during the first year of the 1948 war, the survivors were denounced as cowards. Part of the hate stemmed from the fear that they would compete with the natives for jobs.

What made it worse was that often, the fate of the new immigrants was in the hands of corrupt and incompetent commanders appointed by Ben-Gurion based on personal loyalty or political expediency. One such commander was Ephraim Ben-Artzi, so hated by his company that his men hurled a grenade into his tent. During the 1948 war, Ben-Gurion promoted Ben-Artzi to the rank of general and responsible for supplies, which often failed to reach combat units. [2]

Commander-in chief

The 1948 war brought out the worst in Ben-Gurion. Freed from the shackles of rival Zionist leader Chaim Weizmann, Ben-Gurion became increasingly hysterical and destructive. Although he knew nothing about modern combat, or even the structure of the Haganah, Ben-Gurion insisted on being commander-in-chief. His behavior and appointments represented his determination to become the absolute ruler of the new Jewish state. He appointed the ailing Yaakov Dori, a former Haganah commander, chief of staff although he had just undergone an operation on the eve of independence.

With Dori in the hospital, Ben-Gurion decided that he would run the war. Without his approval, weapons would not be issued; reinforcements would not be deployed. Commanders were called away from their men and had to line up outside Ben-Gurion's office in Tel Aviv for lectures on battle tactics.

Ben-Gurion's commanders were his political cronies. Yisrael Amir was appointed to command the new air force; Amir, a senior Haganah member, had never flown a plane. To those around him, Ben-Gurion's chief threat was not the Arabs or their British military advisers. It was Menachem Begin and the Irgun, far more popular than Mapai and seen as genuinely fighting for independence. The Irgun had already captured Jaffa while the Haganah was forced to stand by. Begin's men pushed out Arab irregulars from large parts of Jerusalem. Even in Washington, the Irgun was seen as successfully lobbying against the British. [3]

One of Ben-Gurion's first acts as prime minister was to attack the Irgun ship, Altalena. In June 1948, the Altalena arrived from France laden with badly-needed heavy weapons and ammunition. Virtually all of Ben-Gurion's commanders welcomed the arrival of the Irgun ship. They had told the prime minister that the new Jewish army could not muster enough artillery, planes or even reinforcements to hold on to the new tiny country. Teddy Kollek was in the United States arranging for shipments of radars and tanks. But U.S. authorities, urged on by the British, stopped the export licenses, and 50 of the tanks were sold to China. Soon, Kollek, under FBI surveillance, left the United States.

Meanwhile, kibbutzim were being threatened by Arab tanks and armored cars, and Ben-Gurion's military chief, Yigal Yadin, responded that the Jewish farmers should assemble firebombs rather than await weapons shipments. [4]

Begin offered to transfer 80 percent of the Altalena weapons to Ben-Gurion. The Irgun chief wanted the remaining equipment to save the now-besieged Jerusalem. Again, Ben-Gurion, who had fled Jerusalem for Tel Aviv and still beholden to the British, felt threatened by the prospect that his sworn enemy would be credited with freeing the ancient Jewish capital, now slated to come under international control. Determined to show the world that he was in charge, Ben-Gurion, who had agreed to a British-inspired ceasefire, ordered the nascent Israel Air Force to bomb the Altalena far from the Mediterranean shore. The order was relayed to non-Jewish volunteers but the pilots refused to kill Jews.

Then, Ben-Gurion turned to his Jewish commanders. At least two of them refused to sink the ship. One of them said he had not come to the Jewish state to murder the survivors of Hitler. Morale plunged in the new air force, in which the lion's share of pilots were foreign volunteers. They soon concluded that Ben-Gurion, despite his warm words, regarded them as little more than mercenaries and demanded high salaries and luxurious accommodations. Finally, the members of the Air Transport Command, assigned to fly Ben-Gurion and other VIPs, went on strike. [5]

B-G finds his man

Ben-Gurion, however, found his man to kill his Jewish rivals. Yitzhak Rabin was appointed to sink the Altalena and kill its 940 passengers, many of them Holocaust survivors. Those who survived would be taken to jail and beaten. One would be shot dead in his sleep. [6]

Rabin's rise in the Palmach and the military had little to do with ability. As chief operations officer, Rabin failed to provide the Palmach with even the rudimentary requirements of a combat force that would soon fight five Arab armies. As commander in April 1948, Rabin's unit was unable to make a dent in the Arab siege of Jerusalem.

His men hated him, but Rabin's pedigree and loyalty to Ben-Gurion were flawless. He was the son of Rosa Cohen, known as Red Rosa. Until her death from cancer in 1937, she held senior positions in many of the organizations led by Ben-Gurion -- the Haganah, Histadrut and the Tel Aviv municipality. Upon her death, the Mapai bulletin, Hapoel Hatzair, wrote, "Her blood flowed with molten iron." Rabin's rapid rise in the army stemmed from Ben-Gurion, and when the old man quit for the last time in 1963, a teary-eyed Rabin, now in a general's uniform, begged him to stay.

The 1948-1949 war was by far Israel's bloodiest, some 6,300 dead, many of them Holocaust survivors. For Ben-Gurion, Israel had gotten off cheap. He had prepared for 60,000 casualties, or 10 percent of the Jewish population, which he insisted would have marked an acceptable price for a Jewish state. Ben-Gurion was probably the main reason for the huge number of dead. His sinking of the Altalena made the entire south of the country vulnerable to the British-trained Egyptian Army.

During the first phase of the war, virtually every battle with the Egyptians resulted in scores of Jewish dead. Meanwhile, Ben-Gurion did everything he could to discredit Irgun rather than fight for a country. When Irgun captured the Arab village of Dir Yassin, the Palmach, endorsing Arab propaganda, claimed that Begin's fighters massacred civilians. He vetoed or sabotaged cooperation between Irgun and Haganah. The Haganah was ordered to stop Irgun operations to save the Jews in Jerusalem's Old City. When the two forces finally agreed on a joint operation, Haganah units would withdraw in the middle of the battle, leaving Irgun and Lehi without mortar cover. [7]

Unable to destroy the Irgun, Ben-Gurion vented his frustrations on his supporters and Holocaust survivors. His outbursts damaged morale at a time when many Jews were uncertain over whether they could survive let alone defeat the Arab onslaught. In June 1948, Kibbut Nitzanim, located more than an hour's drive south of Tel Aviv, surrendered to the Egyptian Army after a 15-hour battle. The kibbutz fought with no reinforcements and very few weapons.

Ben-Gurion's response was to call the surrender "traitorous behavior," words written from the safety of his two-story home in Tel Aviv. His army termed the defeat as worthy of cowardly ghetto Jews in Europe during World War II. [8]

Braver than the Sabras

As it turned out, the Holocaust survivors usually fought more valiantly than the Sabras, or native-born Israelis. The refugees had made it through World War II despite starvation, deportation and death marches. Compared to the Germans, the Arab forces were seen as puny.

Tuvia Bielski was commander of a Jewish force that saved at least 1,200 Jews and fought the Germans in the forests of what is now Belarus. His men killed more than 300 German and other enemy soldiers. After World War II, Bielski and his brothers Aaron and Zus immigrated to Israel and fought in the 1948 war. They were regarded as the most ferocious soldiers in the new army and braved a month-long siege by the Arabs near Bet Shemesh.

Although the brothers were regarded as heroes by their commanders, they were ignored by the state. By 1956, the Bielskis had immigrated to the United States. Tuvia had left with a nearly 400-page memoir in Yiddish on his partisan force in the Soviet Union. In 1987, Tuvia, who drove a delivery truck for his eldest brother Walter in Long Island, died nearly penniless. A year later, his body was exhumed and he was given a funeral with military honors in Jerusalem.

Israel didn't recognize the survivors until the trial of Adolf Eichmann, when they were needed as witnesses or for background on the captured SS officer and his execution of the Final Solution. Soon after the War of Independence, Israel's military closed down its mental health network, a move that denied any help to relieve the traumas of the survivors and others who suffered from combat The military did not recognize combat trauma until after the 1973 Yom Kippur War, in which close to 3,000 soldiers were killed. [9]

Decades after the War of Independence, a leading Israeli academic and author remembered the exploitation of the Holocaust survivors in a poem about the Burma Road, meant to reach Jerusalem and paved after the failure to capture Latrun.

"On the backs of his serfs,

"David Ben-Gurion

"Paved the Burma Road

"Which turned around by the road of the capital of Jerusalem

"With the backs of the refugees of the Holocaust" [10]

Notes

1. Lecture by Tom Segev "Tom Segev -- Holocaust Living History Workshop -- Library Channel" University of California Television. July 11, 2016. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jhdU8a9EafI

2. "Five Missions" Itzhak Pundak. Page 29. Yaron Golan, 2000

3. PRO FO 371/61821 E7167/48G.31 Note of Conversation, Aug. 4, 1947. Cited in "Jewish Terrorist Activities and the British Government in Palestine, 1939-1947" B.R. Hoffman. Page 370

4. "Ben-Gurion: A Biography" Michael Bar-Zohar. Pages 289-290. Am Oved, 1980.

5. "Benzion Netanyahu, the Altalena and Me" Atar Hadari. Mosaic Magazine. July 12, 2017. https://mosaicmagazine.com/observation/2017/07/benzion-netanyahu-the-altalena-and-me/; Israel's Best Defense: The First Full Story of the Israeli Air Force" Eliezer "Cheetah" Cohen. Pages 41-42. Orion Books, New York. 1993

6. "Soldiers Burst Into Metzudat Ze'ev and Shot at Illegal Immigrants" Hamashkif. June 24, 1948. Page 1

7. "Ben-Gurion: A Biography" Michael Bar-Zohar.. Page 334; "Dir Yassin: The Factual Version" Gideon Dokov. Bsheva, July 20, 2017. The article is based on research by Professor Eliezer Tauber of Bar-Ilan University, who pored through archives from Jordan and the Palestinian Authority and determined that the Arab casualties were killed in battle. "ElNakam" Ezra Yakhin. Pages 242, 273, 281, 290 and 303. Yair, 1992.

8. Ben-Gurion's diary entry on June 18, 1948. Quoted in "The Seventh Million" Tom Segev. Page 457. Keter, 1991

9. The Memory of the Holocaust and Israel's Attitude Toward War Trauma, 1948–1973: The Collective vs. the Individual. Irit Kenyan. Israel Studies. Vol. 23, No. 2 (Summer 2018), pp. 95-117

10. "Peter the Great" by Gabi Daniel, pen name for Benjamin Harushovsky, a former Palmach member and winner of an Israeli-state sponsored prize for literature. Published in 1986

Below: Holocaust survivor Marek Herman and his rifle platoon during the 1948 war.