There are wars a nation chooses and wars that are forced upon it, and the war that gave the modern State of Israel its birth belongs unmistakably to the second kind. When the United Nations voted on the twenty-ninth of November in the year 1947 to divide the land west of the Jordan into a Jewish state and an Arab state, the Jewish people of the land accepted the offer—meager, perilous, and grudging as it was—and poured into the streets to dance at the prospect of a sovereignty they had not tasted for nearly two thousand years. The Arab leadership rejected it utterly, and before the dancing had ended the killing had begun. Six months later, on the very day the Jewish state proclaimed its independence, the armies of five Arab nations crossed its borders with the announced intention of strangling it in the cradle. That the infant lived at all is among the more remarkable facts of modern history; that it lived against such odds is, to the eye of faith, something more than remarkable.

We must tell this story plainly, and we must tell it fairly. To say that the Arab states refused partition and chose war is not to indict the Arab peoples, the great mass of whom wished only to till their fields and raise their children in quiet, nor to deny the real anguish the war brought upon the innocent of every nation caught in it. It is simply to set down what the leaders did and what followed from it. The friend of Israel gains nothing by exaggeration and loses nothing by honesty, for the bare record, told without ornament, is more than equal to the truth. What follows is that record: how the partition came to be offered, why it was refused, how the war was fought and won, what borders it left in its wake, and what the whole tragic and triumphant episode means for those who believe that the God of Abraham keeps the covenants He has sworn.

The Land and the Promise

To understand why the events of 1948 mattered to more than the diplomats and the generals, one must begin long before the United Nations existed, in the oldest promise recorded of the God of Scripture to a single wandering man. To Abram the Lord said, in words the believer cannot read without a quickening of the pulse, Unto thy seed have I given this land, from the river of Egypt unto the great river, the river Euphrates. The promise was repeated to Isaac and to Jacob, sworn and re-sworn, made the very spine of the covenant; and it was a promise of a particular people in a particular land, not a vague benevolence toward mankind in general. The land was given, and the giving was not revoked when the people sinned, though the dwelling in it was forfeited again and again by disobedience.

The prophets foresaw both the scattering and the return. Moses warned that the people would be plucked from the land and driven among the nations, and in the same breath promised that the Lord would gather them again from the farthest parts of heaven and bring them back. Ezekiel saw a valley of dry bones, very many and very dry, and was asked whether they could live; and the word came that the Lord would open the graves of His people and bring them into the land of Israel. Amos heard the promise sealed with a finality that has comforted the friends of Israel through every dark hour since: And I will plant them upon their land, and they shall no more be pulled up out of their land which I have given them, saith the LORD thy God. We do not claim to read the secret counsels of providence without error, nor to date the fulfillment of prophecy with a calendar. But we hold, and this ministry exists to declare, that the regathering of a scattered people to their ancient land after two thousand years is not a thing that happens of itself in the ordinary course of nations, and that the believer who knows his Bible cannot watch it with indifference.

The Long Road to Partition

The modern return did not begin with the United Nations. Through the long centuries of exile a remnant had always remained in the land, and from the closing decades of the nineteenth century the trickle of returning Jews became a stream and then a river, as wave upon wave of immigrants came to drain the swamps, plant the orchards, and rebuild the ruined places. When the Ottoman Empire fell at the end of the Great War, the land passed under British administration, and the British government had already declared, in the Balfour Declaration of 1917, its favor toward the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people. The League of Nations wrote that purpose into the very terms of the Mandate. For a season it seemed the nations of the world had aligned themselves with the ancient promise.

Nor was the partition of 1947 the first time the idea had been laid upon the table. A full decade earlier a British royal commission, sent to study the unrest, concluded that the two national movements could not share a single state and proposed dividing the land between them—a far smaller Jewish state than even the United Nations would later offer. The Jewish leadership, grieved at the meagerness of the portion, nonetheless accepted the principle of partition and the idea of a state, however small, as a foundation on which something might at last be built. The Arab leadership rejected it outright, as it would reject every later partition, and answered with a revolt that convulsed the land for three years. The pattern that would define the century was already set in the 1930s: an offer of division, a Jewish yes to compromise, an Arab no to any Jewish sovereignty at all. What changed in 1947 was not the shape of the answer but the weight of the hour, for now the doors of a homeland could open or stay shut over the survivors of a continent’s attempt to murder every Jew within its reach.

But the road proved long and bloody. As Jewish numbers grew, so did the opposition of the Arab leadership, and a pattern established itself that would repeat for a century: periodic outbreaks of violence against the Jewish communities, in the 1920s and again in the 1930s, often incited by leaders who framed the return as an invasion to be resisted by the knife. The British, caught between their promise and their imperial interest, wavered, restricted Jewish immigration, and at last, with the worst possible timing, slammed the doors of the land nearly shut in the very years the Jews of Europe most desperately needed a refuge. When the war ended and the full horror of the Holocaust stood revealed—six million murdered, the survivors crowded into displaced-persons camps with nowhere on earth to go—the moral case for a Jewish sovereignty that could open its gates without asking anyone's leave had become, to all but the willfully blind, overwhelming. Exhausted and bankrupt, Britain threw the whole intractable question into the lap of the newly founded United Nations in 1947. A special committee toured the land, weighed the claims, and recommended that it be partitioned.

The Vote of the Twenty-Ninth of November

And so it came to the vote. On the twenty-ninth of November in 1947 the General Assembly took up Resolution 181, the Plan of Partition with Economic Union, and after days of intense lobbying and uncertain counting it passed: thirty-three nations in favor, thirteen against, ten abstaining. The plan divided the land into a Jewish state and an Arab state, joined in an economic union, with the city of Jerusalem and its environs set apart as a corpus separatum under international administration on account of its sanctity to three faiths. It was no triumphant award. The territory assigned to the Jewish state was a broken and indefensible thing, three fingers of land barely joined, a long coastal strip, and a vast wedge of the Negev desert; much of it was arid waste, and its borders in places narrowed to a few miles, inviting the very invasion that would shortly come.

Yet the Jewish leadership accepted it. They accepted it not because it was just or generous or safe, but because it carried within it the one thing for which they had waited through nineteen centuries of exile and the recent valley of death: the recognition by the family of nations of a sovereign Jewish state in the Jewish homeland, however small. To accept partition was to accept half a loaf, indeed a quarter of a loaf, and to renounce in practice any claim to the rest. It was a compromise of the most painful kind, and the Jewish people made it, and that night they danced in the streets of Tel Aviv and Jerusalem with a joy that the photographs still carry across the decades. They had said yes. Everything that followed turns upon the answer the other side gave.

“A War of Extermination”: The Rejection

The Arab answer was no—not a counter-offer, not a haggling over lines on a map, but a flat and total refusal, backed by the threat and then the fact of war. The Arab Higher Committee rejected the plan; the Arab League rejected it; the leaders announced that they would resist partition by force and would never accept a Jewish state of any size upon any portion of the land. The mufti of Jerusalem, who had spent the war years in Berlin in the company of the very regime then murdering Europe's Jews, had long preached that the Jews must be driven out altogether, and his spirit prevailed in the councils of rejection. The secretary-general of the Arab League is remembered for promising a war of extermination and a momentous massacre that would be spoken of like the slaughters of the Mongols. Whether or not every phrase attributed to him is exact, the intention was published openly and acted upon without delay.

It is essential to grasp what was being refused, for the whole long tragedy of the conflict is contained in this hinge. The Arab leadership did not reject these particular borders in hope of better ones; they rejected the principle of any Jewish sovereignty whatever between the river and the sea. This is why no map, however favorable, has ever sufficed; why offer after offer in the decades since has been met not with a counter-proposal but with the same refusal and the same resort to violence. The objection was never to the size of the Jewish state but to its existence. And here we must be scrupulously fair to the Arab people as distinct from those who presumed to speak and to fight in their name: the villager and the shopkeeper were not consulted, were in many cases swept into a catastrophe they neither chose nor desired, and were ill served above all by leaders who preferred the ruin of a shared land to the acceptance of a neighbor. The rejection was the leaders' rejection. The price was paid by everyone.

Civil War and the British Departure

The killing began the morning after the vote and did not stop. From the close of November 1947 until the following May, while the British still nominally governed and prepared their withdrawal, the land descended into a bitter intercommunal war. Arab irregulars and the volunteers of the so-called Arab Liberation Army attacked Jewish towns, settlements, and the convoys that were the lifeline of besieged communities. The road to Jerusalem, where the Jewish quarter lay encircled and starving, became a gauntlet of ambush; the heights at Latrun changed the fate of the city. There were atrocities, and honesty requires that they be named on every side: the massacre at Deir Yassin, where Arab villagers were killed by men of the Jewish irregular groups; the slaughter of a medical convoy bound for the Hadassah hospital; the fall of the Etzion bloc, where Jewish defenders who had surrendered were murdered. War is a furnace, and it consumed the innocent of both communities. We do not gild it. We record that when one side had said yes to peaceful partition and the other had answered with the gun, the war that resulted was not symmetrical in its origin, whatever the symmetries of its suffering.

The siege of Jerusalem was the heart of that winter’s agony and the clearest measure of the stakes. Tens of thousands of Jews in the holy city were cut off, their food and water dwindling, dependent upon convoys that had to fight their way up a single narrow road overlooked by hostile villages and gunmen. Armored buses were ambushed and burned, and the rusted hulks of them lined the ascent for years afterward as a grim monument. To break the strangling grip the defenders mounted desperate operations to open the road, and where the road could not be held they hacked a rough bypass through the hills by night, carrying supplies in on the backs of men. That a community could be besieged to the edge of starvation in its own ancient capital, for no crime but that of being Jewish in the land of the Jews, tells the honest observer most of what he needs to know about the character of the war and the aim of those who began it.

Five Armies Against a Day-Old State

On the fourteenth of May, 1948, as the British Mandate expired, the leader of the Jewish community stood beneath a portrait of Theodor Herzl in a Tel Aviv museum and read out the declaration of the establishment of the State of Israel. The new nation was hours old—not yet a day—when the armies of the surrounding states crossed its borders to destroy it. Egypt advanced from the south along the coast and into the Negev; Transjordan's Arab Legion, the best-trained Arab force, struck at Jerusalem and the center; Syria and Lebanon came down from the north; Iraqi troops pressed into the heart of the country; and a Saudi contingent fought under Egyptian command. Five regular armies, with artillery, armor, and aircraft, against a people who only the day before had possessed no state, no recognized army, no air force worth the name, and who labored under an international arms embargo that bound the would-be victim as tightly as the aggressor.

The scene of the declaration itself has the quality of prophecy fulfilled in a plain room. There was no grand capitol, only a museum hall in a young coastal city, hastily prepared, the document read aloud beneath the portrait of the visionary who a half-century before had dreamed the state into words and been mocked for the dreaming. Within minutes of the proclamation the President of the United States extended recognition to the new nation, the first head of state to do so, and others followed after; the Jewish people had re-entered the family of sovereign states. Yet recognition came hand in hand with abandonment, for the same powers that recognized Israel maintained their embargo on arms to the whole region, an evenhandedness that in practice favored the five established armies, with their stockpiles and their suppliers, over the improvised force of a state that had existed for a single day. The world acknowledged Israel’s birth, and then, in the matter that counted most, left her to be born or to perish by her own strength and the mercy of heaven.

The disparity in those first weeks was nearly fatal. The defenders fought with whatever could be smuggled or improvised, holding lines that by every conventional calculation should have broken. The turning came in part through arms at last obtained from abroad, famously a shipment out of Czechoslovakia that put rifles and aircraft into the hands of men who had been fighting with far less; and it came through a discipline, a desperation, and a unity of purpose in a people who understood, with the camps of Europe scarcely emptied, that defeat meant not a lost war but a finished people. They had, quite literally, nowhere to retreat to. A nation with its back to the sea and the memory of the ovens behind it fights as other nations do not.

The Survival That Looked Like a Miracle

They held, and then they prevailed. The hastily unified defense forces, soon organized as the army of the new state, stopped the invasion, absorbed its blows through the first desperate summer, and through a series of campaigns over the following months drove the attackers back and secured the nation's existence. There were truces brokered by the United Nations, and there was bitter fighting between them; there were operations in the south against the Egyptians, in the center, and in the Galilee, and at the last a thrust through the desert to the shore of the Red Sea. The cost was severe out of all proportion to the nation's size: some six thousand of its people fell, very nearly one in every hundred souls in the land, a wound in the first year of statehood that touched almost every family. No one who counts that price will speak lightly of triumph.

And yet triumph it was, and the believer may be forgiven for seeing in it more than the fortunes of war. The prophet Isaiah had asked, in a question that reads like prophecy of that very spring, Shall the earth be made to bring forth in one day? or shall a nation be born at once? A nation had been born at once, in a single day, and had survived the concerted assault of those who meant to smother it at birth. We do not presume to read the mind of God in every battle, nor to baptize the deeds of men with a certainty that belongs to Him alone. But we hold it no extravagance of faith to say that the survival of 1948 stands among those events in which the hand that keeps Israel may be discerned by the eye that is willing to see, and that the Keeper of Israel, who neither slumbers nor sleeps, did not bring His people back from the ends of the earth in order to abandon them on the threshold of the land.

The Armistice and the Lines of 1949

The war did not end in a peace, for the Arab states would not make peace; it ended in a set of armistice agreements, negotiated through the first half of 1949 on the island of Rhodes, between Israel and Egypt, Lebanon, Transjordan, and Syria in turn. These drew the cease-fire lines that the world would come to call the Green Line, after the color of the ink upon the map, and they left Israel holding more of the land than the partition plan had assigned—not by conquest of design but as the residue of a defensive war the nation had not sought and had nearly lost. The armistice lines were explicitly not borders; the Arab parties insisted on that very point, refusing to concede that any line could be a true frontier of a state they would not recognize.

Here the honest student finds a fact that the popular telling almost always omits, and it deserves to be stated without heat. The territory that Resolution 181 had set aside for the Arab state did not become a Palestinian Arab state in 1949, nor at any time in the eighteen years that followed. It was taken instead by the neighboring Arab regimes: the hill country of Judea and Samaria was annexed by Transjordan, which renamed itself for its new acquisition, and the coastal strip about Gaza was placed under Egyptian military rule. The very states that had gone to war proclaiming themselves the champions of the Palestinian Arab cause, and that had refused partition rather than see a Jewish state arise beside an Arab one, themselves swallowed the land of the proposed Arab state and raised no Palestinian flag over it. For nineteen years there was no occupation by Israel of those territories and no Palestinian state established there by the Arab powers who held them. The friend of truth notes this quietly and lets it speak.

The Two Exoduses

No honest account of the war can pass over the human displacement it produced, and we will not. In the course of the fighting some seven hundred thousand Arabs left the territory that became Israel—the catastrophe, the Nakba, that stands at the center of the Palestinian memory and grief. The causes were tangled and are still disputed by serious historians: many fled the terror and chaos of war as civilians flee everywhere; some were summoned away by Arab leaders who promised a swift return behind victorious armies; and some, it must be acknowledged, were driven out by Jewish forces in the bitterness of a fight for survival. The suffering of those uprooted families was real, and the compassion of the believer is not rationed by nationality. A Christian who loves Israel does not therefore harden his heart against the Arab mother who lost her home; the God who keeps Israel is also the God who hears the cry of the stranger and the afflicted.

But there is a second exodus, very nearly equal in number and almost wholly forgotten, and justice requires that it be set beside the first. In the years during and after the war, the ancient Jewish communities of the Arab and Muslim world—in Iraq, in Egypt, in Syria, in Yemen, in the lands of North Africa, communities older by far than Islam itself—were subjected to persecution, dispossession, and expulsion, until some eight hundred thousand Jews were driven from homes their families had held for millennia. The difference in what became of the two displaced peoples is the most telling fact of all. The young and impoverished State of Israel gathered in its refugees, the survivors of Europe and the exiles of the Arab lands alike, and made them citizens, and built them into the nation. The Arab states, vast and in places wealthy, by and large refused to absorb their Arab kindred, confining them instead to camps and perpetuating their statelessness across generations through a unique international apparatus, so that the refugees might be preserved as a grievance and a weapon rather than resettled as men and women with lives to live. The one people made its refugees into a nation; the others made of theirs a permanent reproach. The contrast is not incidental to the conflict. It is very near its heart.

The Theology of the Rejection

The friend of Israel who reads his Bible will recognize in the events of 1948 a pattern older than the United Nations and deeper than the politics of any age. The psalmist Asaph, looking out upon the confederated enemies of his own day, wrote words that might have been the very minutes of the councils that rejected partition: They have taken crafty counsel against thy people, and consulted against thy hidden ones. They have said, Come, and let us cut them off from being a nation; that the name of Israel may be no more in remembrance. To cut them off from being a nation, that the name of Israel be no more remembered—this is precisely what was attempted in the spring of 1948, and what has been attempted, in one form or another, in every decade since. The second Psalm sets the same scene on the widest stage: Why do the heathen rage, and the people imagine a vain thing? The kings of the earth set themselves, and the rulers take counsel together, against the LORD, and against his anointed.

We must be careful here, and not press the type beyond its warrant. We do not claim that every soldier in those armies, or every politician who voted no, was a conscious enemy of God; many were ordinary men carried along by leaders and by the passions of the hour, and the Arab who opposed Israel is a soul for whom Christ died as surely as any other. Nor do we read the prophetic catalogs as a license for hatred; the same Scripture that records the conspiracy of the nations commands us to love our enemies and to pray for the peace of Jerusalem. But we do insist that there is a dimension to the hostility against Israel that mere politics cannot explain—a persistence, a ferocity, an indifference to self-interest and even to the welfare of the very Arabs in whose name it claims to act—which the believer recognizes as the visible edge of an older and unseen contention. The rejection of 1948 was a political act with a spiritual lining.

What the War Teaches the Friend of Israel

Several lessons fall from this history into the hands of those who would stand with Israel in our own day, and they are worth gathering plainly. The first is that the conflict was never, at its root, about borders, and therefore cannot be resolved by the mere adjustment of borders. Israel said yes to a small and dangerous partition; the answer was war. In the generations since, the pattern has held with a consistency that ought to instruct the most hopeful negotiator: the offers have been made and remade, and the answer, whenever it would require accepting the permanence of a Jewish state, has been refusal and renewed violence. To understand 1948 is to be inoculated against the perennial illusion that the next concession, the next withdrawal, the next divided city, will at last purchase the peace that every prior concession failed to buy.

The second lesson is the converse, and it guards us against bitterness: that the door of genuine peace, where it has ever truly opened, Israel has walked through. Where an Arab leader has been willing in fact and not merely in word to accept Israel's existence, treaties have followed and held. The hostility is not racial and not eternal; it is the fruit of a rejectionist creed that can, by the mercy of God, be repented and laid down, as a few have begun to lay it down. So the friend of Israel holds two things at once without contradiction: a clear-eyed refusal to mistake the nature of the long rejection, and an open-hearted welcome for every genuine hand of peace, from whatever quarter it is at last extended. He does not deal in the false evenhandedness that cannot tell the arsonist from the fire brigade; neither does he deal in a hatred that would shut the door of repentance against any people. He tells the truth, and he keeps the door open, and he leaves the issue with God.

A third lesson belongs especially to our own age, and it concerns the war of words that long outlasts the war of arms. The events of 1948 have been retold, in the decades since, until in much of the world the aggressor and the defender have changed places—the people who said yes to peace recast as conquerors, and the coalition that launched a war of annihilation recast as the victims of it. The friend of Israel is therefore called not merely to feeling but to memory: to hold fast the plain sequence of what was offered, what was refused, and what followed, against a rising tide of inversion that grows stronger with the passing of the last witnesses. To tell the truth about 1948 is itself a form of standing with Israel, and perhaps in our generation the most needed form, for a lie told about the beginning will poison every judgment rendered upon all that has come since. The keeper of the record is, in his small and unglamorous way, a keeper of the truth that sets men free.

The Keeper of Israel

We end where the believer must always end, not with the strategies of men but with the faithfulness of God. The rebirth of Israel in 1948, surviving the assault of five nations in the first hours of its life, is to the friend of the covenant people not merely a stirring chapter of military history but a sign—a visible token in the world of the unseen faithfulness of the One who said He would gather His people from the nations and plant them again in their own land, no more to be pulled up. The dry bones of Ezekiel's vision had stood upon their feet, an exceeding great army, where for centuries there had been only the dust of exile. The prophet's word had become a flag and a parliament and a tongue revived from the grave of antiquity. Such things do not happen in the ordinary traffic of nations, and the heart that knows the Scriptures is not forbidden to marvel.

Let none mistake this confidence for triumph over a fallen foe, for the believer who marvels at the survival of 1948 marvels also at its cost, and grieves for all who suffered in it, the Arab no less than the Jew. The hope of the friend of Israel is not the humiliation of her neighbors but the day, promised by the very prophets who foretold the regathering, when the nations round about shall beat their swords into plowshares and the land so long contended for shall keep at last a true sabbath of peace. That day is not yet, and the friend of Israel does not pretend it near by the signing of any document or the drawing of any line upon a map. But he labors and prays toward it, knowing that the God who raised the dry bones into a living nation can also, in His own time, turn the heart of the enemy, and make the wilderness of a century’s hatred to blossom as the rose.

Therefore the friend of Israel watches and prays, and his confidence does not rest upon the calculations of any court or the guarantees of any power, for he has read what becomes of those who lean upon the staff of broken reeds. It rests where alone it is safe: upon the promise that he that keepeth Israel shall neither slumber nor sleep. The nations may rage and take counsel as they raged in 1947 and have raged in every year since; the armies may gather as they gathered in 1948; but the keeper of Israel does not sleep at His post, and the people He has planted shall, in His own time and by His own hand, no more be pulled up. To that God the believer commends both Israel and her neighbors, blessing those who bless her as the ancient promise bids—I will bless them that bless thee—and obeying still the old command laid upon every lover of the city of the great King: Pray for the peace of Jerusalem: they shall prosper that love thee. The war of 1948 was the labor; the survival was the birth; and the one who brought the nation to the birth will not fail to bring it, and the world with it, to the day of its peace.