Zionist FAQs: Why did seven well-equipped Arab armies attacked the poorly armed and newly founded "Jewish state"?

Official UN Map: Which was updated in August 1950 showing that Palestinians STILL OWN 94% of the lands

Before we debunk this myth, we have to point out that the framing of this question is a massive dose of gaslight (a.k.a. hasbarah). Palestinians, to this date, defend their land which they still own. Thus, it is silly to frame indigenous peoples' resistance in such a manner; no one "attacks or invades" his or her land. In this regard, it should be noted that Zionist Colonial Corporations (not the Jewish citizens of Palestine who made up only 10% of citizens) own under 6% of the land; here is the evidence from British primary source and the United Nations who gave birth to the "Jewish state".

To destroy this myth from its roots, we shall cite two of the most prominent pro-Zionist historians, Martin Van Creveld (the renowned Israeli military strategist and historian) and Martin Gilbert; only a fool will call into question their Zionist credentials. Soon, you shall discover that Arabs never had the manpower or the intention to destroy the "Jewish state". When the events are closely examined, as you shall find soon, Arab armies rarely made incursions into the areas that were allotted to the "Jewish state" by the UN partition plan. Actually, we shall use Israeli casualty reports to prove that it was the Israeli side who attacked the areas allotted to Palestinians:

• NYTimes Quoting Golda Myerson on May 20th, 1948, saying Arabs are weak & disorganized and could be easily defeated
  "In the Event of invading [Arab] forces were limited to approximately 30,000 men. The strongest [consider this fact while reading the next quote] single contingent was the Jordanian one, already described. Next came Egyptians with 5,500 men, then the Iraqis with 4,500, who ..... were joined by perhaps 3,000 local irregulars. The total was thus around eight rather under-strength brigades, some of them definitely of second and even third-rate quality. To these must be added approximately 2,000 Lebanese (one brigade) and 6,000 Syrians (three brigades). Thus, even though the Arab countries [population] outnumbered the Yishuv by better than forty-to-one, in terms of military manpower available for combat in Palestine, the two sides were fairly evenly matched. As time went on and both sides sent reinforcements, the balance changed in the Jews' favor; by October, they had almost 90,000 men and women under arms, the Arabs only 68,000." (The Sword And The Olive, p. 77-78)
  
• "Senior Hagana commanders met with committee [UN Special Committee On Palestine-UNSCOP] members in Jerusalem's Talpiot quarter in similarly surreptitious circumstances to express confidence that Jewish forces, which they numbered at 90,000, including 35,000 reservists, could overcome any Arab assault should it come to war." (Jerusalem Post)
  
• "I have learned that the state of Israel cannot be ruled in our generation without deceit and adventurism. These are historical facts that cannot be altered", Moshe Sharett wrote it in his diaries on Nov. 16th, 1956, who was the 1st Israeli FM and 2nd Israeli PM (see Simha Flapan, p. 52-53)
  "Ben-Gurion made serious efforts, shortly before the United Nations vote on the Partition proposal, to seek the neutrality of King Abdullah of Transjordan, whose British trained and officered army, the Arab Legion, was the STRONGEST fighting force in the Middle East. The king had long been at loggerheads with Haj Amin al-Husseini, the Mufti of Jerusalem, for the moral leadership of the Arabs of the whole region. Abdullah's secret interlocutor was to be Golda Meir:"' ...... He [King Abdullah ] soon made the heart of the matter clear: he would not join in any Arab attack on us. He would always remain our friend, he said, and like us, he wanted peace more than anything else. After all, we had a common foe, the Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini.'"(Israel: A History, p.149-150)
  
• Browse hundreds of pictures showing Palestinians being ethnically cleansed from their homes
  "As for Abdullah's Arab Legion, it had fought better than any other Arab force. Yet on scarcely any occasion had the Arab Legion attempted to conquer territories allotted to the Jews by the partition plan, preferring to stay on the defensive." (The Sword And The Olive, p. 95)
  
• ".... there was no common military headquarters, no attempts at coordinating the offenses of the Arab armies, and ... not even a regular liaison service for sharing enemy intelligence." (The Sword And The Olive, p. 83)
  
• Fake Valor: Why did two of Israel's future PMs, Menachem Begin and Yizhak Shamir, bomb WWII war efforts while their families were being gassed in Poland?
  "Perhaps the most important [of the Arab armies' problems] was a crippled shortage of ammunition, owing to the international arms embargo ..., in the case of the Iraqis and Egyptians, long lines of communications. For example, after February 25, 1948, the Arab Legion received no new ammunition for its 20mm guns. Some of the ammunition used by the Iraqi artillery was more than thirty years old; the Syrians had no ammunition for their heavy 155mm guns. Whereas Jewish stockpiles were growing all the time [especially the big arms shipment from Czechoslovakia in May 1948], the enemies were so depleted that they stole ammunition shipments from each other. In addition, they were ill-coordinated, technically incompetent, slow, ponderous, badly led, and unable to cope with night operations that willy-nilly constituted the IDF's expertise." (The Sword And The Olive, p. 95-96)
  
• Hitler's Message To The West: If Jews are such noble citizens who you care about, how come you're not letting them in?
  Soon after the execution of Operation Dani in the first half of July 1948, Yigal Allon wrote a Palmach (Haganah's strike force) report stating that the expulsion of Lydda's and Ramla's inhabitants had:

  "clogged the routes of the advance of the [Transjordan Arab] Legion and had foisted upon the Arab economy the problem of "maintaining another 45,000 souls . . . Moreover, the phenomenon of the flight of tens of thousands will no doubt cause demoralization in every Arab area [the refugees] reach . . . This victory will yet have a great effect on other sectors." (Israel: A History, p. 218 & Benny Morris, p. 211)

Although we disagree with the Arab armies' statistics (30,000 men) that Mr. Creveld presented, the reader could conclude the following:

• Browse hundreds of pictures showing Zionist Jews looting Palestinian properties
  The strongest Arab army to enter Palestine was in cahoots with the Israelis from the start. Based on H.M. King Abdullah's orders (who also commanded the Iraqi Army in addition to Transjordan's), the strongest Arab armies did not even encroach on the areas allotted to the Jewish state by the 1947 UN GA Partition plan. On the contrary, the truth was the exact opposite, for example:
  
  
  Fake Valor: Why Did Zionist Jews Hoist Swastikas On Their Haavara Fleet?
  1- Lydda, Ramla, and the Triangle Areas were handed over to the Israelis without a fight. Although Transjordan's Army withdrew based on the orders of H.M. the King, the Iraqi Army (which was positioned a few kilometers north in Ras al-'Ayn) was given explicit orders not to intervene (their motto in Arabic was maku 'Awamer). It should be noted that these areas, which used to be densely populated with Palestinians, were fertile and were strategically located for both Arab and Israeli supply lines. The collusion between Jordan's kings against Palestinians' rights is an open secret in Israel and the whole Middle East. In the case of Nakba, Avi Shlaim (the renowned Israeli historian) wrote a famous book on this subject.
  
  
  Browse hundreds of pictures depicting Palestinian culture
  2- When the Israeli Army attacked the Egyptian (south) and Syrian (northeast) armies in mid-October 1948, the Iraqi and Jordanian armies were forbidden from opening a third front in the middle and south. The Iraqi Army was capable of splitting Israel in half if it was given the orders, and the Jordanian Army watched from the sidelines as the Israeli Army mauled the Egyptians in the southern Hebron and Beersheba areas (Righteous Victims, p. 244). Note that the Iraqi Army was well positioned in the Tulkarm-Jinin areas (southeast of Haifa) which are only 12-14 kilometers from the Mediterranean, click here for a map illustration.
  
• Why did Great Britain indict two of Israel's future PMs on charges of terrorism? Those evil British must have been "Jew-hating" antisemites!
  The other strongest Arab armies, Egypt and Iraq, had long supply and communication lines away from their bases in their respective countries.
  
• Saudi Arabian and Sudanese armies contributed a few thousand soldiers in the middle of the war to shore up the exhausted Egyptian army in southern Palestine.
  
• Under American and French pressure, the Lebanese Army was sidelined from the start, and it did not even cross the international borders. At most, the Lebanese army provided a mediocre artillery cover to some ALA [Arab Liberation Army] volunteers at the beginning of the war. (Righteous Victims p. 233-234)
  
• The Zionist Version Of Lebensraum: A Map Of The Great Israel
  When the Arab armies entered Palestine on May 15, 1948, close to 400,000 Palestinian refugees were already ethnically cleansed out of their homes, and they clogged the roads, burdened local economies, and demoralized the Arab populations and armies, as Yigal Allon admitted it. In other words, the Palestinian refugees were used as a weapon against Israel's enemies.
  
• The Arab armies neither coordinated their military operational plans nor shared military intelligence. In fact, it wasn't until April 30, 1948, that the Arab armies' chiefs of staff met for the first time to work out a plan for military intervention. It's worth noting that this plan was later wrecked by H.M. King Abdullah, who made last-minute changes just before the entry of any Arab army into British-mandated Palestine. (Simha Flapan, p. 133 & Iron Wall, p. 35)
  
• A Jewish Agency assessment of the Arab intentions and capacities, submitted in March 1948, reported that the Arab chiefs of staff had warned their government against an invasion of Palestine and any lengthy war because of the internal situation in most of the Arab countries. For example, the revolt in Yemen kept the Saudis at bay, and there was a mass riot in Iraq against the Anglo-Iraqi treaty (Simha Flapan, p. 123-24)
  
• Yochai Sela, of Tel-Aviv University, provided a statistical breakdown of the number of Israelis killed during the 1948 war. Please pay attention to our analysis below the table:
  
  

  Fatality Category	Value	Percentage of Total
  Civilians killed*	1,150	20.15%
  Military killed	4,558	79.85%
  Total	5,708	100%
  Soldiers killed between Nov. 30, 1947 - May 15, 1948	1,345**	23.56%
  Soldiers killed between May 15, 1948- March 10, 1949	3,213**	56.29%
  Killed within the areas designated by the UN	1,581	27.70%
  Killed outside the areas designated by the UN	2,759***	48.33%
  Killed defending Jewish settlements	984	17.24%
  Killed attacking Arab settlements	1,212	21.23%

  Browse this gallery that shows hundreds of Palestinian land deeds that prove land ownership

  Source: Simha Flapan, p. 198-99.
  * Majority died in Jerusalem
  ** The number of Israelis killed while fighting the Arab Legion 1,367; the Palestinians, 1,092; the Egyptians, 910; the Syrians, 238; the Iraqis, 241; the Lebanese 129; Qawukji' ALA, 336; the British 30. *** Mostly soldiers, non-civilians.

  These statistics clearly proves:
  That the number of Israeli soldiers killed in offensive actions was well over 60% (2,759 ÷ 4,558) of the total Israeli soldiers killed between November 30, 1947 and March 10, 1949.
  Therefore, from the Israeli perspective, the so-called "War of Independence" was more offensive than defensive.

• David Ben-Gurion: we're the aggressors; Arabs defend themselves. (Righteous Victims, p. 652)
  The Israelis maximally exploited the rivalry between H.M. the King Abdullah of Transjordan and al-Hajj Amin al-Husseini. For example, before the entry of any Arab armies to Palestine on May 15th, 1948, al-Hajj Amin (who resided at the time in Tyre-southern Lebanon) wanted to declare a provisional Palestinian government in Galilee, with Safad being its capital. To preempt such a plan, H.M. the King pulled Transjordan's irregular troops out of Safad on May 11th, 1948, which was the primary reason for its falling into Israeli hands a few days later (Benny Morris, p. 105). Another compelling reason that enticed H.M. the King to collaborate with the Jewish Agency was the promise of future annual payments of $4 million for the subsequent five years. (Simha Flapan, p. 138)
  
• By October 1948, the Israeli army had 90,000 armed men, while the Arab armies had 68,000 armed men.
  
• JTA Sept. 3rd, 1933 Quoting Nahum Sokolow: "Hitlerism enables us to convert all Jews to Zionism."
  Although there was an arms embargo on the warring parties in the Middle East, the embargo negatively affected the Arabs more than the Israelis. While the Arab armies were depleting their arms and ammunition, the Israeli army was stockpiling weapons and ammunition from a huge arms shipment from Czechoslovakia that arrived in early May 1948. This important arms deal was critical for Israelis in winning the war of Nakba, and if not for Stalin's approval, it wouldn't have happened. Despite these facts, many Jews shamelessly spread the big lie that it was Stalin's KGB who created Palestinian nationalism. It should be noted that Stalin was critical in Israel gaining recognition at the UN, and not for Uncle Joe (that is how FDR used to refer to Stalin), Israel would not have been recognized!
  
• It's a fabricated myth that seven well-equipped, organized, and coordinated Arab armies attempted to PUSH the poorly armed Jews into the sea; click here to read our rebuttal to this myth.
  
• Click here for a detailed map illustrating the standing of the Israeli and Arab armies on May 14th, 1948.

NY Times, March 20th, 1947: ARABS; Sure of Superiority, Settlers Feel They Can Win Natives by Reason or Force

Ben-Gurion, the first Israeli Prime Minister, recognized that Palestinian nationalism created the very danger he was most afraid of. He knew that the victory in 1948 was achieved not because the Israeli Army was more heroic but because the Arab armies were corrupt and the Arab world was divided. He became obsessed with the fear that a charismatic leader would modernize Arab education and their economies and unite all the Arab states. He wrote on November 11, 1948:

"The Arab people have been beaten by us. Will they forget it quickly? Seven hundred thousand people beat 30 million. Will they forget this offense? It can be assumed that they have a sense of honor. We will make peace efforts, but two sides are necessary for peace. Is there any security that they will not want to take revenge?

David Ben-Gurion envisioned that Nazis' Nuremberg Race Laws would become the LEVER that would end up creating the "Jewish state," but how? Click the image for the details

Let us recognize the truth: we won't because we performed wonders, but because the Arab army is rotten. Must this rottenness persist forever? The situation in the world beckons towards revenge: there are two blocs; there is fear of a world war. This tempts anyone with a grievance. We will always require a superior defensive capability." (Simha Flapan, p. 238

In a nutshell: We are not exagurating by saying that Arab armies helped Palestinians just a little bit more than they did during the genocide in Gaza after the Octorber 7th Raid. Palestinians would have been much better off if they had relied on themselves. Since the war of Nakba to this date, Arab leaders have used Palestinians as a bargaining chip, exactly as they are doing right now. Did they want Nakba to occur? Hell no. On the other hand, no Arab leader, then and now, would risk his neck for Palestinians, and the first to know this formula is the Israelis. Anything else is grounded in pure fiction.

Browse hundreds of pictures depicting Palestinian culture

Finally, we would like to end this article by directly quoting the famous Israeli historian Avi Shlaim, who stated in his famous Iron Wall book:

• "This popular-heroic-moralistic version of the 1948 war has been used extensively in Israeli propaganda and is still taught in Israeli schools. It is a prime example of the use of a nationalistic version of history in nation-building. History is the propaganda of the victors, and the history of the 1948 war is no exception." (Iron Wall p. 34)
• JFK said it BEST in 1939: Palestine Was Hardly Britain's to Give Away
  "Despite all the political miscalculations and failures of those who planned the Sinai Campaign, it is their version that became firmly entrenched in the mind of the overwhelming majority of Israelis. The popular perception of the 1956 war in Israel is that it was a defensive war, a just war, a brilliantly executed war, and a war that achieved nearly all of its objectives. This version of the war was propagated not only by members of the Israeli defense establishment but also by a host of sympathetic historians, journalists, and commentators. However deeply cherished, this version does not stand up to scrutiny in light of the available evidence. It is a striking example of how history can be manipulated to serve nationalist ends. The official Israeli version of the 1956 war, like that of the 1948 war, is little more than the propaganda of the victor." (Iron Wall, p. 185)

God forbid we failed to destroy this myth and you still have your doubts, we ask you to contemplate reading how Simha Flapan addressed this myth from multiple angles. Trust us, it will be worth your time.

Related Links

• Short Clip: President Truman explains Nakba and Americans' role in making it possible in 50 seconds. Duration: 50 sec
• Video: Ilan Pappe: Israeli Myths & Propaganda
• Facts About Haavara: Why did few yishuves see action fighting the Nazis, but over 120k were deployed to fight the Arabs 2 years after WWII ended?
• Zionist Quotes: Expansionism (The Greater Israel)
• Zionist FAQ: Why did Arabs reject the proposed UN General Assembly partition plan, which split Palestine into Jewish and Arab states?
• JPost: Espionage and the Zionist endeavor.
• Listen to an interview with the former Israeli Foreign Minister (Shlomo Ben-Ami) admitting that it is a concocted myth that the poorly armed Israelis faced an overwhelming attack by the "invading" seven Arab Armies during the 1948 war (starting from minute 5:00).
• First Step to Peace: Conquering Nakba Denial by Yousef Munayyer