Personal recollection of 1948 Arab-Israeli war and early Israeli borders

“No reason to be afraid,” our metapelet kept telling me. That only made me more scared. Yet within a few hours, everything was quiet again, and never again did the shellfire get near to us. A few weeks later, I heard the only gunfire inside the kibbutz itself. It came from the top of our water tower. The man on guard duty thought he saw movement on the road outside. But it turned out to be nothing. It wasn’t until well into 1949 that formal agreements were signed and “armistice line” borders drawn with the Arab states. By the measure that mattered most — survival — Israel had won and the Arab attackers had lost. Jordan did end up in control of the West Bank, as well as the eastern half of a divided city of Jerusalem, including the walled Old City and the site of the ancient Jewish temple. The new Israel remained, at least geographically, vulnerable. It was just 11 miles wide around Tel Aviv and even narrower, barely half that, near Mishmar Hasharon. Egyptian-held Gaza was seven miles from the southern Israeli city of Ashkelon and just 40 from the outskirts of Tel AVIV. Israel did secure control of the entire Galilee, up to the pre-war borders with Lebanon and Syria, and of the Negev Desert in the south. The territory of our new state was about a third larger than the area proposed under the UN partition plan rejected by the Arabs. Yet the victory came at a heavy price: more than 6,000 dead, one per cent of the Jewish population of Palestine at the time. It was as if America had lost two million in the Vietnam War. One-third of the Israeli dead were Holocaust survivors. The Arabs paid a heavy price too, and not just the roughly 7,000 people who lost their lives. Nearly 700,000 Palestinian Arabs had fled — or, in some cases, been forced to flee — towns and villages in what was now Israel. The full extent and circumstances of the Arabs’ flight became known to us at Mishmar Hasharon only later. But it did not take long to notice the change around us. Wadi Khawaret was physically still there, but all of the villagers were gone. As far as I could discover, none had been killed. They left with a first wave of refugees in April 1948, and eventually ended up near Tulkarem on the West Bank. After the war, the Israeli government divided up their farmland among nearby kibbutzim including Mishmar Hasharon. The absence of our former neighbors in Wadi Khawaret seemed to me at the time simply a part of the war. From the moment the violence started, I understood there would be suffering on both sides. When we sent our care packages to Giora Ros in Jerusalem, I remember trying to imagine what “living 30 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_011501