Wednesday, March 14, 2012

The Arab-Israeli War


The partition passed by the UN General Assembly sparked even more tension between Arabs and Zionists, inciting a Civil war within Palestine between the two parties. Zionists in Palestine brought in armed forces and increased their efforts to bring new Jewish immigrants. The Arab League pledged its support to the Palestinian Arabs in December of 1947. The civil war began to spread through Palestine during the continual deterioration of the British administration, which was in the process of extricating itself from the tenuous and delicate situation.(2) Due to the rapid escalation of fighting, the United States changed its decision and began to oppose the partition in an attempt to halt the conflict. In mid-March, 1948, the Zionists received a shipment of weapons from Czechoslovakia and began their offensive. In April, 250 Arab civilians at Dayr Yasin were slaughtered, causing an exodus among the Arab people in heavily-populated Jewish areas.
Although Arabs outnumbered Israelis, the Arab soldiers, for the most part, were inexperienced and lacked training, while the Israelis were well trained and had from 20,000 to 25,000 European World War II veterans. Originally, the Arabs were better armed, but the Israelis quickly remedied that situation with foreign aid. The Israelis proved to have the upper hand, and armistice agreements were signed in 1949, conceding much of Palestine to the Israelis. In the end, the war drove almost a million Arabs out of Palestine/Israel, and the Palestinian Arabs lost land that had originally been accorded to them in the partition.

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