Arab Liberation Army

Palestine is decolonized in 1948.

The Jewish settlers in Palestine declare independence in 1948, touching off a series of wars with their Arabic neighbors.

The new nation creates the Central Institute for Intelligence and Security, 1948.

The situation in Palestine in early 1948 appears inauspicious for the Yishuv (the Jewish settlers in Palestine) despite the passage of the UN partition plan.

Following the rejection by the Arab High Command (AHC; reconstituted by the Arab League in 1945) of the plan immediately after its passage and its call for a general strike, violence between Arabs and Jews has mounted.

The Arabs besiege many Jewish centers, including Jerusalem.

Civil war spreads and external intervention increases as the disintegration of the British administration progresses.

Moreover, the British forces in Palestine have sided with the Arabs and attempt to thwart the Yishuv's efforts to arm itself.

Suspected Haganah terrorists, wearing European clothes, throw a grenade into the Semiramis Hotel, in Jerusalem's Katamon Quarter, causing superficial damage but no casualties on January 5, 1948.

During the ensuing confusion, a charge is placed in the basement of the building and it explodes about one minute later, completely demolishing half the hotel.

The terrorists start shooting at the houses in the neighborhood as they withdraw.

The attack kills eighteen Christian and Muslim Arabs, among them women and children, and wounds sixteen more.

All told, Jewish terrorists have killed one hundred and twenty-seven British soldiers and wounded three hundred and thirty-one from 1944 to 1948, as well as thousands of Arabs.

David Ben-Gurion, in a speech to the Mapai Council on February 8th, 1948, states, “From your entry into Jerusalem, through Lifta, Romema [East Jerusalem Palestinian neighborhood] ... there are no [Palestinian] Arabs. One hundred percent Jews. Since Jerusalem was destroyed by the Romans, it has not been Jewish as it is now. In many [Palestinian] Arab neighborhoods in the west one sees not a single [Palestinian] Arab. I do not assume that this will change. ...What had happened in Jerusalem...is likely to happen in many parts of the country...in the six, eight, or ten months of the campaign there will certainly be great changes in the composition of the population in the country.”(Masalha, Nur: Expulsion Of The Palestinians (Institute for Palestine Studies, 1992), p. 180-181")

A car bomb planted by Arab terrorists destroys the Jerusalem headquarters of the Jewish Agency, killing thirteen and injuring eighty-four, on March 11, 1948.

The military prospects of the Yishuv change dramatically in mid-March after receiving the first clandestine shipment of heavy arms from Czechoslovakia.

The Zionists make a major effort to establish their state, insisting that partition is binding and anxious about the change in U.S. policy.

They launch a campaign of psychological warfare simultaneously with their military offensives.

The Haganah goes on the offensive and, in a series of operations carried out from early April, successfully consolidates and creates communications links with those Jewish settlements designated by the UN to become the Jewish state.

David Ben-Gurion, addressing the Zionist Action Committee on April 6th, 1948, states, “We will not be able to win the war if we do not, during the war, populate upper and lower, eastern and western Galilee, the Negev and Jerusalem area ... I believe that war will also bring in its wake a great change in the distribution of Arab population.”

The success of two offensives launched by the Zionists during April coincides roughly with three events.

The first of these had been the failure of an Arab attack on the Zionist settlement of Mishmar Haemek on April 4.