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The State of Israel was formed in May 14, 1948. I guess the first Arab-Israel war broke out in the same month of the same year. Israel won the war decisively. The question is not "How did they win the war?" The question is, "How did they build up their military within days of the inception of the State of Israel?" Who helped them to build their Military so quickly? Where did they find military hardware so quickly? |
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As a matter of fact, the 1948 war actually started on November 30th, 1947 - the day after the UN Partition Resolution, as the Arabs vowed not to accept it. The first phase of the war pitted Palestine Arab irregular warbands against Jewish paramilitary formations - the mainstream Haganah, the more nationalist Irgun, and the really really radical Lehi. The Arabs were largely beaten in this phase. During the second phase, the armies of five regular Arab states invaded the newly formed State of Israel and by and large met with defeat. (The only one of them to acquit itself well was the Transjordanian Arab Legion, a British-trained and partially British-officered unit). The main brunt of the first phase of the fighting was borne by the Haganah. Where did it come from? Well, for the duration of the British Mandate in Palestine, the Jews were building, with British sanction, the institutions of a proto-state, usually called in later historiography "medina shebaderech", literally meaning Hebrew for "a state on its way". This included democratic elections of quasi-executive and quasi-legislative councils, trade unions, healthcare institutions etc. (Wikipedia is very brief on this - but still worth a look). It was also building a paramilitary capacity, known as the Haganah - unlike the rest of the institutions, this was mostly against British wishes. (Haganah-British relations are a somewhat complicated subject, which I haven't time to treat here fully). Haganah was also practicing a form of "voluntary conscription" - young men were expected by their society to join its training for a year; those who declined to do so were socially frowned upon. So, when the newborn Israel needed an army, it had the nucleus of one - Haganah. This is the story in brief. One source which treats this from an interesting angle is a chapter in the book Supreme Command by E.Cohen. |
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The Arab-Israeli conflict didn't start in 1948, it has a long history and was particularly intensified after the British government promised Palestine both to its Arab and Jewish population in the course of World War I. The first armed conflict is apparently assumed to be the Battle of Tel Hai in 1920. As a result, while Israel didn't exist before 1948 there was already a number of Jewish paramilitary organizations like Haganah, Irgun, Lehi. You can read the details in Wikipedia's history of the Israel Defense Forces but the point is: the army didn't come out of nowhere, it was created around existing organizations that came out in the open. Obviously, these were reinforced by a mass conscription once war broke out but there were existing structures available to integrate new arrivals in. As to the military equipment, there was apparently a lot of it smuggled into the country over the earlier years. France was also an important source of weaponry, at that time it was the only country to sell weapons to Israel (later replaced by the United States). |
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