Characters

"In Israel, in order to be a realist you must believe in miracles."

David Ben-Gurion was the founding father of Israel — the man who, more than anyone else, willed the Jewish state into existence. Born in Poland in 1886, he immigrated to Ottoman Palestine in 1906 and spent the next four decades building the institutions of a state before the state existed: labor unions, a political party, a defense force, and an international lobby. When the British Mandate ended on May 14, 1948, Ben-Gurion stood in the Tel Aviv Museum and proclaimed the establishment of the State of Israel — hours before five Arab armies invaded. As both Prime Minister and Defense Minister, he directed the war personally, sometimes overruling his generals. His most controversial decision was accepting the first UN ceasefire — against his generals' wishes — which allowed time to import arms. His most fateful was rejecting the second ceasefire's terms regarding Jerusalem, committing Israel to fighting for the city. Ben-Gurion retired to the Negev desert in 1963, living in a kibbutz and writing his memoirs, convinced that Israel's future lay in making the desert bloom.

"If you want to make peace, you don't talk to your friends. You talk to your enemies."

Moshe Dayan was the most celebrated and controversial Israeli military figure of his generation — a man whose single black eye patch became the face of Israeli military prowess. Born on the first kibbutz in Palestine, he joined the Haganah as a teenager and learned his craft fighting Arab gangs alongside British officers. He lost his eye in 1941 during a Vichy French Syrian campaign while serving with British forces. In the 1948 war, he commanded the 89th Commando Battalion and then the Jerusalem front, fighting in some of the war's bloodiest engagements. He later rose to Chief of Staff, commanding the Sinai Campaign in 1956, and to Defense Minister during the Six-Day War, where his iconic appearance at the Western Wall cemented his legend.

"Peace is not merely an absence of war, but the nurture of human life."

King Abdullah I was the most pragmatic of the Arab leaders who sent armies against Israel in 1948 — and the one with the most complex relationship with the Jewish state he was nominally fighting. A Hashemite prince installed as Emir of Transjordan by the British after World War I, Abdullah was a sophisticated politician who maintained secret contacts with Jewish Agency leaders right up to the eve of war. His goal was not to destroy Israel but to annex the Arab parts of Palestine — primarily the West Bank — for himself. His Arab Legion, trained and commanded by British officers, was the most effective Arab force in the war. Abdullah's willingness to negotiate a separate peace with Israel made him a traitor in the eyes of Palestinian nationalists. He was shot dead at the Al-Aqsa Mosque in 1951.

"Security is not only a military problem. It is a political, economic, and social problem."

Yigal Allon was arguably Israel's finest commander in 1948 — the man whose operations in the Negev and Galilee were most responsible for securing Israel's territorial gains. Born in the Galilee, Allon joined the Haganah as a teenager and rose to command the Palmach, the Haganah's elite strike force. His tactical instincts were exceptional: rather than frontal assaults, he preferred wide encirclements that cut off and destroyed enemy forces. His Operations Yoav (Negev) and Hiram (Galilee) were the war's most decisive offensives. He wanted to continue into the West Bank and complete Israel's control of all of Mandatory Palestine, but Ben-Gurion ordered him to halt under US pressure. The abrupt end of his offensive left a territorial reality Allon spent the rest of his life trying to address through diplomacy.

"We are not fighting for territory. We are fighting to prevent the establishment of a Jewish state."

John Bagot Glubb — 'Glubb Pasha' — was one of the most remarkable figures in the 1948 war: a British officer who commanded the Arab side's best army. A veteran of World War I who served in Iraq and then Transjordan during the interwar period, Glubb had spent two decades building the Arab Legion into a professional military force. In 1948 he commanded it against Israel while Britain nominally maintained neutrality. Under his command, the Legion captured the Jewish Quarter of Jerusalem, held Latrun against repeated Israeli assaults, and secured the West Bank for Jordan. Critics accused him of deliberately limiting Jordan's advance to avoid a full Arab victory that would destabilize British interests; his supporters say he simply had too few men and too little ammunition. He was dismissed by King Hussein in 1956 — a victim of Arab nationalism that resented British officers commanding Arab armies. He retired to England and wrote prolifically about the Arab world.

"We will have peace with the Arabs when they love their children more than they hate us."

Golda Meir was not a general in 1948 — but she may have saved Israel more than any general. Born in Kyiv and raised in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, she had immigrated to Palestine in 1921. By 1948 she was head of the Jewish Agency's political department — effectively Israel's pre-state foreign minister. In January 1948, she traveled to the United States and in a series of speeches to American Jewish audiences raised $50 million (equivalent to over $600 million today) in six weeks — money that bought the weapons that armed Israel's military. Without that money, Israel might not have survived the first weeks of the Arab invasion. She also made the secret diplomatic mission to King Abdullah in the days before independence, trying and failing to prevent Jordanian intervention. After the war, she became Israel's first ambassador to the Soviet Union, then Foreign Minister, then Prime Minister — serving from 1969 to 1974.

"We will fight for every inch of our land."

Abd al-Qadir al-Husayni was the most capable Palestinian Arab military commander of the 1948 war — and his early death was one of the factors that doomed Arab resistance. The son of Musa Kazim al-Husayni, a prominent Jerusalem leader, Abd al-Qadir studied chemistry in Cairo but returned to Palestine to lead the Arab revolt of 1936–39 against both the British and Jewish immigration. When the 1948 war began, he commanded the Holy Jihad Army — a Palestinian irregular force — in the Jerusalem corridor, fighting to keep the road to Jerusalem open against Jewish forces. His tactics were sophisticated: he understood that controlling the heights around Jerusalem was decisive. He was killed on April 8, 1948, leading a counterattack at Qastal, a hilltop village west of Jerusalem, when he ran out of ammunition and was shot. His death removed the one Palestinian commander who might have held the Jerusalem corridor.

"The Arab nation will not rest until Palestine is liberated."

Fawzi al-Qawuqji was the Arab Liberation Army's commander — a romantic pan-Arab nationalist whose military record was more distinguished by dramatic gesture than actual victory. A Lebanese-born officer who had served in the Ottoman Army, he spent the interwar years leading armed revolts against the French in Syria and the British in Iraq. During World War II, he fled to Nazi Germany, where he collaborated with the Nazis in broadcasting anti-British propaganda to the Arab world — a fact that complicated his post-war reputation. In 1948, the Arab League sent him to command the ALA — a motley volunteer force with no air support, limited artillery, and poor logistics — against Haganah and IDF forces that were rapidly growing in capability. His operations in Galilee were consistently outmaneuvered by Israeli commanders, and Operation Hiram destroyed his force in 60 hours. He retreated to Lebanon and spent his remaining decades in exile, his pan-Arab dreams never realized.

"This will be a war of extermination and momentous massacres."

Abdul Rahman Hassan Azzam — 'Azzam Pasha' — was the Arab League's first Secretary-General and the political architect of the Arab states' intervention in the 1948 war. An Egyptian politician and ardent pan-Arab nationalist, he had helped found the Arab League in 1945 and spent the years before 1948 trying to build Arab political unity. When Israel declared independence, Azzam coordinated the intervention of Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Iraq, and Lebanon — but the coordination was political theater rather than military strategy. The Arab states entered the war with different objectives: Jordan wanted the West Bank, Egypt wanted a presence in Palestine, Syria wanted territory. Azzam could not unify these competing interests. His own boastful statement about a 'war of extermination' haunted him: the extermination was of Arab armies' coherence, not Jewish lives. He was dismissed from the Arab League in 1952 after the Arab defeats and retired to obscurity.