Over the years, the history of the Arab–Zionist conflict has undergone interpretative innovation. The massive declassification of archival documentation in the West and in Israel made possible the historiographic breakthrough of the late 1980s that is now commonly called the “new historiography.” And it is the further declassificatory initiative in Israel today that compels a fresh look at much of what was published in the late 1980s and early 1990s. I am speaking specifically of the opening of certain private and institutional papers, of the protocols of Israel's Cabinet meetings between 1948 and 1953, with additional years now in the works, and, most significantly, of the massive declassification of the documentation stored in the Haganah Archive in Tel Aviv and the Israel Defense Forces and Defense Ministry Archive (IDFA) in Givatayim. A certain amount of material is still being held back, but on average more than 95 percent of each file is being made available. The archive's small staff cannot meet the academic community's needs and, so far, less than 10 percent of the 140,000 files covering the years 1947–56 have been opened. But as most of the now declassified files relate to the 1948 War and, more specifically, to its operational side, it can be said that a great proportion of the important material on 1948 in the IDFA is now available.

Looking through these new materials, both military and civilian, has compelled a fresh look at the creation of the Palestinian refugee problem. When writing The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem 1947–1949 in the mid-1980s, I had no access to the materials in the IDFA or Haganah Archive and precious little to first-hand military materials deposited elsewhere.

Recent scholarship on the 1948 War has concentrated on Israeli concerns. Central to revisionist studies of the last two decades has been the importance of the Zionist–Transjordanian alliance that emerged during the 1930s and 1940s. The opening of the Israeli archives has determined this line of inquiry, which presents the balance of power in the region in an entirely new light. The Yishuv, the Jewish community in Palestine, was not David fighting an Arab Goliath, we have learned. In part, this reflected the military balance of power, but it was also due to the political understandings reached among Zionist leaders, King ʿAbdullah, and the British. We now have a much clearer understanding of how disunited the Arabs were, how little reason the Yishuv had to fear the Arab Legion, and how close the Zionists came to avoiding war with the Arab states altogether. The “new historians” have focused on Israel and Jordan at the expense of the other Arab states, about which we know relatively little. The Arab states, not surprisingly, were also influenced by the Amman–Tel Aviv secret dialogue, and the threat it posed.

For Syria, the danger of King ʿAbdullah's dialogue with the Jewish Agency was not so much the likelihood that it would help the Yishuv to become a state, which most believed to be quite small. The real danger was the prospect that it would allow the Hashemites to become the dominant power in the region. From the outset of the war, the primary concern of the Arab states was the inter-Arab conflict.

Between early spring and late fall of 1948, Arab Palestine was radically transformed. At the beginning of that year, Arabs constituted over two-thirds of the population of the country, and were a majority in fifteen of the country's sixteen sub-districts. Beyond this, Arabs owned nearly 90 percent of Palestine's privately owned land.2 In a few months of heavy fighting in the early spring of 1948, the military forces of a well-organized Jewish population of just over 600,000 people routed those of an Arab majority more than twice its size. In the months that followed, they decisively defeated several Arab armies, which had entered the country on 15 May 1948. Over this turbulent period, more than half of the nearly 1.4 million Palestinian Arabs were driven from or fled their homes. Those Palestinians who did not flee the conquered areas were reduced to a small minority within the new state of Israel (which now controlled about 77 percent of the territory of Mandatory Palestine). At the end of the fighting, Jordan took over the areas of Palestine controlled by its army west of the Jordan River, while the Egyptian army administered the strip it retained around Gaza, adjacent to its borders. In the wake of this catastrophe – al-Nakba, as it was inscribed in Palestinian memory – the Palestinians found themselves living under a variety of alien regimes, were dispossessed of the vast bulk of their property, and had lost control over most aspects of their lives.

How and why did this momentous transformation happen? Most conventional accounts of the 1948 War tend to focus on events after 15 May 1948, the date when the state of Israel was founded, and the Arab armies intervened unsuccessfully in Palestine in the wake of the stunning collapse of the Palestinians.

I might as well begin with my own experience of 1948, and what it meant for many of the people around me. I talk about this at some length in my memoir Out of Place. My own immediate family was spared the worst ravages of the catastrophe: we had a house and my father a business in Cairo, so even though we were in Palestine during most of 1947 when we left in December of that year, the wrenching, cataclysmic quality of the collective experience (when 780,000 Palestinians, literally two-thirds of the country's population were driven out by Zionist troops and design) was not one we had to go through. I was 12 at the time so had only a somewhat attenuated and certainly no more than a semi-conscious awareness of what was happening; only this narrow awareness was available to me, but I do distinctly recall some things with special lucidity. One was that every member of my family, on both sides, became a refugee during the period; no one remained in our Palestine, that is, that part of the territory (controlled by the British Mandate) that did not include the West Bank which was annexed to Jordan. Therefore, those of my relatives who lived in Jaffa, Safad, Haifa, and West Jerusalem were suddenly made homeless, in many instances penniless, disoriented, and scarred forever. I saw most of them again after the fall of Palestine but all were greatly reduced in circumstances, their faces stark with worry, ill-health, despair.

The Palestine War lasted less than twenty months, from the United Nations resolution recommending the partition of Palestine in November 1947 to the final armistice agreement signed between Israel and Syria in July 1949. Those twenty months transformed the political landscape of the Middle East forever. Indeed, 1948 may be taken as a defining moment for the region as a whole. Arab Palestine was destroyed and the new state of Israel established. Egypt, Syria and Lebanon suffered outright defeat, Iraq held its lines, and Transjordan won at best a pyrrhic victory. Arab public opinion, unprepared for defeat, let alone a defeat of this magnitude, lost faith in its politicians. Within three years of the end of the Palestine War, the prime ministers of Egypt and Lebanon and the king of Jordan had been assassinated, and the president of Syria and the king of Egypt overthrown by military coups. No event has marked Arab politics in the second half of the twentieth century more profoundly. The Arab–Israeli wars, the Cold War in the Middle East, the rise of the Palestinian armed struggle, and the politics of peace-making in all of their complexity are a direct consequence of the Palestine War.

The significance of the Palestine War also lies in the fact that it was the first challenge to face the newly independent states of the Middle East. In 1948, the Middle East was only just emerging from colonial rule. Though Israel was the newest state in the region when it declared independence on 15 May 1948, its neighbors were hardly much older.

The year 1948 was a defining one for the modern state of Jordan. It was the year in which the government of King ʿAbdullah redefined its treaty relations with Britain and achieved greater independence from London's rule. It was the year in which the Arab Legion engaged in its first all-out war, and the people of Transjordan were mobilized behind the common Arab agenda of preserving Arab Palestine. It was the year in which the desert kingdom of Transjordan was transformed territorially and demographically into the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, through the integration of the West Bank and the absorption of a half-million Palestinian refugees. The events of 1948 isolated Jordan in inter-Arab politics, and were directly responsible for the assassination of King ʿAbdullah three years later. In effect, 1948 was a major turning point when the former British colony emerged as a sovereign actor and was caught up in the turmoil which has buffeted the region down to the present day.

The centrality of 1948 to the subsequent history of Jordan has given the events of that year particular importance in the foundation myths of the Hashemite kingdom. In essence, history has been employed to validate the course of action pursued by King ʿAbdullah and the state which he founded. Consequently, much of what has been published on the subject in Jordan has been limited to the memoirs of participants, and a handful of works by nationalist historians who lived through the 1948 War and based their work primarily on the memoirs and documents of those who took part.

This chapter examines Arab historiography on Egypt's role in the 1948 Palestine War in order to disentangle myth from reality. Most Arab writers allocate the largest share of the blame for defeat in Palestine to the old regimes and marshal arguments and evidence to prove their incompetence, corruption, and treachery. Had the Arab world been ruled by more determined and nationalist leaders, so the argument runs, the war would have been won and the state of Israel would not have been born. Arab historiography called into question the very legitimacy of the old political order in Egypt, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, and Transjordan. The defeat of the Arab states in 1948 represented one of the final nails in the coffin of the old ruling social and political classes. Intentionally or not, Arab writers played an important part in legitimizing the new men on horseback, who began to seize power since the late 1940s, and who promised to redeem Arab honor and prepare for a second round with Israel. Indeed, the institutionalization of militarism in the Arab world owes a great deal to the discrediting of the old regimes. Egypt was a classic case. Egyptian and Arab societies in general are still paying the price of this revolutionary transformation in Arab politics.

Egypt's decision to intervene in the Palestine War was influenced by political and tactical considerations. King Faruq decided to enter the 1948 War against the advice of his prime minister, Mahmud Nuqrashi, the army, and the major political parties. Despite the skepticism of the members of parliament and their questioning of the wisdom of intervention, they, like the king, were influenced by public sentiment and the logic of inter-Arab politics and supported Faruq's decision to enter the war.

In the 1930s and early 1940s, King Abd al-Aziz Al-Saud, the founder of the modern Kingdom of Saudi Arabia better known in the West as Ibn Saud, was isolated both ideologically and politically in the wider Arab world. His state religion, the Wahabi interpretation of Sunni Islam, was viewed by outsiders as a fanatical sect that threatened stability in neighboring countries, especially Iraq, Transjordan, and the Gulf states, where British influence was paramount. In a revealing memorandum, the British diplomat Sir Andrew Ryan wrote in July 1932 that Saudi isolation was less pronounced than it had been, as Ibn Saud had “learned to control his hatred, if not his suspicion, of the Hashemites,” his old rivals from the Hijaz who were expelled by Saudi conquest, only to be placed on the thrones of British protectorates in Iraq and Transjordan. “Carefully nurtured sympathy with [Ibn Saud] seems to abound in Palestine and Syria,” Ryan concluded.

It is in this specific context that Palestine and the upheaval of 1948 became part of the construction of Saudi Arabia's historical narrative. This chapter explores the official presentation that highlights the Saudi contribution to “defending” Palestine. It considers the dissenting voices who challenged the authenticity and credibility of this official narrative. Finally, by navigating a thin line that separates the official from the unofficial, it aims to present an interpretation and assessment of Saudi involvement in the 1948 War that goes beyond the official discourse of glorification and the counter-narratives of condemnation and accusation.

Iraq's role in the 1948 War was ambivalent. Its leaders were the first to advocate coordinated military intervention in Palestine by the armies of the Arab states. Yet its own army, despite being the largest single Arab force in Palestine by the end of the war, did little beyond occupying defensive positions in the hills of the West Bank. Similarly, Iraqi ministers called repeatedly for the imposition of an Arab oil and trade boycott of the Western powers supporting partition, yet did nothing to implement it. During the war itself, Iraq initially rejected all cease-fires, but failed to back this up with more effective military strategies. Following the fighting, the Iraqi government refused to participate in armistice talks and seemed intent simply on withdrawing its troops as rapidly as possible.

The marked disparity between the uncompromising rhetoric of successive Iraqi governments and the rather timid nature of their actions has laid them open to charges of hypocrisy and double-dealing. This was so at the time, both in Iraq and in other parts of the Middle East. In February 1949 it led the prime minister of the day, Nuri al-Saʿid, to establish a parliamentary committee of enquiry into the war. This remarkable document – Taqrir Lajnat al-Tahqiq al-Niyabiyya fi Qadiyyat Filastin [Report of the Parliamentary Committee of Enquiry into the Palestine Question] – was published by the Iraqi government in September 1949. It provided an opportunity both for the public airing, but also for the public vindication of the records of successive Iraqi governments and military commanders in the years leading up to 1948 and during the war itself.

In 1969 the ICP-CL faced an organizational deadlock as a result of the brutal treatment it had experienced at the hands of the Ba'thist regime. The ICP's split into factions left the CL temporarily rudderless, with the defection of the secretary-general and the submission of the rest of the leadership to the Baʿthists in the National Front. This was further compounded by the ICP-CL's refusal to be reconciled with the ICP-CC. There seemed to be no option left for its cadre except to face annihilation at the hands of the Baʿth security and police apparatus (as had already happened to their leadership) or to abandon political activism altogether. However, a new generation of committed cadre emerged, who concentrated their efforts on rejecting all cooperation, let alone the formation of an official alliance, with the Baʿth, and who aimed for a very tightly knit, secretive organizational structure and more defined ideology. Of course, such an organization took time to develop and when Party activists met for a plenary session in Qaradagh, a mountainous area in the vicinity of Sulaimaniyah in Iraqi Kurdistan, the regime had detailed knowledge of both the timing and place of the meeting. It dispatched three. MIG fighters and a Badger bomber to fly low-level runs over the location from 2:00 PM to 8:00 PM to signal the regime's ability to destroy the CL if it so desired.

The Tripartite aggression of 20 October 1956 against Egypt polarized politics in the entire Middle East region, including Iraq, with national fervor turning into popular political opposition to the West and its Arab allies. Public outrage in Iraq and the demonstrations that followed brought the major opposition parties closer together, and a committee representing the Baʿth, Istiqlâl, NDP, and ICP, and including some independent democratic personalities, was created to coordinate their activities. They formed a special Field Committee to direct the daily demonstrations that were taking place. However, the members of this committee were almost immediately arrested, forcing the Party representatives to take over the tasks themselves. In addition to forming the sub-committee, they established the Supreme Student Committee to direct and mobilize students, who in fact formed the backbone of the protests and who represented the parties. A representative of the KDP was added to this student committee, although the KDP was not officially part of the initial sub-committee.

In response to these developments, NÛrî al-Saʿîd's defiance of the opposition intensified and his oppression increased, particularly of the communists and their sympathizers. This spurred closer cooperation among many of the opposition groupings, and by early 1957 the opposition's solidarity had become a pre-condition for their survival. With some effort, an alliance structure began to take shape, and in February 1957 an umbrella organization, the United National Front, was born.

When the Central Committee held its Fourth Party Congress in Ziwiah Ka on the Iraq-Iran border from 10 to 15 November 1985, it found itself divided once more over the direction and objectives of the Party. The split in the Central Committee into two distinct groups along ethnic lines had become evident by the plenum of June-July 1984, and crystallized at the 1985 Congress. The Kurds congregated around Secretary-GeneralʿAzîz Muḥammad, while the Arab groups gathered under the leadership of Bâqir Ibrâhîm al-MÛsawî, a member of the Politburo; ʿÂmir ʿAbd-ul-lah; Mahdî al-Ḥâfiẓ, Mahdî ʿAbd-ul-Karîm; NÛrî ʿAbd-ul-Razzâq; Mâjid ʿAbd-ul-Riḍâ; ʿAdnân ʿAbbâs; Muḥammad Ḥasan Mubârakj and ʿAbd-ul-Wahâb Ṭâhir. In addition to personal animosities between the two cliques, there was also a clear split between the leadership inside Iraq and that from outside that exacerbated their political differences.

The two objectives dividing the Party were whether its immediate priority should be the overthrow of the Baʿth or the defence of the country in the ongoing war with Iran. Zâkî Khairî led the faction calling for a concentration of Party activities against the possibility of an Iranian occupation of Iraq. The dispute resulted in the expulsion of many in the Arab faction and in a reduction in the size of the Central Committee from forty-four members, which had been elected by the Third Congress, to only twenty-four, as it was announced that twenty members of the dThird Congress Central Committee would not be running for re-election.

The autumn of 1967 found the Iraqi communist movement in disarray with schisms within the Party over the emergence of the Central Leadership and a decline in the Iraqi Communist Party-Central Committee (ICP-CC). Recognizing the communist movement's weakened condition, the Baʿth regime, which had assumed power in July 1968, expressed an interest in cooperating with the ICP-CC. Such a relationship would provide the Baʿth with an opportunity to consolidate its power domestically, through appearing tolerant to leftists generally and to communists in particular. Moreover, it raised hopes of a possible opening to a relationship with the Soviet Union.

In response to these overtures from the new regime in Baghdad, the ICP-CC invited representatives of the Baʿth Party into leadership positions within some International Front communist organizations, such as the Majlis al-Silm al-Waṭanî (Council of National Peace). To accommodate the Baʿth, and to distinguish the organization from its communist origins, which dated back to the 1950s, the council's name was altered to Al-Majlis al-Waṭanî lil Silm wa al-Taḍâmun (National Council for Peace and Solidarity). The Baʿthists responded favourably and accepted seats on the the National Council for Peace executive board. Their strategy was to reduce the influence the communists had acquired through their leadership of these mass organizations. In addition, the ICP-CC facilitated the Baʿth's move into the Afro-Asian Solidarity Council, which the communists had been involved with for almost two decades.

The introduction of Marxist thought in Iraq must be accredited to Ḥusain al-Raḥḥâl (1901–1981), who, though he never became a communist himself, was the first to introduce Marxist thought into intellectual circles in Baghdad. Al-Raḥḥâl was a high school student in Berlin in 1919 when the Spartacist uprising, an attempt by the Communist Party of Germany (KPD) to seize control of Berlin, took place; this event left a deep impression on him, and kindled his interest in socialism and Marxism. Returning to Iraq a year later, and profoundly affected by the unstable conditions of the country, under British occupation, he gradually started to teach Marxist and socialist thought. However, in his last days he expressed deep disappointment:

Iraq Before the First World War

The history of modern Iraq can be traced back to 1749 when the Ottoman Sultan appointed Sulimân Aghâ AbÛ-lailah, a Georgian Mamluk officer who was the governor of Basra (1749–1761), to the position of Wâlî (governor) of Baghdad. This appointment initiated the establishment of a semi-autonomous state in Iraq under Mamluk suzerainty.

This book has a story for me. As a young boy in February 1949, in my first year of grammar school, on a sunny morning in Baghdad, I passed by some bodies of communists who had been hanged. Later, my father and I had the following conversation:

I went home and clipped the newspapers that day, and have done so every day since. And since that day, I have been trying to understand.

Though I have never joined any political party, nor been actively involved in one, from my undergraduate years on I have felt driven to understand, and eventually as an academician to explain, but never as an apologist, the communist movement in Iraq. I wanted to write my first book on this topic but had to wait a quarter of a century to see the conclusion of the Cold War. I felt that to understand a movement, one had to have the writings of the participants and their official literature and be able to study their experiences from their own perspectives.