Sie springen ein bisschen, jetzt sind wir beim Bürgerkrieg im Mandatsgebiet, aber das ist okay. Ich zitiere mal aus Benny Morris' "1948: A history of the First Arab-Israeli war"
At the start of the civil war, Whitehall believed that the Arabs would prevail. "In the long run the Jews would not be able to cope ... and would be thrown out of Palestine unless they came to terms with [the Arabs]," was the considered judgment of the Chief of the Imperial General Staff (CIGS).21 And indeed, the battle between the Yishuv and the Arab community seemed, at least on paper, extremely unequal. The Palestinian Arabs enjoyed a rough two-to-one population advantage-i.z or 1.3 million to 630,000-and physically populated more of the country's surface than did the Jews. They also generally enjoyed the advantage of the high ground, whereas the Jews lived principally in the lowlands. Moreover, they benefited from a vast hinterland of neighboring, sympathetic states, which could supply them with volunteers, supplies, and safe havens. The Zionists' "hinterland"-Jewish and Zionist groups in the Diaspora-lay hundreds and thousands of miles away, and supplies and volunteers to the embattled Yishuv had to penetrate the British naval and air blockades of Palestine.
These factors aside, however, the Yishuv enjoyed basic advantages over the Palestine Arabs in major indexes of strength: "national" organization and preparation for war, trained military manpower, weaponry, weapons production, economic power, morale and motivation, and, above all, command and control. Moreover, despite the general demographic tilt, the Yishuv had a disproportionate number of army-age males (twenty- to forty-four-yearolds)22 as, during the 193os and 194os, the Zionist leadership had taken care, as a matter of policy, to ship to Palestine, legally and illegally, young, fit males-deemed "good pioneering material."
Facing off in 1947-1948 were two very different societies: one highly mo tivated, literate, organized, semi-industrial; the other backward, largely illiterate, disorganized, agricultural. For the average Palestinian Arab man, a villager, political independence and nationhood were vague abstractions: his affinities and loyalties lay with his family, clan, and village, and, occasionally, region. Moreover, as we have noted, Palestinian Arab society was deeply divided along social and religious lines. And, among the more literate and politically conscious, there was a deep, basic fissure, going back to the 19zos, between the Husseinis and Nashashibis.
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Unlike the Palestinian Arabs, the Yishuv had a highly talented, sophisticated public service-oriented elite, experienced in diplomacy and economic and military affairs. Most of the twenty-six to twenty-eight thousand Palestinian Jews who had served in the Allied armies during World War II were, or became, Haganah members.
The Yishuv also enjoyed the effective backing of the World Zionist Organization, which had powerful branches in the United States. The Zionist movement had grown by leaps and bounds, and acquired popular support, during and after World War II, as a result of the Holocaust. At crucial junctures, the Zionists were able to tap the goodwill and political and financial resources of the large Diaspora Jewish communities. In an emergency fundraising tour of the United States in January-March 1948, Golda Myerson raised fifty million dollars for the Haganah, twice the sum that Ben-Gurion had asked her to bring back-"a brilliant success," in the words ofAbba Hillel Silver, who praised her "eloquence and persuasion."26 In a second whirlwind tour of American Jewish communities in May and June, she raised another fifty million dollars.27 These funds paid for the Czech arms shipments that proved decisive in the battles of April through October 1948.
Theoretically, the Palestinians had the whole Arab world to fall back on. But that world, less organized and less generous than world Jewry, gave them little in their hour of need in money and arms. More robust was the contribution in terms of volunteers. But in this sphere, too, the pan-Arab contribution was actually meager in all but bluster. There appears to have been great reluctance to actually go and fight, especially among the more prosperous and educated. As one British intelligence official put it in December 1947: "Among the younger men ... there is a great deal of temporary enthusiasm and exhibitionism, especially in Egypt, but very many of the youths who have so bravely smashed the windows of defenseless [Jewish] shopkeepers have little intention of undertaking anything so hazardous and uncomfortable as warfare in the stark Judean hills. "
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