Plausibility Check: Israel defeated in 1948 and the outcome?

ThePest179

Banned
While I'm sure the question has been asked many times in alternate history, I want to know how plausible is an Arab victory/Israeli defeat in the 1948 War? And regardless of plausibility, what would be the most likely outcome of this result?
 
its very plausible that the Jews would lose the war, they were badly out weighed by the Arab forces, the issue was that Arabs didn't really take it seriously, they rather cavalierly figured they'd walk in and win, the Jews knew what they were up against and were fighting tooth and nail for their very lives, they wanted it more, and in the end thats what counted, if all the Arab armies had fought as well and as professionally as the Jordanians Israel would have never made it

as for afterward? Palestine would be subdivided between Syria, Jordan and Egypt (with Lebanon maybe grabbing a little off the side) the Jews would be expelled most likely, anti-Jewish Pogroms in Arab states would likely still happen in the 1950s as they did in OTL but maybe with less bite than OTL, the Jews of Palestine likely end up in the internment camps on Cyprus first from there its hard to say, something like 35% of Palestinian Jews in 1948 were native born, many others, had lived there for 30, 40 or more years and came from countries there died after WWI, had no citizenship to any where else, the Brits at this point were royally pissed off at the Jewish community over terrorism leading up to the British pull out (most notable the King David Hotel bombing) and there was general British anti-Semitism common at the time, Truman was a supporter but idk if he could get the US to open up to 630,000 Jews, I'd guess some would end up in the UK, more in the US even more in Eastern Europe, Hebrew as a spoken tongue dies out, fewer Jews world wide and drop in Judaism
 
Actually not that plausible - the only Arab army with the capacity to actually push Jewish forces out was Transjordan, which was operating on a secret treaty basis with Israel to divide the territory between them.

If you can somehow change *those* circumstances, then Israel really could have been defeated. But I'm not sure what PODs work there - maybe have King Abdullah assassinated at some point or forced out by a military coup during the war?
 
its very plausible that the Jews would lose the war, they were badly out weighed by the Arab forces, the issue was that Arabs didn't really take it seriously, they rather cavalierly figured they'd walk in and win, the Jews knew what they were up against and were fighting tooth and nail for their very lives, they wanted it more, and in the end thats what counted, if all the Arab armies had fought as well and as professionally as the Jordanians Israel would have never made it

as for afterward? Palestine would be subdivided between Syria, Jordan and Egypt (with Lebanon maybe grabbing a little off the side) the Jews would be expelled most likely, anti-Jewish Pogroms in Arab states would likely still happen in the 1950s as they did in OTL but maybe with less bite than OTL, the Jews of Palestine likely end up in the internment camps on Cyprus first from there its hard to say, something like 35% of Palestinian Jews in 1948 were native born, many others, had lived there for 30, 40 or more years and came from countries there died after WWI, had no citizenship to any where else, the Brits at this point were royally pissed off at the Jewish community over terrorism leading up to the British pull out (most notable the King David Hotel bombing) and there was general British anti-Semitism common at the time, Truman was a supporter but idk if he could get the US to open up to 630,000 Jews, I'd guess some would end up in the UK, more in the US even more in Eastern Europe, Hebrew as a spoken tongue dies out, fewer Jews world wide and drop in Judaism

Would the various Eastern European countries really let them in/back, though?

Is it possible that the refugees remain on Cyprus, because that island really needs another feuding ethnoreligious community?

And this is probably a major stretch, but is it at all possible that Stalin overcomes his anti-Semitism and lets the Jews into the Jewish Autonomous Oblast or somewhere else in the USSR as a propaganda victory over the West ("first the fascists killed them and now the neo-fascist capitalists reject them, only glorious communism will defend them")?
 
Would the various Eastern European countries really let them in/back, though?

Is it possible that the refugees remain on Cyprus, because that island really needs another feuding ethnoreligious community?

And this is probably a major stretch, but is it at all possible that Stalin overcomes his anti-Semitism and lets the Jews into the Jewish Autonomous Oblast or somewhere else in the USSR as a propaganda victory over the West ("first the fascists killed them and now the neo-fascist capitalists reject them, only glorious communism will defend them")?

Stalin seemed to believe there was a Jewish conspiracy to murder him.
 
Wasn't that only towards the end of his life though?

yes, but it was building from 1951, any ways, Stalin isn't gonna want bunch of Jews with a democratic history, political parties experience outside of the USSR, their own language, and a burning desire for their own country into his Kingdom, even leaving out his own personal anti-Semitism
 
Actually not that plausible - the only Arab army with the capacity to actually push Jewish forces out was Transjordan, which was operating on a secret treaty basis with Israel to divide the territory between them.
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I've never heard this before; do you have a reference? As far as I'm aware, Israeli-Jordanian covert diplomacy only began after the Suez War.
 
I've never heard this before; do you have a reference? As far as I'm aware, Israeli-Jordanian covert diplomacy only began after the Suez War.

Abdullah promised the British he wouldn't cross the partition line into the Jewish state itself, that being said they didn't view Jerusalem as part of that, and attacked it hard, it was the largest Jewish city at the time, that being said the Prime Minster of Jordan Tawfik Abu al-Huda told the British that other Arab armies would enter Israel itself and Jordan would fallow while Abdullah himself told the French on May 23 that he "was determined to fight Zionism and prevent the establishment of an Israeli state on the border of his kingdom"
 
I've never heard this before; do you have a reference? As far as I'm aware, Israeli-Jordanian covert diplomacy only began after the Suez War.

There's some disagreement about what was agreed, but it's open knowledge that Abdullah met several times with Golda Meyerson (Meir) and other representatives of the Jewish Agency. There's a wide literature on it, but at the moment, I'll just defer to Wikipedia (warts and all):

Abdullah, alone among the Arab leaders of his generation, was considered a moderate by the West. It is possible that he might have been willing to sign a separate peace agreement with Israel, but for the Arab League's militant opposition. Because of his dream for a Greater Syria comprising the borders of what was then Transjordan, Syria, Lebanon, and the British Mandate for Palestine under a Hashemite dynasty with "a throne in Damascus," many Arab countries distrusted Abdullah and saw him as both "a threat to the independence of their countries and they also suspected him of being in cahoots with the enemy" and in return, Abdullah distrusted the leaders of other Arab countries.[12][13][14]

Abdullah supported the Peel Commission in 1937, which proposed that Palestine be split up into a small Jewish state (20 percent of the British Mandate for Palestine) and the remaining land be annexed into Transjordan. The Arabs within Palestine and the surrounding Arab countries objected to the Peel Commission while the Jews accepted it reluctantly.[15] Ultimately, the Peel Commission was not adopted. In 1947, when the UN supported partition of Palestine into one Jewish and one Arab state, Abdullah was the only Arab leader supporting the decision.[1]

In 1946–48, Abdullah actually supported partition in order that the Arab allocated areas of the British Mandate for Palestine could be annexed into Transjordan. Abdullah went so far as to have secret meetings with the Jewish Agency (future Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir was among the delegates to these meetings) that came to a mutually agreed upon partition plan independently of the United Nations in November 1947.[16][17] On 17 November 1947, in a secret meeting with Meir, Abdullah stated that he wished to annex all of the Arab parts as a minimum, and would prefer to annex all of Palestine.[18] This idea of secret Zionist-Hashemite negotiations in 1947 was expanded upon by New Historian Avi Shlaim in his book Collusion Across The Jordan: King Abdullah, the Zionist Movement, and the Partition of Palestine. This partition plan was supported by British Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin who preferred to see Abdullah's territory increased at the expense of the Palestinians rather than risk the creation of a Palestinian state headed by the Mufti of Jerusalem Mohammad Amin al-Husayni.[5][19]

The claim has, however, been strongly disputed by Israeli historian Efraim Karsh. In an article in Middle East Quarterly, he alleged that "extensive quotations from the reports of all three Jewish participants [at the meetings] do not support Shlaim's account...the report of Ezra Danin and Eliahu Sasson on the Golda Meir meeting (the most important Israeli participant and the person who allegedly clinched the deal with Abdullah) is conspicuously missing from Shlaim's book, despite his awareness of its existence".[20] According to Karsh, the meetings in question concerned "an agreement based on the imminent U.N. Partition Resolution, [in Meir's words] "to maintain law and order until the UN could establish a government in that area"; namely, a short-lived law enforcement operation to implement the UN Partition Resolution, not obstruct it".[20]

On 4 May 1948, Abdullah, as a part of the effort to seize as much of Palestine as possible, sent in the Arab Legion to attack the Israeli settlements in the Etzion Bloc.[18] Less than a week before the outbreak of the 1948 Arab–Israeli War, Abdullah met with Meir for one last time on 11 May 1948.[18] Abdullah told Meir, "Why are you in such a hurry to proclaim your state? Why don't you wait a few years? I will take over the whole country and you will be represented in my parliament. I will treat you very well and there will be no war".[18] Abdullah proposed to Meir the creation "of an autonomous Jewish canton within a Hashemite kingdom," but "Meir countered back that in November, they had agreed on a partition with Jewish statehood."[17] Depressed by the unavoidable war that would come between Jordan and the Yishuv, one Jewish Agency representative wrote, "[Abdullah] will not remain faithful to the 29 November [UN Partition] borders, but [he] will not attempt to conquer all of our state [either]."[21] Abdullah too found the coming war to be unfortunate, in part because he "preferred a Jewish state [as Transjordan's neighbor] to a Palestinian Arab state run by the mufti."[17]

The Palestinian Arabs, the neighboring Arab states, the promise of the expansion of territory and the goal to conquer Jerusalem finally pressured Abdullah into joining them in an "all-Arab military intervention" against the newly created State of Israel on 15 May 1948, which he used to restore his prestige in the Arab world, which had grown suspicious of his relatively good relationship with Western and Jewish leaders.[17][22] Abdullah was especially anxious to take Jerusalem as compensation for the loss of the guardianship of Mecca, which had traditionally held by the Hashemites until Ibn Saud had seized the Hejaz in 1925.[23] Abdullah's role in this war became substantial. He distrusted the leaders of the other Arab nations and thought they had weak military forces; the other Arabs distrusted Abdullah in return.[24][25] He saw himself as the "supreme commander of the Arab forces" and "persuaded the Arab League to appoint him" to this position.[26] His forces under their British commander Glubb Pasha did not approach the area set aside for the new Israel, though they clashed with the Yishuv forces around Jerusalem, intended to be an international zone. According to Abdullah el-Tell it was the King's personal intervention that led to the Arab Legion entering the Old City against Glubb's wishes.

More detail from Israeli historian Avi Shlaim here:

On the military balance between Israel and the Arabs:
A second myth, fostered by official and semi-official accounts of the 1948 War, is that the Israeli victory was achieved in the face of insurmountable military odds. Israel is pictured in these accounts as a little Jewish David confronting a giant Arab Goliath. The war is portrayed as a desperate, costly and heroic struggle for survival with plucky little Israel fighting off marauding armies from seven Arab states. Israel's ultimate victory in this war is treated as nothing short of a miracle.

The heroism of the Jewish fighters is not in question. Nor is there any doubt about the heavy price that the Yishuv paid for its victory. Altogether there were 6,000 dead, 4,000 soldiers and 2,000 civilians, or about 1 per cent of the entire population. Nevertheless, the Yishuv was not as hopelessly outnumbered and outgunned as the official history would have us believe. It is true that the Yishuv numbered merely 650,000 souls, compared with 1.2 million Palestine Arabs and nearly 40 million Arabs in the surrounding states. It is true that the senior military advisers told the political leadership on 12 May 1948 that the Haganah had only a 'fifty-fifty' chance of withstanding the imminent Arab attack. It is true that the sense of weakness and vulnerability in the Jewish population was as acute as it was pervasive and that some segments of this population were gripped by a feeling of gloom and doom. And it is true that during three critical weeks, from the invasion of Palestine by the regular armies of the Arab states on 15 May until the start of the first truce on 11 June, this community had to struggle for its very survival.

But the Yishuv also enjoyed a number of advantages which are commonly downplayed by the old historians. The Yishuv was better prepared, better mobilized and better organized when the struggle for Palestine reached its crucial stage than its local opponents. The Haganah, which was renamed the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) on 31 May, could draw on a large reserve of Western-trained and home-grown officers with military experience. It had an effective centralized system of command and control. And, in contrast to the armies of the Arab states, especially those of Iraq and Egypt, it had short, internal lines of communication which enabled it to operate with greater speed and mobility.

During the unofficial phase of the war, from December 1947 until 14 May 1948, the Yishuv gradually gained the upper hand in the struggle against its Palestinian opponents. Its armed forces were larger, better trained, and more technologically advanced. Despite some initial setbacks, these advantages enabled it to win and win decisively the battle against the Palestine Arabs. Even when the Arab states committed their regular armies, marking the beginning of the official phase of the war, the Yishuv retained its numerical superiority. In mid-May the total number of Arab troops, both regular and irregular, operating in Palestine was between 20,000 and 25,000. IDF fielded 35,000 troops, not counting the second-line troops in the settlements. By mid-July IDF fully mobilized 65,000 men under arms,by September the number rose to 90,000 and by December it reached a peak of 96,441. The Arab states also reinforced their armies but they could not match this rate of increase. Thus, at each stage of the war, IDF significantly outnumbered all the Arab forces ranged against it and by the final stage of the war its superiority ratio was nearly two to one.[26]

IDF's gravest weakness during the first round of fighting in May-June was in firepower. The Arab armies were much better equipped, especially with heavy arms. But during the first truce,in violation of the UN arms embargo, Israel imported from all over Europe, and especially from Czechoslovakia, rifles, machine-guns, armoured cars, field guns, tanks, airplanes and all kinds of ammunition in large quantities. These illicit arms acquisitions enabled IDF to tip the scales decisively in its own favour. In the second round of fighting IDF moved on to the offensive and in the third round it picked off the Arab armies and defeated them one by one. The final outcome of the war was thus not a miracle but a faithful reflection of the underlying Arab-Israeli military balance. In this war, as in most wars, the stronger side ultimately prevailed.

On Israel and Jordan:
A fourth issue which gave rise to a lively controversy in Israel is the nature of Israeli-Jordanian relations and, more specifically, the contention that there was collusion or tacit understanding between King Abdullah and the Jewish Agency in 1947-49. That there was traffic between these two parties has been widely known for some time and the two meetings between Golda Meir and King Abdullah in November 1947 and May 1948 have even featured in popular films. Nor is the charge of collusion a new one. It was made in a book published by Colonel Abdullah al-Tall who had served as a messenger between King Abdullah and the Jews, following Tall's abortive coup and defection to Egypt.[32] A similar charge was levelled against Ben-Gurion by Lieutenant-Colonel Israel Baer in the book he wrote in his prison cell, following his conviction of spying for the Soviet Union.[33] Tall condemned king Abdullah for betraying his fellow Arabs and selling the Palestinians down the river. Baer condemned Ben-Gurion for forming an unholy alliance with Arab reaction and British imperialism. A number of books and articles on Zionist-Hashemite relations have also been written by Israeli scholars, the most recent of which are by Dan Schueftan and by Uri Bar-Joseph.[34] But out of the recent crop of books on this rather unusual bilateral relationship, it is my own book Collusion Across the Jordan which achieved real notoriety on both sides of the Jordan and has been singled out for attack by the old historians.

The central thesis advanced in my book is that in November 1947 an unwritten agreement was reached between King Abdullah and the Jewish Agency to divide Palestine between themselves following the termination of the British mandate and that this agreement laid the foundation for mutual restraint during the first Arab-Israeli war and for continuing collaboration in the aftermath of this war. A subsidiary thesis is that Britain knew and approved of this secret Hashemite-Zionist agreement to divide up Palestine between themselves rather than along the lines of the UN partition plan.

And, related, on the general Arab war aims and strategies
Closely related to Israeli-Jordanian relations is the question of Arab war aims in 1948, a fifth bone of contention between the old and the new historians. The question is why did the Arab states invade Palestine with their regular armies on the day that the British mandate expired and the State of Israel was proclaimed? The conventional Zionist answer is that the motive behind the invasion was to destroy the newly-born Jewish state and to throw the Jews into the sea. The reality was more complex.

It is true that all the Arab states, with the exception of Jordan, rejected the UN partition plan. It is true that seven Arab armies invaded Palestine the morning after the State of Israel was proclaimed. It is true that the invasion was accompanied by blood-curdling rhetoric and threats to throw the Jews into the sea. It is true that in addition to the regular Arab armies and the Mufti's Holy War army, various groups of volunteers arrived in Palestine,the most important of which was the Arab Liberation Army, sponsored by the Arab League and led by the Syrian adventurer Fawzi al-Qawukji. More importantly, it is true that the military experts of the Arab League had worked out a unified plan for the invasion and that this plan was all the more dangerous for having had more limited and realistic objectives than those implied by the wild pan-Arab rhetoric.

But King Abdullah, who was given nominal command over all the Arab forces in Palestine, wrecked this plan by making last minute changes. His objective in sending his army into Palestine was not to prevent the establishment of a Jewish state, but to make himself master of the Arab part of Palestine which meant preventing the establishment of an independent Palestinian state. Since the Palestinians had done next to nothing to create an independent state, the Arab part of Palestine would have probably gone to Abdullah without all the scheming and plotting, but that is another matter. What is clear is that, under the command of Glubb Pasha, the Arab League made every effort to avert a head-on collision and, with the exception of one of two minor incidents, made no attempt to encroach on the territory allocated to the Jewish state by the UN cartographers.

There was no love lost between Abdullah and the other Arab rulers who suspected him of being in cahoots with the enemy. Abdullah had always been something of a pariah in the rest of the Arab world, not least because of his friendship with the Jews. Syria and Lebanon felt threatened by his long-standing ambition to make himself master of Greater Syria. Egypt, the leader of the anti-Hashemite bloc within the Arab League, also felt threatened by Abdullah's plans for territorial aggrandizement in Palestine. King Farouk made his decision to intervene in Palestine at the last moment, and against the advice of his civilian and military experts, at least in part in order to check the growth of his rival's power. There were thus rather mixed motives behind the invasion of Palestine. And there was no single Arab plan of action during the 1948 war. On the contrary, it was the inability of the Arabs to co-ordinate their diplomatic and military plans that was in large measure responsible for the disaster that overwhelmed them.

The one purpose which the Arab invasion did not serve was the ostensible one of coming to the rescue of the embattled Palestinians. Nowhere was the disparity between pan-Arab rhetoric and the reality greater than in relation to the Palestinian Arabs.[42] The reality was one of national selfishness with each Arab state looking after its own interests. What was supposed to be a holy war against the Jews, quickly turned into a general land grab. Division and discord within the ranks of the ramshackle Arab coalition deepened with every successive defeat. Israel's leaders knew about these divisions and exploited them to the full. Thus they launched an offensive against the Egyptian army in October and again in December 1948 in the confident expectation that their old friend in Amman would keep out. The old historians by concentrating almost exclusively on the military operations of 1948 ended up with the familiar picture of an Arab-Israeli war in which all the Arabs were united by a single purpose, all were bent on the defeat and destruction of Israel. In retrospect, however, the political line-up on the Arab side in 1948 appears much more complicated and the motives behind the invasion of Palestine much more mixed.

There's also more at the link about Arab peace feelers to Israel in the aftermath of 1948, when Syria, Jordan, and Egypt all expressed interest (publicly in the Syrian leader's case) in a peace agreement, but which Ben-Gurion chose to turn down. You could argue he was justified, since Israel had ultimately made out quite well in terms of territory, and any deal at that point would have required some cession of territory and some refugee resettlement. But the choice existed.
 
I'm actually very familiar with the fact that the Israelis weren't so overwhelmed (though I definitely tend to go with the contemporary analysis that it was about 50/50, numbers vs organization and intelligence).

I was actually aware of the communications, and the Jordanian promise to the British not to cross the partition line, but they also later renenged on it, so I guess I didn't consider it to be any kind of agreement ("We won't invade you...except for your capital, and you know what, actually we will" isn't much of a promise)

Thank you for the blast of info, though - and I wasn't aware that the meetings in 1947 had been secret; after all, the Hashemites had treated openly with the Jews in WWI and at Versailles, and in '37, so...
 
I'm actually very familiar with the fact that the Israelis weren't so overwhelmed (though I definitely tend to go with the contemporary analysis that it was about 50/50, numbers vs organization and intelligence).

I was actually aware of the communications, and the Jordanian promise to the British not to cross the partition line, but they also later renenged on it, so I guess I didn't consider it to be any kind of agreement ("We won't invade you...except for your capital, and you know what, actually we will" isn't much of a promise)

Thank you for the blast of info, though - and I wasn't aware that the meetings in 1947 had been secret; after all, the Hashemites had treated openly with the Jews in WWI and at Versailles, and in '37, so...

Fair points. Certainly there was fighting between the Israelis and the Jordanians over Jerusalem and the West Bank. Plus some not insignificant atrocities and expulsions on the Jordanian side.

My point though was just that there was clearly some level of collusion. Even if not a full agreement. So you'd need to change the nature of the Transjordan/Zionist relationship in order to get a situation where Israel really was defeated in full. Or have the Egyptians more built up and a more serious threat than they were IRL.
 
Israel's odds in 1948 should not be overestimated, though the best (?) PoDs are prewar. This was not the Israel of 2015, it was a state essentially hashed together by paramilitaries in the face of impending doom, armed with some very shoddy Soviet equipment. Its primary strength lay in the incompetence of the invading Arabs - it lacked any powerful sponsors in its own right.
 

Deleted member 9338

Stalin seemed to believe there was a Jewish conspiracy to murder him.

Possibly true, but he did supply Israel with arms during the war.

A closer war could see the Soviets coming in on the side of their little socialist brothers.
 
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