1948 May 15 – 1949 January Israel’s War of Independence
Who: Great Britain, United States, Israel, Egypt, Lebanon, Jordan, Syria, and Iraq.
What: Israel is attacked by Egypt, Lebanon, Jordan, Syria, and Iraq; US air force escorts Egyptian bombers.
Where: Israel
Why: The intention was to allow the surrounding Arab nations to “push the Jews into the sea”, killing the Jewish Underground and the remaining Jewish opposition led by David Ben-Gurion.
Note: The trade and immigration embargoes imposed by the United States and Great Britain on Palestine in The White Papers of 1939 prevented weapons and limited the number of Jewish immigrants to 10,000 per year at a time when European Jews were being slaughtered at a rate of 12,000 per day in Auschwitz.
Note: Aware of the anti-Semitism within the ranks of the British and US military, Field Marshall Jan Smuts, second in command to Winston Churchill was secretly providing the Jewish Underground with the Allies battle plans which allowed David Ben-Gurion to allocate their few military resources in the most efficient ways possible.
