Abstract
The British role in the 1948 War is often overlooked and misunderstood. This dissertation demystifies the British role in the first stage of the conflict, the civil war which emerged in late 1948 through the end of the Mandate in mid-May 1948. British actions in Palestine throughout early 1948 were guided by Britain’s desire to maintain its strategic dominance of the Middle East, a policy dictated by Britain’s global strategic interests in the nascent Cold War. This dissertation asks how did these larger strategic interests influence British tactical decision making, both in implementing the withdrawal from Palestine and in British intervention between Arab and Jewish forces in the first stage of the 1948 War? The decision to end the Palestine Mandate came amidst a wider reevaluation of the Empire’s role in the post-war world which witnessed the rise of the USA and USSR as global superpowers and the loss of Britain’s imperial prestige. British intelligence and security infrastructure failures exposed in the 1930s and 1940s by subsequent Arab and Jewish insurgencies continued to hinder British operations in early 1948. British reliance on institutional memory led local authorities to perceive the rise in Arab-Jewish violence of late 1947 as a return to the disturbances of the Arab Revolt of 1936-19398, rather than burgeoning civil war. While violence continued to grow, military and civilian authorities enacted the phased withdrawal plan, in which only Gaza and the Negev regions would be evacuated before February 29 to avoid disrupting Palestine’s citrus harvest season, vital for the local economy. This phased withdrawal directly influenced the tactical decision making of Jewish and Arab commanders, who only began conducting sustained operations to control Palestine’s vital roadways once British forces were withdrawn from Palestine’s central district, in mid to late March 1948 as part of the second phase of withdrawal. As the violence between Palestine’s warring factions escalated, the British faced a collapse of both political and security authority in Palestine, a failure which threatened Britain’s ongoing strategic interests in the region. In the Mandate’s final months, British authorities in Palestine took steps to restore a modicum of control to the situation, but the intelligence and security failures which accumulated in prior decades meant these reactionary attempts were ultimately doomed.