296 • 17 ISRAEL'S REBIRTH AND THE RISE OF ARAB NATIONALISMthe Arabs called on Israel to withdraw from the lands not allotted to the
Jewish state by the 1947 partition plan. They also refused to negotiate with
Israel until it let the Palestinian refugees return to their homes. The Arabs
argued that these stipulations were contained in the General Assembly res¬
olutions and that Israel had been admitted to the UN on condition that it
comply with them. Israel replied that it was the Arabs who had first defied
the General Assembly's partition plan. As such arguments went on and on,
hopes for a settlement dissipated. Because most UN members recognized
the Jewish state, Western observers thought that the Arab governments
would soon admit that Israel was in the Middle East to stay. Later we ex¬
plain why they did not.
Arab Nationalism,
The main reason why the Arabs failed to defeat Israel in 1948, or in any of
the later wars, is that they were politically divided. In principle, all the
Arab states were opposed to the 1947 partition plan and to creating a Jew¬
ish state in Palestine. As Arab League members, they had vowed to fight
and put their armies under the nominal command of an Iraqi general.
Some, however, had refused to appropriate funds or to commit troops as
long as the British had stayed in Palestine. Transjordan's Abdallah still
wanted a "Greater Syria." Even in 1948 he was willing to make a deal with
the Israelis in order to annex parts of Palestine into his own kingdom, a
first step toward his annexing of Lebanon and Syria, some of whose citi¬
zens still backed the Greater Syria idea. You may recall from Chapter 13
how Mecca's Hashimite family had hoped to unite all the Arabs after
World War I, but the French had taken over Syria and Lebanon. Abdallah
was a Hashimite.
So was Iraq's ruling family, which supported Abdullah's Greater Syria
plan and Arab nationalism generally, provided that the Baghdad govern¬
ment became the senior partner. But both Egypt's Faruq and Saudi Ara¬
bia's Ibn Sa'ud opposed Hashimite claims to unify the Arab world. Egypt
aspired to be the leading Arab country; it had the largest population, uni¬
versities, newspapers, and broadcasting stations in the Arab world. The
Arab League headquarters was in Cairo, and its energetic secretary-general
was an Egyptian. And Egypt did not want a Hashimite king ruling in next-
door Palestine and scheming to annex Syria and Lebanon. Ibn Sa'ud, hav¬
ing ousted the Hashimites from Arabia, agreed with Faruq.
In other words, while the Arabs claimed to be united and were threaten¬
ing the Zionists with invasion if they dared to set up a state in Palestine,
their leaders were really trying to outbluff one another. Up to May 1948,