Original subtitles

60 years ago, Israel fought and won a war for its independence.

For Palestinians, defeat was a catastrophe.

The two sides have been fighting ever since.

What happened 60 years ago still shapes lives in Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories.

If they want peace, they'll need to overcome the legacy of 1948.

Gaza - home to 1.4 million Palestinians,

most of whom are refugees from the land that became Israel.

The current battleground in this long war lies in and around the Gaza Strip.

Israel uses air strikes and ground incursions.

Palestinians rocket Israeli border towns.

Both sides blame each other.

Two miles to the north of Gaza, this is kibbutz Yad Mordechai.

Some of the thousands of rockets fired into Israel have landed here.

History is never far away.

This kibbutz - or communal farm - was founded in the 1930s by Jews from Poland. They were Zionists,

who wanted to return to the biblical home of the Jews to make a state.

We build a society with our own hands.

By new forms of life, not only by high-technology.

The kibbutz, and the development towns.

Those are forms of life that without it,

you cannot understand what Israel is.

We developed the best agriculture maybe on earth.

The Zionists had neighbours - Palestinian Arab farmers, who'd been working the land for centuries.

The relationship between the two was normal, and reasonably friendly.

It was after 1930, with the massive land purchases,

with the massive immigration,

that the Palestinians became aware that their existence was at stake.

In 1943, the kibbutz took the name of Mordechai Anielewicz,

the Jew who led the uprising in the Warsaw Ghetto against the Nazis.

They swore Jews would never be defenceless again.

There was no life in a camp like Auschwitz.

So then I decided, should I survive, I'd become a Zionist activist.

And by miracles, I did survive.

Yad Mordechai has its own Holocaust museum.

They've also preserved the field where they fought the Egyptians during the 1948 war.

MACHINE GUN RATTLES

What happened here was a critical moment in the fight to create a Jewish state.

60 years on, Israelis have a lot to celebrate.

It's been an extraordinary feat of nation-building.

But for Palestinians, every year, this anniversary reminds them

of what they call their catastrophe.

For them, the last 60 years has been about dispossession and exile.

During Israel's independence war, around 700,000 Palestinians became refugees.

They left everything.

They left everything intact at their homes, everything.

Some families even left their money, their jewels at home...

.. and ran. Thinking that...

the storm will calm down and in two or three months, they will come back.

But Israel stopped them returning.

Many of Yad Mordechai's old Palestinian neighbours are still close by -

refugees in the Gaza Strip.

They call it the world's biggest prison.

Here is a war, which had led

to the uprooting of a villager from his village.

You know how attached a villager is to his olive tree,

to his little home, to his house,

to his mode of life, to his...

It's something unimaginable. I mean,

the Palestinian people are one of the oldest people

in their habitation of Palestine.

The Palestinians have to do some soul-searching too.

Why did it become a catastrophe?

They could have accept most of the land, a state of their own.

THEY refused, not us.

In 1947.

We cannot apologise for their mistake.

In 1897, the Zionist movement in Europe met and declared

that it wanted to found a state for Jews in Palestine.

Two years later, the Arab Mayor of Jerusalem

begged them to leave Palestine alone, and warned

there'd be an Arab uprising if they didn't.

After the meeting in 1897, two rabbis were sent to Palestine to see what the country was like.

They reported back, "The bride is beautiful, but she is married to another man. "

Some of the early Zionists warned that confrontation with the Arabs was going to be unavoidable.

Others persuaded themselves that Arabs would be glad to see them,

because they were bringing with them European expertise.

The majority of Palestinian Arabs lived traditional lives

in around 800 largely self-sufficient villages.

Politics was local, and tribal.

Life was hard.

These days in the refugee camps, it is idealised, a lost dream of a homeland.

"Village life was great.

We worked the land and sold the crops in Ramallah, Hebron and Jaffa.

We had olives, watermelons, cantaloupes, wheat and sesame.

All these things.

The people were happy and content.

Britain controlled Palestine between 1917 and 1948.

In November 1917, as British troops were fighting their way up to Jerusalem,

seizing Palestine from the Turks,

the Foreign Secretary in London wrote a letter that became known as the Balfour Declaration.

The Balfour Declaration said the British would "view with favour the establishment in Palestine

"of a national home for the Jewish people, and use their best endeavours to make it happen. "

It also said it was clearly understood that "nothing shall be done

"which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine,

"or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country. "

Now, there's a whole series of incompatible promises in that,

and the British never found a way to keep them.

As a result, they were regarded as betrayers - by both sides.

For the Zionists, it was a big step forward.

But, said the writer Arthur Koestler, it was an impossible idea -

one nation promising another the land of a third.

It did a great deal to create the conflict that continues today.

Small communities of religious Jews had remained in Palestine since Roman times.

The new Jewish immigrants were different.

Many were socialists and atheists, who wanted to escape persecution, and to create a new society.

A dream to change the Jewish nature from a nation

of merchants and bankers to a nation of farmers and fighters.

In 1929, there was a serious clash here at the Western Wall,

the holiest place in the world, for Jewish prayer.

More than 100,000 Jews had arrived in Palestine in the 1920s,

and some had good relations with their Arab neighbours.

But as immigration continued, and as Arab land was sold

for Jewish settlement, then tensions rose.

The trouble here spread across Palestine.

Religious Jews were massacred in Hebron.

Hundreds died on both sides, and after that, nobody could have

any illusions - the two communities were on a collision course.

Events in Europe brought the collision closer.

After 1933, Hitler turned the power of the German state against the Jews.

Heil! Heil!

I came after...

a year under Hitler, in Vienna,

which was a very, very bad year for me as a child.

And, er...

I asked my parents to go away as fast... as fast as possible,

and told them, "I don't want to remain in the... hell. "

Jewish refugees regained a future.

Palestinians felt theirs disappearing.

They were getting angry because they saw that their country

was becoming really threatened.

The Jewish immigration was threatening to overwhelm them,

in their country.

At the Independence Mosque in Haifa, Palestinians were ready to fight.

One of the most popular preachers here was a man called Izzedine al-Qassam.

He became a guerrilla chief, leading attacks on the British and on the Jews.

The British killed him, in a gunfight near Jenin in 1935.

His death was one of the sparks for a full-scale Arab revolt.

It took the British three years to put it down

This is Qassam's grave.

Thousands came to his funeral.

These days, the armed wing of Hamas, responsible for many suicide attacks, is named after him,

and so are the rockets that Palestinians fire out of Gaza.

The British crushed the uprising so ruthlessly that Arab society in Palestine fractured.

It exhausted the stamina of the Palestinian people,

three years of deprivation, of imprisonment,

of exile of the entire Palestinian leadership.

With the result that when the real issue of our existence came,

Palestine was... had no leadership whatsoever.

Attacks on Jews also increased their determination to fight.

I saw suddenly Jews running out of Jaffa

to Tel Aviv. And I heard later on

that the Arabs attacked the Jews in Jaffa,

er... killing, murdering, about nine and more than 50 injured.

And they became refugees.

I couldn't understand it.

Because I couldn't understand Jews refugees in their... in their own homeland.

The biggest Jewish militia was called the Haganah - Hebrew for "the Defence".

From the I930s, it was expanded into an underground army.

It was directed from this building in Jerusalem, the headquarters of the Jewish Agency.

Its leader and later Israel's first Prime Minister was David Ben-Gurion.

The Haganah was one of a number of building blocks of a state,

which the Jewish Agency established

as it worked tirelessly to make itself into a government-in-waiting.

Just look at this place, designed and built in the '20s and '30s,

in what for the time was an ultra-modern style.

It shows the ambition there was here, to create a Jewish state.

They had a very, very clear objective, and from this building,

David Ben-Gurion designed and drove the strategy to get them there.

The Palestinian Arabs never had anything like the Jewish Agency,

and they never had a leader like Ben-Gurion.

A man that, from the morning to the evening,

thought about the Jewish people and the state, nothing private.

A man of tremendous courage,

honesty, historic obligation,

thinking that the Jewish tradition calls for the preference

of the moral call above all other consideration.

With war coming, Britain wanted to strengthen its position in the Middle East against Nazi Germany.

The British reckoned the Jews would fight against Hitler, but Arabs would need to be persuaded.

So in May 1939, a British Government White Paper restricted

Jewish immigration to Palestine to 75,000 over the next five years.

After that, Palestinian Arabs would have to acquiesce in any more Jewish immigration.

Ben-Gurion's response was that Palestine's Jews would fight the White Paper, and fight Hitler.

32,000 of them joined the British Army.

Later, they used the training to fight both the Arabs... and the British.

After 1945, knowledge and guilt about the Holocaust,

and the question of what to do for the survivors,

transformed the case for a Jewish state in Palestine.

We were not brought to Auschwitz to survive, we were brought to die there.

Either immediately on arrival in the gas chambers,

or they worked us to death in the heavy industry.

But should I survive, I decided I'd become a Zionist,

because I did understand

that the only solution for the Jewish people

would be an independent state, a state like all the others,

with all the rights, and all the duties, with the government,

a member in the Concert of the Nations.

A state that could protect its citizens, a state that could speak for its citizens.

American pressure was decisive, as the Holocaust created a new moral argument for the Jewish state.

It is my attitude that the American Government couldn't stand idly by

while the victims of Hitler's madness were not allowed to build new lives.

Truman pressed for the immediate admission of 100,000 Holocaust survivors.

The closest some came were British internment camps in Cyprus.

Ernest Bevin, Britain's Foreign Secretary, stuck to the quota.

He believed mass Jewish immigration would start a civil war in Palestine,

and ruin Britain's relations with Arab states.

Armed Jewish groups stepped up their attacks on the British.

'This is the voice of Fighting Zion, this is the voice of Fighting Zion, the underground radio.

'Today, our soldiers, in defence of their country, attacked the enemy's police headquarters in Jerusalem.

'This is voice of Fighting Zion, broadcasting for the freedom of Israel. '

Two future Israeli Prime Ministers were both wanted men.

Yitzhak Shamir was a leader of the Stern Gang.

Their speciality was assassination.

Menachem Begin commanded the Irgun.

Its methods included kidnapping and bombing.

In July 1946, the Irgun blew up the British military headquarters

at the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, killing 91 people.

They called us terrorists.

Not only they, also Ben Gurion also called us terrorists.

Now, a terrorist is a question of definition, of course.

For one, the act is terrorism, for the other, they are freedom fighters.

The British continued to intercept ships full of Jewish immigrants from Europe.

'After being intercepted by the Navy, the illegal immigrant ship

'Exodus 1947 entered Haifa harbour under escort. '

We were stopped on the high sea and then brought to Haifa.

It was a catastrophe, of course. We were in Palestine, we couldn't stay.

How important was immigration at that point for the Zionists?

Very important,

because we were already aware that there would be a solution.

And we wanted as many as possible Jews in order to get

a bigger piece of this territory, so we wanted the Jews in Palestine.

Why should the Palestinians, who had not heard of it,

pay the price of the Holocaust? Why? Why?

Why displace the Palestinian people to pay a price for a crime which they had not committed?

As Jewish attacks continued, the pressure for a solution increased.

The British Empire was forced to turn for help.

Here in London, at the Foreign Office, they'd had enough.

They turned the problem over to the United Nations.

The UN voted at the end of November 1947 to partition Palestine into two states -

one Jewish and one Arab.

The Jews got the best of it - more than half the country, even though they owned around 10% of the land,

and there were twice as many Arabs.

The Palestinian Arab leadership rejected the plans straightaway.

This was not going to be settled by diplomacy.

In Palestine, the Jews celebrated. Since the 1930s at least,

David Ben-Gurion had believed that getting a state was the first priority,

but he knew they were going to have to fight for it.

At that time, the Jewish population accepted it,

and the night of 29th November, we all danced in the streets.

And we were still dancing when the first news came

that some of the...

That some people were killed on the roads.

We were... We were shocked by the thing.

To see that the country was going to be vivisected.

There had been violence between Jews and Arabs before the partition plan,

but it escalated fast after the vote.

Within a week, there was a civil war.

The British, counting the days until they could leave, were stuck in the middle.

The Jewish underground army was rapidly coming into the open.

They had clandestine arms factories,

but they were still short of weapons.

Their biggest advantage over the Palestinians

was a leadership that had spent years preparing for this moment.

We were better organised, because Ben-Gurion,

with a very far-sighted look,

he knew that we are going to come to a conflict.

And the Haganah - that was the underground forces of Israel -

were organising in such a way

that they would become an army eventually.

The main Palestinian leader, Haj Amin al-Husseini,

the Mufti of Jerusalem, lived in exile in Egypt.

During the Second World War, he was in Berlin supporting the Nazis.

The Mufti controlled the biggest Palestinian militia.

Other Arab leaders saw him as a rival, not as an ally.

He appointed his cousin, Abdel Khader al-Husseini,

to lead his militia, which was called the Holy War Army.

In the minds of people, he was a hero, and he deserved to be a hero.

He was... He was a top level fighter -

courageous, brave, and sincere, loyal...

Husseini led a few thousand guerrilla fighters.

With the help of men from local Arab villages,

they cut the main Jewish supply route from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem - the city they all wanted.

This was the biggest prize of all - Jerusalem, a city holy to Christians, Jews and Muslims,

and which had a central part in the dreams of both sides in the war.

When the fighting started, neither could imagine a future

that didn't include being in charge of this place.

In the partition plan, Jerusalem was supposed to be under international control.

Neither Arabs nor Jews wanted that.

So once again in its bloody history, the Holy City was at war.

Jerusalem was under siege, and the Jewish community in Jerusalem was completely cut off.

There was not enough water, not enough food,

not enough ammunition, not enough soldiers in Jerusalem.

And we used to have convoys going from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem,

carrying wheat and water and food and ammunition and so forth.

From February 1948, the attacks on the convoys from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem intensified.

Arabs controlled the hills overlooking the route.

The Haganah constructed improvised armoured cars -

known as sandwiches - to protect themselves.

We fought our way to Jerusalem, fighting vehicle after vehicle,

and the convoys were almost suicidal operation.

The situation was such that...

we didn't want to fall alive in the hands of...

So, when you drove...

a normal car, with people inside, whatever,

we used to have high explosives inside the truck...

.. that if worst come to worst, and you see that there is no hope,

we prefer to die than to fall alive in their hands.

This was a war without prisoners of war.

In March 1948, the Jews went on the offensive.

Ben-Gurion and his generals adopted Plan D.

Its objectives are still the subject of great controversy.

Some historians say that Plan D was a blueprint for the ethnic cleansing of Arabs from Palestine.

Others say it was simply a military plan, for seizing strategic ground,

and that there was no political scheme to drive the Arabs out of a future Jewish state.

The priority was opening the road to Jerusalem.

As the Arab militias didn't coordinate with each other,

the Jewish forces were able to pick villages off one by one.

If the residents hadn't already left, they were often expelled.

Central to the plan was the capture of Qastel, the site of an ancient fortress.

At the beginning of April 1948 it changed hands several times

in fierce fighting, until the Haganah drove the Palestinians out.

They stormed the hill,

and the... reinforcement came down while they were firing.

The commander said, "The commander will cover,

"and the soldiers... should retreat. "

So in a way, the commanders covered the retreat.

And we lost a lot of people at that time...

.. Qastel cost a lot of blood.

In the days before the battle, al-Husseini had visited Syria to get arms and ammunition.

When Abdel Khader al-Husseini got to Damascus, the Syrian President refused to help him.

Husseini stormed out, yelling that they were "all traitors",

and that history would record that THEY lost Palestine.

That was 5th April, 1948.

Abdel Khader al-Husseini, the strongest war leader the Palestinians produced,

came back to Qastel to continue the fight.

A few days later, he was killed.

On the 9th of April, a group of fighters from the Irgun and the Stern Gang -

the two Jewish ultra-nationalist groups that the British regarded as terrorists -

were moving towards a village nearby called Deir Yassin.

The Haganah gave them fire support.

Recent research suggests the attack killed around 120 Palestinian civilians.

"In every house they entered,

they killed the people inside.

The Jabar family, for example, was killed.

Eight of them.

They were killed in the morning.

There were still sleeping.

They shot them and left.

This is from a report written by Itzak Levi,

who was commander of the Haganah intelligence service in Jerusalem,

dated 12th April 1948, which is three days after it happened.

"The conquest of the village was carried out with great brutality.

"Whole families - women, old people, children - were killed and piles of corpses accumulated.

"Some of the prisoners taken to places of detention, including women and children,

"were brutally murdered by their guards.

"Among the prisoners was a young mother and baby.

"The guards killed the baby in front of his mother and after she fainted, also murdered her. "

Palestinians had been fleeing their homes for safer places since December, I947.

But after Deir Yassin, a mass exodus began.

Menachem Begin, the Irgun's leader, said the massacre was a lie,

propagated by his political rivals and by Jew-haters around the world.

But Begin said the "legend of terror" was worth half a dozen battalions,

because Arabs were seized with panic when they heard the Irgun was coming.

Palestinian radio made the atrocity sound even worse than it was, to stiffen Arab resistance.

The reports made the civilians even more terrified.

"May God curse the reporters who came to us.

They were servants of Jewish imperialism.

They published stories about their crimes, the massacre,

how they violated our women.

This helped the Jews, not us!

It scared us, and made us worry about our honour.

King Abdullah of Transjordan and other Arab leaders came under strong domestic pressure to intervene.

Ben-Gurion sent Abdullah an apology.

Four days after Deir Yassin, there was another massacre.

A column of Jewish doctors and nurses was attacked by Palestinians at Mount Scopus in Jerusalem.

Their vehicles were set on fire and many were burnt to death.

78 people were killed.

Jaffa, just south of Tel Aviv,

was in the Arab state in the partition plan.

What happened here helps explain why so many Palestinians fled.

In April 1948, Arab sniping out of Jaffa was answered by heavy shelling from the Irgun.

The Jews attacked Jaffa.

And by bombarding Jaffa, they, er...

.. they made the conditions for the Arabs to leave,

because the Arabs were afraid that they would be killed.

So, it wasn't voluntarily, but it was a result of the battle.

But the flight was triggered by more than force.

We let them know, in different ways,

not in pamphlets, not over the radio, not officially,

we let them understand that it's better if they leave,

because the Jews are terrible.

And, "Don't stay here when the Jews come here. "

So this was psychological warfare?

In a small scale.

The people flee,

because of this massacre that happened in Deir Yassin.

They were afraid that the same thing will happen here in Jaffa.

Palestinian society was collapsing.

Some Israelis claim that Palestinians were leaving

on the orders of Arab leaders to wait for victory.

Jewish leaders had discussed moving Arabs out of Palestine for years,

but deny that was anything to do with their departure.

Does Israel bear any responsibility for the exodus of the Palestinians in 1948?

No.

Some historians say that Plan D was a blueprint for the ethnic cleansing of Palestine, of Arabs.

Is that true? No.

You know, as they say, I was present at the creation.

I don't mind what historians write or think.

I watched with my own eyes.

Ben-Gurion did not want the Arabs to leave the country.

When we spoke to President Peres of Jerusalem, he said that Israel bears

no responsibility whatsoever for the exodus of Palestinians.

No responsibility whatsoever?!

Then what caused the exodus to happen?

It was the Israeli massacre

of villagers, of people whom they encountered.

I can count to you the scores of massacres,

which happened all over the country.

Do you think that anybody would leave his home

unless he was... really threatened?

That's what Peres said to us. I am surprised that President Peres has said so.

The 14th of May, 1948.

The last day of the British mandate.

Britain's legacy to Palestine was a legal system,

red pillar boxes, chaos and war.

The same day, David Ben-Gurion announced that the State of Israel

would come into existence at midnight.

Within hours, the country was under attack.

We heard the explosions, and I said to my wife, I said,

"The game's on. They're bombing Tel-Aviv. "

Their main targets were the Reading power station,

the Tel Aviv airfield, the central bus station,

and they were really bombing Tel Aviv with impunity, because there was nothing to stop them.

That day, five Arab states invaded.

The Egyptians advanced from the south,

towards the main Jewish centre of Tel Aviv.

The Lebanese barely crossed the northern border,

with the Syrians attacking at either end of the Sea of Galilee.

Further south came the Iraqis, while in the centre,

Transjordan's Arab Legion advanced

towards the West Bank and Jerusalem.

The invading force was between 25-30,000,

against around 35,000 Israelis.

Although the invasion was under the nominal command

of King Abdullah of Transjordan, each country made its own plans.

Abdullah had been having secret but inconclusive negotiations

with Jewish leaders about carving up Palestine between them.

He also wanted to add Lebanon and Syria to his kingdom,

to make an Arab superstate.

No wonder other Arab leaders didn't trust him.

They didn't trust each other, either.

They'd all have liked a piece of Palestine for themselves.

And destroying the Jewish state at birth would have made them into national heroes.

But they knew their capacity to do it was limited.

Some of the Arab states went to war

just to satisfy the ambitions of their common classes.

Some of the Arab states wanted

to prevent King Abdullah from controlling

more areas from the Arab states.

Some of the states, er...

were forcing themselves to go to war,

otherwise the Arab people will call them traitors.

Most of the invading troops were like Egypt's - well-armed, but badly trained and led.

Egypt's King Farouk sent his men to war against the advice of his government.

Transjordan's Arab Legion was commanded by British officers.

It was the most effective Arab fighting force, but small - 8,000 men.

It only fought for land allocated to the Arabs by the partition plan, and in Jerusalem.

"The Jordanians considered Jerusalem and Palestine

as the diamond of the Middle East,

because of the spiritual and religious significance we have as Muslims and Arabs.

So we considered the capture of Jerusalem as our incentive as Jordanian fighters,

and we fought hard to defend it.

For the first month after the invasion, it was touch and go for the Israelis.

The old city of Jerusalem was under attack by the Jordanian army,

so we were stretched all over the place, and there were very few units,

who were free to fight everywhere else.

And the situation at that time I think

was the most critical during the war of independence.

Kibbutz Ramat Rachel near Bethlehem.

Here, the Israelis fought to stop the Egyptians

linking up with the Arab Legion to encircle Jerusalem.

The building behind me was the dining hall here at Kibbutz Ramat Rachel.

It was the strongest building in the place, on the highest point,

and it was there that the Israelis set up their headquarters and decided to make their stand.

You know, it's been 60 years since I was here last.

60 years, that's a long time. It sure is.

There's the wall.

And all those pocket marks from the bombardment.

From the shelling.

You were up here when you were wounded. What happened?

The truth is, I don't know what happened.

A shell exploded in my face

and I got covered with shrapnel all over my body.

I couldn't see. I thought I was blind.

The Israelis held on to Ramat Rachel,

but the Arab Legion kept up the pressure on Jewish-controlled Jerusalem

by cutting the supply route from Tel Aviv.

To reopen it, the Israelis tried - and failed -

repeatedly to take Latroun, a strongpoint on the Jerusalem road.

The first time they thought it was defended by Palestinian irregulars.

Instead, they faced well-dug-in professionals from the Arab Legion.

We were encountered by tremendous fire of machine-guns and mortars, and so forth.

The heat was absolutely about 40, 42 degrees,

and in the shadow.

We didn't have enough water, of course,

and people were hit all the time.

I myself was wounded, first time, in the morning.

I got a bullet in my shoulder,

and then, about 10 o'clock, I got another shrapnel, in my chest.

And the situation was hopeless, as far as we are concerned.

In Jerusalem's walled Old City,

the Jewish Quarter fell to the Arab Legion.

Over 1,000 Jewish civilians lost their homes.

Almost 23,000 Palestinians left districts of the city captured by Jewish forces during the war.

The Legion kept the Jewish-controlled west of the city under siege,

but never risked trying to capture it.

I think that people fired...

'For the Israelis, the breakthrough was finding a cross-country route,

'to ferry supplies and pump water, that bypassed the Arab Legion's positions. '

We assembled 13 Jeeps.

One of them belonged to Ben-Gurion.

We loaded them with about more than half a ton per Jeep

medical supplies, ammunition, weapons.

We knew exactly what the situation in Jerusalem is.

How important was it for the Jewish forces to hang on in Jerusalem?

It's unbelievable how people felt about Jerusalem.

They knew that... that without Jerusalem, there is no Jewish state.

On the southern front, the Egyptian army advanced north towards Tel Aviv,

avoiding smaller Israeli settlements.

But Kibbutz Yad Mordechai was too big to ignore.

On 24th May, Egyptian armour and infantry attacked.

Here, in front of me, I have no bullets and I have no rifles to reach them.

I need a mortar, or I need something...

And I was very, very angry that I can't shoot...

there in front of me.

And I can't do nothing,

because, er, the distance,

it's too wide. I have no rifle, I have no munition.

And no aims to defence myself, or to attack them.

Outnumbered and out of ammunition,

the Israeli forces had to retreat.

But they had bought time to establish a defence line further north,

where the Egyptians were stopped before they could reach Tel Aviv.

After nearly a month's fighting,

the United Nations secured a four-week ceasefire.

During the truce, both sides re-armed, but Israel had the edge,

with big deliveries from Czechoslovakia of modern weapons, including heavy guns and aircraft.

Although hugely outnumbered by Arabs in the Middle East,

Israel was always able to mobilise more soldiers.

It was now better equipped, organised and motivated.

As far as you were concerned, it was a life-or-death struggle. Absolutely.

This was Israel's most frightful war.

It was a case of to be or not to be.

When the ceasefire ended after a month,

the Israelis were ready for what one of their top generals called

a series of sharp, short, decisive and victorious engagements.

The priority was relieving the pressure on Tel Aviv-Jerusalem axis.

Lydd and Ramleh, two adjoining Arab towns close to Tel Aviv,

were the targets.

What happened here was one of the most controversial episodes of the entire war.

The Israelis scored a major strategic victory.

They secured Tel Aviv, and the centre of their new country.

In the process, tens of thousands of Palestinian Arabs lost their homes,

and hundreds of them lost their lives.

The Haganah killed dozens of Palestinians who were sheltering in a mosque.

Some of them just left their houses and found this place as a refuge,

most of the families, and they thought that this is the way,

they are very safe in this place.

The Haganah army, when they got inside the city,

after fears of fighting between the Palestinians and the Haganah,

they just came inside this mosque,

and they just killed all of the people inside here.

Women, children, old people,

all of them were shot. It was a big massacre.

Some of the residents were forced to bury the bodies.

'The army took us to the mosque, to take the dead to the cemetery.

'We entered one room. there were 60 or 70 bodies inside.

'Later, they covered them with clothes and poured petrol, and set them on fire.

'There was a woman dressed in peasant clothes.

'Next to her were two little girls.

'We carried them, and put them over there.

'They were the only ones who had a proper burial. '

There's a controversy over whether Ben-Gurion authorised the expulsions from Lydd and Ramleh.

The Israeli commander who signed the order believed that he had.

More than 50,000 Palestinians were forced out.

It's not a secret any more.

It was called Shualei Shimshon, "the wolf of Samson".

With Jeeps, with machine-guns, it's not a secret any more.

Many things we did we regret until today. We... we regret until today.

And I think that, er...

Well, but in war, you make mistakes. You...

Anyhow, there was no clear order from Ben-Gurion

how to deal with the inhabitants in an occupied village.

But could Israel have functioned with a big town like Ramleh...

full of Arabs...?

Ramleh? All Arabs...

Could you have built a state if you had that many Arabs living right in the centre of the country?

No.

Many refugees died on the long walk to the Arab lines.

The offensive ended with another UN truce.

In ten days of fighting, the Israeli general Yigal Allon

estimated that 20% of the effective Arab fighting force had been lost,

and the war of independence won, though not ended.

In the remaining months of the war, there were more Israeli offensives,

more Palestinians were forced out, and there were more ceasefires.

Of the invaders, only the Arab Legion, in Jerusalem and the West Bank, could claim any success.

The others were humiliated.

When the second war came, it was not in favour of the Arabs.

It was totally in favour of the Jews.

Because their...

The Jews were able to make victory in the south,

and against the Syrians and Lebanese.

We were left alone in the West Bank, defending ourselves.

By the time Israel seized the last corner of the Negev Desert in March I949,

armistice talks had already started.

Yad Mordechai was recaptured, and became a symbol of Israeli resistance.

From November 1947 to January 1949,

around 6,000 Israelis - 1% of the population - had been killed.

What do you think would have happened if you hadn't won?

Well, the Arabs really gave the answer to that question, Jeremy.

When someone said to them, "But what will happen to the Jews

"once you over-run them?"

He says, "There won't be any Jews.

"They will have been drowned in the sea. "

And I have no doubt that it really would have been a holocaust.

One estimate is that around 15,000 Arab soldiers and civilians were killed.

Defeat made the Arab world even more unstable.

There was no balance

between the forces of Israel and the forces of the Arabs,

because in wars,

you don't only depend on the number of soldiers, or the number of tanks,

you have also to have political force,

and you have to have unity among those who are going to war.

Unity did not exist among the Arab states.

Since 1948, the Israelis have built a modern state,

the region's superpower, a homeland for the Jews.

Palestinians believe that it has all come on the back of their loss,

and that troubles some Israelis, too.

"I have no doubt that the Arabs' deportation

also helped the state of Israel.

The truth should be said.

It helped us because hundreds of thousands fled,

and new immigrants settled into their villages and towns.

It's difficult to say, but this DID happen.

We didn't ask for it, but it happened nonetheless.

On the other hand, the situation of an ongoing war,

day after day, for 60 years,

big wars with names, small wars with no names.

The 1948 war is yet to end.

For all Israel's strength, its civilians still get killed by Palestinians.

And with their civilians dying, too,

Palestinians believe that what they called the Nakba -

the catastrophe of 1948- has never ended.

The current peace process, sponsored by President Bush,

will fail, like all the others,

if it cannot solve problems that are hard-wired to 1948.

Partition is still on the agenda.

They need to fix a border between Israel and a Palestinian state.

Jerusalem is still claimed by both sides.

And Palestinian refugees await a future.

Until 1948, that was a bare hill on the edge of Bethlehem.

Now it's Deheishe refugee camp.

The original tents were replaced by permanent structures a long time ago,

but there is no sense of permanence in the minds of the people who live there,

because, for 60 years, they have effectively been in limbo.

The future of the Palestinian refugees

is still one of the Middle East's great unsolved, politically toxic issues.

When the Palestinian camps were new, 60 years ago,

Israel was absorbing hundreds of thousands of Jewish refugees and migrants.

Now almost all Israelis believe a mass influx of Palestinian refugees would destroy their state.

'A UN resolution on their return has never been implemented.

'Some Palestinian refugees, still dreaming of everything they lost, will not hear of compromise. '

'We said it more than once.

'Even if they give us Heaven, we will not give up on our country.

'If they give us enough gold to fill this room, we will decline everything. Impossible!

'I will die, and die a heretic,

'if you take �1 million in gold for an inch of Palestine,

'you die as a heretic.

'Not a Muslim, not a Christian, not a Jew.

'A heretic. And you go to Hell. '

And even though most Palestinians DO accept that they will live alongside Israel,

memory and history stand on every street corner.

My father has built here. My father, he was denied to live,

and he was dispossessed to live in this beautiful house.

It's been now 60 years for most of the people.

There are weaknesses. You want to advance,

and I would want very much to compete and advance as much as the Israelis have advanced,

but I am a Palestinian. My... my... my land has been robbed by the Israelis.

We want them to have a state of their own.

Fair, independent, frank.

And they want it, too.

There is no division in our destinies.

Our problem, from our side, is they are divisioned within themselves, and their weakness.

Others believe the main problem is that Israel is still expansionist,

breaking international law by settling Jews on occupied land that Palestinians say is theirs.

They don't want to give up territory.

They want to squeeze the Palestinians.

They want to take as much territory as they can

and give the Palestinians as little as they can,

which would not be conducive to a solution,

a self-sustaining Palestinian state.

60 years ago, Arab propagandists boasted they would push the Jews into the Mediterranean.

Plenty of Israelis suspect that's still something Palestinians would like to do.

Had they accepted the 1947...

their part, half of Palestine, the mandate,

we would have two countries since then, and no conflict.

But what they wanted is the whole country.

They wanted to drive us into the sea, to kill the Jews.

This is why they don't have anything today.

I will continue to resist, in an un-violent resistance,

until we can co-exist, until we can convince the Israelis

that we want our freedom, but this does not mean

that we want to destroy the state of Israel.

The long war of 1948 has consumed two peoples with two separate stories to tell.

They'll have to find a way to live with its legacy

if they ever want peace.

One day we shall have to shake hands and sit together.

We can't continue fighting for ever.

You can't continue killing and killing and killing.

There must be an end to it.