Word: arabized
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Secret Weapon. At the last minute, Bernadotte and the Security Council tried to extend the truce before the still rickety war machines of Jews and Arabs could pick up momentum. Israel said it was willing to accept the extension. But the Arab League refused, claiming that the truce was "unworkable and one-sided." In Rhodes, where hard-working Bernadotte had found a little time for play (see cut), he warned both sides. After they had rejected his suggestions for a settlement, he said, "the losing party . . . can no longer hope to get so much . . . They take terrible risks in starting...
Both sides were confident enough to take those risks. The month of truce had given Israel time to organize its half-formed army more thoroughly. Fighting with their backs to the sea, the Jews were telling each other last week: "Our secret weapon is ein brera" [no alternative]. Some Arab statements were tempered with a new note of caution. "Of course we're confident," said the Arab League Secretary General, Abdul Rahman Azzam Pasha. "The trouble is that some people expect spectacular results right away, but it isn't that kind of a fight. It is a guerrilla...
Sole Winner. At week's end, the fighting was still scattered and sporadic. On the Arab side, Egyptians (in the southern desert) and Syrians and Iraqis (in Galilee) were most active. Abdullah's Arab Legion, the only force likely to cause Israel serious trouble, had done little but engage in an artillery and mortar duel with Jewish forces in Jerusalem. In a night attack the Jews won Lydda Airport, biggest in Palestine. Later they captured, after surprisingly feeble Arab resistance, the towns of Lydda and Ramleh, and threatened Arab positions blocking the lifeline road to Jerusalem. Abdullah...
...hinted that it might call on the U.N. Security Council for sanctions against the Arabs, and lift the embargo on arms to Israel. "The Arabs," declaimed Syria's Faris el Khoury in reply, "are ready to be killed by your atomic bombs." Khoury and everyone else knew that it would not come to that. But the U.S. and Britain (if it continued to arm Arab states) might easily drift into fighting each other by Jewish and Arab proxies: Or, if Britain joined the U.S. in sanctions against the Arabs, the last chance of winning Arab friendship for the Western...
...kings issued a joint statement in the same vein: no compromise. But on the next leg of his journey, to visit his nephew Regent Abdul Illah of Iraq, Abdullah dropped a hint to the Arab press to stop the chest-thumping which makes compromise impossible. Said Abdullah: "The significant feature of the situation is not so much a matter of the Arab states being against the Jews but rather against the supporters of world Jewry in the international sphere. Therefore, I wish to advise the Arab press not to be too optimistic . . . not too pessimistic...