ABSTRACT
WHEN the fighting in Palestine had come to a somewhat unsatisfactory end, leaving the Middle East neither at peace nor at war, the Arab Governments took stock of their position. In the privacy of their own councils they were obliged to admit to themselves —although no hint of this was ever allowed to emerge in their public statements—that all was far from well. They had lost the war with Israel in that, although they were not defeated, they had most certainly not achieved the victory which their overwhelming numerical superiority should have been sufficient to ensure them. The total combined population of the seven members of the Arab League is in the region of forty-two million: that of Israel is between one million and one and a half million. The three leading Arab military powers, Egypt, Iraq and Jordan, had British-trained and British-equipped armies. Certainly none of these countries had made the slightest sustained effort to build up and maintain a modern military force, despite an enormous amount of spear-shaking and bombastic threats of their intention to drive the Jews into the sea, and not one of the Arab States had received anything like a reasonable return for the quite appreciable sums set aside for the defence services. They had known for at least one year that if they were to fulfil their promises they would have to invade Palestine, and yet, although they had voted sums amounting to between one-fifth and one-third of their national budgets for building up their armed forces, not one had made any apparent preparations for the fight. It is true that soon after the outbreak of hostilities Britain's strict observance of the United Nations ban on the furnishing of weapons of war to any of the belligerents meant an abrupt end of the supplies of arms and ammunition which, under the terms of existing treaties, they had a right to expect and which, because they were armed with British weapons, were indispensable and irreplaceable. But had any of the three countries possessed a general staff worthy of the name or even a government determined to implement any of the promises they had willingly and gratuitously given to the Palestine Arabs, reserves of some kind would have been built up. The Palestine war revealed not only a complete absence of preparation and determination on the part of the Arabs but also a lack of co-operation combined with mutual hostility and jealousy which would have been bound to lead to defeat whatever the size or strength of the enemy. Militarily speaking, the manner in which the Arab armies conducted their Palestine campaign showed a fecklessness, an inefficiency and a corruption, frightening in the extreme to anybody who must depend on them for their defence.
