Play as · Cold War 1947 · L2 · Mandate Endgame

Israel - 1947

Israel in 1947 does not yet exist. What exists is the Yishuv - the Jewish community of Mandatory Palestine - and the question of whether it will become a state, decided this year in New York and on the ground between the Mediterranean and the Jordan. The British Mandate is ending: exhausted, bankrupt and caught between Jewish and Arab nationalisms it can no longer reconcile, Britain has referred the whole problem to the United Nations. On the twenty-ninth of November 1947 the General Assembly votes to partition Palestine into a Jewish state and an Arab state, with Jerusalem international - a resolution the Yishuv's leaders accept and the Arab states reject. From that vote the fighting begins almost at once. The strategic identity here is the state-in-waiting: an organised, mobilised community with its own institutions, defence force and leadership under David Ben-Gurion, preparing to declare independence the moment the British leave in May 1948, and to fight for it against the armies gathering around it. This is the campaign of a nation being born under fire, before it has a flag on any map.

Starting position

The starting board is a community organising for statehood and war at once, inside a Mandate in its last months. The Yishuv has the institutions of a proto-state - an elected assembly, the Jewish Agency acting as a government-in-embryo, a taxation and education system, and in the Haganah a substantial underground army with an elite strike arm. It does not have sovereignty, recognised borders, heavy weapons, or the consent of the surrounding Arab world, whose states have pledged to prevent partition by force. The British, still nominally in charge, are winding down, restricting Jewish immigration to the end while intercepting the ships of Holocaust survivors seeking to enter. After the November vote, civil war between the Jewish and Arab communities of Palestine erupts immediately - over the roads, the mixed cities and the isolated settlements - and everyone knows that the day the Mandate ends, the armies of Egypt, Transjordan, Syria, Iraq and Lebanon are likely to invade. The Yishuv holds strong organisation and desperate motivation, and almost none of the formal attributes of the state it means to become.

What turns the campaign

What the Yishuv's leadership wants is a sovereign Jewish state, declared and defended - to convert the international sanction of the partition vote into facts on the ground before, during and after the British departure, and to survive the war that acceptance of statehood is certain to bring. The obstacles are stark: no recognised borders, encirclement by hostile states, an arms embargo that starves it of heavy weapons, and a British administration that obstructs to the last. The levers are organisation and mobilisation - turning a community into an army and a government overnight; international legitimacy from the UN vote and the sympathy of a world reckoning with the Holocaust; and the diplomacy of great-power recognition, with both the United States and, crucially, the Soviet Union backing partition for their own reasons. The fears are simple and total: that the state will be strangled at birth, that the war will be lost, that the community will be destroyed. The campaign turns on the passage from community to country - securing the vote, surviving the civil war, arming in secret, and timing the declaration of independence to the hour the Mandate ends.

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