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Foreign Volunteers in the 1948 War: A Comparative Examination

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The first Arab-Israeli war of 1948 began as a civil war, fought between the Arab and Jewish citizens of Mandate Palestine. It then developed into an inter-state war after the Israeli declaration of independence and the subsequent intervention of the neighboring Arab states. At the same time it was also a transnational conflict, drawing in volunteers from non-belligerent states. In the early stages of the war the clearest manifestations of transnational involvement were the Arab Liberation Army forces and the Muslim Brotherhood units that joined the fight on the Palestinian Arab side. As the conflict broadened, the most dominant transnational participants were the predominantly Jewish volunteers who travelled to the Middle East from Europe, North America, South Africa and elsewhere to fight for the fledgling Jewish state.

Through an examination of the motivations, military significance and legal status of these foreign participants in the 1948 War, this talk will highlight the common characteristics they shared with foreign volunteers in other conflicts such as the Polish-Soviet War (1920), the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) and the Second World War. It will also illustrate in which respects transnational participation in the conflict in Palestine differs from other historical cases.

SPEAKER: Nir Arielli is Associate Professor of International History at the University of Leeds. His most recent book, From Byron to bin Laden: A History of Foreign War Volunteers, was published by Harvard University Press in early 2018. Arielli is also author of Fascist Italy and the Middle East (2010), editor of the memoir Between Tel Aviv and Moscow: A Life of Dissent and Exile in Mandate Palestine and the Soviet Union (2015,) and co-editor of Transnational Soldiers: Foreign Military Enlistment in the Modern Era (2013). He is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society.