Summary
British General and Chief of Staff of the Arab Legion in Pappe’s account, who dubbed the 1948 war in Palestine the ‘Phony War’, being fully aware of the restrictions King Abdullah’s tacit alliance with the Zionist movement imposed on the Legion.
Details
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The Legion was confined by King Abdullah and his British General Chief of Staff, John Glubb Pasha, to act only in the areas the Jordanians deemed theirs: East Jerusalem and the West Bank (The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, PDF p.149).
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As the Legion’s English Commander-in-Chief, Glubb dubbed the 1948 war the ‘Phony War’; he was privy to the pan-Arab consultations and knew the other Arab armies’ groundwork for a rescue operation was quite ineffective — ‘pathetic’, some of his colleagues called it (The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, PDF p.160).
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Glubb instructed the Arab Legion units stationed near Lydd and Ramla to withdraw before Operation Dani, although both towns lay clearly within the designated Arab state and their residents and defenders had assumed the Legion would resist by force, as it did in East Jerusalem and at Latrun; for his decision to retreat, Glubb later lost his position and had to return to Britain (The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, PDF p.199-200, p.202).
Related pages
The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, Amir Abdullah, Arab Liberation Army