| Summary/Abstract |
The 10-day battle over Mishmar Ha’emek in early April 1948, in which the ‘Arab Liberation Army’, which had penetrated Mandatory Palestine a few months earlier, attempted to storm a strategically located Jewish kibbutz, was a turning point in the ‘civil war’ phase (30 November 1947‒15 May 1948) of Israel’s War of Independence. It largely contributed to the fall of the strategic city of Haifa a fortnight later and the attendant collapse of the Arab war effort in northern Palestine, as well as to the implosion of Palestinian Arab rural society, with its inhabitants becoming victims of events they had only partially taken part in.
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