O Jerusalem!

by Larry Collins

  We were halfway through our research when we received a telegram informing us that King Hussein of Jordan wished to meet us in his palace in Amman. We were already familiar with the Jordanian capital, where we had spent several weeks interviewing former Arab Legion officers, in particular Colonel Abdullah Tell, who had led King Abdullah's conquest of the Old City of Jerusalem.

  King Hussein welcomed us in the same circular green reception room where, on a night twenty years earlier, his grandfather Abdullah had received Golda Meir, who was disguised as an Arab woman.

  The king poignantly referred to that fateful meeting, which could have prevented a war between the Arabs and the Jews. We could almost physically feel the presence of the two protagonists in the room. Hussein was in a somber mood, almost bitter. The recent war of June 1967, to which he had unwisely committed his country, had forever put an end to the dream cherished by his grandfather of being crowned King of Jerusalem. He spoke of the Palestinian refugee tragedy. Jordan had received so many of these desperate people that it had almost become a Palestinian colony. No peace could ever be hoped for in the region without a solution to this issue. He also confided to us the hope that our book would be truly impartial. A truly impartial book, he believed, could serve the cause of peace. It could help enlighten and maybe even help calm some of the passions that burned so cruelly in the hearts of all those involved. I asked him what, to him, was true impartiality. He shook his head several times and finally raised his arms to the sky in helplessness.

  I told him that I had asked the same question of the young Palestinian woman who had worked for us as an interpreter during the three years of our research. She too had expressed the hope that we would be objective in our book. One day I had asked her what it was, according to her, to be "objective." The eyes of the young woman had suddenly burned with a flash of passion as she had answered: "To be objective, Dominique, is to be pro-Arab!"

  The monarch smiled. "I trust you," he calmly declared.

  There is a scene toward the end of the film that shows a group of elderly Jews who have been recruited to transport food to the starving population of Jerusalem. One of the men notices a pack rack near one of the bags. Dozens of other pack racks are scattered about the area. These unusual items would play a vital role in saving the lives of the embattled population trapped within the holy city's walls. By what miracle did the pack racks end up here, on a sunny day in 1948, in the foothills of Judea, where they would allow this group of elderly men to carry supplies on their backs whose weights they would never otherwise have been able to carry? The answer was yet another strange tale that we discovered.

  At a dinner party in Jerusalem, Larry and I had met a small, jovial man who was immediately enthusiastic about the book we were preparing. His name was Xiel Federman. He owned several hotels in Israel, including the famous Jerusalem King David, whose five stories overlooked the Old City. He presented himself as "the Santa Claus of the Hagannah." We soon discovered that this extraordinary man had been sent to Europe by Ben-Gurion in December 1947 to buy WWII military surplus equipment for the future Israeli army. In Antwerp, on Christmas Day 1947, Federman had thus acquired hundreds of binoculars, field telephones, tents, generators; thousands of rounds of ammunition; first-aid kits; flashlights; tens of thousands of shoes, socks, underpants, and uniforms. He had found a bottomless wartime treasure that could have allowed him to equip half the Jews in the world.

  In another depot, he discovered hundreds of pack racks that American GIs had used to carry heavy weights on their backs. Convinced that the soldiers of the Hagannah would have to one day carry similar loads, Federman bought on the spot three hundred of these pack racks. Each cost less than the equivalent of ten cents of a euro. Little did he know that these harnesses would, one day, help save Jerusalem. No spectator of the film will ever forget the scene where hundreds of elderly men stagger beneath the weight of their heavy loads as they struggle through the hills of Judea to bring the food that will eventually save the Jews of Jerusalem from starvation.

  To our delight, the dramatic events that we had chosen to recount offered us a few humorous interludes. One of them had taken place in the final hours of the British mandate. It was told to us by the then British High Commissioner to Palestine, Sir Alan Cunningham, as we shared a whisky soda on the terrace of his cozy cottage in Yorkshire. A few moments after having given the keys of the Zion Gate to the rabbi of Jerusalem, the general had climbed into his Rolls Royce to be driven to the port of Haifa, where the Royal Navy cruiser Achilles was waiting to take him back to England. "Shortly before midnight, the deadline hour that terminated the mandate, I went up to the bridge to participate in the official ceremony that marked the end of British rule in Palestine," he told us. "A band played 'God Save the King.' I was very moved. At that precise moment, I looked at my watch and was horrified to see that it was only eleven p.m.! The ship's captain had forgotten that there was a one-hour time difference between London and Palestine!"

  Unbelievable and yet true! The British mandate had ended with one final misunderstanding.

  Throughout our research, Larry and I never ceased to be amazed at the incredible collection of coincidences and sometimes outright miracles that had contributed to Israel's birth and survival. This is how we found ourselves one day in the back room of a Kansas City shirtmaker, some twelve thousand miles from Israel. No one could have ever suspected that the owner of that shop, a man by the name of Eddie Jacobson, had played a key role in the conflict that President Harry S. Truman and the Jewish leaders who were preparing to declare Israel's birth faced in March 1948. Fearing a bloody war with the Arab states, the American president was insisting that Palestine be placed under the control of the United Nations at the end of the British mandate at least for a few years. He had therefore decided to shut his door to all the Zionist leaders flocking to Washington to obtain his support for the creation of a Jewish state. Even Chaïm Weizman, the Zionist historical leader, had been refused an audience. Out of desperation, Weizman had called the only man he could think of who could perhaps convince the president to receive him. Eddie Jacobson, the shirtmaker from Kansas City, was one of Harry Truman's oldest friends. Convinced that the president would agree to see him, Jacobson jumped on a train to Washington. His story was to be one of the great revelations of our research.

  "The unrelenting lobbying by the American Zionists had so exasperated Truman that he remained deaf to my plea," Jacobson told us. "He was so convinced that the proclamation of a Jewish State would lead to disaster that he stubbornly refused to receive Weizman. I was thoroughly discouraged. Just as I was getting ready to leave his office, I spotted on the corner of his desk a statue of Andrew Jackson riding a horse. As you know, Jackson was one of the great American statesmen of the early nineteenth century. This statue rekindled my resolve. I put my hand on the President's shoulder and shouted: 'All your life, Harry, you have worshipped a hero ... Well, I too worship a hero. A man I have never met, but a man I believe to be the greatest Jew that has ever lived. I'm talking about Chaïm Weizman. He's old, sick, exhausted, almost blind, and yet he has traveled thousands of miles just to meet you and plead for his people."

  Jacobson described for us how Truman started nervously tapping his fingers on his desk. The president swiveled his chair around to gaze into the Rose Garden outside his window. "I told myself: he's changing his mind. All of a sudden, after what seemed like an eternity, the chair swiveled back around. He looked at me straight in the eyes: 'You have won, you, son of a bitch.' "

  That same evening, Truman received Weizman in the Oval Office. After two hours of intense discussion, the American president finally accepted his visitor's arguments. The Jews had won. The United States would not oppose the creation of a Jewish state.

  We worked hard to unearth other miracles that had helped save hopeless situations. One of these was the Republic of Liberia's in extremis change of position during the United Nations' debate on whether or not to approve the partition of P
alestine. Convinced that the small African state was preparing to vote against partition, the Jewish lobby had launched an all-out campaign to pressure the country's leaders and delegates. This campaign would lead us, twenty years later, to the heart of Wisconsin to meet the man who had been responsible for Liberia's change of heart. Tire magnate Harvey Firestone had been a power to be reckoned with in Liberia. He had owned more than four hundred thousand acres of rubber tree plantations and had been on the verge of reinvesting colossal amounts of money into the local economy. Firestone revealed to us the secret dealings he had had with the president of the country whose principal source of income he had held in the palm of his hand. Thanks to this jovial millionaire, Liberia's "Yes" vote fell into the laps of the desperate proponents for a Jewish State in Palestine on that day in November 1947.

  For three years our passion-and our lucky star-propelled us on this journey of unravelling some of the secrets of one of the most extraordinary pages of history that any two authors could ever hope to illuminate. The incredible collection of eyewitness accounts, personal anecdotes, as yet untold revelations, and secret documents we were able to accumulate would help us weave the rich tapestry that was to become O Jerusalem!

  Remember, Larry? Remember the story of that small Jewish-Russian engineer who was able to buy an entire war industry secondhand by pretending to be deaf and dumb; remember those Palestinian spies who dug up the secrets of the British army by going through the safe of Jerusalem's Anglican vicar; remember the tragedy of those survivors from Hitler's death camps who died of thirst on the road to Jerusalem; remember how an old rabbi, who had just flown in from the besieged holy city in an old piper Cub, was able to cast his vote and thus allow Ben-Gurion to proclaim the state of Israel; remember how two divers in the Italian harbor of Bari had sunk the ship the contained the weapons with which the Syrians had hoped to capture Jerusalem; remember how a misplaced bomb that was to blow up a wall in Jerusalem resulted in the partition of the city for the next twenty years; remember that baker in Heliopolis who took us to the nightclub where King Farouk, after a full house in a poker game, decided to go to war against Israel; remember that former Palestinian partisan who so proudly showed us the watch that he had bought in Berlin during Hitler's reign and had used to blow up the Jewish headquarters in Jerusalem; remember that eccentric Corsican mechanic named La Volaille who had turned Ajaccio's airport into the first Jewish airbase...? Yes, Larry, remember all these colorful characters, known and unknown, and the dozens of stories that we so passionately collected in a labor of love for the glory of Jerusalem.

  Today, a film pays homage to this epic page of history. We waited thirty years for this movie. Andre Djaoui, Jean Frydman, and Elie Chouraqui wrapped up the shooting just as destiny, in a cruel turn of fate, was tearing you from us. As you were slowly sinking into a coma on that fateful Sunday in June 2005, at least I was able to whisper in your ear the good news that Chouraqui had just announced to me on the phone from Jerusalem: "The film is finished."

  This film is dedicated to you, Larry, as are these few pages of our magical memories, as well as this new edition of O Jerusalem! prepared with love by our publishers.

  Dominique Lapierre, June 2006

  (Translated from the French by Lawrence Collins)

  PROLOGUE

  THEY KNEW THE SOUND. For months before this afternoon in May 1948, the forlorn wail had symbolized the frontiers of their existence. It was the skirl of British bagpipes, and now its call reverberated for the last time down these ancient stone passageways, piping away the few British soldiers left inside the old walled city of Jerusalem. They marched in columns, silent and unsmiling, the rhythmic tramp of their boots blending with the dying notes of the bagpipes. At the head and the rear of each column one soldier, a Sten gun crooked in his elbow, broke the pattern of their unwavering stares, his restless eyes scanning the hostile stone façades around them.

  Along the Street of the Jews, from the sculptured stone windows of their synagogues and the mildewed hallways of their sacred houses of learning, the bearded old men watched them go. Their ancestors had watched other soldiers march out of Jerusalem: Babylonians, Assyrians, Romans, Persians, Arabs, Crusaders and Turks, the martial predecessors of these departing British soldiers whose brief thirty-year reign over Jerusalem was now ending. Rabbis, Talmudic scholars, interpreters of the Law, pale and stooped from years of unremitting study, those old men and their forebears had huddled for centuries under the walls of Jerusalem, a forgotten fragment of Jewry, living on the charity of their scattered brethren, caretakers of the Jewish heritage of the City of David. They had kept the Sabbath and conformed every action of their poor lives to the precise prescriptions of the Law. They had memorized their Torah verses and painstakingly copied down the Talmudic texts they passed from generation to generation. And daily they had bowed before the stones of the Temple Mount, beseeching the God of Abraham to bring His people back one day to the Land of Zion from which they had been cast.

  That day had never been so close For other eyes, too, followed those British soldiers, peering from sandbagged windows and concealed gunports chiseled into the quarter's venerable stones. Impatient with the ways of the Divine, armed men stood poised to hasten the fulfillment of His prophecies with the homemade hand grenades and Sten guns they clutched by their sides. As the last British soldiers disappeared, they would dash to seize the positions the Englishmen had held for months, a little string of vantage points sealing off the Old City's Jewish Quarter from the hostile Arab quarters surrounding it.

  Suddenly, as the last British column moved down the street, it stopped and veered left up a twisting cobblestone alley leading toward the vast domain of the Armenian Patriarchate. It stopped in front of the arched stones crowning the entry to No. 3 Or Chayim Street.

  Inside, surrounded by his collection of ancient books and silver Jewish artifacts, Rabbi Mordechai Weingarten, the senior citizen of the Jewish Quarter, had passed the afternoon in the reassuring company of his sacred texts. Lost in his thoughts, he hesitated a moment at the knock on his door.

  He got up, put on his black vest and jacket, adjusted his gold-rimmed spectacles and his black hat, and stepped into the courtyard. There before Weingarten stood a middle-aged British major wearing the yellow-and-red insignia of the Suffolk Regiment. From his right hand dangled a bar of rusted iron almost a foot long. With a solemn gesture he offered it to the elderly rabbi. It was a key, the key to Zion Gate, one of the seven gates of the Old City of Jerusalem.

  "From the year 70 A.D. until today," he said, "a key to the gates of Jerusalem has never been in Jewish hands. This is the first time in eighteen centuries that your people have been so privileged."

  Weingarten extended a trembling hand to accept the key. Jewish legend held that on the night the Roman Emperor Titus destroyed the Temple, its despairing priests had thrown the keys of Jerusalem to heaven crying "God, henceforth be Thou the guardian of the keys." Now the improbable agent of their return to Jewish hands stood to attention and saluted.

  "Our relations have not always been easy," he said, "but let us part as friends. Good luck and goodbye."

  "Blessed art Thou, O Lord," murmured Weingarten, "Who had granted us life and sustenance and permitted us to reach this day." Then, addressing the Englishman, he said, "I accept this key in the name of my people."

  The Englishman turned. With a quick order he marched his men out of the rabbi's little courtyard. Already the shadows of evening stretched across the Old City. Soon a new sound rose to replace the echoes of the bagpipes. Hearing it, Weingarten, still clutching the key to Zion Gate in his hands, stiffened. The sound was a reminder of how tenuous was his people's title to the gates it opened, and how short-lived might be their new domain over these stones from which they had been cast in exile so many centuries before. Once again, Jerusalem was about to become a battlefield. While the rabbi listened in the gathering darkness, the noise grew and multiplied until it seemed to rise from every corner of
the Old City.

  Sinister and terrifying, it was the sound of gunfire.

  The Arab woman instinctively tensed at each bullet passing overhead and quickened the pace carrying her up the deserted street. Ahead of her, at the crest of the rise in Julian's Way, was her destination, the six-story stone building in which Assiya Halaby had spent so many of her working days. Its ugly bulk dominated New Jerusalem's skyline as its occupants had dominated the city's life. Named for the Jewish king who had chosen to build his capital in these Judean hills, it was the seat of the British mandatory authority in Palestine.

  This morning the lobby of the King David Hotel was almost deserted. Yellow dust covers shrouded its heavy armchairs and sofas. Its usually immaculate floor was littered with scrap paper. Half a dozen filing cabinets, their locks sealed with red wax, waited at the door for the truck that would confine the once hopeful edicts they contained to the dusty oblivion of some British archive. In one corner of the room, a final handful of British civil servants chatted together with the faintly embarrassed air of the last hangers-on at an official cocktail party.

  Assiya Halaby had risked her life walking to the King David to say goodbye to them. As she stepped into the hotel, she realized she was the only one of their colleagues, Arab or Jewish, who had come to make that gesture to the men who had ruled the land of her birth for a third of a century.