O Jerusalem!

by Larry Collins

  What, politely inquired the Prime Minister, would be His Majesty's government's reaction if King Abdullah annexed to his kingdom the part of Palestine allocated to the Arabs by the U.N.'s partition order?

  Slumped in an armchair by the fire, the pensive figure listened to the majestic strains of a Bach organ fugue filling his sitting room. Sixty miles from Amman, in his luxurious residence looking down upon the city at the heart of Abdullah's ambitions, Britain's High Commissioner in Palestine enjoyed a nightly ritual. Regularly, before dinner, Sir Alan Cunningham locked himself into his sitting room to savor the music of Bach, Vivaldi or Beethoven and contemplate, in their consoling strains, the problems weighing on him.

  Sir Alan was a glum and bitter man during those evening sessions in December 1947, and he had much to contemplate. His administration in Palestine had been a terrible frustration for the Scots general. From the day he had left London to take up his assignment until the past week, he had not been given a policy to follow. Indeed, dismayed by the lack of clear-cut direction he had received in his conversations at the Foreign and Colonial Offices, Cunningham had bluntly asked Prime Minister Clement Attlee on the eve of his departure what policy directives he was to follow in Palestine.

  "Oh," answered Attlee with a shrug, "just go out and govern the country." Then, sensing Cunningham's shock, he got up and, walking him to the door, threw his arm around the Scot's shoulders. "You know, General," he said, "I'm sorry to give you a politician's answer to your question. But it's the only answer I can give."

  Ernest Bevin, Britain's Foreign Minister, had been "completely surrounded by Arabists and got all his reports from the same old group of pro-Arab hands," Cunningham felt. His undersecretary, Harold Beeley, he considered "a very dangerous man."

  Now at last he had received a policy, the policy which he was to carry out in the closing stages of the British mandate in Palestine, and, above all, toward the United Nations partition decision. He was "to keep the situation as calm as possible consistent with a minimal involvement physically." He was "to have nothing to do with Partition in any way, shape or form."

  Those instructions reflected the fact, as Beeley would later recall, that Britain had accepted the partition of Palestine "with an absolute minimum of enthusiasm." From now on, Britain would align her interests in the Middle East as closely as possible with the Arabs. The new Jewish state she would "just forget about for a while, as assuredly it was not going to be very friendly to Britain in the years to come."

  In fact, the only aspect of partition which the Foreign Office supported was the internationalization of Jerusalem. The reason was simple. With the United States labeled as pro-Jewish and Russia as anti-God, any big-power role in the internationalized city was bound to fall to Britain.

  To give teeth to that policy, the British delegation in the U.N. had been instructed to make itself the forthright advocate of the Arab viewpoint. And, on the eve of the Arab League's Cairo meeting, Britain had announced she would forcibly maintain her restrictions on Jewish immigration into Palestine until she left.*

  To Sir Alan those instructions were a cruel disappointment. Unlike Bevin and Beeley, Cunningham favored partition as the only way out of the dilemma into which their tergiversations had led Palestine. An introspective man with the stern Calvinistic sense of duty of his Scots forebears, he felt strongly Britain's obligation to close out her rule in Palestine in the most orderly manner possible and leave behind her some hope of peace. Yet the policy for which he had waited so long now enjoined him to studiously ignore the only plan he thought offered the Holy Land any hope of peace.

  Peace, he knew, would be precious in the Holy Land in the months to come. In the first two weeks since the partition vote, ninety-three Arabs, eighty-four Jews and seven Englishmen had been killed in the ancient territory over which he presided. Their deaths, Sir Alan feared, were only a harbinger of a ghastly harvest to come. Locked into the desk drawer of his office adjacent to his sitting room was a three-page British Army order stamped "MOST SECRET" and dated December 6. As much as the policy instructions he had just received from London, the phrases set down in that order preoccupied the dour Scot. The order laid out the principles which would govern the withdrawal of the only effective instrument Cunningham had with which to maintain order in the coming months, the British Army. It contained one deliberate omission. It made no mention of the British Army being responsible henceforth for law and order in Palestine.

  Harassed, humiliated, shot at and insulted for the past two years, that army was fed up with maintaining law and order in Palestine. With an end to the mandate now set, its commander, one of Cunningham's fellow Scots, Sir Gordon MacMillan, was determined not to risk the lives of any more of his soldiers in Palestine except in the pursuit of British interests.

  Only one phrase in that document had brought to the High Commissioner's face an amused half-smile to relieve the concern with which he had read it. It was the work of some zealous quartermaster in the army that Cunningham knew so well, and in the midst of the agonies of policy and command it was his good clerk's contribution to Britain's coming Palestinian posterity.

  Careful and precise, it was the estimate of the materials which would be required to pack up the remnants of thirty years of British rule in Palestine: four thousand tons of timber and twenty-eight tons of nails.

  The message was whispered at dawn in the shadows of the mosques as the faithful slipped off their shoes before the morning prayer: "Abou Moussa is coming back." At those words, the men set out. From Jaffa, Haifa, Nablus, Jenin and Tulkarm, from twenty key towns to which the message had been sent by that special Islamic grapevine, traveling alone or in small groups so as not to arouse British curiosity, they set off. Their diverse routes led to the village of Beit Surif, southwest of Jerusalem, to which Abou Moussa had promised his return.

  Just before noon, a dusty black Chrysler came bouncing and scraping up the dirt road leading to the village. At the sight of the middle-aged man in a blue-and-white checkered kaffiyeh sitting beside the driver, the mob in front of the house sprang forward, warbling the shrill undulating battle cries of the Arab warrior. The man stepped from the car into a shoving sea of hands and faces stretched out to embrace or even touch him. He was of medium height, stocky, with a round, mournful face and the first hint of a paunch in the strained buttons of his brown business suit. Visibly moved, constantly touching his forehead and heart in an Arab gesture of welcome, he struggled through the crowd toward the simple stone house where his followers waited.

  No Arab in Palestine, not even his cousin Haj Amin Husseini, commanded the admiration and affection stirred by the man hailed as "Abou Moussa"—the father of Moussa. He was the man the Mufti had sent to Palestine to take command of his Holy War Strugglers. Like his cousin, Abdul Khader Husseini was a member of Jerusalem's Husseini clan. He was, on that December morning, barely forty years old. He was a born leader of men. He possessed great physical courage. Unlike most of the Mufti's lieutenants, he was educated; yet he retained an instinctive understanding of the qualities and shortcomings of his peasant people. He had, despite a limited military background, an intuitive ability to mobilize and use their qualities and resources to their best advantage. Above all, the quiet, almost stolid man in the brown business suit walking away from his dusty Chrysler possessed a priceless asset for an Arab leader. Abdul Khader Husseini had charisma. He had the charisma to galvanize a battalion of Dutchmen. Upon his excitable countrymen its effect was electric. Soon, at the mention of his name, hundreds, thousands of peasants, clutching their rifles by their sides, would come swarming from the souks and their rocky villages to do his bidding.

  In the stone building, spread over a mound of steaming rice, the whole roast lamb of a mensif, a Bedouin banquet, waited to welcome him. Abdul Khader squatted cross-legged on the floor at the head of a circle of men. The host stretched out his right hand, plucked an eye from the skull of the sheep and offered it to Abdul Khader. Then, in a babble of excite
d conversation, the banquet began.

  For most of the men sitting on the floor around Abdul Khader, it was their first sight of their leader in almost a decade. Twice during the Arab revolt in 1936–39, Abdul Khader had been wounded at the head of his guerrilleros. After his second wound, in 1938, he was smuggled to Syria bleeding and half dead on camelback. From there he had gone to Iraq, where his participation in another anti-British rising had earned him four years in jail. Even his presence in Beit Surif was illegal; he was still technically barred from Palestine by the British.

  The British had dominated most of Abdul Khader's life. His father had been deposed by them as mayor of Jerusalem in 1920 for his opposition to their mandate. In 1933, after graduating in chemistry from the American University in Cairo, he had participated, at his aging father's side, in his first anti-British demonstration. Since then, in Palestine, Iraq and Egypt, he had spent most of his life fighting or plotting against them. In 1938, the Mufti had even sent him abroad with a hand-picked group of his other followers to polish in the finishing schools of the Third Reich the knowledge of explosives he had first acquired in the chemistry labs of Cairo's American University.

  Now he had returned to Palestine for the first time in nine years to take command of the fight against a new foe. Wiping his lips with the edges of his kaffiyeh, he signaled to the men around him that the banquet was over and the time for serious conversation had arrived. Unlike most of the Mufti's lieutenants, Abdul Khader was not given to explosive bursts of hyperbole, nor was he inclined to work himself into a frenzy vowing to incarnadine the Mediterranean with Jewish blood. He was a serious, soft-spoken man, and he knew exactly what he wanted to say.

  "Diplomacy and politics," he told his listeners, "have failed to achieve our goals." The Arabs of Palestine, he said, had only one choice: "We shall keep our honor and our country with our swords."

  Quietly, methodically, he began to outline his strategy for the fight the Mufti had sent him to lead. Like Yigal Yadin, the planning officer of the Haganah, Abdul Khader Husseini knew that the fight for Palestine would be won or lost on its roads. No fight could be better suited to the means at Abdul Khader's disposal. The military tactic his villagers knew best was the ambush. The lure of loot in trapped trucks and convoys would be a powerful spur to their ardor. Spreading a map of Palestine on the carpet before him, he pointed a finger at a chain of exposed and isolated Jewish settlements circled in red. Harassing Jewish communication with those colonies, ambushing their supplies, finally closing the roads to their convoys, would be their first objective.

  Then Abdul Khader's finger moved to the center of the map, to the dark stain at the heart of Palestine, the city of Jerusalem. As well as David Ben-Gurion, Abdul Khader Husseini realized that the one hundred thousand Jews living there constituted the most vulnerable Jewish target in Palestine. As soon as the men and the arms were ready, they would, he announced, lay siege to Jerusalem.

  Driving his hands together as though to throttle with his gesture that dark spot on the map of Palestine, he vowed, "We will strangle Jerusalem."

  PART TWO

  JERUSALEM: A HOUSE AGAINST ITSELF

  December 1947—March 1948

  7

  "ARE WE NOT NEIGHBORS . . . ?"

  BY THE MIDDLE of December 1947, the exaltation of the night the United Nations had partitioned Palestine had become little more than a memory. Along Ben Yehuda Street the bright-blue banners dangled from the lampposts like the faded ribbons of an old funeral wreath. The hopeful pronunciamentos that had been plastered to Jewish Jerusalem's walls were already covered with a new set of tracts—black-and-white mobilization notices ordering every Jewish male in the city from seventeen to twenty-five to register for military service.

  A few hundred yards away, in the Arab quarter, an elderly hatmaker struggled to keep abreast of the orders for tarbooshes pouring into his shop. Not since 1936 had Phillip Arouk sold those maroon conical felt hats as he had been selling them since partition. To his fellows they were a badge that stamped them as Arabs for the Mufti's gunmen drifting into the city in increasing number.

  Life in Jerusalem in mid-December remained, during the daytime, relatively tranquil. In confusing streams the throngs crowded the heart of the Jewish city, peering into shop windows sheltering a range of merchandise as diverse as the city's population. There were piles of Persian rugs, hand-embroidered silks, spun-silver brooches from the Yemenites, art galleries, music shops with the records of Paris, London, Hollywood and prewar Eastern Europe. The delicatessens were stocked with bottles of wine from the Rishon vineyards, the first Jewish agricultural enterprise in Palestine, the dairy products of the Tnuvah cooperative, sparkling boxes of Elite chocolates. The florists' windows blazed with tall gladioli drooping on their slender stalks and scarlet and gold roses from the hothouses of Sharon.

  Rich and pungent, the aroma of roasting coffee drifted over the crowds from the cafés lining Ben Yehuda and George V. There were the Imperial and the Royal, where the British went; the Atara, whose owners had refrained from getting a liquor license to keep the British out and whose top floor was tacitly reserved for members of the Palmach; the Brazil, where students hung out.

  Around them, rabbinical scholars from Mea Shearim, orthodox Jews in white shirts with a hand-knit kippah—a skullcap—pinned to their heads, girl kibbutzniks in khaki shorts and sweaters, Yemenite laborers, German refugees proud and poor in their shiny double-breasted suits, flooded off the sidewalks, ignoring the imprecations of the police and the impatient honks of British Army patrol cars.

  Missing from those crowds now, however, were the Arabs who had given them still another colorful dimension: the bank of shoeshine boys lined up by Zion Cinema banging their brushes on their boxes to attract customers, the coffee vendors jingling the bells of the bulbous brass urns strapped across their shoulders, the Sudanese roasting peanuts by the curbside on a glowing brazier. Gone, too, were the villagers carting in for sale on their spindly legged donkeys mounds of oranges, tomatoes, carrots, radishes.

  Partly from fear for their own security, partly in response to the Mufti's orders, they had all begun to avoid Jerusalem's Jewish areas. Each community already had its own bus service, the faded-blue vehicles of the Egged Line for the Jews and the dull-silver buses of the National Company for the Arabs. Jewish taxis refused fares for Arab areas, and Arab cabs wouldn't enter Jewish neighborhoods. Going from one to another, a foreign correspondent noted, was "like crossing between two foreign countries."

  Arab and Jewish civil servants, many of whom had worked side by side for years, now greeted each other on arriving at the office in the morning with a reciprocal search for arms. For Jews, access to the law courts and the city's principal bank, Barclays, both entered through Arab areas, became increasingly dangerous. For Arabs, a visit to government offices in the Jewish areas was a hazardous experience. Even children began to pelt each other with stones on the way to and from school.

  The key installations, the General Post Office, the telephone exchanges, Government Hospital, police headquarters, the broadcasting studio, the prison, were all behind the barbed wire of "Bevingrad." Only one back entrance to the G.P.O. remained open, reached by passing through a crooked line of barbed wire. Heinz Kraus, an out-of-work Jewish technician, was on guard duty there every day with an Arab and a British soldier. The Arab, he noted, even searched for arms under the tarbooshes of his fellows.

  On December 15, the Arabs gave the population a chilling reminder of the stranglehold in which they might eventually hold Jerusalem by blowing up the pipes delivering the city's water. While the British repaired them, the Jewish Agency ordered a secret survey of the cisterns in the Jewish areas of the city.

  Even the one refuge in which Arab and Jew had always found harmony, the graveyard, was troubled in the first weeks following the partition vote. Jewish funeral processions winding their way up to the Mount of Olives, some behind the coffins of the first victims of the sporadic shooting ringin
g out in the city, often came under Arab sniper fire.

  More than any other facet of its daily existence, however, a ritual accomplished each evening at the Egged bus station on the outskirts of town had become the symbol of Jewish life in Jerusalem. The struggle for the roads, foreseen by the chiefs of the Haganah and by Abdul Khader Husseini, had begun. The Arab ambushes were still sporadic and unorganized, but they had already forced the Haganah to rely on daily convoys to link Jerusalem with the coast. The steel-plated buses used in the convoys weighed eight tons each. They could go no faster than ten miles an hour climbing up to Jerusalem from Bab el Wad, and rare was the convoy that escaped without being at least sniped at.

  Long before sunset each night, the crowds began to gather in the bus station waiting for the incoming convoy to arrive. As its vehicles ground to a halt, the crowds swarmed over them, every eye fixed on their locked doors waiting for the results of a sinister lottery. The first figures to appear in those doorways were often covered with blood, candidates for the ambulance that waited for each convoy. The last were sometimes dead, laid out on the bus station's asphalt apron to be identified by the pathetic scream of the friend or relative who had come to the station to welcome them back to Jerusalem.

  And yet normally those December weeks were a time of joy in Jerusalem as the Jews celebrated Hanukkah, the feast of lights, marking the triumph of the Maccabean revolt, and the city's Christians prepared for Christmas. Usually at this season Jewish Jerusalem blazed by night with lights from eight-tipped menorahs snapped on one by one as each day of the Hanukkah feast passed. Relay racers rushed blazing torches to the city from the tombs of the Maccabees, and there was public dancing of the hora and communal parties with piles of steaming latkes, potato pancakes.