O Jerusalem!

by Larry Collins

  This year, Jerusalem was dark for the feast of lights. There was no dancing in its deserted streets, and all public ceremonies were canceled. Feeling the chill hostility of the night around them, many a Jew in the security of his home might well have prayed for a contemporary renewal of the ancient blessing he commemorated with a prayer each night of the feast as he lit the candles of his menorah: "We kindle these lights to mark the marvelous victories and wonderful liberation which Thou didst achieve for our ancestors."

  It was the shortest bus ride in Palestine. It lasted barely five minutes. But the half-mile route covered by Jerusalem's No. 2 bus was the most dangerous trip a Jew could take in those first days after the U.N. partition vote. That bus ride ran from the center of Jerusalem through Jaffa Gate, along the rim of the Old City's Armenian Quarter, down to the southern end of an oversized alleyway at the heart of the most ancient Jewish settlement in Palestine, the Jewish Quarter of the Old City. It was the only physical link open between New Jerusalem and the Jewish Quarter, and its half-mile route was ringed by hostile Arab throngs.

  The quarter lay in the southeastern corner of the Old City, on a slope of ground running down from Mount Zion toward the Temple Mount. Its southern flank was the Old City wall. To the west was a settlement of Arab families from North Africa, to the north the Moslem Quarter. Barely the size of fifteen football fields, it sheltered only a symbolic parcel of Jewry, two thousand people, a tenth of the Old City's total population.

  For centuries there had been Jewish scholars living in it. They had built as their monuments to their dispersed nation and the faith that sustained it the twenty-seven synagogues that dominated the quarter. Sometimes built underground because "from the depths you will call to God," sometimes on the high ground because "there is no building a synagogue except at the height of a city," those synagogues were studded through the quarter, the solid anchors on which it depended.

  There was Eliyahu Hanavi, where, according to legend, Elijah the Prophet had appeared to complete a minyan, the ten-man quorum required for a public prayer. In one musty corner of the synagogue a crumbling chair still awaited the Prophet's return. Next door, under the large dome and latticed windows of Ben-Zakai Synagogue, were the shofar on which, tradition held, Elijah would sound his people's freedom and the flask of oil with which he would rekindle the lamp of the rebuilt Temple. There was the Stambuli Synagogue, built by Turkish Jews, in which impaired or damaged sacred texts were guarded. Once a year, thirty men marched out from the synagogue in a candlelit procession to bury those texts and to guarantee a year's rain for Palestine's crops. And, of course, there was the Hurva, the most beautiful of all, under whose magnificent dome were kept the battle flags of the Jewish Legion that had fought in World War I.

  Arab-Jewish relations in the Old City had always been good. Most of the property in the quarter was Arab-owned, and one of its familiar sights was the Arab rent collector making his way from house to house, pausing in each for the rent and a ritual cup of coffee. Here the Islamic respect for men of religion had been naturally extended to the quarter's scholars in their yeshivas. As for the quarter's poor artisans and shopkeepers, the most natural of bonds, poverty, tied them to their Arab neighbors.

  On Friday evening, Arab youngsters would go to the homes of their devout Jewish friends and kindle for them the oil lamps a Jew could not light on the Sabbath. Many an Arab and Jewish youngster would always remember the exchange of gifts traditionally performed between the communities at feast times, the Jews bringing to their Arab neighbors heaps of cut, dried almonds at Sukkoth, the harvest festival, Arabs offering trays of bread and honey to help their Jewish neighbors mark the end of Passover.

  Between the religious leadership of the Old City and the Zionist leadership of the New, however, relations were often strained, and, as a result, the Haganah was weak inside the Old City. On the night that partition was voted, there were exactly eighteen Haganah men in an area where the Arab potential could be numbered in the thousands.

  A Belgian-born arms expert sent to study the quarter's needs after the vote returned with a dismaying report. The entire armory of the quarter consisted of sixteen rifles of which fourteen worked, twenty-five pistols and three Finnish submachine guns. At any moment, Amir knew, the Arabs might decide to blockade the route of the No. 2 bus and sever his only tie to the Old City. While it remained open, he vowed to use it to funnel into the Jewish quarter all the men and arms his strained garrison could spare.

  He was not too soon. Already the same simple, emotional natures that linked the Old City's Arabs and Jews were becoming conductors of the sentiments that would shortly drive them apart. The handful of Arabs in the Jewish quarter moved out. One Arab baker left with his dough still in the oven, handing his key over to the Haganah as he went. Fist fights and shooting erupted.

  Nadi Dai'es, the sixteen-year-old coffee boy who had rushed off to join the mob streaming past his office the day the Commercial Center was burned, was one of the Arabs living in the Jewish Quarter. His family's relations with their Jewish neighbors had always been friendly, but in those days after partition, he remembered, "our feelings were electrified and slowly we began to understand and believe that every Jew was an enemy intent on taking our lives and our land."

  Nadi went to the souks and bought himself a pistol. One night in December, firing erupted in his neighborhood. The sixteen-year-old boy rushed to the window and emptied his pistol into the night. As he did, he heard, coming up to him in the darkness, a pathetic cry from across the alleyway, from the woman whose Sabbath lamps he had lit for a decade.

  "Do not shoot, do not shoot," she cried. "Are we not neighbors since many years?"

  In Jerusalem, as elsewhere in Palestine, the Haganah's basic strategy reflected a philosophy propounded by David Ben-Gurion. What the Jews had, they must hold. No Jew was to leave his home, his farm, his kibbutz, his office without permission. Every outpost, every settlement, every village, no matter how isolated, was to be clung to as though it were Tel Aviv itself. Despite this, Jerusalem's Jewish population began to drift away from mixed neighborhoods in which they were a minority.

  The best way to stop that trend, Amir decided, was to drive the Arabs out of those neighborhoods first. At the same time he resolved to chase them from a few small Arab enclaves embedded in Jewish areas.

  His first tactics were psychological. His men would sneak into the areas at night and plaster the walls and doors of Arab houses with threatening posters. Handbills telling their owners to "leave for your own safety" were stuck to the windshields of Arab cars. Anonymous threatening calls were made to Arab leaders in each neighborhood. Ruth Givton, a secretary at the Jewish Agency, was assigned the job of threatening Katy Antonious, the Arab hostess who had thrown a dinner party on the Old City's walls on Partition Night. The ploy didn't work. The garrulous Arab woman's line was always busy.

  Those psychological tactics produced only a limited success. Amir then raised the pressure. Haganah raiding parties would go in at night, cutting telephone and electric wires, throwing hand grenades onto the ground, firing into the air, striving to create a general air of insecurity. At Sheikh Badr, an Arab settlement below the hilltop where the Israeli Knesset would one day rest, the tactic was repeated several nights running. Finally one morning, Amir's men noted, the Arabs in Sheikh Badr packed up and fled.

  At about the same time, the Arab guerrillas of Abdul Khader Husseini undertook their first organized action in the city. As in Amir's case, its aim was primarily psychological—"to give the Jews a warning," as one of Husseini's leaders told his men. The objective was a Jewish house in Sanhedria in which a group of Haganah men had been stationed. To make the attack, 120 Holy Strugglers were brought to Jerusalem by truck from Hebron. In a drenching rainstorm they made their way through a wadi to a point two hundred yards from the house. Abdul Khader stood up and gave the signal for the attack with a single shot, the first symbolic shot of the campaign beginning that night. The Arabs fired for fift
een minutes, until a British armored car appeared. Then they withdrew, after suffering their first casualty. One of their number had been bitten by a snake.

  "They're attacking!" the driver yelled.

  At his words, Eli Greenberg, a Czechoslovakian survivor of the Dachau death camp, turned and peered through the slit in the steel plates covering the bus's windows. Outside, on the open square before the pillars of Jaffa Gate, Eli saw what looked like a mob of "scores" of screaming Arabs barring their bus's route through the gate.

  At almost the same instant, he heard the driver shout, "The bastards have left us!" The British armored car that was to have convoyed their No. 2 bus through Jaffa Gate had just gone scuttling off down the Bethlehem Road.

  Fortunately for their fellow passengers, Greenberg and ten others on board were members of the Haganah. He leaped up and opened a ventilating plate. With a quick gesture he lobbed a grenade at the feet of the advancing mob. Taking advantage of the panic it caused, the driver shot through the gate, skidded past Suleiman's Citadel and careened along the rim of the Armenian Quarter down to the Street of the Jews.

  That night Greenberg and the men who had entered the Old City with him were taken along the black and menacing alleys to the outposts ringing the quarter. Greenberg was assigned a sandbagged corner of the roof of the Warsaw Synagogue. An officer passed him an enormous Colt and a clip of bullets. "The password is 'Judith,' " he whispered. Then he pointed to a trench of darkness below the position, the alleyway separating the synagogue walls from the row of buildings opposite Greenberg. "They are there," the officer whispered.

  Greenberg drew himself in as close to the sandbags as he could, as if to make his shadowy figure melt into theirs. Thirty months after an American soldier had found him half dead on a slab of wood in Dachau, the Czech jeweler's son realized he faced death again, this time defending a country about which he knew almost nothing, which had become his almost by accident. As he peered out at the shadowy line of roof opposite him, a curious memory came to Greenberg. It was a Biblical quotation he had learned as a child in Prague. "On your ramparts, Jerusalem, I have appointed watchmen."

  Greenberg was just one of the many such watchmen ordered into the Jewish Quarter by Israel Amir. Almost fifty had been sent in, in two buses and three taxis, thanks to half a dozen bribed British guards. Every trip of the No. 2 bus brought in a few more disguised as students, workers or yeshiva scholars. Any cover was valid. Moshe Russnak rode in by ambulance, disguised as a doctor and escorted by a pair of British armored cars. By mid-December, the Haganah had managed to run one hundred and twenty men into the quarter.

  A special air reigned among them. Most were members of Jerusalem's Palmach reserve, composed largely of students at Hebrew University. Their relations with the quarter's elderly rabbis in these early days were congenial. The rabbis extended to the Haganah men the privilege of using their mikveh, the religious baths. Food was limited but not scarce. There was one café, the Europa, where everybody gathered to sample one of its two dishes, Arabic coffee and a sticky yellow pudding.

  The synagogues, because of their size and strategic locations, became the bulwarks of the Haganah's positions. Inspecting the posts installed in Nissan Bek, Shalom Dror saw some two-hundred-year-old Talmudic scrolls and texts pressed into service as sandbags. An old door had been suspended from the dome to serve as a plank from which a sharpshooter could peer through the synagogue's latticed windows into the street. Shivering in the cold, wrapped in a blanket, the guard lay on the door with a pistol in one hand and the text he was studying in the other. Below him, his fellow yeshiva students pondered their lessons.

  A stream of new arrivals poured into the Arab city too: men of the Mufti's forces called in from the countryside, volunteers from Iraq, Syria, Transjordan burning with an ardor for Jerusalem no less fervent than that inspiring the men of the Haganah. With their arrival, the nightly exchanges of fire between the outposts of the two sides increased in intensity. Those exchanges drew a third wave of outsiders into the Old City's walls, the green-kilted men of one of Britain's most distinguished regiments, the Highland Light Infantry.

  Their presence, however, did little to stem the nightly tide of firing or its inevitable consequences. One bitter blue December day a score of men marched up the slopes of the Mount of Olives, bearing on their shoulders a shrouded body laid upon a plank. The name of the man to whom it had belonged was Salamon. He came from a kibbutz in the north, and he was the first Haganah casualty in the latest struggle of the Jewish people for Jerusalem. He had been killed defending a post by the Old City's Nissan Bek Synagogue, the Haganah position closest to the western wall of King Solomon's Temple.

  To Gaby Deeb, the son of Jerusalem's Arab Buick dealer, the man looked like one of those sketches of the local peasantry that artists sent back to their papers from the Middle East in the nineteenth century. His beautifully waxed black moustache curled up a wrinkled brown face. He wore a black Syrian tunic buttoned to his throat, baggy black cotton bloomers and a white Arabic headdress. Two bandoliers glistening with bullets were slung across his sixty-year-old chest. His belt bulged with a pair of Parabellums and an ornate gold dagger. Strapped to his back was a fat black cylinder that resembled nothing so much as a stovepipe.

  He had walked alone all the way to Jerusalem from Aleppo in northern Syria, because, he told Deeb in formal Arabic, he wanted to participate in the crusade for El Kuds, the Holy City. He could not let his first night pass without striking a blow in the struggle.

  Deeb obligingly took the old Syrian to the outskirts of the Jewish quarter of Mekor Hayim along with his nightly party of snipers. There he indicated a water tower frequently used by Haganah riflemen.

  "I shall destroy it," proclaimed the old man. Before Deeb's dumbfounded eyes, he unslung the stovepipe from his back. It was an ancient World War I French mortar, lit by a fuse at its base, held in place by wires fixed to the stakes which the Syrian proceeded to noisily hammer into the ground.

  "Be prepared!" called the old man in a booming voice Deeb thought must have warned every Jew in Mekor Hayim to be prepared. He and his men ducked.

  An ear-shattering explosion shook the ground on which they lay. The old man and his mortar disappeared in an enormous cloud of black smoke. Deeb studied the dark night, waiting to see a shell streaking toward the water tower. Nothing appeared. Seconds ticked by, and the star-filled Jerusalem sky remained despairingly empty, the water tower defiantly intact. Finally the cloud of black smoke began to settle and Deeb started toward it.

  There was nothing left. The old Syrian and his mortar were mixed in a thousand scraps of flesh and metal scattered over the earth of the city he had walked six hundred miles to defend.

  The blue-and-white box of Lux soap powder was there where it should be, before the left-hand pane of the lower window. Seeing it, Uri Cohen, the biology student who had kissed his way to town on Partition Night, turned and entered the shanty. The seven others were already there. The first one in had indicated that the meeting place was secure by placing the soapbox in the window before a predesignated pane. The last one to leave would remove it.

  To those seven men Uri was known only by his code name, Shamir. They were all members of a cell of the Irgun Zvai Leumi, an underground, illegal Jewish organization, hated by the British, feared by the Arabs, disowned by a good majority of their own community. Heirs to the philosophy of a Zionist zealot named Vladimir Jabotinsky, they clung to the dream of a Jewish state running from Acre to Amman, from Mount Hermon to the Suez Canal. For them, Churchill's decision to create the emirate of Transjordan with a stroke of his pen on a Sunday afternoon in Cairo had been a mutilation of the Balfour Declaration. They wanted it all, all the land that had once belonged to the Biblical kingdom of Israel, and they wanted it, if possible, without the encumbering presence of its Arab inhabitants.

  While the Jewish Agency, representative of the majority of the Jewish community, had pursued its goals with negotiations and self-restraint
, the Irgun and its smaller offshoot, the Stern Gang, had gone to the gun. They had not scrupled at murder and terrorism to obtain their aims. Their escutcheon was a rifle thrust aloft by a clenched fist ringed by the motto "Only Thus." In the accomplishment of that pledge, they had already splattered on it the blood of over three hundred victims, most of them innocent—like the ninety Arabs, Jews and Britons they had killed in their most famous exploit, the destruction of a wing of the King David Hotel on July 22, 1946. They had shocked the world and outraged their fellow Jews by hanging two British sergeants, then booby-trapping their bodies, in reprisal for the execution of one of their number. Their excesses were largely responsible for the anti-Jewish sentiment which permeated the British forces in Palestine. Those excesses had produced other fruits, however. They had helped disgust the British public with Britain's role in Palestine, and thus played an important role in leading Clement Attlee to his decision to leave.

  For the Irgun, the United Nations' partition of Palestine was only an invalid dismemberment of the larger homeland they sought. Above all, they condemned the internationalization of Jerusalem, which they proclaimed "was and will forever be our capital." Just before the vote, Menahem Begin, the bespectacled, meek-looking head of the Irgun, had told his commanders in a secret meeting that Jerusalem "was to take precedence over everything else in the months ahead." They were to destroy any hope of internationalizing the city by their actions there. As they had spattered Palestine with British blood in pursuit of a Jewish state, so would they now spatter Jerusalem with Arab blood in pursuit of its Jewish capital.

  Their first actions had been directed against the Arabs of Lifta and Romema, on the western edge of Jerusalem, whose inhabitants they accused of passing information on the movements of Jewish convoys to Tel Aviv. Then they turned their attention to the Arab crowds in the center of the city. On December 13, one of their commandos hurled two bombs into a mass of Arab shoppers at Damascus Gate, killing six people and wounding forty more.