It was the willingness to participate in such actions that bound the disparate members of the Irgun together. The eight men of Uri Cohen's cell gathered in their shanty in Jerusalem's poor Yemenite Quarter were a typical cross section of the organization's membership. One was an elderly man who sold roses from a baby carriage on Ben Yehuda Street. As he did he meticulously gathered much of the intelligence the organization needed for its activities. One was a Yemenite laborer who could barely read and write. Another, the most fanatic member of the group, was an Orthodox Polish Jew from Mea Shearim.
Uri Cohen was in the Irgun because he wanted to be where the action was. He always had. He had spent most of his life satisfying his craving for action on the sports field. At eighteen he had joined the Royal Air Force, looking for action, just as he had joined the Irgun for the same reason four years later. His appetite had gone unfulfilled. "The Haganah is doing nothing," he regularly complained, "and now we are doing nothing, too."
For Uri Cohen, however, this meeting would not be like all the others. He had, his cell leader announced, been selected to begin the next day in an Irgun commanders' course. It would prepare him for the action for which he had clamored so long.
It was a ritual as unvarying as his daily reading of a passage of the Bible. Every Friday at noon, a staff officer hand-carried to the office of the Chaplain General of the British armed forces in Palestine one of the twenty numbered and registered copies of a "Most Secret" document called "Order of Battle and Location Statement." Its half-dozen pages gave the exact location and the movements anticipated for the coming week of every British unit in the Middle East.
After a careful perusal of its contents, the chaplain locked the document in his safe and headed to the officers' mess of the King David Hotel. Before his return an hour later, a photocopy of the document was on its way to Haganah intelligence.
That exploit, carried out by a secretary, was one of the first achievements of an intelligence service whose accomplishments would one day dazzle the world. Given their numerical inferiority, it was not on the primitive bomb-and-run tactics of the Irgun that the Jews of Palestine would have to depend in their struggle with the Arabs. Long before the Irgun had placed its first bomb in the midst of an Arab crowd, the Haganah had sought to mobilize the diverse resources of Palestine's Jewish community for the sophisticated tasks of intelligence warfare.
The head of Jerusalem's Uri net was a twenty-six-year-old German-born physicist named Shalhevet Freir. Freir had learned at first hand the ways of the British military as a sergeant in the Eighth Army fighting his way across Africa. Later, disguised as an English major or colonel, he had run illegal immigrants past Britain's forces in Italy. Now, from an office in an obscure Institute for the Study of Social Affairs on Jerusalem's Bezalel Street, he directed twenty agents filtered into every level of Britain's civil and military establishment. He had even, thanks to an Armenian secretary, succeeded in penetrating the office of the High Commissioner.
The key to the Haganah's successes lay in the brilliance and the variety of the individuals who served it. With his bushy moustache, his penetrating blue eyes, his worn tweed sports jackets, his quietly superior Oxbridge accent, twenty-nine-year-old Vivian Herzog could pass anywhere for a young British officer in civilian clothes. Born in Dublin, Herzog, the son of the Chief Rabbi of Palestine, was officially responsible for liaison between the Haganah and the British Army. His real assignment was establishing a network of strategically located pro-Jewish officers inside the British establishment. If Herzog was to enjoy an extraordinary success in his task, it was not surprising. He brought to it the highest of qualifications. He had been an officer in that most British of British units, the Guards, and he had prepared for his Haganah assignment by serving for a year and a half as a captain in British military intelligence.
Herman Joseph Mayer, the German-born eldest son of Jerusalem's most distinguished bookseller, had spent the war with a pair of earphones clamped to his head, moving from El Alamein to Monte Cassino monitoring the conversations of Luftwaffe pilots for the R.A.F. Now, in the basement of his father's home at 33 Ramban Street, Mayer was busy monitoring other conversations. This time, however, the voices filtering through the static of his earphones were English. Mayer presided over an auxiliary of Jewish intelligence called Arnevet, "the Rabbit." The Rabbit, manned by English-speaking Haganah girls, functioned twenty-four hours a day, its specially adapted radio fixed to a wavelength of 58.2 meters, the channel of the British police.
With the passage of time, the accomplishments of those varied intelligence units would grow to impressive dimensions. Already the flow of information into Freir's headquarters was highly significant. It included the weekly intelligence estimate of the British Army for the Middle East, most of the letters exchanged between Sir Alan Cunningham and his superiors in London, the orders and circulars sent to the subordinate commands of G.H.Q. Palestine, and the British Army's periodic evaluation of the state of Jewish and Arab preparations.
More vital for the future was the penetration established by Jewish intelligence inside the Arab ranks. Within a fortnight of each meeting of the Arab League, a copy of its minutes was in the hands of the Jewish Agency in Jerusalem. Even the Cairo headquarters of Haj Amin Husseini had been penetrated with a paid informer.
In the basement of the Jewish Agency, in two closely guarded rooms, a curly-haired young man named Yitshak Navon was organizing what would become the most precious source of information of all. Those two rooms were linked by a special cable to the central switchboard of the Jerusalem Post Office. There the Post, Telephone and Telegraph's largely Jewish technicians were quietly setting taps on key Arab and British telephones in Jerusalem and on the trunk lines linking Palestine to Europe and the rest of the Middle East. Soon Navon would have a score of operators on duty around the clock in his basement hideaway, carefully transcribing the conversations of every key Arab and British official in the city.
Adjunct of that secret war was a propaganda war that both sides were beginning to wage through clandestine radio stations. The Arabs' radio, called Voice of the Revolution, broadcast every evening at seven o'clock from a small transmitter hidden under a pile of carpets in the delivery van of an Armenian rug dealer.
The Haganah's transmitter was hidden in a private home. To fool the British detection services, it was located in a neighborhood without electric current. Current was supplied by a wire stretched from house to house from a nearby hospital. The Haganah's order for its concealment was: "Hang out more undershirts." The housewives along its route had all been asked to keep it covered with laundry.
8
THE SANTA CLAUS OF THE HAGANAH
THE SNOW CLUNG to the old tile roofs and built up in irregular layers along the city walls. Overhead, the star which 1,947 years earlier had guided the shepherds of Judea and the Three Magi to Bethlehem's stable flickered like a distant beacon in the winter sky. Wrapped in its mantle of snow, Jerusalem prepared to celebrate one of the most uncertain Christmastides in its history.
Seldom had peace seemed more remote and men of goodwill rarer than in that Jerusalem of 1947. Regularly, as December waned toward Christmas, the sound of gunfire shattered the city's peace. The skirmishes that gunfire betokened had grown in intensity and frequency with each passing day. By the end of the year, violence in Palestine would have claimed the lives of 175 Arabs, 150 Jews and fifteen British soldiers.
Arabs and Jews rivaled each other in their ferocity in compiling those figures. As a reprisal for Arab sniper fire into Jewish areas, one Haganah officer set up a Bren gun in an office window and sent a clip of bullets into a crowd of Arab shoppers at Jaffa Gate. Gershon Avner, the young man who had brought David Ben-Gurion news of the partition vote, saw two British soldiers shot before his eyes on a crowded street in the heart of Jewish Jerusalem. Israel Schreiber was kidnapped by a band of Arab teenage hoodlums in the Old City souks. A few hours later his body, stuffed into a burlap bag, was dumped outside
Damascus Gate. Nuria Alima, a half-crippled Jewish newspaper dealer, was murdered by an Arab gunman who had just bought one of his papers. Robert Stern, a popular columnist of the Palestine Post, was shot on the threshold of the Press Office. In the last article he had submitted to his paper, the British-born Stern had inadvertently composed his own epitaph. "If I die," he had written, "rather than a monument to my memory, I would prefer people make an offering to help care for the animals in the Jerusalem zoo." The next day, as the first contributions began to flow into the zoo, the unfortunate newsman's funeral convoy was machine-gunned by Arab sharpshooters.
Beyond the city gates, along the same road the carpenter of Nazareth and Mary, his wife, had plodded with their ass toward Bethlehem, Arab riflemen ambushed a Jewish convoy, killing ten Jews, then mutilating their bodies.
Even Christmas Eve had its ration of gunfire. Driving through the Jewish neighborhood of Mekor Hayim, Samy Aboussouan, who had just played the violin in the Palestine Broadcasting System's annual Christmas Eve concert, came under fire. By the time he reached his destination, a modest hotel in Katamon, his car was pockmarked with bullets. Aboussouan had moved his family into the Hotel Semiramis a few days after the burning of the Commercial Center. The three-story, bougainvillea-covered hotel, owned by his uncle, was so discreet that it had seemed to Aboussouan the surest refuge in Jerusalem.
Inside, with a fire blazing in the fireplace, the atmosphere was a cheerful contrast to the sinister and deserted streets through which Aboussouan had just passed. Determined to forget the situation with a traditional Christmas feast, Aboussouan's uncle, mother, aunts and cousins had set up an enormous Christmas tree in the hotel's sitting room, its branches covered with candles and glittering ornaments. At midnight, Aboussouan's family would march off to the nearby Chapel of St. Theresa for midnight mass, caroling in the darkness as they went the ancient hymns that celebrated the birth of a Savior nineteen centuries earlier in a stable a few miles from where their hotel now lay. Then they would return for an enormous Réveillon, a Christmas feast, at the hotel's banquet table glowing with silver and porcelain. As she always did at Christmas time, Samy's mother had prepared for their feast one of his favorite dishes, karshat, tripe stuffed with rice, garlic and chick-peas.
Just before eleven o'clock, an astonishing apparition appeared at the foot of the stairs leading to the hotel's upper floors. A plumed bicorn on his head, a cape over his shoulders, a sword buckled around the black-velvet and gold braid of his diplomat's dress uniform, it was the figure of Manuel Allende Salazar, vice-consul of Spain, off to represent his nation at the solemn midnight mass celebrated each year before Jerusalem's diplomatic corps and mandatory authorities in the basilica of the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem.
Seeing the surprised and laughing faces of his fellow guests, the young Spanish diplomat gaily whirled back his cape, pulled his sword from its scabbard and profiled himself before the figure of an imaginary bull.
"As Manolete on the eve of his death," he proclaimed. Then, with a rush, he swept out the door into the night. In a few days' time, the laughter he had left behind was to have a tragic echo, and his parting joke the semblance of a ghastly premonition.
A British armored car shepherded the column of automobiles up the winding road, its headlights licking the white fields of snow covering the hills. Stiff and erect in his own diplomat's uniform, the representative of the latest nation to fail to bring peace to this particular parcel of earth sat lost in his melancholy reminiscences. It was a wet December night such as this thirty years before that James H. Pollock, the Jerusalem district commissioner, had seen the hilltop village of Bethlehem for the first time. He had been a young lieutenant in the vanguard of Allenby's army then, standing on the threshold of his life and his career. From that December night until this, both had been associated with the British mandate in Palestine. Now, Pollock sadly reflected, it had fallen to him to be the last Englishman to represent his nation's authority at the ceremony which seemed to symbolize so much of this difficult land he had entered as a conqueror and would leave as a disheartened civil servant.
When Monsignor Vincent Gelat entered the basilica of the Church of the Nativity at the head of the traditional parade of prelates, the strains of the Gloria burst from the assemblage of uniformed diplomats and faithful. As always, the first notes of that militant hymn were the signal that set the church towers of Bethlehem ringing out once again their ancient tidings of the birth of a Messiah.
Only a handful of pilgrims stood outside the basilica, ready to answer the call of the bells with their carols from Sheperds Fields or the square before the church. Hearing the bells in his home a few streets away, Dr. Mikhail Malouf, the Arab head of Palestine's psychiatric hospitals, stood up.
Normally, Christmas Eve was a joyful feast in the Malouf home. Dozens of their friends dropped in to celebrate around the dishes of the Arabic mezze that Berthe Malouf spread over every table in her house. As they feasted, they would listen to the distant caroling rising from Sheperds Fields. And at the sound of Bethlehem's bells they too would walk singing up to Basilica Square.
This year there was no mezze and no feasting in the Malouf home. It had not seemed appropriate. The only sound drifting up to their home that night had been that of a few British soldiers on pass singing loudly off in the distance.
Now, with the chimes of the Church of the Nativity ringing through his living room, Dr. Malouf solemnly wished his wife a traditional Arabic greeting, "May all your feasts find you in good health." Then he kissed her. Arm in arm they stood at their living-room window peering into the darkness through the lightly falling snow. From the center of Bethlehem they heard again the shouts and singing of the British soldiers, a little drunker now, ringing through the night. "But in the houses," Berthe Malouf thought, listening to them, "there is only sadness."
While Jerusalem paced through those age-old Christmas rituals, 2,500 miles away, near the Belgian port of Antwerp, a stumpy young man in a black mackintosh stepped out of a hired Buick, his arms wrapped around the bottles that were to be his offering of the Yuletide season. With a gesture of his head, Xiel Federmann indicated to the solitary guard at the gate of a sprawling line of warehouses that the cognac filling his arms was for him. Grateful at his unexpected visitor's generosity, the guard threw open his gates and waved Federmann inside.
Booming "Merry Christmas," Federmann unloaded the cognac and rubbed his hands in happy anticipation of the task before him. He was, on this Christmas morning, about to become the Santa Claus of the Haganah. Before Federmann stretched the acres and acres of the most fantastic bargain-basement store in the world in December 1947.
There were hundreds of halftracks, ambulances, water tanks, jeeps, trailer trucks, bulldozers, staff cars, ammunition carriers. There were tents in a dozen different sizes to hold one to one hundred men; an ocean of helmets, miles of cables, hose and wire, thousands of radios, field telephones, walkie-talkies, hand-cranked generators. There were carloads of cartridge belts, underpants, socks, combat boots, sweaters, fatigues, flashlights, first-aid kits, prophylactics—equipment enough, it seemed to the wondering Federmann, to fit out half the Jews of the world in the service of the Haganah. As Ehud Avriel had been sent to Europe to buy arms and ammunition, Federmann's task was to find and buy the rest of the material needed to equip immediately an army of sixteen thousand men.
The choice was a marvelous mix of man and mission. Despite his youth, Federmann had installed himself in Haifa running a café for British servicemen on his arrival in Palestine in 1940. Before long, the sale of coffee constituted only a minor part of his commercial activities. Using the contents of the Standard Requirement Book for Equipment and Ordnance as his bible, the extraordinary Federmann became a prime furnisher for the British Army and the Royal Navy.
Rare was the item, no matter how esoteric, that Federmann could not furnish his clients. His most notable achievement was furnishing the Royal Navy with one hundred thousand sailors'
caps on short notice. Nowhere in the entire Middle East was there a press capable of blocking the hats into their unique, flat shape. Federmann prowled the suburbs of Tel Aviv until he found an aging Polish hatmaker accomplished in making the straimel, the round flat hat the orthodox Jews of Poland wore to mark the Sabbath. The elderly craftsman rounded up for Federmann his fellow hatmakers who had escaped the ghettoes of Poland, and soon the fingers that had shaped the straimel were busy pressing into form the flat cap of the Royal Navy.
A few months after the last cap was delivered, Federmann was able to detect during an official ceremony aboard H.M.S. Warspite the presence of those products of his inventive genius. It poured rain that day, and as he watched the admiral review the guard of honor Federmann's nose began to twitch. Rising from the ranks of the men before him was an unmistakable stench. Federmann recognized it immediately. It was the stench of glue dissolving in the rain, his glue, a paste made of crushed cattle bones redolent of the institution in which he had bought it, the Tel Aviv slaughterhouse.
Now the wondering Federmann began to survey the immensity of the display spread before him, preparing his shopping list for the soldiers of his still-unborn country. In one of the first warehouses he entered, he stumbled on a strange device. It was a U.S. Army pack rack designed to help a man carry a heavy load. Federmann hesitated for a moment. They might be useful, he thought, and they cost only twenty cents apiece. With a shrug, he marked three hundred down on his list and walked on. One day, Federmann's twenty-cent pack racks would save the Jews of Jerusalem from starvation.
9
JOURNEY TO ABSURDITY
THE WOMAN STALKED up to the British major searching the bus.
"What is this?" she demanded.
"We're searching for arms," he replied.
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