The Arabs remained adamantly opposed to the city's internationalization as just another manifestation of a partition plan they rejected as illegal. "The people of Jerusalem, who are not sacred, should not be punished because their city is," one of their leaders told the United Nations.
The Jewish position, however, had shifted. The Jewish Agency, originally opposed to internationalization, was now actively fighting for its accomplishment. With the Arab ring around the city tightening, internationalization had begun to appear to some as perhaps the best way of assuring the physical safety and well-being of the city's Jewish population. The Agency now sought to place before those nations and forces which had clamored for Jerusalem's internationalization the consequences of their action. If the Christian West wanted Jerusalem, it would have to pay a price for it, and that price would be men to keep its peace, specifically men for an international police force.
From chancellery to chancellery, the Agency's representatives pleaded for men to man such a force. They got nowhere. Finally, despairing, the Agency's leadership, in a secret meeting at the United States Consulate, asked for the rapid dispatch of five hundred U.S. Marines as the best way of bringing a police force into being. Their suggestion provoked nothing but consternation in Washington. The Truman Administration, whatever its sympathies for the Jewish cause, did not want to bear the onus of sending American troops abroad in an election year.
The greatest source of concern to the Jewish leadership, however, was the Palestine policy of the great power still in physical occupation of the land. The partiality displayed by the British police during the burning of the Commercial Center had not proven to be a passing phenomenon. Instead, to the angry Jewish population it seemed that the British administration was growing increasingly anti-Semitic on the personal level and pro-Arab on the political plane.*
There was justification for the Jews' suspicions. In the two months since partition, fifty Haganah men and women had been arrested in Jerusalem alone for bearing arms and had been sent to jail for it. At the same time, as Lebanon's consul had noted, the British authorities made little effort to prevent armed Arabs from circulating in the city. Richard Catling, the head of the Criminal Investigation Department, summed up British policy by observing, "We didn't mind the Arabs moving around with grenades all over their chests and cartridge belts hanging from their shoulders, just so long as they didn't bother us."
When the Palestine government's Central Security Committee complained to Jerusalem's district commissioner about "the increasing freedom with which armed Syrians and others congregate in public areas in Jerusalem," the only action the district commissioner was told to take was warning Arab leaders "to keep their soldiers as unobtrusive as possible."
Britain enforced a strict ban on importing arms into Palestine on the grounds that its onus fell equally on Arab and Jew. Yet, on January 9, she signed a major arms contract with Iraq, accompanying the sale with a secret codicil authorizing the use of those arms "to discharge Iraq's responsibilities vis a vis the Arab League." There was no doubt in anyone's mind that those responsibilities were in Palestine.
While the Royal Navy maintained its rigorous patrols of Palestine's coastal waters to intercept illegal immigrant ships which might bring military-age renforcements into the country for the Haganah, the British Army was closing its eyes to the infiltration of hundreds of armed Arab guerrillas into the country. Britain's spokesmen at the United Nations and in Jerusalem piously denied any knowledge of that infiltration. The Jewish Agency knew very well the British were lying. The British Army's intelligence summaries stolen by the Haganah's agents each week revealed that not only did the British know the infiltration was taking place, but they knew the date, the time, the location and the approximate size of each infiltration.
Behind that attitude lay the fact that Britain's Foreign Secretary, Ernest Bevin, and his coterie of Arab experts were not yet resigned to partition's inevitability. If it proved unworkable, then the Palestine problem might yet be thrust back into their laps for resolution along lines more to Bevin's liking. Nothing seemed more certain to demonstrate partition's fundamental unworkability than serious Arab military opposition to it. Increasingly, the reports flowing into the Foreign Office predicted just that eventuality.
The author of many of these reports was Brigadier C. K. Clayton, Britain's senior intelligence officer in the Middle East. A Blimpish hangover from Lawrence days, Clayton was, as one of his colleagues remarked, "so absent-minded he could forget to wear his pants to the office," a mental trait not, after all, highly prized in intelligence agents. Still, Clayton had been around a long time, and his signature had appeared on the bottom of so many dispatches that it had begun to take on an aura of infallibility. After all, hardly a meeting of importance took place in the Arab world without his portly silhouette drifting around its fringes in ponderous pseudo-anonymity. From his gleanings at these meetings came the grist for his dispatches, and in the winter of 1948 they were telling Bevin what he and his entourage wanted to hear: the Arabs were going to war with the Jews and they were going to win.*
With that perspective looming on the Middle Eastern horizon, the Foreign Office was more than ever determined to do nothing to help partition along. Beyond that, the Foreign Office wished to adopt an attitude toward the Arabs' evolving military schemes which would not jeopardize the cornerstone of Britain's future Middle Eastern policy, Anglo–Arab friendship.
To the frustrated Jews, however, it seemed that Britain's real aim in Palestine was to give substance to a prediction uttered one winter morning in the United States Consulate General by the government's Chief Secretary, Sir Henry Gurney. Looking calmly at his American host, Gurney declared it was a useless waste of time to talk about the United Nations role in Palestine.
"By the time the United Nations arrives," Gurney predicted, "Palestine will be up in smoke."
11
GOLDA MEIR'S TWENTY-FIVE "STEPHANS"
THE TRUCK SLIPPED through the black winter's night up to the edge of the lawn. Five men armed with planks and coils of rope leaped out and advanced cautiously through the darkness. One of them switched on a flashlight. Its beam fell on two massive metal silhouettes. Behind them an inscription over a doorway revealed the name of the institution to which those shadowy figures belonged, Jerusalem's Menorah Club, the meeting place of the men who had served with the Jewish Legion during the First World War. They were relics of that war. For thirty years enshrined there on the clubhouse lawn, they had been the proud incarnation of Britain's victory over the Ottoman Empire and of the legion's part in it. Now Eliahu Sochaczever, a Polish engineer of the Haganah, had come to claim these souvenirs for a new struggle. Stripped down, sawed into pieces, the two captured Turkish cannons of the Menorah Club were going to serve as barrels for the first artillery pieces of Jerusalem's Haganah.
The fact that the Haganah had to steal them from their honored moorings in the middle of the night—indeed, the fact that anyone could label the instruments for which they were destined "artillery"—was indicative of the Haganah's poverty in heavy weapons. So urgent was the need for them that Jerusalem's Chief Rabbi had granted the workers in Sochaczever's secret workshops a dispensation to labor on the Sabbath while they converted these Turkish cannons into homemade mortars. Called the Davidka after their inventor, David Leibovitch, an agronomist from Siberia, those mortars constituted the sole piece of heavy artillery in the Haganah's arsenal during the winter of 1948. They fired a shell made from water pipes and packed with explosives, nails and bits of scrap metal. Their range and accuracy, in the words of one Haganah man, "were about the same as David's slingshot." In addition to the fact that they existed, the Davidkas had one signal advantage. They made an incredible amount of noise, enough to terrify anybody within hearing range.
In garages, locked into attics, in apartments hastily converted into makeshift laboratories, other Jerusalemites labored that winter to turn out improvised arms for the defense of their city. I
n that enterprise, the Jewish community could call on the services of some of the world's best-known scientists. Joel Racah and Aaron Kachalski, for example, abandoned their pursuit of the secrets of nuclear physics and molecular chemistry to give themselves over to more elementary tasks. In an apartment in Rehavia the two masters of matter's most complex secrets worked day and night developing a better gunpowder for the Davidka. Nearby, two students in the chemistry and physics department at Hebrew University, Jonathan Adler and Avner Treinin, turned out homemade hand grenades and a variety of booby-trap devices for use in the Arab quarters of the city. To develop a detonator for his grenades, Adler used as a textbook the manual of another clandestine body, the Irish Republican Army. In a room lined with rubber sheeting in the orthodox quarter of Mca Shearim, a deaf and dumb student named Emmanuel turned out lethal fulminite of mercury for Adler's detonators.
Far more substantial were the efforts deployed by the Haganah along the coastal plain, where security was more promising. They were supervised by a Jerusalemite, Joseph Avidar, the son of a Ukrainian miller who had immigrated to Palestine at the age of nineteen. Using some of the machinery purchased in the United States by Haim Slavine, and benefiting from the technical counselors furnished him by the Sonneborn Institute, Avidar ran, among other things, a munitions plant covering almost one thousand square feet of floor space. It was hidden underneath the kibbutz of Maagan Michael, north of Tel Aviv, built for the express purpose of providing a cover for its activities. The entrance to the factory was concealed in a laundry in which the kibbutzniks supplemented their income by laundering uniforms for the British Army. Its extraordinary consumption of electric current was concealed by passing its cables through the kilns of the community's bakery. The bakery's smokestack was the underground factory's air vent.
Avidar's greatest problem had been finding cartridge cases for the nine-millimeter bullets he wanted to manufacture. He solved it by a unique stratagem—importing millions of lipstick tubes from an English cosmetics concern. By July 1948, his little clandestine factory would have produced three million cartridges.
Outside Hadera, another workshop under Avidar's command made shells for a small mortar. The crating room of a Haifa orange grove served as a cover for the assembling of fifty thousand hand grenades. One of the most important enterprises directed by the busy Avidar assembled the "sandwich" armored cars upon which the Haganah depended to keep the road to his adopted Jerusalem open. The "armor" that protected those cars was made of two four-millimeter-thick steel sheets "sandwiched" around fifty millimeters of wood. Avidar was constantly besieged by inventors offering him a better lightweight plastic sheeting. He proposed to each of them a quick test to measure the efficiency of their inventions. He told them to hold a sheet of their plastics in front of their chest while he fired a revolver at them from twenty-five yards. He never found a better armor plate than his heavy sandwich.
In Tel Aviv, Haifa and, above all, Jerusalem, the Haganah added to its arsenal by buying arms from its enemies. Hidden under truckloads of carrots or cauliflower, a few rifles and cases of ammunition thus reached the Haganah's hands, sold to them by the Arabs through Armenian intermediaries. The British in Jerusalem also turned out to be a worthwhile source of arms. At the end of January, a pair of British noncoms delivered to the Haganah a truckload of explosives and ammunition for nothing more concrete than a glass of cognac and a grateful handshake. Another noncom sold the Haganah his armored car, its turret packed with shells, gasoline and small arms, for one thousand Palestine pounds.
A few carefully planned raids on the British Army's arms depots supplemented those acquisitions. Inspired by the purchase of their first armored car, the Jerusalem Haganah sent a group of men disguised as British soldiers into the Bevingrad security zone. They drove out with a brand-new Daimler armored car. Like the Flying Dutchman, the car began to mysteriously appear and reappear, until Jerusalem's Arabs were persuaded the Haganah possessed a whole fleet of armored cars.
The British also served as an excellent source of arms for the Arabs of Jerusalem. For a thousand pounds one British sergeant offered to close his eyes to their activities while he stood guard over his regiment's armory. A pair of policemen negotiated the sale of their armored car for the same sum during a stopover in a tobacco store in Upper Beqaa. On the lonely roads beyond the city, "holdups" of British trucks were regularly arranged in return for a few pounds. Prostitutes were sometimes used to take an arms-depot sentry's mind off his work while Haj Amin's men helped themselves to a few cases of the ammunition he was supposed to be guarding. Arab manual laborers in those depots patiently pilfered small arms and spare parts.
The Jerusalem Arab community simply did not have intellectual resources to match those furnished the Haganah by the Jewish community's galaxy of distinguished scientists. They were not, however, without their armaments experts. A British intelligence report signaled early in the winter of 1948 the arrival in Jerusalem of twenty-five Yugoslavian Moslems, veterans of the Wehrmacht. Their task, the report said, was to aid the city's defenders in making mines and explosives.
Above all, the Arabs had the advantage of long, desolate frontiers across which it was relatively easy to smuggle arms. One such shipment was forwarded by Ibn-Saud, King of Saudi Arabia. When Abdul Khader Husseini opened the shipment he was speechless with fury. Saud had sent him a consignment of the primitive pre–World War I rifles with which he had conquered the Arabian desert. Angrily, Abdul Khader broke them one by one over his knee.
The Arabs' principal local source of arms in early 1948 were the battlefields of Egypt's Western Desert. Even there, the intramural feuding that handicapped so many of their other endeavors came into play. Egyptians, Moslem Brothers, Palestinians, acquisitive army merchants, squabbled among themselves for the desert's harvest, outbidding each other with the Bedouins who scavenged the arms from the sands, hijacking each other's purchases. By Bedouin camel train, under truckloads of fruits and vegetables, in the trunks of automobiles, along the desert tracks used by generations of hashish smugglers, those arms found their way back to Palestine. One way or another, a great number of them wound up on sale in Jerusalem's souks. During that winter of 1948 the demand for them was so great that prices lost all relation to value. By midwinter, a single rusty Mauser was sold for one hundred pounds, four times the price of a brand-new Mauser in the Czechoslovakian paradise of Ehud Avriel and Abdul-Aziz Kerine.
Set firmly astride the historic Baghdad–Cairo axis, Damascus, capital of Syria, was the epicenter from which by tradition the multiple explosions of a turbulent past had radiated through the Arab world. A verdant miracle rising from the desert floor, Damascus could inspire such awe that, legend held, the Prophet had turned away from its gates proclaiming, "One cannot enter Paradise twice." From the conquests of the Omayyad caliphs to the conversion of Saul of Tarsus on a street called Straight and to the collapse of the Ottoman Empire in 1918, three thousand years of history were written upon its walls. Nothing was more natural than that in the early winter of 1948 Damascus should become the focal point of the Arab League's campaign to aid the Arabs of Palestine, the staging area upon which converged a strange migration of merchants, mercenaries and impassioned volunteers. Capital of a politically and militarily independent nation, Damascus offered the perfect sanctuary in which to assemble, furnish and train those volunteers, the base from which they could slip into Palestine, the headquarters in which the Arabs could prepare for a major assault on Palestine once the British left.
The half-lit, teeming labyrinth that was Damascus' souk concealed the Middle East's most flourishing arms market. Prewar French rifles, British Sten guns, Mausers of the Wehrmacht, even American bazookas were on sale there. Scraps of the uniforms of six different armies were heaped in indiscriminate piles next to the bolts of silk brocade for which the souk was known.
Above all, Damascus was the theater in which the rival factions of the Arab world contended for its leadership. In the city's suburbs, not
far from the modest mausoleum of the greatest Islamic general in history, Saladin, another general had set up headquarters in an old French Army barracks. Appointed by the Arab League at its December meeting in Cairo, Ismail Safwat Pasha, a fifty-two-year-old Iraqi, was supposed to be the supreme commander of all the Arab forces destined to intervene in Palestine: the Jihad Moqhades of Haj Amin Husseini, the volunteer Liberation Army being raised and armed by the Arab League and, eventually, should they enter the war, the regular armies of the Arab states. In fact, as Safwat Pasha soon discovered, in that anthill of conflicting political interests and ambitious men his effective command was limited to the handful of officers who made up his headquarters staff.
Like so many of his political counterparts, Safwat Pasha combined a mastery of hyperbole and the extravagant phrase with a determined refusal to face reality. Already he had promised his troops "a triumphant parade to Tel Aviv." Confronted by a group of Palestinians who complained they lacked arms with which to attack passing Jewish convoys, he roared, "Then destroy them by throwing stones at their armored cars!" Warned by his able young operations officer, a Jordanian veteran of the British Army named Wasfi Tell, that his triumphant march on Tel Aviv might turn to disaster "because of the deplorable state of our forces," Safwat took only one precaution. He made sure Tell's report did not reach any Arab leaders, confidentially advising his young aide, "If some of the Arab governments read this they will refuse to take the risk of sending their armies to Palestine."
Everything was in short supply in Safwat's headquarters except for the cases of papers and files which spilled through the offices. Chairs, tables, telephones were lacking. There was no radio to link the headquarters to the field. A swarm of Syrian and Iraqi officers buzzed around the building, seemingly more familiar with the science of political intrigue than with that of warfare. The distribution of funds, of commands, of rank, of operational zones, of arms and materials, all were objects of bargaining as intensive as any displayed in the city's souks.
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