On this January night, the columns of lead awaiting his hands contained only a liturgy of Palestine's petty violence. The Haganah, in "preventive retaliation," had dynamited an Arab home in Sheikh Jarrah. The British had seized a Haganah post in Yemin Moshe. An Arab ambush had damaged an undisclosed number of trucks at Bab el Wad.
As he did every evening, the Post's assistant editor, Ted Lurie, paused at Lipshitz' bank to check the layout of the night's story. Then Lurie cast an eye at the front page. In the outer right-hand column of that page was a little box held open until the last moment for late news breaks. Tonight it was empty. On such a quiet evening Lurie had every reason to hope it would remain so. Satisfied with his paper's latest compilation of the minutiae of Palestine life, Lurie picked up his coat and set out for a ritual evening cup of coffee at the Café Atara.
Two miles away, in the Arab village of Shofat on a ridge north of Jerusalem, an anxious man paced the side of the road. In the darkness, Abou Khalil Genno could see the black figures of the village women, squatting on their haunches along the road. They stared at him as he puffed nervously on the first cigarettes he had ever smoked. Those cigarettes and the British police uniform he was wearing were keys to the act Genno was soon to perform. He was, in a sense, going to fill the little blank space in the front page of the Palestine Post for February 2, 1948. He was going to offer Jewish Jerusalem Abdul Khader Husseini's reply to the destruction of the Semiramis Hotel and the Irgun bombs at Damascus and Jaffa Gates.
Terror bombing had been contemplated by the Mufti's men as early as October 1947, when his subordinates submitted to the Arab League a map of Jerusalem and a list of 160 objectives they boasted they were prepared to destroy. Nothing had come of that initiative, however, and it was not until the wave of successful Jewish bombings threatened to shatter Arab morale that Abdul Khader ordered his men to "organize terror bombings inside Jewish civilian areas wherever possible." In Jerusalem, he mixed a team of spies into the city's street cleaners to look for a suitable target for his first effort.
To prepare his explosives, Abdul Khader called on an intense thirty-one-year-old Jerusalemite with blue-green eyes and straight blond hair deeded to him by some forgotten Crusader forebear. The most remarkable aspect of the un-Arabic appearance of Fawzi el Kutub, however, was his fingers. They were lean and strong, and they were never still. They were forever picking apart some object, dancing over some irregular form as though their nervous movements represented the only means of expression available to the dour, taciturn personality that commanded them. Since Kutub's adolescence their principal activity had been playing with explosives, and Kutub's life seemed to have been given over to one maniacal obsession: blowing up his Jewish neighbors.
Using hand grenades he had made from old Turkish artillery shells, Kutub began his career at fifteen attacking the primitive buses shuttling back and forth between the New City and the Old. Later he decided to celebrate with a dinner the purchase of his first British Mills grenade. Before the first course was served, however, Kutub grabbed the grenade and dashed off to hurl it into a nearby Jewish café; only then could he savor his meal. During the 1936 rebellion he would boast he had personally hurled fifty-six grenades at his Jewish neighbors.
With his restless fingers and inventive mind, he became the master of the hand grenade, constantly devising ways to render it more murderous and more effective. Using a rope and a coil he discovered a technique to lower a grenade from a rooftop and explode it outside some unsuspecting Jew's window. One of his favorite tricks was to stuff a homemade grenade into a child's rubber balloon. Its fuse was set so that the balloon would catch fire first. The puff of flame would bring people running to see what was burning—just in time to have a grenade explode in their faces.
The British finally became aware of Kutub's activities, and he fled to Damascus and then Baghdad. Later, during the war, he went to Nazi Germany on the Mufti's invitation. There the Mufti provided him a unique opportunity to develop his savage talents, by enrolling him in an S.S. commando course in Holland. After a year's training in the most refined techniques of terrorism, he was ordered to lead a four-man team of German saboteurs into Palestine. He refused. The German reaction to his ingratitude was swift. Blindfolded and handcuffed, he was taken by the Gestapo to an unlikely location for a young Arab terrorist. Kutub was dumped into a Jewish concentration camp outside Breslau.
There he starved and suffered for three months along with the wretched human skeletons around him. Only the Mufti's personal intervention with Heinrich Himmler prevented him from accompanying them on their final journey to the gas chambers. Released from the concentration camp, he went to Berlin to prepare Arabic propaganda for the Nazis. When the Russians surrounded the city, Kutub stole the uniform from the body of a dead German soldier, put a fake bandage on his arm and headed south. He got as far as Salzburg, Austria, where he was taken prisoner by the Americans. Four months later, his real identity established, he was released.
Kutub made his way from port to port, looking for a boat to take him to Palestine. The one he found in Marseilles was already crowded with passengers. Undismayed, Kutub called upon his concentration-camp experience and managed to pass himself off as a survivor of the gas chambers. Thus, with fifteen hundred Jewish refugees as traveling companions, he finally set sail for the Promised Land.
Since Abdul Khader Husseini's return, Kutub had been at his old friend's side as the Arabs' explosives expert, the intensity of his anti-Jewish sentiments in no way diminished by memories of his concentration-camp days. His first assignment had been to pack with half a ton of TNT the stolen British police pickup truck that Abdul Khader counted on using to open his Jerusalem offensive. To get the truck into the Jewish city, Abdul Khader had the services of two British deserters, Eddie Brown, a former police captain who claimed that his brother had been killed by the Irgun, and Peter Madison, a blond former army corporal.
Because Abdul Khader did not fully trust the Englishmen, Abou Khalil Genno had been chosen to follow the truck in a second car and light with a cigarette the fuse peeping from the driver's panel. Now, still puffing uncertainly on his practice cigarette, Genno awaited the arrival of the booby-trapped truck. In the darkness he heard one of the villagers whisper, "That's the one who's going to do something big in Jerusalem tonight."
"My God," thought Genno, "if they know, everybody in the city must know."
Silently he reviewed the plan. The two British deserters would go in first, passing a British and a Haganah checkpoint on their way. They would park the truck in front of the target and wander off as if they were going to get a drink in a nearby café. Five minutes later Genno would follow. He would park a hundred yards from the target, light a cigarette, casually stroll back and light the fuse.
The booby-trapped police van finally arrived. With the two Englishmen at the wheel it set off to deliver its load of TNT to Jerusalem. Genno started the Vauxhall. As he did, a group of black-robed women rushed wailing out of the shadows. Like priestesses chanting the incantations of some ancient rite, they mumbled a verse of the Koran. Then, in a final blessing, they splashed a bowl of goat's milk under the wheels of the departing car.
Ted Lurie was crossing Jaffa Road when he noticed a British police truck swing into Hassolel Street, clipping the concrete traffic island with its rear wheels as it went. "That guy," thought the assistant editor of the Palestine Post, "is in a helluva hurry to get somewhere."
He crossed Zion Square and marched up Ben Yehuda Street to the Café Atara. At the instant Lurie began to push open the door of the café, a deafening roar shook the center of the city. Lurie stumbled; then, with his newspaperman's instincts, he jumped up and sprinted to the phone to find out what had happened. To his fury, the Palestine Post's number was busy. He hung up and called again. It was still busy. Seething with impatience, he was starting to dial it a third time when an excited voice behind him furnished Lurie the explanation for his busy signal. "My God," the voice shouted, "the
bastards have blown up the Post!"
By the time Lurie reached his newspaper, sheets of flame were already gushing out of the pressroom and a stream of his wounded friends were staggering up the smoke-clogged stairs. The street around the building was a sea of broken glass. Its red stone façade had been scorched sand yellow by the blast, and, like ink blots, great black splotches stained its surface. From the buildings around the Post, householders stared unbelievingly through their shattered windows at the scene below them.
A pair of American newsmen, Fitzhugh Turner of the New York Herald Tribune and John Donovan of NBC, helped pull the wounded from the pressroom. Lurie rushed to the clinic where they were taken, to oversee their treatment.
At midnight, Lurie's wife tugged his sleeve. "Ted," she said, "what are you going to do to get the paper out?"
He looked at her, his blue eyes incredulous. "Are you crazy?" he asked.
"Your job is to get the paper out," she replied coolly.
Lurie realized she was right. He set up a temporary newsroom in a nearby apartment. Within an hour he had located another printing press. Two of his reporters picked their way through the debris looking for carbons of the night's stories while their girl friends retyped the scraps they were able to salvage.
By six o'clock in the morning, faithful to its daily rendezvous with the people of Jerusalem, the paper was on the street. It was a bedraggled, sad little sheet reduced to one page, but it proudly bore the logotype of the Palestine Post. Abdul Khader Husseini had demonstrated he was capable of penetrating the heart of the city, but he had not succeeded in his major goal. He had not silenced the Palestine Post.
In the Hadassah clinic, the gray eyes that had swept over so many banks of type were swathed in bandages. Shimshon Lipshitz was one of the score of victims of Abdul Khader Husseini's bomb. The man whose wife had tried to keep him from going to work would be half blind for the rest of his life. Yet, like the paper he worked for, Shimshon Lipshitz would have his triumph over the disaster of this night. His one remaining eye bolstered by a magnifying glass, he would be back at his printer's bank in time to set in place the blocks of type announcing the birth of a Jewish state.
Whether he was in Jerusalem, Damascus, Beirut, Berlin or, as now, Cairo, the daily routine of Haj Amin Husseini never varied. Precisely at sunrise, he rose from three brief hours of sleep, turned east and, kneeling upon the threadbare prayer rug given him four decades earlier by his father, began the first of his daily prayers. That prayer rug was the only material possession to which the ascetic Haj Amin attached any importance. Money and physical goods were for him tools with which to bend others to his will, never vehicles for his own pleasure.
His prayer accomplished, Haj Amin performed the series of calisthenics which, along with an abstemious diet, had kept his fifty-five-year-old figure as trim as it had been in his days as a cadet officer in the Turkish Army. Then he exercised a curious passion for a man who had condemned scores of people to death with a nod of his head. He walked to the chicken coop he constructed in all of his residences and happily scattered a ration of grain before his favorite animals.
His chickens fed, Haj Amin withdrew to a private sitting room, where for three hours he read and wrote reports. Then, just before ten o'clock, he made his way to the core of his headquarters, an enormous sitting room, its walls lined with dozens of spindly wooden chairs. There, in an atmosphere impregnated with the haze of cigarette smoke, the pungent aroma of Arabic coffee and the hiss of whispered conversations, the Mufti's supplicants waited, shifting from seat to seat in a mysterious game of musical chairs whose rules only they seemed to understand, whose moves were signaled by a quick nod, a hand pressed deferentially to the heart, or a cautiously overblown Arabic greeting. Among the men who had waited there that winter to offer their services to Haj Amin was a young captain in the Egyptian Army. "Patience," the Mufti had counseled the ardent young captain, "your time will come." He was right. The captain's name was Gamal Abdel Nasser.
This morning, a special excitement animated the salon. Abdul Khader was coming. He had returned to Cairo to make his first report to the Mufti on the progress of his campaign in Palestine. When his stocky figure appeared at the door, he was almost swept off his feet by his excited admirers and was accorded the supreme honor of being passed through the salon directly into the office of his kinsman Haj Amin.
The report he had to deliver was bound to please the man who had sent him to Palestine "to drive the Jews into the sea." His efforts to close the road to Jerusalem were increasingly successful. With the Palestine Post explosion he had demonstrated his capacity to penetrate the heart of the Jewish areas of the capital. Encouraged by that success, he announced that he was preparing to strike a new blow in the heart of Jewish Jerusalem, a blow so devastating that this time he hoped it would drive the city's Jews to sue for peace and deliver Jerusalem to the Arabs.
The Mufti was elated. Bestowing a paternal blessing on his kinsman, he ordered him to spend a few days in Cairo checking on arms supplies and visiting with his family, installed in a villa not far from his own.
A bachelor's degree from the American University in Cairo had not kept Abdul Khader from the social traditions of his people. He had met his wife for the first time in her father's house on the morning of his wedding when he timidly lifted the veil from her fifteen-year-old face. Since then she had given him four children and, despite a strict observance of custom that kept her veiled in front of all but her husband's most intimate friends, she was his most fervent supporter. The laundry, the linen closet, the cupboards of her home, were crammed with rifles, detonators, pistols and explosives confided to her keeping by her husband's friends.
For five days she followed with an understanding complicity his efforts to scavenge a few extra rifles and machine guns for his partisans. On the morning of his departure, she pressed into his hand a miniature Koran. Wherever he went he always carried a Koran which she had offered him. His first he had lost just after his serious wound in 1936, and the second he had misplaced just before returning to Cairo. She begged him to keep this newly purchased Koran in his shirt pocket, over his heart, where she was sure it would keep him safe in the days ahead.
She followed his departure from the terrace of their house, her four children lined up beside her. Seeing him wearing the gray suit they had bought together in calmer days at Cairo's Sednaoui's department store, she suddenly thought it might be an omen of better times to come.
Abdul Khader waved. Then, with a last smile, he climbed into his car, off to Jerusalem, off to strike the blow he had promised the Mufti, the blow he hoped would drive the Jews of Jerusalem to surrender.
At about the same time, in a beautiful February dawn 360 miles northeast of Cairo, another man and wife prepared to bid each other farewell. They stood side by side in Tel Aviv's central bus station, their hands barely touching, seemingly bound by a troubled silence in a world of their own. The man wore a khaki shirt and shorts. He was of medium height, with horn-rimmed glasses and a prominent nose. At the first sound of the armored bus's engine, he bent down and kissed his wife. "Shalom," he said and climbed aboard.
David Shaltiel too looked back for a last glimpse of his wife, but he did not smile. He had good reason not to. Twenty-four hours earlier David Ben-Gurion had entrusted to him the most important command in Palestine. He had chosen him to replace Israel Amir as the Haganah's commander in chief in Jerusalem.
The Jewish leader had personally briefed Shaltiel on his assignment. Reiterating his order that no Jewish soil was to be abandoned, he ordered Shaltiel to defend the Jewish areas in the city, house by house and street by street. The population must be obliged to stay put. If some families had to be evacuated, they would have to be replaced by others. Where possible, he would put Jews into abandoned Arab houses to stake out a claim to the areas the Arabs had left.
Militarily, he was to strive to build a continuous line of Jewish settlement in the city by occupying Arab neighborhoods ju
tting in between Jewish quarters. If he could do it without getting into a clash with the British, he was to take over Sheikh Jarrah and secure communications with the Jewish institutions of Hebrew University and Hadassah Hospital on Mount Scopus. Above all, he was to maintain open communications with the Jewish Quarter of the Old City, Mount Scopus, the Dead Sea Potash Works and the satellite settlements around the city. Ben-Gurion had then reminded him that the Jewish Agency accepted internationalization of the city. He was to acknowledge the authority of the United Nations Commission if it arrived, and cooperate with it.
It was a staggeringly difficult assignment, and no one knew it better than the worried man who climbed aboard the Jerusalem bus on February 6, 1948. David Shaltiel was a man whose career had been an accumulation of contradictions, but perhaps the greatest among them was that he should have been chosen to defend the city that meant so much to so many Zionists. No one could have been more unrepresentative of that movement than he. He had received his military training not only in the Haganah's clandestine ranks but also in one of the world's harshest proving grounds, the enlisted ranks of the French Foreign Legion. The setting in which he had learned at first hand the rigors of combat bore a haunting resemblance to the Judean hills to which he was now destined. It was the Rif Mountains, and his foes then as now were Arabs, the savage warriors of Abdel Krim.
Shaltiel was the offspring of an old Sephardic family that had settled in Hamburg, Germany. His father ran a modest leather-goods business. Their adherence to the tenets of orthodoxy was so rigorous that on the Sabbath, all work being forbidden, the young Shaltiel could not even carry a handkerchief in his pocket; instead, it was sewn into the sleeve of his coat by his mother, making it a part of his clothing and reducing the effort required to use it. He revolted early against his religious upbringing. At the age of fifteen, on Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the Jewish calendar, he deliberately ate his way through his first piece of nonkosher food, selecting for his act of defiance the impurest dish of all, a slice of pork. Then he sat back and waited to see if God would punish him. God's failure to do so developed in Shaltiel a lifelong scorn for institutional religion.
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