O Jerusalem!

by Larry Collins

  His rebellion soon extended to his parents' bourgeois existence, and he emigrated to Palestine. For a while he worked in the tobacco fields, his home one-half of a rented cot slept in during the day by the worker who paid the other half of the rent. He later became a hotel bellhop and, briefly, the first butler employed in Tel Aviv. Without any deeply rooted Zionist ideals to sustain him, he soon grew bored with the spartan, unsophisticated Palestinian existence. Fed up because "everything's already done," he drifted to Milan, where he spent a year working for a textile firm. Industry held no more attraction for him than Palestine's tobacco fields, however, and on his first vacation Shaltiel decided to try to find a shortcut to prosperity on Monte Carlo's gambling tables. The shortcut he found was to poverty. Despairing, ready for a new adventure, he celebrated his twenty-third birthday by enlisting in the Foreign Legion.

  Five years later he emerged as a master sergeant with the Médaille de la Mérite on his chest. Exercising a privilege open to him as a Legion veteran, he settled in Paris, working as a salesman for Shell Oil. There he developed a deep and lasting appreciation for things French and above all for those things coming from the kitchens and vineyards of France.

  The rise of anti-Semitism in Nazi Germany drew him back to the Zionist movement. He helped build camps to prepare young people to emigrate to Palestine. In those camps he developed his first real sense of belonging to Zionism, and it eventually returned him to Palestine. He found a job guarding the cats and rabbits awaiting vivisection in the laboratories of Hebrew University. The veteran of the Rif War, however, turned out to be a singularly inept guardian for those animals. Touched by their plight, he opened their cages one day and let them flee.

  He became a construction worker. One day he was spotted by a friend standing in line looking for a new job and was sent to the Haganah. Soon he was back in Europe purchasing arms. In November 1936 he was arrested on a train at Aachen by the Gestapo as he was trying to smuggle 100,000 marks out of Germany.

  For weeks he was shifted from one prison to another, until he had known torture in twenty-four different Gestapo headquarters. He kept his sanity by studying Hebrew from a little grammar he hid under his straw mattress. It was at Dachau, however, that the best in David Shaltiel's character came out. The man who had such a deep love for life's pleasures found in that ordeal spiritual resources he had not thought he had. He became a prison leader, bringing hope and a sense of shared, collective existence to his compound. It was a measure of the horror of that existence that the best job in the compound was burying the dead, because the gravediggers divided the corpses' clothes among themselves. Shaltiel reorganized things so that the fittest dug the graves and the neediest got the clothes.

  Finally, released shortly before the Second World War, he returned to Palestine. He quickly rose through the ranks of the Haganah, launching its counterintelligence, where he became an avid foe of the Irgun. In 1942, when Rommel's army menaced Cairo, he was named the Haganah's commander in the port of Haifa.

  Through all those adventures, Shaltiel remained a fastidious, elegant man with a fine appreciation of life's pleasures. He was an adamant epicurean in a land where gefilte fish and dried beans was considered a gastronomic dish, an aspiring aristocrat in a society whose idols were trade-union secretaries and farm managers. Two bibles, one of his closest friends remarked, were always at his bedside: the real one and the Guide Michelin.

  In the Haganah he remained, despite his rank, essentially an outsider. The long marches under the Sahara sun, the spartan barracks of Sidi-bel-Abbès, had left Shaltiel an apostle of orthodoxy in military matters. His kind of officer was the coolly poised young St.-Cyriens of the Legion who had marched him off to fight the Rif in polished boots and freshly pressed uniforms, not the indifferently dressed sabras of the Palmach, who were as ready to argue about an order as to execute it.

  His concept of soldiering, the enemies he had made in the Irgun as a counterintelligence officer, his lack of old Zionist ties—all those things would work against David Shaltiel in Jerusalem. None of them, however, would prove as much of a handicap as one salient shortcoming, a shortcoming overlooked by David Ben-Gurion when he had picked him for the Jerusalem command. In his long military career, David Shaltiel had never exercised direct command over more than a platoon of men in battle.

  The first battle David Shaltiel fought in Jerusalem was not with Abdul Khader's partisans but with the bureaucrats of the Jewish Agency. His predecessor had operated from two rooms in the Agency basement, running his command like a big informal tribe. Shaltiel wanted at least five times that.

  "It is impossible in these difficult times," an Agency official wrote him, "to destroy our administration . . . and nothing must be done in relation to rooms without the decision of the proper committee." Shaltiel walked in and "requisitioned" the rooms he wanted.

  He set up a formal chain of command. Everyone on his staff was assigned a specific title and function. All orders were to be written down, he decreed. He instituted uniforms with ranks clearly marked for his headquarters and insisted on a gesture that was an anathema to the easygoing soldiers of the Haganah, the salute.

  Less than a week after his arrival, Shaltiel faced his first crisis. A sergeant major of the Highland Light Infantry arrested four Haganah men in a post involved in frequent exchanges of fire with the Arabs. An hour later, the four were handed over to an Arab mob. One of the four was fortunate: the mob killed him with a bullet. His three companions were stripped, emasculated, then hacked to death.

  A furious Shaltiel issued a proclamation saying: "Four Jews were murdered in cold blood by the British." And he ordered: "From now on, every Haganah man in Jerusalem must oppose with his arms any attempt of arrest or search by the British forces."

  The next day he summoned his officers to a formal command conference. Jerusalem, he reminded them, was built of a stone so hard the Arabs called it mizzi Yehudi, the head of a Jew. "We shall become as hard as that stone," he vowed.

  The result of Shaltiel's first reforms, his apparent toughness, was to give a new sense of purpose to his subordinates. "For the first time," thought one young officer, "we have a commander who knows where we are going."

  Despite that outward boldness, however, Shaltiel was deeply concerned by the situation he had found. The measure of his concern was the first request sent by the new commander of Jerusalem to Tel Aviv. It was for three thousand sweaters. So ill-equipped were his men that some of them were catching pneumonia standing guard during the bitter Jerusalem winter nights. Everything seemed to be in short supply: arms, ammunition, men, food—everything, Shaltiel mused, except the growing ranks of his enemies around him.

  "Jerusalem," he sardonically confided to a friend, "is going to become our bloody little Stalingrad."

  At least one corner of Jerusalem was already undergoing an ordeal so harsh that it would indeed enter the city's legends as its little Stalingrad. Since the Arabs had cut the route of the No. 2 bus line, their sole link with the rest of the city, the inhabitants of the Jewish Quarter of the Old City seemed condemned to fall sooner or later in the ruins of their besieged ghetto.

  To galvanize its residents, the Haganah sent the quarter a new commander, a thirty-three-year-old officer of Russian origin. Avraham Halperin was a particularly fortunate choice for the assignment. He was a pious young man, the scion of a family of Russian rabbis. Smuggled into the Old City with the aid of a bribed British soldier, Halperin was shocked by his first glimpse of his command. A group of his new soldiers, clutching long poles in their fists, were threatening to drive an unruly pack of civilians back into the quarter.

  Since the Arabs had barricaded the area, five hundred of its 2,200 residents had taken advantage of the British offer of a safe one-way passage out of the Old City. If that flow continued, Halperin thought, soon the only things left in the quarter for the Haganah to defend would be the stones of its synagogues.

  Halperin was determined to avoid using force to hold his f
rightened civilian population in the quarter. They were, for the most part, either very young or very old members of the different communities of orthodox Jewry. Keep their lives as normal as possible, he reasoned, and they'd forget their desire to flee. He summoned the chief rabbi of the Ashkenazi community and offered him Haganah funds to pay his followers for sitting and studying in a yeshiva, a religious study group. When the chief rabbi of the Sephardic community heard the news, he immediately demanded equal treatment from Halperin. Then a third rabbi came to see him. The members of his community were too old to study, he said. What could the Haganah commander do for them?

  Halperin reflected for an instant. Set them to reciting the psalms, he told the rabbi, and he would pay them a shilling a day.

  The older children were integrated into the defense of the quarter. They stood watch on the rooftops while the Haganah trained. Those roofs were their natural playgrounds, and when the British imposed a curfew it was the youngsters who circumvented it, scurrying from rooftop to rooftop with messages. They learned judo, how to climb walls and how to jump from house to house. Above all, they were sent out to buy and filch bullets from the British for the Haganah's dwindling stores.

  Each morning a band of them would assemble at Haganah headquarters for a few shillings, then scamper off to the British strongpoints. "They would come back," one Haganah girl soldier remembered, "a wild grin on their faces, crying, 'I bought bullets, I bought bullets. Give me more money!' And," she could add, "we lived on those bullets."

  Halperin put most of the rest of his population to work building fortifications and linking up the tightly packed houses of the quarter by knocking holes in the walls between them. A passionate student of archaeology, he had found in his ancient texts hints of underground passageways that could give his men a safe and secret means of moving from one strongpoint to another. He set dozens of people to work uncovering them, building an invaluable network of secret tunnels. One of the best of those tunnels passed through the women's section of the mikveh, the religious baths. The quarter's rabbis were horrified at the thought that Halperin's men might come plunging through that passage while their women were bathing. To pacify them, Halperin installed a locked grill in the passage, keeping the key himself. He would not open it, he promised, except in case of Pikuach Nefesh—life or death.

  Halperin's communications were woefully primitive. The two telephones in the quarter were tapped by the British. Anyone in Jerusalem, if he knew the correct wavelength, could eavesdrop on his lone transmitter. For a while, Halperin's only means of getting his secret messages out of the quarter was by stuffing them into the ear of a dog who liked to go into the New City. The tactic worked well until one day the suspicious Arabs caught and killed the dog.

  Above all, the existence of Halperin's command depended on the twice-weekly convoys the British escorted into the besieged quarter past the Arab barricades. The Haganah used every trick imaginable to sneak arms and ammunition aboard those convoys under the prying eyes of the British inspectors. A few men were even smuggled in on a false-bottomed truck, until their hiding place was discovered. Soap bars were packed with gelignite. One day the Haganah's mess hall received several sacks of a strange grain that looked like rice. When, at lunchtime, a cook sprinkled a few grains on a hot skillet, they began to explode. "I knew then the stuff wasn't for making soup," he later recalled.

  Water was short. Each man received one pail of hot water a week in the mikveh. Beyond that, he had to make do with a few drops splashed on his face and beard every morning.

  Those painful days had their memorable moments. One of them occurred just before Purim. The quarter's population was enriched by the unexpected arrival of a barber and a prostitute. "Ah, there was such happiness!" remembered one Haganah boy. "We all stood in one line waiting for a shave and a haircut, then we stood in another line waiting our turn for her."

  Inevitably, Halperin's efforts to bring the quarter's civilian population under his control led him into conflict with the elderly rabbi who had presided over the quarter since 1935, Rabbi Mordechai Weingarten. Weingarten was a short, stout man with a full beard, plain-rimmed glasses and a slow, ponderous manner. For over two hundred years his family had lived in the Old City, and five generations of Weingarten women had been married in the sprawling home on the edge of the Jewish Quarter which was now his. Since his election as chairman of the quarter's Jewish Council he had run the area like a patriarch, his style far closer to that of the Arab sheikhs who shared the Old City with him than it was to the socialistically inclined young Zionists beyond the Old City's walls. Through his hands were tunneled the five thousand pounds' worth of charitable assistance provided to the quarter each month by the Jewish Agency. With that money he ran his schools, a hospital and a kitchen for the quarter's destitute, presiding over them all with the firm, paternalistic hand of a man who could remember the birthday and wedding anniversary of almost every citizen in the quarter.

  Weingarten's role had led him into close and sympathetic relationships with the British and the Arabs, relationships which the Haganah had found increasingly disturbing in the changing circumstances since partition. One day, shortly after Halperin's arrival, Weingarten's five thousand pounds failed to arrive. Perplexed and angry, he called on Halperin to demand why. Halperin informed the aging rabbi that he, Halperin, would henceforth administer those funds. Weingarten was shocked. He was, he knew, being deliberately cut off from the source of his authority.

  Some time later, Halperin in turn called on Weingarten. As the two men chatted over a cup of coffee, there was a knock on the door. Weingarten got up to answer. Halperin glanced out the window and saw a British officer.

  A few minutes later, as he stepped out of the rabbi's courtyard into the street, Halperin was surrounded by British soldiers. The officer who had knocked on Weingarten's door moved forward.

  "You're under arrest," he said.

  14

  A FLASH OF WHITE LIGHT

  NO ARAB MILITARY VICTORY in Palestine during the winter of 1948 would rival that represented by a single sentence in an official document issued in the distant corridors of the United Nations. "Only armed force," it read, "will be able to enforce the Partition plan." That phrase constituted the principal conclusion of the first report submitted to the Security Council by the United Nations' Operating Committee on Palestine. More than his ambushes at Bab el Wad, more than his penetration of Jewish Jerusalem, it was Abdul Khader Husseini's most significant achievement since his return to Palestine.

  The Jewish Agency had tended to publicly dismiss the Arabs' threats to oppose partition by force during the debates of autumn of 1947. The conviction had arisen among many states that once the world body had made its official pronouncement, the Arabs could somehow be brought to accept it by diplomatic pressures and the lure of economic aid. Now Abdul Khader's campaign had made it clear that the Arabs really meant to fight, and a wave of consternation had begun to sweep through the ranks of partition's backers.

  There was a serious question whether the United Nations had the right under its charter to employ force to implement partition. In any event, no one wanted to provide men for such a force. Britain was out of the question; France was exhausted; Truman had ruled out the use of United States troops and was horrified at the thought of Soviet troops in the Middle East; the smaller nations had no desire to pull the Big Powers' chestnuts from a fire of their own making.

  Yet the idea that the fledgling international body, at the United States' behest, had thrown up an unworkable resolution to its first grave problem was a dismaying thought. In the United States the Administration was split into hostile camps over partition, with the White House supporting it and the State and Defense Departments opposing it. So bitter were their arguments that Truman's White House aides accused their State Department rivals of basing their decisions on anti-Semitism rather than diplomacy, and the others reciprocated by charging that the White House viewed the issues in terms of United States d
omestic politics instead of United States national security.

  The rallying point of the State Department's opposition to partition was the chief of the department's Near and Middle Eastern Affairs Division, Loy Henderson. A courtly old-school veteran of service in the Soviet Union, Henderson viewed the issue in terms of the deepening Cold War. The Arabs' resentment, he reasoned, would prove so profound they would open the Middle East to Soviet penetration and ultimately, perhaps, to Soviet control of its immense oil reserves.

  Like his colleagues in Britain's Foreign Office, Henderson was not resigned to the finality of the U.N.'s partition plan. He had, in fact, resolved to make one more effort to stop it. The unhappy prospects conjured up by the United Nations report gave him the occasion for which he had been searching. He ordered the State Department planning staff to reappraise the chances of partition's success in the light of what had happened since the plan was voted.

  Not surprisingly, the memorandum produced by the planning staff concluded that partition as set up was unworkable. The United States, it pointed out, was not obliged to support partition if force was required to make it work. Therefore, it recommended that the Administration take steps as soon as possible to suspend the partition plan.