O Jerusalem!

by Larry Collins

  The memo won the support of Secretary of Defense James V. Forrestal III. Like Henderson a foe of partition, he was above all concerned with partition's effect on the United States' access to Middle East oil. Without it, he feared, the Marshall Plan would fail, the United States would not be able to sustain a major war, and in a decade, he predicted, "the nation could be forced to convert to four-cylinder cars."

  Forrestal arranged a meeting with Henderson and Assistant Secretary of State Dean Rusk. There was already sufficient evidence, he argued, to publicly declare partition unworkable. Henderson agreed, but he was wise enough to know that any such declaration would get nowhere unless it was accompanied by an alternative proposal. He provided it.

  It called for a ten-year United Nations–run Palestine trusteeship in the hope that somehow, after a decade of communal existence under United Nations rule, Palestine's two warring communities might agree between themselves on a formula for their future. Paradoxically, implementing that plan would require the forces the United States was unwilling to provide to make partition work. The Joint Chiefs of Staff estimated that one hundred thousand troops would be needed to impose it, and a substantial United States contribution would demand a partial call-up of reserves.

  Henderson and his colleagues put the plan into a formal memorandum to be submitted to the White House for Presidential approval.

  It was a zealously guarded secret. Such a sudden and complete reversal of policy on the part of the nation primarily responsible for getting partition through the United Nations would stun and shock the world; and its premature disclosure, Henderson realized, would bring intense Zionist pressure on the White House. Despite all precautions, however, the Jewish Agency realized the United States was beginning to have second thoughts about the resolution that had promised their long-sought Jewish state.

  The United States had already imposed an embargo on all arms shipments to the Middle East. With Britain still freely selling arms to the Arab states, the move was bitterly resented by the Zionists. If the United States should now reverse itself on partition and, above all, push a new plan through the United Nations, it could be a deadly blow to Jewish hopes. The Zionists might find themselves forced to abandon their plans for a state, or carry them through in defiance of the United States and the United Nations.

  To their dismay, the Zionist leadership discovered that at that crucial juncture the doors to the office of the man who had been their greatest bulwark in the United States and in whose hands a decision to abandon partition would ultimately lie were closed to them. Exasperated by the continual pressures to which they had subjected him, prompted by a cordial personal dislike for their principal American spokesman, Rabbi Abba Hillel Silver, Harry S Truman stubbornly refused to meet with the movement's leadership.

  Despairing, the Agency sent an SOS to London to the elderly, half-blind scientist who had led the Zionist movement for so many years. If anyone could get into Truman's office, the Agency leadership reasoned, it was Chaim Weizmann. He had met Truman only once, in November 1947, but between the two had passed an extraordinary current of sympathy and understanding.

  Weizmann sailed immediately for New York and, for over two weeks, confined to his bed in the Waldorf-Astoria with a fever, strove to arrange a meeting with Truman. He failed. The doors of Truman's office remained closed even to him.

  Brokenhearted, Weizmann was preparing to leave the United States when, late one evening, the president of B'nai B'rith visited his hotel suite. A year before, he recalled, he had met in the office of a Kansas City lawyer a man who might be able to help them. He was not a Zionist, he warned, and in calling him they might be clutching at straws. Still, anything seemed worth trying. While Weizmann watched, he walked to the telephone.

  Hundreds of miles away, a telephone rang in a darkened bedroom. The rumpled figure on his bed groping for the call was the most ordinary of men. His concerns that night had been those he shared with millions of other Americans just like him: his family, his income tax, wringing a living from the modest men's-wear shop he ran at Main and Thirty-ninth Streets in Kansas City, Missouri. He was Jewish, but, apart from an interest in "my suffering people across the sea," he had never been an ardent apostle of Zionism.

  Yet all the ambitious hopes of that movement were going to hang on the answer he gave to his telephone ringing in the night. For Eddie Jacobson once had been the business partner of Harry Truman, and on that winter night in 1948 he was one of the few men in the world to whom the office door of the President of the United States was never closed.

  For David Rivlin, as for hundreds of other Jerusalemites, the Saturday night of February 21, 1948, on Ben Yehuda Street would always seem like a miracle. Saturday night on Ben Yehuda was one of Jewish Jerusalem's most faithfully cherished customs. It marked the end of the city's rigorously observed Sabbath, when, its shops shuttered, its streets deserted, Jerusalem scrupulously honored God's day of rest. At Sabbath sundown, the city burst back to life. Lights winked on, cinema marquees lit up, restaurants opened their doors, and by the hundreds Jerusalemites swarmed to the city's center to wander up and down Ben Yehuda Street, drifting from café to café in a happy, talkative, bustling crowd.

  That Saturday night the crowds were back on Ben Yehuda, celebrating, it might seem, the few days of quiet the city had just enjoyed. Even the weather had cooperated. It was a lovely, star-speckled winter's night, softly warm after weeks of penetrating cold.

  David Rivlin decided to spend the night in his favorite café, the Atara. There he met one of his closest friends, Avram Dorion. A special bond united the two men. Rivlin, a seventh-generation Palestinian, had married Dorion's sister—the only other member of his family to survive Hitler's gas chambers—so that the girl could get a Palestine immigration certificate.

  Learning that Dorion was taking the early-morning convoy down to Tel Aviv, Rivlin suggested he spend the night in a spare bed in Rivlin's room a few steps up Ben Yehuda Street. That would save him the dangerous walk back to his hotel in the Arab neighborhood of Talbieh. Dorion accepted. He drifted out of the café early to get a good night's sleep. Rivlin stayed until closing time. Walking up the street to his flat, he stared up again at the clear, dark sky and exulted in the quiet of the night. What a blessing, he thought, to pass a Saturday night on Ben Yehuda Street, its pleasures unmarred by the sound of gunfire or explosions.

  His eyes half closed, Avram Dorion stumbled over the unfamiliar route to his friend's bathroom. He turned on the tap and splashed a handful of cold water onto his face. Sleepily, he stared up into the mirror before him and for a moment studied the outlines of that face. It was a strong, commanding face with a prominent nose and sorrowful, brooding eyes hinting at the tragedies that had marred his life. That face was also the key to the career to which he had so long aspired. Dorion wanted desperately to be an actor.

  In his suitcase in the next room was the negative of his first film, his first concrete step toward his life's goal. Its celluloid coils could permit him to dream that February morning that the face framed in the simple bathroom mirror before him might one day stare down upon the crowds from the marquees of New York, Paris and London. Perhaps it might even be his destiny to represent on the screens of the world the face of a new, a Jewish nation. No actor, after all, had a better claim to portraying the spirit of that nation than he did. He had fought in the Jewish Brigade. His family had died in Hitler's ovens. Stirred by his thoughts, Avram Dorion sleepily reached for his razor and began to shave the dark stubble from his face.

  A few doors down the street, forty-two-year-old Mina Horchberg clamped her hands on her hips and stared at the youth before her. "Eat," she commanded her young nephew. He too was off to Tel Aviv in the morning convoy, and Mina Horchberg was not going to send him back to his mother on a cold February morning without a warm breakfast in his stomach.

  A mile away, over at the Haganah's Romema roadblock at the western entrance to the city, Shlomo Chorpi had been on duty barely half an h
our when the three-truck British Army convoy headed by an armored car labored up the incline from Bab el Wad. Affixed to the bumper of each truck were the metallic yellow squares that were the identifying code for British military traffic moving in Jerusalem that Sunday. A tall fair-haired young man in the greatcoat and blue cap of the Palestine police leaned down from the turret of the armored car and jerked a thumb toward the trucks behind him.

  "They're O.K.," he shouted to Chorpi. "They're with me."

  One of Chorpi's guards poked his head into the cab of the first truck and exchanged a word with its British driver. Then he pulled back and nodded to Chorpi. With a friendly gesture, the roadblock commander waved them on down the Jaffa Road toward the center of Jerusalem.

  The tall blond young man in the turret of his armored car was not English. He was an Arab named Azmi Djaouni, and the act he was about to accomplish was so ghastly he would spend the rest of his life atoning for it in a Cairo insane asylum. The three trucks trailing along behind his armored car were the instruments of the decisive blow Abdul Khader Husseini had promised the Mufti a fortnight earlier, the blow he hoped would force the Jews of Jerusalem to clamor for peace.

  There were, however, real Englishmen in the convoy. Eddie Brown and Peter Madison, the two deserters who had helped destroy the Palestine Post, rode in the trucks behind Djaouni's armored car. This time it was money, not vengeance, which accounted for their presence in Abdul Khader's convoy. They and two comrades were essential to the mission. In fact, Brown and Madison had refused to leave until they had received half of the one thousand pounds sterling they had been promised by the Mufti for their part in the action.

  Each of their trucks had been carefully packed with over a ton of TNT by Fawzi el Kutub, Abdul Khader's explosives expert. He had seeded each charge with a vicious addition of his own devising, a mixture of two hundred pounds of potassium and aluminum powder packed in a dozen oil cans. Their presence, he had calculated, would raise substantially the temperature of the explosion and send a spray of miniature Molotov cocktails through the damaged area. His fuses were fixed onto the dashboard of each truck. Kutub had passed them through a metal tube so that, once ignited, they could not be cut or ripped from their charges. They peeped now from the panel before each driver. A quick gesture of the drivers' well-paid fingers just before they jumped from their trucks, and the fuses would begin an irreversible sixty-second burn.

  A sharp report somewhere out in the street woke David Rivlin. He staggered sleepily onto his little balcony overlooking Ben Yehuda. It was, he would always remember, "a lovely, bright morning." He looked up toward King George V. The only person he saw in the deserted, silent street was a milkman carrying his bottles from door to door. He looked to the right. Zion Square stood empty, the rooftops that ringed it catching the first rays of a beautiful, sunny day. Then he looked down into Ben Yehuda directly below his balcony. Three military trucks were stopped there. One was in front of the Hotel Amdursky a few doors away. The second was just behind it, in front of the Vilenchick Building. The third was right under his window.

  Rivlin went back into his bedroom and sat down on the edge of his bed. As he did, a thought overwhelming in its simplicity struck him.

  "My God!" he gasped. "We are going to be blown up!"

  At almost that instant, Fawzi el Kutub's TNT exploded in a blinding flash of white light. The stone façade of the six-story Vilenchick Building bulged slowly outward, then tumbled into the street. The interior of the Hotel Amdursky collapsed in one slow, majestic movement. Across the street, two apartment buildings crumbled to the ground as if they had been clouted by some gigantic sledgehammer. Hundreds of people were hurled from their beds. For almost a mile around, windowpanes were shattered. Then, as the echo of the explosion ricocheted across the shocked city, the first sheets of flame began to scamper over the wreckage.

  Mina Horchberg had been on her balcony watching her departing nephew when the trucks blew up. The image of the young man for whom she had just prepared a warm breakfast disappearing down the street was the last she saw. She was instantly decapitated by the force of the blast.

  At No. 16 Ben Yehuda, on the fifth floor over Goldman's restaurant, Uri Saphir, a young Haganah soldier, woke up on his bedroom floor in a cloud of dust, smoke and plaster. Saphir's first thought was for his dog. He called out to the animal. There was no answer. Before him was a gaping hole where the bedroom window had been. He dragged himself to it and peered down through the dust and smoke to the street below. There, running nervously around the wreckage, he saw his dog. Part of the window frame still dangled from the ledge beside him. Flapping from it "like a flag over Ben Yehuda Street" were the trousers he had been wearing the night before.

  A blood-soaked figure staggered into the room. It was his father. Uri wrapped him in a blanket and started carrying him downstairs. Everything along the way seemed totally destroyed except for one sight which struck Saphir's eyes: a dozen eggs resting serenely intact on someone's kitchen table.

  David Rivlin remained where he was, seated on the edge of his bed without a scratch, thinking to himself as he gasped for breath in the settling dust, "I'm alive, I'm alive." The balcony on which he had been standing thirty seconds before had completely disappeared. Then, from the apartment next door, he heard someone groaning. He staggered toward the sound. It came from a Stern Gang prison escapee buried under a heap of plaster. Rivlin helped drag his naked body out of the rubble, then went to look for a blanket to cover him.

  Groping his way through the smoke and dust toward his apartment, he came on the figure of a half-naked man swaying uncertainly in a doorway. His face had been shredded into an unrecognizable mass by the explosion. From the hole where the man's mouth might have been, Rivlin heard a gurgling noise that he thought was his name. He looked down and saw that the man was wearing a pair of his own pajama bottoms. Rivlin began to cry, because he had realized at that instant that what he saw before him was all that was left of the handsome face of his friend who had longed to be an actor, Avram Dorion.

  As the magnitude of what had happened on Ben Yehuda Street became apparent, the stunned population's fury turned on the British. The Irgun issued orders to shoot any Englishman on sight. Gunfights broke out all over the city. At noon, after losing almost a dozen men, the British finally did something they had never done before—they ordered their troops to stay out of Jewish Jerusalem.

  The explosion was by far the heaviest blow the Arabs had succeeded in directing against the Jews of Jerusalem. Yet, for all its horror, its results were the opposite of those Abdul Khader Husseini had set out to achieve. Instead of driving them to sue for peace, the tragedy united Jerusalem's Jews in a new determination to resist. Their outburst against the British would aid that determination by leading the mandatory authorities to more or less abandon their efforts to patrol the Jewish areas of the city, as they had weeks earlier its Arab neighborhoods.

  All day, the search for the living and the dead went on in the ruins of Ben Yehuda. In the Hotel Atlantic, on the wall above what had been its staircase, a Zionist flag had somehow survived the explosion. It hung there all day in the winter sunshine. Someone had placed a cardboard sign underneath it. On it, in large letters, were the words "Silence—so we may hear the wounded still under the rubble."

  Late that night, two drunken Englishmen huddled morosely over a bottle of whiskey in the Auberge des Pyramides, one of King Farouk's favorite nightclubs, on the outskirts of Cairo. Eddie Brown and Peter Madison had come to Cairo to collect the balance of the wages due them for their day's work. Now, their usefulness ended, the Mufti of Jerusalem had nothing for them but a cold smile and an empty hand. Instead of the five hundred pounds sterling they had come for, they were contemptuously thrown out of his villa.

  Slobbering in their Scotch, they prepared to disappear for the rest of their lives, condemned to live in fear of the vengeful hand of the Irgun wherever they would go. For Eddie Brown and Peter Madison had given the Irgun much to av
enge. Fifty-four people had been killed by the explosives they had helped deliver to Ben Yehuda Street that quiet Sunday morning. Reckoned in terms of their wages, that came to just under ten pounds sterling a human life, not quite the price of the whiskey they would drink that night in Cairo.

  15

  AN UNLIKELY LAWRENCE

  JOHN BAGOT GLUBB, Glubb Pasha, commander of the Arab Legion, stared with unconcealed distaste at the gray city slipping past the windows of his Humber. Those were not his domains, those chill and dreary streets. His kingdom lay elsewhere, in the solitude of the desert. It was only there, on the silent wastes, under an unending sky, that John Glubb was truly at home.

  He was an unlikely Lawrence, this little man with a high-pitched voice who was sunk into the leather upholstery of his diplomat's Humber. Yet of all the long line of British Arabists that had followed the master east, he was indisputably the greatest. No Westerner alive had mastered the intricacies of the Bedouin dialect as completely as Glubb. He could hear a Bedouin's history in the inflections of his accent and read his character in the folds of his kaffiyeh. He knew their lore, their customs, their tribal structure, the complex web of unwritten law governing their lives.

  Glubb had discovered his life's passion in the aftermath of World War I. His face still bearing the scars of the bullet that had clipped off the tip of his chin, he went out to Iraq as a tribal-affairs officer. Summoned to Transjordan to sort out the warring Bedouin tribes on the country's southeastern frontier, he had fallen in love with the tribesmen whose disputes he was supposed to arbitrate. Their life had become his. Mounted on fast-moving Hajeen camels, Glubb led the elite members of his Long Range Desert Patrol himself, matching his endurance to theirs. He slept wrapped in a goatskin on the desert floor, a rock for a pillow. His rations were their meager patties of desert bread made of meal dampened with water, baked over an open fire with camel's milk and rancid sheep's butter. Through the lonely nights he squatted cross-legged by their campfires, listening and questioning, patiently accumulating his enormous knowledge of their disappearing race.