O Jerusalem!

by Larry Collins

  Without looking up, the major told Stavy he might be disposed to help them, but, he indicated, there would be "some expenses involved." Stavy had expected that. He was prepared, he informed the Englishman, to cover in cash any reasonable sum. The major mentioned two thousand dollars. Stavy nodded his agreement.

  His transaction was the opening skirmish in the only offensive operation in which David Shaltiel was prepared, for the time being, to engage his forces. It was an offensive in which guile would be more important than guns, whiskey more effective than munitions, and it would occur during what Shaltiel foresaw would be the most crucial twenty-four fours of his command, the day the British left the city.

  On that day, the British Army would evacuate the vital complex of buildings and strongpoints from which they had dominated Jerusalem for so many years. Those buildings, selected for their strategic value and their role in the functioning of the city, were the key to the control of central Jerusalem. The side that seized them when the British withdrew would be well on its way to the conquest of the city. There was Bevingrad, at the very heart of Jerusalem, a fortresslike barbed-wire-ringed compound which contained the General Post Office with its telephone exchanges, police headquarters, the courts, the city administration, the prison, the broadcasting station, the Russian Orthodox Compound, two hospitals, banks. There was the Italian Hospital, whose spires looked over an entire corner of the city; the massive French Hospice of Notre-Dame, its great stone wings dominating the walls of the Old City; Allenby and El Alamein Barracks, the King David Hotel. Generally situated along the dividing line between the Jewish and Arab sections of the city, the entrances to most of those buildings from the Jewish side were a tangle of barbed wire, barricaded doors and roadblocks. The approaches from the Arab side, however, were relatively thin and Haj Amin Husseini's followers would be able to pour through them in seconds when the British left.

  It was essential, therefore, that the Haganah make sure the British took the easy course and marched out through the Arab side, so that they could move in behind them as they departed. They would need to know minute by minute the evacuation schedule of each building so that Shaltiel's men could move with utmost precision. Vivian Herzog, the former Guards officer working with Haganah intelligence, was assigned the task of persuading the British to withdraw through the Arab rather than the Jewish side. He was also told to determine what British officers were ideologically sympathetic to the Jewish cause or could be persuaded by a judicious bribe to furnish them evacuation schedules.

  Because it was isolated from the rest of their positions in the city, the British had decided to evacuate the Schneller Compound two months before they left the rest of Jerusalem. As he had promised Stavy he would, the Schneller major telephoned early one March morning. "We are leaving," he said. "Be outside the gate at ten o'clock with the money."

  Stavy was there precisely at ten. The two men toured the compound together, Stavy studying the place as though taking an inventory. Then the major reached into his pocket and handed him a ring of keys. Stavy passed him an envelope containing two thousand dollars. When he had received the money a few minutes earlier from Shaltiel's procedure-conscious adjutant, Stavy had been told to ask for a receipt. The major smiled. It was a perfectly lovely administrative procedure, he admitted, but hardly an appropriate one under the circumstances. "Good luck," he said and walked away.

  Before the major's car had disappeared, the Haganah had occupied the compound. Fifteen minutes later the furious Arabs, realizing what had happened, attacked the buildings. It was too late. Within days they would be the Haganah's main base in Jerusalem.

  16

  THE HABERDASHER FROM KANSAS CITY

  AURA HERZOG CONTEMPLATED with satisfaction the gray flannel suit she had purchased as part of her trousseau at Cairo's Sicurel department store. Today was one of her rare opportunities to wear it. She and her husband were taking to lunch the Norwegian colonel who had arrived in Jerusalem along with the United Nations' Pablo de Azcarate. If the British had welcomed the United Nations to the city with studied contempt and the Arabs had welcomed it with gunfire, the Jewish Agency was eager for the international body's support. Vivian Herzog had been assigned to serve as the Norwegian's liaison officer.

  His wife had decided, on her own initiative, to leave early for her noontime rendezvous with her husband at his Jewish Agency office and spend an hour conferring with the Agency's legal adviser about her work for the Haganah. At the instant Aura Herzog stepped from her bedroom, her eyes fell on a pair of gold earrings. She swept them into her pocket. How fortunate, she thought; in those difficult circumstances they were just the touch needed to help show the Norwegian visitor the kind of elegance of which the women of Jerusalem were still capable.

  Another piece of gold jewelry was the center of Fawzi el Kutub's attention. It was a lady's wristwatch, once destined for the arm of an Arab girl in Jaffa, bought by the Arab demolition expert in wartime Berlin. Kutub's discovery that the girl's affections had not withstood the war intact had kept the watch from its original destination. Now Kutub was about to put it to a use not intended for it by its Swiss manufacurer.

  Having removed its crystal and its hour hand, he had attached a wire to the remaining minute hand. With painstaking care he worked a hot needle into its face just above the number six, then attached a second wire to the needle. When the minute hand reached the needle, it would detonate, by closing an electric circuit, Kutub's latest bomb, a quarter of a ton of TNT packed in the trunk of the gray-green Ford beside him.

  As he had in his Ben Yehuda Street bomb, Kutub had sought to augment his explosive's power with his amateur chemistry by boosting the mass of his detonators with a powder left from the interaction of a mixture of mercury, nitric acid and alcohol. He had even concealed two extra detonators in the car. One was a pressure detonator set to explode if anyone tried to lift his case of TNT. The other would go off in case the driver panicked and ripped the wires on the face of his lady's wristwatch.

  His work finished, Kutub turned to Daoud, the driver. "It's ready," he said. "Get in!"

  Before he did, the man walked up to the car's right front fender and screwed into place the insignia which would guarantee the gray-green Ford swift passage through any roadblock, Arab, British or Jewish, in the city. It was the American flag.

  Daoud's destination was the most heavily guarded Jewish building in Jerusalem, the headquarters of the Haganah and the Zionist movement, the same stone building toward which Aura Herzog had set out a few moments before, the Jewish Agency.

  To Abdul Khader Husseini, as to a whole generation of Jerusalem Arabs, its imposing façade towering near the end of King George V Avenue was the symbol of their ills, the granite incarnation of an alien authority come to lay claim to their lands. Its dark cellar contained the archives of three generations of the Zionist movement. From its offices had gone out a long line of fervent emissaries to recruit funds, immigrants, supporters and finally the caution of the United Nations at Lake Success. It was from its balcony that David Ben-Gurion had proclaimed on Partition Day, "At last we are a free people."

  Its courtyard was surrounded by a steel fence ten feet high. Visitors were screened and searched before being allowed inside. A platoon of the Haganah stood a discreet but constant guard on the building. Yet now a timid Christian Arab from Bethlehem was about to drive a quarter of a ton of TNT into the heart of the Agency's compound under the approving eyes of those Haganah guards.

  Daoud himself had suggested the plan to Abdul Khader. One of the United States Consulate's two regular drivers, he called at the Agency every day to pick up two Jewish secretaries employed at the consulate. He was so familiar a figure that the building's Haganah guards had suggested he sell them arms, and, with Abdul Khader's connivance, Daoud had begun a small traffic in pistols and hand grenades.

  Then, a few days ago, the opening for which Daoud had been waiting arrived. The guards asked him to buy them Bren guns. He agreed, providing he
could bring his car into the Agency compound to deliver them so that no one could witness their transaction.

  Daoud rolled unmolested into the Agency courtyard and parked his car directly in front of the Haganah headquarters. Beside him was a clanking burlap bag containing the most expensive Bren gun the Haganah would ever purchase. While the guard went inside to get his money, Daoud announced he was going to the café across the street to buy a pack of cigarettes.

  As he disappeared, an alert guard noticed the car parked outside Haganah headquarters. He got in, snapped off the hand brake and rolled it across the courtyard to a new location almost directly under the office window of Vivian Herzog.

  That action cost the guard his life, but probably saved the lives of David Shaltiel and most of his subordinates. Thirteen people, all of them in the civilian wing of the Agency, were killed by the explosion.

  The life of the man who should have been the first among them was spared by an extraordinary coincidence. At the moment the guard had started to roll the booby-trapped car toward his office window, Vivian Herzog had gotten up to go to the bathroom. Untouched by the explosion, he began to work his way from room to room helping the injured. As he stepped into the ruined office of the Agency's legal adviser, Herzog started to tremble. He recognized the gray flannel skirt on the blood-covered body lying on the floor. "My God!" he whispered as he sank to his knees. "What are you doing here?"

  There was no answer from his wife's inert figure. Tenderly he bent over and brushed away some of the blood spilling down her handsome face. As gently as he could, he slipped his arms under her body and carried her downstairs to an ambulance.

  Two and a half hours later, precisely at one o'clock as he had promised, Vivian Herzog called at United Nations headquarters to take Colonel Roscher Lund to lunch. He excused his injured wife's absence and apologized for his bedraggled appearance. Then the two men left for the home of Reuven Shiloah, a senior official of the Agency. He too had been injured by Daoud's bomb, and his lacerated head was swathed in bandages that left only four small holes for his eyes, his nose and his mouth. The three men had a glass of sherry, then they sat down to lunch: Shiloah, sipping soup with a straw through one of the holes in the mummylike mask enveloping his face; Herzog, his shirt dark with the dried bloodstains of his injured wife; the Norwegian, his mood shifting from astonishment to awe.

  "We must convince these people we are capable of managing our nation when the English leave," Herzog thought. And so not once during the entire lunch did they mention the disaster that had very nearly taken both their lives that morning. Instead, for an hour and a half they talked of their dreams for the new state they would build in Palestine in the next twenty years. As he listened to those two brave men ignoring a cruel present to plan a different future, tears came to the wondering Norwegian's eyes.

  "My God," he whispered. "No one will stop a people like yours."

  Two days later, on Saturday, March 13, thousands of miles away, in Washington, D.C., the Zionist cause was about to receive another setback, this one diplomatic.

  The Kansas City haberdasher who had been summoned from his bed by a midnight telephone call in February was utterly downcast. In all the years of their friendship, Eddie Jacobson had never heard Harry S Truman talking as he was now—angrily and bitterly. Perhaps for the first time, the man who had once been Jacobson's business partner was refusing him a personal favor. Truman was not prepared, he told Jacobson, to see Chaim Weizmann or any other Zionist leader.

  The need for such a meeting had become urgent. A few days earlier, Truman had given his reluctant approval to an outline of the State Department's proposal to jettison partition in favor of a United Nations trusteeship over Palestine. That approved memorandum was already being acted upon by the State Department.*

  The President had given a hint of his shifting attitude in his answer to the telegram Jacobson had sent him after his midnight phone call on February 20. "The situation has been a headache to me for two and a half years," Truman wrote. "The Jews are so emotional and the Arabs are so difficult to talk to that it is almost impossible to get anything done. . . . I hope it will work out all right, but I have about come to the conclusion that the situation is not solvable as presently set up. . . ."

  Despite the discouraging tone of the President's reply, Jacobson had come to Washington to intervene with him personally. Now, as all Truman's resentment at the pressures to which some American Zionist leaders had subjected him rose to the surface, Jacobson found himself thinking, "My dear friend, the President of the United States, is at this moment as close to being an anti-Semite as a man can possibly be." Jacobson was particularly saddened by the thought that it was the actions of a handful of Jewish leaders who had "slandered and libeled" Truman that were responsible for his attitude. The President's reaction, the firm, angry manner in which he was turning him down, left Jacobson "completely crushed." Stunned, he pondered the President's desk for a moment, despairing at the turn which their conversation had taken. As he did, his gaze fell upon a statue of Andrew Jackson astride a horse.

  "Harry," he said, "all your life you have had a hero. You are probably the best-read man in America on the life of Andrew Jackson . . . When you built the new Jackson County Courthouse in Kansas City, you put this statue," Jacobson said, indicating the statue on the President's desk, "life size, on the lawn, right in front of the courthouse, where it still stands. Well, Harry, I have a hero, too, a man I've never met but who is, I think, the greatest Jew who ever lived—Chaim Weizmann. He's a very sick man, almost broken in health, but he traveled thousands and thousands of miles just to see you and plead the cause of my people. Now you refuse to see him because you were insulted by some of our American Jewish leaders, even though you know Weizmann had absolutely nothing to do with those insults and would be the last man to be a party to them. It does not sound like you, Harry," Jacobson sadly remarked.

  As he finished, Jacobson noticed that the President had begun drumming the desk with his fingertips. Truman swiveled around in his chair and stared out the window at the barren stalks of the White House rose garden. "He's changing his mind," Jacobson thought.

  All of a sudden, Truman whirled around again. "All right, you bald-headed son of a bitch," he said smiling. "I'll see him. Tell Matt* to arrange a meeting as soon as possible after I get back from New York."

  Five days later, in strictest secrecy, Chaim Weizmann slipped through the east gate of the White House for his meeting with Harry Truman. The two men talked for forty-five minutes. Once again, the extraordinary current of mutual respect and sympathy which had animated their first meeting dominated their conversation.

  Weizmann did most of the talking. He pressed Truman for three things: lifting the arms embargo, support for partition and Jewish immigration into Palestine.

  The President told Weizmann the State Department was considering the first point. As for immigration, his position in its favor had always been clear. It was on the second point, however, that this meeting would bear its fruit. The moving plea on behalf of his people by the half-blind Zionist leader nearing the end of his life and his forces weighed more heavily in the mind of Harry Truman than the reasoned memorandum of his State Department counselors. Truman changed his mind again and returned to his original convictions. He would keep faith with this elderly man and the thousands of his kinsmen still behind the barbed wire of Europe's displaced-persons camps. The United States, he promised Weizmann, would continue its support of the partition of Palestine.

  On the afternoon of Friday, March 19, not quite twenty-four hours after Weizmann left the White House, Warren Austin, the United States delegate to the United Nations, slipped into his Security Council seat and asked permission to address the body. The speech he was about to deliver had been drafted by Loy Henderson, the State Department author of the trusteeship plan. Secretary of State George C. Marshall had forwarded it to Austin on Tuesday, March 16, with instructions to deliver it "as soon as possible." Its substa
nce differed little from the memorandum the President had seen and approved shortly before his meeting with Weizmann. Austin, like everyone else in the State Department, had remained totally ignorant of that meeting.

  Now, as, sentence by sentence, he officially unfolded the United States plan to adjourn the partition of Palestine sine die, a shocked and bewildered silence fell over the Council. In the visitors' gallery, many American Zionists were close to tears. The Arab delegations, at first uncomprehending, were soon exultant.

  The United States government, Austin said, was formally asking the Security Council to suspend all action on partition and call a special session of the General Assembly to consider placing Palestine under a United Nations trusteeship when the British mandate ended May 15. It had become apparent, Austin declared, that partition could not be implemented peacefully "as long as existing Arab resistance persists." Unless emergency action were taken, he warned, violence and bloodshed would descend upon the Holy Land, violence which could infect the entire Middle East and even menace the peace of the world.

  To embittered Zionists, the United States' action was a betrayal, a "capitulation" in the face of Arab opposition to partition. The following day, Saturday, services of mourning were held in synagogues across the country. For the jubilant Arab delegations, partition was "dead" and victory theirs.

  In Jerusalem, exultant Arab irregulars sent a triumphant barrage of bullets into the air. From Beirut, Haj Amin Husseini proclaimed he had never doubted that "sooner or later the United States would return to the path of virtue and justice." An angry David Ben-Gurion called the speech a "surrender" and promised his people that when the time came they would proclaim a Jewish state with or without United States support.