O Jerusalem!

by Larry Collins

  Nowhere, however, was the reaction to Austin's speech more vigorous or more angry than it was in the White House. Truman was furious. In approving the State Department's trusteeship memorandum, the President had assumed he was reserving to himself the decision on the manner and timing with which it would be made public. Therefore he had felt no urgency to communicate to the State Department the second thoughts on trusteeship that his conversation with Weizmann had inspired and his conviction that the United States would have to stick to its commitments on partition. He was persuaded that the release of the speech was a deliberate attempt by the antipartition faction in the State Department to force his hand by placing him publicly before a fait accompli.

  Indeed, to a certain degree he was. Clearly, he could not disavow Austin's speech. One complete reversal of American policy in the United Nations had already shaken confidence in his Administration's leadership. Another would destroy it completely. He would have to ride along with trusteeship for the time being.

  Privately, however, Truman was determined to make his views known and his anger felt. At eleven o'clock on the morning after Austin's speech, he ordered Judge Samuel Rosenman, a frequent visitor, to "go find Chaim Weizmann wherever he is. Tell him I meant every word of what I said," the President declared. "I promised him we would stick to our guns on partition and I meant it."

  White House adviser Clark Clifford was instructed to conduct an investigation into how and why the speech was made. Marshall and Undersecretary Robert Lovett both felt the cutting edge of the President's wrath. But, above all, Warren Austin's speech was going to provide its author with an occasion to undertake some enriching foreign travel. By special appointment of the President, Loy Henderson was shortly named to a new post—U.S. minister to Katmandu.

  17

  THE CONVOY WILL NOT ARRIVE

  EVEN JERUSALEM'S OLDEST RESIDENTS could not remember a month as cold as March 1948, For nights on end, the thermometer slipped below zero. The soldiers of David Shaltiel and Haj Amin Husseini shivered through those bitter nights, drenched by storms of sleet and hail, often unable to see beyond the tips of the rifles they clutched in their trembling hands.

  The cold, unfortunately, did nothing to stifle the intensity of their struggle. They had turned parts of Jerusalem, like the Mamillah Road stretching down to Jaffa Gate from the edge of the New City, into shooting galleries. One morning, an elderly German Jewish woman, unable to put up with the firing any longer, piled the contents of her little antique shop on a cart and started down the street. She had covered barely fifty yards before an Arab sniper concealed on the Old City walls killed her. A few days later Ibrahim Dajani saw a sixty-five-year-old friend shot in almost the same spot by a Jewish sniper hidden at the opposite end of the street.

  David Shaltiel intensified the campaign to register all men in the city from eighteen to forty-five. Haganah delegates in armbands began to patrol cafés, restaurants and movie houses checking registration cards. One family which sent its eighteen-year-old son to England to escape services was fined four thousand dollars and ordered to bring the boy back. The training of the Gadna, the Haganah's volunteer youth movement, was expanded. The organization set up a permanent training base in Sheikh Badhur, an Arab village abandoned after a series of Haganah attacks in late December. Called Givat Ram, Commander's Hill, the base was by mid-March providing instruction for two hundred young men and women a day.

  For the Arabs of Jerusalem, as indeed elsewhere in Palestine, the slow but steady drift of the middle classes out of the country was a source of growing concern. On March 8, Haj Amin Husseini noted in a letter to the governments of Syria, Egypt and Lebanon the tendency "of a great number of Palestine's sons to leave their cities and settle in neighboring Arab countries." The Arab Higher Committee, he declared, had decided that no one would be allowed to leave Palestine without its approval. "The numerous Palestinians who have left their country since the start of fighting," he wrote, were to be compelled "in the national interest" to return. He requested the three governments to refuse to extend their residence permits and to refuse to issue new ones without his committee's consent.

  Unfortunately, the first exceptions to that rule were inevitably made for Haj Amin's political allies. Jerusalem's Lebanese consul noted in a March report to Beirut a growing bitterness among the population toward the Arab Higher Committee, whose political leaders were accused of fleeing the country. Equally bitter, he said, were the population's sentiments toward the Arab states accused of "not giving them any effective help, of not keeping their promises, and of having made vain threats over the past few years. The Arab states," he warned with rare clairvoyance, "had better start either to aid the Arabs of Palestine in an effective manner or to begin trying to calm them down."

  Few aspects of the city's life escaped change. Its Jewish schoolchildren managed to celebrate Purim commemorating their ancestors' deliverance from a massacre during the Babylonian exile, with their traditional costumes and disguises, but this year they were forbidden to use two instruments of juvenile joy—fireworks and cap pistols.

  For many, the geography of daily living changed. Harry Levin and his neighbors in one of the city's most exposed Jewish quarters had to sleep in corridors to avoid stray bullets. Ambara and Sami Khalidy too were forced to find a new, less exposed bedroom. Their daughter sorrowfully noted the disappearance of the family rose garden, dug up to fill the sandbags that now marked the boundary between her father's Arab College and the Ben Zvi Agricultural School with which it shared its Judean hilltop. On its grounds she could see the students who used to toss her back a missing balloon or ball with a shy "Shalom" digging slit trenches, young people like her father's students trained for leadership but condemned to war.

  In downtown Jerusalem an institution of another sort closed its doors. Informed that the Haganah had to take over his premises, Max Hesse sadly packed away the Bavarian porcelain, Mosar Czech glassware and Wilna silver that had given his restaurant an appearance as elegant as its cuisine, and shuttered one of the few places in the city where Arabs, Britons and Jews still gathered freely.

  In the growing chaos, some men displayed a rare prescience. Dov Zwettels, a post-office employee, began collecting telephones. Patiently he made his way from one disorganized government office to another, snipping phones from the wall and depositing them in a black satchel. Soon his supply of telephones, hidden away against the future needs of a Jewish state, exceeded the reserve of the post office itself.

  His activities may have contributed to the slow collapse of Jerusalem's communications. One angry resident noted that a cable took two days to reach Jerusalem from London and six days to reach his home from the post office five hundred yards away. Some messages reached their destination through curious channels. Shalom Dror, one of the city's Haganah officers, was trapped in an Arab ambush when his armored car's wireless cackled out the most welcome message he had ever received: his parents, whom the German-born Dror had not seen since the eve of World War II, had arrived in Haifa. Dror had fought for years to wrest them from Hitler's death camps and get them to Palestine. How ironic, he thought, that they should have arrived in the Promised Land on this March morning. Now he would never be able to welcome them to the soil of the country they had taught him to love. Dror was certain he would not survive the desperate fighting around his armored car.

  That fighting was part of the combat dominating all phases of life in Jerusalem, the struggle for the roads. Steadily, inexorably, Abdul Khader Husseini was winning the struggle. The price the Haganah was paying to get its convoys through was exorbitant. The amount of food reaching the city had dwindled to a trickle. Its reserves were disappearing. Unmentioned, but increasingly present, was a specter which now loomed over the Jewish city—hunger.

  Sabine Neuville, the wife of France's consul general in Jerusalem, cast a satisfied glance at the sparkling elegance of her table. Jerusalem may have been a hungry city, but on this March evening twenty-eight of its inhabi
tants at least were going to savor a memorable meal. From its gold-embroidered damascene tablecloth with its garland of roses to its Limoges porcelain and Baccarat crystal, the dining table was a tasteful blend of the refinement of the Orient and the grace of France. Yet none of the Neuvilles' guests would be Arab or Jewish. They were all Europeans, representatives of two nations, France and England, which had spent a century and a half vying with each other for ascendancy in this area. Neuville's formal dinner tonight was an acknowledgment that the influence they had sought to exercise here had passed to other hands, to those of two Semitic peoples whose fight for this land, however cruel, was far more justified than theirs had been.

  No site could have provided a more moving setting for a soirée d'adieu than the dining room of the French Consulate. From its vast bay windows, Madame Neuville's guests would look across the Jewish neighborhood of Montefiore to the sacred Old City in its crown of ramparts that had called out to ten centuries of their forebears.

  Madame Neuville would serve her guests filets de dorade, roast beef Sauce Périgueux, surrounded by fresh vegetables "the way the British prefer it," and foie gras. To accompany that feast, René Neuville had brought out the best bottles of his cellar, carefully selected with his connoisseur's palate from the wines of Alsace and Bordeaux.

  Madame Neuville scrutinized a last time the place she had assigned each of her guests: Sir Alan Cunningham, Chief Justice Sir William Fitzgerald, Cunningham's two aides, "seductive, charming young men with their impeccable French," she thought, her mind drifting back to an earlier era, "and how cleverly Perfidious Albion always chose them."

  Within a couple of hours, the men in white tie with decorations and the women in evening dresses would file into her dining room in the flickering glow of four sterling-silver candelabra set along her table. The sight of those candelabra brought a final, faintly sardonic smile to Sabine Neuville's face. They belonged to her husband's collection of personal memorabilia of a Frenchman toward whose memory he bore a special veneration. Her British guests would, she hoped, recognize the initial stamped on the base of the candelabra presiding over her little soirée d'adieu. Proud and disdaining, it was the great gold "N" of their original owner, Napoleon Bonaparte.

  Five hundred yards from the bay windows of Sabine Neuville's dining room, just behind the crenellated ridge of David's Tower, a pair of men carried on a heated discussion. Its subject was the half-empty bottle of Haig and Haig whiskey one of the two clutched in his hands. Just behind them was a stolen British Army truck, another of Fawzi el Kutub's booby-trapped vehicles.

  This time, to drive its ton of TNT to its target, Kutub had selected from among several volunteers a former French Army corporal from Tunis, Kadour Mansour, known to everyone as El Tunsi, the Tunisian. El Tunsi's price had been the bottle of whiskey Fawzi el Kutub clutched in his hands. Distressed by the speed with which the thirsty El Tunsi had gulped down half the bottle, Kutub had begun to fear that if he drank any more he'd be as likely to deliver his load of TNT into the middle of some Arab village as to the target Abdul Khader Husseini had selected for him.

  El Tunsi begged for his bottle back. Finally Kutub relented. "Promise if you come back you'll never touch another drop," he said.

  El Tunsi agreed. Then, as he drained the last of the bottle before Kutub's unbelieving eyes, he made a last request. "If I come back and give up drinking," he said, "tell me you'll find me a wife."

  Anything, Kutub assured him, pushing him up into the cab.

  Covered by half a dozen machine guns on Mount Zion, El Tunsi's truck, weaving slightly, rolled across the Valley of Hinnom toward its target. Abdul Khader Husseini had selected it because from its old stone houses the Haganah was able to snipe at his Bethlehem-bound traffic. It was the storied Jewish neighborhood of Montefiore, right under Madame Neuville's dining-room windows.

  The farewell dinner of the representatives of France and Great Britain was consigned by Kutub's explosion to a setting appropriate to the chaos into which Jerusalem was slipping. The bomb shattered thirty houses and injured fifteen residents of Montefiore. Only the Haganah's foresight in evacuating some of the quarter's most exposed homes had prevented a disaster.

  When the shock waves subsided, Madame Neuville rushed to the dining room. The floor was awash in blown-out bay window, shattered porcelain and shredded crystal. Only Napoleon's candelabra, she noted with satisfaction, seemed unscathed. Heaving a sigh, she walked to a nearby telephone and pressed a button on its base.

  "Chéri," she announced to her husband, "please call our guests and tell the ladies to bring their furs. There are no windows left in the dining room."

  Haroun Ben-Jazzi stared into the darkness toward the sound rising up the valley he had prowled a month before with his flock of borrowed sheep. It was the low, insistent rumble of motors. For hours Ben-Jazzi and his followers had lain shivering in the last watches of the night, waiting for it. A message from their transmitter hidden in Hulda, the Jewish assembly point, had warned that the Jews would try today to drive a major convoy through Bab el Wad to Jerusalem.

  Ben-Jazzi was ready for them. Three hundred men were hidden in the slopes above the barricade of stones and logs thrown up in the middle of the road. The closest of them were fifteen feet from the roadside, waiting to spring on the leading cars with grenades if the land mines hidden in the roadblock failed to stop them. On each side of the road a Vickers machine gun was trained on the barricade.

  Lieutenant Moshe Rashkes, riding in the armored car leading the convoy up the gorge of Bab el Wad, contemplated the dark forms of the trucks trailing along behind him. There were forty of them strung out for almost a mile down the road to Hulda. Crammed into those trucks were hundreds of sacks of flour, thousands of cans of meat, sardines, margarine; there was even one truck whose panels were spilling over with a fruit the people of Jerusalem had not seen in weeks—oranges. For those 100,000 Jerusalemites the forty truckloads of food in Rashkes' convoy represented far more than a series of meager meals. Their safe arrival would be proof that the lifeline on which they depended, the road to the sea, was still theirs, that it could still deliver to them the ingredients of their survival.

  Ben-Jazzi's first sight of the convoy was Rashkes' armored car lumbering slowly forward through the fading dawn. It was just half a mile beyond the pumping station marking the entrance to Bab el Wad when he saw it. Inside the car, Rashkes heard the shots ring out, then a dull thump as the blockbuster moving up to thrust aside Ben-Jazzi's barricade hit one of his hidden mines. At that moment, over his car's wireless, Rashkes heard the convoy commander announcing to Hulda, "We are surrounded but continuing to move."

  The cars were soon so close that Ben-Jazzi could see the Stens peeping through their steel slats firing onto the hillside. With a whistle, he signaled his men hidden in the roadside ditch to rush the cars with grenades and force the windows shut.

  It became suffocatingly hot inside the cars. The clang of bullets striking Rashkes' vehicle rose to a steady din. Through a narrow gun slit Rashkes strained for a glimpse of his attackers, but all he could see were the huge rocks and the dense pine forests rising above the road. Ahead of him Rashkes saw the blockbuster, tossed into the gulley by the force of the mine. A second truck moving up behind it had hit another mine. Spun at right angles to the axis of the road, it barred the way up to Jerusalem. From all along the column he heard the dull thump of exploding tires. As the morning sky lightened he could see white plumes of steam spurting out of half a dozen trucks whose radiators had already been hit. The convoy commander, in a Hillman, scurried along the line of trucks like a sheepdog yapping at his flock, shouting at his drivers to stop closing up on each other. They ignored him, and the tail end of the convoy pressed insistently forward until the gaps between trucks was cut to a few yards, offering the Arabs a neat, compact target.

  Rashkes' "sandwich" was ordered forward to evacuate the crew of the blockbuster. The five men managed to slip from their overturned vehicle and sprint
to the safety of his car. Then they moved toward the second truck, which was lying on its side, the door to its armor-plated cab shut. From the bottom of the door Rashkes saw a thin dark stream of blood dropping onto the pavement. Its van was on fire and the flames were working their way toward the cab and the gas tank just behind it.

  Rashkes shouted to the truck's two drivers to open the door. There was no answer. The fire moved closer. "They're dead," someone said. Then, as his armored car started to draw away, Rashkes saw the doorknob of the cab move.

  Two of the men in his car slipped out the emergency door and crawled to the truck. While the Arabs sent a stream of fire at them, they struggled to open the door. "Someone's tapping inside!" one of them shouted. Rashkes saw the horror and frustration contorting their faces as they tugged at the jammed door. Below the cab, the little maroon trickle continued to drop onto the pavement. The fire grew stronger, reaching out for the edge of the gas tank. Finally Rashkes ordered his two men to flee the flames.

  Horror-stricken, everyone in his car stared at the overturned truck. The thin stream of blood continued to seep onto the pavement. Once again, almost imperceptibly, the doorknob moved. Then the fire reached the gas tank and the cabin was engulfed in orange flames.

  By now the convoy was hopelessly stuck. Half a dozen trucks had tumbled into the gully trying to turn around. Ben-Jazzi's roadblock and the two vehicles cast up against it eliminated any hope of moving forward.

  Swarms of villagers, alerted by the noise of gunfire, had joined Ben-Jazzi's men. From the pine grove above, shrill and terrifying, the undulating war cry of their women drove them on. Rashkes could hear screams in broken Hebrew ringing down the hillside: "Yitzhak, Yitzhak, today death will find you!"