One hour, two hours, six hours passed. The heat was unbearable. Inside the cars, men stripped to their undershorts. In Rashkes' vehicle the ammunition was almost gone.
Finally the order came over the wireless to withdraw. The trucks that could move began to roll back down the incline in reverse, most of them, tires shot out, riding on their rims. The armored cars covered their withdrawal, pushing into the gully the trucks that couldn't move, to clear the road. As his car inched back down the road to Hulda, Rashkes saw the Arabs swarm down the hillside. Shrieking their jubilant cries of victory, they flung themselves on the abandoned trucks, ripping them to pieces. Frantic hands grabbed at sacks of flour, cases of sardines, cans of meat. Bobbing and tumbling like pearls spilling from a broken necklace, dozens of oranges rolled down the hillside. Soon, like the industrious files of their ancestors carrying stones to erect some prehistoric citadel, long columns of villagers began twisting up the hillside, bent by the weight of the booty they carried away. Tonight in Beit Mahsir, Saris, Kastel, in all the poor villages clinging to the Judean heights above the road, there would be a rare and unexpected banquet on the food which Jerusalem's hungry Jews so desperately awaited.
The Haganah left along the road nineteen vehicles, almost half the number that had set out from Hulda. They included sixteen trucks and two armored cars. The nineteenth vehicle, towed away by his men, would become Haroun Ben-Jazzi's personal souvenir of his victory. It was the Hillman of the convoy's commander.
As he always did, Dov Joseph in Jerusalem had received a coded message at dawn informing him that a forty-truck convoy was on the way. Shortly before nightfall, his secretary brought him the news that it would not arrive. For the first time since November 29, a convoy had completely failed to break through to Jerusalem. Joseph sank into a chair "profoundly depressed." Slowly a realization came upon him. "We are now under siege," he thought.
PART THREE
JERUSALEM: A CITY BESIEGED
March 20, 1948—May 13, 1948
18
A HOUSE IN THE MIDDLE OF HELL
FROM THEIR BARREN HILLTOP, the settlers' barracks looked down upon a road almost as old as the wanderings of man. Nine miles south of Dov Joseph's office windows, they stood midway along the ancient highway linking Jerusalem, the city of David, to Hebron, the city of the Patriarchs. The four hundred and fifty men and women of Kfar Etzion were supposed to constitute the southernmost anchor of Jerusalem's defenses. So exposed was their position, however, that they had lived in a state of quasi-siege for months and David Shaltiel had already recommended to Tel Aviv the abandoning of their settlement.
Abraham had grazed his flocks on Kfar Etzion's ridges. David had marched past this place on his way to the conquest of Jerusalem and the unification of the tribes of Judah and Israel. Jehoshaphat's warriors had gathered in the little vale above which the settlement was perched, to give thanks for their victory over the Moabites and deed it its name, the Valley of Brakha.
Ancient spawning ground of the chiefs of the Hebrew nation, the hills had become over the centuries the stronghold of a deeply felt and often violent Arab nationalism. In Hebron to the south, sixty-six Jews, most of them helpless yeshiva scholars, had been slaughtered during the Mufti-inspired riots of 1929. The survivors had straggled back, but a fresh outburst in 1936 had finally driven the last Jews from the city that sheltered the tomb of the father of the Hebrew people, and had ended its centuries-old tradition as a center of Jewish learning.
The four interrelated colonies which now constituted the settlement of Kfar Etzion represented a fragile effort to reestablish a Jewish foothold in the land of the Patriarchs and at the same time provide a strategically situated southern buttress to Jerusalem. It had been a difficult enterprise. To the Arabs of Hebron, Kfar Etzion was an alien intrusion on ground that had been wholly Arab for centuries. The colony's struggle to survive was a vital illustration of that unique institution sired by the Zionist return to Palestine, the kibbutz.
The land had been first bought in 1928 from an Arab sheikh by a group of orthodox Jews from Jerusalem. Their tentative efforts to settle it were abandoned after the Hebron massacres in 1929. A wealthy citrus grower from Rehovot purchased the land, added a few further tracts acquired from nearby Arab villagers and settled forty workers on it to lay the foundations of a fruit plantation. Once again an Arab uprising, this one in 1936, ended the Jewish settlement.
To prevent the land from falling back into Arab hands, the Jewish National Fund took it over from the disillusioned citrus grower. In 1942, by a complex legal maneuver, the Fund circumvented the restrictions on Jewish land purchases set out by the British government's 1939 White Paper and acquired the land of a nearby German monastery whose monks had been interned as enemy aliens by the British. On an April night one year later, three women and ten men slipped through the darkness to lay claim to the monastery and officially establish the settlement of Kfar Etzion.
Those first settlers were orthodox Jews, members of a movement founded in Poland and dedicated to combining a rigorous observance of the precepts of the Torah with a collective existence. Its members had earned the title deeds of Kfar Etzion's inhospitable ridges with seven years of back-breaking labor clearing land in Samaria. "Our fellow Jews are experiencing a horrible fate in Europe," they wrote on that night when, almost as conspirators, they came to claim their land. "With our efforts we will build a haven for those who survive."
This prophecy proved accurate. Two years later, sixty emaciated men and women arrived at Kfar Etzion to begin a new life alongside its original settlers. As a spiritual bond had united its first pioneers, so a physical one linked the new arrivals, the dark-blue concentration-camp numbers tattooed into their flesh. Akiva Levi, a nineteen-year-old Czech, had finished his education at thirteen and spent his adolescence staring at the gas-chamber doors of a Silesian death camp. Blond, strikingly pretty Zipora Rosenfeld was one of Auschwitz's few survivors. Netanel Steinberg's memory was still haunted by images of the destruction of Warsaw's ghetto. To Yitzhak Ben-Sira, one of Etzion's original founders, their arrival ended a bitter personal pilgrimage. At the war's end, Ben-Sira had left Palestine for Europe to seek the survivors of his family of twelve brothers and sisters. He found five. Four of them had come back with him to reimplant the Ben-Sira family in the hills of Hebron.
A grueling existence awaited the newcomers. In the winter, a cutting wind tore at Kfar Etzion's slopes, sometimes wrapping them in a dank shroud of mist. By summer, a harsh sun seared the moisture from the land and stifled the settlers in their primitive shelters. There was no water. For two years the kibbutzniks survived on the wintertime hoardings of the monastery's cistern, sacrificing to their withered plants the water their own bodies craved. Each acre had to be cleared by hand with the help of four mules, and the spare topsoil terraced with a complex series of stone walls to prevent the winter rains from carrying it away. Soon it became apparent that fruit trees and vineyards were the only crops their rocky soil could sustain.
Planting their first orchards, the settlers paused to dedicate themselves and their saplings to a pledge drafted by one of their number. "We have taken this oath upon settling in Kfar Etzion," they solemnly intoned. "We shall not rest or know peace until we cast off the shame of barrenness from these highlands, until we shall cover them with fruit and forest trees . . ."
Even the orthodox faith that united the settlers added its special problems to those that nature had given them. A complex system had to be devised so that their cows would be milked on the Sabbath without human labor. Almond roots grafted onto apple trees took hold more readily on their unpromising land, but, as the Bible enjoined men against grafting alien roots, a special rabbinical dispensation was required before the settlers could employ the technique. Since the Torah specifically prohibited harvesting fruit trees during the first four years of their life, the settlers were forced to find a nonagricultural source of income. In spring and summer they moved back into their tents and rente
d their stone huts to Jerusalemites anxious for a spell in the country.
Despite all those obstacles, the settlers steadily developed their kibbutz. As their number grew, they established three satellite colonies called Massuot (Torch), Ein Tsurim (Rocky Spring) and Revadim. The four interdependent settlements became known as the Etzion bloc.
The partition vote on November 29, 1947, greeted with so much joy by their fellow Jews elsewhere in Palestine, was welcomed with mixed feelings by the settlers of Kfar Etzion. The kibbutz they had labored so hard to build would not be a part of the new Jewish state. It had been assigned to its Arab neighbor.
The decision had marked the beginning of a cruel winter. Well aware of the menace that the settlement posed to their lines of communication, persuaded—correctly—that Kfar Etzion had been settled for military as well as agricultural reasons, the Arabs lost no time in attacking it. Within a fortnight after the vote, a convoy en route to the colony was ambushed outside Bethlehem. Ten of its twenty-six passengers were killed and all its vehicles lost. Since that date, Kfar Etzion had been in a virtual state of siege. In January women with young children were escorted back to Jerusalem by the British. Shortly after they left, the Arabs launched a concerted attack on the colony. They were thrown back in a day of bitter fighting, but that night in the Neve Ovadia, the "house of God's worker," which served as the kibbutz's synagogue and communal center, someone recorded in the settlement's diary: "A series of miracles saved us today, but how long can we hold out? We are a tiny island in a stormy sea of Arabs."
Four days later, the stone floor of the Neve Ovadia served as an improvised morgue to receive the mutilated bodies of thirty-five Haganah men wiped out trying to reach the colony from Jerusalem. It was the worst defeat the Haganah had yet suffered at the Arabs' hands.
As winter stretched toward spring, the settlers and the Palmach men who had been assigned to the colony laid aside their farm tools to cover their barren lands with slit trenches, crude stone pillboxes and barbed wire. They prepared a primitive landing strip, and the isolated settlement became one of the first beneficiaries of the ancient Aramaean prayer become the Haganah Air Service's byword, "Salvation comes from the sky."
Still the settlers' spartan existence had its compensations. Their fields burst into an incredibly beautiful carpet of flowers with the arrival of spring. Each evening, Yitzhak Ben-Sira and his rediscovered brothers and sisters wandered the fields together, stuffing their knapsacks with scarlet anemones, lavender cyclamen and golden buttercups. Purim arrived and, without their children to perform for them, the settlers staged the Purim play themselves. That evening, when the play was over, they stood together in the Neve Ovadia and drank together "Lechayim"—the toast to life. Never again would that toast have the same meaning for their settlement that it had that night. The springtime upon them was the spring of Kfar Etzion's first harvest.
That same night, ten miles away, the officers of Jerusalem's Haganah anguished over a decision which would determine whether the settlers would have a chance to reap the first fruit of their orchards or not. Dov Joseph's premonition that Jerusalem was under siege had proved premature by exactly twenty-four hours. The flaming wreckage of the trucks lost by Moshe Rashkes' convoy had not marked the real beginning of the siege of Jerusalem. The following day, while the settlers at Kfar Etzion prepared for Purim, the Haganah had managed to run sixty vehicles up the road, drawing only sniper fire from the Arabs, who were still exulting over their triumph of the day before.
Their arrival concentrated in the city almost all of the trucks, armored cars and buses used by the Jerusalem Haganah to keep the road open. It also put the city's commanders before a crucial decision. Should they seize the occasion to gamble those vehicles in a massive effort to resupply Kfar Etzion?
Shaltiel and his Czech planning officer Eliyahu Arbel both opposed the idea. Getting the colony the two hundred tons of supplies it would need to survive for three months would require sixty-five trucks and twenty-five armored cars. "A loss of thirty to fifty percent in such a convoy can be calculated," Shaltiel prophesied. As he had earlier, he urged that the colony be evacuated under British cover and its forces concentrated in Jerusalem.
In Tel Aviv, however, the young archaeologist in charge of the Haganah's operations overruled Shaltiel. To Yigal Yadin, Kfar Etzion was "the bastion holding Jerusalem from an attack to the south." He personally ordered Shaltiel to send the convoy in and put into it everything the Jerusalem command could spare. To lead it, he sent back to the city Mishael Shacham, the man who had destroyed the Hotel Semiramis.
Its success would depend above all on one thing: speed. "The operation's plan has to be as precise as the workings of a Swiss watch," Arbel warned. "If everything doesn't work right on time, the Arabs will have cut the way back." Originally, Shacham proposed to spend an hour inside the colony. Shaltiel's intelligence officer, a wiry, intense man named Yitzhak "Levitza" Levi, exploded at that. Give the Arabs an hour, he warned, and they would mobilize hundreds of men to send stones pouring down into the road. Stubborn, unyielding, he literally tore the minutes away from Shacham until finally it was agreed that the convoy would spend exactly fifteen minutes in the settlement. In groups of five, settlers would line the road up to Kfar Etzion so that the truckers could start throwing things out of the trucks before they had even stopped rolling. Four vehicles of the armored-car escort would stay behind to patrol the road outside the colony and hold the Arabs back while the convoy unloaded.
The Schneller School, "purchased" a fortnight earlier by Nahum Stavy, was turned into the convoy's assembly point. Tons of food, medicine, munitions, cement, iron bars, barbed wire, barrels of fuel were hastily stockpiled in the school's courtyard. Over a hundred men of the Sixth Palmach Battalion were assigned to protect the convoy. To give them firepower superior to anything the Haganah had previously put on the roads, Shaltiel stripped his command of its best arms: eighteen machine guns, two mortars, forty-seven modern rifles, forty-five submachine guns. A barricade buster, a crane, four armored buses, forty trucks and nineteen armored cars, virtually every vehicle at the Jerusalem command's disposal, was assigned to rush the two hundred tons of supplies and a 136-man relief force to Kfar Etzion. Four wireless sets were scattered through the convoy. Its commander, Mishael Shacham, was given one of the Haganah's precious Austers so that he could control its movements from the air.
Its departure was set for 6 A.M. Easter Saturday, March 27, in the hope that a rare Sabbath action might catch the Arabs unprepared. All night long a frantic activity animated the Schneller Compound. The task of organizing a convoy far more important than anything they had yet put on the road proved too much for the Jerusalem Haganah, however. At six o'clock a dozen trucks remained to be loaded. The convoy was not ready to leave until a few minutes before eight.
Looking at that long line of trucks, the noise of their motors beginning to wake up half of Jerusalem, a sense of the enormity of their gamble overtook Arbel. Grabbing his map, he sought out the man who would command the convoy's escort. Once again he pointed out to him the worst danger spots along his route, the sites he would have to patrol with particular care while the convoy was unloading. His finger slid along the map to a point just beyond Solomon's Pools where the road narrowed to a bend lined by a high wall. "Here," he said. "Here is where the Arabs are going to try to get you."
Sent off with a burst of applause and anxious waves, the enormous convoy slid outside Jerusalem toward the silent hills. It rolled past the Greek Monastery of Mar Elias, and Rachel's Tomb down to Bethlehem, where, to its commander's relief, a handful of Arab guards, apparently stunned by its size, fled their barricades as it moved into view. As each mile passed, the convoy's wireless set recorded its progress for the worried Haganah command in Jerusalem. Past Solomon's Pools; then past the dangerous bend indicated by Arbel. Finally, within ninety minutes, the lead trucks started rolling up the dirt road to Kfar Etzion without a shot having been fired at them.
A
joyous shout of triumph from the settlers greeted the sight. Exactly as they had planned, the truckers began tossing their first packages to the ground before their vehicles had lurched to a stop. In Jerusalem, the Haganah's commanders were jubilant. They were going to win their gamble.
The convoy's trip out had been unimpeded, but it had not been unobserved. From a window of the Mar Elias Monastery, Kamal Irekat, a forty-two-year-old former police inspector, had watched the trucks crawl by with satisfaction. Abdul Khader's lieutenant south of Jerusalem had been waiting for this convoy. All the way down to Hebron he had men and explosives like the mines stocked behind him in the monastery, waiting for its arrival. Irekat had no intention of trying to stop it on its way into Kfar Etzion. He would wait and fall on it on its way back, when it would be far from Jerusalem and help. Before the first trucks had reached the gates of Kfar Etzion, Irekat's messengers were already miles away, rushing from village to village calling the men to arms. Irekat himself had leaped on a motorcycle and headed toward the site he had already picked for his ambush. As he did, he glanced at his watch. It was nine-thirty. For once, an Arab leader's estimate was more conservative than that of Shaltiel's intelligence officer. Bouncing down toward Kfar Etzion, Irekat guessed he would need two hours to turn his ambush into a fatal trap.
In Jerusalem, Shaltiel, Arbel and Levitza, the intelligence officer, followed each step of the unloading operation on the wireless set linking them to Kfar Etzion. Fifteen minutes came and there was no indication that the convoy was ready to leave. "Mishael, Mishael," Levitza pleaded into the microphone, "for God's sake, hurry!"
At Kfar Etzion, the unloading had gone exactly as planned. Two unexpected problems, however, were delaying the convoy's departure. The first was an order from Tel Aviv that Shacham had received when he had landed his Auster at Kfar Etzion. A Haganah plane had crashed-landed on the same strip a few days before. Shacham was told to load it into one of his trucks and get it back to Jerusalem.
O Jerusalem! Page 28