O Jerusalem!

by Larry Collins

  The second problem was being caused by the sudden and stubborn refusal of the only member of the settlement authorized to leave with the convoy to board his waiting transport. Despite the frantic efforts of half a dozen settlers, Zimri, Kfar Etzion's seed bull, refused to enter the truck destined to take him to a sniper-free pasture in the plains of Sharon.

  While sixty vehicles and two hundred men waited on a reluctant bull and a broken airplane, Irekat's call to arms spread with feverish excitement to every corner of the Hebron hills. In mosque after mosque, muezzins mounted to their minarets to send the word warbling across the village rooftops. On horseback, in creaking jalopies and new American cars, on donkeys and by foot, the men of Nahlin, Beit Fajar, Hallul, Artas, Beit Sahur and Beit Jalla came swarming toward the road. Fathers fought with sons for the honor of taking the family rifle to the fight. Men rushed from their stone huts with a firearm and a handful of bullets stuffed into their trousers. There was no thought of food or water or first-aid equipment. No one told them where to go or how to get there or what to do. Command went to the oldest or to the man who ran fastest or shouted loudest. But they came, first dozens, then scores, then hundreds and finally thousands. In Bethlehem and Hebron, honking trucks summoned men from shops, coffeehouses and souks. Fiercely firing their weapons to the sky, they too joined the rush to the road.

  The very nature of his tumultuous army imposed its limitations on Irekat's well-laid plans. When he got to his ambush site he discovered that a couple of hundred men were already sending a stream of boulders bouncing onto the road half a mile away. He shrugged, then ordered his followers to pick up their mines and join the others. Like a cancer growing on the site nature had chosen for it, his ambush would now take place on the curve to which his village warriors had instinctively gravitated.

  Sweeping over the area in a Haganah spotter plane, Daniel Beckstein gasped. For miles back into the hills he could see the lines of men converging on the road. He radioed a frantic warning to Jerusalem to get the convoy moving before it was too late.

  By now an almost unbearable tension united the men around the wireless set in Shaltiel's headquarters. "We are all going to explode," Arbel thought. Over and over again they repeated into the microphone, "When are you going to leave? Why are you taking so much time?"

  At Kfar Etzion the settlers continued to struggle with Zimri the bull and the Haganah's airplane. The British by now were aware of what had happened and of the fast-building Arab efforts to block the convoy's route back. Furious that the Haganah had sent the convoy out without British knowledge or permission, the district commissioner's office sent a police officer to the Jewish Agency with a stern warning to keep the convoy in the colony or accept the consequences. Shaltiel hesitated a moment, then decided to continue the operation. He could not contemplate leaving the vehicles on which his command depended isolated at Kfar Etzion.

  An hour, an hour and a half dragged by. As each minute clicked past, the silent knot of men gathered around Shaltiel's wireless grew more pessimistic. "The worst is going to happen," thought Arbel, standing beside the Jerusalem commander. The four armored cars left behind to patrol the road reported that the Arabs were now so numerous they could no longer hold them back.

  Finally Kfar Etzion announced that the convoy was ready to leave. At its head was a scout car followed by the barricade buster and its crane. A hundred yards back came the first of the empty trucks, then the four armored buses full of Palmach men, then the rest of the trucks. Like sheepdogs, the armored cars were scattered protectively through the convoy. One of them brought up the rear, just behind the truck bearing away Kfar Etzion's seed bull. It was eleven-thirty. Instead of fifteen minutes, the convoy had spent two hours at Kfar Etzion, just the time Kamal Irekat had calculated he needed to cut off its way back to Jerusalem.

  The convoy's wireless operator kept Shaltiel's headquarters abreast of its progress minute by minute. The barricade buster cut a path through a first Arab barricade, then a second and a third. The tension eased in the convoy. Three more barricades were successfully pushed aside. Ahead was the seventh, the biggest one the convoy had encountered. Under a steady Arab fire, the barricade buster moved up to attack its boulders. Suddenly, without warning, a rock slide spilled off onto the buster. The heavy vehicle trembled an instant, then tumbled over on its side into a ditch. From a slit in the rear of its cab an injured crewman saw the entire convoy, like a dying snake with its head cut off, writhing to a stop two hundred yards behind. A sheet of Arab fire poured onto the stalled vehicles, the roar of gunfire now punctuated with the report of exploding tires. The trap had snapped shut.

  "Where are you?" Jerusalem radioed the convoy.

  "Nebi Daniel," came the reply. At those words, Eliyahu Arbel sank morosely into his chair. Nebi Daniel was the name of an old Arab house. It sat on a hillside just beyond Solomon's Pools, at exactly the spot Arbel had indicated on his map to the convoy commander four hours before.

  The echoes of a different fusillade rang out that same Saturday afternoon in another set of hills just south of Jerusalem, only a few miles from the ambushed Kfar Etzion convoy. This fusillade, however, was a joyous outburst of noise designed to welcome into the little Arab village of Al Maliha eight hundred residents of a neighboring community. Dressed in the traditional red velvet robes of the Keis tribe, Alia Darwish, the fifteen-year-old daughter of one of Al Maliha's patriarchs, heard the noise with a tremor of excitement. It marked the end of her childhood. Those neighbors had come for her. In a noisy, happy procession they would lead her back to their village, where a man she had never seen, a handsome, dark-eyed stonecutter named Mohammed Moussa Zaharan, awaited her. This March Saturday was Alia Darwish's wedding day.

  Alia Darwish was seated astride a horse harnessed in gold. Her father placed in her hands a long sword whose blade she pressed to her lips and forehead over the white veil hiding her face. She would not remove it until the moment of her marriage, when her husband would symbolically take possession of her by cutting the veil from her face with the sword.

  Singing traditional nuptial hymns to the shrill atonal pipings of their flutes and the vibrant thump of the kakabeh, a kind of guitar, the procession, Alia at its head, wound its way out of Al Maliha. Behind the bride, the women of her village, their long robes embroidered in velvet and satin, coins jangling in their headdresses, danced the zafeh, the wedding dance.

  The little community toward which they bore Alia Darwish clung to a rocky ledge on the other side of a deep wadi from Al Maliha. Its slopes, covered by almond trees, were scarred by gaping white holes, the rock quarries which had for decades constituted the village's principal source of wealth and repute. Generations of villagers like Alia's fiancé had worked the stone from those quarries, and their skilled stonecutters' hands were a legend through all the Middle East. From Jerusalem to Baghdad there was scarcely a city which did not boast at least one house whose finely chiseled white stones had come from that quarry.

  For years, the village inhabitants had cultivated friendly relations with their Jewish neighbors of Givat Shaul, Motza and Montefiore. They went to each other's feasts, danced and sang together over cups of coffee and glasses of arak. Even in that troubled springtime of 1948, the village which was now to become Alia Darwish's new home had managed to remain a strangely calm oasis at the gates of Jerusalem. With quiet but firm resolve, her new neighbors had kept the Mufti's men from their peaceful village, named after one of the notables who had founded it. It was called Deir Yassin.

  There was no longer any hope of breaking the barricade barring the road back to Jerusalem for the convoy which had resupplied the settlement of Kfar Etzion. The Arabs had slipped down to within three hundred yards of the trapped vehicles, and inside their cabins the drivers could now hear them calling to each other.

  Rather than risk total disaster, the convoy commander ordered every vehicle that could move to fall back on the settlement. It was already too late for most of the vehicles. Only five armore
d cars, carrying thirty-five men, and five trucks managed to break away. One of them was the vehicle carrying Zimri the seed bull whose stubborness had helped delay the convoy's departure.

  For the one hundred and eighty men and women left behind in Irekat's trap, the only hope of saving themselves lay in the thick walls of the abandoned Arab house for which their ambush site was named. The trucks that could still move closed up on Nebi Daniel, ringing it two deep in a circle like a wagon train drawn up to hold off an Indian raid.

  The gate was blown open. Men rushed inside to barricade windows and set four machine-gun positions on the roof. The armored cars that could still move inched from truck to truck along the line of stricken vehicles, rescuing their crews and bringing them into the besieged compound.

  No one could reach the men trapped in the barricade buster. All afternoon its crewmen, several of them wounded, held off the steadily advancing Arabs. After six hours their ammunition was gone and the men lay listless and exhausted on the floor. Toward sunset a pair of Molotov cocktails thumped against the car. Calmly, Zerubavel Horowitz, the commander, told his men they were free to make a break for safety any way they could. He would stay behind with his wounded. One by one, the others leaped out. As Yaacov Ai, the last man to leave, pushed through the door he caught a final glimpse of Horowitz standing among the wounded like "the captain of a sinking ship who refuses to desert his helpless passengers." Seconds later the burning vehicle exploded.

  As the afternoon wore one, the messages from the men and women trapped in the Nebi Daniel house grew increasingly desperate. Shaltiel asked Tel Aviv to mobilize the Haganah Air Service to "bomb" the Arabs' positions. The Haganah offered the best it could: an Auster and a Tigermoth, from whose windows Uzi Narciss and Amos Chorev dropped lengths of pipe stuffed with dynamite and fitted with a screw device that, hopefully, would explode them on impact.

  The news of the disaster swept rapidly through Jewish Jerusalem, casting a pall of gloom through the community. Few of its members did not have a friend or relative among the besieged. In Bet Hakerem, Benjamin Golani, a Russian-born mason, played with the dials of his radio set to intercept the voice of his son, the Haganah's radio operator in the besieged Old City. The voice he found that afternoon was not his son's, but it was almost as familiar. It belonged to his son-in-law Moshe, to whom, the evening before, Golani had confided his revolver, a magnificent Parabellum. Through his words from one of the ensnared armored cars, Golani learned he was caught in the Arab ambush less than ten miles away from his living room.

  The Jerusalem Haganah had put practically all its mobile forces into the trapped convoy. There was no reserve in the city capable of breaking through to the besieged men and women. Only one way of saving the one hundred and eighty people and the precious vehicles caught at Nebi Daniel was available. Shaltiel had to turn to the British for help.

  Their reaction to his first pleas was not enthusiastic. As District Commissioner James Pollock had already found out, the Palestine police "were not inclined to be very helpful." A group of them had practically mutinied when Pollock had ordered them out to study the situation. The Haganah, they had replied, had run their convoy against British orders and had left Kfar Etzion against British advice. Now they would just have to pay for the consequences of their "bloody-mindedness."

  Dublin-born Isaac Herzog, the Chief Rabbi of Palestine, violated the sanctity of the Sabbath by picking up his telephone to personally intervene with Sir Alan Cunningham, the High Commissioner. His son Vivian, the former Guards officer, raced from office to office beseeching the men whose uniform he had worn so long to save his fellows from a massacre.

  Both the British commander, Sir Gordon MacMillan, and his Jerusalem deputy, Brigadier C. P. Jones, were in Athens that weekend for a regional conference. The officer left in charge, Colonel George W. Harper of the Suffolk Regiment, had on earlier occasions proven helpful to the Haganah. Today he was caught in a dilemma. If he lost British soldiers extricating a convoy that had gone out against regulations, there would be hell to pay when MacMillan returned. On the other hand, if the men and women at Nebi Daniel were all murdered and the British had done nothing to save them, there would be hell to pay, too.

  Harper pushed a unit up the Hebron road until it ran into Arab mines. With darkness falling, he felt he could not risk going on. He ordered the unit back. The besieged Jews would have to get through the night as best they could.

  In the building at Nebi Daniel, the situation worsened steadily. The wounded littered the floor. Morphine, virtually the only medical supply the men had salvaged from the trucks, was almost gone. Yehuda Lash watched one dying man cling to a girl, caressing her body, "trying to hold on to her warmth as though it was life itself." When he died Lash heard the girl murmur, "It was all that I could do for him."

  Outside, the Arab ranks continued to grow. Under the cover of darkness they crept steadily closer to the ring of trucks protecting the house. Irekat saw one man from Bethlehem hurl his body and a Molotov cocktail into an armored car. Set ablaze by his own bomb, he rolled off into a ditch and died. Just after midnight, Irekat's men, led by Sheikh Hamoud of Hebron, tried to rush the house with a huge mine. The Jews spotted them seventy yards from success and drove them off with hand grenades. That stopped the Arabs' assaults. All night, however, the people trapped in the house could listen to them talking just beyond their ring of armored cars, waiting for dawn and the assault with which they would overwhelm Nebi Daniel.

  As bright and clear as the spring sunshine, a joyous wave of sound spilled over the rooftops of Jerusalem, driving for a moment the echo of gunfire from the Judean hills. As they had for centuries, the church bells of Jerusalem were announcing once again the miracle of Jesus Christ's resurrection from the tomb of Joseph of Arimathea.

  The gaps between the symbolic promise of Christ's sacrifice and the harsh human realities of Jerusalem that morning did not modify in any way the solemn liturgy of the day. Preceded by a deacon bearing a massive silver cross, the Latin Patriarch led the traditional parade of prelates and notables through the shadowy corridors of the Church of the Holy Sepulcher to the marble-faced chamber of Christ's Tomb. Tall and dignified, conscious of the fact that a Britisher was accomplishing this rite for the last time, District Commissioner James Pollock marched at the head of the diplomatic corps. In the district commissioner's pocket was a telegram, still another plea to the United Nations for an international police force for the city. The heads of Jerusalem's Christian communities, Armenian, Coptic, Greek and Latin, had presented it to Pollock. It was the first time in history, he thought sardonically, that the august heads of those communities had ever been able to agree on anything.

  The procession shuffled to a stop before the darkened tomb. The Patriarch bowed low, then solemnly proclaimed, "Christ is risen."

  "Christ is risen," came the reply from the line of men behind him. "Allelujah, peace to all mankind." Another Easter Sunday morning had come to Jerusalem.

  There was no peace at the gates of Jerusalem. The messages reaching the city from the house at Nebi Daniel were tense and faint now, as though the depleted batteries of the besieged men's radio had become the barometer of their own condition. Exhausted, dizzy with hunger, plagued by heat and smoke, the defenders rushed from gunport to gunport, sometimes tripping over the dead and dying lying on the floor.

  Outside, the ferocity of the Arabs' attacks intensified. They too had been without food for twenty-four hours. Some, who had gone without water since the battle started, dipped their kaffiyehs into dried-up wells to get them damp, then sucked the moisture from them to ease their thirst. But they had the promise of victory to drive them on. Toward ten o'clock, hundreds of them, covered by a smoke screen, began advancing on the house. At the same time, the defenders received a grim piece of news. A second British relief column en route to the site had stopped.

  Colonel Harper had stopped this time to begin negotiations with the Arabs for their surrender. It was going to be a c
ostly one. Communicating by radio with the Mufti in Cairo, Irekat demanded that everyone in the building be handed over as a prisoner of war. The British refused. Finally Irekat and the British agreed on terms that the Jewish Agency felt compelled to accept. Shaltiel's estimates of the risks of running a convoy out to Kfar Etzion would be proven low. To save the men and women trapped in Nebi Daniel, the Jerusalem commander was going to have to give up every one of his command's precious vehicles and all the arms he had culled from his strongpoints.

  Colonel Harper ordered the column forward again, fourteen half-tracks and five trucks preceded by an armored car. Behind it came a line of Red Cross ambulances for the dead and wounded.

  At Nebi Daniel, the firing was still going on. As the column rounded a curve, Jacques de Reynier of the Red Cross suddenly saw the house "small and alone in the middle of hell." On the road leading up to it, he noted "a sprawl of shattered, blackened vehicles and burned bodies, their heads and sexual organs carefully mutilated."

  The end came quickly. Colonel Harper explained the surrender terms and gave the Haganah commander three minutes to organize his people. Already the Arabs had begun to seep down the hillside to savor the spectacle. Inside the house, someone smashed the radio with an ax and tossed the bolts of the machine guns into a well. Then, blinking at the sunlight, covered with grease and smoke, the first man staggered out the door.

  The rest followed quickly, throwing their arms in a heap at Harper's feet. On the hillside, the Arabs watched the growing pile with noisy impatience. When the last of the thirteen dead and forty wounded had been carried from the house, Harper turned to Irekat.

  "It's all yours," he said.

  Less than an hour later, the survivors' convoy reached Jerusalem. Seeing the stunned, shocked faces staring up at them from the sidewalks, the men in the first truck began to sing. The others behind them joined in, until the echoes of their song rang through the streets. They were coming back from the worst defeat the Haganah had suffered at the hands of the Arabs, but to the worried citizens of Jerusalem they had decided to sing "Hatikvah," the Hope.