O Jerusalem!

by Larry Collins

  The echoes of other songs rang over the desolate hills around Kfar Etzion. From their rocky ridge the settlers stared in silence at the spectacle passing before them. Jubilant and triumphant, Kamal Irekat's warriors rolled down to Hebron in the remains of the powerful convoy that had come to succor them, brandishing the scores of captured arms they would soon turn on the colony.

  Late that evening, a shaken young man arrived at the home of Benjamin Golani. It was Moshe, the son-in-law to whom Golani had given his prized Parabellum thirty-six hours earlier. The gun was gone, Moshe sadly revealed, but no Arab would use it on the settlers of Kfar Etzion. Solemnly he reached into his pocket and passed his father-in-law a piece of metal. It was the hammer of his Parabellum.

  Two of the most disconsolate young men in Palestine sat glumly before David Ben-Gurion. Yigal Yadin, who had ordered the Jerusalem command to put everything available into the Nebi Daniel convoy, and Mishael Shacham, who had commanded it, had come to examine the consequences of the disaster with the Jewish leader. To Yadin, the convoy's loss would always be "the darkest moment of our struggle."

  Indeed, wherever they might look in those last days of March 1948, the leaders of the as yet unborn Jewish state could find cause to despair. The Arabs were winning the battle for the roads. Communications with the Yishuv's isolated settlements were cut or being maintained at great sacrifice. The whole north of Palestine was threatened by the still-unmeasured menace of Fawzi el Kaukji's Liberation Army. Internationally, the tide of public opinion which had helped sustain the Zionist cause in November had receded as Arab resistance had made a peaceful application of the partition plan appear unlikely. The Zionists' principal diplomatic ally, the United States, had turned on them with a damaging arms embargo and the trusteeship proposals.

  There were, of course, bright spots in the picture. No Jewish-held ground had been lost to the Arabs. The local arms factories, the need for which Ben-Gurion and Haim Slavine had foreseen three years before, were coming into production. In Europe, Ehud Avriel and his colleagues had been remarkably successful in purchasing arms. Not a single shipment of those arms, however, had yet reached Palestine.

  Still, the fact remained that the Haganah was almost everywhere on the defensive and that the defeats inflicted on it had come, not from the enemies Ben-Gurion feared most, the regular Arab armies, but from the guerrillas of Abdul Khader Husseini. The able Arab chieftain was on the verge of making good his vow to strangle Jerusalem. Since the convoy whose trucks had been lost at Nebi Daniel had slipped into the city, not a single Jewish vehicle had gotten through Bab el Wad. One small convoy had been wiped out. Two others, much larger, had been beaten back by the Arabs. With the road cut, one sixth of the entire Jewish settlement in Palestine was now isolated and menaced by starvation. Clearly the current was running against the Jews, and if it were not reversed, the Yishuv was going to face disaster.

  To David Ben-Gurion, Jerusalem was the foundation on which all else would stand or fall. The loss of the Nebi Daniel convoy, Abdul Khader's success in closing the road at Bab el Wad, gave the city's plight an immediacy which could not be ignored. "The High Commissioner," Ben-Gurion told his visitors, "gave us a solemn promise to keep the road open and he has failed to keep his word. Now it is up to us to open it."

  Yadin proposed a scheme to Ben-Gurion that, by the standards to which the Haganah was accustomed, was bold and imaginative. It called for the use of four hundred men, far more than the Haganah had ever employed in a single operation.

  Ben-Gurion blew up. "What do you mean, four hundred men?" he barked at Yadin. "That's not going to open anything up. The Arabs," he told his young planning officer, "understand the importance of Jerusalem even if you don't. They know if they can get Jerusalem and one hundred thousand Jews in their clutches it will be all over for us, and this state of ours will be finished before it's even begun. We can't save Jerusalem with these little efforts of four hundred men."

  Call all the regional commanders of the Haganah to Tel Aviv immediately, he ordered Yadin. Together they would draw up a proper plan to relieve Jerusalem.

  When Yadin and Shacham had left, Ben-Gurion went to his desk and drafted a message to the devoted Viennese he had ordered to Europe to buy arms four months before. If ever the Yishuv needed those arms, it was now, and there was no trace of the affection he bore Ehud Avriel in the angry words soon spurting to Europe over the transmitter "Shoshanna."

  "Your arms will not save Jerusalem in Prague," Ben-Gurion declared. "Get them to Palestine any way you can."

  19

  "HANG ON TO JERUSALEM WITH YOUR TEETH."

  JERUSALEM'S PLIGHT could be measured in a chart wrapped in an orange folder and locked into the upper right-hand desk drawer of Dov Joseph, the Canadian lawyer who had been ordered to prepare the city for a siege. It recorded the quantity of twenty-one basic commodities ranging from flour to laundry soap, tea and dried meat available in Jerusalem's warehouses. On Monday March 29, 1948, the day David Ben-Gurion called for a meeting of the commanders of the Haganah to open the road to Jerusalem, Joseph's chart showed that the city had on hand a five-day supply of margarine, four days of macaroni, ten days of dried meat.

  There were no fresh meat, fruit or vegetables available in its markets. If eggs could be found, they were sold for twenty cents apiece. The city was living off its slender reserves of canned and packaged food: sardines, macaroni and dried beans. David Shaltiel's Haganah soldiers received a daily ration of four slices of bread covered with a syrupy spread called Cocozine, a bowl of soup, a can of sardines and a couple of potatoes. They were the best-fed people in Jerusalem.

  Dov Joseph had avoided instituting rationing as long as possible so as not to create a climate of insecurity in the city. Now it began with a vengeance. Adults were allowed, for example, two hundred grams, about four slices, of bread a day. For children, Joseph proclaimed a special supplementary ration. It consisted of one egg and fifty grams of margarine a week.

  Nor was food the only staple in short supply in the city. No kerosene had reached Jerusalem since February. Housewives had begun using DDT and Flit as cooking fuel. People learned how to improvise. Anyone with a patch of land or a window box tried to grow a few vegetables. For those who did not even own a flowerpot, a handful of erudite biologists at Hebrew University suggested hydroponics, a technique for growing vegetables in water without soil. Soaked cotton was recommended for nurturing seedlings.

  In the cafés among the ruins of Ben Yehuda Street where off-duty Haganah soldiers gathered, the standard drink was a "champagne" which would have curdled the palate of a French vintner. It was a mixture of a little white wine, lemon squash and a splash of soda water. Every Haganah soldier received three cigarettes a day; members of the elite Palmach got five. Usually a cigarette was passed from hand to hand among half a dozen soldiers so no precious wisp of smoke was wasted.

  Occasionally help came from the enemy. One night Chaim Haller heard a soft whistle coming from beyond the barbed wire ringing his home in Katamon. Creeping to the sound in the dark, he found Salome, the elderly Arab woman who had been his maid for years. She passed him a few tomatoes through the wire, whispering, "I know you have nothing."

  In view of the city's plight, the United Nations Security Council called for a truce in Jerusalem. The Mufti's Arab Higher Committee, however, sensing that victory was within its grasp, vehemently rejected the plea. The position of the city's one hundred thousand Jews would become untenable, its spokesman boasted, "when we cut off the water supply and put three hundred barricades between Jerusalem and the sea." For its part, the Jewish Agency gratefully announced it would accept a truce from any source whatsoever provided it left the approaches to the city open. The Agency had, in fact, tried once again on March 26 to get the Christian West to accept the obligations implicit in internationalizing Jerusalem, by calling for a force of ten thousand Danish and Norwegian troops. That request got no more response than had the similar pleas which preceded it.

&
nbsp; Clearly, the Jews of Jerusalem could count only on their own determination to survive and on whatever help the rest of the Yishuv could bring them. Studying the figures in his little orange folder, Dov Joseph knew that rationing the supplies he had encouraged householders to build up at home could stretch a bit here, save a bit there. Those measures would only be palliatives, however. Unless the Haganah could reopen the road to the city, the one hundred thousand Jews of Jerusalem were going to be starved into submission long before the British left Palestine. There was no more concrete evidence of that than the last entry on the first line of Dov Joseph's chart. It showed that on Monday March 29, 1948, his warehouses contained exactly thirty-four tons and 226 kilograms of flour, enough to provide each Jewish resident of Jerusalem with just six slices of bread.

  For a pastry cook from Toronto, Canada, Julius Lewis was demonstrating an extraordinary interest in the technical jargon of the three Americans beside him in the bar of Paris' Hotel California. They wore identical dark-blue uniforms still bearing the brass buttons of the organization from which they had bought them second hand, Pan American World Airways. Together with an aging DC-4 hangared at Le Bourget Airport, they constituted the corporate executives, flying personnel, shareholders and capital resources of Ocean Trade Airways, a chartered airline incorporated in Panama. With their old DC-4, the three men made a modest if adventuresome living on the fringes of legality by flying items like nylons, cigarettes, perfume and whiskey around Europe.

  They accepted Lewis' offer of a drink with the same alacrity with which they accepted his subsequent invitation to dinner at the Jour et Nuit, a restaurant a few doors away at the corner of the Champs-Elysées. There, over coffee, Lewis revealed that he was in fact an Englishman, a six-year veteran of the R.A.F., and that his real name was Freddy Fredkens. His occupation had little to do with baking pastries. He was an agent of the Haganah and he had received his current assignment from Ehud Avriel a few minutes before coming downstairs to the California bar. The presence of the three owners of the Ocean Trade Airways in the bar had been a fortunate coincidence for all concerned. Fredkens had a charter to propose. It would be the most highly paid assignment Ocean Trade Airways had ever undertaken. Fredkens suggested they fly, for ten thousand dollars, a cargo of Czech arms from Prague to Palestine.

  One by one, the commanders of the Haganah crowded into the little second-floor study of the house on Keren Kayemet Street where three years earlier David Ben-Gurion had received his American diplomat heading home from Yalta. As each man arrived, Paula Ben-Gurion passed him a cup of tea. When the last of them had settled into place, Ben-Gurion began.

  "We are here," he said, "to find a way to open the road to Jerusalem. We have three vital centers, Tel Aviv, Haifa and Jerusalem. We can still survive if we lose one of them—provided the one we lose is not Jerusalem. The Arabs have calculated correctly that the subjection of Jewish Jerusalem, its capture or its destruction would deal a severe and possibly fatal blow to the Yishuv and break its will and its ability to withstand Arab aggression. We are going to have to take risks. We have got to get the Jerusalem road open no matter how great the risks involved are."

  To do it, the Haganah would have to do something it had never done before, he said. It would have to cast off the techniques of an underground army and operate for the first time in the open, in strength, in pursuit of a precise geographic objective. Ben-Gurion wanted fifteen hundred men assembled for the operation by taking the best troops and best equipment from each of the Haganah's regional commands.

  When he had finished, there was a moment of silence. The forcefulness of Ben-Gurion's exposition, his concern for the safety of Jerusalem, had struck each man in the room. The need for the operation he proposed was evident; but so were the risks it involved. He was asking them to commit a terrible share of their men and arms to a single action. Every other front in Palestine would be critically exposed while it went on. If it involved the loss of a substantial number of arms it would be a disaster. Listening to him, Joseph Avidar, the Ukrainian miller's son running the Haganah arms stores, knew that the Jewish Army that night could count on barely ten thousand modern weapons in all of Palestine. The Golani Brigade in the exposed north had, according to Avidar's figures, 162 rifles and 188 Sten guns. Above all, after the loss of the Kfar Etzion convoy, the Haganah could not risk another defeat. Whatever its outcome, the operation that Ben-Gurion proposed would be a turning point in the struggle for Palestine.

  At midnight, Ben-Gurion at their head, the Haganah commanders got into two cars and drove to their Red House headquarters to begin requisitioning the arms and men the operation would require. All night long, messengers on bicycles pedaled back and forth between Red House and their transmitter hidden behind a toilet in the basement of a nearby radio repair shop. As each message left, Joseph Avidar noted down the number of arms and rounds of ammunition it called for with the anxiety of a man watching his life's savings being swept from his bank account by some unforeseen emergency.

  Shortly before dawn, one of the weary men in Red House proposed a name for the hazardous operation they had agreed to undertake. They would call it Operation Nachshon, after the first Hebrew who, according to legend, dared accept the challenge of the unknown by marching into the parting waters of the Red Sea during the flight from Egypt.

  For a man who had come to Palestine to drive all the Jews into the sea, Fawzi el Kaukji was displaying a disarming civility toward his Jewish guest. Yehoshua Palmon, the astute Haganah intelligence agent, had finally realized his ambition. For almost two hours he had been squatting cross-legged on the floor of Kaukji's headquarters in the village of Nuri Shams, chatting amiably with him about theology, the history of the Middle East, and the conflict between their peoples. Now Palmon delicately turned the subject to the Mufti.

  To his surprise, Kaukji, despite the presence of a dozen of his subordinates, launched into a bitter tirade against "the manner in which the Husseinis murder people." Haj Amin, he said, had "political ambitions in Jordan and Syria which are not in the interests of the Arab nation and which every patriotic Arab should oppose."

  Palmon cautiously inserted Abdul Khader's name into the conversation. Abdul Khader, Kaukji said, was scheming against him, too. Then he let slip two sentences which in themselves justified all the risks Palmon had taken in striving for this meeting. "I don't care if your people fight him," Kaukji told Palmon. "In fact, I hope you do fight him and give him a good lesson. If you do, he is not going to be able to count on me for any help."

  With that, the Arab general launched into a further, astonishingly frank declaration. "I must avenge myself for the defeat of my forces at Tirat Zvi," he said. "I must fight you and beat you in the Valley of Jezreel in a few days." Palmon was sure Kaukji would be true to his word. He had realized that Kaukji, like the Mufti, had political ambitions, and victories were the fuel he needed to sustain them.

  Back in his own base, Palmon reflected on the extraordinary conversation. In addition to what Kaukji had told him, he had come away with one distinct impression. His stay in Germany had influenced Kaukji far more than Palmon had realized. The man who prized the Iron Cross above all other decorations wanted desperately to run the kind of battle the Germans ran, to be a German general. The only problem was that Kaukji's soldiers were Arabs, not Germans, and they were trained for guerrilla actions, not blitzkriegs. For the moment one thing remained to be done. That night every Jewish settlement in the valley of Jezreel was placed on the alert.

  Operation Nachshon, the drive to open the road to Jerusalem, rested on a simple strategy. Since it was clear that the road could not be reopened by ramming bigger convoys into Bab el Wad, Nachshon would try to temporarily establish a Jewish-held corridor on both sides of the road, six miles wide in the plains, one to two miles broad in the hills beyond. That belt of land would encompass the dozen Arab villages upon whose support Abdul Khader Husseini depended in his campaign to close the road.

  From Deir Mahsir in the
west to Kastel and Kolonia in the east, that chain of villages represented a Palestine far older than the British mandate and Zionism's early pioneers. Their stone huts, bleached the color of stale milk chocolate by decades of sun, clung like barnacles to the desolate hills of Judea. Scattered around them, sad little beads of broken-stone fences terraced the land in a vain effort to fix the few patches of topsoil that still remained on to the hillside. Those villages grew figs and olives, and, a few months before, the hands that were now striving to close the road to Jerusalem had cultivated the vegetables that had nourished the city. On the hillsides the villagers pastured sheep destined for the animal souk of Herod's Gate in Jerusalem during the Moslem feast of Bairam marking the end of Ramadan.

  Few of the villages had electricity; none of them had water or telephones. The primary means of communication between them remained horseback and foot. Their social structure was primitive, but it had proven impervious to the mandate's efforts to change it. Two buildings dominated each town, a mosque and the home of the mukhtar, the headman, a post usually passed from father to son. The mukhtar ran the village, and in his house the men gathered daily to sip coffee and argue and, if they were fortunate, to listen to news of great consequence on a battery-powered radio.

  Abdul Khader's bands could not operate without those villages as their base. They provided him food and a pool of supplementary manpower that could be swiftly called into battle. While the Haganah was moving convoys up to Jerusalem through its Operation Nachshon corridor, the Palmach's Har-el Brigade under Yitzhak Rabin, a young officer of whom the world would hear a great deal two decades later, would have the mission of razing those villages. By "not leaving stone on stone and driving all the people away, there was not going to be a village for anybody to come back to," Rabin realized, and "without those villages the Arab bands were not going to be able to operate effectively any more." Then, when the operation was finished, the Haganah could safely go back to the convoy system.