O Jerusalem!

by Larry Collins

  Shimon Avidan, the commander of the Palmach's Givati Brigade, one of Orde Wingate's first pupils, a heavyset man who had spent the war training Palestinian saboteurs to drop behind the German lines, was assigned to command Nachshon. Despite the requisitions from the regional commands, Avidan's arms situation remained crucial. Many of the men assigned to his operation were young recruits just out of training. Iska Shadmi, one of his company commanders, recalled that the troops assigned to him were "like kids on a youth movement outing. They came with their suitcases and boxes, they were romantic boys and girls. They carried no ammunition, but they had their possessions in small cases, the girls all with their books of Rachel, the poetess of the Kinneret."

  Shadmi lined them up and informed them that henceforth each person would carry just one knapsack. "Decide what you want, flowers or your clothes," he announced. Some of the girls started crying. "In a few days, with these kids, ten rifles and four machine guns," Shadmi thought, "I am going to have to go to war for a road to Jerusalem."

  The Arabs of Beit Darras had shown little interest in the run-down airfield handed over to them by its departing owners, the R.A.F. Its single landing strip was pocked with holes and scarred with clumps of grass. There was no control tower, no electricity, no fuel pump, no radio. Its only equipment consisted of two small wooden hangars. Yet as soon as darkness fell one night at the beginning of April, a column of trucks, lights out, drew up to the airstrip. Half of the men they carried silently set to work filling in the holes on the runway, while the others took up defensive positions around the field.

  As soon as the strip was serviceable, a chain of electric lights hooked to a portable generator was strung around the field. Then the men unloaded dozens of jerricans of aviation gasoline and stacked them in a hangar. Finally someone rigged up a control tower. It consisted of a portable radio transmitter set in the back of a truck. At ten o'clock, after just two hours of intensive efforts, the renovated airport of Beit Darras was ready to receive its first traffic.

  The radio operator began sending out his call signal. It was "Hassida," Hebrew for stork. If the Arabs had not been interested in the airfield, the Haganah was. Aaron Remez, the R.A.F. veteran who had promised his next-door neighbor David Ben-Gurion that "salvation comes from the sky," had borrowed the Arab airfield for a daring one-night operation. His hastily repaired airstrip was designed to share in the salvation of Jewish Jerusalem.

  Beside Remez, his radio operator repeated their insistent call, "Hassida." There was no reply. As the minutes dragged into hours and his calls to "Stork" remained unheard, a gradual sense of despair gripped Remez. Along the runway, the men who had worked so hard preparing the strip sat silently in the darkness listening for the sound of an airplane engine. They heard only the wind.

  The DC-4 for which they were waiting was miles away, droning steadily southward under an intermittently cloudy sky. The crew and owners of Ocean Trade Airways had come a long way from the bar of Paris' Hotel California. Their first stop after leaving Le Bourget Airport had been Prague. Ehud Avriel had been waiting for them to supervise the loading of the first of his arms destined to go into action against the enemy. Manifested as agricultural machinery bound for Addis Ababa, they were packed in the fuselage behind the crew, one hundred and forty Czech M-34 machine guns taken out of their crates to save weight, and thousands of rounds of ammunition.

  A fourth crewman had also joined the three Ocean Trade Airways owners—Amy Cooper, a Palestinian R.A.F. veteran with hours of flying time in the Middle East. The well-trained Cooper had been appalled by the condition of the DC-4. Its radio was so weak that it couldn't even receive the weather bulletins. Their celestial navigation had been hindered by a substantial cloud cover over most of their route, and Cooper feared it had been a highly approximate effort. Now, six hours out of Prague, they stumbled through the sky searching for a glimpse of the Palestine coast.

  Suddenly the pilot poked Cooper in the ribs. "Hey!" he shouted. "We're there! There's Tel Aviv!"

  The R.A.F. veteran stared down at the lights coming up under the starboard wing. Cooper was not a chauvinist, but the lights blinking below seemed to him rather feeble for the Jewish city. He grabbed a map and studied it intently.

  "My God!" he yelled after a moment. "That's Port Said! We're heading straight into Egypt!"

  The pilot abruptly swung the plane northward. Thirty minutes later they were over Tel Aviv. Cooper picked up the despairing calls for "Stork" and ordered the field to flash its lights three times when they heard the sound of the plane's engines. A few minutes later, gobbling up every inch of the little runway, the Ocean Trade Airways DC-4 settled down at Beit Darras.

  From his window, Cooper could see the men alongside the runway jumping up and down at the miraculous sight of the plane gliding to a landing on their strip. Seconds later they swarmed over the aircraft. The astonished Italian, Irishman and Jew from New York who had flown arms to Beit Darras as they might fly cigarettes to Naples were acclaimed like heroes, a greeting markedly in contrast to that which they were accustomed to receiving.

  Shimon Avidan, the commander of Operation Nachshon, expressed his own deep relief in a different manner. He climbed into the DC-4's fuselage and began to kiss his one hundred and forty new machine guns one by one.

  Samir Jabour was the son of a cobbler in Jaffa, a lean young man with a luxuriant black pompadour, tawny skin and melancholy brown eyes. Jabour had not wasted his youth at his father's cobbler's bench. He lived at night, in the half-lit little bars along the sea where Jaffa blended into Tel Aviv and sex did not distinguish between Arab and Jew. On one of his rounds, he met a dowdy, unhappy brunette named Rachel P. Despite her appearance, Jabour rarely left her side after their first encounter. It was her occupation that interested the young Arab. Rachel was a secretary at the Jewish Agency in Tel Aviv. Jabour was a clandestine agent of the Arab Higher Committee.

  Twenty-four hours after Ehud Avriel's plane had made its brief visit to Beit Darras, Jabour was able to inform Abdul Khader Husseini's headquarters that the Jews had held a major meeting in Tel Aviv to prepare a "big onslaught" on the road to Jerusalem. They would try to drive the Arabs from the heights above Bab el Wad. They were going to use an "enormous" number of men to do it and there were reports that they had received new arms to help them. For an intelligence service as primitive as the Arab Higher Committee's, it was an astonishingly accurate report.

  Abdul Khader had been expecting a major Jewish effort on the road. His foes, he knew, could not allow him to isolate the city. What alarmed him more was Jabour's report of "new arms." With the exception of the arms seized at Nebi Daniel, his armament was the same heteroclite collection of weapons with which he had started his campaign, supplemented by occasional gleanings from the Western Desert. Given his great numerical superiority, that had been enough to keep the poorly armed Jerusalem Haganah on the defensive. A major assault from the coast with new arms was a different matter.

  Abdul Khader immediately set out for Damascus to demand the delivery of the modern weapons he had been promised for weeks. Husseini and his aide Emile Ghory found the atmosphere in the Syrian capital "depressing." The United States' trusteeship proposal had prompted the Arab leaders, it seemed to Ghory, to "overreact as always, to behave as though the war was won and they could now throw up their hands and wait for the General Assembly to save them." The rivalries dividing the Arabs were as intense as ever, and Abdul Khader noted a growing hostility to his kinsman Haj Amin.

  He opened his first meeting in Damascus by describing the military situation. Then he revealed his information on the forthcoming Jewish attack. The Haganah's aim, he predicted, would be to capture the hilltop village of Kastel, because, he said, "whoever holds Kastel controls the road to Jerusalem." Once the Haganah had succeeded in reopening the road to the city, they would be free to strike at Jaffa and Haifa, he declared.

  "We are prepared to fight to the last man," Abdul Khader vowed, "but we have no effective arms.
You have been promising us modern arms for months, but all you have sent us is a lot of camel shit from the Western Desert." Give him artillery and modern rifles, he pleaded, and his guerrillas would turn back the Jewish attacks.

  His pleas left Ismail Safwat Pasha, the Iraqi named to head the Arab League's military effort, unmoved. The regular Arab officers around Safwat did not esteem Abdul Khader's capacities as highly as did his Jewish foes. Nor did his allegiance to the Mufti encourage their confidence. His men, Safwat told Abdul Khader, were not experienced enough with artillery to be trusted with it. The Jews, he said, would probably overrun their positions and capture the guns. As for arms, the shipload of Czech rifles heading for Beirut was already earmarked for Kaukji's Liberation Army. Abdul Khader would have to get along with what he had. In any event, Safwat assured him, 'if the Haganah captures Haifa or Jaffa, we'll hand them back to you in two weeks."

  Normally Abdul Khader was an undemonstrative man, but at Safwat's words he quite literally turned red with fury. Seizing a folder of papers from the desk between them, he smashed it over the Iraqi's head. "You are a traitor!" he shouted.

  "You will hang on to Jerusalem with your teeth," David Ben-Gurion growled to Dov Joseph. His tone was more controlled than Abdul Khader Husseini's in Damascus had been, but the passion behind it was no less intense. The Canadian lawyer had flown from Jerusalem to Tel Aviv on Ben-Gurion's order, in the fragile Piper Cub that linked the city to the coast. The success of Operation Nachshon would be measured, Ben-Gurion knew, by the amount of food thrust into Jerusalem while the road was open. He wanted one man in charge, one man who would be totally responsible, who would see to it that at all costs Jerusalem would not be forced in the future to give in from lack of food.

  He had designated Joseph as that man. He would have absolute authority, Ben-Gurion told him. He instructed the Jewish Agency's treasurer, Eliezer Kaplan, to make available whatever sums Joseph needed.

  "When can you start?" Ben-Gurion asked.

  "When do you want?" replied Joseph.

  "Right now!" said Ben-Gurion.

  It was after midnight. Joseph got up, filled with a terrible sense of apprehension. Ben-Gurion's charge had been powerful and bruising, and Joseph realized the problem was now his alone. "Good God!" he thought. "How horrible if I don't succeed."

  Joseph took over an office in a nearby building and called in a number of Haganah men. They worked all night. The Canadian calculated that if he could get three thousand tons of food to Jerusalem, he could feel safe. He gave his Haganah colleagues a rough outline of what Jerusalem needed. They, in turn, gave Joseph a list of all the food wholesalers in Tel Aviv. At dawn, carrying an order from Joseph, Haganah men placed a seal on every food warehouse in the city. Not a can of beans was to leave them until Joseph had first made his selections for Jerusalem.

  Two Haganah veterans of the British Army, Harry Jaffe and Bronislav Bar-Shemer, were assigned the job of organizing the convoys that would carry Joseph's supplies to Jerusalem. The Canadian told them they would need a minimum of three hundred trucks. After two days of scouring Tel Aviv's trucking firms, Bar-Shemer had managed to assemble barely sixty vehicles. To get the rest, he chose a simple expedient. He decided to hijack them.

  "I took the Haganah boys from their training camps and sent them to the busy intersections," he later recalled. "They started stopping every truck that came along. I don't know who was more scared, the drivers or the soldiers pointing their guns at them, telling them to drive to a big empty field at Kiryat Meir."

  Every time a score of trucks had collected in his playing field, Bar-Shemer formed their loudly protesting drivers into a convoy and, under the command of his teenage soldiers and their Sten guns, packed them off to the assembly point for the Nachshon convoys, an abandoned British Army camp called Kfar Bilu. The drivers were the most disgruntled group of human beings Bar-Shemer had ever seen. "They hated our guts," he remembered. "None of them had any idea of what was happening." Some of them, Bar-Shemer knew, "had wives who were giving birth and here we'd kidnapped them at high noon or in the middle of night." Fortunately for Bar-Shemer, most of those drivers owned their trucks, and the vehicles represented their livelihood. They were not inclined to abandon them to Bar-Shemer, not even for a wife in childbirth.

  Feeding his group of captive drivers soon became a serious problem. A firm believer in direct action, Bar-Shemer walked into one of the Tel Aviv's most popular restaurants, Chaskal's. "The Jewish nation needs you," he told its owner, Yecheskel Weinstein. In about three minutes' time Bar-Shemer explained what he required and placed a truck and a squad of soldiers at Weinstein's disposition. It was eleven o'clock in the morning. At five o'clock in the afternoon Weinstein was ladling out a hot meal to four hundred men at Kfar Bilu.

  20

  SIX WORDS ON A BUMPER

  THE LEGIONS of Rome had been the first to fortify the rocky outcropping at the summit of the steep slope up which the men stealthily picked their way. To the north, across the gorges of Bab el Wad, was the peak of Nebi Samuel, where, according to legend, the Prophet had sat in judgment on the fallen nation of Israel, the Maccabees had fasted before their assault on Jerusalem, and Richard the Lionhearted had wept at his first view of the Holy City. To the east, the naked eye could glimpse Jerusalem's outskirts. Just below the 2,500-foot-high peak, as exposed and vulnerable as an open nerve, lay the road to Jerusalem.

  For twenty centuries, as a Roman camp, a Crusader castle, a Turkish bunker, that lonely, windswept promontory has been a strategic height, the natural guardian of Jerusalem's western approaches. Now, on this dark and rainy April night, the 180 men of the Palmach's Har-el Brigade climbing through its groves of fig trees were fresh proof of its eternal vocation. A few feet above their heads slept Kastel, the village that Abdul Khader had prophesied in Damascus would be the Haganah's first objective.

  Operation Nachshon's plan called for two preliminary operations: a diversionary attack near Ramie, to lure back into the town the Arab guerrillas deployed north of the Jerusalem road just before Bab el Wad, and the capture of Kastel.

  Uzi Narciss, one of the two men who had "bombed" the attackers at Kfar Etzion, posted a machine gun at either end of the village. Just after midnight he attacked. The fifty-odd armed men in the village were no match for Narciss' force. Rounding up the villagers, they abandoned Kastel and fled into the night. For the first time since partition, an Arab village was in Jewish hands.

  Shortly after noon the following day, Saturday, April 3, seventy men of the Jerusalem Haganah arrived to relieve Narciss' Palmach force. Their commander was a stern curly-haired Latvian named Mordechai Gazit who aspired to be one of the Jewish nation's first diplomats. Narciss ordered Gazit to set up a defensive perimeter around the area, then to destroy the village so that the Arabs could no longer use it as a base for their forays on the road.

  When word of Kastel's fall reached Damascus, Abdul Khader Husseini immediately ordered his Jerusalem headquarters to retake the village. Once again the messengers of Kamal Irekat rushed from hamlet to hamlet, this time calling for men to help free Kastel.

  By sundown, Irekat was ready to begin his attack. The procedure was simple. He shouted, "Nashamdi! Let those who are ready go!" and started to run for the first Jewish positions, in the Tzuba rock quarry in front of Kastel. Four hundred men followed him, crying, "Allah akhbar! God is great!" Many insisted on wearing their white kaffiyehs even though they were easily visible in the darkness, because tradition held it a shame for a Bedouin to remove his headdress in battle. They swept the Jews from their trenches and forced them back into the quarry buildings. All night the Arabs tried unsuccessfully to drive them out of that refuge.

  The arrival at dawn of reinforcements under Ibrahim Abou Dayieh, the Hebron shepherd commanding the Arabs in Katamon, recharged their spirits. A new assault drove the Haganah from the quarry buildings. Then, with another whooping rush, Irekat's men swept the Jews back to the outskirts of Kastel itself. By now, however, the
Arabs were exhausted. Most of them had been without food for twenty-four hours.

  Irekat sent messengers to the villages near Kastel for help. Within an hour, singing and chanting the undulating Arab war cry behind their veils, the black-robed village women came streaming up to the battle site balancing on their heads baskets of eggs, leban cheese, olives, tomatoes and flat round loaves of Arabic bread.

  The attack resumed. Gazit's men had not had time to start destroying the village, and now they turned each house into a strongpoint to hold off Irekat's attackers. Halfway through this assault, the Arabs suddenly ran out of ammunition. Just as no one had thought of food in the headlong rush to Kastel, so, too, no one had been concerned with the ammunition supply. Another swarm of messengers fanned out across the countryside.

  John Glubb, commander of the Arab Legion, saw one of them in Ramallah running through the streets shouting, "Has anyone ammunition for sale? I pay cash." Before the Englishman's astonished eyes, he bought two hundred rounds of ammunition, some Turkish, some German, some English, then leaped into his car and set off to repeat the process in the next town.

  By sunset, enough new ammunition had been hauled up to the outskirts of Kastel on muleback to allow the assault to begin again. Shortly after midnight, with his men within hand-grenade range of Gazit's seventy beleaguered Haganah troops, Irekat was wounded. His only medic, a hospital employee from Bethlehem, treated the leader with the sole first-aid kit available to his five hundred villagers. Then, over Irekat's loud protests, the medic strapped him onto a mule for the trip back to Jerusalem.