O Jerusalem!

by Larry Collins

  Irekat knew well the psychology of his village warriors. Products of the hierarchical structure of their villages, they tended to magnify the importance of the leader, to erect around his person a kind of cult. Guided by an able man, those villagers were capable of acts of great bravery. Without a galvanic presence to rally them, however, their organization risked rapid disintegration.

  As Irekat had feared it would, that was exactly what happened on that night of Sunday, April 4. Gazit and his men, bracing for the Arabs' final assault, suddenly saw their foes start to wander off the battlefield. They were going home to their villages. By dawn Monday, barely a hundred of them remained. Kastel was still firmly in Jewish hands.

  Three men whispered together like conspirators in the predawn darkness on Jerusalem's King George V Avenue just opposite the shuttered windows of Yarden's coffeehouse. They represented the Stern Gang, the Irgun and the Haganah. The Haganah man noted with satisfaction that there was no one in the deserted street to observe their conversation. Yeshurun Schiff had every reason to cloak their meeting in secrecy. He was the adjutant of a man who bore a special loathing for the two dissident groups, David Shaltiel. Yet Schiff had invited them to this darkened street corner to ask them to come to Shaltiel's aid.

  The Jerusalem commander's forces were stretched so thin he had no reserves to relieve Gazit's harassed men at Kastel and those in an equally difficult situation at the Jewish settlement of Motza below the captured Arab village. Schiff wanted the Stern Gang and the Irgun to employ their forces in an attack on the rock quarries at Tzuba and thus relieve Arab pressure on Kastel and Motza.

  As Schiff expected, his request did not arouse the sympathy of the two organizations. Neither was inclined to come to the aid of a man whom they considered almost as much of an enemy as the Arabs. Jealous of their independence, wary of Shaltiel's motives, they had maintained their refusal to cooperate with his command. They told Schiff they would give him an answer the following night. If they agreed, however, there would be a price to pay. They would expect the Haganah to reward them with a substantial supply of arms and grenades.

  The following night, the two organizations conveyed their agreement to Schiff and claimed the materiel promised them. Neither group, however, had any intention of attacking the rock quarries at Tzuba. Yoshua Zetler, leader of the Stern Gang, and Mordechai Ra'anan, chief of the Irgun, wanted Shaltiel's additional arms to secure a victory of their own, a dramatic victory that would demonstrate their dynamism to Jewish Jerusalem and force its leadership to recognize their claims in the city. They had settled upon a target for their action. Its reputation, its size and proximity, promised a victory as easy as it would be dramatic. It was a community of stonecutters on Jerusalem's western outskirts, the village of Deir Yassin to which Alia Darwish had been borne for her wedding a few days before.

  Redolent with the stench of rotting onions, the dumpy little tramp steamer sailed up to a berth in Tel Aviv harbor. A sniff of her cargo hold assured the port's British customs inspectors of the accuracy of the S.S. Nora's manifest. As soon as they cleared her for unloading, a horde of stevedores swarmed over the ship. Frantically they clawed aside the onions to get at her real cargo, thousands of Czech rifles and machine guns. Chartered after so many difficulties, Ehud Avriel's first freighter had arrived with providential timing. Operation Nachshon was due to begin in just twenty-four hours. The Nora's arms could mean the difference between victory and defeat in the hours ahead.

  As fast as the stevedores could pull them out of the Nora's hold, the weapons—still enclosed in a thick coat of grease—were packed onto trucks and rushed to the Haganah units assigned to Nachshon. Iska Shadmi, who had ordered the recruits of his company to choose between clothes or flowers, got his consignment at ten o'clock at night. He had nothing with which to clean off the grease, and his unit was scheduled to go into action before dawn. Like many others of his generation of Palmachniks, Shadmi had been nourished on a book on the conquest of Kazakhstan, The Men of Pompillo. Seek the dramatic, the unexpected solution, was its message.

  Shadmi pondered a moment. Then he called his company together. He ordered the men to strip off their undershorts. That solved the problem of cloths to wipe off the grease. The girls he told to unravel strands of barbed wire so that they would have a tool to ram the cloths down the rifle barrels.

  For the first time since he had joined the Palmach, Shadmi had enough ammunition, but he had nothing in which to carry it. He ordered his recruits to fill their socks with cartridges, then tie them to their belts.

  Haim Laskov, a British Army veteran commanding another infantry company, received a consignment of MG-34 machine guns. None of his men knew how to fire them. Laskov found a former British Army machine-gunner to demonstrate them for the company. To Laskov's horror, he discovered that the guns would fire only one round at a time. Laskov rushed a car to Tel Aviv to locate an ordnance expert. While his men awaited the order to move out, the expert scratched away on the guns' defective firing pins with an old file, putting as many of them as he could into working order.

  Assembled into three battalions of five hundred men each, the Jewish forces opened their attack at nine o'clock in the evening of April 5. The first companies quickly seized an abandoned British Army base and two Arab villages in the area adjacent to the convoy's planned departure point. The men behind them moved up into the hills above Bab el Wad to seize the heights dominating the road. They encountered ferocious resistance from the Arabs. The villages of Saris and Beit Mahsir repulsed their attacks, but the Jewish soldiers were finally able to seize positions between the villages and the road.

  Farther east, the key village of Kastel was already in Haganah hands, but just beyond it Arab forces crossed the road and attacked the Jewish settlement of Motza. Their action threatened to cut at that one vital point the highway now open along the rest of its length.

  Despite the setbacks, the operation's opening phase was a success. By midnight, the gorge of Bab el Wad and its flanks were controlled by the Haganah. The order was radioed back to start the first convoy through.

  The former British Army camp of Kfar Bilu swarmed with Bronislav Bar-Shemer's kidnapped truck drivers, mechanics, Haganah men, all milling around the stocks of goods commandeered on Dov Joseph's orders from Tel Aviv's warehouses. To load them onto the waiting trucks, the Haganah had rounded up a team of Salonikan stevedores from the port of Tel Aviv. Squat, heavily muscled men whose leaders had ordered them a special diet of sardines, rice, apples and cheese, they set to work by the flickering glare of torches.

  "It was like an automatic chain belt," the wondering Tel Aviv restaurateur Yecheskel Weinstein recalled. "Every five minutes they loaded a truck. Two young boys stood beside them playing a guitar while they worked. Greek music filled the night and those stevedores kept heaving crates and sacks of food to one another without a break in their rhythm."

  Standing by the side of the road in the darkness, Bar-Shemer watched the trucks set off. There was an incredible variety of vehicles in that line passing before his eyes. There were vans from the Tnuvah dairy, Bedfords, Fords, factory trucks, delivery vans, heavy Mack dump trucks, open kibbutz farm trucks, White semitrailers, Rio hay wagons. They came in every size, shape and color imaginable, many of them splashed with posters advertising soap, baby food, a kosher butcher in Haifa, a brick kiln in Ramat Gan or a shoe factory in Tel Aviv. The light ones came first. The heavier, slower vehicles brought up the rear, each rigged out with a steel cable to take in tow the trucks that faltered along the way.

  None of them had its lights on. Bar-Shemer had seen to that. His men had meticulously removed the bulbs from every headlight in the convoy so that no panicky flick of a light switch would illuminate the column for Arab snipers. Their escorts swung on board as they rolled past the kibbutz of Hulda. Iska Shadmi landed in a load of potatoes and quickly dug himself a foxhole.

  Looking up at the sullen, fearful faces of those drivers his men had kidnapped a few days befor
e, Bar-Shemer thought, "If looks could kill, I'd be dead." From his vantage point he followed their progress, a long column stretching out in the moonlight like an immense caterpillar. "The delicious odor of orange blossoms," he noted, "filled the night." Ahead, the road ran straight and flat for six miles up to a gentle hilltop rising on the left. There the steeple and the ochre façade of the Trappist Monastery of Latrun towered above a stand of olive trees. Then an easy arc to the right past the monastery's vineyards brought the column to the foothills marking the entry to Bab el Wad. Waiting for the last truck to leave Hulda so that he could fall in at the end of the convoy, Bar-Shemer noted far off in the distance the echo of sporadic rifle fire. "They're moving into Bab el Wad," he thought.

  Riding at the head of the column, Harry Jaffe, the convoy commander, heard three of those rounds clang into the panel of his new blue 1947 Ford. He prayed they were only the work of an isolated sniper. The trucks strung out behind him had none of the protective armor of the vehicles that had been used previously on the Jerusalem road. Huddled in his pile of potatoes, Iska Shadmi angrily scanned the dark forests above him for some sign of a foe. All the way up to Jerusalem, he would see only one human being in those pines, an old Arab with a white beard.

  As Jaffe had hoped, apart from a few snipers there were no Arab forces in the hills. Shaking the night with the steady drone of their engines, the trucks ground slowly up the pass toward Jerusalem. Some lurched along with two or three tires flattened by sniper fire. From others, overheated by the long, slow trip, Jaffe saw jets of steam squirting into the air. All along the column, like huntsmen spurring on a pack of hounds, his men shouted, "Kadima, Kadima! Forward! Forward!" to the harried truckers.

  In Jerusalem, the news that a convoy was coming rippled through the city. Hundreds of people ran down Jaffa Road to watch it come in: women in bathrobes and slippers and pincurlers, schoolchildren, religious Jews coming from morning service in the synagogues, their prayer shawls still draped over their shoulders. They hung out of windows, clambered onto rooftops and balconies, to watch in awe and gratitude. They sang and cheered and clapped as the convoy hove into sight. They were a desperate, hungry people existing that week on a ration of two ounces of margarine, a quarter of a pound of potatoes and a quarter of a pound of dried meat. For two weeks not a single vehicle had reached the city, and now they were rumbling forward in a steady stream as far back as the eye could see—dozens of trucks bumper to bumper, their swaying vans crammed with supplies.

  Mature men watching them from the curb wept openly. Children scrambled up onto the trucks with flowers. Women sprang onto dashboards to kiss the drivers. In front of the Sephardic Home for the Aged an elderly woman embraced Yehuda Lash, and the young veteran of so many Jerusalem convoys sighed, "If only it could have been her daughter." Riding on his pile of potatoes, Iska Shadmi remembered all his lessons in the Palmach and the youth movement about "how, if we were strong, we would become a nation." Suddenly, seeing those grateful Jerusalemites, that theory became reality for Shadmi. Even the sullen truck drivers Bar-Shemer had forced to make this journey were transformed. Rolling down the corridor of ecstatic human beings, they understood they had saved a city.

  Above all else, one memory would remain engraved upon the minds of those Jerusalemites watching the convoy stream down the streets of their city that happy April morning. It was the first glimpse many of them had of the convoy—the front bumper of the blue Ford of Harry Jaffe.

  On it, Jaffe had painted six words: "If I forget thee, O Jerusalem . . ."

  21

  "ONE OF THE ARABS WE KILLED LAST NIGHT"

  BARELY A MILE and a half from the happy throngs welcoming Operation Nachshon's first convoy to Jerusalem, in the bedroom of a house in the Arab quarter of Bab el Zahiri near Herod's Gate, an embittered Arab leader wrote to his wife in Cairo. Abdul Khader Husseini had returned to Jerusalem just in time to learn that his foes had broken at last the stranglehold he had so patiently fastened on the city. In the back of his car were fifty rifles given him by the Syrian Army and three Bren guns purchased with his own money in the souks of Damascus. They were the only modern weapons he had been able to obtain on his trip to Syria.

  Abdul Khader's last days in Damascus had been as disillusioning as the earlier ones had been. Despite the angry conclusion of their first encounter, he had met again with Safwat Pasha. It was during one of their conferences that the news of Irekat's failure at Kastel arrived.

  "If your men cannot retake Kastel," Safwat Pasha had remarked, "then we will ask Kaukji to do it."

  Abdul Khader had made still another plea for weapons. The answer was the fifty rifles he had brought back to Jerusalem, offered not by Safwat but by Syrian President Shukri al Kuwatli. "The blood of Palestine and its people shall be on your head," Abdul Khader had angrily told the unyielding Iraqi general as he stamped out of their meeting. Late that night, he had left Damascus.

  Now, in his brother's Jerusalem home, he finished his letter to his wife. His words were shaped in the ornate rhetoric of his language, but they were an accurate reflection of those traits and emotions which had made Abdul Khader Husseini such an effective leader of his people.

  MY DARLING WAJIHA,

  We have written great and glorious pages of history, and this was not easy but only with great sacrifice and efforts day and night. When we act, every man forgets himself and his relatives and his sons, his food and his sleeping. . . .

  The enemy is strong, but we will reach the final victory, if God wills. [inch' Allah]

  Then he slipped into the envelope a poem he had written to his son the night before in Damascus.

  This land of brave men

  Is our ancestors' land.

  On this land

  The Jews have no claim.

  How can I sleep

  When the enemy is upon it?

  Something burns in my heart.

  My country is calling.

  When he had finished, Abdul Khader summoned one of his lieutenants, a wiry schoolteacher named Bajhat Abou Gharbieh. Never had Abou Gharbieh seen his chief so bitter. "We have been betrayed," he said. His last sight in Syria, Abdul Khader recounted, was a warehouse full of arms at Al Mazah Airport, for his rival Kaukji. "They have left us three choices," he remarked angrily. "We can go to Iraq and live in disguise. We can commit suicide. Or we can die fighting here."

  He told Abou Gharbieh to send him two of the Haganah armored cars captured at Nebi Daniel and to order Ibrahim Abou Dayieh with one hundred of his men to meet him at the Tzuba rock quarry. Whatever happened, Abdul Khader had his mind set on one thing. He was going to take Kastel back even if he had to lead the attack himself.

  At Kastel, Mordechai Gazit and his seventy Haganah defenders were exhausted. They had been under constant fire for four days. Abdul Khader's attack against them began at ten o'clock on the evening of April 7. The Arab leader had almost three hundred men. He positioned most of them, under Abou Dayieh, directly in front of the village. The others, split into two groups, he posted on the flanks. To replace the cannon Safwat had denied him, Abdul Khader had four mortars operated by a quartet of British deserters.

  Gazit and his men suddenly found themselves caught in a devastating barrage of fire from those mortars. Before it had lifted, Abou Dayieh and his followers were moving forward against their advance posts. After an hour of heavy firing, the Arabs had driven Gazit's men from the first row of houses in the village and were barely one hundred yards from his key position in the house of the village's mukhtar. Sensing his foes weakening, the Hebron shepherd sent a messenger to Abdul Khader. Then he sent forward a mining party to dynamite the mukhtar's house.

  A few minutes later, Gazit heard his troops in the house call for help. Taking a party of men, Gazit scrambled toward the position. No one was there. Just in front of it, he stumbled on a big tin can, the kind used by the Arabs to carry olive oil. It was filled with a reddish powder, and attached to it he found an unignited fuse. Obviously his men's cries
had frightened off Abou Dayieh's mining party. Reassured, Gazit returned to his command post.

  As he slipped inside, he heard his sergeant major, Meyer Karmiol, scramble to his feet on its little balcony. "Who's there?" he called in English.

  "It's us, boys!" came the answer in Arabic. Through the window, Gazit watched Karmiol arm his Sten gun and fire a burst along the slope before the house. Twenty-five yards down the incline, Gazit saw the outline of a body falling to the ground.

  Despite the failure of his mining party, Abou Dayieh pressed his attack against Gazit's positions all night long. Just before dawn, a messenger arrived from his eastern flank. Instead of reinforcements, however, he brought bad news: a party of Haganah men was moving up the hill behind Kastel.

  Abou Dayieh had had no response from his message to Abdul Khader. Dejectedly he decided to withdraw. For the fourth time, the Arabs had failed to reconquer Kastel.

  Meanwhile a dozen Palmach, led by Uzi Narciss, the original conqueror of Kastel, finally reached Gazit with a welcome treasure, fifty thousand rounds of ammunition from the S.S. Nora.

  The two men talked for a few minutes. Narciss promised Gazit that that the Palmach would relieve his weary men at noon. Then, in the graying dawn, Narciss noticed a man lying dead on the hillside below them.

  "Who's that?" he asked.

  "One of the Arabs we killed last night," Gazit replied.

  Narciss crawled down the slope and rolled the dead man over onto his back. Methodically he began to go through his pockets looking for his papers. He found little: a driver's license, one Palestine pound, some notes on a conversation with a United States consul and, in the breast pocket of the shirt, a miniature leather-bound Koran.

  As soon as he had withdrawn his men, Ibrahim Abou Dayieh began looking for Abdul Khader. He was nowhere to be found. Thinking he might have gone back to Jerusalem for reinforcements, he sent men to the city searching for him. He was not there. The rumor spread that he was missing. The news leaped from village to village with that special alacrity linked to bad tidings. From Hebron to Ramallah men set out for Kastel to join the search for their leader. In Jerusalem the souks emptied. Everyone who could get a rifle, it seemed, rushed from the city. The price of ammunition shot up to a shilling a bullet. The National Bus Company canceled its services and devoted its vehicles to hauling volunteers to Kastel. Taxicab drivers, truckers, the owners of private cars offered their services to get men to the battle site.