"All of the killed, with very few exceptions," he remarked, "were old men, women or children." There was never to be any question in Arieli's mind that "the dead we found were all unjust victims and none of them had died with a weapon in their hands." So appalling was the scene that the man who had fought in the rear guard of Britain's retreat from Greece refused to allow his youngsters into the village to witness it. Instead, he set to cleaning it up with his officers.
Yeshurun Schiff, Shaltiel's adjutant, who had involuntarily provided the terrorists with the tools of their carnage, followed with a large party of men. Instead of the help the terrorists had promised him, they had preferred, he noted, "to kill anybody they found alive as though every living thing in the village was the enemy and they could only think 'Kill them all.'"
"You are swine," he said to the Stern commander. His men surrounded the dissidents in the village square, and the two parties eyed each other menacingly. Schiff gave his report to Shaltiel by wireless. The Jerusalem commander told him to disarm the dissidents. "If they don't lay down their arms, open fire!" he ordered.
Schiff was aghast. Things had reached such a tense state that, he knew, the dissidents would not give up their weapons without a fight. Despite his loathing for what they had done, he could not bring himself to fire on the men of the two groups. Jewish history was too full of stories of fratricidal struggle in the face of an enemy to start that now.
"I can't do it," he gasped.
"Don't tell me what you can or can't do, those are your orders," Shaltiel replied.
"David," Schiff begged, "you'll bloody your name for life. The Jewish people will never forgive you."
Finally Shaltiel relented. The dissidents were ordered instead to clean up the village. As Schiff looked on, they carried the bodies of their victims to Deir Yassin's rock quarry and laid them out on the stones. When they had finished, they poured gasoline over them and set them ablaze.
"It was a lovely spring day," Schiff would recall. "The almond trees were in bloom, the flowers were out and everywhere there was the stench of the dead, the thick smell of blood, and the terrible odor of the corpses burning in the quarry."
The dark pillar of smoke rising from the rock quarry of Deir Yassin would become a stain upon the conscience of a new state. By their actions, the Irgun and the Stern Gang had consecrated the little Judean village for years to come as a symbol of the Palestinians' misery. Few Jewish prisoners in the months ahead would not hear the vengeful scream of "Deir Yassin!" and many would reach their own graves in retribution for the dissidents' crime.
The overwhelming majority of the Jews of Palestine reacted to Deir Yassin with shock and abhorrence. The Jewish Agency immediately disassociated itself from the terrorists' act and roundly condemned it. David Ben-Gurion personally cabled his shock at the incident to King Abdullah. The Chief Rabbi of Jerusalem took the extraordinary step of excommunicating the participants in the attack.
It was the Arabs, however, who had the obligation to announce the tragedy to the world. For hours, Hazem Nusseibi and Hussein Khalidi, secretary of Jerusalem's Arab Higher Committee, agonized over how to present the news. "We were afraid the Arab armies for all their talk weren't really going to come," Nusseibi later recalled. "We wanted to shock the population of the Arab countries into bringing pressure on their governments." And so they decided to broadcast the news of Deir Yassin in all its horror. It was, as Nusseibi would one day admit, "a fatal error." The gruesomely detailed news did not change any minds in the council of the Arab governments. But it stirred a growing sense of panic among the Arabs of Palestine. By their unhappy error of judgment, the Arab propagandists too had unwittingly helped set the stage for a problem soon to haunt the Middle East, the drama of thousands of Arab refugees.
Fawzi el Kaukji was a man of his word. For the second time in ten days he was, as he had promised Yehoshua Palmon he would be, sending his troops against a key Jewish position in the Valley of Jezreel, the kibbutz of Mishmar Ha'emek. Far from erasing the scar of his earlier defeat at Tirat Zvi, however, his first attack on the colony had ended in disaster. And yet the man who dreamed of being a German general had introduced to the battlefields of Palestine that day a new weapon much prized by his mentors, artillery. For hours his guns had pounded the helpless kibbutz. Prepared by their own energies and Palmon's warning, however, the settlers had been ready. It was not a white flag Fawzi had seen rising from the ruins of their smoldering kibbutz when he stopped the bombardment, but a round of Haganah rifle fire. His troops, sent off in pursuit of an easy victory, had retreated in panic. Only the rage of General Sir Gordon MacMillan at learning that Kaukji had broken his pledge had saved the day. The British had imposed a truce in the area.
Now Kaukji was ready to begin the second round. So, too, however, was Yehoshua Palmon. He had entered Mishmar Ha'emek along with a party of reinforcements during the cease-fire. With half a dozen men, he had then slipped around Kaukji's flank toward his rear. From a hilltop he surveyed the Arab's preparations with a pair of fieldglasses. Soon he spotted a car shuttling back and forth carrying, he was sure, Kaukji's orders. Its movements led him to the sight he was looking for, Kaukji's artillery, seven 75-millimeter cannons and three 105s.
As he had expected, they were inadequately defended. Convinced he had before him a glittering opportunity to equip the Haganah with some of the artillery it so gravely lacked, Palmon called reinforcements to his side. Then he launched a slashing attack on the Arab guns.
Palmon's attack did not produce the result he had hoped for. With a hasty effort, Kaukji's gunners managed to save his cannon. Their success would soon allow their leader to train them on the most prestigious target in Palestine, the rooftops of Jerusalem. The assault, however, had other, even more important consequences. Panicked by the sound of firing in their rear, Kaukji's men began to flee the battlefield. Within moments, the Liberation Army's attack on Mishmar Ha'emek collapsed. The triumph its leader so desperately sought would have to await another day and another battlefield.
It remained for Kaukji to provide his superiors in Damascus with a satisfactory explanation of his setback. Taking a pencil, Kaukji drafted a cable to Safwat Pasha. The Jews, he reported, "possess 120 tanks, of which the lightest weighs six tons. In addition, they have twelve batteries of 75s, six squadrons of bombers and fighters with all their equipment. They possess a complete infantry division, of which one regiment is composed of non-Jewish Russian Communists."
When he had dispatched his cable, the embittered Kaukji returned to his headquarters in the village of Jabba. There he was to discover the only consolation of his unhappy day. If Kaukji could not be a German general, he could at least be a German husband. It was his birthday, and waiting for him in his quarters, with a birthday cake and a bottle of champagne she had carried across the Allenby Bridge in a suitcase, was his German wife, Anna Elisa.
23
"SHALOM, MY DEAR . . ."
THE TWO MIDDLE-AGED MEN half ran, half stumbled after the departing convoy. It was too late. Slowly gathering speed, it slid off down the street. One of the two shrugged and gave up. He would catch the next convoy in one week's time.
His companion continued to pound along after the disappearing vehicles, shrieking, "Wait, wait!" Dr. Moshe Ben-David had played a vital role in the development of the two institutions on Mount Scopus to which they were headed, Hadassah Hospital and the Hebrew University. He was not going to let the convoy leave without him.
By a miracle, one of Jerusalem's rare taxis passed by as he ran down the street. Ben-David jumped in. Minutes later, red-faced, his heart pounding, he climbed into one of the buses in the convoy and slumped into a seat.
Supplying the hospital and the university to which Dr. Ben-David was bound had been a problem for the Jewish Agency since partition. The only road to the hilltop passed through the Arab stronghold of Sheikh Jarrah. As early as December, Arab ambushes had forced the Jewish Agency to resort to a weekly armed convoy to keep the two inst
itutions on Mount Scopus supplied. For the past month a tacit truce had ruled along the road, and the passage of the convoys had been relatively free of incidents. There seemed no reason to doubt that the convoy of Tuesday, April 13, would have an equally easy trip.
At the foremost Haganah guard post at the end of the Street of the Prophet Samuel, Moshe Hillman, a Jewish officer, held up the convoy while he made a routine check with a British police inspector named Webb.
"Send the convoy up," Webb told the Haganah liaison officer. "The road's clear. We just patrolled it."
Hillman waved the line of vehicles off on the two-and-a-half-mile trip to Mount Scopus. An armored car led the way. Behind it came an ambulance bearing the red star of the Magen David Adorn, the Jewish Red Cross, then two buses, another ambulance, four trucks, and a second armored car to protect the rear. Driving one of the trucks was a stubby little man named Benjamin Adin. For five hundred pounds he had purchased in December the dubious right to run a truckload of goods up the hill once a day. Scooting out of back streets at odd times, banging across open fields and dirt tracks, he had succeeded so well he had won the nickname Mishugana, the Crazy Man. Today, for the first time, the Haganah had forced him to make his run in the convoy. He also had a passenger, a man who had begged him for a ride because his wife had just had a baby at Hadassah Hospital.
Packed into the buses and ambulances ahead of his truck was an astonishing assembly of professors, doctors, researchers and scholars, the most precious cargo a Haganah convoy could carry through the dangerous curves of Sheikh Jarrah to Mount Scopus. Distinguished products of the most famous faculties of Europe, they had fled the persecutions of the Continent to come here and found a prestigious array of hospitals, laboratories and research centers. From Berlin, Vienna and Krakow they had come, bringing an intellectual capital of inestimable value to the fledgling Jewish state. Today they were members of the Faculty of Medicine of Hebrew University or the Hadassah Medical Organization, a philanthropic body founded by an American Jewish woman in 1912 to apply in Palestine the byword of Jeremiah, "Cure my people." Sustained by the contributions of American Jewry, Hadassah had built medical institutions all across Palestine. The most important among them, the temple of Jewish medical science, was the ultramodern hospital on Mount Scopus.
The convoy's most prestigious passenger, the director of Hadassah Hospital, the world-renowned ophthalmologist Chaim Yassky, had characteristically taken one of the most exposed seats, beside the driver of the first ambulance. Behind him were his wife, six other doctors, a nurse and a wounded man on a stretcher.
Yassky was personally familiar with every meter of the roadside along their way. He had lived in Jerusalem for twenty years. Peering through the narrow slit in the ambulance's armor-plated window, he recognized, behind its garden walls, the elegant mansion of the Nashasshibis, a distinguished Arab family with whom he had often dined. Farther on was the house where Katy Antonious had received her guests, its precious salons converted now into a guard post by thirty Jocks of the Highland Light Infantry. None of the ambulance's passengers was more eager to arrive than Yassky. Chaim and Fanny Yassky had a deep affection for their hilltop. From the windows of their residence, they never ceased to admire the view of the Old City spread below, or the perpetually changing tints of the Mountains of Moab to the east.
Esther Passman, a young American widow riding in the second ambulance, did not share Yassky's eagerness to arrive. The directress of social services at the hospital's Cancer Institute, she was in the convoy somewhat against her will. She had wanted to stay in Jerusalem with her fifteen-year-old son, still recovering from a wound he had received assembling explosives for the Gadna. He had insisted she leave, however, and she had rushed to the Street of the Prophet Samuel just in time to catch the convoy.
When the driver of their ambulance announced that they were almost out of Sheikh Jarrah, she and her fellow passengers relaxed and began to babble happily in the darkened vehicle. Even the two wounded Irgunists riding with them, who had been hit at Deir Yassin, cheered up. A nurse opened a thermos of tea and offered everybody a sip.
Their gaiety was premature. Crouched in a ditch alongside the road, his fingers fixed on the plunger of an electric mine, a tailor named Mohammed Neggar watched the convoy's approach, calculating the instant at which to fire his explosives. Forty-eight hours before, in a bar he frequented, Neggar had been given the date and the hour of the convoy's passage by a British officer. Moreover, the Britisher had told Neggar that if his men attacked the convoy, they would not be molested as long as they did not fire on British patrols.
His words were an invitation to attack it. To the Arabs, Mount Scopus also represented a Haganah strongpoint from which their foes sometimes launched assaults on their rear. All the next day in the back room of his tailor shop, while Neggar shuttled in and out to give his customers fittings, his aides had planned the ambush. Counting on British indifference, they had decided to strike from the roadside ditch near a clump of cypress trees beyond the Orient House Hotel. The road began to flatten out there, and the Jews might be expected to relax their vigilance.
The din of the convoy's motors rose, and finally the lead armored car appeared around a bend on the road. Tensely, Neggar watched it crawl toward him. It seemed to the tailor like "an enormous black beetle." He tightened his fingers until he heard the click of the plunger. An explosion shook his ditch, and a cloud of smoke enveloped the armored car. When it cleared, Neggar blinked. He had pushed his plunger too soon. Instead of destroying the vehicle, he had blown an enormous crater in the road. Unable to stop in time, the heavy vehicle had lumbered forward and tumbled into the hole.
Behind the car, the rest of the convoy ground to a halt. So abrupt was the stop in Esther Passman's ambulance that the nurse dropped her thermos of tea. For a moment, the concerned passengers sat in their darkened vehicles, wondering what was happening outside. A signal from Neggar to the score of men with him in his ditch gave them the answer. A rain of gunfire swept into the stalled convoy.
The explosion, the gunfire, attracted the attention of all Jerusalem. By the scores, then by the hundreds, Arab irregulars poured toward the ambush site from the villages nearby and the walls of the Old City. In the suffocating darkness of their metallic prisons, the passengers began to hear a new sound mingling with the din of the gunfire. It was a guttural clamor, a furious call for vengeance, the name of the Arab village the two wounded men in Esther Passman's ambulance had helped assault three days earlier: "Deir Yassin!"
Less than a mile away, in the courtyard of St. Paul's German Hospice, three companies of the Highland Light Infantry, their officers in the regiment's green-and-yellow kilts, stood to attention. While the units' bagpipes played, an inspecting party walked slowly down their ranks. Suddenly a signalman waving a slip of paper rushed up behind them.
"What's the matter?" a short beribboned colonel snapped at him. The signalman handed him a message from the regiment's soldiers in Antonious House. It had been timed off at 09:35 and gave the British command their first notification of the convoy's plight. The colonel spun on his heels and left to investigate the incident.
A veteran of Dunkirk, the landing in Sicily and a commando mission which had ended in Dachau, Jack Churchill, forty-eight, was a florid-faced, colorful Scot who had begun his career with the Highland Light Infantry in Rangoon in 1926. A pleasant eccentric, he had later distinguished himself marching from Naples to London playing the bagpipes. The second in command of the Highland, Churchill knew as well as Chaim Yassky the terrain between Mount Scopus and Jerusalem. The road linking them had been his unit's responsibility for months. He leaped into his Dingo armored car and set out for the ambush site.
There the driver of Esther Passman's ambulance struggled to turn his vehicle around. To the American widow, the assault outside seemed "like an Indian attack on a wagon train." Behind them, the Crazy One, his tires flattened by a hand grenade, wrestled to force his six-ton truck through the same man
euver. Crouched at his feet, his face white with fear, his passenger whimpered that he was never going to see his newborn child. Inch by inch, Adin swung his truck around, then started rolling back toward Jerusalem. The three other trucks, Esther Passman's ambulance and the last armored car followed.
By the time Colonel Churchill arrived, the lead armored car, the Yasskys' ambulance and the two buses were caught in Neggar's trap. Armed Arabs were arriving from all sides. The Jews in the armored car were holding them off, firing through the slits of their vehicles. Churchill cupped his hands and yelled for a cease-fire. His words were lost in the clatter of gunfire. He quickly understood the gravity of the situation. The Arabs had occupied the houses all along the road, and, at the rate at which they were arriving, the Jews would soon be hopelessly trapped.
At ten-thirty he radioed Jerusalem headquarters requesting half a troop of Life Guard armored cars, an observation officer to arrange for shelling the houses in which the Arabs had taken position, and permission to use his three-inch mortars. He was denied his last two requests, and it would be almost an hour before the Life Guards would receive orders to move. That baffling indifference to the convoy's plight characterized the British headquarters reaction to the tragedy all day long. Whether from a bureaucratic and inept application of procedures, a subliminal desire to punish the Jewish community for Deir Yassin, or the active complicity at some level in the command of the officer who had given Neggar the green light for the operation, the British would be responsible for an unconscionable delay in coming to the convoy's rescue.
Furious at the answer to his requests, Churchill fumed, "They don't realize we're going to have a tragedy here. If they don't hurry, nobody's going to get out alive." Determined to do what he could to save the trapped Jews himself, Churchill rushed back to St. Paul's Hospice for a truck and a half-track to mount a rescue operation of his own.
O Jerusalem! Page 35