O Jerusalem!

by Larry Collins

  His determination to do something was all the more remarkable since the Haganah had not yet realized the urgency of the situation. Another convoy on the opposite edge of Jerusalem had the attention of the organization's leadership that day. It was the second to arrive from Tel Aviv since Operation Nachshon had reopened the road to Jerusalem. Informed of the ambush as he watched the convoy's one hundred and seventy-eight vehicles roll down Jaffa Road, David Shaltiel immediately asked the convoy commander for the loan of the armored cars in his escort. The commander refused. He had strict orders to return to Tel Aviv as fast as possible. All Shaltiel had available was three cars of his own, commanded by a young officer named Zvi Sinai.

  The operation turned into a nightmare. The first car was hit by heavy fire, took several wounded and bolted past the trapped convoy to deliver its injured to Hadassah Hospital. The car in the rear turned back to Jerusalem after taking several killed and wounded. Sinai's car, driven by a soldier from Tel Aviv who did not know the road, stumbled onto the mine crater that had trapped the convoy's lead armored car. Only one man remained alive in that car, Sinai discovered, and he was wounded. Then his own car stalled. His driver, paralyzed by fear, refused to start it again.

  Calmly Sinai put his pistol to the boy's head. "You have two possibilities," he said. "Either you're going to be killed by the Arabs or you'll be killed by me if you don't start this car." As the stunned youth turned the engine over, however, there was an explosion outside. An Arab mine had torn off a front wheel. Another metal hulk was caught in Neggar's trap. To the prisoners of the Haganah convoy were added the fourteen Palmachniks in Sinai's car.

  Meanwhile, Colonel Churchill had returned with a G.M.C. and a halftrack. To his immense chagrin, he learned that Dr. and Mrs. Yassky were among the trapped passengers. Barely a week earlier, Churchill had dined with the doctor and his wife on their flower-covered Mount Scopus terrace. His Dingo armored car in the lead, Churchill moved out to the trapped vehicles.

  "If the Arabs shoot at me, blow their bloody heads off," he told Cassidy, the half-track gunner. Then he leaned out of his car and banged on the door of the last bus with his swagger stick. He told the nurse who came to the grill to open the doors and run for his half-track.

  "Can you guarantee us safety?" asked the nurse.

  "No, I can't," replied Churchill. "Open the door and run for it."

  "But we'll all be killed!" screamed the nurse.

  "If you stay there, you'll all damn well be killed," Churchill told her. Again he urged her to run the few feet between their bus and his half-track, promising that his gunner would cover them.

  "But we're all right here," pleaded the nurse.

  "You won't be all right very long," Churchill shouted.

  Then another voice inside the bus yelled, "Why don't your soldiers chase the Arabs away?"

  By now Churchill was furious. At the risk of his life he had come out to save these people, and all he was getting was an argument. Someone else added, "We'll wait here until the Haganah rescues us."

  At that instant, Churchill heard a shout behind him. Cassidy, the gunner of the half-track, had been hit in the neck. Churchill gave the trapped passengers a last chance to flee. They refused. Staggered, Churchill backed off to take his dying gunner to Antonious House. The only serious British effort to save the imperiled Jews had failed.

  From rooftops, from balconies, from windows, from Government House and Mount Scopus, half of Jerusalem would now witness the dying agony of the convoy. The British remained impassive despite the dozens of beseeching calls pouring down on them. At eleven-thirty, two hours after the first word of the incident, the first Life Guard armored cars reached the scene. The lead car fired one round and its gun jammed. It was two more hours before additional cars arrived. Colonel Churchill did not receive permission to use his mortars until noon. Permission to use anything heavier would never be forthcoming. The Haganah was bluntly informed that its men would be fired on if they tried to intervene.

  Inside Zvi Sinai's armored car, the Jews' sole defense against the hundreds of Arabs besieging the convoy, the situation was critical. The first man killed had been the first-aid man. Then one of their machine guns had jammed. By now half the men inside the car were dead or wounded. The floor was covered with blood and bodies. The survivors, jumping from side to side to fire their Stens from the car's slits, stepped indiscriminately on them. "If they shouted, you knew they weren't dead," Sinai grimly recalled. At the rear end of the car, the only machine gun working was being fed by a man who had already lost half a hand. The wounded, with no one to care for them, sat propped up against the sides of the car slowly bleeding to death.

  By the side of the road, a thirteen-year-old Arab boy named Jamil Bazian watched the men beside him soaking rags in gasoline to hurl at the trapped cars.

  At three-fifteen, Dr. Yassky turned to peer from the slit by the driver's seat of the ambulance. A hundred yards behind him he saw the first results of the scene Jamil Bazian had just witnessed. Great sheets of orange flame were sweeping over the two buses crowded with his friends and colleagues. He turned toward his wife. "Shalom, my dear," he said. "It's the end."

  Then Yassky pitched forward and tumbled to the floor of the ambulance. His wife rushed to his side. The director of Hadassah Hospital was dead. He had been struck by a bullet passing through the ambulance slit at the moment he had turned to address his wife.

  Seconds later, the shocked occupants of his ambulance heard a frantic rap on the door of their vehicle. "Open, quick!" a voice screamed. It was a survivor of one of the blazing buses. He plunged half crazily into their midst, groaning, "Save yourselves! You're all going to be roasted." At his words, the ambulance's Yemenite driver opened his door and slipped outside.

  One of his passengers, Dr. Yehuda Matot, decided to follow him. Matot shouldn't have been in the convoy in the first place. His turn in Scopus was next week, but he had agreed to substitute this morning for a colleague. Tumbling into the outside ditch, Matot had a strange thought. "At last," he told himself, "I can light a cigarette." The sight of the dead ambulance driver a few yards away brought him back to his senses. Desperately he started crawling toward Antonious House. Jamil Bazian saw him start his frantic race. Everybody fired on him. One shot struck Matot in the back, but he continued to pull himself forward until he reached Katy Antonious' garden wall. "What good luck!" sighed his thirteen-year-old enemy.

  Katy Antonious' house was a scene of wild confusion. Its parquet floors were littered with wounded, Arab, Jewish and even British. One officer of the Highland Light Infantry, Captain James Crawford, had gone up to Hadassah Hospital and returned with a doctor to treat the wounded. As the two men rushed into Antonious House, they stumbled on an elderly Arab dying in the garden, moaning for help. The man had been caught in a crossfire as he walked into town with his donkey. Despite the fact that so many of his colleagues awaited his care inside, despite the risks of pausing in the exposed garden, the Jewish doctor knelt beside him to examine his wounds.

  Almost six hours after the explosion of Mohammed Neggar's mine, shortly after half past three, the British command finally authorized the men on the spot to intervene vigorously in the ambush. While Churchill and his soldiers of the Highland provided cover fire, Captain Michael Naylor Leyland led his Life Guard armored cars to the besieged vehicles. When he got in close, he radioed back for smoke to cover their movement. To his fury there "was some interminable chitchat about what kind of smoke." Finally he fired off all his own car's smoke himself.

  He and his men then took their car covers and, using them to screen a passage between the trapped vehicles and their cars, got the survivors out. There were barely half a dozen left alive.

  One of them was Zvi Sinai. A few minutes later, delirious and barely conscious, suffering from a terrible head wound, Sinai lay on a stretcher in Hadassah Hospital. A doctor walked down the line of wounded men selecting those to be treated first. He peered down at Sinai's face. "No," he said, "
that's one of them. It's an Arab." He passed on. Sinai was too weak to protest, too dizzy from loss of blood to care. A nurse passing behind the doctor cast a quick glance at him. She started. "My God," she gasped, "it's not an Arab. It's Zvi Sinai!"

  By nightfall it was over. A ghastly silence reigned at last on the bend in the road to Mount Scopus where Mohammed Neggar had detonated his mine. A few ribbons of smoke, the putrid stench of burned flesh, and the carbonized remains of the convoy's trapped vehicles remained to greet the falling dusk. Dr. Moshe Ben-David had been faithful to his appointment in Samarra. The bus after which he had so frantically run had been his coffin. At least seventy-five others, most of them men and women who had come to Palestine to heal, not kill, had died with him. So completely had the flames devoured their victims that twenty-four of their bodies would never be identified.

  The following morning, Moshe Hillman, the Haganah man who had cleared the convoy's departure, picked through the ruins, removing a skull, an arm, a hat, a stethoscope, a pair of glasses. When he had finished, he turned the wreckage over to a team of British demolition experts.

  "The remaining vehicles were blown up to clear the road," laconically noted the daily log of the Highland Light Infantry, "and the road mended, and reopened to traffic."

  As they had in December, the curious crowds collected along Cairo's Kasr al Nil underneath the brightly lit windows of Egypt's Ministry of Foreign Affairs. This time the hot breath of the khamsin licked their faces and sent its fine powder sifting into the room above where once again the leaders of the Arab League debated into the night.

  They had reached a critical turning point in the Palestine situation. Their early guerrilla successes had been followed by several recent reverses. The Haganah had succeeded in temporarily reopening the road to Jerusalem and had killed Abdul Khader Husseini. Fawzi el Kaukji's Liberation Army had proved a disappointment. The massacre of Deir Yassin was producing the first hints of an Arab flight from Palestine. Six thousand precious rifles and eight million rounds of ammunition, the principal fruit of their arms-purchasing efforts, had been lost in Bari harbor. To even the most ardent advocates of guerrilla warfare it was apparent that only the coordinated intervention of all the Arab armies could now reverse the situation.

  For the past six months their foe's strategy had been based on the assumption that the Arab states would attack a Jewish state as soon as Britain's Palestine mandate expired. That calculation had determined David Ben-Gurion's planning and had sent Golda Meir on her American fund-raising drive and Ehud Avriel into the arsenals of Eastern Europe. Yet the Arab leaders in Egypt's Ministry of Foreign Affairs were no closer to taking that decision than they had been in December.

  They did not have to choose war. Before them was a chance to wrest from the West a more favorable Palestine settlement than they could have dared hope for a few months earlier. If their guerrilla campaign had not defeated the Jews, it had led to the Arabs' first significant diplomatic victory in Palestine since Britain's 1939 White Paper: the United States' attempt to substitute a United Nations trusteeship for partition. Now the United Nations Security Council was appealing to both sides in the conflict for a cease-fire. Implicit in the call was the idea that a cease-fire would be followed by a fundamental reexamination of the Palestine issue. The Arab leadership could seize the opportunity offered by those proposals, take the diplomatic initiative and perhaps force the world to a new Palestine formula more favorable to their cause, or they could commit themselves to war and order their armies to do what Haj Amin's guerrillas were clearly incapable of doing, defeating the Jews.

  With the exception of Haj Amin Husseini, a recent addition to their circle, the men who were confronted with those grave choices were moderate and intelligent individuals. None of them belonged to the generation of more extremist leaders whose revolutions would soon alter the character of the Arab world. They were tranquil bourgeois, inclined more to conservatism than to adventure. As individuals, they were often culturally closer to the Westerners of the nations that had once ruled them than they were to the masses they governed. Jamil Mardam's passions were growing apricot trees and reciting Arab poetry. Riad Solh's regular bedside reading consisted of Montaigne, Descartes and Rousseau. Azzam Pasha was a gravely polite, courtly gentleman whose accomplishments included a medical degree and the honor of having been the youngest man ever elected to the Egyptian parliament. Nuri as-Said was more at ease in London than he was in the deserts of Iraq.

  Yet collectively those individually capable men were leading their people to disaster. Their persistent tendency to underestimate their Jewish foes, to judge their settlement by a condescending, faintly anti-Semitic standard, had led them into an appalling state of overconfidence. "The idea that they might not be able to lick the Jews simply hadn't occurred to them," observed Britain's able minister in Amman, Sir Alec Kirkbride.

  Reasonable and moderate in private, particularly with foreigners, they reverted in public to the overwrought flights of rhetoric that were the coin of their political discourse. Always ready to stir public passions to their private ends, they were now trapped by the passions they had stirred. Leaders of a society in which the Word had an exalted role in every act of life from welcoming a stranger to pronouncing a funeral exhortation, they hurled off their verbal thunderbolts without measuring their impact on the emotional, underdeveloped masses they led. Nor did they measure their impact on their foes. None of the men in the Egyptian Foreign Ministry really meant to be taken literally in threatening to "drive the Jews into the sea." But they failed to remember that their foes had just seen six million of their kind driven into Hitler's ovens. While their threats might not be taken at face value in the salons of Cairo, they were read with total seriousness on the sidewalks of Tel Aviv.

  Azzam Pasha continued to advocate, as he had done for months, military action in Palestine. Yet in the privacy of his own soul he had concluded, "We didn't really want war, but we were putting ourselves in a position in which there was going to be no way out but war." He did not dare urge an alternative on his colleagues, but, with the knowledge of only one among them, Azzam had gone to a secret meeting with British Ambassador Sir Ronald Campbell to beg him to get Britain to extend her Palestine mandate for another year. Thus Britain, he hoped, might spare his fellow Arabs the confrontation he dreaded but did not dare condemn publicly.

  While Jamil Mardam's Syrian government had been nourishing that winter the army pledged to drive the Jews into the sea, his wife had been regularly visiting Jerusalem to have a stomach ulcer treated by her Jewish doctor. Transjordan's King Abdullah had already secretly decided to use his army to aggrandize his kingdom, not attack the Jews. The eviction that interested Egypt's Nokrashy Pasha was not that of the Jews from Palestine but that of the British from the Suez Canal Zone. Iraq's Nuri as-Said had been brandishing his army like a sword for months, yet when the day of decision came that army would be most noted for its absence from the battlefield. No man had more persistently urged military action to thwart partition than Lebanon's Solh. Only Transjordan's Abdullah, however, had more amicable relations with the Jewish Agency than he. In seven months' time, in Paris, in one of his regular secret meetings at 7 A.M. in his hotel room with the Jewish Agency's Tuvia Arazi, he would poignantly express the Arab dilemma.

  "Tuvia," he would plead, "you must convince the Americans to force us to make peace with you. We want to do it. But it's only possible for us politically if we are forced to do it."

  Azzam Pasha revealed that George Allen, first secretary of the United States Embassy in Cairo, had submitted to him a copy of the American trusteeship proposal with a request for the Arab League's opinions before the special session of the General Assembly that was due to convene in four days, on April 16. Haj Amin Husseini quickly suggested that the proposal be submitted for study to a special committee made up of the representatives of Syria, Transjordan and Palestine. A few minutes later, he succeeded in confiding to the same committee the task of replying
to the United Nation's truce call.

  The committee's report on both items was ready in forty-eight hours. With minor changes, it was adopted and sent off to New York. The Arabs could have saved themselves the time and trouble. Their reply was couched in conditions so hopelessly unrealistic that any possibility of its receiving serious consideration by even their most ardent backers was eliminated. They would consider a truce only if the Haganah were dissolved, the Stern Gang and the Irgun disarmed, all Jewish immigration stopped and all illegal Jewish immigrants in Palestine deported. As for trusteeship, they would accept it only if it were exercised by the Arab states, not the United Nations, and led swiftly to what they had been asking for years, an Arab Palestine state. With their answer, Loy Henderson's scheme was dead, the last life wrung from it by the very men it had been designed to assist.

  Having rejected peace, the logical course of action for the Arab leaders was to prepare for war. Things were not to be as simple as that, however. While the men meeting in Cairo had been willing to vote a joint war chest of four million pounds sterling, they had thus far actually paid up barely ten percent of that sum. With the exception of the Arab Legion, none of the Arab armies had made any significant preparation for war in the past four months. A fifteen-page typewritten document accompanied by three maps constituted the Arabs' most substantial preparation for war. It was a plan for the invasion of Palestine.

  The plan had been drafted by Major Wasfi Tell, the young officer who had earlier authored the stern warning on the Haganah's capacities to Safwat Pasha. It called for a northern thrust by the Lebanese, Syrian and Liberation armies, spearheaded by an Iraqi armored force to capture the port of Haifa, while a narrow southern thrust by the Egyptian Army up the coastal plain would seize Jaffa. Thus the new state would be deprived of the ports that Tell knew it would need to bring in men and arms after the British left. At the same time, the Arab Legion and the balance of the Iraqi Army would aim to cut the Jewish settlement in half by thrusting across the coastal plain from the Judean hills to the sea north of Tel Aviv. The campaign was to take eleven days.