O Jerusalem!

by Larry Collins

  For a man reaching out, as Nokrashy was, for some justification for a shift in his policy, Sir Ronald's words had a most welcome ring. The Prime Minister succumbed. A few days later, his aides shifted their daily instructions to the Cairo press. Palestine was ordered back onto the front pages of Egypt's newspapers. A popular poster began to appear around the city. It showed a dagger dripping blood; on the hilt was the Star of David.

  A few voices tried to warn Nokrashy. One of them belonged to an able newsman named Mohammed Hassanein Heikal. Heikal had been to Palestine, and his dispatches warned that the Jews were courageous, organized foes. Called to Nokrashy's office, Heikal was told his articles were harming morale; no one's more, perhaps, than that of the uneasy history teacher reluctantly preparing his nation for war.

  Another Egyptian voice on a long-distance telephone call revealed the real state of preparedness of the army that Haidar Pasha had pronounced ready for war. If Haidar's soldiers were going to parade to Tel Aviv, they would first of all have to find out how to get there. The Egyptian Army, George Deeb, the son of Jerusalem's Buick dealer, was told, had no road maps of Palestine. The man who had organized the defense of the Upper Beqaa neighborhood was assigned the task of stealing fifty maps from the Land Settlement Department so that Haidar Pasha's subordinates could start plotting a route for their march to Tel Aviv.

  25

  A MESSAGE FROM GLUBB PASHA

  "IT IS THE PASSOVER SACRIFICE for the Lord, who passed over the houses of the children of Israel in Egypt when he smote Egypt and spared our houses." With those words began the 3,388th observance of mankind's oldest continually observed religious ceremony, the Jewish Passover. It commemorated in a sense the night on which the history of the Jewish nation began, and on the evening of April 23, 1948, its celebration seemed heavy with the portents of the nation's imminent rebirth.

  Passover's high point is the seder, the family banquet in which each ingredient is endowed with special significance. There is matzo, unleavened bread, a reminder of the haste in which the Israelites prepared the flight from Egypt. Placed on a large plate in the center of the seder table are a roasted bone, for the sacrificial lambs slaughtered on the eve of the flight, a roasted egg for the festival offering of Temple days, bitter herbs to recall the bitterness of the Egyptian bondage, a touch of parsley for the green of spring, salt water for the tears of suffering, and a mixture of chopped apples, nuts and cinnamon symbolizing the bricks made by the Israelites for Pharaoh. The ritual meal is eaten to prayers, hymns, the recital of the Haggadah, the story of the Exodus. For almost two millenniums, since Titus' destruction of the Temple, a dispersed people have ended the ceremony with one symbolic vow: "Next year in Jerusalem."

  To the one hundred thousand Jews celebrating the Passover in Jerusalem in April 1948, next year was at hand. Yet for that privileged fraction of the Jewish people, the symbol of their scattered race, the western wall of Solomon's Temple, seemed that night as distant and unreachable as it was for the most dispersed of their brethren. For the first time since Saladin, no rabbi, no Jew, had bowed before the stones of the Wailing Wall. Masters of every access to the site, the Arabs of Jerusalem had refused passage to even a symbolic group of rabbis.

  The Jews closest to the wall, trapped in the Old City's Jewish Quarter, celebrated their seder in two shifts, one for the Ashkenazim and one for the Sephardim, so that all the Haganah soldiers on guard duty could join one or the other.

  On their isolated hilltops guarding Jerusalem's southern approaches, the settlers of Kfar Etzion marked the Passover with a special fervor. The tables of the Neve Ovadia, the house of God's worker, were spread with some of the first fruits plucked from their orchards. The men on guard duty joined the others at the end of the dinner. When they entered the Neve Ovadia carrying their rifles, the words of a psalm sprang from the lips of their fellow settlers: "O God, place guards over Thy city day and night."

  In New Jerusalem, Dov Joseph decreed a special Passover Week ration. It consisted of two pounds of potatoes, two eggs, half a pound of fish, four pounds of matzo, half a pound of meat and one and a half ounces of dried fruits. That was hardly the making of a feast, but to the city's famished inhabitants it was nonetheless an extravagant treat.

  For many a Jerusalem family, a rap on the door marred the household seder. To some, the knock was eerily suggestive of the mystic visit of the Prophet Elijah, the messenger of the Messiah bringing peace to the world, for whom a goblet of wine was set out on every seder table. The author of those knocks, however, was mortal and his message concerned war, not peace. It was a representative of the Haganah calling a father or a son to prepare for Yitzhak Sadeh's coming offensive.

  No seder was as memorable, perhaps, as that held in the cooperative restaurant of the Histadrut labor organization around the corner from the still-blackened ruins of Ben Yehuda Street. Gathered in the restaurant were two hundred and eighty truck drivers, the survivors of the men Bronislav Bar-Shemer and his soldiers had kidnapped three weeks earlier from the streets of Tel Aviv. They were trapped in Jerusalem by Emile Ghory's barricades, condemned now to share the suffering of the city whose hunger they had sought to ease.

  A grateful Dov Joseph presided. The banquet was sparse. There was, he would recall, "a soup consisting largely of water with a few matzo balls swimming in it," gefüllte fish made "of matzo meal with a few scraps of fish to glue it together," rice and a little meat. An air of gaiety, however, made up for the cuisine. The son of a local truck driver asked the four ritual seder questions of the eldest of the stranded Tel Aviv drivers. There was, Joseph recalled, "a great deal of hilarity and hymn singing."

  At the solemn concluding moment of the banquet, someone opened the door so that Elijah could enter the room. His cup was placed in the middle of the table. Then the truck drivers rose. In a lusty, bellowing chorus, they shouted out their two-thousand-year-old pledge, adding to that ancient promise two significant words: "Next year in Jerusalem—the Delivered!"

  The first phase of Operation Jebussi, designed to set the stage for a Jewish takeover of Jerusalem, proved a costly failure. Thirty-five Palmachniks lost their lives on the night of April 26 in a vain attempt to drive the Arabs from the heights of Nebi Samuel. Operation Jebussi's second phase, executed the same evening, ran into the opposition of the British. Yitzhak Sadeh's occupation of the Arab quarter of Sheikh Jarrah placed his men astride one of the British Army's evacuation routes from Jerusalem. Brigadier C. P. "Splosh" Jones, the city's troop commander, gave them six hours to withdraw or be forced out.

  "Whatever makes Jones think anybody wants to stop them from leaving?" Dov Joseph snorted on reading the brigadier's ultimatum. "Don't the British realize both of us, Jew and Arab, have been trying to get them out of here for years?"

  Jones was not bluffing. At exactly six o'clock in the evening of April 27, a battalion of the Highland Light Infantry and a troop of tanks supported by a battery of field artillery started to move along the road on which so many Jewish scholars and physicians had died a fortnight earlier. At the sight of their heavy equipment, so conspicuous by its absence during the agony of the Hadassah convoy, Yitzhak Sadeh's men took their lone British bazooka and withdrew to Mount Scopus.

  Jones's reaction prompted Sadeh to revise the aims he had set for Operation Jebussi's third phase and limit his attack to the wealthy Arab neighborhood in which Mishael Shacham had destroyed the Hotel Semiramis, Katamon. Shacham's explosion had driven a number of Katamon's prosperous businessmen out of the quarter, but their places had been taken by a group of the Mufti's partisans, under Ibrahim Abou Dayieh, and, recently, a contingent of Iraqi volunteers. Entrenched in Katamon's solid stone villas, they were an Arab beachhead jammed into Jewish Jerusalem's southern flank.

  Sadeh's first objective consisted of two buildings surmounted by a spindly Cyrillic cross set on the highest ground in Katamon. There, in a grove of pine and cypress trees, the Greek Orthodox Monastery of St. Simeon looked down a gentle incline toward the h
eart of Jerusalem. Sadeh's men slipped along the wadi below the monastery, then attacked straight up its steep briar-covered slopes. Abou Dayieh's guerrillas and his Iraqi allies put up a ferocious resistance, but the Palmachniks, fighting their way from room to room with knives, bayonets and hand grenades, finally drove them out of the monastery into a three-story green-shuttered dwelling a hundred yards away.

  There Abou Dayieh rallied his men for a counterattack. Using a train of mules to avoid British surveillance, he brought four three-inch mortars up from the Old City to his new strongpoint. Two hundred villagers led by a twenty-one-year-old sheikh arrived to reinforce his exhausted followers.

  The situation inside the monastery grew desperate. So devastatingly accurate was the Arabs' sniper fire that one Jew who waved a hand for an instant outside the monastery had a fingertip shot off. On the roof, six Jewish dead, all killed by the same sniper, lay beside a Czech machine gun while a seventh man, already wounded, struggled to work the gun alone. David Elazar, a young company commander, carried off the roof one of his oldest friends, whose leg had been practically torn from his body by a mortar shell. The friend begged Elazar to kill him, murmuring, "I saw my leg." Elazar offered him what comfort he could, a shot of morphine and a reassuring word. When he returned a few minutes later, his friend was dead. He had rolled to a window, seized a shard of broken glass and cut open one of his arteries.

  Before long, scores of dead and wounded lay scattered through the monastery, choking in a stench of blood, smoke and cordite. All of the officers were wounded. The radio was out. The first-aid supplies were exhausted and most of the ammunition as well. Only one member of a relief party sent to bring fresh supplies had managed to break through the Arab lines.

  Among the cypress trees and the brambles around the monastery, motionless patches of blue and white, the checkered kaffiyehs of the Arab dead, attested to the high price the Arabs were paying for the losses inflicted on their foes. Hit in the spine by a grenade fragment, the stoic Abou Dayieh continued to lead his men from a wooden chair carried from place to place by two of his followers.

  Finally Eliyahu Sela "Ranana," the senior Jewish officer, realized that his troops could not hold the monastery. Surrender was impossible; he was certain it would lead to a massacre. He did not have enough able-bodied men left to get his wounded out. Ranana decided to split the remains of his two companies into three groups. The walking wounded and a covering escort of a few men would try to break out of the rear of the building first. Then the rest of the men still standing, with all the wounded they could carry, would follow. He and his five officers would stay behind with the rest of the wounded to cover the withdrawal. Then they would mine the monastery and blow it up on themselves and their wounded comrades. That at least would spare them the agony of dying by an Iraqi knife.

  The first group left. Only one of its thirty members reached safety alive. As the second group prepared to leave, a dazed Ibrahim Abou Dayieh, a few hundred yards away, picked up a telephone. At the other end of the line, in Cairo, was Haj Amin Husseini. Brokenhearted, Abou Dayieh begged the Mufti to let him break off his attack. His men were on the verge of collapse. Only six of his original partisans remained unwounded. His ammunition and mortar shells were practically exhausted. Half sobbing, the little shepherd told the Mufti, "We have lost the battle."

  As he uttered those words, a Haganah intelligence officer sat upright in the basement of the Jewish Agency. Haj Amin Husseini was not the only one listening. Minutes later a report of that vital interception was on its way to Shaltiel's headquarters from the room in which a score of men and women listened around the clock to the conversations of Jerusalem's key Arab and British leaders.

  Just before the second Palmach party was due to leave the monastery, the radio began working again. The beleaguered men were informed of Abou Dayieh's declaration and urged to hold on. Within a short while, the Arabs' fire began to slacken. By nightfall reinforcements reached the monastery. St. Simeon and Operation Jebussi's first success were secured.

  With the Monastery of St. Simeon in Jewish hands, the task of taking over Katamon itself was confided to the officer who had relieved the battered Palmach, Yosef Nevo, a twenty-eight-year-old who had been brought to Palestine as an infant by parents he liked to describe as the only Zionists in Chattanooga, Tennessee. In his varied career, Nevo had been an aspiring chemist, a founding member of a kibbutz, the honor graduate of the first officers' course organized by the Haganah, a sergeant major in the Royal Artillery, a student at the London School of Economics, a fledgling diplomat. He was an ebullient, outspoken young man with a shock of stiff black hair and a voice which, in a different destiny, could have called home the hogs for miles around in Tennessee.

  Nevo placed his men on two parallel streets running through the center of Katamon and began working his way through the neighborhood. At one point, a pair of Arab Legion armored cars swung out of the Iraqi Consulate and opened fire. For an instant Nevo was afraid his inexperienced soldiers would panic. He ordered them into a sturdy building and told them to use their two-inch mortars as bazookas. The cars withdrew and his exultant men continued their advance.

  Worn out by the heavy losses of the day before, Abou Dayieh's men collapsed. With astonishing swiftness it was over. Nevo had taken Katamon, the Haganah's first significant conquest in Jerusalem.

  His advance was so swift that the Arab civilians still in the neighborhood were forced to flee in minutes, carrying away the possessions they could stuff into their pockets or clutch in their hands. As soon as he learned the news, Dov Joseph ordered teams of men into the captured area to seize every scrap of food they could find. The scenes that greeted them in those abandoned homes were extraordinary. They found tables set, meals half eaten, forks full of food resting on the plates, ovens still lit, the food they contained blackened, gas burning under coffeepots, bathtubs overflowing, a hundred small reminders of the precipitous flight of Katamon's Arabs. Those homes yielded up a precious store of food and fuel for the city's hungry Jews. Leon Angel, the city's leading baker, uncovered a five-day supply of flour for his ovens. Dov Joseph's sugar and cooking-oil supplies, severely depleted, were suddenly replenished. One house yielded a barrel of caviar, a delicacy strictly prohibited to orthodox Jews as nonkosher. The epicurean commander of Jerusalem's hungry soldiers, David Shaltiel, could not bear the thought of letting it go to waste. He ordered it put into a marmalade vat and served up as breakfast jam at his Schneller base.

  Following in the footsteps of Joseph's men, spurred by the lure of those elegant homes, came a different horde, scavengers in search of loot. Despite Nevo's orders to his men to shoot them in the legs on sight, looters sprang up everywhere like mushrooms after the rain, picking the homes bare of silver, crystal, linen, furniture, rugs, anything that would move. The following morning, one of the Arabs who had fled Katamon had an opportunity to measure the extent of their activities. The Jewish colleague with whom he shared an office telephoned him after checking on the condition of his home for him. "There is nothing left," he announced sorrowfully. "They've even taken the front door off its hinges."

  "Politics is like chess," Transjordan's King Abdullah liked to remark. "You cannot rush your pawns across enemy territory. You must look for a favorable opening." Stroking his goatee, his pale face impassive, the sovereign scrutinized the Arab leaders arrayed around him with his intense black eyes, pondering whether the moment had come to advance his pawns on the Palestine chessboard. In his immaculate white linen waistcoat and black trousers, his gold-flecked turban knotted on his head in the style peculiar to his Hejazi ancestors, the little King appeared almost out of place in the assembly gathered in his palace, a relic left over from another Arabia, an Arabia of desert tents and camel-borne warriors.

  He was not what he seemed, however, and his fellow leaders of the Arab League had congregated in Amman on this May Day to obtain from Abdullah what they had obtained from Farouk, a promise to make war on the Jews. Their presence
in his spare throne room placed the Hashemite ruler in an exquisitely delicate position, as complex as any of the chess problems he so enjoyed solving. With a subtlety as Oriental as the aroma of the Indian perfume he ordered regularly from Bombay, Abdullah was maneuvering on many levels. He had his special relationship with the British, and, through the periodic visits of his personal physician, Dr. Mohammed el Saty, to Jerusalem, he had maintained his contacts with the Jewish Agency. He was the only Arab leader who understood the inevitability of partition. Yet, while he might whisper his acceptance of the scheme to Briton or Jew, he did not dare recommend it to his fellow Arabs. Such advocacy, he well knew, might cost him his life or his throne. Nor did he have any intention of revealing to the men around him his plan to annex the Arab part of Palestine to his kingdom. Nonetheless, he was determined to warn his fellow Arab rulers of the perils inherent in the course they contemplated.

  Should fighting be necessary, he promised, he would "be among the soldiers fighting at the front." But before plunging into war, he declared, "my advice is: stop shooting at the Jews and demand an explanation from them. Has anyone even tried this, just to find out what possibilities it offers?" he asked. The Haganah, he warned, was "perfectly trained and equipped with modern weapons." Palestine's Arabs were "emigrating by the hundreds and thousands. The price of a room in Irbid is now six dinars.* They are emigrating while the Jews advance. Tomorrow the Jews will arrive by the thousands. They will push along the coast to Gaza and up to Acre. How will the Arabs stop them? Yes, let the Arabs try to confront them and thrust them back after the English leave and say to them, 'We don't recognize you,' and then God will do as he wills.