O Jerusalem!

by Larry Collins

  At the conclusion of the ceremony Nevo crushed a glass under his heel, a symbolic gesture of grief for the destruction of the Temple whose ruins lay barely three miles away. He gave Naomi a fervent kiss. Then Nevo returned to duty with the Haganah, and Naomi went back to her mother. The conqueror of Katamon might be married at last, but until he could find a way to smuggle the woman who still did not know she had become his mother-in-law past the Arabs besieging Jerusalem, his share of marital bliss was going to be limited to the fervent kiss he had just given his bride.

  President Harry S Truman surveyed the men around his desk as a magistrate might contemplate the litigants before his bench. Indeed, the scene in his office bore its resemblance to a trial. Forty-eight hours after Moshe Sharett's departure for Tel Aviv, Truman had assembled his advisers to debate the most urgent foreign-policy issue before his government: if the Jewish Agency spurned Marshall's advice and proclaimed a Jewish state on May 14, should the United States extend the new state diplomatic recognition?

  For Harry Truman, there was no question. He yearned to recognize the new state and honor the pledge he had secretly sent to Chaim Weizmann on the eve of Passover. But he could not undertake so major a decision without the concurrence of his principal advisers. Persuaded that the arguments in favor of recognition were overwhelming, he had summoned them for a "full, complete and exhaustive discussion," convinced that the outcome would be a decision to recognize a new state. On one side of his desk sat Secretary of State George C. Marshall and Undersecretary Robert Lovett. Opposite them were the President's special counsel, Clark Clifford, and his political adviser, David Niles.

  Marshall began by putting forward the case against recognition. The professional diplomats in the department he represented were almost unanimous in opposing the move. One of his Middle Eastern ambassadors, George Wadsworth, had cabled his colleagues that he wished "to go on record as saying if the United States recognizes a Jewish state and continues its uncritical support of Zionist policy, then the Russians will be the dominant force in the Middle East within the next twenty years." His cable had brought a wave of supporting messages pouring into Washington from his fellow ambassadors. The Secretary could not easily ignore such an overwhelming manifestation of their opinion. In addition, despite his personal sympathies for the Zionists, he did not believe, as he had told Sharett, that their state could hold out against the Arabs. Withold recognition and all it implied, Marshall counseled Truman, until the new state had demonstrated to the world its viability.

  When he had finished, Clifford presented the other side. He urged Truman not only to recognize the state but to strive to be the first nation to recognize it. Such a gesture would be only logically consistent with the United States's policy in Palestine, he argued.

  To Clifford's dismay, Marshall responded not by rebutting his arguments, but by attacking the very fact that they were arguing. "Is this a contested proceeding?" he asked the President. Recognition was not, he said, "a matter to be determined on the basis of politics. Unless politics were involved, Mr. Clifford would not even be at this conference. This is a serious matter of foreign-policy determination, and the question of politics and political opinion does not enter into it."

  It quickly became apparent that instead of a debate on recognition, Truman's meeting had turned into a debate on the prerogatives of the Secretary of State. Marshall made it clear that he considered their debating of recognition an invasion of the jurisdiction of his office, an affront to his dignity. To overrule him now, Clifford realized, would be tantamount to calling for his resignation.

  Crestfallen, the President began to gather up the papers on his desk. There was no man in his Administration on whom he depended more than Marshall. However deep was his desire to recognize the state, however he longed to make this last gesture to "the old doctor" he so esteemed, he could not do it if the price were going to be a rupture with his Secretary of State.

  "Thank you all for your contributions," he said. "I accept your recommendation, General. The United States will not at this time recognize a new Jewish state in Palestine."

  26

  "WE SHALL COME BACK."

  HIS BLACK ROBE and shoulder-length white wig fixed firmly in place, Sir William Fitzgerald stared down from his Chief Justice's bench at the courtroom before him. On this warm spring morning the last case to be heard by the British court system in Palestine lay before Sir William. The sound of intermittent gunfire outside punctuated the proceedings. No litigation could have symbolized the agony of Palestine better than that final suit at law on Sir William's docket. The litigants were an Arab and a Jew, and the issue at dispute between them was a quarrel over a piece of land.

  His decision rendered, Sir William rose and left the courtroom. When it had been cleared, he returned to take down with his own hands the royal coat of arms. Carefully he laid out on his bench the shield bearing two lions and a unicorn, thinking that with his gesture "British justice in Palestine was ending." Then he returned to his chambers, hung his robe and his wig on their hook, cast a last glance at his legal volumes and his ornate gold inkstand, and started out the door. He paused. Instead of shutting it, he left it open, the key hanging from its unturned lock "for whoever would come to claim it."

  Thus in a hundred different offices in Jerusalem did the British administration in Palestine begin to go through the last rites of a thirty-year sojourn in the Holy Land. By the end of the first fortnight in May, Britain would have evacuated 227,178 tons of merchandise from Palestine, including items as diverse as fifty-nine tons of maps and twenty-five tons of official archives. And if Britain was leaving, then the appurtenances of British life would leave with her. The unsold cigarettes, whiskey, marmalade and Indian tea from the Naafi stores, the British Army's equivalent of the PX, were crated up for the voyage home.

  For Sir Alan Cunningham, those last weeks were a trying ordeal. "We had no instructions from anybody on what to do," he would recall. He had hoped Jerusalem's internationalization at least would be put into effect, but he noted sadly, "No one did anything to carry it out. The Christian world was not sufficiently interested in the problem to provide the cooperation and assistance necessary."

  He himself had devoted most of those last days to trying to arrange a truce in the Holy City. But just as, earlier, the Arabs sensing victory had refused to listen to truce calls, so now the Haganah, under Ben-Gurion's resolve to capture the city, was indifferent to his appeals.

  There seemed, indeed, to be almost as many peace plans as diplomats in Jerusalem. Jacques de Reynier, the Red Cross representative, concocted a scheme to protect the city by placing it under a Red Cross flag. The counsels of the United States, France and Belgium, representing the Security Council, ceaselessly sought to reconcile the warring parties. The United Nations' Pablo de Azcarate tried to use his influence, but, in addition to local indifference, he was plagued by the naïveté of his superiors in New York. While he was trying to stop people from killing each other, he noted in his diary, his United Nations Palestine Committee was arguing about bus services for Jerusalem. "Does someone have to shout at them," he wrote, "to make them understand that a war is raging in Palestine and if they don't take steps to stop it, the whole of Palestine, including Jerusalem, will become a battlefield?"

  None of those efforts, however well-intended, would produce anything enduring. As their futility became apparent, Sir Alan turned increasingly to about the only activity left him, saying goodbye to old friends. Among them were Sami and Ambara Khalidy, the Arab College head and his wife. After a last lunch, they strolled a few moments in his garden, talking, Ambara would remember, "of roses and the Iliad, as though nothing was happening, really."

  One afternoon, the mandate's senior civil servants, Arab and Jewish, came to the Residence for a final ceremony. "Gentlemen, there is not much left for you to do," Cunningham said with fine understatement. "Goodbye and good luck." Then he offered each a parting handshake, a gesture which for many of those men ter
minated decades in the service of His Majesty's government.

  Another visitor came to see him that afternoon. Despite the problems separating them, a mutual sense of esteem and respect had characterized the relationship between Sir Alan and Golda Meir. And so, when they had finished their business, Sir Alan allowed himself a personal comment.

  "I understand your daughter is in a kibbutz in the Negev," he said. "There will be war, and they stand no chance in those settlements. The Egyptians will move through them no matter how hard they fight. Why not bring her home to Jerusalem?" he suggested.

  Golda Meir was touched by his gesture. "Thank you," she replied, "but all the boys and girls in those settlements have mothers. If all of them take their children home, then who will stop the Egyptians?"

  "Jerusalem is like one big kibbutz." Thus did one of its residents describe life in the Jewish city on the eve of Britain's departure. It was a sorely tried, desperately hungry kibbutz. The jubilation that had welcomed the Nachshon convoys was gone. The eighteen hundred tons of foodstuffs they had brought to the city, not even half the total that Dov Joseph estimated as indispensable to withstand a siege, were locked under armed guard in his warehouses. From them once a week a miserable portion of his hoard was distributed to the population. The ration issued for the last week of Britain's mandate was an indication of how critical Jewish Jerusalem's plight was. It consisted of three ounces each of dried fish, dried beans, lentils and macaroni, and one and a half ounces of margarine.

  The open-air market at Mahane Yehuda was empty. There was simply no fresh food of any kind left. By night, secret emissaries of Dov Joseph visited half a dozen friendly Arab villages in search of a few boxes of vegetables or a lamb or two to slaughter. Jerusalem's twenty-nine bakeries were consolidated into five to save fuel. They were allowed to produce twenty-five thousand loaves of bread a day for the civilian population, a quarter of a loaf for each Jerusalemite. To maintain the strength of the city's workingmen, Joseph's committee set up a community kitchen serving five thousand meals a day, enough to give each worker two reasonably nutritious meals a week. On Ben Yehuda, the cafés known for their thick chocolate cake or sugar-crusted apple strudel could offer their clients only a slice of gray bread smeared with a sweet paste. Inevitably, a black market sprang up. One egg was worth seven olives. A man with a can of peaches to barter away was rich. A handful of British Jews chose evacuation with their departing compatriots; some of them, their neighbors noted bitterly, sold their food reserves at several times their real value. There were a few defeatists. Harry Levin encountered one survivor of Dachau who despaired, "This is our fate wherever we live, even here."

  In most Jerusalem homes, however, the prevailing mood was a determination to hang on, a grim conviction that, painful as the city's situation was, the alternatives were worse. A popular watchword was a warning that Haganah officers often gave their recruits. "If you can't face death," it went, "you can run. But remember, if you run, you can't run just a mile. You must run a thousand miles."

  Just as serious as the food shortage was the fuel situation. Buses stopped moving at nightfall. Taxis had disappeared. Most private cars had already been taken over by the Haganah. Few people had kerosene left for cooking. The handful of cans still available were black-marketed for as much as twelve pounds a can. People cooked out of doors in gardens or back yards over campfires, and Dov Joseph's committee taught the population how to build box ovens to keep food warm without artificial heat.

  For weeks, Alexander Singer, the power-plant manager, had had to watch the brightly lit Arab quarters from his own darkened Jewish city. He had deliberately cut the current coming into Jewish Jerusalem, to force the power plant, while still in British hands, to economize on the fuel supply in its storage tanks. Still, when he had been able to reenter the plant after the capture of Katamon, Singer found only four hundred tons of fuel left. Now, to stretch that precious reserve as far as possible, he closed down all the station's diesel generators except one, and fed the city's vital installations in rotation off that unique generator.

  More than anything else, however, one dramatic incident, on the afternoon of May 7, one week before the mandate was due to expire, drove home to every resident of Jerusalem just how precarious the city's situation was. Suddenly, without warning, there was not a single drop of water left in the faucets of Jerusalem. Miles away at Ras el Ein, the Arabs had cut the city's waterline, trying to make good a boast of the Arab Higher Committee "to kill the Jews of Jerusalem from thirst."

  Only the foresight of Dov Joseph and his water expert Zvi Leibowitz stood between the city and disaster. Since January, Leibowitz had been building up his emergency reserve in the city's cisterns. His stock now stood at 115,000 cubic meters, enough to last the city 115 days on the spartan ration Leibowitz had proclaimed for his fellow citizens. Leibowitz had determined it by locking himself and his wife in their house and decreasing their own water consumption until he reached what he considered to be the minimum ration allowable, two gallons per person a day in the furnace heat of a Palestine summer. That would allow each Jerusalemite four pints of drinking water daily. Every demand of cooking, toilet flushing, washing and personal hygiene would have to be met with what was left.

  From the beginning, Leibowitz had been persuaded that the best way to avoid panic was to bring the water to his consumers instead of sending the consumers to water. He had mobilized a team of civilian volunteers to man his donkey- and horse-towed water tanks. Suddenly they appeared in Jerusalem's Jewish neighborhoods, regularly delivering each householder a three-day ration. They would soon be an institution. For weeks, through the searing heat of summer, between bursts of Arab shellfire, Jerusalem's housewives would line up with their bottles, their teakettles, saucepans and milk cans, to wait for the neighborhood donkey cart and their precious water ration.

  Jerusalem being Jerusalem, the city could not endure a siege without some manifestation of Providence. In April, before the Nachshon convoys arrived, a weed called khubeiza had provided a miraculous relief to the hungry population. The spinachlike herb sprang up wild in the fields after the spring rains. It was nutritious, filling and full of vitamins. Women scoured the fields of the city looking for it, and before it disappeared it had even made its appearance on the menu of the Hotel Eden as "spinach croquettes." Suddenly, just before the British left, a wholly unseasonable three-day rain struck Jerusalem, bringing a new and totally unexpected crop of khubeiza pushing up from the soil. "Ah," said the city's solons, "the Lord is with us. The last time when we left Egypt, he sent us manna. This time he sent us rain for the cisterns and the khubeiza."

  There was no khubeiza in the cobbled alleyways and obscure courtyards of the Old City. The seventeen hundred residents of the Jewish Quarter and their two hundred defenders lived in a peculiar world of contrasts, of echoing rifle fire blending with the psalmody rising from its synagogues. On its domed rooftops, young soldiers leaped from building to building in pursuit of Arab snipers, while in their musty yeshivas below aged rabbis pursued the wisdom of the Torah. Behind Haganah headquarters, an elderly rabbi, using one leg as a writing table, eating only bread and water in the custom of his exalted calling, spent his days copying sacred texts a few feet from the building where other men drew plans to defend his quarter.

  The very concept of defending the quarter, protected until now from the Arabs all around it by British strongpoints, was controversial. Shaltiel considered the place indefensible and had repeatedly urged its evacuation. Many of its elderly residents thought they could arrange a solution to their problems with their Arab neighbors if the Haganah would leave. Sir Alan Cunningham had tried to persuade Jerusalem's Chief Rabbi Isaac Herzog to abandon the area. His refusal echoed the deep emotion those few hundred square yards of soil evoked. Its defenders, he replied, were "trustees guarding the heritage of all past generations of Jews."

  Avraham Halperin, the officer arrested after leaving Rabbi Weingarten's house, had never been able to return. His
place as commander had been taken by Moshe Russnak, a soft-spoken Czech. Russnak's headquarters were in the Tipat Chalav, the "Drop of Milk," a social service founded to provide milk for underprivileged children. Many of Russnak's men had first entered that building as infants in their mothers' arms. They came from a variety of backgrounds. The most magnetic officer in the command was a handsome, blond twenty-one-year-old Hebrew University student, a native of the Old City, named Emmanuel Meidav. An exuberant, outgoing youth, he was adored equally by the children of the quarter and the pious older residents, who loved the sound of his resonant voice booming out the Sabbath hymns. Emmanuel had an extraordinary faculty for picking apart weapons and explosives. He had, his awed comrades claimed, "golden hands."

  None of Russnak's soldiers seemed more out of place than a quietly determined, dark-haired twenty-two-year-old English girl named Esther Cailingold. Born in London into a devoutly orthodox household, she had spent the Blitz serving beside her father in a volunteer fire brigade. Deeply moved by the victims of the death camps after the war, she had come to Palestine to teach in 1946. Soon she was serving full time in the Haganah. All during the winter and spring of 1948 she had been obsessed by one desire, to fight at the symbolic center of the dispersed nation she had come to Palestine to help revive. Just after Passover, her request had been granted. Disguised as a nurse, Esther Cailingold had been sent to the quarter she so wanted to defend.

  The heart of the quarter was the Street of the Jews. It ran from the Old City walls one hundred yards below Zion Gate to Lubinsky's House, a building spanning its six-foot width at its northern end as a Venetian overpass might span a canal. Underneath the span an iron gate erected after the 1936 riots marked the dividing line between the Arab and Jewish quarters. West of the street, the Jewish Quarter continued up a gentle incline toward the compoundlike outline of the Armenian Quarter. To the south, it was protected by the Old City walls, falling away to the Valley of Kidron. Its western defense depended to a large degree on the Armenians' preventing the Arabs from using their neighborhood to assault it. Its most exposed flanks were the north and the east, and their defense depended on two key positions. The first, in the quarter's northeastern corner, was the Warsaw Building, a collection of three-storied structures built around a courtyard with the contributions of Warsaw's Jewish community. They included a synagogue, and study rooms and living facilities for its scholars, all now evacuated to turn the compound into a Haganah strongpoint.