Inside the Old City's walls, a nucleus of able men headed by Anwar Nusseibi struggled to create a municipal administration, but their efforts were stymied by the dimensions of the task, the lateness of the hour, and a lack of skilled help. The inevitable result of that atmosphere of doubt, confusion and growing fear was the new wave of departures. Some people, like Hadawi, found a sanctuary only a few yards from their homes; for others, it would be at the end of a long journey to a neighboring Arab country.
A strange coming and going of trucks and carts preceded their departure. Inevitably, their journeys led them to one of Jerusalem's convents or monasteries. The spartan cells and austere rooms of men and women who had renounced the world and its works began to overflow with crystal, silverware, carpets and porcelain. Emile Kashram, the owner of a women's store on the Mamillah Road, chose the Convent of the Little Sisters of Charity as the repository of his stocks. In an hour, nuns in whose humble life a bar of yellow laundry soap was a luxury found their convent crammed with nylon stockings, silk bras and girdles, a dozen different kinds of French perfume, toilet soap, lipstick, rouge, mascara, all the accouterments of a life totally alien to their existence.
A night of heavy firing frightened Brahim Abou Hawa into rushing to the Allenby Barracks to buy from a British soldier the indispensable supplement to the taxi fare out of Jerusalem, a jerrican of gasoline. Then he loaded his six children into a cab. Before leaving, his wife had carefully packed everything away, draped their easy chairs with dust covers, and stuffed her savings into her bra. As she started out the door, she reached for two of her favorite possessions, a portable sewing machine and a radio. Brahim ordered her to leave them behind. Like most departing Jerusalemites, he had the unshakable conviction that their departure was temporary, that soon they would return to a city occupied by the Arab armies. In eight days, he assured his doubting wife, they would be safely settled in their home once again.
Jamil Tukan, a veteran of twenty years' service in the Land Settlement Department, had his illusions quickly dispelled. From the Old City retreat to which he had retired with a single suitcase, Tukan picked up a telephone and dialed 2026, the number of his abandoned flat. After a few seconds, an unknown voice answered. "Shalom," it said.
Some people, of course, refused to budge. The three sons of Mrs. George Deeb, Jerusalem's Buick dealer, were determined to leave their Upper Beqaa home to carry on their fight elsewhere. She refused to accompany them. As they hurried off she was digging a hole in the garden in which to bury three broken pistols they had left behind. They would not see her again for three years, until, dying of cancer, she was carried from her home on a stretcher.
Her eyes filled with tears, Ambara Khalidy snapped tight the shutters of the little library in which she had translated the Iliad into Arabic and had followed the partition debate with her husband. Sami Khalidy's bookshelves were bare now, his precious texts already hidden for safekeeping in an Old City monastery. After a parting glance around the room, Ambara went to the kitchen and kissed Aziza, her cook.
"We'll be back when school opens," she murmured. Then she went to the door. It was a gray, overcast day. The windows of her husband's college were taped over, and armed guards paced the lawn where his students had strolled. To her left were the new wings he had just completed, their labs and dormitories ready to receive their first students in the fall, concrete incarnations of his ambition to make his Arab College a fitting rival to Hebrew University.
One by one, her husband leading the way, the six members of the family walked to a waiting taxicab. The car started and Ambara turned to look again at her home. "How happy I have been here," she thought. "Here I have known Paradise." Up front, red-faced and totally silent, her husband stared straight ahead, refusing to turn back for a last glimpse of the institution to which he had devoted his life. On one side of Ambara, a daughter clutched a doll in her lap, on the other her youngest son, Tarif, hugged a worn teddy bear. As the last cypress tree rolled past the taxi windows, Ambara could no longer control herself. She burst into tears.
"La tibki, Mama," murmured the children beside her, "ha nerjaa baden. Don't cry, Mama, we shall come back."
Ambara Khalidy's children were wrong. They would never return to the college to which their father had given so many years of labor. They were all unwitting participants in a new Middle Eastern tragedy whose consequences would haunt the conscience of the world for years to come, that of the Palestine refugees. Talented and persevering, the Khalidys would overcome the rigors of their exodus and contribute a new generation of scholars to the educational institutions of another Arab society in Lebanon. For thousands of their less fortunate compatriots, however, the road away from Palestine would lead only to the endless anguish of a refugee camp.
The catalyst behind their exodus was the Haganah's decision to occupy a series of vital areas before the Arab armies could hurl their promised invasion at them May 15. Most but not all of those sites were inside the boundaries assigned the Jewish state by the United Nations and contained substantial Arab populations anxiously awaiting the invaders.
The first major town to fall had been Tiberias, the ancient resort of Roman emperors, on April 18. Hardly had the Haganah secured the town when a victory of far greater consequence took place. After twenty-four hours of intense fighting, the Jewish Army seized control of the port city of Haifa. Safed, the ancient city of the Cabala, was occupied early in May. Dozens of smaller towns and villages in Galilee then came under Jewish control.
In only one instance did the British intervene in force to check the Jewish advance—in the port of Jaffa, next to Tel Aviv. Stung by Arab criticism of Britain's passivity, Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin gave Sir Gordon MacMillan "a direct, unequivocal order to bloody well put troops in there and get Jaffa back for the Arabs."
His command forced MacMillan to do what he had been reluctant to do since partition, commit British soldiers to an Arab–Jewish action. His troops checked the advance, largely an Irgun operation, but MacMillan soon found that there were virtually no Arabs left in Jaffa to whom his troops could return the city. By early May, sixty-five thousand of the port's seventy thousand residents had fled.
That unhappy situation was being repeated all over Palestine, and its causes were varied. Sometimes it was the result of a calculated Haganah policy. Anxious to clear Upper Galilee of Arabs to check the Arab invasion routes without using his own exhausted troops, the Palmach's Yigal Allon turned to psychological warfare. "I gathered all the Jewish mukhtars who had contacts with the Arabs in different villages," he recorded later in the Palmach history Sefer ha-Palmach, and "asked them to whisper in the Arabs' ears that a great Jewish force had arrived in Galilee and that it was going to burn all the villages of the Huleh [the Lake Huleh region]. They should suggest to those Arabs that they flee while there was still time." The tactic, he noted, "attained its goal completely."
On occasion, the Jewish leaders actively sought to persuade their Arab neighbors to remain in their midst. In Haifa, Tuvia Arazi even took the exceptional step of obtaining the Chief Rabbi's permission for Jewish bakers to violate the Passover prohibitions by baking bread for the Arabs in the quarter captured by the Haganah. Yet despite such gestures thousands of Haifa's Arabs streamed into the port, clambered aboard any seaworthy vessel they could find, and fled to Beirut.
Contributing to the exodus everywhere was the exodus that had already taken place, that of the Arabs' middle- and upper-class leaders. Like their brothers in Jerusalem, most of those who left were convinced that their departure was temporary, that they would soon return in the avenging van of the Arab armies.
Above all, fear and uncertainty fueled the Arabs' flight. Panic has no nationality, and fear is not the property of any one people. Just as fear of the coming occupants had seized the French and the Belgians of 1940, so now fear seized the less sophisticated Arabs of Palestine, hurling them onto the roads by thousands. As the French and the Belgians had repeated to each other on the hi
ghways of their exodus stories of German soldiers raping nuns and slaughtering children, so the Arabs nourished theirs with the images of the atrocities of Deir Yassin.
And so by thousands they fled, poor, bewildered people, clutching a few belongings in a cardboard box, a sack, a suitcase, carrying their bawling young in their arms. In dilapidated buses whose roofs were crammed with their possessions, in taxis, on foot, on bicycles, on donkeys, they poured out of the country thinking that, unlike their Jewish neighbors, they had somewhere to go, vowing, like Ambara Khalidy's children, "We shall come back." They were wrong.
27
"THROW STONES AND DIE."
CLUSTERS OF POLICE surrounded Egypt's massive Parliament Building despite the supposedly secret nature of the meeting beginning inside. Their presence attested to the success of the press campaign unleashed the month before to stir the population's martial ardor. It had been so successful that Egypt's authorities feared the extremists of the Moslem Brotherhood might at any moment hurl Cairo's aroused masses onto the streets of the capital.
Even King Farouk had made his contribution to the military mood embracing the city. Now he stalked its nightclubs in a garment more appropriate to its new atmosphere than his usual dinner jacket—a field marshal's uniform. So that his entire entourage might share in the temper of the hour, Farouk had even proclaimed uniforms de rigueur in his court and had awarded military ranks to his sisters and half a dozen of his favorite courtesans.
Inside the royal parliament, however, the mood was grim and businesslike. His face set in a somber mask, his hands clutching the speech he had spent the morning preparing, Mahmoud Nokrashy Pasha rose from his place below the Speaker's stand and stared at the men arrayed in the circular chamber. It was six o'clock in the evening, Tuesday, May 11, 1948. The moment Nokrashy Pasha had once hoped to avoid was at hand. Calmly he asked the men before him for a declaration of war on the as yet unborn Jewish state in Palestine.
As he droned through his speech, only one dissenting voice rose to protest his call. "Is the Army ready?" asked his predecessor, Ahmed Sidki Pasha.
Amid the chorus of jeers and catcalls that greeted the question, Nokrashy quietly replied, "I will take the responsibility that the Army is ready."*
In two hours it was over. The secret session had voted Nokrashy Pasha a war, a state of siege, and six million additional dollars for his army.
Fifteen thousand members of that forty-thousand-man army were already concentrated in an Egyptian Expeditionary Force around the seaside community of El Arish in the Sinai Peninsula. Though it now had road maps of Palestine, the army that Nokrashy believed prepared had yet to receive a single mobile kitchen from which to feed the men he was sending to war. Protesting that only four battalions of the two brigades gathered in El Arish were ready for action, the force's deputy commander, a pipe-smoking Sudanese colonel named Mohammed Naguib, warned his superiors they were courting disaster.
Nonsense, replied Major General Ahmed Ali el Muawi. There would be little fighting and no real opposition.
At the opposite end of the Palestine coastal strip, in the Lebanese port of Sidon, the eight hundred members of another armed force debarked to take their place in the gathering ranks of the Arab armies. Beige woolen burnooses over their shoulders, a Koran in a leather pouch hung around their necks, these Moroccan volunteers represented North Africa's contribution to the coming jihad. Pointing dramatically south toward the city that had beckoned to them in their Magrib, Lebanon's Prime Minister Riad Solh set them on the road to Jerusalem. Then the man who had convinced Farouk to enter the war returned to his capital to perform another action poignantly illustrative of the fratricidal nature of the conflict overtaking the Middle East: he ordered a detachment of his tiny army to protect the citizens of Beirut's ancient and populous Jewish Quarter.
Faithful to its historic tradition, the city of the Ommayad caliphs was the most warlike capital in the Middle East. Daily the vehicles of Syria's armored brigade paraded through Damascus to the noisy accolades of thousands of its citizens. Responding to an impassioned plea by Jamil Mardam, the Syrian parliament in its turn readied a declaration of war and announced that the nation's borders would be closed to civilian traffic two hours before the mandate expired. To flesh out the Syrian Army with an additional five thousand recruits, the parliament appropriated six million Syrian pounds from an account surprisingly well provisioned in a nation so anxious to wage war, that containing the funds paid by young Syrians to avoid the draft.
In the Orient Palace Hotel, Haj Amin Husseini continued to glide mysteriously from salon to salon, his thin figure protected by the folds of his bulletproof vest. The Mufti had hoped for a different resolution to Palestine's problems than the one at hand. He had wanted to see his Jihad Moqhades poised now to drive his Jewish foes into the sea. Instead they were barely able to defend the ground they held, and Palestine's fate lay in other hands, those guiding the Arab armies and above all those of his rival Abdullah.
After two days of furious argument in the Arab League War Council, Abdullah succeeded in thwarting Haj Amin's most cherished scheme, the proclamation of an Arab state in Palestine with as its government his Arab Higher Committee. Instead the War Council announced that the Arab portions of Palestine and the Jewish territory soon expected to be under Arab control would be administered by the Arab League.
A furious Haj Amin cabled his benefactor, King Farouk, his congratulations on Egypt's declaration of war and sent a secret messenger to Egyptian Army headquarters in El Arish. His task was to urge the Egyptians to follow the right road on the maps of Palestine that George Deeb had furnished them. It led to Jerusalem, not Tel Aviv. After twelve years in exile, Haj Amin longed to return to the city of which he was nominally the Mufti. He knew that if his rival Abdullah took Jerusalem his chances of reclaiming the seat of Al Aqsa were as slim as they would be if it fell to his Jewish foes.
The pier's weary old spans crept across a sea shimmering under the unrelenting sun. Its worn shafts had been driven into the Gulf of Aqaba to receive the arms of an earlier Arab conquest, T. E. Lawrence's drive up the Hejazi railway to Damascus. Now the munitions to fuel another campaign were being unloaded on Lawrence's jetty. They represented a vital part of the stores John Glubb had purchased with the subsidy his countrymen had given the Arab Legion in February.
Waiting to receive it was one of the men recruited with that subsidy, an adventuresome young lieutenant named Nigel Brommage. Brommage had corralled twenty-seven trucks, every truck in southern Transjordan, to cart the millions of rounds of rifle ammunition being unloaded from the ship in Aqaba harbor across the desert to the railhead in Ma'an. And in forty-eight hours another, even more vital cargo was due to arrive, thousands of shells for the Arab Legion's artillery.
Those two shiploads of ammunition represented one phase of the Legion's preparations for the coming crisis. The British government had agreed officially to give the Transjordanians enough ammunition to fight a thirty-day war. Unofficially, the Legion had also been able to get a good deal more. For the past six weeks, the British had been nightly dumping their spare ammunition into the Dead Sea. Thanks to Glubb's contacts, much of it instead had been dumped into the waiting trucks of his Legionnaires.
The Legion itself had been expanded to 7,000 men, of whom 4,500, divided into four mechanized regiments, could be counted on for front-line service. The distinctive red-and-white kaffiyeh that the Legionnaires wore was the most coveted piece of clothing a Transjordanian might possess, the badge of honor to which the Beni Sakr and Howeitat tribesmen roaming Abdullah's kingdom assiduously aspired. All volunteers, tightly disciplined, well trained, they were the only Arab force that inspired doubt in the soldiers of the Haganah.
The British arms they employed had proven their value on other deserts in conflict with the Afrika Korps: six-pound antitank guns, 25-pounder field artillery, three-inch mortars and a fleet of fifty Marmon Harrington armored cars. To lead them, Glubb had recruited a nucleus of a
ble British professional officers, men who had fought in Burma, Crete, El Alamein and the Rhineland.
The decision of the Amman conference gave the Legion responsibility for the central section of the front from Jerusalem to Nablus. The Egyptians were responsible for the south up to Bethlehem, and the Syrians and the Iraqis, Glubb noted sardonically, were supposed "to descend like the wolf on the fold in Galilee."
Yet the man who commanded that Legion from a small office with French windows on a hilltop in Amman had no intention of ordering it to Tel Aviv or the sea. The limits that John Glubb had set on his armored cars' advance had been written on the map of Palestine on November 29, 1947. As Colonel Goldie's secret mission to the Haganah had indicated, Glubb's primary concern was executing the agreement between Ernest Bevin and Prime Minister Abou Hoda. He had already quietly given his British officers firm orders to stay inside the areas assigned the Arab state when they moved over the Jordan.
Pondering the tactical problem before him, Glubb knew that from the east of Haifa south to Beersheba a long mountain ridge had offered, from time immemorial, the ideal obstacle to an army trying to reach the heartland of Palestine from the sea. Since Glubb's intention was "just to make a semblance of war," his idea was to move his army along that mountain screen, shifting it from spot to spot to plug any Jewish effort to break through its passes.
The one imponderable in Glubb's planning was Jerusalem. John Glubb had no particular feeling for the city. His Arabs lived in the desert. For both military and political reasons, he was determined to keep the Arab Legion out of the Holy City. His men's superior firepower would be wasted in a house-to-house fight. His Jewish foes with their urban backgrounds were better adapted to city fighting than his Bedouin tribesmen. Glubb reckoned that capturing Jerusalem would require two thousand men, almost half his force. And Britain, to whom Glubb owed his first allegiance, still harbored hopes for its internationalization. Thrusting his Legion into its precincts might place in jeopardy Transjordan's private arrangement with Ernest Bevin, and none of Glubb's orders to his British officers was more categoric than those involving Jerusalem. The vision haunting David Shaltiel's planning might be an illusion. If John Glubb had his way, the sand-colored armored cars of the Arab Legion would never appear on the ridge lines of Jerusalem.
O Jerusalem! Page 42