Other voices, however, contested John Glubb's resolve to offer his Legionnaires only "the semblance of a war" in the days ahead. Fed on the same intoxicating diet of propaganda and belligerent boasts as the crowds of Cairo, Baghdad and Damascus, the souks of Amman clamored for war—a real war, not a pretense.
Fueling their emotions were the stories brought to Amman by the Arabs fleeing Palestine, and a constant flow of men looking for arms and ammunition. Among them was a delegation of Jerusalem's leaders. Swallowing their pride, those followers of the Mufti went to Abdullah's palace to beg for weapons. Embarrassed and ill at ease they told the King how depleted their armories were, how serious a blow to the Arab cause the loss of the city would be.
The monarch listened to them with scant pleasure. He did not need to be reminded of Jerusalem's importance. It figured prominently in his own ambitions. But he could not conceal his distaste for the men before him. Turning to the treasurer of the Mufti's Arab Higher Committee, he observed, "You used to collect funds for the Mufti's criminals, and now you dare come here and ask me for money."
Disconcerted, his visitors launched again into a lurid description of the state of their supplies. "Our ammunition is almost gone," they pleaded. "We'll have to defend the city by throwing stones."
"Then throw stones and die," coldly replied the little King.
That same evening a car slipped discreetly up to the side entrance of the residence of Sir Alec Kirkbride. It had come to take the British minister in Amman to a meeting in a private house on the other side of the city. Waiting for him was Azzam Pasha, the secretary general of the Arab League. Azzam appeared to Kirkbride that night "a very worried man, uncertain of the wisdom of going to war." Indeed, what he sought from the British diplomat was reassurance about the course of action on which the Arabs were embarked.
Unaware of the conversation between Nokrashy Pasha and Sir Ronald Campbell, Azzam asked Kirkbride if he would assure him that the British Army would not disturb Egypt's line of communications in the Suez Canal Zone during the coming conflict. The British envoy replied that it would be inconsistent with His Majesty's government's policy as he understood it for Britain to do so. He told Azzam he would ask London for a formal reply, but added that if the Army intended to interfere they clearly wouldn't say so, so that in any event the answer to his query would be No.
Instead of reassuring the Arab leader, his words, Kirkbride noted, seemed only to further perplex and puzzle Azzam. Yet they were an excellent reflection of Britain's policy. The British Foreign Office was not totally displeased by the Arabs' decision to go to war. With the exception of the disappointing showing of the Palestinians, things seemed to be working out about as the Foreign Office had anticipated. The coming conflict, Whitehall estimated, "would be of relatively short duration and would eventually be checked somehow by the United Nations." Indeed, Ernest Bevin had privately warned a Palestinian Arab friend, "Make sure that whatever efforts you undertake, you undertake in two weeks. For two weeks, perhaps, we can help you. After that we can only help you diplomatically."
Bevin and his associates did foresee "some considerable Arab successes in the fighting." In particular, his deputy Sir Harold Beeley would later recall, "We were doubtful about the fate of Jewish Jerusalem. Their situation looked very precarious and we thought they would go under. We were not trying to warn the Arabs off going to war, but we were cautious," Beeley noted. "It would be correct to say that if we did not encourage the Arab states to go to war in Palestine, we did not discourage them, either."
The view of His Majesty's representative in Amman was considerably more candid. Two decades after, Sir Alec Kirkbride would still think, "We were waving the green flag at the Arabs."*
Seventy-five miles northwest of Amman, another black car drew up to an Arab Legion checkpoint. The Legionnaire on duty peered inside toward the heavyset, black-veiled woman sitting in the back seat. Beside her was a bulky man in a curly black astrakhan hat. The driver leaned toward the soldier and whispered one word: "Zurbati." That was not a password but a name, the name of the driver, an illiterate Iraqi Kurd who had become King Abdullah's most trusted servant. Respectfully, the soldier stiffened to a salute and waved the car forward.
The car was stopped ten times on its three-hour drive to Amman. Each time Zurbati's name whispered in the night sped its passage forward. In the back seat the passengers remained silent. Peering over her veil, the woman's dark eyes followed intently the shadowy outlines of the Arab Legion armor headed in the opposite direction, toward the Jordan River. In Amman, the two went straight to an ornate stone house above the road to the airport, across a wadi from the royal palace. There they were ushered into a lime-green circular salon dominated by a huge black-tiled fireplace. As they sipped a welcoming cup of tea, the frail silhouette of the man they had journey to Amman to see appeared in the doorway. The woman in the black veil rose and uttered a one-word greeting to the King of Transjordan: "Shalom."
Golda Meir had come to Amman at the risk of her life for a last confrontation with the Bedouin sovereign, hoping to find a key to the elusive state extolled in the greetings of their languages—"Shalom" in Hebrew, "Salam" in Arabic. The woman who had arrived in New York with ten dollars in her pocketbook and left with fifty million had been sent to Abdullah by David Ben-Gurion for something more valuable than all the Zionist funds in the world, an agreement that would keep the Arab Legion out of the approaching war.
Given Abdullah's and Glubb's intentions, it would not have seemed difficult. Much had changed, however, in the ten days since Glubb had sent Colonel Goldie to his meeting with the Haganah. The man Golda Meir saw before her that evening was a "sad and nervous king." The strident calls for war rising from the impassioned mobs of his souks had shaken his resolution. His fellow Arab leaders had so enmeshed him in their plans that his freedom of maneuver was now drastically reduced. If Abdullah still hoped to carry out his schemes, the new circumstances had forced a change in his tactics. He wanted to find a way to talk his fellows out of the war in which they sought to involve him. Through his physician-courier Dr. el Saty he had sent a message to the Jewish leadership. Give him some concession, he asked, so that he might in turn display to the rest of the Arab leadership the advantages of pursuing peace instead of war.
His message had prompted Golda Meir's trip. Dressed in a pair of coveralls, she had flown out of besieged Jerusalem in an open plane. In Haifa a dressmaker had hastily sewn up the black Arab dress that had disguised her on her journey.
Now the representatives of the two branches of the Semitic race, a Bedouin king who traced his descent to the Prophet and whose ancestors had dwelt on the Arabian Peninsula for centuries, and the daughter of a carpenter from Kiev so physically alien, yet so spiritually rooted in this ancient land of her Hebrew forebears, began their last effort to prevent a collision between their peoples.
The King reiterated the concessions his messenger had suggested: postpone proclaiming a Jewish state, keep Palestine united, with the Jews autonomous in their areas, and work out its destiny through a parliament composed equally of Arab and Jewish deputies. He desired peace, he told his visitor, but if his proposals were not accepted he feared war was inevitable.
They were not acceptable, Golda told the monarch. The Jews of Palestine sincerely wanted peace with their Arab neighbors, but not at the price of abandoning the most elemental of their aspirations, a land of their own. However, if they could return to the idea alluded to in their November conversation, the annexation scheme Abdullah still secretly intended to carry out, an understanding between them would be reached. The Jewish Agency was ready to honor the frontiers drawn by the United Nations as long as there was peace. Should war come, she gently warned, then her people would reach out and fight wherever they could as long as their strength lasted, and, she told the King, that strength had increased immeasurably in the past months.
The King said he realized the Jews would "have to repel any attack." But the situation had cha
nged radically since their last meeting. Deir Yassin had inflamed the Arab masses. "I was alone then," he said. "Now I am one of five and I have discovered I cannot make any decision alone."
Golda and the man who had accompanied her, a brilliant Orientalist named Ezra Danin, tactfully reminded the King that Jews were his only real friends.
"I know that," he replied. "I have no illusions. I believe with all my heart that Divine Providence has brought you back here, restoring you, a Semitic people who were exiled in Europe, and have shared in its progress to the Semitic East which needs your knowledge and initiative. But," he said, "conditions are difficult." Be patient, he urged.
The Jewish people, Golda quietly remarked, had been patient for two thousand years. Their hour of statehood was at hand and could not be postponed now. If an understanding between them could not be reached on another basis and His Majesty wanted war, then, she said, "I am afraid there will be war." She was confident they would win, and perhaps they would meet again after the conflict as representatives of two sovereign states.
It was the critical moment of their conversation. Had the King revealed his real intentions to his visitors, they might have moved on to an agreement. He did not, and the proud little sovereign would carry to his grave the explanation of his silence. Perhaps he was convinced that May night that the course on which he was embarked was so perilous that he dared reveal his plans only to the handful of non-Arabs who would be responsible for carrying them out, John Glubb and the British officers of his Arab Legion. "I am sorry," he told his visitors. "I deplore the coming bloodshed and destruction. Let us hope we shall meet again and not sever our relations."
The conversation that might have prevented the first Arab-Jewish conflict was ended. Before leaving on her dangerous journey, Golda Meir had told her escort, Danin, that she would "walk to hell" if there was a chance of saving one Jewish soldier's life by her action. She rose to her feet sadly aware that she had saved no lives this night.
At the doorstep, Danin turned to Abdullah. They had been friends for years. "Your Majesty," he said, "beware when you go to the mosque to worship and let people rush up to kiss your robe. Someday a man will shoot you like that."
"Habibi, dear friend," replied the King, "I was born a free man and a Bedouin. I cannot leave the ways of my father to become a prisoner of my guards."
The trio shook hands. The last glimpse Danin and Golda would have of the King was standing on the stairs in his white robe and headgear, "slowly, sadly, waving goodbye."
28
BY JUST ONE VOTE
THE MELANCHOLY NOTES of an accordion rose through the darkness in the settlement of Kfar Etzion. Sometimes nostalgic, sometimes defiant, Zvi Ben-Joseph, a Viennese poet, played one of his own songs to the hushed band of young people gathered around him. "If I fail, friend, take my gun and avenge me," he sang. Softly, moodily, the boys and girls of the Haganah before him took up each chorus, sending Ben-Joseph's words through the shell holes in their Neve Ovadia into the night beyond. Few words could have captured better the spirit of the 545 settlers and soldiers waiting in the Etzion bloc that night of May 11 for a final tidal wave to break upon their unfortunate hills.
Much had happened in the six weeks since the settlement's convoy had been lost at Nebi Daniel. On April 12 the colony was assigned the task for which, in a military sense, it had been founded: to harass Arab traffic between Jerusalem and Hebron. Then, on April 30, the settlers received the order that would seal their fate. The men of Jerusalem's southern bastion were told to cut the road to prevent reinforcements from reaching the city from Hebron during the Palmach's attack on Katamon.
His dour face marked by his years in Nazi concentration camps, Kfar Etzion's commander, Moshe Silberschmidt, had urged his men to the dangerous job with one phrase: "Netsach Yerushalayim"—for the eternity of Jerusalem. Throwing up barricades, cutting telephone communications, ambushing passing vehicles, they had succeeded in their task, so completely that the Arabs could not ignore the challenge. At dawn on May 4 the inevitable had happened. Only this time, for the first time in Palestine, Jewish soldiers saw in their rifle sights the image of the war David Ben-Gurion had so long prophesied, uniformed regular soldiers moving at them behind a screen of armored vehicles. Determined to wipe out the strategically placed settlement before May 14, the Arab Legion was attacking.*
Two squadrons of armored cars began to pour point-blank fire into the settlers' advanced posts in an abandoned Russian Orthodox monastery along the Jerusalem-Hebron road. Then, backed up by hundreds of Arab villagers, the Legion's Bedouin infantry moved to the attack. The monastery's defenders had been forced to fall back on their colony, leaving only five hundred yards between their foes and the heart of their settlement.
A hastily scribbled message had saved the colony that day. Anxious to reopen the Hebron road, not to engage in a major battle, Glubb Pasha ordered the officer directing the attack to break off action and return to his base. Deprived of a victory he had believed within his grasp, Major Abdullah Tell had vowed to the villagers around him, "We will be back."
The following morning, beside the common trench dug into their lands beneath the colony's flowering fruit trees, Moshe Silberschmidt had had the sad task of eulogizing twelve more dead settlers of Kfar Etzion. "What are our lives worth?" the young officer asked his sorrowing soldiers. "Nothing compared to our task. Remember: It is the ramparts of Jerusalem we defend here."
The men and women who had vowed not to rest until they had covered Kfar Etzion's barren ridges with blossoming fruit trees now faced the cruel prospect of becoming, according to their commander, "another Masada," the legendary repair of the last Jewish Zealots holding out against the Romans. "At least," one of them wrote in a last letter that night, "we can rejoice at being able to do what the youth of the ghettos of Europe could not do, rise up against our enemy with our arms in our hands."
Yet on the evening of May 11 when Zvi Ben-Joseph's accordion was finally put away in the Neve Ovadia, the sound of young laughter rang out again across the settlement. For a few hours, before a spell of guard duty or a brief nap, Kfar Etzion's youthful defenders had managed to forget.
Not for long. Saying goodbye to his girl friend, a nurse he had walked back to the hospital, Yaacov Edelstein had a premonition. He had fought with the partisans against the Wehrmacht in the forests of his native Poland, and he had instinctive feeling for the kind of menace under which Kfar Etzion lived.
"Listen," Edelstein told his girl. "I'm sure they're about to come for us. I'm afraid we shall not see each other again."
He was right. The Legion was coming back. Unknown to its British commander, dozens of its soldiers were at that moment mounting their armored cars and half-tracks. In Hebron and the surrounding villages, the irregulars too boarded their trucks. All of them were heading for Kfar Etzion.
Their attack began at 4 A.M. Wednesday, May 12. Shaken from his bunk by the first exploding shells, Yaacov Edelstein rushed to his post in his pajamas. Tumbling into his position, he saw the first gray light of dawn on the horizon through the halos of fog clinging to the hills around him.
He had been right. Kfar Etzion's last battle was beginning. True to the vow he had uttered eight days earlier, Major Tell was ready to destroy the colony at all costs. He had used a ruse to justify his attack to the Legion's hesitant commander. He had told his subordinate Captain Hikmet Muhair in Hebron to radio Glubb that one of his convoys was under fire from the colony.
Muhair began the attack with a company of infantry, a squadron of armored cars and hundreds of irregulars. One platoon was to seize a piece of high ground called the Mukhtar's Saddle, then work its way to a grove of umbrella pines and cypress trees south of the buildings of the main kibbutz. His principal force would follow the lines of the May 4 assault. After a heavy shelling by his armored cars, his men would seize the Russian Orthodox monastery from which the Haganah had harassed passing traffic on the Hebron road. Then his armored cars and a band of irregu
lars would push to a ridge north of the settlement called Lone Tree after the enormous oak on its crest. Once there, Muhair would have split Kfar Etzion off from its three satellite settlements, Massuot, Ravadim and Ein Tsurim.
His attack on the monastery was brief and devastating. Their sandbagged positions shelled apart, their trenches destroyed, their strongpoints shattered by cannon fire, the buildings' defenders were forced to withdraw, leaving their wounded behind. The survivors made their way back toward the main kibbutz, leaping from shell hole to shell hole. Zvi Ben-Joseph, the poet whose songs had animated the Neve Ovadia the evening before, was mortally wounded as the retreat began. A comrade grabbed his Sten gun from Ben-Joseph's dying grasp and continued the flight back toward Kfar Etzion. Minutes later another bullet ended Moshe Silberschmidt's determination to live another Masada. The survivor of four years in Nazi Germany's concentration camps fell a few yards from the body of his poet friend.
Once the monastery was in their hands, Muhair's men set out for the first obstacle on their path to Lone Tree. It was a strongpoint set on a knoll between the monastery and Lone Tree, holding eighteen men, a Spandau machine gun and the settlement's only mortar. Within an hour, the commander of the post was dead, the machine gun jammed and the mortar broken. The knoll's defenders in their turn fell back on Kfar Etzion.
O Jerusalem! Page 43