O Jerusalem!

by Larry Collins

  Paving the way with another deluge of shells, the Arabs rushed toward Lone Tree, where Kfar Etzion's one old British bazooka waited for them. Its half-dozen shells had no effect on the advancing armored cars. From there the Arabs swept up a short rise littered with white stones to the telephone exchange. When their last ammunition was gone, the operators on duty smashed their switchboard with an ax and fled. Telephone communication between the bloc's four settlements was cut. In a few moments all land contact was, too.

  Muhair had completed the first phase of his plan. He had split up Kfar Etzion into four isolated settlements. Now he had only to wipe them out one by one.

  In the cluttered Tel Aviv library in which he had pondered most of the major decisions of his life, David Ben-Gurion prepared for what well might be the most important meeting he had ever attended. On this May afternoon, the Council of Thirteen, a body he had created to replace the Jewish Agency Executive and to serve eventually as a provisional government, would decide whether or not to proclaim a Jewish state when Britain's Palestine mandate expired. Secretary Marshall's grave warning and the menacing presence of the Arab armies drawn up on the borders of Palestine had found their audience. A strong current of opinion in the Council favored accepting Marshall's truce proposal and agreeing to postpone the proclamation of a state. So closely aligned were the votes on the issue that Ben-Gurion had taken the extraordinary precaution of sending a Piper Cub to Jerusalem to fly one of the Council members, an orthodox rabbi on whose vote he knew he could count, to the meeting.

  For Ben-Gurion there was, of course, no question. He was in complete agreement with the elderly scientist he had so often disputed for the leadership of the Zionist movement: proclaim the Jewish state, now or never. If the Jewish people hesitated it might prove fatal, he felt, to the state for which they had worked so long. Implicit in the United States's proposals was the idea of using a truce period for still another reappraisal of the Palestine question, a reappraisal which might put back into question his people's dreams of statehood.

  Despite his esteem for Marshall, Ben-Gurion did not believe that postponing their state would halt the Arabs' invasion. State or no state, truce or no truce, he believed the Arabs would invade, and when they did, the mechanisms of statehood would be indispensable to the Yishuv's survival. With a state, they would be able to buy arms openly as the Arabs did, to run their own maritime commerce to bring them to Palestine. A state would give his people a national identity to buoy their spirits in the difficult times through which they would have to pass.

  His opponents in the Council of Thirteen favored a truce as a means of buying time. By rushing ahead now, by triggering an Arab onslaught, the Yishuv, they argued, risked losing everything that the Jewish people had for years striven to attain. Another thought weighed on them as they considered the decision they would have to make Wednesday, May 12. Having just lost six million people in the Nazi holocaust, could they accept the risk of another slaughter? They were also keenly aware that the army on which their settlement depended was beset by internal divisions.

  With the advent of a state and the conflict its birth would produce, the Haganah would have to become an army. The army after which Ben-Gurion wanted his soldiers to pattern themselves was Britain's. To Ben-Gurion, it seemed that much of the Haganah leadership, nurtured in the underground, had not grasped "what a state was, what a war was." They had been trained to defend settlements, not to fight a war, and they didn't understand the difference. In war, Ben-Gurion thought, "you take a man from Tel Aviv and put him in front of Beersheba and it's for the state, not Beersheba, that he must be ready to give his life." In trying to prepare the Haganah for its new role Ben-Gurion placed the greater part of his confidence in those officers who had fought with the British Army during the war instead of in those who had remained in Palestine.

  That had stirred resentment among the 5,200 men of the Palmach, the elite of the Jewish forces. An intense and special kind of camaraderie bound its members, officers and men alike, together. Disdaining the external trappings of military discipline, they were united by a highly developed sense of interdependence and mutual confidence. That gave them great resiliency and flexibility in battle. It also gave them a sense of superiority over the rest of the Haganah. Palmach officers were not above disputing and, on occasion, ignoring, orders passed to them by Haganah officers whose judgment they questioned. They had no inhibitions about strengthening their armories by raiding the supplies of nearby Haganah units. Their tactics had proven highly successful in the Palestine of the mandate. In the new situation, Ben-Gurion feared, they could lead to disaster. In addition, the Palmach's leadership was drawn largely from the kibbutzim of Ben-Gurion's political rivals of the Mapam party, a more left-wing Socialist body than his own Mapai. One day the Palmach might be the instrument of a left-wing coup d'état, he suspected. He had already taken steps to bring it under tighter control.

  He had begun by eliminating the job of Israel Galili, the man who represented the Palmach in the Haganah high command. The ensuing outcry had forced Ben-Gurion to backtrack and reinstate Galili, but the Jewish leader had made his point: the days of an independent Palmach were numbered.

  On paper, the Jewish position was not as desperate as it might have appeared. The Haganah had a trained-manpower pool of sixty thousand people. A third of those citizen soldiers had had wartime experience in the Jewish Brigade or some other military group. Twenty-eight thousand immigrants, many of them of military age, waited in Britain's Cyprus detention camps for the boats that would deliver them to Palestine after the end of the mandate. Others, packed into overcrowded vessels, were already on their way from Europe.*

  Yet, on the twelfth of May, the Haganah had only 18,900 men fully mobilized, armed and in position to meet the Arab onslaught. They were divided into nine brigades, three in the north to defend the Galilee and the seacoast north of Haifa, two protecting the southern approaches to Tel Aviv, two in the Negev, one in Jerusalem and one in the bitterly disputed Bab el Wad bottleneck.

  In almost every instance the Arabs held the superior terrain. In Tulkarm they were less than ten miles from the sea and the possibility of cutting the Yishuv in half. The Arab communities of Lydda and Ramle were only minutes from the heart of Tel Aviv. The Negev seemed wide open to Egypt's armor. Jerusalem, above all, remained completely cut off. Another effort to reopen the road as Nachshon had done was on the brink of failure.

  Those considerations paled beside the Haganah's gravest problem, its shortage of arms. If only twenty thousand of the sixty thousand trained Jews in Palestine were mobilized, it was because there were not enough weapons in the country to equip the rest. To the 10,000 rifles in the Haganah's central reserve, the S.S. Nora and the secret flight of Ocean Trade Airways had added 4,500 rifles and 400 machine guns. Haim Slavine's underground factories had managed to produce an additional 7,000 Sten guns. That represented virtually all the Haganah's small arms. Yet the organization was rich in hand weapons compared to its shortage of heavy equipment. Its field artillery was made up almost exclusively of the homemade Davidka and a few bought or stolen three-inch mortars. There was not a single warplane in the country. Joseph Avidar's workshops had buckled protective armor-plating onto six hundred assorted vehicles, effective enough in running the gauntlet of Arab ambushes, but worthless against Glubb's armored cars or Egypt's armored force.

  Two folders lying on the Jewish leader's desk contained the details of the Haganah's only hopes of victory and the arguments with which Ben-Gurion hoped to persuade his fellows to proclaim their state. They were the summaries of the arms purchased abroad by Ehud Avriel and Yehuda Arazi. Stockpiled in Europe, awaiting the legal sanction of Jewish statehood to begin their journey to Palestine, they could alter the tide of the conflict. Somewhere on the waters of the Mediterranean beyond Ben-Gurion's windows, the first shipload of those arms waited just outside Palestine's territorial water. The holds of the S.S. Borea contained the Haganah's first field-artillery pieces,
five 65-millimeter mountain guns and 48,000 shells. Ben-Gurion was going to propose to his hesitant fellows a gamble, a gamble on their ability to withstand the Arabs' onslaught until the caravan of ships of which the Borea was a harbinger could reach their ports. Clutching the reports on which his arguments and the proclamation of a Jewish state would stand or fall, David Ben-Gurion set off for his historic meeting in the Tel Aviv headquarters of the Jewish National Fund.

  "They're closing in. Urgent you send aviation to help us."

  In the command post of the kibbutz of Kfar Etzion, the fingers of Eliza Feuchtwanger, the colony's young Polish-born radio operator, skimmed over still another despairing plea for help. Her desperate stream of S.O.S.'s indicated the gravity of the kibbutz's plight. "Situation in regard to men, arms and ammunition grave. Do everything you can tonight. We can no longer attend the dead and wounded," pleaded one. The shellfire of the Legion's armored cars had already ravaged most of the kibbutz's biuldings. Half of the roof of the Neve Ovadia was torn off. The dining hall, the kitchen, the hospital, the library and most of the dormitories were in ruins. Only the headquarters itself, installed in a solid stone building that had housed the German Benedictine monks from whom the Jewish National Fund had bought part of Kfar Etzion, had survived intact.

  The structure swarmed with breathless messengers, wounded, fighters numb with fear and fatigue grabbing an instant's rest. The constant din of shellfire, the acrid pall of smoke from the kibbutz's burning buildings, the disorderly movement of people shouting for arms, ammunition or help, gave the building an atmosphere of despairing hysteria. The bloc's new commander, a curly-haired sabra named Abbras Tamir, had been seriously wounded May 4. Carried to the command post from the hospital after Moshe Silberschmidt's death, he had to give his orders from a stretcher.

  On the other side of the fighting lines, Captain Hikmet Muhair too sent a message. As he had agreed with Tell, he radioed Legion headquarters a lurid account of his situation and called for reinforcements. Two more platoons were sent to bolster his forces.

  Toward the end of the afternoon, the Legion's shellfire began again with increased fury, followed by another sortie of Muhair's armored cars. On Rock Hill, the principal outpost before the kibbutz itself, a two-inch mortar being used as a bazooka and two light machine guns hurled a barrage of fire at the oncoming cars.

  Despite the shellfire exploding all around them, Rock Hill's defenders held on, training their inadequate weapons on the only vulnerable part of the machines advancing toward them, their tires. Their tactic succeeded. Like a pack of wounded animals, Captain Muhair's cars began to limp back to Lone Tree on their flat tires. The tenacious resistance of the handful of men on Rock Hill had earned their fellows in Kfar Etzion a precious gift, the chance to survive another night.

  David Ben-Gurion scrutinized the faces of the nine men gathered around him in the headquarters of the Jewish National Fund. In the absence of three members of the national Council of Thirteen unable to attend their meeting, those leaders of Zionism's supreme body would in a few moments determine whether or not the Jewish people would have a sovereign state of their own. The burden of making that decision had fallen on those individuals around Ben-Gurion for a variety of reasons. Three of them were rabbis representing on the Council the religious consciousness of a people whose attachment to the land of Palestine was originally a profound manifestation of their spiritual heritage. Some, like Golda Meir, Eliezer Kaplan and Moshe Sharett, were veterans of years of service on the body which had preceded the Council, the Jewish Agency Executive. Others were relative newcomers appointed in case the Council became a provisional government.

  Ben-Gurion was disturbed by the concern and uncertainty he sensed in the faces of his nine fellow leaders. Sharett's description of his meeting with Secretary of State Marshall had shaken the determination of at least a third of the representatives of Ben-Gurion's own Mapai party. Golda Meir's report of her visit to Abdullah had added its ration of doubt. Now, at the request of the Council, Yigal Yadin presented the Haganah's assessment of their chances in a conflict with the Arab armies.

  If the truce proposed by General Marshall would give them time to bring arms into the country, then it was worth accepting it, Yadin indicated. If they did not accept and war broke out immediately, the Haganah would be sorely tried. They knew what the Syrians would do, because intelligence had penetrated Syrian headquarters, but the plans of the Iraqis, the Egyptians and the Arab Legion were unknown. At best, he gave the Haganah a fifty-fifty chance of victory.

  Ben-Gurion grimaced at the stunned gasp that followed Yadin's words. The doubting members, he noted, were more frightened than they had been before his speech. He took over the meeting himself.

  "I fear for our morale," he told his hesitant colleagues. The Yishuv had been spoiled thus far: the enemy had failed to capture any of its centers. There was no need to regret that, but in the event of heavy casualties, a loss of ground in the future, he feared the Yishuv's morale would be shaken. The trial ahead would certainly lead to those losses, he warned, both in territory and in manpower. They might produce serious repercussions among the public. He paused. Then he opened the files containing the two reports he had studied earlier in his library. He knew something, he revealed, that Marshall had not known when he issued his warning to Sharett. He knew that the Yishuv now possessed arms that could alter the situation.

  Slowly, dramatically, he read out the contents of his files, letting the effect of each figure make its impression on the men around him. Avriel, he revealed, had purchased 25,000 rifles, 5,000 machine guns, 58 million rounds of ammunition, 175 howitzers and thirty airplanes. Arazi had succeeded in buying ten tanks, thirty-five antiaircraft guns, twelve 120-millimeter mortars, fifty 65-millimeter cannons, 5,000 rifles, 200 heavy machine guns, 97,000 artillery and mortar shells of assorted calibers, and nine million rounds of small-arms ammunition.

  As he had hoped they would, those figures instilled a new air of confidence in the circle of his colleagues. If the arms were stockpiled in Palestine, he continued, they might contemplate the situation more calmly. However, they were not, and the time needed to bring them to Palestine would be decisive in determining not only the outcome of the war but also its duration and the number of casualties they would suffer. The Arab armies would probably march into the country before the arms arrived in any significant quantity. The Jews would have to steel themselves for severe losses and shocks. But, he growled, in view of the prospects of their growing strength, flouting his own experts, "I dare believe in victory. We shall triumph!"

  Transfixed by the magnetic personality of their chief, the other leaders fell silent. Ben-Gurion called for a vote. The question was whether to accept Marshall's call for a truce and with it a temporary postponement of statehood. If the vote went against accepting the truce, then it would automatically mean the proclamation of a state. The closeness of the vote, in spite of the power of Ben-Gurion's final oration, was the measure of how near the people in the Jewish National Fund headquarters had come to turning away from statehood. At his call for those in favor of accepting the truce, Ben-Gurion saw four hands go up. The motion had failed by just one vote. On that one vote had hung the rebirth of the Jewish state.

  The Council turned to the consequence of its vote, the protocol of proclaiming a state. Someone suggested that the declaration should stipulate that the state's borders would be those contained in the United Nations partition resolution.

  Ben-Gurion rejected the idea. The Americans, he said, had not announced the frontiers of their state in the Declaration of Independence. Despite considerable reservations, particularly on the internationalization of Jerusalem, the Jews had accepted the partition resolution. The Arabs had not and by their action they had forfeited their right to the partition plan. The borders of their state would be those that would come out of the war. "We have before us," he said, "a chance to get a state whose borders will be practical ones. The state we are proclaiming is not the state
that resulted from the United Nations decision but the de facto situation existing today."

  Then the group chose a name for the new state. Two names, Zion and Israel, were before them. On Ben-Gurion's urging, the choice finally fell on Israel.

  One last decision remained: fixing the exact hour at which they would announce to the world the news for which the Jewish people had been waiting for almost two millenniums. Technically their state would come into existence at midnight Friday, May 14. That would be in the midst of the Sabbath, and the orthodox among them would not be able to travel in an automobile or even affix their signature to a proclamation of statehood at that hour.

  One of the participants took from his pocket the chart carried by all Jews wishing to be scrupulously exact in their observance of the rites of their religion. Studying its figures, he announced that in order to conclude before the official hour of the setting of the sun, the ceremony proclaiming the birth of a new Jewish nation in the land of Israel should begin at precisely four o'clock on Friday, May 14, 1948, the fifth day of the month of Iyar in the year 5708 of the Hebrew calendar.

  In the silent night of Kfar Etzion, the anguished eyes of the settlement's defenders studied the star-filled sky. They clung to a last desperate hope, the thought that somehow the Haganah might fill that sky with planes bringing them the instruments of their salvation. Those hopes were illusory. The few light airplanes the Haganah could put into the evening sky had no chance of saving an entire colony. Most of the parachutes of arms and medicine they tried to drop to the settlers fell beyond their lines.

  Using the cover of darkness, a team of sappers laid on the approaches to the kibbutz what mines the settlement had left. Abbras Tamir decided to send his thirty-five wounded to one of the other colonies. Volunteers carried those who couldn't walk. Led by Dr. Aaron Windsberg, a former surgeon in the Red Army, the pitiful procession of injured stumbled off over the stones and scrub brush of a goat track, trying to limit the noise of their passage to the groans of the dying. Tamir himself was carried on his stretcher past the Arab lines to Massuot, where he hoped to find enough men to organize a counterattack for the morning.