O Jerusalem!

by Larry Collins

  Toward midnight, a shell set fire to the stable and the barn. There was no water left to put it out. The macabre ballet of those flames reminded some of Kfar Etzion's deeply religious settlers of the burning of the Temple sanctuary. Eliezer Sternberg relived for a few grim instants a more recent tragedy, the end of the Warsaw ghetto.

  All night, occasional bursts of tracer bullets poked their orange fingers through the dark sky. "It was a lovely spring night," Yaacov Edelstein would recall. The only sounds in the darkness were the shrill fluttering of cicadas and the occasional guttural mumble of the Arabs massed all around them. Some of Kfar Etzion's exhausted defenders slept. Others prayed. They prayed that the night might never end.

  In an army camp near Jericho, the faint ring of a field telephone roused a sleeping Arab soldier. At the voice of his orderly exclaiming, "Ah, ya Pasha!" as he picked up the phone, Major Abdullah Tell leaped from his bed and took the receiver from the soldier's hands. There was only one pasha in the Arab Legion and only one pasha in the life of Abdullah Tell. He had been waiting for Glubb's call. In his familiar, faintly hesitant voice, the only Englishman who spoke Arabic with a perfect Bedouin accent ordered the commander of his Sixth Regiment to round up the rest of his men and rush to Kfar Etzion. Captain Muhair, Glubb reported, was "in serious difficulty."

  Tell smiled. The ruse had worked. He ordered his men, already in a state of alert, to get ready. Then, picking up his talisman, an ebony swagger stick topped by a hand-worked ornate silver knob, he mounted his command jeep. Burning with an intense desire to personally supervise the Arab Legion's first conquest in Palestine, Tell waved his column of vehicles forward.

  No ambition might have seemed beyond the reach of that thirty-year-old officer setting out at the head of his men for the besieged kibbutz of Kfar Etzion. If the face of the young actor disfigured on Ben Yehuda Street might have incarnated the face of a new Jewish nation in Palestine, so Tell could well have offered the visage of its older, Arab civilization. With his perfectly spaced features, his dark moustache, his brown eyes, his white teeth showing through his spacious smile, his head swathed in the perfectly draped folds of his red-and-white kaffiyeh, Tell might have seemed the leading man in some Hollywood drama of the Arabian desert. He had the age, almost, of the emirate he served. His mother had often told him that one of her first gestures after his birth had been to hold him up to the window so that his infant eyes might witness a turning point in his people's history, the retreat of Turkey's soldiers through the streets of his native Irbid. Like so many of his generation, an eighteen-year-old Tell had gone to jail for demonstrating against the power that had replaced Turkish influence in the Middle East, Great Britain. Yet, seven years later, he sought to wear the coveted British battle dress and red-and-white kaffiyeh of the army founded by Lawrence's heirs. In action against Iraq's Golden Square rebels, on duty in Palestine, one single-minded obsession dominated the young Tell: "to resemble as closely as possible a British officer, to be as admired by my men as Glubb was by his Bedouins."

  On November 30, 1947, listening to a radio announce the results of the partition vote in a British officers' mess, Tell had had the opportunity to measure the limits to which he might push that resemblance. None of the Englishmen around him appeared moved by the news. Years later, he would still recall his shock at realizing that he alone in the mess was concerned. The Arabs would have to take their destiny into their own hands, he told himself. His determination to seize Kfar Etzion without his British commander's knowledge or blessing was going to be a first manifestation of the young officer's resolution that day to "wipe out the injustice of partition."

  29

  THE LAST SUPPER

  EVERY MORNING for twenty-eight years Fouad Tannous' working day had begun with the same little ritual: a cup of Turkish coffee, a glance at the morning paper, and a few jokes on what it contained with his colleagues in the Jerusalem testing laboratories. On this Thursday morning, May 13, only two of his fellow employees remained to share for the last time that rite with Fouad Tannous. There were no jokes that morning. Sad and solemn, the three men "sat there looking at each other." There was absolutely nothing for them to do. Yet, totally faithful to the British training that had been the focal point of his adult existence, Tannous remained on duty until the laboratory's final closing hour. A few minutes before the end, he went to the office of the director of medical services at Government Hospital to get his certificate of service. The director handed it to him with three words: "Here it is." That was all. No handshake, no thank-you, no goodbye, no "Good luck." For Fouad Tannous twenty-eight years of service to the British Empire had ended in that curt phrase.

  He went back to his lab to close up. Usually his last gesture was to lock the large iron cupboard containing almost a year's supply of chemicals and pharmaceuticals. This time, he slipped the key into the cupboard door and left it there. "What's the use?" he thought. "The Jews will get it anyway. They'll get the chemicals. They'll get the building. They'll get the whole country."

  A few hundred yards away in the Municipality Building at the foot of Jaffa Road, an equally brief gesture marked the end of Jerusalem's existence as a united municipality. The city's British controller gave checks for 27,500 pounds sterling, half the balance in the municipality's bank account, to representatives of the Arab and Jewish communities. Anton Safieh gasped at the size of his check. It represented more money than the Christian Arab had earned in his adult life. Trembling with the heavy responsibility it thrust upon him, he rushed to deposit it in the safest place he knew, the vault of the Municipality Building. That task accomplished, Safieh turned to a more prosaic chore. With two comrades, he spirited away thirteen municipal vehicles, most of them garbage carts, and placed them just inside the entrance to Jaffa Gate.

  The coolest head in the Jerusalem city administration that morning belonged to Safieh's brother, Emile. Inspired by that special respect for sound procedures he had absorbed in his years as a British civil servant, Emile Safieh carried away to safety the archives on which he had worked most of his life. Safieh well knew that no nation, no county, no municipality no matter how small, could hope to exist without such documents. They constituted, in a sense, the finest baptismal offering he could make to Jerusalem's new Arab entity—the complete income-tax records of its Arab inhabitants.

  As he did every day, the mandate's official spokesman, Richard Stubbs, met in his office at the Press Information Office this Thursday morning with Jerusalem's press corps. Blandly, he assured the men before him that the British administration in Jerusalem would end May 15, and that a substantial British military presence would remain in the city for at least another week.

  His statement was a hoax. Anxious to slip out of the city swiftly so that his rear guard would not get caught in the fighting sure to follow his departure, Brigadier C. P. Jones planned to begin his evacuation at midnight. If all went well there would not be a single British soldier or official left in Jerusalem when the city's journalists reached Stubbs's empty office for their daily briefing the following morning.

  Stubbs's words were part of an effort to tranquilize the populace by persuading it that British forces would remain in the city for some days to come. That same morning, the government's Chief Secretary Sir Henry Gurney smilingly informed the United Nations' Pablo de Azcarate, "Absolutely nothing will happen for a few days yet." Thus reassured, the United Nations diplomat set off on an overnight trip to Amman, certain he would be back before the British left.

  From the rooftop of the Haganah's Red House headquarters a pair of anxious men followed with binoculars the progress of a dumpy little steamer plodding toward Tel Aviv harbor. It was the S.S. Borea, the forerunner of the fleet of ships David Ben-Gurion had promised his colleagues would eventually bring them the arms to secure a Jewish state. So pressing was the need for the five guns and 48,000 shells her hold contained that the Haganah's leadership had decided to take the risk of running her into port forty-eight hours before the end
of the mandate.

  Suddenly one of the two men on Red House roof groaned. Joseph Avidar had just spotted in his glasses the outline of a British destroyer steaming toward the Borea. On the Red House radio, Avidar followed the ensuing drama. British customs officers boarded the vessel and called for the Borea's manifest of tomato juice, potatoes and the inevitable load of onions. Not satisfied, they ordered the ship to Haifa for inspection.

  Avidar radioed the captain to send a crewman to the engine rooms to smash some vital piece of machinery so that they could tell the British the vessel couldn't move. No such gesture was going to stay the firm hand of the British mandatory authority, however. Although the mandate may only have had a few hours left to live, her customs agents were going to see that the regulations by which they had sought to prevent arms from reaching the Jews of Palestine remained in effect until the very last of those hours had elapsed. A second destroyer was called up to take the Borea into tow. With despairing glances, the chiefs of the Haganah watched as the little steamer and their five field guns began to move slowly off up the coastline of Palestine toward Haifa.

  Eyes reddened with strain, limbs numb with fatigue, another group of Haganah soldiers watched the arms that would soon overwhelm them surge toward their posts. For the one hundred and fifty soldiers and settlers left alive in the principal settlement of Kfar Etzion, the slow approach of the armored cars of Abdullah Tell destroyed any lingering hopes that some miracle might save their colony.

  Still, the situation that the commander of the Sixth Arab Legion Regiment had found at Kfar Etzion had been much less favorable than his foes imagined. Captain Muhair had scattered his armored cars over so much ground that he had forfeited their effectiveness; his Legionnaires, mixed in with the undisciplined irregulars, had been infected with their passion for looting; and Muhair had so completely surrounded the central kibbutz that some of his men were firing into each other's positions.

  Tell immediately took charge of the operation. He separated his infantry from the irregulars and regrouped his armored cars to concentrate their firepower around the Lone Tree. From that vantage point, they could pulverize the handful of men on Rock Hill who had checked the advance of Muhair's cars the afternoon before.

  At 11:30 A.M. he began his assault. The Jews, as he would later recognize, fought "with incredible bravery." In the main kibbutz they rushed the sole machine gun from post to post to support the battered men on Rock Hill. Hammered by round after round, the strongpoint defenders fought until their ammunition was gone. Then they destroyed their weapons and fled. The door to the central settlement of Kfar Etzion was open.

  At its main gate, Nahum Ben-Sira saw the lead armored cars start down the road from Lone Tree. In the hands of the young man who had come to Kfar Etzion from the Mauthausen death camp with the survivors of his shattered family was the kibbutz's bazooka, a stovepipelike device with a primitive gunsight. Neither Ben-Sira nor his companion, Abraham Gessner, had ever fired it. His heart pounding, his finger tensed on the trigger, Ben-Sira followed the advancing armored car. When it was fifty yards away, he fired. Nothing happened. While Ben-Sira held his aim, Gessner desperately shook the tube. The rocket refused to budge. Despite their efforts, Kfar Etzion's bazooka remained silent. Ben-Sira crawled to the plunger of the mine hidden behind the roadblock barricading the entrance. As the car smashed into its stones, he squeezed the plunger. But, like his bazooka, the mine refused to work. So many shells had torn up the ground around the entrance that the wire commanding it had been cut.

  The car pushed aside the stones of the barricade and rumbled into the kibbutz itself. Two well-aimed Molotov cocktails finally stopped its progress. Gessner and Ben-Sira's string of bad luck had finally ended. Their victory was brief. From behind the thick smoke wrapping the burning car came the rumble of other cars, and in their wake a screaming horde of irregulars rushed toward the gate.

  At the command post, Eliza Feuchtwanger radioed Jerusalem: "The Arabs are in the kibbutz. Farewell." Reading her words in his headquarters, David Shaltiel, the man who had urged Kfar Etzion's evacuation, felt tears come to his eyes. Then the young Polish girl added a few words to her message. "The Arabs are everywhere," she said. "There are thousands of them. They are blackening the hills."

  Minutes later, her silhouette appeared on the roof of the command post waving a bloody sheet which she attached to the radio's antenna. Since the men in the positions around the kibbutz couldn't see her white flag, messengers dashed out to tell them they were surrendering. Gradually the firing died out, and one by one the colony's exhausted defenders staggered up to the command post. Some of them seemed relieved by the decision. Others, like Zipora Rosenfeld, a beautiful blond Polish survivor of Auschwitz, cried. Yaacov Edelstein smashed his rifle in protest.

  Fifty survivors finally reached the little square before the headquarters. Among them was Eliza Feuchtwanger, whose messages would soon become a legend throughout Palestine. Yaacov Edelstein looked for the nurse he had walked to the hospital two days before. As he had feared, they would not meet again. She was dead. Yitzhak Ben-Sira searched for the five brothers and sisters he had brought to Kfar Etzion from Europe's death camps. Only one, Nahum, was still alive. Zipora Rosenfeld leaned against the husband she had refused to leave when the colony's mothers had been evacuated, thinking certainly of her infant son, Yosi, born only a few weeks before on the promised land of her new country.

  Scores of irregulars swarmed around them, shrieking, "Deir Yassin!," ordering them to sit down, stand up, sit down again. Edelstein saw one of them step forward. With a click of the shutter of his camera, he registered the saddest spectacle in the long and painful history of Zionism's efforts to settle the hills of Kfar Etzion.

  Suddenly a machine gun began to fire. Edelstein saw bodies tumbling all around him. "It's the end," he thought. The sight of a bayonet plunged into a comrade's chest spurred him to action. With a leap, he sprang up from the mound of dying men and women and started a wild flight, shoving his way past the startled Arabs surrounding them. Spurred by his gesture, half a dozen others followed in a wild, instinctive flight. "There was no place to go," Edelstein recalled, "because the whole area swarmed with Arabs."

  Nahum Ben-Sira stumbled exhausted into a little vineyard at the edge of the kibbutz, only a few paces from a path along which the Arabs raced up and down in search of loot and survivors. He would huddle there until nightfall, tensed for the shout of "Yahud!" which would precede a fatal burst of gunfire.

  Edelstein and three others crawled over the stone fence at the end of the settlement and darted into a little glade, called the Song of Songs because it was the favorite sanctuary of the kibbutz's lovers. They burrowed among its boulders and closely spaced trees, hoping somehow that the boughs that had sheltered their lovers' trysts would now save their lives. Suddenly the snapping of a twig told Edelstein they had been discovered. Above him was a wrinkled, toothless old Arab. "Don't be afraid," he told them.

  Then a group of irregulars rushed up and threw Edelstein and Yitzhak Ben-Sira, who had hidden with him, against a wall. The old Arab stood in front of them, protecting them with his body. "You have killed enough," he said.

  "Silence," one of the irregulars yelled, "or we'll kill you too!"

  "No," replied the old man, spreading his arms over the two Jewish prisoners. "They are under my protection." While they argued, a pair of Legionnaires came up. As they led Edelstein and Ben-Sira off to captivity, Edelstein heard shots from the lovers' glade. The irregulars had found the two others who had fled with him.

  Eliza Feuchtwanger had thrown herself into a ditch behind the school with half a dozen others. The Arabs rushed to the trench and began to empty their Sten guns at the helpless survivors inside. A piercing shriek from Eliza interrupted their slaughter just long enough to allow one of them to yank her from the trench. A knot of men surrounded her, disputing the privilege of raping her with the Arab who had pulled her from the ditch. Finally two of them dragged her away fr
om the others and pushed her screaming through the smoking ruins of the kibbutz to a clump of wood. There they began to claw at her, tearing at her clothing, unable to agree who would assault her first.

  Suddenly two bursts of gunfire interrupted their fight. Eliza saw the two Arabs drop dead at her feet. Stunned, she looked up and found before her an Arab Legion officer, smoke still curling from the mouth of his Sten gun. Lieutenant Nawaf Jaber el Hamoud took a piece of bread from his pocket.

  "Eat this," he said. When she had done so, he told her, "Now you are under my protection," and marched her to his armored car.

  The only sound in the kibbutz as they left was the shrieks of the looters fighting for each item they tore from the ruins. The shaken Eliza was the only member left alive of the Palmach force assigned to the principal kibbutz. Of the eighty-eight settlers present in the colony when Tell's attack had begun, three had survived, Yaacov Edelstein and Nahum and Yitzhak Ben-Sira.

  The grim prophecy of Moshe Silberschmidt had been realized. One hundred and forty-eight people had soaked with their blood the earth they had vowed to cover with fruit trees, deeding to a new generation the legend of a modern Masada, the kibbutz of Kfar Etzion.*

  A haze of dust stirred by the advancing column hung in the air and frosted the trucks with a fine gray powder. In the outskirts of Amman, in the country villages and crossroads, huddled on rooftops, hanging from windows, clustered by black Bedouin goatskin tents, the excited crowds cheered the men on. The Arab Legion was going to battle.