The last images those Britishers would take away from Jerusalem were mingled with relief at leaving a place in which, as one of them thought, they "had been a football being kicked about between two sides." For some, the last impression they would take away from the Holy City would be religious. For others, like Lieutenant Robert Ross, it would be the memory of the unlikely spot in which the young Scot had been shot at for the first time in his life, the Garden of Gethsemane. For Lance Corporal Gerald O'Neill of Glasgow, it would be the knowledge that he was going to be the last British soldier to leave Jerusalem. For Captain Naylor Leyland it would be the blood of one of his men still coating the inside of the armored car in which the unfortunate soldier had been killed a few days before. For Lieutenant Colonel Alec Brodie, a veteran of dozens of campaigns, it would be something as banal as a desperate search for a piece of rope to bind up a last suitcase.
For Major Dan Bonar it would be the last act of the military career he had opened thirty years earlier, on another May morning in 1918. That day in the little French hamlet of Adinfen he had raised the Union Jack after the battle of the Somme. The intervening years had taken him to Archangel, to Ireland, to Egypt, to Dunkirk, to Normandy, the Ruhr and Palestine, and now he closed them with an act paralleling the gesture with which they had begun: he lowered the Union Jack from its last perch in Jerusalem.
For Captain James Crawford, it was the sight of an elderly sheikh, hand upraised in a perfect military salute, a gesture Crawford saw "as a mark of respect to the comrades I was leaving behind who had given their lives in a fight that was not really theirs."
For General Jones, it was wandering through the empty rooms of Government House on a last inspection, each room as neat and spare as a pin, Sir Alan's office with its bare desk and empty chair looking "as though no one had ever lived or worked here."
For Chief Justice Sir William Fitzgerald it was an image in a bend of the road on the edge of town, an image as old as Palestine, a fellah on an ass plodding down to Bethlehem, his weary head not even raised to watch them go. Studying him from his bus window, Sir William suddenly asked himself, "Did we really change anything in our thirty years here?"
Theirs were not the only departures taking place that morning. Seizing the microphone over which Sir Alan Cunningham had delivered his parting address a few hours earlier, Raji Sayhoun proclaimed, "A new era for Palestine begins today. Long live a free and independent Palestine!" Then he left the broadcasting station for what would henceforth be its new headquarters in the Arab community of Ramallah.
As he drove out of the city, he cast a last look at its center from the heights of Sheikh Jarrah. The object that caught his eyes was hardly an auspicious omen for the new era he had so proudly announced a few minutes before. Flying over his former office at the Palestine Broadcasting System on Queen Melisande's Way was the blue-and-white Zionist banner.
It marked the first stage of the advance of Arieyeh Schurr's soldiers through the pie-shaped wedge of Bevingrad. The wedge's outer rim was a 350-yard arc that ran along Queen Melisande's Way between Jaffa Road and St. Paul's Road. Its sides, barely a quarter of a mile long, followed the narrowing course of those two roads to the point at which they met opposite the walls of the Old City between New and Jaffa Gates. Most of Schurr's targets were inside that triangle. He had also to seize a strip of buildings, including the General Post Office and the telephone exchange, that ran like a continuous cement barrier down Jaffa Road just across the street from Bevingrad. His last major objective was the Hospice of Notre-Dame, vacated by the Highland Light Infantry. Built in the shape of an E, it lay next to the point of the Bevingrad wedge opposite the Old City wall. From its high wings, gunmen could control both the Old City to the southeast and the heart of New Jerusalem to the west. To carry out his assignment, Schurr had four hundred Haganah men and six hundred Home Guard volunteers.
By eight o'clock, his first units had crossed Queen Melisande's Way and slipped into Bevingrad's northwestern perimeter, the rim of the pie-shaped wedge. At the same time, he sent some of his men with their wirecutters to cut the carpet of barbed-wire coils blocking access to its buildings. Others with ladders began to scale its walls. One unpleasant surprise greeted them: the British had planted a second layer of barbed wire inside Bevingrad itself. Nonetheless, Schurr's men were in possession of the buildings along the northwestern perimeter before the British troops had finished marching out the other side into Suleiman's Way opposite the Old City.
In the General Post Office building, the forty men of Schurr's Players Brigade took over the instant the British withdrew. Its telephone switchboard quickly became an important psychological weapon. His men would telephone the Arabs in the buildings ahead and try to frighten them into fleeing. As each building was taken, a soldier would grab a phone and call Schurr to tell him, "Cross it off your list."
Thus, within the first hour of full-scale operation, Schurr had taken over half of the targets assigned him. Only two areas gave him concern. Along St. Paul's Road bordering the Arab neighborhood of Musrara, the Arabs managed to get a thin foothold inside Bevingrad around the Central Prison. Opposite the walls of the Old City, a band of irregulars broke into Notre-Dame and drove out the handful of Haganah men who had reached it first.
Elsewhere in Jerusalem, David Shaltiel's three-pronged operation designed to secure a continuous north-south front through the city had begun almost as auspiciously. Assigned responsibility for the north, Shaltiel's intelligence officer Yitzhak Levi followed from the rooftop of his headquarters in the Histadrut Building the last British convoys heading for Haifa. As soon as they had disappeared over the ridge line beyond Mount Scopus, he ordered his men, waiting in the streets of Mea Shearim, into action. So swift was their advance that they seized almost without opposition their first objectives, the buildings of the Palestine Police Training School and Sheikh Jarrah from which the British had driven Yitzak Sadeh's Palmachniks seventeen days earlier. By midmorning, Levi had managed to reestablish communications with the besieged university and hospital on Mount Scopus.
In the south, Avram Uzieli had been ordered to take the sprawling grounds of the Allenby Barracks. Its capture would cut the Arab neighborhoods of German Colony, Greek Colony and Upper Beqaa off from the rest of the Arab city, and with it the Haganah would hold a continuous front in the south from the railroad station through the captured barracks and the Jewish neighborhoods of Mekor Hayim and Talpiot to the settlement of Ramat Rachel at the southern entrance to the city. To take the barracks, Uzieli had two platoons, a Davidka, three shells and not enough time. A group of Iraqi volunteers got to the barracks first and stopped his initial attack.
The Iraqis' prompt reaction was an exception. Nearly everywhere else the Arabs had been surprised by the alacrity with which the British had left and Shaltiel's men had attacked. Proudly displaying the pontifical flag and his note of authority from the Italian consul, Father Ibrahim Ayad rode up to claim the Italian Hospital in the name of the Mufti, only to discover that Dan Ben-Dor's men were already there. Mounir Abou Fadel, the former police officer in charge of the Old City's defenders, realized that the British were leaving when he saw their passing convoys as he walked his bulldog, Wolf, along the walls of the Old City.
Trapped behind a tombstone in Mamillah Cemetery after an unsuccessful attempt to reach the buildings already in Schurr's hands, Anwar Khatib caught a glimpse of Sir Alan Cunningham's departing limousine. How desperately he had wanted to see that sight, the Arab thought, and how uncertain he was of the future now that he was witnessing it.
Back in the Rawdah headquarters, Khatib found "no coordination, no one running things, just a lot of people shouting at each other."
Fadel Rashid the Iraqi and Khaled Husseini the nominal commander wouldn't budge from the headquarters. Mounir Abou Fadel's authority in the Old City was being contested by a twenty-five-year-old cobbler's son named Hafez Barakat, called "the General" by his followers. Emile Ghory had planned to lead six hundred men
down the slopes seized by Yitzhak Levi's forces. One miscalculation had frustrated his plan. He had figured the British were leaving May 15, and his men were still hours away from Jerusalem. Only in the American Colony, a wealthy neighborhood below Sheikh Jarrah, and Musrara, an Arab quarter outside the Old City walls between Damascus Gate and Notre-Dame, did the Arabs react effectively. There schoolteacher Bajhat Abou Gharbieh, leading a mixture of Syrian Moslem Brothers, Iraqis and Lebanese volunteers, offered Shaltiel's men their only serious opposition.
If the morning had been an almost unmitigated disaster for the Arabs of Jerusalem, ten miles south of the city thousands of other Arabs were about to secure a victory whose repercussions would deprive the Haganah of the pleasure their successes in Jerusalem should have brought them. The three surviving satellites of Kfar Etzion were about to surrender.
Shortly before dawn a barely audible radio message had informed the settlers that the negotiations to save them from a massacre similar to the one that had befallen their comrades in the central kibbutz had succeeded. They too, however, were going to pay the price for having sought to cultivate the barren hills of Kfar Etzion. In a few hours they would begin an experience familiar to generations of their people. They would be going to captivity in Amman.
From the rooftop on the infirmary of Massuot, Uriel Ofek, a poet enlisted in the Palmach, had watched the Arabs swarm toward the kibbutz for hours. They were so numerous that it seemed to Ofek that all the villages between Jerusalem and Hebron must have been drained of men.
A fragile cease-fire arranged by the Red Cross had been in effect since 4 A.M. Sensing the ease of the victory before them, the hordes clamored for the chance to submerge the three colonies while their tense defenders watched their growing buildup with despair. The Red Cross delegation sent to arrange the surrender was swamped in a sea of shouting people before they could even get near the first kibbutz. When they did, its leaders, aware of the massacre that had taken place at Kfar Etzion, insisted on surrendering to the Arab Legion.
An emissary was sent to a Legion detachment left behind in Hebron in violation of the army's orders to leave Palestine before the mandate expired. It was a breach of orders for which the settlers left in Kfar Etzion would later have cause to be grateful. The detachment and its transport finally arrived at noon and the surrender began. At each settlement, the Haganah officers refused to hand over their arms until their women and wounded were in ambulances and their men safely aboard the Legion's trucks. At Ein Tsurim, a settler went back to the dining hall, already filled with looting irregulars, to take the Sefer Torah from the walls. At Massuot a rabbi began to recite the Sabbath prayers. Tears streaming down their faces, the men around him replied, ". . . the Lord is righteous, my Rock in whom there is no evil." In the radio room, an operator tapped out a last message: "Tonight we shall no longer be here. So ends the chapter of the Etzion bloc."
As the trucks rolled off each hill, the prisoners caught their last glimpse of the buildings on which they had labored so hard. One by one they burst into flames. Then, like a swarm of locusts, the Arab multitudes descended on their orchards and vineyards. As if to eradicate forever the last trace of that foreign intrusion upon their ancient hills, they tore out by the roots the settlers' young trees, beginning to blossom with the fruit of their first harvest.
Miles away, in Haifa harbor, a pair of greasy hawsers consummated another Haganah setback at the hands of a different enemy. As soon as the port's stevedores had firmly secured the S. S. Borea to a quay, a platoon of British troops marched up and formed an arc around the ship. No one, the platoon's commander informed the captain, would be allowed on or off the ship.
Half from relief, half from sorrow, tears filled David Shaltiel's eyes when the news of Etzion's end reached him. Neither the Jerusalem commander nor his men, however, had time to mourn their loss. On all sides, their progress through Jerusalem continued.
Arieyeh Schurr's men gradually pushed the Arabs from the footholds they had managed to secure in the Bevingrad triangle. Behind them, other teams of Haganah men rushed into the buildings they had captured. To the ill-equipped men of the Jerusalem command, it was like a voyage into some bewildering cave of Ali Baba. Despite the precision of their organization, the British had left behind stores astounding in their variety and occasional abundance. In one building the Haganah found forty thousand pairs of shoes, two pairs for every soldier in the Jewish army. Another office revealed enough flashlights "to light up half of Palestine." Netanel Lorch found a beautiful handworked sword in Police Headquarters. It would soon be used at the inauguration of a Jewish state's first President. The young officer also found to his delight boxes of engraved stationery belonging to the government's Chief Secretary Sir Henry Gurney. Its handsome folds would be the joy of Lorch's correspondents for months. Murray Hellner, ordered to climb the Palestine Broadcasting System's forty-foot tower to take down its antenna, received a bizarre reward for his dangerous mission. In a studio closet he found two British state mourning flags. He immediately appropriated them for bedsheets for his army cot.
Outside Government Hospital, a soldier of the Irgun stumbled on a prize of a different sort, a flock of sheep. They belonged to Dr. Hassib Boulos. The young Arab surgeon was certain they were the key to his staff's survival in the days ahead. Pointing to his Red Cross armband, he asked the Irgunist to help him round up the frightened animals.
"Do those sheep have Red Cross armbands, too?" the Irgunist asked. At Boulos' stunned silence, he said, "Then tough luck. They're mine."
British journalist Eric Downton, moving through the compound with another Irgun veteran, participated in an extraordinary incident. The soldier pushed open a door in Police Headquarters. There before the two men was a chilling sight, the gallows tree, its loop of cord suspended motionless from its crossbar, its silent trap waiting only to be sprung. The Irgunist began to weep. Turning to Downton, he whispered, "This is where you hanged my friends."
None of Jerusalem's Arabs was more surprised by the speed of Schurr's advance than Anton Safieh. Trying to dodge his way through the shooting around Jaffa Gate, Safieh learned that the Municipality Building, "the safest place in Jerusalem," in whose vault he had deposited his £27,500 check, had just fallen to the Jews. Physically sick, he sought out his municipal comrades to inform them that their brand-new municipality was bankrupt.
In the southern section of the city, the Arabs announced an even more startling piece of news. The first of Avram Uzieli's three Davidka rounds failed to explode, but the second did, producing an enormous roar and almost no damage. The stunned Iraqis in the Allenby Barracks shouted over the telephone that the Jews had a weapon like the atomic bomb and begged for help. Informed of the remark by a switchboard operator who had overheard it, Uzieli fired his last round and sent his men rushing toward the barracks. The Iraqis fled, and Uzieli's soldiers in their turn stumbled on a hoard of abandoned British supplies ranging from bully beef to Players cigarettes.
To the north, Yitzhak Levi secured the approaches to the city on the line he had established from Sanhedria, the ancient Jewish burial grounds, through the Police Training School barracks, Sheikh Jarrah and Mount Scopus. In defiance of Ben-Gurion's order that no Jewish settlement was to be abandoned, he authorized the isolated settlers of Neve Yaacov north of the city to fall back into his lines. He had no intention of seeing another Kfar Etzion in his command.
His only setback came in Musrara, where Bajhat Abou Gharbieh's mixed irregulars refused to budge. The Arab schoolteacher had split his seventy men into three groups, the Syrians in a school, the Iraqis in a hotel and the Lebanese along St. Paul's Road opposite the Russian Compound. His Browning machine gun was aimed against the Haganah entrenched in a property destined to become a symbol of a divided Jerusalem, the home of a wealthy businessman named Mandelbaum.
By late afternoon, as the fighting calmed down, Shaltiel was able to radio Tel Aviv that most of his objectives had been secured and "the defense of the enemy was
very weak." At about the same time, the accuracy of Shaltiel's message was being confirmed in a cable from Jerusalem's Arab command to Haj Amin Husseini. The situation "was critical," it said. "The Jews have reached almost to the gates of the Old City."
Whistling joyfully, the happiest man in Jerusalem marched up Ben Yehuda Street to the Café Atara. In the two hours he had managed to seize away from his unit, Yosef Nevo would now have two auspicious beginnings to celebrate, the beginning of his married life and the beginning of a new era for Jerusalem. His first glimpse of the waxen face of his bride warned him, however, that he might have overestimated the number of blessings he had to celebrate this day. Her first words confirmed his fears.
"She's back," Naomi gasped. "The convoy didn't get through."
An almost equally unpleasant discovery awaited Pablo de Azcarate on his return to Jerusalem that morning from Amman. The British administration had bid farewell with a lie to Azcarate's United Nations mission which it so disdained. Despite Sir Henry Gurney's assurances, the British were gone. Bitterly Azcarate noted in his diary: "The time for the plunge into the unknown has come."
In New York, the international organization that had sent Azcarate to Palestine groped toward the only answer it could find for the chaos in the land whose problems it had sought to solve. If the United Nations could not offer Palestine a messiah, it proposed the only alternative of which it seemed capable, a mediator. Their hopeful action, however, would only add one more name to the long list of men martyred for Jerusalem, that of Count Folke Bernadotte.
O Jerusalem! Page 47