O Jerusalem!

by Larry Collins

  The long and dolorous road followed by the Hebrew people from the land of Ur of the Chaldees to Pharaoh's Egypt, Babylon and all the corners of the earth led at last to a simple stone building on Rothschild Boulevard in the heart of Tel Aviv. There, on this humid Friday afternoon in May, the leaders of the Zionist movement prepared to accomplish perhaps the most important gesture in the history of their people since an obscure warrior king named David brought the Ark of the Covenant "with shouting and with the sound of the trumpet" from Abou Gosh to a tabernacle in Jerusalem.

  The building, a museum, had been the home of Meir Dizengoff, first mayor of Tel Aviv. Appropriately, its galleries contained not the pottery shards, stone relics and religious vessels of a dead Jewish civilization, but the bold modern art of the new one about to be brought forth in its precincts. Outside, a detachment of Haganah military police meticulously checked the credentials of the two hundred selected guests who would be privileged to witness the ceremony scheduled to take place in the building. The backgrounds of those men were as diverse as the race they represented. Some of them had almost died of malaria clearing the Huleh swamps. Others had survived the death camps of Germany. They came from Minsk, Cracow and Cologne; from England, Canada, South Africa, Iraq and Egypt. They were bound together by a common faith, Zionism, a common heritage, Jewish history, and a common curse, persecution. Looking down upon them as they gathered was a portrait of the black-bearded Viennese newspaperman who had founded the movement that had brought them to the Tel Aviv museum's main gallery. Barely fifty-three years had passed since the January day when Theodor Herzl had witnessed the public humiliation of Alfred Dreyfus. They had been years of anguish for his people, and the most apocalyptic of the visions he could have imagined that morning on the Champs de Mars had just overwhelmed them. Yet they had been years of triumph too, and because his followers had willed it the Jewish people were about to have a state of their own.

  At precisely four o'clock, David Ben-Gurion rose and sharply rapped a walnut gavel on the table before him. Clad in a dark suit, a white shirt and, in deference to the solemnity of the occasion, a tie, the Jewish leader picked up a scroll of white parchment. Indicative of the haste with which this ceremony had been prepared was the fact the Tel Aviv artist commissioned to prepare the scroll had had time to finish only the decoration. The text Ben-Gurion was about to read had been typed on a separate piece of paper and stapled to the parchment.

  "In the Land of Israel the Jewish people came into being," he began. "In this land was shaped their spiritual, religious and national character. Here they lived in sovereign independence. Here they created a culture of national and universal import and gave to the world the eternal Book of Books."

  He paused an instant to insure a properly purposeful tone to his delivery. Always the realist, Ben-Gurion was not carried away by the exultation of the moment. In a few hours he would note in his diary: "As on November 29, I mourn among the happy ones." He had lived for two years with the declaration he was reading. He was saying the words, but, as he would one day recall, there "was no joy in my heart. I was thinking of only one thing, the war we were going to have to fight."

  "Exiled from the land of Israel," he said, "the Jewish people remained faithful to it in all the countries of their dispersion, never ceasing to pray and hope for their return and the restoration of their national freedom. Impelled by this historic association, Jews strove throughout the centuries to go back to the land of their fathers and regain their statehood." In recent decades, he reminded his audience, "they returned in their masses. They reclaimed the wilderness, revived their language, built cities and villages . . . "

  It was, he continued, "the self-evident right of the Jewish people to be a nation, as all other nations, in their own sovereign state." Accordingly, he said, "by virtue of the natural and historic right of the Jewish people and of the Resolution of the General Assembly of the United Nations, we hereby proclaim the establishment of the Jewish state in Palestine, to be called Israel."

  One by one, he set out the principles that would guide the new nation: "principles of liberty, justice and peace as conceived by the Prophets of Israel"; full social and political equality for all citizens without distinction of religion, race or sex; freedom of religion, conscience, education, language and culture; safeguarding of the Holy Places of all religions; and the loyal upholding of the principles of the United Nations charter.

  Crammed into the only space they had been able to find for their transmitters, a toilet just off the museum's main room, the technicians of the new nation's radio service felt their throats constrict with emotion. Except for the labored breathing of a handful of old men, the main gallery was silent, as though even a foot scraping on the floor might detract from the grandeur of this moment so long awaited by so many. Later, to some of those present the intense silence of their gathering would seem a mystic evocation of their six million dead.

  "We appeal to the United Nations to assist the Jewish people in the building of its state and to admit Israel into the family of nations," Ben-Gurion read. "We offer peace and amity to all the neighboring states and peoples . . . Our call goes out to the Jewish people all over the world . . . to stand by us in the great struggle for the fulfillment of the dream of generations, the redemption of Israel.

  "With trust in the Almighty," he concluded, "we set our hand to this declaration at this session of the Provisional Council of State . . . in the city of Tel Aviv on the fifth day of Iyar, 5708, the fourteenth day of May, 1948."

  When he had finished he said, "Let us all stand to adopt the Scroll of the Establishment of the Jewish State."

  Choking with emotion, an elderly rabbi offered thanks to "Him who hath kept and sustained us and brought us unto this time." One by one the leaders in the room put their signatures on the scroll. Then Ben-Gurion announced that the British White Paper of 1939 with its restrictions on Jewish land purchase and immigration was annulled. Otherwise, all mandatory laws would remain in effect for the time being.

  It was 4:37 P.M. The entire ceremony had taken barely half an hour. Once more Ben-Gurion picked up his gavel and rapped the table.

  "I hereby declare this meeting adjourned," he said. The state of Israel had come into being.

  At almost the same time, on the banks of the Nile, another ceremony was taking place. Its focal point, too, was a scroll—the diploma of the Royal Egyptian Army Staff College. Few men's lives would be affected as much by the declaration that had been read in Tel Aviv as that of a distinguished thirty-year-old graduate of that course. The cataclysm it would produce would drive him to the forefront of world politics and lead his fellow Arabs to hail him as their people's greatest leader since Saladin. For the moment a simple joy filled the heart of Captain Gamal Abdel Nasser. He had just received his first major assignment. Within forty-eight hours he was to report for duty as staff officer of the Sixth Battalion on its march to Tel Aviv and the destruction of the state proclaimed by David Ben-Gurion.

  Dusk was beginning to fall. Away to the south, caught between the mountains of Moab and Judea, the motionless waters of the Dead Sea cast back the sun's last light like a silver mirror. Five miles to the east of the assembly area that John Glubb had chosen for his Arab Legion, in the rhododendrons and rushes of the perennially green Wadi Shueib, lay the Allenby Bridge and the Jordan River. On the other side of the river Glubb could see the brown stone rooftops of Jericho and beyond them the imposing four-thousand-foot-high wall of the Palestine mountains.

  Just behind Jericho, between the Mount of Temptation and Kerith Brook where the ravens had fed Elijah, a little spur ran up that mountain wall. Glubb studied it intently. It was his secret pride. For four thousand pounds, the villagers beyond Jericho had turned it into a track capable of taking his armored cars and vehicles—and unmarked on his foes' maps. At midnight, the 4,500 men of his Arab Legion now lined up before him in parade formation would begin moving into Palestine over that mountain spur, along which, twenty-five cen
turies before, Joshua had led the children of Israel in the invasion of the Promised Land.

  Glubb looked at that line of troops before him with pride and a broken heart. He had known some of those men since they were infants placed in his arms by their proud fathers. The Arab Legion was Glubb's life, and he despaired at the thought of its being torn apart in a war. Yet he understood the terrible pressures building up in the Arab capitals. Already he had begun to doubt his ability to make only "the semblance of a war" as he wanted. The situation was "so hopeless, so confusing," he felt that night. He hadn't "the vaguest notion what the Syrians and the Egyptians were going to do." Even his precious shipload of artillery shells for his new guns had not yet arrived in Aqaba.

  As Glubb meditated, a black sedan with a pennant fluttering from its fender drove up. The man for whom he had assembled his troops had arrived. Dressed in his British Army uniform, King Abdullah marched to a simple wooden platform above the flat, barren plain on which his troops were drawn up. As he did, on the horizon to the south a dark pillar climbed toward the sky, the funnel of an approaching sandstorm. The band began to play Transjordan's lilting national song. The King saluted the men before him, the men who might deliver him at last from the sandy confines of the kingdom which that anthem extolled, the desert cage in which the British had placed him. As much as the simplest of his Bedouin soldiers perhaps, Abdullah was stirred by the emotions of that moment, by the contrived exaltation of military assembly.

  Suddenly, almost from nowhere, the sandstorm came shrieking down on the gathering. In seconds visibility was reduced to twenty-five yards. Whipped by the sands, the men in the ranks squinted and strained to hear. Months later Major Abdullah Tell would think the sandstorm "was a protest from God against the conspiracy that was sending us into Palestine not to fight but to add land to Abdullah's kingdom." Tell himself heard only the first three words the King uttered: "My dear sons." The rest was lost in the wind.

  The King finally abandoned his efforts to speak. Instead he pulled his pistol from its holster and fired it into the air. As he did, caught, perhaps, by the emotion of the instant, he shouted the magic cry with which so many of history's conquerors had inflamed their soldiers' spirits. Although his men had strict orders to avoid it, Abdullah cried, "On to Jerusalem!"

  Carried by the transmitter tucked into the toilet of the Tel Aviv museum, the words of David Ben-Gurion's speech had been delivered all across the territories of the newly reborn Jewish state. In the Galilee and the Negev, men who were braced to repulse an Arab invasion listened to it, their arms by their sides. On Tel Aviv's Dizengoff Boulevard the crowds were dancing their triumphant horas before the ceremony had ended. In Jerusalem, David Shaltiel and his senior aides followed its scratchy, barely audible tones in the broadcast room of the Jewish Agency. "We knew what a state was," one of them would remember later. "It called for blood and we had already given a full measure at Kfar Etzion."

  At the French Consulate, where he had been the Jewish representative in a day-long, unsuccessful effort to install a cease-fire in the city, Vivian Herzog stood up and solemnly informed his colleagues that henceforth he was the representative "of an independent Jewish state." As they congratulated him Herzog noticed an extraordinary sight. On her hands and knees to avoid the occasional bullet passing through the consulate windows, Madame Neuville, ever the gracious hostess, was crawling toward them with a tray of champagne glasses to toast the occasion.

  In the Old City, Rabbi Yitzhak Orenstein's son, Avraham, an officer in the Haganah, brought him the news. The pious man immediately recited a shechiyanu, a prayer of thanks to God "for having let us live to see this day." The rabbi would not be allowed to live many days in the state he was acclaiming. He would figure in the heavy price the Jewish people would have to pay to secure it. Ten days hence, he would be killed by an Arab artillery shell.

  Elsewhere, as a young Haganah officer noted, "there was no time for celebrating. There were wounded and killed." That sober reaction was characteristic of the effect of the announcement in most of the new state's territory. The state would be under attack within hours and there was no time for the wild outbursts of joy that had followed news of the partition vote.

  Just beyond the center of Jerusalem, near the area soon to be known as the Mandelbaum Gate, a score of young men gathered in an abandoned house. Members of a religious company of the Gadna youth defending Mandelbaum, they followed the traditional service marking the arrival of the Sabbath eve. Without religious candles to illuminate the room that was their improvised house of worship, they huddled together in the semidarkness. They had only a couple of prayer shawls and two or three prayer books which they passed from hand to hand. Yet for their leader, Jacob Ben-Ur, their impoverished service would always be the most memorable religious ceremony of his life. Their rifles stacked at the door, the sound of gunfire ringing through their half-ruined building, the news of Ben-Gurion's declaration still fresh in their minds, Ben-Ur and his teenage soldiers began to chant the ancient words: "Blessed art Thou, O Lord, who spreadest the shelter of peace over us and over all Thy people, Israel, and over Jerusalem."

  For the 359 survivors of the Etzion bloc, the Sabbath eve that marked the rebirth of the land to which they had dedicated their lives would be a painful memory. Covered with insults, spit, and an occasional blow, they were marched through the streets of Hebron, its angry populace screaming for their blood. Only the vigilance of their Arab Legion guards prevented a new massacre from marring this historic Sabbath eve. And for those men and women, many with flesh still scarred by the numbers of Auschwitz, Dachau and Buchenwald, that interminable corridor of hate would lead, not to the freedom they had sought here, but to the barbed wire of still another camp.

  Just outside Bethlehem, a bus bore their seriously wounded in the opposite direction, back to Jerusalem. Abbras Tamir, who had commanded the settlement from a stretcher, saw an Arab Legion sergeant leap onto the bus during a momentary pause. Half conscious from the blood he had lost, Tamir watched as the man shouted to them in Arabic, "Your Ben-Gurion has just declared a Jewish state, but we'll finish you in seven days." It was Tamir's first news of the state. He tried to sit up to cry his joy, but, too weak, he fell back exhausted. As he did, he felt tears of pride and pleasure fill his eyes and his mouth twist into a sob.

  An immaculately uniformed British naval officer climbed up to the bridge of the S.S. Borea in Haifa harbor and smartly saluted her captain. With a glance at his watch he announced, "It is ten o'clock. In exactly two hours' time His Majesty's government's mandate in Palestine is due to expire. I have been requested to inform you that at that time your guard will be withdrawn and this vessel and all she contains returned to your custody."

  While the Borea's stunned captain struggled to assimilate this final gesture of the dying administration, the officer saluted once again. "Good luck," he said and marched off the bridge.

  At the end of a promontory pointing into Haifa harbor from under the shadows of Mount Carmel, a solitary figure stood looking out to sea. On a rainy November night in 1917, wrapped in a poncho on a hilltop above Jerusalem, James Pollock had witnessed the opening act of Great Britain's Palestine drama. Tonight Jerusalem's last district commissioner had come to this lonely outcropping to witness the last act of the regime to which he had devoted his adult life.

  In the harbor, on board the cruiser Euralyus, Sir Alan Cunningham climbed slowly up the passageway leading to the bridge. There the ship's captain motioned him to a large wooden platform in its center. As Cunningham mounted it, the ship's crew cast off the ropes holding her to the shore. Slowly the ship moved into the channel, where an aircraft carrier and half a dozen destroyers of the British Mediterranean Squadron lined her passage out to sea. On their decks, in dress whites, their crews moved to a salute. At a signal, all their searchlights fell on the lonely man on the bridge of the Euralyus. Gathering speed, the cruiser slipped along the majestic line of ships. As she drew abreast of the aircraft carrier, a ban
d on the quarterdeck played "God Save the King."

  Listening to the strains of his nation's anthem fill the night, hearing the swish of the water sliding under the Euralyus' keel, Cunningham thought, "It's the end of the show." Overwhelmed by the poignancy of the moment, he kept his regard fixed on the magnificent bulk of Mount Carmel slowly receding behind him. As the hymn finished, the band, in honor of Cunningham's Scottish blood, began to play him out of the harbor to "The Highland Lament." Hearing its melancholy strains come drifting across the water, the departing High Commissioner felt tears fill his eyes. How fitting, he thought, that he should be going home to the sad notes of that tune.

  It had all begun so well and ended so badly. What a world of squandered hopes between Lord Allenby's magnificent gesture, dismounting his horse at Jaffa Gate because he would not ride over the stones on which his Savior had carried His Cross, and his own hurried departure from Jerusalem this morning. How much had gone into this land, how many Britons had died to conquer it, to govern it in the name of an impossibly contradictory set of promises! And now "after all those disappointments, after all those years, after so many efforts, it had all been a failure, we're leaving, and the end is war and misery."

  As Sir Alan's cruiser finally reached the three-mile limit, she hove to for the act that would officially mark the end of Great Britain's Palestine mandate. From one end of the ship to the other, an enormous spray of fireworks arched into the Mediterranean sky, sprinkling the dark night with ribbons of orange, red and yellow. When the last spark tumbled hissing into the sea, Sir Alan thought, "That's the end. It's all over."