O Jerusalem!

by Larry Collins

  Shaltiel's plan was simple. He would send his "armored force"—two British armored cars and a scout car commanded by Yosef Nevo—toward the Jaffa Gate. While they riveted their fire on the gate's defenders, a team of sappers would blow the grill. Then his infantry would dash for the passageway and take the Arabs in the Citadel from behind.

  Shaltiel's calculations were determined by the despairing, almost hysterical messages that had been pouring into his headquarters all day long from the Old City. One had even warned that the Jewish Quarter could not hold out more than a quarter of an hour. Still unaware of the rabbis' surrender negotiations, persuaded that he was involved in a race with time, Shaltiel had given up the more logical but time-consuming scheme of trying to surround the entire Old City. Once his men had secured the Citadel, they would have a relatively easy job moving through the Armenian areas to relieve the Jewish Quarter. To keep the Arabs from grouping at Jaffa Gate, Shaltiel planned two diversionary assaults, one on the left at New Gate by the Irgun and the Stern Gang, the other on the right on Mount Zion by the Palmach.

  From the outset, Shaltiel ran into difficulties. The Irgun, the Stern Gang and the Palmach all suspected that he had assigned them to diversionary attacks to keep the glory of seizing the Old City for his own forces. The Palmach's Yitzhak Rabin and Yosef Tabenkin didn't believe his plan would work. To Rabin, attacking Jaffa Gate was like "banging your head against a stone wall." He and Tabenkin urged instead that they put all their forces into an assault from the Mandelbaum house to the northeastern corner of the Old City, which would give them control of the principal access routes to Jerusalem.

  "I don't want your advice on how to conduct this war," Shaltiel told them. "All I asked was, Are you ready to make a diversion or not?"

  Even the members of his own staff did not share Shaltiel's confidence in his scheme. Yitzhak Levi warned him that one Arab machine gun on David's Tower of the Citadel would stop the attack. The first officer he asked to command the operation, Zelman Mart, refused, saying the plan wouldn't work.

  None of their criticisms, however, shook Shaltiel's resolve. So confident was he of the operation's outcome that he had already prepared two elements essential to celebrating its success. One was a flag of the new Jewish state which Shaltiel intended to have raised on the top of David's Tower. The other was a baby lamb secreted in the back of Shaltiel's Jewish Agency quarters. A far more exalted destiny than that originally intended for it by its Arab shepherd awaited the animal. Shaltiel was going to sacrifice it at the base of David's Tower as soon as he had returned the ramparts of Jerusalem to Jewish hands.

  33

  "GO SAVE JERUSALEM."

  IT WAS A TRANQUIL, moonless night. Somewhere in the silence, in a building perched on one of Amman's seven hills, a man rose from the mattress spread on the floor on which he slept, and unfolded his prayer rug. It was 4 A.M., Monday, May 17. As he always did, King Abdullah of Transjordan began a new day by resuming his solitary dialogue with the God of whom one of his distant ancestors had been the messenger.

  His dialogue was interrupted by his aide de camp, Hazza el Majali, bursting into the bedroom. He had just received a telephone call from Jerusalem. Weeping, Ahmed Hilmi Pasha, one of the two members of Haj Amin Husseini's Arab Higher Committee still in the city, had begged for the Legion "to come to our assistance and save Jerusalem and its people from a certain fall."

  It was the second call Majali had received that night from Hilmi begging for help, the climax of a series of pleas that had been pouring in for the past twenty-four hours. "The Jewish flag will fly over the tomb of your father if you do not send troops," one distraught Jerusalemite had warned the King.

  Those words had not left the little sovereign unmoved. Though he had resigned himself to the partition of Palestine, the internationalization of Jerusalem was a project which pained him no less than it did Ben-Gurion. Only the constant pressure of Great Britain, the nation whose support and subsidy were vital to his throne, had kept him from sending his Bedouin soldiers to El Kuds, the Holy City. Jerusalem's fall would be a bitter blow to him personally and would have a disastrous effect on his prestige. What good, after all, was the best army in the Arab world if its soldiers were not to defend the third city of Islam?

  Abdullah's palace was not the only place where Jerusalem's fate was being debated that night. In the army camp of Zerqa, just outside Amman, the worried leaders of the Arab League had been summoned from their sleep by the cry for help from the Holy City. An Egyptian volunteer fighting in Jerusalem had come to Azzam Pasha to tell him it would fall if the Arab Legion did not intervene. The city was desperately short of ammunition, and the loss of most of the New City had been devastating to morale. One concerted Jewish attack, he warned, and "all Jerusalem will be theirs."

  In pajamas, occasionally shouting at each other in the heat of their exchanges, the League leaders debated his message in the sitting room of Azzam's cottage. Finally, exasperated, Azzam turned to Iraq's Crown Prince Abdul Illah. "If you don't go immediately and convince your uncle to send troops to Jerusalem," he threatened, "and if Jerusalem falls for want of them, I will tell the world the Hashemites are Arab traitors even if I hang for it." His outburst spurred them to action. They all decided to dress and rush to Abdullah's palace.

  Meanwhile, in a simple stone house in Djebel Amman, a sleepy Tewfic Abou Hoda stumbled from his bedroom and gaped at the figure before him. Transjordan's Prime Minister had come to expect unusual gestures from the eccentric monarch he served, but nothing had prepared him for the sight of Abdullah standing in his living room in the middle of the night. The shock did not, however, disturb his presence of mind. Any interference in Jerusalem, he told Abdullah, would in his view constitute a breach of the agreement he had concluded with Bevin and the British.

  His reply disturbed the King. Those were not the words he had come to his Prime Minister's home in the middle of the night to hear. As anxious as Abdullah was to send his soldiers to Jerusalem, he was not yet prepared to do it if it meant defying his only allies.

  Meditating morosely on his problem, he returned to his palace, to stumble upon the angry delegation of his fellow Arab leaders. Once again the outspoken Azzam repeated the threat he had made at Zerqa to Abdul Illah. This time he added that if the Arab Legion saved Jerusalem, "I will not oppose declaring you king of Jerusalem and I will put the crown on your head with my own hands even though my own sovereign will oppose it."

  The King leaped from his chair and embraced him.

  "You will not be disappointed," he promised.

  Netanel Lorch eyed the five Four Square cigarettes before him with suspicion. The young officer who had told himself on Partition Night that "dancing is for the innocents" knew that three was the daily ration. There would be a price to pay for the two extra cigarettes, he thought. Before he had had time to enjoy the first one, he found out what it was. He was summoned to a conference at the Schneller base to be briefed on his role in David Shaltiel's attack on Jaffa Gate.

  It was, Lorch would recall, a "very solemn, very formal" briefing. Neat and cool in a freshly pressed uniform, Shaltiel looked on while Ephraim Levi, the young officer he had chosen to lead the assault, explained the operation on a map of Old Jerusalem. Levi himself had at first thought that "the whole thing was crazy"—trying to "break into the Old City through this little window leading to some stairs which no one was really certain were there or not." Pondering it, Levi had become convinced that despite the heavy casualties he was certain they would take, they would somehow get in.

  The Irgun and the Stern Gang would strike at New Gate, the Palmach at Mount Zion, he explained, while the main Haganah force would wait in the Tannous Building opposite Jaffa Gate. As soon as the sappers had blown the grill with a bangalore torpedo, they would make for the tunnel under the protective fire of Nevo's "armored force." The first group would seize the northwest tower of the Citadel, controlling Jaffa Gate. The second, Lorch's, would take the southeast tower, then the po
lice headquarters just beyond it.

  When Levi had finished, David Amiran, the man whose archaeologist wife had furnished the idea for the attack, gave them a lecture on the Citadel's architecture, stirring in Lorch an unexpectedly passionate interest in archaeology. Then Shaltiel presented them a flag of their new state. "Tomorrow morning," he promised his young officers, "this flag of Zion will fly from the Tower of David."

  John Glubb scrutinized the slip of red paper reserved in the Arab Legion for urgent communications. "His Majesty the King orders an advance towards Jerusalem from Ramallah," it said. "He intends by this action to threaten the Jews in order that they may accept a truce in Jerusalem." Half an hour later, at noon, a still more explicit cable reached Glubb, stressing that the King was "extremely anxious" to "ease the pressure on the Arabs and incline the Jews to accept a truce for Jerusalem. . . . His Majesty," the cable concluded, "is awaiting swift action. Report quickly that the operation has commenced."

  Those two cables were as far as Abdullah dared go in manifesting to his English troop commander his growing desire to get his soldiers into Jerusalem. For forty-eight hours, Glubb had been opposing both the King and the government on Jerusalem for reasons that were "partly political, partly military." He did not believe the situation in the city was as desperate as its leaders claimed. To Glubb, with his ingrained dislike of city Arabs, they were incompetent, semihysterical men more adept at overestimating their foes' strength than at using theirs.

  Elsewhere, his hopes of waging only a semblance of a war had been notably successful. His Legion had been inside Palestine for over forty-eight hours without a single engagement of any consequence. Some of his regiments had not even fired a round of ammunition.

  But they were paying a price for their inactivity, and it was growing with each passing hour. In Amman, the city crowds, spurred by the nonstop, triumphant bulletins emanating from their neighbors' radio stations, were beginning to scream for victories of their own. The Arab officers and soldiers to whom Abdullah had cried, "On to Jerusalem!" added their protests to the crowds'. The proud Bedouins who had ridden down to the Jordan through a cheering crowd now found their campsites surrounded by jeering women calling them cowards. There had been a significant number of desertions to the ranks of the irregulars. At least one unit was close to mutiny, and everywhere relations between British and Arab officers were strained. When Colonel T. L. Ashton invoked the example of India in an argument with his subordinates, his adjutant Captain Ali Abou Nuwar replied with a curt phrase that summed up the sentiments beginning to rise in many of his fellows: "India was not your country. And this is ours."

  Despite those pressures, Glubb remained steadfast in his determination to stay out of Jerusalem. He clung to the hope that the Consular Commission might still arrange for a cease-fire in the city and save the internationalization scheme from collapse. More than ever he was haunted by the idea of using his precious troops in an urban conflict. But he could not ignore the King's cables. He would send Jerusalem's population a reminder of the force that lay just beyond the Judean hills ringing their city—one of the 25-pounder guns purchased with the subsidy he had received in London. Perhaps, as Abdullah hoped, a few shells from that field piece would sober the city's Haganah command and spare him the need of sending his army to Jerusalem.

  Netanel Lorch was furious. The good Jewish mothers of Jerusalem, his own at their head, had, at an enormous sacrifice of their own skimpy rations, prepared hundreds of sandwiches for their hungry compatriots in the Jewish Quarter of the Old City. In addition to the ammunition, water and first-aid kits already weighing down the men of his platoon, Lorch was ordered to give each man a sack of sandwiches to carry.

  The first preparations for the attack that was going to deliver those sandwiches were hardly auspicious. Moving up to their positions, Lorch's men came under a withering enfilade fire from an Arab machine gun. "Headquarters said the Arabs have no automatic weapons and they're never wrong," one of his men yelled from the back of the bus in which they were being transported. "That's not a machine gun—it's ten Arabs firing in order." With that, his men leaped from their buses into the burned-out ruins of the Commercial Center. Then they began to blow their way from shop to shop up to the Tannous Building, their assigned jump-off point. There an Arab sniper killed one of Lorch's men. Afraid of the effect his death might have on the inexperienced platoon's morale, Lorch propped the dead man up in a corner of the room and, pretending that he was only wounded, began a running conversation with his corpse.

  Looking at the city spread below the crest of Nebi Samuel, Mohammed May'tah felt an extraordinary emotion seize him. The only time the artillery officer of the Arab Legion had seen Jerusalem, he had been on his white horse Sabha riding through its cheering crowds in a parade to celebrate Britain's victory at El Alamein. Now, on Glubb's orders, he was going to open the Arab Legion's war on the city with the 25-pounder behind him.

  Shouting "Fire!," he told himself, "I am the first."

  As his shells screamed into Jerusalem, another Arab officer of the Legion appeared at the Arab radio station in Ramallah. He handed Raji Sayhoun a communique. "The artillery of the Arab Legion has just begun to shell the Jewish positions in Jerusalem," it read. "Our shelling will not cease until the four-color flag of Palestine floats over the entire city."

  Eight artillery shells on Jewish Jerusalem were not, despite Glubb's and Abdullah's hopes, going to influence the thinking of the Haganah. Shaltiel's command had far more pressing problems to deal with that day. Early in the morning, Rabbi Weingarten had informed Terra Sancta that the Jewish Quarter would surrender to the Arab Legion only, and the furious irregulars had reopened their attacks with new energy. Meanwhile, through the Belgian consul, the Jewish Agency got its first indication that the quarter Shaltiel was planning to save was already negotiating its end.

  For the quarter, the day was, as one leader would observe, an "unrelieved disaster." Only their shortage of ammunition and their failure to press their attacks instead of looting and burning each building as they captured it prevented the Arabs from penetrating into the very heart of the quarter. Its exhausted defenders fought bitterly for each room they yielded up. The unfulfilled promises of help which arrived almost hourly from Shaltiel's headquarters did little to raise their morale. One, the evening before, had even promised relief in an hour and a half. Late in the afternoon the quarter's defenders angrily informed the New City, "Help will soon be useless. The need is now. The hour and a half has already continued thirty-six hours. What watch are you going by?"

  Bobby Reisman, the American paratrooper from Buffalo who had come to Palestine almost by mistake, talked quietly beside an armored bus with his close friend Moshe Salamon. In a few minutes one of them would have to get into that bus to lead the most dangerous phase of an attack that neither of them believed in, blowing out the secret gate at the base of Suleiman's Citadel.

  "Suppose we do get in?" Salamon said to Reisman. "What do we do then? We won't last ten minutes."

  Reisman shrugged. "Maybe they've got another operation," he said. "Maybe we're just a diversion."

  Salamon drew a shilling from his pocket. "Heads I take them in, tails you get the job," he said.

  He flipped the coin. It was heads. Salamon ordered onto the bus the men who would help him blast the grill. As Salamon climbed on board himself, Reisman called "Good luck" to his disappearing figure.

  In the Synagogue of Yemin Moshe, the four platoons of the Palmach who were going to be the diversion waited for the order to assemble for their assault on Mount Zion. Uzi Narciss, the man who had captured Kastel, was in charge. His four under-strength platoons were all that was left of the Har-el Brigade's Fourth Battalion after six weeks of constant combat.

  Just before moving his men out, Narciss got a call from Shaltiel. The Haganah commander asked him if he had a flag.

  "In fact, no," answered Narciss. "Why the hell would I have a flag?"

  "To put on Mount Zion if you
capture it," Shaltiel replied.

  "Well," grumbled Narciss, "I just didn't think about it."

  Ephraim Levi had his flag tied around his waist, planning to raise it before dawn on the medieval tower which loomed before him in the darkness. With Yosef Nevo, he contemplated from a blown-out window of the Tannous Building the outlines of the walls of the city against which he was about to launch the first attack of a Jewish army in almost two thousand years. There was no moon, and in the almost perfect blackness they could see nothing moving. They would have the advantage of surprise. Nevo's two British armored cars, his command car and Moshe Salamon's bus were hidden in the streets below. Levi glanced at his watch. It was a few minutes before midnight. He tapped his friend on the shoulder, and Nevo moved downstairs to his cars.

  A cry as old as Jerusalem rang through the Holy City's twisting alleys: "To the walls!"

  Kamal Irekat answered its call half dressed, with two barefoot aides running along behind him. As he reached the Jaffa Gate someone yelled, "The Jews are coming! The gate is open!"

  Irekat ran up to the entry, the widest in the Old City. Only a few sandbags lined its mouth—not enough to stop a truck. Then he glanced to one side and spotted, along the Citadel wall, the thirteen garbage carts Anton Safieh had rescued from the crumbling municipality May 13. They were a providential gift. Irekat and his followers began to push them into the gate to form an improvised barricade.

  On the walls above, there was pandemonium. Men ran up to the wall from every direction, half dressed, pulling their kaffiyehs on as they came, squatting down to fire from any crenellated gunport that was undefended. As their ancestors had spilled boiling oil on the Crusaders of Godfrey de Bouillon, they rolled up wads of paper, set them on fire and dropped them over the wall to illuminate the moonless night. Their principal firearm was a grenade made by Fawzi el Kutub out of a clump of dynamite sticks which could be flung a great distance by whirling them from the end of a cord. Already a relay of women and children were rushing them to the wall as fast as Kutub could manufacture them in his Turkish bath.