O Jerusalem!

by Larry Collins

  David Ben-Gurion pondered with distress the pile of cables littering his glass-topped desk. All day long, the front which claimed priority in his preoccupations had been sending him a series of urgent warnings. Between its growing shortage of food and ammunition, the menace of the Legion from the north and that of the Egyptians from the south, the situation in Jerusalem was so alarming that a disaster was inevitable if some way was not found to get help to the city.

  Ben-Gurion was determined to find a way. "At last we had a state," he would later write, "but we were about to lose our capital." He was irked by what he felt was the Haganah's underestimation of the danger to Jerusalem. "They don't see the importance of Jerusalem," Ben-Gurion thought. "They are used to defending villages."

  "I knew," he would later recall, "that if ever the people of the country saw Jerusalem fall, they would lose their faith. They would lose their faith in us and in our hopes of winning." He had never before directly intervened in a tactical problem of the Haganah. Tonight he was going to. Despite the lateness of the hour, he summoned to his office Yigal Yadin and his senior officers.

  Three weeks earlier, on his way to the besieged city, Ben-Gurion had studied for himself the exact nature of the tactical problem confronting Jerusalem. Like John Glubb and Sir Alec Kirkbride, David Ben-Gurion was persuaded that the key to Jerusalem was Latrun. The sudden appearance on its heights of the soldiers of the Arab army he feared most added immeasurably to the city's perils. Unaware that the men of the Palmach had held those heights for a few brief hours, he now told his Chief of Operations, "I want you to occupy Latrun and open the road to Jerusalem."

  Yadin stiffened. For the young archaeologist who had over-all direction of the Haganah, other fronts that night had priority over Jerusalem. The Egyptian advance would menace Tel Aviv if Yad Mordechai fell. All of Galilee seemed threatened by the Syrians. Jerusalem, he was persuaded, could hold on. "If we follow his idea," Yadin thought, "we'll save our capital and lose our state." Once they had checked the onrushing Egyptians and Syrians, then they could turn their attention to the capital. In any event, he told Ben-Gurion, "you simply cannot take Latrun by a frontal attack. We have to take a longer period and hit them by the flanks."

  Ben-Gurion insisted. Yadin's timetable was not his, and their clash was violent and acrimonious. "Jerusalem can't hold out," the Jewish leader said. "By the time we capture Latrun under your plan there won't be any Jerusalem left to save!"

  At those words, Ben-Gurion saw his young subordinate's face pale. With a sweep of his arm, Yadin crashed his fist down on the desk, shattering its glass cover. The young man wiped a few flecks of blood from his fist and stared at his leader.

  "Listen," he said, his voice low with fury and barely controlled passion. "I was born in Jerusalem. My wife is in Jerusalem. My father and mother are in Jerusalem. Everybody I love is there. Everything that binds you to Jerusalem binds me even more. I should agree with you to send everything we have to Jerusalem. But tonight I don't because I'm convinced they can hold on with what we've given them and we need our forces for situations far more dangerous than the one in Jerusalem."

  Shaken by Yadin's unexpected outburst, Ben-Gurion drew his head down into his shoulders like a wrestler, the certain sign of his unshaken determination. Pushing aside the shards of glass on his desk, he sat back in his chair and quietly studied Yadin. Then he gave him a straightforward, unequivocal order: "Take Latrun."

  37

  TICKET TO A PROMISED LAND

  THE TASK of carrying out Ben-Gurion's order was given to the phlegmatic Haganah veteran who had earlier received the secret messenger of Glubb Pasha at the kibbutz of Naharayim. Shlomo Shamir, to whom Colonel Desmond Goldie had hinted of Glubb's hopes for a peaceful division of Palestine, was now to lead the first military formation raised by the new state of Israel against the entrenched forces of Glubb's Legion.

  The thirty-three-year-old Russian-born Shamir had been a shopkeeper, a printer, an artist, an electrician and a globetrotter before undertaking full-time service with the Haganah. What had led Ben-Gurion to appoint him commander of the Seventh Brigade was not his Haganah background, however, but his service in the British Army.

  Before attacking the Legion, the newly appointed commander of the Seventh Brigade first had to assemble his brigade. Half of it was to be made up of companies assigned to him from existing units; the rest would have to be recruited from training depots and reserve headquarters, or simply, as Shamir observed, "on the sidewalks of Tel Aviv."

  With a few hundred pounds issued by the Haganah's paymaster to set up his headquarters, Shamir requisitioned three rooms in the Hotel Bristol, in the center of Tel Aviv. Using the telephone, prowling the sidewalk cafés of Dizengoff Street, sending scouts north and south, he managed to recruit a skeleton force of officers for his brigade. Since the best men were already taken, he had to dig through his memory for the names of friends he had met and admired during the war. The first was that of Vivian Herzog, the elegant former Guards officer who had been the Haganah Intelligence Service's liaison with the British in Jerusalem. Rushed to Tel Aviv by Piper Cub, Herzog became Shamir's chief of operations. The atmosphere he discovered in the three rooms of the Bristol Hotel bore little resemblance to the British headquarters he had known. "It had an air of happy chaos," he remembered, "with men without rank hitting each other on the shoulder, trying to get done in two days what the British would have taken nine months to do."

  To lead two of his battalions, Shamir managed to get his hands on a pair of fellow Russians. The first was Haim Laskov, twenty-nine, a former captain in the Jewish Brigade and an assiduous student of Clausewitz. He had discovered his taste for the military as a boy collecting buttons that had fallen from the uniforms of Napoleon's soldiers by the banks of the Berezina. The battalion he was assigned to lead was a former Palmach unit whose noncommissioned officers, preferring to stick with their Palmach brothers fighting in the south, had disappeared. His armor was a heteroclite assembly of twenty vehicles hastily plated up in Joseph Avidar's workshops, and a dozen of the half-tracks which had just arrived on the first boat sent by Xiel Federmann, the Santa Claus of the Haganah.

  His vehicles lacked light machine guns, munitions, radios and tool kits. His drivers didn't know how to drive with their lights out or their armored slits down. Some of them, Laskov noted, "didn't even know how much air to put in their front tires." Pompously designated as the 79th Motorized Battalion, his command was, in Laskov's own words, a parody of an armored force.

  Even more difficult was the task assigned Shamir's second battalion commander, twenty-nine-year-old Zvi Hurewitz, a veteran of Orde Wingate's specially created night assault units. His 72nd Infantry Battalion existed only in the hopeful imagination of its planners. He would have a hundred recruits in various stages of training as the nucleus of the battalion. To get them, Hurewitz rushed to Tal Hashomer, a hospital outside Tel Aviv used as a training center. He reported to Shamir that the scene there was like "an Oriental bazaar. Brigades were fighting over men as though they were scraps of bread, and if you didn't get in and fight yourself, you got the crumbs."

  With his first hundred men under his wing, Hurewitz asked Shamir where the rest were to come from. Shamir threw his arms to the sky. "Who knows?" he said. "Tomorrow we'll find an answer."

  In Jerusalem, the Arab Legion's assault on the Jewish Quarter of the Old City continued unabated. Abdullah Tell had placed his armored cars and six-pound antitank guns on the Mount of Olives to support his attacks. They were hurling two hundred shells a day into the quarter.

  The first major Haganah stronghold to fall was the Nissan Bek Synagogue, the splendid building whose dome had been donated by the Emperor Franz Josef. It was essential to Russnak's defense plan, and the Haganah fought tenaciously to hold on to it. From all over the quarter, reserves came to help. The girls gave an extraordinary demonstration of courage to the men. Esther Cailingold dashed from post to post carrying ammunition and tending the wounded. Sixte
en-year-old Judith Jaharan, trained as a nurse, was forced into the role of an infantryman to defend the street in which she had been born.

  Unable to spot all of the positions from which they were directing fire at his men, one Arab officer turned for help to a man who owed his intimate knowledge of the quarter's buildings to his little-loved calling as a rent collector. Dressed in a business suit and a red tarboosh as though he were off on his rounds, the rent collector was picking out buildings when a sniper, presumably firing from one of his tenants' windows, killed him.

  Fawzi el Kutub finally ordered eight of his men to rush across an open space and place a charge at the base of the synagogue. All of them were killed or wounded. No one would volunteer for a second try. Hoping to force his men's hands by his example, Kutub sprinted across the space himself. When he got to the base of the synagogue, he saw that no one had followed him. Like a spider, he pressed himself up against its wall until finally the Tunisian to whom he had promised a wife rushed out to him carrying a fifty-five-pound charge.

  The explosion barely chipped the wall.

  Three more unsuccessful attempts were required before Kutub managed to blow a hole in the synagogue wall and a party of Legionnaires rushed through the smoke into Nissan Bek's interior.

  Sure that the Haganah would counterattack and that the irregulars swarming into the synagogue would quickly turn to looting, Kutub decided to destroy it with a 220-pound charge. His strongest follower, a one-eyed former porter in the railroad station nicknamed the Whale, staggered up with the explosive. A terrible roar shook the quarter and blew out the heart of the building. As the smoke cleared and the frightful devastation caused by the bomb became apparent, Kutub heard a cry of consternation rising from the Jewish posts around him.

  It was quickly replaced by a triumphant yell. A small group of Haganah led by Judith Jaharan counterattacked and took the smoking ruins of Nissan Bek from the Arabs. As Kutub had suspected, the irregulars had spent their time looting the synagogue. The Haganah found the bodies of Arab irregulars killed in their counterattack with altar cloths around their waists, pages of the Torah stuffed into their shirts, pieces of chandeliers and lamps in their pockets.

  More than courage such as that displayed by the defenders of Nissan Bek was going to be needed if the quarter was to survive. Two more efforts to break through Zion Gate had failed and a sense of defeat was beginning to grip many defenders. That night, after Nissan Bek had fallen again, two of the quarter's senior rabbis sent a despairing, almost hysterical message to their colleagues in the New City: "The community is at the end of a slaughter. In the name of the residents, a desperate cry for help . . . Shake the higher institutions and the whole world to save us."

  An equally grave warning cry rang through the Jewish suburb of Beth Hakerem that same night. Like coast watchers warning seafront residents of an incoming tidal wave, the neighborhood's Home Guardsmen raced from door to door shouting the news that Ramat Rachel had fallen. The Egyptians were, quite literally, at their doorsteps. After his long chain of Arab conquests, Colonel Abdul-Aziz had finally added a Jewish one to his laurels: with almost twenty-four hours of continuous shelling to pave the way, his men had swept through the ruins of the settlement at nightfall. Now his armor was reported heading for Beth Hakerem.

  Boys ran from house to house calling for anybody with "two arms and two legs" to come out and build barricades. Women came in bathrobes and pin curlers, men in pajamas or a pair of pants hastily pulled on, children in undershirts and sandals. By early morning, under the full moon, the entire neighborhood was at work. Sixty- and seventy-year-old men with hernias and bad hearts heaved stones onto the fortifications. Twelve-year-olds struggled to push heavy wheelbarrows up to the barricades while younger children raced along behind them with the heaviest stones they could carry. Women scoured the fields, filling their shopping baskets with rocks. If Beth Hakerem was going to become the second Jewish community of Jerusalem to face an Arab army, its residents were determined to give the rest of the city an example. Abdul-Aziz' men would have to pay a price for every Jewish home they seized.

  Slowly, like an old man out of breath, the rusty hulk rescued from a cluster of ships waiting for the scrap-metal dealer, plodded across the majestic bay, a black cloud from its funnel huddling over it like an umbrella. Built long before the war to carry eight hundred first-class passengers, the decks, passageways and holds of the S.S. Kalanit crawled today with two thousand men contemplating in awe and silence the spectacle before them: the port of Haifa and beyond it the green slopes of Mount Carmel. For those men the port culminated a dream of years and a voyage begun somewhere in Central Europe seven, eight, nine years earlier in the wake of Hitler's drive east. Some of them had managed to flee to the forests, where, like hunted animals, they had fought alongside the partisans until the hour of liberation. Others, swept into the death camps of Nazi Germany, had awaited their liberation at the portals of the gas chambers in which six million of their kind had perished before their eyes.

  The Allied victory they had so desperately awaited had delivered them from one barbed-wire camp to another, and it was in the displaced-persons centers that the Haganah had found most of them. Zionist and non-Zionist, orthodox and atheist, Communist and capitalist, they were animated by the desire to join their fellow Jews outside a Europe in which they no longer had confidence, and in which they had been so consistently betrayed to their Nazi oppressors.

  The Haganah had offered them that opportunity, demanding only one thing in return for their passage to Israel—that they fight. Organized by the networks of the underground army's illegal immigration service, they were secretly directed to assembly areas where some of them received a rudimentary military training, then shipped to their ports of embarkation. The most important was Sète, near Marseilles; from its wharves some of the men aboard the Kalanit this morning had set out for Haifa seven months earlier on another equally overcrowded vessel. The prow of the Exodus, however, had never anchored in the waters below Mount Carmel, and its unhappy human cargo had been returned to Europe to be dispersed again in a new set of camps.

  On the high seas, the immigrants of the Kalanit had shouted cries of triumph at the news that the country toward which their old steamer was bearing them had conquered the right to receive them openly, legally. No fanfare, no speeches, no pretty girls with bouquets of flowers were on hand to welcome them on the docks of Haifa. The only sight that greeted them, as they stared down from their decks, was the line of yellow roofs of the column of old buses waiting for them.

  Matti Megid, the young officer of the Haganah who had accompanied the immigrants from Germany and Rumania, noticed a black Oldsmobile slide up to the quay and heard someone calling his name. Two hours later, in a pinkish building by the Tel Aviv seafront, Megid was hurried into an office filled with people and noise. At one end of the room, behind a table, Megid saw the disorderly white tufts of hair of a familiar head poring over a list of names, the passenger list of the Kalanit. Without looking up, the white-haired man began to question Megid.

  "How many are they?" Ben-Gurion asked.

  Ben-Gurion wanted to know everything: who they were, where they came from, how old they were, what kind of military training they had. Then the old leader suddenly lifted his massive head and looked at Megid.

  "Do you know why they're here?" he asked. As Megid nodded, Ben-Gurion added, "Because we need them."

  "But not right away?" questioned the young officer, concerned for the first time by the turn the conversation was taking.

  The Jewish leader gazed at Megid, somewhat surprised by his remark. "That's not your concern," he replied.

  Suddenly realizing that the immigrants he had brought to Israel were going to have to buy their right to enter their new country by risking their lives in a conflict for which they were not yet prepared, Megid begged Ben-Gurion not to throw his men into combat too quickly. His comment clearly disturbed Ben-Gurion.

  "You can't judge," Ben-Gu
rion said. "You don't know how serious the situation is."

  Then, sadly, he added, "We need them all."

  As Shlomo Shamir had predicted, the new day had brought an answer to Zvi Hurewitz' manpower problems. Taken directly from the docks of Haifa to Tel Hashomer, four hundred and fifty immigrants of the Kalanit were to constitute the rank and file of Hurewitz' 72nd Battalion. The Russian-born officer studied them as they scrambled down from their yellow buses and lined up before him. They were all young. Those who had spent time in the British detention camps in Cyprus were tanned. The others were gray and pale. They clutched in their arms everything they owned, stuffed into a little cloth sack or a frail valise.

  There were blue-eyed Poles, Hungarians, Rumanians, Czechs, dour Bulgars, Yugoslavs, Russians with hair as blond as sun-bleached straw. They were uniformly thin, and a certain furtiveness in their regard betrayed the painful pasts which had preceded their arrival in Haifa.

  Hurewitz lined his four hundred and fifty recruits up in the hospital courtyard and decided to mark their arrival in this new camp with an attention that had rarely honored their unhappy lives at their other, earlier destinations. He bade them welcome. But as Hurewitz began to talk, he realized from their uncomprehending stares that his battalion was a Tower of Babel in which apparently only one language, Hebrew, was not spoken.

  He sent for the Polish sergeant who was his clerk and had him translate his words into Yiddish and Polish. "Welcome to the ranks of the Army of Israel," Hurewitz began again. "We have been impatiently awaiting your arrival. Time is short and Jerusalem is in danger. We are going to her rescue." As he uttered his last words, Hurewitz felt a tremor of emotion seize him. The pale faces of the remnants of a condemned people suddenly came alive and from the mouths before him rose a spontaneous, triumphant shout.