O Jerusalem!

by Larry Collins

  The intensity of the shelling had forced an end to the normality Dov Joseph had sought to maintain. Most shops were closed now and Jerusalem's streets almost as deserted in the daytime as they were at night. People slept in cellars or in the hallways of their homes, and Jerusalem's citizens became adept at identifying the sound of incoming shells and judging their point of impact.

  Dana Adams Schmidt of The New York Times found the incessant shelling more terrifying than anything he had been exposed to during four years of reporting the European war. Shells seemed to select their victims at random. One, Schmidt noted, crashed through a barbershop window, killing the barber and the client in his chair but leaving unscathed another client waiting in the corner. One of his acquaintances spent an entire day scouring the city for a cup of condensed milk for her pregnant sister. On her way home with her treasure, she was knocked down by the concussion of an exploding shell. She was badly hurt, but her cup of milk remained unspilled.

  Certain categories of citizens became local heroes. Among them were Zvi Leibowitz' water carriers and Alexander Singer's repair crews for the high-tension lines feeding the hospitals and the bakeries. Fourteen- and fifteen-year-old Gadna youths carried messages under shellfire from one Haganah post to another. One of them, Tova Goldberg, a dark-haired, big-framed girl, always ran to her destination thinking that if she did the shells had less chance of finding her. She could not run fast enough. One morning an Arab shell caught up with her. When the stunned girl recovered her senses, she saw her hand, severed from her wrist, lying on the ground before her, its fingers still folded around her message. She picked it up and staggered to the Haganah post to which it was addressed. "Here is your message," the sixteen-year-old girl said, passing her severed hand to a soldier. "Now please get me a doctor."

  Jerusalem's Jewish population would not easily forget that the centers of Western Christianity, which had clamored for their city's internationalization, now ignored their agony. The Vatican, the Church of England, the councils of Orthodoxy, the governments of those nations that had supported internationalization did not see fit to launch a storm of protest over what was happening to them in New Jerusalem. To the city's besieged residents, it seemed that the outside world was more interested in saving Jerusalem's Christian stones than in saving its Jewish inhabitants.

  As the city's casualties grew, a walk through Jerusalem's streets became a painful as well as a dangerous experience. Its walls and telephone poles were covered with death notices and with pictures of the young men and women who had died defending the new state. One of them one day early in June bore the photo of a young girl killed in the fighting in the south. The following morning her father was at his desk promptly at seven o'clock, as he was every day. Even the loss of his daughter could not be allowed to interrupt Dov Joseph's terrible task.

  On Saturday, June 5, he was forced to make still another cut in the city's ration. It was the last he would be able to make: when it was gone, there would be nothing left. Henceforth his fellow Jerusalemites would get 150 grams a day—four thin slices—of a soggy, crumbling mass called bread, and, for a week, eight ounces of dried beans, peas and groats.

  On the other side of the city, Major Abdullah Tell waited patiently. Inspecting his men's positions each day, his swagger stick in his hand, his pearl-handled Smith and Wesson revolver strapped to his waist, the young officer was sure that he was slowly squeezing the Jewish city into submission. The intelligence he was able to glean from the city's diplomats, the two desperate attacks of the Haganah at Latrun, revealed how grim his foes' situation was. And on June 5 he received his first indication that events were heading toward a conclusion. The Belgian consul discreetly sounded him out on his surrender terms.

  Only one faint worry disturbed him. It was a report brought him by a peasant from a village near Bab el Wad. "The Jews," he said, "are building a secret way to Jerusalem."

  Colonel Habes Majali had already observed the bulldozers' advancing column of dust and heard their motors' echoes at night. For several days, villagers near Latrun had been informing him that large numbers of Jewish civilians were assembling in Beit Jiz and Beit Susin. When Tell relayed the peasants' words to him, they confirmed his growing suspicions. Majali had only to order his 25-pounders to open an intense fire in the area and he could have devastated Marcus' project and killed dozens of workers. But he could not undertake a major action without the agreement of his brigade commander and a major addition to his ammunition supply. He sent his adjutant, Captain Rousan, to the English colonel, T. L. Ashton, commanding the brigade, for permission to bombard the area. Rousan explained to the Englishman their conviction that the Jews were building a road to Jerusalem that could bypass the Latrun salient.

  Ashton shrugged his shoulders with indifference. "The terrain is too tough," he said. "It's too mountainous. They'll never get a road through there."

  Before sending Rousan back to his regiment's headquarters, Ashton gave the young officer a handwritten order for Colonel Majali. "Under no condition," it said, "are you to waste your 25-pounder ammunition in the sector Beit Jiz-Beit Susin."

  By Monday, June 7, Dov Joseph was desperate. As the first week of June slipped by, he had watched in a growing fear and apprehension the steadily shrinking figures in each column of the orange folder locked in his desk. One by one, the last of the commodities each of these columns represented had disappeared and he had drawn a double line under the column indicating it was finished.

  They were, Joseph thought, "coming to a perilous end." There was three days of food left in his warehouses. The prospects were so horrible he didn't dare contemplate them. "I was mentally bracing myself for that terrible moment when I'd have the women of Jerusalem on my doorsteps crying out for food for their children and I would have nothing to offer them but empty warehouses," he would one day recall. "Whatever would I say to them?"

  On the outskirts of Jerusalem it was already coming to that. Leon Angel, one of the city's bakers, found on his doorstep, begging for a piece of bread for her children, a woman who had walked through the Arab shelling. Reuven Tamir, taking a few tins of canned meat to his fellow soldiers, saw families crying in the street from the pains of hunger.

  Aware of how desperate the city's situation had become, the Haganah was preparing still another assault at Latrun. Jerusalem, Joseph feared, could not even wait for that. He was not an emotional man, but on this June morning he poured out all his concern and anger in a cable to Ben-Gurion:

  Do we have to be satisfied with only hopes and possibilities? I've been warning for weeks that there is a need to send food supplies and nothing has arrived. I suggested a few ways and you didn't respond. You managed to send other things, why not food? Why not draft those hundreds who are sitting in cafés in Tel Aviv for Jerusalem's sake? I ask you what will happen if, God forbid, the operation doesn't succeed. If we do not receive flour by Friday, there will be starvation in the city.

  So brief was the delay proposed in that cable that there was no question of waiting for the Burma Road. Ben-Gurion summoned his closest collaborators to find a way of nourishing the famished city. There was only one. Three miles of steep ravines and sharp inclines separated the farthest point to which Marcus had been able to push his bulldozers and the point to which vehicles coming down from Jerusalem could penetrate into the hills. Since it was totally impossible to push a truck through those three miles, the survival of Jerusalem's one hundred thousand Jews would have to be entrusted to another form of transport, the most ancient in the world: two marching feet.

  Ben-Gurion's experts calculated that if they could round up six hundred men and marched them through the darkness each night over those three miles of terrain with a forty-five-pound sack on their backs, they might get enough food across the hills to save the city.

  An hour later, Pinhas Bracker, a forty-year-old meter reader for the Palestine Electric Company, like scores of others, got a call ordering him to report immediately to the headquarters of Histadru
t, the labor organization. Bracker assured his wife he'd be home for dinner. He was used to such summonses; he had been a member of the Home Guard since 1940.

  A line of buses waited for Bracker and the scores of men called up with him. As soon as they arrived, they were loaded into the buses for what they were informed would be "a very short but very special mission." They were a rich variety of types: bank clerks in dark suits, civil servants in shirtsleeves, workers, shopkeepers. Even Mordechai Zeira, Israel's best-known folk singer, was among them.

  Most of them shared two characteristics. They were city dwellers and had rarely walked more than half a mile at a time. They were middle-aged or older; the legs and backs which would have to nourish Jerusalem were all close to retirement age.

  The buses took them to Kfar Bilu, the old British Army camp from which the Nachshon convoys had set out. The camp was already brimming with activity when they arrived. Called in haste from the nearby kibbutzim, women were frantically stuffing flour, rice, sugar, dried vegetables and chocolate into the sacks the men would carry.

  Their leader, Joseph Avidar, gathered them for a briefing on the job ahead. As he spoke, he began to see signs of fear and doubt creeping into the faces of some. The Russian miller's son who had lost a hand making grenades for the Haganah stalked up closer. In a voice hoarse with emotion he told the men before him that the entire ration distributed to their brothers in Jerusalem that morning had consisted of four slices of bread. Pointing dramatically to the pile of sacks awaiting them, he proclaimed, "Each one of you is going to carry on your back the food to keep a hundred Jews alive another day."

  Avidar had one more surprise. The three hundred pack racks Xiel Federmann had bought for twenty cents almost as an afterthought on Christmas Day in Antwerp had found at last a utilization. Avidar ordered the hastily mobilized men to lash their sacks to a rack and get back into their buses. They were off to the hills of Judea.

  There was still another way by which Jerusalem might be saved, and Ben-Gurion was determined to seize it if he could. It was a cease-fire. After the Arabs had summarily rejected the United Nations' first cease-fire call, Britain had placed before the Security Council another, calling for a four-week truce. Two of its terms, providing for an embargo on the shipment of arms and of men of military age into the area during the truce, displeased Tel Aviv. It was, indeed, to be able to do just that that the Israelis wanted a cease-fire.

  The Arabs, despite Britain's change of mind, continued to resist the appeal, and the problem of getting both sides' agreement was thrust into the lap of the United Nations mediator, Count Folke Bernadotte. The Swedish diplomat had made a hurried trip to Cairo, Beirut, Amman and Tel Aviv seeking agreement. On this Monday morning, June 7, Bernadotte had submitted to the Arab League and Tel Aviv a new truce plan. It made one concession to the Israeli position. Men of military age would be allowed into the area provided they had not been formed into military units before the truce.

  Ben-Gurion felt he had no choice but to accept. There was no doubt in his mind that "we were at the end of our rope." Supplies "were running out everywhere." They had suffered two defeats at Latrun, lost the Old City and suffered what would have been a serious defeat against the Iraqis in Jenin if their enemies had pursued it. The Egyptians were twenty-five miles from Tel Aviv. Only in the north, where they had captured Acre, driven to the Lebanese border and chased the Syrians out of Galilee, had they been successful. Everywhere their units needed time to regroup, reorganize and reequip. And above everything else loomed the problem of Jerusalem. Despite the heroic efforts of Marcus' road builders and his porters, Ben-Gurion had a growing fear that "the Arabs were going to get Jerusalem." Hoping his foes would do the same, he cabled his acceptance of the plan to Bernadotte.

  As they had a few days earlier, the Arab League's leaders gathered in Amman to debate the mediator's proposal. This time they were bitterly divided.

  On the surface, there seemed little reason for the Arabs to accept a cease-fire. If their gains were considerably less than their enflamed propaganda had indicated, they still had the Israelis on the defensive almost everywhere. The reality, however, was not as promising.

  The Egyptian Army had captured great stretches of territory, but it had conquered relatively few settlements. A whole string of Israeli colonies lay menacingly to the army's rear. The ferocious resistance of each settlement's underarmed defenders gave evidence of the high price the Egyptians would have to pay to conquer them. A determined Israeli counterattack had finally checked their advance south of Tel Aviv. The campaign had exposed the army's inefficiency and the corruption of its suppliers. Medicine, food, water, gasoline, munitions, all were lacking. Rifles jammed and grenades exploded prematurely in men's hands. The higher-ranking officers preferred the shelter of their tents to sharing the heat of the desert with their men. Morale was low. The army's younger officers felt bitterly that they had been thrown into a war for which they were unprepared and unequipped, while in Cairo the country's rulers continued to live a life of undiminished ease and luxury.

  The Iraqis had been a total disappointment to their fellow Arabs. The Lebanese, after a few gestures on May 14, had been inactive, and the Syrians, as Major Wasfi Tell had predicted, were soundly defeated. Although the Arab Legion had some notable successes to its credit, it had failed in the streets of Jerusalem. The Iraqis, Egyptians and Transjordanians all were dependent on Britain for supplies, and with an embargo looming they were running short of arms, supplies and spare parts. Now the nation which had made no effort to stop the conflict on May 14, Great Britain, was actively counseling her Middle Eastern friends to accept the cease-fire.

  Events had not worked out quite as Ernest Bevin's Foreign Office had predicted. The Israelis had been tenacious, the Arabs less aggressive than expected. A beleaguered Israel turning to Britain to extricate her, at the price of handing the Arabs the Negev or some other part of her territory, was no longer likely.

  Ironically, in Amman it was the leaders of the nations that had made the smallest contribution to the war, Syria and Lebanon, who were most anxious to pursue it. Haj Amin Husseini's Arab Higher Committee also opposed a cease-fire bitterly, fearing that it would deprive the Arab drive of its momentum and shatter the delicate alliance that had driven them to fight. So, too, did Azzam Pasha. He now felt that the war had to be pursued because he was sure a pause would favor their foes. Given the state of world opinion, he felt that the Arabs would be unable to resupply themselves during a cease-fire, while the Israelis would.

  Glubb was "rather pleased" by the prospects of a cease-fire. His Legion was intact and he noted that "we had accomplished rather more than I had hoped we might accomplish when I went into the war with such misgivings."

  The decisive position was that adopted by the history professor who had been talked into asking for a declaration of war. Farouk's limited patience had been strained by his army's failure to win a swift triumph, and Nokrashy was now free to express his second thoughts on their original decision.

  "We went into this war when we never should have," he told his colleagues. It was time to accept the United Nations cease-fire and "use the four weeks to improve the state of our armies. Then perhaps we can hope to win the war."

  "You are talking nonsense," Azzam Pasha exploded. "Your army is twenty-five miles from Tel Aviv. You haven't been defeated and you want to catch your breath. What do you think the Jews will do with a cease-fire? Do you think they will do nothing? They will use it, too, and you will find them twice as strong as you are afterward."

  Nokrashy was adamant. "Azzam," he said, "my decision is based on the advice of my Chief of Staff. I'm not going to take your advice over my soldiers'."

  "You're getting your advice from the most ignorant man in Egypt when it comes to warfare," Azzam snorted in reply. The League's secretary general feared that Nokrashy's stand was simply a pretext to abandon the war altogether. He knew, too, that the Egyptian masses, fed a daily barrage of misleading communiqués, we
re going to be enraged if a cease-fire deprived them of their expected triumph. Just as bellicose propaganda was in part responsible for getting the Arab leaders into the war, it now threatened to keep them in it. It was Azzam's ace in the hole.

  When it became apparent that the truce was going to carry the day and that only the Syrians were prepared to go on fighting, Azzam grabbed a piece of paper from his desk. Angrily he wrote out his resignation and threw it on the table. He was going to publicly denounce the men who had forced a cease-fire on the League, he said, as he stalked from the meeting.

  White-faced, Nokrashy leaped up and rushed after him. He caught up with Azzam in the corridor. Tugging his sleeves, he said, "Azzam, do you know what you are doing? You are killing me. If I go back to Cairo with your resignation and a cease-fire, I will be assassinated."

  Azzam was shattered by his words. He knew how much truth there was in what Nokrashy had just said. Despite their bitter political differences, they were friends and they had lived through many tribulations together.

  "All right," he said, "I'll accept. But the Arab people will never forgive us for what we are about to do." Then, wordlessly, Azzam walked back into the meeting room and tore up his resignation.

  A nervous silence prevailed in the buses. Like many of the men around him, Pinhas Bracker, the meter reader of the Palestine Electric Company who had promised his wife he would be back for dinner, wondered what anguish his prolonged absence was going to cause his family. From Kfar Bilu their bus had gone through Hulda, then up toward Latrun. Two miles below the crossroads which the Seventh Brigade had twice tried to wrest from the Arab Legion, the bus had turned east up a dirt track to Beit Jiz.