O Jerusalem!

by Larry Collins

  It was midnight as the first buses started into the Judean foothills. A chill wind rolled down from the plateau, sending shivers through these men dressed in shirtsleeves for the humid sidewalks of Tel Aviv. Ahead, green, pink and yellow streaks of light danced across the dark skies, signal flares announcing, perhaps, their arrival to some hidden Arab gunner. At the first whistle of a few random shots fired by Mahmoud May'tah's mortars, the men threw themselves onto the floor of the bus.

  The convoy struggled through cyclamen and lavender up to the village of Beit Susin, easternmost terminus that night of the Burma Road. There the men got down and slung their sacks on their backs.

  Bronislav Bar-Shemer, the officer who had kidnapped the trucks of Tel Aviv for Operation Nachshon, arranged them in single file. Each man was instructed to take hold of the shirttail of the man before him so that they would not get lost in the darkness. Then, Bar-Shemer at their head, they started forward into the night.

  Watching them disappear, Vivian Herzog was struck by a strange detail, "the total silence of those men who belonged to the world's most talkative people." To David Marcus, their disappearing silhouettes evoked the image of "the caravans of antiquity on King Solomon's highways."

  The column passed through the zone where Marcus' two bulldozers and his army of laborers fought, as they had for nights, to push the road forward. Some of them were already laying the first segments of a pipeline which would soon deliver water over the hill to tank trucks run down from Jerusalem. The pipeline that would eventually ease Jerusalem's collective thirst had originally been destined to replace the pipes of London blown out by the Blitz.

  After a slight decline, the track straightened out to assault the steep incline leading up to the first crest. It was there that the porters' martyrdom began. Without any light, the men stumbled on hidden stones, slipped to the ground, grabbing a clump of wild carrots or a bush to keep themselves from rolling down the hillside. Felled by a heart attack, one man tumbled back down the ravine, bouncing helplessly from rock to rock. The men behind him stepped over his body to attack in their turn the slope that had killed him.

  Some, too exhausted to go on, sank to the ground by the side of the path. The strongest struggled to the top, laid down their loads, then came back down to help them. To forget the pain of his ascent, Pinhas Bracker forced himself to remember a happy picnic he had had in these hills as a young family man. Others remembered Avidar's words, that they carried on their aching backs the ingredients of one hundred thousand Jews' survival. Still others thought only how to move one foot forward after the other. Mixed with the scraping and stumbling noise of their feet was a bizarre sound, the panting of their middle-aged lungs. At points the slope became so steep that the men literally had to pull themselves forward by tugging on stone ledges or grasping the roots of the rare shrubs along their route. The one that offered the best support was a kind of wild strawberry plant with deep roots, called because of its red flower "Blood of the Maccabees."

  Some men crawled forward on their hands and knees. On the reverse slopes, those who couldn't hold on slid down the hillside on their stomachs, moving like crabs from rock to rock so that the precious load on their backs would not be lost.

  Without a word, without a cry, the column continued along its way. At its head, Bar-Shemer prayed that the guns of Latrun would remain silent and not turn their expedition into a disaster with a few mortar shells. Finally, after three hours, he saw ahead in the predawn grayness the silhouettes of a team of porters brought out from Jerusalem to load their sacks onto waiting trucks and jeeps. Dov Joseph's desperate appeal had been heard. The efforts of Bar-Shemer's three hundred men from Tel Aviv would give thirty thousand Jews in Jerusalem food for another day.

  At dawn, Arieh Belkind, the manager of Dov Joseph's warehouses, arrived at his principal depot at the Evelyn de Rothschild School. All he had that morning of Tuesday, June 8, was a few crates of matzo. On his way to work, his thoughts had been on their "impending tragedy." Walking in the door, he suddenly discovered a pile of sacks sitting on the warehouse floor. Belkind bent down, opened one, and ran his fingers through its contents. It was flour. Overcome, he began to cry.

  44

  A TOAST TO THE LIVING

  "THIS IS Mahmoud Rousan. The Jews have captured the police station. Open fire on it with all available artillery."

  Hearing that name on the Arab Legion's radio net at Latrun, a man sat bolt upright in the midst of the heavy assault straining the Legion's positions. Grabbing his microphone, Captain Mahmoud Rousan, the real one, said, "This is Mahmoud Rousan. The Jews are trying to fool us. I forbid anyone to fire on the police station. Our men are still inside."

  The discovery of their ruse would deprive the Haganah of a success they were close to winning on the night of June 9. For the third time, the Jewish Army was trying to wrest the heights of Latrun from the Arab Legion and reopen the Jerusalem road before a cease-fire could freeze their enemy in his commanding positions. To carry it out, a fresh brigade, one of the best in the Palmach, had been brought down from Galilee to replace the shattered battalion of the Seventh Brigade. Their task was to try to take the Arab positions from behind while a smaller, diversionary attack fixed Arab attention once again on the police station. Paradoxically, the latter effort, due to an error on its commander's part, came closer to bringing the Haganah success at Latrun than either of the two previous efforts.

  Turning up the wrong valley, the diversionary force stumbled on the Legion's headquarters. They seized the artillery control center and were within a few yards of overrunning Colonel Habes Majali's command post when their attack faltered for lack of reinforcements. Just before dawn, a hastily assembled group of Arab cooks, clerks and signalmen, rallied by the cries of "Allah akhbar!" from the regiment's imam, took the crests back. For nineteen years they would remain in the hands of the Legion.

  When news of the Haganah's third defeat at Latrun reached Jerusalem, a pall descended on the city. To Leon Angel, one of the two bakers still working, it seemed on that Thursday, June 10, as though "death was stalking the city. Everything was silent. Shutters were closed." The hunger-weakened population, he surmised, "was probably staying inside, trying not to move to save energy."

  To finish baking his bread that morning, Angel had used his last reserves. He had swept the flour on the floor to fill out his ration. All the heroism of the middle-aged men struggling up the hills from Beit Susin was not going to save Jerusalem. The flour they had been able to deliver had been a tonic to the city's morale, but it could not fill Jerusalem's stomachs and its warehouses. Those warehouses contained that morning flour for about thirty thousand loaves of bread, a third of a loaf per person, enough perhaps to allow the city to survive another forty-eight hours. Their situation was so grim that Joseph and Shaltiel had to consider the awful question of whom to stop feeding first, the civilians or the soldiers. At the Schneller base, the ration that Thursday morning consisted of six olives, a slice of bread and a cup of tea.

  Most families' hidden reserves were gone. Even the black market had dried up. Famine was truly at Jerusalem's doorstep. Certain elements in the city's Oriental population were close to panic, and a food riot might have a catastrophic result, by showing the Arabs how desperate the situation was. It might even lead them to dismiss the cease-fire Dov Joseph counted on to save the city. Dan Ben-Dor suggested that Joseph cut the ration of Jerusalem's European Jews still further to give a bit more to the Orientals. The Westerners, he argued, would better understand the need to hang on.

  "What?" yelled Joseph. "Give them the price of their weakness? Never!"

  Even if they could get more flour, they would have nothing to bake it with. That morning Alexander Singer had extracted the last barrels of fuel from his tanks by cutting the sludge at their bottoms with kerosene. The resulting mixture would give him a few spasms of current—enough to keep Jerusalem's bakeries and hospitals powered for perhaps thirty-six more hours. Only the water reserves of Zvi Lei
bowitz were capable of going on a bit longer.

  For the twenty-sixth consecutive day, Arab shellfire racked the city. In the past forty-eight hours, Emile Jumean's guns had dropped 670 rounds in its streets. David Shaltiel, his ammunition supply still critically low, could answer the deluge with only a few desultory rounds. Jumean, however, was gracious enough to make up for his failure to reply. Hoping to provoke a worldwide storm of protest against the Jews, he sent two of his own shells at the Church of the Holy Sepulcher and the Dome of the Rock, sure that the Haganah would be blamed for the outrage.

  In the midst of the chaos produced by the shellfire and their hunger, the city's population clung to one hope, the thirty-day cease-fire ordered by the U. N.'s mediator, Count Folke Bernadotte. It was scheduled to begin the following morning, Friday, June 11, at ten. The news drew no celebrations. Twice before, the mediator had set cease-fire dates, and twice the Arabs had ignored them.

  Dov Joseph refused to contemplate what would happen if they spurned it again. As poised and calm as he had been all during the struggle, he spent the evening in the most hopeful exercise he could find, reviewing the supplies he wanted rushed into the city when a cease-fire took effect. It was, he reflected, the only worthwhile thing left to do. If a cease-fire did not go into effect, it was going to be all over anyway.

  Twenty miles from Dov Joseph's office, in the darkness above Bab el Wad, a pair of American newspapermen clung desperately to a swaying jeep. Painfully they made their way along the vague track which David Marcus' bulldozers had hacked out of that terrible terrain. With their passage, the Burma Road was pronounced officially open for traffic.

  The news bore little relation to the real state of the road. The Israelis had chosen to reveal to the world their secret route for a very specific reason. They had now established that the Burma Road had linked Jewish Jerusalem to the plains before the cease-fire took effect. They could henceforth maintain that it would not fall under the jurisdiction of the United Nations truce supervisors.

  A few miles ahead of the jeep, near the church of the Christian Arab village of Abu Gosh, the sound of gunfire shattered the night. A Jewish sentry at the command post of the Haganah forces operating between Bab el Wad and Jerusalem rushed toward the white-robed figure he had just shot. David Marcus would not live to see the "inauguration" of the road on which he had labored so hard. The first Jewish general since Judas Maccabaeus was dead, mistaken for an Arab because he had wandered out to urinate in the fields by his tent wrapped in a bedsheet.

  It was shortly after eight o'clock in the morning of Friday, June 11, when another newspaperman, this one Arab, walked into the office of Major Abdullah Tell. Before Abou Said Abou Reech could put a question to the Arab officer, the telephone rang.

  "Yes, Your Majesty," he heard Tell say. Then the expression of the handsome Arab officer's face changed to shocked disbelief. "Your Majesty," Tell gasped, "how can I stop these men? They feel victory is within reach."

  Aware of the delicate problems Tell would face in enforcing a Jerusalem cease-fire, not only on his own men but on the Mufti's partisans as well, the King had made the exceptional gesture of calling him personally. Abou Reech heard the sovereign's voice rasping through the phone.

  "You are a soldier and I give you an order," the King told Tell. "You must order a cease-fire at ten o'clock." Then, to underscore the seriousness of his words, he said he intended to come to Jerusalem for noon prayers at the mosque.

  Heartbroken, Tell hung up. Dabbing at his eyes with the edge of his kaffiyeh, he rushed wordlessly past Abou Reech into the street.

  For the next two hours Jerusalem was racked by almost constant gunfire, as though both sides, realizing that a cease-fire was imminent, now sought to empty their armories before it began. At ten o'clock it burst into a last spasm. Then the fire began to slacken like the rain of a fading thunderstorm. Behind the battlements of the Old City a word fled from one Legionnaire's lips to another: hudna, truce. At Mandelbaum, at Notre-Dame, on Mount Zion, David Shaltiel's exhausted men lowered their weapons at the sound of sirens blown throughout the Jewish city. By 10:04, a strange, almost oppressive silence shrouded Jerusalem.

  In the Arab Old City quarters, the first reaction to the cease-fire was shocked disbelief, then grief and fury. Little groups of people began to gather protesting, demonstrating against the politicians who had deprived them of their victory. A few of the Mufti's snipers opened fire in an effort to sabotage the truce. Tell's Legionnaires silenced them, but they had their own profound misgivings. They expressed them by beginning a Bedouin funeral dance in the streets.

  To watch the reaction on the other side, their commander climbed up to the tower on which David Shaltiel had hoped to plant an Israeli flag. Bitterly Abdullah Tell looked for the first person he could see moving in that city now freed from the menace of his shellfire. It was a woman, her head bent, running fast with a basket in her hand, off to get food for her family. Watching her go, Tell suddenly saw his victory disappearing with her fleeing figure. Never again would he be as close to conquering all Jerusalem as he had been that morning.

  Dazed, numbed almost, by the silence, the inhabitants of New Jerusalem crawled from their cellars and shelters, not quite believing after so many false alarms that the firing had really stopped. There was no jubilation, no celebrating. They were too weak with hunger for that. The streets were littered with broken glass, masonry, stacks of refuse. Jerusalem's stone dwellings had survived well, but a shattered roof or gaping black hole at each street corner bore evidence to the severity of the struggle the city had undergone.

  Dov Joseph barely paused in his routine to savor the truce. He dispatched a message to Ben-Gurion with an urgent reminder to get a food convoy in immediately, holding its contents to absolute essentials. Reflecting an instant, he told himself, "It has been a people's struggle and we survived because our people struggled."

  A few doors away in his own Jewish Agency office, David Shaltiel assembled his staff officers. From the bottom drawer of his desk he took out a bottle of French champagne one of his men had found on their advance May 14, and poured a glass for each man. Solemnly he proposed a toast to the men whose lives had been saved by the cease-fire. Then he warned that it was of a limited, four-week duration. Each day of that respite would have to be used to prepare for a new outbreak of hostilities. The next round, he promised, was going to be theirs.

  As he had said he would King Abdullah had arrived in Jerusalem for noon prayers in the Mosque of Omar. Afterward, in one of the classrooms of the Rawdah School, the city's leaders offered a Bedouin banquet in his honor. As was the custom, a whole roast sheep on a pile of steaming rice was set before the sovereign. A special lore enveloped Abdullah's banquets: when he found a partner too talkative, he plucked the tongue from the sheep's head and passed it to him; to guests whom he considered dull or whose ideas displeased him, he proposed the brains. Today, however, he had only honors to propose, and the first man to receive them was Abdullah Tell. He announced Tell's promotion from major to colonel.

  As King Abdullah got up to leave, each man filed past him to kiss his hand. Normally he offered it palm down. When he was angry he extended his fist. To the young officer he had ordered to "go save Jerusalem," he offered the highest of accolades. He gave him his hand palm up.

  For another young officer who had saved Jerusalem, June 11 was also a day of triumph. Riding in the back seat of a Palmach jeep on the very first convoy to leave the besieged city was a prim and proper middle-aged Englishwoman in a flowered hat. It had taken all of Yosef Nevo's connections and prestige to get her there. It was his mother-in-law, and this evening he would be able to celebrate at last an event which he had looked forward to for five weeks, his wedding night.

  Several miles down the road, above the intersection for which so many men had fought and died, the Trappist monks of Latrun chanted the Mass of Saint Barnaby with a particular fervor. Then, reinstalled in their damaged refectory, they decided that in honor o
f the truce they would climax their usually austere meal with a little cordial from the cellars of Father Godart.

  To David Ben-Gurion in his study in Tel Aviv, the thirty-day respite the cease-fire had won his beleaguered nation was a "golden dream." As on Partition Night, as on May 14, he had no time for celebration. Before him was a report from Ehud Avriel announcing a third shipload of arms ready to leave Yugoslavia. They had bought 100-millimeter mortars in France. The Czechs had agreed to train pilots, paratroopers and armored experts for them. Planes had arrived that could fly nonstop from Prague to Tel Aviv.

  His state had survived and he knew the tide was turning, a new phase in his country's history beginning.

  His foes had made that day "a mistake, a fateful mistake."

  45

  THE THIRTY-DAY PAUSE

  THE SPOT DESIGNATED for the first encounter between the two men whose forces had struggled for the control of Jerusalem for almost a month was singularly appropriate. It was in the middle of a street named for another soldier who centuries before had shared their dream of conquering Jerusalem, Godefroy de Bouillon.

  David Shaltiel, the sophisticated Jew from Hamburg, and Abdullah Tell, his handsome young Arab rival from Transjordan, paused for a silent instant to appraise each other. Then they saluted and shook hands. The task before them at that first meeting was to fix a cease-fire line in one part of their disputed Holy City, the Arab quarter of Musrara. The evening before, a last Haganah attack had pushed its irregular defenders back two hundred yards. Shaltiel insisted that the demarcation line must include their gains.