O Jerusalem!

by Larry Collins

  With their summary rejection of Bernadotte's proposals, the Arabs were once again foreclosing their options. They had again been trapped by their own propaganda. In Jerusalem, the Arab crowds were repeating a new slogan, "Wait until the ninth of July," the date the cease-fire was to expire. Once again the civilians of Palestine were sapping the Legionnaires' morale by calling them cowards for having stopped fighting. In Bethlehem, one of Glubb's officers watched the Moslem Brothers chanting for a resumption of the Holy War.

  Nowhere was the menace of the crowds more keenly felt than in Cairo. The predictions of Azzam Pasha in Amman on the eve of the cease-fire were being fulfilled. Wary of the Moslem Brotherhood's extremists, Egypt's Prime Minister Nokrashy Pasha reversed himself once again. Egypt, he declared, was prepared to resume hostilities.

  This time, the country that had made no effort to prevent the Arabs from embarking on war May 14 strongly counseled them against resuming the conflict. Britain made it clear that the Arabs would not be able to get arms in England for a second round.

  Before Transjordan's Tewfic Abou Hoda left for Cairo, Glubb had warned him, "We have no ammunition. For God's sake, no matter what happens, don't agree to resume fighting." Afraid of being diplomatically isolated, Abou Hoda joined the others in voting to resume fighting July 9 if the mediator did not submit a more satisfactory peace plan in the meantime.

  On his return to Amman, Abou Hoda was greeted by a furious Glubb. "Good heavens," Glubb said, "why did you agree to resume fighting? Whatever are we going to use for ammunition?"

  "Well," said the Prime Minister after a moment's reflection, "don't shoot unless the Jews shoot first."

  With his arms supply secured and the Irgun crushed, Ben-Gurion devoted his time to ensuring that Israel had one army, not a number of armies, and one basic strategic plan. On June 29, the Israel Defense Force officially came into being, an army with ranks, pay scale, and messes like any other. The recalcitrant Palmach was brought under stricter supervision in the new organization. The strategic plan concentrated above all on Jerusalem.

  Despite the U. N., 7,500 tons of food and 2,800 tons of fuel, enough to last almost a year, had been stocked in the city's warehouses during the cease-fire period. This time no one was going to menace Jewish Jerusalem with starvation. But the long-term solution for the city depended on more than its ability to withstand a siege. "King David chose one of the most difficult places in the country for his capital," Ben-Gurion told his Cabinet. He deplored the fact that Zionism's pioneers had not resolved the problem by linking Jerusalem to the sea with a chain of settlements. In the next round of fighting, the objective would be to capture all the city, and to establish a broad territorial link to the plains, seizing enough of the countryside around the city to give it breathing space.

  "We must mend in this war," he said, "what we neglected in peacetime."

  The Arab's swift rejection of Bernadotte's proposals spared the Israelis the onus of being the first to turn down a U. N. plan which, this time, was as unacceptable to them as it was to the Arabs. On July 6, Moshe Sharett gave Bernadotte Israel's formal rejection of his scheme.

  The following day, in a last effort to preserve peace, Bernadotte called on both sides to accept a prolongation of the truce. The Israelis had no reason to accept. Both sides had violated the truce whenever possible, but the Israelis' efforts had been far more successful than the Arabs' had. The Iraqis and the Egyptians had each managed to add about ten thousand men to their forces; otherwise there had been no substantial changes on the Arab side. But Israel was now ready to put sixty thousand men into the field. For the first time, the Jews would both outnumber and outgun the Arabs.

  Reviewing the situation, Ben-Gurion "knew it was finished. I knew we had won. They couldn't conquer us. It was only a question of how far we could go." Yet he knew that his state's reputation and the ideals to which it subscribed obliged him to take a decision against which all his fibers rebelled. He accepted Bernadotte's proposal. Israel would not resume firing.

  "I was afraid of one thing that day," he would remember two decades later, "that the Arabs would acept the truce, too."

  Ben-Gurion need not have worried. As so often before, his Arab foes obliged him. In a last unsuccessful effort to head off a resumption of hostilities, King Abdullah invited Lebanon's Riad Solh, Syria's Jamil Mardam, Egypt's Nokrashy Pasha and the Arab League's secretary general to his palace in Amman. Much as he wanted to avoid war, Abdullah felt, as he had in May, that he could not stand alone. He had to persuade the others to join him.

  Patiently Abdullah reminded them that they had all accepted the cease-fire because their ammunition was running low. During the past four weeks all their information indicated that their enemies had received enormous quantities of arms. The Arab Legion, for its part, had gotten virtually nothing. Perhaps, suggested Abdullah, his fellow Arab leaders might be able to indicate what new provisions they had received to justify going back to war with a vastly strengthened enemy they had not been able to defeat even when they enjoyed a clear margin of superiority.

  Riad Solh exploded. They had to go back to war. Their people wanted it. Arab pride, honor and dignity demanded it. If they lacked grenades and ammunition, then, he declared, "we shall pick the oranges from the trees and hurl them at the Jews to fight and save our honor."

  A silence followed his impassioned words. Abdullah sighed.

  "Thank you, Riad Bey," he said, "for your sentiments and such a delicate expression of our national spirit. I must, however, remind you of something you seem to have forgotten. We are now in the month of July. There will be no oranges on the trees of Palestine before September."

  46

  THE FLAWED TRUMPET

  THE JAGGED SHARDS of metal were still warm. Twisting one of them between his fingers, Major Abdullah Tell studied it with the appraising eye of a pawnbroker scrutinizing a piece of jewelry. It took Tell only a few seconds to realize that these scraps marked the end of one era in Jerusalem and the beginning of another. "The Arabs' hopes of capturing New Jerusalem," he would later note, had disappeared with their arrival. They came from the shattered casing of a six-inch mortar shell. Less than an hour after the expiration of the cease-fire, they confirmed Tell's fears that his was no longer the only artillery in Jerusalem. Now it would be his enemy's turn to take the offensive and try to drive him from the ramparts of Suleiman the Magnificent.

  Bent on giving Jerusalem's Arab population a taste of the shelling that the New City had endured for four weeks under the Arab Legion's cannon, David Shaltiel's men poured round after round of artillery into the Old City. Now it was the Austrian Hospice which was submerged in a wave of victims. Aladin Namari, the city's self-appointed Minister of Information, saw one woman, her stomach torn apart by a direct hit on her car, hysterically shrieking for her six children. Near her stretcher was a hamper full of human fragments, all that remained of her family.

  All night the firing continued. By dawn, Jerusalem's stunned and shell-shocked Arab population had understood what Abdullah Tell had realized in the first minutes after the cease-fire had expired. The ninth of July for which they had clamored with such impatience was going to prove the beginning of a time of trial, not triumph.

  The mortars of Jerusalem were an indication of what was happening all over the country. Everywhere the Israeli forces were going over to the offensive. In the south they captured several villages from the stunned Egyptians. In the north, four Israeli columns struck at the Syrians holding their colony of Mishmar Hayarden below Lake Huleh, while others routed the refurbished Liberation Army of Fawzi el Kaukji and took the ancient city of Nazareth.

  By far the most important gains were made in the area north of Latrun, around the Arab cities of Lydda and Ramle. Within three days the two cities and the surrounding countryside were in Jewish hands. Vital to the Israelis' quick success were the spectacular tactics of a commando unit led by a one-eyed officer whose face was destined to become a symbol of his country's militar
y prowess—Moshe Dayan.

  In the wake of the sudden Israeli triumph, tens of thousands of Arab refugees began swarming up the hills toward Ramallah. This time their flight was not a result of fear, but of a calculated Israeli policy to drive them out. The earlier Arab departures had made it all too clear that the land seized by the Israelis was more valuable without the embarrassing presence of its Arab inhabitants. Loudspeaker vans roamed the streets telling the Arabs to leave. Arab leaders were summoned to Israeli Army headquarters and bluntly advised to get out. Buses were promised to transport their people to Arab lines. In Lydda, after many Arabs, persuaded that the Legion was counterattacking, turned on the Israelis to whom they had just surrendered, large parts of the population were physically evicted from their homes and ordered onto the road to Ramallah.

  Under a boiling sun, clutching what few possessions they had had time to gather, an occasional Israeli bullet whistling overhead to keep them moving, the miserable column of human beings stumbled over the rock-and thorn-strewn hillside toward Ramallah. An unknown number of the aged and the young died during their trek.

  When the news of their flight and the fall of Lydda and Ramle reached the Arab world, riots broke out everywhere. In Amman, thousands of angry young men screaming "Treason!" marched on the King's palace. Defying his shocked aides, the King walked straight into the face of the advancing mob, marched up to one of its chanting ringleaders and slapped his face sharply.

  In the stunned silence that followed, the King glared up at him. "You want to fight the Jews?" he asked. "Go enlist in the Arab Legion." With a wave, he pointed out a recruiting office. "If you don't," he said, "go home and shut up." With that, the King ordered the mob out of his palace grounds and strode back to his office.

  The plane's wings bore the little-known insignia of the air force of Panama. Its navigator was picking out landmarks with a map taken from a Baedeker bought in a secondhand bookstore in Prague. The B-17 Flying Fortress's machine guns were Czech-made Skodas, and seven out of its ten Israeli, English, American and South African crewmen were fainting because the welder's oxygen provided for them on their departure at Ehud Avriel's Žatec air base was inadequate for high altitudes.

  Bought as U.S. war surplus, the plane was one of three B-17s smuggled out of the United States despite F.B.I. surveillance. With its two companion planes it was en route to Tel Aviv. On the way, the Israeli Air Force had decided to bomb Cairo to show the Egyptians that its nation's new offensive spirit was not confined to its ground forces.

  The big bomber's pilot, Ray Kurz, a former Brooklyn policeman, knew these Mediterranean skies well. He had been flying them for the past two years as a flight engineer for Trans World Airlines. At exactly 9:40 P.M. he set his radio to the familiar frequency of Cairo's Almaza Airport.

  "Cairo Control," he announced, "this is TWA Flight 924. May I have the runway lights, please?"

  At his words, an obliging pool of light illuminated the B-17's target. "Roger, TWA 924," answered Cairo Control. "Please land on Runway Four."

  Kurz's South African bombardier, Johnny Adir, fixed the airport in the crosshairs of his German bombsight. Setting his course straight down the tarmac on which he had so often landed, Kurz held the B-17 steady while Adir blanketed the unsuspecting airport with high explosives. Banking off toward Suez on a ten-degree compass heading, Kurz could not resist calling back a parting message.

  "Cairo Control," he asked, "do you still want me to land on Runway Four?"

  An unusual animation stirred the little Lebanese mountain resort of Aley on the evening of July 14. Around the dining-room table of a large villa, Lebanon's Prime Minister Riad Solh had welcomed the cause of so much activity in Aley—his fellow leaders of the Arab League. Their meeting was an urgent response to a kind of ultimatum issued to the warring parties in the Middle East by the United Nations Security Council, calling for an immediate and indefinite end to the fighting.

  This time, the Arab leaders had every reason to accept it. As Abdullah had predicted barely a week earlier, the balance of power had been rudely upset during the four-week cease-fire. Now their forces were being thrown back everywhere by the Israelis. To Azzam Pasha's secretary, Whalid el Dali, the meeting seemed as if "it was a funeral and they had all come to bury some dear relative."

  In a sense they had; for their reply that night finally interred the Arab Armies' hopes of conquering Palestine. Even the usually bellicose Syrians agreed, although for a special reason. The nation's President, Shukri al Kuwatli, had revealed to his colleagues that Syria would soon be in a position to lead a new jihad. She now possessed a locally made atomic bomb. It had been manufactured, he confided to them, by an Armenian blacksmith in Damascus.

  Just before midnight, Whalid el Dali rushed through the darkened corridors of Beirut's General Post Office, kept open past its closing time on orders from Riad Solh. Azzam Pasha's secretary shook the sleeping telegraph operator in the cable office and handed a short cable addressed to Trygve Lie, Secretary General of the United Nations.

  It announced the Arab League's willingness to accept an immediate and indefinite end to the fighting in Palestine.

  The swiftness of the Arab reply deprived the officer who was planning to conquer all Jerusalem of one of the assets he counted on most, time. Instead of the month he had estimated he would have, David Shaltiel learned on the morning of July 15 that he would have less than forty-eight hours. The United Nations mediator had fixed the cease-fire in Jerusalem for 5 A.M. Saturday, July 17, forty-eight hours before it would take effect in the rest of the country.

  Shaltiel immediately summoned his staff. It was clear to them all that this cease-fire would end the war and that what they did not get now might be lost for years, perhaps generations, to come. The Jerusalem commander reminded them of the historic importance that the conquest of the Old City would have for the state of Israel and for the Jewish people.

  "What glory will fall upon us," he said, "if it is we who conquer Jerusalem for our generation and all the subsequent generations of Jewry."

  The plan they had prepared for taking Old Jerusalem called for two wide, encircling movements, followed by an artillery barrage to provoke a panicked flight of its residents. To Shaltiel, the scheme posed a major drawback: it would take three or four days to carry it out—two more days than he had.

  The alternative was a direct attack on the walls. It was more risky and it would certainly cost more lives. To Shaltiel's adjutant, Yeshurun Schiff, the frontal attack was like poker: you won or lost everything in one high hand. He knew that for Shaltiel, with his ingrained sense of the dramatic, it had an almost irresistible appeal. Although almost every officer in the room opposed the plan, Shaltiel announced, "We shall attack directly at the Old City. Start preparing the plans immediately."

  Like any good poker player, David Shaltiel had an ace in the hole. Called the "Conus," because it bore a resemblance to a cone, it was a hollow charge designed to have a devastating penetrating effect. The idea for it had come from one of the world's most distinguished physicists, Joel Racah. The elderly scientist had come upon it in an Italian textbook. A prototype of the device had been built to Racah's specifications in a Beth Hakerem laundry. It weighed 335 pounds and rested upon a metallic tripod. To be effective, it had to be exploded precisely six inches from its target, but Racah assured Shaltiel that it would tear a gaping hole in the walls of the Old City.

  Since the assault was scheduled to take place almost 2,500 years after the Babylonians of Nebuchadnezzar had breached Jerusalem's walls, it was baptized Operation Keddem—Antiquity. As Joshua's trumpets had blown down the walls of Jericho in another battle of antiquity, so the invention of a twentieth-century physicist would blow down the walls of Jerusalem for Keddem and return its alleys to Jewish rule for the first time in two thousand years.

  While his commanders completed the detailed arrangements for the attack, Shaltiel and his headquarters staff prepared for an historic burden: giving Jerusalem's Old City its
first Jewish government in twenty centuries. Totally confident of the success of their operation, they labored with meticulous care to prepare every facet of their occupation. Provisional currency was hastily printed. Shaltiel named a whole military government to administer the city. A set of posters in Hebrew, Arabic and English had been prepared, and a team of Gadna youths was already selected to paste them on the walls of the city.

  For the role of military governor, Shaltiel had chosen a soft-spoken chemistry professor named David Amiran. Amiran had assembled his staff and had set out in step-by-step detail the actions he would take as Jerusalem's military governor. He would begin by proclaiming a curfew. Then, conscious of a grave warning from David Ben-Gurion to see that no harm came to the city's shrines, he would surround them with military police. He had drafted a ten-point "order to the population," already printed in three languages. It called for the handing over of all arms, the surrender of regulars and irregulars, and a return to normal life as quickly as possible. Each member of his staff had been provided with a handsome blue-and-white Military Government armband. Amiran had even designated on a huge map of the Old City the location of his headquarters. He had chosen the Austrian Post Office just inside Jaffa Gate.

  Aware of the awesome burdens that would soon be his, Amiran decided to go to sleep at sunset so that he could be up at dawn "ready to act swiftly and decisively" in his new role.

  David Shaltiel too had prepared physically and psychologically for the burdens his historic victory would impose on him. As on the night of his assault on Jaffa Gate, a lamb stood ready for the ritualistic sacrifice at the Temple Mount. The Jerusalem commander had also carefully drafted the speech announcing the Old City's fall to the world from the Tower of David. At sundown, he assembled his staff to listen to him rehearse it.