O Jerusalem!

by Larry Collins

  "I have the supreme honor to announce," it began, "that the forces of the city of Jerusalem have liberated all of the city and we hand it over to the people of Israel with pride."

  The man who was determined to thwart the promise of Shaltiel's speech nervously paced up and down in his headquarters at the Rawdah School. For Abdullah Tell as for David Shaltiel it would be a night of decision. He knew his foes must soon launch the assault he had been expecting for days. Just after 10 P.M. a first mortar shell fell into the Old City. Within minutes it was followed by a score of others. Soon Tell was under the heaviest artillery barrage he had ever known, the certain prelude to the attack he had been awaiting.

  The depth of Tell's emotional attachment to the city was no less profound than Shaltiel's. In his desk he too had an order of the day drafted for this moment. Tell ordered it radioed to all his positions. "Let every True Believer resolve to stand or die," it said. "We shall defend the Holy City to the last man and the last bullet. Tonight there will be no retreat."

  For the next three hours, five hundred shells rained into the Arab city, as much in an hour as the New City had received in a day during the Arab Legion's daily shelling of Jewish Jerusalem. For the medical staff of the Austrian Hospice "it was a night out of hell." The mobile patients were taken to its cellars, and the litters of those who couldn't be moved were dragged into the hallways. One of the first shells destroyed the hospital's ambulance; another set the trees in its courtyard ablaze so that stretcher-bearers couldn't move outside. "Women were screaming in terror all over the place," Dr. Hassib Boulos would recall. "The living, dead and dying were mixed pell-mell throughout the city with no way to get them help."

  In New Jerusalem, in an office opposite Zion Cinema, Zvi Sinai, named by Shaltiel to command the attack, ran through his last-minute preparations. His objectives were "Moscow," "Paris" and "Berlin," the code names assigned to the three spots at which his task force would breach Jerusalem's walls. Using conventional explosives to open their way, one hundred and fifty men of the Irgun would rush from Notre-Dame into New Gate—"Paris." The Stern Gang would attack "Moscow"—Jaffa Gate. The bulk of his men, five hundred soldiers of a newly formed battalion, would rush from Mount Zion through the hole that the Conus would blast in Jerusalem's wall just past the Zion Gate at "Berlin."

  Commanding one of the assault companies was Mishka Rabinovitch, the bazooka expert, his wounded arm now healed. As he briefed his men on their role in the attack, one of them, a deeply religious soldier, asked, "What happens if we get to the Wall and the Temple Mount?" The Temple Mount, of course, now contained two of Islam's great mosques.

  Rabinovitch thought a moment. "We'll take off our shoes and go on fighting barefoot," he answered.

  Riding toward Barclays Bank, their assembly point, a group of Stern Gang's soldiers had other plans for the Temple Mount. In defiance of Ben-Gurion's charge to see that no damage came to the Holy Places, they planned to destroy the Dome of the Rock and El Aqsa Mosque, and thus pave the way for the reconstruction of the third Temple.

  As Sinai's troops moved into their position, an agonizing problem arose for the young officer. In the haste to manufacture the Conus, no one had thought to provide a means to move it forward. Finally a pair of iron bars were slipped under its tripod base and, with men at each end, the explosive was carried off like a litter.

  The climb up Mount Zion was a torture. The trench through which men usually reached the summit was just one foot too small to take the Conus, and its porters had no choice but to carry it in the open, fully exposed to the Arab Legion's shells.

  Mishka Rabinovitch was ordered to help speed its arrival. He split a platoon into three groups of eight men. One staggered forward with the Conus for twenty yards, then ran ahead fifty yards to give covering fire while another rushed up to repeat the process. Hands bleeding, their legs and backs aching, grunting under their dangerous load, Rabinovitch's men slowly heaved the Conus up the hillside.

  It was well after two o'clock when the assault began with the Irgun's attack at New Gate. A few minutes later, a triumphant message announced to Zvi Sinai his first success. "Paris" was in the hands of the Irgun. By telephone he ordered his battalion on Mount Zion to attack as soon as the Conus had battered a hole in the wall. Then, despite the Arab shellfire, he stepped to the balcony of his headquarters to watch for the explosion. Hidden in his advance command post, a ditch near Yemin Moshe, David Shaltiel too kept his eyes fixed on the site chosen for the explosion on which all his hopes depended.

  From the walls of the Old City, Captain Mahmoud Moussa suddenly saw an extraordinary apparition surging toward him out of the darkness. It was a group of men trying to lug what looked to him like a vegetable vendor's cart through the Armenian Cemetery. All around him his men began to hurl grenades.

  One of them set fire to a clump of thistles in the cemetery. To the men advancing "through almost the light of day," it was "total hell." The Arabs on the walls were throwing grenades and shooting, the fire was burning and at any moment their 350 pounds of explosives might blow up.

  At the place selected for it, a slight bulge in the wall where they were protected from enfilade fire, they discovered that the Conus' base was too short. Under fire they raised it with stones so that the charge stood at the proper height and distance from the wall. Then they connected three fuses and bolted for cover.

  "Conus primed," Rabinovitch shouted as he slid to safety behind the cemetery wall. "Get ready."

  An incredible blaze of light lit up the sky and a roar shook the city. Seeing the explosion's flash, Zvi Sinai on his balcony in New Jerusalem threw up his hands in glee. "The wall has been breached," he told himself. "They're moving in."

  From his trench, David Shaltiel, overwhelmed, had seen the fantastic flash and, his radio operator puffing after him, started up Mount Zion. On its summit, waiting to attack, Avram Uzieli thought it was "just like Jericho. The walls are coming down before our trumpets." The battalion commander, Avraham Zorea, heard one of his forward posts shriek in delight, "It worked!"

  "Get in," Zorea ordered his forward company. "I'll bring the rest of the battalion in behind you."

  As Zorea rushed through the Armenian Cemetery, he suddenly saw a bewildered man running toward him through the smoke gushing up from the explosion site. It was the commander of his assault company. "My God, my God," gasped the dazed man, "I don't understand. All that noise and there's no hole. All it did was leave a black smudge on the wall!"

  For the officers of Israel's new Army there was to be no miracle in that July dawn. This time their trumpet had failed. The miraculous device on which all their hopes had rested had turned out to be a noisy firecracker.

  When a messenger ran to give him the bad news, David Shaltiel, it seemed to his adjutant, aged ten years. It was almost five o'clock, and the cease-fire would soon be on them. So confident had they all been in their Conus that there was no alternative plan of attack. Almost broken by the admission, Shaltiel declared, "We have no choice. Now we must follow the cease-fire."

  The Jerusalem commander immediately went to Zvi Sinai's headquarters. Sinai begged Shaltiel to let him take the battalion off Mount Zion and put it through the opening the Irgun had forced at New Gate. To do so, of course, would have meant violating the cease-fire. Shaltiel put his hand on his young officer's shoulders. Their orders were clear. They would have to obey them.

  Overwhelmed by "a terrible sense of failure," Sinai picked up his phone and told his units they would cease fire as scheduled.

  In the Jewish Agency, someone woke the man who should by then have been the military governor of Old Jerusalem. David Amiran walked into the office that was to have been his and looked at the currency, the posters, the decrees, the armbands of the first Jewish occupation of Old Jerusalem in two thousand years. Sadly he selected two examples of each for the archives of the Israeli Army. Then, with a bitter laugh, he marked the rest for destruction.

  Outside, the sky was already gray an
d the guns began to cease firing. Peace crept uncertainly back into the skyline of Jerusalem. Hearing the sound of firing fade away, David Shaltiel whispered to Yeshurun Schiff, "Thank God, at least nobody will die today. But we did not take the Old City."

  Behind its walls, Abdullah Tell sadly contemplated his wounded in the Austrian Hospice. His happiness that he had held Jerusalem's walls was mingled with the compassionate thought that "so many Jews had lost their lives for nothing."

  The last firing came from the Irgun's foothold inside New Gate. Surrounded, without hope of reinforcement, they finally drew back to the New City on Shaltiel's orders, leaving Old Jerusalem's ramparts to the Arab Legion. From Sheikh Jarrah in the north to Ramat Rachel in the south, their action left Jerusalem split in half. The ancient prophecy of Isaiah was fulfilled: Jerusalem had "drunk at the hand of the Lord the cup of His fury." The line drawn down her heart would divide the Holy City for years to come.

  EPILOGUE

  THOUGH THE PEACE descending upon Jerusalem that July morning would prove fragile, its divisions would endure. Two more outbursts of fighting in the Negev and one in Galilee were undertaken before the United States's Dr. Ralph Bunche on the island of Rhodes negotiated armistice agreements between Israel and Egypt, Lebanon, Jordan and Syria early in 1949. Those agreements put a formal end to the hostilities. They did not end the war, and the Arab states resolutely continued to proclaim their intention of one day terminating the existence of a state they would neither accept nor recognize.

  What the Israelis would call their War of Independence thus came officially to an end. The young nation's survival had been bought at a terrible cost. Approximately six thousand people, military and civilian, had lost their lives in the fighting. Those losses would have represented, on a proportional basis, two million Americans, more men than the United States lost in two World Wars. The end of the fighting left Israel occupying 500 square miles of land and 112 villages assigned to the Arabs by the partition plan; the Arabs held 129 square miles of territory and fourteen sites allotted the Jewish state.

  None of the legacies left by the war would be as long-festering or as bitterly disputed as the one symbolized by the Arab families who had fled their homes in Jerusalem in the first weeks of the partition, that of the Arab refugees. Even their number could never be agreed upon. The Arabs claimed that up to a million people had left. More conservative estimates set the figures at between 500,000 and 700,000. According to a note in his diary, Ben-Gurion was informed on June 5, 1948, that 335,000 Arabs had fled. That, of course, was before the flight from Lydda and Ramle. In any event, on that June night David Ben-Gurion set the tone of his government's policy on the issue for years to come. He ordered his aides to "see to the settling of the abandoned villages." Later in the year, on the urging of Tuvia Arazi, the man who had sought to persuade the Arabs to stay in Haifa, Ben-Gurion agreed to the return of 100,000 compassionate cases at the signature of a final peace treaty. Persuaded that a more substantial return would alter the fundamental nature of their state and pose an unacceptable security risk, successive Israeli governments refused to go beyond his offer.

  The Arab states displayed no haste to succor their suffering brothers. The Lebanese, afraid that the predominantly Moslem refugees would upset their nation's delicate balance between Christian and Moslem, persistently refused them. The Egyptians kept them crowded into the Gaza Strip. Syria and Iraq, whose resources made them the countries best equipped to receive the refugees, turned their backs on them. Only Jordan, poorest of the Arab states, made a genuine effort to welcome them into its ranks.

  An element of political propaganda for the Arabs, a grating embarrassment for Israel, the refugees were left to fester in squalid refugee camps, the wards of international charity administered by the United Nations. But if the world forgot them, they did not forget. A generation was born and raised in the misery of those camps, nourished by dreams of vengeance and a return to a lost land they had never known. In the aftermath of the 1967 Six-Day War, that generation emerged on the Middle East scene as the Palestine fedayeen.

  The conflict born the day the representatives of thirty-three nations, assembled in an old ice-skating rink outside New York, decided to partition Palestine would claim other victims. The first to fall was the man who had hoped to restore peace to the Holy Land, United Nations mediator Count Folke Bernadotte. He was assassinated by the Stern Gang on September 16, 1948, as he drove to a meeting with Dov Joseph.

  Mahmoud Nokrashy Pasha, the hesitant history professor who wanted to keep Egypt out of the war but had not dared to place his convictions above his ambitions, fell as he had predicted he would, to an assassin's bullet, fired by a member of the Moslem Brotherhood as he left his office in Cairo on December 28, 1948.

  Lebanon's Riad Solh, who had urged King Abdullah to fight with oranges, was killed in his turn in the summer of 1951.

  On an evening of that same summer, Thursday, July 19, 1951, King Abdullah attended a reception in Jerusalem. The monarch had long since realized his dream: he had been proclaimed king of "Arab Palestine" on December 1, 1948, and thirteen days later his parliament had confirmed the union of Transjordan and the remnants of Arab Palestine into the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan. That night, contemplating the city he had so yearned to add to his kingdom, Abdullah was a sad and melancholy man. Pointing to his grandson Hussein, he told his Prime Minister, "If anything ever happens to me it is he who must carry on the house of the Hashemites."

  The Prime Minister protested that there was no reason to talk of his succession.

  "No" said the little King, "I feel my time is near."

  It was.

  At noon on the following day, as Ezra Danin had predicted the night he and Golda Meir had secretly visited the King, Abdullah was shot dead by an assassin on entering the Mosque of Omar for his Friday prayers.

  The last of the 1948 Arab leaders to meet a violent death was Iraq's Nuri as-Said. Deafer than ever to advice he did not wish to take, the man the Arabs considered Britain's spokesman in the Middle East was overthrown by a coup d'etat in July 1958. Captured while trying to flee his capital disguised as a woman, he was murdered and his body dragged through the streets of Baghdad behind a jeep.

  One man outlived all the others. An occasional rust-colored hair still peeping from his white beard, still remarkably slender, Haj Amin Husseini lives quietly in the hills above Beirut, surrounded by his bodyguards and the latest manifestation of his lifelong preoccupation with his physical security, an atomic shelter. The leadership of the movement he launched in the souks of Jerusalem has long passed to other, younger hands, but amidst his diaries and his chickens he remains implacable in his hatred of Briton and Jew, persuaded that it may yet be Allah's will to return him to his domains in Jerusalem.

  As David Ben-Gurion guided his people's struggle for independence, so he presided over the extraordinary transformation of their tiny state into a viable economic entity. Prime minister with an interruption of only two years from 1948 to 1963, he watched his nation's population more than double, his immigrants reclaim hundreds of acres of land from the Negev he had fought so hard to join to the country, and his businessmen give to Israel a vigorous industrial base. Now retired, he lives in quiet simplicity in the kibbutz of Sde Bokher in the Negev. There, in a sparely furnished room, its walls lined with books, he remains withdrawn from the world, but constantly aware of it, preparing his memoirs and reading the papers and letters he receives from all over the world. Like any other member of the kibbutz, he performs his daily chores. One fixed activity is the daily pole of the old man's life, his visit to the grave of his wife, Paula.

  The child of a carpenter in the Russia of the czars returned to her homeland in 1949 to become Israel's first ambassador to the Russia of the Soviets. For years in Jerusalem and the United Nations, Golda Meir was the architect of Israel's diplomacy. Summoned from retirement and ill-health to become prime minister in 1969 on the death of Levi Eshkol, she runs her high office with the
simplicity that has always marked her life. Not a few of the most important decisions in the Middle East are now decided over a cup of coffee in the kitchen where Golda Meir counted the votes of the partition debate in 1948.

  In Jerusalem itself, the Mandelbaum house, where Jacob Ben-Ur and his Gadna youngsters stopped the armored cars of the Legion, became an international symbol of the divisions separating the world's most cherished city. A strange crossing point, the Mandelbaum Gate was the one spot where the Arab and Israeli worlds opened onto each other. For years the stern guardian of the Arab side of that crossing was Assiya Halaby, the woman who had fled her home on May 14 with a copy of The Arab Awakening under her arm.

  Battlements and barbed wire became a permanent part of Jerusalem; the great scars of no man's land marred its center with ruins and uncharted minefields. For almost twenty years, the rusting wreck of the armored car lost on the night of the Jaffa Gate attack lay against the walls of the city, the bones of its crew whitening in the sun.

  To those battlements came the the pious elders of orthodox Jewry every Sabbath eve to stare across the rooftops toward the hidden stones of their lost Wall. Others, on the anniversary of the death of a wife or a child, climbed to a height in Mea Shearim to look longingly toward the cemetery they could no longer visit on the Mount of Olives. Among them was Rabbi Mordechai Weingarten, the man to whom a British officer had handed the key to Zion Gate. From the fall of the Old City until his death, the elderly rabbi lived his life in accordance with the rigid principles of Jewish mourning, his personal sign of grief for the loss of the quarter over which he had presided for so many years.

  On the other side of the city, the Arabs too came to the walls to stare at the homes they had lost, occupied now by a tide of new immigrants. The Moslems among them looked in their turn at the cemetery they too could no longer reach in the heart of a thriving Israeli city.