* Not to be confused with Al Fatah, the contemporary Palestine liberation movement.
* Moshe Sharett's surname was then Shertok. But in his case, and in the case of other well-known people who Hebraicized their names after May 14, 1948, it was decided, in the interest of simplification, to use the names by which they are now generally familiar to the public.—L. C. and D. L.
* The news was announced to the city's British administrators gathered for Easter services in Jerusalem's Anglican cathedral by a captain named Naylor who galloped up to the church door, dismounted and tiptoed into the pew behind the chief secretary of the government. "Sir," he whispered, "you may be talking about peace on earth and goodwill to men in here, but down at the Jaffa Gate the Jews and the Arabs are beating bloody hell out of each other."
† The regard in which his fellows held Haj Amin's qualifications for the post was revealed when, despite British pressures, he failed to win a place among the top three nominees. The British fixed that, however. As Sir Alec Kirkbride, then a young Arabist, later recalled, "We simply told the two top names on the list they were off and that was that."
* Twelve years later, the Paris paper Paris Presse claimed that the quid pro quo for his escape was the Mufti's pledge to regard benevolently France's role in her North African colonies of Morocco, Tunisia and Algeria.
* Only one of Arazi's shipments failed to reach its destination on time. Warned that the British Intelligence Service was preparing to intercept a delivery of machine tools designed to manufacture bullets, Arazi diverted his shipment at the last moment to a notably inhospitable destination, Beirut. By some miracle, the Lebanese customs never investigated the delivery, which sat in a bonded warehouse for two years. Finally smuggled into Haifa, the equipment was assembled after the war in a tiny underground munitions factory built under the fields of a kibbutz. By late 1945, it was turning out the first munitions manufactured locally by the Jewish settlement in Palestine.
* Those customs officials were among the few beneficiaries of that troubled time. In New York in the fall of 1969, Rudolf Sonneborn estimated to one of the authors of this book that as much as $250,000 of his institute's funds had wound up in the Swiss accounts of British officials as the price for their inattention when vital shipments were sent into Palestine.
* The Haganah nickname for a hiding place, taken from the Hebrew verb lesalek, meaning to dispose of.
* From 1946 to February 1948, according to a report submitted to the War Office by Sir Gordon MacMillan, the last commander in chief of British forces in Palestine, the British intercepted forty-seven shiploads of illegal immigrants, interning 65,307 illegal immigrants in their detention camps on the island of Cyprus.
* There were, of course, exceptions. The Jewish Agency had an unknown ally in its campaign for a Jerusalem police force, British High Commissioner Sir Alan Cunningham. Despairing of maintaining order in the rest of Palestine, Cunningham hoped at least to salvage Jerusalem. That winter he wrote to all the archbishops he could think of, urging them to bring pressures to bear for the creation of a 3,000-man police force. His campaign was no more successful than the Agency's. The Archbishop of Canterbury's response was to write a letter to The Times, an action which, the High Commissioner grimly noted, "shook absolutely no one to the core." Francis Cardinal Spellman, Archbishop of New York, didn't even answer his letter. Cunningham's attachment to Jerusalem, however, led him to one decision that proved of capital importance to Jewish hopes in the city. By the end of January, he came under heavy army pressure to evacuate the city entirely and administer the mandate until its close from the port of Haifa. He refused and threatened to resign if London forced him to do so. Given the state of Jewish preparations at the time, his acceptance would probably have led to an Arab takeover of Jerusalem.
* Like many British military men in the Middle East, Clayton tended to overestimate the Arabs and underestimate the Jews. It was a natural error. The British had, after all, trained the principal Arab armies and, as tutors, could hardly be expected to disavow the value of their teaching.
* The effectiveness of the Flying Club's delivery service was limited by the accuracy of its aim and its drop techniques. Carmi Charny, the rabbi's son born next to the Bronx Zoo, who had had such difficulty talking his way into the Haganah, witnessed one unfortunate drop at the kibbutz of Har Tuv outside Jerusalem. It consisted of a sack of World War II German arms. The sack fell into the kibbutz's one, outdoor bathtub, shattering the tub and bending the rifles hopelessly out of shape.
* In defiance of their professors, several hundred of the young students would volunteer for combat with the Haganah. The medical examination to which the organization submitted its recruits revealed a sad fact. An astonishing number of those Talmudic scholars were stricken with tuberculosis.
*Nor were the department's activities limited to trusteeship. The day before Truman's meeting with Jacobson, three officers of the State Department had held a secret meeting with Camille Chamoun in the Lebanese United Nations delegate's New York hotel room. The aim of their meeting, according to a cable sent by Chamoun to his superiors in Beirut, was "to begin a confidential exploration of other solutions to Palestine than partition." The three Americans had indicated, Chamoun said, that if he could get Arab acceptance of a single federal state composed of Jewish and Arab cantons, American support for the plan would be forthcoming.
* Matt Connelly, the President's appointments secretary. Truman was going to New York March 17 to address a Saint Patrick's Day dinner at the Hotel Astor.
* A few moments after the explosion at Jaffa Gate, Uri Cohen's stolen police armored car struck a traffic island as he was preparing to unload the second bomb. Cohen and his companions abandoned the car and, under British fire, attempted to flee across Mamillah Cemetery to the safety of a Jewish neighborhood. Three were killed. One escaped, only to die a few months later in another Irgun action. Uri Cohen was wounded and was taken to a hospital, from which he was later rescued by the Irgun. From that wound he would keep his own souvenir of the tragic explosion which had taken the lives of seventeen people on January 7, 1948—one leg two inches shorter than the other.
* The Irgun and Stern gang leadership have always denied the excesses attributed to them by the Arabs of Deir Yassin, maintaining that the killing which took place was a result of the Arab opposition to their attack. Their actions were deplored and condemned by the vast majority of Palestine's Jewish community as representing an outrage on Jewish and Zionist ideals. In the interest of avoiding any Arab tendency to magnify the events in retrospect, the material used in this and subsequent passages on Deir Yassin was taken from Jewish sources, the report of the International Red Cross's Jacques de Reynier and three reports on the incident forwarded to the Chief Secretary of the Palestine government, Sir Henry Gurney, by Richard C. Catling, Assistant Inspector General of the Criminal Investigation Division, on April 13, 15 and 16, 1948. Bearing the dossier number 179/110/17/GS, the designation "Secret" and signed by Catling, they contain the interrogation reports of the massacre's survivors by a team of British police officers together with corroborating physical evidence obtained through medical examination of the survivors by a doctor and nurse from Government Hospital in Jerusalem. A copy of the three reports is in the authors' possession. To the report of April 15, the British interrogating officer appended the following remarks: "On 14th April at 10 A.M., I visited Silwan village accompanied by a doctor and a nurse from the Government Hospital in Jerusalem and a member of the Arab Women's Union. We visited many houses in this village in which approximately some two to three hundred people from Deir Yassin village are housed. I interviewed many of the women folk in order to glean some information on any atrocities committed in Deir Yassin but the majority of those women are very shy and reluctant to relate their experiences especially in matters concerning sexual assault and they need great coaxing before they will divulge any information. The recording of statements is hampered also by the hysterical state of the
women who often break down many times whilst the statement is being recorded. There is, however, no doubt that many sexual atrocities were committed by the attacking Jews. Many young school girls were raped and later slaughtered. Old women were also molested. One story is current concerning a case in which a young girl was literally torn in two. Many infants were also butchered and killed. I also saw one old woman who gave her age as one hundred and four who had been severely beaten about the head by rifle butts. Women had bracelets torn from their arms and rings from their fingers and parts of some of the women's ears were severed in order to remove earrings."
* A town in the northern corner of his country. A dinar was the equivalent of a pound sterling.
* Britain's minister in Amman, Sir Alec Kirkbride, assessing Arab intentions, noted that "they were determined to attack the Jews no matter what anybody said. If you tried to warn them disaster might be ahead, that the Jews were tough, you were a Zionist agent trying to demoralize them. Their whole attitude was: 'The sooner you British get out and leave us to deal with the Jews the better!'"
* The three nations had been named by the Security Council to a Palestine Truce Commission.
* Sidki's pertinent query earned him a scornful nickname—"El Yahud" (The Jew).
* It is interesting to note, in retrospect, how fallacious some of the considerations dominating Britain's Middle East policy in 1948 turned out to be. "Centuries of wise British diplomacy have kept the Russians out of the Middle East," noted a British Army intelligence report in April 1948. "American Demagogy, blind to all but electoral consideration, is letting them in. In vain have the Greeks and Turks warned of the futility of using their countries as barriers to block the front door against Russian aggression while leaving open the pasture gate in Palestine. Once British troops have left, there will be no one to control or prevent an unlimited immigration of Jewish communists from Russia." (Authors' italics)
* The survivors of the assault affirm that in addition to the Legion forces at least one British tank joined in the shelling of their settlement.
* The Arab armies, despite the fact that the populations from which they were culled vastly outnumbered the 600,000 Jews of Palestine, totaled only 80,000 men. Of them, 23,000 had been committed to the invasion of Palestine.
* Among the dead were Zipora Rosenfeld and the husband whose side she would not leave. Nineteen years later, after the Six-Day War, a Rosenfeld came back to the bleak hills of Kfar Etzion to carry on the project for which the parents he had never known had given their lives. Yosi Rosenfeld is today an electrician in the resurrected kibbutz of Kfar Etzion.
* His patient, suffering from a perforated colon, was saved. In the trying days ahead, confronted by cases which went far beyond his experience and lay well outside his specialty, the twenty-nine-year-old Tleel would have many an occasion to be grateful for his purchase. Using the texts, he also succeeded in saving several men with lung wounds and one with a head injury.
* Narciss saw Shaltiel's failure as a breach of promise and would always suspect that Shaltiel had not been prepared because he had not really believed the Palmach could break in. To Shaltiel, Narciss' decision to withdraw was placing the priorities of the Palmach above those of the city.
* A religious school devoted to Biblical studies.
* Authors' italics.
* The rabbi, Dr. Elmer Berger, a distinguished scholar, noted for his anti-Zionist convictions, in turn presented it to a New York synagogue.
* In 1949, Sochaczever took some of his product to the French town of Cheddes for whose factory it was named. The astonished Frenchmen found that his product was even purer than theirs.
Publisher’s Note
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Table of Contents
Cover Page
Copyright Page
CONTENTS
PROLOGUE
PART ONE JERUSALEM: "A TIME TO MOURN AND A TIME TO DANCE"
1. DECISION AT FLUSHING MEADOW
2. "AT LAST WE ARE A FREE PEOPLE."
3. "PAPA HAS RETURNED."
4. TWO PASSENGERS TO PRAGUE
5. TWO PEOPLES, TWO ARMIES
6. "WE WILL STRANGLE JERUSALEM."
PART TWO JERUSALEM: A HOUSE AGAINST ITSELF
7. "ARE WE NOT NEIGHBORS . . . ?"
8. THE SANTA CLAUS OF THE HAGANAH
9. JOURNEY TO ABSURDITY
10. "BAB EL WAD ON THE ROAD TO THE CITY"
11. GOLDA MEIR'S TWENTY-FIVE "STEPHANS"
12. "SALVATION COMES FROM THE SKY."
13. "WE SHALL BECOME AS HARD AS STONE."
14. A FLASH OF WHITE LIGHT
15. AN UNLIKELY LAWRENCE
16. THE HABERDASHER FROM KANSAS CITY
17. THE CONVOY WILL NOT ARRIVE
PART THREE JERUSALEM: A CITY BESIEGED
18. A HOUSE IN THE MIDDLE OF HELL
19. "HANG ON TO JERUSALEM WITH YOUR TEETH."
20. SIX WORDS ON A BUMPER
21. "ONE OF THE ARABS WE KILLED LAST NIGHT"
22. THE PEACE OF DEIR YASSIN
23. "Shalom, MY DEAR . . ."
24. "ATTACK AND ATTACK AND ATTACK."
25. A MESSAGE FROM GLUBB PASHA
26. "WE SHALL COME BACK."
27. "THROW STONES AND DIE."
28. BY JUST ONE VOTE
29. THE LAST SUPPER
30. THE FIFTH DAY OF IYAR
PART FOUR JERUSALEM: A CITY DIVIDED
31. "THESE SHALL STAND."
32. "THE MOST BEAUTIFUL MONTH OF THE YEAR"
33. "GO SAVE JERUSALEM."
34. "A LAMENT FOR A GENERATION"
35. "YOSEF HAS SAVED JERUSALEM!"
36. "TAKE LATRUN."
37. TICKET TO A PROMISED LAND
38. "EXECUTE YOUR TASK AT ALL COSTS."
39. THE WHEATFIELDS OF LATRUN
40. ". . . REMEMBER ME ONLY IN HAPPINESS."
41. "GOOD NIGHT AND GOODBYE FROM JERUSALEM"
42. "WE'LL OPEN A NEW ROAD."
43. "THE ARAB PEOPLE WILL NEVER FORGIVE US."
44. A TOAST TO THE LIVING
45. THE THIRTY-DAY PAUSE
46. THE FLAWED TRUMPET
EPILOGUE
BIOGRAPHICAL NOTES
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
CHAPTER NOTES
Publisher’s Note
O Jerusalem! Page 72