by Alan Gold
The date of the assault had been advanced by over a week, in order to cause maximum embarrassment to the British. It was decided by the Irgun leader, Menachem Begin, that the assault on the prison, and the release of a hundred freedom fighters, should coincide with the meeting of the General Assembly of the United Nations that had been specially convened to discuss the British mandate and the entire Palestinian issue.
There were many nations among the fifty-seven member states who would vote against the partition of Palestine into Jewish and Arab nations, but Menachem Begin and other leaders were certain that if enough damage was done to the reputation of the British army, then votes could be swayed away from a further mandate.
The mood of the men and women who met late in the evening at the home of an Irgun supporter in the upper reaches of the Neve Sha’anan region of Haifa was one of restrained fury. Only two or three weeks earlier, four Irgun freedom fighters had been hanged in the prison. The death of the men was the spark that ignited the decision to bring forward the operation to free the other people incarcerated.
To prepare for this mission, it had taken days and days of intense study of the fortress, the roads around it, and the most vulnerable access points.
It was Judit who had been instrumental in sourcing much of the information. She’d seduced a sergeant major in the British army in order to acquire plans of the Acre Fortress so that the Irgun’s bomb makers could estimate the type and quantities of explosives necessary. The sergeant major subsequently died in a road accident.
Judit was also put in charge of stealing British uniforms, buying Jeeps, trucks, and ordinary motor vehicles, and then arranging their painting in British army colors and insignia.
To her comrades, she was a fierce strategist for the cause of Lehi who’d do anything necessary to achieve their ultimate goal of a free Jewish Israel. But to herself, she was a servant of Soviet Russia who at this moment saw a clear alignment of both ideals.
In the past month, she’d caused accidents—road, boating, and gunshot—that had led to the deaths of five prominent people on the list she’d been given by Anastasia, people whose right-wing and ultra-nationalist ideas would put them at odds with the ambitions of Moscow in a future Israel, a friend of the USSR. People who said publicly that they saw no point in replacing Britain with Russia; people who would have stood in the way.
In a week’s time, she’d have to find an excuse to travel to Tel Aviv to meet with Anastasia and the Russian team of which she was now leader, to receive their reports and mete out punishments to those who had failed in their missions. But in the meantime, she had an Irgun mission in which to participate, helping her colleagues to blow a British prison to hell, and free dozens of imprisoned Irgun soldiers. And by coincidence, one of the men still on her list was participating in tomorrow’s assault on the fortress at Acre.
• • •
Dov was dressed in the uniform of a lieutenant in the Engineering Corps of the British army in Palestine. He was supervising five NCOs laying telephone and electricity cables close to the southern wall of the citadel above an old underground Turkish bath. Dov stood and pondered why he so favored the operational name he’d chosen.
All Lehi and Irgun fighters adopted operational names, partly out of security and partly out of bravado. He’d chosen as his nickname “Shimshon,” known as Samson to the British he fought. Samson had been the character from childhood stories in Riga who had embedded himself in Dov’s imagination. In bed at night, beneath the covers, he’d fantasize about being Samson—a great judge, brave, daring, and relentless against his enemies, slaying a lion with his bare hands, killing an entire army with the jawbone of an ass, and destroying a pagan temple using his strength alone; then appearing before the people and lauded as a hero.
Dov’s life hadn’t been so heroic. He’d stolen weapons, bombed rail lines, shot British soldiers, and fought off Arab attacks, but always in the dark and the quiet. Something in him longed to be a hero.
He glanced over at his colleague, Ariel Waxman, a right-wing firebrand journalist whose articles in the Palestine Post were becoming increasingly militant, calling for the British to withdraw immediately and allow Arabs and Jews to decide the fate of the new nation. Waxman’s membership in the Irgun was something he hinted at in his articles, and he’d only just been released from imprisonment in this fortress for inciting revolt.
Dov looked at his watch and hoped that the other Irgun troops under his command, stationed at the other sides of the walls of the prison, weren’t meeting resistance or scrutiny. They each knew precisely how to perform their roles, as did the prisoners. It had been planned to begin at precisely 4:22 P.M., when the day guards were tired and distracted, thinking about what they’d do during the night, and the evening shift workers were not yet in place.
The first explosion would be in the one weak spot of the prison in Acre, where he and his men were pretending to lay cables. When the Ottomans had conquered Acre, they’d built a Turkish bath in the basement of the citadel and had significantly weakened the structure above. It was the only point in the walls of the vast fortress that was vulnerable, a weakness discovered by Judit.
The minutes ticked on, and at 4:10 P.M., in the most British voice he could muster, he said, “All right, chaps, that’s enough. Clear up. Our work’s done here.”
It took them three minutes to pick up their tools, leaving the explosive they’d planted inside the hole they’d made in the wall covered with rocks and debris. They’d buried it in a cavity that would ensure the explosive forces expanded up, down, and into the building, and would not dissipate uselessly into the street.
Bundled into the British Army Engineering Corps truck, they trundled north and then onto a side road near the market to wait. Dov peered steely-eyed through the windshield. Around him, the men were silent. No longer naive boys driven by anger and ambition, they were now veterans; experienced guerrilla fighters. It hadn’t been easy, and they’d lost many along the way—imprisoned or dead. But those who were here were reliable.
He glanced at his watch, then back through the windshield. His mind ticked away the remaining moments. And then he heard a massive explosion. The sound was deep and resonant, though there was almost nothing visual to show for its scale. The damage was contained and focused and a signal to those inside.
• • •
The moment the explosion in the walls above the Turkish bath was heard and felt throughout the prison, the inmates who knew of the raid—members of Irgun—went into action. For days, TNT had been smuggled inside by Jewish cooks; it had been fashioned into hand grenades and bombs, and as the external bomb was detonated, bombs inside the prison were set off, blasting off doors and breaching the internal structures adjacent to where Shimshon and his men had fractured the external walls.
Though a carefully guarded secret operation, the moment the explosions ripped through the prison, hundreds of Arab and Jewish inmates knew there was a jailbreak happening. They rushed to the sound of the explosions while Irgun and Lehi prisoners, armed with the grenades, blew open iron grilles and doors and held the stunned British guards at bay.
Within minutes, the inside of the prison became a smoke-filled, ear-splitting maelstrom of explosions, gunfire, screams from wounded and dying men, orders yelled, feet running, and yelps of panic. But the prisoners of the Irgun and Lehi knew precisely what they should be doing, and which exit point in the wall they should be heading for. Some Jews knew that their task wasn’t to escape but to form a vanguard to hold the British soldiers in position so their colleagues could climb out of the breach; it was a suicide mission for four of the men, knowing they’d be either killed by the guards or hanged for their participation in the escape.
The corridors of the prison became a nightmare of flashes of light and detonations as bullets erupted from the barrels of guns tracing arcs through the dense smoke. The screams of pain and hatred from wounded men blended into a discordant babble of languages. Those who had learne
d Hebrew when they arrived in Palestine reverted to their native German or Hungarian or Polish as they fell to the floor wounded in the arms or legs or back; those British soldiers screamed bloodcurdling curses against the Jews; those Arabs who used the opportunity to escape begged for the help of their Prophet or screamed out “Allahu Akbah” as they ran toward the hole in the wall, hoping to escape from the prison into the ancient alleyways of the city.
Outside the walls, close to where the men under Dov’s command had blown the external hole, he and his second in command, Ariel Waxman, waited until the first men had climbed through the breach. Dov turned to Waxman and quipped, “Not a word about this in the Palestine Post . . . got it?”
Waxman had already composed in his mind the first three paragraphs of the article he’d be writing later that night, a satirical condemnation of the Irgun for preventing the British from doing their job of murdering Jewish soldiers. “Try and stop me, Shimshon,” he said. “This is going to make headlines around the world. Wait till those bastards in the United Nations read it. I can’t wait for the reaction of the British ambassador.”
Both men looked around to see whether any genuine British troops were appearing on the periphery. They hoped that when the real troops saw the Irgun men in British uniforms, holding rifles to kill escapees, they’d move on to other locations. If not, then there would be a gun battle, which would give cover to the men escaping from the prison.
The smoke billowing out of the massive hole quickly dissipated into the air, and Shimshon and Ariel saw the first man’s head appear. He looked right and left, and Dov barked a command in Hebrew: “Move, don’t look . . . move!”
He jumped out of the hole, followed by one, then three. Altogether, twenty-eight freedom fighters from Lehi and the Irgun emerged and scrambled into trucks emblazoned with the insignia of the Engineering Corps of the British army.
But more and more men started to appear, men whose faces were unrecognized by either Dov or Ariel. They were Arab prisoners, clearly benefiting from the meticulously planned incursion. Dozens and dozens of Arab men hurled themselves out of the hole in the wall and onto the pavement and ran across the road into the shuks and alleyways of the ancient city.
Suddenly, a British army truck screeched around a corner and accelerated toward Dov and Ariel. It screamed to a halt twenty yards from where they were standing, and a dozen men jumped off the back. They shouldered their rifles and began firing at the Jews who stood on the pavement. Dov screamed in pain, clutching his chest as he fell to the floor. The Jews hid behind their truck in order to return fire, and in the melee, some British soldiers were shot dead or severely wounded. Ariel stood to get a better shot and suddenly yelped, spun around, and fell to the floor, wounded in the shoulder. He had enough strength to shout, “Move out, quick. Go!”
The men knew what to do. They had to save themselves and leave the dying and wounded where they’d fallen. This was the Irgun way. As the truck roared off, the British jumped back into their truck and took off in hot pursuit.
And a place that moments ago had been a vortex of smoke and flames, of gunshots and noise, of joy and agony, was silent. Apart from the sound of distant gunfire, of the occasional barked order, the street where the explosion had taken place was quiet.
Ariel looked around and saw Dov, his eyes staring into the eternal void, close by him. Another Jew was also dead. Ariel raised his head to see the place where the British had been shooting: two Tommies were lying in the roadway. He realized that he’d been spared. He would use this opportunity to crawl across the road and somehow find a place where a doctor could remove the bullet that had torn his shoulder apart. It was throbbing mercilessly, but he was alive, and though an atheist, he thanked God for saving him. And he started to compose the rest of the article he’d write against the British tomorrow.
He was halfway across the road when he sensed somebody walking up to him. A British soldier? It was agony, but he turned his head and saw the legs of a woman in a skirt, a European skirt. Relief overcame him.
He raised his head more to see who it was, flashes of pain radiating from his torn shoulder. And he recognized her immediately. He smiled in gratitude at his good fortune. “Judit. Thank God you’re here. I’ve been—”
She raised a pistol, shook her head, and said softly, “I’m sorry, Ariel.”
“I don’t . . . what . . . ?”
“I’m afraid you’re part of my problem,” she said, just a second before she pulled the trigger. The bullet blew his face away from his skull.
West of the village of Ras Abu Yussuf
1947
SHALMAN USED A small trowel to carefully scrape away the dirt from the short, shallow trench over which he huddled. In the cave, the air was cool and dry, while the bright sun from the entrance filled it with light. He teased the soil away and, in looking for remnants of the ancient past, found he was able to temporarily escape the troubling present.
His argument with Judit echoed in his mind and was confused with the images of the truck rolling slowly toward the aircraft on the runway. Judit’s cold stare and the determination that put her cause above her family was overlaid in his mind with the body of an Arab boy engulfed in flame in an explosion. But here and now, with his hands in the ancient dirt, such thoughts seemed very far away. This was where he belonged. This was where his head was clear.
He had arranged to come here with Mustafa as often as he could, which in truth was rare between caring for his daughter and the demanding routine of Mustafa having to work on his father’s meager plot of land. But here they were, side by side, toiling in the earth for ancient treasures at the burial site of a woman named Ruth.
Despite the calm that Shalman found in the cave, Mustafa sensed something was worrying the strange friend working silently beside him.
“You are very quiet today,” said Mustafa.
Shalman just shrugged, the sort of response typically associated with Mustafa.
“That’s unusual for a Jew,” he said dryly.
Shalman let out a small laugh, then sat back and put down his trowel.
For the past months they’d been together, and true to his word, Shalman had been teaching Mustafa. Shalman had taken pleasure in showing the sharply intelligent and attentive young Arab man the university books he had been studying, and they talked not just of history and archaeology but of mathematics and geography and cartography. It was maps that Mustafa took to most readily, and he would eagerly pore over any that Shalman was able to beg, borrow, or steal away to bring to him. The two men compared maps showing ancient borders and conquests of the Romans and the Egyptians and the Crusaders with modern maps showing contemporary towns, cities, and roads. And they would fantasize about what they might discover if able to dig under some of Jerusalem’s most ancient sites.
A map had been published recently in the newspaper showing the UN-proposed partition of Palestine, and Shalman had brought this with him to discuss with Mustafa. His mind was so focused on the map as a reference for where they might explore in the future that he was blinkered to its contemporary implications. Mustafa looked it over with thoughtful eyes.
“Where will you live when they carve up the land?” he asked.
“Stay in Jerusalem, I should think,” Shalman answered.
“It is to be a . . .” Mustafa searched with his finger on the map for the term. “Corpus Separatum?”
“That’s right. Jerusalem will belong to nobody,” said Shalman.
“Nobody?”
“Well, it’ll belong to everyone. And be run by the United Nations. Jerusalem is our birthright, yet it’s being taken from us by the governments of the world.”
“We have as much right to Jerusalem as you do, Shalman,” said Mustafa softly.
Shalman didn’t want to begin one of the perennial arguments over who had a greater claim to the city, so he mumbled an apology.
“But you could still live there?” Mustafa asked.
“Yes. And so could you
if you wanted.”
Mustafa gave a snort. “I can’t grow olive trees in the city.”
The two men sat in silence for a moment before Mustafa spoke again. “Many Arabs won’t accept this partition. Syrian, Jordanian, Egyptian, and especially the Saudis—they’ll never accept Jerusalem as a Jewish capital. Funny how the people who don’t actually live here have the strongest opinions.”
“Not so different for us. The fate of my people rests with the United States, Russia, Britain.”
“And in between are you and me. Two men with nowhere else to go.”
Shalman smiled. “We could always live together in a cave.”
Mustafa grinned back and took a swig from his canteen before tossing it to Shalman.
“You think there will be war, don’t you?” said Shalman.
“You Jews have enemies on all sides, my friend. To the north, to the east . . .” His hand traced the map on the ground. “To the south. Only the sea is your friend.” He looked up from the map. “And Arab armies from all sides will drive you into it. And we will be in the middle. If you asked me where I will live when they carve up the land, I want to say the best place for me to be is far away from here.”
“There’s not going to be a war, Mustafa. People will come to their senses. No one wants to die or fight if they don’t have to. After the pounding the British have taken, after the millions and millions who died because of Hitler, nobody wants another war. Not your people, not my people.”
Mustafa shook his head sadly. “Yet I think underneath your archaeologist’s clothes, you’ve been a freedom fighter. You haven’t said so, but I can tell. You’re much more than an archaeologist; the way you handle yourself, the way you’re always checking what’s around you. You’re as much soldier as academic. And Shalman, my friend, if you think there’s going to be no war, then you have more faith in people than I do. Which is strange, since it’s you who’s the fighter and me who’s just a farmer.”