Israel

by Fred Lawrence Feldman

  Herschel had newspapers with him to occupy himself and Benny during the uncomfortable flight. He began swearing as he read.

  “What’s wrong?”

  Herschel showed him the article. “A couple of days ago the damned British expelled Palestine from the Sterling Block. That means nobody with savings in English institutions can get their money. It’s robbery. Those bastards might as well have used a mask and a gun to rob us.”

  “Tough break,” Benny said. “You lose anything?”

  “About twenty thousand pounds.”

  “How much is that in real money?”

  Herschel smiled. “Approximately a hundred thousand dollars.”

  “A hundred grand! Holy shit. How can you just sit there?”

  “Thanks to my mother, what’s been frozen in England is just a small portion of my family’s assets. Most of our money is in America.”

  “You’re saying that you’re rich?”

  “Somewhat.”

  “Don’t hand me that limey understatement crap. You’re rich, yes or no?”

  “Yes.”

  “Does Becky know?”

  “What an odd question. Well, no, I don’t think she does.” Herschel pondered him. “Benny, I hope you are not suggesting that Becky loves me for my money? That’s absurd. She’s wealthy in her own right.”

  “No, but it does mean you’re not after hers.” He winked. “It’s a good thing I’m coming along, now that I think about it. I can take care of you for her.”

  “How thoughtful of you.”

  “And it’s great about you being rich.”

  Herschel was amused. “I’m pleased that you’re pleased.”

  “Hey, we’re buddies, right?” Benny asked affectionately. “Once we get this war outa the way, you and me can go into business. We’ll bring in some trucks.”

  Chapter 64

  Palestine

  Danny banked the droning Piper Cub in wide, lazy circles through the cloudless sky. It was March; spring had come early to Judaea tufting the rugged, rusty terrain with light green. As Danny circled, he kept his eye peeled for a sign of the ground party that was supposed to meet him.

  The Piper Cub had had its two passenger seats pulled out and its doors removed to facilitate loading cargo. That was good for the ground crew but a little breezy for the pilot. Danny was wearing chino pants and a long-sleeved shirt, his leather jacket and goggles. The Cub was loaded with four hundred pounds—the maximum weight—of ammunition, food and medical supplies. When he received his signal he would set down on a nearby stretch of dirt road, unload and get the hell out of there before an Arab raiding party closed in.

  He saw the dust cloud formed by two trucks coming out of a ravine. He waited for the signal that would identify the trucks as friendly, meanwhile noting how the hilly, arid country below reminded him of south Texas, where he had some flight training. Then a hand-held mirror began winking at him and he concentrated on the sequence in order to assure himself that it was the right signal.

  There was no better plane than a Piper Cub for this sort of work, Danny knew. His initial flight out of Teterboro had unnerved him. The big DC-3 might as well have been an ocean liner; it just wasn’t the sort of airplane a fighter jock could feel good in. He prayed to God that he wouldn’t ever have to fly anything like that.

  He wasn’t in the Holy Land a week before they hurried him to a sideshow called the Palestine Flying Club in Tel Aviv. There Danny was interviewed by a former RAF pilot named Aaron Remez. He had been supplied with Danny’s records by good old Milty of Lion Airways. He asked Danny a few questions, sympathized with his complaints about the DC-3 and promised him that an operation much to his liking was in the works. In the meantime they had something to keep a hotshot pilot occupied.

  He was hustled to Lod Airport, where the embryonic air force of the soon-to-be Jewish state sheltered in a ramshackle hangar. That was where Danny and his Piper Cub fell in love at first sight. Flying the Cub was the perfect way to ease back into the air.

  He began to bring her in for the landing. The road was two lanes wide and rutted in places. There was a much better landing strip not far away, at the Ezyon settlements in the Hebron hills. That was where the supplies in the Piper were going. The problem was that the settlements were surrounded by hostile Arabs trying to starve out the settlers. Two truck convoys had been massacred trying to reach the outpost. An airlift, meager as it might be, was the best that could be done for them.

  Danny came in with full flaps and just a little power, keeping his air speed way down. As the tires kissed the earth he cut his engine, raised his flaps and stood on the brakes.

  He was taxiing sedately as the trucks screeched to a halt. Two men hopped out of the cab of each truck. They were young and intense, dressed in baggy cotton clothes, sandals and wide-brimmed hats. They wore long sideburn locks as a sign of their orthodoxy and toted Sten guns.

  Danny stepped out of his airplane and went to greet them, the old Webley revolver in its busted-up flap holster bouncing on his hip.

  “Shalom,” one of the settlers grinned.

  Danny unzipped his leather jacket and pulled his goggles down so that they dangled from his neck. “How you doing?”

  The settler smiled. “We’ll do better now that you’ve come. That was a nice landing.”

  “Nice!” Danny exclaimed. “From touchdown to full stop less than two hundred feet. You won’t ever see better.”

  “I’m sorry you could not use the strip we built.”

  “Yeah, well, maybe next time. It’s a little unfriendly over there right now. Not even the Arabs could miss a Piper with massed machine guns and heavy-shot antiaircraft fire.”

  He helped the settlers load their trucks. When it was done he asked, “You guys will be okay getting back?”

  The one who spoke English shrugged. “We got out okay. Go. We will stay to cover you until you are airborne. Shalom, comrade. God be with you.”

  “You too, pal.” Danny climbed back into the Piper and took off. He waggled his wings in a good-bye salute and headed back to Lod, about fifty miles away. As he flew he found himself wondering how those settlers were going to make out. Since his arrival in Palestine he’d flown dozens of these pipsqueak airlifts to rural settlements. To him it was like the cavalry surrounded by Apaches in the old West. The problem was, this time it was the Indians who had the modern weapons and the good guys who were stuck with bows and arrows.

  There was no way to supply all the settlements. There were only a handful of Pipers in the country to carry the precious supplies that could be spared from the cities. A lot of those settlements were stuck for water as well as food and weapons. Four hundred pounds of water was a spit in the bucket out in the desert, but carrying even that much meant Danny couldn’t bring anything else.

  He fingered the bullet hole in the windscreen. It had happened a few weeks ago, shocking the hell out of him, though he wasn’t touched. It gave him pause. That was just one bullet. What must dog-fighting be like with an opponent’s machine guns ripping after you? He knew the British were supplying the Arabs with the most modern of weapons but had taken solace in the notion that the enemy was untrained in their use.

  Now he fingered the bullet hole, thinking that at least one guy down there had been practicing his target shooting.

  Back at Lod he set down close to the Palestine Flying Club’s hangar. The airport was still under British control, but the authorities either believed or were willing to pretend that the club’s reason for existing was purely recreational.

  The British Danny had met were a strange group. One thing about them was that you couldn’t generalize. After listening to Herschel for so long, Danny arrived expecting to find a bunch of Nazis, and while it was true that some of the British had nothing to learn from Hitler, there were others who seemed deeply embarrassed about England’s treatment of the Jews.

  As Danny cut the engine he glimpsed Dov Gretz, the club’s operations officer, waving at him fr
om the office. He was chatting with a young man.

  “What’s up?” Danny asked, taking off his jacket and lighting a cigarette. “Everything went fine, if that’s what you’re—”

  “You still want to fly a fighter?” Gretz asked.

  “Yeah, sure.”

  “All right. I’m taking you off supply runs. Roy here will take your Cub. You two should get along. He also has no Hebrew.”

  “What happens to me?” Danny asked.

  “You go for training—”

  “Hey, I’ve had training.”

  “Not in these you haven’t.”

  “What are they, Spitfires?”

  “Nope. Messerschmitts.”

  Danny froze. “You’re shitting me. Messerschmitts?”

  “ME-109’s.”

  “Kraut planes! All the fighters you guys coulda come up with—Spitfires, Mustangs—what was the matter, you couldn’t find any Jap Zeros?”

  “That’s what we’re getting,” Gretz said. “You want in or not?”

  “Sure, sure. Where am I taking training, the Black Forest?”

  “Czechoslovakia. Pack your bag and you’re out of here.”

  “You’re not kidding, are you? I can’t wait. Come on, Roy, I’ll take you up. The Piper’s a beauty, but there’s a few things about her you oughta know.”

  They walked to the hangar where the Piper was parked. Roy stared at the cowling. “What is that painted on it,” he asked, “an apple?”

  “Nah, that’s a cherry,” Danny said proudly. “I did it myself.” He smacked the black lettering beneath it.

  CHERRY STREET MARKET

  We deliver

  “That’s coming off,” Roy warned.

  “Suit yourself, pal,” Danny said coolly. “I’m gonna paint it on my—Messerschmitt.” He shuddered and made a face.

  Chapter 65

  It was May fourteenth, a Friday, and hot as hell in Tel Aviv. Benny Talkin had suffered through some pretty awful New York City summers, but this was hot. He felt he was suffocating, and moreover, being jammed into this stuffy meeting hall, busting his ass on a slat-backed folding chair, made it a lot worse.

  The hall was part of Tel Aviv Museum. Hersch said that it was once the home of a guy named Meir Dizengoff, a big man in this burg. Evidently Hersch’s old man and this Meir guy, once the mayor of Tel Aviv, had done a real estate deal here years ago. Anyway, that was the best Benny could figure it because Herschel had been too frazzled getting ready for this inaugural ceremony to explain more.

  Benny had the sense to know that this was strictly a VIP affair. There were lots of Haganah cops out front checking everybody’s credentials. It was a measure of Herschel’s pull that he’d been able to get Benny in. Benny argued that as an American he was going to feel unwelcome, but Herschel insisted that Benny had done as much as anyone here and ought to share the moment of glory.

  Since their arrival a couple of months ago they’d been touring munitions factories. Sadly, Herschel’s own gun project was on the shelf for the time being. The leadership considered that this was not the time to divert precious manpower to developing a new, untried design.

  Benny had taken a look at the prototypes, and while he was no arms expert, he could tell it was a light automatic weapon, far less cumbersome than the Tommy gun and far more reliable than the Sten. Benny’s entrepreneurial instincts told him Herschel’s little submachine gun would someday be a winner.

  Hersch was a winner too, in Benny’s opinion. Since they got here he’d played big brother, warming as he never had in New York. Benny figured he’d have gone crazy by now if it hadn’t been for Hersch. Everyone else here had made a commitment to this new land, but Benny figured he’d be going home eventually. Until then it was tough trying to make out without speaking Hebrew. Benny had a little Yiddish, but nobody here liked Yiddish at all. People would speak English to him if they had to get some information across, but when it came to pleasant conversation, they chose to leave him out rather than switch off from their damned Hebrew.

  But Herschel had been just grand to him. Right now he was off speaking to some guy with an eye patch named Dayan, so Benny was sitting by himself twiddling his thumbs, but usually Hersch kept him company.

  Benny glanced around the room. He recognized Golda Meir from newspaper photos. Up on the dais were Ben-Gurion and the other big shots of the provisional government. Behind them on the wall was a huge and brooding portrait of a bearded Theodor Herzl flanked by a brace of Mogen Davids. A lot of men up there did not look all that happy, and Benny, even if he was an out-of-towner, understood why. They had tried to postpone their country’s independence.

  Back in December of ’47 the representatives from the seven Arab states issued a joint statement that they would support the Arabs of Palestine with arms and money and that their own armies would attack the Jews upon the British evacuation. In March, just a few days after he and Herschel arrived, the Arabs made good on their threat. Syrian regulars crossed the border, moving against the Jewish village of Magdiel in Galilee. The battle lasted ten days and ended in stalemate. Haganah then staged a series of retaliatory attacks against Arab villages in the Jordan valley, dynamiting the homes of suspected ringleaders. To Benny the policy of demolition seemed needlessly cruel; Herschel said it was a trick taught to the Jews by the British, who used dynamite to tame rioters during the thirties.

  In April, while he and Hersch were smoothing out the glitches in the assembly lines of the underground munitions operations, the Haganah attacked the village of Castel, just west of Jerusalem. That same month combined lrgun and Stem group forces attacked the village of Deir Yassin, also near Jerusalem. Hundreds of Arabs, men, women and children were massacred. The provisional government was so shocked that it actually sent a cabled apology to Transjordan even as Palestine’s Arabs began to flee in panic from the Haganah units advancing throughout Galilee. Haganah also turned its attention to punishing the rebellious lrgun. Grenades were tossed into the midst of lrgun rallies. In an attempt to halt what Benny viewed a gang war, the two rivals, Begin and Ben-Gurion, drafted a series of truces, none of which lasted long. It was a bad situation, Benny thought, and typically Jewish.

  The British went beyond freezing Jewish assets in their attempt to stack the deck in favor of the Arabs. Benny had seen them act like spoiled children, causing as much chaos as they could during their departure. All equipment and property that could not be handed over to the Arabs was destroyed. A nasty unofficially sanctioned paramilitary group, the British League, had sprung up to terrorize Jewish civilians with grenade attacks and kidnappings, after which the victims were turned over to Arab mobs.

  The British did their best to salt the earth as they left, but they did at last leave. The Jewish forces rushed to fill the vacuum. On the British withdrawal from Jaffa the lrgun, which had been massing just outside Tel Aviv, invaded the ancient Arab port city and drove out some ninety thousand Arabs. In Haifa days of street fighting culminated in a Haganah attack in the wake of the British departure. Seventy thousand Arabs were exiled, mostly to Lebanon. In the same manner Jewish forces grabbed all the rest of the territory granted to them by the UN. Of all the Jewish holdings, only the Ezyon Block—on Arab land according to the UN plan—had been lost. Jewish reinforcements had not been able to break through the Arab lines, while the airlifts had not been enough to keep the besieged settlements going.

  As of today virtually all the territory granted under the partition plan, including Jerusalem with the exception of the Old City, was under Jewish control. It was Independence Eve, the British were gone and only a few thousand Arabs remained in Jewish territory.

  And yet Benny could sympathize with those somber men on the dais who had begged Ben-Gurion to postpone independence and to accept Secretary of State George Marshall’s recent offer to negotiate a truce with the Arabs. Their plan was to stall until the massive supplies of arms that had been purchased in Europe could be transported here, giving the new regular army a better chance
when the Arab attacks did finally come. Marshall pointed out that President Truman was considering sending U.S. troops as a peacekeeping force but would do so only if the independence proclamation was delayed. If his offer was refused, Marshall warned, they would have themselves to blame for bringing upon the Jewish people a second holocaust.

  All this last minute diplomatic maneuvering threw the provisional government into turmoil. Herschel had been busy the last few days using what limited influence he had to lobby for a forthright declaration of independence. Benny figured Ben-Gurion thought the same way, for that point of view had prevailed.

  Now the seven Arab states would definitely attack, and despite the best efforts of men like Herschel, there were still only enough weapons in the country to arm one in three would-be soldiers. The Jews had so far done well in separate skirmishes, but could they manage against sustained attacks from all sides? Just as important, would the two feuding factions resist turning their guns on each other?

  Benny watched as Herschel made his way down the aisle to take his seat beside him. He looked happy about something.

  “It’s arranged,” Herschel whispered. “We’re going with Moshe Dayan. It’s not yet official, but he’s been placed in command of the Jordan valley. The Syrians will invade there, and Dayan fought them during the Second World War.”

  “Good for him,” Benny said. “Where are we going?”

  “Remember I told you about Degania?”

  “Sure, that’s your home town.”

  “Something like that,” Herschel chuckled. “Anyway, Degania is in the Jordan valley. My mother is there. It’s where I wish to make my stand in the battle to come.” He paused, his expression growing serious. “There’s another reason, Benny, one nobody knows. I have a score to settle with someone. He will be fighting with the Syrians, and he will also come to Degania, looking for me the way I am looking for him.”