by Adam LeBor
As Yoram sprinted ahead he felt a hammer blow to his back. One of his comrades had shot him accidentally in the shoulder. He wobbled, righted himself and tried to ignore the pain. ‘We got the first package of money to our vehicle. As we went to grab the second one, a British armoured vehicle drove into the street, and opened fire on us. There was shooting everywhere. Our driver drove off with the first package. We threw the second one into a nearby garden, and ran off.’ Once out of the square, he stopped running, and strolled down into nearby Shenkin Street, past the rows of pavement cafés. 1940s fashion helped save Yoram as he fled the half-bungled robbery. His suit had thick padded shoulders, which absorbed the blood seeping from his shoulder wound.
A few blocks down he got into a waiting taxi. The fleet owner was a Lehi sympathiser, and he took Yoram back to the Lehi safe house where his wound was treated. The package of notes that had been thrown away, Yoram found out later, contained £105,000. The one that the Lehi men had escaped with contained £45,000, all in ten-shilling notes. Two days later Yoram married Rina Bloomshtein, and his family came to the wedding. Yoram’s father Shabat, his mother Leah, and his brothers had arrived in 1946. Unlike most eastern European Jews, they were at least alive – and able to celebrate Yoram’s marriage. ‘There were fifteen people at the wedding but I didn’t tell my father that I had been shot. I said I had hurt my shoulder. Only my brother knew that I was in Lehi. These kind of actions against the British were not new to me. This was a war, and we were fighting for a Jewish state.’ Soon Lehi would no longer exist, and Yoram would fight in the first Hebrew army for almost two millennia.
9
Al Nakba – The Catastrophe
April–May 1948
The conquest of Jaffa, however, stands out as an event of first-rate importance in the struggle for Hebrew independence.
Menachem Begin, The Revolt1
Jaffa’s Arab sentries were suspicious of the truck loaded with oranges coming from Tel Aviv. The driver was dressed in Arab clothes, but something felt wrong. As the vehicle approached their checkpoint, they opened fire and the truck turned back. But the driver and his companion returned on 4 January 1948, and this time they had better luck. The driver parked his truck, again piled high with oranges, in an alley off Clock Tower Square, alongside the New Seray, Sultan Abdul Hamid’s imposing government building. It housed Jaffa’s municipal offices, welfare workers, and a kitchen for needy children. The two men walked to a nearby café for coffee. They departed soon after, and left the vehicle behind.
By now Britain wanted to leave Palestine, and London had handed over the Mandate to the United Nations in February 1947. British public opinion, the press, Parliament, all were clamouring for their soldiers to come home. It was increasingly clear that the days of empire were over. Even India had become independent in August 1947, and compared to the Indian elephant, Palestine was little more than an annoying mouse. In addition, the deaths of British soldiers at the hands of the Zionists were fomenting wide-spread anti-Semitism and threatening social unrest. The United Nations set up a special committee for Palestine. UNSCOP, like the Peel and Woodhead Commissions before it, concluded that Palestine should be partitioned. In November 1947 the United Nations General Assembly voted to divide Palestine into two states, one Arab and one Jewish, with Jerusalem remaining under international control. The Arab state would have 42 per cent of Palestine, and the Jewish state 56 per cent (much of its allocated territory was in the Negev desert), while an international zone would be created around Jerusalem. Jaffa would be a tiny Arab island, surrounded by Jewish territory.
The Jewish Agency, the government of the state-in-waiting, accepted the plan and celebrated. The ‘yes’ vote in favour of UN Resolution 181 was a defining moment in the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Ben-Gurion himself said it was the greatest moment in Jewish history. Thirty-three states voted yes, thirteen no, and ten abstained. Both the United States and the Soviet Union, who had already expressed their support for partition, voted yes, together with western Europe, the Soviet bloc, the British Commonwealth and Latin America. The Muslim and Arab states voted no. The agreement between Washington, DC and Moscow was a rare instance of superpower co-operation across the divisions of the Cold War, which the Zionists deftly exploited over the next few crucial months. The principle of Jewish statehood was now established – only the borders remained to be defined.
Western guilt over the failure to prevent or halt the Holocaust was an important factor, but the Palestinians were furious that they had to pay the price for the Nazi genocide, in which they had taken no part. The Palestinian leadership unequivocally rejected the plan and called a three-day general strike. Fighting erupted within a few hours of the vote. Jewish and Arab snipers traded shots across Jaffa’s border areas, shooting into homes, cafés, and onto the streets. On 8 December 1947, after several days of skirmishes between Arab fighters and the Haganah, hundreds of Arab fighters attacked the Tel Aviv quarter of Hatikvah in a major frontal assault. The attack was repulsed, with sixty Arabs and two Jews killed.2 The Arab exodus from Jaffa began. Much of the middle class and the a’yan, who could have provided leadership in the testing days ahead, relocated to relatives or to their summer homes in Cairo and Beirut, believing they would return once the situation calmed down. Flight, like panic, is infectious. When Jaffa’s artisans and workers saw that their bosses were leaving, they too began to desert their homes. The Haganah’s intelligence service reported that inhabitants of Manshiyyeh and Abou Kabir, to the south, were moving out of the city, pushing handcarts full of their possessions. Many of the middle-class employers also closed their shops and businesses, leaving Arab males jobless. Most Jewish businessmen had already sacked their Arab workers. Unemployment, poverty and food shortages all fuelled the rising tension.
Palestine burned throughout the winter of 1947–48. It was a brutal conflict, with neither side observing the rules of war. The Irgun set off bombs in the Arab quarters of Haifa, Jaffa and Jerusalem. On 30 December an Irgun squad threw bombs at a bus stop near the Haifa oil refinery. Six people were killed and dozens more wounded. Arab workers immediately attacked their Jewish colleagues with chisels, hammers and stones. Thirty-nine were killed and fifty wounded. A week later, a Haganah unit blew up the Semiramis Hotel in Jerusalem, believing it to be a command post for Arab irregulars, killing twenty-six people. Arab gunmen ambushed Jewish vehicle convoys, especially in isolated areas or en route to Jerusalem, killing everyone they could before melting away back to their villages. Seeing the terror wrought by the Irgun attacks, the Mufti of Jerusalem’s forces began bombing the cities. His chief bomb-maker, Fawzi al-Kutub, had trained on an SS course in Nazi Germany.3 On 22 February 1948, aided by deserters from the British army, al-Kutub set off three truck bombs in Jewish Jerusalem, killing fifty-eight. In response Irgun and Lehi fighters shot dead sixteen British soldiers and policemen. It was less a war than anarchy. In Tel Aviv and Jaffa at least, some groups on both sides were still talking. Jewish and Arab orange-grove owners had signed a non-aggression pact: the plantations around the city at least would not be targeted, so the crop could be safely gathered and exported.
But Jaffa’s heart received no such quarter. Soon after the truck driver and his companion left that morning in January 1948, a thunderous explosion shook the city. Broken glass and shattered masonry blew out across Clock Tower Square. The New Seray’s centre and side walls collapsed in a pile of rubble and twisted beams. Only the neo-classical façade survived. Windows shattered for yards around, and a thick choking cloud of dust billowed out. After a moment of silence, the screams and moans began. Twenty-six were killed, and hundreds injured. Most were civilians, including many children who had been eating at the charity kitchen. The bomb missed its target completely as the Arab Higher Committee, which was organising Jaffa’s resistance, had moved from the New Seray to Ajami.
Ismail Abou-Shehade was working in a nearby garage when he heard the explosion. He sprinted to the square and helped
dig out the casualties from beneath the rubble. Ismail was twenty-four years old. He had once hoped to study Islamic law at the prestigious Al-Azhar University in Cairo, to become a qadi, an Islamic judge. The family home was filled with shelves of books on Islamic law. The Second World War rendered that dream impossible, so he went instead to technical school. Ismail still lives in Jaffa. He is an articulate man, who speaks a vivid, poetic Arabic. But his voice chokes as he recalls the darkest months of his life. ‘They claimed that the Seray was a centre for terrorists, but it was nothing but an orphanage. Lots of children were killed. I personally was one of those who helped get the dead bodies out from under the wreckage. When the journalists came to ask me what I saw, I told them everything.’
The bomb was terrorism in its classic form: it terrorised Jaffa and destroyed Arab morale and leadership. Municipal services all but collapsed. The exodus of Jaffa’s middle class further accelerated, angry accusations of abandoning Jaffa following in their wake. ‘Whoever could leave [Jaffa], has left, there is fear everywhere, and there is no safety,’ an Arab informant told Elias Sasson, head of the Jewish Agency’s Arab Affairs department, in January 1948.4 Those who stayed prepared for the worst: in Jebaliyyeh, Hasan Hammami and his friends were training in first aid.
Unlike the previous conflicts of 1929 and 1936, this was war, the start of the struggle for command of territory and the future frontiers of a Jewish or Arab state once Palestine was partitioned. The intricate borders drawn up by UN bureaucrats were one thing, but the ‘facts on the ground’, the control of land, quite another. Militarily and politically, the Zionists were far more prepared than the Arabs. Jewish fighters outnumbered the Arab militias. They had been trained by the British, and many had military experience fighting the Nazis. The Jews were better armed, disciplined, highly motivated, and fighting for a country that was all but ready to be born. The Haganah had about 35,000 members, including more than 3,000 troops in its elite strike force, the Palmach; the Irgun about 3,000, and Lehi several hundred. The Haganah boasted a general staff with a coordinated command structure, and a highly efficient intelligence service, largely dependent on Arab informers. The split between the Haganah’s policy of restraint, and the Irgun and Lehi’s use of pre-emptive strikes was over. Attack was now the best form of defence. Auschwitz had been liberated just three years before; Jews would never again follow orders to walk to their deaths.
Jaffa was the centre of the Palestinian Najjada (auxiliary corps), with 2,000–3,000 members, some of whom had also fought in the British army, but they lacked arms and proper leadership. Several thousand troops of the Arab Liberation Army crossed the border into Palestine, but most were poorly trained and badly armed. There was no effective national command structure, and many Arab villages formed their own militias, a rather grandiose term for a group of local men with rifles and no military training. Some villages even allied themselves with the Jews, adding to the complicated feuds that bedevilled Arab society. Bands of paramilitaries and irregulars roamed the countryside, answering to no one but themselves. The lack of clear-sighted Arab leadership and the low calibre of many Arab fighters would prove to be among the Zionists’ best assets. The Arab irregulars robbed and intimidated their own people, behaving like conquerors, noted Nimr al-Khatib, a member of the Arab National Committee. ‘They confiscated their weapons and sold them, imposed fines and stole, and confiscated cars and sold them… the inhabitants were more afraid of their defenders/saviours than of the Jews, their enemies.’5 Jaffa’s disparate defence guards were not even properly fed. The Irgun’s intelligence service recorded a conversation between a militia commander and an Arab political leader in Jaffa. The fighters in Manshiyyeh and Jebaliyyeh were complaining that they did not have enough to eat. The commander reported that they were fed pitta bread, cheese, oranges and olives. The political leader said they should be given meat when possible. There was no meat, the militia commander replied.6
Even as the Palestinians began to flee, rival Arab leaders continued their feuding and vendettas. Blinded by his hatred of the Jews, Hajj Amin al-Husseini, the Mufti of Jerusalem, now exiled in Cairo, led his people to disaster. The Palestinians rejected one partition plan after another, and demanded independence. But they made little, if any, serious preparation for statehood. There was no Palestinian equivalent of the Jewish Agency or the Haganah. There was no strategic plan for capturing and holding Palestine, or even a united military leadership. In Damascus the Arab League intrigued against the Palestinians’ Arab Higher Committee, and vice versa. The Palestinian leadership was still divided by the feud between the Mufti of Jerusalem and Ragheb al-Nashashibi, the city’s mayor. The former was a Nazi enthusiast, and the latter was on the Zionists’ payroll.
Jaffa was left leaderless. ‘Even before the battle,’ writes Benny Morris, ‘Jaffa, far more than the other Arab cities in Palestine, was characterised by disunity of command.’ There were seven distinct and overlapping power centres in the city, including autonomous militia commanders, the Najjada, the municipality itself and the representative of the Mufti.7 The irregulars, many of whom were not from Jaffa, refused to follow orders from the national leadership. Jaffa’s mayor Yousef Heikal understood the city could never withstand a full-blown assault. He favoured a truce or agreement with the Haganah, but was opposed by the commander of Jaffa’s paramilitaries, who was not from Jaffa. In addition the Mufti’s men were provoking the Haganah in and around Jaffa, and sabotaging, probably intentionally, Heikal’s attempts to reach some kind of agreement with the Haganah.
‘There was a belief that the Jews were generally cowards. Thus the people of Jaffa, as well as the members of the National Committee, believed that if they made ready a bit, and the British did not interfere on the side of the Jews, they would emerge victorious,’ wrote the Palestinian political scientist Ibrahim Abu-Lughod, who left Jaffa in May 1948. ‘They believed this, despite the fact that the National Committee had not succeeded in mobilising people or in finding a substantial number who were willing to engage in military action, and despite the fact that the results of the first encounters between the Arabs and the Jews had not been promising.’8 Rather, notes Abu-Lughod, ‘The “military confrontation” pitted a largely disarmed, pitifully led, and tightly controlled Palestinian community against a much enlarged, modern, tightly organised, brilliantly led, and internationally anchored and connected Palestinian Jewish community that was determined to fulfil its goal of establishing a Jewish state.’9
As winter turned to spring in 1948, darkness descended. There was a growing sense of anarchy. Ahmad Hammami joined Jebaliyyeh’s defence guard. ‘Every day there was a funeral near us, because our house was by the cemetery,’ says Fadwa. ‘We heard the bombing and the shootings. Of course we were frightened. It started on a lower level, and there was no television then, to tell you everything that is happening. Then it got worse. They started to tell us that there was no school that day, because there had been fighting the night before, and the Jews were coming to attack Jaffa.’ Manshiyyeh was Jaffa’s northern front line, Jebaliyyeh its southern. Hasan Hammami’s premonitions about Bat Yam, to the south, came true. ‘Every night they shot from Bat Yam to Jaffa, and the Arabs shot back.’
Ahmad was often out all night at the security post. A few neighbouring families packed up and left, but Ahmad and Nafise were determined to stay, says Fadwa. ‘My parents started to prepare the house for war. They put sandbags against the wall, outside and inside. Of course they were nervous, but I was sure that they did not want to leave. They laid down enough stocks to last for a year. All the food that we normally ate, but in massive quantities. Olives, olive oil, goat’s cheese salted in water, dry goods like wheat and rice, butter, honey, and my mother made jams and marmalade.’
Jaffa’s long porous border with Tel Aviv made it difficult to defend, and easy to infiltrate. Arab men met in cafés at certain times of the day to hear the daily news broadcasts. The Irgun knew this, drove into the city, and rolled barrels filled with ex
plosives into the coffee houses.10 In response, Arab snipers shot into Tel Aviv, killing civilians. Still Ahmad Hammami would not leave. ‘He said that this is our country and we will die here,’ says Fadwa. ‘He had many Jewish friends, and they told him that he should take his family and go. They told him that there were going to be “vicious days”. They knew he had children, girls, and the Arabs are always afraid for their women.’
Then came news of Deir Yassin.
Deir Yassin, a small Arab village not far from Jerusalem, was captured by a joint force of Irgun and Lehi troops, supported by the Haganah, on 9 April 1948. A bloodbath ensued. Whole families, including women and children, were shot as they came out of their homes, others were killed and their houses demolished on top of them. At least one hundred, and possibly more than two hundred and fifty people were killed. The survivors were rounded up, their money and jewellery stolen, and loaded onto trucks to be driven around Jewish West Jerusalem in a macabre ‘victory parade’, where they were abused, cursed and spat at. The Jewish Agency and the Haganah condemned the killings. The Arab response was quick. On 13 April, fighters attacked a convoy of ten vehicles carrying unarmed medical staff, and two Irgun fighters wounded at Deir Yassin, to the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. The convoy was captured after a six-hour battle, while the British looked on. Seventy Jews were killed in the fighting, and the buses were drenched in petrol and set on fire. Deir Yassin was a little over an hour’s drive from Jaffa, and the news of the massacre there spread quickly across Palestine. The Arab media’s repeated claims that the Zionists had raped women would have a crucial effect in the coming days. ‘Everybody was panicking,’ says Fadwa. ‘My mother and father started telling the stories that they had heard, that people were massacred. They were especially afraid for their girls, because some of the women had been raped.’