O Jerusalem!

by Larry Collins

  "Breakfast is ready!" she announces in the legendary voice that has cowed many a journalist.

  Before each of us are laid a coffee bowl and a plate of freshly baked cakes that perfume the entire room. There is no sign of any servants or assistants in the apartment: on Shabbat, the mamma of Israel is the sole mistress of her private domain. She is so excited to revisit the past with her old friend Avriel that she forgets to stub out her old cigarette before lighting a new one. We soon find ourselves taking notes through a haze of smoke.

  Golda has read Is Paris Burning? in Hebrew and greets us with a compliment that goes straight to our hearts. "That's how history must be told," she declares outright. Such an introduction will help us get long interviews out of her busy schedule. Like Ben-Gurion, Golda Meir has never gone into such detail with anyone on these matters; she relives for us her adventures in the fall of 1947 and the spring of 1948. These same adventures had incited Ben-Gurion to proclaim, "The day when the story of Israel will be told, it will be said that it was thanks to a woman that it was born ... "

  As the tobacco haze invades every inch of the tiny kitchen, we grill Golda with questions relating to her historic November 1947 trip to the United States to collect funds to buy the arms so vital for the future survival of Israel. As we absorb liters of coffee, we struggle to keep up with all the mesmerizing details that Golda brings forth about her travels from one end of America to the other. Larry and I had managed to find a copy of a speech that she had given to a gathering of American Jews who seemed to her, at first sight, indifferent to the survival of the Jews of Jerusalem. Larry doesn't hesitate to read to a beaming Golda these precious lines, which we would later include in our book. One day I dare ask her if she was ever discouraged during this exhausting trip.

  "Yes, once," she answers. "In Florida, in Palm Beach. As I watched all these elegant ladies in front of the stage, decked out in their fur coats and their finest jewelry, with a glistening moon lighting up the night sky through the bay windows of the dining room, I couldn't help but think of all those young Hagannah soldiers, trembling in the cold darkness of the Judean hills. I was overtaken with emotion. I told myself that these people didn't want to hear about war and death in Palestine. I was wrong. Before the evening was over, all these elegant guests, overwhelmed by what I had told them, pledged over one and a half million dollars: enough money to buy a new coat for every soldier in the Hagannah."

  The film adaptation of O Jerusalem! captures several of the significant episodes we tell in our book thanks to those long interviews in the kitchen of the First Lady of Israel. One of them concerns the final meeting she had with the last British High Commissioner to Palestine, Sir Alan Cunningham, on the morning of May 14, 1948, moments before his departure and the end to Great Britain's thirty-year rule over Palestine. Theirs had never been an easy relationship, yet, as they bid farewell in the garden of Cunningham's residence, the British general allowed himself to transgress protocol and offer some personal advice to his tenacious guest. "I seem to recall that you have a daughter in a kibbutz in the Negev," he told her before adding, "There is going to be a war and those colonies have no hope to survive. The Egyptians will crush them, regardless of their courage. Wouldn't it be wise that you call your daughter back to you?"

  Even though she was touched by this advice, Golda had just smiled before answering. "Thank you, Sir Alan, but every boy and girl in all the colonies also have mothers. If every mother recalled her child, who will be left to stop the Egyptians?"

  * * *

  We soon became regular guests in the picturesque kitchen of Israel's prime minister. She took an obvious pleasure in satisfying our endless curiosity. Director Elie Chouraqui brings to the screen one of the most poignant chapters of our book when, dressed up as an Arab woman, Golda goes to Amman to plead desperately for peace with King Abdullah of Transjordan. "The road to Amman was packed with armored convoys slowly winding their way to the River Jordan under the cover of darkness," she recalled for us. "Before leaving on this last minute gamble, I had told Ben-Gurion that I would even go to hell if I felt I could save the life of a single one of our young Jewish soldiers. The King received me in the large, circular green reception room of his palace. He seemed tired and nervous."

  The story of this meeting between the messenger from Jerusalem and the Arab monarch was to become one of the major revelations of our book. For more than two hours, Golda frantically tries to convince Abdullah not to go to war against the young Jewish state that is about to be born. She insists that the Jewish people are his only true friends in the region. Golda remembered every word of the King's reply. "I know this," the King answered. "I have no illusions: I believe with all my heart that Divine Providence has brought you back here, restoring you, a Semite people who were exiled in Europe, and have shared in its progress, to the Semitic East which needs your knowledge and initiative. But the conditions today are different. The massacre at Deir Yassin has ignited the hearts of the Arab people. I am no longer alone. Today, I am but one in a coalition of five nations."

  The movie captures Golda's utter despair upon hearing these words. She remembered the response she gave to the only Arab leader who could still prevent a conflict: "Majesty," she said, "the Jewish people have been patient for two thousand years. Their hour of statehood is now at hand. If we cannot come to some sort of compromise, then I fear that war is indeed unavoidable."

  Upon hearing these words, the King, with a saddened look on his face, had nodded. "Our destiny is now in the hands of Allah."

  They had shaken hands. Golda recalled clearly the last image she had kept of the Arab monarch. It was, she confided to us, that of "a small man, dressed in a long white robe, sadly waving me farewell from the top of his palace steps."

  Neither David Ben-Gurion nor Golda Meir had ever allowed anyone to dig so deeply into their personal memories. The two architects of Israel's birth had never allowed anyone to dissect their thoughts in such a way; they had never described in such detail the day-by-day, hour-by-hour struggle as the young Jewish state's fate hung in the balance, hinging on the last-minute arrival of a few hundred rifles hidden under a shipload of onions or the discovery of a small, winding footpath through the rocky hills of Judea that would save Jerusalem's starving defenders from the grips of the surrounding Arab fighters.

  These two political giants were just the first in an army of people we interviewed. By the end of our research, we had met more than a thousand Jews, Arabs, Britons, Americans, and French. We had searched for interviews not only in Israel and in all the Arab States, but throughout the world.

  One day, in order to re-create precisely the details of the Arab invasion of Israel on May 15, 1948, I find myself in Baghdad to interview the commander of the Arab coalition forces, an Iraqi general by the name of Ismail Safwat Pasha. In order to get to his home, I have to cross the notorious square where, barely a week earlier, three Israeli spies were publicly hung. The sun is so strong that I reach into my pocket and pull out a cloth hat. As I do, my wife's face freezes in a grimace of pure horror: My hat proudly boasts in bright letters the words "Shalom Israel." I had forgotten that I had bought it in a kibbutz in Galilee.

  This meeting with the Iraqi general permitted us to describe more precisely the electric atmosphere that reigned amongst the various leaders of the Arab coalition that had vowed to destroy the state of Israel. Eli Chouraqui's film re-creates one famous scene from our book, the tumultuous meeting in Damascus when Palestinian leader Abel Kader el-Husseini comes to beg the chiefs of the Arab states to give him more weapons with which to throw the Jews back into the sea.

  O Jerusalem! would become the first major book that attempted to portray the viewpoints of all parties involved, whether they be Jews, Arabs, British, or Americans. We were able to hunt down el-Husseini's widow, Wahija, in a Cairo suburb. She had been her husband's most fervent supporter. She showed us the closets, laundry baskets, and other secret compartments that her husband had used as caches to hide
his precious stock of rifles, handguns, detonators, and explosives in preparation for the war in Palestine. She told us how, as she had bid him farewell on the last morning, she had placed in his hand a miniature copy of the Koran. She had asked him to keep it in his breast pocket, above his heart, as "a protective talisman" to keep him safe. She took us to the balcony where, with their four children clinging to her side, she had seen him leave for the last time. As she had watched him walk away, Wahija had hope that the gray suit he was wearing-a suit they had bought together in Cairo during more peaceful times-might be a harbinger of yet more peaceful days to come. He had waved back and, with one final smile, had clambered into the car that would drive him to Jerusalem.

  Wahija allowed us to read the last letter she had received a few days later from her husband, written just after el-Husseini and his men had captured the strategic village of Kastel, which controlled the road to Jerusalem. "My beloved Wahija, we have just written a big and glorious page of history," he wrote. "What we have accomplished took a day and night of painful sacrifices ... The enemy is determined but, Inch Allah, victory will be ours!"

  A few weeks after our meeting with el-Husseini's widow, we were able to find in a kibbutz in Galilee Uzi Narciss, the Jewish officer who had in April 1948 identified the bullet-riddled body of the Palestinian leader in the smoldering ruins of the Arab village of Kastel that the Hagannah had just retaken. There was a miniature Koran in the breast pocket of his shirt.

  True to our book, Elie Chouraqui faithfully re-creates onscreen the ferocious battle in which the soldiers of the Hagannah and el-Husseini's partisans tear each other apart for the control of Kastel. We managed to reconstruct this crucial battle with the help of several of the participants from both sides, including teacher Baghet Abou Garbieh, who was with el-Husseini when he died; and Uzi Narciss, mentioned above.

  One day we knocked at the door of the huge monastery at Latrun. It was in the peaceful vineyards of this holy establishment that the battle between the soldiers of the Hagannah and the Bedouins of the Arab Legion had taken place. A monk waved us inside. With twenty of his brothers, Father Marcel Destailleur had lived for thirty years in this monastery that overlooked a crossroad on the only road to Jerusalem. King Abdullah had deemed the place to be of such vital strategic importance that he sent his famous Arab Legion to occupy it as soon as the state of Israel was proclaimed. In an emotional scene of the film, monks in their brown robes and Arab legionnaires in their kaffiyehs meet in the chapel. Father Marcel had kept his diary from those terrible days in May 1948 when Arabs and Jews confronted each other in the vineyards and wheat fields of this biblical valley of Ayalon, where Joshua had once bade the sun stand still. This diary, combined with the eyewitness accounts of the monks, allowed us to describe in great detail the battle in which the Jewish immigrants-freshly arrived on the ship Kalanit with few weapons and almost no military training-threw themselves at the seasoned Arab Legion's entrenched positions in a desperate bid to open the road to Jerusalem.

  Little did the Jewish and Arab fighters know that their terrible hand-to-hand fighting was taking place directly above an underground maze filled with an unusual treasure. The monks took us through these tunnels that, back in the spring of 1948, contained enough alcohol to reconcile even the fiercest warriors in a collective drunken stupor. The hidden wine cellars of the Latrun Monastery were home to 78,000 liters of Pommard and chablis; 26,000 liters of cognac; and 12,000 liters of vermouth, curaçao, and crème de menthe. But what our investigation led us to discover was that at the peak of the battle the Jewish soldiers owed their success less to their courage than to the sudden arrival of a most unusual ally: a swarm of bees, infuriated by the smell of gunpowder, descended on the helpless Arab legionnaires and forced them to abandon their dominating position above the monastery.

  I could have been a taxi driver in Jerusalem because by the end of our research, I knew every alleyway, every building, every piece of wall in the city. Larry and I searched these ancient stones relentlessly for the motives that had made so many men, from different origins and creeds, give up their lives for the conquest of Jerusalem's ancient walls. Over and over again, we were struck by the passion and the emotion that infused every syllable uttered by the various actors we interviewed as they recounted the roles they had played in the struggle for the Holy city.

  Fawzi el-Koutoub had been a young Arab in Jerusalem in 1948. Twenty years later, when we found him in a suburb of Damascus, his eyes lit up with a diabolical fervor when we pronounced the Holy City's name. He had always had but one obsession, to kill as many Jews as possible. At the age of fifteen, el-Koutoub had already declared war on the Jews by throwing homemade grenades made from old Turkish shells into the buses of the Number 2 line in Jerusalem. An ancestor of today's suicide bombers, his favorite targets had been synagogues, crowded marketplaces, bus stops. The movie re-creates his final attack on the Hurva, the ancient synagogue where the last Jewish survivors of the Old City had come to seek refuge.

  There had been dozens of el-Koutoubs in Jerusalem in 1948. Twenty years later, we sought them out in a meticulous search that would lead us to the farthest corners of the Arab world. Sometimes we were able to convince some of these men to return to the sites of their attacks. On a few occasions, we were even able to bring the Jewish and Arab protagonists face-to-face. These extraordinary meetings occasionally gave way to heart-stopping emotional moments of reconciliation between ancient enemies.

  One day, searching through the archives of TWA, we spotted Ehud Avriel's name on the passenger list of a flight that had left Tel Aviv for Paris on November 3, 1947. Avriel had been going to Prague to buy the arms and ammunition that would eventually permit Israel to defend herself against the Arab armies' invasion. A little farther down the same list, another name drew our attention. Passenger Abdul Aziz Kerine, a Syrian army captain, had also been on his way to Prague that same day to buy for his government the weapons that were to throw the Israelis back to the sea.

  Twenty years later, we were able to track down the mysterious Syrian officer and arrange a meeting with him in a suburb of Damascus. The confession of this Arab would be one of our favorite scoops and a perfect illustration of our desire to write a truly impartial book, a book that could be widely read not only in Israel, but also in the Arab countries, as well as in the rest of the world. O Jerusalem! would eventually be read by more than fifty million people and acclaimed unanimously by critics as a truly objective and unbiased work of history.

  When we decided to tackle the story of the massacre at Deir Yassin, an episode quite painful to the collective conscience of the Israelis, we knew we were going to provoke strongly negative reactions in the opinions of many of our Jewish readers. Asher Ben Natan, then the Israeli ambassador to France, begged us not to tell the story. A few years later, Menachem Begin, who had by then become the prime minister of Israel after having been himself a member of the Irgun, would reiterate the same plea.

  The movie told the story of this tragedy with the same courage and objectivity that we had striven for when we first put it down on paper. In a small inn overlooking Lausanne, we had obtained from Jacques de Reynier, a representative of the Red Cross and the first witness to arrive in the village after the massacre, the notes of his personal diary in which he had described to the last detail what he had seen. It was only after corroborating this priceless testimony with former members of the Irgun and the Stern group, as well as with Arab survivors from the martyred village, that we committed the story to paper.

  One thing is certain: a book and a film that skipped such a tragic episode would have lost all credibility.

  Keeping a clear head at all times as we researched was our constant obsession. At any moment the intensity of a particular testimony, a tragic description of a situation, could have swayed our account in favor of one side or another. The British we interviewed were not really helpful in our quest for truth. They each had their own opinions and preferences, some in favor of the
Jews, others in favor of the Arabs.

  Researching the last moments of their rule in Jerusalem was an adventure full of surprises. Between those who gave tins of corned beef to starving Jews to feed the cats and dogs they could not take with them and those who spontaneously surrendered their weapons to Arab friends, Her Majesty's soldiers had left mixed memories in their wake. One of the most interesting episodes was the visit that Sir Alan Cunningham, the last High Commissioner to Palestine, had paid to Rabbi Weingarten, who was in charge of the Jewish quarter of Jerusalem. Twenty years later, the old rabbi's eyes glistened with emotion as he described to us the vision of "this British general, stiff and proud in his meticulous uniform, surrendering for the first time in two thousand years the key of the Gate of Zion into Jewish hands." This was to be one of the many gripping scenes of our book and a scene faithfully re-created in Chouraqui's film.

  Of the thousands of interviews we were to conduct over the three years of our research, few moved us as much as those that described the creation of the brigade from the ranks of the immigrants freshly arrived on the Kalanit, this new Exodus loaded with survivors from the Nazi death camps. The movie brilliantly re-creates this episode. We had managed to find Zvi Hourewitz, the officer who had been ordered to transform this motley group of half-starved European survivors into a cohesive fighting brigade. In a voice trembling with remembrance, this tough sabra explained his total surprise when he discovered that his new force was a living tower of Babel in which the only language not spoken was Hebrew. "I called the Polish sergeant that was my secretary and had him translate my orders into Polish and Yiddish. All my sub-officers were sabras like myself who only spoke Hebrew. How on earth would they be able to lead into battle men who couldn't understand their orders? We were so short on time that I told them we had to use the same technique that we would use with children: teach them just a few basic words. The words that would allow them to fight and survive." Hourewitz described how, a few hours later, he could hear a strange murmur coming from the campground where the immigrants were assembled. It was the rustling of hundreds of voices repeating a succession of syllables. The new recruits from the Kalanit were desperately trying to learn and understand the orders in Hebrew that they would hear again in a few hours as they marched on Jerusalem, armed only with old British Enfield rifles that they, for the most part, didn't even know how to use.