O Jerusalem!

by Larry Collins

  The preliminaries were brief. The positions of the principals were all well known now, endlessly declared and restated in the months of debate that had led to this Saturday afternoon.

  Britain's Sir Alexander Cadogan, aloof and imperturbable, maintained an air of studied indifference. Ten days before, he had carefully spelled out Britain's policy. She would leave Palestine on the day and hour of her choosing. The General Assembly could look for no help from His Majesty's Government in implementing any plan that had not been accepted by both Arab and Jew, a likelihood so inconceivable—as no one knew better than the British—that Cadogan's statement made it clear that England was washing her hands of Palestine. Since then, the sole contribution made to the debate by His Majesty's delegation had been the addition of a comma to a committee report.

  Shortly after five o'clock, the Assembly President, Oswaldo Aranha of Brazil, gaveled down the last speaker and solemnly informed the men before him that the vote on the recommendation to partition Palestine would now be taken. From his seat in the spectator's gallery, Moshe Sharett stared with concern at the banks of silent men about to take the most important decision in the history of his people. For the hundredth time, he studied his calculations, not daring to imagine the cost of failure, knowing, as he had warned the Assembly, that his people would "never submit to any attempt to subjugate them to an Arab majority."

  Not far away, in the same spectator's gallery, Jamal Husseini, the representative of Palestine's Arabs, also waited impassively for the vote to begin. A few minutes before, in the delegates' lobby, he had reiterated the threat he had made so often in the past weeks: If the General Assembly voted partition, the Arabs of Palestine, supported by the Arab states, would go to war against its decision as soon as the British left.

  An aide set a basket before Aranha. In it were fifty-six slips of paper, each bearing the name of one of the nations represented in the hall. Aranha extended his hand and slowly drew from the basket the name of the nation whose vote would begin the poll. He unfolded the slip of paper and stared an instant at the men ranged before him.

  "Guatemala," he announced.

  At his words, a terrible silence settled over the Assembly. Even the press gallery fell quiet. For an instant, the three hundred delegates, the spectators, the newsmen, seemed united in awe of the moment before them, in their awareness of the grave and solemn decision about to be taken.

  The delegate of Guatemala rose. As he did, suddenly, from the spectators' gallery, a piercing cry sundered the silence of the Assembly hall, a Hebrew cry as old as time and the suffering of men: "Ana Ad Hoshiya. O Lord, save us."

  2

  "AT LAST WE ARE A FREE PEOPLE."

  SIX THOUSAND MILES from the converted skating rink in which a handful of men were about to decide the fate of the land of which it was the heart, the sacred city of Jerusalem waited impassively for the newest sign of its destiny.

  Whether in the sacrifice of animals on the altar of her ancient Jewish Temple, the sacrifice of Christ upon a cross, or the constantly renewed sacrifice of men upon her walls, Jersusalem had lived as no other city in the world, under the curse of bloodshed. Yet her name, according to legend, came from the ancient Hebrew "Yerushalayim," meaning "City of Peace," and her first settlements had stretched down from the Mount of Olives under a grove of palm trees whose branches would become a universal symbol of peace. An unending stream of prophets had proclaimed here the peace of God to man, and David, the Jewish king who had made the city his capital, had celebrated it with the words "Pray for the peace of Jerusalem."

  Sacred to three great religions, Judaism, Christianity and Islam, Jerusalem's stones bore the stigmata of her sanctity and her walls the memory of the crimes committed within them in the name of religion. David and Pharaoh, Sennacherib and Nebuchadnezzar, Ptolemy and Herod, Titus and the Crusaders of Godefroy de Bouillon, Tamerlane and the Saracens of Saladin, all had fought and burned and killed here.

  Now, in the midnight blue of this November night, Jerusalem offered a deceptively peaceful appearance. A ring of distant lights surrounded the city like satellites: to the north, those of Ramallah; far to the east by the Dead Sea floor, Jericho; to the south, Bethlehem. Closer by, a second chain of lights leaped from hilltop to hilltop like lighthouses in the night standing guard over the approaches to Jerusalem. Most important among them were the lights of Kastel, blinking from the peak from which the village dominated the sole road linking Jerusalem to the sea, the artery along which virtually every vital supply for the 100,000 Jews of Jerusalem flowed. Those few miles of twisting asphalt were the hinge upon which Jewish Jerusalem's existence hung that November evening. And, almost without exception, the lights along its route belonged to Arab communities.

  Jerusalem began where the highway became Jaffa Road. The city's principal commercial artery, the road ran through a mixture of banks, stores, coffeehouses and cinemas blending in their unique manner the Orient and the Jewish quarters of Central Europe. To the north, huddled around the domes of their numerous synagogues, the zealous guardians of a Hasidic sect of orthodox Jewry lived in Mea Shearim. To the south were the city's modern Jewish quarters, and beyond them another set of equally modern and largely Arab quarters.

  At the end of Jaffa Road lay the walls of old Jerusalem, proud and imposing, imprisoning the Old City in a splendid belt of stone. Wrapped inside a vast puzzle of vaulted alleyways and hidden passages were fifty thousand people sealed by race and rite into separate ghettoes. Jewish, Armenian, Christian and Moslem, those traditional quarters were the nervous tissue around the three sacred sites that were Jerusalem's glory and its curse.

  Two hundred yards east of the Jewish Quarter, enclosed in an alley barely ten feet wide, was a façade of huge, uneven stone blocks. Those stones, granitic remnants of Solomon's Temple, were the spiritual center of Judaism, the Wailing Wall, the symbolic beacon toward which twenty centuries of Jewry had turned to mourn their exile. Caressed to an ochre sheen by the reverent touch of thousands of hands, lips and foreheads, they had resisted every calamity, natural and man-made, that had battered Jerusalem through the centuries. A handful of black-coated orthodox Jews, bobbing up and down to the rhythmic singsong of their ancient prayers, stood perpetual guard at that shrine to a glorious and dolorous history. Stuck into the cracks and crevices of the great stone blocks were dozens of scraps of paper, memoranda from the faithful to the Lord, petitioning for his blessing on a newborn son, an ailing wife, a flagging enterprise and, above all on this November night, the deliverance of his people.

  A few hundred yards away, two stone cupolas and a Romanesque belfry crowned the dark and incense-filled caverns of another beacon calling to generations of humanity, the site for which the masses of Europe had hurled themselves into the adventure of the Crusades. Those stones spanned the most sacred shrine in Christendom, the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, built over the hilltop on which Jesus Christ is presumed to have been crucified. There, in a profusion of stairways, pillars, altars and sanctuaries, priests of all the sects of Christianity met, Greek, Russian, Coptic, Latin, Armenian, Chaldean, Syriac, kneeling in mutual aversion, chanting their similar litanies to the resurrected Savior each claimed as his own.

  The symbol of Jerusalem's importance to another faith lay to the east. The Qubbet es Sakhra, the Dome of the Rock, stood serene and stately at the center of its spacious esplanade. Below its gracious ceiling, covered with its inscriptions to Allah, the One, the Merciful, was a clump of gray stone, the Mount Moriah of antiquity. A faint impression upon that rock bound it to Islam, the handprint of the Angel Gabriel for the faithful, holding the rock to the earth on the night the Prophet Mohammed on his white steed El Burak ascended from it into heaven.

  Ringing over the Old City's rooftops with equally sonorous fervor, the carillons of her church towers, the piercing call of her minarets, the cry of the shofar from her synagogues called Jerusalem to a perpetual prayer. For thousands in the city, they were a reminder that Jerusalem was only a way
stop on a mystic journey, a journey whose destination was a deep ravine running below the city's eastern walls. There, below the spare slopes of the Mount of Olives, ran the Biblical Valley of Jehoshaphat to which the trumpets of the Last Judgment would call the souls of all mankind at the end of the world. Anticipation of that event had made Jerusalem a city where men came to die as well as to live, and generations of Christians, Jews and Moslems slept scattered under a sea of whitened stone around the valley, achieving in death in Jerusalem what they had so often failed to achieve in life: a peaceful reconciliation of their claims to its ramparts.

  To Jerusalem's traditional divisions, another had been added recently. Demarcated by British barbed wire, it had grown out of the conflict between Jerusalem's Jewish population and its British authorities, and divided the community into a series of British-controlled security zones. They included the huge central compound which enclosed its vital installations. It had been scornfully dubbed Bevingrad by the city's Jews, after Britain's Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin. For all its divisions, however, as the evening of November 29, 1947, stretched into night, Jerusalem enjoyed a blessing it had known rarely in the past third of a century: unity. In homes, in cafés, in clubs, linked together by an electric cable and a common sense of anguish and anxiety, the people of Jerusalem, Arab and Jew alike, sat by the radio, following word by word the distant debate on which the future of their city depended.

  As they had almost every evening of their married life, Ambara and Sami Khalidy had gathered that night before the fireplace of their library, Ambara at the fragile writing desk at which she had made the first Arabic translation of Homer, Sami in his leather wing chair by the fire. In circling ranks on the walls around them, their leather bindings burnished to a mahogany glow, were the silent witnesses to the right by which they occupied that room, the texts of the oldest Islamic library in the world. Since the day in A.D. 638 when Khalid ibn al-Whalid had ridden into the Holy City at the head of a column of the Caliph Omar's conquering warriors, there had been Khalidys in Jerusalem. Latest representative of a stream of scholars, teachers and sheikhs the family had produced to provide the intellectual leaven of Jerusalem's Moslem community, Sami Khalidy was the president of Jerusalem's Arab college. Shopkeepers' sons, the scions of Jerusalem's old Arab families, the progeny of Bedouin sheikhs—Sami Khalidy had gathered them all into his college, the hopeful raw material from which he might fashion a new generation of leaders for the Arabs of Palestine. Now, his bright-blue eyes clouded with concern, Sami Khalidy clung to every word coming from his radio and wondered if destiny was about to deprive his young pupils of the country he had prepared them to lead.

  In their little apartment near Herod's Gate, thirty-six-year-old Hameh Majaj and his young wife softened the impact of the news flowing from their radio by contemplating the blueprints of the little house they planned to build in the spring just outside Jerusalem. All fall they had dreamed of that house, which bore the promise of a final ration of happiness for Hameh Majaj.

  An orphan as a child, a shy and lonely man as an adult, Majaj's happiness dated from the moment three years earlier when a pretty girl had appeared at his post-office desk looking for a job. The job he had given her was that of his wife. She had since given him two children. He had just completed payments on the parcel of land on which their new house would take form. Even the number of its lot, thirteen, seemed a harbinger of good luck.

  Around her feet, Katy Antonious' servants spread their cloths over the uneven stones that would serve as a table for the myriad little dishes of an Arabic mezze. Even on this fateful night, the widow of the foremost Arab historian of his generation remained faithful to the role that had been hers for two decades: that of the first hostess of Arab Jerusalem. Rare was the distinguished visitor who had not passed under the Arabic inscription "Enter and be welcome" on the stone arch above the door to her home. Over her parquet floors had passed a sampling of international society, bishops and Arab princes, scholars and generals, poets and politicians.

  Determined to mark this night with a gesture worthy of her tenacious devotion to Jerusalem's ancient stones, Katy had gathered her dinner guests around her and marched them off to an al-fresco supper on the squared roof of the Stork Tower. That tower was anchored in the northeastern corner of Jerusalem's old walls, hard by the spot where, eight centuries before, an earlier generation of Arabs had resisted another invasion of Jerusalem, that of the Crusaders of Godefroy de Bouillon.

  On the opposite side of Jerusalem, in a simple stone house in one of the city's new Jewish quarters, another woman puffed nervously on a cigarette and fretted with the pencil and paper before her. She too was a renowned Jerusalem hostess, although of a different sort. Her salon was her kitchen, and the measure of her hospitality the endless cups of coffee she poured for her guests from the pot on her stove. Two generations of Zionists had met in that kitchen to laugh and argue, curse and cry, plan and despair. Chain-smoking her cigarettes, pushing forward her coffee and cakes, she had been the eternal Jewish mother in the adolescence of a new kind of Jew.

  In a sense, she had been born to live this night. Her father was a carpenter whose talented hands had earned him the privilege of living in Kiev, outside the Pale of Settlement in which Czarist Russia had confined its Jews. Slender that privilege, for it gave a Jew only the chance to starve a little more slowly than his less fortunate kin. Five of the six children who had preceded her birth in 1898 had died in early childhood. Her father brought her to another Promised Land, and there, in the streets of an American city, at the age of seventeen, collecting funds for the victims of a World War I pogrom, she had found her Zionist faith.

  She had devoted her life to that cause. To her, this evening might represent the culmination of everything she had lived for, a justification of her very existence. Normally, she was the most gregarious of women. Yet so precious were the emotions of these hours that Golda Meir had chosen to spend them alone with a cup of coffee, her endless cigarettes, and the note pad on which she would register each vote that brought her closer to a lifetime's dream.

  Not far from Golda Meir's home, thirty of the most wanted men in Palestine followed the news on an old upright Philips radio placed in the center of a table spilling over with platters of omelette, great brass coffeepots and a dozen uncorked bottles of vodka. Barely a quarter of a mile away, wrapped in its protective layers of barbed wire, was the headquarters of the British Security Police, whose officers had spent two years chasing them up and down Palestine.

  At the head of the table, his bald head ungraced by so much as a curl of hair, his massive chest heaving with each word he uttered, was the man who had summoned them to this room. He had been a wrestler in the circus, the foreman of a rock quarry, an art dealer, a journalist and a doctor of philosophy. It was not, however, his mastery of any of those diverse crafts that had excited the admiration of his fellows and the dedicated pursuit of the British police. Yitzhak Sadeh was the spiritual father of the Haganah and the founder of its elite striking force, the Palmach.

  He had molded the Palmach on his own Marxist-Socialist principles. It was an army without insignia, indifferent to uniform and drill, relaxed in its discipline; an army in which rank had only one privilege, that of getting killed first.

  Now someone asked Sadeh what he thought the result of the vote just beginning would be.

  He was solemn and unsmiling. "I do not care," he said. "If the vote is positive, the Arabs will make war on us. Their war," he said, his eyes sweeping the faces of his young officers, "will cost us five thousand lives."

  In the hush that followed he added, "And if the vote is negative, then it is we who shall make war on the Arabs."

  Silence filled the room. The radio began to announce the passing votes. Sadeh reached out and very deliberately poured himself a tumbler of vodka from the bottle before him.

  He raised it to his young subordinates.

  "My friends," he said with a sad half-smile, "you might as well to
ast all of the votes with a glass of vodka."

  In the wire room of the Palestine Broadcasting System, the news of each nation's vote was ripped from a teletype machine as it came in. A Jewish runner raced one copy across a small courtyard to the studios of the Hebrew service. An Arab runner raced a second across the same courtyard to the Arabic studios eight yards away.

  There Hazem Nusseibi scribbled an Arabic translation for his waiting broadcaster. Watching the votes come in, Nusseibi thought, It can go either way. Suddenly, an urgent bulletin fell on his desk. Nusseibi translated it for his broadcaster. Only as the man read out his words did the full impact of what he had just written strike Nusseibi.

  "The General Assembly of the United Nations," the broadcaster read, "by a vote of thirty-three in favor, thirteen against and ten abstentions, has voted to partition Palestine."

  "A milestone has passed," thought Nusseibi; "a curtain has fallen upon our heads." From across the courtyard, he heard the first jubilant shouts of his Jewish colleagues.

  Outside the night was still. From his balcony, Israel Rosenblatt stared with an almost mystic awe at the panorama spread before him in the cool dark air: Suleiman's Citadel, the Tower of David, Old Jerusalem's walls, the domes of her churches and synagogues, her slender minarets, all glowing with an alabaster sheen in the moonlight. Then, from some hidden courtyard, a sound sundered the silence. It was the primeval bleating of a shofar, the ram's-horn trumpet with which Joshua's hosts had laid down the walls of Jericho. Hearing it, Rosenblatt remembered the words of a solemn Yom Kippur prayer. "My God," he whispered, "the shofar has sounded our freedom at last." From courtyards and synagogues all across the city, other shofars took up the call until that harsh and primitive sound seemed to claw apart the night, a cry thirty-five centuries old adding its ancient message to that just relayed by radio. At that moment, like many another man in Jerusalem that night, Israel Rosenblatt turned his regard eastward toward that wall of stone that was the repository of so many of Judaism's sacred memories. Softly, almost imperceptibly, he began to mumble a prayer of thanksgiving.