O Jerusalem!

by Larry Collins

  Zihab Khatib, the twenty-one-year-old accountant who had watched the celebration in Mea Shearim, lived a disappointment of a different nature that morning. The Jews in his office were in the midst of an impromptu party when he arrived for work. Among them was a lovely blond Rumanian named Elissa who dominated the young accountant's hopeful dreams. They whispered together for a moment. Then Elissa brought him a cake and, taking him by the hand, led him over to join the dancing. Khatib tried, but his heart would not let him. A few minutes later, sadly aware that the events of the night had erected a barrier between them that could never be bridged, Khatib drifted out of the office. The young Arab would see the blond Jewish girl he had hoped to love only once again in his life, in April, behind a rifle pointing from the sandbags of a Haganah guard post in the Montefiore quarter.

  In the rest of the Arab world, a rising tide of fury at the U.N. vote was already erupting in violence. Angered by a decision they felt deprived them unjustly of a part of the Arab patrimony, the youth of Damascus had rampaged through the Syrian capital since dawn, chanting, "We want arms." The Prime Minister, fifty-five-year-old Jamil Mardam, offered them the chance to display their patriotism with acts, not words. He promised that a recruiting office would open to enlist volunteers to fight in Palestine. They preferred other activities, however. By noon they had sacked the United States and French legations and, protesting Russia's vote for partition, burned the headquarters of the Syrian Communist Party. In Beirut, capital of Lebanon, similar crowds smashed their way into the offices of the Arabian-American Oil Company. In Amman, capital of the kingdom of Transjordan, only a last-minute effort by police saved two American professors from a lynching at the hands of an angry mob. From his desert palace in Riyadh, King Ibn-Saud of Saudi Arabia proclaimed that his last wish was "to die at the head of my troops fighting in Palestine."

  Curiously, the capital of the most important country in the Arab world, Egypt, took the news most calmly. By customary arrangement, a courier from the Prime Minister's office brought King Farouk's chamberlain a bribe and a dispatch with the news. The bribe was the guarantee needed to get the chamberlain to set important documents before the King at the only moment he was disposed to read them—around noon, when he awoke from his usual night of revelry.

  Egypt's Prime Minister, Mahmoud Nokrashy Pasha, pondered the news with concern. A former history professor, a man as modest as his sovereign was profligate, Nokrashy was a rarity among Egyptian politicians. He was honest. A lifelong foe of the British, he felt with deep conviction that the only proper concerns of his nation were securing the English evacuation of the Suez Canal Zone and union with the Sudan under the Egyptian crown. Under no circumstances did Nokrashy Pasha want Egypt's army to get involved in a war in Palestine.

  Circumstances, however, would deprive the Egyptian Prime Minister of his wish. Spurred by genuine emotion, exhorted by cynical politicians unwilling to restrain the passions unleashed by their reckless rhetoric, led by men living a charade based on careless illusions, the Arabs were soon to be embarked on the high road to disaster. Already, in the streets beyond the Egyptian Prime Minister's palace, two forces were at work sowing the wind whose tempest would bring Egypt to revolution and Mahmoud Nokrashy to a rendezvous with an assassin's bullet.

  In the narrow byways of Cairo's ancient bazaar, the Khan el Khalil, the rectors of Al Azhar, the world's oldest Islamic university, drafted the decrees which would sanction the ancient call that had driven the warriors of the caliphs from Baghdad to Poitiers and Saladin to the Horn of Hattin. Debased by overuse, eviscerated of much of its spiritual appeal, still no cry could stir Arab opinion as readily as that ancient call to jihad, the holy war.

  In those same Cairo souks the fanatic messengers of a newer Islam, the Moslem Brothers, stirred, too. They saw in the United Nations' decision the seeds of the popular upheaval they awaited to carry them to power.

  Soon the walls of Damascus, Beirut and Baghdad would be splashed with the slogans of those Knights Templar of a renascent Islam, calling their followers to a new crusade with the Koran, the dagger and the machine gun.

  David Ben-Gurion returned to Jerusalem at dawn. Seeing the celebrations, he said to himself, "They are silly. They think that a war is for dancing." He went straight to his office to work. By forenoon, an enormous crowd had built up once again in the courtyard of the Jewish Agency, clamoring for the appearance of their leaders.

  Determined to infuse them with some of the urgency he himself felt at this hour, Ben-Gurion finally stepped out onto the Agency balcony, surrounded by fifty of his senior aides. As he began to speak, someone whispered to Golda Meir a piece of news to justify Ben-Gurion's caution. Three Jews had just been killed in an ambush outside Tel Aviv.

  Yet, as the applause, the happy shouts, the almost physical pleasure of the crowd below swept up to him, Ben-Gurion's stern façade began to dissolve. Suddenly he too felt the overwhelming emotion of that hour, the grandeur of being alive at that rendezvous between the Hebrew race and the two-thousand-year-old promise they had sworn to the Judean hills.

  When he finished, he turned to the blue-and-white Zionist flag beside him. Gently, almost reverently, he caressed its folds.

  "At last," he murmured in a half-whisper, "at last we are a free people."

  3

  "PAPA HAS RETURNED."

  NEITHER THE ARABS nor the Jews were completely unprepared for the struggle which the U.N. vote made inevitable. Grimly mindful of the prospect of violence, both sides had been quietly girding themselves for months.

  In the early spring of 1945, David Ben-Gurion had received a visitor in the cluttered study of his modest house at 15 Keren Kayemet Street. Surrounded by thousands of books of philosophy and history through which his restless mind had prowled, Ben-Gurion greeted his caller and waved him to a chair. Beyond an open window the two men could hear the wash of the Mediterranean sliding down the beaches of Tel Aviv half a mile away. That book-lined study was Ben-Gurion's private citadel, the sanctuary into which he retired every night to read and work. Rare was the event or man that could deprive the Jewish leader of even thirty minutes of that nightly ritual.

  Ben-Gurion's visitor was an American and he was a senior official of the United States government. A few weeks before, he had participated in a meeting designed to lay the outlines of the postwar world, the Yalta Conference. As Ben-Gurion listened with growing intensity, his visitor related the details of a private conversation to which he had been a party at that conference. Its participants were Franklin Roosevelt, Winston Churchill and Joseph Stalin. The subject was Palestine.

  Suddenly, he said, the Russian dictator had turned to Churchill. There was only one solution to the Arab–Jewish problem in Palestine, Stalin told the Englishman, the solution the Soviet Union was going to support. "It is a Jewish state," he said.

  Hearing his visitor recite the Russian dictator's words, Ben-Gurion started. Years later he would recall that at that instant, for the first time, he had the absolute certainty that the Jewish people would have a state in Palestine. Between the combined pressures of the Soviet Union, ruled by the dictator whose thoughts on Palestine had just been revealed to Ben-Gurion, and a United States responsive to public opinion, Britain would eventually be compelled to yield to Jewish desires.

  Sitting back, Ben-Gurion calculated the impact of what he had heard. For years the brunt of Zionist diplomacy had been concentrated on obtaining world acknowledgment of the Jewish people's right to a state. From this moment forward, it would have to have another, even more important objective, preparing to defend such a state at the point of a gun. For if the major powers could give his people legal sanction for a state, Ben-Gurion knew only they themselves could bring it into being. That, he was certain, would have to be done in a military showdown with the Arab states. Their survival and their dreams of a state would depend on their being prepared for that showdown.

  On the morning of April 6, 1945, shortly after David Ben-Gurion had received his
American visitor, a crucial turning point came, too, in the existence of the man whom fate had destined to oppose him, Mohammed Said Haj Amin el Husseini, the Mufti of Jerusalem, spiritual leader of Jerusalem's Moslem community. It took place at a lunch in the capital of Nazi Germany. Once, in his own villa on Goethestrasse in Berlin's Selendorf West, Haj Amin had played host to the leaders of Hitler's Germany. That morning, in a friend's apartment, the only representative of the Third Reich at the table was the S.S. bodyguard-chauffeur who had driven the Mufti to Berlin from Badgastein, Austria, in a wood-burning Mercedes. And the plate set before the man whose table had a few months before been laden with the delicacies of occupied Europe was a staple of the Egyptian fellaheen, a mash of red kidney beans soaked in vinegar, called foul, which the Germans considered fit only for livestock. Gathered around Haj Amin in the lugubrious gloom of mourners at a funeral banquet were a dozen of the Arabs who had followed him in October 1941, when, disguised as the female servant of an Italian diplomat, he had escaped a British dragnet and walked from Teheran to the Turkish frontier and thence made his way to Berlin.

  Convinced that a German victory would secure the aims to which he had devoted his political life—driving the Jews from Palestine and the British from the Middle East—Haj Amin had thrown in his lot with the Nazis. Placing at their disposal the prestige of his person and the influence of his religious office, the Mufti had done everything he could to secure a German victory. He had recruited Arab agents to drop behind the British lines as saboteurs. He had helped raise two divisions of Yugoslavian Moslems for the S.S. He had facilitated the German entry into Tunisia and Libya. His agents had provided the Wehrmacht with a forty-eight-hour warning—ignored—of the Allied landings in North Africa. Fully aware of the finality of the Final Solution, he had done his best to see that none of its intended victims were diverted to Palestine on their way to Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler's gas chambers. In 1943 he intervened personally with Reich Foreign Minister Ribbentrop to prevent the emigration of four thousand Jewish children from Bulgaria to Palestine.

  Haj Amin Husseini had lost his wager. A reminder of his defeat and that of the ally to whose cause he had joined his could be heard just beyond the windows of the villa in which he lunched, the insistent drone of Allied planes methodically bombing Berlin. Like David Ben-Gurion, Haj Amin had now to prepare for the next round in the struggle between their two peoples. With a gesture, he sent his S.S. bodyguard to his car. The German returned toting a burlap sack stuffed with Red Cross prisoner-of-war parcels. Silently the Mufti distributed them to the men around the table. Then he reached into the folds of his black robe and drew out a leather pouch. From it he pulled a thick clump of bank notes: Swiss francs, U.S. dollars and British gold certificates. Carefully he counted them out into a dozen packets, one of which he set before each man.

  His pale-blue eyes as impassive, as imperturbable as they had been three years before at those exalting moments when the armies of Germany had seemed within reach of victory, Haj Amin told his followers, "It is finished for us here now. Each of you must try to find his way back home as best he can. There our struggle must begin again in different circumstances."

  Then he rose and, with the quick mincing walk for which he was famous, slipped from the room as furtively as a nursing nun gliding from the bedchamber of a dying man.

  Haj Amin Husseini was a man of many and diverse qualities, but a deep religiosity had never been one of them, not even on the March day in 1922 when he was summoned to the office of Britain's first High Commissioner in Palestine, Sir Herbert Samuel, to receive at his Jewish hands his appointment as mufti, a kind of bishopric of the third most important city of Islam. Two years of study at Cairo's Al Azhar had revealed little of the theologian in young Haj Amin. Bored, he had turned to a dissimilar but more suitable calling as a cadet officer in the Turkish Army. With his bright-red hair, his sharp blue eyes, a sword dangling from his belt, he cut a dashing figure; so dashing that he quickly attracted the attention of Jerusalem's Arab nationalists and through them that of the British, for whom he was soon working as an intelligence agent. Aware of Britain's promises to the Arabs, convinced that they were destined to be the liberators of his people, he became a passionate Anglophile.

  The passionate convert became a passionate apostate when Haj Amin saw evidence of British perfidy on the publication of the Balfour Declaration and the Sykes-Picot Agreement. Thereafter, in the hierarchy of Haj Amin's hatred, the British would always enjoy pride of place before that accorded to his Jewish enemies. Quitting his job as an adviser to the British in the Sudan, he returned to Jerusalem. In the streets and souks of his native city, stirring with the first vague resentment against Jewish immigration, Haj Amin Husseini at last found his true vocation. He took those ill-defined emotions and patiently coaxed the expository anger of the coffeehouse into the fury of the mob.

  On Easter Sunday 1920, his manipulations of the city's discontent reached their logical culmination: bursting from the crowded souks and alleys of the Old City, an Arab street mob turned on the Jews at Jaffa Gate.* Twelve people were killed in the ensuing riot. Six were Jews. Six were Arabs. Theirs was the first blood spilled in the Semitic struggle for Jerusalem between Jew and Arab. Henceforth, the strong points and the open countryside of Arab Palestine might belong to the British, but the villages and the souks would be fiefs of Haj Amin Husseini.

  His role in the riot earned him a ten-year jail term in absentia. With the guile that would become his personal hallmark, Haj Amin escaped arrest and fled to Transjordan.

  His exile was brief. Soon the most important Moslem religious office in Palestine, that of mufti of Jerusalem, fell vacant. It was Britain's responsibility to fill the post from one of three nominees proposed by a college of Moslem notables. E. T. Richmond, a rabid anti-Zionist and the mandate's political secretary, resolved to give Haj Amin the post. He persuaded the High Commissioner, Sir Herbert Samuel, striving as a Jew to be impartial, to support him on the grounds that the job might convert its holder to responsibility.†

  Thus the British installed their most implacable foe for life in the central Moslem office in Palestine, their High Commissioner accompanying the appointment with only one admonition: he told Haj Amin to go home and grow a beard to give his twenty-eight-year-old face a dignity worthy of his new post.

  For a while, it appeared that the British decision had been a wise one. Haj Amin was silent. He had better things to do than harass his foes. He labored patiently to build his power base. He secured his election to the post of president of the Supreme Moslem Council, capturing with it unfettered control over all Moslem religious funds in Palestine. He took over the courts, the mosques, the schools, the cemeteries, so that soon no Moslem in Palestine could be born or die without being beholden to Haj Amin. No shiekh, no teacher, no official however petty, received an appointment in Haj Amin's domain without first establishing his total personal loyalty to the Mufti. Scornful and suspicious of the country's educated classes, he built his following in the souks and villages, upon the solid rock of ignorance, binding his followers to him with the promise of alms and arms.

  On Yom Kippur, September 24, 1928, Haj Amin found the pretext for which he had been building his organization and biding his time. It was the Wailing Wall. That day, the Jews erected a portable screen by the wall to separate men and women at prayer. A minor gesture, but no one knew better than Haj Amin that the mind of Jerusalem had been conditioned for centuries to attach major political importance to minor religious gestures, and that every status quo was a citadel to be zealously protected; after all, the city's Christians had struggled for generations for a privilege so small as scrubbing one step of the Holy Sepulcher. Accusing the Jews of violating Islamic property, insinuating that their aim was to take over the Dome of the Rock, the Mufti orchestrated a growing wave of religious fanaticism.

  It spilled over on a Friday, the Moslem Sabbath, a year later. The Mufti's noonday sermon at the Dome of the Rock that day was une
xceptional. He was too wise to let the British catch him exhorting the crowd that his deputies had shepherded to the mosque. Besides, the crowd knew what it had come for. So did Haj Amin. After the service, from the balcony of his little garden above the Wailing Wall, his silent black-robed figure stared down as the crowd did its work on the Jewish worshipers below.

  This time, the rioting he had provoked spread all across Palestine. When it was finished, over one hundred Jews were dead and Haj Amin Husseini was the undisputed leader of Arab Palestine.

  In 1935, some of his followers started small-scale guerrilla activities to protest the rising tide of Jewish immigration from Nazi Germany. The people, Haj Amin decided, were ready to die. He would offer them that chance in a jihad, its aims no less ambitious than driving the British from Palestine and settling the Jewish problem at leisure on his own terms.

  His bold undertaking began with a six-month general strike. When that failed to budge the British, the strike became an armed uprising. Aimed at first at the British and the Jews, the Mufti's rebellion soon turned from its original targets to his fellow Arabs. Those offered a chance to die were now the Mufti's enemies from the Husseinis' rival clans, and finally anyone whose social situation or skills aroused Haj Amin's suspicions. Landowners, schoolteachers, government officials, clerks, at times anyone accused of reading and writing English too well, all were gunned down. Men began to hire the Mufti's gunmen to exterminate personal enemies. In the towns, the murders usually took place at the open-air market, early in the morning, when the men, following Arab custom, did the shopping. A figure would glide up behind the victim, pull a pistol from the robes of his abayah, shoot and glide away. In the country, they took place at night, a gang bursting into a man's house and killing him in his bed.

  Over two thousand people died in that vicious intramural bloodletting. While the Jews of Palestine were developing the young leaders and the social institutions that would be their greatest resource, Haj Amin Husseini methodically deprived the Arabs of theirs. Throttling progress and any drift to rational thought with his angry fanaticism, cowing with the guns of his ignorant villagers the educated elite, he reduced a generation of Arab leadership to fear and silence.