O Jerusalem!

by Larry Collins

  None of the isolated highways, however, represented a danger as grave as that posed by the route heading southeast across the heart of sheet number ten of the map spread out before Yadin and Shacham. The thickness of the wiggling red line it traced across the map indicated its importance. Forty-five miles long, rising from sea level to 2,500 feet, it was the artery leading to the men, women and children who represented the largest, most important Jewish settlement in Palestine, the 100,000 Jewish residents of Jerusalem.

  In turn a caravan route of antiquity, a Biblical highway, the Via Maris of the legions of Rome, a passage to the heights of Judea for pilgrims, Crusaders, Saracens, Turks, every milestone along its path was engraved with the tortured history of the land it crossed. From the outskirts of Tel Aviv and Jaffa the road glided through the rich green orange groves to the first village on its route, an assemblage of ancient masonry bleached gray-white by the Mediterranean sun called Beit Dagon, after the fish god of the Philistines. Half a dozen miles farther on, it passed the dozens of acres of Palestine's largest British military camp, Sarafand. From there the road passed into Arab territory, its passage marked by the slender spire of a minaret beckoning from a town on the eastern horizon.

  Founded by Suleiman the Magnificent, captured by Richard the Lionhearted, destroyed by Saladin, rebuilt by Egypt's Mamelukes, stormed by Napoleon, the community of Ramle, first major Arab town along the route, had been for generations the repair of caravan raiders and bandits. Just beyond, past a bald, sun-bleached hill, was the site of the Biblical city of Gezer, dowry of the daughter of Egypt's Pharaoh for her marriage to Solomon. From there the road skirted the Biblical Valley of Sorec, where Delilah was born and Samson's jackals with their flaming tails fired the crops of the Philistines. Sweeping along an easterly arc past an expanse of vineyards and wheatfields, the road entered the Valley of Ayalon, over which the sun had stood still for Joshua. At its exit stood two contradictory symbols of Palestine in 1947: the barbed-wire-encircled blockhouse of a British police station dominating from its hillside eight miles of road, and, across a little draw, the red-tiled roof of the Trappist Monastery of the Seven Agonies of Latrun.

  Below the monastery's terraced vineyards was a pumping station for Jerusalem's water supply and the ruins of an old hostelry. On both sides of the route, a stand of pines soared abruptly above the flat plains, the aged sentinels that marked the road's entryway into the narrow gorge which would carry it up two thousand feet to the heights of Judea. It was a green and pleasant place, called, in Arabic, Bab el Wad, the Gate of the Valley—in a few months, the name would symbolize for a generation of Palestine Jewry the price they had had to pay for a state called Israel.

  From there, for twenty miles, the road twisted its way up a series of tight curves, its path buried at the foot of the valley, each of its sides a sheer, impenetrable descent of rock and forest. There every rock could hide a rifleman, every curve an ambush, every clump of trees a company of attackers. Even the communities dominating from their rocky perches the valley floor were in Arab hands: Kastel, hugging its heights by the ruins of a Crusader castle built in its turn upon the Roman fort that guarded the western approach to Jerusalem in Christ's time; Abu Gosh, where David had kept the Ark of the Covenant for two decades waiting to enter Jerusalem; Kolonia, rest area for Titus' legionnaires during the siege of Jerusalem.

  It was not until the road had reached the heights of the Judean plateau and the kibbutz of Kiryat Anavim that a Jewish traveler could feel safe again. Four miles farther on, the road crested up to its culminating point. There, at the end of a long left-hand curve, the suburbs of Jerusalem promised safety at last.

  Successors to the camel caravans of Biblical times, the chariots of the Romans, the zealous columns of the Crusades, wheezing lines of Jewish trucks and buses now struggled up that gulch to Jerusalem, carrying in their vans the ingredients vital for the city's life. Protecting that fragile communication line was an immense, almost insurmountable problem.

  While Shacham and Yadin pondered its future, Jerusalem tied up the wounds of a day's rioting. A severe curfew had finally cleared the Commercial Center of Arab looters. The once prosperous quarter was a black jumble of damp and rancid ruins. Standing at the window of his apartment above the Jewish shop he had saved earlier in the day, Samy Aboussouan stared into the night contemplating the results of his countrymen's wrath. His electric power, his telephone, his gas were cut. Now, in the darkness, he listened to a series of sharp reports coming from the still-smoldering cinders of a nearby grocery store. That disconcerting noise would haunt the blackened quarter all night long. It was the intermittent explosion of hundreds of cans of sardines. Angrily, Aboussouan decided he had had enough. He would leave the Commercial Center for a safer refuge as soon as he could.

  The bedroom of the Hotel California on Paris' Rue de Berri, across the street from the offices of the Paris Herald Tribune, was gray with the haze of cigar smoke. On the edge of the bed, the man whom David Ben-Gurion had sent to Paris to buy ten thousand rifles caressed his bald head in despair. The merchant who had been going to open the gates to Europe's arsenals to Ehud Avriel had turned out to know as much about buying rifles as Avriel knew about buying roses. In a desperate search for a replacement, Avriel had spent the day interviewing it seemed every spurious arms merchant in Europe.

  His last interviewee, a Rumanian Jew operating a small import-export business in Paris, now sat before him. Somewhat shamefacedly, Robert Adam Abramovici explained to Avriel that he had smuggled himself into Palestine aboard a small sailing boat in 1943 but had not stayed. The Promised Land had been too confining, too spartan for his tastes. "I like the good life," he confessed. "I like horses, women. So when the war was over, I came to France. If I hadn't been so demanding, I would still be a Palestinian and it would be I, not you, Ben-Gurion would have sent to buy arms." He had been the Rumanian representative of one of Europe's biggest arms manufacturers before the war, he revealed, and the managers of that firm remained his close friends. "They will sell us what we need," he told an astonished Avriel.

  He drew out of his briefcase two catalogues. Avriel, his eyes bulging with wonder, skimmed their pages crammed with the photographs of an arsenal so vast, he thought, even David Ben-Gurion's fertile imagination could not have conceived of it.

  There was, Abramovici warned, one major restriction on the purchase of those arms. The manufacturers could not deal with an individual, but only with the authorized representative of a sovereign nation. Since a Jewish state would not officially exist for months to come, Avriel would have to get them official credentials from some other nation.

  Avriel pondered for a moment, then ordered an aide to the office around the corner at 53 Rue de Ponthieu from which he had directed the clandestine immigration operations for the Jewish Agency. In the bottom drawer of his old desk was a file which might contain a solution to their problem. That file bore the name of a nation whose only ties to Jewry lay in the Biblical era, in the days of Solomon and Sheba. One year earlier, for the sum of one thousand dollars offered to the White Russian prince who was Haile Selassie's special envoy in Europe, Avriel had purchased one hundred signed and sealed blank letterheads of the Paris legation of Ethiopia. He had used them to draw up false visas for Jewish immigrants crossing France to the secret ports of embarkation.

  The aide returned with the file. There were exactly eight letterheads left. As Abramovici looked at them, a warm and knowing smile spread over his face. They were exactly the documents they needed.

  Abramovici drew two envelopes out of his pocket. He kept one and handed the other to Avriel. The Rumanian epicure had thought of everything. They contained plane tickets to the capital in which the headquarters of his former employers' arms industry was located.

  As Avriel congratulated himself on his good luck in his Paris hotel room, fifteen hundred miles away a beaming Arab captain was congratulating himself, too, on the success of his own European mission. While Avriel and Abramovici ha
d been talking, Abdul-Aziz Kerine had been buying arms from his Czech manufacturers in their modern office building at 20 Avenue Belchrido in Prague. In less than twenty-four hours after his arrival, he could note with satisfaction, he had secured his country's order for ten thousand Model E-18 Mausers and one hundred MG-34 submachine guns and had started to make arrangements to ship them to Damascus.

  The young captain's satisfaction would have been less complete had he been aware of the identity of the next client who would enter the modern office building in which he had spent the afternoon. At the moment Captain Kerine sat down to dinner in his hotel, the other client was packing his toothbrush, his Bible and his volume of Faust for a trip to Prague, where, the next morning, Ehud Avriel was scheduled to have his own conference at 20 Avenue Belchrido with the directors of the Zbrojovka Brno arms works.

  Ehud Avriel's appearance at 20 Avenue Belchrido marked the beginning of the newest phase in a struggle which had been, for the Jews of Palestine, as relentless as the pursuit of water to irrigate their fields: the search for the arms with which to defend them. Until 1936, the armories of their kibbutzim and fortified villages had been filled with a random assortment of rifles bought from the Arabs whose marauders they were meant to repulse. The arrival in the port of Haifa that year of a seemingly routine shipment of tractors, road rollers and steam boilers marked the end of the helter-skelter procurement of arms and the beginning of a more systematic effort to furnish the Haganah equipment. Every hollow space in that array of machinery was stuffed with arms and ammunition.

  It had been placed there by a former police inspector turned orange exporter, an elegant man whose talent for intrigue was rivaled only by his taste for beautiful women. To cover his activities in his Warsaw headquarters, Yehuda Arazi had taken control of an agricultural machine shop by saving its debt-ridden owner from the public auctioneer's hammer. Every Saturday after the last worker had left, Arazi and the grateful owner stripped down a week's production of tractors and road rollers, jammed them full of arms, then welded them back together again. Over the course of three years, Arazi's little machine shop managed to smuggle to Palestine 3,000 rifles, 226 machine guns, 10,000 hand grenades, three million cartridges, hundreds of mortar shells and, his proudest achievement, three small planes.*

  The end of World War II, however, led to the most extraordinary adventure in the Haganah's arms procurement program. It began, in a sense, in a Tel Aviv sidewalk café one evening in early summer 1945. Scanning his newspaper that night, the eyes of Haim Slavine fell upon a brief news item datelined Washington, D.C. Seven hundred thousand practically new machine tools of the U.S. armament industry would be converted to scrap metal in the next few months, it said. Slavine got up, went home and drafted a letter to David Ben-Gurion. Before the Yishuv, he said, was an opportunity that history would not offer twice. Get those machines, he urged, and smuggle them into Palestine to provide the foundations of a modern armament industry.

  A cantankerous, irascible genius, Slavine had a mastery of chemistry, physics and engineering which, with the already impressive contribution he had made to the Haganah's arms program, assured his letter a careful reading. By day the director of Palestine's most important power station, Slavine became by night the Haganah's mad chemist. Using the kitchen of his two-room flat as a miniature arms lab, he produced TNT detonators and experimented with the manufacture of hand grenades. His letter reached Ben-Gurion while the Jewish leader was still digesting the information imparted him a few weeks earlier by his American visitor en route home from Yalta. To Ben-Gurion, it offered a concrete way to prepare his people for the showdown he foresaw with the Arabs.

  He ordered Slavine to leave for New York immediately. There he put him in contact with the aristocrat scion of one of the United States' most prominent Jewish families. Since his first visit to Palestine as a young naval lieutenant just after World War I, two preoccupations had dominated the life of Rudolf G. Sonneborn—Zionism and his family's chemical concern. At Ben-Gurion's behest, he had assembled a score of American Zionist leaders into a body already dubbed the Sonneborn Institute. Chosen by Sonneborn because they could keep a secret, its members were men of means who represented a broad breakdown of the United States both geographically and industrially.

  With their help, Slavine set to work. He began by locking himself into a hotel room with stacks of back issues of Technical Machinery, a publication he had discovered by chance on a New York newsstand. Meticulously he memorized from the photographs in those old magazines the technical details of the machines needed for an armament industry. Then, passing himself off as deaf and dumb so that his limited and heavily accented English would not stir suspicions, Slavine set out on a pilgrimage to the machine-tool centers of the United States. From city to city he made his way, buying up drill presses, lathes, grinders, borers in his new role as a scrap-metal dealer. Some machines whose only function was producing munitions had already been broken down as required by American law and their parts widely scattered. To find the parts he was not able to purchase, Slavine organized a team of scavengers who scoured the nation's junkyards. As each machine was bought, it was shipped back to Slavine's headquarters, an abandoned dairy plant at 2000 Park Avenue.

  By the time his prodigious purchasing mission was finished, Slavine had acquired the machinery to mount a daily production of fifty thousand rifle or machine-gun bullets, the machine tools needed to perform the 1,500 operations necessary for assembly-line production of a machine gun, and equipment to manufacture 81-millimeter mortar shells. Bought by weight at its value as scrap metal, that mass of machinery had cost Slavine $2 million. In terms of what such machinery had cost new only months before, its value was over $70 million.

  Shipping it back to Palestine was an enormous problem. Its bulk was so tremendous that Yehuda Arazi's tactic of stuffing a few bits and pieces into a steam boiler was hopelessly outmoded. After devoting all his skill and patience to assembling his machines in his dairy, Slavine set about stripping them down to the last nut and bolt. When he had finished, 75,000 pieces of machinery had been scattered about the dairy floor. Slavine personally classified each piece according to a code he invented. Then, chosen at random, the bits and pieces were mixed up and crated for shipment to Palestine under an official import permit for thirty-five tons of textile machinery taken out in the name of an imaginary Arab manufacturer. So completely had the pieces been scrambled that only an engineering genius could have detected the real nature of the machines at a customs inspection. Crate by crate, they were slipped past British customs, their passage occasionally expedited by a well-placed bribe.*

  By the night when the United Nations had voted to partition Palestine, those crates were safely hidden in kibbutzim throughout Palestine, waiting to be unpacked and assembled. The long delay between the vote and the date the British would actually leave Palestine posed a dilemma for the Jewish leadership. Should they assemble Slavine's equipment immediately so as to have it in full production by the time of the British departure, at the risk of having the British discover and confiscate it? Or should they keep it safely hidden until the British had gone, knowing that it would not be in production when they would need it most, in the first weeks of their state's life?

  Finally the risks of losing it seemed too great. For the engineer who had envisaged an arms industry in a Tel Aviv café, that decision postponed the proudest moment of a lifetime. When the last of his machines was finally assembled and operating, Haim Slavine would be able to boast that he had not lost a single bolt, a single screw, a single washer in shipping 75,000 pieces of machinery from his New York dairy plant to the kibbutzim of Israel.

  5

  TWO PEOPLES, TWO ARMIES

  NO JEW IN PALESTINE awaited the arms Ehud Avriel had been sent to Europe to purchase more anxiously than Israel Amir, commander of the Jerusalem Haganah. In Jerusalem, as everywhere else, the Haganah's shortage of arms was a crippling problem. Jerusalem's pitiful little arsenal was squirreled away
in two dozen slicks,* secret caches, scattered around the city, their whereabouts known to only one man on Amir's staff—his arms expert, a Yemenite cheesemaker. They were toted around the city by Amir's girl soldiers, the parts tucked into bras or girdles or strapped between their legs. There were more men than weapons and sometimes, it seemed, as many types of arms as there were potential users.

  Eight days after the partition vote, thanks, as Amir would later recall, to "a little planning and a lot of confusion," the Jerusualem Haganah had mobilized five hundred men on a full-time basis. Instant soldiers, those men had been plucked from civilian life with a phone call, a message on a scrap of paper or a whispered order on a street corner.

  Amir assembled them in the Jewish high school of Rehavia. He held some there as a reserve for his Home Guard, composed of older, less trained men. The rest he stationed in exposed neighborhoods or in mixed quarters where trouble was likely to break out. In dark-olive corduroy trousers and old work shirts, they took up posts on rooftops, in gardens, behind doorways and windows, surveying every incident, studying the comings and goings of the population, following the movements of strangers. With a girl beside them they patrolled the sidewalks like loitering lovers, the girl hiding a pistol under her blouse.

  Netanel Lorch, who had thought "dancing is for the innocents" on Partition Night, was sent to the ultra-religious quarter of Mea Shearim with twenty boys and six girls. He classified his girls according to the size of the weapon they could smuggle. The range went from a pistol carrier up to a girl so big she could, Lorch thought, have smuggled him a field gun—if only he had had a field gun to smuggle. The presence of the boys and girls together in one small apartment outraged the moral dignity of the conservative religious community. Lorch finally had to set up two guard systems, one to protect him from a nearby British police station, the other to protect him from Mea Shearim's angry rabbis.