O Jerusalem!

by Larry Collins

  Eliyahu Arbel, another of Amir's officers, also ran into the conservatism of those religious communities. After an exhausting argument with a rabbi who wanted a written guarantee that his students would not fight on the Sabbath, Arbel threw up his hands. "Look," he said, "if you really want that pledge, it's the Arabs who'll have to give it to you, not I."

  The task of forming a new battalion fell to Shalom Dror, a soft-spoken German Jew with the girth of a stevedore. To equip his nonexistent battalion, he sent girl soldiers to take up a door-to-door collection for blankets, cots, clothes and utensils. To feed his first recruits, he printed up a series of meal tickets for use in the neighborhood restaurants. For most of his manpower he turned to the white stone buildings of Hebrew University, set in a grove of pines on the heights of Mount Scopus dominating the northwestern approaches of the city. That university was a lodestone for some of the most capable youth in Palestine. It had also become a magnet attracting Jewish youth from all over the world. The Haganah now turned to some of those young men to bear witness to the solidarity of the world Jewish community in the coming struggle for Jerusalem.

  Bobby Reisman should not have been at Hebrew University at all. He really wanted to be at the Sorbonne in Paris. A businessman's son from Buffalo, New York, Reisman had served with the 101st Airborne in World War II until a wound ended his military career. After the war he had decided to go to Paris to study on the G.I. Bill, but en route, a friend had persuaded Bobby to go instead to Jerusalem because he was sure they would speak English at the university there. To their dismay, the two discovered on their arrival that at Hebrew University they spoke Hebrew, not English. His friend left, but Bobby stayed, studying philosophy and, before long, a dark-haired sabra named Leah. By December 1947, they were married, living in a room of a student boardinghouse in Bet Hakerem.

  Stretched out on his bed one night, Reisman heard a rustling of paper. It was a note being slid under his door. He picked it up. The note was in Hebrew, a language he still could not read. He passed it to his wife. She read it silently. Then she lowered it and looked at him for a long and thoughtful instant. It was an invitation, she said, an invitation to join the Haganah.

  Reisman sank wordlessly back onto his bed. He had not come to this land to fight. He had had all the war he ever wanted in Europe. Yet he could feel the dark eyes of his wife watching him, waiting for his answer. A few feet away, under a pile of clothes in their bureau, was a small pistol, the badge of her own membership in the organization. He looked into her waiting eyes, and as he did he knew he could not be a spectator in his wife's war. "All right," he sighed, "I'll do it."

  Carmi Charny's situation was just the opposite. Carmi desperately wanted the Haganah; the problem was, the Haganah didn't want Carmi. Carmi had been born next to the Bronx Zoo on New Year's Eve 1925, the son of a rabbi. Like his father, he had been destined for the rabbinate. In the Bronx of the depression, that meant a bleak and cheerless life of study. Carmi paid the price. He grew up shy, introspective, frail. With his thick glasses, his pale sensitive face, his stooped shoulders, he was every neighborhood bully's idea of the helpless Jew, the target on which to show off one's fists by the corner drugstore. Carmi took his solace in the dreams of the Land of Zion that rose from his texts and the poems he wrote in Hebrew, a language he had mastered before he was an adolescent. After the war, as naturally as if he were getting on the downtown subway, he boarded the S.S. Marine Carp, leaving behind forever the crowded tenements of the Bronx, and set out for the land to which he had felt himself destined since childhood.

  Since his arrival in Jerusalem he had tried to enlist in the Haganah. The pale, scholarly Carmi, however, was not the kind of recruit the Haganah was looking for. Finally, thanks to a girl friend who belonged, Carmi found himself in the darkened basement of Rehavia High School, sitting opposite three men whose faces he could not see. When they had finished questioning him, he was taken into a cell-like chamber. On a table before him were two candles, a Bible and a pistol. A projector cut through the blackness, drenching him in light. Carmi could feel in the darkness beyond the projector the presence of other men watching. He placed one hand on the Bible, the other on the cold pistol butt, the metallic embodiment of his schoolboy's visions. Shivering with emotion, the frail rabbi's son from the Bronx swore, by the "supreme conscience of Zionism," his allegiance to the underground army of the Haganah.

  By that brief and memorable ceremony a generation of Palestinians had entered the organization that was the common denominator of their existence. Known by its code name "The Aunt," the Haganah was tightly woven into every structure of the community to which it belonged. Aware of the numerical superiority of the Arabs, the Haganah from its beginning had accepted women on an equal footing with men. It had spawned its own youth organization, the Gadna, which under the cover of Girl Scout and Boy Scout troops prepared youngsters for Haganah service. As a result, by the time the United Nations decided to partition Palestine the majority of Palestine's Jewish youth had been exposed to some form of Haganah training.

  For some like Netanel Lorch, Haganah service was a tradition passed from father to son. His first exposure to the organization came carrying bullets in the lining of his schoolboy's jacket to his Haganah soldier father during the Arab uprising in 1936. For others, the swearing in ceremony at sixteen was a kind of temporal bar mitzvah, a symbolic step toward Palestinian manhood. For still others, victims of Nazi persecution, the Haganah underground in Europe represented a first contact with Palestine.

  The Haganah's primary rule was secrecy. There were no photographs, and written records were held to a minimum. Its training centers were in the basements of Jewish institutions, usually schools or trade-union clubs. Protected by a triple tier of guards, members met once a week to practice judo, learn to break down weapons, climb ropes, burst into houses, jump from moving cars, always ready at any hint of a British raid to convert themselves into studious schoolboys or card-playing workers. Then they served an apprenticeship carrying messages or tracking the movements of key Arab and British figures. Finally they began field training two or three days a month, usually in some remote wadi reached by a punishing march under the sun, where the wastes of the desert might muffle the crack of a rifle shot. Oranges and potatoes stuffed with detonators served as dummy hand grenades. So desperately short was ammunition that the most solemn moment in a recruit's rifle course often came when he was given a single round to fire as a kind of graduation present. In the summer, disguised as extra field hands, Haganah units were sent out to kibbutzim for two weeks or a month's advanced training. Guerrilla tactics and the night fighting the Arabs loathed became their specialties. The Haganah command even managed to install, despite British surveillance, a two-month officers' course, processing one hundred and fifty men at a time at an experimental agricultural station in the Valley of Jezreel. The texts that inspired that course were culled from a collection of little red books patiently pilfered from the barracks of the mandatory power, the training manuals of the British Army.

  By the Second World War, the Haganah had an embryonic general staff, its members scattered around Tel Aviv, in the Housing Bureau of the Histadrut trade union, an architect's office, a bank, the office of an importer of agricultural machinery, the Water Supply Bureau. Its few archives were locked in an underground hideaway built into the foundations of a Tel Aviv apartment building. World War II gave its men combat training. Largely at its bidding, forty-three thousand Palestinian Jews served in the war.

  Paradoxically, Jerusalem, the center of Zionist aspirations in Palestine, had never been fertile ground for the Haganah. British surveillance had been stricter there than elsewhere. Urban youth simply did not respond to the Haganah with the fervor of kibbutz youth. Jerusalem's orthodox communities were often indifferent or even hostile to its aims.

  Yet in Jerusalem, as elsewhere in Palestine, it was one of the principal motors of Jewish society. More than its training courses, more than its organization, more t
han any of its clandestine accomplishments, the real strength of the Haganah lay in the spirit it had engendered among the Jews of Palestine. Egalitarian yet individualistic, organized yet guided by an agile sense of improvisation, the Haganah was an accurate reflection of the community it sought to defend. The best young men produced by the Jewish return to Palestine unhesitatingly provided its leadership. By their example, they had given the Haganah a tradition of sacrifice and service to which Carmi Charny had bound himself laying his hands on a Bible and a pistol in the darkened basement of Rehavia High School.

  No comparable tradition animated Jerusalem's Arab community. Young males of the Arab bourgeoisie who had had any systematic exposure to arms or military training were rare. Such activities had been traditionally disdained by the Arab bourgeoisie, who left to other classes the tasks of soldiery. When Hazem Nusseibi the young radio editor and his neighbors discovered there was not even a pistol in their dozen villas near the road to Mount Scopus, their reaction was typical. Each rushed to the souks to buy a firearm from the illegal gun merchants flourishing there, driving even higher their already inflated prices. Then Nusseibi led a neighborhood delegation to the offices of the Arab Higher Committee, seeking protection. After a long session of haggling interspersed with cups of coffee, the committee agreed to furnish them ten peasant riflemen from a village in Samaria for the fee of ten Palestine pounds per man per month.

  In Upper Beqaa, a middle-class community south of the railroad station, three brothers, George, Raymond and Gaby Deeb, sons of Jerusalem's Buick dealer, set out to form a home guard. From Upper Beqaa's five thousand inhabitants they were able to raise barely seventy-five volunteers. Most of the families found an excuse to keep their sons and husbands out of its ranks. Some of the neighborhood's wealthier merchants sent their sons to school in Beirut or Amman to keep them out of the force.

  Resigned, the Deebs filled out the ranks of their home guard from the only source of manpower available in Jerusalem, the armed bands of the Mufti. For the going rate of ten pounds a man a month, they hired twenty-eight men from a village in the north. They housed them in the neighborhood's garages and attics and fed them out of its kitchens. To lead their mercenaries the Deebs hired a former police sergeant with a rasping voice, a quick temper and a fondness for Scotch whiskey, named Abou Khalil Genno.

  The colorful Genno and his band soon became a nightmare for the Deebs and their neighbors. The accidental explosion of a hand grenade caused the first casualties in the neighborhood, and the mercenaries seemed to spend as much time searching abandoned houses for liquor as they did on guard. A leaping cat, an unusual noise, a probing shot from a Jewish post was usually enough to unleash a wild burst of their fire, terrifying with indiscriminate equality the Arabs of Upper Beqaa and their Jewish neighbors.

  Those wild bursts of gunfire expressed, to a certain degree, the mentality of the Arab villagers. For them, the possession of a firearm was as sure a proof of its owner's masculinity as his first male heir. Part weapon, part plaything, it was used to mark weddings, funerals and village feasts with a copious barrage of noise and lead. From that upbringing came a natural familiarity with arms but a tendency to fire off ammunition recklessly that was markedly different from the habits inculcated in their Jewish foes, to whom each cartridge was a minor treasure.

  Often only a generation or two removed from the Bedouin existence, those villagers were frequently men of real courage endowed with an instinctive capacity for the ambush and the guerrilla raid. Properly led, they could be a ferocious adversary, and it was from their ranks that the Mufti had always drawn his most faithful followers. His Jerusalem representatives had tried to group their clans into a coherent force capable of becoming the Arab answer to the Haganah. Haj Amin himself had recently officially baptized the organization the Jihad Moquades, the Holy War Strugglers. Its members, like the young Jews of the Haganah, were taken secretly to the woods and wadis to learn to operate the astonishing variety of weapons the war had left scattered throughout Palestine. Like the Haganah, it had a youth group, called the Futweh, to funnel to it young recruits.

  What the Mufti's men took to be an operational force, however, was in fact just an improvised paramilitary organization thrown over Palestine's village and tribal structures. Chained to the villages which sustained it, its members ignorant of anything except elemental military techniques, its command structure based on clan and family rather than ability, it was an ill-disciplined force of limited effectiveness.

  Above all, the prime requisite for membership was allegiance to the Mufti, and it was the clans, tribes and villages whose loyalty was already well established that were called on to furnish its manpower. Unlike the Haganah with its deep roots in the Jewish community, the Mufti's warriors were a kind of private army whose function was as much to remind Palestine's Arab community who their leader was as it was to fight the Jews.

  Mediocre at its best, abysmal at its worst, its leadership was barely literate, more suited to uttering threats at their Jewish neighbors than to leading their men in the field. Their chief was a forty-two-year-old inspector in the Palestine police force, the scion of an old Jerusalem family, named Kamal Irekat. He had a professionally fierce scowl, a Pancho Villa moustache, burning black eyes and a predilection to be photographed in front of his men in riding breeches and a flowing Arab headdress. Irekat had achieved the dubious distinction of being the first Arab leader to vow to "throw the Jews into the sea."

  These glaring shortcomings in their social and military structures did not unduly alarm the Arabs of Jerusalem. They knew that in Palestine they belonged to a community twice as large as that of the Jews. They had, in the Middle East, far more access to arms than the Jews. With their strategically situated villages ringing Jerusalem, they had the advantage of superior terrain.

  More than anything else, however, they believed that the key to their salvation lay elsewhere. For weeks, the radio and press of the Arab capitals around them had been assuring the Arabs of Palestine that their plight was the plight of all the Arabs. Never would their Arab neighbors allow Palestine to fall to the Jews. As once the warriors of Omar and Saladin, they would come to the rescue of their brothers in Palestine and with their artillery, their aviation and their armor rescue them by the force of Arab arms.

  6

  "WE WILL STRANGLE JERUSALEM."

  AS THEY HAD every night all during the week of December 1947, crowds gathered along Cairo's main street, the Kash el Nil, to stare up at the lights blazing from the palace of Kamal Adin Husseini, office of the Egyptian Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Their charcoal braziers glowing in the mid-December dusk, the street vendors wandered among them selling grilled watermelon seeds and ears of freshly roasted corn. In the palace, under a bank of Aubusson tapestries, eight angry men, the objects of the crowd's curiosity, argued around a rectangular table in the main salon.

  Seven of those men represented the seven nations of the Arab League—Egypt, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Yemen, Lebanon, Transjordan; the eighth was the secretary general of their organization. Prime ministers or foreign ministers of their nations, they were the leaders upon whose pledges the Arabs of Palestine were counting for their deliverance. They represented a potentially impressive force. Together, the men gathered in the salons of the Egyptian Foreign Ministry ruled some forty-five million people spread over three million square miles, an entity thirty times more populous and two hundred times larger than Palestine. Under their desert wastes lay the world's most important proven reserves of petroleum. They had at their command five regular armies, three of them, in Iraq, Egypt and Transjordan, of some importance.

  Bound together by common ties of language, history and religion, they offered a deceptive appearance of strength and solidarity. Two nations, Syria and Lebanon, were French-style republics. Three, Saudi Arabia, Yemen and Jordan, were quasi-feudal kingdoms evolved from desert tribal patterns. Two, Egypt and Iraq, had constitutional monarchies of British inspiration.

 
They were riven by rivalries: the historic rivalry between Cairo and Baghdad, dating to the caliphs; modern, economically inspired rivalries between oil-rich Saudi Arabia and her poorer neighbors; tribal, national and personal rivalries such as those that led Syria to covet Lebanon, and Iraq, Syria and their leaders to indulge in a continual conspiracy for preeminence in their fractured society.

  For four years those leaders had vied with each other in the extremism of their declarations on Palestine, turning the issue into the yardstick by which an Arab politician's patriotism might be measured, encouraging with their extravagant threats the unbending stance of Palestine's Arabs. "The United Nations," Lebanon's Riad Solh had boasted, "will have to station a foreign soldier in front of every Jew in Palestine to make their state work."

  Now the time had come to start translating their bellicose threats into action. For a long and clamorous week they had argued in this room, their debates revealing what they all well knew: that a considerable gap lay between their public threats and their private sentiments. The nobility of sentiment with which some of them proclaimed their bonds to their Palestine brothers was limited by the covetous regard they themselves cast upon that ancient land. For them, action in Palestine would be undertaken with an eye to its effect on their own rivalries and conflicting interests. Disdainful of their foes, they did not feel the need for sacrifice and strain to prepare themselves for a showdown with the Zionists.

  Night after night, in the position of honor reserved for the delegate of the host country, Egypt's Prime Minister Mahmoud Nokrashy Pasha had reiterated his stand: he was prepared to send to Palestine arms and money, but not the force the men around him clamored for, the Egyptian Army. Proud of their pharaonic heritage, Nokrashy's countrymen tended to regard their Arab neighbors with a somewhat patronizing air, and few Egyptians were deeply concerned by the Palestine problem. Palestine was assigned a secondary role in the Egyptian press.