O Jerusalem!

by Larry Collins

  Behind Nokrashy's attitude was Egypt's conflict with Britain over the Suez Canal. Without Britain's accord he felt he could not commit his army to a struggle in which his lines of communication would have to pass through the British-controlled canal zone.

  Next to Nokrashy was the representative of the wealthiest nation in the Arab world, Prince Faisal of Saudi Arabia. His father was a legendary warrior, an old-style desert caliph who could slit a rival's throat with his own hands or welcome him with the elaborate courtesy of his Bedouin upbringing. He had established his kingdom by driving from Arabia the family that ruled two of the nations sharing the table with Faisal, the Hashemites of Iraq and Jordan.

  An able and soft-spoken diplomat, Faisal was the antithesis of the public's image of an Arab prince. Scion of the blood in a land in which a man's rank might be measured by the size of his harem, Faisal had had one wife all his life and lived as frugally as any New England banker serving up his codfish cakes with a homily on thrift. The persistent pain of the stomach ulcer he nursed with the milk of an ass had creased his face and darkened his melancholy eyes until, peering out from under the hood of his black-and-gold abayah, he seemed the incarnation of some mournful El Greco Christ.

  His father's wish to die at the head of his troops in Palestine was a noble sentiment, but not a particularly helpful one. Ibn-Saud didn't have any troops worth speaking of. What he did have was oil, and the threat that stopping its flow represented in the West, particularly in the United States. Each time his son had been urged to cut the flow of that oil—and the revenues it produced—as Saudi Arabia's contribution to the conflict, his reply had been, "The problem is Palestine, not petroleum."

  Opposite Faisal was the representative of the man who ruled Iraq as surely as Faisal's father ruled Saudi Arabia, Nuri as-Said Pasha. He had ridden with Lawrence and had chosen since 1917 to cast his destiny with the British he so admired. Short, stubby, with a little white Chaplinesque moustache, Nuri Pasha was given to tweed suits, the striped ties of his numerous London clubs, and, with the onset of age, a growing deafness to noise and advice he did not like. He was above all a prodigious manipulator of men. No officer in Nuri Pasha's army, no politician in his government, no merchant or landlord in his nation acquired a new mistress, a late-blooming taste for camel boys or a disproportionate slice of baksheesh without that fact coming to Nuri Pasha's attention for use at some propitious moment in the future. Those tactics had earned Nuri Pasha few friends; but they had provided him with a host of devoted followers.

  No Arab leader was more ready to do the Jews verbal violence than Nuri Pasha. But, while he was reviling them publicly, he had been whispering to his friends in the British Foreign Office that he would accommodate their state if the price of his agreement were British support for his annexing Syria to Iraq and realizing his dream of a fertile Arab crescent from the Mediterranean to the Persian Gulf.

  Nuri Pasha's representative at the conference had put forward a plan designed to stall for time. Wait until the British left Palestine, he counseled; then the Arab armies, with Iraq's at their head, would sweep to Tel Aviv. His suggestion had raised more suspicion than support. Nuri Pasha's rivals saw in all his moves the hand of the British, and they suspected that his proposal was designed as much to use his army to extend British influence into Palestine as it was to shatter plans for a Jewish state.

  His maroon fez cocked at its usual jaunty angle, a broad smile accenting his prominent cheekbones, Riad Solh, representative of the smallest country at the table, Lebanon, was the foremost advocate of an immediate guerrilla campaign in Palestine. He spoke with considerable authority. He was the architect of Lebanon's proudest claim, that of being the first Arab country to win its independence from the West. Six times Solh had been condemned to death by the French and Turkish occupants of his country. On the day he became an independent Lebanon's first prime minister, he could look back on half a lifetime spent in jail or exile. He had himself already made his personal contribution to the conflict, a gesture of a dimension appropriate to the land he represented in Cairo. Over his wife's furious objections, he had helped convert his next-door neighbor's print shop into a miniature arms plant to make bullets for the Palestinians.

  Beside Solh sat his close friend and political ally, a gentleman farmer whose passionate devotion to Arab independence had earned him too half a lifetime in jail or exile. Syria's Jamil Mardam had, in fact, been one of the first members of the Al Fatat secret society founded to win Arab independence from Ottoman Turkey before World War I. He too was a passionate advocate of opening an immediate guerrilla campaign in Palestine. Under Syrian guidance he hoped it would provide a means to counterbalance the influence and ambitions of his rivals in Iraq.

  At the center of the table, nervously clicking his amber worry beads between his fingers, Abdurrahman Azzam Pasha, the secretary general of the Arab League, had striven all week to ride herd on the divergent opinions and personalities gathered around him. A lean, courtly man with a soft voice and a receding chin, he was, despite his title, a revolutionary. While Lawrence had led the Arabs against the Turks, Azzam, aided by the Turks, had led his own uprising against Egypt's British overlords. He was surely the first Arab to appeal for Soviet aid for the Arab cause, asking Lenin for assistance in his rebellion the day news of the October Revolution reached Constantinople.

  Now on the table before him was a four-page memorandum. Stamped "SECRET," it was largely the product of Azzam's patient efforts to effect a compromise between the viewpoints represented in the salon of the Egyptian Foreign Office. Slowly Azzam began to read it to the men around him.

  The first paragraph represented the very essence of the problem that had brought them to Cairo. "The Arab League," it proclaimed, "is resolved to prevent the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine and to conserve Palestine as a united, independent state."

  The secretary general looked up. He well knew that at least three men at the table around him had grave reservations about committing themselves to that course of action, and an even graver reluctance to pay the price to carry it out. A week of debate had revealed neither the conviction nor the coordination the Arabs would need to realize such a resolution. As they had debated, however, they had released a daily stream of belligerent communiqués. As had happened so often in the past, as would happen so often in the future, Arab leaders were unable to avoid the consequences of their own careless rhetoric. In a chorus, the men at the table gave their approval to the resolution.

  Azzam continued. The countries around the table were to furnish to the League, on a predetermined basis, ten thousand rifles, three thousand volunteers and one million pounds sterling to provide an immediate beginning for guerrilla operations in Palestine, as Mardam and Solh had insisted. Then, with a glance at Nuri as-Said's representative, Azzam read a last clause. The League, it said, would assign to a fifty-two-year-old Iraqi general, a veteran of the Turkish Dardanelles campaign, the responsibility of preparing a plan for the coordinated intervention of the Arab armies in Palestine.

  Hanging over the debate of the Arab League leaders had been the image of the soft-spoken, red-bearded leader who stood at the very center of the Palestine drama, Haj Amin Husseini. He had followed their meeting with zealous attention from the cluster of stone villas in suburban Cairo in which he had installed his headquarters. One by one, each of the men assembled in Cairo had made his discreet pilgrimage to that headquarters to confer with Haj Amin. He had received them all under an enormous photograph of Jerusalem, his gold pocket watch hanging on a chain around his neck, urging on them the course of action he himself sought.

  Haj Amin did not want their Arab armies in Palestine. With armies, he knew, went authority, and he had no intention of sharing his authority in Palestine with anyone, above all his rivals who commanded the armies of Iraq and Jordan. His aim was to build up his own guerrilla forces so that they could defeat the Jews without outside help.

  The League's decisions suited him well. His g
oal now was to get control of the arms, the money and the volunteers they had called for, and to have guerrilla operations in Palestine placed under his supreme command. To justify such a claim, he was sending to Palestine as his hand-picked field commander the most able fighter his rebellion against the British in 1936 had produced. In a few days he would leave Cairo, ordered to carry out a follower's boast that the Mufti had adopted as his own: to "drive the Jews into the sea."

  Two candles, one at either end of the plain wooden desk, lit the room. Behind the desk, the white wisps of his hair glowing in the candlelight, David Ben-Gurion stared at the knot of men seated before him. No curious crowds had watched their coming as one by one they had made their way to their secret rendezvous in a Jewish high school in the suburbs of Jerusalem.

  They were the city's Haganah commanders. Ben-Gurion had summoned them to this meeting because he was convinced that it was here in Jerusalem that the Jews of Palestine faced their gravest trial in the months ahead. Isolated, depending for its existence on one exposed highway, Jerusalem was the Achilles' heel of the Yishuv, the Jewish settlement, the one place where all Ben-Gurion's hopes could be shattered by a single, decisive blow.

  Looking at the faces peering at him through the candlelight, he solemnly warned that if the Arabs could lock Jerusalem into their stranglehold, "they can end us, and our state will be finished before it is born."

  After that grim preamble, he turned his thoughts to the wider aspects of the struggle. It was the measure of the Jewish leader's genius that on that December evening, while the leaders of the Arab League were completing their debate in Cairo, he had already perceived what the Arab leaders themselves had not yet fully comprehended, the climax to which their entangling skein of rhetoric would inevitably force them.

  "It is time," he told the men before him, "to start planning for a war against five Arab armies."

  His words fell on them like a gust of winter wind. Some were incredulous.

  "Do you think the Arabs of Jenin are going to attack us in tanks?" someone asked, half laughing. To Eliyahu Arbel, the former Czech officer in charge of Haganah planning in Jerusalem, it seemed fantastic: "Ben-Gurion was talking about planning a war against five Arab armies and we were still being arrested by the British for carrying a pistol down the street."

  Ben-Gurion persisted. He never made the mistake of underestimating his foes. Nothing could menace his people more than a concerted attack on them by five Arab armies. But if Ben-Gurion did not underestimate his foes, he did not overestimate them, either. He knew their tendency to believe their extravagant boasts, to accept rhetoric as reality, to prepare themselves for a trial with speeches rather than sacrifice. Their threat of war presented to his people a terrible menace; but it also presented them a great opportunity.

  The United Nations partition of Palestine had not been a really satisfactory solution from his point of view, but it had been one with which he could live. The internationalization of Jerusalem had left its ache in Ben-Gurion's heart, as it had in the heart of almost every Jew. The long and tortured frontiers assigned to the Jewish state were a military catastrophe. Some Jewish leaders favored fighting to expand the area assigned to the Jewish state, regardless of what the Arabs did. Ben-Gurion and a majority of the Jewish Agency Executive were opposed to their ideas.

  If the Arab states insisted on going to war, however, the situation would change. Then the frontiers of their state would not be the boundaries assigned them by the United Nations, but those they could seize and hold by force of arms in the Arabs' war.

  Ben-Gurion had often seen Arab intransigence inadvertently become the handmaiden of Zionist aspirations, "helping us by attacking us, helping us make important achievements we otherwise might have missed." The first Arab attacks on their settlements had forced Palestine's reluctant Jewish landlords to begin employing Jewish labor. Arab attacks on Jews in Jaffa had led to the establishment of Tel Aviv. The Arabs' refusal to allow the survivors of Hitler's death camps into Palestine had led to world backing for a Jewish state. But the greatest error the Arabs could make on their behalf, Ben-Gurion thought, would be refusing the United Nations' decision. That "would change everything for us," he thought. That would give his people "the right to get what we could." From that moment on, what their state would be would depend on arms, and not the United Nations decision.

  Across the Jordan River from Jerusalem, beyond the dark ridge lines of the mountains of Moab, an enigmatic Arab sovereign sat, as he did every night, in the sitting room of his palace overlooking the eastern edge of Amman and pondered the problem on a chessboard. King Abdullah ibn-Hussein el Hashimi was an accomplished chess player. His favorite piece was the unpredictable knight, and the tactics he preferred in that game paralleled those he had used to arrive at his current station in life: subtlety, indirection and surprise.

  The kingdom over which he ruled this December evening was three-quarters desert. It contained barely half a million people, and its national budget, before British subsidies, was a million and a half pounds sterling. From that sparse domain, however, had sprung the pieces Abdullah could move on the chessboard of the Middle East: the men of its only truly professional army, the army David Ben-Gurion feared above all the others, the Arab Legion.

  Yet, paradoxically, no Arab leader understood Ben-Gurion better than the monarch who commanded that army. Abdullah was the only Arab chieftain who had had any real contact with the Jews of Palestine over the past decade. The electric current which illuminated for this descendant of the Prophet the verses of his Koran at dawn each day was furnished by a Jewish power plant in the northwestern tip of his kingdom. On the eve of the U.N.'s partition vote he had had a cordial and secret meeting with Golda Meir in the home of the power plant's director. The two had agreed that their common enemy was the Mufti and to maintain contact with each other. He frequently called on his Jewish neighbors for advice and technical help. Abdullah had, in fact, tended to regard the Jewish return as a return of one Semitic people persecuted in the West to aid another Semitic people whose development of their ancient homeland had been held back by a Western institution, colonialism.

  The realistic little monarch harbored no illusions of the Arabs' chances of thwarting partition. Unlike the Mufti, who tended to think of the Jews of Palestine in terms of the pale rabbinical students of Mea Shearim fleeing before his bullies' clubs, or the Syrians and Iraqis who judged them by their own peaceful Jewish communities, Abdullah well knew the vigor and capacity that lay behind their settlement.

  The short, cherubic monarch had only the deepest scorn for his fellow leaders of the Arab League wrangling in Cairo. The League he characterized as "a sack into which seven heads have been thrust." He despised Egyptians in general and King Farouk in particular. "You do not make a gentleman of a Balkan farmer's son simply by making him a king," he liked to remark. The Syrians, whose land he coveted, he considered a cantankerous and quarrelsome people. A natural hatred had flourished between Abdullah and the Mufti of Jerusalem since their first meeting in 1921. "My father," Abdullah continually reminded his followers, "always told me to beware of preachers."

  The life of the pale, fragile monarch had been an unending series of frustrations. It was he who had first whispered the words "Arab rebellion" to the British in 1914. But T. E. Lawrence had preferred to confide the rebellion's leadership to his more malleable younger brother, and its glory had passed Abdullah by. The Saudis had driven him and his family from their ancient throne by the Red Sea. The dusty kingdom he ruled had been lopped off Palestine by Winston Churchill and tendered to him as a consolation prize when the French drove his brother Feisal from Damascus. To add to the indignity, Churchill would often boast: "I created Transjordan with a stroke of a pen on a Sunday afternoon in Cairo."

  Its inhabitants had welcomed their new emir to his domains with a barrage of eggs and tomatoes, and for years his residence had been a Bedouin tent on the hilltop overlooking Amman where his palace now stood. It was not until 193
4, when the British suddenly rediscovered Abdullah tucked away in his little emirate and decided to build him up as a counterweight to the troublesome Mufti, that his fortunes began to rise.

  Those had been trying years for Abdullah, for, above all else, he burned with ambitions: the ambition to avenge his humiliated family, to hold sway over a domain worthy of his proud ancestry. He was, in the words of one of his contemporaries, "a falcon trapped in a canary's cage, longing to break out, to realize his dreams and passions of being a great Arab leader; but there he was, pinned up in the cage of Transjordan by the British."

  Now, perhaps, partition offered him the chance that had been denied him for a quarter of a century, the chance to get out of that cage, to become the leader he longed to be, to obtain a kingdom to the measure of his ambition and his heritage. Abdullah longed for the sacred city beyond the mountains of Moab, Jerusalem. With Jerusalem he would gain international stature for himself, and for his Hashemite kin a return to the central role in Islam from which the Saudis had cast them. Without it he was condemned to remain what he was, the inconsequential sovereign of a lot of sand.

  As carefully as if he were shifting the pieces on his chessboard, Abdullah thought through the moves that might lead him to his goal. One December morning, while, in Cairo, the Arab League colleagues he so despised talked their way through another of their meetings, he pushed forward his first pawn. Shortly before noon, his hand-picked Prime Minister called at a modest residence not far from the King's palace. It was the home of Britain's jovial and distinguished resident minister in Transjordan, Sir Alec Kirkbride.