"You can't do that," she announced.
"I can't?" asked the major.
The woman was not to be put off. She demanded the major's card. Like a proper Englishman, he drew it from his pocket and handed it to her. Behind his back, a few of his men began to snicker. Despite her heated protests, the search continued.
Finally the major said, "O.K., the bus can go."
"Wait a minute," said Golda Meir. "What about the girl in the car over there?" The car had carried the Haganah escort of the Jerusalem-Tel Aviv bus on which Golda was a passenger. The British had captured one of its occupants, a girl, and a Sten gun.
Golda Meir's intervention had been more than just a personal protest. The situation on the Jerusalem–Tel Aviv road was one of her major political concerns. Given Jerusalem's importance, its international stature, the planners of the Haganah had assumed the British would keep its vital road link to the sea open as long as they remained in Palestine. The Haganah's definition of an open road and that of the British Army had turned out to be two different things, however. For Britain's army commander, Sir Gordon MacMillan, an open highway was one on which his convoys could pass unmolested.
Sensing the nuance, the Arabs allowed British patrols and convoys to pass unscathed, saving their fire for Jewish vehicles. On behalf of the Jewish Agency, Golda had demanded British police escorts for their convoys, arguing that Britain remained responsible for security on the roads. The British had finally agreed, but at a price: they insisted on the right to control the convoys' contents to prevent the Haganah from bringing arms and men into Jerusalem. Since that was one of their principal tasks, the Agency had started instead to place Haganah guards on them. In return, the British had begun to search the convoys for arms, a move infuriating to the Agency, where it was thought English energies might be put to better use preventing Arab ambushes.
Finally Golda Meir had wrung from Sir Henry Gurney, the government's Chief Secretary, a reluctant agreement to end the searches. Now, having found that the agreement was not being carried out, she got a second unpleasant surprise. The British major announced that he was taking his girl prisoner to a police station deep in Arab territory. Golda shuddered.
"In that case," she declared, "I'm going with you."
Irritated, the major told her, "You can't do that. I'll have to arrest you."
"That, young man, is precisely what I want you to do," Golda snapped, and climbed onto the seat beside the arrested girl.
The two women, thanks to her insistence, were finally taken to a Jewish police station. The British desk sergeant on duty noted down the details of their case. Then he asked Golda her name. "Oh, my God!" he sighed softly on hearing it, and clapped his hands to his head.
A few minutes later, a chief inspector arrived to offer her a drink and a safe passage to Tel Aviv in his armored car. At the outskirts of Tel Aviv she motioned the inspector to stop. "It is you who are in danger now," she said, and climbed down from the car. As the inspector started to back away, Golda remembered that it was December 31, 1947, and that for her English escort a New Year was about to begin. Turning, she cupped her hands before her mouth and cried "Happy New Year!" to the unknown British policeman.
Then she strode briskly off toward Tel Aviv.
The new year opening before the inhabitants of Jerusalem would be the most turbulent of modern times. No calling, not even that whose traditional role was easing the suffering of men, would be spared its ramifications.
At high noon one day, three Arab gunmen stepped from behind a clump of bushes at the Arabic Beit Safafa Hospital and murdered Dr. Hugo Lehrs, a physician who despite the pleas of his Jewish colleagues had refused to abandon his Arab patients. Hearing the news minutes later on the Palestine radio, Dr. Mikhail Malouf, the Bethlehem psychiatrist, exclaimed, "Ya Allah!" And he lamented to his wife, "This should never have happened."
At high noon the next day, the Biblical ration of vengeance, an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, was exacted on the Arab medical community. On his way to visit the inmates of a little insane asylum outside Bethlehem, Mikhail Malouf was murdered, wrapping in a new sadness the home in which a few nights before he and his wife had celebrated their melancholy Christmas together.
To not a few Jerusalemites, those opening days of the new year meant a sudden uprooting. The regrouping of the city's population sought by the tactics of the Haganah and the snipers of Haj Amin Husseini had begun. It was on the villa-covered slopes of the middle-class Arab neighborhood of Katamon that the situation deteriorated most rapidly.
Inhabited largely by Christian Arabs and a minority of well-to-do Jews, Katamon was cursed by the strategic value of its high ground and its geography. Separating the Jewish quarter of Mekor Hayim from the neighborhood of Talbiyeh, it was, for the Haganah, a kind of Arab abscess in the southern flank of the city, breaking the continuity of their settlement, providing a constant threat to Jewish Jerusalem's integrity. For the Arabs, conversely, Katamon was a valuable stronghold in enemy territory, the bridgehead from which they might one day launch the thrust that would cut Jewish Jerusalem in two. Arab gunmen regularly machine-gunned passing Jewish cars and sniped into Mekor Hayim from its rooftops.
Seeking to provoke an Arab exodus from the quarter, the Haganah had blown up eight abandoned Arab houses on its fringe New Year's Eve. That gesture, and the rifle fire sweeping through its streets, had its effect. Without further provocation, a number of Katamon's Arab bourgeoisie left the area for the safety of Beirut, Amman and Damascus. Gibrail Katoul, the civil servant who on Partition Night had seen in the United Nations vote a kind of worldwide conspiracy, was among them. Forty-eight hours before his departure, his next-door neighbor's eldest son appeared in his doorway. During the 1936 Arab rebellion, Katoul had made the armed guards he hired to protect his home swear to extend their protection to the home of his Jewish neighbor.
"Now," sighed Katoul to the neighbor's son, "it is too late. We can do nothing to help you and you can do nothing to protect us. You are in danger here in this Arab quarter. You too must leave."
Two days later, a horse cart drew up in front of the Jewish home to pick up the family's belongings. The same morning, a truck came for the carefully packed wooden cases of the Katouls. From their windows the neighbors watched the two families go, two sad little caravans, the Jews moving off in one direction, the Arabs in another.
For the second time in a month, Mishael Shacham found himself in front of the chief of staff of the Haganah in the underground army's Tel Aviv headquarters. This time the matter that had brought him there was a report from a special Haganah envoy to Jerusalem. Its implications were so grave that Yaacov Dori had decided to relieve Shacham of his transportation task for the time being and send him to Jerusalem.
The situation in the city, the report said, was deteriorating daily. Despite the Haganah's efforts, Jews were leaving the outlying areas and mixed quarters for the densely populated Jewish areas in increasing numbers. Something, Dori was convinced, had to be done immediately to stop that flow. David Ben-Gurion's order that every parcel of land had to be defended was not just a ringing phrase to rally a beleaguered people. For the Jews of Palestine, there were no Ammans, no Beiruts, no Damascuses. There was only the sea. If a psychology of abandonment were allowed to take hold of the population, the whole Jewish settlement in Palestine might simply start to unravel. Jerusalem was the first place where that problem had arisen, and it was there it had to be stopped. Dori told Shacham to go to Jerusalem immediately. With whatever tactics he wished, he was to stop the deterioration in the situation and, if possible, reverse the flow.
Within hours after getting his orders, Shacham was at Israel Amir's headquarters. Jews were now leaving new areas from which they had not previously retreated, Amir told Shacham, and were hiring British policemen to get them and their belongings out past the Mufti's gunmen.
Amir's intelligence staff believed that the only swift and effective way of altering the situation was to stri
ke a major blow inside Arab Katamon. The shock of such a mission, they held, might force the Arabs out of the quarter and change the psychological climate in the city.
"All right," said Shacham. "Where is the main Arab headquarters in Katamon?"
The Arab leadership was no less concerned than the Haganah with the fate of Katamon. The day following the Haganah's destruction of eight abandoned houses in the area, the local defense committee began to organize a home guard. More important, Abdul Khader Husseini summoned up from Hebron one of the Mufti's most faithful followers, an illiterate shepherd named Ibrahim Abou Dayieh. Abou Dayieh had distinguished himself during the 1936 revolt. Since then he had been responsible for the south of Palestine, running a little peasant army of his own in the hills around Hebron.
On Saturday, January 3, the day of Mishael Shacham's arrival in Jerusalem, Abou Dayieh, Abdul Khader and Emile Ghory prowled the streets of Katamon in a jeep, planning the disposition of the one hundred men Abou Dayieh planned to smuggle into the neighborhood on Jerusalem's No. 4 bus. At sunset, the three men stopped for tea and a conference with Katamon's leaders at a pleasant, bougainvillea-covered three-story building. Its discreetly quiet sitting room made it one of their favorite meeting places. A plaque over its stone doorway indicated its name. It was the Hotel Semiramis.
Israel Amir's intelligence staff had the answer to Mishael Shacham's question ready for the daily staff conference at 10 A.M. on Sunday, January 4. One of their Arab informers had furnished the information. There were two Arab headquarters in Katamon, he reported. One was a little boardinghouse called Claridge's. The other was the Hotel Semiramis. The informer had himself seen the sand-colored jeep of Abdul Khader Husseini parked in front of the hotel for over an hour the evening before. Shacham located the two buildings on a map of Jerusalem. Its proximity to the Jewish lines made one of the two the easier target. Looking up from his map, Shacham announced his choice—the Hotel Semiramis.
Outside, leaden ridges of cloud rolling up from the plain pushed across the Sunday morning sky, bringing the promise of a furious storm. At almost exactly the same moment Israel Amir's officers had sat down to their daily staff conference, the eighteen members of the Aboussouan family who were gathered at the Hotel Semiramis had set out for ten-o'clock mass at their little neighborhood Chapel of St. Theresa. There Samy Abousouan's pious mother urged everyone in the family to confession and Communion as "the only real protection against the perils menacing us all."
After mass, still another member of the family arrived at the hotel, Wida Kardous, the teenage daughter of the governor of Samaria, sent to Jerusalem for the end of her Christmas vacation. Shortly before lunch Manuel Allende Salazar, the Spanish diplomat living in the hotel, came up to Samy Aboussouan with a book he had borrowed a few days before. The two men chuckled over how apt a description of their own situation its title was. It was called Journey to Absurdity.
Heralded by a cracking roll of thunder, the storm that had been building up all day finally burst loose at sunset. While jagged streaks of lightning lashed the sky, a deluge hammered the city, swiftly turning the streets of Katamon into muddy torrents. The first waves of wind and rain tore out the power lines, plunging the quarter into blackness. Terrified, two of Samy Aboussouan's elderly aunts began to recite the rosary in the darkness while the hotel's domestics scuttled around looking for candles.
Dinner was a lugubrious affair. Outside, the rain beat on the windows and the reverberating thunderclaps set the flames of the candles on the dining table swaying. Suddenly, halfway through the meal, there was a loud banging on the front door. Two armed Arab guards, their water-filled boots squishing on the floor, marched into the room looking for the proprietor's twenty-three-year-old son, Hubert, to take his turn on guard duty. His mother shrieked, then began to cry.
"Not tonight," she pleaded. "Take him tomorrow night, the night after tomorrow, every night of the week, but not tonight."
Furious, the guards stalked back out into the storm.
Barely one thousand yards away, in the top floor of the Rehavia residence of a Jewish surgeon, four men gathered around a Jerusalem street map. With a finger, Mishael Shacham traced out the route that would take them to their target. The four-man demolition team would be covered by a squad of Haganah riflemen. In the rain-swept street outside were the black Humber and the prewar Plymouth they would use to get to the Semiramis. Once there, Shacham explained, they would have exactly ten minutes to break open the cellar door, get their two suitcases containing 175 pounds of TNT into the basement and up against the hotel's key supports, light them and get out. H hour was one o'clock.
The rain continued to beat down on the city. It was, in the terms of an old Arab adage, "raining from the earth and the sky." In the Hotel Semiramis, Samy Aboussouan and three cousins sat down by candlelight to play a few desultory hands of bridge. The Spanish consul came in early and went directly upstairs. In one corner of the room, the two elderly aunts continued to pray. Shortly after eleven, everyone went to bed. The last words Wida Kardous, the teenager who had arrived that morning, heard as she climbed the stairs was a reassuring whisper in the dark from one of her cousins: "Don't be afraid." By midnight the last candle in the hotel was snuffed out.
There was no letup in the storm. Normally, thirty young men of the hastily assembled local militia guarded Katamon in ten key checkpoints. In a storm like this, they reasoned, there was no chance of a Jewish attack. Most of them were sent home to bed. At midnight, his tour finished, twenty-year-old law student Peter Saleh went home to bed, too. No one relieved him. There were, huddled in the rain and darkness, exactly eight guards left on duty in three of Katamon's ten checkpoints.
The Humber and the Plymouth were fifteen minutes early. Not a single Arab had been on duty at the only roadblock along their way. From the courtyard of the Orthodox convent opposite the hotel, a watchman saw one of the cars stop in front of the Semiramis kitchen. He noticed two figures leap out carrying satchels and run toward the building.
The door to the hotel cellar was locked. Cursing in the darkness, Avram Gil pulled a grenade from his belt and fixed it to the door. With a sharp roar it blew the door from its hinge. Gil and two other members of the commando plunged into the smoking basement carrying their satchels of TNT.
A rain of falling glass caused by the grenade's explosion woke up Wida Kardous. In the darkness she heard her Aunt Maria calling out to her. Then another voice called out, "Lie on the floor!"
The same sound of falling glass woke Samy Aboussouan. For an instant he thought there was a fight out in the street. Then he heard footsteps crunching over the broken glass in the courtyard below his window and a voice in Hebrew calling, "Od lo, od lo. Not yet, not yet." At that sound, Samy leaped from his bed. In the darkened hallway beyond his bedroom he found his parents, an uncle, and an aunt rushing up and down in their bathrobes, babbling to each other in fear and worry. He told them to go down to the sitting room, the safest place in the hotel, then ran to the telephone.
As quickly as he could, Samy dialed 999, the number of the motorized police. "They've attacked the Hotel Semiramis with hand grenades!" he cried to the sleepy English voice that answered.
In the cellar of the hotel, the explosive charges had already been carefully set against the building's principal supports. Avram Gil and his aide could not light the fuse, soaked by its brief exposure to the pouring rain. It was their voices Samy Aboussouan had heard calling back their cover squad, which had started its withdrawal.
Nervous, sweating, they did not know what to do. "Yoel," Gil whispered to their commander, who was standing guard at the door, "we can't light the fuse."
The commander came down "very relaxed, very composed." He sat down cross-legged in front of the explosive. "This is what you have to do in such operations," he explained. "Take it easy, don't get nervous, then all will be well." Patiently he cut the soggy fuse with his pocketknife and began to make up a new one.
Upstairs, Wida Kardous' Aunt
Maria let go of the young girl's hand and told her, "I'm coming right back. I'm going to get a bathrobe." Frightened, Wida watched her disappear in the blackness. Samy Aboussouan hung up the telephone and started toward the sitting room. On the floor above him, his brother Cyril gave his hand to their mother to guide her down the stairs to the salon. Their father, putting on a dressing gown, followed.
It had taken about four minutes to make the new fuse, but now it was ready. The commander went to the entry, picked up a still-glowing splinter from the wreckage of the door and walked back to the explosive. Softly he blew on the scrap of wood until it glowed yellow-orange. He pressed it against his new fuse. It sputtered. He waited a moment. Then he said, "The fuse is lit. Run!"
Wida Kardous did not hear a thing. She would only remember for the rest of her life opening her eyes on an incredible spectacle. Above her "there was only the sky."
"Where is the roof? Where are the people?" she murmured.
Samy Aboussouan was blinded by an immense blue light, followed by a violent shock and a sharp whistling. He had the impression the walls were tumbling in on him "in a monstrous race." Picked up by the blast, hurled to the ground, he found himself lying on a heap of plaster looking up at the lightning flashes streaking across the sky. He lifted his head for an instant toward the doorway through which his parents should have entered the sitting room. All he could see was a pile of broken stones and one step of the staircase dangling from a broken beam. For a long moment the ghastly scene before him was "wrapped in a frightful silence." Then, rising from some corner of the ruins, he heard the anguished voice of his brother begging for help.
The shattering roar of the explosion awakened most of Katamon. From his nearby bedroom window, law student Peter Saleh, the guard who had just gone to bed, saw the hotel lift up with a roar, then collapse on itself. A cloud of smoke and dust rose from the ruins while the shock waves rolled back and forth over the Judean hills. As it died away, Saleh heard again the steady splash of the rain and, from underneath the pile of rubble almost below his window, a first pathetic moan.
O Jerusalem! Page 16
