Awakened by the noise of the first hand grenade, Kay Albina, the wife of the man who had filmed the destruction of his own movie house a month earlier, had seen the whole drama from her bedroom window. She had heard the Haganah cars flee and had watched in awe as the terrible explosion seemed to lift the roof of the hotel slowly up into the air, then drop it back to earth. A first-aid student, Kay Albina swept up her Red Cross kit and a handful of sheets and rushed through the rainswept streets to help the wounded.
None of her first-aid manuals, however, had prepared her for the horror of the first sight she saw in the ruins of the hotel. It was the figure of a woman stumbling hysterically through the rubble, cradling in her arms the severed head of her infant daughter.
Twenty-six people died in the explosion of the Semiramis Hotel. Samy Aboussouan and Wida Kardous survived, but the Aboussouan family was virtually obliterated. Samy's mother and father, his two aunts and his three uncles died. Hubert Lorenzo, the twenty-three-year-old son of the proprietor, died along with the parents who would not let him take his turn on guard duty.
Three days after the explosion, the frantic scratching of a dog who had not left the ruins since the blast led the searchers to the body of the last innocent victim still buried in the rubble. Hidden under a heap of masonry and broken beams, it was the corpse of his master, the young Spanish diplomat who on Christmas Eve had laughingly compared himself to Manolete on the eve of his death. Victim of a drama which was not his, Manuel Allende Salazar had completed the last steps of his own Journey to Absurdity.
Journeys of a different sort had ended in those early days of January. There would be no more No. 2 buses to run men and supplies from New Jerusalem into the Jewish Quarter of the Old City. On New Year's Eve the Arabs cut the bus route with a massive roadblock at Jaffa Gate, and the quarter's residents began to endure in modern form one of the oldest traditions of the ancient city they so esteemed, the siege.
Not an ounce of food, fuel or ammunition had reached the quarter since the Arabs had erected their roadblock. The unburied dead accumulated in a week of blockade lay just beyond the Haganah's headquarters. Kerosene, used by the quarter's residents for cooking, was almost gone. So, too, was milk for the children.
Alarmed, the Jewish Agency had protested daily to the British, for whom it would have been an easy matter to force the Arabs to remove the roadblock. The British reply had been a request to the Agency to temporarily evacuate the quarter. The Agency refused. The British then proposed a compromise. They would escort a supply convoy to the quarter through Zion Gate once a week, providing they could search it for arms and ammunition. They would escort anyone who wanted to leave out of the quarter, but no one would be allowed in.
The proposal was against almost all the principles the Jewish Agency was trying to maintain in its dealings with the British. The situation in the quarter was desperate, however. The residents were already beginning to blame the Haganah for their difficulties and clamoring to leave with or without a British escort. Reluctantly, the Agency agreed to the British suggestion.
For the handful of Haganah officers assigned to defend the most sacred acres the Jewish people possessed in Palestine, those days constituted a rude descent into reality. They were trapped in one of the most exposed positions in Palestine with a garrison of only one hundred and fifty Haganah men, fifty men of the Irgun and Stern Gang, and a force for which they would be increasingly grateful in the months to come, threescore girl soldiers of the Haganah.
Those winter nights gave Isser Natanson, the quarter's Irgun commander, many a moment to ponder his last exchange with the man who had ordered him into the quarter.
"What will we do there?" he had asked.
With a sour smile his superior had replied, "You'll be a sacrifice. What other reason is there for being there?"
January seventh was always a special day in the life of Hameh Majaj. It was his wedding anniversary. Normally, he and his wife celebrated the event with a festive dinner at the home of his uncle. Festive dinners, however, did not seem appropriate in the troubled January of 1948. They had decided instead to celebrate with a quiet dinner in their own dining room. When it was finished, they would begin their nightly contemplation of the blueprints of the dwelling in which a year hence they would celebrate their anniversary for the first time in a home of their own.
Hameh Majaj had a surprise for his wife, however. It was a three-tiered gold harem ring he had bought in the souks. On his modest salary, its price represented a considerable sacrifice, and it was a measure of his devotion to her. He had planned to give it to her at dinner, but, seeing her smiling at the breakfast table that morning, he could not resist. He leaped up, rushed to his bedroom and got the ring. Shyly, he slipped it onto his surprised wife's finger, then watched with pride and pleasure as she held it up to the morning sunlight.
January seventh, 1948, would be a special day in the life of Uri Cohen too. His persistent demand for action had at last been accepted by his superiors in the Irgun. Before him, on a bed in the one-room shack of a Yemenite porter at the Jerusalem bus station, were three stolen British police uniforms. They would provide disguises for Cohen and his companions in the mission to which he had been assigned.
The commander of their mission was an Oriental Jew only a couple of years older than Cohen. He had, Uri knew, "done this thing several times before." Looking at him in his suit and tie, the young biology student suddenly thought he was "just like a businessman getting ready to go to work."
The commander led them next door, to the back room of an automobile repair shop. There, sitting on the floor, were the instruments of the action for which Uri Cohen had been clamoring: two fifty-gallon oil drums packed tight with old nails, bits of scrap iron, hinges, rusty metal filings. At their center was a core of TNT whose explosion would turn the barrels into a vicious weapon, hurling those rusty shards of iron at a velocity sufficient to shred to ribbons any human being unlucky enough to stand in their way. The firing device was a plain cotton fuse wrapped in a dozen wooden matches. Scraping a matchbox over them would light the fuse.
Quietly, the commander assigned each man his job. Uri Cohen's stomach sickened when he was given his. He was going to be the bomber. When the time came, his job would be to light the fuses with a matchbox and push the oil barrels onto their target.
At precisely four o'clock, Cohen arrived in his uniform in front of a high school in the Rehavia quarter. The police van that would carry them on their mission was waiting. It had been stolen from a Ford garage where it was being repaired. Cohen got into the police van. The commander sat in front next to the driver. On either side of Cohen, armed with machine guns they would fire from the slit along the side of the van, were two other men.
Their route had been carefully planned so that they would enter the Arab part of the city through an Arab Legion checkpoint. Cohen peered through the slit as they rode by, the Arab Legionnaires staring impassively at them, assuming they were British. Suddenly they were inside Arab Jerusalem, heading up the Bethlehem Road under the slopes of Mount Zion toward the walls of the Old City.
As they started up the hill, Uri began to tremble. "What am I doing here?" he asked himself. Suddenly the whole thing seemed crazy, far-fetched. "Here I am, a biology student; I study life and in a few minutes I'm going to kill people," he thought. The wheels in his mind turned over faster and faster and a slick of nervous sweat dampened his forehead. "What am I doing this for, what am I doing this for?" he asked himself again and again.
It was too late for those questions now. In the stolen police van there was no talk. Ahead, through the windshield, Uri saw an Arab roadblock and, a hundred yards beyond, the target for the first of the two bombs beside him. He saw an Arab raise his hand to flag them to a stop. Very calmly, the commander turned to the driver. "Drive right on through," he said.
Hameh Majaj looked at his watch. He and his wife had cut short the ritual courtesy visit they paid each year, on their wedding anniversary,
to his wife's elderly aunt inside the Old City. With the situation, and the work still to be done for their dinner, Hameh's wife was in a hurry to get home. In three minutes, he knew, a No. 3 bus was due at Jaffa Gate. They could just catch it, if they hurried. Taking his wife by the hand, he tugged her along the narrow passageways. Half running, they turned out of the Old City and rushed toward the knot of people waiting at the Jaffa Gate bus stop.
The commander told the driver to stop, then turned and looked back at Cohen. "Light your bomb," he said.
Cohen reached into his pocket, then stiffened. He was a nonsmoker, and in his excitement he had forgotten to put into his pocket a matchbox to light the bomb. The commander coolly stood up, walked to the back of the van and handed Cohen a pack of matches from his own pocket. Cohen scraped the box over the matches ringing the fuse. Then he threw open the rear doors of the police van and looked out for the first time on his target.
A sea of surprised faces stared up at him. At his feet the fuse sputtered. For a second, Cohen peered out at those figures of what seemed to him like "hundreds of people, a real crowd, all shocked and startled." They were the evening crowd of Arab bus riders waiting for the No. 3 bus at the Jaffa Gate stop.
"They have seen the devil," Cohen thought. "They see the bomb right in front of them with the fuse burning." He reached down and with his athlete's arms began to twist the bomb gently down onto the pavement in their midst. It thudded to the ground, sparks spitting from its fuse. The crowd seemed paralyzed with terror, staring first at the bomb, then at Cohen as if he were "a figure in a nightmare," as if, Cohen thought, they were all "in a movie that has suddenly stopped."
He reached out to close the door, his arms passing within hand reach of those stunned Arab bus riders about to be killed by the bomb he had just set down among them. The door closed, and Cohen could still see their uncomprehending faces as he snapped it shut.
The explosion went off at the instant Hameh Majaj and his wife won their race for the No. 3 bus. Still holding hands, they were hurled backward by the shock. Struggling up into a sitting position, Majaj gagged at the horrible spectacle all around him. The enormous square was littered with bodies, bits and pieces of them strewn across the pavement like chunks of meat. Next to the bus stop was a store whose owner had been cranking down his metal shutter when the bomb went off. The explosion had driven his body into the screen, impaling it on its raw metal edges in a grotesque crucifixion. He turned to his wife on the pavement beside him. She was covered with blood, her eyes half open.
"Something is falling inside me," she mumbled. Then her eyes closed.
Hameh spoke to her, but there was no answer. He knelt over her and took her limp hand in his, begging her for a reply. There was none. Even her convulsive shudders had stopped. Screaming, Hameh Majaj leaped to his feet pleading for help, for an ambulance to get her to a hospital.
Three hours later, a duty surgeon at the hospital came out of the operating room into which they had wheeled Majaj's wife. "He looked at me," Majaj would later recall. "I couldn't talk, but I knew what his eyes were telling me."
Hameh Majaj went into the emergency room for a last look at his wife's body. With tear-blurred eyes he stared down at the remains of the woman who had brought him so much happiness. His hands shaking with his sobs, he bent over and withdrew from her finger the keepsake by which he would remember her for the rest of his life, the three-tiered gold harem ring he had so proudly offered her for their wedding anniversary that morning.*
10
"BAB EL WAD ON THE ROAD TO THE CITY"
Every time we go to sleep, we are not sure we are going to wake up. It is not the bullets we mind so much, but the dynamiting when you're asleep. People wake up in the middle of the night under the debris of their houses. Your father has to go to work in an ambulance. Every time we hear the door knock we are scared stiff that they have come to blow up our house. We stay home every evening from six o'clock on and lock all the doors and windows.
THUS DID AN ARAB MOTHER writing to her son at the American University of Beirut describe what life had become for her in Jerusalem two months after the United Nations partition vote. Her words might well have summarized existence in the city for many another housewife, Arab or Jewish, in January 1948. "Jerusalem," wrote a correspondent of The New York Times, "is becoming virtually isolated behind a curtain of fear. No one comes to Jerusalem or leaves his neighborhood except for an emergency."
In Jewish Jerusalem, food was now beginning to disappear. Milk, eggs, meat and vegetables were in short supply. Most restaurants were open only at noon. Fink's restaurant remained the hangout of Jerusalem's newsmen and night owls, but its cuisine was limited to a kind of hamburger liberally mixed with flour. Max Hesse kept his restaurant, the most elegant in Jerusalem, functioning because of his good relations with the Arab merchants who had supplied him for years. They delivered Max's daily order to a kind of neutral ground, the burned-out ruins of the Rex Cinema, where his chef picked it up.
It was a bitter cold winter, and in most Jewish homes fuel was desperately short. Even more serious for the city's housewives was the shortage of kerosene for cooking. The most elegant among them began to carry a pail or tin can when they went out, in case a donkey-towed kerosene tanker should cross their route.
Little mail was delivered; cable communications were chaotic, and international telephone calls were held up for hours and sometimes days; Jewish lawyers refused to attend court, because their safety was not assured, and the court system ground to a standstill; the District Health Office ceased registering deaths, births and contagious diseases at the beginning of the year. The cemetery on the Mount of Olives was now inaccessible to Jerusalem's Jewish population. Covered with sheets, laid out on litters, their dead were borne off instead to the burial grounds of Sanhedria where their ancestors had laid the judges of an earlier Israel to rest.
For members of both communities, physical security was an almost daily concern. Few, however, led lives as exposed as Ruth and Chaim Haller, one of the few Jewish couples left in Katamon. Their only access to their home was by a trench dug through their garden up to their back door. At night Ruth stood guard at a ground-floor window, clutching in her hand a cowbell with which to rouse the Haganah guard upstairs in case of danger. Yet, like so many others, they learned to adapt their life to the circumstances. One evening as they prepared to leave for a concert, the Haganah warned the Hallers they would dynamite a nearby Arab home that night. The pair debated a moment. Then, opening their windows so that the blast would not shatter them, they set out for the concert anyway.
More than anything else, however, the somber mood of Jewish Jerusalem that winter was reflected in a square white handbill. Like a blight upon a leaf, those white scraps of paper began to fleck the walls, the telephone poles, the shop windows of the Jewish city. They were pasted there by the Haganah, the Irgun or the Stern Gang. Whatever the source, the stark black letters they bore inevitably began with the same phrase: "We stand to attention before the memory of our comrade . . ."
Jerusalem's Arab population, living in a city surrounded by Arab countryside, suffered none of the food and fuel shortages plaguing the Jewish neighborhoods. Their preoccupation with security was no less urgent, however, than that of the Jews. In the book-lined library in which they had followed the partition debate, Ambara and Sami Khalidy continued to read and study nightly. Now, however, Ambara's chair was placed before the window, blocking the view of her husband. The assassination by profession touched off by the murders of Drs. Lehrs and Malouf had spread to the academic community, and Ambara feared that some Jewish gunman might slip into their garden bent on killing her husband to avenge a murdered Jewish professor.
Even her children had been affected by the deterioration in Jerusalem life. Watching the arrival of the guards whom her father had requested for his Arab College, Sulafa, the eldest daughter, thought, "Now the good days are gone."
Unlike the Jewish quarters, where relations bet
ween the populace and their Haganah defenders were naturally close, a kind of uneasy truce existed in the Arab areas between the middle-class population and their essentially mercenary peasant protectors. Each neighborhood had its warlord loyal to Haj Amin but not necessarily to his fellow warlords. They squabbled constantly, extorted protection money from the citizens they were hired to defend. To their ranks had been added the stream of gangs flowing into Jerusalem from Syria, Transjordan and Iraq. Ostensibly there to defend the Holy City, they were often as anxious to pillage it as they were to fight for it. A thieves' market developed in the souks to handle the goods they looted from abandoned Arab and Jewish homes. Untrained, undisciplined, they would respond to a few random Jewish sniper shots with a wild barrage of rifle fire, then spend hours searching the souks for ammunition to replace the rounds they had wasted.
"Jerusalem," the city's Lebanese consul noted with despair in a dispatch to his Foreign Office, "is subject to a disorder unequaled anywhere in the world. Arms of every kind are passed from hand to hand under the eyes of the authorities. Public life is practically paralyzed. Stores and markets close at noon. The Arab bands have one chief here, another there, all acting independently without any contact between them."
One place in the city stood apart from the rancor and chaos of Jerusalem, however—a little island all its own in which a handful of Jews and Arabs lived together in peace and harmony. It was the government insane asylum. After observing its inmates' indifference to the strife sundering their peoples, Jacques de Reynier, the delegate of the International Red Cross, made a melancholy entry in his diary: "Vive les fous!" (Long live the nuts!)
"We must make the Jews live hell." That threat, uttered by the secretary of Jerusalem's Arab Higher Committee, summed up the ambitions of the Mufti's partisans in the city in the winter of 1948. Yet, with the British still present in Jerusalem in impressive strength, the Arabs no more than the Haganah could contemplate actually seizing and holding enemy ground. And so the two sides nightly sent their forces on destructive commando raids into each other's territory, striving to accomplish psychologically what they could not yet accomplish militarily.
O Jerusalem! Page 17
