O Jerusalem!

by Larry Collins

  The favorite Haganah tactic was to send a small, select commando team deep behind Arab lines, to the rear of a village or quarter suspected of harboring the Mufti's gunmen. While a second group of men drew the Arabs forward by opening fire on the front of the area, the commandos slashed into the rear. The idea, in the words of Abbras Tamir, a young Haganah officer, was "to go in fast with surprise, blow up some houses, kill some people and get out."

  Despite their inferiority in men and arms, the well-trained and disciplined Haganah had the better of those forays, and a psychosis of fear began to overtake the Arabs in the city. Those who could afford another sanctuary, the upper and middle classes, began to drift away, leaving behind a leadership gap that would have serious consequences later.

  In Sheikh Jarrah, an Arab neighborhood north of the Old City, Katy Antonious marked her going by asking all her friends to a last luncheon. Two successive assaults on the house next to hers had given reality to the threat the Haganah had been unable to deliver verbally because her phone was always busy. Now the walls of her villa were scarred with bullet holes, and her guests shivered in the February air rushing through its shattered windows. They sat on shaky bridge tables scattered among the packing cases that contained the silverware and crystal with which she had given so many brilliant receptions. Looking at those guests, Katy thought, "How sad it is. This house has known so much laughter and gaiety and now it is the last party, with an air of Brussels on the eve of Waterloo."

  She left the next morning, persuaded, as so many others would be, that her departure was temporary. She was wrong. Katy would enter that house only once again in her life, during a brief lull in the fighting months hence. Its roof would be riddled with shell holes, its doors and windows gone, the parquet floor on which her guests had danced charred with cooking fires and covered with bloodstains and human excrement. She would sit on a crate and weep. She would never be able to go back.

  In Romema, the largely Arabic community on the edge of the Tel Aviv road that had been the object of repeated Irgun bombings, the Arabs' departure was organized under the protection of the Haganah. For forty-eight hours before they left, little groups of Jews and Arabs stood haggling on the sidewalks, negotiating the sale of the fixtures in the shuttered shops behind them, terminating leases, arguing over the price of the furniture the Arabs could not carry away with them. Then, one morning, the Arabs left en masse and the community's new Jewish residents moved in behind them. Down came the Arabic signboards. A new set, in Hebrew this time, went up in their place. Soon there was a new Jewish grocer, a new Jewish gas station, a Jewish coffeehouse. The wicker stools on which the old Arab men had squatted in front of their café went off to a secondhand furniture dealer, their nargilehs to an antique shop. Within three weeks the last traces of the community's generations of Arab inhabitants had disappeared. Romema looked as though it had been Jewish since the day it was built.

  It was not, however, in the fight for a few shattered houses or an isolated neighborhood that the key to the struggle for Jerusalem lay in those winter weeks of 1948. It was elsewhere, before a pair of black eyes gazing out from under the folds of a kaffiyeh wrapped around the face of a shepherd stumbling with his flock along a ridge of the Judean hills. For almost a week, the man had wandered the ridge line, pondering the terrain before him, intently studying each craggy slope, each clump of fir trees, each rocky promontory.

  Haroun Ben-Jazzi was not, however, a shepherd. The animals at his feet were a borrowed flock picked up from a villager to cover his activities. Ben-Jazzi was a sheikh of the Howeitat Bedouin tribe, a first cousin of Abou Taya, the Arab chieftain who had ridden with Lawrence, and the sight upon which his windburned Bedouin eyes gazed with such intensity was a strip of black asphalt, the road to Jerusalem. That was the key to the city's existence, and the struggle for it was now to enter a new phase, the phase foreseen by Abdul Khader Husseini a few weeks earlier when, with a gesturing of his hands, he had vowed, "We will strangle Jerusalem." The disorderly, unorganized assaults on the road which had already exacted their toll on Jewish traffic were now to be replaced by more systematic, planned attacks. Abdul Khader had personally ordered Ben-Jazzi to survey every foot of ground along the road from Bab el Wad to the Arab village of Kastel. With his borrowed flock nibbling the grass at his feet, Ben-Jazzi had drifted from crest to crest, silently staring down at the Jewish convoys snaking up to Jerusalem, calculating each natural ambush site along their route, each spot where "one man could do the work of one hundred."

  Abdul Khader's original plan to throttle that Jewish traffic had called for a semipermanent roadblock he could defend with a relatively small number of his Holy Strugglers. He abandoned the idea for two reasons. First, the British, he realized, would be compelled to break the roadblock. Second, Abdul Khader wanted to draw the villagers in the communities along the road into his campaign. And so he decided to launch individual attacks on each passing convoy and to allow the villagers who had aided the attack to join in looting the convoys afterward. Knowing well the mentality of his people, he knew that each success and its spoils would provide a spur to draw into his ambushes an ever larger number of village fighters. Their growing numbers would give him a steadily expanding strength to match the certain growth in the size of the convoys' escorts.

  Using the information Ben-Jazzi provided, Abdul Khader opened his campaign. He led the first major attack himself. His kaffiyeh streaming behind him, he raced ahead of his men toward the passing convoy, gesticulating with his rifle to the rhythm of his Arabic war cries. Improvised at first, his attacks began to take on a well-planned pattern. One group of Abdul Khader's men stationed near the foot of Bab el Wad would rush out as soon as the convoy passed and would throw up a roadblock to cut its escape route. Up ahead, the bulk of his men would hastily erect another barricade to force it to a halt. As Abdul Khader had predicted, the news that a convoy was trapped, the sound of gunfire, drew hundreds of screaming villagers to the site. While his guerrillas manned the roadblocks, the villagers, scenting the loot ahead, swooped down like a swarm of locusts on the convoy.

  Abdul Khader soon developed a relatively effective intelligence system. He hid a wireless set near the village of Hulda, the key assembly point for the Jewish convoys. A weatherbeaten shepherd, a dirty-faced little boy, a black-robed woman were formed into a rotating guard to observe Jewish movements. They scampered back to the radio set with information on each departing convoy, its size, its length, its contents. That information was radioed to Abdul Khader's headquarters, where it was relayed to Ben-Jazzi through a smaller transmitter hidden in one of the dozens of grottoes tucked into the cliffs above the Jerusalem road.

  His offensive caused the British little concern. For the British Army, the Jerusalem–Tel Aviv road had assumed a secondary importance to their main evacuation routes, in the north to Haifa, in the south to the Suez Canal. A squadron of the Life Guards' armored cars based in Jerusalem ran a two-car patrol twice daily down the road. The patrol was called a "swan." "You'd boom down in the morning and boom back," recalled the squadron's commander. "Then you'd do the same thing again just before nightfall." The safe passage of those patrols was sufficient, in the eyes of the British command, to constitute an open road. Abdul Khader's men were careful to interfere with them as little as possible.

  For the Jews, each convoy to Jerusalem was an ordeal, a brutal, desperate struggle to claw one more load of goods past Abdul Khader's increasingly effective ambushes. The survival of the one hundred thousand Jews in the City of David depended on the Haganah's ability to force thirty trucks a day up the gorge of Bab el Wad to Jerusalem. Thirty trucks; yet as each week passed, the daily average fell under the pressure of Abdul Khader's attacks.

  As the weeks of that terrible winter dragged on, Jewish Jerusalem's well-being lay in the hands of a band of boys and girls of the Palmach. Called "Furmanim" because all their orders were addressed to an imaginary Mr. Furman in Room 16 of Jerusalem's Jewish Agency building, they w
ere the permanent guards of the convoys. They rode in the Haganah's flimsy homemade armored cars, six cars to each convoy, and the insignia they proudly sewed onto their uniform was one of those armored "sandwiches" in a pair of wings. They were kids like Yehuda Lash. It was one of the paradoxes of that strange winter that his mother could cook breakfast for him before he left his Jerusalem home at 4 A.M. each day to risk his life in Abdul Khader's ambushes. He would always remember his mother walking him to the door in the predawn blackness, "her eyes full of concern." He was a convoy commander. He had just turned twenty.

  The return trip was always the more difficult. Crammed with sacks of flour, sugar, rice, concealed munitions, the heavily loaded trucks crawled up the road in low gear. The sixteen-mile trip from Bab el Wad to Jerusalem averaged three hours. To smash the roadblocks along the route, the Haganah used trucks equipped with bulldozer blades. The Arabs began to mine the roadblocks and the shoulders of the road so that the besieged trucks couldn't extricate themselves. From their high perches they poured fire into the thin, unprotected roofs of the Jewish armored cars.

  Reuven Tamir, another of the young Palmachniks making that run, recalled how in his car "we would always sing as we came to Bab el Wad. Then the singing would stop and the silence was overwhelming. It was a terrible feeling. The only noise left was the sound of our motor."

  Tamir was caught in a disastrous ambush while escorting one convoy up the Bab el Wad gully. Through the slits of his armored car, he could see the Arabs leaping from rock to rock, gesturing at them, daring them in Hebrew to come out of their cars. Behind them, two trucks were already ablaze, their Arab assailants leaping through the flames around them in a kind of frenzied, exultant war dance. One truck had been loaded with eggs. Egg yolks poured down its flanks in gashes of yellow sludge, steaming and spitting in the heat. Within half an hour, the ammunition in Tamir's car was gone, and the Arabs were hurling grenades at them from only a few feet away. Suddenly Tamir realized he "didn't even have one bullet left to commit suicide." That day, however, the British intervened just in time to save Tamir and his convoy.

  Such intervention was rare. As the weeks passed, the road up from Bab el Wad was littered with burned-out vehicles. Scorched by Molotov cocktails, torn apart by mines, looted of every movable part, those stark metallic skeletons were a constant reminder of the price the Haganah was paying to supply Jerusalem. To the kids of the Furmanim riding past their swelling ranks twice a day, each blackened wreck was a memorial to some friend whose youth had ended there in the gulch of Bab el Wad.

  "On both sides of the road our dead are piled up," wrote one of the Furmanim, a poet.

  The iron skeleton is as quiet as my friend.

  Bab el Wad!

  Remember our names forever.

  Bab el Wad on the road to the city.

  Abdul Khader Husseini was on the verge of realizing his goal. Jerusalem was slowly being strangled. For the city's Jews, the prospect of having to endure the rigors of a siege was becoming a real threat. Three years after the end of World War II the city that was supposed to be a symbol of peace for mankind had in its turn to face the prospect of food shortages, rationing, blackouts, all the appurtenances of civilian suffering that the cities of Europe were at last beginning to forget. The task of preparing Jerusalem and its citizens to withstand that suffering was assigned by the Jewish Agency to its legal counselor, a taciturn lawyer named Dov Joseph.

  It was a fitting choice. Joseph had borne Jerusalem a special devotion since his youth in Montreal. For four hours every afternoon during the long Canadian winters of his boyhood, while the rest of his neighborhood played in the snow, Joseph had attended Hebrew school, his youthful eyes staring up at the focal point of his classroom, a drawing of Solomon's Temple as it might have been in the days of the Jewish kingdom. He had seen the city first in 1919, in the pith helmet and bush jacket of a sergeant in the Jewish Legion. When, for the first time, he saw before him the stone remnants of the building that had called to him during the dark winter afternoons of his boyhood, Joseph felt an "overpowering" emotion and his body began to tremble. Two years later he was back in Jerusalem for good with, as his bride, the first Jewish woman to immigrate to Palestine from North America. He was an intense, often irritable man, tenacious in the pursuit of his goals. Above all, Dov Joseph was not a man to indulge his own weaknesses; in the painful days that lay ahead, he would show little inclination to indulge the weaknesses of his fellow Jerusalemites.

  His first act was to order an inventory of all the food stocks in the city's warehouses and stores. From then on, every truckload of food coming into Jerusalem was stored under his supervision in the safest warehouses he could find.

  With a pair of nutrition experts, Joseph calculated the basic foodstuffs Jerusalem would need to survive on a minimum ration for a day, a week and a month. Then he and his aides set about the grim task of secretly printing up the cards which, in an emergency, would entitle the city's population to the pitifully small rations they had allotted them.

  Even graver than the risk of famine in a besieged Jerusalem, however, would be the risk of dying of thirst. Ninety percent of the city's water came from the springs of Ras el Ein, sixty miles to the west. The eighteen-inch pipe and the four pumping stations required to get the water up three thousand feet to Jerusalem lay in territory as Arab as the slopes of Bab el Wad. Even the little additional water available to the city from one of its most ancient sources, King Solomon's Pools, lay in Arab-controlled territory. Once the British left, the Arabs could cripple Jewish Jerusalem and force its surrender without a shot by depriving the city of the most vital element of daily existence, water. A bundle of dynamite sticks would be all they would need to do it.

  Fortunately for Joseph, one of the first regulations of the British mandate in Jerusalem had called for the construction of a cistern in every new dwelling built in the city. In December he had made a secret survey of those cisterns. Now Joseph confiscated them all. He ordered Zvi Leibowitz, a German-born water expert, to begin quietly diverting a part of the incoming water into them, sealing and locking each cistern as it was filled. Those cisterns, Joseph was convinced, would be his city's only means of hanging on if the Arabs cut the water.

  The city's sole electric-power plant was also vital to the Jews of Jerusalem, who absorbed ninety percent of its output. It lay in a kind of no man's land just south of the city. Thirty tons of fuel a day were required to keep its diesel generators operating. While waiting for the moment the Haganah could take the plant, Joseph ordered its supervisor, Alexander Singer, to start building up an emergency fuel supply.

  Finally, since the city's principal hospital facilities on Mount Scopus might be cut off from the rest of Jerusalem by the Arabs, Joseph prepared a series of emergency operating theaters and clinics inside the Jewish city. To help supply them, a blood bank was opened.

  None of Joseph's tasks, however, was to cause the dour Canadian lawyer as much anguish as one lonely decision he took early in February. With the tempo of Arab assaults on the road rising daily, Joseph came under considerable pressure to evacuate Jerusalem's women and children to the coast while they could still escape. There were sound reasons for doing it. Their evacuation would make the food and water problem immensely easier. The decision not to let them go was Joseph's alone. He took it because he reasoned the fighting spirit of Jerusalem's men would be raised if they knew that their homes and families lay helpless just behind them. Those men would have no illusions about their families' fate if the city were overrun. The pain of that decision, the awareness of the terrible moral burden that would be his if Jerusalem fell, would weigh on Joseph for months to come. But, as he would remark years later in recalling that decision, "We did not favor the easy way."

  Six thousand miles and a world away, another group of men wrestled, too, with the problems of Jerusalem. They labored in the standardized dreariness of the committee rooms of the United Nations, and the problem before them was represented by an obj
ect as banal as a calendar. While Dov Joseph was deciding whether to evacuate Jewish women and children from his city, the members of the United Nations Working Committee on Jerusalem agonized over the fact that if the official holidays of all the religious communities and national bodies represented in Jerusalem were to be honored as such, the holidays of the little international city they were planning would exceed the number of days on the calendar.

  That preoccupation was indicative of the trivialities into which the United Nations' planning for an international Jerusalem had slid. For six weeks, while the situation in the city deteriorated daily, the members of the United Nations Working Committee on Jerusalem had argued their way paragraph by paragraph through the legal charter with which they would order the birth of the world's first international city. They extended its limits to include Bethlehem and three Arab communities so that its population would be made up of an equal number of Arabs and Jews. It was to be divided into three boroughs, one for the Arabs, one for the Jews, and one, made up of the old walled city at the heart of it all, for the world. It would be demilitarized and run by a United Nations–appointed governor aided by an elected legislative council. Justice would be administered by a court system complex enough to bewilder Jerusalem's most abstract theologians. The committee had even thoughtfully provided it with a flag, the United Nations flag with the seal of Jerusalem imposed upon it, and a Latin term to define its legal status for the world to which it would belong—corpus separatum.