When the palavering at the headquarters was finished, the officers adjourned to the salons of the other pole of Damascus' political life, the Orient Palace Hotel. Half a century of plots had been hatched on the worn velvet easy chairs and sofas of the hotel's sitting room. In that winter of 1948, the Orient Palace remained faithful to its conspiracy-cluttered past. An air of intrigue permeated the place. It was ringed by an ominously evident collection of bodyguards watching over the enigmatic figures who drifted in and out. Groups whispered intently in corners, then froze into blatant silence at the appearance of some figure in the doorway. Through hastily opened and closed doors came glimpses of other men in rooms adjoining the salon huddled over tables covered with coffee cups and maps. Perched on their stools in the bar, the intelligence agents of the Western powers observed the proceedings with feigned disinterest which deceived no one.
The arrival, early in February, of a client of particular mark signaled the importance of the role Damascus and the Orient Palace had assumed in Palestine's affairs. Together with his senior aides, Haj Amin Husseini moved into an entire floor of the hotel. Wrapped in that air of intrigue which seemed to flow so naturally from him, Haj Amin began to glide along its corridors, his movements carefully screened by half a dozen bodyguards. Occasionally, an indiscreet twist of his abayah revealed that he wore another garment under its folds. It was a bulletproof vest, the personal gift of the man who had until recently been his protector, Adolf Hitler.
Haj Amin had reason to wear a bulletproof vest, for he had many a bitter enemy in Damascus. His undisguised ambition to turn Palestine into his personal fiefdom, the wave of assassinations which had accompanied his rise to power, his intransigence, the ferocity with which he could turn on his foes, had left him with few true friends among his Arab brothers. He was, commented Sir Alec Kirkbride, Britain's knowledgeable minister in Amman, "like the Red Queen in Alice in Wonderland. He had so stirred up extremist sentiment in Palestine that he had to keep running faster, getting more and more extreme, just to stay where he was."
Since the Arab League meeting in Cairo in December, Haj Amin had insisted that the arms and money being collected by the League be placed at the disposal of his organization. He had come to Damascus to achieve two things. First, he wanted to convert his Arab Higher Committee into a provisional Palestine government to rival the Jewish Agency. Second, he wanted to thwart the plan, set in Cairo, to raise a volunteer Liberation Army. Operating from Syria with recruits raised in the Arab world, the army was supposed to begin a guerrilla campaign in Palestine before the British withdrew. If he could not block its creation, Haj Amin at least wanted its commander to be one of his faithful lieutenants.
He had little success. Safwat Pasha accused him of misappropriating funds, of stealing arms, of nepotism, of substituting political loyalty for military skill in making appointments. The Mufti's organization, he shouted in one angry meeting, was swallowing up the arms and the money to support two thousand men in Haifa alone, yet there were barely two hundred fighters in the city.
His fellow political leaders realized that with world opinion overwhelmingly in favor of the Zionists as a result of the Nazi holocaust, the Palestinians would elicit little sympathy for their cause as long as they were led by one of Hitler's collaborators. The British and Haj Amin's political foes in the councils of the Arab League did not want an abundance of weapons in Haj Amin's untrustworthy armories. Besides, the British hoped that by the shifting of the Palestine problem from Haj Amin's uncompromising hands into the more responsible chancelleries of the Arab governments, some solution to the question might eventually be found. The British had led the Arab League's secretary general, Azzam Pasha, and Syria's Prime Minister Jamil Mardam to understand that they would oppose the Liberation Army if it were Mufti controlled, but were prepared to take a more lenient view of its activities if it was not.
Faced with that array of opposition, Haj Amin's plans ran into trouble. King Abdullah's insistence that he wanted no part of a Mufti-led government in Palestine helped stifle that scheme. The Liberation Army had already gained so much momentum it could not be stopped. Bound to grow in importance, it would clearly have first claim on the Arab League's finances and arms. After a series of angry arguments presided over by Syrian President Shukri al Kuwatli, the army was given the responsibility for operations in all northern Palestine. Abdul Khader Husseini retained control of the Jerusalem area and another faithful Mufti subordinate the countryside around Jaffa. But his fellow Arabs' choice for the commander of the Liberation Army was Haj Amin's cruelest disappointment in Damascus.
With his scarred face, his thick neck and his closely cropped red hair, Fawzi el Kaukji bore a closer resemblance to a Prussian major than to an Arab chief. He was closemouthed and uncommunicative. Among the many decorations which on occasion graced his uniform, the one he esteemed most was a black metal cross—the only mark of a true warrior, in his opinion. He had won the Iron Cross second class thirty years earlier as a lieutenant in the Ottoman Army in another Palestine campaign, fighting alongside the Prussians of General Otto von Kreiss against the British. Since then he had been an unqualified admirer of things German, a sentiment he had affirmed by marrying a German girl he met in Berlin during the Second World War.
Convalescing in the German capital from a wound he had received in Iraq, Kaukji had become a familiar figure in the nightclubs of the wartime Reich. One night on his cabaret rounds, his eyes fell on a striking young blonde. To win her attention, the elegant Oriental ordered to her table two of the rarest commodities in the Nazi capital, a bottle of Veuve Clicquot champagne and a package of Camel cigarettes. From that night on, the pretty German girl and the fifty-five-year-old Arab adventurer thirty years her senior were an inseparable couple.
Born in northern Lebanon, Kaukji had served his military apprenticeship in the Turkish Army. When the Ottoman Empire began to crumble, he went to work spying on the Turks for the British. Then, successively, he spied on the French for the British, on the British for the French, on the French and the British for the Germans. The high point of his military career had come during the Arab revolt against the British in Palestine in 1936. His frequently demonstrated prowess won him fame among the Arab population and the esteem of Haj Amin Husseini. His popular following, however, was not altogether to the Mufti's liking, and, equipped with arms and money, he was shunted off to Iraq to foment a rebellion there. Instead of promoting an uprising, the Mufti's aides later claimed, "he swallowed up the arms, the money and the rebellion."
The Mufti prized servility and loyalty above all else in his aides, and Kaukji had failed on both counts. As a result, when the two men met again in wartime Berlin, relations between them were cool and soon deteriorated to a deep mutual dislike. In the chaos of defeat, Kaukji had managed to slip into France and later escape into Egypt. There he had announced he was "at the disposition of the Arab people should they call on me to take up arms again."
And so they had, as commander of the Liberation Army, as much for his value as a counterbalance to his enemy Haj Amin Husseini as for his capacity as a military chief. After all, if his career had inspired a popular legend, it had not inspired an inordinate amount of confidence in his fellow Arab leaders. The measure of their trust was the one stipulation that went with his appointment. At the request of the Syrian government, Kaukji was not to take command of his troops on Syrian soil, but only inside Palestine. The Syrian government feared that, bought at the last moment by some rival political faction, Kaukji might be persuaded to make a wrong turn and march on the ministries of Damascus instead of the kibbutzim of Palestine.
On the radio, by enormous newspaper ads, with fiery speeches in their mosques and coffeehouses, the young men of the Arab world were called to volunteer for Kaukji's army and for the defense of El Kuds, the Holy City of Jerusalem, whose spires were woven into the rugs upon which so many of them recited their daily prayers. Those calls promised to volunteers the not inconsiderable sum of sixty
Syrian pounds a month for private soldiers and Syrian Army pay scales for noncoms and officers. From the crowded slums of Cairo, from the cavernous souks of Aleppo, from the banks of the Tigris and the Euphrates, the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf, the volunteers responded, setting out on the road to Jerusalem, adventure and loot.
From the south, up the routes used by pilgrims to Mecca, from the west out of Mosul and Baghdad across the wastes of the Iraqi desert, from the east past the snow-tipped crest of Mount Hermon, a noisy migration descended on Damascus. They came in convoys of open trucks and dilapidated old buses, covered with flags and flowers and old bedsheets painted with patriotic slogans. They rode through the city, a jubilant cavalcade of noise, of shouting men, chanting rhythmic slogans, singing, above all firing their weapons into the air. There were the huge silver buses of the Nairn Company, their flanks eroded by sandstorms from their trips across the desert from Damascus to Baghdad. There were taxis from all over the Arab world, some so overloaded that their mufflers seemed to scrape the asphalt. There were motorcycles and bicycles, camels, horses and even an occasional mule. Often a bold banner hanging from the flanks of a truck or bus identified its occupants as the "Lions of Aleppo" or "Falcons of Basra."
Packed into that stream of vehicles parading through the streets of Damascus was an incredible array of human beings. There were young students from Beirut, Cairo and Baghdad burning with youthful fervor. There were idealists and patriots, middle-class intellectuals in business suits or jodhpurs and a kaffiyeh out to avenge what they considered an injustice to their people. There were young Syrian politicians, like Akram Hourani and Michel Aflak, founders of the Baathist Party, persuaded that Palestine would prove the ideal crucible in which to mold their ideas. There were Egyptian Moslem Brothers as anxious to overthrow their country's rulers as they were to march on Tel Aviv; Iraqis thrown out of the army after Nuri as-Said had crushed the Rashid Ali uprising; notorious Syrian Francophiles who had served all the French and Vichy secret services; veterans of the Mufti's 1936 rebellion; Circassians, Kurds, Druzes, Alaowites, spurred more by the lure of pillage than by a passion for the Mosque of Omar; Communists out to infiltrate the fledgling army. There were thieves, adventurers, brigands, homosexuals, nuts, all the quacks of the Arab world with a hate in their hearts for the British, the French, their local governments and even the Jews; the pariahs of the Arab world for whom the jihad was a call to plunder instead of to arms.
Their destination was a bleak, rolling plateau of red sandstone foothills and windblown topsoil thirty miles southwest of Damascus. Set in that desolate scene, behind a village of flat-roofed mud houses, were a few dreary remnants of Syria's French occupation, the barracks of the Katana military camp. Soon some six thousand volunteers had been assembled in its primitive stone buildings. To their ranks were added a small group of British deserters, escaped German prisoners of war, Yugoslav Moslems sentenced to death by Tito for having served in the Wehrmacht, men for whom this crusade offered above all a refuge from the police forces searching for them.
No central authority governed the camp or instilled a common discipline in its disparate recruits. Trained officers were desperately short. Command was more or less abandoned to the self-styled leaders arriving at its gates at the head of their private bands. The new arrivals were thrown into a semblance of a uniform from the leftover stocks of the Syrian Army and scraps of American, British and French apparel dredged from the souks. Arms and ammunition were lacking and when they were available often failed to work. One section of recruits was set to work doing nothing but cleaning rusty rifles with the lemons of the Palestine they had come to conquer. Training was haphazard. The shortage of ammunition limited rifle instruction. Recruits who were able to fire half a dozen rounds at a target and toss a hand grenade or two were considered well trained.
In the shortest supply of all was money to pay for Katana's burgeoning operations. The states of the Arab League which had been so quick in Cairo in December to vote for a one-million-pound-sterling war chest (to which they had subsequently added an additional one million pounds) had actually paid in little more than a tenth of their pledges. Azzam Pasha, secretary general of the League, sometimes felt his days were divided between writing promissory notes to sustain Katana and writing letters urging the Arab governments to honor their commitments.
The clamor and confusion of the Syrian scene in that winter of 1948 would inspire diverse reactions, but none more succinct than that of the little Englishman who, from the hilltop of another Arab capital, commanded the Middle East's most professional military force. To John Bagot Glubb, Glubb Pasha, commander of the Arab Legion, Damascus that winter had become "a madhouse."
The same problem preoccupying the harassed Secretary General of the Arab League in Damascus would disturb the leaders of the Jewish Agency in Tel Aviv that winter. One January evening they were summoned to hear a report by Eliezer Kaplan, their treasurer. Kaplan had just returned from a fund-raising trip to the United States with his pockets virtually empty. The American Jewish community, so long the financial bulwark of the Zionist movement, was growing weary of the incessant appeals for aid of their Palestine brothers, he reported. The time had come, Kaplan said, to face a bitter reality. In no case could they count on more than five million dollars from America in the critical months ahead.
That figure hit the group gathered around Kaplan like a thunderbolt. One by one, their glances turned toward the stubby man who had followed Kaplan's report with ill-disguised impatience. David Ben-Gurion was better placed than any of them to understand how serious were the consequences of what Kaplan had just said. The rifles and machine guns for which he had sent Ehud Avriel to Prague could hold back the Palestinian Arabs; but against the tanks, artillery and aircraft of the regular Arab armies he was sure the Yishuv would one day face, they would be useless, however courageous its soldiers might be. Ben-Gurion had drawn up a plan to equip a modern army. To carry it out, he needed at a minimum five, six times the sum mentioned by Kaplan. Springing from his seat, he growled to the men around him, "Kaplan and I must leave for the United States immediately to make the Americans realize how serious the situation is."
At that moment a quiet female voice interrupted him. It belonged to the woman who had found her Zionist faith taking up a collection in Denver, Colorado.
"What you are doing here I cannot do," Golda Meir told Ben-Gurion. "However, what you propose to do in the United States I can do. You stay here and let me go to the States to raise the money."
Ben-Gurion reddened. He liked neither interruptions nor contradictions. The matter was so important, he insisted, he and Kaplan should go. The other members of the Agency Executive, however, supported Golda. Two days later, with no more baggage than the thin spring dress she wore and the handbag she clutched in her hand, she arrived in New York on a bitter winter's night. So precipitate had her departure been that she had not had the time to take the convoy up to Jerusalem to fetch a change of clothes. The woman who had come to New York in search of millions of dollars had in her purse that evening exactly one ten-dollar bill. When a puzzled customs agent asked her how she intended to support herself in the United States, she replied simply, "I have family here."
Two days later, trembling on a podium in Chicago, Golda Meir found herself facing a distinguished gathering of the members of that family. They were the leaders of the Council of Jewish Federations, drawn from the forty-eight states of the Union. Their meeting and her arrival in the United States had been a fortuitous coincidence. Before her in one Chicago hotel room were most of the financial leaders of the American Jewish community, the very men whose aid she had been sent to seek.
For the carpenter's daughter from the Ukraine the task before her was an intimidating challenge. She had not been back to the United States since 1938. On her earlier trips, her associates had been dedicated Zionists and Socialists like herself. Now she faced the whole enormous spectrum of American Jewish thought, much of it indifferent or even hostil
e to her Zionist ideals.
Her friends in New York had urged her to avoid this confrontation. The council's leadership was not Zionist. Its members were already under great pressures for funds for their own American institutions, for hospitals, synagogues, cultural centers. They were weary, as Kaplan had discovered, of appeals from abroad for money.
Yet Golda Meir had insisted. She had telephoned Henry Montor, director of the United Jewish Appeal, in Chicago and, despite the fact that the speakers' program of the meeting had been drawn up long in advance, announced that she was on her way. Then, pausing only to buy a coat with which to face the American winter, she had set out for Chicago.
Now Golda Meir heard the toastmaster announce her name. At the sight of her simple, austere figure moving to the speakers' stand, someone in the crowd murmured, "She looks like the women of the Bible." Then, without a text, the messenger from Jerusalem began to speak.
"You must believe me," she said, "when I tell you that I have not come to the United States solely to prevent seven hundred thousand Jews from being wiped off the face of the earth. During these last years, the Jewish people have lost six million of their kind, and it would be presumptuous indeed of us to remind the Jews of the world that seven hundred thousand Jews are in danger. That is not the question. If, however, these seven hundred thousand Jews survive, then the Jews of the world will survive with them, and their freedom will be forever assured." But if they did not, she said, "then there is little doubt that for centuries there will be no Jewish people, there will be no Jewish nation, and all our hopes will be smashed."
In a few months, she told her audience, "a Jewish state will exist in Palestine. We shall fight for its birth. That is natural. We shall pay for it with our blood. That is normal. The best among us will fall, that is certain. But what is equally certain is that our morale will not waver no matter how numerous our invaders may be."
O Jerusalem! Page 20
