O Jerusalem!

by Larry Collins

  Yet, she warned, those invaders would come with cannon and armor. Against those weapons "sooner or later our courage will have no meaning, for we will have ceased to exist," she said.

  She had come, she announced, to ask the Jews of America for twenty-five to thirty million dollars to buy the heavy arms they would need to face the invaders' cannon. "My friends," she said in making her plea, "we live in a very brief present. When I tell you we need this money immediately, it does not mean next month, or in two months. It means right now. . . .

  "It is not to you," she concluded, "to decide whether we shall continue our struggle or not. We shall fight. The Jewish community of Palestine will never hang out the white flag before the Mufti of Jerusalem . . . but you can decide one thing—whether the victory will be ours or the Mufti's."

  A hush had fallen on her audience, and for an instant Golda thought she had failed. Then the entire assembly of men and women rose in a deafening wave of applause. While its echoes still rang through the dining room, the first volunteers scrambled to the platform with their pledges. Before coffee was served Golda had been promised over a million dollars. They were made available immediately in cash, a fact without precedent. Men began to telephone their bankers and secure personal loans against their own names for the sums they estimated they would be able to raise later in their communities. By the time that incredible afternoon was over, Golda was able to telegraph Ben-Gurion her conviction that she would be able to raise the twenty-five "Stephans"—twenty-five million dollars, in the code they had chosen (using the name of American Zionist leader Rabbi Stephen S. Wise).

  Astounded by her Chicago triumph, the American Zionist leadership urged her to set off on a cross-country tour. Accompanied by Henry Morgenthau, Jr., Franklin D. Roosevelt's former Secretary of the Treasury, she set a grueling pace, speaking sometimes three and four times a day. From city to city she moved on her pilgrimage, renewing before each of her audiences her dramatic plea, eliciting from each the same spontaneous, overwhelmingly generous reaction she had produced in Chicago. And from each stop a telegram went back to Tel Aviv tallying the "Stephans" raised during the day. From time to time along the way other telegrams went out from her hotel room. To Ehud Avriel in Prague, Xiel Federmann in Antwerp, and others seeking to buy equipment for a Jewish army, they brought the most reassuring news those men could hope to receive—the details of the bank transfers which would allow them to go on with their purchases.

  Only once in her extraordinary pilgrimage did she falter. It was in Palm Beach, Florida. Looking at the elegance of the dinner crowd before her, their jewels, their furs, the moon playing on the sea beyond the banquet hall's windows, she suddenly thought of her soldiers of the Haganah trembling in the cold of the Judean hills that night. Drinking black coffee on the dais, thinking of the contrast between that scene and the one before her, tears came to her eyes. "These people don't want to hear about fighting and death in Palestine," she thought. But they did, and so movingly that before the evening was over the gathering at Palm Beach had pledged her a million and a half dollars, enough to buy a winter coat for every soldier in the Haganah.

  The woman who had arrived in the United States one bitter January night with ten dollars in her pocketbook would leave with fifty million, ten times the sum Eliezer Kaplan had mentioned, twice the figure set by David Ben-Gurion, three times the entire oil revenues of Saudi Arabia for 1947. Waiting for her airplane at Lydda Airport was David Ben-Gurion, the man who had wanted to go in her place. No one appreciated better than he the magnitude of her accomplishment in the United States or its importance to the Zionist cause.

  "The day when history is written," he solemnly told her, "it will be recorded that it was thanks to a Jewish woman that the Jewish state was born."

  12

  "SALVATION COMES FROM THE SKY."

  WITH GRATIFYING REGULARITY, the bellhop delivered the little slips of paper to the client in Room 121 of Prague's Hotel Alcron. Issued by the city's Zivnostenska Bank, they confirmed the transfer, from the Chase Manhattan Bank in New York via a Swiss bank, of a steady stream of dollars to the bank account of Ehud Avriel. That was his share of the harvest of Golda Meir's American trip, a prodigious flow of funds which in a month and a half had allowed Avriel to purchase 25,000 rifles, 5,000 Bren guns, 300 machine guns and 50 million cartridges. The mind of the man who had come to Europe with a toothbrush and a copy of Faust to buy arms, however, no longer thought "in terms of ten thousand rifles, but of dozens of tanks, airplanes and guns." Avriel had learned of the change in the Haganah's fortunes in a flying visit to Tel Aviv to acquaint Ben-Gurion with the possibilities he had discovered in Czechoslovakia.

  "You don't have to worry about money any more," Ben-Gurion told him. "Just tell me what we can do." A new phase in the purchase activities was opening. Now they were going after heavy weapons wherever they could find them.

  Golda Meir's dollars were sent to Geneva's Pictet and Company, a bank in which the Haganah, capitalizing on the fluctuating exchange rates of Europe's currencies, converted them into Swiss francs, then to Italian lira, gold, and back to dollars, a complex circle whose profits would allow Ehud Avriel to buy a few extra rifles with each purchase he made.

  To direct the expanded arms-buying operations, Ben-Gurion set up a full-scale purchasing mission with its own experts, organization and communications system. Geneva with its reputation for discreet financing was headquarters. Ben-Gurion sent to Geneva to run it one of his most trusted friends, a Russian with a mania for secrecy so deeply rooted that before opening his safe he looked in the mirror to make sure who he was. Shaul Avigour was a Haganah legend. A survivor of the first Zionist combat on the soil of Palestine, the battle of Tel Hai, founder of the first illegal immigration network, his most recent exploit had been successfully smuggling fifteen thousand Rumanias and Bulgarians into Palestine.

  Shaul Avigour in his Geneva headquarters soon began to run up one of the biggest telephone bills in Switzerland, calling New York, Prague, Buenos Aires, Mexico. The telephone was his only means of communication, as the Haganah had felt it imprudent to install in Switzerland one of the secret radio transmitters with which it linked most European cities to Tel Aviv. The network's code name was "Gideon," for one of the judges of Biblical Israel. It had been established for the illegal immigration program, and now it provided secure communications for Avigour's arms buyers. It was located on the roof of an orphanage in Monte Mario, one of the seven hills of Rome. Five times a day its thirty-six-foot antenna relayed to "Shoshana"—the Haganah's Tel Aviv headquarters—the reports of Avigour's agents filtering across Europe in search of arms for the soldiers of Jerusalem.

  If those reports confirmed the success of Avigour's and Avriel's purchasing activities, they spoke increasingly that winter of another problem facing the Haganah's arms agents. It was one thing to buy arms in Europe; it was another to find a ship willing to risk running them past a British naval blockade into Palestine.

  Most maritime insurance was written or rediscounted in London, and agents prepared to insure Palestine-bound ships were hard to find. Besides, losing a precious cargo of arms to Britain's naval blockade was a disaster the Jewish Agency could not afford. And so Ben-Gurion's arms purchasers concluded they would have to stockpile arms in Europe until the British mandate expired, then try to rush them eastward before the state they were meant to defend could be overrun.

  Ben-Gurion grew more impatient with the problem as every day went by. He bombarded Avriel and Avigour with insistent, angry cables urging them to find a way to smuggle at least some of their arms past the British into Palestine.

  It was not easy. Xiel Federmann, the Santa Claus of the Haganah, finally chartered a Danish freighter, by pretending its destination would be Istanbul, not Tel Aviv. Federmann turned it into a cornucopia of military stores with all the supplies he had plucked from the war-surplus warehouses of Antwerp: halftracks in wooden crates labeled "TRACTORS" in Turkish with an Istanbul address; jeeps, t
rucks, water tankers, helmets, socks, tents, camouflage nets, pack racks, all neatly crated and marked with a fictitious Turkish destination. Then he ordered forty tons of soft coal brought to the dock. Federmann's men patiently dumped the contents of the coal sacks one by one into the ship's holds until a dusty black mattress covered Federmann's Istanbul-bound shipment. When he had finished, he announced to the ship's master that the coal was destined for Tel Aviv, implying that if he didn't want to go there before heading for Istanbul, he could unload the coal himself piece by piece.

  On the eve of the ship's sailing, the indefatigable Federmann learned of the existence of a lot of field telephones in perfect condition that he had somehow overlooked in his foragings around Antwerp. Their asking price was $40,000 cash. Federmann didn't have that sum. The only banker he knew in the city refused to give it to him. Federmann, however, was a resourceful young man. He went to a Jewish survivor he knew in what had been Antwerp's world-famous diamond-cutting center. At Federmann's friend's request, the quarter's Jewish diamond merchants began drifting into his shop bringing all their available cash with them wrapped in old newspapers or tucked in little suede diamond sacks or battered jewelry boxes. In half an hour, Federmann had his $40,000.

  Ehud Avriel spent three months looking for a ship willing to take a proportion of his purchases to Palestine. He finally located a tramp steamer called the Nora in the Yugoslavian port of Brno. To get his cargo of Czech rifles past Britain's customs inspectors, Avriel covered them with a commodity chosen to dull their professional curiosity: six hundred tons of Italian onions.

  Avriel's wretched tramp steamer, however, provided him with more than transport. One day in the offices of the Yugoslavian shipping agent who had located the Nora for him, a clerk whispered to Avriel, "Congratulations. I see you found another ship. We wrote orders to put your second shipment of rifles on the Lino."

  Avriel's bushy eyebrows raised just a bit. He had ordered no second shipment of arms through Brno. But he had a very good idea who had. Abdul-Aziz Kerine, the Syrian officer who had preceded him in the offices of Prague's Zbrojovka Brno arms works, must, he reasoned, have found a ship to carry his arms to Syria. No British blockade would hinder the movements of his ship. Someone else would have to undertake that job. Instead of simply trying to run a blockade, Avriel would now have the problem of setting up one of his own.

  "Yakum purkan min shemaya—salvation comes from the sky," promised an old Aramaic prayer in the language that was the lingua franca of Palestine in Christ's time. In contemporary Palestine, no one was a firmer believer in a modern interpretation of that ancient adage than David Ben-Gurion. He had been in London during the Blitz and knew what air power meant in modern warfare. Even in the reduced scale of the combat that his people faced in Palestine it could prove decisive. Air transport might well be the only reliable means of supplying the isolated Jewish colonies scattered through Palestine, and even, if worse came to worse, Jerusalem itself. The Jewish leader had been obsessed with the idea of laying the foundations for an air force, but he had been unable to solve one problem: How do you build an underground air force in an occupied country?

  The answer was given to him, surprisingly, by his next-door neighbor in Tel Aviv, a twenty-nine-year-old R.A.F. veteran whom Ben-Gurion had once bounced on his knee. Aaron Remez had flown for the R.A.F. for four years, providing air cover at the Normandy landings, escorting Bomber Command flights over Germany, attacking the V-bomb sites. None of those experiences, however, had produced a shock to rival the one he had received on his return to Palestine. It came on his first sight of his father. He was behind the barbed wire of a British concentration camp, guarded by men wearing the uniform of the country for which Remez had risked his life for four years. Embittered, Remez returned to Tel Aviv and drafted a fifteen-page memorandum for his next-door neighbor. It was a proposal for the establishment of a Jewish air force.

  That document, four private pleasure planes, an air taxi and twenty pilots were the foundations of what would become, two decades later, the most proficient air force in the world. Remez' memorandum had, in a sense, answered the question that had plagued Ben-Gurion, by ignoring it. You didn't build an underground air force in an occupied country, he wrote. You build it up outside while preparing inside the country the structures to receive it.

  Set up a foreign-based organization to buy planes, he urged. They would have to rely at the outset on recruiting non-Palestinian volunteers, Jewish and non-Jewish, to fly them. Conceal them on secret airfields, using fictitious companies to provide them a cover. Negotiate landing and fueling rights for those dummy companies.

  In Palestine, Remez proposed setting up a Haganah Air Service. Its cover would be an organization whose headquarters were in a simple office building at 9 Montefiore Street—the Palestine Flying Club. The club had a primitive hangar at Lydda Airport sheltering its four monoplanes and a De Havilland Dragon Rapide used as an air taxi between Tel Aviv and Haifa. The club's president became the Haganah Air Service's first commander, and Remez his operations officer. Remez began rounding up all the Palestinians he could find with flying experience. Around the country, settlers set to work building ten primitive dirt landing strips to receive the Air Service's planes—when they had them. With a longer perspective, Remez began to lay plans to occupy the R.A.F.'s Palestine bases when the mandate expired.

  The most notable achievement of his fledgling service in those early weeks, however, took place not in Palestine but in the office of the War Assets Administration in Washington. There, one morning shortly after the partition vote, the Air Service's first foreign recruit, a thirty-one-year-old flying enthusiast from Bridgeport, Connecticut, named Adolph (Al) Schwimmer handed the W.A.A. a check for $45,000 and received in return three gray slips of paper. They were the titles to the Haganah's first real planes, three practically brand-new Constellations each of which had cost half a million dollars to build.

  To that trio of planes Al Schwimmer soon added fifteen C-46s for short-haul transports. His burgeoning little collection of planes, painted with the insignia of two companies that the former U.S. Air Transport Command major had established, Service Airways and Panamanian Air Lines, were hangared in Burbank, California, and Millville, New Jersey.

  There was no question, however, of using those planes in Palestine. Yet as Abdul Khader Husseini's attacks on Jewish transport increased in numbers and effectiveness, the need for some kind of air service, however limited, grew. One day Remez learned that the British wanted to sell twenty R.A.F. Auster observation planes for scrap metal. They were not C-46s, but they had wings and a motor and some of them at least could be made to fly. He arranged for their purchase by a friendly scrap-metal dealer, who handed them over to the Palestine Flying Club. By cannibalizing their parts, Remez' mechanics were able to put a dozen of them into flying condition. As each plane was finished, it was painted in exactly the same manner as one of the Flying Club's pleasure planes, a Taylorcraft to which the Austers bore a fortunate resemblance. Then Remez and his men stenciled onto its wings the serial letters of their Taylorcraft, VP-PAI, and put it into service. Soon a fleet of thirteen VQ-PAIs, twelve Austers and the original Taylorcraft were flying around Palestine. The British Civil Air inspectors never discovered the explanation behind the astonishingly active life of VQ-PAI.

  Thus, salvation of a limited sort at least began to arrive from the sky for Palestine's isolated kibbutzim. Those planes scouted the countryside around them for Arab ambushes, flew water to the Negev and dropped emergency supplies to ammunition-short settlements. They even began night flights into primitive strips illuminated by the headlights of parked trucks.*

  In Jerusalem, the Haganah carved a rough two-thousand-foot dirt runway out of a wadi floor next to the Monastery of the Cross, below the hill on which an Israeli parliament would stand one day. Getting in and out of that little strip was the most difficult challenge the pilots of the Air Service faced.

  For the Jews of Jerusalem, the put-put
of their little planes slipping regularly in and out of the improvised strip became a comforting part of daily existence. Soon they had given them an affectionate nickname, inspired by their triangular landing gear. They called them "Primus" because they looked as fragile and unstable as the little three-legged kerosene stoves on which so many Jewish housewives cooked that winter.

  13

  "WE SHALL BECOME AS HARD AS STONE."

  "TONIGHT, Lipshitz, you don't go."

  Shimshon Lipshitz was not a man to ignore lightly such an injunction from the woman who had ordered every detail of his orthodox household for eighteen years. Above all, his wife's warning concerned his own safety. Like hundreds of other Jerusalemites in the winter of 1948, Lipshitz could not make the half-mile walk from his home to his place of work without exposing himself to sniper fire.

  Yet his wife's words threatened something that was a source of great pride to Shimshon Lipshitz. Since December 1, 1932, he had never missed a day's work. He did not intend to miss one now. Resting a chunky hand on his wife's shoulder, he announced, "Lipshitz has never missed a day. I am going."

  The destination to which Lipshitz' determination drove him was an ordinary three-story red stone building on Hasollel Street a few steps from Zion Square and the heart of New Jerusalem. It was the headquarters of the Palestine Post, the foremost English-language newspaper north of Cairo. Caught between the Jewish extremists whose terrorism it deplored and a mandatory administration whose policies it criticized, the Post was Zionism's most articulate public voice in the Middle East. Since its first edition had reached the streets of Jerusalem in 1932, Lipshitz had been the Post's chief printer.

  With his soft gray eyes that could sweep over banks of inverted type as surely as a rabbi scanning the verses of his Torah, and with his deft, heavy hands, Lipshitz had assembled the blocks of lead that had recorded an epoch period in his people's history. From Nazi Germany's Crystal Night to the triumph of Partition Night two months ago, those hands and eyes had followed the ghastly tragedy of the death camps and the struggle for a Jewish salvation. In a few months' time, they would hold the type announcing the fulfillment of his and Zionism's dream, the announcement of the birth of a Jewish state.