O Jerusalem!

by Larry Collins

  So complete was Glubb's emulation of their habits that whenever he sat down to a meal or a conference with his Bedouins he began to pluck imaginary lice from his chest and squash them, Bedouin style, between his thumbnails. Over the years he had grown into a kind of Bedouin himself, preferring solitude to company, silence to small talk. Glubb shunned Amman's social life, preferring to save himself for the moments he could escape the city and flee back to his Bedouins and their silent sands.

  In March 1939 he had been given command of the Arab Legion when its founder, Colonel F. G. Peake (Peake Pasha), retired. Against everyone's advice, Glubb had decided to build his illiterate Bedouin tribesmen into an elite mechanized force as the core of the Legion. Under his supervision, the Legion grew from two thousand men in 1939 to sixteen thousand in 1945. They fought alongside the British against the Vichy French in Syria and against their brother Arabs in Iraq, winning the admiration of friend and foe alike in both conflicts.

  Their commander was a complex, complicated man. His face was anything but fierce: a small, unmilitary moustache, plump cheeks, pale-blue eyes and graying hair parted neatly in the middle of his head. He had soft, almost feminine hands and a shy, reserved manner. Yet he had a ferocious temper. Once, in a fit of fury, he had beaten a sheikh so badly with a camel stick that he had to send him twenty camels the next day to make amends. More than one of his officers had fled his office with an inkwell or paperweight flying past their ears. He was a hard-driving ascetic man who insisted on meddling in every aspect of the Legion's affairs.

  Few of the men who had served with him would ever claim to have fully understood him. "You never knew what was going on with Glubb," one of them later commented. "His mind had begun to work like an Arab's. He was all subtleties. He had the kind of lucid mind that could understand the illogic of the Arabs and anticipate it. He knew they would act from their emotions, and he knew what those emotions were. He dealt as an Arab with the King's palace, as a Bedouin with the tribes, as a British officer with London. No one except Glubb knew everything that was going on."

  Glubb's presence in the black Humber was the measure of that. Beside him was King Abdullah's Prime Minister, Tewfic Abou Hoda. Their destination was Whitehall and a secret meeting with Britain's Foreign Secretary, Ernest Bevin. Abou Hoda had chosen to entrust the task of serving as his interpreter to Glubb rather than to a fellow Arab.

  The two men were immediately ushered into the enormous office in which on so many occasions over the decades the map of the world had been altered with a few words or a judicious pen stroke. As soon as he was seated, Abou Hoda began his plea for another alteration in that map, a minor one by the standards of that somber room, but one of major concern to the sovereign who had sent him to London.

  King Abdullah, he told Bevin, was being urged by numerous Palestinians to move into the west bank after the British mandate in Palestine expired and to lay claim to those areas assigned to an Arab state under the partition plan. He carefully stressed the interest shared by England and Transjordan in preventing the return of Haj Amin Husseini to Jerusalem. Obviously, he pointed out to Bevin, Abdullah would never undertake so major an action without the concurrence and support of his principal ally.

  The British Foreign Secretary thought for just an instant. Like John Glubb, who had translated Abou Hoda's words, he was persuaded of the value to Britain of a stable Hashemite monarchy in Transjordan united by blood to Britain's other Middle East ally, Iraq.

  "It seems the obvious thing to do," he told the Prime Minister. Then, almost as an afterthought, he appended one word of caution to the approval he had just given to Abdullah's program. "Don't go and invade the areas allotted to the Jews," he said.

  John Glubb now had an additional approval to secure in London if Abdullah's hopes were to be realized. The Arab Legion, on which King Abdullah was going to have to rely in the months to come, had been allowed to run down from its wartime peak of sixteen thousand men to four thousand. Glubb wanted to build it up to seven thousand, and to expand its mechanized regiment to a division by purchasing fifty to seventy-five armored cars. Even more important, the Legion had always relied on the British Army in Palestine to provide its maintenance support, workshops and logistics. All that would have to be replaced when the British withdrew.

  He turned to his countrymen. Three months later, on the eve of Britain's departure from Palestine, the results of John Glubb's visit to London would become apparent. Thanks to a threefold increase in the Arab Legion's subsidy, John Glubb and his Bedouin warriors would hold in their hands the fate of Jerusalem.

  It was not the discomfort that annoyed Pablo de Azcarate quite so much as the indignity of it all. His rank and the eminence of the organization he represented entitled him, it seemed to the Spanish diplomat, to a more elaborate welcome to the city than the one he was getting. Azcarate had frequently thought about his official entry into Jerusalem, ordering it in his imagination with the loving concern for detail and protocol absorbed in his years as an international civil servant. Often had he dreamed of his first magic glimpse of its marvels, the Mount of Olives, Gethsemane's gardens, the ancient ramparts. Reality was turning out to be considerably less romantic than all that, however. The only spectacle to greet the first representative of the United Nations to reach Palestine on his official entry into Jerusalem was a pair of hobnailed boots and the imperious buttocks of a British policeman.

  Over Britain's vigorous objections, Azcarate had been sent to Jerusalem along with a Norwegian colonel, an Indian economist, a Greek lawyer and two secretaries to establish a United Nations presence in the city and prepare the way for partition. The only representative of the Palestine government at the airport to welcome his party, an indifferent second lieutenant, had ordered the Spaniard onto the cold metal floorplates of an army truck at the feet of a police sergeant. Whenever he tried to raise his head for a glimpse at the passing scenery, the sergeant reminded him with a gesture of his Sten gun to keep it fixed between his knees for his own "protection."

  Whatever illusions Azcarate had left about the treatment he was going to get in Jerusalem were dispelled when his truck drew up to the official "residence" the British had prepared for his group. It consisted of a few rooms in the ground floor and cellar of a small two-story house across the street from the King David Hotel. When Azcarate marched into the building to take possession of it in the name of the worthy international body which had sent him to Palestine, he found a plumber installing their toilet, the electric current off and a pair of workmen happily knocking a hole in a wall. The shabby scraps of furniture heaped here and there looked to him as though they had been pillaged from a monk's cell or a prison. There was not even a bottle of ink or a scrap of paper to write on. The Arabs, the only servants allowed inside the British security zone, refused to have anything to do with them, he was informed; one of their number would be taken under guard to the Y.M.C.A. at mealtimes to fetch a hot meal.

  Azcarate's astonishing reception was a calculated humiliation fashioned by the British to impress upon the Spaniard the distaste with which they viewed his and the United Nations' presence in Palestine. His Majesty's civil servants, as they had already made clear, did not propose to share their authority in Palestine with the United Nations or anyone else until their mandate expired.

  Shocked by their attitude, Azcarate debated making an official protest. Finally, deciding that the best policy would be to "show unconcern and goodwill," he ordered his group to unpack.

  The next morning, the principal secretary of the United Nations Palestine Implementation Commission officially inaugurated his mission by addressing himself to the first task at hand, washing his breakfast dishes and making his own bed. Then, thinking it fitting that the United Nations' presence, however unwanted, be properly signaled to the city, Azcarate unpacked the lovely new blue-and-white United Nations flag given him just before he left New York.

  Proudly conscious of the drama of the moment, the short, bespectacled Azcarate
marched up to a second-floor window to unfurl the banner of the of the parliament of man over the sacred city.

  Even Azcarate, who by now had understood the limits of his mission's popularity, was taken aback by the reaction his gesture provoked. A flurry of sniper fire began zipping past the flag. The unfortunate diplomat had overlooked a vital point. The blue and white of the United Nations flag closely resembled the colors chosen by Theodor Herzl decades before for his Zionist banner. Every Arab sniper in Jerusalem was convinced he had just decorated his house with the Jewish flag.

  As he did every morning at precisely seven-thirty, General Sir Gordon MacMillan, commander in chief of the British forces in Palestine, ate a Jaffa grapefruit as he read the overnight messages delivered to his mess by the King David signals room. The dispatches awaiting the general's eyes on Saturday morning, March 6, 1948, were going to spoil the taste of his grapefruit. They announced the arrival in Palestine of the delegate of another concert of nations, riding, too, in a military vehicle. At midnight, at the head of a column of twenty-five trucks and five hundred men, Fawzi el Kaukji had rolled over the Allenby Bridge into Palestine, absolutely unmolested by the troops MacMillan had stationed there. The general was furious. However tolerant the Foreign Office view of Kaukji might be, he could not be allowed, MacMillan well knew, "to go openly rampaging over territory in which Britain considered herself a sovereign power."

  As he feared, he had barely finished breakfast before he began to receive "all kinds of screaming messages from London saying Kaukji and his people had to be run off and no nonsense about it."

  That was precisely what Sir Gordon MacMillan did not want to be obliged to do. Concerned above all with the lives of his men, he saw "no point in getting a lot of British soldiers killed in that kind of operation." Since Kaukji was already inside Palestine, the best tactic, he reasoned, would be to persuade him to lie low and avoid stirring an international incident until the British had left. MacMillan convinced High Commissioner Sir Alan Cunningham to send a district officer along with one of his generals to try to reason with Kaukji.

  Kaukji was in a cordial and expansive mood when the British delegation caught up with him late in the afternoon. The essence of MacMillan's message was quite simple. We are responsible for law and order, Kaukji was told, and if you start stirring things up we will have no choice but to run you off. After all, you shouldn't even be here in the first place; but we'll make an exception this time if you promise to behave.

  Kaukji smilingly agreed and offered his visitors a cup of coffee to seal their agreement. He had, of course, no intention of keeping it, but his formal pledge to behave himself was enough for MacMillan. As he had hoped it would, it "placated His Majesty's Government for a while and got us off the hook."

  In any event, Kaukji was not in a great hurry to open operations. He had, thanks to the regular infiltrations of the past two months, four thousand armed men under his command. Grouped into four regiments, they were concentrated in the Galilee and around Nablus. So openly acknowledged was their presence in Nablus that six hundred of them had paraded before ten thousand residents of the city, then received an official welcome from the mayor.

  By Palestine standards, his men were relatively well armed. Communications and logistics, however, were primitive. Runners ran word-of-mouth commands or handwritten messages from post to post. The shortage of food and other essential items did not unduly concern Kaukji. He intended to let his army live off the plunder of conquered Jewish settlements. Nor did the fact that his medical supplies consisted of aspirin, bandages and laxatives worry him. He anticipated neither a long campaign nor serious casualties.

  "I have come to Palestine to stay and fight until Palestine is a free and united Arab country or until I am killed and buried here," he announced. His aim, he declared, borrowing the slogan that was becoming the leitmotiv of the Arab leadership, was "to drive all the Jews into the sea."

  "Everything is ready," he proclaimed. "The battle starts when I give the word."

  The commanding general of the British Army in Palestine was not the only person seeking to establish a dialogue with Fawzi el Kaukji on March 6, 1948. Yehoshua Palmon had been trying to arrange a secret meeting with the Arab leader for weeks. One of the most skilled linguists in Palestine, Palmon had lived for months in the desert with Bedouin tribes. For a year, disguised as an Arab peddler, he had wandered around Syria with a mule and a case of dry goods. From those experiences had come a wealth of Arab contacts. Through them he was aware of the bitter rivalry dividing Kaukji and the Mufti. If only he could use his contacts to arrange a meeting with Kaukji, he thought, he might achieve something of great consequences for his employers. Palmon was one of the Jewish Agency's most effective intelligence agents.

  Kaukji's arrival in the north of Palestine had immediate repercussions in Jerusalem. Until his army's value had been measured in the field, the leaders of the Haganah could not risk withdrawing men from the Galilee to reinforce the city. Yet Jerusalem's new commander, David Shaltiel, had come to the conclusion that he had to have more men or reduce the area he had been assigned to defend. His first month in the city had revealed numerous shortcomings in his command.

  Jerusalem's local peculiarities had left the Haganah markedly less effective than it was elsewhere in Palestine. Years of rigid British surveillance had hampered training. The complex mosaic of ethnic communities in the city made unity difficult. The orthodox sects which composed a large part of Jerusalem's population had never been a fertile source of Haganah recruits. The Jerusalem contingents of the Stern Gang and the Irgun, the largest and most influential in the country, resisted the city's internationalization and thus made impossible the kind of cooperation that was growing between these organizations and the Haganah elsewhere.

  All of those factors led Shaltiel to write Ben-Gurion early in March asking for reinforcements. The three thousand men under his command, he said, were not enough to defend the city. Many of his commanders, he declared, were not up to their tasks, and he asked permission to change them. Unlike Dov Joseph, Shaltiel felt that the fact that Jerusalem was being defended by her own sons was a disadvantage. "Every time a Jerusalemite is killed," he wrote, "it affects the morale of everyone."

  He had just enough arms for his fixed posts. "Every time I have to equip a convoy," he reported, "I have to take arms from my positions. If the convoy is ambushed, I lose the arms."

  A few days later, summing up the city's situation in a report to Eliezer Kaplan, treasurer of the Jewish Agency, Shaltiel said Jerusalem was unprepared for war in its water reserves, its fortifications and the organization of its manpower. Whether or not Jerusalem would even be able to hold out until the British withdrew would depend, he warned, on their ability to solve several problems. For Shaltiel, the most important was to bring the Irgun and the Stern Gang under Haganah discipline. His efforts met with little success, however.

  "No compromise," Yoshua Zetler, local commander of the Stern Gang, snapped at him at a secret meeting arranged between the two men. "You [the Jewish Agency] were willing to internationalize Jerusalem. You will get no help from us in that."

  Shaltiel begged him to station some of his men in the villages protecting the city's flanks. Zetler refused.

  "I'm not interested in villages," he said. "Jerusalem is the only thing that interests me."

  The Haganah commander's relations with Jerusalem's numerous orthodox communities were equally unsatisfactory. Their good rabbis were convinced that the thousands of young men in their Talmudic schools would serve Jerusalem's cause better reciting psalms and praying for victory than bearing arms or digging trenches. Shaltiel ordered a young diplomat named Jacob Tsur to try to change their attitude.

  Wearing a new black hat purchased for the occasion, Tsur marched into the home of the Chief Rabbi of Palestine to address Jerusalem's most eminent religious leaders. Summoning up all his erudition, Tsur began to recite, chapter and verse, the words of the great Jewish philosopher Maimoni
des, who wrote of total wars in which the people's existence was imperiled and "every man, even the bridegroom under his canopy, should be mobilized." After several hours of intense casuistical debate, the rabbis finally agreed to allow their students to spend four days a week digging fortifications. For the remaining three days, they decreed, they would devote themselves to prayer "so God may grant us victory."*

  All of Shaltiel's problems paled, however, before the complications arising from his prime responsibility, defending a command that embraced settlements around the city, the besieged Jewish Quarter of the Old City and the Dead Sea Potash works twenty-six miles away where David Ben-Gurion had heard the news of the partition vote. Almost a third of his men were tied up either in those outposts or in keeping communications with them open.

  The frustrated Shaltiel decided to urge on Tel Aviv a move which contradicted Ben-Gurion's order that no Jewish territory was to be abandoned for whatever reason. He urged that the Jewish Quarter and settlements west and south of the city be abandoned and the men and weapons thus saved concentrated in Jerusalem. The Arabs, he predicted, would enjoy "a steady increase in numerical strength . . . so that by May 1 their ratio to us will be as high as five to one. Our deteriorating military situation, which includes bad training, lack of experience, poor leadership, considerable losses and a continuing increase in the enemy's strength does not allow room for any sentiment." The evacuations had to be carried out, he said, and "political considerations must not be taken into account, because they are contradictory to our military imperatives."

  "The only reason he's come to us is we're better customers," thought Nahum Stavy, watching the British major before him nervously wipe his glasses. The major was stationed in a vital compound of buildings on the northeastern fringe of Jewish Jerusalem, the Schneller School, an orphanage confiscated by the British from a German charity. Stavy, one of Shaltiel's officers, had just explained to him the Haganah's need for those buildings and, above all, its overwhelming desire that they not fall into Arab hands.