O Jerusalem!

by Larry Collins

  By midmorning, Mordechai Gazit and his exhausted soldiers were under fire from all sides. Before long almost two thousand Arabs were pouring fire onto Kastel. Gazit and his men hardly knew where to shoot. A mystical fervor seemed to be driving their assailants. Shouting, brandishing their arms, their black-and-white checkered kaffiyehs bobbing up everywhere, they surged irresistibly forward.

  The ammunition Narciss had brought was tied up in bundles and tossed from window to window, since it was impossible to step outside. Gazit himself staggered through the building kicking his sleeping men to their feet so that they could fire a few rounds before tumbling back to sleep again. Finally, just after one, the commander of the reinforcements the Palmach had been promising him for hours arrived.

  "What shall we do?" he asked.

  Before Gazit could answer, a soldier burst in shouting, "The Arabs are here!" This time it was true. They had already captured the mukhtar's house only a few yards away.

  "What do you suggest?" the Palmach man asked Gazit. "I suggest we get out of here," Gazit replied, indicating their only line of retreat, the steep hillside falling down toward the road. Gazit ordered his men to get out as best they could. He took the three wounded men with him and began rolling them down the terraced hillside, kicking and pushing them along with his hands and feet. It was, he would recall, a terrible experience, twisting them from level to level like sacks of corn, hearing their heads and limbs thud from bump to bump and bang against the rocks of each of the three-foot-high stone walls along their route down.

  At the crest of the hill, the victorious Arabs swept into Kastel, yelling and brandishing their rifles in the air. To their exuberant shouts, someone raised the Arab banner from the roof of the mukhtar's house. Once again, after three days of fighting, Kastel was an Arab village.

  Almost at the instant the flag was up, a voice screamed out, "Allah akhbar!" It was a cry of grief, not triumph. It came from Nadi Dai'es, the coffee boy who had rushed off to help burn the Commercial Center the day after partition. Nadi's propensity for following passing crowds had led him to Kastel. Struggling to join the others at the summit of the village, he had stumbled on the body of Abdul Khader Husseini lying on his back on a low flight of stairs before a little stone house.

  His discovery turned the Arab victory celebration into a wake. The exultation of their triumph was replaced by terrified consternation, glee by hysteria. Men swarmed around the body weeping and shrieking their grief, kissing the dead leader's face. Others mashed their heads with the stock of their rifles to mark their remorse.

  Abdul Khader was gently placed on a stretcher, his face washed and his clothes straightened out. Then, passed from hand to hand, he was carried down the hillside of his last conquest while behind him the tear-stained villagers he had led so often to battle moaned over and over again, "Allah akhbar, Allah akhbar."

  Watching the procession as it wound down the hill, a heartbroken Abou Gharbieh, the schoolteacher who had been with him barely twenty-four hours earlier, thought, "We can never replace him. He was our chief, our only chief, and he has disappeared."

  The driver's license and the miniature Koran taken by Uzi Narciss from Abdul Khader's body had reached Haganah intelligence in Jerusalem too late to get a warning to Gazit that a furious Arab assault looking for Abdul Khader's corpse was sure to strike him. Yitzhak Levi, Shaltiel's intelligence officer, put the discovery to another use. The Arabs of the Old City, informed only of the recapture of Kastel, were celebrating their triumph. At five-thirty in the afternoon, on Levi's orders, the Haganah's Arabic-language radio broadcast the first word of Abdul Khader's death. Immediately, the celebrating stopped and a shocked silence fell on the Old City.

  Haj Amin Husseini received the news of the death of his ablest lieutenant in the midst of a meeting of his followers in Damascus. He stood up.

  "Gentlemen" he announced in his quiet voice, "I give you the jihad martyr Abdul Khader Husseini. Rejoice and thank God." For Emile Ghory, listening to him, these words marked "the end of the Palestine resistance movement. There is something in our blood," he thought, "that ascribes such importance to the man, such hero worship to the leader, that when he dies, everything collapses."

  22

  THE PEACE OF DEIR YASSIN

  A PAIR OF CORPSES in each valise wouldn't have been as heavy. Sweating from his effort, the traveler dragged them along, one after the other. Freddy Fredkens, the false pastry cook who had found the crew of Ocean Trade Airways in a Paris bar, was going back to the wars. It had been five years since the former R.A.F. ace had touched the controls of a plane similar to the one discreetly parked in the hangar of a flying club at Toussus-le-Noble Airfield just outside Paris. It was an Anson bomber, the kind of aircraft Fredkens had flown on dozens of missions over Nazi Germany. With the aid of an old R.A.F. colleague, Fredkens had arranged the purchase of four Ansons for the Haganah's fledgling air forces.

  He shoved his heavy valises on board and clambered up to the cockpit. His first stop was Rome. There he got the final instructions he needed for the assignment awaiting him. In his twin-engine Anson devoid of any official identification, Fredkens was going to carry out a bombing raid over the Adriatic Sea in the name of a state which did not exist. Packed into the pair of valises he had carried to his Anson with such difficulty were two one-hundred-pound bombs. They would, hopefully, be the weapons with which Fredkens would sink the S.S. Lino, a tramp steamer en route from Fiume to Beirut. Packed into the Lino's holds were six thousand Czech rifles and eight million rounds of cartridges, the harvest of Syrian Captain Abdul-Aziz Kerine's mission to Prague.

  Sector by sector, Fredkens prowled the Adriatic searching for the Lino. To aid him, he had the exact hour of her sailing, her course, and her speed, furnished by Ehud Avriel's agents in Fiume. Despite all that, he failed to discover the ship. After three days of futile searching, Fredkens and his old Anson were grounded by a furious storm.

  The following morning he discovered his missing target—as did almost everyone else in Italy—on the front pages of the Italian press. The storm that had grounded Fredkens had driven the Lino into the port of Malfetta, north of Bari. There an Italian customs inspector had discovered her secret cargo, and the press immediately announced to the world the arrival of the mysterious shipload of arms in an Italian port. Italy was at that moment in the midst of a hotly contested national election. Ada Sereina, one of Avriel's Italian colleagues, contacted a friend in the ruling Christian Democratic Party. The Lino's arms, she suggested, were probably destined for the Italian Communist Party to help foment an antigovernment rising. The government immediately seized the ship pending an investigation, arrested the crew and towed the Lino to Bari, where it was placed under military guard.

  The action, of course, presented the Haganah a superb opportunity to destroy the vessel. The task was assigned to Munya Mardor, one of the Jewish organization's boldest agents. Together with an explosives expert, two frogmen, a radio operator and a driver, Mardor rushed off to Bari. Their transport was a G.M.C. disguised as an American Army truck. Their explosives were packed into its spare fuel tank, onto which they had painted the letters "DDT."

  It was quickly apparent there was no way to reach the Lino by land. The only way to approach the vessel was by sea, at night. A first attempt failed due to the alert Italian surveillance of the ship. A second attempt was set for midnight April 9.

  At eleven o'clock at night, Mardor's G.M.C. slipped discreetly up to an isolated corner of the harbor seawall on the Corso della Vittoria. The two frogmen and the explosives expert unloaded their material, inflated a rubber life raft and paddled out to sea.

  The explosives expert clutched his bomb tightly to his chest while the frogmen rowed. It was a motorcycle inner tube packed with TNT. Its three detonators were wrapped in prophylactics, an item that had been almost as difficult to find in Roman Catholic Italy as TNT. Each consisted of a ration of potassium corked by a plug of tightly wadded newspaper. Once the tire had been at
tached to the hull of the Lino, the frogmen would turn the three detonators upside down and gently break a vial of sulphuric acid packed into the head of each one. Mardor had carefully determined the length of the newspaper plug between the acid and the potassium. The time it would take the acid to eat through the paper would cover their escape. With unconcealed glee, Mardor had personally chosen the paper for the plugs. It came from the Rome Daily American, a journal not noted for its sympathy to the Zionist cause.

  The night was perfectly still. Soon the raft slipped into the military port, and the prow of the Lino loomed up in the darkness. Above them, the three men could hear the footfalls of its guards pacing its deck. The frogmen slipped into the water and swam silently to the boat. With great care, they attached the bomb to the Lino's hull, just below the waterline. Then they swam back to their raft and paddled to a little fishing port where Mardor and their truck were waiting. A few seconds later they were on their way to Rome.

  Shortly after four o'clock the first drop of sulphuric acid terminated its hungry journey through the pages of the Rome Daily American. An enormous explosion shook the port, tearing a gaping hole in the Lino's hull. Slowly, Captain Abdul-Aziz Kerine's six thousand rifles and eight million rounds of ammunition went gurgling to the bottom of Bari harbor.

  The charisma which had made Abdul Khader Husseini such an effective leader in life was going to deprive him in death of his last victory. Determined to honor their dead leader by being present at his funeral, the hundreds of Arabs who had swarmed to Kastel in search of him in the morning now poured back toward Jerusalem. By bus, taxicab, weeping in the open vans of trucks, they streamed away, leaving practically deserted the village for which Abdul Khader had died.

  Barely forty men, lead by schoolteacher Abou Gharbieh remained behind. "Our attack was chaotic, but our victory is even worse," he remarked bitterly to the last leader to leave, Anwar Nusseibi, elder brother of the man who had given the partition news on the Palestine Broadcasting System. Nusseibi promised to send him relief and supplies as soon as he could.

  For the Haganah, retaking Kastel was essential if Operation Nachshon was to continue. Shortly after midnight two companies of Palmach under a brilliant young officer named David "Dado" Elazar moved up to assault the village. Abou Gharbieh saw them preparing their attack. He knew he had no chance of holding them off. Determined to avoid unnecessary losses, he abandoned the village. Once again the men of the Haganah were masters of Kastel.

  Colonel Fouad Mardam grabbed a glass of ice water to dislodge the morsel of shish kebab suddenly sticking in his throat, then reached over and turned up the volume on his radio. The explosion of unexplained origin, continued Radio Damascus' noon news bulletin, had sunk a shipload of arms in the Italian port of Bari. A few hours later, a telegram confirmed the worst of the fears that had interrupted the Syrian Army Quartermaster General's lunch. The famous rifles he had sent Captain Abdul-Aziz Kerine to Prague to purchase were now resting in the silt in Bari harbor.

  In view of the gravity of the situation, Mardam himself was dispatched to Italy to try to salvage the lost cargo and arrange for its shipment east on another ship. A few days later, the Syrian watched the first case of his sunken arms store emerge from the murky waters of the Adriatic. Under his orders a squad of frogmen plunged in and out of the wreckage of the S.S. Lino, hauling up to the Bari docks everything they could save from its flooded holds. Mardam quickly realized that his eight million cartridges were a total loss. As his rifles began to pile up on the Bari docks, however, his hopes mounted. Most of them could be saved by treating them with an anticorrosive agent. His foes' escapade was not going to yield the result they had sought. Reassured, Mardam left for Rome in search of a ship to continue his rifles' interrupted voyage.

  The catastrophe of the S.S. Lino had only served to give fresh impetus to the Arabs' arms purchasers and the incredible array of merchants anxious to fill their orders. Convinced of the gullibility of those newly independent Arab states, the world's arms traffickers descended on the ministries of Beirut and Damascus by the dozens. A Czech offered six thousand rifles and five million cartridges for olive oil. A Spaniard proposed twenty thousand Mausers and twenty million cartridges. From Italy came an offer of four hundred 81-millimeter mortars and 180,000 shells. A Swiss suggested antitank guns. An ingenious Hamburg scrap dealer proposed Hitler's personal yacht and a fleet of secondhand submarines. Sometimes these arms were real, sometimes they existed only in the imagination of the man selling them. In all cases, they served to confuse and bewilder the Arabs they were meant to arm.

  One of the most colorful dealers was an Italian named Giuseppe Doria. For twenty years his munitions had fueled conflicts in Ethiopia, Spain, Greece, China. So complete was his line of goods that Doria boasted he alone could furnish an entire army. To deliver them, he owned three ultrarapid three-hundred-ton motor launches "capable of delivering, for a modest surcharge, arms to any place in the world." One restriction, however, accompanied Doria's sales. He insisted on being paid in full, in cash, in dollars, in a Swiss numbered bank account before he would deliver a single bullet.

  No one, however, rivaled, for sheer imagination, a French World War II ace named Commander Duroc. An instructor in Haile Selassie's Air Force, Duroc promised to sell the Damascus Defense Ministry six Mosquito fighter bombers complete with crews, ready to fly from Tangiers, to any airport in the Middle East. In addition, he told the Syrians, he owned an air transport firm composed of six C-46s with French pilots able to fly fifty tons of arms a week. All he asked for his nonexistent airplanes was an enormous amount of cash.

  Nor were the Arabs themselves lacking in imagination in the pursuit of arms. A secret report to Lebanon's Riad Solh from one of his colleagues proposed a particularly ingenious way to equip Lebanon with an air force. Recruit a large number of decorated former pilots, urged the report, then send them into Palestine with orders to kidnap the Jews' planes and fly them to Beirut.

  Despite the enormous burden of not being able to operate in the open like the Arabs, David Ben-Gurion's arms buyers had a number of notable achievements to their credit. In hotels near the Rome railroad station, under the hot metal roofs in hangars in the airport of Panama City, a hundred pilots anxiously awaited instructions. Idealists, Zionists, mercenaries, adventurers, Jews and non-Jews, they came from the United States, Europe, South Africa and Asia. Their members included a Dutch millionaire, a Persian veteran of the Indian Air Force, a Red Army deserter, a T.W.A. captain, a newspaperman, a milkman, a fireman, and even a Brooklyn cop. They had two things in common, a desire to fight for the new Jewish state and the thousands of hours of flying time they had amassed during the Second World War.

  The planes they would fly were as varied as their pilots' background. On the airstrips of Panama City were a practically new Constellation and ten war-surplus C-46s. Two more Constellations, five Mustangs and three Flying Fortresses waited in airports in California, New Jersey and Florida for a chance to escape the surveillance of the F.B.I. and take off for Europe. Twenty-five Norseman transports bought from an American scrap-metal dealer in Germany were hidden on airfields around Europe. Four Beaufighters slipped out of Britain by a fake movie company on the pretext that they were to be used in a film were tucked away in an airport near Ajaccio on the island of Corsica.

  To that burgeoning air force was soon to be added its most substantial acquisition, a purchase David Ben-Gurion deemed indispensable for the first phases of the conflict looming before his followers. Ehud Avriel, the young Austrian whose Czech rifles and machine guns had helped open the road to Jerusalem three weeks earlier, was ordered to pay his Czech friends four hundred thousand dollars for the purchase of ten Messerschmitt 109s, and to take an option on fifteen additional aircraft.

  Ben-Gurion's envoys had been equally active purchasing armor and artillery for his army. The most important achievements in that domain had been the handiwork of the man who had sent the Haganah its first Polish rifles in a road roller.
To facilitate his work, Yehuda Arazi had employed a two-hundred-thousand-dollar bribe to get himself named special ambassador of Nicaragua to the governments of Europe charged with the task of procuring arms for the Nicaraguan Army. It was not Arazi's first venture into the world of diplomacy. In Italy, he had designed for a printer a set of United Nations diplomatic passports for his agents. So impressive had Arazi's false passports been that when the first real United Nations diplomats had arrived they were arrested by the Italian police for traveling on false documents. The Nicaraguan ambassador's first purchases, five 20-millimeter Hispano Suiza antiaircraft guns and fifteen thousand shells, were already being prepared for shipment to Tel Aviv.

  From New York and Los Angeles other ships would soon be on their way carrying in their holds the harvest of a massive collection taken up for the Jews of Palestine from one end of the United States to another. Designed to supplement the surplus material purchased in Belgium by Xiel Federmann, the Santa Claus of the Haganah, the goods amassed by "Materials for Palestine" covered everything except arms and ammunition. Run by the "Sonneborn Institute," the association of devoted Zionists so helpful to Haim Slavine in his quest for an armament industry, Materials for Palestine gathered into its depots contributions from every Zionist state organization in America. Wisconsin sent 350,000 sandbags, Ohio 92,000 flares, New Jersey 25,000 helmets, Chicago one hundred tons of barbed wire and ten tons of khaki paint; San Francisco offered mosquito netting, Minneapolis six hundred mine detectors. From New Orleans came salt tablets and penicillin. Norfolk, Virginia, proposed two corvettes, an ice-cutter and, to guide the naval strategists of the future Jewish state, the complete memoirs of Admiral von Tirpitz.