O Jerusalem!

by Larry Collins

  Impressive as his agents' lists of acquisitions might be, David Ben-Gurion well knew they would only have value once they were landed in Palestine. Despite the approaching end of the mandate, Britain's surveillance of the Palestine coast was as vigilant as ever. Increasingly, the Jewish leader realized that his forces would be confronted by a dangerous time gap, the gap between the end of the mandate and the time enough arms to stem an Arab invasion could be brought into the country. It was during that interval, he told himself, that a war would be won or lost.

  Ahmed Eid gently shook his sleeping wife. Then the middle-aged mason quietly knocked on the doors of several nearby houses. It was four o'clock in the morning, the hour at which his wife and half a dozen of her neighbors left to bake pitas, flat loaves of unleavened bread, in the communal kiln attached to the mukhtar's home. It was a thankless ritual performed by that handful of women each dawn and one to which, in a few hours, they would owe their lives this April day.

  His ancient Mauser slung over his shoulder, Eid returned to his guard post at the entrance to the village. Although no special danger menaced Eid's community, its elders had followed an old Arab custom and designated a score of its inhabitants to share the duties of night watchmen. This evening, along with two other masons, three stonecutters and a truck driver, Eid had spent the night watching over his neighbors' rest. Only the distant echoes of the firing around Kastel and along the road from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem had disturbed their vigil. Their peaceful community hugging its rocky promontory west of Jerusalem had no need to concern itself with those sounds. So successful had its elders been in holding it out of the tumult around it that Jerusalem's Haganah commander David Shaltiel could note that the community had been "quiet since the beginning of disturbances . . . not mentioned in reports of attacks on Jews, and one of the few places which has not given a foothold to foreign bands." Until this Friday morning, April 9, 1948, the primary function of the old Mausers and Turkish rifles cradled by Eid and his six fellow watchmen had been shooting rabbits or providing a noisy backdrop to village feasts. The last time they had been fired had been twelve days earlier to welcome Alia Darwish to their village of Deir Yassin. Serene and confident, the seven men tranquilly awaited the dawn.

  Beneficiaries of the community's peaceful reputation, virtually the entire village population slept at their feet. Those inhabitants who worked outside Deir Yassin had returned to pass the Moslem Sabbath. Others, like Ahmed Khalil, a worker at the Allenby Barracks, or his brother Hassan, a waiter at the King David, had come because their posts had just been terminated by the departing British. The premature end of the school year accounted for the presence in the village of several young men like Mohammed Jaber, a student at Jerusalem's Ibrahimyeh School. There was even an unexpected guest in the village this night. The young teacher in the village's girls' school, Hayat Halabes, had been caught in Deir Yassin when the No. 38 bus she took each night for her return to Jerusalem had fallen into an ambush.

  The sharp report of a rifle shattered their sleep and the predawn calm. Then a voice screamed, "Ahmed, Yehud alainou! The Jews are coming!" On the slope below his post the mason could make out the forms of men moving up the wadi. Suddenly, rifle fire seemed to break out on all sides of the village. It was four-thirty. The peace of Deir Yassin was forever ended.

  Moving up from three different directions, the commandos of the Irgun and the Stern Gang were in the process of preparing the assault their leaders hoped would win the organizations greater authority in Jerusalem. The Irgun men had approached Deir Yassin by way of the nearby Jewish suburb of Bet Hakerem to the south while the Sternists attacked from the north. To the east, along the only road leading to the village, was an armored car equipped with a loudspeaker. In all, one hundred and thirty-two men were involved. To mark the occasion, their leaders had selected a password particularly appropriate to their effort this night. It was Achdut, "Unity," since they had united their armories for the task. The explosives came largely from the Stern Gang, the Sten guns from the Irgun's clandestine arms shop. The rifles and hand grenades had been furnished by the Haganah in the illusory hope that they might have been used to aid their forces at Kastel.

  While the guards of Deir Yassin fired into their ranks or raced from door to door giving the alert, the attackers huddled just beyond the first row of houses waiting for the arrival of the loudspeaker and the signal to open the attack. After a heated debate, the leaders of the two groups had finally decided to warn the population of the village to flee their homes. The armored car with its loudspeaker, however, would never broadcast its warning to the villagers of Deir Yassin. It had tumbled into a ditch behind a row of stones cutting the road into the village. The loudspeaker had been tossed onto its side far short of Deir Yassin's first houses, and its words were lost in the night, heard only by its frightened crew. Finally, a machine-gun burst tore into the village. It was the signal. From north and south the attackers moved forward. Operation "Unity" was under way.

  "Yehud!" Like a tocsin's ring, that call echoed through the streets of the sleeping village. Barefoot, sometimes with only a robe thrown around them, many of Deir Yassin's inhabitants managed to flee to the west. Among them was the family of Mohammed Zeidan, a well-to-do merchant who rented several houses in Jerusalem to Jewish tenants. Only the schoolteacher in the girls' school remained behind in his house. Hayat Halabes got dressed and ran to get the first-aid kit in her school. She slipped on its Red Crescent armband and rushed toward the firing. Her race was brief. Hit only a few steps from her schoolroom, she fell to the ground dead, among the first victims in the village in which she had been an unexpected guest.

  After a first rush, the Irgun and Sternist attack stalled. The terrorists were used to a different kind of war than the one in which they suddenly found themselves. They had had no experience and little training in operations such as this. Almost every male in the village, following Arab custom, had a firearm of some sort, and the citizens of Deir Yassin staged a surprisingly tenacious defense of their homes. Nearly two hours were required before the attackers could breach the first row of houses and reach the center of the village. There the men of the two groups fell into each other's arms.

  Their joy, however, was of short duration. Their ammunition supply was almost gone and the Irgun's homemade Sten guns were jamming one after another. Although in reality their casualties were light—the attack would cost the two groups only four killed—in the heat of the battle they seemed high to the untrained terrorists. Two key leaders were wounded. There was even talk of withdrawing. No one seemed to have imagined it might be considerably more difficult to conquer a resisting village than it was to toss a bomb into an unarmed crowd waiting for a bus. Giora, the leader of the Irgun command, rallied his men for another push forward. Then he too was wounded. A kind of collective hysteria overtook the attackers. As the opposition to their assault finally waned, they fell with increasing fury on the inhabitants of Deir Yassin.

  Driven from their home along with thirty-three neighbors, the newlyweds of the village's last feast were among their first victims. They were lined up against a wall and shot, their hands clasped as though to seal for eternity their new love. Twelve-year-old Fahimi Zeidan, one of the few survivors of that killing, explained, "The Jews ordered all our family to line up against the wall and they started shooting us. I was hit in the side, but most of us children were saved because we hid behind our parents. The bullets hit my sister Kadri [four] in the head, my sister Sameh [eight] in the cheek, my brother Mohammed [seven] in the chest. But all the others with us against the wall were killed: my father, my mother, my grandfather and grandmother, my uncles and aunts and some of their children."

  Haleem Eid, a young woman of thirty belonging to one of Deir Yassin's principal families, declared she saw "a man shoot a bullet into the neck of my sister Salhiyeh who was nine months pregnant. Then he cut her stomach open with a butcher's knife." She said that another woman witnessing the same scene, Aiesch Radwas, was ki
lled when she tried to extricate the unborn infant from the dead mother's womb. In another house, Naaneh Khalil, sixteen, claimed she saw a man take "a kind of sword and slash my neighbor Jamil Hish from head to toe then do the same thing on the steps to my house to my cousin Fathi." Similar scenes took place in house after house. The survivors' accounts indicated that the female members of the two commando groups matched the savagery of their male counterparts. Bit by bit Deir Yassin was submerged in a hell of screams, exploding grenades, the stench of blood, gunpowder and smoke. Its assailants killed, they looted, and finally they raped.

  Safiyeh Attiyah, a forty-one-year-old woman, saw one man open his pants and leap on her. "I screamed," she said, "but around me other women were being raped, too. Some of the men were so anxious to get our earrings they ripped our ears to pull them off faster."

  Reaching the scene in midmorning, Mordechai Ra'anan, the head of the Irgun in Jerusalem, decided to wipe out the last houses in which the Arabs were still resisting, with a tactic the Irgun had used against British police posts. They dynamited the buildings from which an occasional shot seemed to ring out. The most important of them was the house of the mukhtar. "Within a few minutes," Ra'anan observed, "the house was a pile of ruins and broken bodies." The kiln, however, thanks to its heavy iron door, survived the Irgun's dynamite. Inside, Ahmed Eid's wife and her terrified friends heard a voice reassure them, "Come out! There's no risk." The women refused. Shafikah Sammour, the mukhtar's daughter, recognized the speaker's accented Arabic.

  More than fifteen houses were thus destroyed before the Irgun's supply of dynamite ran out. The terrorized survivors fled to those homes still standing. Then the Irgun commandos began to systematically work their way through those remaining buildings with Sten guns and grenades. Before many of them the earlier brutal scenes were played out again. Just before noon Mohammed Jaber, the youth who was in Deir Yassin because his school had closed early, saw from a hiding place under his bed "the Jews break in, drive everybody outside, put them against the wall and shoot them. One of the women was carrying a three-month-old baby."

  Shortly after noon, the attackers threatened to dynamite the kiln on the heads of the women inside if they refused to come out. The mukhtar's daughter opened the door and stepped out first. In the ruins of her home, she found the bodies of her mother and two brothers. Slowly an oppressive silence punctuated only by an occasional cry smothered the village, its ruins warmed by the lovely spring sunshine.

  Operation "Unity" was finished. The terrorists of the Irgun and the Stern Gang had secured the victory they sought. Deir Yassin was theirs.*

  By the thousands, the Arabs of Palestine poured into Jerusalem for the funeral of Abdul Khader Husseini. The dead leader's body, wrapped with flowers and the flag of his Palestine movement, was exposed in a plain pine coffin in the sitting room of his brother's house, where forty-eight hours earlier he had written his last letter. Since Moslem tradition demanded swift burial, neither his wife nor his children would reach Jerusalem in time for his interment. Abdul Khader's legacy to them would be a request to honor his debts of six thousand Palestine pounds, run up on his own signature buying arms for his followers.

  By the time the funeral procession was ready to set out from his brother's house, the alleys and streets outside were dense with men. There were shepherds in rough wool cloaks and sandals, men in suits and fezzes. Above all, there were hundreds of the men who twice in twelve years had answered the dead leader's call to arms. Clutching their rifles to their chests, dressed in a disparate collection of uniforms but united by the grief contorting their faces, they mourned the leader who had been for them a kind of surrogate father.

  As Abdul Khader's coffin left his brother's house, the first member of the procession fired his pistol into the air. His shot was the signal for the wildest outburst of gunfire Jerusalem had yet heard. From every corner of the Arab city, Abdul Khader's followers sent a noisy barrage skyward, snapping telephone cables and electric wires and killing two bystanders. "The waste is appalling," thought Anwar Nusseibi. "We are firing off enough ammunition to conquer half of Palestine."

  Thus began the most grandiose funeral Jerusalem had witnessed in generations. In accordance with Moslem customs, Abdul Khader's coffin was passed from hand to hand by his followers. In a sea of waving arms, accompanied by a din of piercing laments, it swayed slowly over their heads as dozens fought for the honor of touching it for even a few seconds. Through Damascus Gate, down Solomon Street and the Via Dolorosa, the unhappy procession flowed toward the great esplanade of the Haram esh Sherif. There, in the octagonal monument of the Dome of the Rock, Abdul Khader Husseini was accorded one last honor. In recognition of his extraordinary career, he was awarded the rare privilege of being inhumed in that Islamic shrine from which the Prophet allegedly ascended to heaven.

  All morning, on the esplanade outside, the men wept and talked together, grimly conscious that they had laid to rest not only a man, but many of the hopes his leadership had raised in their hearts as well.

  Walking home from the funeral, a depressed and melancholy Anwar Nusseibi suddenly came upon Abou Gharbieh, whom he had last seen in Kastel the evening before.

  "Ah, Abou Gharbieh," he said, "did someone relieve you at Kastel?"

  "Yes," the schoolteacher replied bitterly. "The Jews did."

  A few miles from the Mosque of Omar, on Jerusalem's western outskirts, other Arab bodies, these anonymous, were now to be buried. For the scores of men, women and children killed at Deir Yassin, the graveyard would be the rock quarry which had been the source of the village's wealth, the pit to which so many of them had gone each day of their adult lives to hew stones for the homes of Jerusalem.

  Jacques de Reynier, the Swiss representative of the International Red Cross, led the first party to reach the site. It did not take him long to discover that Deir Yassin was in the hands of men with whom he had had no previous contact. Only the intervention of an enormous German-born member of the Irgun who told Reynier he owed his life to the Red Cross got the Swiss past the dissidents' sentries.

  The spectacle awaiting him made Reynier gasp. "The first thing I saw were people running everywhere, rushing in and out of houses, carrying Sten guns, rifles, pistols and long ornate Arab knives," he wrote that night in his diary. "They seemed half mad. I saw a beautiful girl carrying a dagger still covered with blood. I heard screams. "We're still mopping up,' my German friend explained. All I could think of was the S.S. troops I'd seen in Athens." Then, to his horror, Reynier noted, he saw "a young woman stab an elderly man and woman cowering on the doorstep of their hut."

  Still dazed by that sight, Reynier pushed his way into the first house he reached. "Everything had been ripped apart and torn upside down," he wrote. "There were bodies strewn about. They had done their 'cleaning up' with guns and grenades and finished their work with knives, anyone could see that." He suddenly saw something moving in the shadows. Bending down, he discovered "a little foot, still warm." It belonged to a ten-year-old girl, still alive despite her wounds. Reynier picked her up and ordered his German escort to carry her to an ambulance. Then he furiously demanded he be allowed to continue his search for wounded. He found two more, an elderly woman half paralyzed with fear hiding behind a woodpile, and a dying man. In all, he estimated he had seen two hundred corpses. One of them belonged, his diary would record, "to a woman who must have been eight months pregnant, hit in the stomach, with powder burns on her dress indicating she'd been shot point blank."

  Embarrassed by Reynier's presence, the Irgun and Stern leaders finally ordered him back to Jerusalem with the wounded he had managed to save from the ruins. There the few survivors of the massacre were being paraded through the streets by their captors. Harry Levin saw three trucks "driving slowly up and down King George V Avenue, carrying men, women and children, their hands held over their heads." In the front truck he spotted "a young boy, a look of anguished horror written on his face, his arms frozen upright."

 
High Commissioner Sir Alan Cunningham received his first report of the incident during the daily session of his Security Committee. He had had enough contacts with the Haganah to know that the organization was incapable of such an action. It was, Sir Alan had no doubt, the work of his enemies, the Irgun and the Stern Gang. "At last," he told his troop commander, General Sir Gordon MacMillan, "you've got those bastards. For God's sake, go up there and get them."

  Deir Yassin, however, was going to prove one of Cunningham's "greatest disappointments in Palestine." His fellow Scot kept insisting that he did not have the troops available. Another participant in the meeting, Jerusalem Commissioner James Pollock, quickly realized "MacMillan simply did not want to use his troops." It ran counter to his policy of employing his soldiers only in the pursuit of strictly British interests.

  Angrily, Cunningham turned to his R.A.F. chief for an air strike. He readily agreed, but pointed out to the High Commissioner a problem which symbolized to Cunningham "our frustrations of that morning and the hell of our last months in Palestine." The R.A.F. had sent all its light bombers to Egypt the day before and its rockets to Habbaniya in Iraq. It would take twenty-four hours to get them back.

  Before the Security Committee had ended its deliberations, however, a new factor had arisen which would rule out the strike. The Haganah moved into Deir Yassin to take over the village. The first party to reach the area was led by Eliyahu Arieli, a scholarly veteran of six years' British Army service who commanded the Gadna, the youth organization. The spectacle he found was, in his eyes, "absolutely barbaric."