O Jerusalem!

by Larry Collins

  To implement it, Tell had asked that virtually all of the Arab armies be placed under a supreme commander. If those forces, prepared or not, were made available, Tell's plan had every chance of success. It was the stuff of which Ben-Gurion's nightmares were made.

  Its most ardent advocates, Riad Solh and Jamil Mardam, knew that its implementation depended on the cooperation of two enigmatic monarchs who cordially loathed each other. One was Abdullah. The other sovereign was the court of last resort able to overrule the stubborn history professor who refused to commit the largest army the Arabs possessed to their Palestine adventure.

  Farouk sat almost nightly in a building a few doors down the Kasr al Nil from the Foreign Ministry. The only official designation stamped onto its carefully polished brass doorplate were four initials, "A.C.R.E." There, with astonishing regularity, the King of Egypt took his place at a green-baize-covered table of the Automobile Club Royal d'Egypte, an ice-cold bottle of orange soda pop at his side, to play baccarat and chemin de fer. Indicative of his nation's popular indifference to the Palestine drama and the country's long tradition of Arab–Jewish harmony was the fact that almost half of his regular partners were Jewish.

  The sovereign who could not be disturbed with the news of the partition vote had just turned twenty-eight in April 1948. He had inherited his throne on his father's death twelve years earlier, coming to it a handsome, athletic young man, adored by his people, seemingly destined to an exemplary reign. Three humiliating circumstances turned his life into a tragicomedy. The first was physical. Nature had given him an undersized sexual organ, a cruel jest on the proud young ruler of a land in which sexual potency was traditionally one measure of a man's ability to lead. The second was political. It occurred in January 1942 while Rommel prepared the offensive with which he hoped to seize the Suez Canal. A revolver in his hand, Britain's ambassador to Cairo had ordered Farouk to replace his pro-German Prime Minister with a man more to Britain's liking. From that moment forward the humiliated Farouk harbored a deep and sometimes blinding hatred of the British. The third was an automobile accident in 1944 which upset his glandular balance and helped turn the vain young King into a corpulent figure of ridicule.

  By April 1948, Farouk had fallen far from the promise of his youth, but he was no less ambitious for that. He was the heir to the throne of the pharaohs. He longed to avenge the humiliations of his life and his nation by reviving Egypt's ancient grandeur, by installing her at the head of a proud new caliphate stretching from the Euphrates to the Nile. He regarded his fellow Arab leaders with contempt, but above all he scorned the chess-playing Bedouin in Amman. For Farouk, Abdullah was only the Middle Eastern tool of his hated foes, the British.

  Those noble designs, however, did not seem to occupy a preponderant place in the young King's preoccupations that spring. Each evening when his card game was finished, he set off on a tour of his favorite shrines, the nightclubs of Cairo. The grail that Farouk sought on those nightly crusades was the pleasure which nature had contrived to deprive him of, sexual satisfaction. His guide was a wizened little monkey nicknamed "the Stork" because in years of following in Farouk's nocturnal footsteps he had learned to sleep standing up.

  Antonio Pulli had begun his remarkable career by getting on the wrong boat. Youngest of a family of nine children, he had left his native Naples to seek his fortune along the Amazon, but wound up by mistake along the Nile. His prolific family had relatives in Egypt as well as Brazil, however, and he went to work as an apprentice to an electrician uncle in the royal palace. One day Pulli was summoned to the royal nursery to repair Crown Prince Farouk's electric train. From that simple act was born a lifelong friendship.

  By 1948 he had become the King's Minister of Personal Affairs with a salary two and a half times that of the Prime Minister. One special task accounted for his exalted stipend. In the shadowy corners of the Cairo night, Antonio Pulli procured women for the King of Egypt. The most important rendezvous Pulli arranged for his sovereign in that April fortnight of 1948, however, were with a courtesan of a different sort, and they would alter the history of his adopted land. They were with Riad Solh.

  Each night, under Pulli's discreet regard, the two men paced along the giant palms and eucalyptus trees of the Koubeh Palace gardens, Solh, the spellbinding talker, exhorting the King to war, Farouk listening patiently.

  Solh knew well the arguments that would stir the King's imagination. When the British left, the Arabs would sweep into Palestine, he said, and restore that land to Arab sovereignty. What a tragedy it would be for the Arab world, for Egypt, for Farouk, if the Arabs' largest army was not present at that historic rendezvous, from which Farouk could emerge the undisputed leader of the Arab world. If he remained aloof from the conflict, Solh warned, it would be at the profit of his enemies, Abdullah and the British. Palestine would soon be under an Arab crown, and it was up to Farouk to decide whether it would be the crown of Egypt or the crown of the Hashemites.

  Should he wish, Solh reminded the King, he could install his protégé Haj Amin Husseini in Palestine. Then his influence would reach from Khartoum to Jerusalem, and the stage would be set for the emergence of a modern caliphate, this time with its headquarters in Cairo, not Constantinople.

  When their midnight conversations were finished, usually around two or three in the morning, Solh regularly dropped in for a chat with his friends on Cairo's largest paper, Al Ahram. One night in mid-April, the paper's young proprietor saw him stride into the city room, his tarboosh cocked at a rakish angle on his head, a jubilant smile across his face.

  Solh settled in the editor's chair and clapped his hands for coffee. "You cannot print what I am going to tell you," he said. As usual, he reported, he had been walking for hours in the Koubeh Palace gardens with Farouk.

  "This time," he smiled, "I convinced him. I can announce to you the best news the Arabs have had since partition. Egypt is going to war."

  24

  "ATTACK AND ATTACK AND ATTACK."

  ABDUL KHADER HUSSEINI'S DEATH forced major changes in the Arabs' guerrilla tactics and organization around Jerusalem. The Mufti named another member of the Husseini family, Khaled, a forty-year-old officer of the Palestine police force, to succeed him. With none of the personal magnetism of his kinsman, Khaled could not impose any real authority over the collection of chieftains making up the Arabs' Jerusalem command. At the moment when Britain's approaching withdrawal made unity and a central authority imperative, the Arabs' organization thus tended to revert to its system of splintered neighborhood bands. Ibrahim Abou Dayieh, the Hebron shepherd, commanded Katamon. Kamal Irekat, who had organized the ambush of the Kfar Etzion convoy, ran the south. Mounir Abou Fadel, a former police inspector, was in charge of the center of the city with a group of former policemen. Bajhat Abou Gharbieh, the schoolteacher who had been left behind in Kastel, took over the north. To their already divided ranks was added still another chieftain, this one a thirty-four-year-old Iraqi bank clerk named Fadel Rashid, who arrived in the city with five hundred volunteers.

  Emile Ghory took over the remnants of Abdul Khader's organization in Bab el Wad. Their leader's death and the assaults of Operation Nachshon had been severe blows for the Arab guerrillas stationed along the road. Deir Yassin had compounded their problem by starting a flow of people out of the hilltop villages vital to the guerrillas. There were "few arms, no money and bad morale," Ghory discovered.

  He decided to abandon the ambush tactics which required the support of massive numbers of villagers and go back to the strategy Abdul Khader had once rejected, of closing the road with mammoth barricades defended by a limited number of men. Ghory raised ten thousand pounds sterling from the Arab banks in Jerusalem, then set out from village to village raising paid levies.

  Capitalizing on the disarray of their foes, the Haganah had already pushed three major convoys up the road since opening it April 5. Before a fourth could be organized, a cable of major consequence reached Tel Aviv from the Jerusalem Hag
anah. The British were going to evacuate certain fortified areas in the city before the mandate expired, probably in the last days of April, Shaltiel's intelligence officers reported. To capitalize on the move, Shaltiel asked for the Har-el Palmach Brigade operating around Bar el Wad. With it, he said, "it will be possible to strike a decisive blow in the city. . . . The outcome of our battle in Jerusalem depends on the number of reinforcements you send."

  His cable placed the Tel Aviv command before a difficult decision. The brigade still had not cleared many of the Arab villages along the route to Jerusalem. Only one village, Kastel, had actually been destroyed, the mukhtar's house near which Abdul Khader Husseini had fallen being left intact by the departing Palmach as a symbol of their victory there. Nonetheless, at almost the same time as Emile Ghory, Tel Aviv decided on a change of tactics. Yitzhak Rabin was ordered to put his men on the next convoy to the city, leaving virtually unprotected the heights they had been trying to clear and abandoning for the time being the effort to push supplies into Jerusalem.

  The last convoy, composed of almost three hundred trucks, left Kfar Bilu before dawn April 20. In addition to their loads of flour, sugar, rice and margarine, its trucks contained stocks of the traditional unleavened bread, matzo, so that Jerusalem could celebrate the coming Passover. Riding at its head, exposed to Arab riflemen in an ordinary car, was perhaps the most important commodity the Jewish people possessed that spring, the white-haired figure of David Ben-Gurion. Silent and unsmiling, he rode through the gorge he had walked four decades before as an ardent young Zionist. The roadside gullies in which he had slept so peacefully were now a clutter of burned-out trucks, blackened relics by which Ben-Gurion could reckon the cost of clinging to the city in which he had once sought inspiration and found instead a Tower of Babel.

  The convoy stretched over sixteen miles of road. Its first vehicles reached Jerusalem without incident. Then Emile Ghory's men fell on those coming behind them. The Arab leader was awed by their ferocity. He saw one of them, crawling on his stomach, drag a can of gasoline under a stalled truck. He poured the liquid onto the asphalt and set it ablaze. Then, rolling like a dervish, he raced the flames back toward the roadside gully from which he had come.

  All day long in Jerusalem, Dov Joseph recorded in his logbook each truckload of supplies as it reached his warehouses. The goal he had set for himself that night in Tel Aviv when David Ben-Gurion had assigned him his responsibility was three thousand tons. With strict rationing, that reserve, he calculated, would last Jersualem two months. Despite his dictatorial powers, however, he had been able to amass only eighteen hundred tons from Tel Aviv's warehouses before returning to Jerusalem. As the afternoon wore on, the column of trucks that managed to extricate themselves from Ghory's ambush dwindled to a trickle. Even the eighteen hundred tons he had managed to commandeer were not going to reach the Canadian's warehouses. The doors were slamming shut again, and he had been able to get barely half what he considered essential into the city. Noting the figures in his book, he suddenly thought, "It is not enough."

  It was dark when the last vehicle entered the city. Back in Bab el Wad, Emile Ghory's men were already at work piling up the roadblocks with which to cut the route for good. Once again Jewish Jerusalem was under siege.

  "He doesn't walk into a room, he stomps into it," thought Chaim Haller.

  Eyebrows knit in anger, his forehead furrowed, David Ben-Gurion settled into his place before Jerusalem's senior officials. He was in a fierce, angry mood. First he turned to David Shaltiel's recommendations to pull out of Kfar Etzion and the Jewish Quarter of the Old City. Shaltiel's planning officer, Eliyahu Arbel, noticed that Ben-Gurion was "shaking with fury" at their proposal. "No Jewish settlement will be evacuated!" he shouted at Shaltiel, smashing his fist on the table top.

  Courageously Shaltiel tried to defend his thesis, but Ben-Gurion interrupted him, growling, "There will be no retreat." An entire strategic doctrine lay behind Ben-Gurion's refusal. If he acceded to Shaltiel's request, how could he force his lonely Negev settlements to stay put in the face of an Egyptian advance?

  Then he turned to the matter which lay at the heart of his presence in the besieged city. His arrival coincided with a basic change in his intentions toward its political destiny. The Jews had, he felt, honestly endeavored to be faithful to the internationalization scheme. After all, among his first instructions to Shaltiel had been the order to accept the United Nations' authority in the city if and when the international body established a presence there. The Jewish Agency had repeatedly pleaded with the plan's backers to put their scheme into effect. The last of those pleas, a letter from Chaim Weizmann to Harry Truman, had been hand-carried to the President by Judge Samuel Rosenman on April 20, the day Ben-Gurion had had to fight through an Arab ambush at Bab el Wad to get to the city.

  Jerusalem should not be a problem of Jewish defence [Weizmann wrote]. It was the United States which took the lead together with France, Belgium and Holland in urging the Jews to give up their claim that Jerusalem should be within the boundaries of a Jewish state, on the grounds of the city's universal character and its association with Christianity and Islam. The Jews, after deep heart searchings, made that sacrifice: it is now for the United Nations to fulfill the task which they have undertaken.

  Ben-Gurion, however, had few illusions as to what the response to this latest plea would be. The indifference of internationalization's backers to the city's plight, the Arabs' repeated threats of war, had released the Jewish people, he felt, from their pledge to internationalize the city. With the Arabs of the city in a state of disarray, the Haganah had a glittering opportunity before it.

  Ben-Gurion's confrontation with Shaltiel over Kfar Etzion had undermined his confidence in the city's commander, however. To take advantage of the situation, he decided to place Shaltiel's forces and the Har-el Brigade of the Palmach under the temporary command of Yitzhak Sadeh, the founder of the Palmach. The former circus wrestler who had toasted each passing partition vote with a glass of vodka was a man Ben-Gurion could count on to carry out his new orders to Jerusalem's soldiers: "Attack and attack and attack."

  The next morning a green-and-black Hebrew poster appeared on the walls of the city. It announced the creation of an exclusively Jewish Jerusalem City Council. It was the logical consequence of the new Jewish position on Jerusalem, and it heralded the birth of one idea and the death of another. Internationalization was finished. Jerusalem would now belong, not to the world, but to whoever had the strength to claim it.

  Yitzhak Sadeh lost no time in planning an offensive in Jerusalem. Instead of waiting for the British to move, as intelligence had promised they would, Sadeh decided to go into action himself. His objective, he told the Har-el Brigade commander, Yitzhak Rabin, was "to seize the vital areas of the city from the Arabs so that on May 14 Jerusalem will fall into our hands."

  "If we can get away with this," he promised, "Jerusalem will be all ours forty-eight hours after the British leave."

  Sadeh's plan was split into three phases. The first called for the capture of the peak of Nebi Samuel, from which Kaukji had shelled the city. The second, in the north, called for the capture of the Arab quarter of Sheikh Jarrah to establish a link with Mount Scopus, then as soon as possible to move to the Mount of Olives, clearing the whole northern ridge of the city and cutting the Arab Legion's natural access routes to Jerusalem. Simultaneously, in the south, Rabin's forces would try to seize the Arab quarters of Katamon, German Colony, Talpiot and Silwan, thus virtually encircling the city.

  It was a classically simple, straightforward plan, and twenty years later another generation of Israeli soldiers would draw their inspiration from it. Sadeh conferred on it the name that Jerusalem had borne four thousand years before, when it was little more than the campsite of a Semitic tribe. Operation Jebussi had only one drawback. Its success depended on one imponderable: to what extent would the British interfere?

  In Cairo, Farouk's Prime Minister, Nokrashy Pas
ha, was summoned to lunch at the Mohammed Ali Club by members of the King's inner circle. Farouk wanted a declaration of war, he was told. Either Nokrashy would ask parliament for it or the King would get a prime minister who would.

  Nokrashy's principal failing, in the eyes of one of his key subordinates, was that "he was a man who wanted to have everything." He wanted to stay out of war, but he wanted even more to stay in his prime minister's office. Despite his misgivings, he let himself be convinced of the wisdom of changing his mind. As a first step, he arranged a conference with the commander in chief of the Egyptian Army, a gruff, genial giant of a man named Mohammed Haidar Pasha. Haidar possessed two qualifications for his high office: he had been director of his nation's prisons and he made Farouk laugh.

  The Army, he assured Nokrashy, was prepared for war. In any event, he told the Prime Minister, "there will be no war with the Jews." It would be "a parade without any risk whatsoever." The Army, he pledged, "will be in Tel Aviv in, two weeks."

  Shortly thereafter another visitor called on Nokrashy. Sir Ronald Campbell arrived with his motorcycle escort in a manner befitting His Majesty's ambassador to Egypt. Great Britain, he informed Nokrashy, according to a minute dictated by the Egyptian after their conversation, did not approve or encourage the coming clash of arms in Palestine. For her part, she was resigned to accepting partition as representing the judgment of the world as expressed by the United Nations. If she were asked for counsel by any of her Arab friends, she would advise them not to participate in the war and to accept partition.

  However, Sir Ronald continued, should it be Egypt's decision to enter the war, Great Britain would not oppose her efforts nor hinder the movement of her forces. Then he turned to the question of arms. Should Egypt decide to go to war and find herself in need of additional munitions and armaments, His Majesty's government was prepared to allow the Egyptian Army access to her Suez Canal supply depots on two conditions. The first was discretion. The second was that the two nations continue satisfactory progress toward a solution to the problem which most concerned them, the Sudan.