O Jerusalem!
Page 39
"I swear to you," he said, "if tomorrow groups of Arabs coming from Jaffa, from Haifa or someplace else come forward and miserably demand an understanding with the Jews, the reins of the affair will escape the Arab leaders, the Arab states and the Arab League."
That was not the sort of language the Arab leaders had come to Amman to hear, however. Their minds were already made up that May afternoon. The situation David Ben-Gurion had envisaged, and had begun to prepare for six months before, had come to pass. The Arabs were irrevocably bent on war.*
Indeed, they had become so confident that a conviction was rising that they need only mass their armies on Palestine's borders when the British left and the Jewish will to resist would collapse. Each of them had brought to Amman his nation's senior military men to discuss such an eventuality. The latter had waited in an anteroom while Abdullah presented his futile brief for peace. Now, after thanking the King for his words, Azzam Pasha proposed calling in the soldiers. The time had come, he said, to begin a discussion of the military problems relevant to an invasion of Palestine.
Their conference lasted all afternoon. Fully confident of the outcome of the forthcoming conflict, each leader claimed for his nation's army the preponderant role in the march to Tel Aviv. Huddled over their enormous maps of Palestine, they discussed their lines of advance, the zones of operation in which each army would maneuver, and the forces they planned to commit to the campaign.
Then politicians and generals turned together to the most difficult problem facing their coalition: selecting a joint command and a supreme commander. The rivalries infecting the Arabs' political exchanges were mirrored in their military relations. Abdullah had no intention of letting his Arab Legion, for which he had his own plans, be placed under foreign command. Farouk would not consider subordinating his army to his Bedouin rival. None of the Arab military men present trusted the most capable soldier available, John Glubb.
Hoping to exercise military control over an enterprise he had not succeeded in restraining politically, Abdullah modestly suggested that he himself be appointed commander in chief. An embarrassed silence greeted his proposal. Aware of how utterly unacceptable such an idea was, Azzam Pasha saved the situation with a graceful phrase. "We will all be guests in Abdullah's country," he said, "and so, of course, he commands us all."
His words were never committed to paper, but they served at least to mollify Abdullah. But graceful phrases do not make efficient commands, and the answer finally adopted by the Arab soldiers left their problem unresolved while offering the illusion of a solution. Each nation, it was decided, would appoint a liaison officer to a joint operations center at the Arab Legion base of Zerqa, outside Amman.
When the conference was over, Lieutenant Colonel Charles Coker, one of the Legion's British officers, drove a high-ranking Iraqi back to the center of Amman.
"How did the meeting go?" he politely asked his passenger.
"Splendid!" was the reply. "We all agreed to fight separately."
While the leaders of the Arab armies planned their invasion of Palestine in Amman, fifty miles away in the kibbutz of Naharayim on the opposite side of the Jordan River an officer of an Arab army, in civilian clothes, began an extraordinary secret dialogue with a representative of the Haganah. While his sovereign was being shoved reluctantly toward a war, John Glubb had ordered a secret emissary to the Jewish kibbutz to propose a way to keep the Arab Legion out of the coming conflict.
To an astonished Shlomo Shamir, Colonel Desmond Goldie suggested that an arrangement could be made for the peaceful division of Palestine, with the Arab Legion taking over the Arab parts of the country, the Haganah the Jewish parts, and both staying out of Jerusalem.
The Legion, Goldie informed Shamir, was prepared to delay at least two or three days before crossing any partition boundaries, to allow the Haganah time to arrange things on its side of the border and thus hopefully avoid a war. Stressing the fact that he spoke in Glubb's name, Goldie asked what were the Haganah's intentions in Palestine. Did they intend to stay within the borders assigned the Jewish state or did they intend to expand beyond them?
Shamir's reply was deliberately noncommittal. Borders, he said, were the work of politicians, not soldiers, but if it chose to do so the Haganah was capable of conquering all of Palestine. If the Arab Legion did not attack Jerusalem there would be no need for fighting there. He would immediately deliver a full report on Goldie's message to his superiors, he promised.
The ebullient young officer who had led the Haganah through Katamon confronted conquests of a different sort now. They involved a middle-aged woman welcoming him into her daughter's flat with ill-concealed distaste. For three years Yosef Nevo had been trying, with a singular lack of success, to persuade that woman to become his mother-in-law.
Nevo had first met her in the winter of 1945, when, as a student at a British Army course near London, he had been invited along with several fellow Palestinians to her home for her daughter Naomi's birthday party. One month later, while crossing a street in London, he had proposed to the pretty redheaded Naomi.
To her mother, however, Nevo was a brash, ungainly young man with a haphazard academic background, no discernible financial future, and none of the qualifications she had in mind for an aspirant for her daughter's hand. She coldly refused to sanction the match. Even a trip to Palestine, ostensibly to study the kibbutz movement, had not freed Naomi from her mother's surveillance. Her resumed romance with Nevo had been interrupted shortly after she had settled in Jerusalem by a cable announcing her mother's forthcoming arrival.
To the young couple's growing horror, she had found life in tension-filled Jerusalem entirely to her liking. The danger, the food shortages, the air of excitement, she had informed her daughter, reminded her of the exalting experience of living through the Blitz in London. As the convoys to the coast had dwindled, then stopped entirely, she had remained impervious to her daughter's pleas that she leave. Steadfast, upper lip resolutely stiffened, she had preferred to stay in besieged Jerusalem with her daughter and her daughter's unsuitable suitor.
Now Yosef Nevo was a hero, and he was determined to wed with or without the approval of his future mother-in-law. On the evening after his conquest he informed Naomi, "We're getting married."
Naomi paled. She knew from his determined air that the moment of decision had arrived. All right, she sighed, get a rabbi, and they would marry in secret in a girl friend's apartment.
A British-inspired cease-fire had concluded Yosef Nevo's other, martial conquest in Katamon and brought an end to Operation Jebussi. Yitzhak Sadeh left Jerusalem, turning command of the city back to David Shaltiel. His departure and Jebussi's limited achievements gave fresh importance to Shaltiel's plans to seize the key buildings in the center of Jerusalem the day the British withdrew. He had assigned that task to a methodical, self-effacing police officer named Arieyeh Schurr. Schurr already had one notable triumph to his credit. A major in the military courts had slipped him a copy of the British Army's Jerusalem evacuation plan. The enormous document gave Schurr the order of departure of all British units in the city, the routes they would use, and their key assembly points. Unfortunately, it left blank a series of vital spaces. Completed by hand at the last minute, they would contain the information Schurr wanted most, the exact hour and minute of the evacuation of each British-held building in the city.
Schurr persuaded a number of the Jewish workers in the city's vital installations to remain on the job until the British walked out, so that they could hold the buildings for a few precious minutes until his troops arrived. Repairmen, typists, operators, often with no military training at all, they were baptized the "Players Brigade," after the firearm with which they would have to defend themselves while they waited for Schurr's soldiers: a box of Players cigarettes stuffed with TNT and a crude detonator. Six hundred of those primitive hand grenades had been smuggled into the General Post Office, the telephone exchange, Barclays Bank, and the court buildings.
Carmi's job was assembling the finished product on an empty roof on Ben Yehuda Street. Each flashlight's tip had to be screwed down to the precise point at which one more sharp twist would burst the vial. When Carmi had reached what he thought to be the proper point, he would hold the flashlight to his ear. If he heard nothing, he knew he had gauged correctly. If he heard a persistent psst, he had twisted too far. It was time to leave the roof as quickly as possible.
Those primitive weapons and the risks their inventors took in making them would only serve as vehicles for a number of Jewish suicides, however, if Schurr did not succeed in filling in the blank spaces on the evacuation plan handed him by his British major, so that he could get to his Players Brigade before the Arabs overran them. Two buildings in particular concerned him: the fortresslike Russian Compound, at the heart of Bevingrad, and the Italian Hospital, whose towers dominated central Jerusalem. The compound was commanded by a British police officer known to be pro-Arab. Schurr decided to handle this officer himself. The task of subverting the major commanding the hospital was assigned to a garrulous architect named Dan Ben-Dor. Ben-Dor had served four years as an officer in the Royal Engineers, and his name was celebrated from Baghdad to Benghazi—everywhere in the Middle East, in fact, where a British soldier had taken a shower in the past five years. By perforating the bottom of a beer can, he had developed a device immortalized as Ben-Dor's Beer Bomb, to replace the Army's irreplaceable and constantly stolen brass shower heads.
Ben-Dor quickly discovered that the major had a proper British affection for the sporting life. Striking up a conversation with him one night while strolling along the barbed wire ringing the hospital, he invited him to tea. Then he arranged to have his brother pop in on them unexpectedly with his pet Great Dane, a handsome animal named Assad V—"Young Lion" in Arabic. The Britisher fairly leaped from his seat at the sight of the magnificent black beast.
"What a superb creature!" he cried.
"Ah, yes," replied Ben-Dor sadly. "What a shame that we shall soon have to put him away." Food, and particularly meat, was so desperately short in Jewish Jerusalem, he explained, that rather than see Assad V suffer slow death by starvation they would be forced to destroy him.
"You'll do nothing of the kind," replied the Britisher. Under Ben-Dor's approving eyes, he took his calling card from his pocket, wrote a few words on it and handed it to the architect. "Take this to my mess sergeant at the hospital," he said. "He'll see the dog is fed regularly."
And so began an evening ritual for Ben-Dor. Promptly at six o'clock each night, tugged along by the hungry Dane, he set out for the hospital kitchen. There the mess sergeant opened a nightly tin of bully beef for the dog. Watching the meat disappear down his dog's throat, Ben-Dor tried to stifle the hunger pains contorting his own empty stomach by chatting with the British soldier.
United States Secretary of State George C. Marshall led his visitor to the map of Palestine on his office wall. "Here you are surrounded by Arabs," he said, indicating the Negev. "Here you are surrounded by other Arabs," he continued, pointing to Galilee. "You have Arab states all around you, and your backs are to the sea. How do you expect to withstand their assault?
"Believe me," the distinguished soldier said to the Jewish Agency's foreign secretary, Moshe Sharett, "I am talking about things about which I know. You are sitting there in the coastal plains of Palestine while the Arabs hold the mountain ridges. I know you have some arms and your Haganah, but the Arabs have regular armies. They are well trained and they have heavy arms. How can you hope to hold out?"
The evident sincerity of the Secretary, the man's unquestioned military competence, shook the Jewish diplomat. His words reflected an urgent American desire to persuade the Jewish Agency to postpone proclaiming a Jewish state. If the Jews acquiesced, the department was convinced, a truce could then be arranged in Palestine between the Agency and the Arab states which would forestall an invasion.
All Marshall's Middle Eastern envoys were advising him that an Arab assault was inevitable if a Jewish state was proclaimed when the British mandate expired in one week's time. Only American military intervention could then save the Jews of Palestine from extermination, they warned. Their warnings were taken with the utmost seriousness in Washington. At the highest levels in the American government active consideration was being given to the possibility of landing United States troops in Palestine within a fortnight. The previous day, President Truman had sent a top-secret memo to his legal adviser Ernest Gross for a brief on his executive power to order American soldiers into Palestine without waiting for Congressional approval.
Faced with such a dismaying prospect, the State Department had gone to extraordinary lengths to get the Jewish Agency's agreement to its scheme for postponing statehood and organizing a truce. Marshall had even offered the Presidential plane, The Sacred Cow, to Sharett to fly him to Jerusalem together with representatives of the United States, France, Belgium* and the Arabs, to try to arrange a truce. Sharett had declined the offer, but had come instead to Washington to meet personally with Marshall and Lovett before returning to Jerusalem.
When Marshall had finished, Lovett turned to Sharett. If the Agency refrained from proclaiming a state and the Arabs attacked, then the United States would have some justification for intervening on the grounds that she was aiding a group of individuals, not taking sides in a war between nations. Should, however, the Agency persist in its announced intention of proclaiming a state, he explained, then the Jews of Palestine could not look to the United States for help in the event of an Arab invasion. Having proclaimed their state, they would have to assume by themselves the obligation of defending it.
The Jewish diplomat's reply was deliberately noncommittal, since the decision of whether or not to declare a state would be taken by the Jewish Agency's thirteen-member governing body in Tel Aviv. In his heart, however, Sharett was a worried man. Marshall had convinced him. The next day in New York, he told his Agency colleagues they should consider the secretary's proposal. A surprisingly large number of them agreed.
Just before he boarded his aircraft to return to Tel Aviv, a loudspeaker paged Sharett to take an urgent call. It was Chaim Weizmann telephoning from his sickbed at the Waldorf-Astoria. Weizmann was privy to a secret which would not be revealed until ten years after his death. When Judge Samuel Rosenman had carried his recent letter to the White House, the President had told him, "I have Dr. Weizmann on my conscience." If a Jewish state was declared, Truman had promised, he would do everything in his power to see that the United States recognized it as soon as it was proclaimed. Then he had extracted Rosenman's pledge to repeat his words to only one man, Chaim Weizmann.
His voice grating with illness and passion, the man so many of his colleagues had once accused of indecision now hurled a final injunction at Sharett. "Don't let them weaken," he growled, "don't let them spoil the victory. Proclaim the Jewish State, now or never!"
In Jerusalem, the crash of artillery fire marred the city's life. Unable to conquer the kibbutzim of Galilee, Fawzi el Kaukji had brought his army south to the hilltops of Judea. From Nebi Samuel, the height that Yitzhak Sadeh's men had failed to conquer, his gunners trained their cannon on the most prestigious target he could offer them, the rooftops of Jewish Jerusalem.
His exploding shells provided an inauspicious counterpoint to
a secret and ancient ceremony about to be performed in the city below his guns. Yosef Nevo was ready to marry at last the redheaded girl whose mother had so long refused to agree to their union. Naomi's wedding dress was a frilly white blouse she had bought for the occasion and a white skirt she had managed to sneak past her mother's curious eyes. At the last moment, realizing she had forgotten a veil, she had torn one from a girl friend's hat.
Now, as the ceremony was about to begin, the rabbi whom Nevo had brought to the apartment of one of Naomi's friends reminded the couple of a salient point they had forgotten in their obsession to keep their marriage secret. There could be no wedding without a minyan, the ten-man quorum required for public worship, and there were only four males in the room.
Bride, groom, best man and rabbi rushed down the stairs to look for volunteers. In the streets, deserted because of Kaukji's gunfire, they found only four Palmachniks passing nearby. They were pulled upstairs and assigned the task of holding the poles of the traditional wedding canopy over Naomi and Yosef's heads. To get the remaining men, one of Naomi's girl friends set out on a run for the Jewish Agency. "Quick," she shouted, racing from office to office, "ten men for a minyan!"
Her tactic succeeded; the required males were found. As the ceremony was about to begin there was a knock on the door. Answering it, the owner of the flat found before her an English employee of the Agency, an intimate friend of Naomi's mother. He was clad in a sober suit and dark tie. "My poor child," he whispered, "I understand you want ten men for a minyan." In the inexorable logic of that Jerusalem springtime, he had assumed that the only religious office for which a minyan would be needed was a funeral.