O Jerusalem!

by Larry Collins

  East of the Warsaw, a narrow alley called the Street of the Stairs ran along a row of low, one-story houses to the other key position, the Nissan Bek Synagogue, the highest building in the quarter, a huge rectangular edifice surmounted by a cupola donated by the Austrian Emperor Franz Josef in 1870. From the cupola, five windows looked in every direction. Ringing the base of the cupola was a gallery, supported by three arches, that had been the synagogue's women's section. Its circling tier made it an ideal position for its Haganah defenders. An extraordinary array of murals looked down on them from the synagogue walls as they crouched at their posts peering out over the Arab rooftops toward the Mount of Olives. Lurid and unearthly, they portrayed the legend of the destruction of the Temple whose Mount lay under their gaze only a few hundred yards away. To defend that perimeter, Russnak's one hundred and fifty men and women and the fifty-odd members of the Irgun and the Stern Gang had a pitifully small armory. It consisted of three machine guns, a two-inch mortar, forty-two submachine guns, three grenade launchers and an assembly of unmatched and often unreliable rifles and pistols.

  The Irgun's years of underground warfare stood them all in good stead, however. To stretch out their meager arms supply, one of its members, a schoolteacher named Leah Vultz, manufactured hand grenades in Players cigarette tins. Her former pupils prowled the quarter for empty tins left by British soldiers. She packed them with explosives, and an elderly upholsterer wrapped the detonators with wooden matches and tied the grenades together. She assigned the most dangerous job to her husband. It was cutting the detonators by hand with a small saw. One slip of the saw and the device could blow off a man's hand. Leah knew that her husband had the steady hands the task required. They were the hands of a musician trained for years to caress the chords of a cello.

  The vital supplies required by their besieged quarter had been delivered twice a week on board a British-escorted and -inspected convoy. Shaltiel's men had used every ruse imaginable to slip arms to the Old City's defenders aboard the convoy. They had hidden hand-grenade detonators in loaves of bread, pistols in flour sacks, bullets in kidney beans. Their most important smuggling tools, however, were the ten 200-liter barrels of kerosene allowed in with each convoy for the quarter's stoves. Fitted with a special conical device that would allow an inspector's baton to plunge from top to bottom encountering only liquid, those barrels had brought the quarter's beleaguered defenders Sten guns, ammunition and explosives.

  With Britain's withdrawal imminent, the quarter's Haganah men needed to smuggle every bullet they could onto their final British-run convoys. To their dismay, at the beginning of May they were informed that there was no kerosene in the New City to fill their fake barrels. "Fill the barrels with water," they begged. "Sprinkle a little kerosene on top to give them the right smell and send them in."

  Gershon Finger, disguised as a civilian, supervised the operation for the quarter from the midst of a knot of curious civilians near Zion Gate. It was a scorching hot day. Nervously he watched the ten barrels delivered to the British checkpoint. An officer opened the second barrel and pushed a thin stick into its spout. He repeated the process with two more barrels selected at random. Then he nodded to a group of waiting Jewish porters. They started to roll the barrels down a three-hundred-yard cordon of British troops to the Street of the Jews.

  As they did, Finger froze. One of the barrels had sprung a leak, pouring a wet ribbon at the foot of the British troops as it rolled down to the Jewish Quarter. Instead of leaving the dark stain of kerosene, of course, the water evaporated a few seconds after it hit the hot pavement. Trembling nervously Finger waited for an alert Britisher to notice the evaporating "oil" stain at his feet. Not one did. To his relief the leaking barrel disappeared safely into the quarter. As it did, an elderly white-bearded Kurdistani rabbi standing beside Finger looked up.

  "Ah," he whispered, "those Englishmen! How many wars did they fight, how many did they kill, how many of their kind did they lose, all for what? For an empire of oil. And what is the difference between oil and water they cannot tell."

  Like a suburban housewife on a Saturday-morning shopping spree, the man who would lead the Arab assaults on the Jewish Quarter prowled the souks of Damascus, his knowing fingers picking over the mounds of fuses, detonators, timers and Bickford cord heaped in the gloomy stalls. After the Palestine Post, Ben Yehuda Street and the Jewish Agency, Fawzi el Kutub had decided to make the destruction of the Jewish Quarter his personal crusade. It was a task for which he was preeminently suited. Kutub knew its cluttered alleys and misshapen houses better than most of its defenders. He had spent his childhood playing among them. It was there that he had thrown the first hand grenade of his violent career.

  In his pocket were fifteen thousand Syrian pounds, a gift from the Mufti with which to launch his operation. In addition, he had a letter from the Arab leader authorizing him to form a group of twenty-five men called the Tadmir, the explosives unit. Those men would carry the mines primed by the devices Fawzi was buying in Damascus from his headquarters in a Turkish bath near the Mosque of Omar to the targets Kutub selected in the Jewish Quarter.

  By the time Kutub had spent the last of his fifteen thousand pounds, he had accumulated enough material to fill three automobiles. He contemplated his purchases with satisfaction. Then he set off for Jerusalem, burning to begin the endeavor that was the inevitable conclusion of his strange and violent life.

  For centuries, the ground on which the troops paraded had been the domain of other marching feet. Now an army of the shadows was at last emerging into the daylight. Faces taut, arms swinging high in imitation of Palestine's British rulers, the marchers strode down an aisle of their cheering compatriots toward the makeshift reviewing stand set up at the Evelyn de Rothschild School. Proudly defiant of British authority, the Haganah was staging the first full-dress parade in its history right through the heart of Jerusalem.

  The marchers wore a staggering variety of uniforms. There were men in work shirts and khaki sweaters, girls in shorts, pants or skirts. Their headgear included olive-drab U.S. Army surplus wool caps, British flat helmets, wide-brimmed Australian bush hats, the dark skullcaps of the orthodox. Equally varied was the collection of arms they carried.

  His body stiffened in a rigid salute, the man who had ordered their parade watched from the reviewing stand. For David Shaltiel, the march-past was a measure of spiritual nourishment for his city's hungry Jews, a reassuring gesture to the fainthearted who doubted Jerusalem's ability to hang on when the British left. The meticulous Shaltiel had even marked the occasion by having a tailor sew up the immaculate new uniform in which he watched his troops march past. As they disappeared, he turned to the officers on the reviewing stand beside him. With the formality of a French general in his mess, he proposed a champagne toast to the success of their arms.

  The disparate group of soldiers to whom the former Foreign Legion sergeant had raised a glass of champagne represented almost all the forces he would be able to muster in the critical days ahead.

  They consisted of three Haganah battalions, a battalion of the Har-el Palmach Brigade, the Irgun and Stern Gang's quasi-independent forces, the Gadna youth formations and the Home Guard. Their arms, by the terrifying standards to which its conflicts had accustomed the world, might seem derisory. Three years after Hiroshima, the conquest of the Holy City was going to hinge on an armory that included fifty-five Sten guns, seventy light machine guns, three Austrian heavy machine guns, six three-inch mortars, three Davidkas, eight thousand homemade grenades and the better part of one million rounds of rifle ammunition delivered under a truckload of vegetables by an Arab from Ramallah.

  Unimpressive though they might seem, those forces were nonetheless superior to those available in the city to Shaltiel's dispirited and disorganized foes. The key to operations in the days ahead would lie in the complex character of the commander Ben-Gurion wanted to "attack and attack and attack." For four vital days, history was going to offer him the same op
portunity it had offered Godefroy de Bouillon and Saladin—that of being the conqueror of Jerusalem.

  Shaltiel, however, was a conservative man, and he was terribly aware that if his fragile force were shattered in an unsuccessful attack, all Jerusalem would lay open to the Arabs. Rather than gamble everything on the kind of bold, all-out assault Ben-Gurion wanted, Shaltiel preferred to move on deliberately classic lines. When the British left, he would launch a three-pronged movement called Operation Pitchfork, designed to create a continuous line from north to south in the major part of the city. In the north, he would capture Sheikh Jarrah and establish a link to the institutions on Mount Scopus. In the south, his men would take Britain's Allenby Barracks and isolate the Arab neighborhoods below Katamon from the rest of the Arab city. The most vital task was the occupation of the public buildings of Bevingrad dominating central Jerusalem.

  When those three objectives had been achieved, Shaltiel would feel ready to consider the capture of Old Jerusalem itself. His cautious hopes and careful plans would depend, however, on an element that rarely favors the designs of conservative men, time. It was the amount of time he would have between the moment the British left and the moment the first sand-colored armored cars of the Arab Legion appeared on the ridge lines above Jerusalem.

  The headquarters of David Shaltiel's Arab foes were in a school built upon the piece of ground which had witnessed the beginning of the most famous drama in Jerusalem's history. It was the site of the Antonia, Herod's palace, the point from which Jesus Christ set out on his march to Calvary and from which, in a sense, the Christian religion might date its incredible rise throughout the world. Upon the uneven stone slabs over which the Arab leaders scurried, Rome's soldiery had left the marks of their hopscotch games and had cast the bone dice with which they chose the victims for their Saturnalias.

  Adjacent to the Ecce Homo Arch, two hundred and fifty yards inside the Old City walls, the Rawdah School was one of Jerusalem's most famous Arab institutions. Many of the men occupying it had received their first exposure to the tenets of Arab nationalism on its wooden benches and had flocked from its classrooms to participate in their first demonstrations for the cause they now led.

  If David Shaltiel's headquarters represented at best the approximation of a military organization, the command post of his rivals looked like a bazaar. Pieces of mortars, machine-gun bullets, Sten-gun clips, lay scattered around the building. Rifles leaned in corners, pistols were tossed on classroom benches under hand-lettered verses from the Koran. Cases of hand grenades and ammunition, often the private hoards of one or two men, were locked into closets and the cellar. From the street outside came the constant honking of horns and shouts of "Balak, balak!" to clear a passage for an ancient Dodge taxi or a loaded donkey signaling the arrival of still another local chieftain with his offerings of a few hand grenades or a case of cartridges for the altar of the Rawdah School.

  More than arms and ammunition, however, the men in Rawdah School lacked leadership. The one man who might have supplied them that leadership lay buried in the Mosque of Omar a few hundred yards away, beyond a brilliant burst of mimosa under the schoolroom windows. Abdul Khader Husseini's successor, Khaled Husseini, inspired little more than indifference in his followers. Convinced that the men in the Rawdah School were all British agents, Fawzi el Kutub had embarked on his personal crusade against the Old City's Jewish Quarter. Everybody loathed Fadel Rashid, the Iraqi, who was accused of devoting most of his time to expanding his collection of Persian carpets. Ibrahim Abou Dayieh had been crippled by the wound he had received in Katamon. Instead of a single commander, each neighborhood had its leader in Rawdah, each defending his quarter's needs.

  As a result, the rivalries sundering the Arab leadership on a higher level found their reflection on a plane as local as the headquarters. Men rushed in and out of its converted classrooms in an air of disarray and tumult, constantly shouting and quarreling, the din of their fervid arguments stilled only by the intermittent calls of the muezzin from the nearby minarets of Al Aqsa.

  The leaders of the Arab school had available approximately three thousand men: two thousand supporters of the Mufti, six hundred Iraqi volunteers, and four hundred former policemen led by a former police officer named Mounir Abou Fadel. The state of their morale—and the measure of the opportunity before David Shaltiel—was reflected in a cable from Safwat Pasha to Kaukji on May 9, less than a week before the mandate was due to expire. "The situation of the defenders of Jerusalem has become desperate," it said. "Our forces there have had enormous losses. Much of their armament has been lost. Jerusalem must be protected at any cost even at the price of abandoning ground elsewhere."

  No less than their Jewish foes, the Arabs were aware of the importance of seizing the vital areas in the center of the city when the British left. As he had once plotted accident sites on his maps in police headquarters, Mounir Abou Fadel had indicated on a huge map of the city the 138 posts and buildings his men would have to seize when the British left. He had, however, no concerted plans to equal the careful preparations being made on the other side of the city by Arieyeh Schurr and David Shaltiel. As in so many other areas, that responsibility was left to individual initiative.

  Incongruous among the kaffiyehs, jodhpurs, old battle jackets and khaki shirts mingling in the Arab headquarters was the black cassock of a Roman Catholic priest. The son of a woodworker who had carved rosary beads from the olive trees of Bethlehem, Father Ibrahim Ayad bore a passionate devotion to the Arab cause that was exceeded only by his devotion to his Church. His talent for intrigue had been perfected in the Terra Sancta, the custodian's office for the Holy Land where for generations the clans of Christianity had conspired for control of their common shrines. Thanks to an Italian colleague there, he now carried in the folds of his cassock a letter from the Italian consul and a key, the instruments that promised the Arabs access to at least one of Jerusalem's vital buildings, the Italian Hospital to which Dan Ben-Dor walked his black Great Dane each night for a tin of bully beef.

  Curious fact in a headquarters so resolutely Arab, one of Rawdah's dominant personalities belonged to a woman. Nimra Tannous' husky voice was as familiar to the Haganah operatives eavesdropping on Arab conversations in the basement of the Jewish Agency as it was to her colleagues in the school. For the last six months, to the Haganah operatives' despair, her principal concern as a Jerusalem telephone operator had been breaking in on the calls of the city's garrulous Arab leaders to warn them that an enemy might be listening.

  Daughter of a woman who had lost twenty-two children during pregnancy, she had been given at birth, on the advice of an astrologer, the name of a ferocious animal to insure her survival. Inspired by the role her sister telephone operators played in the Jewish community, Nimra "Tigress" Tannous had been determined to make a similar contribution to the Arab cause. Together with an Armenian engineer, she had installed Rawdah's communications system, carrying its components piece by piece from the central post office in her handbag or concealed under her skirt. For a fortnight, a stray kitten cradled in her lap, a small revolver on the table before her, she had been the voice of Jerusalem 25290, the telephone number of the Rawdah headquarters.

  As was the case in the Jewish Agency, the most pressing calls to filter through her little switchboard dealt with arms. The largest consignment to reach Rawdah, a personal gift from Farouk, had doubled the Arabs' heavy arms. It consisted of fifteen machine guns, two two-pounder guns, and seven two-inch mortars.

  As did many another educated Jerusalemite, Dr. Hassib Boulos, a surgeon at Government Hospital, looked with concern on the disarray in the Rawdah headquarters. Like most of his fellows, however, Boulos listened regularly to the radios of Damascus, Cairo and Beirut. Their speeches, military music and bellicose slogans eased the doubts Jerusalem's defenders inspired in the young doctor. Nightly they promised the Arabs of Palestine that their armies were ready, that soon the hour would arrive to "let the sword speak."

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bsp; Fumbling with the radio in his hand, the civil servant who had told himself on Partition Night, "The British will never leave," locked his front door. Sami Hadawi's thoughts that night had been wishful thinking; the British were leaving and so was he. Casting a last glance at his front yard, its garden bursting with unpicked calla lilies, his children's sandbox still littered with toys, he hurried off to join his family in the safety of the Old City.

  His was not an isolated gesture in the Arab neighborhoods of Jerusalem during those closing days of the mandate. It was not the specter of famine or thirst that drove people from their homes. Their food and water supplies were adequate. They were frightened by something else, the speed with which the Haganah had moved through most of Katamon, and the knowledge that only a British cease-fire had stemmed the Jews' advance.

  The outflow was an acceleration of the movement which, since Christmas, had seen people drifting away to Beirut, Amman, Damascus. Some had been driven out by telephone threats or a bomb. Others had left out of a concern for their own well-being or a desire to ride out the coming storm in calmer ports. With rare exceptions, it had been the well-to-do who had left. They had been followed by the Mufti's political leaders. Only two members of his Arab Higher Committee remained in Jerusalem, a pair of worthy but ailing septuagenarians. The rest of the leaders who had so frequently proclaimed their willingness to drive the Jews into the sea now preferred to leave that task to others and follow the struggle from the safety of some distant Arab capital.