O Jerusalem!

by Larry Collins

  From Mafraq and Zerqa in central Transjordan, the men and vehicles of the army that had just overwhelmed the last defenders of the Etzionbloc's principal settlement moved down the Mountains of Moab to the staging area by the Jordan River from which they would cross into Palestine.

  For three uninterrupted miles their cavalcade covered the roads of Transjordan, five hundred vehicles, trucks, jeeps, signal vans, mobile kitchens, armored cars, troop carriers. It was an impressive display, and the throngs went wild at the sight. From behind their black veils, the women warbled the tremulous "Yo yo yo" war cry that had sent Moslems into battle since the Prophet's warriors first streamed out of the deserts of Arabia twelve hundred years before. Men clapped and cheered. Children threw flowers and scampered along behind the passing vehicles. In the countryside riders galloped beside the column on horse or camelback wildly firing into the air.

  Jubilant and excited, the troops responded in kind, cheering and waving to the crowds. Some of their trucks were hung with pink oleander and green palm sprays. All of them were infected by the excitement of the populace. Looking at their faces, Captain Ali Abou Nuwar, adjutant of the Second Regiment, thought, "All their hopes are on us." To Youssef Jeries, a platoon leader elated at the thought of "rescuing our Palestine brothers," it was as though they were "going to a wedding."

  Riding along with his men, John Glubb thought the procession "looked more like a carnival than an army going to war." For a man who knew the Arabs as well as Glubb did, that was a surprisingly inaccurate reading of his men's mood. It was not a "semblance of war" his Bedouin officers and soldiers wanted. They wanted to fight, to march on Tel Aviv, to drive their armored cars down to the shores of the Mediterranean, and their martial mood was going to challenge the English general's plans in the days just ahead.

  At the Zerqa camp from which some of Glubb's Legionnaires had just set out, the atmosphere in the Arab armies' joint headquarters was considerably less reassuring. The place, Azzam Pasha noted, "brewed with confusion." The brigadier sent by the Egyptians as their liaison officer appeared to have no idea of what his army's movements would be. The Iraqi hadn't even shown up yet.

  To compound their troubles a cable arrived at noon May 13 from General Safwat Pasha in Damascus. "Firmly convinced that the absence of agreement on a precise plan can only lead us to disaster," it announced. "I submit my resignation." Azzam replaced him with another Iraqi, a Kurd who at least bore a propitious name, that of one of Saladin's generals, Nurreidin Mahmoud. In Zerqa's disturbing atmosphere the worried secretary general of the Arab League found only one voice to reassure him. It belonged to the Arab Legion's British liaison officer. "Don't worry," he kept promising Azzam, "we're going to lick them."

  For other Britons, packing to leave the following morning, their war was ending at last. Many of them had been fighting practically without pause in one part of the world or another since 1939, and the next day would offer them their first peace in a decade. In Jerusalem, the souks of the Old City swarmed with British soldiers searching for a last souvenir of their service in Palestine. Colonel Jack Churchill, the officer who had tried to save the victims of the Hadassah convoy, had long had his eye on two carpets. The Middle Eastern veteran knew how to barter, but this afternoon he didn't have to. Into the hands of the merchant who had been asking one hundred pounds he thrust four ten-pound notes, saying "take it while you can. Tomorrow the Jews will be here and they'll get them for nothing."

  For a handful of British soldiers, the coming departure forced to the surface a decision as old as men and arms: whether to leave behind a girl or desert and accept a new life in exile. Mike Scott did not hesitate. For months, once a week in a darkened Jerusalem movie house, he had slipped his Jewish fiancée documents from his office in Army Intelligence. Ordered home, he had immediately volunteered his services to the Haganah's Vivian Herzog. Was there anything, he inquired, that he might bring along with him when he came? With the understatement of his years of service with the Guards, Herzog had modestly suggested that the Haganah could do with a cannon.

  And so, on the afternoon of May 13, accompanied by a crane, a truck and three British soldiers, Major Mike Scott strode into the Army's main weapons park in Haifa. The Jerusalem command, he told the commanding general, had just lost a twenty-five-pound gun in a road accident outside Ramallah and wanted an immediate replacement in case of trouble during the withdrawal.

  "Help yourself," said the general, waving to his artillery park. A few minutes later in a garage on Mount Carmel, the army that had been deprived of five precious guns by a zealous British naval officer got its revenge for the seizure of the Borea. The Haganah took possession of its first piece of field artillery.

  No woman lay behind the decision of other British soldiers to remain in Palestine. The war in which they had been supposed to play the role of impartial policemen had become a cause for them, and its passions and divisions had become theirs. They now deserted to one side or the other. Three soldiers in civilian clothes, carrying their weapons and ammunition, calmly walked into the home of Antoine Sabella, an Arab leader in the area around the railroad station, and offered their services.

  In the Jewish Quarter of the Old City, an army private named Albert suddenly seized a Bren gun and bolted away from his mates into the stunned arms of the Haganah. He had brought not only his weapon but also a precious piece of information. The Army would evacuate the quarter in just one hour. Thus, when the bagpiper began to march the British out of the Old City, and the last detachment headed to Mordechai Weingarten's house to offer the elderly rabbi the key to Zion Gate, the Haganah was ready. Kicking aside empty beer cans, whiskey bottles and cigarette boxes, they slipped into the British posts as each was cleared. By nightfall, Operation Shfifon (Serpent) had achieved all its objectives. The Haganah controlled all the abandoned British Army posts that had surrounded the quarter, Zion Gate, and a key cupola called the Cross Position on the edge of the Armenian Quarter, dominating the western flanks. The first skirmish in the struggle for Jerusalem had been an unqualified Jewish success.

  Hiding behind a pile of crates in the Schneller School, Yosef Nevo followed with glee the only British departure from Jerusalem which interested him, that of his mother-in-law. It was the result of some of the young officer's most intense strategic thought. In a neat gray suit and daintily flowered hat, she was the only civilian in a convoy of unkempt Palmachniks off to break through the Arab blockade and make a dash for the seacoast. As soon as the convoy disappeared, Nevo and his bride, Naomi, fell into each other's arms. "I am moving in tonight," announced the exultant bridegroom.

  Some strange feminine premonition gripped Naomi. "No," she said. "Wait one night. I'll meet you tomorrow morning at ten o'clock at the Café Atara."

  A deathly silence wrapped the hills of Kfar Etzion. The fall of the main kibbutz had deprived its three satellites, Massuot, Ein Tsurim and Revadim, of their principal source of strength. Smaller, less well-armed and protected, they now waited helplessly for their turn to come.

  It would not, however, be the men of Abdullah Tell who would overrun them. Persuaded that he had successfully stamped out the colony, under orders to get back across the Jordan River before the British mandate expired, Tell had withdrawn his men to Jericho, leaving the satellites to the irregulars.

  Before turning to that task, however, the thousands of villagers swarming through the wreckage of Kfar Etzion had an easier job to complete. Toward late afternoon, the settlers of Massuot saw a column of trucks and farm wagons drive into the vanquished settlement. When the column left an hour later, they rushed to study it with binoculars, expecting to see their fellows being carted off to captivity in its vans. Instead, they saw the remnants of the kibbutz itself go rolling past their eyes. Spilling over with goods, the incredible column of pillage stretched on for kilometers. It seemed to one observer that Arabs were carrying away Kfar Etzion "down to the last nails." There were beds, mattresses, cooking utensils, furniture, cows, mules, ba
les of straw, roofing. Even the Torah of the demolished Neve Ovadia was carted off to decorate some neighboring Arab village.

  When they had finished, Abdul Halim Shalaf, Haj Amin's principal deputy in the Hebron region, began to assemble his partisans to exterminate Kfar Etzion's three satellites. Determined not to fall into their vengeful hands, Ein Tsurim informed Shaltiel's headquarters that the survivors would try to break through the ring around them during the night and reach Jerusalem by foot.

  Convinced that the tactic would lead to still another massacre, Shaltiel begged the settlers to remain where they were. He began instead a race against time to save them through the intervention of the Red Cross and the consuls of Belgium, France and the United States.

  From the Romanesque bell tower of the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, the resonant chimes of the Angelus tolled another sunset. Equally faithful to the watches of Islam, the muezzin's plaintive call reverberated down the alleyways of the Old City, beckoning believers to evening prayer. In their barracks and residences, the British soldiers and civil servants still left in Jerusalem heard those sounds for the last time. Thirty years, five months and four days after General Sir Edmund Allenby's arrival at Jaffa Gate, the British presence in Jerusalem entered its final evening.

  Each Englishman would mark it in his own way. At Goldschmidt's boardinghouse at the edge of Zone B in Rehavia, a group of army officers gathered, guests of the man who had once served in their ranks, Vivian Herzog. To Herzog, their meeting was a small measure of the gratitude he felt toward those men, commanders of some of the key buildings in downtown Jerusalem. Each of them had, in one way or another, aided him in preparing for their takeover by the Haganah in a few hours.

  Herzog would always remember their jovial gathering as the "last supper." It was a singularly skimpy last supper. If whiskey was abundant, the plates of Herzog's guests were an accurate reflection of the desperate food situation in the city they were leaving behind. All he was able to offer them was an omelette made of powdered eggs.

  In the officers' mess of the Highland Light Infantry in the massive old French Hospice of Notre-Dame, the regiment's officers donned their tartan kilts and mess jackets for a final, formal dinner accompanied by their traditional drink, Athol Brose, a mixture of whiskey, honey, oatmeal and cream. The shouts of a gigantic farewell poker game rising from a street corner in Yemin Moshe marked the final gathering in the Press Club. Its dreary little bar had become the last place in Jerusalem where Arabs, Jews and Britons mingled. That bar had been the scene of not a few monumental drinking bouts in recent weeks. And huddled in its chairs, Gabe Sifroni, dean of the city's Jewish press corps, and his Arabic counterpart, Abou Said Abou Reech, had reached many a discreet agreement to help a newsman's friend or relative threatened by the Mufti's men or the Irgun and the Stern Gang.

  Now their last emotional embraces and the cries of the poker game mingled with the noise of a radio blaring in the corner. Between martial airs and exalting Arabic odes, the Palestine Broadcasting System, now Arab-run, was informing its listeners to stand by for an important announcement from the mandatory government at nine o'clock. The British, a few of the cynical newsmen decided, were about to announce they were not leaving after all.

  An intimate and elegant last supper in the King David Hotel united a handful of the government's senior officials—the Chief Secretary, the Attorney General, Chief Justice Sir William Fitzgerald. Offered by the hotel's Swiss manager, it was, Fitzgerald would recall, "a sad and silent meal." When it was over the little group strolled to the bay window. There, spread at their feet, its domes and spires glistening in the moonlight, was the most haunting panorama in Palestine, the rooftops of the Old City of Jerusalem. Intuitively, each raised his wineglass in a silent toast to that capital of mankind, their brief reign over which was ending this night.

  For Assad V, the magnificent black Great Dane of architect Dan Ben-Dor, it was a last supper, too, and it would reward his master for all his evening walks to the British mess in the Italian Hospital. After the mess sergeant had opened a final can of bully beef for the dog, he took a case of tins from the shelf.

  "Here," he said to Ben-Dor, "take this. It's the last time I can feed him. We're leaving tonight."

  "Oh, really?" said Ben-Dor, as casually as possible. "What time?"

  "Twelve-thirty," replied the cook. Half an hour later, alerted by Ben-Dor, a unit of the Haganah was in position in the streets around the hospital.

  In the magnificent state dining room of Government House, the chandeliers blazed over Sir Alan Cunningham's farewell dinner. Clad in dress uniforms and decorations as though they might be staying on in Jerusalem for years to come, his senior staff officers chatted their way through a last meal together, their mood lightened by the sprightly airs of the Highland Light Infantry's regimental band.

  Shortly before nine o'clock, a black Rolls Royce escorted by a pair of armored cars drove up to the studios of the Palestine Broadcasting System. Peering from his office windows, Raji Sayhoun, the station manager, understood that the man who was to make the "important announcement" for which he had been preparing the public had arrived.

  His ruddy face set in a somber mask, Sir Alan Cunningham stepped from the vehicle in which, a few minutes before, he had left his dinner guests. The Arab station manager escorted him to Studio A, a tiny broadcasting booth equipped with a microphone, a chair and a table. At precisely nine o'clock, Sayhoun cut the recorded Arabic march the radio was playing and announced "an important declaration by his Excellency the High Commissioner." Beside him, the technician flipped the switch on Sir Alan's microphone and with a sharp wave of his finger indicated to the High Commissioner that he was on the air.

  At his first words, Sayhoun felt his throat tighten with emotion. The High Commissioner, he realized, was saying farewell to the people of Palestine. His speech was brief and poignant. When he had finished, the men in the studio watched in stunned silence as he stepped from the booth.

  Respectfully, Sayhoun asked Sir Alan if he wished him to add a few phrases in Arabic before resuming their regular broadcasts.

  "No," quietly replied the High Commissioner, "just play 'God Save the King,' please. It's perhaps the last occasion you'll have to play it."

  In his little study in Tel Aviv, David Ben-Gurion labored late into the night. Spread on the desk before him was the text which, a few hours hence, would announce to the world that the seat of power left vacant by Sir Alan Cunningham and the nation he represented would be filled by a new authority. It was the draft of the official proclamation of a Jewish state.

  30

  THE FIFTH DAY OF IYAR

  WHISPERING INTENTLY, the two men paced beside the coils of barbed wire lining the street. Already the first gray shafts of dawn picked at Jerusalem's skyline, defining the rooftops rising from the shadows just behind them. One of the two was the British officer commanding those imposing structures of Bevingrad. The other was the ex-policeman to whom David Shaltiel had given the task of seizing them in the footsteps of their departing British occupants.

  Arieyeh Schurr hung on each of the Englishman's words as he reviewed once again the final details of the evacuation due to begin in a few minutes. "I have to be going now," the officer concluded. "Good luck."

  Before he could turn to leave, Schurr said, "Wait. There is something I want to give you as a measure of our gratitude for what you have done for us. Perhaps you've helped us save the Jews of Jerusalem from a massacre." The Haganah man reached into his pocket and drew out the most appropriate gift he had been able to discover in his beleaguered city, a gold wristwatch. On it was inscribed the Englishman's name, the date and one phrase to remind him in the years he would wear it of the army that had offered it to him: "With gratitude from H."

  With a parting handshake, Schurr returned to his headquarters. In it he had assembled a self-contained telephone network. Its twenty-four phones linked to three separate switchboards tied Schurr to the observers he had stationed on rooft
ops all around central Jerusalem, and to the apartments along the perimeter of Bevingrad in which he had hidden his waiting soldiers. In addition, a group of post-office technicians, carrying portable phones, were ready to follow his men on their advance into Bevingrad so that Schurr would be able to keep abreast of their progress almost room by room. The meticulous Schurr had even found a merchant who had a stock of hundreds of British Army surplus wirecutters. Purchased for two shillings apiece, these tools would allow his men to swiftly hack their way through the dense forest of barbed wire on the Jewish side of Bevingrad.

  Now Schurr's weeks of preparation were about to pay off. One of the lights on his switchboard lit up. It was an observer calling. He had just noticed the first British soldiers begin to move out of the General Post Office. Schurr glanced at his watch. His British friend had been true to his word. As he had promised, it was exactly four o'clock.

  In Notre-Dame and Bevingrad, in the Allenby and El Alamein Barracks, on the Hill of Evil Counsel and in the nearly deserted lobby of the King David Hotel, the departing British had begun to stir to life as soon as the first shafts of sunlight fell on the city. Soldiers heaved a last duffle bag onto their trucks, civilians packed away their last belongings and souvenirs for their trip home. All over the city, motors coughed to life, vehicles fell into columns and men marched toward their assembly points.

  To Brigadier C. P. Jones, the last act of the British Army in Jerusalem would be "a straightforward military movement." To designate the city during the operation, his signals officer had selected a code word barren of even a hint of the history, the religious vocation, the prestigious nature of the community his compatriots were leaving. Jerusalem, on this Friday morning, May 14, 1948, was "Cod."

  By seven the first columns were ready to move. The yellow silk regimental colors which had been carried in battle against the Maoris of New Zealand a century before at the head of their procession, the men of the Suffolk Regiment marched down Mount Zion to their embusing point. Kilts packed away in favor of battle dress, bagpipes leading their procession, the men of the Highland Light Infantry in turn marched solemnly out of the Hospice of Notre-Dame. Captain Michael Naylor Leyland, the officer who had rescued the last survivors of the Hadassah convoy, led the vehicles of his First Life Guards Armored Car Squadron through the barbed wire that had separated their British Zone from the inhabitants of Jerusalem. Entering the city, Naylor Leyland noted a little sadly that "there was practically no one out to watch us go."