He glanced at his watch. Then he gasped. It was only eleven o'clock. Britain's star-crossed Palestine mandate had not been able to end without one final error. It had been terminated one hour too soon. The ship's captain had forgotten to take into account the difference between British summer time and Palestine time.
PART FOUR
JERUSALEM: A CITY DIVIDED
May 15, 1948—July 17, 1948
31
"THESE SHALL STAND."
THE SHRIEK of a locomotive whistle swept down the ill-lit station platform. With a series of metallic clangs the long line of cars lurched forward. All along the platform, the wives, parents, friends and children of the departing troops cheered and clapped. Leaning from the train's windows, the men of Egypt's Sixth Infantry Battalion laughed and waved back. They were heading to the Sinai, to war, but their mood was as gay as that of the crowds seeing them off in Cairo's Abassya Station. Lieutenant Mohammed Rafat, the battalion's twenty-six-year-old intelligence officer, was certain they were "off on a promenade." In a month, he had assured his fellows, they would be back to a reception even gayer than the one marking their departure.
Everywhere in the Egyptian capital other rituals of war were being performed. At midnight, after playing the march from Aida, Egypt's national anthem, Cairo Radio announced the imposition of martial law, and the sheikh of Al Azhar proclaimed, "The hour of the Holy War has struck." All Arab fighters, he said, must look upon the struggle for Palestine as a religious duty. Prime Minister Nokrashy Pasha announced that the nation was invading Palestine "to save it from Zionism and bring peace back to its borders." A few minutes later the Egyptian Foreign Ministry officially informed the United Nations Security Council that with the termination of the British mandate "Egyptian armed forces have started to enter Palestine." At Almaza Airport, crews were already loading the bays of Egypt's half-dozen bombers for the first air raids of the war.
A discordant reminder of the conflict marred even the candlelit roof garden of the Semiramis Hotel overlooking the waters of the Nile. A group of uniformed men in capes clustered around a table in one corner of the music-filled terrace. Proudly attired in his field marshal's uniform, a pretty girl by his side, King Farouk studied with his operations staff the first moves of his army's triumphant march to Tel Aviv on the map spread before him.
After its round of bellicose proclamations was finished, Cairo Radio turned its microphone over to a vibrant, husky female voice. No speech, no martial air, no heroic poem could move the masses of the Arab world as that voice did. It belonged to a plump middle-aged balladeer named Om Khalsum. In every corner of the Arab world, radios switched on in that early morning of May 15 to hear her sing. Appropriately, the long and plaintive ballad she had chosen to perform extolled a site as universal in its appeal to her audience as her legendary voice: Jerusalem.
In his home in Beirut, the Prime Minister of Lebanon woke his sleeping daughters so that they could hear the tremulous accents spilling from the radio. When Om Khalsum had finished her evocation of the Prophet's ascent to heaven from the Dome of the Rock, Riad Solh's eldest daughter, Alia, saw tears in her father's eyes. "My God, my God," he murmured, "let the Rock remain in our hands always."
Across the mountains, in Damascus, the Syrian government closed its frontiers, proclaimed martial law and gave its radio over to the nonstop broadcast of military marches. In Baghdad, Nuri as-Said, the man whose aides had vowed that his army would take Haifa in two weeks, had thus far dispatched only two thousand troops to Palestine. Sir Alec Kirkbride scathingly denounced their commander "as an incompetent idiot incapable of commanding a squad of infantry." Nuri, however, vowed that between two and three million tribesmen were ready to march on Palestine. Even the Arab League's Azzam Pasha, who privately abhorred the turn events had taken, was swept up by the emotion of the hour. "This will be a war of extermination and a momentous massacre," he predicted in a phrase that would haunt him for years, "which will be spoken of like the Mongolian massacres and the Crusades." Haj Amin Husseini's spokesman Ahmed Shukairy announced the Arabs' goals as "the elimination of the Jewish State." The foreign press was not immune to the spell cast by the Arab orators. Reuters from Cairo referred to an Egyptian Army of 200,000 men. The New York Times correspondent in Damascus described a Syrian brigade "speeding toward the Galilee after a lightning feint toward the Mediterranean."
At exactly five minutes after midnight, the advance party of the Arab Legion left the staging area in which a few hours before a sandstorm had drowned out the final exhortation of King Abdullah. Riding at the head of the main column in an open jeep was the adjutant of the Fourth Regiment, Captain Mahmoud Rousan. There was almost no moon, and the column moved without headlights. The only sound Rousan could hear was the low rumble of the engines. Ahead of him, he could just make out the ruby glow of the taillight of the last vehicle in the advance party. At the Jordan River, the military policemen controlling the movement silently waved him across Allenby Bridge. "It was," the young captain would later think, "the most exalting moment of my life." He was certain that "within fifteen days" they would be coming back across that bridge "a triumphant army having undone the wrong of partition."
As he had on Partition Night, David Ben-Gurion went to sleep early on May 14 to conserve his energies for the trials ahead. Once again he was awakened by a messenger bringing him news from the New World. Shortly after one o'clock, a telephone call informed him that the United States had officially recognized the new state. He understood at once that the gesture would be "a great moral encouragement to our people."
That announcement greeted by Ben-Gurion with so much pleasure was the culmination of five days of intensive activity in Washington to alter the decision taken in President Truman's office May 9. Largely through the efforts of Clark Clifford, Secretary of State Marshall had been persuaded to reconsider his stand and recommend to the President that the United States recognize the new state. Delighted, Truman had ordered Clifford to set the machinery of recognition in motion. At the same time that the independence ceremony was beginning in the Tel Aviv museum, Clifford had called the Jewish Agency's Washington representative, Eliahu Elath. "You'd better write a letter asking us for recognition," he told him.
Almost two thousand years had elapsed since the last diplomat in some dim corner of history had written an official letter on behalf of a Jewish state, Elath thought as he started to draft his request. It presented only one problem: Elath did not know the name of the state for which he was requesting recognition. Solving the problem by calling it simply "the Jewish state," he had dispatched his letter to the White House. Hardly was it out of his office door when the radio announced the name of the new nation. Elath sent a second messenger racing after the first one. His letter was intercepted at the White House gate and the word "Israel" added to it in ink. At 6:12 P.M. twelve minutes after Britain's mandate expired, President Truman had announced American recognition of the reborn Jewish state.
That would not be the only news to interrupt Ben-Gurion's sleep that night. Over the furious pleas of Paula Ben-Gurion, Yaacov Yanai, the Haganah's communications chief, pushed into his bedroom three hours later to ask the Jewish leader to make a radio broadcast to America. The sleepy Ben-Gurion stumbled out of bed and pulled a coat over his pajamas while Paula got him his shoes and stockings.
He had barely begun his broadcast from a secret Haganah transmitter when the planes being loaded in Cairo a few hours before arrived over Tel Aviv. The crash of their falling explosives shook his studio and echoed into his microphone. The sound they had just heard, Ben-Gurion dramatically told his audience, was the explosion of the first bombs dropped in the new state's war for independence.
As soon as he had finished, he drove off to inspect the damage. Riding through areas hit by the raid, he scanned the faces of his countrymen peering from their windows as he had once scanned the faces of Londoners during the Blitz. Were they afraid? he asked himself.
Worry and concern he saw
on those faces, but no tears, no panic. Returning home, Ben-Gurion entered two words in his diary. They summed up the relieved Prime Minister's impressions of his countrymen's reactions to their first exposure to modern warfare. "Eleh yamduh. These shall stand," he wrote.
In the march of the Arab armies into Palestine, one was moving in the opposite direction to all the others. It was leaving Palestine. There was no role in the coming offensive for the general who had sworn to capture Tel Aviv or die at the head of his troops. The only laurels Fawzi el Kaukji would take back from the campaign that was to have made of him a general in the Prussian mold were the splintered ruins of a few homes in Jerusalem. In accordance with the orders he had received from Damascus, he prepared to lead his army back across the Jordan, where an honorless dissolution awaited it. Just before dawn, his withdrawing columns crossed an advancing group of Arab Legion vehicles in the sleepy streets of the town of Ramallah. Kaukji was sure they were moving up to replace him in the positions from which he had just retired.
Held now by only two hundred irregulars under Haroun Ben-Jazzi, those hilltop positions controlled the most important crossroads in Palestine. Below them, in the wheatfields and vineyards of the Valley of Ayalon, the principal roads from the north, south and west joined to form the highway that ran up to Jerusalem through the gorge of Bab el Wad. Since Biblical times, the destiny of Jerusalem had been decided on the ridge lines of Latrun.
It was there on the evening of his terrible battle that Joshua had bade the sun stand still to give him time to complete his victory over the Canaanites. From there the Philistines had terrorized the Hebrews of Saul's time. Here Judas Maccabaeus, Judas the Hammer, had begun his war to liberate his people. Herod had defeated the Jews on these hills, and Vespasian had installed his legions along its crests. Richard the Lionhearted had built on one of its peaks "a vigilant citadel along the route of the Caliphs," only to have it razed by Saladin on his own march to Jerusalem. Nine centuries later, in 1917, Prussians and Turks had tried to stem on its ridges the advance of General Allenby. Only the fact that they were held by the British and not the Arabs had kept them from becoming the focal point of Operation Nachshon a month earlier.
Now, as the sun of Joshua began to rise over the Valley of Ayalon on the first morning in the life of a new Jewish state, Fawzi el Kaukji's withdrawal had presented to the soldiers of Israel a glittering opportunity to seize the heights that were the key to the road to Jerusalem.
Squatting on his prayer carpet in the predawn grayness, King Abdullah fondled his pet, a one-eyed cat, and ruminated with his newspaperman guest.
"All right" he said, "the Arab countries are going to war and we must naturally be at their sides, but we are making a mistake for which we will pay dearly later. One day we will live to regret that we did not give the Jews a state to satisfy their demands. We have been following the wrong course and we still are."
The King paused a moment. Then, smiling faintly at the guest in his Amman palace, he added, "If you quote me on that, I will deny it publicly and call you a liar."
The principal concern of Jerusalem's Haganah on the first day of the new state's existence was the determined resistance still being put up by Bajhat Abou Gharbieh in the quarter of Musrara outside the Old City's northwestern wall. At seven o'clock in the morning a Haganah attack wrested from the Arabs the Hospice of Notre-Dame, overlooking one side of Musrara, and soon loudspeakers warned its inhabitants, "Return to the Old City or you'll be killed."
Despite the warning and an order from his chieftains at the Rawdah School to withdraw, Abou Gharbieh refused to abandon the neighborhood in which he had been born. For the next two hours, he and his men waged a furious combat with the Haganah, its epicenter a curious location, the basketball court of a Swedish school.
Elsewhere, in the Arab neighborhoods of Greek Colony, German Colony and Upper Beqaa, cut off by Avram Uzieli's capture of the Allenby Barracks, the day was characterized by the outburst of an ancient malady that had followed conquering armies in the Holy City since time immemorial—looting. For Nairn Halaby, as for most of the Arabs left in those middle-class neighborhoods, the memory of that May 15 would always be associated with a sight he watched from his window, "an orgy of looting." Their first visitors were simply hungry Jews literally begging for something to eat. But then, as word spread, others swarmed in behind them.
Halaby saw one group bring a horse and a cart up to his next-door neighbor's abandoned home and systematically strip it bare. Down the street other looters carried away tires, furniture, kerosene and heaps of clothing from another house. Halaby's worst shock, however, came when he saw a green Willys drive by his window. It was his. He had left it in a friend's garage with its distributor cap removed, thinking that no one would be able to move it.
The father of Hassib Boulos, the surgeon at Government Hospital, looked on helplessly as a wave of looters picked his home clean, even stripping the clothes from his closet. "If I had known," he later lamented, "at least I would have put on a good suit that morning." Daoud Dajani heard a noise outside his house. Stepping out, he saw a man trying to get into his home through a little door under its eaves. He yelled and the frightened looter tumbled at his feet. It was a Yemenite truck driver from the Dead Sea Potash Works who had been a customer of Dajani's grocery store for years. Late in the afternoon, Emile Hourani overheard two elderly women who were looting his neighbor's house bitterly complain, "The rich people took all the good things and left nothing for us."
Unprepared for what was happening, preoccupied with the city's military situation, the Haganah made only cursory efforts to curb the looting. The terrorist organizations complicated their problem. One Arab automobile dealer brought the Haganah a slip of paper in Hebrew given him by the men who had "requisitioned" 180 new tires from his cellar. "It's the Irgun," the Haganah people told him. "There's nothing we can do."
The blare of sirens rising above the gunfire denoted another aspect of the agony overtaking Jerusalem. On both sides of the city her inhabitants, Arab and Jewish alike, were paying with blood for their attachment to Jerusalem. The emergency clinics and operating theaters established in the New City by the Magen David Adorn were already overflowing. Deprived of their facilities on Mount Scopus, the Jewish medical establishment had converted their neighborhood clinics into military hospitals. They had even rented the classrooms of the St. Joseph Convent School to supplement their limited hospital space.
Bandages, plasma, antibiotics and two thousand flasks of blood had been divided among the clinics. Water was desperately short. What had been used to scrub wounds was meticulously saved to wash the floors. Since laundries couldn't work, sheets were taken from the dead to welcome the wounded. As there was almost no electric power, operations were performed by flashlight. Antitetanus serum and morphine were almost nonexistent.
To the nurses in the St. Joseph clinic, the agony of one young Haganah soldier represented much of the suffering besetting their city. His wounded brother was in the bed beside him. His father had been killed in the withdrawal from Neve Yaacov a few hours before. And he, he was going to lose both his legs with, as his only anesthesic, one shot of morphine and the blocks of ice in which his heartbroken mother had wrapped his mangled limbs.
The Jews of Jerusalem had one priceless resource, however: the skill of their doctors who had survived the Hadassah ambush. They were men like Dr. Edward Joseph, a brilliant abdominal surgeon in the clinic of the Street of the Prophet. Twice, in 1929 and 1936, the gray-haired graduate of the University of Edinburgh Medical School had cared for his fellows wounded defending their city. Almost speechless with fatigue, he labored hour after hour on the battered bodies of the Haganah wounded.
A few hundred yards away, an Arab doctor struggled to imitate the movements that had made Dr. Joseph world famous. Dr. Ibrahim Tleel had never operated on the abdomen. He had no assistants, and his only nurse was busy somewhere else. As in so many other domains, the confusion and disorder in his improvised hosp
ital were part of the price the Arabs were paying for their failure to organize their society. Only after repeated warnings from the British and the Red Cross had they established an emergency clinic in the Austrian Hospice on the Via Dolorosa by the Fourth Station of the Cross. It lacked almost everything: fuel, electricity, water, bandages, blood, penicillin, anesthetics, plaster, even food. Volunteers were going from door to door in the Old City begging for a jar of kerosene, a box of sugar, a sheet or a mattress. Its equipment, brought in haste by the young Dr. Tleel three days earlier, consisted of an antiquated sterilizer, one old operating table, some plasma, penicillin and morphine. Cut off from Government Hospital and the other institutions on which they had relied in the New City, the Arabs could offer their wounded little more than a stopping-off place on the way to the grave.
Even the men on whom they had counted were absent. Dr. Hassib Boulos, who could have performed the operation haunting Dr. Tleel, was trapped in Government Hospital. Despairing, the young Palestinian took the only course open to him. He ran up the stairs to his bedroom and grabbed one of the six enormous volumes on his bookshelf. Tleel had bought them in London for six guineas. Frantically he plunged into the pages of Love and Bailly's Emergency Surgery in search of the knowledge that would save the man dying on his operating table.*
Assiya Halaby, the woman who had gone to the King David to say goodbye to her British colleagues, was among the volunteers who came to Tleel's aid. Her first wounded was a Syrian. Someone had stuffed an old rag into the gaping hole in his head. Assiya called for scissors to cut it away and clean the wound. There were none. She ran out into the souks, dashing from stall to stall until she finally found a pair. Tied around her neck with a black ribbon, they became for the woman who had left her home with a copy of The Arab Awakening a kind of weapon, the symbol of her participation in the struggle enveloping the city.
O Jerusalem! Page 49
