O Jerusalem!

by Larry Collins

  All day John Glubb had fretted over the failure of his second ammunition ship, the one bearing thousands of rounds for his artillery, to arrive in Aqaba. Late in the afternoon, a telephone call from the commanding general of Britain's Middle Eastern forces in Port Said provided him the explanation for its absence.

  "I say, old boy, your allies seem to be pinching your ammunition," the general said. The Egyptians, he reported, had ordered the departing ship back to the dock and were unloading its cargo. The shells its hold contained were going to wind up in the cannon of King Farouk and not in the guns of the Bedouin rival he so despised.

  No event in Jerusalem during that first full day of the Jewish state's existence would have as much bearing on the city's struggle as a discovery in the hills abandoned the evening before by Fawzi el Kaukji. A unit of the Palmach's Givati Brigade, surprised by the lack of response to a couple of probing mortar shots, began to push cautiously up the slope. To their stupefaction, the men found no opposition. In a few minutes they were inside the heavily fortified British police station commanding the road for which they had made such sacrifices six weeks before during Operation Nachshon.

  From the police station, they crossed through the grove of olive and cypress trees wrapping the Trappist Monastery of Latrun in a protective belt of greenery and scaled the summit behind the abbey's buildings. There they came under a furious attack, not from their Arab foes, but from hundreds of bees in the monks' hives.

  Faces puffed from their assault, the Palmach conquerors of Latrun prudently withdrew to the police station to ponder their exploit. They immediately radioed Tel Aviv that the road for which they had been fighting so desperately was unexpectedly open and the key heights of Latrun were empty of the enemy. Kaukji's assumption as he passed through Ramallah had been wrong.

  Latrun did not, for the moment, figure in the strategy of the commander of the Arab Legion. By an extraordinary coincidence it was not going to figure in the strategy of the Haganah either. Instead of the interminable column of trucks they had hoped to see rushing up to Jerusalem on the road that now lay open, the frustrated men on the heights of Latrun and Bab el Wad would see only one truck pass below them. It would become known in Israeli legend as the Orphan Convoy.

  Even more inexplicable to some was the decision to abandon the Latrun ridge a few hours later. To the Chief of Operations of the Israeli Army, however, the new state resembled that afternoon "a nude girl with only a handkerchief to cover herself." As the girl would have to decide what to hide, so Yigal Yadin had to decide what to defend. The young archaeologist was convinced on Saturday, May 15, that the gravest danger Israel faced was not the situation in Jerusalem, but that created by the Egyptian Army columns pouring into the country from the south.

  Rejecting Yitzhak Rabin's plea to hold Latrun in force by adding a battalion of the Givati Brigade to Rabin's battered Fifth Battalion, he ordered the Givati troops south to meet the forces of King Farouk. Thus for a few hours, abandoned in turn by the Arabs and the Haganah, the vital heights of Latrun would be virtually empty. They would not be for long.

  Thousands of miles from the shores of the new state of Israel, in a suite in the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York, a small group of friends stood around the sickbed of Chaim Weizmann. The long struggle of Zionism's most distinguished spokesman had culminated with an honor no man deserved more than he. Raising a glass of champagne to the ailing scientist, his secretary, Joseph Linton, proposed, "for the first time in two thousand years," a toast to "the President of a Jewish state."

  32

  "THE MOST BEAUTIFUL MONTH OF THE YEAR"

  IN THE BEDROOM overlooking the Austrian Hospice, in which he had taken refuge, an out-of-work Arab civil servant patiently twisted the dials of his battery-powered radio. Since May 14, Aladin Namari had been the self-appointed Minister of Information of Arab Jerusalem. The two days in which he had discharged his function had been marked by one Arab setback after another in the city. Its citizens had an important consolation, however, and its source was the crackling voices pouring out of Namari's radio as he moved the dial from one Arab broadcasting service to another.

  As soon as he had switched off the radio, Namari began to compose the bulletin he would mimeograph for his fellow Jerusalemites. This Sunday, May 16, it would inform them that, according to Palestine Radio in Ramallah, "the Arab armies continued to advance on all battlefields, winning victory after victory."

  Baghdad had announced, "Iraqi forces have captured the Rutenberg power plant which supplies most of Palestine with electric power."

  Cairo claimed that "the Egyptian Army arrived in Gaza via Khan Yunis and advanced beyond in its successful march."

  Beirut proudly declared that the Lebanese Army "continued its advance triumphantly, destroying the fortifications of the Jewish settlements on its way."

  To that litany of Arab triumphs Namari appended only one local note, an urgent appeal for donations to relieve the shortages in the Austrian Hospice below his windows.

  It was the only accurate item in Namari's bulletin that morning. The Rutenberg power plant "captured" by the Iraqis was inside Transjordan, while Khan Yunis and Gaza were purely Arab communities. Reading Namari's bulletin and later hearing of other Egyptian "victories" in Beersheba, Hebron and Bethlehem, George Deeb would angrily ask a friend, "Can't they read the maps I sent them? All their conquests are Arab!"

  If the Arabs' victories to date were largely in their own minds, the situation facing the Jewish state was still extremely grave, and the diary of David Ben-Gurion that Sunday corroborated the tone, at least, of Namari's bulletin. In the north, he noted, "we have one hundred and fifty casualties in a battalion of five hundred." In Upper Galilee the situation was "dire." Morale in many units was low. Egyptian attacks were reported in Nir Am, Nirin and Kfar Darim, and the settlements, he recorded, were "sure they will not be able to hold out." There was "news of Egyptian columns along the shore," Ben-Gurion concluded, and "the south is open."

  One of the men moving up with those advancing columns was Lieutenant Mohammed Rafat, the twenty-six-year-old intelligence officer of the Sixth Battalion who had so cheerfully waved goodbye to his family in the Cairo station. He was a confused young man. He had been ordered to prepare a dawn attack on a Jewish kibbutz that wasn't even marked on his map.

  With no reconnaissance, led by a colonel who had never commanded a unit in the field, Rafat and his men set out in search of their missing Jewish settlement. After walking nine miles through the desert, they stumbled on it just after dawn. That example of the helpless Jewish colonies that were supposed to line their route to Tel Aviv was surrounded by barbed wire and sandbagged strongpoints. A devastating wave of fire swept out from its trenches, causing the Egyptians heavy losses. Nailed to the desert floor under a battering sun, they suffered for hours until darkness allowed them to stagger back across the desert to their base. There one final shock awaited them. There was no water in the camp. Exhausted, racked with thirst, the embittered young Rafat realized that his "promenade" to Tel Aviv was over.

  The struggle for Jerusalem had brought pandemonium into the lives of a special category of its citizens, those men and women dedicated to a religious vocation. Priests, monks and nuns whose cellars already overflowed with goods given them for safekeeping now found their convents and monasteries clogged with refugees. On this Pentecost Sunday, communities which had chosen to detach themselves from the temporal world were forced by the crisis enveloping the city to come to grips with its most ferocious aspects.

  None of them had their life as completely disrupted as a group of twenty-nine cloistered French nuns who had the immense misfortune to live in what was probably the most exposed building in Jerusalem. The architect of their convent had made it a kind of modern assault tower, its front end extending beyond the Old City's walls next to New Gate and its rear actually inside the Old City itself.

  Its community of Soeurs Réparatrices lived a life so isolated from the world that the on
ly male many of them had seen for half a century was their priest. Their only ventures into the streets of Jerusalem were walking to their convent on the day of their arrival and leaving it at their death for the graveyard beyond Gethsemane. Their Holy City was the chapel in which they prostrated themselves in perpetual adoration before a host representing the Savior who had been crucified a few hundred yards from their altar. Overnight, the peaceful haven of their convent had become an appealing target to both sides. Those sheltered nuns, who barely remembered what a man was, now saw men streaming through their convent by the dozens, Arabs from one side, Jews from the other. In the first forty-eight hours of fighting, the building and its rooftop vantage points were seized first by the Arabs, then by the Haganah, then by the Arabs again. At each intrusion, the mère supérieure and her assistant the mère econome valiantly tried to scold the invaders out of their convent with a perfectly futile declaration of their neutrality.

  Finally, on this Pentecost Sunday, with the Haganah preparing to wrest the building back from the Arabs, the mother superior decided to suspend her followers' vows. The war was going to return the Soeurs Réparatrices to the world for five minutes, just the time needed to rush through the streets of Jerusalem to the Roman Catholic Patriarchate. Once there, they were installed in the Archbishop's reception hall. Each of the nuns was assigned a huge red velvet chair which she turned to the wall to form a temporary cell in which to practice the meditations of her order. That evening in the Patriarchate's chapel, they resumed their rigid routine. Arms extended in a cross, they recited the rosary. Then, in unfeigned joyfulness, they sang an old French hymn: "It is May. It is the month of Mary. It is the most beautiful month of the year."

  Fawzi el Kutub was ready to launch his personal crusade against the Jewish Quarter of the Old City. Behind the Arabs' explosives expert was the bomb he had prepared for his assault at his headquarters in a Turkish bath: twenty-five homemade mines. Each consisted of thirty-five pounds of dynamite stuffed into metal cans and armed with one of the detonators he had purchased in the souks of Damascus. Kutub was going to blow his way into the quarter building by building.

  His first target was the Haganah position in the Warsaw Buildings, barely a hundred yards from the spot where he had been born. To set an example for the twenty-five volunteers he had recruited for his Tadmir unit, Kutub lit a cigarette, stuck it into his mouth and raced forward with the first mine. As he did, the metal scraps of an exploding booby trap peppered his face. Kutub lit the mine with his cigarette, heaved it at its target and sprinted to cover. His face smeared with blood, seized by an almost hysterical frenzy, he grabbed a second bomb and thrust it at Kadour Mansour, "El Tunsi," his whiskey-drinking truck driver. Pulling out his pistol, he pointed it at the trembling Tunisian's temple and ordered him to run. The bomb balanced on his head like a safari porter's load, El Tunsi staggered off.

  Three times Kutub forced the Tunisian to repeat the gesture. After the third, the man told him, "Shoot me. I don't give a damn. I'm not going back."

  Kutub turned to another member of his unit, a fourteen-year-old boy named Sabah Ghani, and ordered him to go. Inspired by a parade of volunteers marching through Damascus, Ghani had run away from his Syrian home to join his father and brother, already fighting in Palestine. Knees trembling, he started out. As he did, an elderly man leaped forward, grabbed the bomb from his arms and, screaming, "Allah akhbar!," rushed off in his place. Two Haganah men in a concealed tunnel cut the old man down with a Sten-gun burst. Then they drove the rest of Kutub's men back to cover.

  It was only a momentary respite. On all sides, the Arab irregulars hammered the beleaguered quarter. The most serious attacks were along its western flank, where the Jewish and Armenian Quarters ran side by side. The Arabs had occupied the cross-shaped belfry of the Church of St.-Jacques, which the Old City Haganah had been ordered to abandon by Shaltiel's headquarters after a series of vociferous Armenian protests. As a result the vital Haganah post at Zion Gate had come under a crossfire and had to be given up, too. Using the Cross Position for support, the Arabs then drove down the little slope on which Rabbi Weingarten lived toward the heart of the Jewish Quarter, the Street of the Jews. As they advanced, they tried to lure the Israelis into the open with offers of tomatoes and bread. The fighting was desperate, from room to room and street corner to corner; despite the Haganah's determined resistance, the Arabs progressed steadily.

  As composed as if she were still walking the streets of her native London, Esther Cailingold moved through the fighting, bringing ammunition, food and a cheering word to each post. Discovering in one a tray of sandwiches covered with dust, she quietly admonished its occupants. In England, during the Blitz, she told them, they had had to learn to make sure precious food wouldn't spoil. Fifteen minutes later she brought them a new set of sandwiches, all carefully wrapped.

  On one of her trips a ricocheting bullet struck her hip. Insisting that the Arabs' attack was too intense to allow anyone to leave a post, she limped off to the hospital unaided.

  None of the losses the Haganah would suffer that day would have a more depressing effect on morale than that which occurred shortly after noon in an abandoned building in the line of the Arabs' advance. To try to check their assault, Emmanuel Meidav, the boy with the "golden hands," had returned to booby-trap the building with one of the Irgun's homemade bombs. Emmanuel had had no experience with the device and something went wrong. A frightful explosion shook the building.

  An hour later, his fiancée, Rika Menache, finally found him in the hospital. Dr. Abraham Laufer, the Old City's surgeon, sorrowfully took her to a table on which Emmanuel lay on a stretcher, his face swathed in bandages.

  "Will he live?" Rika whispered. Laufer nodded. She sank to his side and began to caress his broken body. The energetic, vital young man who had been her fiancé could hardly breathe. One of his "golden hands" had been amputated; the other was a useless claw. Worse, the handsome face under the bandages would never see again. The explosion had torn out both of Emmanuel's eyes.

  Outside, the Arabs continued to push their way toward the quarter's principal artery, the Street of the Jews. In one day's fighting, they had brought almost a quarter of the neighborhood's surface under their control. The frightened residents who had lived in the areas they had captured crowded into the Stambuli Synagogue. Relations between them and the Haganah had deteriorated since the English had left. On Saturday, May 15, some of them had even refused to dig fortifications for the quarter, shouting "Shabbos! Sabbath!" at the Haganah.

  Now panic overtook many of them. Crowded together, reciting psalms while frightened mothers scurried after missing children, they began to chant in unison, "Surrender. Wave a white flag. Save our souls." To the Haganah men guarding them they insisted, "We lived in peace with the Arabs. If we surrender we can live in peace with them now."

  Their insistent pleas for surrender, the gains made by the Arabs in one day's fighting, exacted a toll on the morale of the quarter's Haganah leadership. Their messages to the New City grew increasingly urgent. "The situation is desperate," said one. "They are breaking in from all sides." "Send help immediately," read another later in the day, "otherwise we will not be able to hold out."

  In that atmosphere of growing despair, Rabbis Weingarten, Mintzberg and Hazan marched into Haganah headquarters to ask their shaken commander for his agreement to the opening of surrender negotiations. Further resistance was futile, pleaded Weingarten; they should surrender to avoid a massacre of innocent civilians. Appalled by the idea of assuming responsibility for such a slaughter, disheartened by what he felt was a lack of understanding and guidance in Shaltiel's headquarters, Russnak finally agreed.

  "All right," he told the rabbis in a half-whisper, "go ahead."

  Half an hour later, Alberto Gori, an Italian priest at Terra Sancta, the custodian's office for the Holy Land, received a telephone call from Weingarten asking him to find out the Arabs' surrender terms. The request fell on the dispirited leader
s in the Arab headquarters like a breeze on a pile of dying embers. The situation in the rest of Jerusalem was grim. Their untrained irregulars had been expending ammunition at an appalling rate. None of their pleas to the Arab Legion for help had shaken Glubb's determination to keep his soldiers out of the city. Outside of their attacks on the Jewish Quarter, their sole offensive gesture this Pentecost Sunday had been performed by the few gunners Fawzi el Kaukji had left behind in Palestine. To bolster the Arabs' sagging morale, they had resumed their indiscriminate shelling of Jewish Jerusalem from their position on Nebi Samuel.

  Elated at the thought of their first victory in the city since the British departure, the Arab leaders informed Gori that the quarter's inhabitants could be returned to New Jerusalem under Red Cross supervision and combatants taken prisoner. When Gori telephoned the Arabs' terms, Weingarten was crestfallen. Like everyone else in his quarter, Weingarten was haunted by the specter of the slaughter committed by the Arab villagers at Kfar Etzion. It was the soldiers of John Glubb, not the partisans of the Mufti, to whom he wanted to surrender. "But where is the Arab Legion?" the puzzled rabbi asked.

  The absence of the Arab Legion delighted another Jewish leader in Jerusalem that Sunday. To David Shaltiel, each hour in which its sand-colored armored cars failed to appear on the ridge line above Sheikh Jarrah was a precious gift taking him one step closer to the conquest of the city. Operation Pitchfork, his three-pronged assault keyed to the departure of the British, was largely complete. He was ready to thrust his men against the Old City itself. As their target he had picked what seemed to be the most impregnable part of its walls, Jaffa Gate, dominated by the three imposing towers of Suleiman's Citadel. Shaltiel, however, had a secret tactic to storm the Citadel. It had been suggested to him by a lady archaeologist, the wife of an officer on his staff. Thanks to her studies, she knew that at the base of the Citadel, outside the wall, was an almost forgotten iron grill. Behind it a secret passageway six feet high and three feet wide led to the interior of the Citadel's courtyard.