O Jerusalem!

by Larry Collins

  In less than twenty-four hours, there would be over one thousand of those soldiers in the city with their armored cars and artillery. The assault that a score of exhausted Palmachniks were preparing to launch on Zion Gate was going to be David Shaltiel's last chance to seize Jerusalem. By nightfall tomorrow the Haganah's hopes of capturing its ancient ramparts would have disappeared. Then the situation would be reversed and it would be Shaltiel who, with a dwindling ammunition supply and a half-starved city behind him, would have to cling to the stones of Jerusalem until help could reach him.

  A tightly rolled map of Palestine pinned like a swagger stick under his arm, John Glubb gravely walked into the residence of Sir Alec Kirkbride, Britain's resident minister in Amman. The two men were close friends. Defying the snide remarks of detractors who were certain he came to receive orders from His Majesty's government, Glubb frequently called on the diplomat, whose wisdom and experience he appreciated.

  Tonight Glubb needed all the consolation he could get. His hopes of offering his soldiers only the semblance of a war were collapsing. Carefully he unrolled his meticulously drafted British Army map on Kirkbride's dining-room table. Traced upon it was a sweeping curve joining Bethlehem, Ramallah and Nablus, its arc passing well outside Jerusalem. It indicated the limited objectives he had assigned to his forces on their entry into Palestine, and it was well inside the area assigned to an Arab state by the partition plan. As he had secretly informed the Haganah a fortnight earlier, he had hoped to wait out a diplomatic agreement between the warring parties in those positions. Now the crisis in Jerusalem had confronted him with a new situation. He had committed his men to the city; he would have to fight for it. As Abdul Khader Husseini's guerrilla campaign had shown, the key to Jerusalem lay in the gorges of Bab el Wad. Morosely. Glubb asked Kirkbride what he thought of the situation.

  Kirkbride leaned over Glubb's map. "Well," he said after a brief reflection, "you've had to go into Jerusalem, and it seems to me what happens in Jerusalem is going to be decided in Latrun. You'll have to go down there."

  Glubb hesitated a moment. Placing his Legion in strength on the historic hills would pose a challenge that the Jewish army could not ignore. It would have to drive him off those heights or lose Jerusalem.

  "You're right," he said quietly, "but you realize that if I move into Latrun, that means we're going to have a real war on our hands."

  A strangely peaceful carillon rolled down the darkened hills that were the center of Glubb's and Kirkbride's preoccupations. As they did every night, the church bells of the Trappist Monastery of the Seven Agonies of Latrun summoned the community's forty monks to herald the birth of a new day with the mournful mutter of their Latin matins.

  Those monks and their predecessors had built with their own hands the imposing array of buildings whose arched windows looked down upon the strategic crossroads of Latrun. Just three miles from their monastery, after cutting across the fringe of their six-hundred-acre domain, the road to Jerusalem entered the treacherous gorge of Bab el Wad. Kaukji's troops had dug into the crest line above their buildings, and it was through their wheatfields and vineyards that the soldiers of the Givati Brigade had moved to their brief conquest of the abandoned British police station at the limit of their estate.

  From October 31, 1890, when seventeen French Monks had reached that hilltop over the Valley of Ayalon to found their monastery on its historic slopes, the sleep of Latrun's Trappist community had been regularly marred by that nightly summons to prayer. It marked the ritual beginning point in a life dedicated to silence, prayer and labor on the land. With half a century of effort, Latrun's monks had turned their fields into an agricultural enterprise as flourishing as any of Palestine's kibbutzim. Their twenty Dutch cows and the bees whose angry attack had startled the men of the Palmach had helped return their valley to its Biblical promise as a land of milk and honey.

  The monastery owed its real renown to yet another product of its domain, a product sought after by the connoisseurs of the Middle East. Swollen by the sun that had stood still for Joshua, the grapes of Latrun's vineyards were transformed into Pommard, Chablis or cognac by a Belgian theologian whose two passions were the dogma of the Incarnation and the mysteries of enology. The caves of Father Martin Godart stretched for dozens of yards below Latrun's vital crossroads. In that troubled May of 1948 when the Valley of Ayalon was about to revert to its ancient calling as a battleground, Father Godart's cellars harbored a treasure that could have reconciled all the claimants to Latrun's crossroads in a common alcoholic euphoria: 78,200 liters of Pommard and Chablis, 26,000 liters of cognac and 12,000 liters of vermouth, curaçao and crème de menthe.

  His back bent under forty pounds of plasma and ammunition, Yosef Atiyeh stumbled through the darkness toward the crest of Mount Zion. Breathing heavily from the unaccustomed exertion, the eighty middle-aged men and young recruits who, with Atiyeh, were supposed to save the Old City struggled along behind him. Uzi Narciss exploded with fury when they reached the top. Was this sorrowful troop the company of men Shaltiel had promised him? he asked Gazit.

  Seething with anger, he called Shaltiel. To the Jerusalem commander's pleas that he too was short of men, Narciss replied, "Don't bring me your bloody troubles, I've got enough of my own. You damn well organize your men yourself."

  "What the hell," he told Gazit, "take your men inside as reinforcements." Gazit protested that his men weren't prepared, that they had been promised they wouldn't be away from their families for more than twenty-four hours. Narciss shrugged. It was too late for that now. Take over Mount Zion, he ordered Gazit, so that he could assemble his exhausted Palmachniks for the assault.

  There were forty of them, all that remained of four hundred who had set out for Jerusalem in Operation Nachshon six weeks before. David "Dado" Elazar, the young officer who had led the assault on the monastery in Katamon, had to call for volunteers for the first time in his career. He picked twenty-two, twenty men and two girls. Like everyone else in the Palmach, they had been living for days on Novadrin pep pills and had reached a state of such total exhaustion that a pill now had no more effect than an aspirin.

  At twenty minutes past two a Davidka and three two-inch mortars opened fire on Zion Gate. One of the Davidka shells fell short and its explosion deprived the attacking force of two of its members. As the barrage lifted, two sappers ran forward and placed 165 pounds of explosive at the base of the gate. They exploded in a whistling blast of stone and shattered masonry.

  Dado sprang up. "Follow me!" he shouted to the men hunched along the wall of the Armenian Cemetery behind him. As he raced forward, he suddenly made a disconcerting discovery. No one was following him. He looked back and through the darkness saw his men still slumped against the wall. He ran to the first one. A strange sound was rising from the line of soldiers. It was snoring. They were all sound asleep. He went down the line kicking them awake one by one. Then, with twenty grumpy, half-sleeping soldiers, he charged Zion Gate for a second time.

  From a window in the Armenian Convent, Lieutenant Nawaf Jaber el Hamoud saw half a dozen of his men scramble toward him from the tower of Zion Gate. "The tower, the tower!" he cried. "Don't abandon the tower. Go back."

  It was too late. Dado Elazar's men had already seized it. Twenty exhausted men and two women had done something no Jewish soldier had done since the days of Judas Maccabaeus—they had breached the walls of Jerusalem. Zion Gate was back in Jewish hands, its portals opened not by the rusting key proffered by a British officer but by an explosive manufactured in the cellars of Jewish Jerusalem. In small groups, Elazar's men leapfrogged down the line of Armenian shops to the Street of the Jews. Just after three they radioed Narciss, "We're in."

  Lieutenant el Hamoud debated whether to launch a counterattack. Captain Moussa, after suffering three flesh wounds, had withdrawn to the Mount of Olives, leaving him in charge. Troubled, Hamoud decided to remain in his positions until Moussa returned. The passage into the besieged Jewish Quarter was s
ecured.

  The quarter's elated inhabitants swarmed over the Palmach men. Hundreds of depressed and homeless people packed into the Rabbi Jochanan ben Zakai Synagogue began to weep and embrace them. The company's garrulous political officer, Benny Marshak, thought he had "never gotten so many kisses." Some of the quarter's defenders, assured that they were about to be relieved, began to pack their suitcases.

  Outside, on Mount Zion, Gazit was ordered to "get your people and get in quickly." Carrying their loads of plasma and ammunition, their bulky U. S. Navy helmets giving them a grotesque look, Gazit's protesting men were driven in as fast as he could round them up. At Zion Gate, some of them refused to go in, claiming that they were their parents' only sons and thus exempt from combat. The Palmachnik at the gate forced them ahead with a wave of his Sten gun.

  Shmuel Bazak was greeted on arriving by Esther Cailingold, who offered him a glass of warm milk. Yosef Atiyeh, sent to relieve the guard at the Porat Yosef Synagogue where his father had been the head of a yeshiva, found himself deluged by his father's former pupils.

  The excitement of the Palmach's breakthrough brought everyone rushing out of the hospital. Only the nurse beside him heard the muffled cry escaping from the bandage-shrouded figure of Emmanuel Meidav. She shook awake his fiancée, sleeping at the feet of the handsome young officer who had been so admired in the quarter. Since Emmanuel had been wounded, Rika Menache had not left his side, feeding him liquids with a spoon, sponging the sweat from his fevered body.

  In the doorway another nurse appeared with a bearded Palmachnik. "Look," she said, pointing to him, "they broke in. We're saved!"

  At that moment an anguished scream from Rika filled the room. "Don't, don't," she pleaded. The two nurses looked at her. The Palmach had arrived too late for the boy with the golden hands. Rika was already sobbing on the chest of her dead fiancé.

  When Mordechai Gazit, now the senior officer in the Old City, arrived at headquarters, Moshe Russnak informed him, "I'm going to sleep." He had been without sleep for five days, he said. His deputy, Mordechai Pincus, promptly imitated him. Gazit was unable to arouse the exhausted men. Then he got the worst news of his trying day. The Palmach was withdrawing back to Mount Zion.

  The decision was an agonizing one for Narciss to take, but Elazar's exhausted men were incapable of going on without rest. Leaving them at Zion Gate would only lead, Narciss feared, "to a lot of blame and a lot of dead." Shaltiel had failed to send him the men who could hold the gate. He felt he had no choice.

  Jerusalem was going to pay for the rivalry and lack of communication between the Palmach and the Haganah.

  Staggering with fatigue, the bone-weary Palmachniks came out at dawn. The Jewish Quarter was once more in a state of siege. It would be two decades before a Jewish soldier would breach those walls again—"a lament for a generation," in the words of the man who breached them that night, Dado Elazar.*

  35

  "YOSEF HAS SAVED JERUSALEM!"

  THE RUMBLE of artillery ripped apart the fragile silence shrouding the Judean hills. Once again the cannon of the Arab Legion pounded Jerusalem, this time opening the way for the Legion's entry in force into the city. In the darkness, a file of armored cars, motors turning, waited for the barrage to lift. Behind them in trucks and half-tracks, the infantry of Lieutenant Abdullah Salam nervously watched for the order to move forward. Salam, a dark-skinned Bedouin from Iraq, had requested the honor of leading the attack. It was the most memorable moment of the young officer's life. He was about to enter the Holy City of Jerusalem for the first time.

  With the methods taught them by their British Army instructors, the Legion's gunners walked their fire forward, shifting it to the orthodox quarter of Mea Shearim. The deep barks of three-inch mortars joined the barrage. The streets of Mea Shearim suddenly filled with frightened, half-dressed people thrown from their beds by the shelling, desperately scurrying about in search of a shelter or rushing toward the center of town. Everywhere a terrible rumor swept the crowd: "The Legion is coming!" Nor were the civilians alone in their fright. Some of the members of the Irgun defending the Police Training School at the entrance to Sheikh Jarrah began to flee, too.

  At four-thirty, at about the time the last of Uzi Narciss' Palmachniks were withdrawing from Zion Gate, the fire stopped and Major Bob Slade ordered his men into Jerusalem. On the rooftops of the Palestine Broadcasting System building from which his Beza machine gun had been giving the Palmach cover fire all night, Carmi Charny saw them come. The sight made his blood run cold. Majestically they rolled toward the heart of Jerusalem, "as imperturbably as if they were in a parade."

  On the rooftop of Mea Shearim's Tipat Chalav, in which he had installed his advance headquarters, Yitzhak Levi, the man who had driven the Arabs from Sheikh Jarrah five days earlier, also watched the line of advancing armor. A far more dismaying sight held the attention of Shaltiel's intelligence officer—the flight of the Irgun defenders of the Police Training School. Realizing that the Irgun's flight was going to deprive the Jewish city of its northern bulwark, Levi ran out to meet the fleeing terrorists with his pistol. By threatening to shoot them, he managed to stem their flight for a few moments. Then he asked Shaltiel to send him Yosef Nevo with his "armored force" as reinforcements.

  Still scarred by their combat at Jaffa Gate, Nevo's vehicles staged a noisy parade through Mea Shearim. Jerusalem's unluckiest bridegroom hoped that the sight of his vehicles, their turrets hastily painted with the six-branched star of the new Army of Israel, would reassure its distraught residents. Then he went to the rooftop of the Tipat Chalav, to discover in his turn the oncoming parade of Legion armor. Watching through his glasses, he, too felt a cold shiver shake his body. "If they keep coming," he thought, "they'll be in Zion Square in an hour." Beyond the police station and a skirmish line below him in Mea Shearim, there was nothing to stop them.

  Watching them, Nevo noticed that they were violating one of the cardinal tenets of British tactics—the infantry was lagging behind the armor. Either Glubb was afraid of taking casualties or, aware that the Haganah had no effective antitank weapons, he had accepted the risk of moving in his armor first: In any event, Nevo was sure Jerusalem's fate was going to depend on the Legion's faithful adherence to another adage of the British Army: Move in the morning, consolidate in the afternoon.

  If the Legionnaires followed that principle and consolidated their hold on Sheikh Jarrah before thrusting into the heart of the city, the Haganah would have a few hours in which to throw up a defense to save Jerusalem. If they didn't, then Nevo knew they would not be able to stop them. All New Jerusalem would be open to them. Nevo telephoned his conclusions to Shaltiel. The city commander's response was straightforward—he put Nevo in charge of the sector, with orders to stop the Legion.

  Nevo hung up and announced to the men in the confused and disorganized headquarters that he was in charge. He named the most military-looking man in the room as his adjutant and ordered him to throw everyone who had no urgent business there out of headquarters. Then he ran back to his command car to survey for himself the slender resources with which he was supposed to check Glubb's armored cars.

  Huddled in the garden of an American seminary, Bajhat Abou Gharbieh, the schoolteacher whose disparate horde of Syrians and Iraqis had been the only Arab force to effectively resist the Haganah in Jerusalem, wondered if the shells dropping around him were Arab or Jewish. Looking back toward Sheikh Jarrah, he too discovered the imposing column of armored cars grinding toward the city. He snorted his satisfaction. Then, as he lowered his weary eyes, his gaze fell on a rose. The ferocious little warrior leaned over, plucked it, stuffed it into the muzzle of his submachine gun, and lay down to sleep. Jerusalem's fate, he thought with relief, was now in better armed hands than his.

  On the hilltop above Sheikh Jarrah, Lieutenant Abdullah Salam threw himself on the ground at his first glimpse of Jerusalem's skyline. The devout Bedouin kissed the earth three times in fervent thanks to his One and Merc
iful God. The same mystic sense of mission ran through the Arab soldiers behind him. Inspired by those beckoning rooftops of the Holy City, the column plunged forward.

  Major Slade's men encountered little opposition from the Police Training School, and soon, he would recall, "we were having ourselves a fine little attack." At the first turning in Sheikh Jarrah, Slade came upon an imposing barricade of stones, logs and barbed wire. He jumped out of his car to help his men dismantle the roadblock. As he did, a crashing explosion tore the ground at his feet. One of his units' mortar rounds had fallen short. His back and buttocks lacerated by shrapnel, Slade fell to the ground unconscious. Behind him, his body pointing toward Jerusalem, another officer lay dead. Lieutenant Abdullah Salam would not reach the city that had fed the dreams of his boyhood in the deserts of Iraq.

  From a rooftop in Mea Shearim, Yosef Nevo watched in astonishment as the advancing chain of cars ground to a halt, then began to pull back toward the ridge above Sheikh Jarrah. Begun with such elan, the Legion's attack was faltering at the sudden disappearance of two key officers. Nevo, of course, could not know the reasons behind the action, nor did he bother to wonder. Only one thing mattered. The Legion was offering him the gift he needed most: time.

  Pinchas the Strong peeped cautiously from his trench at the southern end of the Street of the Jews, the Jewish Quarter's main street. Ahead was the tower of Zion Gate. To his astonishment, Pinchas caught a glimpse of a red-and-white kaffiyeh fluttering between the crags of the tower. Like most of the quarter's defenders, he didn't know that the Palmach had pulled back to Mount Zion. "Hey, men," he whispered, "are the Arabs up there?"

  The reply was the slap of a sniper's bullet smacking into the wall above his head. Captain Mahmoud Moussa, his wounds treated, had returned to the city at sunup with the rest of his company. He had immediately ordered Zion Gate retaken and had launched a probe of the quarter's defenses to measure the reinforcements that had slipped in during the night. Pinchas the Strong and his fellows were quickly driven from their trench back into the quarter's lifeline, the Street of the Jews.