O Jerusalem!

by Larry Collins

  "If these are your positions, where are your fortifications?" a skeptical Tell asked.

  "Our bloody shirts are our fortifications," Shaltiel quietly replied.

  Impressed, Tell told his rival, "Very well, I will accept your word as an officer and a gentleman."

  In Jewish Jerusalem, life staggered slowly back to normal. Stores opened, the broken glass and the rubble were cleaned from the streets. The Palestine Post reappeared and a fragmentary bus service was instituted. Above all, the cease-fire checked the famine menacing its population. As the first convoys came up from the coast, Jerusalem began to eat again. For Ruth Erlik, Professor Joseph's operating-room nurse, a knock on her door marked the end of her hunger. It was a friend from Tel Aviv, and "if Elijah the Prophet had stood there," the young woman thought, he would not have impressed her more favorably—for the friend handed her a package of chocolate and canned food. A similar surprise awaited David Shaltiel one night. Returning to his room at Greta Asher's boardinghouse, he found the wife he had left in Tel Aviv months before. Yehudit Shaltiel had brought her husband a Camembert cheese, unhappily converted into a pool of yellow sludge by her long, hot trip up the Burma Road.

  Dov Joseph's first concern was establishing a working relationship with the United Nations mediator, Count Folke Bernadotte. The Swede's interpretation of how the cease-fire should be implemented made their relations difficult. He insisted that Jerusalem's food supply at the end of the cease-fire should be the same as it had been at the beginning and that food coming into the city over the Burma Road should be included in the totals when the final tally was made. It was a convention Joseph had no intention of accepting. The nightmare of the last few days was not going to be repeated if he could help it. He was going to pull every ounce of food he could into Jerusalem during the next four weeks. The Burma Road did not come under United Nations jurisdiction, he maintained, and in any event, he told the Swede, "You are not going to tell us how much we can eat after weeks of starvation."

  David Shaltiel immediately ordered his planners to start drawing up plans and laying in the supplies they would need to go on the offensive when the four-week truce ended. This time he intended to be in a position to seize all Jerusalem for his new state.

  David Ben-Gurion's first gesture was to summon all the senior commanders of the Haganah to Tel Aviv for a full-scale conference. Exhausted, pushed to the edge of physical and mental endurance by the test they had just undergone, they nonetheless had cause for satisfaction that morning of June 12. They had survived, and that in itself was an achievement.

  The price had been heavy. Their casualties had been higher than anyone had expected, and at the end they had been stretched to the breaking point. Moshe Carmel, the commander in the north, summed up the sentiments of all of them, remarking that the truce "came to us as dew from heaven."

  Deficiencies of every sort had surfaced which would have to be corrected before the next round. Arms and ammunition had been in short supply almost everywhere, while cases of goods piled up unused on the docks of Haifa. The almost universal lack of antitank weapons had been a disaster. Men had fought without shoes, in pajamas, with hats which failed to protect them from the desert sun.

  Patiently, David Ben-Gurion listened to the long list of complaints. Then he took over, his voice a familiar, confident growl. They had thirty days ahead of them and they would use every one. Thirty days, he believed, were enough to train a Jewish soldier. Despite the restrictions of the cease-fire, they would use them to bring in their arms and their manpower reserves from Cyprus and Europe. Their real problem, he said, was not hats that failed to prevent sunstroke, or poor shoes. It was their lack of discipline. How many positions had they lost, how many opportunities had they missed because of that shortcoming, he wondered. "If we had one army instead of a number of armies," he said, "if we had operated according to one strategic plan, we would have more to show for our efforts."

  That would not be allowed to happen again. The next time, he warned, they "must have a plan for victory, otherwise we will be defeated.

  "If the battle is renewed," he proclaimed, "and it must be assumed it will, we shall be entering the decisive phase."

  In Amman, John Glubb was serenely confident that the war would not be resumed. He had good reason to think as he did. At about the time the Haganah chiefs were assembling in Tel Aviv, Prime Minister Tewfic Abou Hoda categorically informed Glubb, "There won't be any more fighting." He and Nokrashy, Abou Hoda said, were determined not to let the war break out again. There was going to be "no more fighting and no more money for soldiers."

  It was a point of view with which Glubb was wholly in accord. The fighting had proved to him that there was no future for the Arabs in throwing their populations into conflict with the Jewish state. The principal factor in the situation, in Glubb's view, "was that you had a modern European population opposed to a much more numerous local population which was without technical knowledge and modern skills, and which was uncontrollably excitable and emotional." The behavior of the Arabs facing Israel, it seemed to Glubb, "had been similar to that of the Jews during the Maccabean and Roman revolts." The Arabs were "forever splitting up into little groups. No one would take orders from anyone else and then when something went wrong, somebody had to be a traitor because that was the only possible explanation of why things had gone wrong."

  "It makes it terribly difficult to operate a war against an external enemy," he would later note with bitterness, "when you are under the constant menace of hysterical riots by your own people." Until the Arabs had produced more mature societies, economies and populations, they would be no match for their new Jewish neighbors, Glubb felt, and they had best keep out of war with them.

  Despite Glubb's observation, the most significant accomplishment of the Israelis during the four-week cease-fire was achieved thanks to sweat, not sophistication, and artisan skill rather than technology. With almost frantic energy, work went forward on the Burma Road. Additional bulldozers and laborers were recruited. A pair of powerful tractors were installed on two grades to tow trucks to the top. By June 19, less than three weeks after work had begun, the Burma Road was ready for its real, working inauguration. On that day, 140 trucks, each carrying a three-ton load, reached Jerusalem traveling over a highway carved from terrain a British brigadier had scornfully dismissed with the words "They'll never get a road through there."

  Since U. N. truce supervisors were carefully checking the food convoys passing through Latrun to make sure they carried no arms, the first trucks up the Burma Road were assigned to David Shaltiel's forces. To the man who had once had to order his men not to fire on targets more than one hundred yards distant, they brought an impressive variety of weapons. Forty tons of dynamite, hundreds of rifles, Sten guns, Czech machine guns, cases of hand grenades and ammunition came pouring into the Haganah's armories. Behind them came two-, three- and six-inch mortars. Next time, Jerusalem's Haganah was going to answer the cannon of the Arab Legion not with the sporadic and inaccurate fire of the Davidka, but with a murderous counterfire from its own guns. Watching the first of those fieldpieces arrive, an awed David Shaltiel kept repeating over and over again to his adjutant Yeshurun Schiff, "Oh, my God! Oh, my God!"

  As traffic increased, other convoys began pouring in with food for Dov Joseph's warehouses. In the first full week of operation, the Burma Road delivered Joseph a staggering 2,200 tons of food, enough to last the city almost four months on the minimum supply of 140 tons he had needed during the desperate closing days of May. The final symbol of the city's triumph over the threat to "strangle Jerusalem" uttered by Abdul Khader Husseini six months earlier was a chain of trucks June 22 bringing Jerusalem a forgotten luxury—oranges.

  Alongside those passing convoys, 150 men labored to complete a sixteen-mile pipeline that would ensure Jerusalem the other element essential to its survival: water. Divided into four teams under Moshe Rochel, a Polish-born engineer who had built pipelines for the Iraq Petroleum C
ompany, they worked fourteen hours a day, laying their pipes above ground, contour-welding, and pacing off distances by foot, without tape measures. In nineteen days they had finished. Rochel went to Jerusalem and, beaming with pleasure, watched the first drops of water pour from the city's faucets. The event was so extraordinary that he was asked to mark the accomplishment with a press conference. He refused. "There's nothing to say," he said. "It's done."

  The supplies rolling up the Burma Road to Jerusalem were a mere token of things to come. At last the arms David Ben-Gurion had promised his colleagues May 12 were beginning to pour into the country in considerable number—and, evidently, in open violation of the terms of the cease-fire. On June 15, one of Yehuda Arazi's ships delivered ten 75-millimeter cannon, ten Hotchkiss tanks, the first real armor to reach Israel, nineteen 65-millimeter cannon, four antiaircraft guns and 45,000 shells. A second ship delivered 110 tons of TNT, ten tons of cordite and 200,000 detonators.

  From Mexico, the S.S. Kefalos brought thirty-six 75-millimeter cannon, five hundred machine guns, seventeen thousand shells, seven million rounds of ammunition and, as an extra dividend, 1,400 tons of sugar used to hide its real cargo in case the British tried to seize the ship at Gibraltar. Materials for Palestine sent from the United States included two boatloads of war-surplus jeeps, trucks and half-tracks, bombsights, chemicals for the production of explosives, a radar set and the machine tools require to manufacture bazookas. The indefatigable Yehuda Arazi also bought thirty surplus Sherman tanks in Italy. To his consternation, he discovered that there was no crane in the ports of Israel capable of swinging their weight ashore. Not a man to be put off by details, Arazi went out and bought a fifty-ton crane.

  In Prague, Ehud Avriel continued his purchasing activities. During June alone, he bought eight million rounds of ammunition, twenty-two light tanks and four hundred machine guns. The air force which had started out with a handful of pleasure planes now possessed fifteen C-46s, three B-17 Flying Fortresses, three Constellations, five P-51 Mustang fighters, four Boston A-20 bombers, two DC-4s, ten DC-3s, twenty Messerschmitts, seven Ansons and four Beaufighters. To fly them, volunteers and mercenaries, Zionists and non-Zionists, Jews and non-Jews, were pouring into Avriel's Zatec airbase. Begun by a letter to Ben-Gurion from his next-door neighbor, the Haganah Air Service had become in less than six months the most powerful air force in the Middle East. In Israel, the miniature arms industry bought surreptitiously in the United States by Haim Slavine was in full production, turning out, among other things, nine hundred mortar shells and six thousand bullets a day. Equally important, the men to man those weapons were being mobilized in Israel and arriving every day from Europe and Cyprus.

  As Ben-Gurion had foreseen, the tide was turning, and it was turning fast.

  Cut off from their principal source of arms in Britain, deprived of the support of a sympathetic world opinion, the Arabs were unable to make anything more than a few marginal acquisitions of arms during the four-week cease-fire. Glubb flew to Suez and literally begged his old friend who was commanding the British forces in the Middle East for an illegal supply of arms. "His feelings were all with me," Glubb later acknowledged, "but his orders were blunt and unequivocal: not one cartridge."

  Glubb did arrange to "steal" a substantial number of small-arms stores from the R.A.F. in Amman. But to face an enemy now receiving artillery shells by the thousands, Glubb was not able to procure a single shell for his 25-pounder guns.

  The midnight requisitions of the Egyptian Army in the Suez Canal Zone were also discontinued. An Egyptian officer in the Negev noted that during that period "we were getting chocolate, biscuits and tea from Cairo, but no bullets."

  As the Israelis had been earlier, the Arabs were now forced into a kind of cottage industry for the production of arms. Colonel Desmond Young, a one-eyed Burma veteran serving with the Arab Legion, set up a clandestine production center in the Science Laboratories of the American University in Beirut with a rabidly anti-Semitic German as his chief chemist. The ingenious Young also had a group of Palestinian tinsmiths in Zerqa make antipersonnel mines out of bicycle pumps stuffed with scrap metal.

  But there was one aspect of their arms program in which the Arabs could take satisfaction. It was going on in Bari harbor. With great patience, Colonel Fouad Mardam supervised the cleaning of the rifles salvaged from the hulk of the S.S. Lino. Freshly greased and recrated, they were being kept under guard in a Bari warehouse while Mardam tried to charter a ship to take them to Alexandria. Despite all his efforts, Mardam was unable to find a charter in Bari. Thanks to the proprietor of his hotel, however, he finally got the name of a shipping agent in Rome who might help him.

  Two days later, as discreetly as possible, making sure he was not being followed, Mardam walked into the offices of the Menara Shipping Agency on the Via del Corso in Rome. For one million lire, he secured a charter on a 250-ton corvette, the S.S. Argiro. Relieved that his mission was accomplished and his ill-fated Czech arms en route at last to their final destination, Mardam cabled Damascus the good news.

  The news was not quite as good as all that. Mardam's Czech arms were indeed on their way to their final destination, but it would turn out to be Tel Aviv, not Alexandria. The Menara Shipping Agency, whose name had been so kindly furnished Colonel Mardam by the owner of his hotel, had neglected to inform the Syrian of one salient detail. The S.S. Argiro's owners were the Israeli Navy.

  David Ben-Gurion and his fellow leaders could face the future with growing confidence. Each passing day of the truce period saw their forces increasing and their prospects of victories in a new period of hostilities improving. But their optimism was going to prove slightly premature. More painful than the invasion of five Arab armies, an ancient curse befell the Jewish state—civil strife, the menace which had plagued its ancient predecessor and had finally led to its downfall. The terrorists of the Irgun who had sought to assert their authority in Jerusalem in the slaughter of Deir Yassin were now going to imperil the domestic stability of their new nation. The arrival off Israel of a freighter of the Irgun, the Altalena, detonated the conflict. In its holds were five thousand rifles, five half-tracks, three hundred Bren guns and nine hundred men. Landing the men and arms it carried would be an open challenge to the authority of Ben-Gurion's government. The order establishing the Army of Israel prohibited the maintenance of separate armed organizations, and the Irgun and the Stern Gang had been invited to place their men in the ranks of the Haganah. The Irgun, whose leader, Menahem Begin, had denounced the truce as "a shameful surrender," nonetheless continued to operate as an independent, private army.

  Ben-Gurion considered the ship's arrival a challenge he could not ignore. He gave orders that the arms it carried be landed and placed in government warehouses. Begin refused. He wanted them in Irgun warehouses under Irgun guards and he wanted twenty percent of them shipped to his men in Jerusalem, which was outside the sphere of his agreement with Haganah. Despite the warning that his actions would have grave consequences, he ordered the ship unloaded June 20 at Kfar Vitkin. Six hundred men of the Alexandroni Brigade surrounded the unloading party, and firing broke out. The Altalena hastily set sail.

  Dodging the Israeli Navy ships sent out to intercept her, she headed south to Tel Aviv, where her captain tried to run her aground on the beach. He got to within a hundred yards when the vessel grounded itself on the ruins of a prewar immigrant ship sunk by the British. Its presence there on the waterfront of Israel's first city brought on the crisis. The Irgun's chief of operations began to mobilize his men to "take over the government." Ben-Gurion summoned his Cabinet.

  The Irgun move, he warned, "endangers the very existence of the state." He told Yigal Allon, the chief of the Palmach, "Tel Aviv is in danger of falling to rebel forces. Your new assignment may be the toughest one you've had so far. This time you may have to kill Jews."

  Allon did. In one bloody day's fighting, eighty-three people were killed and wounded. For a few hours the control of Tel
Aviv was for all practical purposes in the Irgun's hands. Allon was outnumbered in the city, but the situation was saved for him by a quick artillery hit which set the Altalena ablaze and deprived the Irgun of its prize and the reason for this factional strife. Slowly Allon brought the city back under control. In one blow, Ben-Gurion had ended the gravest threat to the new nation's domestic stability. The gun that had sunk the Altalena, he later proclaimed, merited "a place in Israel's War Museum."

  Dressed in an immaculate white robe, a cherubic smile on his face, King Abdullah climbed aboard a dark-gray Vickers Viking. He was off for Riyadh, the capital of Saudi Arabia, to make his peace with the warrior King who had driven his family from the sacred cities of Mecca and Medina. Packed inside the plane were the gifts which would consecrate his historic gesture, a golden dagger, a porcelain tea set and an embossed silver tray flown to him from London by a Jewish silversmith.

  If the divisions of the Arab world were at the moment less evident than those in Israel, they were nevertheless real, and Abdullah's trip was a manifestation of them. The King was convinced of the folly of going back to war with the Israelis and he had good personal reasons for his sentiment. Count Bernadotte was in the process of formulating a peace proposal which fulfilled all his own ambitions. It would give him Jerusalem, the Negev, a free port in Haifa and a free airport at Lydda, while giving western Galilee to the Israelis. To win Ibn-Saud's support for the plan, Abdullah was prepared to make an extraordinary gesture—he was going to renounce his family's claims to the ancient homeland from which Ibn-Saud's warriors had evicted them.

  While Abdullah visited with his old foe, the prime ministers of the Arab League in Cairo were rejecting Count Bernadotte's plan. It took the Arab leaders just one session on June 27 to unanimously decide "in deep sorrow" that the Arab League could "not accept these proposals as a convenient basis for negotiations." Bernadotte's plan, they maintained in a three-page memorandum, was just a reworking of partition with its unacceptable provision for a Jewish state.