Arab vengeance was swift. On 14 April, a convoy of ambulances and food trucks set off for the Hadassah Hospital on Mount Scopus. Bertha Spafford watched as “a hundred and fifty insurgents, armed with weapons varying from blunderbusses and old flintlocks to modern Sten and Bren guns, took cover behind a cactus patch in the grounds of the American Colony. Their faces were distorted by hate and lust for revenge,” she wrote. “I went out and faced them. I told them, ‘To fire from the shelter of the American Colony is the same as firing from a mosque,’ ” but they ignored her rollcall of sixty years’ philanthropy and threatened to kill her if she did not withdraw. Seventy-seven Jews, mainly doctors and nurses, were killed and twenty wounded before the British intervened. “Had it not been for Army interference,” declared the Arab Higher Committee, “not a single Jewish passenger would have remained alive.” The gunmen mutilated the dead and photographed each other with the corpses splayed in macabre poses. The photographs were mass-produced and sold as postcards in Jerusalem.
Deir Yassin was one of the pivotal events of the war: it became the centrepiece of a bloodcurdling Arab media campaign that amplified Jewish atrocities. This was designed to fortify resistance, but instead it encouraged a psychosis of foreboding in a country already at war. By March, before Deir Yassin, 75,000 Arabs had left their homes. Two months later, 390,000 had gone. Wasif Jawhariyyeh, living with his wife and children in western Jerusalem, close to the King David Hotel, was probably typical—and he recorded his thoughts and actions in the diary that is a unique and under-used record.
“I was in a very bad way,” he writes after these events in mid-April, “depressed, physically and mentally,” so much so that he abandoned his job in the Mandate administration and “stayed at home trying to decide what to do.” Finally, the diarist records the “reasons that made me decide to leave my home.” First was the “dangerous position of our house,” where he was under fire from the Arabs at the Jaffa Gate, the Jews in Montefiore and the British Bevingrad security zone: “there was non-stop shooting day and night so it was hard even to reach the house. The fighting between Arabs and Jews, the blowing up of buildings, continued day and night around us.” The British fired on Montefiore, blowing off the top of Sir Moses’ windmill, but to no avail. Wasif wrote that the Jewish snipers in Montefiore, “shot at anyone walking in the streets and it was a miracle we survived.” He considered how to save his collection of ceramics, diaries and his beloved oud. His health was deteriorating too: “My body became so weak I couldn’t handle the pressure and the doctor told me to leave.” The family debated: “What will happen when the Mandate ends? Will we be under the Arabs or the Jews?” Wasif’s neighbour, the French consul-general, promised to protect the house and the collection. “Even if we never come back,” Wasif felt they should pack their bags “to save ourselves and our children”: “We thought we would not leave the house for more than two weeks because we knew how soon the seven [sic] Arab armies will enter the country not to occupy it but to free it and return it to its people and we are its people!” He left in the last days of the Mandate, never to return. Wasif’s story is that of the Palestinians. Some were expelled by force, some departed to avoid the war, hoping to return later—and approximately half remained safely in their homes to become Israeli Arabs, non-Jewish citizens in the Zionist democracy. But altogether 600,000–750,000 Palestinians left—and lost—their homes. Their tragedy was the Nakhba—the Catastrophe.
Ben-Gurion summoned the chief of the Jerusalem Emergency Committee, Bernard Joseph, to Tel Aviv to decide how to supply the now starving Jerusalem. On 15 April the convoys broke through, and food trickled into the city. On the 20th, Ben-Gurion insisted on visiting Jerusalem to celebrate Passover with the troops: Rabin, commander of the Palmach’s Harel Brigade, protested at Ben-Gurion’s grandstanding. Soon after the convoy set off with Ben-Gurion in an armoured bus, the Arabs attacked. “I even ordered two stolen British armoured cars to be brought out of concealment and sent into action,” said Rabin. Twenty were killed—but the food and Ben-Gurion reached Jewish Jerusalem—which he described, with grim humour but acute observation, as “20 percent normal people; 20 percent privileged (university etc), 60 percent weird (provincial, medieval etc.)’—by which he meant the Hasidim.
British rule was now in its last days. On 28 April, Rabin captured the Arab suburb Sheikh Jarrah, home of the Families, but the British forced him to relinquish it. As the British took the last salute, the Jews held the western part of the city, the Arabs the Old City and the east. At 8 a.m. on Friday 14 May, Cunningham, the last high commissioner, marched out of Government House in full uniform, reviewed a guard of honour, mounted his armoured Daimler and drove to inspect his troops at the King David Hotel.
a The description is that of Arthur Koestler, the writer who had come to Jerusalem as a Revisionist Zionist in 1928 but had soon left. In 1948, Koestler returned to cover the War of Independence and interviewed Begin and Ben-Gurion.
b That summer, Churchill wrote to Stalin suggesting an allied conference in Jerusalem—“There are first class hotels, Government houses etc. Marshal Stalin could come by special train with every form of protection from Moscow to Jerusalem”—and the British prime minister helpfully enclosed the route: “Moscow Tbilisi Ankara Beirut Haifa Jerusalem.” Instead they met (with President Roosevelt) at Yalta.
c This is now a museum to the Jewish resistance fighters who were imprisoned there. The Nikolai Hostel was the last Russian pilgrim hostel to be built, with room for 1,200 pilgrims, opened by the Romanov Prince Nikolai in 1903.
d One of those killed was Julius Jacobs, a cousin of the author and a British civil servant who happened to be Jewish.
e Farran remained a war hero to British security forces. He failed to win a Scottish seat in Parliament as a Conservative in 1949 and then moved to Canada. There he took up farming, was elected to the Alberta legislature, becoming minister of telephones, solicitor-general and a professor of political science. He died in 2006 aged eighty-six. A street in East Talpiot, Jerusalem, was recently named after Rubowitz.
CHAPTER 51
Jewish Independence,
Arab Catastrophe
1948–1951
THE BRITISH DEPART; BEN-GURION: WE DID IT!
General Cunningham headed out of Jerusalem through streets deserted except for a few Arab children. British troops manned machine-gun posts on street corners. As the Daimler sped past, the young onlookers “clapped childishly and one saluted. The salute was returned.” From Kalandia airport, the high commissioner flew out of Jerusalem to Haifa whence, at midnight, he sailed for England.
British troops evacuated their Bevingrad fortress in the Russian Compound: 250 trucks and tanks rumbled out along King George V Avenue, watched by silent Jewish crowds. The race to control the Russian Compound started instantly. The Irgun stormed the Nikolai Hostel. Gunfire ricocheted across the town. Nusseibeh rushed to Amman to beg King Abdullah to save the city, “once sacked in the Crusades” and about to be sacked again. The king promised.
At 4:00 p.m. on 14 May 1948, just outside Jerusalem, Rabin and his Palmach soldiers, exhausted by their fight to keep the road open, were listening to a radio announcement from David Ben-Gurion, chairman of the Jewish Agency. Standing beneath a portrait of Herzl, before an audience of 250 in the Tel Aviv Museum, Ben-Gurion proclaimed, “I shall read from the scroll of the Declaration of the Establishment of the State of …” He and his aides had debated what the name of the state should be. Some had suggested Judaea or Zion—but these names were associated with Jerusalem and the Zionists were struggling to hold even part of the city. Others had proposed Ivriya or Herzliya, but Ben-Gurion had argued for Israel and that was agreed: “The Land of Israel,” he read out, “was the birthplace of the Jewish people.” They sang the national anthem, Hatikvah (The Hope):
Our hope is not lost
The hope of two thousand years;
To be a free people in our land,
The land of Zion and Jer
usalem!
Ben-Gurion beamed at the journalists. “We did it!” he said, but he eschewed jubilation. He had repeatedly accepted two-state partition, but now the Jews had to resist an invasion by the regular Arab armies with the openly stated object of annihilation. The very survival of the State of Israel was in jeopardy. On the other hand, his views had evolved since he had hoped in the 1920s and early 1930s for a shared socialist Palestine or a federated state. Now, faced with total war, everything was up for grabs.
At the Jerusalem front, Rabin’s soldiers of the Harel Brigade were too weary to listen to Ben-Gurion on the radio. “Hey men, turn it off,” pleaded one of them. “I’m dying for some sleep. Fine words tomorrow!”
“Someone got up and turned the knob, leaving a leaden silence,” recalled Rabin. “I was mute, stifling my own mixture of emotions.” Most people did not hear the Declaration anyway, because Arab forces had cut off the electricity.
Eleven minutes later, President Truman announced de facto recognition of Israel. Encouraged by Eddie Jacobson, Truman had secretly reassured Weizmann that he backed partition. Yet he had almost lost control of the administration when his UN diplomats tried to suspend partition. His secretary of state George Marshall, wartime chief of staff and doyen of American public service, outspokenly opposed recognition. But Truman backed the new state while Stalin was the first to recognize Israel officially.
In New York, Weizmann, now almost blind, waited in his room at the Waldorf Astoria, delighted by independence yet feeling abandoned and forgotten, until Ben-Gurion and his colleagues asked him to be the first president. Truman invited Weizmann to make his first formal visit to the White House. When the U.S. president was later praised by Eddie Jacobson for having “helped create Israel,” he retorted: “What do you mean ‘helped create’? I am Cyrus! I am Cyrus!” When the chief rabbi of Israel thanked him, Truman wept.
President Weizmann travelled to Israel, while he feared “the Jewish shrines in Jerusalem, which had survived the attacks of barbarians in medieval times, were now being laid waste.” In Jerusalem, Anwar Nusseibeh and a few irregulars, mainly ex-policemen, did their best to defend the Old City until the real armies arrived. Nusseibeh was shot in the thigh, and had to have his leg amputated. But the irregular war was over.
The real war was now starting and Israel’s position was dire. The armies of the Arab League states, Egypt, Jordan, Iraq, Syria and Lebanon, invaded Israel with the specific mission of liquidating the Jews. “This will be a war of extermination and a momentous massacre,” announced Azzam Pasha, secretary of the League, “which will be spoken of like the Mongolian massacres and the Crusades.” Their commanders were overconfident. The Jews had been inferior subjects of Islamic empires, sometimes tolerated, often persecuted, but always submissive, for over a thousand years. “The Arabs believed themselves to be a great military people and regarded the Jews as a nation of shopkeepers,” recalled General Sir John Glubb, the English commander of King Abdullah’s Arab Legion. “The Egyptians, Syrians and Iraqis assumed they’d have no difficulty defeating the Jews.” Secular nationalism merged with the fervour of holy war: it was unthinkable that Jews could defeat Islamic armies, and many of the Jihadist factions that fought beside the regular armies had long since embraced a fanatical anti-Semitism. Half the Egyptian forces were mujahidin of the Muslim Brotherhood, among them young Yasser Arafat.
Yet the intervention with its blood-curdling hopes and political cynicism would be a disaster for the Palestinians and help forge a much larger and stronger Israel than would otherwise have emerged. On paper there were 165,000 troops in the Arab armies but such was the disorganization that, during May, they fielded about 28,000—roughly the same as the Israelis. Since Abdullah’s 9,000-strong British-trained Arab Legion were the best of them, he was officially appointed Supreme Commander of Arab League forces.
King Abdullah stood on the Allenby Bridge and, drawing his pistol, fired into the air. “Forward!” he shouted.25
ABDULLAH THE HASTY
The king, recalled his grandson Hussein, “was a full-blooded extrovert.” When we last saw Abdullah, he was in Jerusalem receiving his desert kingdom from Winston Churchill. Lawrence had described him as “short, thick-built, strong as a horse, with merry, dark brown eyes, a smooth round face, full but short lips, straight nose”—and he had led an adventurous life, shocking Lawrence with his raffish exploits: “once Abdullah shot a coffee-pot off his court-fool’s head thrice from twenty yards.” As a Sherifian, thirty-seventh in line from the Prophet, he could tease the ulema. “Is it wrong to look at a pretty woman?” he asked a mufti. “A sin, Your Majesty.” “But the Holy Koran says ‘If you see a woman, avert your eyes’ but you can’t avert the gaze unless you’ve been looking!” He was both a proud Bedouin and a child of the Ottoman sultanate, he had commanded armies as a teenager and been “the brains” of the Great Arab Revolt. His ambitions were as boundless as they were urgent, hence his nickname “the Hasty.” Yet he had waited a long time for this chance to conquer Jerusalem.
“He was more than a soldier and diplomat but also a classical scholar,” remembered Sir Ronald Storrs, who was impressed when “he intoned for me the Seven Suspended Odes of Pre-Islamic Poetry.” The British ambassador in Amman, Sir Alec Kirkbridge, always called him “the king with a twinkle in his eye.” As a diplomat Abdullah was witty. Asked when he would ever receive a diplomat he disliked, he answered, “When my mule foals.”
Now that his mule was foaling, he was realistic about the Zionists, citing the Turkish proverb: “If you meet a bear crossing a rotten bridge, call her ‘Dear Auntie.’ ” Over the years, he often talked to Weizmann and Jewish businessmen, offering the Jews a homeland if they would accept him as king of Palestine. He had often visited Jerusalem, meeting up with his ally Ragheb Nashashibi, but he detested the mufti, believing that Zionism flourished all the more thanks to “those partisans of the Arabs who’ll accept no solution.”
The king had secretly negotiated a non-aggression pact with the Zionists: he would occupy the parts of the West Bank assigned to the Arabs in return for not opposing the UN borders of the Jewish state: and the British had agreed to his annexation. “I don’t want to create a new Arab state that will allow the Arabs to ride on me,” he explained to the Zionist envoy Golda Myerson (later Meir). “I want to be the rider not the horse.” But the horse had now bolted: the war, particularly, the Deir Yassin massacre, obliged him to fight the Jews. Besides, the other Arab states were as determined to limit Abdullah’s ambitions as they were to rescue Palestine, and the Egyptians and Syrians planned to annex their own conquests. Abdullah’s commander Glubb Pasha, who had devoted his life to providing the Hashemites with a decent army, was now loath to risk it.
His Arab Legion advanced cautiously through the Judaean hills towards Jerusalem, where the irregular Arab Liberation Army attacked the Jewish suburbs. By nightfall on 16 May, the Haganah had captured the Mea Shearim police station and Sheikh Jarrah to the north and all the New City south of the walls as well as the former British strongholds in the centre, the Russian Compound and the YMCA. “We have conquered almost all of Jerusalem, apart from the Augusta Victoria and the Old City,” claimed an overwhelmed Ben-Gurion.
“SOS! The Jews are near the walls!” Anwar Nusseibeh rushed back to the king to beg for his intervention. Abdullah never forgot his place in history: “By God I am a Muslim ruler, a Hashemite king, and my father was king of all the Arabs.” Now he wrote to his English commander: “My dear Glubb Pasha, the importance of Jerusalem in the eyes of the Arabs and the Muslims and Arab Christians is well known. Any disaster suffered by the people of the city at the hands of the Jews would have far-reaching consequences for us. Everything we hold today must be preserved—the Old City and the road to Jericho. I ask you to execute this as quickly as possible my dear.”
ABDULLAH: THE BATTLE OF JERUSALEM
The king’s “troops were in jubilation, many of the vehicles decorated with green branches or bunches of pi
nk oleander flowers.” The procession of the Arab Legion towards Jerusalem “seemed more like a carnival than an army going to war,” observed Glubb. On 18 May, the first Legionaries took up positions around the walls of the Old City whence, he wrote, “nearly 1900 years ago the Jews themselves had cast their darts at the advancing legions of Titus.” But the king was “haggard with anxiety lest the Jews enter the Old City and the Temple where his father the late King Hussein of the Hejaz was buried.” Glubb’s forces smashed through the Israeli-held Sheikh Jarrah to the Damascus Gate.
Within the Old City, first irregulars and then Arab Legionaries surrounded the Jewish Quarter, home of some of the oldest Jewish families in Palestine, many of them aged Hasidic scholars, and all defended by just 190 Haganah and Irgun fighters. Rabin was furious to learn that only meagre forces could be spared to rescue the Old City. Was this, he shouted at the commander of Jerusalem, David Shaltiel, “the only force the Jewish people can muster for the liberation of its capital?”
Rabin tried unsuccessfully to storm the Jaffa Gate, but simultaneously other troops broke through the Zion Gate into the Old City. Eighty Palmachniks joined the defenders before losing the Zion Gate. But now, the Arab Legion arrived in force. The battle for the Old City would be desperate; the fighting, noted Glubb, was “room to room, down dark passages, up and down tiny staircases cut into courtyards and down in cellars” through the “teeming rabbit-warren of the Jewish Quarter on top of the spoils and rubble of millennia.” Glubb now ordered the systematic reduction of the Jewish Quarter. Its rabbis appealed for help. Ben-Gurion became frantic: “Jerusalem can fall at any minute! Attack whatever the cost!”
Jerusalem Page 65
