Birthright

by Alan Gold

  The words stung Shalman, reminding him of the airfield and the truck and the explosion and the little Arab boy.

  Mustafa continued, “I’m more of a rationalist. As you teach me about mathematics, I can do the calculation. There are a hundred million Arabs and only eleven million Jews in the whole world. And how many of your people are here? Three, four hundred thousand Jews in Palestine the newspaper tells me.” Mustafa shook his head again. “The numbers don’t add up, my friend. If I were you, I would leave this place.”

  Shalman detected a strange hint of sadness and resignation in Mustafa’s voice that troubled him much more than the weight of numbers.

  Jerusalem

  November 29, 1947

  JUDIT SAT IN the crowded room along with two dozen people around a table on which were coffee cups, dirty plates, dried fruits, hummus, fried eggplant, and ashtrays overflowing with long-dead cigarettes. She’d left Shalman at home with their daughter. Nobody in Jerusalem was willing to babysit, as the whole of the Jewish community was at home or with neighbors, glued to radios. Only Shalman, it seemed, was distant and uninterested in the imminent news. Judit didn’t question this strange behavior, as she knew she needed to be present for the announcement.

  She looked into the faces of her colleagues in the Irgun, those who had begun this battle with her in Lehi, some members of the Haganah, and others who were associated with Israel’s fledgling civilian army. What was happening at this moment was a reminder of the time two years earlier, crowding around a similar radio, listening to the plummy voice of a BBC announcer telling the world that the Instrument of Surrender had been signed and World War II was at an end. In the last two intense years, Judit had honed her skills in what she’d trained to be: a killer fighting the British, but also preparing the way for a communist state and a part of the empire of the Soviet Union.

  Judit looked at the faces gathered in the room. Her eyes fell on a young woman she’d known since the attack on the British officers at Goldschmidt House: Ashira from Tunisia.

  After that night, Ashira had sought her out with a closeness that made Judit uncomfortable. Ashira was driven by anger; to Judit, that was plain to see. Her brutal treatment at the hands of a group of Bedouin men on her journey to Palestine hadn’t broken her but had made her fiercely determined. Not fearless—Judit had seen how Ashira’s hands had trembled on her weapon at times—but the way she gritted her teeth and willed herself to be strong impressed Judit.

  As she looked at the crowd gathered around the radio, Judit could not help but think of those who were absent, those who had died or disappeared or were locked up in British jails. And as she thought of the missing faces, her mind also turned to those she was responsible for, the lives she had snuffed out—British, Arab, and Jewish. How many more lay ahead of her? She had killed eight militant right-wing ultra-Zionists in the past year. Between them, her Russian secret group had killed five times that number—nearly fifty leading politicians, journalists, and scholars whose views and potential place in a future government would be counter to socialist ideals.

  It was, in simple terms, a strategy based on the fact that decisions would be made by those who were still standing—with Palestine in a frenetic state, with everybody hating everybody else, with bullets flying and even children taking up arms, nobody had yet put together the disconnected deaths of these fifty right-wing Jews among the hundreds of Jews who had died since the end of the war, so nobody had perceived a pattern. That was what Moscow Central had counted on. Palestine was so full of murder and death and trauma that the loss of an individual was no longer noticed.

  Judit’s attention returned to the present when one young man at the table asked, “Are they really going to do it?”

  “They have to,” another young man said. “Look at the shit the Indians and the Pakistanis are in since Britain withdrew. The last thing the UN wants is the forced march of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians into Syria or Lebanon like the Muslims from India into Pakistan. They’re bound to vote for partition. It’s the only solution.”

  “They might still give the mandate to some other country, and they’d just replace the British,” said Ashira.

  “No,” said Judit, gently moving so that she was sitting next to Ashira. “There’s not another country in the world who’ll take the mandate from the British. We’ve created too much chaos, so it’s partition or nothing.” Judit gave Ashira a wink.

  Yossi Dagan, an Irgun leader from Galilee, held up his hand. “Shush!” he snapped. “Quiet! I think it’s time!”

  He reached over and turned up the volume. At the same time, people cleared the table of plates, so the map of the Plan of Partition could be laid out. As it was unrolled, everybody looked at the reality of what Israel would become should the vote go ahead. While there would be exultation and celebration, the truth told in the map was more somber. The land allocated to the Jews was, in places, so thin that it could be walked from east to west in hours. An army could cut off the north from the south with ease, and a plane could cover the distance in minutes. To look at the map with a critical eye was to realize the reality of being scattered and surrounded everywhere by the enemy, with the nation’s back to the wall: in this case, the sea.

  “The speeches for and against have finished,” said Yossi, listening carefully to the commentator above the crackle and hiss of the static. “They’re now calling the vote in alphabetical order.”

  “So when the vote is passed, we can call ourselves Israelis?” Ashira whispered into Judit’s ear.

  “No, it’s just the beginning,” Judit whispered back. “A lot of politicians still have a lot of talking to do. But it means the British will withdraw, and within a year the UN will vote to declare Israel and Palestine the world’s newest nations.”

  Yossi looked at a sheet of paper, a long list of countries divided into columns. The first was the name of the country, then a second, thinner column was headed “Yes” and another column, equally thin, was headed “No.” A fourth column was headed “Abstain.” He was ready with his pen.

  “First is going to be Argentina; there’re so many fucking Nazis there that they’ll probably vote no. Australia will say yes, then Belgium . . . that’s going to be a yes. But as to Bolivia and Brazil, you can bet they’ll be a no. Byelorussia, God knows. Canada will be positive, I’m sure, but Chile, China, Colombia . . .”

  “Yossi,” said Judit, “how about we let Trygve Lie go through the list. He’s secretary general of the United Nations, not you, so don’t try to do his job for him.”

  They all burst out laughing, including Yossi.

  Judit knew that the simple voting of yes or no belied the complexity of the undertaking and the process ahead. Even if the UN voted for partition, there would have to be an agreement on an economic union between the two states, and then a seemingly endless series of commissions and advisory groups and inspections. Then the General Assembly of the United Nations would have to vote in twelve months on the recommendation to give independence to the two new nations. For their part, the Jewish leadership had agreed to accept the findings of the UN and the borders the General Assembly agreed upon. But the Arab people had not. If the vote was for partition, then the moment it was declared, the Arabs would prepare for war. So as she sat, listened, and looked over the map, Judit knew that the battle against the British would become a war against the Arabs. And she was the only one in the room who knew for certain which way the ambassador from the Soviet Union would vote.

  Her reality was that she and her fellow Russians were instructed to use the national excitement and the mayhem that would erupt onto the streets the moment the vote was taken as a time to seek out the twenty remaining targets on the list that Anastasia Bistrzhitska had given them. They were to become collateral damage in the attacks that the Arab forces would undoubtedly launch.

  • • •

  Two hours later, immediately after partition had been voted for, and when the cheering and backslapping and shouts of �
��Mazel tov!” and “L’chaim” had quieted down, the celebration was replaced by explosions of gunfire. They began in the distance, just one or two sporadic events separated by minutes, but they grew closer and increasingly rapid until they were a staccato orchestrated throughout the Arab areas of Jerusalem.

  Though the sounds of rifles and pistol shots were far from uncommon in Jerusalem these days, the volume and aggression of the screams and anger that erupted, as word spread to cafés and mosques, was far beyond the usual.

  The role of the Irgun and Lehi that night was not strategic attacks on British targets but defense of Jewish homes and people as the city fell into chaos. Judit looked down to Ashira beside her, holding a short-barreled Sten gun. Gripping tight to the stock, Ashira’s hands were steady as stone. Tonight Ashira felt she would be firing bullets at Arabs, and this felt much more natural to her than British targets. Because now, only now, could she exercise restitution against the race who had raped her in the desert.

  Judit slipped from the group into the streets of Jerusalem. When she was clear of the building and confident that she wasn’t being followed, she snaked from street to street into an area she knew well.

  Her target for assassination was Professor Emile Durace, head of the Department of Political Studies at Jerusalem University, by all accounts an eloquent, incisive speaker and a highly influential man.

  Though he was not an orthodox Jew, having migrated to Palestine from Paris, where his family members were scions of the secular movement, his philosophy for the creation of the State of Israel was based in right-wing Zionism. His father, also an academic, had been an early supporter of the founder of modern Zionism, Theodore Herzl, who had witnessed the degradation of Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish French army officer wrongly imprisoned for treason when it was obviously a show trial. Like his father, Professor Durace was a militant Zionist, and this made him Judit’s target.

  It took her half an hour on foot to reach the street where the professor lived with his wife and three children. She saw lights blazing in a number of the rooms of his house. She studied the pattern of lights in the house and could see that the family had been listening keenly to the radio announcement, as was much of the city. Durace and his wife, Colette, along with their two daughters and son, were downstairs drinking champagne and celebrating.

  Hidden by the shadows of trees and bushes at the bottom of the garden, Judit drew out the sniper rifle that she’d concealed in her long overcoat and moved into a position where the front room of the house was clearly visible. Through the scope, she could see the aging professor and his wife sitting at a table. From moment to moment, his head was obscured as his children moved into and out of her field of view, but because of the way the family was relaxing, she knew she had a good amount of time to frame the target for the kill.

  Judit studied the geography of the room through the telescopic sights. French paintings on the wall, menorah candlestick on a chimney breast, photographs of the family group in the foreground of the Eiffel Tower. Judit moved the scope slowly over the people in the room.

  The professor seemed grandfatherly, with his tufts of unruly white hair above his ears and his exultant face as they lived and relived the moment of success in the UN vote. Colette must have been a beauty in her early years and was still a handsome woman, with salt-and-pepper hair and eyes that were luminous even through the rifle scope. The eldest of the children, a young woman about Judit’s age, was stunningly attractive, with raven hair and deep-set seductive black eyes. Judit couldn’t see the rest of her body, but she seemed to be tall and slender. In Paris she might have been a model for one of the fashion houses, but Judit thought that in tomorrow’s Israel, she’d more likely be an engineer or driving a tractor on a kibbutz. For a brief moment, Judit pondered the extraordinary nature of the place in which she lived.

  She studied the younger children, both of whom had faces that were interesting, arresting, and full of lively character. It was a lovely, warm, close family group.

  Regret descended on her. All of her training in Moscow had taught her to be removed from her target, to consider them as nothing more than a step toward a grand vision to the benefit of everyone. She once was an alienated Jewish child and the daughter of a violent and aggressive father. And now she was an instrument of the communist state. It was a role she had accepted. It had given her solace, a place, and power.

  But now Judit looked through the rifle scope, through the windows, to a family bathed in warm light and felt regret. In the years she’d been in Palestine, Judit had been a willing assassin for the cause. But confronted by the reality of destroying a family at the moment of its triumph, in order to prevent nothing more than a political possibility, she hesitated.

  And in that hesitation, she became the family’s other daughter—a sister to the young man and the two beautiful young women seated at the table. The professor and his wife could have been—should have been—her father and mother. She should have been in this family, talking about politics and philosophy, history and religion, listened to, respected, admired, and loved. This should have been the family in which she had grown and been nurtured.

  Judit saw in that house everything she would never have. Tears began to well up in her eyes, clouding her vision. Years of hiding secrets, of frustration and of pent-up anger, of lying to Shalman, the man she truly loved, and missing her daughter, Vered, who was growing up without a mother, absent for whole days at a time. Judit breathed deeply, trying to steady her emotions. She blinked away a tear as if trying to blink away years of a childhood filled with fear. Her mind floundered and stumbled, but her body remained committed, her hands mechanical. She held her breath, fixed the crosshairs on Professor Durace’s head, and slowly squeezed the trigger.

  She heard the shattering of the window, but for once she did not look at the scene to check her work. Tears cascaded down her cheeks at the awful reality of what she’d done. Who she was suddenly struck her in the gut. So much killing, so many lies, so manifold the deceptions. She felt that she was drowning in a pool of quicksand. She could barely breathe.

  Judit turned on her heel before the screams of the family inside the house reached her ears. She walked quickly away from the garden into the street, buttoning up her overcoat to conceal the weapon.

  Judit’s rapid escape, however, didn’t go unnoticed. Ashira watched her retreat up the road and then into the main street where men and women had, until the shooting started, been dancing and singing at the recent news.

  Ashira had followed Judit when she left the meeting. She hoped to accompany her, to learn from her, to be near the woman she so admired in a world dominated by men. But what she saw had shattered her confidence, and she found her hands shaking with nervousness once more.

  What in God’s name had Judit just done? Why had she fired a bullet into that house, a Jewish house? No, it couldn’t be a Jewish house. Surely! Yet on the post at the front door, quite clearly displayed for all in the street to see, was a large mezuzah, the box that carried part of the Jewish prayer, the identity of a house where Jews lived.

  The village of Ras Abu Yussuf

  First week of December 1947

  SHALMAN STOOD IN front of the crowd of Arab men gathered in the center of the small village and felt his hands shake. The sun was not hot, the air had a crisp edge, yet he sweated. Many of the men knew him, some even seemed to like him from his time spent in the village with Mustafa, but most were attuned to the direction the political wind was blowing and looked upon him as the enemy. But he had been brought to the village as a guest of Mustafa, and for now they watched him coldly but respectfully.

  Just a few short days ago Shalman had been home alone with baby Vered in their small apartment in Jerusalem. With the child asleep in the other room, he had sat alone and listened to the radio, as all the peoples of Palestine did that day, while the votes from the United Nations were announced over the radio. Where others had gathered in hotels and restaurants and on street corners, in gro
ups and crowds, Shalman sat alone and in silence.

  He had felt his life was lived on quicksand. Where once his footing had been on solid earth, it was now insecure. Faith in the cause and the fight of Lehi, revenge for his father’s disappearance, haunted by the stories of those who had fled Europe and had nowhere else to go but a land under oppression and beset by enemies—these were the things that had made his world clear and solid. Falling in love with Judit had only cemented that footing further . . . until now.

  He had sat by the radio, listening to the count of countries and their votes, and wondered where his wife was. Other families were together on such a momentous night for the nation, but where was she on this night? What cause did she serve? How many lives would she take? Shalman thought again, as he had so often, of the Arab boy on the airfield runway.

  He turned to Mustafa standing beside him and whispered, “I think this was a mistake.”

  “Probably,” said Mustafa with a shrug.

  The village headman was speaking to the group, but his words were clearly for Shalman, saying nothing that the crowd didn’t already know—that Arabic radio from Cairo, Amman, and Damascus was calling for Arab unity in the face of United States and Zionist aggression; that the armies of the Arabs were ready to invade Palestine and push the Jews into the sea so that all of the Middle East remained under the shield of Islam.

  The headman was no firebrand but spoke in calm, deliberate tones, and Shalman could see the genuine worry that creased his brow. The village was close to Jerusalem and, should war come, would be clearly boxed between Arab and Jewish armies.

  When the headman finished speaking, Shalman was about to rise, but he stopped as Mustafa’s father, Awad, got to his feet and ascended the platform. For such a mild and gentle man, his voice was surprisingly strong.

  “This is our home, as it was home to my parents, their parents, and those generations who came before us. It is small and it is poor, but it is ours. There have always been occupiers. Before the British, it was the Ottoman Turk; before the Turk, many others. And then the Jews arrived in large numbers, and today our land is still our land, but our neighbors have changed once more.