An attack my father describes in great detail was the bombing of the King David Hotel, in July 1946, one of whose wings housed the nerve center of the British colonial administration. On the day of the attack, a milk delivery van drove up to the service entrance of the hotel from the Jewish neighborhood of Yemin Moshe. Three men got out of the van, each carrying what appeared to be milk cans but were in fact bombs. When the bombs went off, the whole area dissolved into black dust. The explosives brought down the southern wing of the hotel, killing more than a hundred civil servants and senior officers. A close friend of Father’s (a British officer he affectionately called “Blenks”) was among the dead.
For the British it was a losing battle. Restricting immigration to the victims of Nazism was a hard policy to defend at a time when bestselling books such as Arthur Koestler’s Thieves in the Night—in Father’s estimation a “very ably written work”—cast the Stern Gang and Irgun, another militant Zionist group, in the same glamorous light as the underground fighters who had fought against the Nazis. Fed up, the British submitted another partition plan, which both Arabs and Jews rejected. Terror and British retaliation continued until London announced that it would hand over the problem to the newly created United Nations, which came up with its own partition plan. In it, the Jews, with a third of the population and ownership of only 6 percent of the land, were to occupy more than half the territory, including the fertile coastal strip, parts of the Galilee, and all of the Negev, while the ancient Jewish biblical heartland, the stony hill country, would go to the Arabs.
Bracketing out the palpable injustice of divvying up a country without listening to the opinion of those living in it—needless to say, Arabs were not invited to vote on the deal—the plan required so much goodwill and imagination that no one in Palestine, Jew or Arab, believed it could work. The plan called for an “economic union” between the two states, a silly thing to expect in a country that, since 1936, had had no common economy, where economic and communal separation was an overwhelming fact of life, and where each side used economic weapons whenever it could to bring maximum harm to the other.
The United Nations plan also guaranteed the rights of the Arabs in the Jewish portion. But Arabs would make up half the population (and with a much higher birthrate.) How could a Jewish state possibly exist with this built-in fifth column? Judah Magnes, the American-born president of the Hebrew University, was certain that partition was bound to lead to war. Even if the Jews could “lick the Arabs”—and he had no doubt they could—the irredenta produced by two squabbling ministates was guaranteed to spark one war after the next.1
To make matters worse, at least for the Arabs, the British made it clear that they wouldn’t enforce the terms of the UN’s partition plan because they knew it wouldn’t work.2 “Arch intriguer in the sordid drama,” Father writes of the British decision to wash their hands of the problem, “the guardian who had failed in her duty toward her ward and who, in order to cover up his failure, had condemned her ward to death.”
The UN Member States accepted the plan, with Joseph Stalin and Harry S. Truman as its chief backers. For the sake of a clean conscience, the British abstained, even though they were relieved that on May 15, 1948, they would no longer be in the thankless business of controlling two hostile populations.
In Palestine, the Zionist leadership voted to accept the plan, with stiff opposition from Jabotinsky’s followers, who considered it a betrayal of the Zionist dream of controlling all of Palestine, including the east bank of the Jordan. Meanwhile Ben-Gurion, while championing the plan in public, privately assured his followers that the real borders of the state would be defined by the army.
It was predictable that Arab leaders in Cairo, Damascus, and Baghdad would reject partition out of hand, and they issued one martial statement after the next vowing an armed response. Many leaders, under pressure from the mufti Haj Amin Husseini, went so far as to declare a war to rid Palestine of the Zionist interlopers. In fact, the “united Arab opposition” was anything but united, with the Syrians and Jordanians making plans to carve out a piece from the Palestinian carcass for themselves. Amir Abdullah, now king of Transjordan, is said to have made a secret deal with Ben-Gurion, hammered out with Golda Meir, to take over the West Bank, making it part of Jordan.
Local Arabs were far more united in their opposition. “Why should we pay for what the Europeans did against the Jews,” ran the argument. Father also rejected the plan, though for a different reason. Partition wasn’t just about a piece of real estate to be haggled over at the UN; what was at stake was his heritage, stretching back well over a millennium.
Another reason for his opposition was his belief, widespread at the time, that the Zionist leadership had no intention of fully complying with the terms of the partition requiring them to respect the legal rights of Arabs living in the Jewish state. He believed that they were paying lip service to the proposal only because they wanted legal recognition by the world at large of an independent Jewish state. However, they knew that the state as proposed was unviable, and feared more than anything that the Arabs would accept it. So while on the one hand the Zionists backed the plan, on the other they did all they could to whip up Arab opposition to it. “When Arab resistance to the partition plan seemed to be flagging, the Jews stirred it,” Father wrote. They did this by using the same instrument that had proved so effective against the British: terror.
Most of the action in my father’s memoirs takes place during the interregnum between the UN decision, in December 1947, and the technical end of the British Mandate, the following May. When the UN made its decision, the Jews spent the whole day in jubilation, and local Arab leaders ordered a countrywide three-day protest strike in response. On the first day of the strike Father was sitting at home when his younger brother told him that there was a demonstration on Mamilla Street, a major commercial area where my father had his law practice. The two walked over to the demonstration, and instead of a mass protest saw “fifty odd urchins” standing around with hands in pockets, not knowing what to do. There was no leadership, no organization.
Father went up to his office and watched how an “uninspiring” protest turned into mayhem. It started when the “urchins” beat up the only Jew they could find, a journalist for The Palestine Post. The demonstrators next sacked the commercial center. They “indiscriminately looted Arab and Jewish premises alike,” carting off from shops and buildings whatever they could carry, everything from the shops’ inventory to their doors, window frames, and toilets. “Nothing was spared.” They used TNT to blast open locked shops, and by the time they had finished, the commercial center had been reduced to “dust, noise and chaos.”
The British police, for twenty years enforcers of law and order, looked on with their hands in their pockets. It was now a battle between Arabs and Jews, with the British as unwilling umpires. Beyond defending themselves when attacked, “they cleared the ring and composed themselves to watch the fun.”
While the Arabs were so disorganized that they couldn’t even stop street rabble from looting Arab shops, the Jews had a well-oiled quasigovernmental apparatus. The Hebrew University president Judah Magnes was right about the Zionists “licking” the Arabs. It was never a fair fight, nor could it have been. The Jews had created a highly organized community with an admirably disciplined leadership, who knew what they wanted and set out systematically to achieve it. They had statelike institutions, such as a Hebrew educational system, including a university on Mount Scopus in Jerusalem. They had their own bus service, health system, and, more pertinent to the first Arab-Jewish War, a crack underground army.
In his memoirs, Father surveyed the respective strategic and military forces of that time. His fellow Arabs went into the fray with a great store of illusions and misplaced pride. “The Palestinians … had no shadow government ready to take over, no leader, no weapons, no armed forces.” There were hundreds of villages and cities to defend, and nearly no one to do so. Even more fatal
ly, they had no clear understanding of what the fighting was all about. In the earlier rebellions against the Turks, territory was never the bone of contention. The Turks didn’t take over a village in order to drive out its people and replace them with settlers. With the Zionists, the struggle was for every inch of soil.
The only forces that could have put up a fight were the British-trained and -equipped Arab Legion, and the Arab Liberation Army. At the head of the Arab Legion was John Bagot Glubb, known by the Arabs as Glubb Pasha, an eccentric Englishman who spoke fluent Bedouin Arabic. Glubb was a military expert who knew that without British troops in the way, the Jews would easily overrun the whole of Palestine.3 But the orders he got from London forbade him from crossing into Palestine until May 15, and even then he could do so only to occupy those parts included in the Arab section of the partition plan.
Until May 15, the only force in a position to put up any resistance to the Jews was the Arab Liberation Army, comprising 2,800 mostly Syrian and Iraqi volunteers. Poor leadership, however, doomed it to be disastrously ineffective.
Arab leaders in Cairo, Damascus, and Baghdad, assuming that the Jews would be pushovers, were already arguing over who would take the credit for their glorious triumph. They passed over local Palestinian leaders, most notably the grand mufti’s cousin Abdel Kader el-Husseini, and handed joint command of the army to the Syrian Fawzi al-Qawukji and the Iraqi general Ismail Safwat.
Both were “phenomenal failures,” Father comments. “Qawukji and Safwat never even set foot in the country which they were charged to rescue throughout the period of operations. Often it was even difficult to locate them … Delegations from the National Committees of the various Palestine Arab areas used to make a tour of all the capitals of the Arab states seeking them. They would go to Damascus, only to be told that the Pasha Generals had left for Cairo, and so on, in an interminable circle.”
A friend of Father’s from Haifa knew the city would fall if it didn’t get help from the Arab Liberation Army. He and some of his colleagues succeeded, after many attempts, in tracking down General Safwat in Damascus. The friend pleaded to the general for troops and weapons. “The great man listened to all this with the tolerant patience of a trained brain specialist watching the curious antics of a mental case gone past the tertiary degree of decomposition, and when it was all over, he, the specialist behaved in rather an extraordinary manner.
“‘Hello,’ he said, picking up his telephone and addressing the mouthpiece. ‘Hello, is this the Skoda Arms factory? Would you be so kind as to send me the following weapons of the best and latest variety.’ He followed with an impressive list. Replacing the receiver the General turned around to his audience and blurted: ‘You want guns? Right.’ Clawing the air with his right hand he placed imaginary guns at the feet of the importunate delegate.”
When the local Palestinians warned the general that their towns could fall if they didn’t get the support of the Arab Liberation Army, the general said there was no need for alarm. “Let Jaffa fall,” he told my father’s friend. “Let Haifa fall,” he added, warming up to his theme. “Let Acre fall, let Safad fall, let Jerusalem fall, let Nazareth fall, these towns are of no strategic importance whatever, and we can always take them back.”
The Jewish leadership, by contrast, knew precisely what they wanted. They had a plan, and the discipline necessary to carry it out. Counted together, the various military groups such as the Haganah and Irgun had thirty thousand well-trained men working together in coordinated attacks. Theirs was a Spartan army, steeled by the horrors of Europe. It was also far better equipped than the local Arabs, as it had access to large numbers of weapons that had been smuggled into the country from Europe or stolen from the British during the war. Small factories were making armored cars, mortars, and bombs.
As for their plan, it was offensive rather than defensive. The idea was to expand their borders and thin out the Arab population by taking the battle far beyond the UN-sanctioned partition borders. They set out to grab as much territory as a fait accompli before the Transjordanian army arrived on May 15.
In the months leading up to the end of the Mandate, while the British were still technically in control of the country, the same story repeated itself throughout Palestine. Just as Glubb Pasha had predicted, in villages and cities, organized groups under either the Haganah or the various underground Zionist organizations, attacked poorly defended Arab areas. A large number of Arab towns and cities designated by the UN plan as part of the Arab state fell under Jewish control. Jaffa, Haifa, and other Arab towns and villages “were sacked and ravaged.” By May 15, hundreds of thousands of Arab refugees clogged the roads heading east away from the coast. My father’s memoirs tell a grim story of an entire people fleeing out of fear.
There was a lot of expulsion at gunpoint, though just as many Arabs left their homes willingly, as people often do to escape a battle or a natural disaster, assuming that they would return the moment calm again prevailed. This was another case of people not knowing what they were up against. Ben-Gurion had come to the conclusion that expulsion was both necessary and, under the cover of war, possible. Rational political and military planners, not hate-filled thugs, ordered these expulsions. Their primary aim was to make their state demographically viable.
This tragedy was something Father experienced firsthand. One day a peasant farmer came to his office. He was from a small village in the south, near the Jewish town of Rechovot. His modest house had been blown up, and his village lands had been taken by Jewish forces. His only son had been killed, and he himself had been shot in the leg and was in danger of losing the limb.
Father didn’t recount this man’s adventures with the detachment of a historian, but rather with the flare and skill of a tragedian. “Jaffa is the home of 200,000 Arabs,” he writes about their expulsion by Israeli forces. “And its loss means the dispersion of these people. The loss of Acre, Nazareth, Safad, Ramle, Lydda, and all the other towns and villages of Palestine mean more than red dots on the map. They mean the warm hearths and proud homes of an old established community. The hearths have turned to ashes and homes ground to dust and the life that once throbbed within them throbs no more.”
The partition plan designated Jerusalem to be an international area outside both the Arab and Jewish states. The British had divided the city into security zones before May 15, and their policy was to keep the warring tribes confined in their respective districts.
Like the rest of the country, the cosmopolitan city rapidly descended into civil war. Father’s is a nightmarish account of normal life disintegrating into madness and chaos as professors, doctors, and shopkeepers on both sides manned checkpoints and traded fire with people who under different circumstances would have been houseguests, not targets. The moorings of civilization were uprooted, and military logic governed the thinking of two otherwise peace-loving peoples.
In my father’s story, the battle for Jerusalem began with a bombing at Damascus Gate, a fifteen-minute walk from his home. A few days after the UN vote at the end of 1947, three members of the Jewish underground dressed as Arabs drove in a taxi to Damascus Gate in Jerusalem and deposited what seemed like two tar barrels among the market stalls. Just as they were driving off, my father’s brother Hassan was heading out of the Old City. Approaching Damascus Gate, Hassan heard a faint, dull thud, like a badly backfiring car. Within minutes he saw a torn human limb, bloody and shapeless, stuck to the wall of the Old City. Suleiman the Magnificent’s thick walls prevented the bomb from injuring people inside the gate, to my uncle’s good fortune. Those outside, however, were defenseless against the shrapnel of the homemade bomb.
A few days later Uncle Hassan came under direct attack. He had inherited Al-Kasr, the massive old stone fortress just outside the Old City walls, which belonged to our family. He had recently renovated it—indoor plumbing, hot and cold running water, a heating system, the works—to fit the modern tastes of his new bride. One night, Father heard a loud explosion. He
got dressed and rushed downstairs to see what had happened. His cousin arrived within minutes and said to him cryptically, “Long life to you.” It was an ominous remark.
“Who’s dead?” my father asked.
“No one, but they blew up your brother’s castle.”
“And my brother?”
“Thank God, he’s safe. He’s with his wife’s people in the Old City.” Alive thanks only to a Jewish neighbor who warned him of the attack, Uncle Hassan didn’t end up blasted to smithereens like his castle. The next morning the Jewish underground, as echoed in The Palestine Post, justified the attack as a necessary operation to eradicate “snipers’ nests.”
Shortly after this, Father prudently decided to send his wife and children to Lebanon for safety. He rented them a beautiful villa in the Lebanese hills.
In the months leading up to May 1948, Jews and Arabs traded attacks and counterattacks. One day, what looked to be an armored police car drove down Jaffa Road, turned around the traffic island, and parked outside some stores. It aroused nobody’s suspicions because the area, a busy trading center for Arabs, was often patrolled by police cars for security reasons. A few moments later the car drove off again. Before anybody realized what was happening, a huge explosion was heard. The militants in the vehicle opened up with automatic fire on both sides of the road and sped back in the direction of the Jewish quarter of Rechavia. More than two dozen people died in the attack.
Father also describes the constant sniping coming from the roof of a synagogue in the Jewish quarter of the Old City. The snipers targeted Muslim worshippers at the Al-Aqsa mosque and the Dome of the Rock.
Once Upon a Country Page 5
