Arab counterattacks were no less bloody. There were bomb attacks on the building housing The Palestine Post. At one point three trucks loaded with dynamite, escorted by what appeared to be an armored police car, stopped on Ben Yehuda Street and exploded.
Through all this, my father divided his time between defending nationalists condemned to the gallows by the British and defending the Old City against the siege. In the spring of 1948, wave after wave of attacks chipped away at the granite blocks of Herod’s Gate. The din of exploding bombs was too much for many of the middle class, who left the city until things calmed down.
My father and a group of other leaders were concerned that if they didn’t put up an effective defense, the Old City would be lost. The time had come to take things into their own hands and form a defense committee. Father named it the “Herod’s Gate Committee.” “There were about thirty of us, each with a family and home to think about, and all rather scared.”
Father’s manuscript mentions some members of leading Arab families who participated—the Husseinis, El Khalidis, Darwishs, and Dajanis. But most of the defenders had neither social status nor education. It was the chauffeur and not the pasha in the backseat. In my father’s words, they were “heroic, stupid, or just plain commonplace” men fighting with antiquated weapons.
The Herod’s Gate Committee made its first move when it decided it needed to compete with the Haganah, which was smuggling in prodigious amounts of weaponry from Eastern Europe. They needed guns. And to get them Father and his friends did what normal people often do when they need public funds: they held a public raffle of old clothes from their closets. The two hundred people who showed up for the raffle gave enough donations to purchase a total of one rifle and a few rounds of ammunition. “When compared with dizzy figures which the Jews were said to be collecting from New York alone,” my father writes, “our modest effort seemed puny and pathetic, guaranteed to discourage the most optimistic.”
Their first meeting was held near Herod’s Gate, but a few hand grenades tossed over the wall convinced them to move to the home of Sherif Sbouh, a retired inspector of education whom my father considered the most outstanding character on the Herod’s Gate Committee.
Originally from Nablus, Sbouh spoke in the thick dialect of his native town, and was almost entirely self-taught. By dint of hard work he had pulled himself up from humble village origins, all the way to the top of the educational ministry. Father’s manuscript describes him as “a slight figure of five feet six inches, balancing himself elastically on two bow legs, like a cowboy in town clothes, his eyes blinking myopically from under steel-rimmed spectacles, a broad and determined grin on his withered face, waving his lean, eloquent hands to give point to his momentous decision.”
His main job was to mind the account books. “He was usually poring over some neatly written figures with a Waterman black fountain pen poised in one hand and a string of maroon-colored beads in the other. We would discuss the latest news and our campaign for the evening, then sally forth to inspect the various posts and collect money from the residents for our meager treasury.”
The fact that a retired inspector of schools with a constant head cold and a knack for numbers should be the Herod’s Gate Committee’s most important man says something about the group. Its members laid no bombs, planned no attacks. Their group was defensive in nature, and their chief preoccupation was scraping together weaponry.
This was my father’s job. In one account he went home for lunch one day to find the mulberry tree near the front door of his house overloaded with an odd assortment of pistols, bandoliers, and rifles. They had been dispatched by the Arab Higher Committee in Cairo.
The Arab Higher Committee … bought whatever arms they could find, whenever and wherever they could find them. The Western Desert was said to be littered with the arms that had been left behind by the various armies in the ebb and flow of battles. It was necessary only to collect the weapons … We had the English, German, Italian, French and Canadian varieties of weapon and a few others whose identity was difficult to establish.
Exposure in the Western Desert had made most of the guns useless. None had spare parts, and even the weapons that functioned lacked sufficient ammunition. To get the weapons operational, the committee turned to Raouf Darwish, whom Father immortalizes in his memoirs as the “nearest living approach to Falstaff I know … Built on rather a generous scale, red of face and witty of tongue, I have known him to put a quarter-full bottle of bad whiskey to his mouth and, for a bet, only remove it when he had drunk the last drop.”
Darwish was the Herod’s Gate Committee’s night supply officer. He cleaned the sand-jammed guns and, “like a hawk in an oriental bazaar,” sorted through an assortment of finger-shaped cartridges, handing out the appropriate type and caliber to waiting guards.
The climax of my father’s story occurred six weeks before the end of the British Mandate. The situation in the city was growing more and more desperate. “Jerusalem, during those last tense days of the Mandate, was like a worn-out water hose, repaired in one place, only to burst in two more. Day and night the patching continued, with everyone taking part.” To save the Old City from capture, Father met frequently with Abdel Kader el-Husseini to discuss the security situation.
My father had known Abdel Kader since both were children in Jerusalem. And in fact, on my father’s mother’s side the two were related, due to unfortunate circumstances. (Several generations earlier, two Nusseibehs, both tax collectors, were on their way from Jaffa to Jerusalem with a small force of gendarmes. At one point, near the village of Abu Ghosh, a band of Husseinis appeared and murdered them in cold blood. Afterward, the Husseini family made peace with my family by giving the sister of the then mufti in marriage to the surviving brother of the two victims.)
Back to 1948—Abdel Kader el-Husseini had quit his senior government post and taken to the hills to oppose the British policy of partition. His headquarters was at the village of Birzeit, north of Ramallah. Because the British had put a price on his head, he came to Jerusalem only on very rare occasions and under conditions of the strictest secrecy.
Abdel Kader, my father, and the other committee members decided that to save the city, Abdel Kader’s forces would have to win back al-Castal, an old Crusader fort that the Jews had captured in a surprise attack. Al-Castal’s position, on top of a high hill, gave it immense strategic importance. It was there that most Jewish Tel Aviv–Jerusalem convoys supplying West Jerusalem had come to grief under Arab attack.
Abdel Kader, accompanied by my father, headed immediately to Damascus to try to persuade Ismail Safwat, the commander of the Arab Liberation Army, to provide some support. At one point, Safwat turned to them and said, in what my father describes as a deliberately insulting tone, “I hear, Abdel Kader, that the Jews have occupied al-Castal. Do you want to go back and recapture it or do you wish me to order the Liberation Army to do this for you?”
Abdel Kader rejoined that it would be impossible to recapture the fort using the antiquated assortment of Italian rifles his men were fighting with.
“I am afraid we cannot spare you an army,” Safwat announced imperiously while sipping tea.
“I’ll recover al-Castal then,” rejoined Abdel Kader, “but frankly I think that you have no wish to save Palestine”—at which point he and my father left the room. “I have no hope left,” Abdel Kader said to Father. “We’ll either go and hide ourselves in Iraq or return to die at al-Castal.” They headed back to fight.
It was on their way back from Damascus to Jerusalem that Father made a slight detour to look in on Mother in Beirut. This was the last time my mother saw her husband in one piece. They had an amorous reunion, resulting in what would become their fourth child: me. Meantime, Abdel Kader continued on to al-Castal.
The following day, Father arrived home and headed directly to the makeshift offices of the Herod’s Gate Committee. There he learned that the fighting in al-Castal had begun, and that Abdel Kad
er was leading the attack. Father decided to visit the scene of the decisive battle. In his typical fashion, he left only after finishing up some office work.
It wasn’t until after lunchtime that he and his younger brother Ahmad set off from Jerusalem by car. Before long, a sniper forced them to abandon their vehicle and continue on foot. It wasn’t until dusk that they arrived at a hilltop not far from the battle site.
From there they watched the Arab attack: “The people in our sector started going forward, warily keeping to the edge. Bullets whizzed all around … One fighter,” my father writes, “jumped forward very much in the manner of a grasshopper. Throwing all discretion to the wind, he hopped along kneeling down every now and then to point his rifle and fire at his objective.”
On the third day of the battle, Father was there to experience the victory: Abdel Kader and his band of fighters had put Safwat to shame by recapturing the strategic mountaintop. As the first sign that the supposed victory was the harbinger of catastrophe, however, Father learned that Ein Kerem, another village on the outskirts of Jerusalem, had come under attack, and many villagers were wounded and without medical help.
Father immediately decided to return to Jerusalem via Ein Kerem. His brother Ahmad, a medical doctor, said he could help. They both decided to stay the night at a Franciscan monastery in Ein Kerem. As Ahmad tended to the wounded, Father went around the village to take stock of what the residents needed. At a local café he was surprised to meet up with a group of Arab irregulars whom he had earlier seen at al-Castal. From them he heard the devastating news: Abdel Kader had been shot dead.
While he was still reeling from the shock of his friend’s death, even more disturbing news began to arrive. Another village, Dir Yassin, was now under attack. Father immediately returned to Herod’s Gate Committee headquarters for an assessment of the worsening situation. The battle for Jerusalem had taken a sharp turn for the worse.
That day, after the Arabs retook al-Castal, Jewish fighters decided to do something to maintain their morale. In collaboration with the Haganah, 132 soldiers of the Stern Gang and Irgun, led, respectively, by the future Israeli prime ministers Yitzhak Shamir and Menachem Begin, launched an assault on the village, butchering more than 250 villagers.
That night, Father collapsed from exhaustion in his office. Events were rushing along at increasing speed—the futile meeting in Damascus, the attack on Ein Kerem, the death of Abdel Kader, and now the bloodbath at Dir Yassin—leaving him despondent.
The Herod’s Gate Committee’s troubles rapidly multiplied. With the massacre at Dir Yassin, people in neighboring villages began a panicked flight from their homes, crowding into the Arab-controlled parts of Jerusalem and occupying convents, churches, mosques, and empty fields. The Jewish forces were throwing fresh consignments of matériel and trained soldiers into the battle. The Jerusalem neighborhood of Katamon fell, and all its residents were expelled.
On one occasion my father escaped from a courthouse in a spotted peasant headdress just before the Stern Gang blew up the building. He also narrowly avoided being kidnapped.
At this point the Arab defenders of the Old City numbered three hundred trained and armed volunteers, many from the British Mandate police corps. But as May 15 approached, attacks grew fiercer and the situation more desperate. Father knew that once the British Mandate formally ended, the committee would be facing twelve thousand well-trained Jewish soldiers hammering away at the city’s gates. Unless he managed to get the help of the Arab Legion in Amman, the city would fall. King Abdullah was their last hope.
Father traveled across the Jordan River to meet the king. First he visited Glubb Pasha, who made it quite clear that if the Arab Legion ever entered the country, it would do so as a British unit, in order to support British policy.
From that meeting, Father continued on to the palace, where he kissed His Majesty’s ruby ring and told him that Jerusalem was anxiously awaiting the Arab Legion. “It had once been sacked in the Crusades,” he explained, “and judging by Dir Yassin, there was no reason to anticipate better treatment at the hands of the Jews once they succeeded in storming their way in.” Father pleaded with the king to allow the army of the Arab Legion to defend the area allotted to the Arab state. “If this isn’t done, the Jews will occupy all Palestine in a few hours, regardless of the UN boundaries.” His Majesty assured him that he would never allow the Holy City to be sacked by a new set of Crusaders.
On May 13, Father bought some ammunition and inspected some new Soviet-made weapons for sale on the black market. The next day, Abdullah ordered his troops to Jericho in preparation for the march up to Jerusalem.
On May 15, the British Mandate ended, and Russian-born David Ben-Gurion announced that after two thousand years, the “foreign rule” of Palestine was over, once and for all. Jewish forces immediately took over the Arab neighborhoods of Talbieh, the German Colony, and Baqʾa. There were also attacks at Jaffa Gate, New Gate, and Zion Gate. For four days the ragtag Arab forces held out. Arab radio stations broadcast appeals for help in Jerusalem, but the only volunteers came from a small village near Haifa, arriving in Ramallah eager to “save the Holy Sepulcher and the Mosque of Omar from Zionist desecration,” according to one of my father’s colleagues, a Christian physician.4 My father declared to the motley band of volunteers, armed with primitive weapons and lacking all military leadership and training, “we will march with you and we will be in the front line.” Four of the five were unarmed; one carried a tommy gun.
With ammunition running dangerously short, Father went to Ramallah to meet with the commander in chief, but he wasn’t there. Father and four others then visited the Jewish settlement Nabi-Yacoub, which had been abandoned, its defenders having fled to Hadassah Hospital on Mount Zion. Local Arabs were ransacking the place, carting off everything they could.
It was in the car on his way back to Jerusalem that he was shot in the thigh. The bullet came from the Mount Scopus Police Camp and hit the main artery of the leg above the knee. He was rushed to the Nablus Government Hospital, but with the loss of blood, gangrene set in. Without any anesthetic, doctors amputated his leg, abruptly cutting off his pursuit of tennis, his favorite sport.
Chapter Five
The Pepper Tree
I CAN PICTURE MY FATHER with his typewriter set on his bandaged stump, looking for the causes of a disaster that had led to what he described as the “dislodgement and dispossession of nearly a million Palestinian Arabs.” When I read his poignant description of the refugees created by the war—he called them “unwanted outcasts, wretched people wandering about homeless and jobless, living mainly on the handouts from the West”—I understood the emotional source for his subsequent decades of labor defending their rights.
There was plenty of blame to go around, starting with the Zionists who did the expelling and the Arab leaders (he dubbed them “grinning apes”) who didn’t lift a finger to stop them. Father also blamed himself for never having taken the trouble to understand his foe.
My fault lay in my overweening conceit and in this I speak of myself as the average man. I underestimated the strength of my enemy and overestimated the strength of my own people … I thought too much in terms of the past glories of my people and willfully blinded myself to present shortcomings. My approach to Palestine’s problem has been effort-saving and therefore fundamentally dishonest—and again I speak of myself as a type.
But my father’s privileged family background, his ancient Arab roots in Jerusalem, along with his self-esteem as a Cambridge man, gave him the inner resources to brush off disaster, spring back, and barrel ahead. He liked to call his attitude “Kismet,” which for him wasn’t fatalistic submission to the “will of Allah” but an attitude described by one of his collection of favorite English mottoes: “There’s no use crying over spilt milk.” Kismet gave him the knack of springing back up after a fall, of rolling with the punches, and of maintaining his dignity and self-confidence while others mourned their losses and dec
ried their fate. Father was a master at spinning gold out of dross.
Compared with the hundreds of thousands of stateless refugees living in camps, my immediate family suffered relatively few material losses in the war. Arabs had maintained control of the eastern half of Jerusalem, where most of the family properties were, though Father lost some properties in Israeli-controlled West Jerusalem, as well as land near Lydda, the spot where Ben Gurion International Airport now sits.
What happened to my mother’s side of the family was a more typical refugee story. By 1948 the family was already impoverished, having lost its holdings to the British. After my father was shot, my pregnant mother left my older siblings with relatives in Beirut and went to the hospital in Nablus to look after my father. She then returned to Ramle to take care of her widowed mother.
In June, the Israeli army showed up. Yitzhak Rabin, at the time a commander of the Haganah, recalled with perfect frankness in his memoirs the events that led to the expulsion. Once his forces had established control over the area, he asked Ben-Gurion what was to be done with the population. Having concluded a decade earlier that expulsion was a necessity, Ben-Gurion waved his hand in a gesture as if to say, “Drive them out!” Expulsion was a popular move among Zionist politicians. Chaim Weizmann, hitherto a man who had vowed a thousand times to respect Arab rights, now, giddy with joy, called the mass exit of the Arabs from the coastal plains a “miraculous simplification of Israel’s task.”1
Some of the dispossessed Arabs were given transport in trucks or buses. Most, like my family, had to travel on foot back across the demarcation lines and into Jordanian-controlled East Jerusalem and the West Bank. My mother, grandmother, and the rest of the family left behind centuries of memories. They feared they would never again see my grandfather’s grave, in the tomb of the Sufi master.
Once Upon a Country Page 6
