O Jerusalem! Read online

  The afternoon before in her third-floor office in the King David, she had performed her last official act for them as a servant of His Majesty's government. She had signed a special supplementary expenditure warrant authorizing the Agricultural Department to spend 650 Palestine pounds for the services of two additional guards for the forest of Jenin. The certain knowledge that the trees of that forest would never know the protective glance of those guards had not stayed for a second the swift stroke of her bureaucrat's pen. Perhaps it was fitting that it had not, for in many ways Assiya Halaby was a product of the British administration in Palestine.

  The daughter of a middle-class Christian Arab family, she owed much to that administration. Above all, she owed it her emancipation as a woman, a fact symbolized by a brief ritual in Jerusalem's motor-vehicle registry one spring morning in 1939. When it was finished, Assiya had become the first Arab woman in Palestine to own and operate her own car.

  Like many Palestinian Arabs, Assiya Halaby had not really believed the British were going to leave. It seemed incomprehensible that the men who had taught her to love the orderly administration of human affairs would "run away and leave behind a vacuum." Yet now, after a parting handshake with Assiya, they climbed, one by one, aboard their waiting bus. In their haste to leave, they did not think to offer a safe passage home to the only individual in Jerusalem who had come to bid them farewell. Their convoy rolled off down Julian's Way toward Damascus Gate and their own safe passage home. Behind them, alone, Assiya Halaby waved a last goodbye. The King David was empty now. All that remained of Britain in the building that had been the citadel of her civil power in Palestine were a few scraps of paper scuttling like dry autumn leaves along an empty corridor.

  When Assiya Halaby got home, she found a message from her brother urging her to join him in the safety of the Moslem Quarter of the Old City. She packed up a few belongings: a portable typewriter, her baby pillow and teddy bear, a green two-piece suit. As she left her house, she snatched a book from her library shelf to read in the days ahead.

  For Assiya Halaby, as for many others in Jerusalem, a new life was beginning in that dawn. Soon a wall would lacerate Jerusalem's heart, and its stones would make Assiya Halaby an exile in the city of her birth. Instead of a few days, she would have years to ponder the message of the book she had taken with her that morning. Its title was The Arab Awakening.

  Stiff and solemn in the freshly pressed uniform of a general of His Majesty's Royal Artillery, the Scot stepped out of the formal entrance of his residence and paused an instant to savor the spectacle spread before him. Some long-forgotten bureaucrat with an eye for a view and a gap in his knowledge of the Bible had chosen to build the official residence of the British high commissioners in Palestine on the Hill of Evil Counsel. The irony of that gesture had not been lost on those whose lives had depended on the decisions of the men who had lived in it. Now Sir Alan Cunningham, the last of their line, let his eyes enjoy a parting glance at that magnificent panorama at his feet, the Old Walled City of Jerusalem, ancient and unchanging, spread upon its barren hilltop.

  Sir Alan had little time for contemplation, however. His last ritual as British high commissioner awaited him. As surely as the churches of the city sprawled below, the-authority he represented had its faithfully prescribed liturgy, and even failures could not end without the appropriate closing ceremony. This morning, the ceremony over which Sir Alan was presiding would mark the end of British rule in Palestine.

  Great Britain had eagerly sought that rule in the aftermath of World War I during which she had been lured to Palestine by two strategic objectives, securing the northern approaches of the Suez Canal and casting a bridgehead toward the desolate wastes of Iraq with their promise of a new and fabulous treasure, petroleum. Her rule had been formalized after the war by a League of Nations mandate, substituting her authority for that of the conquered leaders of Ottoman Turkey.

  That rule had begun with high intent. Britain had promised to succor the wandering Jew here, to tutor the native, to replace Turkish misrule with an example of enlightened Christian colonialism. But it had not worked out that way. The problems she had encountered in Palestine had proved insurmountable, and, as no one knew better than her last High Commissioner, the legacy Britain was leaving behind on this May morning was chaos and the promise of war. With his last glance at Jerusalem, an agonizing thought struck Cunningham: there, below his garden wall, 160,000 people awaited only his departure to start killing one another.

  He turned away. A score of people—army officers, government officials and a handful of newsmen—waited for him. Scanning their faces, Cunningham sadly realized that not a single representative of either Jerusalem's Arab or Jewish community had come to bid him farewell. He took his place in front of the residence. On its balcony, five soldiers of the Highland Light Infantry stood to attention. It was seven o'clock. A bugle sounded in the clear morning air. Sir Alan drew to attention. Slowly and majestically, the bagpipes began to play the Union Jack out of the blue sky of Jerusalem.

  Watching it come down, Sir Alan felt "an overwhelming sadness" sweep over him. "So much effort expended," he thought, "so many lives lost to such little purpose finally. Thirty years and we achieved nearly nothing."

  The black limousine that would carry him to the airport drove up. It was a four-ton armored Daimler built for George VI's tours of Blitz-ridden London. Clement Attlee had sent it to Jerusalem for Cunningham's safety. The stubborn Scot had always refused to ride in it. On the formal orders of his security officer, it would take him on his last, sad journey across Jerusalem.

  Before getting in, he spun around. He could not leave without a parting stroll along the paths of the Residence garden he had loved so well during his three years in Palestine. How often, here among his roses, had he pondered the fate of a condemned Jewish prisoner or struggled to forget the sight of British bodies mangled by a terrorist's bomb. He knew every clump of lavender, every rose climbing the garden walls, every meticulously thinned Aleppo pine.

  PART ONE

  JERUSALEM: "A TIME TO MOURN AND A TIME TO DANCE"

  1

  DECISION AT FLUSHING MEADOW

  IN THE AFTERNOON of Saturday, November 29, 1947, in a cavernous gray building that had once housed an ice-skating rink, in Flushing Meadow, New York, the delegates of fifty-six of the fifty-seven members of the General Assembly of the United Nations were called upon to decide the future of a sliver of land set on the eastern rim of the Mediterranean. Half the size of Denmark, harboring fewer people than the city of St. Louis, it had been the center of the universe for the cartographers of antiquity, the destination of all the roads of man when the world was young: Palestine.

  No debate in the brief history of the United Nations had stirred passions comparable to those aroused by the controversy over that land to which each of its members might in some way trace a part of its spiritual heritage. Before the General Assembly was a proposal to cut the ancient territory into two separate states, one Arab, one Jewish. That proposal represented the collective wisdom of a United Nations special committee instructed to find some way of resolving thirty years of struggle between Jew and Arab for the control of Palestine.

  A mapmaker's nightmare, it was, at best, a possible compromise; at worst, an abomination. It gave fifty-seven percent of Palestine to the Jewish people despite the fact that two thirds of its population and more than half its land was Arab. The Arabs owned more land in the Jewish state than the Jews did, and before immigration that state would contain a majority of barely a thousand Jews. Each state was split into three parts linked up by a series of international crossroads upon whose functioning the whole scheme depended. Both states were militarily indefensible.*

  Most important, the United Nations plan refused to both states sovereignty over the city of Jerusalem, the pole to which, since antiquity, the political, economic and religious life of Palestine had gravitated. Holding the attachment to Jerusalem too widely spread and deeply f
elt, its potential for prompting strife too great to entrust it to one nation's care, the United Nations Special Committee on Palestine had recommended that the city and its suburbs be placed under an international trusteeship.

  The proposal had been a staggering blow to Jewish hopes. Re-creating a Jewish state in Palestine without Jerusalem as its capital was anathema to the Jewish people, the resurrection of a body without its soul.

  Two thousand years of dispersion were summed up in the phrase "If I forget thee, O Jerusalem." The most important wall of the synagogues of the Diaspora faced east to Jerusalem. A patch of wall in every orthodox household went unattended in Jerusalem's name. The Jewish bridegroom crushed a glass under his foot at his wedding to show his grief at the destruction of the Temple, and prayed that his marriage would provoke joy and dancing in the streets of Jerusalem. The traditional words of Jewish consolation, "May the Almighty comfort you and all the mourners of Zion and Jerusalem," evoked the City. Even the word "Zionism," defining the movement to reassemble the Jews in their ancient homeland, was inspired by a hilltop in Jerusalem, Mount Zion.

  Through the generations, men with neither the interest nor the intent—nor even the remotest possibility—of ever gazing on Judea's hills had nonetheless solemnly pledged to each other at the end of their Passover feast, "Next Year in Jerusalem."

  Beyond those spiritual concerns lay strategic ones. Two out of every three inhabitants of Jerusalem were Jewish. They represented almost one sixth of the entire Jewish settlement in Palestine. With Jerusalem and a wide access corridor to the sea, the Jewish state would have a firm foothold in the Judean heartland of Palestine. Without it, the state risked becoming a coastal enclave clinging to the Mediterranean.

  Urged by the Vatican, the Catholic nations of Latin America had made it clear to the Jews that the price of their votes for the plan to partition Palestine would be the internationalization of Jerusalem. Without them, the Jews had no hopes of mustering the ballots needed to pass partition. With a heavy heart, they had yielded, and Jerusalem's loss was the measure of the price they were willing to pay for a Jewish state.

  Despite the loss of Jerusalem, the partition plan proposed by the United Nations Special Committee on Palestine still promised the Jewish people—and, above all, the 600,000 Jews of Palestine—the fulfillment of a two-thousand-year-old dream and an urgent present need. With a constancy, a tenacity, unequaled in the annals of mankind, the Jews had clung to the memory of the Biblical kingdom from which they had been driven in A.D. 70 as the centuries of their dispersion had stretched toward an eternity. In their prayers, in their rites, at each salient moment in the passage of a lifetime, they had reminded themselves of their attachment to that Promised Land and the transient nature of their separation from its shores.

  Their ancestors, the first wandering Hebrew tribes fleeing Mesopotamia, had barely set foot on that land before history condemned them to ten centuries of warfare, migration and slavery. Finally, fleeing Egypt under Moses, they began their forty-year trek back to the hills of Judea to found their first sovereign state.

  Its apogee, under David and Solomon, lasted barely a century. Living at the crossroads of the caravan routes of Europe, Asia and Africa, installed on a land that was already a beckoning temptation to every nearby civilization, the Hebrews endured a millennium of unremitting assaults. Assyria, Babylon, Egypt, Greece, Rome, each in turn sent its cohorts to conquer their land. Twice, in 586 B.C. and in A.D. 70, their conquerors inflicted upon them the supreme ordeal of exile and destroyed the Temple they had built in Jerusalem's Mount Moriah to Yahweh, their one and universal deity. From those dispersions and the suffering accompanying them was born their tenacious attachment to their ancient land.

  Reinforcing its appeal, giving it a continual contemporary urgency, was the curse of persecution which had followed the Jews into every haven in which they had taken shelter during their dispersal. The roots of Jewish suffering grew out of the rise of another religion dedicated, paradoxically, to the love of man for man. Burning in the ardor of their new faith to convert the pagan masses, the early fathers of the Christian Church strove to emphasize the differences between their religion and its theological predecessor by forcing upon the Jews a kind of spiritual apartheid. The Emperor Theodosius II gave those aspirations legal force in his code, condemning Judaism and, for the first time, legally branding the Jews a people apart.

  Dagobert, King of the Franks, drove them from Gaul; Spain's Visigoths seized their children as converts; the Byzantine Emperor Heraclius forbade Jewish worship. With the Crusades, spiritual apartheid became systematic slaughter. Shrieking their cry "Deus vult! God wills it!," the Crusaders fell on every hapless Jewish community on their route to Jerusalem.

  Most countries barred Jews from owning land. The religiously organized medieval craft and commerce guilds were closed to them. The Church forbade Jews to employ Christians and Christians to live among Jews. Most loathsome of all was the decision of the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215 to stamp the Jews as a race apart by forcing them to wear a distinguishing badge. In England it was a replica of the tablets on which Moses received the Ten Commandments. In France and Germany it was a yellow O, forerunner of the yellow stars with which the Third Reich would one day mark the victims of its gas chambers.

  Edward I of England and later Philip the Fair of France expelled the Jews from their nations, seizing their property before evicting them. Even the Black Death was blamed on the Jews, accused of poisoning Christian wells with a powder made of spiders, frogs' legs, Christian entrails and consecrated hosts. Over two hundred Jewish communities were exterminated in the slaughters stirred by that wild fantasy.

  During those dark centuries, the only example of normal Jewish existence in the West was in the Spain of the Caliphate, where, under Arab rule, the Jewish people flourished as they never would again in the Diaspora. The Christian Reconquista ended that. In 1492 Ferdinand and Isabella expelled the Jews from Spain.

  In Germany, Jews were forbidden to ride in carriages and were made to pay a special toll as they entered a city. The republic of Venice enriched the vocabulary of the world with the word ghetto from the quarter, Ghetto Nuovo—New Foundry—to which the republic restricted its Jews. In Poland, the Cossack Revolt, with a ferocity and devotion to torture unparalleled in Jewish experience, wiped out over 100,000 Jews in less than a decade. When the czars pushed their frontier westward across Poland, an era of darkness set in for almost half the world's Jewish population. Fenced into history's greatest ghetto, the Pale of Settlement, Jews were conscripted at the age of twelve for twenty-five years of military service and forced to pay special taxes on kosher meat and Sabbath candles. Jewish women were not allowed to live in the big city university centers without the yellow ticket of a prostitute. In 1880, after the assassination of Alexander II, the mobs, aided by the Czar's soldiers, burned and butchered their way through one Jewish community after another, leaving a new word in their wake: pogrom.

  Bloody milestones on the road to Hitler's gas chambers, those slaughters succeeding one another through the centuries were the constant of Jewish history, the ghastly heritage of an oppressed race to whom the crematoriums of the Third Reich might seem only the final, most appalling manifestation of their destiny.

  Yet, by a strange paradox, the event which produced the decisive Jewish reaction to that bloodstained history was not a pogrom, not a slaughter, not a Cossack troop's brutality. It was a military ceremony, a ritual whose killing was spiritual, the public humiliation of Captain Alfred Dreyfus in Paris in January 1895.

  In the midst of the crowd massed on the esplanade of the Champ de Mars to watch the ceremony was a Viennese newspaperman named Theodor Herzl. Like Dreyfus, Herzl was a Jew. Like Dreyfus, he had led his life in comfortable, seemingly unassailable assimilation into European society, little concerned with his race or religion. Suddenly, on that windy esplanade, Herzl heard the mob around him begin to cry, "Kill the traitor! Kill the Jew!" A shock wave rolled thro
ugh his being. He had understood. It was not just for the blood of Alfred Dreyfus that the crowd was clamoring; it was for his blood, for Jewish blood. Herzl walked away from that spectacle a shattered man; but from his anguish came a vision that modified the destiny of his people and the history of the twentieth century.

  It was Zionism. With the energy of his despair, Herzl produced its blueprint, a one-hundred-page pamphlet titled Der Judenstaat—"The Jewish State."

  "The Jews who will it," it began, "shall have a state of their own."

  Two years later, Herzl formally launched his movement with the First World Zionist Congress in the gambling casino of Basle, Switzerland. The delegates to Herzl's congress elected an international Jewish executive to guide the movement, created a Jewish National Fund and a Land Bank to begin buying land in the area in which he hoped to create his state, Palestine. Then they picked two indispensable symbols of the state whose foremost claim to existence was in the fervor of their speeches, a flag and a national anthem.

  The flag was white and blue for the colors of the tallith, the shawl worn by Jews at prayer. The title of the Hebrew song chosen as a national anthem was even more appropriate. It represented the one asset Herzl and his followers disposed of in abundance. It was "Hatikvah"—"The Hope."

  At no time had Jewish life wholly disappeared in the Palestine to which Herzl's followers proposed a return. Even in the darkest hours of the dispersion, small colonies of Jews had survived in Safed, Tiberias and Galilee. As elsewhere, their cruelest sufferings had come under Christian rule. The early Christians had had them banned from Jerusalem, and the Crusaders burned the Holy City's Jews alive in their synagogues.

  Palestine's Moslem rulers had been more tolerant. The Caliph Omar had left them relatively unmolested. Saladin had brought them back to Jerusalem along with his Moslem faithful; under the Ottoman Turks, they had been able to take the first steps toward a return to the Promised Land. Sir Moses Montefiore, an English philanthropist, built the first Jewish suburb outside Jerusalem's old walls in 1860, offering his kinsmen a pound sterling to spend a night beyond the ramparts. By the winter day in 1895 when Theodor Herzl witnessed the degradation of Alfred Dreyfus, thirty thousand of Jerusalem's fifty thousand inhabitants were already Jewish.