O Jerusalem! Read online

  In the sitting room of her stone house, Golda Meir's note pad rested on her knees, the last figures she had written on it staring up at her. The woman who had worked so hard for this moment could no longer read those figures. As the fateful announcement had come over her radio, Golda Meir's eyes had overflowed with tears.

  The Arab educator Sami Khalidy had gotten up from his wing chair and crossed his library at the news. With a sharp snap, he turned off his radio. He looked at his wife. "A tragedy is now beginning," he said.

  On the other side of Jerusalem in the Arab quarter that bore his family's name, young Nassereddin Nashasshibi heard his father declare at the same instant, "This means war." In the years to come, he would always remember the grim prophecy of Syria's United Nations delegate Fares el Khoury coming from the radio in his living room. "The Holy Places," said the Syrian, "are going to pass through long years of war, and peace will not prevail there for generations."

  As Paris had lived its liberation night, as London and New York had reveled at the end of the war, Jewish Jerusalem now erupted in its own special explosion of joy, the most exuberant perhaps in its history, a wildly happy outburst to herald the end of a two-thousand-year wait.

  In his little bar, Fink's, David Rothschild had listened to the news with two pretty girls. When the results came in, the three of them rushed out into the still-deserted streets. Giggling like children, they skipped down King George V Avenue, banging on doors, shouting up at the silent walls and windows, "We have a state, we have a state!" Two young Haganah officers, Mordechai Gazit and Zelman Mart, leaped into Mart's old Chevrolet and went careening through Jerusalem, their horn blaring, until Gazit thought "we had woken up the entire city."

  Everywhere, as the impact of the news registered, lights snapped on, windows were flung open, neighbors called to each other in the dark. In pajamas and slippers, with a bathrobe or an overcoat tossed over the shoulders, Jerusalemites invaded the streets. At a corner of Ben Yehuda, Uri Avner joined a group of students rushing down the street. As they ran along, people flowed out of the doorways to join them. At the corner of Jaffa Road a British patrol car stopped their procession.

  "Do you realize it's after midnight?" an officer asked them.

  "Do you realize we have a state?" they shouted back.

  Another group of youngsters commandeered a truck with a loudspeaker and drove through the city calling people out to celebrate. A British armored car stopped them too, then swung in behind them, adding the voice of its loudspeaker to theirs.

  On Ben Yehuda Street, Reuven Tamir, a member of the Jewish settlement police, and a group of friends pried open a kiosk that sold cakes and soda during the daytime. As they started distributing cakes to their friends, the angry owner ran up. Then, understanding that on this night everything was free, he joined them, passing out his stock. At that instant a crowd rushed by, carrying a Jewish member of the British police on their shoulders and crying, "He'll be our first police minister!" Tamir blinked. It was his father.

  Bars and restaurants opened as their owners rushed to join the celebration. The director of the Carmel Mizrachi wines rolled an enormous vat of red wine into the middle of Ben Yehuda Street and began passing out free drinks to the crowd. In the ultra-religious quarter of Mea Shearim, yeshiva students with their curly side locks and bearded rabbis stood in the streets toasting lechayim—life—with bottles of cognac. Drivers ran to their buses and began bringing people free into the city. By two o'clock, thousands of deliriously happy Jews had poured into the heart of Jerusalem. Exultant young people stamped and swirled through the hora at every street corner. Arm in arm, others marched through the streets singing the Zionist anthem, "Hatikvah." In Russian, Czech, German, Hungarian, Yiddish, Hebrew, in almost every tongue of the human race, the old hymns of Zionism's pioneering days echoed through the night. Strangers embraced and kissed. Uri Cohen, a biology student at Hebrew University, happily kissed his way from his home to the city center.

  Even the British joined in. On King George V Avenue, Yaacov Salamon saw a British armored car rolling up the street. He froze. He had been on guard duty for the Haganah, and on his hip was a canteen in which he had hidden a hand grenade and a pistol, enough to earn him a life sentence in a British jail if he were caught with them. As he wondered what to do, a group of young people swarmed over the armored car and began to embrace the British police. The stunned Englishmen smiled and embraced them back. "The first time," thought Salamon, "the British have stood by while the Jews went mad with happiness."

  So contagious was the mood that some English soldiers even reached into their pockets for a handful of shillings to put into the collection boxes of the Jewish National Fund, then happily pinned its pale-blue emblem to their uniform. Rabbi Ezra Spicehandler offered a swig of cognac to a British soldier. "Oop the Jews!" he cried and gulped down a third of the bottle.

  Long before sunrise, the whole of Jewish Jerusalem seemed to be awake and celebrating. Synagogues opened at three and were thronged with grateful assemblies offering a prayer of thanksgiving. Everyone reacted differently to the emotion of those moments. As the first faint light of dawn softened the sky, Zev Benjamin thought of the words of the Bible for the creation of the world: "And the evening and the morning were the first day." Watching the young people dance, Russian-born Reuven Ben-Yehoshua remembered "the early pioneers who never imagined this night," thinking, "If they hadn't come, perhaps this night would never have taken place." Even the most agnostic of Jews might have felt the hand of God upon them that night.

  Yet, in that happy carousel, there were the voices of dissent. Bowing in the dark sanctuary of their synagogue, the leaders of the rabidly fanatic Neturei Karta sect of orthodox Jewry were in virtual mourning. To those deeply religious men who believed the Divine alone could order the homecoming of the Jews, the state their fellows were celebrating was an abomination, a miracle wrought by the hands of man when only those of God would do. The dissent of a young student, Netanel Lorch, an officer in the Haganah, was of a different order. Lorch had few illusions of what the Arabs' reaction to tonight's news would be. Watching his fellows whirl through their horas, Lorch thought, "Dancing is for the innocents."

  Along Ben Yehuda Street, a tall distinguished man wandered alone, an island of concern in the midst of the jubilant crowds. While they celebrated the promise of a new Jewish state, every fiber of Eleazar Sukenik's being was concentrated on an old one, the one that had died almost two millenniums before on the mountaintop of Masada. That afternoon, in the shop of an Arab souvenir dealer near the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem, Eleazar Sukenik's fingers had caressed a few scraps of ancient leather. Trembling with emotion, he had realized he held in his hand the most precious remnants ever found of that dead civilization. Tomorrow he was to meet the Arab souvenir dealer to negotiate their purchase. Now he despaired that tonight's pledge of a new Jewish state in Palestine would destroy his only link with those priceless ties to its long-dead predecessor. They were the first scraps of the most important archeological discovery of the twentieth century, the Dead Sea Scrolls.

  Everywhere, the Jews of Palestine shared the joy of Jerusalem. Tel Aviv, the first Jewish city of the world, was like some Latin capital on carnival night. In kibbutzim around the country, young people danced and prayed. In the settlements of the Negev and on the Syrian border in the north, watchmen in their lonely sentry posts blessed the night above them.

  In Jerusalem, the celebration built toward a crescendo in front of a fortresslike structure whose stone wings had enclosed for years Jewish hopes for a state in Palestine. Bathed in the glow of searchlights, the Jewish Agency building and its courtyard were the scene of an exultant happening. When the white flag of Zionism with its pale-blue star of David proudly crept up the building's flagstaff, an explosion of noise burst from the crowd.

  Brusquely the tumult quieted and, like a breaking wave, a strange silence rolled over the sea of faces as the bulky silhouette of a woman appeared on the balc
ony above them.

  "For two thousand years," cried Golda Meir, "we have waited for our deliverance. Now that it is here it is so great and wonderful that it surpasses human words." Then, her voice hesitant with emotion, her heart overflowing, the carpenter's daughter from Kiev become the Pasionara of Zionism grasped for the two words her people had used for generations to mark the passage of life's gay and solemn moments. "Jews," she cried, "mazel tov! Good luck!"

  In the Arab quarters of Jerusalem, the echoes of those triumphant Jewish cries rang like a tocsin through the deserted streets. Peering into the night, listening to the distant sound of merriment rising from the Jewish quarters, many an Arab pondered the change in his own destiny that those cheers foretold.

  Oppressed by gloom and bitterness, Gibrail Katoul, an officer in the Education Department of the mandate, announced to his wife, "Everything is lost. The streets of Jerusalem will run with blood." Then, with Arab fatalism, Katoul opined, "It is the fault of the British. They let us down. The whole world has conspired to defeat us."

  The reaction of Sami Hadawi, another mandate civil servant, was similar to that of many Arabs. Drawing tight the shutters of his new home in Katamon, Hadawi struggled to recover from the news. Then, from somewhere in his subconscious, a firm and reassuring voice told him it was all a lie, it would never come to pass. "The British," he thought in a rush of comfort, "will never leave Palestine."

  From his bedroom window, Zihad Khatib, a twenty-one-year-old accountant, watched the flickering orange glow of torchlight dancing on the walls of nearby Mea Shearim and listened to the din of his neighbor's revelry. "It is like V-Day," he told himself. Then, bitterly, he thought, "But it is they who are the victorious ones, not us."

  Leaving his studio, Hazem Nusseibi, the Arab who had translated the momentous news, heard a voice beside him whisper in the darkness, "When the day comes, there will be Arabs ready to perform their duty."

  Turning, Nusseibi looked at the owner of that voice, a Bedouin officer of the unit guarding the Palestine Radio. He belonged to an elite corps whose cannon would soon exact a heavy price from the Jews of Jerusalem for the state they celebrated this night: the Arab Legion.

  Of all the Arabs who witnessed Jewish celebrations that night, none witnessed them in stranger circumstances than a young captain in the Syrian Army wandering in civilian clothes through the exulting crowds of Tel Aviv. As the first rays of dawn lightened the city, Captain Abdul-Aziz Kerine stood at the window of his little hotel peering down in fascination at the happy throng still dancing the hora in the street below. Fascinated he well might be, for a special mission had brought Captain Abdul-Aziz Kerine to Tel Aviv. In a few hours, at Lydda Airport, he would set off for Prague. There he planned to buy ten thousand rifles and one thousand machine guns, the first consignment of the arms with which the Arabs hoped to shatter the dreams of the dancers below the young captain's hotel window.

  "So what if we won?" hissed the middle-aged woman in her bathrobe. "Let the old man sleep." Yet, to awaken him, Gershon Avner, a young bureaucrat of the Jewish Agency, had driven twenty-five miles from Jerusalem to the Jewish potash works on the Dead Sea. In his briefcase he carried the draft of an official declaration by the Jewish Agency welcoming the United Nations' historic vote. More than any other individual of his generation, the sleeping man before Avner was responsible for that triumph. With the implacable determination of a hunter stalking a quarry, he had pursued the goal of a Jewish state in Palestine. Coaxing, cajoling, threatening, inspiring, he had led his people toward it with the zeal of a Messianic prophet and the realistic cunning of a Biblical warrior. Avner looked down at the small round stomach and the strands of white hair standing out from his head that identified him to millions around the world. Gently, he shook his shoulder.

  "Mazel tov," he whispered to David Ben-Gurion. "We won."

  Ben-Gurion got up, slipped on a bathrobe, and plodded to a small writing table. Adjusting his glasses, he began to study the declaration Avner handed him. Then his pen started to fly over its 150-word English text. Soon the paper was covered with its scratchings, giving, Avner noted, the emotional content of the original a more sober tone.

  "More paper," Ben-Gurion called, the first words he had uttered to Avner.

  With Ben-Gurion's wife, Paula, Avner began a frantic search while the old man waited with fast-rising impatience. Finally, in despair, Avner grabbed the only sheaf of paper he could find, a strip of brown toilet tissue taken from the bathroom next door. Ben-Gurion started to write on it the text of his historic declaration.

  As he finished, a group of excited young people from the potash works burst into the room. Circling the stubby little figure of their leader, they began to dance a wild, happy hora. His fists thrust into the pockets of his worn bathrobe, Ben-Gurion watched them with a heavy heart. He well knew the price the Jewish people would have to pay for the state the United Nations had promised them this night. When the young people beckoned him to join their hora, he shook his head.

  "I could not dance," he would later recall. "I could not sing that night. I looked at them so happy dancing and I could only think that they were all going to war."

  As the Jewish leader knew, the United Nations vote was not in itself a guarantee that a Jewish state would actually come into existence. Between the vote this November night and the actual end, some months away, of Britain's rule in Palestine lay a difficult time of trial. Both sides, Ben-Gurion was persuaded, would try to use it to strengthen their forces and improve their positions for the conflict he felt must follow Britain's eventual withdrawal. In Jerusalem, the first preparations for a showdown still far in the future were already beginning. About the same time Gershon Avner's Austin had driven up to the potash works, another car had slipped through the darkened streets of a Jewish suburb on the city's western outskirts. It stopped in front of the outpatient clinic of the Histadrut Medical Aid Society. A squat, heavyset man strode to the door of the clinic and rapped softly. From the shadows inside, the white-coated figure of a medical orderly emerged. The two men walked through the deserted clinic to a small office at the rear. There the gray-haired man set to work.

  His name was Israel Amir, and he was the Jerusalem commander of the Haganah. The medical orderly who had opened the door was one of his soldiers. For over a year the clinic had provided the Jerusalem commander a cover to hide his headquarters from British surveillance. Amir scanned the sheaf of intelligence reports telephoned during the night to his headquarters. They indicated no unusual activity in the Arab city, but Amir was not reassured. The Arabs, he felt, could not let this occasion pass without some reaction. Like most Haganah headquarters, his command had an informal but carefully prepared system to bring his forces into readiness. Quickly he made the three seemingly innocent telephone calls that put his forces on alert.

  The outburst which Israel Amir feared was already brewing. Clasping slips of paper marked with a crescent and a cross adjoined at an identical angle, each signed with the Arabic initials "E.G.", Arab messengers were already moving through Old Jerusalem's darkened alleys. The initials belonged to Emile Ghory, a member of Jerusalem's sizable Christian Arab community and a graduate of the University of Cincinnati. Ghory was the leader of the Arab city's unofficial ruling body, the Arab Higher Committee.

  The destination of the men who bore his slips of paper were as diverse as Old Jerusalem. One was near the Wailing Wall, another at a mosque next to St. Stephen's Gate, a third behind the Holy Sepulcher. Soon Ghory's messengers aroused from their sleep sheikhs, obscure shopkeepers, peddlers, even women, the widows of conservative religious families whose piety placed them above all suspicion.

  They passed Ghory's slip of paper to each sleepy figure and in turn were guided to the hiding place of the objects for which they had come. They unfastened false panels, pulled up floorboards, dug into cellars, chipped away the mortar of caches hidden in walls, opened crates of cheap religious souvenirs, picked apart kilns and baking ovens. By sunrise their
work was completed. While the Jews of Jerusalem had danced the night away beyond the Old City walls, they had removed from their hideaways the secret arsenal of Jerusalem's Arab Higher Committee, the eight hundred rifles they had carefully sealed away after the last Arab uprising in Palestine almost a decade earlier, a bloody three-year revolt against the British in 1936-39.

  For some Arabs and Jews, however, the aftermath of the U.N. vote led to a kind of sad reaching out to each other, a grasping toward the hope that the conflict to which they seemed condemned might still be avoided. Making their rounds at Government Hospital the morning after the vote, two old friends, Drs. Rajhib Khalidy and Edward Cooke, studied the long rows of beds soon to be filled with the victims of their fratricidal war. "Must we really fight each other?" sighed Cooke. "It will be too horrible."

  On King George V Avenue, an Arab dentist named Samy Aboussouan got a jarring response of his own to that same thought. A cultivated man, an accomplished violinist, Aboussouan was one of those Arabs who had always lived in harmony with the Jewish community, and he persisted in his belief in the ultimate reconciliation of Jew and Arab. Suddenly, amidst the jubilant dancers, Aboussouan saw an old friend, violin professor Isaac Rottenburg, a man he had long admired for his "calm, his serenity, his pacifism." Wrapped around the peaceful violin professor's biceps was the armband of the Jewish Home Guard.