O Jerusalem! Read online

  Soft-voiced and courteous, serene and elegant, Haj Amin stood at the center of it all, never raising his voice, proffering his visitors their ritual coffee cup with his exquisite gestures, condemning a man to death with a barely perceptible wave of his immaculately manicured fingers. He protected his own life with extraordinary precautions. He never went out without his bulletproof vest and six black bodyguards. When he traveled, it was in an armored Mercedes. He was always early or late for his appointments; never on time.

  When the British finally decided to arrest him, the Mufti escaped from the Old City disguised as a beggar and fled to Jaffa, whence a fishing boat smuggled him to Lebanon.

  From Beirut, under France's benign regard, the Mufti carried on his rebellion until World War II broke out. That September evening in 1939, contemplatively sucking on an olive, he asked a friend, "Do you think the Germans will be any better than the British?"

  The Mufti's mind was already made up. He had been in contact with the Germans since 1936. The French politely chased the Mufti from Beirut to Baghdad, where he aided in a plot to overthrow a pro-British government with Axis help. When the plot failed, he fled to Teheran ahead of the onrushing British, and from there, when the British and the Russians invaded Iran in September 1941, to his rendezvous with Adolf Hitler in Berlin.

  Six weeks after his final luncheon in Berlin in April 1945, Haj Amin Husseini and two of his followers were in Paris' Cherche Midi prison. They had fled Klagenfurt, Austria, in a Luftwaffe training plane, hoping for asylum in Switzerland. Rebuffed, Haj Amin had elected to turn himself over to the French. From Paris his path seemed destined to lead to a place of honor in the Nuremberg war-crimes trial and a sentence which would remove him from Palestine politics, thus opening the way to power to a more moderate Arab leadership.

  There was ample evidence for such a trial. Much of it had been patiently amassed by Haj Amin's favorite chambermaid in Badgastein, a Jewish woman who was an operative of the Jewish Agency planted to shadow his activities. So successful had she been, so ignorant the Mufti of her role, that on his departure he had rewarded her with the mark of his affection: a substantial tip.

  But Haj Amin never reached Nuremberg. The French, furious at their British-inspired eviction from Syria and Lebanon, were not displeased to hold in their custody such a potential source of embarrassment to the English. General Charles de Gaulle, the Mufti was told, "is interested in your case." Instead of prison, the Mufti and his followers were allowed to stay in a private villa outside Paris under discreet police surveillance.

  The British, unwilling to risk Moslem ire in their colonies, did little, despite a series of pious public pronouncements, to get him on the road to Nuremberg. Finally, in the spring of 1946, Leon Blum on a United States visit was told by Zionist leaders that handing the Mufti over to the war-crimes trials would be an expected quid pro quo for United States economic aid. Sympathetic to the Zionist cause, Blum agreed. His Premier, Georges Bidault, did not. The Mufti was discreetly informed that it would be best if he slipped quietly away. On May 29, 1946, his beard shaven, in a business suit, bearing a forged Syrian passport and an American travel priority, he boarded a TWA plane for Cairo.*

  Four days later, a three-word telegram arrived in his Jerusalem headquarters. It read: "Papa has returned." From that moment forward, the leadership of the Arabs of Palestine returned to his fanatic, uncompromising person. The bright, Western-educated young men Britain had groomed to take over from him began to look over their shoulders at who might be following them, and suddenly found pleasant things they had long forgotten to say about the Mufti.

  For the next year and a half, Haj Amin Husseini, like David Ben-Gurion, devoted himself to preparing his people for the conflict both leaders knew would come. In a hotel room in the Lebanese mountain resort of Aley, he had followed, word by word, the final stages of the United Nations Palestine debate. At dawn, in a telephone call to Jerusalem, he issued the orders for the first action in the fight he had vowed during his last lunch in Berlin to resume. As he had twenty-seven years earlier at the outset of his career, he chose to begin that newest phase in his lifetime's struggle in the bastion he knew best, the souks of Jerusalem.

  The crowds began to assemble in the souks at dawn December 1. "The street" was going to provide Haj Amin's reply to the United Nations vote. The city's Arab merchants shuttered their shops and whitewashed their storefronts with a crescent or a cross to shield them from the fury of the mob ready to answer the Mufti's call for a three-day general strike. For Jerusalem's Jewish population, the binge of Partition Night was over. The Arab crowd, its volatile emotions fired by the rumors deliberately spread on such occasions—this morning's claimed that two Arab women had been raped by the Jews at Jaffa Gate—quickly escaped control. Picking up supporters as they rolled along, a stream of workers, drifters, peasants in black-and-white checkered kaffiyehs, excited adolescents, curious shopkeepers in business suits, howling women, flowed toward the Jewish areas like a rush of water bursting from a dike. Sixteen-year-old Nadi Dai'es, a coffee boy at the bus company near Barclays Bank, felt "a surge of national feeling" fill his soul as the mob swept by. Suddenly elated, he dropped his coffee tray and rushed off to join it.

  Yelling their slogans in a rhythmic Arabic singsong orchestrated by hand-clapping cheerleaders, the mob drove forward waving a forest of clubs and iron bars. One unlucky Jewish journalist caught on its route, Asher Lazar, was dragged from his car and badly wounded.

  Watching them push up Princess Mary Avenue, Zvi Sinai, a Haganah observer, thought that at any moment the British would step forward and bar their progress. Like so many others, he had seen those same police drinking with and congratulating Jerusalem's Jews twenty-four hours earlier. Now, to his stupefaction, they stared at the advancing demonstrators as indifferently as if they were a few drunken undergraduates celebrating the Oxford—Cambridge boat race at Piccadilly Circus.

  Sensing the police's indifference, the mob swung into a sprawling marketplace full of Jewish shops, called the Commercial Center. Clubbing its terrified Jewish shopkeepers, smashing windows and ripping doors from their hinges, the rioters plunged into its stores, tearing goods from the shelves by the armful. Kids scampered into confectionery shops, stuffing their mouths and pockets with sticky wads of candy and halva. Adults tossed the cheap merchandise aside to reach for the best goods they could find—bolts of cloth, hats, bedspreads, shoes, cases of canned food. Some British policemen even gave a helping hand by shooting the locks off doors or, on at least one occasion, smashing open an iron grill with one of their armored cars.

  With the shops half looted, the burning began. Before long, tight black spirals of smoke drifted up from every section of the quarter, sending a mist of ashes over the New City. A few of the area's Arab residents tried to check the damage. Samy Aboussouan, the violin-playing dentist, put out a fire in the store below his own apartment, then went off and discreetly painted a cross on a few shops left undamaged by the mob. They belonged to his Jewish friends.

  Such efforts were whistling against a windstorm. Soon most of the quarter was ablaze, and a cordon of British police kept the Haganah from entering it.

  Determined to revenge the Arab violence, a commando group of the illegal Irgun Zvai Leumi broke into the projection room of the Rex Cinema. They littered the floor with spools of film and set them on fire. In a few minutes the enormous theater was ablaze, its flaming shell sending the biggest, blackest column of smoke in the city up into Jerusalem's skyline.

  A few blocks away, an Arab calmly stood on his balcony recording the spectacular blaze with his camera. Antoine Albina's pictures would find their way into Albina's family photo album. He was the owner of the theater going up in flames before his camera, its marquee still proclaiming the film Albina had been offering to his fellow Jerusalemites that week: It's a Pleasure.

  4

  TWO PASSENGERS TO PRAGUE

  SWISSAIR FLIGHT 442 lifted off the tarmac and headed out over the
dark green waves of orange groves toward the sea. From his window, Captain Abdul-Aziz Kerine stared down at the regular rectangles of Tel Aviv's city blocks where a few hours before he had stared in fascination at the exulting crowds celebrating the promise of a Jewish state. The captain unsnapped his seat belt and lit a cigarette. He was safely underway at last. In seven hours he would be in Paris, where he would catch another plane to his final destination, Prague.

  The young captain owed his presence in the Swissair DC-4 to the fact that Syria's recently won independence gave her a prerogative she shared with only one other Arab state, Lebanon: the right to buy arms openly on the international arms market. Since independence, a horde of manufacturers' agents, middlemen, quasi-smugglers, all the fauna of the strange world of international arms traffic had laid siege to the office of Syria's M.I.T.-trained Defense Minister Ahmed Sherabati. A Belgian offered fifty thousand submachine guns at fifty-two dollars each, Spain twenty thousand used German Mausers for thirty-seven dollars apiece, Switzerland 81-millimeter mortars. An Italian of dubious reputation tried to peddle Sherman tanks. There were rifles without firing pins, machine guns without barrels, tanks without guns, airplanes without engines. Europe was, in fact, in those postwar days a gigantic secondhand arms store open to anyone with national credentials and cash in his pocket.

  Syria's Defense Minister had finally decided to ignore the opportunists crowding his office and place his first order with one of Europe's most experienced arms manufacturers, the Zbrojovka Brno works of Czechoslovakia. The Syrian captain was on his way to Prague to confirm the order and arrange for its shipment to Damascus. By the standards of World War II, the ten thousand rifles it called for might seem a pittance. By the standards of the Jews of Palestine against whom those arms were to be used, however, it was enormous. The order, a copy of which was tucked into Captain Kerine's briefcase, represented, in fact, more than twice the number of arms in the entire Haganah central reserve.

  A few seats behind the Syrian officer, another passenger, his shirt sleeves stretching well past the cuffs of a suit coat manifestly small for even his stubby figure, pored over the Hebrew daily Davar. Together with a toothbrush, a leather-bound Bible and a copy of Faust, that newspaper constituted the entire baggage of the absorbed reader. The Palestinian passport in his coat identified him as George Alexander Uiberall, a commercial director of the Jewish public-works firm Solel Boneh. In fact only two aspects of that passport were authentic: the passenger's age, thirty-one, and the photograph of his round, frowning face dominated by a pair of quietly determined eyes staring out from under two furry eyebrows.

  His name was Ehud Avriel. He was not a commercial director of Solel Boneh or any other business enterprise. It was business, however, that was taking him to Europe, exactly the same business that had ordered Captain Abdul-Aziz Kerine's voyage. Ehud Avriel was flying to Europe in search of ten thousand rifles. His were for the Haganah.

  A few hours earlier, a battered gray Ford had driven up to Avriel's kibbutz at Nahariya in northern Palestine. "Wash up and change," the driver told him. "I'm taking you to Jerusalem. The boss wants to see you."

  Avriel had displayed no surprise. For ten years the quiet Austrian intellectual had devoted himself to the Zionist cause, achieving some of its most spectacular triumphs. From Vienna, then Istanbul, Athens and finally Paris, Avriel had supervised one of the most extraordinary adventures of the Jewish movement, the illegal immigration of thousands of European Jews into Palestine. In the middle of the war, he had succeeded in smuggling his men into Hitler's death camps. Over one hundred thousand Jews from every country in Europe were personally indebted to Avriel and his organization for having gotten them out of the Nazi inferno and onto the shores of the Promised Land. Now, barely two months after his own return to Palestine, he was once again being called away from his family and his kibbutz.

  Three hours later, Avriel had entered a book-lined office on the second floor of the Jewish Agency Building in Jerusalem. Behind the desk, as quietly composed as the freshly pressed folds of his white open-necked shirt, David Ben-Gurion waited for him. With a gravity of tone Avriel had rarely remarked in the Jewish leader, Ben-Gurion told him that the very existence of the Jewish settlement in Palestine might depend on the success of the mission he was now assigning him.

  "Listen, my young friend," he said. "War is going to break out here very soon. The Arabs are getting ready. They have five armies preparing to invade us sooner or later. After the United Nations' vote, we are going to have an Arab revolt on our hands right here in Palestine. What happened in 1936 was just child's play."

  He was, he told Avriel, sending him to Europe to put his experience in the illegal immigration service to work buying arms. "We've got to change our tactics. We haven't got time any more to stuff four rifles into a tractor and wait for them to get to Haifa. We have to work fast and decisively.

  "You have one million dollars at your disposal at the Union de Banques Suisses in Geneva," Ben-Gurion said. Then, taking from his pocket a meticulously folded piece of paper bearing six typewritten lines, he added, "Here is the list of what we need."

  Avriel looked at the list: ten thousand rifles, one million rounds of ammunition, one thousand Sten guns, fifteen hundred machine guns. When Avriel glanced up, Ben-Gurion took a second piece of paper from his desk. It was a letter.

  "There is a Jewish businessman in Paris named Klinger who says he can get it for us," said Ben-Gurion. "Go see him in Paris right away."

  Then, getting up, the Jewish leader walked around his desk and clamped his heavy hand on Avriel's shoulder. "Ehud," he said, "you've got to get us those ten thousand rifles."

  At about the same time Ehud Avriel's flight neared its final destination, two of the men who would be responsible for the use of the arms he had been sent to get met in a faded-pink stucco house on the Tel Aviv seafront. Known as the "Red House," that nondescript building at 44 Hayarkon Street was the secret headquarters of the Haganah. One of the two men was a brilliant archeologist, the son of the man who forty-eight hours earlier had seen the first scraps of the Dead Sea scrolls. In the summer of 1947, David Ben-Gurion had summoned Yigal Yadin from his studies of ancient Arabic inscriptions to the study of contemporary Arabic intentions as the chief planning officer of the Haganah.

  Mishael Shacham was a Haganah workhorse. He had carried a gun in the Jewish cause since the age of eleven, when he had taken for the first time his turn as a guard in the settlement in which he had been born. Shacham had set up the Haganah's first primitive ammunition factory. Marrying his skills as a carpenter, electrician and plumber with the theoretical genius of the scientists at the Weizmann Institute, he had helped develop in 1938 a revolutionary explosive that could be detonated even when it was water-soaked.

  The two men had been summoned to the office of Yaakov Dori, the chief of staff of the Haganah. Already the Haganah possessed a primitive communications system, and the Red House was linked to every Jewish settlement in Palestine by wireless. Its regional commanders reported daily on activities in their areas to Tel Aviv, where their reports were recorded in a central logbook.

  The entry in the logbook for that winter day that had most concerned the commander of the Haganah did not, surprisingly, bear on the Arab riots in Jerusalem. It dealt with a minor incident, but an incident which was, it seemed to Yaakov Dori, a fatally ordained precursor of the struggle about to open. A Jewish bus driving from Natanya to Jerusalem had been ambushed by Arab riflemen near Lydda Airport. Three women and two men had died in the attack. Indicating the logbook entry that recorded the ambush, Dori told Shacham he was giving him the responsibility of guaranteeing the roads for Jewish transport.

  "The war will be won or lost on the roads of Palestine," he said. "Our survival will depend on our transportation. You must keep the roads open."

  Shacham and Yadin withdrew to Yadin's office. Spread around its walls were the sixteen sheets of a 1:100,000 survey of Palestine drawn up in 1945 by the 512th Survey
Company of the British Army. Scattered to every corner of that enormous map was a field of red-tipped pins whose locations indicated the magnitude of the problem just assigned Mishael Shacham. From the Lebanese frontier in the north to the tip of the Negev in the south, from the Mediterranean to the Dead Sea, each of those red pins represented a Jewish settlement for whose lines of communication Shacham was now responsible.

  Underneath each pin was a white tag bearing a few lines in Hebrew. They summarized the objectives assigned the settlement by the plan which Yadin had been summoned from his studies six months earlier to prepare. It was the Haganah's primary strategic document. Known as Plan D, Dalet, its basic premise was that warfare would break out in Palestine if the British withdrew and an attempt was made to establish a Jewish state. It also assumed that warfare would spread to Jerusalem along with the rest of the country, whatever the arrangements that might be made to hold the city out of the conflict.

  The plan foresaw a temporary vacuum preceding and coinciding with Britain's withdrawal. During that vital first stage, the plan assigned to each settlement the task of static defense, of assuring its own survival until forces for a mobile war had been brought into play. The ability of those scattered settlements to survive would depend on whether the Haganah could get them the men and materials required for their defense before the British left Palestine.

  Stretching from pin to pin, covering the map like irregular threads of some gigantic cobweb, were the miles of roads on which the Haganah chief of staff believed the war would be won or lost. To get to their destinations, most of those roads passed through large stretches of territory entirely under Arab control. There, over dozens of miles, the slightest curve, the merest hill or gully, a cluster of houses by the side of the road, could provide the cover for a disastrous ambush.