The Zionists were vulnerable in Jerusalem: the road from Tel Aviv passed through 30 miles of Arab territory and Abd al-Kadir Husseini, who commanded the 1,000-strong Jerusalem brigade of the mufti’s Holy War Army, attacked it constantly. ‘The Arab plan’, recalled Yitzhak Rabin, the Palmach officer born in the Holy City, ‘was to choke Jerusalem’s 90,000 Jews into submission’ – and it soon began to work.
On 1 February, Husseini’s militiamen, aided by two British deserters, blew up the offices of the Palestine Post; on the 10th, he attacked Montefiore again but was repelled by the Haganah after a six-hour gun battle. The British set up a command post below the Jaffa Gate to defend Montefiore. On 13 February, the British arrested four Haganah fighters and then released them unarmed to an Arab mob, who murdered them. On the 22nd, Husseini sent British deserters to blow up Ben Yehuda Street, an atrocity that killed fifty-two Jewish civilians. The Irgun shot ten British soldiers.
Trying to defend the Arab areas in Jerusalem, recalled Nusseibeh, ‘was like a worn-out water hose repaired in one place only to burst in two more.’ The Haganah blew up the old Nusseibeh castle. The former Arab mayor Hussein Khalidi complained, ‘Everyone’s leaving. I won’t be able to hold out much longer. Jerusalem is lost. No one is left in Katamon. Sheikh Jarrah has emptied. Everyone who has a cheque or a little money is off to Egypt, off to Lebanon, off to Damascus.’ Soon refugees were pouring out of the Arab suburbs. Katy Antonius left for Egypt; her mansion was blown up by the Haganah, but only after they had found her love-letters from General Barker. Nonetheless Abd al-Kadir Husseini had successfully cut off Jewish west Jerusalem from the coast.
Ironically the Jews, like the Arabs, felt they were losing Jerusalem. By early 1948, the Jewish Quarter in the Old City was under siege and defence was made more difficult by the number of non-combatant ultra-Orthodox Jews. ‘Well, what about Jerusalem?’ Ben-Gurion asked his generals on 28 March at his headquarters in Tel Aviv. ‘That’s the decisive battle. The fall of Jerusalem could be a deathblow to the Yishuv.’ The generals could spare only 500 men. The Jews had been on the defensive since the UN vote, but now Ben-Gurion ordered Operation Nachshon to clear the road to Jerusalem, the start of a wider offensive, Plan D, designed to secure the UN-assigned Jewish areas but also west Jerusalem. ‘The plan’, writes the historian Benny Morris, ‘explicitly called for the destruction of resisting Arab villages and the expulsion of their inhabitants’ but ‘nowhere does the document speak of a policy or desire to expel “the Arab inhabitants” of Palestine.’ In some places, the Palestinians remained in their homes; in some places they were expelled.
The village of Kastel controlled the road from the coast to Jerusalem. On the night of 2 April, the Haganah seized the stronghold, but Husseini massed his militiamen (including Iraqi irregulars) to retake it. He and Anwar Nusseibeh realized, however, that they needed reinforcements. The two of them hurried to Damascus to demand artillery only to be exasperated by the incompetence and intrigues of the Arab League generals. ‘Kastel has fallen,’ said the Iraqi commander-in-chief. ‘It’s your job to get it back, Abd al-Kadir.’
‘Give us the weapons I requested and we will recover it,’ answered Husseini furiously.
‘What’s this, Abd al-Kadir? No cannon?’ said the general, who offered nothing.
Husseini stormed out: ‘You traitors! History will record that you lost Palestine. I’ll take Kastel or die fighting with my mujahidin!’ That night he wrote a poem for his seven-year-old son Faisal who, decades later, would become Yasser Arafat’s Palestinian ‘minister’ for Jerusalem:
This land of the brave is the land of our forefathers
The Jews have no right to this land.
How can I sleep while the enemy rules it?
Something burns in my heart. My homeland beckons.
The commander reached Jerusalem next morning and mustered his fighters.
GUN SALUTES ON THE HARAM: ABD AL-KADIR HUSSEINI
On 7 April, Abd al-Kadir led 300 fighters and three British deserters up to Kastel. At 11 o’clock that night, they attacked the village but were repelled. At dawn the next day, Husseini moved forward to replace a wounded officer, but as he approached in the fog, unsure who held the actual village, a Haganah sentry, thinking the new arrivals were Jewish reinforcements, called in Arabic slang: ‘Up here, boys!’
‘Hello, boys,’ retorted Husseini in English. The Jews often used Arabic – but never English. The Haganah sentry sensed danger and let slip a volley that hit Husseini. His comrades fled, leaving him on the ground, moaning, ‘Water, water.’ Despite attention from a Jewish medic, he died. The gold watch and the ivory-handled pistol revealed that he was a leader, but who was he?
On the radio, the exhausted Haganah defenders eavesdropped on the anxious Arabic talk of regaining the body of the lost commander. His brother Khaled assumed the command. As word spread, Arab militiamen streamed into the area on buses, donkeys and trucks and retook the village, the Palmach troops dying in position. The Arabs killed their fifty Jewish prisoners and mutilated the bodies. The Arabs had retaken the key to Jerusalem – with Husseini’s body.
‘What a sad day! His martyrdom depressed everyone,’ recorded Wasif Jawhariyyeh. ‘A warrior of patriotism and Arab nobility!’ On Friday 9 April, ‘no one stayed in their house. Everyone walked in the procession. I was at the funeral,’ Wasif noted. Thirty thousand mourners – Arab fighters waving their rifles, Arab Legionaries from Jordan, peasants, the Families – attended as the fallen Husseini was buried on the Temple Mount next to his father and near King Hussein in Jerusalem’s Arab pantheon. There was an eleven-cannon salute; gunmen fired into the air and a witness claimed that more mourners were killed than had died in the storming of Kastel. ‘It sounded as if a major battle was in progress. Church bells rang, voices cried for revenge; everyone feared a Zionist attack,’ remembered Anwar Nusseibeh, who was ‘despondent’. But the Arab fighters were so keen to attend Husseini’s burial that they left no garrison in Kastel. The Palmach destroyed the stronghold.
As Husseini was being buried, 120 fighters of the Irgun and Lehi jointly attacked an Arab village just west of Jerusalem named Deir Yassin, where they committed the most shameful Jewish atrocity of the war. They were under specific orders not to harm women, children or prisoners. As they entered the village, they came under fire. Four Jewish fighters were killed and several dozen wounded. Once they were in Deir Yassin, the Jewish fighters tossed grenades into houses and slaughtered men, women and children. The number of victims is still debated, but between 100 and 254, including entire families, were murdered. The survivors were then paraded in trucks through Jerusalem until the Haganah released them. The Irgun and Lehi were undoubtedly aware that a spectacular massacre would terrify many Arab civilians and encourage flight. The Irgun commander, Begin, contrived to deny that the atrocity had taken place while boasting of its utility: ‘The legend [of Deir Yassin] was worth half a dozen battalions to the forces of Israel. Panic overwhelmed the Arabs.’ But Ben-Gurion apologized to King Abdullah, who rejected the apology.
Arab vengeance was swift. On 14 April, a convoy of ambulances and food trucks set off for the Hadassah Hospital on Mount Scopus. Bertha Spafford watched as ‘a hundred and fifty insurgents, armed with weapons varying from blunderbusses and old flintlocks to modern Sten and Bren guns, took cover behind a cactus patch in the grounds of the American Colony. Their faces were distorted by hate and lust for revenge,’ she wrote. ‘I went out and faced them. I told them, “To fire from the shelter of the American Colony is the same as firing from a mosque,”’ but they ignored her rollcall of sixty years’ philanthropy and threatened to kill her if she did not withdraw. Seventy-seven Jews, mainly doctors and nurses, were killed and twenty wounded before the British intervened. ‘Had it not been for Army interference,’ declared the Arab Higher Committee, ‘not a single Jewish passenger would have remained alive.’ The gunmen mutilated the dead and photographed each other with the corpses splayed in macabre poses. The photogra
phs were mass-produced and sold as postcards in Jerusalem.
Deir Yassin was one of the pivotal events of the war: it became the centrepiece of a bloodcurdling Arab media campaign that amplified Jewish atrocities. This was designed to fortify resistance, but instead it encouraged a psychosis of foreboding in a country already at war. By March, before Deir Yassin, 75,000 Arabs had left their homes. Two months later, 390,000 had gone. Wasif Jawhariyyeh, living with his wife and children in western Jerusalem, close to the King David Hotel, was probably typical – and he recorded his thoughts and actions in the diary that is a unique and under-used record.
‘I was in a very bad way,’ he writes after these events in mid-April, ‘depressed, physically and mentally’, so much so that he abandoned his job in the Mandate administration and ‘stayed at home trying to decide what to do’. Finally, the diarist records the ‘reasons that made me decide to leave my home’. First was the ‘dangerous position of our house’, where he was under fire from the Arabs at the Jaffa Gate, the Jews in Montefiore and the British Bevingrad security zone: ‘there was non-stop shooting day and night so it was hard even to reach the house. The fighting between Arabs and Jews, the blowing up of buildings, continued day and night around us.’ The British fired on Montefiore, blowing off the top of Sir Moses’ windmill, but to no avail. Wasif wrote that the the Jewish snipers in Montefiore, ‘shot at anyone walking in the streets and it was a miracle we survived.’ He considered how to save his collection of ceramics, diaries and his beloved oud. His health was deteriorating too: ‘My body became so weak I couldn’t handle the pressure and the doctor told me to leave.’ The family debated: ‘What will happen when the Mandate ends? Will we be under the Arabs or the Jews?’ Wasif’s neighbour, the French consul-general, promised to protect the house and the collection. ‘Even if we never come back,’ Wasif felt they should pack their bags ‘to save ourselves and our children’: ‘We thought we would not leave the house for more than two weeks because we knew how soon the seven [sic] Arab armies will enter the country not to occupy it but to free it and return it to its people and we are its people!’ He left in the last days of the Mandate, never to return. Wasif’s story is that of the Palestinians. Some were expelled by force, some departed to avoid the war, hoping to return later – and approximately half remained safely in their homes to become Israeli Arabs, non-Jewish citizens in the Zionist democracy. But altogether 600,000–750,000 Palestinians left – and lost – their homes. Their tragedy was the Nakhba – the Catastrophe.
Ben-Gurion summoned the chief of the Jerusalem Emergency Committee, Bernard Joseph, to Tel Aviv to decide how to supply the now starving Jerusalem. On 15 April the convoys broke through, and food trickled into the city. On the 20th, Ben-Gurion insisted on visiting Jerusalem to celebrate Passover with the troops: Rabin, commander of the Palmach’s Harel Brigade, protested at Ben-Gurion’s grandstanding. Soon after the convoy set off with Ben-Gurion in an armoured bus, the Arabs attacked. ‘I even ordered two stolen British armoured cars to be brought out of concealment and sent into action’, said Rabin. Twenty were killed – but the food and Ben-Gurion reached Jewish Jerusalem – which he described, with grim humour but acute observation, as ‘20 per cent normal people; 20 per cent privileged (university etc), 60 per cent weird (provincial, medieval etc)’ – by which he meant the Hasidim.
British rule was now in its last days. On 28 April, Rabin captured the Arab suburb Sheikh Jarrah, home of the Families, but the British forced him to relinquish it. As the British took the last salute, the Jews held the western part of the city, the Arabs the Old City and the east. At 8 a.m. on Friday 14 May, Cunningham, the last high commissioner, marched out of Government House in full uniform, reviewed a guard of honour, mounted his armoured Daimler and drove to inspect his troops at the King David Hotel.
51
JEWISH INDEPENDENCE, ARAB CATASTROPHE
1948–51
THE BRITISH DEPART; BEN-GURION: WE DID IT!
General Cunningham headed out of Jerusalem through streets deserted except for a few Arab children. British troops manned machine-gun posts on street corners. As the Daimler sped past, the young onlookers ‘clapped childishly and one saluted. The salute was returned.’ From Kalandia airport, the high commissioner flew out of Jerusalem to Haifa whence, at midnight, he sailed for England.
British troops evacuated their Bevingrad fortress in the Russian Compound: 250 trucks and tanks rumbled out along King George V Avenue, watched by silent Jewish crowds. The race to control the Russian Compound started instantly. The Irgun stormed the Nikolai Hostel. Gunfire ricocheted across the town. Nusseibeh rushed to Amman to beg King Abdullah to save the city, ‘once sacked in the Crusades’ and about to be sacked again. The king promised.
At 4.00 p.m. on 14 May 1948, just outside Jerusalem, Rabin and his Palmach soldiers, exhausted by their fight to keep the road open, were listening to a radio announcement from David Ben-Gurion, chairman of the Jewish Agency. Standing beneath a portrait of Herzl, before an audience of 250 in the Tel Aviv Museum, Ben-Gurion proclaimed, ‘I shall read from the scroll of the Declaration of the Establishment of the State of …’ He and his aides had debated what the name of the state should be. Some had suggested Judaea or Zion – but these names were associated with Jerusalem and the Zionists were struggling to hold even part of the city. Others had proposed Ivriya or Herzliya, but Ben-Gurion had argued for Israel and that was agreed: ‘The Land of Israel’, he read out, ‘was the birthplace of the Jewish people.’ They sang the national anthem, Hatikvah (The Hope):
Our hope is not lost
The hope of two thousand years;
To be a free people in our land,
The land of Zion and Jerusalem!
Ben-Gurion beamed at the journalists. ‘We did it!’ he said, but he eschewed jubilation. He had repeatedly accepted two-state partition, but now the Jews had to resist an invasion by the regular Arab armies with the openly stated object of annihilation. The very survival of the State of Israel was in jeopardy. On the other hand, his views had evolved since he had hoped in the 1920s and early 1930s for a shared socialist Palestine or a federated state. Now, faced with total war, everything was up for grabs.
At the Jerusalem front, Rabin’s soldiers of the Harel Brigade were too weary to listen to Ben-Gurion on the radio. ‘Hey men, turn it off,’ pleaded one of them. ‘I’m dying for some sleep. Fine words tomorrow!’
‘Someone got up and turned the knob, leaving a leaden silence,’ recalled Rabin. ‘I was mute, stifling my own mixture of emotions.’ Most people did not hear the Declaration anyway, because Arab forces had cut off the electricity.
Eleven minutes later, President Truman announced de facto recognition of Israel. Encouraged by Eddie Jacobson, Truman had secretly reassured Weizmann that he backed partition. Yet he had almost lost control of the administration when his UN diplomats tried to suspend partition. His secretary of state, George Marshall, wartime chief of staff and doyen of American public service, outspokenly opposed recognition. But Truman backed the new state while Stalin was the first to recognize Israel officially.
In New York, Weizmann, now almost blind, waited in his room at the Waldorf Astoria, delighted by independence yet feeling abandoned and forgotten, until Ben-Gurion and his colleagues asked him to be the first president. Truman invited Weizmann to make his first formal visit to the White House. When the US president was later praised by Eddie Jacobson for having ‘helped create Israel’, he retorted: ‘What do you mean “helped create”?’ I am Cyrus! I am Cyrus!’ When the chief rabbi of Israel thanked him, Truman wept.
President Weizmann travelled to Israel, while he feared ‘the Jewish shrines in Jerusalem, which had survived the attacks of barbarians in medieval times, were now being laid waste.’ In Jerusalem, Anwar Nusseibeh and a few irregulars, mainly ex-policemen, did their best to defend the Old City until the real armies arrived. Nusseibeh was shot in the thigh, and had to have his leg amputated. But the irregular war was over.
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sp; The real war was now starting and Israel’s position was dire. The armies of the Arab League states, Egypt, Jordan, Iraq, Syria and Lebanon, invaded Israel with the specific mission of liquidating the Jews. ‘This will be a war of extermination and a momentous massacre,’ announced Azzam Pasha, secretary of the League, ‘which will be spoken of like the Mongolian massacres and the Crusades.’ Their commanders were overconfident. The Jews had been inferior subjects of Islamic empires, sometimes tolerated, often persecuted, but always submissive, for over a thousand years. ‘The Arabs believed themselves to be a great military people and regarded the Jews as a nation of shopkeepers’, recalled General Sir John Glubb, the English commander of King Abdullah’s Arab Legion. ‘The Egyptians, Syrians and Iraqis assumed they’d have no difficulty defeating the Jews.’ Secular nationalism merged with the fervour of holy war: it was unthinkable that Jews could defeat Islamic armies, and many of the Jihadist factions that fought beside the regular armies had long since embraced a fanatical anti-Semitism. Half the Egyptian forces were mujahidin of the Muslim Brotherhood, among them young Yasser Arafat.