Exodus

Briefly in 1908 there was a rebellion of the Young Turks, who deposed the corrupt old tyrant and despot Abdul Ha-mid II. The entire Zionist movement was hopeful as he was replaced by Mohammed V as Sultan of the Ottomans and spiritual head of the Moslem world.

They soon learned that the rebellion would have no effect on the granting of a charter. Mohammed V had inherited a collapsing empire, and was known to the world as the “sick man of Europe.”

From the very beginning, the British had shown the greatest sympathy for the Zionists. Barak felt that Jewish interests and British interests could be brought together, while

there was no basis for cooperation with the Turks. The British had offered both Sinai and Uganda for settlement. Many high British officials spoke openly in support of a Jewish homeland. England itself was the headquarters for the Zionists; and further, Dr. Chaim Weizmann, a Russian-born Jew, had become the world spokesman for the Zionist movement.

With the rise of the British in the Middle East and the obvious eclipse of the Ottomans, Barak and the Yishuv and the Zionists became openly pro-British.

Mohammed V had lost a series of costly Balkan wars. His position as the “Shadow of God,” the Moslem spiritual leader, was slipping and the five-century-old Ottoman reign was tottering as the empire came close to economic collapse.

For centuries the Czars of Russia had dreamed of having warm-water ports on the Mediterranean. It had been their eternal ambition to break through the Bosporus and the Dardanelles. With the collapse of the Ottomans at hand, Russia concocted a gigantic power play to carry this out at last. Russia goaded Turkey in an attempt to line her up on the side of Germany. Russia wanted a war with Turkey and she made the ownership of Constantinople the condition of entering that war on the side of the Allied powers. Mohammed V was well aware of what Russia was up to and he studiously avoided a fight. He realized that not only were the Russians going to grab Constantinople but the British, French, and Italians were impatiently waiting to pounce on the empire and split it up among themselves.

World War I erupted!

Mohammed V did not oblige either the Russians or the British by collapsing. Indeed, the Turks showed more fight than anyone had bargained for. The Russian Army was stopped dead trying to cross the Caucasus Mountains; and in the Middle East the Turks lunged out of Palestine, crossed the Sinai Desert, and stood at the very artery of the British Empire, the Suez Canal.

McMahon, the British commissioner in Egypt, began making promises to the Arabs if only the Arabs would rebel against the Ottomans. The British promises implied independence for the Arabs in return for their aid. British agents worked desperately to drum up an Arab revolt against the Turks. They went to the leading Arab prince, Ibn Saud, the powerful Wahabite of Arabia. Ibn Saud decided to wait until he was certain which way the wind was blowing. The balance of the Arab world either fought alongside the Turks or played a game of waiting.

On the Ottoman side, Mohammed V, titular head of all the Moslems, sent out hysterical calls for the entire Moslem

world to rise against the British in a “holy war.” His appeals were met with silence.

The British concluded that the only way to get Arab allies was to buy them. British gold was consequently spread about liberally as bait to hook support. The bait was snapped at. The position of sherif of Mecca was a semi-independent job within the Ottoman rule. The sherif was officially “Keeper of the Holy Places of Medina and Mecca.” The job was inherited and held for a lifetime by those in the direct line of descent from Mohammed.

The sherif of Mecca was indeed a little man in the Arab world. Further, he was the arch enemy of Ibn Saud. When the British approached him he saw the opportunity to seize power over the entire Arab world if Mohammed V and the Ottomans should fall. So the sherif of Mecca went over to the British, at the price of several hundred thousands of pounds sterling. The sherif had a son named Faisal who was a rarity among Arab leaders, a man who had a social conscience and vision. He agreed to assist his father in getting Arab tribes to “rebel” against the Ottomans.

The Yishuv in Palestine did not have to be bribed or coddled or bought. The Jews were solidly behind the British. When the war broke out they placed themselves in great peril as avowed friends of the enemies of the Ottomans.

In a swift move, Jemal Pasha the Turk took command of the Palestine province and clamped a reign of terror on the Jewish community.

Barak Ben Canaan had only six hours’ warning to flee Palestine. Both he and his brother Akiva were on the extermination rolls of the Turkish police. The Zionist Settlement Society had been forced to close its offices and most Jewish activity had stopped.

“How soon, darling?” Sarah asked.

“We must be gone by daybreak. You are only to pack one small handbag. We must leave everything behind.”

Sarah slumped against the wall and rubbed her hand over her belly. She was six months pregnant and could feel the life in her body as she had never felt it in any of the previous pregnancies… . Five miscarriages, she thought. …

“I can’t go,” she said. “I can’t go.”

Barak turned and faced her. His eyes narrowed and his red beard seemed to blaze in the candlelight. “Come now, Sarah … we have not time for that.”

She spun around. “Barak … oh, Barak”-and she ran into his arms-“I’ll lose this child too … I can’t, I can’t … I can’t.”

He sighed deeply. “You must come with me. God knows what will happen if the Turks get you.”

“I will not lose this baby.”

Barak packed his handbag slowly and shut it.

“Get up to Shoshanna right away,” he said. “Ruth will take care of you … stay away from her blessed cows …“He kissed his wife’s cheek gently, and she stood on her tiptoes and clung to him.

“Shalom, Sarah. I love you.” He turned and walked out quickly.

Sarah made the perilous journey from Tel Aviv to Shoshanna by donkey cart and there, with Ruth, awaited the birth of her child.

Akiva and Barak fled to Cairo where they met their old friend Joseph Trumpledor, the one-armed fighter. Trumpledor was busy forming a unit of Palestinian Jews to fight in the British Army.

Trumpledor’s unit, the Jewish Mule Corps, joined the Anzacs in a mammoth operation. Barak and Akiva were there as the British landed at Gallipoli and vainly attempted to open the Dardanelles and march on Constantinople from the south. In the retreat and debacle that followed the landing, Akiva was wounded in the chest.

The Jewish Mule Corps was disbanded after the Gallipoli disaster. Akiva and Barak continued on to England where Zev Jabotinsky, an ardent Zionist, was busy forming a larger Jewish fighting unit, the 38th, 39th, and 40th Royal Fusiliers, comprising a brigade known as the Judeans.

Akiva had not fully recovered from his wounds and was sent to the United States to lecture in the cause of the Jewish homeland under the sponsorship of the American Zionists, whose leader was Justice Brandeis of the Supreme Court.

When it was discovered that Barak Ben Canaan was among the Fusiliers he was pulled from the ranks at once. Dr. Weizmann, the world spokesman for Zionism, reckoned that Barak was too important a figure to carry a rifle.

Barak entered the Zionists’ negotiation team in time to hear about a further British disaster in the Middle East. General Maude had launched an attack on the eastern flank of the Ottoman Empire. Using Mesopotamia as a jumping-off point, he planned to come down on Palestine from the north. The route of conquest was to be the Tigris-Euphrates Valley into Bagdad, and then he would wheel and strike for the sea. Maude’s legion pressed forward with ease as long as the opposition was Arab troops. The campaign was termed “brilliant.” Then, at Kut, the British ran into a Turkish division and their forces were beaten to the ground.

The British were reeling! The Ottomans sat on the edge of the Suez Canal and the Germans had torn the Russian first-line army to shreds. British efforts to stir up an Arab revolt against the Ottomans had fallen flat.

Then came the final blow! The Arabs suspected that a secret British-French agreement was in the wind to carve up and subjugate the Arab world.

Dr. Weizmann and the Zionists felt the time was ripe to score a point for the Jewish homeland. England desperately needed sympathy and help. In Germany, Jews were fighting for their fatherland as they were in Austria. In order for the Zionists to gain the support of the Jews of the rest of the world, especially those in America, a dramatic decision was needed.

As the negotiations between the Zionists and the British were brought to a close, Lord Balfour, the British Foreign Minister, wrote a letter to Lord Rothschild with the revelation:

His Majesty’s Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object.

Thus was born the Balfour Declaration, the Magna Charta of the Jewish people!

CHAPTER ELEVEN: Jemal Pasha’s police found Sarah Ben Canaan at the Shoshanna kibbutz just two weeks before her baby was due. Till then, Ruth and the members of the kibbutz had guarded her carefully and seen to it that she had rest and comfort to protect the baby.

The Turkish police were not so considerate. Sarah was dragged from her cottage in the middle of the night, locked in a covered van, and driven over a bumpy, muddy road to the black basalt rock police station in Tiberias.

She was grilled without respite for twenty-four solid hours.

Where is your husband? … how did he make his escape? … how are you communicating with him? … you are smuggling out information and we know it … you are spying for the British. Come now, your husband wrote these papers in behalf of the British, you cannot deny it … what Jews in Palestine do you contact? …

Sarah answered the questions directly and without being ruffled. She admitted that Barak had fled because of his British sympathies, for it was no secret. She insisted she had

remained only to deliver her child. She made no further admissions to their charges. At the end of twenty-four hours Sarah Ben Canaan was the calmest person in the inspector’s office.

They began to make threats, and still Sarah remained calm and direct. At last she was grabbed and pulled into a forbidding-looking room with thick basalt walls and no windows. One small light burned over a wooden table. She was stretched out on her back, pinned down by five policemen, and her shoes were removed. The bottoms of her feet were lashed with thick branches. As they beat the soles of her feet they repeated the questions. Her answers were the same.

Spy! How do you get information out to Barak Ben Canaan? Speak! You are in touch with other British agents … who are they?

The pain was excruciating. Sarah stopped speaking altogether. She clenched her teeth and the sweat poured from her. Her courage fed the Turks’ anger. The whip ripped open the soles of her feet and blood spurted out.

“Speak!” they screamed. “Speak!”

She quivered and writhed in agony….

“Jew! Spy!”

At last she fell unconscious.

A bucket of water was thrown at her face. The beating and the questioning continued. She passed out again and they revived her again. Now they held her arms apart and placed red hot stones in her armpits.

“Speak! Speak! Speak!”

For three days and three nights the Turks tortured Sarah Ben Canaan. Even the Turks were awed by the woman’s endurance. At last they let her go as a token to her courage, for they had never seen anyone endure pain with such dignity. Ruth, who had been waiting and pleading in the station anteroom, carried Sarah back to Shoshanna on a donkey cart. ,With the first labor pains she allowed herself the luxury of screaming in anguish. She shrieked for all the times the Turks could not make her cry. Her battered body rebelled convulsively.

Her cries grew dimmer and weaker. No one believed she was going to live through it.

A son was born and Sarah Ben Canaan lived.

She hung between life and death for weeks. Ruth and the farmers of Shoshanna lavished every affection and care upon her. The remarkable courage that had kept the little black-eyed Silesian alive under Turkish torture and the pain of childbirth kept her alive now. Her will to see Barak again was so strong that death could not intervene.

It took over a year for her to mend. Her recovery was slow

and filled with pain. It was months before she was able to stand and walk on her battered feet. There was a limp that would never go away.

The child was strong and healthy. Everyone said he would grow up to be another Barak, for already he was lean and tall, although he had Sarah’s dark features. With the torment over, Sarah and Ruth awaited their men.

From Cairo to Gallipoli to England to America the brothers wandered. Each day they were tormented with fear for the lives of Sarah and Ruth. They were aghast at the tales being brought from Palestinian refugees of the terror of Jemal Pasha.

Early in 1917 the British Army swept out of Egypt and pushed the Turks back over the Sinai Peninsula to the doorstep of Palestine. At Gaza they were stopped cold. General Allenby then took command of the British forces and under him the British renewed the offensive. By the end of 1917 they had slashed into Palestine and captured Beersheba. On the heels of this victory the ancient gates of Gaza were stormed and Gaza fell. The British knifed up the coast to capture-Jaffa.

With Allenby’s successful campaign, the long-overdue, much-heralded, very costly, and highly overrated Arab revolt began. Faisal, son of the sherif of Mecca, brought in a few tribes from the desert when it was obvious that the Turks were losing. With the Ottomans on their backs, the Arabs dropped their cloak of neutrality so that they could share in the coming spoils. Faisal’s “rebels” made a good deal of noise and hacked up an unguarded rail line but never put it out of commission. Never once did Arab “rebels” engage in a major or minor battle.

At the ancient city of Megiddo the forces of Allenby and those of the Turks set for a battle. Here was the testing ground for a hundred conquering armies over five thousand years-Megiddo, where the stables of Solomon were to be found and where it was said that the second coming of Christ would take place. Megiddo commanded a ravine to the north which was a natural passageway. It had been the route of conquest since man had begun to record time.

Megiddo fell to Allenby!

By Christmas, less than a year after Allenby assumed command, he led his British forces into liberated Jerusalem!

The British rolled on to Damascus until the Turks were scattered and driven to oblivion. The fall of Damascus was the death knell of the Ottomans.

The Czar of Russia, who had wanted so badly to start a war with the Turks, never lived to realize his dream of a Rus—

turies of suppression, and he and his entire family were shot by a firing squad.

Although his empire was completely crushed and stolen and he had lost his position as the “Shadow of God” to a billion Moslems, Mohammed V was enjoying life in his harem as the war ended.

Barak Ben Canaan and his brother Akiva came home. The roses were in bloom and the land was alive and green and the waters of the Jordan plunged into the Sea of Galilee as they entered the gates of Shoshanna.

There was white in the great red beard of Barak and there was white in the black hair of Sarah as they stood before each other at the door to her cottage. He held her in his arms very softly, and in that moment all the hardships of the past few years faded away. His little Sarah took him by the hand. She limped slightly as she led him into the cottage. A scrappy, strapping, bright-eyed three-year-old boy looked up at him curiously.

Barak knelt before the boy and held him up in his powerful hands.

“My son,” Barak whispered, “my son.”

“Your son … Ari,” she said.

CHAPTER TWELVE: The Balfour Declaration was ratified by fifty nations.

During World War I the Yishuv population had been cut in half by the Turkish terror. In the wake of the war a new rash of pogroms broke out in eastern Europe.

The times that followed were exciting and vital for the Yishuv. The Third Aliyah was pouring in to escape persecution and filling the decimated ranks of the Yishuv.

For years the Zion Settlement Society had had its eye on the Jezreel Valley which made up the entire southern Galilee. It was mostly swampland with but a few poverty-stricken Arab villages. Most of the Jezreel belonged to a single effendi family, the Sursuks, who lived in Beirut. The Turks would not permit the Jews to buy into the Jezreel, but with the coming of the British and the lifting of land restrictions Barak Ben Canaan and two other land buyers traveled to Beirut and purchased an area from Haifa to Nazareth. The great Jezreel purchase was the first land deal of such magnitude in Palestine and the first one backed entirely by the funds of world Jewry. The Jezreel opened great opportunities for the establishment of more kibbutzim.

Old time kibbutzniks unselfishly left their farms to help

found new kibbutzim. Akiva and Ruth, and their newborn daughter Sharona, left the relative comfort of their beloved Shoshanna to help build a new kibbutz just north of Rosh Pinna. The settlement was named Ein Or, the Fountain of Light.

At last the Jews shared part of Barak Ben Canaan’s dream. Land was purchased deep in the Huleh Valley near the Syrian and Lebanese borders. They even farmed at his hill and built a kibbutz, the village of Giladi, close by. Barak’s old friend and comrade, Joseph Trumpledor, went up to Kfar Giladi to handle security.

Along with the growth of farming, Tel Aviv and the other cities grew. Jews began buying homes in Haifa above the city on Mount Carmel. In Jerusalem there was building beyond the old Walled City as the needs of the Yishuv called for larger headquarters and the religious elements joined with the Zionists in the spirit of redemption.

The British administration made many reforms. Roads were built. Schools and hospitals were erected. Justice came to the courts. Balfour himself traveled to Jerusalem and on Mount Scopus lay the cornerstone of a new Hebrew university.

To govern the Yishuv, the Jews elected a representative body. The Yishuv Central was a quasi-government to speak for the Jews, deal with the Arabs and British, and serve as a link to the Zion Settlement Society and to the world’s Zionists. The Yishuv Central and the Zion Settlement Society both moved to the new headquarters in Jerusalem.

Barak Ben Canaan, a senior respected citizen, was elected to the Yishuv Central, a position he held along with his work with the Zionists.

But there were ominous signs. Palestine was becoming the center of a gigantic power play.

The first act of this play was the publication of the secret Sykes-Picot Agreement, by which the French and the British sought to divide the Middle East between themselves-. The paper was first discovered in the files of the Czar by Russian revolutionaries and published to embarrass the British and French.

The Sykes-Picot Agreement directly contradicted earlier British promises to grant independence to the Arabs. The Arabs felt betrayed. Despite British efforts to soothe the situation, Arab fears proved justified later when, at the San Remo Conference, England and France cut the Middle East pie and England grabbed for herself the lion’s share. France snatched the Syrian province and a pipeline from the oil-rich Mosul fields.

Under Ottoman rule the Syrian province had also included

Palestine and Lebanon. France felt she was entitled to northern Palestine. The British were adamant. They too wanted a terminal from the Mosul oil fields at Haifa, and they argued that because of the Balfour Declaration and the unique position of Palestine as a promised Jewish homeland it should stay under British rule.

As a result, the French hired several tribes of Syrian Arabs to stir up trouble in Palestine and grab up as much of northern Palestine as possible until fixed boundaries were set.

Those Jews who had ventured into the Huleh to Kfar Giladi were caught in the trap. The French-hired Arabs, in an effort to dislodge them in order to fortify French border claims, attacked Tel Hai, the very hill that Barak and Akiva had crossed to come into Palestine.

Joseph Trumpledor, the legendary Jewish soldier of fortune, made a valiant stand at Tel Hai. He himself was killed but Tel Hai held and the Jews remained at Kfar Giladi and the Huleh Valley remained within the British mandate.

The next of France’s troubles came from Faisal, son of the sherif of Mecca and leader of the alleged Arab revolt in World War I. Faisal arrived in Damascus, sat himself down, and declared himself king of a new greater Arab state and the new head of the Moslems. The French chased him out of Syria. Faisal moved on to Bagdad where the British accorded him better treatment. They rewarded their faithful servant by creating a new state out of the Mesopotamian Province. They called the country Iraq and proclaimed Faisal king.

Faisal had a brother named Abdullah who had to be rewarded too. The British, without authorization from the League of Nations, formed another “country” from part of the Palestine mandate and named Abdullah its king. This country they called Trans-Jordan.

Both Faisal and Abdullah were arch enemies of Ibn Saud, who had refused to help the British in World War I.

So-the British fared well. They had their puppets in Iraq and Trans-Jordan-two creations. They had Egypt, the Suez Canal, the Mosul oil fields, and the Palestine mandate. In addition they had a dozen “protectorates” and sheikdoms around the Arabian Peninsula.

The British knew about Arab hate feuds and employed the proved method of “divide and rule.” Their Arab puppets were kept happy with the latest automobiles and with well-stocked harems.

Palestine was a different problem. It could not be governed by British puppets. The Balfour Declaration had been ratified by the entire world. The articles of mandate further bound the British to create a Jewish homeland. Further, the Jews

had presented them with a democratically elected quasi-government, the Yishuv Central, the only democratic body in the entire Middle East.

Barak Ben Canaan, Dr. Chaim Weizmann, and a dozen other Zionist leaders entered into a historic negotiation with Faisal, then leader of the Arab world. A mutual friendship pact was signed between Jews and Arabs in which each agreed to respect the aspirations of the other. The Arabs welcomed the return of the Jews and appreciated their historic rights to Palestine and their humanitarian rights to a homeland. Further, the Arabs stated openly that they welcomed the culture and the “Hebrew gold” the Jews were bringing in. Further, the Arabs in many quarters had proclaimed the Jews as redeemers.

In Palestine as elsewhere in the Arab world, there was no representative Arab government. When the British asked the Arabs to present their government, the usual inner-Arab squabble ensued. The various alliances of effendi families spoke for a small percentage of Arabs.

The most powerful effendi family was the El Husseini clan which owned land in the Jerusalem area. They were so feared by the other effendis that a power block was formed against them that made impossible any form of Arab representation.

The leader of the dreaded El Husseinis was the most vile, underhanded schemer in a part of the world known for vile, underhanded schemers. His name was Haj Amin el Husseini. Haj Amin had once fought on the side of the Turks. Now he saw the demise of the Ottoman Empire as a chance to gain power, just as a dozen Arab leaders in a dozen parts of the Arab world saw it. El Husseini was backed by a clan of devils.

Haj Amin’s first move was to grab Palestine. He saw his opening through the position of Mufti of Jerusalem. Jerusalem was second only to Mecca and Medina as a holy Moslem city. Under Ottoman rule the job of Mufti was mostly honorary. Constantinople as head of Islam was the true ruler of all Moslems. With the Ottomans gone and a Christian power ruling Palestine the position of Mufti suddenly became important. Enormous funds poured in from Moslems all over the world for the retention of holy places. Once these funds had been administered by Constantinople but now they would be at the discretion of the Mufti. If Haj Amin could seize the position he could use this money to further his own aspirations. There was another reason why he wanted to be Mufti. The Palestinian fellaheen were ninety-nine per cent illiterate. The only means of mass communication was the pulpit. The tendency of the fellaheen to become hysterical at the slightest provocation might become a political weapon.

One thing stood in the way of Haj Amin’s desire to become Mufti of Jerusalem. Moslem law declared the position could be held only by someone in the direct blood line of Mohammed. Haj Amin dodged this requirement by marrying a girl in the Mohammed line and holding this as valid enough fulfillment of the prerequisite.

When the old Mufti died, an election was held for the position. The effendis knew of Haj Amin’s ambitions and he came in fourth. This did not disturb him, for the El Husseini clan was busy terrorizing the three men who had drawn more votes and “persuaded” them to withdraw from office.

Haj Amm el Husseini became Mufti of Jerusalem by default.

He saw the return of the Jews as the greatest block to his plans.

On the Moslem holy day which celebrated the birth of Moses, Haj Amin el Husseini whipped up a mob of fellaheen with hatred for the Jews. The mob became hysterical and a pogrom was on!

They did not become so hysterical as to turn their wrath on the cities and kibbutzim where the Jews were able to defend themselves. Instead they slaughtered pious old defenseless Jews in the holy cities of Safed, Tiberias, Hebron, and Jerusalem.

Ruth was in Tiberias on her way back to Ein Or from a visit to Shoshanna when the rioting broke out. She and her daughter Sharona were caught and murdered.

Akiva was inconsolable. No one had ever seen a man with such grief. Barak rushed up to Ein Or and took his brother home to Tel Aviv; and as he had done as a boy, he maintained a day-and-night watch. It was months before Akiva came out of his grief. But it left a scar so ugly and deep within him it would never heal.

Many of the settlements had given up their arms to the British when they took over the mandate. Had the Arabs chosen to attack these settlements there would have been a slaughter. The British were responsible for maintaining order and the Yishuv waited for them to bring the Arabs under control and lead the culprits to justice. Such a thing would not have happened under the Turks, for as corrupt as they were they would not tolerate murder.

A commission of inquiry found Haj Amin el Husseini at fault. He was pardoned!

Immediately after the pardon the British Colonial Office issued a White Paper, or declaration of policy, limiting Jewish immigration to “economic absorption.” It was then that Winston Churchill became instrumental in taking over half the

mandate and creating Trans-Jordan from it. For the Yishuv it was the end of an era.

The bubble of British benevolence burst. The Yishuv Central and the Zion Settlement Society called a secret meeting in Tel Aviv which fifty of the leading members of the Yishuv attended.

Dr. Chaim Weizmann flew in from London to attend. Barak was there and Akiva, still in a state of bereavement, was there. Itzak Ben Zvi was there. A stocky, short, bushy-browed young leader in the second Aliyah named David Ben Gurion was there. Many felt that this fiery, Bible-quoting Zionist was destined to lead the Yishuv.

Avidan, a bald, block-like man of the Third Aliyah, was there. Avidan had come to Palestine after a momentous war record in the Russian Army. He was second in reputation as a fighter only to the martyr Trumpledor, and it was said he was destined to lead Jewish defense.

The meeting was called to order by Barak Ben Canaan. The cellar room was grim and tense as he spoke. A great crisis had fallen. Barak recalled the personal misfortune that all of them had suffered for being born Jews. Now, in the one place they sought freedom from persecution, a pogrom had occurred.

Dr. Chaim Weizmann led a group that argued that the British were the recognized authority and had to be dealt with legally and openly. Defense was a British responsibility.

Another group, ultra-pacifists, felt it would only invite trouble from the Arabs to arm the Jews.

At the other extreme, there were the activists led by Akiva, who demanded nothing less than swift and ruthless retribution. They argued that British protection and well meaning was an illusion; the British acted only in self-interest. Haggling, guilt documents, and the like would never take the place of a gun in an Arab’s mind.

The debate raged far into the night, never exhausting that endless capacity of Jews to argue. The British were damned and the British were praised. The pacifists begged caution while the activists called Palestine the “Twice Promised Land” -once to the Jews and once to the Arabs.

Between the two extremes in thinking, Ben Gurion, Ben Canaan, Avidan, and many of the others suggested a realistic middle course. While they recognized need to arm themselves, they wanted to further the Jewish position by legal means.

These men, on behalf of the Yishuv, decided to arm themselves quietly and train a militia in secret. This armed force would be used for one purpose and one purpose alone-defense. While this force existed, the official agencies of the Yishuv were to disclaim all knowledge of it publicly and privately co-operate with its growth. With this silent arm, the Jews would have an unseen partner in restraining the Arabs and in negotiating with the British.

Avidan, the fighter, was voted to head this new secret organization.

They called it Haganah, the Army of Self-Defense.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN: The Third Aliyah penetrated the newly purchased Jezreel, the Sharon Valley, and Samaria and into the hills of Judea and the Galilee and even south toward the desert, and called the earth back from its long-naked slumber. They brought in heavy machinery and introduced intensive agriculture through crop rotation and fertilization and irrigation. In addition to the grape, citrus, and olive export crops they raised grain and vegetables, and fruits and flax and poultry and dairy herds.

They experimented with anything and everything to find new crops and increased the yield of the old ones.

They penetrated to the Dead Sea. They went after alkaline land which had not produced a living thing for forty thousand years and they brought it back and made it produce.

They dug fishponds and farmed fish as a crop.

By the mid-1920s over fifty thousand Jews in a hundred colonies worked better than a half million dunams of redeemed land. Most of them wore the blue of the kibbutz.

A million trees were planted. In ten-twenty-thirty years the trees would fight off soil erosion. Tree planting became an obsession of the Yishuv. They left a trail of budding forests behind them wherever they went.

Many of the new kibbutzim and other settlements adopted the name of the Biblical site they occupied. Many new names sprang up over the ancient land and they had the sound of music. Ben Shemen, Son of Oil; and Dagania, the Cornflower on the Sea of Galilee; and Ein Ganim, the Fountain of the Gardens; and Kfar Yehezkiel, the Village of the Prophet Ezekiel; and Merhavia, which means the Wide Spaces of God; and Tel Yosef, the Hill of Joseph. There was Ayelet Hashahar, the Morning Star, which stood at the entrance to Barak’s beloved Huleh Valley. There was Gesher, the Bridge; and Givat Hashlosha, the Hill of the Three; and there were more and more being built every month.

The kibbutz movement, that unique child of necessity, be-came the key to all settlement. The kibbutzim could absorb vast numbers of new arrivals.

Yet not everyone could adapt to life on a kibbutz. Many women who fought for their independence didn’t like it once they had it. Others objected to the lack of privacy and others to the children’s houses. Although the entire Yishuv subscribed to the idea of national land and the conquest of self-labor, the main reason some could not stand kibbutz life was the lack of personal identification with a piece of land one could call one’s own. A splinter group broke off from the kibbutz movement. It was called the moshav movement. In a moshav each man had his own piece of land to work and his own house instead of the communal arrangement. As on the kibbutz all the civic functions were centrally run and all the heavy machinery was owned by the entire moshav. Certain base crops were farmed by the entire community and there was a central agency which did all the marketing and purchasing.

The main difference was the measure of individual freedom and the fact that a man’s family was in his own house and he ran his own farm in the way he saw fit. The first moshav was in the Jezreel Valley and was named after its Biblical site, Nahalal, the Heritage. The Nahalal pioneers faced the toughest swamp and did a miraculous job of redemption.

The drawback of the moshav movement in the over-all scheme was the working for personal profit and the inability of the moshav to absorb the numbers of new arrivals the kibbutz could; but both movements flourished and grew.

As the Yishuv grew, so did the complexities of the community. Barak Ben Canaan, a respected elder citizen, was never at rest. Zionism had a bulky machinery and there were a dozen different political philosophies inside the Yishuv. The dealings with the Arabs became more delicate after the riots and the dealings with the British became more confusing after their sudden departure from the Balfour Declaration and the articles of mandate. Barak’s wise council was sought in every quarter. Although there were no more outbreaks against the Jews, the atmosphere was one of uneasy calm. Every day there was a new story of an ambush, a sniping, or a theft. The tirades from the Moslem pulpit never ended. There was always tension in the air, for the sinister Mufti, Haj Amin el Husseini, lurked in the shadows.

One day in 1924 Barak returned to Tel Aviv after a particularly difficult week at the Yishuv Central in Jerusalem. He was always happy to come home to his three-room flat on Hayarkon Street overlooking the Mediterranean. This time he was delighted and surprised to see his old friend, Kammal,

the muktar of Abu Yesha awaiting him.

“For many years I have been meditating to try to solve the perplexing riddle of how to help my people. It grieves me to say this but there are no greater exploiters than the Arab effendis. They do not want things better for the fellaheen … it may endanger their own pleasures.”

Barak listened intently. This was a tremendous confession on the part of an Arab and one so enlightened as Kammal.

“I have watched the Jews come back and perform miracles on the land. We have nothing in common in religion or language or outlook. I am not even sure the Jews will not eventually take all the land. Yet … the Jews are the only salvation for the Arab people. The Jews are the only ones in a thousand years who have brought light to this part of the world.”

“I know this is difficult for you to say, Kammal …”

“Let me continue, please. If we can live side by side in peace although our worlds are far apart then we must eventually prosper from what you have done. I see no other way for the Arab people, Barak, and I don’t know if it is right or wrong.”

“We have never given you reason to doubt our sincerity in wanting peace… ”

“Yes … but there are powers greater than you and I who could bring us into conflict against our will.”

How true … how very true, Barak thought.

“Barak, I am going to sell the Zion Settlement Society that land by the Huleh Lake you have always wanted.”

Barak’s heart began to beat fast.

“It is not merely benevolence. I have conditions. You must allow the Arabs of Abu Yesha to learn your farming and sanitation methods. This can only be done slowly over a period of time. I want a portion of the village’s more deserving boys to be able to attend your school to learn to read and write.”

“That will all be done,” Barak said,

“There is one more condition.”

“And what is that?”

“You must come too.”

Barak rose and rubbed his great beard. “Me? Why me?”

“As long as you are there I know the conditions will be kept and that we will be able to live in peace. I have trusted you from the first day you entered Abu Yesha as a boy over thirty years ago.”

“I will think it over,” Barak said.

“And what will you tell Kammal?” Sarah asked. Barak shrugged. “What is there to say? We can’t go, of course. What a shame. For years I have been trying to set

him to sell that land. Now if I don’t go up there we will never get it.”

“It is a pity,” Sarah agreed and poured some tea.

Barak paced the floor unhappily. “After all, Sarah,” he mumbled, “we must face facts. I am needed at the Yishuv Central and the Settlement Society. It isn’t as if I was running a candy store on Allenby Road.”

“Of course not, dear,” Sarah said sympathetically. “You are vital in your work. The entire Yishuv needs you.”

“Yes,” he said, pacing again, “and we aren’t children any longer. I am past fifty and the land is going to be very very hard to redeem.”

“You are right, Barak. We are too old to pioneer. You have done your share in building this country.”

“Right! I’ll turn Kammal down.”

He sank into a chair and sighed deeply. He had not succeeded in convincing himself. Sarah stood over him and smiled. “You are mocking me, woman,” he said softly. “What’s the use?”

She sat on his lap and was almost lost in his greatness. His huge hands were amazingly gentle as they stroked her hair.

“I was thinking of you and Ari. It will be brutal work and the hardships will be great.”

“Shhhh… drink your tea.”

Barak resigned his position with the Zion Settlement Society, sold his apartment in Tel Aviv, and led twenty-five pioneer families out to the Huleh swamplands to build a moshav. They called it Yad El, the Hand of God.

They pitched tents below the fields of Abu Yesha and mapped out their task. No pioneers yet had faced a job so difficult. The Huleh swamp was deep, and full of forbidding tangles of thickly matted unyielding brush and papyrus which towered to heights of fifteen feet. The muck was alive with poisonous snakes, scorpions, and rats and a hundred other creatures. Wild boars and wolves lurked near the isolated base camp. Everything had to be brought in on muleback, including drinking and washing water.

Sarah was in charge of the base camp, the hospital tent, and the kitchen. Barak headed the work gangs which took to the swamps daily with shovels and picks.

In that first scorching summer they worked day after day, week after week, and month after month in hundred-degree heat, in waist-and neck-high water, slogging away the muck to start drainage channels. With machetes they hacked at the jungle growth until they couldn’t raise their arms. The women

Worked right in the swamps along with the men. Young Ari

Ben Canaan, ten years of age, one of the three children in the settlement, ran off the pails of sludge and ran in drinking water and food to the workers. The workdays were seven each week. The work hours were sunrise to sunset. Still each night they found the energy to sing a few songs of the fields and dance a hora before their six or seven hours of sleep.

At night there was the usual guard against robbers and animals.

It was a race to get the channels in before the winter rains. If the water didn’t drain off, the summer’s work would be wasted. Hundreds of Australian eucalyptus trees were put in to suck up water. Every kibbutz and moshav in the area sent over as many workers as they could spare each day to help the pioneers.

At night, by candlelight, Sarah and Barak took turns schooling Ari and the other two children.

The winter downpours came and all but swept the base camp into the swamp. After each downpour they rushed to the channels to keep the slush from blocking the runoff.

Even a man so strong and resolute as Barak Ben Canaan was beginning to wonder if they hadn’t attempted too much this time. Each time he looked at Ari and Sarah his heart bled. They were always covered with bug bites or suffering from dysentery or hunger or thirst.

And worse was the ravaging malaria. In that first summer and winter Sarah had five attacks and Ari four. The chills and fevers and deliriums all but killed them. Ari, like Sarah, took his pain in silence.

The swamp broke many of the families. Half the original group quit to return to the city to find an easier way.

And soon-Yad El had a graveyard. Two members died of malaria.

Yad El: the Hand of God. It may have been the hand of God that led them there but it was going to be the hands of men that licked the swamp.

For three solid years they beat back the swamp!

At last there was enough land to make twenty-five farms of two hundred dunams each. There was no time to gloat, for there were crops to be planted and homes to be built.

Young Ari Ben Canaan had shaken off the effects of malaria and the other illnesses and had become as sturdy as a rock. At the age of fourteen he could do a man’s day’s work.

When they moved into their cottage and the fields had been plowed and planted Barak was given a reward for his years of toil. Sarah told him she was pregnant again.

At the end of the fourth year two momentous things happened to Barak Ben Canaan. Sarah presented him with a baby daughter who had flaming red hair like his own. The

second occasion was the harvest of the first crop at Yad El.

At last the weary pioneers stopped their labor and took time to celebrate. What a celebration it was! Kibbutzniks and moshavniks from all over the area who had lent a hand at Yad El came to join in the celebration. Arabs from Abu Yesha came. There was gaiety for a week, each night ending at dawn as weary hora dancers collapsed with joy. Everyone came to look at Barak’s and Sarah’s new daughter. She was named Jordana after the river which flowed past the edge of Yad El.

As the celebration continued, Barak took his son An and saddled two horses and they rode up to Tel Hai to that place where he had crossed into the Promised Land from Lebanon forty years before. Tel Hai, the death place of Joseph Trumpledor, was a shrine of the Yishuv, Barak looked down from the hill to Yad El as he had sworn he would long ago.

“I took your mother up here before we were married,” he said to Ari. He put bis arm around his son’s shoulder. “Someday there will be two dozen settlements in this valley and it will be green all the year around.”

“Look how beautiful Yad El is from here, Father ”

The irrigation sprinklers were whirling and a school was under construction. They could see an enormous shed where the community had put a dozen pieces of heavy machinery There were paths of rose bushes and flowers and lawns and trees.

There was sadness, too, for the Yad El cemetery had already claimed five members,

As Kammal had hoped, the establishment of Yad El had a tremendous effect upon the Arabs of Abu Yesha. The creation of the moshav was in itself a startling revelation. Barak was true to his agreement and set up special schools for the Arabs to teach them sanitation, the use of heavy machinery and new farming methods. Their school was open to any Arab youngster of Abu Yesha who would attend. The Yad El doctor and nurse were always at the call of the Arabs.

Kammal’s favorite son was a youngster named Taha who was a few years younger than Ari. From the time of his birth Kammal had ingrained into Taha his own great desire to better the conditions of the fellaheen. As the coming muktar of Abu Yesha, Taha spent more time at Yad El than in his own village. He was the personal ward of the Ben Canaan family. Taha and Ari became close friends.

While Yad El and Abu Yesha lived in peace and proved Arab and Jew could exist side by side despite their cultural differences a slow mantle of fear was falling over many of

the other effendi families in Palestine. They were becoming

frightened at the spirit and progress of the Third Aliyah.

In the beginning the effendis had sold the Jews worthless swamps and rock-filled and eroded hills, eager to get their hands on Jewish gold and certain the land would continue its dormancy. The Jews turned around and performed miracles of redemption. Not only had the farms grown, tout cities were springing up all over Palestine.

The example of the Jews could be disastrous. What if the fellaheen began demanding education, sanitation, and medical facilities? What if the fellaheen, God forbid, were to take a fancy to the way the Jews governed themselves by equal votes of both men-and women! It could well wreck the perfect feudal system of the effendis!

To counter the progress of the Jews, the effendis harped on the ignorance, fears, and religious fanaticism of the fellaheen. They pounded the theme that the Jews were invaders from the West out to steal their fellaheen’s lands-even though the effendis had themselves sold this land. They maintained tension so that the fellaheen would not come into too close contact with the new ideas.

After many years without a major incident Haj Amin el Husseini moved again. This time he concocted a coldblooded fraud aimed at driving the Arabs wild. The year was 1929.

The site of the Dome of the Rock or the Mosque of Omar in Jerusalem was worshiped as holy ground by the Moslems as the point where their prophet Mohammed ascended to heaven. On this very site stood the one remaining wall of the Great Jewish Temple which had been destroyed for a second time in a.d. 76 by the Romans. This wall of the Temple was the holiest of all Jewish holy places. Pious Jews gathered before the wall to pray and to weep for the past glory of Israel. From their tears it became known as the “Wailing Wall.”

The Mufti circulated faked pictures showing Jews at the Wailing Wall preparing to “desecrate” the Arab holy place of the Dome of the Rock. The fanatic Moslem fellaheen started another outbreak supported by effendi and Husseini Jew baitings. Again the riots hit the defenseless old Jews of the holy cities. The slaughter was far greater than the Mufti-inspired riots of a decade before. The rioting spread against some of the weaker settlements and on to the roads, and casualties mounted into the thousands on both sides. The British again appeared helpless to stop the slaughter.

They sent a commission of inquiry. The commission squarely placed the blame on Arab shoulders. Then, by great paradox, they completely ignored the Balfour Declaration and the

articles of mandate and suggested that Jewish land buying and irnmigration be restricted to “soothe Arab fears.”

CHAPTER FOURTEEN: In the same year as the riots, 1929, the farmers of Yad El made an agreement with the grain miller of the Arab village of Aata, some ten kilometers away.

Barak gave Ari the job of going to Aata to have their grain milled. Sarah objected to sending a fourteen-year-old boy out on the roads alone with the tension of the riots all around. Barak was adamant on the subject. “Neither Ari nor Jordana is going to live in fear like ghetto Jews.”

Ari felt very proud of the trust as he jumped onto the seat of the donkey cart. It was loaded with a dozen bags of grain. He set out down the road for Aata.

He was spotted the instant he entered the village by a dozen Arab boys who were lying around near the coffeehouse. They waited till he turned the corner, then trailed him to the miller’s.

Ari went about his business, flushed with his own importance. He carried on his transactions in perfect Arabic, which he had learned from his good friend Taha. The grain was crushed to flour. Ari watched closely to make certain that the sacks were filled full and with the same grain, not inferior Arab wheat. The miller, hoping to gain a sack on the deal, was perplexed by the youngster’s sharpness. Ari headed back toward Yad El.

The Arab boys who had been waiting quickly made a deal with the miller to steal all Ari’s wheat and sell it to him. The boys scampered out of Aata by a short cut and set up an ambush and road block.

In a few moments Ari rode along the road right into the trap. They sprang out from cover, hurling stones at him. Ari whipped the donkey but moved only a few feet before the road block stopped him. He was stoned from the cart and knocked half senseless to the ground. Four of the attackers pounced on him and pinned him down while the others pulled the grain from the cart and made off with it.

The boy returned to Yad El late that night.

Sarah opened the door, took one look at his blood-streaked face and torn clothing, and screamed. He stood there wordless for a moment, then clenched his teeth and pushed past his mother and went into his room and locked the door.

He refused to open it despite her pleas until Barak returned home later from a moshav meeting.

He stood before his father. “I let you down … I lost the wheat,” he said through puffed and distorted lips.

“It is I who have let you down, son,” Barak said.

Sarah rushed over to Ari and threw her arms around him. “Never, never, never send this boy out alone …” She led him off’ to clean him up. Barak did not answer.

The next morning after breakfast, before Barak headed for the fields, he took Ari by the hand and led him out to the barn. “I have neglected some of your education,” Barak said, and pulled down his old bull whip from a peg.

Barak built a dummy and nailed it to the fence. He showed Ari how to judge distance, aim, and swing. With the sound of the first crack Sarah came running from the house with Jordana in her arms.

“Have you gone mad teaching a boy like that to use a bull whip?”

“Shut up, woman!” Barak roared in a tone she had never heard in over twenty years of marriage. “The son of Barak Ben Canaan is a free man! He shall never be a ghetto Jew. Now get out of here … we have business.”

From morning to night Ari practiced using the bull whip. He cut the dummy to shreds. He aimed at rocks and tins and bottles until he could whirl around and split them with a flick of the wrist. He threw the whip so often that by the end of each day he could barely lift his arm.

At the end of two weeks, Barak loaded up the donkey cart with another dozen bags of grain. He put his arm around his son’s shoulder and led him to the cart and handed him the bull whip. “Take the grain to Aata and have it milled.”

“Yes, Father,” Ari said softly.

“Remember one thing, son. You hold in your hand a weapon of justice. Never use it in anger or revenge. Only in defense.”

Ari jumped onto the cart and started for the gate of Yad El toward the main road. Sarah went into her bedroom and wept softly as she watched her son disappear down the road.

Barak did something he had not done for many, many years. He sat down and read the Bible.

The Arab ambush struck again when Ari was a mile outside Aata on his way back to Yad El. This time Ari’s eyes were sharp and his body alerted for danger. Remembering his father’s words, he remained cold, calm. As the first rocks flew at him he leaped from the cart, spotted the Arab leader, and with a lightning flick sent the mighty bull whip whistling through the air and wrapped it around the boy’s neck and flung him to the ground. Then Ari unwrapped the whip and

brought down a lash that snapped so sharply it tore his foe’s flesh apart. It was all over that quickly.

Barak Ben Canaan’s face paled as the sun began to set and Ari had still not come back. He stood trembling by the gate of Yad El. Then he saw the donkey cart coming down the road and his face broke into a large smile. Ari stopped for his father.

“Well, Ari. How was your trip?”

“Fine.”

“I’ll unload the flour. You had better go right in and see your mother. She was worried for some reason or the other.”

By 1930 the riots had died down. Abu Yesha and Yad El stayed out of trouble altogether. The majority of villages out of the Mufti’s sphere of influence did not participate in the disturbances.

Ari Ben Canaan was not only built like his father but acted very like him too. He was deep within himself and he had Barak’s quiet, stubborn ways. He saw the value of learning about his Arab neighbors. Taha was always one of his closest friends and he treated all other Arabs with understanding and compassion.

Ari fell in love with a girl named Dafna whose family had a farm half a mile away. No one was quite sure when it had happened but everyone was quite sure that Ari and Dafna would marry someday, for they had eyes only for each other.

Little redheaded Jordana was a spirited and rebellious girl. In many ways Jordana typified the children being born to the settlers of Palestine. Their parents who had lived in ghettos and had known the fear and degradation of being Jews were determined to purge this horror from the new generation. They bent over backward to give the children freedom and to make them strong.

At the age of fifteen Ari was a member of Haganah, the secret Army of Self-Defense. At the age of thirteen, Dafna could handle half a dozen weapons. For if this was a new generation and a new type of Jew it was also a generation born with a mission even greater than the missions of the Second and Third Aliyah.

The Haganah had grown strong enough to be a restraining force on the Mufti-inspired disturbances, but they were unable to erase the cause of these riots-only the British could do that.

Again British commissions of inquiry came and again the Arabs were whitewashed.

British timidity caused the Mufti to grow bolder.

Shortly after the riots abated, Haj Amin el Husseini called a conference of Moslem leaders to Jerusalem. They arrived from all over the world. He formed a federation, with himself as head, and advertised his fight to save Islam from the British and Jews.

The early friendships, the fact that the Jews had raised the standard of living of the entire Arab community, and the fact that Palestine had lain neglected and unwanted for a thousand years in fruitless despair until the Jews rebuilt it was all forgotten in the face of the Mufti’s tirades. The destruction of the Jewish homeland was made a “holy” mission of Pan-Arabism.

The British were subjected to the next tirade. They had lied about granting independence to the Arabs. They supported the Jews against Arabs. And as the Arab demagogues ranted and raged the British took it all in silence.

In the year of 1933 another great calamity befell the Jews as Adolf Hitler and the Nazis ascended to power. Hitler moved first against the Jewish “professional” people. The wiser ones among them left Germany immediately and many sought sanctuary in Palestine.

Once again the need for a national home and for Zionism were confirmed. Jew baiting could flare up in any part of the world at any time. Herzl had known it and every Jew knew it.

The German Jews who fled Hitler were different from the ghetto and eastern European Jews. They were not devout Zionists but had largely been assimilated into German society. They were not pioneers and merchants but doctors and lawyers and scientists and artisans.

In 1933 the Arab leaders called a general strike of all Arabs to protest the new Jewish immigration. There was an attempt to stir up more rioting. But both efforts failed. Most Arabs who had done business with the Jews continued to do so for they were economically dependent on one another and many communities like Yad El and Abu Yesha lived in close harmony with each other. Furthermore, the Haganah stood ready to halt a repetition of the 1929 disturbances.

The British solution to the general strike was more talk and more commissions of inquiry. In outright appeasement of the Arab threats the British this time definitely limited immigration and land selling by the Jews. At the very moment when the Yishuv needed open immigration so desperately the British forgot their promises.

The Yishuv Central through the Haganah fought back in the only way they could … Aliyah Bet.

The Mufti maintained his pressure on the British until the

British sent the Royal Navy out to stop Aliyah Bet runners and to set up a blockade of the Palestinian coast.

The strength of Haj Amin e] Husseini grew every day. He found a powerful ally for himself-Adolf Hitler. For the Germans, who had their own aspirations in the Middle East, the situation was perfect. What could be more fortunate for the German propaganda machine than to be able to pump the theme that the Jews of Palestine were stealing the Arab lands just as they had tried to steal Germany. Jew hating and British imperialism-what music to the Mufti’s ears! The Germans were in luck. And Haj Amin el Husseini saw at long long last the instrument for seizing control of the Arab world.

German money showed up in Cairo and Damascus. The Germans are your friends! Arab lands for Arab people! Throw out the British and their Jewish henchmen! In many high places in Cairo and Bagdad and in Syria the Arabs clasped hands with Nazis in friendship.

As the storm gathered the Yishuv still held one trump card-the Haganah! Although this secret army was officially divorced from the Yishuv Central its existence and strength was an open secret. The Jews pretended it was not there but the British knew it existed. More important, the Mufti knew it existed.

It had grown from nothing to a force of over twenty-five thousand men and women. It was almost entirely a militia with but a few dozen “paid” full-time leaders. It had a small but deadly efficient intelligence service, which not only had the open cooperation of many British officers but could purchase Arab spies for next to nothing. Every city, village, kibbutz, and moshay had its Haganah setup. A secret code word could send a thousand men and women to hidden arms caches within minutes.

Avidan, the bald-headed square-built ex-soldier who headed Haganah, carefully built it up in a decade and a half under the noses of the British. The efficiency of the organization was terrifying; they ran a secret radio, carried on the Aliyah Bet immigration, and their intelligence network spread throughout the world where agents purchased arms to smuggle back to the Yishuv.

Arms were smuggled into Palestine in a hundred ways. Hiding them in heavy building equipment was a favorite method. The roller of a steam roller as often as not contained a hundred rifles. Every crate, piece of machinery, and even food tins and wine bottles coming into Palestine were potential munitions carriers. It was impossible for the British to halt the smuggling without inspecting every item, and many

British were turning their backs at the docks to let the arms through.

The entire Yishuv was behind the arms-smuggling movement, but even so they could not bring in heavy weapons or sufficient numbers of first-class small arms. Most of what came in were old rifles and pistols discarded or outmoded in other countries. No arsenal in the world contained the conglomeration of weapons the Haganah had. Every known rifle and pistol was represented in some numbers. A thousand ingenious varieties of mortars, Sten guns, and grenades were manufactured in secret. The Haganah arsenal even included walking canes which could fire a single shot.

Once inside Palestine every desk, chair, table, icebox, bed, and sofa was a potential hiding place for weapons. Every Jewish home had at least one false-bottom drawer, hidden closet, trap door, or trick wall.

Arms were moved about inside the spare tires of buses and in market baskets and under donkey carts. The Haganah played on British “respectability” by having the children run weapons and by using the best hiding place of all-under women’s skirts.

In the building of the Haganah the kibbutz proved not only the answer to redemption but the answer to Jewish arms. Because of the communal character of the kibbutz it was the best place to train young soldiers. A dozen or two dozen could be slipped in easily among three or four hundred members and absorbed by the community. The kibbutz was the best place to hide the larger arms caches and the best place to manufacture small arms. It was also the best place to absorb newly arrived illegal immigrants. From the kibbutzim came the majority of the outstanding Haganah leaders.

The one great strength of the Haganah lay in the fact that its authority was accepted without question by the entire Yishuv. A Haganah command was a positive order. Avidan and the other Haganah leaders were very careful to use their army only in self-defense. When the 1933 general strike broke out Avidan warned that the Haganah would not try to conquer the Palestine Arabs. “Palestine will be conquered with our sweat.” It was an army of restraint.

There were many in the Haganah who felt that it should not be held in such restraint. These were activists who demanded swift retribution.

Akiva was one of these. Officially he was a dairy farmer in the kibbutz of Ein Or but in reality he was a high man in the Haganah in charge of all defense in the Galilee.

The years had aged Akiva far more than his brother Barak. His face looked tired and his beard was nearly gray. He never fully recovered from the death of Ruth and Sharona.

It was a bitterness he carried with him every day of his life.

He was the unofficial leader of the fringe element within the Haganah who demanded more action. As time went on and the trouble heightened, Akiva’s group became very militant. Outside Palestine, splinter groups formed from the main. Zionist body to support them.

When the British threw the blockade along the coast of Palestine, Akiva could stand it no longer. He called a rump session of his supporters within the Haganah. They were all angry men like himself and they reached a decision that rocked the Yishuv to its core.

In the spring of 1934 Barak received an urgent call from Avidan to come to Jerusalem.

“A terrible thing has happened, Barak,” Avidan said. “Your brother, Akiva, has withdrawn from the Haganah and taken dozens of our top men with him. Hundreds of rank-and-file people are beginning to follow.”

When the initial shock had passed, Barak sighed. “He has threatened to do that for years. I have been amazed at the restraint he has shown till now. Akiva has been smoldering for decades, ever since our father was killed. He has never recovered from his wife’s death.”

“You know,” Avidan said, “that half my work in the Haganah is to hold our boys back. If we let them, they’d make war on the British tomorrow. Your feelings, my feelings, and Akiva’s feelings are the same, but he can destroy us all. One reason we have been able to achieve what we have in Palestine is that despite our differences we have acted in unison in our outside dealings. The British and the, Arabs have always had to negotiate as though with a single person. Now Akiva has a hot-tempered gang of activists. If they start terror tactics the entire Yishuv will have to answer for his actions.”

Barak traveled back north to Ein Or, which was not far from his own moshav of Yad El. Ein Or, like most of the older kibbutzim, had been turned into a veritable garden. As senior member and one of the founders Akiva had a separate little two-room cottage of his own which was filled with books. He even had his own radio and toilet-a rarity in kibbutz life. Akiva loved Ein Or as he had loved Shoshanna before it. Barak had wanted him to live with them at Yad El after the death of Ruth and his daughter but Akiva loved kibbutz life and remained, unhealthily, with their ghosts.

Barak talked softly to his brother. Akiva had heard all the arguments before. He was nervous and restless at the prospect of a showdown with his brother.

“So, the gentlemen of Yishuv Central have sent you around

to cry for them. They are becoming experts at appeasement.”

“I would have come without their invitation when I heard what an insane thing you have done,” Barak said.

Akiva paced the room again. Barak studied him. He was alive with the same angry fire he had had as a boy. “All I am doing is something the Yishuv Central recognizes and is afraid to do. Sooner or later even they are going to have to face the facts of life. The British are our enemy.”

“We do not believe that, Akiva. All told we have done very well under British rule.”

“Then you are a fool.”

“I have been wrong before. The British represent the constituted government of Palestine.”

“While they cut our throats,” Akiva mocked. “The gentlemen of the Yishuv Central carry their brief cases to conferences and read their little notes and findings and bow and scrape while the Mufti and his cutthroats run wild. Do you see the Arabs negotiating?”

“We will achieve our aims legally.”

“We will achieve our aims by fighting for them!”

“Then if we must fight, let us fight as a unified people. You put yourself in the category of the Mufti by starting a band of outlaws. Have you ever thought of the consequences if the British leave Palestine? No matter how bitter your feelings … and mine … the British are still our greatest instrument for achieving statehood.”

Akiva waved his hand in disgust. “We will achieve statehood the same way we redeemed this land … with our sweat and blood. I refuse to sit around and wait for British handouts.”

“For the last time, Akiva … don’t do this thing. You will only give our enemies an opportunity to point their fingers at us and increase their lies.”

“Aha!” Akiva cried. “Now we have come to the guts of the matter! Jews must play the games by the rules. Jews cannot be wrong! Jews must beg and appeal! Jews must turn their cheeks!”

“Stop it!”

“God no!” Akiva cried. “Whatever you do, don’t fight! You wouldn’t want the Germans and the Arabs and the British to think you are bad boys.”

“I said stop it.”

“Ghetto Jew Barak. That is what you are and that is what the Yishuv Central is. Well, let me tell you something else, dear brother. Here is one Jew who may be wrong but intends to live. So let us be wrong in the eyes of the whole damned world.”

Barak trembled with rage. He sat motionless to try to hide

his anger. Akiva ranted on. Was Akiva really wrong? How much pain and degradation and betrayal and suffering must a man take before fighting back?

Barak got out of his chair and walked to the door.

“Tell Avidan and the gentlemen of the Yishuv Central and all the little negotiators that Akiva and the Maccabees have a message for the British and the Arabs … ‘an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth!’ ”

“You are never to set foot in my house again,” Barak said.

The two brothers glared at each other for many moments. Tears welled in Akiva’s eyes. “Not set foot in your house?”

Barak was frozen.

“We are brothers, Barak. You carried me to Palestine on your back.”

“And I have lived to regret it.”

Akiva’s lips trembled. “I am a Jew who loves Palestine no less than you do. You condemn me for following the dictates of my conscience …”

Barak stepped back into the room. “It is you, Akiva, and your Maccabees who have turned brother against brother. Since we were children I have heard your convenient quotations from the Bible. Well … perhaps you had better read again about the Zealots who turned brother against brother and divided Jewish unity and brought on the destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans. Maccabees you call yourselves. I call you Zealots.” Barak again walked to the door.

“Remember one thing, Barak Ben Canaan,” Akiva said. “Nothing we do, right or wrong, can ever compare to what has been done to the Jewish people. Nothing the Maccabees do can even be considered an injustice in comparison to two thousand years of murder.”

CHAPTER FIFTEEN: Yad El blossomed into a Garden of Eden. The moshav continued to push back the swamps so that its cultivable land was increased to bring in another hundred families. There were two dozen pieces of heavy machinery and an experimental station. The entire moshav worked the fishponds as a joint crop.

The streets of Yad El were green all year round and there was a blaze of colors in the spring and autumn. Yad El had a primary and secondary school, large community center with a swimming pool, library and theater, and a small hospital with two full-time doctors.

The greatest event of all occurred when electricity was brought in! The celebration throughout the Huleh Valley

settlements made all other celebrations look small as the

lights went on in Ein Or and Kfar Giladi and Ayelet Hashahar and Yad El simultaneously.

In the same year, the Jews of Yad El helped bring tap water to Abu Yesha, making it the first Arab village in all of Palestine to have it. Yad El extended some of the electric irrigation pumps into Abu Yesha fields to show the Arabs how to farm intensively through irrigation.

To show his gratitude, Kammal gave several dunams of a hillside site to the Zion Settlement Society when he learned the Jews were looking for land in the area for a youth village.

Ari Ben Canaan was the pride of his father’s heart. By the age of seventeen he was six feet tall and had the strength of a lion. Besides Hebrew and English he mastered Arabic, German, French, and Yiddish, which Sarah slipped back to in moments of anger or excitement.

Ari loved farming.

He and Dafna and most of the moshav’s youngsters belonged to a youth group, as did most of the young people in the Yishuv. They would tramp the length and breadth of Palestine to the sites of ancient battles and tombs and cities. They climbed the mountain at Masada where the Hebrews held out against the Roman siege for over three years and they tramped through the desert over the route of Moses and the twelve tribes. They wore the traditional blue shirts and shorts and they were always filled with the songs and dances and ideals of the redemption of the homeland.

Dafna had developed into a buxom, earthy, attractive girl filled with love for the son of Barak Ben Canaan. It appeared that Ari and Dafna would marry at an early age. They would either open a new farm at Yad El or travel out with a youth group to begin a new moshav or kibbutz as was sometimes the tradition after schooling. But as the troubles mounted in Palestine, Ari and Dafna had less and less time to spend together. Ari had shown remarkable skill and leadership within the Haganah and despite his tender age was considered by Avidan one of the most promising soldiers in all of Palestine. In fact, most of the outstanding soldiers were in their late teens.

By the age of seventeen Ari had set up defenses at Yad El, Ein Or, and half a dozen kibbutzim and had done so well that he went into Haganah work almost full time.

When the illegal immigration war with the British began, Ari was called to duty at the sites where Aliyeh Bet ships beached. Ari worked at getting the illegal immigrants hidden in kibbutzim and at collecting the visas and passports of “tourists” who had entered Palestine.

When he had a day or two free he would often phone

Yad El and Dafna would hitchhike to Tel Aviv to meet him. They could hear the new philharmonic symphony which had been formed largely with German musicians and whose initial concert was conducted by Toscanini-or they could go to the art exhibits or lectures at the Youth Headquarters-or merely walk along Ben Yehuda Street and Allenby Road where crowds sipped coffee in the sidewalk cafes. Or perhaps they would stroll along the quiet beaches north of Tel Aviv. Each separation became more and more difficult. Ari did not wish to marry until he could get a parcel of land and build a home. With trouble constant and his services more and more in demand it seemed as though that time would never come. They loved each other very much. By the time she was seventeen and he was nineteen she had given herself to him. Now in their rendezvous they spent their few hours discovering the wonder of each other.

The tension which began with the German Aliyah in 1933 hit a peak in the year 1935 when the Jews succeeded in bringing in more immigrants than ever before, legally and illegally. Just as the Second Aliyah brought ideals and leaders and the Third Aliyah brought the pioneers-the German Aliyah resulted in a tremendous cultural and scientific spurt in the Yishuv.

The effendis who were watching the continued progress of the Jews became frantic-frantic enough, in fact, to unite their dissident political groups for the first time and as a unified body make definite demands on the British that all selling of land to Jews and all Jewish immigration be stopped.

Early in 1936 Yishuv Central requested several thousand visas from the British to conform with the growing anxiety of the Jews in Germany. Under violent Arab pressure the British granted less than a thousand visas.

The Mufti, seeing the growing British weakness, made his move at last for control of Palestine. In the spring of 1936 he stirred up a new series of riots. They began in Jaffa with the fable that the Jews were snatching all the Arabs in Tel Aviv and murdering them, and they spread from city to city. As usual, the majority of the victims were defenseless old Orthodox Jews in the holy cities. Immediately after the first outbursts Haj Amin announced the formation of a Higher Arab Committee, with himself as head, for the purpose of “directing” another Arab general strike in protest against the “pro-Jewish” British policies.

This time the Mufti moved after careful preparation. The instant the Higher Arab Committee was announced, the El Husseini mob, flanked by hired thugs, fanned out throughout the Arab community to “enforce” the general strike, and to see that a full boycott was carried out. A wanton rash of

assassinations began systematically to wipe out any known Arab opponent of the Mufti. Although the rebellion was supposedly directed against the Jews and the British, its major objective was to kill off all the Mufti’s political opponents.

Kammal, the long-time friend of Barak Ben Canaan, and the muktar of Abu Yesha, was made to pay for his friendship with the Yishuv. Husseini’s henchmen found the aging muktar kneeling at prayer in the little mosque by the stream in his village-and they slit his throat.

Taha, the son, was whisked away into Yad El to live in the Ben Canaan home where he would be safe. The Mufti’s blood orgy continued to enforce the general strike and the boycott of the Jews. Without a market the Arab crops rotted in the fields. The port of Jaffa and the commerce around it ground to a near halt. The strike was paralyzing the Arab population, but they were helpless against the Mufti. Haj Amin el Husseini again used his pulpit to twist the blame upon the Jews; and as the Arab hardship heightened, so did their desperation and anger. Soon the Arabs began to dare to attack settlements and burn fields and steal crops. When an isolated and unarmed Jew was found his murder was always followed by decapitation, dismemberment, eye gouging, and the most primitive brutalities.

As the atrocities increased, Avidan called upon the Yishuv to exercise self-restraint. The Arab population was being victimized, he declared, and no good would come of returning their cruelties.

It was a different story with Akiva and the Maccabees. Soon after the Maccabees broke from the Haganah the British outlawed them and forced them underground. The British, to some extent, turned their backs on the Haganah because they knew about the policy of self-restraint and the fact that the Haganah fought only in self-defense. Furthermore, the Haganah never fought against the British. Not so the Maccabees. They were avowed enemies of the British and they had no intention of exercising restraint. The Maccabees, therefore, had to move into the cover of the three major cities: Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, and Haifa.

Akiva’s followers tried to trade terror for terror but they were not large or effective enough to keep pace with the Mufti’s thugs. Although they were officially disclaimed by the Jewish leadership, many of the Yishuv were happy over the Maccabee actions.

Once Haj Amin el Husseini had his hands on Palestine’s throat, he moved ahead with the next phase of his plan. He sent out a fanatically worded appeal for all Arabs of all nations to join the common struggle to liberate Palestine

from the clutches of british imperialism and Zionism

Husseini gangsters entered Arab villages and demanded fighters for attacks on Jewish settlements. Most of the beleaguered fellaheen had absolutely no desire to fight but they were too terrified of the Mufti to refuse.

From outside of Palestine came an answer to the Mufti’s appeal. An Iraqi army officer named Kawukji saw the Palestine “revolt” as his long awaited chance to seize power and make a fortune as the Mufti’s military arm. Kawukji was obsessed with himself; his egomania knew no bounds. He purchased many fine new uniforms with all types of fancy decorations and declared himself generalissimo of the army of liberation. With money extorted from the Palestinian Arabs by the Mufti, Kawukji went about recruiting his army outside the country. He got together a band of thieves, dope runners, white slavers, and the like with the lure of the many Jewish women they could rape and the “Hebrew gold” they could loot. They were as vicious, degenerate, and brutal a gang as had ever been assembled. Under Generalissimo Kawukji they poured in from Lebanon to save the great Islam martyr, Haj Amin el Husseini.

Kawukji used safe and simple tactics. He would set up a road ambush after first having made certain of an avenue of retreat. When a bus, unarmed vehicle, or party small enough not to fight passed by, the Arabs would spring, loot, and flee.

Soon Kawukji and the Mufti’s gangs had the entire country terrorized. The Arab community was defenseless, the British were inept and reluctant to fight, and the Jews would fight only in self-defense.

Instead of moving to stamp out the Arab attacks, the British were nearly comical in their efforts. A few times they swept in on suspected bandit hide-out villages and assessed collective fines, and once or twice they even destroyed a few villages. But they went into a defensive shell. They built over fifty enormous concrete police forts that encircled all of Palestine. Each fort was capable of holding from a few hundred up to several thousand troops. Each fort was to control its own immediate area. They were designed by a man named Taggart and built by the Jews.

The Taggart forts that ringed besieged Palestine were a system as old as the land itself. In Biblical days the Jews used twelve mountains. A fire from one could be seen by the next and relayed to the next. The Crusaders adhered to the same theory by erecting fortified castles each within sight of the next castle or walled town. Even the Jews now put each new agricultural settlement within sight of a neighbor.

At night the British buttoned up in their Taggart forts and staved out. By day their raids were ineffective. The moment a

convoy was spotted leaving a fort the word was passed along the countryside. Every Arab in every field was a potential spy. By the time the British reached their objective, the opposition had disappeared into thin air.

Yet, under this unbelievable pressure, the Jews continued to smuggle in immigrants and build new settlements for them. On the first day of a new settlement several hundred farmers and builders from all the neighboring settlements would gather on the breaking grounds at sunrise. Between sunup and sundown they quickly constructed a tower with searchlight facilities and generator and a small stockade around it. By night of the same day it would be completed and they would disappear to their own settlements, leaving the new settlers inside the stockade with a small guard of Haganah men.

Ari Ben Canaan, just over twenty years of age, became an expert on the “tower and blockade” settlements. He generally commanded the Haganah unit which stayed behind to teach the new settlers the trick of handling Arab infiltrators and attackers and how to use their weapons. Almost every new settlement underwent an Arab attack. The presence of the Haganah and their ability ultimately to repulse the attackers was a steadying influence upon the newcomers. Not Ari or any other Jewish leader ever lost a “tower and stockade” settlement. At the end of a few weeks in one place, Ari would take his unit on to the next new “tower and stockade” settlement under construction.

The settlers worked out from the stockades slowly, opening up their land a bit at a time. They erected permanent buildings and slowly expanded into full-fledged villages. If the settlement was a kibbutz the first building would be the children’s house. It was always built in the inner line of defense so that it would be the last building that could be reached by attackers.

Avidan said that the “tower and stockade” farms were a fulfillment of the Biblical story of the rebuilding of Jerusalem with one hand on the spear and one hand on the trowel. The prophet Nehemiah had said … “half my servants wrought in the work and the other half held the spears.” And so it was that they worked their land and built their homes with a rifleman behind every plow and every carpenter.

The Arabs became so bold that even the British could not go on ignoring the terror. Haj Amin and Kawukji had made them all look like jackasses. At last they plunged into action and broke up the Higher Arab Committee and issued a warrant for the arrest of Haj Amin. The Mufti fled ahead of

British police into the Mosque of Omar, the holiest Moslem shrine in Palestine.

The British balked and dared not enter the mosque for fear of inciting a “holy” uprising on the part of the entire Moslem world. After a week of hiding out, Haj Amin, dressed as a woman, fled and escaped to Jaffa, where a boat carried him to Lebanon.

Everyone breathed a great sigh of relief as the Mufti of Jerusalem left Palestine-especially the Arab community. The riots and attacks abated and the British again renewed their commissions of inquiry and investigations.

The Arabs boycotted the British inquiries except to send a few of their most fanatical members in to read prepared speeches. Although Haj Amin had left the scene, the El Husseinis were still on hand. At the commissions of inquiry the Arabs made more and more outrageous claims against the Jews, who paid eighty-five per cent of all the taxes despite the fact that the Yishuv was smaller than the Arab community.

And so, after another survey of the situation, the British took a new tack and recommended that Palestine be divided into two separate states. The Arabs were to get the lion’s share and the Jews a strip of land from Tel Aviv to Haifa and those parts of the Galilee they had reclaimed.

The Yishuv Central, the world Zionists, and the Jews in Palestine were tired of the continued bloodshed, the growing Arab fanaticism, and the ever more apparent British betrayal. Once the mandate for the Jewish homeland had included both sides of the Jordan River-now the British were offering but an iota. Yet, despite everything, the Jews decided to accept the proposal.

The British pointed out to the Arabs that it would be wise to accept, because the area allotted to the Jews couldn’t hold many more immigrants. But the Arabs wanted nothing more or less than that every Jew be thrown into the sea. Haj Amin el Husseini was the treasure of Islam and the martyred victim of British and Zionist injustice. From Beirut he renewed the rebellion.

Taggart, who had built the British system of forts, erected an electrified barbed-wire wall along the Lebanese border to stop the Mufti’s thugs and arms runners. At intervals he constructed more blockhouse forts to interlace with the wall.

One of the forts on the Taggart wall was erected above Abu Yesha and Yad El at the site believed to be the burial ground of Queen Esther. It became known as Fort Esther.

The Taggart wall slowed the Arab infiltration but could not stop it.

The Haganah, which had contained itself so long, became very restless and the Yishuv began to wonder when the Yishuv Central would let the Haganah fight. Under this growing pressure, Ben Gurion finally agreed to listen to a plan advanced by Avidan. In turn the Zion Settlement Society purchased a piece of land on the northern extremity of the Galilee, right on the Lebanese border, at a point where Haganah intelligence suspected most of the Arab infiltration to be taking place.

Shortly after the land purchase Ari Ben Canaan and two other top young men in Haganah were called to Tel Aviv to Avidan’s secret headquarters.

The bald-headed leader of Jewish defense unfolded a map and pointed out the new parcel of land. Its importance to the continuation of the Arab revolt was obvious.

“I want you three boys to take command of a unit to go up to this land and build a kibbutz there. We are carefully picking eighty of our top men and twenty women to go with you. I don’t have to tell you what to expect.” They nodded.

“We know the Mufti is going to stop everything else in an effort to run you out. This is the first time we have picked a spot for a kibbutz because of its strategic value.”

Sarah Ben Canaan was sick at heart. For years she had not seen her son without a whip or a gun near at hand. Now she feared this mission as she had feared none of the others. A hundred of the best members of the Yishuv were being put into a suicidal position. Ari kissed his mother and brushed away her tears and in his simple way said that it would be all right. He shook his father’s hand and said nothing, for the understanding between them was complete.

Dafna knocked on the door and they said good-by to her too.

Dafna and Ari walked out the gates of Yad El and turned to look back briefly at the fields and at the friends who had gathered. Barak sighed and put his arm on Sarah’s shoulder as the younger couple disappeared down the road.

“They want so little from life,” Sarah said. “How long . . how long must we go on giving him?”

Barak shook his great head and his eyes narrowed to catch a last glimpse of his boy and Dafna.

“God asked Abraham to give his son in sacrifice. I suppose we of the Yishuv live in that shadow, We must keep giving Ari so long as God wills it.”

A hundred of the finest young men and women of the Yishuv went up to the border of Lebanon and placed themselves in the path of thieves and murderers. Ari Ben

Canaan, at twenty-two years of age, was second in command. They called the place Ha Mishmar, the Guardpost.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN: Ten trucks carrying a hundred Haganah boys and girls and their equipment sped along the coastal road past the last Jewish settlement at Nahariya in northern Galilee and penetrated into territory where no Jew had gone before. A thousand pairs of Arab eyes watched the convoy as it moved up into the foothills of the mountains on the Lebanese border below the Taggart wall.

They stopped, set out guards, and unloaded the trucks quickly. The trucks rushed back to Nahariya before dark. The hundred were alone. Above them the hills were filled with Arab marauder gangs. Behind them were a dozen hostile Arab villages.

They erected a small stockade, dug in, and waited out the night.

By next morning the word had spread from Hebron to Beirut … “The Jews have moved into the hills!” Haj Amin el Husseini in Beirut was enraged. It was an open challenge. He swore by the beard of Allah that the Jews would be thrown into the sea.

During the next few days the Haganah force worked themselves to exhaustion tightening the defenses of the base camp at the bottom of the hill against the attack that had to come. Each night when they weren’t standing guard, Dafna and Ari fell into exhausted slumber in each other’s arms.

On the fourth night the attack camel

The Jews had never undergone anything like it. A thousand Arab riflemen flanked with machine guns poured a steady tattoo of fire into the Jews’ stockade for five consecutive hours from the top of the hill. For the first time the Arabs used mortar fire. Ari and bis forces lay low and waited for the Arabs to try an assault.

The attack came when Arab thugs began slithering along the ground with knives between their teeth.

Suddenly––

Half a dozen searchlights darted out from the stockade and swept the field. The light caught the Arabs in close. The Jews poured on a deadly counterfire and in the very first burst shot sixty Arabs dead.

The Arabs were paralyzed with fear Art led half the Haganah force out from the cover of the stockade in a fierce counterattaek which littered the field of battle with Arab dead and wounded. Arabs who survived fled back to high ground screaming in terror.

The Arabs did not attack again for a week. Nothing the Mufti could say or do could make them attack. Kawukji could not make them attack.

In that first night three Haganah boys and one girl were killed in the fighting. One of them was the commander. Ari Ben Canaan stepped up to assume command.

Each day the Haganah moved up the hill a few feet, consolidated the position, and waited out the night. The Arabs watched from their positions above but never attacked during the daylight hours. By the end of a week Ari abandoned the first base camp and had established a second camp midway up the hill.

The Arabs resumed their attacks, but the lesson of the first night was still fresh. They did not try a direct assault but were content to fire at the camp from long distances.

While the Arabs remained indecisive, Ari decided to take the offensive. At the end of the second week at dawn he made his move. He waited until the Arabs were tired from firing all night and their guard was lax. He led twenty-five crack men and ten women in a dawn attack that threw the sleepy Arabs off the top of the hill. The Jews dug in quickly while the Arabs got their bearings and reassembled for a counterattack. Ari lost five soldiers but he held his position.

Quickly he fortified a lookout post on the top of the hill which commanded a view of the entire area. By daylight they worked feverishly to build their foothold into a fortress.

The Mufti was nearly insane with rage! He changed commanders and assembled another force of a thousand men. They attacked, but as soon as they came into close range they broke and fled.

For the first time Jews commanded a hilltop position and the Arabs were not going to dislodge them.

Although the Arabs would not fight at close quarters and would therefore not be able to run the Haganah out, ihey did not intend to make life easy for the Jews. Ari’s troops were constantly harassed by Arab rifles. His force was completely isolated from the rest of the Yishuv. The closest settlement was Nahariya. All supplies and even water had to come in through hostile territory by truck, and once there everything had to be carried up the hill by hand.

Despite the hardships, Ha Mishmar held fast. A few crude huts were erected inside the stockade and a road was started to the bottom of the hill. Ari began night patrols along the Taggart wall to catch infiltrators and arms runners. The Mufti’s underground highway into Palestine was being squeezed shut.

Ninety per cent of the Haganah force were from either kibbutzim or moshavim. Redemption was so much a part of

them that they could not stay long in one spot without trying to grow something. They began farming at Ha Mishmar! The place had been opened in the guise of a kibbutz, and by God they were going to make it one. Hillside fanning was a new venture for them-and it was especially difficult when there was no natural water except the sparse rainfall. None the less they went at the task with the same vigor with which they had redeemed the swamplands of the Jezreel Valley and the eroded Plain of Sharon. They terraced the hillsides and petitioned the Zion Settlement Society for money for farm tools.

The Yishuv Central and the Haganah were so delighted over the success of the dogged youngsters at Ha Mishmar that they decided that from then on some new settlements would be selected for their strategic value in choking off the Arab revolution.

A second group of pioneers set out for another troublesome spot. This time they were Orthodox Jews. They moved deep into the Beth Shean Valley and built a kibbutz at the juncture of the Syrian and Trans-Jordan borders. Their kibbutz was called Tirat Tsvi, the Castle of the Rabbi Tsvi. It stood in the midst of a dozen hostile Arab towns and villages. Again the Mufti attempted to dislodge them. But this force of religious Jews was not of the same ilk as the old pious Jews of the holy cities. As at Ha Mishmar, the Arabs could not defeat the Jews of Tirat Tsvi.

Ari was sound asleep in his tent.

“Ari… come quickly.”

He threw off his blanket, grabbed his rifle, and ran after them to the south fields which were being terraced for grapevines. There was a gathering. Everyone turned silent as they saw Ari approach. He pushed through and stared at the ground. It was blood-spattered. Parts of a blue blouse were on the ground. A trail of blood led off to the hills. Ari looked from face to face. No one spoke.

“Dafna,” he whispered.

Two days later her body was dumped near their camp. Her ears, nose, and hands had been amputated. Her eyes had been gouged out. She had been raped over a hundred times.

No one saw Ari Ben Canaan weep or even raise his voice.

After Dafna’s murder he would disappear for hours at a time, returning chalky-faced and shaken. But he never displayed passion or hatred or even great anger. He never mentioned her name to anyone again. Ari accepted this tragedy in the same way that the Yishuv had learned to accept such things-not by being stirred to violence, but only by deepening his determination not to be thrown from the land. An

Ben Canaan was all soldier. Half a dozen Arab villages near Ha Mishmar cringed and awaited a revenge attack—but it never came.

The Jews hung on at Ha Mishmar and at Tirat Tsvi and half a dozen other strategically placed settlements. The new tactic was hampering the Mufti’s revolt but,not stopping it.

Into this hodgepodge came an English major named P. P. Malcolm.

Major P. P. Malcolm had been transferred to British intelligence in Jerusalem at the outbreak of the Mufti’s revolt. He was a loner. P.P. dressed sloppily and scorned military tradition. He thought protocol ridiculous. He was a man who could express his feelings openly and violently if need be, and he was also a man given to deep meditation for days on end, during which he might neither shave nor comb his hair. His periods of detachment came at odd times-even in the middle of the formal parades, which he hated and believed a waste of time. P. P. Malcolm had a tongue like a lash and never failed to startle those around him. He was eccentric and looked upon as an “off horse” by his fellow officers.

Physically P.P. was tall and thin and bony-faced and had a slight limp. He was, all told, everything that a British officer should not be.

When Malcolm arrived in Palestine he was pro-Arab because it was fashionable for the British officers to be pro-Arab. These sympathies did not last long. Within a short period of time P. P. Malcolm had turned into a fanatic Zionist.

Like most Christians who embrace Zionism, his brand was far more intense and rabid than a Jew’s. Malcolm learned Hebrew from a rabbi and spent every spare minute reading the Bible. He was certain it was in God’s scheme for the Jews to rise again as a nation. Malcolm made detailed studies of the Biblical military campaigns and of the tactics of Joshua, David, and especially Gideon, who was his personal idol. And finally-he became obsessed with the notion that his coming to Palestine had been divinely inspired.

He, P. P. Malcolm, had been chosen by God Himself to lead the children of Israel in their noble mission.

Malcolm drove around Palestine in a battered secondhand jalopy and he hiked on his gimpy leg where there were no roads. Malcolm visited every site of every battle of Biblical times to reconstruct the tactical events. Often Jew and Arab alike were stunned to see this strange creature limping along a road singing a Psalm at the top of his voice and oblivious to everything worldly. 282

It was often asked why the British command tolerated Malcolm. General Charles, the commander of Palestine, recognized quite simply that Malcolm was a genius and one of those rare types of military rebels who pops up every so often. Malcolm laughed at the British handbooks on war, had nothing but disdain for their strategy, and for the most part thought the entire British Army was a waste of money. No one ever seemed to win an argument with him for he never appeared to be wrong and he was convinced of his own infallible judgment.

One day toward evening P. P. Malcolm abandoned his car when it blew two tires at once and hiked along the road toward Yad El. As he entered the defense perimeter half a dozen guards headed in on him. He smiled and waved at them. “Good work, chaps,” he called. “Now be dear lads and take me to Barak Ben Canaan.”

Malcolm paced up and down Barak’s living room. His appearance was even more slovenly than usual. For a solid hour he lectured Barak Ben Canaan about the glory and beauty of Zionism and the destiny of the Hebrew nation.

“I like Jewish soldiers,” Malcolm said. “The Hebrew warrior is the finest, for he fights and lives close to ideals. This land is real to him. He lives with great glories all around him. Your chaps in the Haganah probably constitute the most highly educated and intellectual as well as idealistic body of men under arms in the entire world.

“Take the British soldier,” Malcolm continued. “He is a stubborn fighter and that is good. He responds to discipline and that is good. But it ends right there. He is a stupid man. He drinks too much. He would sleep with a pig and often does. Ben Canaan, that is what I have come to see you about. I am going to take your Haganah and make a first-class fighting organization out of it. You’ve got the best raw material I’ve ever laid eyes on.”

Barak’s jaw dropped!

Malcolm looked out the window. He could see the water sprinklers whirling in the fields and in the distance he could see Abu Yesha nestled in the hills below the Taggart fort, Fort Esther.

“See that fort up there-Esther, you call it-stupidity, I call it. All the Arabs have to do is walk around it. The British will never learn.” Malcolm began humming Psalm 98 and singing the words softly in Hebrew. “I have the Psalms memorized up to a hundred and twenty-six. It comforts me.”

“Major Malcolm. Just what is the nature of this visit?” Barak said.

“Everyone knows that Barak Ben Canaan is fair and non-283

partisan. Frankly, most Jews like to talk too much. In my Jewish army they won’t have ten words to say. I’ll do all the talking.”

“You have made me quite aware that you like to do all the talking,” Barak said.

“Humph,” Malcolm grunted, and continued to look at the lush fields of Yad El through the window. Suddenly he swung around and his eyes were ablaze with the same intensity Barak had often seen in his brother Akiva-

“Fight!” Malcolm cried. “That is what we must do … fight! The Jewish nation is destiny, Ben Canaan, destiny.”

“You and I are in certain agreement about the destiny of the homeland … I don’t need refreshing.”

“Yes you do … all of you do … so long as you stay buttoned up in your settlements. We must go there and start punishing those infidels. If an Arab conies out of his coffeehouse and takes a pot shot at a kibbutz from a thousand yards distant he thinks he is a brave man. The time has come to test these bloody heathens. Hebrews, that’s what I want … Hebrew soldiers. You’ arrange an appointment with Avidan for me at once. Englishmen are too stupid to understand my methods.”

As suddenly as this strange man had appeared at Yad El, he left. P. P. Malcolm limped through the gates singing a Biblical Psalm at the. top of his voice and left Barak Ben Canaan scratching his beard and shaking his head.

Barak later phoned Avidan and they spoke in Yiddish in case the line was being tapped.

“Who is this man?” Barak asked. “He walked in like the Messiah and began preaching Zionism at me.”

‘We have reports on him,” Avidan said. “Frankly, he is so odd we don’t know what to make of him.”

“Can he be trusted?”

“We don’t know.”

Major P. P. Malcolm now spent all his free hours among the Jews. He candidly observed that British officers were idiots and bores. In a matter of months he was known by the entire Yishuv. Although he moved in the highest circles most of the leaders treated him like a harmless eccentric. “Our mad Englishman,” he was called with affection.

Soon it became apparent that P. P. Malcolm was not mad. In close discussion Malcolm had the persuasive power to talk the devil out of his horns. Members of the Yishuv came away from his home certain they had been under a magic spell.

After nearly six months of evasions, Malcolm burst into Ben Gurion’s office in the Yishuv Central building in Jerusalem one day, unannounced.

“Ben Gurion,” he snapped. “You are a God-damned fool.

You waste all your time talking to your enemies and you haven’t five minutes to spare for a friend.”

With that blunt announcement he turned and walked out

Malcolm’s next appointment was with General Charles, the military commander. He argued to convince the general to let him work out some of his theories on Arab warfare with the use of Jewish troops. General Charles was pro-Arab as was most of his staff, but the Mufti’s rebellion was beginning to make him look ridiculous. Little by little the British had trained and armed their own Jewish police and had ignored the Haganah arms which supplemented their own forces. The British had failed so badly he decided to let Malcolm go ahead.

Malcolm’s jalopy showed up at Ha Mishmar where guards took him up the hill to Ari. The strapping Haganah commander studied the scrawny Englishman before him with puzzlement.

Malcolm patted his cheek. “You look like a good boy,” he said. “Listen to me, obey my orders, observe what I do, and I’ll make a first-class soldier out of you. Now, show me your camp and fortifications.”

Ari was perplexed. By mutual arrangement the British had stayed out of Ha Mishmar and turned their backs on Ari’s patrols. Yet they had every legal right to enter Ha Mishmar. Major Malcolm completely ignored Ari’s suspicions and obvious attempt to show him only half the layout.

“Where is your tent, son?”

In Ari’s tent, P. P. Malcolm stretched out on the cot and meditated.

“What do you want here?” Ari demanded.

“Give me a map, son,” he said, ignoring Ari’s question. Ari did so. P. P. Malcolm sat up, opened the map, and scratched his scraggly beard. “Where is the key Arab jump-off base?”

Ari pointed to a small village some fifteen kilometers inside Lebanon.

“Tonight we shall destroy it,” Malcolm said calmly.

That night a patrol of eight men and two women crossed over from Ha Mishmar into Lebanon with Malcolm in command. The Jews were astounded at the speed and stamina with which he could push his fragile body through the steep and tortuous hills. He never once stopped for rest or to check directions. Before they left, Major Malcolm had heard someone sneeze and had said he could not go-and that anyone who did not keep up with the pace would be thrashed

within an inch of his life. He led them in singing a Psalm

and lectured them on the nobility of their mission.

As they neared their objective, Malcolm went up ahead to reconnoiter the village. He returned in half an hour.

“As I suspected, they have no security up. Here is what we shall do.” He drew a hasty map to pinpoint what he believed to be the three or four huts belonging to the smugglers. “I will take three of you chaps into the village and we will open fire from short range and give them a blast or two of grenades to loosen the party up a bit. Everyone will flee in wild disarray. My force will drive them to the edge of the village here where you, Ben Canaan, shall establish an ambush. Be so good as to bring a pair of prisoners, for this area is obviously loaded with arms caches.”

“Your plan is foolish. It will not work,” Ari said.

“Then I suggest you begin walking back to Palestine,” Malcolm retorted.

That was the first and the last time Ari ever questioned the wisdom of P. P. Malcolm. The man’s certainty was gripping.

“Never question my judgment again, young man,” he said.

Malcolm’s plan was executed. The major led a four-man squad right up to the suspected headquarters. Four grenades were lobbed into the huts and followed by rifle fire. According to Malcolm’s prediction, there was a panic. He coolly drove the thugs right at Ari’s ambush. It was all over within ten minutes.

Two prisoners were taken to the major.

“Where are your guns hidden?” he asked the first one in Arabic. The Arab shrugged.

Malcolm slapped the Arab’s face and repeated the question. This time the Arab pleaded his innocence as Allah was his judge. Malcolm calmly took out his pistol and shot the Arab through the head. He turned to the second prisoner. “Where are your guns hidden?” he asked.

The second Arab quickly revealed the location of the arms.

“You sons and daughters of Judea have learned many valuable lessons this night,” Malcolm said. “I will explain them to you in the morning. One thing, never use brutality to get information. Get right to the point.”

The news of Malcolm’s raid had a sobering effect on all of Palestine. For the Yishuv it marked a historic occasion. For the very first time the Jews had come out of their settlements to make an offensive action. Many thought it was long overdue.

The British were in an uproar. Most of them demanded that P. P. Malcolm be removed at once. General Charles was not so sure. British methods of fighting Arabs were sorelv

lacking, and he felt Malcolm had most of the answers.

For the Mufti’s thugs and the Husseinis and the Moslem fanatics it was a day of reckoning. No longer could they rove at will and pick their places for attack without expecting retribution.

Ari went out with P. P. Malcolm on a dozen more raids deep into Lebanon. Each raid was more successful than the last. The marauder gangs, the thugs and the gun runners and Kawukji’s mercenaries, were shaken from their complacency, for their activities were no longer profitable or safe against the swift merciless raids of the Haganah. The Mufti placed a reward of a thousand pounds sterling on P. P. Malcolm’s head.

After Malcolm and his Haganah boys and girls at Ha Mishmar succeeded in quieting down the Taggart line, he moved his headquarters to the kibbutz of Ein Or. Malcolm requested from the Haganah a hundred and fifty top soldiers; he specifically wanted Ari Ben Canaan, whom he greatly favored. At kibbutz Ein Or, Malcolm formed his Raider Unit.

When the hundred and fifty soldiers had assembled from all over the Yishuv, Major Malcolm led them on a long hike to Mount Gilboa at the traditional site of the grave of the great Hebrew judge and warrior, Gideon, who was Malcolm’s idol. At Gideon’s grave he stood before his charges and opened his Bible and read in Hebrew.

“ … so Gideon, and the hundred men that were with him, came unto the outside of the camp in the beginning of the middle watch; and they had but newly set the watch: and they blew the horns, and brake the pitchers that were in their hands.. And the three companies blew the horns, and brake the pitchers, and held the lamps in their left hands, and the horns in their right hands to blow withal; and they cried, The sword of the Lord and of Gideon. And they stood every man in his place round about the camp; and all the host ran, and cried, and fled.”

Malcolm closed the Bible. He walked back and forth with his hands clasped behind him and seemed to look off into space as he spoke. “Gideon was a smart man. Gideon knew the Midianites were an ignorant and a superstitious people. Gideon knew he could play on their primitive fears and that they could be frightened by noise and by the night. Gideon knew it … and so do we.”

The Arabs never knew where or when the Raider Unit would strike next. Their old reliable spy system simply did not work against Malcolm. He would send three units out in

three different directions to confuse them. He would pass on

Arab village and double back and strike it. He would send a

convoy of trucks down a road and drop men off one at a time. During the day they lay hidden in the ditches at the roadside and at night they would assemble.

Every attack that came sounded like a thousand men. He never failed to send his enemy into a panic.

He elaborated on something his Jews already knew-the terrain of Palestine. He taught them the strategic as well as the historic value of every wadi and hill and tree by pointing out how the ancient Hebrew generals had used the land and the knowledge of it to great military advantage.

Ari Ben Canaan became a devoted disciple of this eccentric Englishman, as did all of the Raiders. He went alongside Malcolm in a hundred raids against the enemy and never once was Malcolm guilty of error. It was almost as though he were divinely guided as well as divinely inspired. He created a flawless text on Arab fighting. He demanded iron discipline and fanatical and unquestioning devotion in payment for victory after victory.

The Raider Unit put a fear into the Arabs which was even greater than that of the Husseinis. With a hundred and fifty men he ripped the rebellion to shreds. The marauders began to flee and Kawukji’s grand army of liberation raced back to Lebanon. In floundering desperation the Mufti turned his fire on the oil line which ran from the Mosul fields to Haifa.

“Twenty thousand of those dunderheaded Englishmen could not defend that pipeline,” Malcolm said. “We will do it with our Raider Unit. Our plans are simple. Each time there is a break in the line the nearest Arab village to that break will be attacked and flattened by the Raider Unit. This will teach the Arab villages to guard the lines against marauders in the interest of their own safety and it will teach them not to shelter those thugs. Reprisal … remember that, for the Jews are outnumbered … we must use the principle of reprisal.”

Every time the Arabs moved they got it right back in the teeth. Reprisal, from then on, became the key to Jewish defense.

The Arab revolt petered out and died. It had been a miserable and costly failure. The Arabs had bankrupted their entire community and murdered their foremost spokesmen. Three years of riots and bloodshed had put them on the brink of destitution. In all that time they did not displace a single Jewish settlement or keep some fifty new ones from going up.

With the death throes of the Arab uprising Whitehall made a clean sweep of their government in the mandate.

Major P. P. Malcolm was told he must leave Palestine, for

his continued consorting with the Jews now would cause them nothing but embarrassment. Malcolm had been the greatest single instrument in breaking the backs of the Arabs. The Jews he trained were the nucleus of a greater new army-his brilliant tactics their military Bible.

For the last time Major P. P. Malcolm stood before his Jews at Ein Or. The Raider Unit honored by red badges on their blue farmer’s clothing stood at attention, and there were tears in the eyes of many.

Malcom opened his Bible. “… Gird thy sword upon thy thigh O most mighty, with thy glory and thy majesty. And in thy majesty ride prosperously because of truth and meekness and righteousness.”

He walked away quickly to the waiting car. His heart was broken. The Yishuv had bestowed upon him the greatest honor they could give a non-Jew. They called him “the Friend.”

Ari Ben Canaan returned to Yad El after the Raider Unit was disbanded. His heart seemed always on a lonely hill on the Lebanese border where Dafna lay in eternal sleep alongside twenty other Haganah boys and girls who had fallen for Ha Mishmar.

With things quiet and safer, Taha left Yad El, where he had lived all this time under the protection of the Ben Canaan family, to assume the job of muktar of Abu Yesha. Both Barak and Sarah realized that in the eighteen months Taha had lived with them he had fallen in love with Jordana, who was now past her thirteenth birthday. Love of a younger girl was not uncommon among Taha’s people. Both of the parents never spoke a word about it and hoped that the boy would get over it without too much pain.

The new British administration, under the command of General Haven-Hurst, came to Palestine. They soon rounded up the Raider Unit men. The latter were hauled into court and thrown into jail for terms of six months to five yearsl The charge-illegal use of arms!

Ari and a hundred other Haganah members of Malcolm’s Raider Unit were locked in the dungeon-like Acre jail. Many of them regarded their plight as rather humorous and spent their days frustrating the British guard by singing Haganah marches and songs of the fields from morning to night. It was a thick-walled old castle-clammy and monstrous and filled with lice and rats and slime and darkness.

Ari was released in the spring of 1939. He returned home to Yad El pale and gaunt.

Sarah cried in the sanctity of her room after she had seen him. What had her son had from birth but a whip and a gun

and tragedy? His Dafna was dead and so many of his comrades were dead-how long would it go on? Sarah vowed she would keep her boy at Yad El forever.

With Haven-Hurst commanding Palestine with an iron fist and open anti-Jewish sentiments the stage was set for the final British betrayal. …

There was another commission of inquiry. The three years of Mufti-inspired bloodshed were blamed on Jewish immigration.

Whitehall and Chatham House and Neville Chamberlain, their Prime Minister and renowned appeaser, shocked the world with their pronouncement. The British Government issued a White Paper on the eve of World War II shutting off immigration to the frantic German Jews and stopping Jewish land buying. The appeasers of Munich who had sold Spain and Czechoslovakia down the river had done the same to the Jews of Palestine.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN: The Yishuv was rocked by the White Paper, the most staggering single blow they had ever received. On the eve of war the British were sealing in the German Jews.

The Maccabees, who had been dormant, suddenly sprang to life. The White Paper brought Jews into the Maccabees by the hundreds. They lashed out in a series of raids, bombing a British officers’ club in Jerusalem and terrorizing the Arabs. They raided a British arsenal and they ambushed several convoys.

General Haven-Hurst completely reversed all previous policies of semi-co-operation with the Jews. The Jewish police were disbanded and the Haganah was driven underground. Leaders of the Yishuv Central and more former Raider men were hauled into court and then thrown into Acre jail.

Ben Gurion again called upon the Yishuv to show the same wisdom and restraint they had shown in the past. He publicly denounced the terror tactics. But even as he spoke there were elements within Haganah who wanted to come into the open and fight. Fearing a showdown would lead to its destruction, Avidan was again forced to hold his army in check.

Barak Ben Canaan was sent to London to join Dr. Chaim Weizmann and the other Zionist negotiators in trying to force a reversal of the White Paper. But the men in Whitehall were determined not to revoke it and thereby incite the Arabs.

In Palestine the Husseini mob was busy again. Despite the

fact that Haj Amin was still in exile the rest of the clan

was still handling opposition through assassination. The Higher Arab Committee was grabbed by the Mufti’s nephew, Jemal Husseini.

Within Germany the Jewish situation was beyond despair. The Zionists’ organizations were on the verge of collapse as even the most complacent German Jews panicked to get out of the country.

The British were making it as difficult for certain Jews to leave Palestine as for Jews to get in from Germany. They realized that anyone with a Haganah and Aliyah Bet background was a potential agent. When Ari left Palestine on orders from Avidan he had to slip over the Lebanese border at Ha Mishmar and hike to Beirut on foot. He carried the passport and visa of a Jew who had recently arrived in Palestine as a “tourist.” In Beirut, Ari caught a boat for Marseilles. In another week he showed up in Berlin at Zionist headquarters at Number 10 Meinekestrasse.

His orders were: “Get as many Jews out as possible.”

When he arrived in Berlin, Zionist headquarters was a scene of panic and chaos.

The Germans were playing the visa market for all it was worth. The more desperate the Jews became, the higher the price for their freedom. Many families turned over entire fortunes for the privilege of being able to escape from Germany. Visas were forged and stolen-visas were life. The first cruel fact of life was that few countries of the world wanted the German Jews. They simply closed their doors. If they did give visas it was with the understanding that the Jews would not come to their countries.

Ari was faced with the decision of deciding who got the visas and who didn’t. Each day he was the victim of threats or the object of bribes and desperate pleas. The Zionist rule of thumb was to get the children out. For five years the Jews had appealed to their German numbers to leave Germany.

Along with the children there were essential scientists, doctors, professionals, and artisans, the very cream of the society.

Ari and the Aliyah Bet were moving them in mere hundreds, while thousands were being trapped.

He decided on a desperate gamble in an attempt to get several thousand visas at one time. That way, Ari reckoned, he could at least move the “essentials” and many children out. He alerted Aliyah Bet in France to be prepared either to receive these thousands-or to expect his own disappearance to a concentration camp.

Ari then went into negotiations with high Nazis to sell them the idea of issuing exit permits in larger numbers. He

argued with a strange but fascinating logic. Britain and Germany were both trying to win Arab favor; Ari pointed out that the more Jews who got to Palestine, the more embarrassed the British would be.

How paradoxical that the Aliyah Bet was teaming up with the Nazis in an effort against the British. Arii quickly had training farms set up in the Berlin area under Gestapo protection.

In addition to all the visas he could buy, steal, bribe, and otherwise wangle, Ari built an underground railroad right under the Germans’ noses for getting out the top-priority Jews; but these people, mostly scientists, escaped only in twos and threes. During the fear-filled summer of 1939 he worked around the clock as the time ran out.

Meanwhile in London, Barak Ben Canaan and the other negotiators worked the clock around too. They spoke to members of Parliament, Ministers, or anyone who would listen to them. But do what they might, the British would not budge from their immigration policy.

In mid-August, Ari received an urgent message from Aliyah Bet in France: leave Germany at once.

Ari ignored the cable and continued his work, for each day now seemed a race against death.

Another cable came. This time it was a Haganah order for him to leave.

Ari gambled on just seventy-two hours more, for he was working on a stack of visas to get a trainload of children into Denmark.

A third cable came-and a fourth.

As the trainload of children crossed the Danish frontier, Ari Ben Canaan made his own escape. He left Germany forty-eight hours before Hitler’s Wehrmacht rolled into Poland and ushered in World War II.

Ari and Barak Ben Canaan returned to Palestine from their separate missions. Both men were exhausted and both of them were crushed by despair.

At the outbreak of war it took only ten minutes for the Jewish leaders to announce their course of action. Ben Gurion urged the Yishuv to come forth for duty in the British Army to fight the common enemy.

There was additional encouragement from the Haganah which saw this as an opportunity to train its men legally.

General Haven-Hurst, the Palestine military commander, raised strong objections with the War Office about letting Palestinian Jews into the British Army. “If we train Jews now and give them combat experience we will only be spiting ourselves, for surely we will have to fight the very same Jews later on.”

Within a week after the war began one hundred and thirty thousand men and women-one out of four in the entire Yishuv-had signed up at Yishuv Central to volunteer for the British Army.

As for the Arabs, most of the Arab world looked upon the Germans as their “liberators” and waited for them.

It was impossible for the British to ignore the Yishuv’s offer. It was also impossible not to heed General Haven-Hurst’s warning. The War Office decided upon the middle road of accepting Palestinian Jews but keeping them out of front-line assignments so that they could not get actual weapons training and combat experience. The Palestinians were turned into service units, transportation and engineering battalions. Yishuv Central protested angrily against the discrimination and demanded equal opportunities fighting the Germans.

The Yishuv had presented a solid front, except for the dissenting Maccabees. Avidan decided to swallow his pride and through a chain of underground contacts asked for a meeting with Akiva.

The two men met in a cellar beneath Frankel’s Restaurant on King George Road in Jerusalem. It was filled with cases of canned food and bottled goods stacked halfway to the ceiling, and it was dark except for the light from a single light bulb.

Avidan offered no handshake as Akiva entered, flanked by two Maccabees. It had been five long years since the two men had seen each other.

Akiva looked in his sixties and more. The long hard years of building two kibbutzim and the more recent years of underground living had turned him into an old man.

The room was cleared of Maccabee and Haganah guards. The two men faced each other.

At last Avidan spoke. “I have come, quite simply, to ask you to call a truce with the British until the war is over.”

Akiva grunted. He spat out his contempt for the British and their White Paper and his anger at the Yishuv Central and Haganah for their failure to fight.

“Please, Akiva,” Avidan said, holding his temper. “I am aware of all your feelings. I know exactly what differences there are between us. Despite them, Germany is a far greater enemy and threat to our existence than the British.”

Akiva turned his back on Avidan. He stood in the shadows thinking. Suddenly he spun around and his eyes blazed as of old. “Now is the time to get the British to revoke the White Paperl Now-right now-declare our statehood on both sides of the Jordan! Nowl Hit the damned British when they’re down!”

“Is statehood so important to us that we must gain it by contributing to a German victory?”

“And do you think the British will hesitate to sell us down the river again?”

“I think we have only one choice-to fight Germany.”

Akiva paced the cement floor like a nervous cat. Tears of anger welled up in his eyes. He grunted and mumbled to himself-and at last he spoke with trembling softness. “Even as the British blockade our coast against desperate people … even as the British create a ghetto inside their army with our boys… even as they have sold us out with the White Paper … even as the Yishuv puts its heart and soul into the war effort while the Arabs sit like vultures waiting to pounce … even with all this the British are the lesser of our enemies and we must fight with them. Very well, Avidan … the Maccabees will call a truce.”

The air was filled with Akiva’s hostility as the two men finally shook hands. Akiva wet his lips. “How is my brother?”

“Barak just returned from conferences in London.”

“Yes … conferences … that would be Barak. And Sarah and the children?”

Avidan nodded. “You can be proud of Ari.”

“Oh yes, Ari is a fine boy … a fine boy … how … how … does Ein Or look these days?”

Avidan lowered his eyes. “Ein Or and Shoshanna show the love and the sweat of the men who built them.” Avidan turned and walked toward the ladder to the trap door.

“Zion shall be redeemed with judgment,” Akiva cried from the shadows of the cellar, “and the destruction of the transgressors and of the sinners shall be together and they that forsake the Lord shall be consumed. Our day with the British will come!”

Ari had changed. He was melancholy all the time. It was difficult to say exactly what had been the breaking point for him. He had carried arms since he was a boy. The “tower and stockade” days-Ha Mishmar-the Raider Unit-the Acre prison. The heartbreaking work for Aliyah Bet in Berlin. And the death of Dafna. Ari lived at Yad El and farmed and wanted to be left alone. He scarcely spoke a word.

Even when the war broke out Ari remained at Yad El. Most of his spare time was spent at the Arab village of Abu Yesha with his boyhood friend, Taha, who was now the muktar.

One day, several months after the war had begun, Ari returned one evening from the fields to find Avidan himself waiting to see him. After dinner Ari, Avidan, and Barak retired to the living room to talk.

“I suppose you know why I came,” Avidan said.

“I can imagine.”

“Let me get right to the point. There are a few dozen of our boys that we feel should join up. The British have contacted Haganah half a dozen times and asked for you. They are willing to give you an officer’s commission.”

“I’m not interested.”

“They want you badly, Ari. I’m sure we can put you into a position-say, Arab intelligence-where you could be of great value to the Haganah too.”

“That’s very nice. I thought they’d have me shoveling garbage with the rest of the Yishuv troops. It’s good to know I’m one of the good Jews.”

“Don’t make me issue this to you as an order.”

“You may be surprised if you do.”

Avidan, who was an iron disciplinarian, was somewhat taken aback. Ari Ben Canaan had been as reliable and unquestioning a soldier as any in the Haganah.

“I’m glad this is in the open,” Barak said. “This boy has been eating his heart out since his return from Berlin.”

“Ari … I’m afraid we are going to have to insist upon it.”

“Why should I wear a British uniform? So they can throw me into prison again for bearing arms for them.”

Barak threw up his hands.

“All right, Father … if you want it in the open. Five years ago Uncle Akiva had the courage to name our enemy.”

“You are not to mention his name in this house!” Barak roared.

“It’s about time it was mentioned. I might even have joined the Maccabees except that I would not go against you.”

“But Ari,” Avidan said quickly, “even Akiva and the Maccabees have called a truce with the British.”

Ari turned and started for the door. “I’ll be playing backgammon at Taha’s house. Call me if the Germans invade.”

The German avalanche thundered across Europe. The British suffered one debacle after another. Dunkirk! Cretel Greece! London underwent merciless bombing.

Even as the Yishuv poured its energy into the British war effort it was forced to swallow degradation by the British. A series of unbelievably horrible events occurred which rankled in the hearts of even the most benevolent Jews.

A pathetic, fifty-foot Danube river boat named the Struma crept into Istanbul loaded with nearly eight hundred frantic Jews trying to escape from Europe. The boat was unsafe and the people in dire straits. Yishuv Central literally begged the British for visas. The British refused. In fact,

they turned heavy diplomatic pressure on the Turkish government to get the Struma out of Istanbul. Turkish police boarded the Struma and towed it through the Bosporus and cut it adrift in the Black Sea without food, water, or fuel. The Struma sank. Seven hundred and ninety-nine human beings drowned. One survived.

Two battered steamers reached Palestine with two thousand refugees and the British quickly ordered them transferred to the Patria for exile to Mauritius, an island east of Africa. The Patria sank off Palestine’s shores in sight of Haifa, and hundreds of refugees drowned.

And so it went-the British clung to the White Paper-the Arabs had to be kept calm!

The war continued badly for the British. By the end of 1941 Palestinian Jews had made their way into fighting units despite General Haven-Hurst’s forebodings, for the British were desperate and they were getting no manpower at all from the Arabs. As the Arabs sat, fifty thousand of the cream of the Yishuv wore British uniforms.

With western Europe crushed, German barges waited in the English Channel to invade. England had her back to the wall! And this was the moment of English glory! The Germans, who had beaten the Russians and the Greeks and the Yugoslavs, stood and balked at the showdown with those pale, scrawny wonders-the dogged Englishman. They feared the English as they feared no others.

As England had carved up the Ottoman Empire, so now the Germans prepared to carve up the British Empire. Rommel’s powerful Afrika Korps was building toward a series of strikes that would throw the British out of the Middle East and open a gateway to the Orient and India.

Haj Amin el Husseini moved from Lebanon in search of greener pastures. He landed in Bagdad, Iraq, nominally a British ally but in not much more than name. In Bagdad he was greeted as a great martyr of Islam. He staged a coup with a gang of Iraqi army officers to deliver Iraq to the Germans. The plot failed. But only at the last moment did the British prevent it from succeeding by sending the Arab Legion in to control the country.

Haj Amin fled again. This time he went to Germany where Adolf Hitler greeted him personally as a brother. The two madmen could work through each other for mutual personal profit. The Mufti saw in Germany’s military plans a new opportunity to seize power over the entire Arab world. Hitler needed the Mufti to show what a warm and tender friendship could exist between Arab and German. As a Nazi agent, Haj Amin broadcasted over and over again from

Berlin to the Arab world; what he had to Say he had said many, many times before.

“O, Arabs, rise and avenge your martyrs … I, Mufti of Palestine, declare this war as a holy war against the British yoke of tyranny. … I know the hatred you feel for them … I know you Moslems are convinced the British and the Jews are enemies of Islam and plot against the precepts of the Koran … the Jews will take our holy Islamic institutions … they even now claim a Temple occupies the site of our most holy Mosque of Omar and surely they will desecrate it as they have tried before … kill Jews wherever you find them for this pleases God, history, and religion. This saves your honor … God is with you … perish Judea!”

As the Mufti spoke, the Arab world seemed to heed his words.

Syria and Lebanon were in the hands of Vichy French, and German materiel was pouring in to pave the way for an invasion of Palestine and Egypt.

The Egyptian chief of staff sold secrets to the Germans. King Farouk of Egypt refused to give the British a single soldier for the defense of Egypt against Rommel. Further plots hatched in Iraq.

The only avowed friend of the Allies was the old despot, Ibn Saud, who had been bought with American dollars. But Ibn Saud did not so much as offer a single camel to the British Eighth Army, which was fighting for its life.

In all the Middle East the Allied Powers had but one true fighting friend-the Yishuv!

Rommel, flushed with victory in Libya, stood poised to break through to Alexandria where German flags were being prepared to welcome the “liberators.”

On the Russian front, the Wehrmacht stood before the gates of Stalingrad!

This was the Allies’ darkest hour.

The prime target of the Germans was the Suez Canal, Egypt, and Palestine-the solar plexus of the British Empire. A break-through at Stalingrad could form another arm of a pincer movement to sweep through the Caucasus Mountains and open the doors of India and the Orient.

At last the British came to Yishuv Central and asked the Jews to form guerrilla units to cover the retreat of the British and harass the German occupation. This guerrilla force was called the Palmach. It was later to become the striking arm of the Haganah.

Ari Ben Canaan sat down for supper one evening. “I enlisted in the British Army today,” he announced quietly.

The next day Ari reported to kibbutz Beth Alonim, House of the Oaks, where youths from all over Palestine had assembled to organize the Palmach.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN: Kibbutz Beth Alonim stood at the foot of Mount Tabor in the center of the Jezreel Valley. Ari was given a commission in the British Army and placed in charge of operations of the guerrilla units of boys and girls, most of whom were in their teens. Most of the officers were “old-timers” in their mid-twenties like Ari.

Many of the former Raider Unit men joined the Palmach to indoctrinate the youngsters in the methods of Major P. P. Malcolm.

The troops wore no uniforms nor was there rank below the officers, and boys and girls were treated exactly the same. They were trained with the same sense of Biblical destiny that Malcolm had given his fighters.

Two of the soldiers showed such promise and leadership that they were advanced to lead units directly under Ari. One was a heavy-set kibbutznik from Galilee. His name was Zev Gilboa. He wore a big black mustache which later became the badge of a male Palmachnik. The other was a small interne young student from Jerusalem named David Ben Ami. Neither David nor Zev was yet twenty.

One day they were paid a visit by General Haven-Hurst. He was a tall thin blond man in his early fifties. As he inspected the camp he was aware of the coldness which greeted his presence. After the inspection, Haven-Hurst asked Ari to report to the camp’s headquarters.

As Ari entered the office, the two men nodded stiffly, neither concealing his dislike for the other.

“Sit down, Lieutenant Ben Canaan,” Haven-Hurst said. “You are to be commended on your work here with these Palmach troops.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“Matter of fact, I’ve been studying your record … or your case history, if you will. You’ve been a busy chap.”

“The conditions of my environment and the unfortunate circumstances of my birth have dictated it,” Ari said. “I am a farmer at heart.”

Haven-Hurst took the rebuff without showing it.

“My main purpose for coming to Beth Alonim today was to ask you to volunteer for a special assignment. I know that when you enlisted it was on the proviso that you could train Palmach troops, but we feel this is urgent enough to alter that.”

“I am a soldier in the British Army, General Haven-Hurst. I will accept any assignment given me.”

“Good. Briefly, here is what it consists of. There has been a large German build-up in Syria. We feel they may attempt an invasion of Palestine this spring.”

Ari nodded.

“We are not at war with the Vichy French and we cannot invade Syria, but we do have sufficient Free French forces to do the job, provided we get flawless intelligence. We have selected you for this job because you know Syria and Lebanon from your Ha Mishmar days, and also because of your mastery of Arabic. We want you to reassemble those lads who were at Ha Mishmar with you and return there to use it as a reconnoitering base. When the invasion begins there will also, be special assignments. There will be a captain’s rank in this for you.”

“I see one problem, sir.”

“Yes?”

“A great number of my comrades from Ha Mishmar have been thrown into jail by the British.”

Haven-Hurst’s face turned crimson. “We will arrange releases.”

“Yes, sir. One more thing, sir. I have two men here who are exceptional soldiers. I would like to take them to Ha Mishmar with me and have them transferred into the British Army.”

“Very well,” Haven-Hurst said, “take them with you.”

Ari walked to the door. “An invasion of Syria at this time is excellent strategy, sir. It will give the British Eighth Army plenty of room to retreat to India.”

Haven-Hurst glared at the Jew. “I suppose it is unnecessary to say, Ben Canaan, that you and I will be on opposite sides of the fence one day.”

“We already are, sir.”

Ari left Beth Alonim with Zev Gilboa and David Ben Ami as his sergeants and returned to Ha Mishmar on the hill which held such bitter memories for him. Fifty of the original Haganah gang were assembled-some from many parts of the world where they had been serving in the British forces.

Using Ha Mishmar as headquarters, Ari’s patrols worked all the way up to Damascus. Extreme caution was needed, for the invasion was to be a complete surprise. Ari’s basic method was simple. Most of his people spoke fluent Arabic and were familiar with the territory. He sent them out during the day, dressed as Arabs, and they merely walked along the roads gathering information. Although his intelligence was

proving flawless, Ari wanted to get right inside Damascus and Beirut. This was a touchy job, and Ari reckoned it called for an individual foray. The one selected had to be able to move perfectly without raising suspicion. Ari checked with Haganah and they sent him a seventeen-year-old boy named Joab Yarkoni.

Yarkoni was a Moroccan Jew born in Casablanca and could indeed pass for an Arab anywhere. He was small, with saucer-like flashing black eyes and an overabundant sense of humor.

In Casablanca he and his family had lived in a mellah, the Oriental-African version of a ghetto. These Oriental and African Jews had little in common culturally with their Russian or German counterparts. Most of them were descendants of ancestors who had fled the Spanish Inquisition. Many still had Spanish names.

In some Arab lands the Jews were treated with a measure of fairness and near equality. Of course, no Jew could be entirely equal to a Moslem. A thousand years before, when Islam swept the world, Jews had been among the most honored of the Arab citizens. They were the court doctors, the philosophers, and the artisans-the top of the Arab society. In the demise of the Arab world that followed the Mongol wars, the demise of the Jews was worse.

There were Jews in Bagdad and Cairo and Damascus and Fez and Kurdistan and Casablanca, throughout the coast of Africa and deep into countries of the Middle East.

The Moslems never went to the extremes of the Christians in the matter of killing Jews. Arab riots were always kept within reasonable bounds-a few dozen murders at a time.

Joab Yarkoni and his family had escaped the mellah of Casablanca when he was but a youngster. His family settled down in a kibbutz in Samaria that hugged the sea. It was at Caesarea and called Sdot Yam, Fields of the Sea. Many illegal boats beached near Caesarea and it was here that Joab first went to work for Aliyah Bet as a gun runner when he was only twelve years of age.

When he was fifteen he took it upon himself to try a daring feat that spread his fame throughout the Yishuv. Joab walked from Sdot Yam with a donkey to Bagdad. There he stole some of the precious Iraqi date-palm saplings and smuggled them into Palestine. The saplings were sent to Shoshanna kibbutz on the Sea of Galilee and were instrumental in opening an entire new export crop for the Yishuv.

Ari’s job was easy for young Joab. He walked to Damascus to Beirut to Tyre and returned to Ha Mishmar within three weeks. His information confirmed everything they already knew and further located Vichy strength nearly to a man.

Free French Forces moved quietly into Palestine, to the Galilee, and deployed for the invasion.

Ari’s fifty men were bolstered by a special hand-picked group of forty Australians, experts in mines, automatic weapons, and explosives.

This ninety-man force was split into three units of thirty each. Each unit was given a special assignment to cross into Lebanon and Syria ahead of the invasion, advance and hold key roads and bridges against a counterattack until the main body could reach them.

Ari’s force had the most dangerous of the missions. He was to lead his thirty men right up along the Lebanese coast, penetrate close to a Vichy garrison, and keep them from getting to half a dozen vital mountain bridges, which could halt the Free French advance. Ari took Joab, Zev, and David with him. He had sixteen more Jews and ten Australians.

His unit moved out twenty-four hours before the invasion and sped up the coast with beautiful ease, for they knew every inch of the way. They passed the six crucial bridges one by one.

They stopped three miles from the Vichy garrison of Fort Henried and in a mountain pass mined the roads, set in their machine guns, and waited for the invasion to reach them.

As so often happens in a large-scale battle, an error was made. How, why, who made it is not so important after it occurs. The eastern arm of the invasion crossed from Trans-Jordan into Syria twelve hours ahead of H-Hour. As they moved toward Damascus they tipped off the entire operation.

For Ari it meant he would have to hold his mountain pass for twelve hours plus the additional three or four hours it would take for the main body to reach him.

Within a few hours after the error was made the Vichyites had massed two battalions with tanks and artillery at Fort Henried and started down the coastal road to blow up the mountain bridges.

As soon as Ari saw them coming he realized something had gone wrong. Quickly he dispatched David and Zev back to Palestine to bring help.

The Vichy troops marched blindly into the pass and were pulverized by explosions and crossfire from both sides of the hill. They fell back, reassembled, and sent artillery fire into the pass.

Six unbelievable hours passed before David and Zev came back with a battalion of Free French troops.

All the bridges were intact. There was no break-through. The pass was littered with over four hundred dead Vichyites who had tried to break Ari’s position.

Five men of Ari’s force were alive when help arrived. Ari Ben Canaan himself was at death’s door. His back was filled with shrapnel, two bullets were lodged in his body, and his leg and nose were broken.

The Free French went on to complete the invasion of Syria.

For Ari Ben Canaan the war was over. He was taken back to Palestine for a long slow recovery. The British promoted him to major and he was decorated for his stand at the mountain pass.

Ari had played his role for Allied victory. So had the Yishuv.

Members of the Yishuv were in suicide squads that helped capture Tobruk and Bardia. Later a battalion of Palestinians was at the epic defense of Tobruk.

They fought in Italy and in Greece and in Crete and in the Lowlands. They numbered thousands in the Royal Air Force. They ran the “death” patrol along the Mediterranean coast. The home guard kept the Arabs under control within Palestine. They fought in the desert in the captures of Sidi Barrani, Sollum, and Fort Capuzzo.

Jewish suicide units were picked for their valor in the campaigns in Eritrea and Ethiopia. Three thousand of the Yishuv joined the Free Forces of Czechoslovakia, Holland, France-and even Poland. A suicide force of Jews went out to destroy the oil refinery at Tripoli. Every member perished. Jews were used by the British for special spying missions. German Jews were dressed in German uniforms and worked right in Rommel’s headquarters. Jews guarded the Mosul oil fields against continued Arab attempts to disrupt production.

When the British needed spies in the Balkans they turned to the Jews and trained them as parachutists. They reasoned that any Jew would be protected by the rest of the Jews in the country where he was dropped. Several were parachuted -few returned. One girl, Hanna Senesh, from Joab Yarkoni’s kibbutz was dropped into Hungary and captured. She became a martyr by refusing to her death to break under the cruelest Nazi torture.

The Yishuv covered itself with glory. Just as in World War I the British glorified the Arab revolt-so they tried to hide the efforts of the Yishuv in World War II. No country gave with so much vitality to the war. But the British Government did not want the Jews to use this as a bargaining point for their homeland aspirations later on. Whitehall and Chatham House kept the Yishuv’s war effort one of the best secrets of the war.

Rommel never reached Alexandria-they never broke the defenses of Stalingrad.

As the tide turned in favor of the British the Arabs no longer looked for the Germans to liberate them. Quickly they “declared war” on Germany. The main purpose behind the Arab declarations of war was to gain a vote at the peace conferences and block the Zionists who had no vote but only the blood of their sons to show for their efforts.

Despite the Yishuv’s magnificent record the British did not revoke the White Paper. Despite the Arab treachery and the fact that they did not raise a finger for victory they did not revoke it. Even with the ghastly news of the murder of six million Jews the British would not allow the survivors in.

The Haganah grew restless. Its ranks were filled with experienced soldiers. But it was the Maccabees who called off the truce! A series of terror bombings shook Palestine from end to end and again sent the British into their Taggart forts. The Maccabees, now numbering in the thousands, blew up one British installation after another.

General Haven-Hurst went after the Maccabees. With surprising swiftness he snared and deported several hundred Maccabee leaders to the Sudan. But Akiva’s avenging warriors were not deterred.

Haven-Hurst ordered newly captured Maccabees to be lashed. The Maccabees retorted by catching British soldiers and whipping them in public.

Maccabees were hanged. British soldiers were caught and hanged. A dozen Maccabee bullets and grenades found their mark on a dozen of the more outspoken anti-Jewish officers.

Violent and sordid murders were perpetrated by the Arabs in answer to the Maccabees. The Holy Land reeled under the terror.

Haj Amin el Husseini was placed on the list of war criminals by the Yugoslav government. He had made himself spiritual head of the Yugoslav Moslems who had fought for the German Army. He was placed under arrest in France. The British, however, wanted El Husseini alive and ready to stir up trouble when they needed him, so they helped him escape to Egypt where he was welcomed as a Moslem hero. In Palestine his nephew Jemal seized control of the Arab community.

A new phase of history was bringing the United States into focus as the new power in the Middle East. In addition, since most of the European Jewish communities had been wiped out, by mere process of elimination Jews and others in the United States became the world leaders of the Zionist movement.

With America’s rise, the British proposed a joint Anglo-

American inquiry into the Palestine situation. This joint committee made another exhaustive survey of the Arabs and the Yishuv. They went to Europe to the DP camps. They came to the only human conclusion possible-“100,000 jews

MUST BE ALLOWED INTO PALESTINE AT ONCE.”

The British balked.

It would only be considered if the Haganah and Palmach were disbanded at once! Preposterous! The British found a dozen more reasons not to follow the commission’s recommendations.

The Arabs were as relentless as the Maccabees. Throughout the Arab world there were riots and protests against the Anglo-American commission.

At last the Yishuv Central had had enough. They sent the Palmach and Haganah on a series of damaging raids on British positions.

The British poured in tens of thousands of front-line troops and turned the country into a police state. In a massive roundup they arrested several hundred prominent leaders of the Yishuv and threw them into Latrun prison.

In a masterful countermove, the Haganah blew up every frontier bridge in and out of Palestine in a single night.

The Aliyah Bet was putting more and more pressure on the British blockade.

Finally the British Foreign Minister burst forth with an anti-Jewish tirade and proclaimed all further immigration stopped.

The answer to this came from the Maccabees. The British had their main headquarters in the right wing of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem. This hotel was in the new city with its rear and gardens facing the wall of the old city. A dozen Maccabees, dressed as Arabs, delivered several dozen enormous milk cans to the basement of the hotel. The milk cans were placed under the right wing of the hotel beneath British headquarters. The cans were filled with dynamite. They set the timing devices, cleared the area, and phoned the British a warning to get out of the building. The British scoffed at the idea. This time the Maccabees were playing a prank. They merely wanted to make fools of the British. Surely they would not dare attack British headquarters!

In a few minutes there was a blast heard across the breadth of Palestine. The right wing of the King David Hotel was blown to smithereens!

CHAPTER NINETEEN: The Exodus was declared fit and ready for the run to Palestine.

Ari set the sailing time as the morning after the Chanukah party which the management of the Dome Hotel had arranged on the hotel terrace.

Three hundred places were set. The small Jewish community of Cyprus and the crew of the Exodus sat at a long head table. There was tremendous gaiety as the children rushed to the terrace dressed in new clothing and were deluged with gifts from the people of Cyprus and soldiers from the garrison. The children took one gift each for themselves and marked the rest for the detention camps at Caraolos. The tables were bulging with food and the children squealed with delight. The terrible ordeal of the hunger strike was behind them; they had carried their burden like adults and now they could act like happy children with complete abandon. All around the terrace dozens of curious Greeks and British soldiers watched the celebration.

Karen looked around frantically for Kitty and lit up when she saw her some distance away, standing with Mark Parker by the rail.

“Come on, Kitty,” Karen called, “There is a place for you here.”

“It’s your party,” Kitty answered. “I’ll just watch.”

When everyone had opened his present, David Ben Ami stood at the head table. The terrace became very still as he began to speak. Only the steady shush of the sea could be heard behind him.

“Tonight we celebrate the first day of Chanukah,” David said. “We celebrate this day in honor of Judah Maccabee and his brave brothers and his band of faithful men who came from the hills of Judea to do combat with the Greeks who enslaved our people.”

Some of the youngsters applauded.

“Judah Maccabee had a small band of men and they had no real right fighting so large and powerful an enemy as the Greeks, who ruled the entire world. But Judah Maccabee had faith. He believed that the one true God would show him the way. Judah was a wonderful fighter. Time and again he tricked the Greeks; his men were the greatest of warriors, for the faith of God was in their hearts. The Maccabees stormed Jerusalem and captured it and drove out the Greeks of Asia Minor, who ruled that area of the world.”

A riot of applause.

“Judah entered the Temple and his warriors tore down the idol of Zeus and again dedicated the Temple to the one true God. The same God who helped us all in our battle with the British.”

As David continued with the story of the rebirth of the

Jewish nation, Kitty Fremont listened. She looked at Karen and at Dov Landau-and she looked at Mark and she lowered her eyes. Then she felt someone standing alongside her. It was Brigadier Bruce Sutherland.

“Tonight we will light the first candle of the Menorah. Each night we will light another candle until there are eight. We call Chanukah the feast of lights.”

David Ben Ami lit the first candle and the children said “oh” and “ah.”

“Tomorrow night we shall light the second Chanukah candle at sea and the night after we shall light the third one in Eretz Israel.”

David placed a small skullcap on his head and opened the Bible. ” ‘He will not suffer thy foot to be moved; he that keepth thee will not slumber.’ ”

Kitty’s eyes came to rest on the head table. She looked at them-Zev Gilboa the farmer from the Galilee, and Joab Yarkoni the Moroccan Jew, and David Ben Ami, the scholar from Jerusalem. Her eyes stopped at Ari Ben Canaan. His eyes were rimmed with weariness now that he had had a chance to relax from his ordeal. David set the Bible down and continued to speak from memory.

“Behold!” David said, “he that keepeth Israel shall neither slumber nor sleep. ”

An icy chill passed through Kitty Fremont’s body. Her eyes were fixed on the tired face of Ari Ben Canaan. “Behold …he that keepeth Israel shall neither slumber nor sleep.”

The ancient motors of the Exodus groaned as she slid back into the center of Kyrenia Harbor and she turned and pointed out to sea in the direction of Palestine.

At dawn of the second day everyone sighted land at once.

“Palestine!”

“Eretz Israeli”

A hysteria of laughing and crying and singing and joy burst from the children.

The little salvage tug came within sight of land and the electrifying news spread through the Yishuv. The children who had brought the mighty British Empire to its knees were arriving!

The Exodus sputtered into Haifa Harbor amid a blast of welcoming horns and whistles. The salute spread from Haifa to the villages and the kibbutzim and the moshavim and all the way to Jerusalem to the Yishuv Central building and back again to Haifa.

Twenty-five thousand Jews poured onto the Haifa dock to cheer the creaky little boat. The Palestine Philharmonic

Orchestra played the Jewish anthem-“Hatikvah,” the Hope.

Tears streaked down the cheeks of Karen Hansen Clement as she looked up into Kitty’s face.

The Exodus had come home!

CHAPTER ONE: A line of silver and blue buses from the Palestine bus cooperative, the “Egged” Company, awaited the children on the docks. The official celebration was kept to a quick minimum. The children were loaded aboard the buses and whisked out of the harbor area, convoyed by British armored vehicles. The band played and the crowd cheered as they rolled out of sight.

Karen tugged her window open and shouted to Kitty, but Kitty could not hear her over the din. The buses disappeared and the crowd dispersed. In fifteen minutes the dock was deserted except for a gang of longshoremen and a few British soldiers on guard duty.

Kitty stood motionless by the rail of the Exodus, stunned by the sudden strangeness. It was hard to realize where she was. She looked at Haifa. It was beautiful, with that special beauty that belonged to cities built on hills and around a bay. Close to the waterfront was the Arab sector with crowded clusters of buildings. The Jewish sector sprawled all over the long fingerlike slope of Mount Carmel. Kitty looked to her left, just past Haifa, and saw the futuristic shape of the tank and chimney buildings of the immense Haifa oil refinery, the terminus of the lines from the Mosul fields. At a nearby dock she saw a dozen dilapidated, rickety ships of the Aliyah Bet which, like the Exodus, had managed to reach Palestine.

Zev, David, and Joab interrupted Kitty’s thoughts as they said good-bys and offered thanks and hope that they would see her again. And then they, too, were gone and Kitty was alone.

“Pretty town, isn’t it?”

Kitty turned around. Ari Ben Canaan was standing behind her. “We always bring our guests into Palestine through Haifa. It gives them a good first impression.”

“Where are the children going?” she asked.

“They will be dispersed to a half dozen Youth Aliyah Centers. Some of the centers are located on a kibbutz. Other centers have their own villages. In a few days I will be able to tell you where Karen is.”

“I’ll be grateful.”

“What are your plans, Kitty?”

She laughed sardonically. “I was just asking myself the same thing, along with a dozen other questions. I’m a stranger in town, Mr. Ben Canaan, and I feel a little foolish at the moment, asking myself how I got here. Oh, Good Nurse Fremont has a solid profession in which there is always a shortage. I’ll find a place, somewhere.”

“Why don’t you let me help you get situated?”

“I suppose you’re rather busy. I’m always able to get along.”

“Listen to me, now. I think Youth Aliyah would be perfect for you. The head of the organization is a close friend of mine. I’ll arrange an appointment for you in Jerusalem.”

“That’s very kind but I don’t want to impose.”

“Nonsense. It’s the very least … If you can tolerate my company for a few days I will be happy to drive you to Jerusalem. I must go to Tel Aviv on business first, but it’s just as well … it will give me a chance to set your appointment.”

“I don’t want you to feel that you are obligated to do this.”

“I’m doing it because I want to,” Ari said.

Kitty wanted to give a sigh of relief. She was nervous about being alone in a strange land. She smiled and thanked him.

“Good,” Ari said. “We will have to stay in Haifa tonight because of the road curfew. Pack one bag with what you will need to keep you for a few days. If you carry too much with you the British will be going through your suitcases every five minutes. I’ll have the rest of your things sealed and held at customs.”

After clearances Ari ordered a taxi and drove up Mount Carmel into the Jewish section, which spread through the hills on the mountainside. Near the top they stopped at a small pension set in a pine grove.

“It’s better to stay up here. I know too many people and they won’t let me alone for a minute if we stay in the center of town. Now you rest up. I’ll go down the hill and scare up an auto. I’ll be back by dinner.”

That evening Ari took Kitty to a restaurant on the very top of the Carmel, commanding a view of the entire area. The sight beneath was breathtaking. The whole hillside was alive with green trees and half-hidden brownstone houses and apartment buildings, all done in a square Arabic style. The weird-looking oil refinery appeared to be but a dot from this height, and as it turned dark a golden string of lights ran down the twisting road from Har Ha-Carmel into the Arab section by the waterfront.

Kitty was flushed with excitement and pleased with Ari’s sudden show of attention. She was surprised by the modern-ness of Jewish Haifa. Why, it was far more modern than Athens or Salonika! Much of the strangeness went away when she was addressed in English by the waiter and a half dozen people who knew Ari and stopped at their table to exchange greetings.

They sipped brandy at the end of the meal and Kitty became solemn, intent on the panorama below

“Are you still wondering what you are doing here?”

“Very much. It doesn’t seem quite real.”

“You will find that we are quite civilized and I can even be charming-sometimes, You know, I never have properly thanked you.”

“You don’t have to. You are thanking me very nicely I can only remember one other place so lovely as this.”

“That must be San Francisco?”

“Have you been there, Ari?”

“No. All Americans say that Haifa reminds them of San Francisco.”

It was fully dark and lights twinkled on all over the Carmel hillside. A small orchestra played some light dinner music and Ari poured Kitty another brandy and they touched glasses.

Suddenly the music stopped. All conversation halted,

With startling speed a truckload of British troops pulled to a stop before the restaurant and the place was cordoned off Six soldiers led by a captain entered and looked around. They began to move among the tables, stopping at several and demanding to see identification papers.

“This is just routine,” Ari whispered. “You’ll get used to it,”

The captain in charge of the detail stared at Ari’s table, then walked over to it. “If it isn’t Ari Ben Canaan,” the captain said sarcastically. “We haven’t had your picture on the boards for a long time. I hear you’ve been making mischief elsewhere.”

“Evening, Sergeant,” Ari said. “I’d introduce you if I could remember your name.”

The captain grinned through clenched teeth. “Well, I remember yours. We’re watching you, Ben Canaan. Your old cell at Acre jail is lonesome for you. Who knows, maybe the high commissioner will be smart this time and give you a rope instead.” The captain gave a mock salute and walked on.

“Well,” Kitty said, “what a lovely welcome to Palestine. He was certainly a nasty person.”

Ari leaned close to Kitty and spoke into her ear. “He is Captain Allan Bridges. He is one of the best friends the Haganah has. He keeps us advised on every Arab and British move in the Haifa area. That was all for appearance.”

Kitty shook her head, bewildered. The patrol left with two Jews whose papers didn’t appear in order. The orchestra harassed them with a chorus of “God Save the King.”

The lorry drove away and in a moment it was as though nothing had happened, but Kitty was a little dazed by the

suddenness of it and astonished by the calm of the people

“You learn to live with tension after a while,” An said, watching her. “You’ll get used to it. It is a country filled with angry, emotional people. After a while you won’t know what to do when you get one of those rare weeks of peace and quiet. Don’t be sorry you came just when you are getting ,.’”

Ari’s speech was cut off by a shock wave that ran through the restaurant, rattling the windows and jarring some dishes from the tables. In a second they saw a huge orange ball of flame push angrily into the sky-Another series of explosions followed, shaking the place to its foundations,

Shouts arose: “The oil refinery!” . . “They’ve got the refinery!” . , .“Maccabee raid!”

Ari grabbed Kitty’s hand. “Let’s get out of here. In ten minutes the whole Carmel Valley will be crawling with British soldiers.”

The cafe was emptied in seconds, Ari led Kitty out quickly. Below them oil was flaming madly The entire city screamed with the frantic siren shrieks of speeding fire trucks and British patrols.

Kitty lay awake half the night trying to comprehend the sudden violent things she had seen She was glad that Ari had been with her Would she get used to living with this? She was too bewildered to think about it, but at the moment she felt her coming to Palestine was a sorry mistake.

The next morning the oil refinery was still blazing. A pall of thick smoke hung over the entire Haifa area. The information spread that the raid was Maccabee terrorist work. It had been led by Ben Moshe-Son of Moses-the Maccabee field commander under Akiva, and formerly a professor at the Hebrew University before he rose in Maccabee ranks, The raid was part of a double-pronged Maccabee action. The other strike was against the Lydda airdrome in another part of Palestine, where the terrorists destroyed six million dollars’ worth of Spitfire fighter planes on the ground. The action was the Maccabees’ own way of welcoming the Exodus.

Ari had been able to acquire a small Italian Fiat, a 1933 model The drive to Tel Aviv took only a few hours under normal conditions. Inasmuch as he had never known conditions to be normal he suggested they depart Haifa early, They drove down from the Carmel and took the coastal road along the edge of Samaria. Kitty was impressed by the greenness of the fields of the kibbutzim near the sea. Their color showed more brilliantly by contrast to the drabness of the hills and the dulling glare of the sun A few minutes’ drive from Haifa they met the first roadblock. Ari had warned Kitty to expect it. She watched his reactions. He was apparently not at all annoyed, despite the fact that many of the

soldiers knew him and taunted him with the reminder that his amnesty was only temporary.

Ari left the main road and drove to the Caesarea ruins on the sea. A lunch had been packed for them at the pension and they ate it on the ancient sea wall. Ari pointed to the Sdot Yam-Fields of the Sea-kibbutz where Joab Yarkoni lived and where he had spent much time with the Aliyah Bet when they beached the illegal runners during the 1936-39 riots. Ari showed Kitty how the Arabs had built their town on ruins, some Roman, some Crusader. The Arabs were experts in building on other people’s civilizations and had, in fact, constructed only one wholly new city in all of Palestine in a thousand years. Some of the magnificent Roman statuary and columns had been dragged off from Caesarea and could be found in Arab homes throughout the Samarian and Sharon districts.

After lunch they continued south toward Tel Aviv. The traffic was light. There was only an occasional bus load of either Arabs or Jews or the ever-present donkey cart. Every now and then a speeding, siren-screaming British convoy raced past them. As they passed Arab sections Kitty noticed the contrast of these villages and lands. The Arab woman toiled in the fields and the Arab fields were stony and drab. The women walked along the roadside encased in cumbersome robes with enormous loads balanced on their heads. The coffeehouses along the road were filled with listless men sitting motionless or lying down playing backgammon. Below Zichron Yakov-Memory of Jacob-they passed the first barbwire-enclosed ominous-looking Taggart fort. At Hadera, a bit farther, they came to another, and thereafter they seemed to pop up at every town and crossroad.

Beyond Hadera the land around the Plain of Sharon was even more lush and fertile. They drove between enormous archways of Australian eucalyptus trees.

“Everything you see was waste just twenty-five years ago,” Ari said.

In the afternoon they entered Tel Aviv-the Hill of Spring.

Along the Mediterranean coast arose this city “so white it dazzled the eye in the afternoon sun. Tel Aviv was like frosting on a cake. Ari drove on broad, tree-lined boulevards between rows of ultramodern apartment houses. The city was alive with bustle and movement. Kitty liked Tel Aviv the instant she saw it.

On Hayarkon Street, right on the sea, Ari checked into Gat Rimon Hotel.

In late afternoon all the shops reopened after the siesta period. Ari and Kitty strolled down Allenby Road. Kitty had to change some currency, purchase a few things, and

satisfy a lot of curiosity. Beyond the Mograbi Theater and plaza the road was filled with small shops, the honking and rushing of buses, cars, and people. Kitty had to see every last shop. There were a dozen or more book stores, and she paused to gaze at the cryptic “Hebrew letters. They walked and walked, up to Rothschild Boulevard past the main business district. Here was the older town where Tel Aviv had begun as an outgrowth of Jaffa. The closer they came to the Arab city the more rundown the buildings and shops became. Walking along the streets connecting the two cities, Kitty felt as though she were walking back in time. The surroundings grew dirtier and more odorous and the shops grew smaller and shabbier with each step. They circled back to Tel Aviv through a market place common to both Jews and Arabs. The narrow street was a mass of haggling people crowded around the stalls. They returned down the opposite side of Allenby Road, back to the Mograbi plaza and turned into another wide, tree-lined street. This was Ben Yehuda Street and it was filled with sidewalk cafes. Each cafe had its own distinctive flavor and its own distinctive clientele. There was a cafe for the gathering of lawyers and there was a cafe of the socialist politicians and a cafe of artists and a businessmen’s cafe. There was a cafe where fellow travelers of the terrorists hung out and there was a caf6 of old retired folk playing never-ending chess games. All the cafes of Ben Yehuda Street were filled and were bursting with chatter and arguments.

The news hawkers of the tiny, four-page newspapers shouted out in Hebrew of the Maccabee raids on Lydda and the Haifa refinery and of the arrival of the Exodus. There was a steady stream of people flowing by. There were Orientals in mideastern habit and there were well-groomed women in the latest of fashions from a dozen European countries. Mostly, there were native men in khaki pants and white shirts opened at the necks. They wore thin chain necklaces with a Star of David or some Hebrew pendant. Most of them sported the black mustache which was a trademark of the native born They were a rugged lot. Many were in the blue of a kibbutz with sandaled feet. The native women were tall, angular, and high breasted in plain dresses or slacks or shorts. There was an aggressiveness and pride about them, even in their walk.

Then Ben Yehuda Street became quiet.

It was the same sudden quiet that Kitty remembered from the night before at the restaurant in Haifa.

A British armored sound truck inched down the middle of Ben Yehuda Street. Tight-lipped Tommies manned machine guns on the car.

“attention all jews, the commanding general has ordered a curfew. all jews must be off the street by dark. attention all jews. the commanding general has ordered a curfew. all jews must be off the street by

DARK.”

A ripple of applause and laughter broke out from the onlookers.

“Watch it, Tommy,” someone called. “The next intersection is mined.”

When the trucks had passed, the scene quickly returned to normal.

“Let’s get back to the hotel,” Kitty said.

“I told you you’ll get so that you won’t be able to live without excitement inside a month.”

“I’ll never get used to it, Ari.”

They returned to the hotel with their arms filled with Kitty’s purchases. After cocktails in the small quiet bar there was dinner on the terrace overlooking the sea. Kitty could see the sweep of the coast line where the new city of Tel Aviv ran into the ancient city of Jaffa, the oldest port in the world.

“Thank you for a very nice day, British patrols and roadblocks notwithstanding.”

“You’ll have to forgive me,” Ari said. “I must leave after dinner for a while.”

“What about the curfew?”

“That only applies to Jews,” Ari said.

Ari left Kitty and drove from Tel Aviv to the adjoining suburb town of Ramat Can-the Hill Garden. It was a contrast to the apartment-house city of Tel Aviv in that it was a town of individual homes set in lawns and trees and gardens. The houses were of stucco with red tiled roofs, and they ranged from cottages to huge villas. Ari parked the car and walked about for more than a half hour to make certain he was not being followed.

He came to Montefiore Street 22, a large villa owned by a Dr. Y. Tamir. Dr. Tamir answered the knock, greeted Ari with a warm handshake, and led him downstairs to the basement.

The home of Tamir was Haganah headquarters.

The cellar held munitions and arms, and a printing press which ground out leaflets in Arabic warning the Arabs to remain calm and keep the peace. In another section of the basement a girl spoke in Arabic into a tape recording machine, repeating the warning of the leaflets. The tape would

later be transmitted over the secret mobile radio station, Kol Israel-the Voice of Israel. The manufacturing of hand grenades and the assembly of homemade Sten guns were also among the activites of the underground headquarters.

All activity stopped as Dr. Tamir appeared with Ari. The latter was surrounded and congratulated on the Exodus affair; questions were fired at him from all sides.

“Later, later,” Dr. Tamir pleaded.

“I must see Avidan,” Ari said.

He made his way past the stacked cases of rifles to the door of a secluded office and knocked upon it.

“Yes?”

Ari opened the door and stood before the bald-headed, squat farmer who commanded the underground army. Avidan looked up from the papers on his rickety desk and burst into a smile. “Ari! Shalom!” He sprang up and threw his arms around Ari’s neck, shoved him into a chair, closed the door, and slapped Ari on the back with the force of a pile driver. “So good to see you, Ari! You did a first-class job on the British. Where are the boys?”

“I sent them home.”

“Good. They deserve a few days. Take a few days yourself.”

This was an impressive reward from Avidan, who had not taken a day off for himself in a quarter of a century.

“Who is the girl you came in with?”

“An Arab spy. Don’t be so nosy.”

“Is she one of our friends?”

“No, she isn’t a friend. Not even a fellow traveler.”

“A shame. We could use a good American Christian.”

“No, she’s just a nice woman who looks at Jews as though she were looking into a cage at a zoo. I’m running her up to Jerusalem tomorrow to see Harriet Saltzman about getting her a place in Youth Aliyah.”

“Something personal, maybe?”

“Good Lord, no. Now turn your Jewish curiosity somewhere else.”

The room was stuffy. Avidan pulled out a large blue kerchief and mopped the sweat from his bald pate.

“That was quite a welcome we got yesterday from the Maccabees. I hear the refinery will be burning for a week. Wrecked production.”

Avidan shook his head. “They did a good job yesterday-but what of the day before yesterday and what of the day after tomorrow? They are making three bad raids to every good one. Every time they resort to brutality or indiscriminate murder the whole Yishuv suffers. We are the ones who have to answer for Maccabee actions. Tomorrow General Haven-Hurst and the high commissioner will be at Yishuv Central. They’ll be pounding their fists on Ben Gurion’s desk demanding we use the Haganah to apprehend them. I swear I don’t know what to do sometimes. So far the British haven’t really turned on the Haganah but I am afraid if Maccabee terror continues … they’ve even taken up bank robbery to finance their operations.”

“British banks, I hope.” Ari lit a cigarette and stood up and paced the tiny office. “Perhaps the time has come to stage a few good raids of our own.”

“No … we just can’t risk the Haganah. We are the ones who must defend all the Jews. Illegal immigration … that is the way we will fight them for now. One thing like the Exodus is more important than blowing up ten Haifa refineries.”

“But the day must come that we commit ourselves, Avidan. We have an army or we don’t.”

Avidan took some sheets of paper from his desk drawer and pushed them over toward Ari. Ari thumbed through them: order of battle, 6th airborne division.

Ari looked up. “They have three parachute brigades?”

“Keep reading.”

ROYAL ARMORED CORPS WITH KING’S OWN HUSSARS, 53RD WORCESTERSHIRE, 249TH AIRBORNE PARK, DRAGOON GUARDS, ROYAL LANCERS, QUEEN’S ROYAL, EAST SURREY, MIDDLESEX, GORDON HIGHLANDERS, ULSTER RIFLES, HERTFORDSHIRE REGIMENT-the list of British troops in Palestine ran on and on. Ari threw the papers down on Avidan’s desk. “Whom are they fighting, the Russian Army?”

“You see, Ari? Every day I go through it with some young hotheads in the Palmach. Why don’t we raid? Why don’t we come out and fight? Do, you think I like it? Ari … they have twenty per cent of the combat strength of the British Army here. One hundred thousand troops, not counting the Trans-Jordan Arab Legion. Sure, the Maccabees run around shooting up everything, grabbing the limelight, accusing us of hiding.” Avidan slammed his fist on the desk. “By God, I’m trying to put an army together. We haven’t even got ten thousand rifles to fight with and if the Haganah goes, we all go with it.

“You see, Ari … the Maccabees can keep mobility and hide with a few thousand blowhards. We have got to stall and keep stalling. We can’t have a showdown. We can’t get Haven-Hurst angry, either. One British soldier here for every five Jews.”

Ari picked up the list of British troops again and studied it in silence.

“The British dragnets, cordons, screenings, raids get worse

every day. The Arabs are building strength while the British turn their backs.”

Ari nodded. “Where do I go from here?” “I am not going to give you a command, yet. Go on home, take a few days’ rest then report to Palmach at Ein Or kibbutz. I want you to assess our strength in every settlement in the Galilee. We want to know what we can expect to hold … what we are going to lose.”

“I’ve never heard you talk like this, Avidan.” “Things have never been so bad. The Arabs have refused even to sit at the same conference table and talk with us in London.”

Ari walked to the door.

“My love to Barak and Sarah and tell Jordana to behave herself with David Ben Ami home. I am sending him and the other boys to Ein Or.”

“I’ll be in Jerusalem tomorrow,” Ari said. “Do you want anything?”

“Yes, dig me up ten thousand front-line troops and the arms to outfit them.” “Shalom, Avidan.”

“Shalom, Ari. It is good to have you home.” Ari grew morose as he drove back to Tel Aviv. Long ago in Cyprus he had told young David Ben Ami that many things are tried in the Haganah and Palmach and Aliyah Bet. Some plans work and some fail. A professional should do his work and not become entangled emotionally. Ari Ben Canaan was a machine. He was an efficient, daring operator. Sometimes he won, sometimes he lost.

But once in a while Ari Ben Canaan looked at it all with realism and it nearly crushed him.

Exodus, the Haifa refinery, a raid here, a raid there. Men died to smuggle in fifty rifles. Men were hanged for smuggling in a hundred frantic survivors. He was a little man fighting a giant. He wished, at that moment, he could have David Ben Ami’s faith in divine intervention, but Ari was a realist.

Kitty Fremont waited in the little bar off the lobby for Ari’s return. He had been so decent that she wanted to wait up for him and talk some more and have a nightcap or two. She saw him walk into the lobby and go to the desk for his key.

“Ari!” she called.

His face showed the same deep concentration it had showed that first day she saw him on Cyprus. She waved to him but he did not even seem to see or to hear her. He looked directly at her, then walked upstairs to his room.

CHAPTER TWO: Two buses carrying fifty of the Exodus children drove past the tel of the ruins of Hazor and into the Huleh Valley All during the drive from Haifa through the Galilee the travelers had been hanging out of the window cheering and waving and pointing in wonder at the sights of their long-promised land.

“Dov! Everything is so beautiful!” Karen cried.

Dov’s grumble Karen interpreted as meaning that he didn’t see so much to make a fuss about.

They drove deep into the Huleh to Yad El, the home of Ari Ben Canaan. Here a road branched from the main road and ran up into the hills toward the Lebanese border. The children saw the road sign pointing to Gan Dafna; they nearly exploded with anticipation, with the lone exception of the morose Dov Landau. The buses worked up the winding road and soon the Huleh expanded into full vista, carpeted with green fields of the kibbutzim and moshavim. The rectangular fishponds made a dozen small lakes around the larger swamplands of Huleh Lake.

They slowed as they entered the Arab village of Abu Yesha halfway up the mountains. There was none of the coldness or hostility at Abu Yesha the children had noted in the other Arab villages. They were greeted with friendly waving.

Past Abu Yesha they climbed beyond the two-thousand-foot elevation marker and then on to the Youth Aliyah village of Gan Dafna-the Garden of Dafna. They stopped before green lawn measuring fifty by a hundred yards in the center of the village. The whole place sat on a large plateau. The center green was surrounded by administration buildings and was the hub of the village, which ran off in all four directions. Flowers and trees and green were everywhere. As the Exodus children debarked the village orchestra greeted them with a rousing march.

In the center of the green stood a life-sized statue of Dafna, the girl after whom the village was named. The figure was cast in bronze with a rifle in her hands, looking down on the Huleh, much the same as that day at Ha Mishmar when the Arabs had killed her.

The village founder, a tiny man with a slight humpback named Dr. Lieberman, stood by the statue of Dafna, smoking a large-bowled pipe as he welcomed the new youngsters. He briefly told them that he had left Germany in 1934 and founded Gan Dafna in 1940 on this land which had been

generously given. to Youth Aliyah by Kammal, the late muktar of Abu Yesha. Dr. Lieberman went to each youngster to speak a few personal words of welcome in a half dozen languages. As Karen watched him she had a feeling that she had seen him before. He looked and acted like the professors at Cologne when she was a baby , . ” but it was so long ago she could not really remember.

Each new child was attended by a member of the village.

“Are you Karen Clement?”

“Yes.”

“I am Yona, your new roommate,” said an Egyptian Jewess a bit older than Karen. The two girls shook hands, “Come, I will show you to our room. You will like it here.”

Karen called to Dov that she would see him later and she walked beside Yona past the administration buildings and the schoolrooms to an area of cottages set in a shrubbed pathway. “We are lucky,” Yona said. “We get the cottages because we are seniors.”

Karen stopped a moment before the cottage and looked at it with disbelief, then entered. It was very simple but Karen thought it the most wonderful room that she had ever seen. A bed, a desk, a wardrobe and a chair-her own, her very own.

It was evening before Karen had a free moment. After dinner the children were to be given a welcoming show at the outdoor theater.

Karen met Dov on the green near the statue of Dafna. For the first time in weeks and weeks she felt like dancing. The air was so crisp and wonderful and the village was heaven! Karen trembled with happiness. She stood by Dov and pointed to the white clustered houses of Abu Ycsha below them in a saddle of the hill. Above them was the Taggart fort, Fort Esther, on the Lebanese border, and down at the floor of the valley were the fields belonging to the village, adjoining the fields of the moshav of Yad El. Along the hilltops at the far end of the Huleh was Tel Hai, where Trumpledor fell, and across the valley was Mount Hermon and Syria.

Karen was dressed in olive-drab slacks and high-collared peasant’s blouse and she wore new sandals on her feet. “Oh, Dov! This is the most wonderful day of my life,” she cried. “Yona is lots of fun and she was telling me that Dr. Lieberman is the nicest man on earth.”

She rolled in the grass and looked up in the sky and sighed. Dov stood over her, wordless. She sat up and took his hand and tugged at him to sit beside her

“Cut it out,” he said.

She persisted and he sat down. He became nervous as she

squeezed his hand and lay her head on his shoulder. “Please be happy, Dov … please be happy.”

He shrugged and pulled away from her.

“Please be happy.”

“Who cares about it?”

“I care,” Karen said. “I care for you.”

“Well . care for yourself.”

“I care for myself, too.” She knelt in front of him and gripped his shoulders. “Did you see your room and your bed? How long has it been since you’ve been in a room like that?”

Dov flushed at the touch of her hands and lowered his eyes. “Just think, Dov No more displaced persons’ camps … no more La Ciotats, no more Caraolos. No more illegal ships. We are home, Dov, and it is even more beautiful than I dreamed.”

Dov got to his feet slowly and turned his back. “This place is fine for you. I got other plans.”

“Please forget them,” she pleaded.

The orchestra played and the music drifted over the green.

“We had better get to the theater,” Karen said.

Once Ari and Kitty left Tel Aviv and drove past the huge British camp at Sarafand she felt the tension of Palestine again. They passed through the all-Arab city of Ramie on the road to Jerusalem and felt angry Arab eyes on them. Ari seemed oblivious of the Arabs and oblivious of Kitty. He had not spoken a dozen words to her all day.

Beyond Ramie the car turned into the Bab el Wad, a snaking road that twisted up into the Judean hills. Young forests planted by the Jews pushed up from the earth on ravines on either side of the road. Deep into the hills stood ancient terracing that stood out from the denuded earth like ribs of a starving dog. Once these very hills and terraces supported hundreds of thousands of people. Now it was completely eroded. The hilltops held Arab villages clustered in white clumps above them.

Here in the Bab el Wad the magic pull of Jerusalem gripped Kitty Fremont. It was said that none could pass through the Judean hills for the first time and escape the haunting power of the City of David. It seemed strange to Kitty that she should feel it so intensely. Her religious training had been in matter-of-fact midwestern Protestantism. It had been approached with a basic sincerity and a lack of intensity. Higher and higher they drove and the anticipation became greater. She was with the Bible now, and for the first time, in these silent and weird hills, came the realization of what it was to be in the Holy Land.

In the distance a dim outline of the citadels of Jerusalem jutted on the horizon and Kitty Fremont was filled with a kind of exaltation.

They entered the New City built by the Jews and drove down Jaffa Road, the principal commercial spine that passed crowded shops, toward the wall of the Old City At the Jaffa Gate, Ari turned and drove along the wall tb King David Avenue and in a few moments stopped before. the great King David Hotel.

Kitty stepped from the car and gasped at the Sight of the right wing of the hotel sheared away.

“It was once British headquarters,” Ari said. “The Maccabees changed all that.”

The hotel was built of Jerusalem stone. It was grandiose in the overburdened European manner, with its lobby an alleged duplication of King David’s court.

Kitty came down to lunch first. She waited on the terrace in the rear of the hotel that looked over a small valley to the Old City wall. The terrace was opposite David’s Tower and was set in a formal garden. A four-piece orchestra behind her played luncheon music.

Ari walked out to the terrace and stopped in his tracks. Kitty looked lovely! He had never seen her like this before. She wore a flouncy and chic cocktail dress and a wide-brimmed hat and white gloves. At that moment he felt far away from her. She was all the lovely women in Rome and in Paris and even Berlin who belonged to a world in which women acted in a way he could not quite understand. It was a light year from Kitty to Dafna but she was beautiful, indeed.

He seated himself. “I have spoken to Harriet Saltzman. We will see her right after lunch.”

“Thanks. I’m very excited about Jerusalem.”

“She has mysterious powers. Everyone is excited on his first visit. Take David Ben Ami … David never gets over Jerusalem. Matter of fact he will be sightseeing with you tomorrow. It is the Sabbath. He wants to take you into the Old City.”

“He is sweet to think of me.”

Ari looked at her closely. She seemed even prettier now than when he entered the terrace. He turned his eyes away and signaled for a waiter, then stared off into space after giving the order. Kitty had the feeling now that Ari had committed himself and was anxious to complete his obligation. No word passed between them for ten minutes.

She picked at her salad. “Do I bore you?”

“Of course not”

“Since you came back from your engagement last night you’ve acted as though I haven’t existed.”

“I’m sorry, Kitty,” he said without looking at her. “I guess I have been rather bad company tQday.”

“Is there something wrong?”

“There’s a lot wrong but it doesn’t concern you or me or my bad manners. Let me tell you about Harriet Saltzman. She’s an American. She must be well over eighty years old now. If we conferred sainthoods in the Yishuv, she would be our first saint. See that hill beyond the Old City?”

“Over there?”

“That’s Mount Scopus. Those buildings make up the most modern medical center in the Middle East. The money comes from American Zionist women that Harriet organized after the first world war. Most of the hospital and medical centers in Palestine come from her Hadassah organization.”

“She sounds like quite a girl.”

“Yes, she is. When Hitler came to power Harriet organized Youth Aliyah. She is responsible for saving thousands of youngsters. They maintain dozens of youth centers all over Palestine. You’ll get along fine with her.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Well, no Jew who has lived in Palestine can ever go without leaving his heart here. It’s the same way with Americans, I think. Harriet has been here for years but she’s still very much an American.”

The orchestra stopped playing.

A silence fell over Jerusalem. They could hear the faint cry of a Moslem muezzin calling his people to prayer from a minaret in the Old City. Then it became quiet again with a stillness that Kitty had never experienced.

The bells from the carillon in the YMCA tower over the street played a hymn and the tones flooded the hills and the valleys. And then-again it became still. It was so peaceful it would have been sacrilegious to speak. All life and all time seemed to stand still in one moment.

“What an utterly wonderful sensation,” Kitty said.

“Those kinds of moments are rarities these days,” Ari said. “I am afraid that the calm is deceptive.”

Ari saw a small olive-skinned man standing at the terrace door. He recognized the man as Bar Israel, the contact for the Maccabees. Bar Israel nodded to Ari and disappeared.

“Will you excuse me for a moment?” Ari said. He walked into the lobby to the cigarette stand and purchased a pack and then thumbed through a magazine. Bar Israel walked up alongside him.

“Your Uncle Akiva is in Jerusalem,” Bar Israel whispered. “He wants to see you.”

“I have to go to the Zion Settlement Society but I will be free shortly after.”

“Meet me in the Russian compound,” the contact man said, and hastened through the lobby.

King George Avenue was a wide boulevard in the New City and was lined with administrative buildings and schools and churches. The Zion Settlement Society, a large, four-storied rambling affair, stood on a corner. A long driveway led to the main entrance.