Exodus

The storming of Kastel became the first Jewish offensive action in the War of Liberation. The brigade made a sheer-guts attack, crawling up the treacherous incline under cover of friendly darkness. They reached the peak of the Kastel bloodied and weary but threw themselves into hand-to-hand combat and threw the Arabs out.

Kastel lifted the flagging spirits of the Yishuv. Following the victory, the huge convoy from Tel Aviv battled every inch of the way through the Bab el Wad, slogged on through to New Jerusalem, and again brought vital relief to the beleaguered Jews.

Kawukji summoned Mohammed Kassi, the Huleh commander of the irregulars, from Fort Esther to headquarters in Nablus. E-32 489

Kawukji was frantic for a victory. For months he had been writing communiques boasting of triumph after triumph. As the “general” of the Mufti, Kawukji had nourished the dream of commanding an Arab army that spread from the borders of Turkey to the Rock of Gibraltar. He blamed “British intervention” as the reason he had been unable to win a Jewish settlement. When the British pulled out of the Huleh area he had no alibi left.

Kawukji kissed Mohammed Kassi on both cheeks in the accustomed. style and they spoke at great lengths of their glorious victories. Kassi told of how he had “conquered” Fort Esther, and Kawukji described how he had weakened Tirat Tsvi and Mishmar Haemek with brilliant probing tactics.

“I have received a message from his Holiness, the Mufti in Damascus,” Kawukji said. “On May 15, the day after the British terminate the mandate, Haj Amin el Husseini will make a triumphant return to Palestine.”

“And what a magnificent day that shall be for all of Islam,” Mohammed Kassi nodded.

“His Holiness has selected Safed as his temporary capital until the Zionists are completely exterminated. Now that the dear friend of the Jews, Major Hawks, is gone from Safed, we will have it within a week.”

“I am delighted to hear such news!”

“However,” Kawukji continued, “Safed will not be truly safe and fit for the return of his Holiness so long as a single Jew remains in the Huleh Valley. They hold a dagger in our backs. We must erase them.”

Mohammed Kassi turned slightly pale.

“The Huleh, I believe, is in your command, my brother. I want you to capture Gan Dafna at once. As soon as Gan Dafna falls we will have the rest of the Huleh Zionists by the throat.”

“Generalissimo, let me assure you that each and every one of my volunteers is a man filled with the courage of a lion and is dedicated to the noble cause of crushing Zionism. They have all vowed to fight to the last drop of blood.”

“Good. They are costing us almost a dollar a month in pay alone.”

Kassi stroked his beard and held up his forefinger with its large jeweled ring. “However! It is well known that Major Hawks left three thousand rifles, a hundred machine guns, and dozens of heavy mortars at Gan Dafna!”

Kawukji sprang to his feet.

“You cringe before children!”

“I swear by Allah’s beard that the Jews have sent in a 490

thousand Palmach reinforcements. I have seen them with my own eyes.”

Kawukji slapped Mohammed Kassi twice across the face. “You will lay open Gan Dafna, you will level it to the ground, and you will wash your hands in their blood or I will set your carcass out for the vultures!”

CHAPTER FIVE: Mohammed Kassi’s first move was to send a hundred of his men into Abu Yesha. Immediately some of the villagers went down to kibbutz Ein Or to report the fact to Ari. Ari knew that the people of Abu Yesha were predominantly with the Jews. He waited for them to act.

The Arabs of Abu Yesha resented the presence of the irregulars. They had been neighbors of the people of Yad El for decades; their homes had been built by the Jews. They were not angry and had no desire to fight and they looked to Taha, their muktar, to rally them and eject Kassi’s men.

Taha kept a strange silence, speaking neither for nor against the coming of the irregulars. When the elders of Abu Yesha urged him to unite the people, Taha refused to discuss the matter. His silence sealed the fate of Abu Yesha, for the fellaheen were helpless without leadership. They quietly submitted to the occupation.

Kassi was quick to capitalize on Taha’s passive acquiescence. Day by day his men became bolder and more unruly as Taha continued his silence. The road to Gan Dafna was cut. There was anger in Abu Yesha but it was no more than grumbling on an individual level. Then four Abu Yesha Arabs were caught by the irregulars running food up to Gan Dafna. Kassi had them killed, decapitated, and their heads put on display in the village square as a warning. From that point on Abu Yesha was completely subdued.

Ari had guessed wrong. He had felt sure that the people of Abu Yesha would force Taha to take a stand, especially with the safety of Gan Dafna at stake. Their failure to act and the closing of the road put him in a terrible position.

The road shut, Kassi’s ponderous mountain guns began an around-the-clock shelling of Gan Dafna from Fort Esther.

The Jews had trained for this sort of thing at Gan Dafna from the day the place was opened. Everyone knew his job. They switched onto emergency footing quickly and quietly.

All children over the age of ten were assigned to an active part in the village defense. The water tank had been sandbagged and the power generators, medical supplies, arsenal, and food stores had been installed underground.

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Life went on as usual in the dank bunkers. School classes, dining, games, and all routine functions continued below the ground. Sleeping quarters were shelf-like bunks in dormitories built inside sections of twelve-feet-diameter concrete water pipes which had been sunk deeply into the earth and covered with yards of dirt and sandbags.

Whenever the shelling outside stopped, the children and staff came out from the bunkers to play, stretch their cramped muscles, and to take care of the lawns and gardens.

Within a week the staff had made it seem that the whistling shells and explosions were merely another minor unpleasantness of daily living.

Down at Ein Or kibbutz, Ari faced the problem. All the settlements must depend on their own defense systems, but Gan Dafna held six hundred children and stood in the most vulnerable place, there beneath Fort Esther. There was enough food for a month, and the water supply would be ample if the tank was not hit. Fuel would become a problem. It was extremely cold during the nights in the mountains and Ari knew that Dr. Lieberman would rather freeze than cut down the precious trees for burning. Communications from Gan Dafna were maintained by blinker light to Yad El; the telephone line had been cut. The children’s village was so completely cut off that the only way it, could be reached was by a dangerous and grueling climb up the west face of the mountain, more than two thousand feet, which had to be negotiated by night.

The communication and supply problem, however, was not Ari’s main worry. The fear of a massacre was. He could not guess how long it would be until the “armed might” myth of Gan Dafna would be exploded.

By shaking down his entire command, Ari was able to come up with a dozen Spanish rifles of late 1880 vintage, twenty-three homemade Sten guns, and an obsolete Hungarian antitank weapon with five rounds of ammunition.

Zev Gilboa and twenty Palmach reinforcements were ordered to deliver the new equipment. Zev’s patrol were to be human pack mules. The antitank gun had to be dismantled and carried in pieces. The patrol moved out under cover of dark, and through one entire night they climbed up the sheer west slope of the mountain.

At one critical point they passed within a few feet of Abu Yesha’s boundary, through a three-hundred-yard draw which had to be negotiated by crawling a few inches at a time. They could see, hear, and smell Kassi’s irregulars.

The sight of Gan Dafna was a saddening one. Many of the buildings showed artillery hits, and the lovely center green had been, chopped to pieces. The statue of Dafna had been 492

knocked from its pedestal. Yet the morale of the children was amazingly high, and the security system was completely effective. Zev was amused by the sight of little Dr. Lieberman coming out to greet the patrol with a pistol strapped to his waist. Sighs of relief greeted the coming of the twenty Palmach reinforcements.

Kassi continued the* bombardment for ten more days. The mountain guns knocked down the buildings one by one. Gan Dafna drew its first casualties when a shell exploded near the entrance of a shelter and killed two children.

But Kawukji wanted action. Kassi tried two or three halfhearted probes. Each time his men were ambushed and killed, for Zev had extended Gan Dafna defenses to the very gates of Fort Esther. Palmach boys and girls hid out near both the fort and Abu Yesha to watch-every Arab move.

Meanwhile, a courier came to Ari from Haganah headquarters in Tel Aviv. Ari called his settlement commanders together at once. A high decision had been made in Tel Aviv regarding the children in border settlements. It was recommended that all children be moved into the Sharon-Tel Aviv area close to the sea where the situation was not so critical and where every home, kibbutz, and moshav was ready to receive them. One could read between the lines: the situation had become so bad that the Haganah was obviously thinking of eventual evacuation of the children by sea to save them from massacre if the Arabs broke through.

It was not an order; each kibbutz and moshav had to make the decision for itself. On the one hand, the farmers would fight more fiercely with their children close by. On the other hand, massacre was a horrible specter to contemplate.

The evacuation of the children was a doubly painful thing for these pioneers, for it became symbolic of further retreat. Most of them had fled from former horror to come to this place and their farms were the last line of retreat. Beyond Palestine there was no hope.

Each settlement made its decision. Some of the older and longer-established places simply refused to let their children go. Others vowed they would all stand and die together: they did not want their children to know the meaning of retreat. Others in the mountains already isolated and undergoing hardships managed to bring children out for removal.

Gan Dafna was everyone’s responsibility.

Ari’s spies reported that Kawukji was bringing unbearable pressure on Mohammed Kassi to make an assault on Gan Dafna. Food was getting low in the village and fuel was all but gone. The water tank had sprung several leaks from near hits. The hardship of bunker life was wearing down the community, although there were no complaints.

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The commanders in the Huleh Valley agreed that the younger children had to be taken out of Gan Dafna. The question was-how! A truce would involve a double danger: first, Kassi would never recognize it; second, it would be a costly show of weakness to the Arab commander. If Ari tried a convoy through the roads or an outright attack on Abu Yesha he would have to pull out and mass his entire Huleh strength—then he could be only half certain of success. It was not merely a matter of winning or losing a battle. To lose would lead to the death of the children.-

As so many times before, Ari was called upon to evolve a desperation measure to counter crushing odds. And because there was no choice, again he conceived a fantastic plan, this one more daring than anything he had ever tried in his life.

After organizing the details of his scheme, Ari left David to mobilize a task force and he set out for Gan Dafna. The climb up the mountainside was painful every inch of the way. His leg throbbed constantly and collapsed several times during the night. He was able, to compensate for the handicap by - his intimate knowledge of the route, for he had climbed it a dozen times as a boy. He reached Gan Dafna at dawn and immediately called a meeting of the section heads at the command post bunker. Zev, Jordana, Dr. Lieberman, and Kitty Fremont were among them.

“There are two hundred and fifty children here under the age of twelve,” Ari said without introduction or preface. “They will be evacuated tomorrow night.”

He looked at the dozen surprised faces.

“A task force is now assembling at Yad El moshav,” he continued. “Tonight, four hundred men from every settlement in the Huleh will be led up the west face of the mountain by David Ben Ami. If everything goes according to plan and they are not discovered they should be here by daybreak tomorrow. Two hundred and fifty of the men will each carry a child down the mountain tomorrow night. The balance, a hundred and fifty men, will act as a guard force. I may add that the guard force will be carrying all the heavy automatic weapons in the Huleh Valley.”

Ari’s listeners in the bunker stared at him as though he were insane. There was no sound or movement for a full minute.

Finally Zev Gilboa stood up. “Ari, perhaps I did not understand you. You actually plan to carry two hundred and fifty children down the mountain at night?”

“That is correct.”

“It is a treacherous trip for man by himself in daylight,” 494

Dr. Lieberman said. “Carrying a child down at night-some of them are certain to fall.”

“That is a risk that has to be taken.”

“But Ari,” Zev said, “they must pass so close to Abu Yesha. It is certain that Kassi’s men will detect them.”

“We will take every precaution to see that they are not detected.”

Everyone began to protest at once.

“Quiet!” Ari snapped. “This is not a forum. You people here are not to speak of this to anyone. I want no panic. Now, get out of here, all of you. I have a lot of work to do.”

The shelling from Fort Esther was particularly heavy during the day. Ari worked with each section head in turn to complete the smallest details of the evacuation and to work out a minute-by-minute timetable.

Each of those dozen people who knew of the scheme went around with hearts heavy with apprehension. A thousand things could go wrong. Someone could slip and cause a panic … the Arab dogs in Abu Yesha would hear them or Smell them and bark … Kassi would discover the move and attack all the settlements in the Huleh realizing they were without their heavy weapons …

Yet they knew that there was little else that Ari could do. In a week or ten days Gan Dafna would reach a desperation level anyhow.

As evening approached, David Ben Ami, with the task force in Yad El, sent out a coded blinker message that he would be on the way with the darkness.

Throughout that second night, the four hundred volunteers pushed their way up the mountain and appeared on the outskirts of Gan Dafna before daybreak in a state of exhaustion from the climb and the tension. Ari met them outside the village and hid them in the woods. He did not want them spotted by Kassi’s men, nor did he want any wild speculation inside Gan Dafna.

They remained in the woods through the entire day. At ten minutes to six in the evening, exactly forty minutes before the sun was to set, the operation went into full effect.

The children to be evacuated were fed at exactly five minutes to six and a sleeping powder was put in each child’s milk. By a quarter after six the’ children were put into then-bunks in the water-pipe shelters beneath the ground. They were led in group singing until they dropped off into a deep drugged slumber.

At six thirty-two the sun set behind Fort Esther.

At six-forty Ari called a meeting of the entire staff outside of the children’s bunkers.

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“You will all pay strict attention,” he said sternly. “In a few minutes we are going to begin the evacuation of the younger children, Your name will be called and you will be given an assignment. Everything has been worked out on a tight schedule and any variation of it could endanger the lives of the children and their escorts as well as yourselves. I want no discussion or questions. Any failure to co-operate will be dealt with drastically.”

At six forty-five Jordana Ben Canaan set out a guard around Gan Dafna consisting of the rest of the children. The guard was four times normal strength to make certain there would be no Arab infiltration that might discover the movements inside Gan Dafna. Zev Gilboa and his twenty Palmach troops attached to Dafna pushed out toward the hills on a special covering mission.

As soon as the security around Gan Dafna was reported tight, twenty-five of the Gan Dafna staff went into the bunkers to dress the sleeping children in their warmest clothing. Kitty moved from child to child to make certain that each one had been properly drugged by the sleeping powder. A thick strip of adhesive tape was placed over each child’s mouth so that he could not cry out in his sleep. By seven thirty the unconscious children were dressed and ready. Ari then brought the task force from its hiding place in the woods.

A chain line was formed from the bunkers, and the sleeping little bodies handed out one by one. Improvised strap rigs had been sewn together to form a makeshift saddle seat for the back of the men so that the children could be carried like packs. This would allow each man to have both hands free for his rifle and the climb.

By eight-thirty, the two hundred and fifty men and their small slumbering loads stood a final check to see that the children were strapped in securely. Then the line moved out to the main gate where the protecting force, a hundred and fifty men with automatic weapons, stood ready. With Ari leading the way, they pushed off over the edge of the drop down the side of the mountain. One by one the men and the children dropped down, until the last of them disappeared into the night.

Those left behind stood at the gates of Gan Dafna in silence. There was nothing to do now but wait until morning. They began drifting back toward their bunkers, where they would spend the sleepless night in silence, trembling with fear for the children and for the fate of this strange convoy.

Kitty Fremont stood alone by the main gate for more than an hour after they had gone. She stared vacantly into the darkness. 496

“It is going to be a very long night,” a voice said behind her. “You might as well get in out of the cold.”

Kitty turned. Jordana stood next to her. For the first time since they had met, Kitty was actually glad to see the redheaded sabra. She had been developing a growing admiration for Jordana since her decision to stay. Jordana was perhaps the one person most responsible for keeping Gan Dafna calm. The girl had instilled the young Gadna troops with an infectious confidence; they behaved like spirited battle veterans. During all the ordeals since the closing of the road, Jordana had remained contained and efficient. It was quite a load for a young woman not yet twenty, but Jordana had that quality of leadership that made those around her feel secure.

“Yes, it’s going to be a very long night,” Kitty said.

“Then we can keep each other company,” Jordana said. “I will tell you a secret. I have a half bottle of brandy hidden in the command-post bunker. I think that tonight would be a perfect time to finish it. Why don’t you wait for me at my bunker? I have to bring in the guards. I’ll be back in a half hour.”

Kitty didn’t move. Jordana took her arm. “Come on,” she said gently, “there is nothing we can do now.”

Kitty had been sitting nervously and smoking cigarette after cigarette until Jordana finally got back to the command post. Jordana took the brown Haganah stocking cap from her head, and her long scarlet tresses fell to her shoulders. She alternately held her cheeks and nabbed her hands together to drive out the cold. The brandy was hidden in a loosely filled place in the dirt wall. She took it out and wiped off the bottle and poured Kitty and herself a stiff drink.

“Le chaim,” Jordana said, taking a sip. “That is good.”

“How long will it be before they pass near Abu Yesha?”

“That won’t “be until after midnight,” Jordana answered.

“I have been telling myself over and over that they are going to come through all right. Then I begin thinking of the thousands of things that can go wrong.”

“It is impossible not to think about it,” Jordana said, “but it is in the hands of God now.”

“God? Yes, He does special things here,” Kitty said.

“If you don’t get religion in Palestine, I doubt that you’ll get it anywhere,” Jordana said. “I cannot remember the time that we have not lived on faith. We actually have little else to sustain us.”

Coming from Jordana Ben Canaan, the words sounded strange, yet-not strange at all. On the surface Jordana did not appear to harbor a deep faith … but what else could give her the power to exist under this constant tension if it were not faith?

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“Kitty,” Jordana said suddenly, “I have a confession to make to you. I have wanted very much for us to become friends.”

“Why is that, Jordana?”

“Because I have learned something from you … something I have been very wrong about. I have watched you work here with the children and I know what you did for Ari. When you decided to stay I realized something … I realized that a woman like you can have just as much courage as … our kind of people. I used to believe that to be feminine was a sign of weakness.”

“Thank you, Jordana,” Kitty smiled weakly, “but I’m afraid I could use a little of your brand of faith or courage or whatever it is right now. I feel as though I’m ready to fall apart.”

Kitty lit a cigarette and Jordana poured her another brandy.

“I have been thinking …” Jordana said. “You would be good for Ari.”

Kitty shook her head. “We are, as the saying goes, two nice people not made for each other.” ’

“That is unfortunate, Kitty.”

Kitty looked at her watch. She knew from the discussions that the long column of men would now be approaching the first of the almost straight drops. With the children, they would use ropes easing each man’s descent, one by one. It was a thirty-five-foot plunge. From there they would have to slide in loose dirt for a hundred yards.

“Tell me about yourself and David,” Kitty said quickly.

Jordana’s eyes lit up. “Ah, my David… my gentle, wonderful David.”

“Where did you first meet?”

“At the Hebrew University. I met him the second day I was there. I saw him and he saw me and we fell in love at that very moment and we have never fallen out of it.”

“That’s the way it was with my husband and me,” Kitty said.

“Of course it took me all that first term to let him know he was in love with me.”

“It took me longer than that.” Kitty smiled.

“Yes, men can be a bother about such things. But by summer he knew very well who his woman was. We went out on an archaeological expedition together into the Negev Desert. We were trying to find the exact route of Moses and the ten tribes in the Wildernesses of Zin and Paran.”

“I hear it’s pretty desolate out there.”

“No, actually there are ruins of hundreds of Nabataean 498

cities. The cisterns still have water in them. If you run in luck you can find all sorts of antiquities.”

“It sounds exciting.”

“It is, but it’s terribly hard work. David loves digging for ruins. He feels the glory of our people all around us. Like so many others … that is why the Jews can never be separated from this land. David has made wonderful plans. After the War we are both going to return to the university. I will go for my master’s degree and David his doctorate, and then we shall excavate a big, big Hebrew city. He wants to open Hazor, right here in the Huleh. Of course, these are only dreams. That takes lots of money … and peace.” Then she laughed ironically. “Peace, of course, is merely an abstract word, an illusion. I wonder what peace is like?”

“Perhaps peace would be dull for you.”

“I don’t know,” Jordana said, with a trace of tiredness in her young voice. “Just once in my life I would like to see how human beings live a normal life.”

“Will you travel?”

“Travel? No. I do what David does. I go where David goes. But, Kitty, I would like to go out once. All my life I have been told that all life begins and ends in Palestine. But … every once in a while I feel strangled. Many of my friends have gone away from Palestine. It seems that we sabras are a strange breed made for fighting. We cannot adjust to living in other places. They all come back to Palestine sooner or later-but they grow old so quickly here.” Jordana cut herself short. “It must be the brandy,” she said. “As you know, sabras can’t drink at all.”

Kitty smiled at Jordana and felt her first compassion for the girl. She snuffed out her cigarette and looked at her watch again. The minutes were dragging.

“Where would they be now?”

“Still being lowered down that first cliff. It will take at least two hours to get them all down.”

Kitty sighed weakly and Jordana stared into space.

“What are you thinking?”

“About David … and children. That first summer on the desert we found a graveyard more than four thousand years old. We managed to uncover a perfect skeleton of a little child. Perhaps it died trying to find the Promised Land. David looked at the skeleton and cried. He is like that. His heart is sick day and night over the siege of Jerusalem. I know he is going to try to do something foolish. I know it. … Why don’t you lie down, Kitty? It is going to be a long time before we know anything.”

Kitty finished her brandy and stretched back on the cot

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and closed her eyes. In her mind she saw that long line of men being lowered by rope with the sleeping children dangling from their backs. And then she saw flinty-eyed Arab irregulars lurking near the column, spying on their moves-waiting for them to get close and into a trap.

It was impossible to sleep.

“I think I’ll go over to Dr. Lieberman’s bunker and see how they’re doing.”

She put on a wool-lined jacket and walked outside. There hadn’t been any shelling all evening. An alarming thought came: perhaps Mohammed Kassi knew something and had moved most of his men out of Fort Esther. She did not like it. The moon was far too bright. The night was far too clear and quiet. Ari should have waited until a foggy night to move the children. Kitty looked up the hill and made out the outlines of Fort Esther. They must have seen, she thought.

She entered one of the faculty bunkers. Dr. Lieberman and the rest of the staff all sat on the edge of their cots staring blankly, numb with tension. Not a word was spoken. It was so morbid she could not stand it and she went outside again.

Both Karen and Dov were standing sentry duty.

She returned to the command-post bunker to find that Jordana had gone.

She stretched out on the cot again and covered her legs with a blanket. The vision of the men inching down the mountainside came to her once more. The day had left her spent. She began to doze. The hours passed.

Midnight-one o’clock. Kitty thrashed about on the cot. Her brain was filled with nightmare. She saw the horde of Kassi’s men charging out at the column^shrieking, with their sabers glinting. The guards were dead and the Arabs had taken all the children and dug a huge pit for them… .

Kitty bolted up on the cot in a cold sweat with her heart pounding madly. She shook her head slowly and trembled from head to foot. Then a sound reached her ears. She cocked her head and.listened. Her eyes widened in terror!

It was a sound of distant gunfire!

She staggered to her feet. Yes! It was gunfire … coming from the direction of Abu Yesha! It was no dream! The column had been discovered!

Jordana entered the bunker just as Kitty rushed for the door.

“Let me go!” she shrieked.

“Kitty, no, no… !”

“They’re killing my babies! Murderers! Murderers!”

Jordana exerted all her strength to pin Kitty to the wall but Kitty was wild. She lashed out and tore from Jordana’s grasp. The sabra girl grabbed her, spun her around, and 500

smashed her across the shoulders, sending her to the floor sobbing.

“Listen to me! That gunfire you hear is Zev Gilboa and the Palmach making a diversionary attack. They are hitting the opposite side of Abu Yesha to draw Kassi’s men away from the convoy.”

“You’re lying!”

“It is true, I swear it. I was told not to say anything until just before the attack. I came here and saw you asleep and went to warn the others.”

Jordana knelt down and helped Kitty to her feet and led her to the cot. “There is a little brandy left. Drink it.”

Kitty swallowed it, half gagging to force it down. She brought herself under control.

“I am sorry that I struck you,” Jordana said.

“No … you did the right thing.”

Jordana sat beside Kitty and patted her hand and massaged the back of her neck. Kitty weakly lay her head on Jordana’s shoulder and cried very softly until she had cried herself out. Then she stood up and put on her heavy clothing-

“Karen and Dov will be coming off guard soon. I’ll go to my bunker and make them some tea.”

The hours of darkness dragged on and on-a night without end. Out in the blackness the men crawled on their bellies past Abu Yesha while the Palmach made its raid on the other side of the village, and then they plunged quickly down … down…

Two o’clock. Three o’clock. By now the waiters, even Jordana Ben Canaan, sat drained and empty, in a dazed silence. At five-fifteen they came out of the bunkers. The morning was icy. A thin, slick frost covered the center green. They all walked out of the main gate to that point where the lookout post hung over the edge of the mountain.

The darkness faded from the land and the lights in the valley went off one by one as a musty gray dawn revealed the floor far below.

The sentry looked through the field glasses for some sign of life down the mountain. There was nothing.

“Look!”

The sentry pointed. All of them stared toward the Yad El moshav, where dots and dashes blinked out from a signal light.

“What does it read? What does it mean?”

“It says … X1416…”

For a moment there was confusion. The message was repeated-X1416.

“They are safel” Jordana Ben Canaan said. “But lift thou

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up thy rod, and stretch out thine hand over the sea, and divide it: and the children of Israel shall go on dry ground through the midst of the sea. Exodus: fourteen, sixteen.” She smiled exultantly at Kitty.

CHAPTER SIX: Four days after the younger children of Gan Dafna had been evacuated a series of reports filtered in to Ari. His settlement commanders were forwarding information that Arab pressure was lessening. When he learned from friends in Abu Yesha that Kassi had withdrawn half of the hundred men in the village and ordered them back to Fort Esther, Ari knew that the attack on Gan Dafna would come any day.

Ari took twenty more Palmach troops, the last that could be spared anywhere in the Galilee, and once again made the mountain climb to Gan Dafna to assume personal command.

He had forty Palmach troops in all, around thirty staff and faculty members capable of fighting, and Jordana’s Gadna youngsters, some two hundred ‘in number, His arsenal showed one hundred and fifty antiquated rifles or homemade Sten guns, two machine guns, a few hundred homemade grenades, mines, and fire bombs, and the obsolete Hungarian antitank gun with its five rounds of ammunition.

Intelligence reports indicated that, opposing him, Mohammed Kassi had eight hundred irregulars with unlimited ammunition and artillery support, plus perhaps another several hundred Arabs from Aata and other hostile villages along the Lebanese border.

Ari’s supply of ammunition was critical. He knew that when the attack did come it had to be broken immediately. His one advantage was knowledge of the enemy. Mohammed Kassi, the Iraqi highway robber, had no formal military training. He was recruited by Kawukji on the promise of adventure and loot. Ari did not consider Kassi’s men a particularly brave lot, but they could be whipped into a frenzy; if they ever got the upper hand during battle they would become murderous. Ari planned to use Arab ignorance and lack of imagination as his allies. He banked his defensive plan on the presumption that Kassi would try a direct frontal assault in the straightest and shortest line from Fort Esther. The frontal attack had been the history of Arab irregulars’ tactics since he began fighting them as a boy. He stacked his defenses in one place.

The key spot in Ari’s defense was a ravine that led like a funnel into Gan Dafna. If Ari could get Kassi to come into the ravine he had a chance. Zev Gilboa kept patrols in the 502

rocks and brush right outside Fort Esther to observe the Arab movements. He had confirmed the fact that Kassi was massing men.

Three days after Ari arrived at Gan Dafna, a young runner came into his command post with the news that Kassi’s men, nearly a thousand strong, had left the fort and were starting down the hill. Within two minutes the “black alarm” was sounded and every man, woman, and child at Gan Dafna took his post and stood by.

A deep saddle in the mountains could cover Kassi’s men until they arrived at a knoll directly over Gan Dafna, some six hundred yards from the north side of the village and two hundred yards from the critical ravine which led in like a funnel.

Ari’s men dug in to their prepared positions, became silent, and waited.

Soon heads began popping tip on the knoll. Within minutes the point was swarming with irregulars. They stopped their progress and stared down at the ominously quiet village. The Arab officers were suspicious of the silence. Not a shot had been fired by either side.

In the watch and gun tower atop Fort Esther, Mohammed Kassi looked through powerful field glasses and smiled as he saw his horde of men poised atop Gan Dafna. Since the Jews had not fired at them his confidence grew that his men would be able to overrun the place. A cannon fired from the fort as a signal for the attack to begin.

In Gan Dafna they could hear harangues and conversation in Arabic as officers shouted at their men. Still no one moved down from the knoll. The quiet from the village baffled them. More of them began to scream and point down at the village. Their curses and their anger rose in hysterical crescendo.

“They’re trying to work themselves into a heroic lather,” Ari said.

The disciplined forces of the Jews showed neither their faces nor their guns, though each man found it hard to remain controlled under the chilling abuse of the Arabs.

After twenty minutes of ranting there was a sudden eruption from the knoll as irregulars poured down with unearthly shrieks, sabers and bayonets flashing a steel silhouette against the sky.

The first phase of Ari’s defense would now receive a test. Each night he had sent patrols out to plant homemade land mines which could be detonated from inside Gan Dafna. The mines formed a corridor and were so placed to compress the Arabs toward the middle of the ravine.

Zev Gilboa, in the forwardmost position, waited until the

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Arab charge was in full fury. When the horde of men reached the mine field, Zev held up a green flag. Inside Gan Dafna, Ari set off the charges.

Twenty mines, ten on each side, blew up at once. The roar shook the mountainside. The mines exploded on the fringe of the mob, which immediately squeezed together and rushed right down the funnel of the ravine. >

On the sides of the ravine Ari had placed his forty Palmach troops, the two machine guns, and all the grenades and fire bombs in the arsenal. As the Arabs passed directly under them the Palmach opened up a crossfire with the two guns and turned the ravine into a gory turkey shoot. Flames erupted from the fire bombs and turned dozens of the irregulars into human torches, while the Palmach hurled a torrent of grenades among them.

In addition the Palmach set off strings of firecrackers, while from loudspeakers in the trees came a recording of bombing explosions. The continued din of the real and artificial arms was deafening and terrifying.

Inside Fort Esther, Mohammed Kassi frantically called for artillery to clean off the sides of the ravine. The excited Arab gunners opened fire and landed half of their shells among their own men. Finally they managed to silence one Palmach machine gun.

The advance Arab force had been cut down like cordwood, but still they poured in. They had been stimulated to such frenzy that their thrust was now that of men insane with fear.

The second machine gun stopped firing when its barrel burned out. The Palmach quit its position on the sides of the ravine and dropped back into Gan Dafna before the unabated onslaught. The Arabs’ rush came to within a hundred yards of the village in disorganized knots of screaming men. David Ben Ami had the cover off the barricaded and sandbagged Hungarian antitank gun. The projectiles had been modified and each of the five rounds now contained two thousand shotgun pellets. If the gun worked properly it would have the effect of a battery of men firing at once.

The leading bunched mass of maddened Arabs rolled to within fifty yards … forty … thirty … twenty …

The sweat poured down David Ben Ami’s face as he sighted the gun at point-blank range.

Ten yards …

“Fire one!”

The ancient antitank gun bounced off the ground and spewed pellets into the faces of the chargers. Bloodcurdling shrieks mingled with smoke, and through it, as he swiftly reloaded, David glimpsed piles of men lying dead or wounded 504

within yards of the gun and others staggering back in blind shock.

The second wave came in behind the first

“Fire two!”

The second wave went down in slaughter.

“Fire three!”

The barrel blew off the gun and she was finished, but she had done her work. In three shots the buckshot canister sprays had dropped nearly two hundred men. The momentum of the drive was halted.

A last assault was tried. A hundred Arabs again reached the edge of Gan Dafna, to be met by a broadside from Jordana Ben Canaan’s entrenched Gadna youths.

Bewildered and bleeding, the Arab survivors now scrambled back up the death-filled ravine. As they retreated, Zev Gilboa yelled out for the Palmach troops to follow him. The shepherd led his forty fighters after several hundred running Arabs. He chased them back up the knoll and continued to pursue them.

Ari looked through his field glasses.

“The God-damned fool!” Ari yelled, “he’s going to try to take Fort Esther. I told him to stop at the knoll.”

“What’s the matter with Zev?” David grunted between his teeth.

“Come on,” Ari cried. “Let’s see if we can stop him.”

Ari issued hasty orders for Jordana to have the Gadna children pick up the Arab arms in the field and pull back into Gan Dafna.

His plan had paid off. In less than fifteen minutes he had dissipated the strength of his defense, but nearly half Kassi’s troops lay dead or wounded.

When Mohammed Kassi saw his men run back up toward the fort, confusion broke out. Zev Gilboa was twenty-five yards out ahead of the rest of the Palmach when it happened. Arab gunners from Fort Esther began firing toward their own retreating men in order to stop the pursuing Palmach. Some of the Arabs managed to get inside Fort Esther. Those too close to the pursuing Jews were shut out and fired on. Zev had passed the outer accordions of barbed wire only forty yards from the fort.

“Cover!” he screamed at his troops. He threw himself flat and fired his Sten gun at the fort until the Palmach fell back out of range. Seeing that his attack was futile, Zev turned and tried to crawl back down the hill. A barrage of bullets came from the fort and he was hit. He stood up and ran and again he was hit, and this time he fell into the barbed wire and became entangled. He was unable to move.

The Palmach had dug in and were preparing to go up to

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try to bring Zev out when Ari and David crawled up to them.

“It’s Zev. He’s out there tangled up in the wire.”

Ari looked out from behind a large rock. He was a hundred yards away from Zev across an open field. There were some places he could find cover behind large rocks, but close to Zev he would be fully exposed. ,

Suddenly the firing from Fort Esther stopped and it became very still.

“What’s going on?” David asked.

“They’re using Zev for bait. They see he can’t move and they hope we’ll try to get up there and get him.”

“Those bastards. Why don’t they shoot him and get it over with?”

“Can’t you see, David? He’s lost his rifle. They’re going to wait until we leave and try to take him alive. They’re going to take it out on him for all the men they lost today.”

“Oh, my God,” David groaned. He jumped out from cover but Ari grabbed him and threw him back.

“Somebody give me a pair of grenades,” Ari said. “Good. David, take the troops back into Gan Dafna.”

“You’re not going up there by yourself, Ari…”

“Do what I order, damn you!”

David turned quietly and signaled to start a withdrawal. He looked back to see Ari already scuttling up the hill toward Zev.

The Arabs watched Ari move up. They, knew someone would try to get the wounded man. They would wait until he got close enough and try to wound him too; then the Jews would send another man up … and another.

Ari got up, sprinted, and dived behind a rock. The Arabs did not shoot.

Then he crawled again until he got to cover twenty yards from where Zev was tangled in the wire. Ari guessed that the Arabs would wait until he actually reached Zev and was an unmissable target.

“Get back … !” Zev called. “Get back!”

Ari peeked around the boulder. He could see Zev clearly. The blood was spurting from his face and stomach. He was completely trapped in the wire. Ari looked up to Fort Esther. He could see the sun glint off the barrels of rifles trained on Zev.

“Get back!” Zev shouted again. “My guts are hanging out. I can’t last ten minutes… get back!”

Ari slipped the hand grenades from his belt.

“Zev. I’m going to throw you some grenades!” he called in German. Ari locked the pins in so they could not explode. He stood up quickly and threw both grenades to the boy. One landed just beside him. 506

Zev picked up the grenade and held it close to his torn stomach.

“I’ve got it… now get back!”

Ari ran down the hill quickly, catching the Arabs off guard; they had been expecting him to come up after Zev. When they opened fire he was out of range and making his way toward Gan Dafna.

Zev Gilboa was alone now and the life was oozing from him. The Arabs waited for a half hour, watching for a trick, expecting a Jew to come up after him. They wanted him alive.

The gates of Fort Esther opened. Some thirty Arabs emerged and trotted down to surround Zev.

Zev twisted the pin out of the grenade, held it next to his head and let the spoon fly off. t

Ari heard the blast and stopped. He turned chalky white and his bad leg folded up under him. The insides of him shook; then he continued crawling down to Gan Dafna.

Ari sat in the command-post bunker alone. His face was waxen, and only the trembling of his cheek muscles showed there was life in him. His eyes stared dully from black-ringed sockets.

The Jews had lost twenty-four people: eleven Palmach boys, three Palmach girls, six faculty members, and four children. There were another twenty-two wounded. Mohammed Kassi had lost four hundred and eighteen men killed and a hundred and seventy wounded.

The Jews had taken enough weapons to make it likely that Kassi would never try another attack on Gan Dafna. But the Arabs still held Fort Esther and controlled the road through Abu Yesha.

Kitty Fremont entered the bunker. She too was on the brink of exhaustion. “The Arab casualties have all been removed to Abu Yesha except those you wanted for questioning.”

Ari nodded. “How about our wounded?”

“Two of the children don’t look as though they’ll make it. The rest will be all right. Here … I brought you some brandy,” Kitty said.

“Thanks… thanks …”

Ari sipped and remained quiet.

“I brought Zev Gilboa’s things over to you. There isn’t very much here … a few personal things.”

“A kibbutznik doesn’t have very much of his own. Everything, including his life, belongs to something else,” he said, with a trace of irony.

“I liked Zev,” Kitty said. “He was telling me last night how

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he looked forward to tending his sheep again. Anyhow … his wife may want these things. She’s having another baby, you know.”

“Zev was a damned fool!” Ari snarled. “He had no business trying to take that fort.”

Ari picked up the handkerchief filled with Zev’s, meager articles. “Liora’s a good girl. She’s tough. She’ll come through it.” Ari threw the belongings into the kerosene stove. “I’ll have a hard time replacing him.”

Kitty’s eyes narrowed. “Is that what you were thinking … you’d have a hard time replacing him?”

Ari stood up and lit a cigarette. “You don’t grow men like Zev on trees.”

“Is there nothing you cherish?”

“Tell me, Kitty. What did your husband’s commander do when he was killed at Guadalcanal? Did he hold a wake for him?”

“I thought this was a little different, Ari. You’ve known Zev since he was a boy. That girl, his wife, is a Yad El girl. She was raised two farms away from yours.”

“What do you want me to do?”

“Cry for that poor girl!”

For a second Ari’s face twisted and his lips trembled and then his features sat rigidly. “It is nothing new to see a man die in battle. Get out of here____”

CHAPTER SEVEN: The siege of Safed had begun exactly one day after the partition vote of November 29, 1947. When the British left Safed in the spring of 1948, as expected, they handed the three key spots over to the Arabs: the police station looking right down on the Jewish quarter, the acropolis commanding the entire city, and the Taggart fort on Mount Canaan just outside town.

Safed was shaped like an inverted cone. The Jewish quarter occupied a slice of about one eighth of the cone, so that the Arabs were above, below, and on both sides of them. The Jews had only two hundred half-trained Haganah men. Their refusal of evacuation and their decision to fight to the last man was in the spirit and tradition of the ancient Hebrews. The Cabalists of Safed, the least capable among the Jews of defending themselves, had been a primary target for the Mufti’s riots. They had faced slaughter from Arab mobs before and they had cringed. Now they had made up their minds that they would stand and die. The Jewish quarter, jammed into the narrow twisting lanes, sustained an amazing spirit.

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One day after the British left, Ari slipped Joab Yarkoni into the Jewish quarter of Safed with thirty Palmach boys and twenty Palmach girls. A wild celebration marked their arrival. It was the Sabbath and Yarkoni’s troops were exhausted from travel through hostile country and they were hungry. For the first time in centuries, the Cabalists broke the Sabbath by cooking a hot meal for the reinforcements.

Kawukji, wanting to secure Safed as the temporary capital for the Mufti, ordered the irregulars to overrun the Jewish quarter. The Arabs tried a few sorties and were thrown back out; they soon realized that they would take the quarter only by a house-by-house, room-by-room fight. They reconsidered and returned to sniping and siege tactics.

The Jews were commanded by Remez and Joab Yarkoni. Brigadier Sutherland had left his villa on Mount Canaan to become the only guest of Remez’s resort hotel. He was called upon for advice now and then but conceded that the Jews were doing quite well enough without his help.

Remez took on as his first task the clearing of a definite field of fire. The Arab and Jewish quarters were jammed up against each other, making it easy for Arab patrols to slip through and spread his already thin defensive strength. He wanted space between bis forces and the Arabs. Yarkoni took a crew into the Arab quarters, seized a dozen borderline houses, and began shooting from them. Then he withdrew. Each time the Arabs came back, Yarkoni would again attack and take the same borderline houses. Finally the Arabs dynamited the houses to keep the Jews from using them. It was exactly what Remez wanted: it created the space between the two sectors to give the Jews better visibility and easier defense.

With this accomplished Remez and Yarkoni devised the second tactic. Yarkoni set out to harass the Arabs around the clock. Each day he sent three or four Palmach patrols iato the Arab sector to move through the maze of alleys or over the roof tops. His patrols would suddenly make a sharp hit-and-run attack, each time at a different place. Whenever the Arabs concentrated their men in one strong point, the Jews were informed of it by spies and thus knew exactly where to strike and what spot to avoid. Like a jabbing boxer the daylight patrols kept the Arabs off balance.

But it was the night patrols of the Palmach that drove the Arabs into a frenzy. Yarkoni had lived in Morocco and he knew his enemy. The Arab was a superstitious man, with an unnatural fear of the dark. Yarkoni used the darkness like extra troops. The Palmach night patrols, merely by shooting off firecrackers, kept the Arab population in a panic.

Remez and Yarkoni admitted that their tactics were des—

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peration measures. They were not strong enough to do real damage to the enemy, and the sheer weight of Arab numbers, position, and arms began to grind them down. A lost Palmach or Haganah soldier could not be replaced. Food was almost as difficult to replace. Ammunition was so critical that fines were levied against any Haganah or Palmach soldier who wasted a bullet.

Even as they were being worn down, the Jews held every inch of their quarter, and the amazing spirit never flagged. A single radio receiver was by now their only daily contact with the outside world, yet schools continued on schedule, the small newspaper never skipped an edition, and the pious did not miss a minute of synagogue. Letters got out by the patrols were fixed with hand-drawn stamps and were honored throughout Palestine by the Yishuv.

The siege carried on through the winter and the spring. Finally one day Yarkoni met with Sutherland and Remez to face bitter reality. The Jews had lost fifty of their best fighting men, they were down to their last twelve bags of flour, and they did not have ammunition to last five days. Yarkoni did not even have firecrackers for his patrols. The Arabs had sensed this weakness and were becoming bolder.

“I promised Ari that I wouldn’t bother him with our troubles but I am afraid I must get to Ein Or and talk to him,” Yarkoni decided. The same night he slipped out of Safed and went to Ari’s headquarters.

Joab reported in full on the Safed situation. He concluded, “I hate to bother you, Ari, but in another three days we are going to have to start eating rats.”

Ari grunted. The stand at Safed had been an inspiration to the entire Yishuv. It was more than a strategic position now, it was another invaluable symbol of defiance. “If we could win Safed we could crush Arab morale in the whole Galilee.”

“Ari, every time we have to fire a bullet, we must go into a debate about it.”

“I have an idea,” Ari said. “Come with me.”

Ari set up an emergency night patrol to get at least some supplies of food into Safed and then took Joab to the ordnance shed. In an inner room he showed the Moroccan a strange-looking contraption of cast iron, nuts, and bolts.

“What the hell is it?” Joab asked.

“Joab, you are looking at a Davidka.”

“A Davidka?”

“Yes … a Little David, handcrafted by Jewish genius.”

Joab scratched his jaw. In some respects one might say it did appear to be a weapon-of a sort. Yet … nothing quite like it existed anywhere else, Joab was sure.

“What is it supposed to do?”

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“I am told that it shoots mortar shells.”

“How?” /

“Damned if I know. We haven’t experimented yet. I have a report from Jerusalem saying that it has been very effective.”

“For the Jews or Arabs?”

“Joab, I’ll tell you what I’m going to do. I’ve been saving this weapon for the proper situation. It’s yours, take it to Safed.”

Joab walked around the odd piece of machinery. “The things we have to resort to to win a war,” he mumbled.

The night patrol carrying emergency rations into Safed also brought along the Davidka and thirty pounds of ammunition. As soon as he arrived, Joab called the Haganah and Palmach leaders together, and through the rest of the night they traded ideas on how the thing was supposed to work. Ten people were present and ten opinions were given.

At last someone thought of sending for Brigadier Sutherland. He was awakened at the hotel and half dragged to headquarters. He stared at the Davidka in disbelief.

“Only a Jew could concoct something like this,” he concluded.

“I hear it was very effective in Jerusalem,” Joab apologized.

Sutherland played with all the. levers and handles and switches and sights and in the next hour they evolved a firing procedure which might-or might not-r-work.

The next morning the Davidka was carried to a clearing and pointed in the general direction of the Arab-held police station and some nearby houses the Arabs used as sniping posts.

The Davidka’s ammunition was no less strange in appearance than the Davidka. It was shaped like a mallet, of which the head was an iron cylinder filled with dynamite equipped with detonators. The thick handle allegedly fit down the mortar tube. On firing, the handle was supposed to be thrust out with such force that it would hurl the whole unbalanced load of dynamite at the target. Sutherland had visions of the thing flying for a few feet and exploding in front of them.

“If that warhead merely falls out of the end of the tube-as I confidently expect,” Sutherland said, “we are likely to lose the entire Jewish population of Safed.”

“Then I suggest we rig up a long line so we can fire it from a safe distance,” Remez said.

“How do we aim it?” Yarkoni asked.

“Aiming this monstrosity isn’t going to do much good. Just point it in the general direction and pray for the best.”

The chief rabbi and many of the Cabalists and their wives gathered around the Davidka and carried on a lengthy debate on whether or not it meant doomsday for all of them. Fi—

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nally the chief rabbi said special benedictions over the weapon and asked the Messiah kindly to spare them for they had indeed been very good in keeping the laws.

“Well, let’s get it over with,” Remez said pessimistically.

The Cabalists backed to safety. Firing caps were stuffed down the tube and one of the shells was lifted and the long handle placed inside. The cylinder of dynamite balanced over the end of the tube threateningly. A long line was attached to the firing mechanism. Everyone took cover and the earth stood still.

“Let her go,” Yarkoni ordered in a shaky voice.

Remez jerked and a strange thing happened. The Little David fired.

The handle hissed out of the tube and the bucket of dynamite arched and spun, handle over bucket, up the hill. As it hurled through the air, growing smaller and smaller, it made a hideous swishing sound. It crashed into some Arab houses near the police station.

Sutherland’s mouth hung open.

Yarkoni’s mustache went from down to up.

Remez’s eyes popped out.

The old Cabalists stopped praying long enough to look in astonishment.

The shell exploded like a thunderclap, shaking the town to its foundations. It seemed as though half the hillside must have been blown away.

After moments of stunned silence there was an eruption of shouting and hugging and kissing and praying and jubilation.

“By jove …” was all Sutherland could say. “By jove … !”

The Palmachniks formed a hora ring and danced around the Little David.

“Come on, come on. Let’s fire another round!”

In the Arab quarters they could hear the Jews cheering, and the Arabs knew why. The very sound of’ the flying bomb in itself was enough to frighten one to death, to say nothing of the explosion. No one, Palestinian Arabs or irregulars, had bargained for anything like this; each time the Little David fired, a scene of havoc followed. The Arabs quaked in terror as the Jews revenged some of the hundred years of torment.

Joab Yarkoni got word to Ari that the Davidka had the Arabs in a turmoil. Ari sensed an opportunity and decided on a risky attempt to exploit it. He took a few men from each settlement and was able to scrape together two companies of Haganah. He got them into Safed at night with more ammunition for the Davidka.

Swish… whoom! 512

The bucket of bolts and its hissing bomb was devastating the town. Swish … whoom!

The third day after the Davidka had come to Safed the skies opened and it poured rain. Ari Ben Canaan then made the greatest bluff of the war that counted bluffs as part of the arsenal. He had Remez call all the Arab spies together and he gave them a briefing.

“In case you didn’t know, brothers”-Ari addressed them in Arabic-“we have a secret weapon. I am not at liberty to disclose the nature of the weapon but I might say that you all know that it always rains after a nuclear blast. Need one say more?”

Within minutes the spies spread the word that the Little David was a secret weapon. Within an hour, every Arab mouth in Safed had repeated the appalling news: the Jews have the atom bomb!

Swish … whoom! The Little David roared and the rain turned to a deluge and the panic was on. Inside of two hours the roads out of Safed were clogged with fleeing Arabs.

Ari Ben Canaan led the Haganah on an attack with three hundred men. The attack was more spontaneous than calculated and Ari’s men were thrown off the acropolis by irregulars and a handful of angry Safed Arabs. He lost heavily, but the Safed population continued to run.

Three days later, with Safed nearly empty of Arab civilian population and with hundreds of the irregulars deserted, Ari Ben Canaan, Remez, and Joab Yarkoni led a better planned, three-pronged attack and took the acropolis.

The tables were turned. The Jews were on the high ground above the Arab police station. Now those who had for decades tormented and murdered the Cabalists in wild mobs had their chance to stand and fight, but they fled in the face of the Jewish wrath. The police station fell and Ari immediately headed outside of the town to block off the huge Taggart fort on Mount Canaan, the strongest of the Arab positions. When he arrived he was astounded to discover that the Arabs had abandoned the Taggart fort, a position it would have been impossible to take. With the fort in his hands, the conquest of Safed was complete.

The victory of Safed was staggering. The vulnerable position thought impossible to defend had not only been defended but the defenders had conquered the city-with a few hundred fighters and a weird weapon called the Little David.

There were many theories and much discussion on just how this victory came about. Even the Cabalists of Safed were split on the subject. Rabbi Haim of the Ashkenazim or

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European school was quite certain of divine intervention as foretold in Job:

When he is about to fill his belly, God shall cast the fury of his wrath upon him, and shall rain it upon him while he is eating. He shall flee from the iron weapon …

Rabbi Meir of the Sephardic or Oriental school disputed Haim and was just as certain of divine intervention as described in Ezekiel:

Thy walls shall shake at the noise … he shall enter into thy gates, as men enter into a city wherein is made a breach … thy strong garrisons shall go down to the ground.

Bruce Sutherland returned to his villa on Mount Canaan. The Arabs had desolated it. They had trampled his lovely rose garden to the earth and they had stolen everything including the doorknobs. It did not matter to Sutherland, for it would all be rebuilt again. He and Yarkoni and Remez walked out to his rear patio and looked over the valley to Safed. They drank a lot of brandy and they began to chuckle.

Neither they nor anyone else was aware of it yet, but the stampede of Safed’s population had opened a new and tragic chapter-it began the creation of Arab refugees.

Somewhere in the Galilee, an obsolete Liberator bomber piloted by a volunteer crew of South Africans and Americans looked to the earth for a pair of blue flares.

The flares were spotted and they landed the bomber blind, with only a few flashlights marking the airfield. The plane bumped harshly over a pitted runway and skidded to a stop. The motors were cut quickly.

Swarms of people engulfed the plane and emptied it of its cargo, the first shipment of modern arms. Rifles, machine guns, mortars, and hundreds of thousands of rounds of ammunition were snatched from its waist and tail sections and its converted bomb bays.

The working parties stripped the Liberator clean in minutes. They loaded up a dozen trucks, which scattered in as many different directions. In a dozen kibbutzim Gadna youths stood ready to clean the weapons and get them out to the embattled settlements. The plane was turned and made a hair’s-breadth take-off and flew back to Europe to get another load of arms.

In the morning British troops came to investigate Arab complaints that they had heard an airplane landing in the area. The British were unable to find a single trace of a plane and were certain the Arab imagination was being carried away again.

By the time the fourth and fifth shipment of arms arrived, the Jews began to roll up victories. Tiberias on the Sea of 514

Galilee had fallen to the Jews. The huge Gesher Taggart fort was grabbed by the Jews and held off repeated attacks by Iraqi irregulars.

With the fall of Safed, the Jews launched their first coordinated offensive, Operation Iron Broom, to sweep Galilee clean of hostile villages. Iron Broom was led by machine-gun-bearing jeeps which blazed into the villages and stampeded the Arabs. Safed had started a crack in Arab morale that gave Iron Broom a psychological jump.

With a score of local victories behind them and the knowledge that they could mount a successful offensive, the Haganah went after the vital port of Haifa.

The Haganah swept down the slopes of Mount Carmel in a four-pronged attack, each action aimed at an Arab strong point. The Arab troops, consisting of home guards, Syrian, Lebanese, and Iraqi irregulars, mounted a strong defense and were at first able to contain the battle. The British, who still controlled the dock area, called truce after truce to stop the Jewish offenses, and at times took away hard-won vantage points.

The Arabs continued to hold well against the steady Jewish pressure. Then, as the fighting reached a peak, the Arab commander and his entire staff slipped out and quietly fled. Arab resistance became demoralized and collapsed entirely. Again the British called a truce as the Jews swept into the Arab quarters.

At that point a fantastic event took place. The Arabs suddenly announced, to the general astonishment, that the entire population wished to leave. The procedure followed the curious pattern of Safed and many of the villages. It was a strange spectacle to see whole Arab populations stampeding for the Lebanese border, with no one pursuing them.

Acre, an all-Arab city crammed with refugees, fell to the Haganah after a halfhearted and feeble defense that lasted only three days. The infection spread to the Arab city of Jaffa, where the Maccabees held the center of the line and launched an attack which took this oldest port in the world-and the Arabs of Jaffa fled.

In the Jerusalem corridor, Abdul Kadar succeeded in driving the Jews from the vital height of the Kastel, but the Haganah and Palmach came right back and threw the Arabs off in turn. Kadar rallied his people for still another attempt on the Kastel, and in this try he was killed. The loss of their one good commander was a further severe blow to the demoralized Arabs.

May 1948 came into being. The British had only two more weeks left to complete their evacuation and give up the mandate.

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On the borders, the revengeful armies of Syria, Yemen, Lebanon, Trans-Jordan, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Iraq stood poised to cross and crush the conquering Jews.

The hour of decision-to declare statehood or not to declare statehood-was at hand.

CHAPTER EIGHT: Between November of 1947 and May of 1948, the Yishuv had staged a spectacular show by successfully fighting against overwhelming odds with little more than nothing. During that period of time the Jews had converted the Haganah from an underground defense Unit into the nucleus of a real army. They had trained new troops and staff men and organized tactical schools, operations, supply and transport and the hundreds of other things that marked the conversion from guerrilla fighting to organized warfare.

The first air force of grenade-throwing Piper Cub pilots had grown to include a few Spitfires manned by Jews who had flown with the American, British, and South African air forces. The Navy had begun with the rickety immigration runners and now had a few corvettes and PT boats.

From the beginning the Jews had appreciated the importance of administration, intelligence, and command. Each day they gained in experience and their victories brought confidence. They had shown they could organize and coordinate small-scale efforts: the convoys to Jerusalem, Operation Iron Broom, and other local actions.

They had met the challenge and triumphed. Yet they knew that they had only fought a small war, against an enemy who did not have a tremendous desire to fight. The Arabs had little organization or leadership and no stomach for sustained fighting. The Arab debacle proved that it took more than slogans to give a man the stamina and courage to put his life on the block.

The planeloads of small arms had helped to save the Yishuv. As the hour of decision came near the reality came with it that these arms would have to face regular armies with tanks, artillery, and modern air forces.

Those who believed that the Arab countries were bluffing soon got a rude awakening as the Arab Legion of Trans-Jordan wantonly violated every concept of honor. The Legion operated in Palestine as a British police force. This “British police force” began open action against the isolated Etzion Group settlements on the Bethlehem Road.

The four villages in the Etzion group were manned by Orthodox Jews who chose to stay and fight, as did every 516

settlement in the Yishuv. Led by British officers, the Trans-Jordan Arab Legion shelled the four settlements without mercy and completely cut them off from outside help.

Kibbutz Etzion was the first target of the Legion. After blasting the kibbutz apart, the Legion attacked the siege-weary, half-starved settlement. The Orthodox Jews of kibbutz Etzion held fast until their last round of ammunition had been fired and only then did they surrender. Arab villagers who had followed the Legion rushed into the kibbutz and massacred almost all the survivors. The Legion made an attempt to stop the slaughter but when it was over only four Jews had survived.

The Haganah immediately appealed to the International Red Cross to supervise the surrender of the other three Etzion group settlements, which were also close to being out of ammunition. Only this move prevented mass murder there, too.

In the Negev Desert near the Dead Sea, the Arab Legion of Trans-Jordan attacked again.

This time they hit a kibbutz that the Jews had built in the lowest and hottest place on the earth. It was called Beth Ha-Arava-the House in the Wilderness. In the summertime it was one hundred and twenty-five degrees in the shade. When the Jews came to this place no living thing had grown in the alkaline soil in all of history. They washed the soil down, acre by acre, to free it of salts, and by this painstaking process and through the creation of spillways, dams, and cisterns to trap the rainfall, they built a modern farm.

With the nearest Jews a hundred miles away and facing unbeatable odds, Beth Ha-Arava surrendered to the Arab Legion, and as the people walked from the House in the Wilderness the Jews set a torch to it and burned their houses and fields which had been built with inhuman toil.

And so, the Arabs had got their victories at last-Beth Ha-Arava-the House in the Wilderness-and the bloodstained conquest of the Etzion group.

On the night of May 13, 1948, the British High Commissioner for Palestine quietly left embattled Jerusalem. The Union Jack, a symbol here of the misuse of power, came down from the staff-forever.

MAY 14,1948

In Tel Aviv the leaders of the Yishuv and the world Zionists met in the house of Meier Dizengoff, the founder and first mayor of the city. Outside the house, Sten-gun-bearing guards kept back anxious crowds.

In Cairo, in New York, in Jerusalem, and in Paris and

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London and Washington they turned their eyes and ears to this house.

“This is Kol Israel-the Voice of Israel,” the announcer said slowly from the radio station. “I have just been handed a document concerning the end of the British mandate which I shall now read to you.” i

“Quiet! Quiet!” Dr. Lieberman said to the crowd of children who had gathered in his cottage. “Quiet!”

“The Land of Israel,” the voice over the radio said, “was the birthplace of the Jewish people. Here their spiritual, religious, and national identity was formed. Here they achieved independence and created a culture of national and universal significance. Here they wrote and gave the Bible to the world.”

Bruce Sutherland and Joab Yarkoni stopped the chess game in Remez’s hotel and, with Remez, listened raptly.

“Exiled from the Land of Israel, the Jewish people remained faithful to it in all the countries of their dispersion, never ceasing to pray and hope.for their return and the restoration of their national freedom.”

In Paris, the static on the radio increased and drowned out the voice as Barak Ben Canaan and the Yishuv agents frantically twisted the dials and beat on the receiver.

“Impelled by this historic association, Jews strove throughout the centuries to go back to the land of their fathers and regain their statehood. In recent decades they returned in their masses. They reclaimed the wilderness, revived then-language, built cities and villages, and established an evergrowing community with its own economic and cultural life. They sought peace, yet were prepared to defend themselves. They brought the blessings of progress to all inhabitants …”

In Safed, the Cabalists listened in hope of words to fulfill the ancient prophecies. In the Jerusalem corridor the dog-tired Palmach fighters of the Hillmen Brigade listened, and in the isolated and besieged settlements of the blistering Negev Desert they listened.

“… right was acknowledged by the Balfour Declaration of November 2, 1917, and reaffirmed by the mandate of the League of Nations, which gave explicit international recognition …”

David Ben Ami rushed into the commander’s office at Ein Or kibbutz. Ari held his finger to his lips and pointed to the radio.

“… the recent holocaust which engulfed millions of Jews in Europe proved anew the need …”

Sarah Ben Canaan listened at Yad El and she remembered the first time she had seen Barak ride into Rosh Pinna on a 518

white Arab steed with his great red beard flowing down on his tunic.

“… re-establishment of the Jewish state, which would open the gates to all Jews and endow the Jewish people with equality of status among the family of nations …”

Dov and Karen held hands quietly in the dining hall and listened to the loudspeaker.

“In the second world war the Jewish people in Palestine made their full contribution to the struggle. … On November 29, 1947, the General Assembly of the United Nations adopted a resolution requiring the establishing of a Jewish state in Palestine … the right of the Jewish people to establish their independent state is unassailable. It is the natural right of the Jewish people to lead, as do all other nations, an independent existence as a sovereign state.

“We hereby proclaim the establishment of the Jewish state in Palestine, to be called the State of Israel.”

Kitty Fremont felt her heart leap-Jordana smiled.

“The State of Israel will be open to immigration to Jews from all countries of their dispersion; will promote the development of the country for the benefit of all its inhabitants; will be based on the principles of liberty, justice, and peace as conceived by the prophets of Israel; will uphold the full social and political equality of all its citizens, without distinction of religion, race, or sex; will guarantee freedom of religion, conscience, education, and culture; will safeguard holy places of all religions; and will loyally uphold the principles of the United Nations Charter …

“.’. . In the midst of wanton aggression, we yet call upon the Arab inhabitants of the State of Israel to preserve the ways of peace and play their part in the development of the state, on the basis .of full and equal citizenship and due representation in all its bodies and institutions …

“… we extend our hand in peace and neighborliness to all the neighboring states and their peoples, and invite them to co-operate …

“… With trust in Almighty God, we set our hand to this declaration at this session of the Provisional State Council, on the soil of the homeland, in the city of Tel Aviv, on this Sabbath eve, the fifth of Iyar 5708, the fourteenth day of May 1948.”

After two thousand years, the State of Israel was reborn.

Within hours, through President Harry Truman, the Urited States became the first of the nations of the world to recognize the State of Israel.

Even as the crowds in Tel Aviv danced the hora in the streets, Egyptian bombers took off en route to the city to

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destroy it and the armies of the Arab world crossed the frontiers of the infant state.

CHAPTER NINE: As the individual Arab armies violated the borders of Israel they boasted of immediate victory and began to issue glorious communiques giving vivid descriptions of imaginary triumphs. The Arabs revealed that they had a “master plan” for throwing the Jews into the sep, If a master plan existed there was no master commander, for each Arab country had its own idea of who should run the armies and each Arab country had its own idea of who should rule Palestine afterward. Bagdad and Cairo both claimed leadership of the Arab world and of a “greater Arab state”; Saudi Arabia claimed leadership as the country which held the sacred cities of Mecca and Medina;. Jordan aspired to Palestine as part of the mandate; Syria had never dropped the claim that Palestine was the southern part of an Ottoman province. And so-the “united” Arabs attacked.

NEGEV DESERT

A much-heralded Egyptian aggressive force came from bases in the Sinai through Arab-held Gaza along the coast. The first of two Egyptian columns, backed by tanks, armored cars, artillery, and modern aircraft, moved along the coastal road which followed the railroad due north to the Jewish provisional capital of Tel Aviv. The Egyptians were confident the Jewish settlements would break and run before their awesome, overwhelming power.

At the first kibbutz, Nirim, the Egyptians made a headlong rush and were hurled out. At the second and third settlements along the way they met the same stiff resistance. This shocking bit of business caused the Egyptian staff to re-evaluate the situation. They decided to bypass these tougher spots and continue on up the coast. However, they ran the danger of overextending their supply lines and leaving their rear open for attack from these Jewish pockets: it was mandatory that they stop and fight in certain key places.

Egyptian artillery pounded the settlements to the ground and Egyptian planes bombed and raked them. After furious encounters the Egyptians captured three settlements. The majority of the settlements held and were bypassed.

The most vital strategic settlement in the Egyptian line of march was kibbutz Negba-Gate of the Negev-which was located near the intersection of the north road to Tel Aviv and a lateral road that ran inland. This was one of the places that the Egyptians had to capture. 520

Less than a mile from kibbutz Negba stood the Taggart fort of Suweidan-the Monster on the Hill. Suweidan had been handed over to the Arabs by the British. From the fort they were able to shell kibbutz Negba to rubble. Negba did not own a gun which could reach the fort.

The farmers of Negba realized the importance of their vital junction to the invaders. They also knew they were not invincible. They knew what to expect; nevertheless, they made the decision to stay and fight. As the guns from Suweidan knocked down every last building and the water ration was reduced to a few drops a day and the subsistence fell to starvation level, Negba continued to hold. Assault followed assault, and each time the Jews threw the Egyptians back. During one Egyptian attack led by tanks, the Jews were down to their last five rounds of antitank ammunition and they knocked out four tanks. For weeks Negba held the Egyptians at a stalemate. It refused to be taken. It fought as the ancient Hebrews of Masada had fought, and Negba became the first symbol of the defiance of the new state.

The Egyptian coastal column left huge forces in Suweidan and continued on up the coast. They moved dangerously close to Tel Aviv.

At Isdud, only twenty miles from Tel Aviv, the Israelis stiffened their defenses. As quickly as arms could be unloaded at the docks, they were rushed to Isdud, along with green new immigrants, to block the Egyptian column.

The Egyptians called a halt to regroup, resupply, and probe in preparation for a final thrust which would take them into Tel Aviv.

The second half of the Egyptian invasion force wheeled inland to the Negev Desert. As they advanced unmolested through Arab cities of Beersheba and Hebron and Bethlehem, Radio Cairo and the Egyptian press hailed “victory after victory.”

It was intended that this second column join in the “glorious” conquest of Jerusalem by attacking from the south simultaneously with an attack of the Arab Legion. However, the Egyptians decided not to share the credit and went after Jerusalem by themselves.

Massing at Bethlehem, they assaulted Ramat Rahel-the Hill of Rachel-a kibbutz outpost defending the southern approach to New Jerusalem, the place where Rachel once wept for the exiled children of Israel.

The farmers of Ramat Rahel held under the Egyptian attack until they could hold no longer and they fell back slowly into Jerusalem. At the southern outskirt of the city they were met by Haganah reinforcements and they regrouped

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and roared back into their kibbutz and threw the Egyptians out and chased them to Bethlehem.

JERUSALEM

When the British left Jerusalem, the Haganah moved quickly to seize the sections where the British had been and to launch attacks on sections which held Kawukji’s irregulars. The fighting consisted of street-to-street engagements, with Gadna children serving as runners and men in business suits leading attacks.

The second objective of the Haganah was to take an Arab suburb which separated the Jews on Mount Scopus from the Jews in New Jerusalem. With this done, a decision had to be made. The Jews were now in a position to win the Old City of Jerusalem. With the Old City in their hands they would have a solid strategic front. Without the Old City they were vulnerable. International politics, the fear of damage to the holy places, and great outside pressures made them decide to leave the Old City alone, although inside the walls was a quarter of several thousand pious Jews.

The Jews abandoned a lookout post in the tower of an Armenian church inside the Old City, at the request of the monks. The moment the Jews left, the irregulars grabbed the same place and refused to leave. Despite this fact, the Jews felt that the Arabs would not dare to attack the Old City, sacred to three religions, and would follow the example set by the Jews in this holiest ground in the world.

The Haganah then became faced with the final bit of treachery. Glubb Pasha, British commander of the Arab Legion, had given solemn promise that the Legion would be returned to Jordan when the British evacuated. But when the British left Jerusalem, the Arab Legion rushed to that city in open violation of the promise. The Legion attacked and was able to gain back part of what the Haganah had taken earlier. The suburb linking New Jerusalem with Mount Scopus had been given to the Maccabees to defend; they lost it to the Legion, thus isolating the forces on Scopus. Then Glubb ordered the Arab Legion to attack the Old City!

The Jews had no illusions left after their years of dealing with the Arabs, but this attack on the most sacred shrine of mankind was the nadir. There was nothing to stop the Legion but a few thousand ultra-Orthodox Jews who would not raise a finger in their own defense. The Jews rushed as much of the Haganah as they could spare into the Old City, and the Haganah was followed by several hundred angry Maccabee volunteers. Once inside the Old City there was no escape for their forces. 522

JERUSALEM CORRIDOR

The road from Jerusalem to Tel Aviv continued to bear the hardest fighting of the war. The Hillmen of the Palmach had cleared a half dozen heights in the Judean hills. The Kastel was firmly in their hands and they had assaulted and won the Comb, Suba, and enough key places to open the tricky and vulnerable Bab el Wad.

Then the blackest blot on the Jewish record occurred. The Maccabees were given the high Arab village of Neve Sadij to hold. In a strange and inexplicable sequence of events a panic broke out among Maccabee troops and they opened up a wild and unnecessary firing. Once started it could not be stopped. More than two hundred Arab civilians were massacred. With the Neve Sadij massacre the Maccabees, who had proved so valuable, had fixed a stigma on the young nation that it would take decades to erase.

Although the Hillmen Brigade had opened the Bab el Wad, the British made it more convenient for the Arabs to blockade Jerusalem by handing the Legion the Taggart fort of Lat-run. Latrun, once a British political prison at one time or another graced by all the leaders of the Yishuv, sat squarely on a junction in the road, blocking the entrance to the Bab el Wad.

Latrun, therefore, became the most important objective of the Israelis. In a desperation plan to capture the fort a special brigade was formed. Most of it consisted of Jewish immigrants freed from Cyprus internment or from the DP camps. The officers were equally unequipped for a major operation. Quickly armed and trained, this brigade was moved into the corridor and a night attack on Latrun was tried^ It was ill-planned, and badly executed. The disciplined Arab Legion threw it back.

The brigade tried two more attacks on Latrun on succeeding nights with equal lack of success. Then the Palmach Hillmen Brigade, badly overextended by the attempt to cover the long stretch of the Bab el Wad to Jerusalem, nevertheless made an attack on Latrun and almost, but not quite, succeeded in taking the place.

An American army colonel, Mickey Marcus, who used the code name of Stone, had joined the Israeli Army. Now he was sent to the corridor, where his tactical and organizational experience was desperately needed. His efforts there began to bear fruit. In a short time he had reorganized the transportation and amplified the mechanized jeep-cavalry which the Israelis had used in Iron Broom. Marcus was mainly concerned with quickly forming a well-trained and well-led unit capable of carrying out a strategic movement on the Latrun

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bottleneck. He was close to attaining this objective when another tragedy befell Israel: Marcus was killed. Jerusalem remained sealed off.

HULEH VALLEY-SEA OF GALILEE

The Syrian Army swept into Palestine from the eastern side of the Sea of Galilee and the Jordan River in several columns, led by tanks and supported by aircraft.

The first Syrian column chose as its objective the three oldest collective settlements in Palestine: the bloc consisting of Shoshanna, the birthplace of An Ben Canaan, and Dagania A and Dagania B, where the Jordan flowed into the Galilee.

The Jews were so short of men in that area that they daily drove trucks back and forth from Tiberias to these settlements to make the Syrians believe they were bringing in reinforcements and arms.

The farmers at the Shoshanna bloc had so little to fight with that they sent a delegation up to see Ari Ben Canaan. The Shoshanna bloc was actually outside his command, but they hoped to appeal to a sentimental regard for his birthplace. Ari’s hands were full, however, with Kassi at Gan Dafna and at Safed and with another of the Syrian columns. He told the delegation that only one thing might save them-anger. He advised them to make Molotov cocktails and to let the Syrians get inside the villages. If anything could raise the Jews-to an inspired defense, it would be the sight of Arabs on their beloved soil.

The Syrians went after Dagania A first. The Haganah commanders ordered the defenders to hold their fire until the tanks leading the attack penetrated to the center of the village houses. The sight of Syrian tanks on their rose gardens enraged the kibbutzniks to the point where they loosed their barrage of fire bottles with deadly accuracy from a distance of a few feet and gutted the lead tanks. The Syrian infantry which followed the tanks was no match for the farmers. They fled under the wrath of the Jews and would not return.

The second Syrian column attacked farther to the south in the Jordan-Beth Shean valleys. They managed to win Shaar Hagolan and kibbutz, Massada-where the Yarmuk flowed. When the Jews counterattacked, the Syrians burned the villages to the ground, looted everything that could be carried off, and fled. At the Gesher fort, taken earlier by the Haganah, the Jews held and they held at the rest of their Jordan-Beth Shean settlements.

The third column came over the Jordan River in Ari Ben Canaan’s area of the Huleh Valley. They overwhelmed and captured Mishmar Hayarden-the Guardpost of the Jordan. 524

Then they regrouped for the thrust that would carry them into the center of the Huleh to link up with Kawukji’s irregulars on the Lebanese side. But Yad El,,Ayelet Hashahar, Kfar Szold, Dan, and the rest of the tough settlements stiffened and held, patiently enduring the artillery fire which they could not return, then fighting like tigers when the Syrians came within rifle shot. At Ayelet Hashahar a rifleman actually managed to bring down a Syrian airplane, the credit for which was taken by every kibbutznik in the settlement.

Across the way, the Lebanese pawed at the Jewish settlements in the hills and at Metulla. The Lebanese, mostly Christian Arabs, had some leaders who were sympathetic to Zionism, and these people had little desire to fight. They entered the war mainly out of fear of reprisal from other Arab nations and to make a “show of unity.” The first time they ran into stiff resistance the Lebanese seemed to vanish as a fighting force.

Ari had successfully blocked a junction of Arab forces in the Huleh. When he received a new shipment of arms he moved quickly to the offensive. He evolved a “defense-offense” plan: those settlements not under direct pressure organized offenses and took objectives rather than sitting and waiting for an attack. By this method Ari was able to keep the Syrians completely off balance. He was able to shift arms and men to the hard-pressed places and ease their burden. He built up his communications and transportation so that the Huleh became one of the strongest Jewish areas in Israel. The only major objective left for him was Fort Esther.

The entire Syrian invasion sputtered. It had turned into a fiasco except for Mishmar Hayarden and one or two smaller victories. The Syrians chose to concentrate their efforts on a single kibbutz-to make up for their losses. Ein Gev, on the eastern shore of the Sea of Galilee, the home of the wintef concerts, was the objective.

The Syrians dominated high hills on three sides of the kibbutz. The sea was the fourth side. The Syrians held the columnar mountain of Sussita-the Horse-the ancient Roman city which looked right down into the kibbutz. Ein Gev was completely cut off from contact except by boat at night from Tiberias across the lake.

As Syrian guns shelled the kibbutz without respite the Jews were forced to live underground. There they kept up their schools, a newspaper, and even their symphony orchestra practice. Each night they came out of the bunkers and tended their fields. The endurance of Ein Gev was matched only by the stand at Negba in the Negev Desert.

Every building in the kibbutz, was blown to pieces. The

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Syrians burned the fields. The Jews did not have a weapon capable of firing back. They were subjected to brutal punishment.

After weeks of this pounding the Syrians made their assault, sweeping down from their high ground in numbers of thousands. Three hundred kibbutzniks of fighting age met the charge. They fired in disciplined volleys, and snipers picked off the Syrian officers. The Syrians rallied time and again and pressed the Jews back to the sea. But the defenders would not yield. There were twelve rounds of ammunition left to them when the back of the Syrian attack was broken.

Ein Gev had held and with it the Israeli claim to the Sea of Galilee.

SHARON, TEL AVIV, THE TRIANGLE

A large bulge of land in Samaria anchored by the all-Arab cities of Jenin, Tulkarm and Ramallah formed the “Triangle.” Nablus, the early base for Kawukji’s irregulars, became the chief base of the Iraqi Army. The Iraqis had made an illfated attempt to cross the Jordan River into the Beth Shean Valley but were badly beaten, then had settled down in Arab Samaria.

Opposite the Triangle on the west was the Sharon Valley. It was a vulnerable area-the Jews held only a narrow neck of land along the Tel Aviv-Haifa highway, ten miles inside from the Triangle front to the sea. If the Iraqis could make the break-through they could cut Israel in half.

The Iraqis, however, showed an aversion to combat. When the Jews made badly organized attempts on the Triangle city of Jenin, the Iraqi officers fled, and only the fact that then-troops were chained in their positions kept them from running away. The thought of attacking the thickly settled Sharon Valley was distasteful; the Iraqis wanted no part of it.

Tel Aviv itself suffered several air raids from the Egyptians before antiaircraft equipment arrived to ward off further attacks. In the Arab press, however, there were at least a dozen reports of Tel Aviv being completely leveled by Egyptian bombers.

The Jews managed to get a few planes into operation and scored one big air victory by driving away an Egyptian cruiser which had come to shell Tel Aviv.

WESTERN GALILEE

After six months Kawukji’s irregulars were yet to take their first Jewish settlement. Kawukji moved his headquarters to the predominantly Arab area of central Galilee, around Nazareth. Here he waited for that junction with the Syrians, Lebanese, and Iraqis which never came. There were many Chris-526

tian Arabs in the Nazareth area who wanted nothing to do with the war and repeatedly requested of Kawukji that he remove himself from the Nazareth Taggart fort.

Most of the western Galilee had been cleaned out before the invasion of the Arab armies. Haifa had fallen to the Jews and the Hanita Brigade’s Iron Broom had done away with many hostile villages. With the fall of Arab Acre, the Jews held everything up to the Lebanese border. The Galilee was free of the enemy except for Kawukji in the center.

The advertised “master plan” of the Arabs had become a complete fiasco. The infant Jewish state had borne and blunted the first shock of invasion. Over the world military experts shook their heads in disbelief. The Jews had fought a civil war on a hundred fronts; they had won out over fantastic odds on a dozen more fronts against regular troops.

The Arab victories could be measured. The greatest success had been scored by the Legion which continued to hold Latrun, the key to the Jerusalem blockade. The rest of the Arab armies combined had captured but a handful of settlements and no cities or towns. They had managed to get to within striking distance of Tel Aviv.

Arms poured into Israel, and every day the Jewish military establishment improved. On the day title Israelis declared statehood six new settlements broke ground and throughout the invasion immigrants built more communities. Nation after nation recognized the State of Israel.

Ein Gev and Negba and the hundred other settlements which would not give up, the Palmachniks, who fought for days without food and water, the new immigrants who rushed to the battle lines, the ingenuity employed in place of guns, the raw courage which made extraordinary heroism a commonplace-all these stopped the Arabs.

There was more. Divine inspiration, the destiny foretold by the ancient prophets, the heritage of a people who had fought for their freedom before, the tradition of King David and Bar Giora and Bar Kochba, strength and faith from an unseen source-these, too, stopped the Arabs.

CHAPTER TEN: Barak Ben Canaan had concluded several arms negotiations as well as several diplomatic missions in Europe. He had been sick with anxiety and begged to be allowed to return to Israel. Now past his eightieth year, he had begun to slow up considerably, although he would not admit it.

He arrived in Naples to catch a ship home. There he was

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met by Israelis who had a headquarters in the city. Most of them were Aliyah Bet agents now working on dissolving the DP camps in Italy as.fast as ships could be procured. The manpower of the DP camps was urgently needed in Israel. Those of military age were rushed to training centers as quickly as they landed. A great part of the rest was sent out to build defensive border settlements.

Barak’s arrival was the signal for a gathering, and the midnight oil burned in Israeli headquarters. Over many drinks of brandy everyone wanted to hear and rehear Barak’s story of the “Miracle of Lake Success” and of the secret arms deals which he had just concluded.

Then talk turned to the war. There was general dejection over the siege of Jerusalem; news had come through that another attempt to capture Latrun had failed. No one knew how much longer the hundred thousand civilians could hold out.

Around two o’clock in the morning the conversation turned to the private little war the Israelis were having right in Naples over a ship named the Vesuvius, a four-thousand-ton Italian motor ship. The Vesuvius had been chartered by the Syrians to carry arms to Tyre. The cargo, purchased all over Europe, included ten thousand rifles, a million rounds of ammunition, a thousand machine guns, a thousand mortars, and a variety of other weapons.

A month ago the Vesuvius was ready to sail from Naples. The Israelis learned of the ship and cargo from a friendly Italian customs official, and the night before her scheduled departure Israeli skin divers swam along the waterfront, dived beneath the ship, and fixed magnetic mines to her sides. The mines blew three nice holes in the Vesuvius’s sides but failed to set off the explosives as they had hoped. The ship did not fully sink, but partly submerged at her berth. From that point on the Vesuvius became the center of an involved cat-and-mouse game.

Syrian Colonel Fawdzi, in charge of the multimillion dollar cargo, had the ship raised, dry-docked, and the holes repaired. He brought fifty Arab students from Rome and Paris to guard the area and replaced the twelve-man crew with Arabs. Only the captain and his first and second officers were Italians from the chartering company. The captain, however, could not have disliked the pompous Colonel Fawdzi more and secretly agreed to help the Israelis, provided they promised not to damage his ship again. Again they got word that the Vesuvius was ready to sail.

The Israelis could not allow the arms to reach Tyre-but how to stop the ship? They had promised both the Italian officials and the captain that they would not blow her up in the 528

harbor. Once on the high seas the Israeli Navy, consisting of three corvettes, could never find the Vesuvius.

Barak Ben Canaan was impressed by the importance of the situation and intrigued by the kind of knotty problem he had faced and solved many times before. Once again he conceived the inconceivable. By dawn he had worked out the details of another of his fantastic plots.

Two days later the Vesuvius moved out of the Naples harbor and, as it did, the Italian second officer was relieved of radio duty as an extra precaution by Fawdzi. Radio contact, however, was not necessary to the plotters. The Israelis knew the exact instant the Vesuvius left. The ship had barely cleared the harbor area when an Italian customs cutter raced for her with its bull horn blasting.

Fawdzi, who knew no Italian, rushed up to the steering room and demanded to know from the captain what it all meant.

The captain shrugged. “Who knows?”

“Hello, Vesuvius,” the loudspeaker boomed. “Stand by to be boarded!”

A Jacob’s ladder was dropped and twenty men wearing uniforms of the Italian customs service quickly boarded from the cutter.

“I demand to know the meaning of this!” Colonel Fawdzi screamed.

The leader of the boarding party, a giant of a man with a great red and white beard, who bore a remarkable resemblance to Barak Ben Canaan, stepped forward and spoke to Fawdzi in Arabic: “We have information that one of your crew set a time bomb in one of the holds,” he said.

“Impossible,” Fawdzi shouted.

“We happen-to know he was bought out by the Jews,” the leader asserted sincerely. “We must clear the harbor area before the ship explodes.”

Fawdzi became confused. He had no intention of being blown up with the Vesuvius, nor did he like the idea of going out of the harbor with this strange gang of Italian “customs officials” aboard. On the other hand, he could not show cowardice by demanding to be taken off the ship.

“You will line up your crew,” the man with the big beard said. “We will find the culprit and he will tell us where he has planted the bomb.”

The Arab crew was assembled and taken into the gallery for “questioning,” and while they were being questioned the Vesuvius passed outside of the three-mile limit and the customs’ cutter returned to Naples. The disguised Aliyah Bet agents then produced pistols and locked up Fawdzi and the

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Arab crew. Later that day, when they had made further distance, the crew was given a compass, a map, and a rowboat and set adrift. Colonel Fawdzi was kept aboard in his cabin. The Israelis took over as crew of the ship as it raced for open sea.

Thirty-six hours later, the Vesuvius was met by two corvettes flying skull and crossbones. The corvettes tied up on either side of the motor ship, removed the cargo and crew, and sped off after smashing the radio. The Vesuvius then returned to Naples.

Colonel Fawdzi foamed with rage and demanded a full investigation of the high-seas piracy. The Italian customs service, accused by the Arabs of lending the Jews a cutter and uniforms, said it knew nothing about the matter. All cutter movement was clearly logged for anyone to see. The Arab crew followed Arab practice of never admitting failure and twelve different stories came from the twelve men. Other officials of the Italian government assumed that if there was any piracy, they certainly were not aware of it, for the captain of the ship and the first and second officers swore that the Arab crew deserted because they found out the hold held explosives.

Soon a corps of lawyers had the affair so twisted up with contradictory stories that it was impossible to unscramble the facts. The Israelis in Naples added the final touch of confusion by planting the story that it was actually a Jewish ship stolen by the Arabs and that Fawdzi was a Jewish spy.

Colonel Fawdzi took the only course open. He faked an elaborate suicide and disappeared, never to be heard of again -apparently to the regret of nobody.

Two days after the transfer of arms, the corvettes, now flying the Star of David, brought Barak home in a triumphant entry to Israel.

CHAPTER ELEVEN: Ari Ben Canaan received orders to report to Tel Aviv. Headquarters was located in a pension in Ramat Gan. Ari was surprised at the sight of it. The Star of David flew atop the building and uniformed guards of the new army of Israel were everywhere. Identification passes were demanded by the security police before entry was permitted. Outside the headquarters were a hundred jeeps and motorcycles, and there was a military bustle and briskness all about.

Inside, the big switchboard rang constantly. Ari was led through the operations room where huge blown-up maps pinpointed the battle lines and the message center where a battery of radios communicated with the front lines and the 530

settlements. As Ari looked around him he’reflected that it was a far cry from the mobile one-desk headquarters of the Haganah.

Avidan, the former head of the Haganah, had given up official command to the young leaders in their mid-twenties and early thirties who had had experience as British officers or were seasoned, as Ari was, in long years of Arab fighting. Avidan now acted in the capacity of liaison between the Army and the provisional government, and although he held no official post he was still a power in general policy as “commander emeritus.”

He greeted Ari warmly. It was difficult for Ari to tell if Avidan was tired or had just awakened, or if he was morose or happy, for Avidan always wore the same solemn expression. As they went into his office he ordered all telephone calls or other interruptions withheld.

“This is quite a fancy store you have here,” Ari said.

“Not much like the old days,” Avidan agreed. “It is hard for me to get over it myself. I drive up here many mornings thoroughly expecting the British to sweep down and throw us all into Acre jail.”

“None of us expected you to retire yourself.”

“This army and running a big war is a young man’s job. Let me argue policy in my old age.”

“How goes the war?” Ari asked.

“Jerusalem … Latrun. There is our problem. We won’t be able to hold out too much longer inside the Old City. God knows how long the New City can stand it if we don’t get through to them soon. Anyhow … you’ve certainly done a job for us in your district.”

“We’ve been lucky.”

“Safed wasn’t-luck and neither are those magnificent children at Gan Dafna luck. Don’t be modest, Ari. We’ve got children under siege at Ben Shemen too … the Iraqis won’t dare take a try at them. Ari, Kawukji is still in the central Galilee … we want to get rid of the bastard. That’s why I asked you to come down here. I want to extend your command and I want you to take charge of the operation. In a matter of a few weeks we should be able to get a battalion of men up there to you, along with some new stuff.”

“How do you figure it?”

“If we take Nazareth I think we’ve got it all. We’ll have the whole Galilee then, all the roads from east to west.”

“What about the Arab villages in the area?”

“Mostly Christian, as you know. They’ve already sent delegations down here to see us. They’ve asked Kawukji to leave. At any rate, they’re not interested in fighting.”

“Good.”

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“Before we proceed with the planning of this operation we want you to secure your area completely, Ari.”

“Fort Esther?” Ari asked.

Avidan nodded.

“I need artillery to take Fort Esther-I wrote you that. At least three or four Davidkas.” ,

“Why don’t you ask for gold?”

“Look, there are two border villages guarding the approaches to Fort Esther. I just can’t get at the place without some long-range pieces.”

“All right, I’ll send them up to you.” Avidan stood up abruptly and began pacing the room. Behind him was a large map of the fighting zones. Ari had felt strangely all along about Avidan calling him to Tel Aviv. He had felt there was more to it than the planning of a new operation and he knew that Avidan was leading up to it now.

“Ari,” the bald-headed block of a man said slowly, “you were ordered to capture Abu Yesha two weeks ago.”

“So that’s why you called me down here.”

“I thought it would be best if you and I talked it over before it gets kicked around like a football in general staff.”

“I sent you a report that I didn’t feel Abu Yesha was a threat to us.”

“We think differently.”

“As area commander, I believe I’m in the best position to judge.”

“Come off it. Abu Yesha is a base for Mohammed Kassi. It’s an entry point for the irregulars and it blocks the road to Gan Dafna.”

Ari stiffened and looked away.

“You and I have known each other too long for equivocation.”

Ari was silent for a moment. “I’ve known the people in Abu Yesha since I was old enough to walk and talk,” he said. “We’ve celebrated weddings together. We’ve gone to funerals together. We built their houses and they gave us land to make Gan Dafna.”

“I know all that, Ari. Dozens of our settlements are faced with the same thing. We happen to be fighting for our lives. We didn’t invite the Arab armies to invade us.”

“But I know those people,” Ari cried; “they aren’t enemies. They’re just plain decent farmers who want nothing more in life than to be left alone.”

“Ari!” Avidan said sharply. “We have Arab villages who have shown the courage to resist Kawukji and the Arab armies. The people in Abu Yesha made their own decision. It is wishful thinking for you to say it is not hostile. It has to go …” 532

“Go to hell,” Ari said and got up to leave.

“Don’t go,” Avidan said quietly. “Please don’t go.” The big farmer now actually did appear tired. His shoulders sagged. “We’ve begged the Palestine Arabs a thousand times to stay out of this fight. No one wants to drive them from their homes. Those villages that have shown loyalty have been left alone. But the others have left us no choice. They are used as arsenals and training camps and as bases to attack our convoys and starve our settlements. A hundred thousand civilians are starving in Jerusalem now because of them. We talked about this thing for weeks. We have no choice but to kill or be killed.”

Ari walked to the window and lit a cigarette. He stared moodily out of the window. Avidan was right and he knew it. The Jewish settlements had not been given the same choice the Arab had been given. With the Jews it was stand and die … fight to the last bullet and be massacred.

“I could easily put another man up in your command to take Abu Yesha. I don’t want to do it that way. If you feel morally incapable of doing this then I give you the choice of asking for a transfer from your area.”

“To what? Another Abu Yesha by another name?”

“Before you give an answer … I have known you since you were a baby. You have been a fighter since you were fifteen years old. We haven’t enough men of your caliber. In all those years I’ve never known you to disobey an order.”

Ari turned from the window. His face was lined with worry, sadness, and resignation. He sagged into the chair. “I will do what has to be done,” he whispered.

“Get together with operations,” Avidan said softly.

Ari shook his head and walked to the door.

“By the way, you are Colonel Ben Canaan, now.”

Ari gave a short sarcastic laugh.

“I am sorry, believe me, I’m sorry,” Avidan said.

Colonel Ari Ben Canaan, his executive officer and his adjutant, Majors Ben Ami and Joab Yarkeni, mapped out Operation Purim for the capture of Fort Esther and the removal of Abu Yesha as an Arab base. It would be the final securing of the Huleh Valley.

The artillery that Avidan had promised never arrived, but Afi really didn’t expect it. He brought the faithful Little David mortar from Safed and rounded up fifty rounds of ammunition.

Frontal attack from Gan Dafna on Fort Esther was ruled out without the artillery. Kassi still had some four hundred men in the area and superior arms at Fort Esther plus better strategic position. Ari also knew that Kassi’s men would give

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a better account of themselves fighting a defensive battle inside the concrete barricade.

Ari had three Arab villages to worry about. Abu Yesha was the first on the road to Fort Esther. High up in the mountains on the Lebanese border a pair of villages flanked the entrances to Fort Esther. Kassi had men stationpd in both of these. Ari planned his battle to get around to the rear of Fort Esther. In order to do it he had to get past the two flanking villages.

The move on Fort Esther was planned to involve three columns. Ari took the first unit out. At darkness, they went up the mountainside by goat trails to the Lebanese border with the Davidka and its ammunition. His objective was to get near the first of the mountain villages. The going would be hard and tricky. He had to swing wide and travel many extra miles to be able to get at their rear without detection. He had the mountain, the darkness, and the weight of the mortar and ammunition to contend with. Thirty-five men and fifteen girls carried one round of ammunition each. Another fifty men acted as cover.

Ari’s leg still gave him trouble but he pushed his column up the mountain in a brutally paced forced march. They had to make their objective by daylight or the whole operation would fail.

They reached the top of the mountain at four o’clock in the morning, exhausted. But there could be no rest now. They continued at a murderous pace along the mountaintop toward the first village. They swung wide of it and made a rendezvous with a patrol from a friendly Bedouin tribe which was acting as a watch on the village. The Bedouins advised Ari the area was clear.

Ari raced his outfit into the ruins of a small Crusader castle two miles past the village. As dawn began to break they scrambled for cover and collapsed into a heap of weariness. All day they stayed bidden, with the Bedouins standing guard. ,

The next night the two other columns moved out from Ein Or headquarters. Major David Ben Ami led his men up the face of the mountain on the now familiar route into Gan Dafna. He reached the village by daylight and went into hiding in the woods.

The final column led by Major Joab Yarkoni traced Ari’s steps in the wide circular route on the goat trails. His men were able to move faster because they did not have the weight of the Davidka and its ammunition. However they had a greater distance to travel as they had to pass the first village where Ari hid, pass Fort Esther and get near the second of the villages. Again the Bedouins met Yarkoni’s column on 534

the mountaintop and led them undetected to their objective.

At nightfall of the second day Ari sent the Bedouin leader to the near village with a surrender ultimatum. Meanwhile Ari moved his men out of the Crusader fort and crept close to the village. The muktar and some eighty of Kassi’s soldiers thought it was a bluff: no Jews could have got up the mountains and behind them without detection. The Bedouin returned to Ari with the report that the village needed convincing, so Ari had two rounds of the Davidka fired.

Two dozen of the mud huts were blown to pieces. The Arabs were convinced. With the second mortar shot the officers of the irregulars were leading a stampede across the Lebanese border and an array of white flags was going up. Ari acted quickly. He dispatched a small part of his column into the village to guard it and sped on to the second village where Yarkoni had already opened an attack.

Twenty minutes and three Davidka rounds after Ari arrived, the village fell and another hundred of Kassi’s men fled to Lebanon. The awesome Little David had again done its job of inflicting terror and destruction. The two villages had fallen so quickly that Fort Esther was completely unaware of it. They assumed the distant sound of the Davidka shells and the firing were their own men firing for pleasure.

At dawn of the third day, David Ben Ami moved his column out of hiding at Gan Dafna and set up an ambush outside Abu Yesha where Kassi had another hundred men. With Ben Ami’s men in position to cut off reinforcements from Abu Yesha, Ari and Yarkoni’s forces, moved to. the rear of Fort Esther. When the Little David opened fire Kassi had only a hundred men in the fort. The rest were in Lebanon or Abu Yesha. Round after round of the buckets of dynamite swished and sputtered through the air and exploded against the concrete blockhouse. Each round came a little closer to the mark, the iron rear gate. By the twentieth round, the gate was blown off its hinges, and the next five rounds fell into the courtyard of the fort.

Ari Ben Canaan jumped off with the first wave of attackers, who crawled forward on their bellies beneath machine-gun fire and intermittent blasts of the Davidka.

The actual damage to Fort Esther was superficial, but the noise and the sudden swiftness of the attack was too much for Kassi and his dubious warriors. They made a feeble defense, waiting for reinforcements to come. The only reinforcements left moved out of Abu Yesha and walked right into David Ben Ami’s trap. Kassi saw it through his field glasses. He was cut off. The Jews were at the rear gate. The white flag of surrender went up over Fort Esther.

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Yarkoni took twenty men into the fort, disarmed the Arabs and sent them packing to Lebanon. Kassi, now quite docile, and three of his officers were led to the jail as the Star of David was raised over the fort. Ari took the rest of the men down the road to where David had set the ambush. They were ready for the final phase of the end of Abu Yesha as an Arab base.

The people of Abu Yesha had seen and heard the fighting. They knew, surely, their village was next. Ari sent a truce team in to give those who were left twenty minutes to evacuate or face the consequences. From his vantage point he could see many of his lifelong friends trudging out of Abu Yesha toward the hills of Lebanon. Ari felt sick in his stomach as he saw them go.

A half hour passed and then an hour.

“We had better start,” David said to him.

“I … I want to make sure they are all out.”

“No one has left for a half hour, Ari. Everyone is out who is coming out.”

Ari turned and walked away from his waiting troops. David followed him. “I’ll take command,” David said.

“All right,” Ari whispered.

Ari stood alone on the mountainside as David led the men down to the saddle in the hill where Abu Yesha nestled. He was pale as he heard the first sounds of gunfire. David deployed the men as they approached the outskirts. A clatter of machine-gun and small-arms fire went up. The Jews dropped and crawled forward in a squad-by-squad advance.

Inside Abu Yesha a hundred Arabs led by Taha had chosen to make a determined stand. The fight for the village was a rare situation for this war; the Jews had superior numbers of men and arms. A withering barrage of automatic fire was followed by a rain of grenades on the forward Arab positions. The first Arab machine gun was knocked out, and as the defenders fell back the Jews gained a foothold in the town itself.

David Ben Ami conducted the battle by sending out patrols to move street by street, house by house, to clean out pockets of resistance. The going was slow and bloody; these were houses built of stone, not mud, and those who remained fought it out hand to hand.

The day wore on. Ari Ben Canaan did not move from his position on the mountainside. The constant sound of gunfire and the bursts of grenades and even the screams of men reached his ears.

The Arabs of Abu Yesha fell back from position after position as the relentless attack cut off any coordination between groups or individuals. Finally all those left were 536

squeezed into one street on the edge of town. More than seventy-five Arabs had been killed fighting to the end in the most dramatic defense the Arabs had made of one of their villages. It was a tragic fight; neither the Jews nor the Arabs wanted it.

The last eight men were pushed into the last stronghold, the fine stone house of the muktar which stood near the stream across from the mosque. David called for the Davidka. The house was blown to pieces. The last eight men, including Taha, were killed.

It was nearly dark when David Ben Ami walked up the road to Ari. David was battle weary.

“It is all over,” David said.

Ari looked at him glassy-eyed but did not speak.

“There were nearly a hundred of them. All dead. We lost fourteen boys, three girls. Another dozen wounded are up at Gan Dafna.”

Ari did not seem to hear him. He started to walk down the hill toward the village.

“What is going to become of their fields?” Ari whispered. “What will become of them … where will they go … ?”

David grabbed Ari’s shoulder.

“Don’t go down there, Ari.”

Ari looked at the little sea of flat roofs. It was so quiet.

“Is the house by the stream …”

“No,” David said. “Try to remember it as it was.”

“What will become of them?” Ari said. “They are my friends.”

“We are waiting for the order, Ari.”

Ari looked at David and blinked his eyes and shook his head slowly.

“I must give-it then,” David said.

“No,” Ari whispered, “I shall give it.” He looked at the village for the last time. “Destroy Abu Yesha,” Ari said.

CHAPTER TWELVE: David slept in Jordana’s arms.

She held his head tightly against her breast. She could not sleep. Her eyes were wide, staring into the darkness.

Ari had given her leave from Gan Dafna so the two of them could travel to Tel Aviv together and have a weekend alone. After tomorrow, the Lord only knew how long it would be before she saw him again, if ever. Jordana had known in her heart all along that David would volunteer for such a mission. Since the beginning of the siege he had been eating his heart out for Jerusalem. She saw that distant look of sadness and pain each time she looked into his eyes.

He stirred in his sleep. She kissed his forehead gently and

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ran her fingers through his hair and he smiled in his sleep and became still once more.

It would not be right for a sabra girl to tell her lover she was ill with worry for him. She must only smile and encourage him and conceal the fear in her heart. She felt weak with apprehension and she pressed him close to her body and wanted to hold him for a night without end.

It had begun the day partition was voted. The next day the Higher Arab Committee called for a general strike which erupted into the savage burning and plunder of the Jewish commercial center of Jerusalem. While the Arab mobs ran wild, British troops stood by.

The siege of the city began almost immediately with Abdul Kadar using Arab villages along the highway to blockade the Jewish convoys from Tel Aviv. While the titanic battles in the corridor raged for the heights, the Kastel and the other villages, the Jews in Jerusalem were frozen, hungry, and thirsty, and under direct cannonading from Kawukji and Kadar. While the Palmach Hillmen fought to keep the road open, the Yishuv organized the convoys which slugged their way along the Bab el Wad until the Judean hills were littered with wreckage.

Inside the city the fighting started with bombings and ambushes and erupted into full-scale war. The Haganah cleared a huge field of fire from King David Hotel to the Old City wall where the irregulars massed and the wreckage was called Bevingrad. The commander of the Haganah in Jerusalem was saddled with problems beyond mere military matters. He was burdened by a huge civilian population that had to be fed and protected in a situation of siege. He was further burdened by the fact that a large part of his population, ultra-Orthodox and fanatical Jews, not only refused to fight, but obstructed the efforts of the Haganah to protect them. In ancient Israel the commander of Jerusalem had been plagued by the same problems. In the siege against the Romans the fall of Jerusalem was hastened by a division of strength by the Zealots, and it led to a Roman massacre of 600,000 Jews. On that occasion the Jews had held out against the Romans for three years; it was unlikely that they could do it again.

In addition to the problem of the ultra-Orthodox and fanatics who refused to fight, the Maccabees only cooperated part of the time and were frequently concerned with carrying on a private war. When they did support the Haganah, it was not with particular distinction. The Hillmen Brigade of the Palmach was overextended and overworked in the Judean hills and quite reluctant to take orders from the Haganah commander of Jerusalem. It added up to a desperate situation in which the Haganah commander could do no right.

Beautiful Jerusalem became battle scarred and bloody. The Egyptians attacked from the south and shelled the city and bombed it from the sky. The Arab Legion used the sacred walls of the Old City as a stockade. Casualties mounted to the thousands. Again uncommon valor and ingenuity were the keynotes of the Jews’ defense. Again the Davidka mortar did yeoman’s work. It was moved from place to place to make the Arabs think there were many of them.

Outside Jerusalem, when the Arab Legion took Latrun fort they promised to keep the water pumping station open so that the civilian population would have enough to drink. Instead the Arabs blew up the pumping station and cut off the water supply. Cisterns two and three thousand years ojd were known to exist under Jerusalem. The Jews located them, tore the covers from them and discovered that, as if by a miracle, they still held water. Until emergency pipelines could be built, these ancient cisterns were all that kept the Jews from dying of thirst.

The days passed into weeks and the weeks into months and still Jerusalem held out. Every home became a battlefield. Men, women, children daily girded to battle with a spirit of defiance that would never be conquered.

David Ben Ami’s heart ached for Jerusalem. The siege was on his mind all day and all night.

He opened his eyes.

“Why aren’t you sleeping?” he asked Jordana.

“I have enough time for sleeping when I am away from you,” she answered.

He kissed her and told her that he loved her.

“Oh, David … my David.”

She wanted to beg him not to ask for this mission. She wanted to cry out and tell him that if anything happened to him there could be no life for her. But she held her tongue as she knew she must. One of his six brothers had died at kibbutz Nirim fighting the Egyptians and another was dying from wounds received in a convoy to relieve besieged Negba in the Negev Desert. David’s brother Nahum of the Maccabees had chosen to go into the Old City.

David heard the rapid beating of Jordana’s heart.

“David, love me … love me,” she pleaded.

In the Old City of Jerusalem, the Arab mobs surged in behind the Legion to destroy a score of synagogues and holy places, and they pillaged and looted every Jewish house that fell.

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The pious ones and their Haganah and Maccabee defenders were squeezed back and back until they held only two buildings, one of them the Hurva Synagogue. It could only be a matter of days before they were all wiped out.

Jordana was awakened by the light of day. She stretched and purred with contentment, for her body was pleased with love. She reached out for David. He was not there.

Her eyes opened with alarm and then she saw him standing over her. David, for the first time, was dressed in the uniform of the army of Israel. She smiled and lay back on the pillows and he knelt beside her and touched her hair, which was a scarlet disarray.

“I have been watching you for an hour. You are very beautiful when you sleep,” he said.

She reached out and opened her arms and drew him close and kissed him.

“Shalom, Major Ben Ami,” she whispered in his ear, and kissed it softly.

“Darling, it’s late. I have to be going,” he said.

“I’ll get dressed right away,” she said.

“Why don’t I just go right now by myself? I think it will be better this way.”

Jordana felt her heart stop. For a fraction of a second she meant to seize him, then she quickly masked her shock and smiled.

“Of course, darling,” she said.

“Jordana … Jordana … I love you.”

“Shalom, David. Go quickly … please.”

She turned her face to the wall and felt his kiss on her cheek and then she heard the door closing.

“David … David,” she whispered. “Please gome back to me.”

Avidan drove with Major Ben Ami to the flat that Ben Zion, the chief of operations, kept near headquarters. General Ben Zion, a man of thirty-one, was also a Jerusalemite. His aide, Major Alterman, was present when they arrived.

They exchanged greetings and condolences for the death of David’s brother at Nirim.

“Avidan tells us you have something of interest,” Alterman said.

“Yes,” David answered slowly. “Ever since the partition vote, the ‘lament of the exiles’ has been running through my mind, night and day, ‘If I forget thee, O Jerusalem.’”

Ben Zion nodded. He shared David’s feeling for Jerusalem. His wife, his children, and his parents were there.

David continued. “We control the road fairly well up to 540

Latrun. Beyond Latrun, in the Bab el Wad, the Palmach had cleared most of the heights.”

“We all know that Latrun is our greatest stumbling block,” Alterman said crisply.

“Hear him out,” Ben Zion snapped.

“I have been thinking … I know that area around Latrun like my mother’s smile. I have been going over the ground in my mind, inch by inch, for nearly six months. I am absolutely certain Latrun can be bypassed.”

There was a stunned silence for a moment.

“Just what do you mean?” Ben Zion asked.

“If you draw an arc around Latrun from road to road, it is sixteen kilometers.”

“But this sixteen kilometers is merely a line on the map. There is no road. Those hills are wild and impassable.”

“There is a road,” David said.

“David-what on earth are you talking about?” Avidan demanded.

“Over part of the way there is an ancient Roman road. It is two thousand years old and it is completely covered by brush and slide and washout, but it is there. The bed runs through the wadis for about eight kilometers. I know as surely as I stand here that I can follow the wadis for the balance of the distance.”

David walked to the wall map and drew a semicircle around Latrun, linking the roads.

Avidan and Ben Zion stared for several moments. Alterman looked cynical. Avidan, who had already heard some of the plans from Ari Ben Canaan, was critical.

“David,” Avidan said coldly, “say you are able to find this alleged Roman road and suppose you are able to find a goat path through the wadis-what then? You are still a long, long way from relieving the siege of Jerusalem.”

“What I propose,” David said without hesitation, “is that we build another road atop the Roman road and eliminate the need for capturing Latrun by going around it.”

“Come now, David,” Ben Zion said. “According to the route you have drawn on the map we will have to build this road right under the noses of the Arab Legion at Latrun.”

“Exactly,” David said. “We don’t need much more than a trail. Just enough to accommodate the width of a single truck. Joshua made the sun stand still at Latrun. Perhaps we can make the nights stand still. If one task force builds from the Jerusalem end and another from Tel Aviv and we work quietly by night, I know we can complete the bypass in a month. As for the Arab Legion, you know damned well that Glubb won’t bring them out of Latrun to fight. He is keeping them where they are safe from open battle.”

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“We aren’t so sure of that,” Alterman said. “He may fight for the road.”

“If Glubb wasn’t afraid of committing the Legion to battle, then why hasn’t he attacked from the Triangle and tried to cut Israel in half?”

It was a question no one could answer. It couldionly be assumed that David was right. The opinion of the staff was that Glubb was overextended and had no intention of fighting beyond the areas of Jerusalem, the corridor, and Latrun. Besides, the Israelis would welcome the chance to meet the Legion in the field.

Ben Zion and Avidan sat quietly and mulled over David’s proposal.

“What do you want?” Ben Zion said at last.

“Give me a jeep and one night to drive through.”

Avidan was worried. In the early days of Haganah, it pained him every time he drew a casualty. It was like losing a son or daughter. In a small, close-knit community like the old Yishuv, each loss was a personal tragedy. Now, with the war, the Jews had casualties in the thousands and for a small country it was a devastating number. Most of them were the cream of the nation’s youth, men and women. No nation, no matter how large or small, had David Ben Amis to spare, Avidan thought. It seemed like a suicide task that David was taking upon himself. Maybe David only thought he knew of a route into Jerusalem because he wanted to believe that one existed.

“A jeep and twenty-four hours …” David pleaded.

Avidan looked at Ben Zion. Alterman shook his head. What David wanted to do was impossible. The burden of Jerusalem Weighed every heart, it was the life beat, the very breath of Judaism, yet … ; Ben Zion wondered if it had not been madness to try to hold the city from the very beginning.

David’s parents had suffered enough, Avidan thought. One brother dead and another wounded and a third the leader of the Maccabees suicide squad inside the Old City walls.

David looked from one to the other frantically. “You must give me a chance!” he cried.

There was a knock on the door. Alterman took a communique and handed it to Ben Zion. The blood drained from the face of the operations chief. He handed the paper to Avidan. None of them remembered Avidan’s ever losing his composure, but now his hand trembled as he read and tears welled in his eyes.

His voice quivered. “The Old City has just surrendered.”

“No!” Alterman cried.

David sagged into a chair.

Ben Zion’s fists clenched and he gritted his teeth. “Without 542

Jerusalem there is no Jewish nation!” he cried. He turned to David. “Go up to Jerusalem, David … go up!”

When Moses led the tribes of Israel to the shores of the Red Sea he asked for a man with such faith in the power of God that he would be the first to jump into the sea. Nahshon was the name of the man who came forward. “Nahshon” became the code name of David Ben Ami’s venture.

At darkness David left the town of Rehovot south of Tel Aviv and drove toward Judea. At the foothills, near Latrun, David turned off the road into the wilderness, into the steep rock-filled hills and the gorges and wadis. David Ben Ami was driven by an obsession, but his passion was tempered by his appreciation of the gravity of the mission and controlled by bis infinite knowledge of the land around him.

The jeep twisted and banged and rebelled against the torture which no mechanical thing was made to take. In compound low gear David drove slowly and cautiously as he came very close to Latrun. The danger of meeting a Legion patrol was great.

His eyes and instincts sharpened as he saw the fort in the distance. He inched the vehicle down a treacherous slope, in search of the Roman road buried under centuries of debris. He followed the contours of washed-down dirt and rocks, and at the junction of two wadis he stopped and dug up some rocks. Their size and texture assured him that the road was there. Once he had established the general direction of the pathway of Roman legions he was able to move along it more quickly.

David Ben Ami swept in a circle around Latrun, pushing himself and his vehicle without mercy. Many times he cut the motor and sat in frozen silence to listen for an imagined enemy sound. Many times he crawled on his belly in the darkness to feel out the route through the dry, rocky wadis. Those sixteen kilometers were the longest David had ever known. The night passed too quickly for him and with its passing the danger of an Arab patrol increased.

At dawn, Ben Zion and Avidan were drowsy from a night of waiting and filled with apprehension. They now knew the folly of David’s attempt; they felt in their hearts that they would never see him again.

The phone rang. Avidan lifted the receiver and listened.

“It is the coding room,” Avidan said. “They have just received a message from Jerusalem.”

“What is it?”

“1358.”

They dashed for the Bible. Ben Zion emitted a long sigh of

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relief as he read, “Isaiah: thirty-five, eight: And an highway shall be there … no lion shall be there, nor any ravenous beast shall go up thereon … but the redeemed shall walk there…”

Nahshon had arrived in Jerusalem! David Ben Ami had found a bypass of Latrun. Jerusalem still had a chance.

Thousands of volunteers in Jerusalem were sworn to secrecy. They poured out of the city to claw a road through the wilderness along the route that David had found. David returned to Tel Aviv where a second corps of volunteers worked at the opposite end to link up with the Jerusalem people.

The two task forces hid by day and built by night, right under the noses of the Arab Legion at Latrun. They toiled in feverish silence, carrying away by hand each bagful of dirt. Through the wadis and ravines, along the ancient Roman road, the two forces inched toward each other. David Ben Ami asked for permanent transfer to Jerusalem and got it.

Jordana had had a case of nerves ever since she had left David in Tel Aviv. She returned to Gan Dafna where there was a tremendous amount of work to be done rebuilding the wrecked village. Most of the buildings had been hit by artillery fire. The younger children who had been evacuated were now returned. Kitty’s cottage had not been too severely damaged so Jordana moved in with her and Karen. The two women had developed a fast friendship. Jordana found herself able to confide in Kitty the things which she could not tell others for fear of showing weakness.

Kitty was fully aware of Jordana’s state when she returned from Tel Aviv, though Jordana tried to mask it with an outward show of gruffness. On an evening two weeks after she had parted from David she sat with Kitty in the dining room, having a late snack and tea. As Kitty chatted, Jordana suddenly became pale and stood up quickly and ran from the room. Kitty followed her outside and reached her just as Jordana slumped to the ground. Kitty caught her and supported her, hah0 leading and half carrying Jordana to her office. She stretched the sabra on the cot and forced some brandy into her.

It was ten minutes before Jordana came fully around. She sat up in a daze. Kitty made her put her head down. When she had regained her senses Jordana shook her head with disbelief.

“What happened?” Kitty asked.

“I don’t know. Nothing like that has ever happened to me. I was listening to you and all of a sudden I couldn’t hear you or see you. It turned dark and a cold chill passed through me.”

“Go on …” 544

“I … I heard David shriek … it was horrible.”

“Now you listen to me, young lady. You’ve been so tensed up you’re ready to explode. I want you to take a few days’ rest. Go down to Yad El with your mother …”

Jordana sprang to her feet. “No!” she said.

“Sit downl” Kitty barked.

“It’s nonsense. I am behaving shamefully.”

“You are acting quite normally. You wouldn’t get yourself into such a state if you would let off a little steam and a few tears occasionally and not try to hold it all inside you.”

“David would be so disgusted with me if he knew I was carrying on so.”

“Oh, stop it, Jordana. Damn your sabra pride. I’m giving you a sedative and I want you to go right to bed.”

“No!” Jordana said and ran from the room.

Kitty gave a sigh of resignation. What did you do with a girl who felt that any show of emotion would be construed as a weakness. Years of tension and struggle had built a thick skin on the sabras. Their pride was fierce beyond comprehension.

Three days after the incident Kitty came into her cottage one evening after sending Karen over to Dov’s. Jordana was working on reports. Kitty sat down before the desk. Jordana looked up and smiled, then turned grave as she saw the expression on Kitty’s face. Kitty took the pen from her hand.

Neither of them spoke for several moments.

“David is dead,” Jordaaa said.

“Yes.”

“How did it happen?” Jordana said in an emotionless monotone.

“Ari phoned a few minutes ago. The details are not clear. It seems that he organized a band of some Palmach, some Maccabees, some Haganah. It was not authorized … apparently David had been looking at the walls of the Old City and it was more than he could stand. They made an attack to try to win back the Old City. They conquered Mount Zion…”

“Go on,” Jordana said.

“They didn’t have a chance. It was a suicide mission.”

Jordana did not move or even blink her eyes.

“What can I do? What can I say?” Kitty said.

The girl stood up and held her chin high. “Don’t worry about me,” she said in a clear voice.

If Jordana Ben Canaan had tears for her David, no one ever saw them. She disappeared with her grief into the ruins of Abu Yesha. She sat neither moving nor eating nor drinking for four days and four nights. She returned to Gan

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Dafna. As Ari had done with his sweetheart, Jordana never mentioned David’s name again.

One night, a month from the time David Ben Ami found the way to Jerusalem, the “Burma Road,” the bypass of Lat-run, was completed. A convoy rushed through”and the siege of Jerusalem was over for all time.

Until that moment no one had known for certain if Israel would live. In the magic instant when the workers from Jerusalem shook hands with the workers from Tel Aviv, the Jews had won their War of Liberation.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN: There were many months of the bitterest and most bloody fighting ahead, but the opening of the “Burma Road” gave the Jews a spiritual lift at a time it was sorely needed.

After the Jews had stopped-the first invasion of the Arab armies, the Security Council of the United Nations was able to effect a temporary truce. Both sides welcomed it. The Arabs obviously had to shake up their commands and reorganize. They had lost face in the eyes of the world by failure to overrun the country. The Israelis wanted the time to get in more weapons and increase their operational strength.

The Provisional Government did not have complete control of the situation, for the cooperation of the Palmach, the ultra-Orthodox, and the Maccabees was still a matter of degrees. The Palmach, to their credit, gave up their elite corps and joined the army of Israel en masse, when faced with expulsion from the fighting fronts for failure to take orders from the central command. The Maccabees likewise made up special Maccabee battalions in the Israeli Army, but insisted on their own officers. But nothing could change the unyielding attitude of the fanatics who continued to wait for the Messiah in an absolute literal interpretation of the Bible.

Just as unification of these elements appeared a reality, a tragic event occurred to alienate the Maccabees forever. Maccabee sympathizers in America had purchased a large amount of needed arms and a cargo plane which was named the Akiva. Along with the arms, they had several hundred volunteers ready to join the special Maccabee battalions. Under truce conditions, neither side was supposed to rearm nor reinforce any position. Both Arabs and Jews ignored this UN dictate. Both sides secretly moved arms and men around in their build-ups of strength.

The existence of the Akiva became known by Israeli people in Europe. The Provisional Government demanded that the

Akiva and its arms be turned over to it. Israel was one nation now, fighting a single war, they argued, and, after all, the Maccabee battalions were part of the army of Israel. The Maccabees objected. They wanted to keep their identification and they argued that the arms were specifically purchased for use of their members.

The government brought up the question of violation of the truce. If the Provisional Government handled the entry of the Akiva the chances of getting the arms in secretly were a hundred per cent better than if the Maccabees tried on their own. The Maccabees countered by claiming that they did not have to recognize the truce order for they were independent of a central command. So the bitter squabble raged, with the Provisional Government asserting that there could be but one central authority and the Maccabees claiming otherwise.

The Akiva took off from Europe with its first load of arms and volunteers. The government, which sorely needed both the arms and the men, was forced to order the Maccabees to make the plane return without landing. The Maccabees were enraged at this order.

As the Akiva reached Palestine, in defiance of the edict, the airdrome was filled with government officials, Maccabees, and United Nations observers. The government radioed the plane a final warning to return to Europe. The Akiva refused. The Provisional Government ordered fighter planes up and the Akiva was shot down.

Fighting erupted between army and Maccabee troops. In anger the Maccabees withdrew their battalions from the army. Both sides hurled names and charges and countercharges until all justice in the “Akiva incident” was buried under a welter of insults and accusations. The bitterness created in Maccabee ranks was permanent.

The incident did prove to be a final clearing of the air. During the years of the British mandate the Maccabees had been a factor in making the British quit by their constant goading. Once the British were gone, terror tactics lost their usefulness and the Maccabees appeared unable to accept the discipline that a field army required. Thus their value as a fighting force was seriously qualified. Their one great victory had been at Jaffa, a city of crushed morale. In other places they had failed. Their massacre at the village of Neve Sadij remained as the one great black mark against the Jews. The Maccabees were activists with great individual courage but by their very nature they rebelled against authority. After the Akiva incident they remained as an angry, defiant, political group whose basic tenet was that force conquered all problems.

For a month talks went on with both sides. Count Berna—

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dotte and his American aide, Ralph Bunche, working for the United Nations, were unable to bring the sides together. They could not break down in a month what had been building for three decades. Kawukji, in central Galilee, had been constantly violating the truce. Now the Egyptians broke faith by resuming fighting before the truce deadline was up.

It was a great mistake, for it triggered a new Israeli campaign. If the world’s military experts had been amazed by the ability of the Jews to withstand the invasion, they were stunned as the army of Israel went on the offensive.

The new phase of the war opened with the Israel air force bombing Cairo, Damascus, and Amman as a warning for the Arabs to quit similar attacks on Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. The Arabs did not bomb Jewish cities from the air again. Israeli corvettes carried the fight to the enemy by shelling Tyre, in Lebanon, one of the key ports for the entry of arms.

At Ein Gev kibbutz on the Sea of Galilee, the farmers, who had been under siege for months and who had broken a Syrian attack, now struck back. In a bold night maneuver, they climbed the Sussita mountain and threw the Syrians from it.

In the central Galilee, Ari Ben Canaan went after Kawukji and Nazareth. By pushing his troops to the limit of their endurance and by making brilliant use of his equipment he completely outmaneuvered and outfought the irregulars. The Mufti’s personal general took a sound licking and lost Nazareth. With the fall of Nazareth the hostile Arab villages in the central Galilee collapsed and Kawukji led a flight to the Lebanese border. The Israelis commanded the entire Galilee and all its roads.

In the Bab el Wad and the Jerusalem corridor the Hillmen Brigade widened the way and began moving south toward Bethlehem.

In the Negev Desert, the Israelis held the Egyptians in a stalemate. Samson once set fire to the tails of a thousand foxes and .turned them loose on the Philistine fields. Now lightning jeep units with machine guns, called “Samson’s Foxes,” made fierce attacks on Egyptian supply lines and Arab villages. The terrible siege of Negba kibbutz was lifted.

It was in the Sharon Valley facing the Triangle that the Israelis scored their most spectacular success. Using the jeep units to the fullest and led by the former Hanita Brigade of the Palmach, the Jews swept into Lydda and Ramie, Arab towns that had harassed the road to Jerusalem. They captured the Lydda airdrome, the largest field in Palestine, and then swung into the Samarian Triangle to develop a maneuver to encircle Latrun. On the way they brushed aside the Iraqi forces and relieved the siege of another children’s village,

Ben Shemen. Just as encirclement of Latrun was near accomplishment the Arabs, in unison, screamed for a second truce. All the Israeli victories had been scored in ten days.

As Bernadotte and Bunche conducted the second truce talks, the Arab world was frantic. Abdullah of Trans-Jordan was the first to see the handwriting on the wall. He went into secret negotiations with the Provisional Government and agreed to keep the Legion sitting and out of action. This would permit the Jews to turn their full attention to the Egyptians. In exchange, the Jews agreed not to go after the Old Gity or the Legion-dominated Samarian Triangle.

Again the brigand Kawukji broke the truce by attacking from Lebanon. As the second truce ended, “Operation Hiram,” named for the Lebanese King in the Bible, blew Kawukji and the Mufti’s dreams into smoke, once and for all. The Israeli Army swept over the Lebanese border on the heels of the shattered and fleeing irregulars. Lebanese villages showed an array of white flags of surrender. With Kawukji banished, the Jews pulled back to their own borders, although there had been little to stop them from going clear to Beirut and Damascus.

With the Galilee clear, the Sharon quiet, and a promise to Abdullah not to attack Jordan-held positions, the army turned its full attention on the Egyptians.

Meanwhile the Arab world scrambled to explain away the series Of Israeli successes. Abdullah of Trans-Jordan publicly blamed Iraq for the Arab failure: Iraq had failed to attack from the Triangle to cut the Jews in half and had generally made themselves look ridiculous. Iraq, which dreamed of ruling a Greater Arab Nation in its “Fertile Crescent” scheme blamed their overextended supply lines. The Syrians were the most vocal of all: they blamed the Americans and Western imperialism. The Saudi Arabians, who fought in the Egyptian Army, blamed nearly everyone, each Arab country in turn. The Egyptians blamed Trans-Jordan for selling out by Abdullah’s agreement with the Jews. However, one of the most spectacular by-products of the War of Liberation was the manner in which the Egyptian press and radio translated Egyptian disasters as victories. So far as the Egyptian public was concerned, their troops were winning the war. The Lebanese and the Yemenites kept very quiet. They were not too interested in the fighting to begin with.

The myth of Arab unity exploded as the Jews continued to administer defeats on the combined Arab strength. The former kisses, handshakes, and vows of eternal brotherhood changed to knife pulling, haranguing, and, finally, political assassination. Abdullah was eventually murdered by Moslem

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fanatics as he came from prayer in the Mosque of Omar in the Old City. Farouk was thrown out of Egypt by a clique of militarists who spoke the pages of an Arab Mein Kampf. Intrigue and murder, the old Arab game, raged at full force.

In the Negev Desert, the army of Israel, now balanced and • coordinated, brought the war into its closing Stages. Suweidan, the Monster on the Hill which had tormented the Negba kibbutz, fell. It was at Suweidan that the Egyptians showed their greatest valor.

A bypassed Egyptian pocket at Faluja, which had been under Jewish siege, was later evacuated under truce talks. One of its Egyptian officers was a young captain later to lead the overthrow of Farouk. His name was Gamal Abdel Nasser.

The pride of the Egyptian Navy, the cruiser Farouk, had tried to shell a Jewish position a few hours before one of the truces to gain a tactical advantage. It was sunk by Israeli motorboats filled with dynamite which were driven out in the water, set, and rammed into the cruiser’s sides.

Beersheba-the Seven Wells, the city of Father Abraham Ś-fell in the autumn of 1948 to a surprise Israeli attack. The Egyptians dug in and built a deep and stacked defense for a stand below Beersheba. The defenses seemed impenetrable. Again the Jews called upon their intimate knowledge of the land. They found a Nabataean path, thousands of years old, which allowed them to encircle the Egyptian defenses and attack from the rear.

From then on it was a rout. The army of Israel lashed out after the fleeing Egyptians. They bypassed the Gaza area and crossed into the Sinai itself.

The Lord has mingled a spirit of perverseness in the midst of her; and they have caused Egypt to go astray in every work thereof, as a drunken man staggereth in his vomit. Neither shall there be for Egypt any work which head or tail, palm branch or rush, may do. In that day shall the Egyptians be like unto women; and they shall tremble and fear because of the shaking of the Hand of the Lord of Hosts, which he shaketh over them.

The words of Isaiah had come true!

At the Suez Canal, the British became alarmed at the Egyptian debacle and the possibility of Israeli penetration near the canal. They demanded that the Jews stop or face the British Army. In warning, the British sent Spitfire fighters into the sky to gun the Israelis. It seemed only fitting somehow that the last shots of the War of Liberation were against the British. The Israeli Air Force brought down six British fighter planes. Then Israel yielded to international pressure by letting the

Egyptians escape. The shattered Egyptian Army regrouped and with fantastic audacity marched into Cairo and staged a “victory parade.”

The War of Liberaton became history!

For months there had been truce talk. For centuries there would be arguments over how it all happened. Experts were confounded and realists were confused.

The Arab people of Palestine had long ago accepted the return of the Jews and were prepared to live in peace and benefit from the progress which had been brought after a thousand sterile years. These people simply did not want to fight and never had. They were betrayed by leaders who were first to run in the time of danger. Their courage was mob frenzy. They were confused by catch phrases they did not understand, much less believe in. They were victimized by racist polemics and filled with a fear of a militant “Zionism” that never existed. Arab leaders exploited their ignorance for their own willful purposes.

Some of the Arabs and their armies fought with valor. Most of them did not. They had been promised easy victories, loot, and rape. They had bolstered each other with a false illusion of Arab unity. Obviously, the “cause” was not so great it was worth bleeding for.

There never was a-question of the Jews’ willingness to die for Israel. In the end they stood alone and with blood and guts won for themselves what had legally been given them by the conscience of the world.

And so-the Star of David, down for two thousand years, shone from Elath to Metulla, never to be lowered again.

The aftermath of the War of Liberation involved one of the most widely discussed and thorniest dilemmas of the century -the Arab refugee problem. More than a half million Palestine Arabs had fled from their homes to neighboring Arab states. All discussions of the disposition of these people became bogged down in furious arguments, accusations, confusion, nationalism, and incrimination. The issue became so involved and mired that it turned into a political time bomb.

Barak Ben Canaan was called upon once more to serve his country. The government of Israel asked him to make a complete study of this apparently insolvable situation. He made a painstaking investigation and his findings filled several hundred pages. In a short summary, Barak shed light on what appeared to be a hopelessly confused problem.

SUMMARY OF THE ARAB REFUGEE SITUATION

The most publicized afterevent of the War of Liberation

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has been the Palestine Arab refugee problem. It has become the most potent political weapon in the Arab arsenal.

The Arabs have gone to great lengths to describe the plight of these war victims and to keep the refugee camps as working models to demonstrate to the world Jewish cruelty. Indeed, those who visit these wretched souls are certain to ‘be touched by their plight.

The Arabs would have the world believe that the Palestine Arab refugee is unique. Nothing could be further from the truth. Every war man has waged has created refugees, homeless and displaced people. Today in Europe and Asia, five years after the end of World War II, displaced people number in the tens of millions. This is the very nature of war.

Had the Arab leaders obeyed the decision of the highest international tribunal and adhered to the law, there would have been no Arab refugee problem. The refugees came as a direct result of a war of aggression waged by the Arabs to destroy the people of Israel.

The Arabs created the Palestine refugee problem themselves. After the November 1947 partition vote the Yishuv of Palestine begged the Palestine Arabs to remain calm, friendly, and to respect the unassailably legal rights of the Jewish people.

Despite wanton aggression the State of Israel, in its Declaration of Independence, held out its hand in friendship to its Arab neighbors, even at the moment her borders were being violated.

The avowed intention of murdering the Jewish people and completely destroying the State of Israel was the Arab answer to law and friendship.

Strangely, most of the Palestine Arabs fled even before the invasion. Jaffa, Haifa, and the Galilee created most of the refugees while the fighting was comparatively light.

The first reason for this was that the Palestine Arabs were filled with fear. For decades racist leaders had implanted the idea of mass murder in their minds. These leaders played on the illiteracy, superstition, and fanatical religious devotion of the fellaheen. These leaders never cared for the fellaheen but only for their own personal ambitions. They completely betrayed the people. Blind fear and ignorance caused the first flight of the Arabs. Was this fear founded upon fact? Nol At one place, Neve Sadij, there was an unforgivable massacre of innocent people. Otherwise, the Arabs who remained in Palestine were completely unmolested. No Arab village which remained at peace was harmed in any way by the Israelis.

In regard to Neve Sadij we might add that this one example of Jewish excessin the heat of war, one must remember-552

pales beside the record of scores of Arabled massacres in over a three-decade period of nominal peace.

The second major cause of the refugee situation comes from the absolutely documented fact that the Arab leaders wanted the civilian population to leave Palestine as a political issue and a military weapon.

The Arab generals planned an annihilation of the Jewish people. They did not want a large Arab civilian population present to clutter their operational freedom.

The politicians wanted to prove Jewish inhumanity by pointing to the Arab refugees “forced” from their homes. Lastly, the actual fighting helped create part of the refugee situation. Those few Arab villages which fought against the State of Israel were attacked and the Arabs driven from them. No apologies have to be made for this.

Documented proof exists that the Arabs were promised they could return to their homes on the heels of Arab victories to loot the destroyed State of Israel. No one can question Arab hostility toward Israel since the war. They have blockaded the Suez Canal in violation of international agreement, they have boycotted business, blackmailed foreign firms, raided border settlements, and constantly threatened to come back for a second attempt to destroy Israel. In the light of this it is inconceivable that Israel could even consider resettlement of a hostile minority, pledged to destroy the State. We come now to the most horrible of all the facts concerning the Arab refugees. The Arab nations do not want these people. They are kept caged like animals in suffering as a deliberate political weapon. In Gaza, to cite one example, the roads are mined and patrolled so that these refugees cannot reach Egypt.

The United Nations has established a fund of two hundred million dollars for resettlement of the Palestine refugees. There is much lush, fertile, and empty land in the seven million square miles of the Arab world. The Tigris-Euphrates Valley, one example, has some of the richest unused land in the world. It is inhabited by a handful of Bedouins. This section alone could take not only the half million but ten million others as well.

Not one penny of the resettlement money has been used.

On the other hand, Israel, an unfertile land whose seven thousand square miles are half desert, has taken in more than a half million Jewish refugees from Arab countries and stands ready to take in that number again.

The Arabs argue that the Palestine refugees themselves do not want to be resettled but want their farms in Palestine back. This is sheer nonsense. The Arabs have cried crocodile

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tears over the great love these poor fellaheen have for their lost homes.

The fact is, the Palestine fellaheen were victimized by men who used them as a tool, deserted them, and are victimizing them again. Kept penned up, fed with hatred, they are being used to keep Arab hatred of Israel at the boiling point. ’

If the Arabs of Palestine loved their land, they could not have been forced from it-much less run from it without real cause. The Arabs had little to live for, much less to fight for. This is not the reaction of a man who loves his land.

A man who loves his land, as the Arabs profess, will stand and die for it.

The Arabs tell the world that the State of Israel has expansionist ideas. Exactly how a nation of less than a million people can expand against fifty million is an interesting question.

The Arab people need a century of peace.

The Arab people need leadership, not of desert sheiks who own thousands of slaves, not of hate-filled religious fanatics, not of military cliques, not of men whose entire thinking is in the Dark Ages. The Arab people need leaders who will bring them civil liberties, education, medicine, land reforms, equality.

They need leaders with the courage to face the real problems of ignorance, illiteracy, and disease instead of waving a ranting banner of ultranationalism and promoting the evil idea that the destruction of Israel will be the cure for all their problems.

Unfortunately, whenever an enlightened Arab leader arises he is generally murdered. The Arabs want neither resettlement of the refugees, alleviation of their plight, nor do they want peace.

Israel today stands as the greatest single instrument for bringing the Arab people out of the Dark Ages.

Only when the Arab people get leadership willing to grasp the hand extended in friendship will they begin to solve the problems which have kept them in moral and physical destitution.

BARAK BEN CANAAN

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BOOK 5

Wiik Winqs as

M voice crieth-in the wilderness, Trepan ye the, waif of the lord, vnnke stmiqht in the desert a. highway for our God.

Ihey that wait upu*it up< wUhuilntisns eagles. ”

Isaiah.

WILDERNESS OF PA

I(S I NA 1) ”

CHAPTER ONE:

NOME, ALASKA LATE 1948

The entire flying stock of the Arctic Circle Airways consisted of three army-surplus cargo ships purchased on credit by Stretch Thompson.

Stretch had served in Alaska during the war. He had won renown as a young man with a fertile mind and unlimited imagination when it came to devising means of avoiding honest labor. The nights were long in Alaska and they gave Stretch Thompson much thinking time. Most of his thinking time was devoted to exploiting the untapped riches of Alaska and avoiding honest labor. The longer the nights became, the more Stretch stretched-and thought. And one night he hit it

Crabs!

The entire coast was lined with virgin beds of Alaskan king crabs, some sixteen inches in diameter. Why, with a little enterprise he could train the American public to drool for king crabs. In a year he would make them a delicacy equal to Maine lobsters, Maryland terrapin, or cherry-stone clams. He could fly the giant crustaceans-down to the United States packed in ice. Eager dealers would snap them up. He would be rich. He would be known as Stretch Thompson, the King Crab King.

Things did not work out exactly as Stretch had planned. It appeared that the human race was not advanced enough for his king crabs. The cost of a plane, gas, and a pilot seemed, somehow, always to come out to more than what he could get for his crabs. None the less, Stretch was not a man to say die. With deft bookwork and glib tongue he kept the creditors off his back and he did have an airline, such as it was. With bailing wire, spit, and chewing gum he was able to keep the three crafts of Arctic Circle aloft. Just when things looked the darkest, along came a pay load to keep him in business.

Stretch’s one bit of continued good luck was his chief, and sometimes only, pilot, Foster J. MacWilliams, known as “Tex” for the usual obvious reason. Foster J. had flown the Hump during the war and was, as Stretch put it, “The best goddam chief pilot any goddam airline ever had.” Such was Foster J. MacWilliams’ prowess that no one in Nome would bet against his setting down a C-47 on the tail end of an iceberg in the middle of a blizzard-drunk. In fact, on various occasions Stretch tried to raise enough money to make the bet worth while but something always happened … either the blizzard slackened or Foster couldn’t get drunk enough.

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MacWilliams was a tramp. He liked flying. He didn’t like the fancy stuff of flying over set routes or with a schedule or with first-class craft., Too dull. The risks of flying Arctic Circle suited him fine.

One day MacWilliams came into the shack at the end of the runway which served as office, operations headquarters, and home for Stretch Thompson. ’

“Goddam, Stretch,” he said, “it’s colder than a well digger’s ass out there.”

Stretch had the look on his face of the proverbial canary-filled cat. “Foster,” he said, “how’d you like to go to a warmer climate and get all of your pay in one bundle?”

“You always did have a gruesome sense of humor.”

“I kid you not, Tex. You’ll never guess …”

“What?”

“Guess.”

Foster shrugged. “You sold the airline.”

“That’s right.”

Foster’s mouth dropped open. “Who’d buy this pile of crap?”

“I didn’t ask their life history. I found out their check was good and that was all she wrote.”

“Well, I’ll be a sad bastard. That’s fine, Stretch, because I’m getting tired of this chicken kacky up here, anyhow. How much you figure you owe me?”

“With the bonus I’m giving you, about four grand.”

Foster J. MacWilliams whistled. “That will buy a lot of first-class tail. I can stay drunk and laid from here to South America. That’s my next stop, Stretch. I’m going to latch onto one of them South American outfits. I hear they pay big dough hauling dynamite over the Andes.”

“There’s a hitch …” Stretch said.

“I figgered as much.”

“We got to deliver the three planes to the new owners. I hired two boys to run the number one and two ships over … I can’t find another one.”

“You mean I’m the only one fool enough to fly the number three ship. Well, that’s all right. Where do I deliver it?”

“Israel.”

“Where?”

“Israel.”

“Never heard of it.”

“I was just looking for it on the map, myself, when you came in.”

Stretch Thompson and Foster J. MacWilliams searched high and low on the world map. After a futile half hour Tex shook his head. “Stretch, I think somebody gave you the rub.”

They went into Nome and asked around the bars where 558

Israel might be. One or two people had heard something or the other about it. Stretch was beginning to perspire in the cold when someone suggested they get the librarian up.

“It’s Palestine!” the irate librarian said, “and midnight is no time to pound on my door.”

After another search on the map they finally located it.

Foster shook his head. “Goddam, Stretch,” he said. “It’s smaller than a big iceberg. I’m liable to fly right over it.”

Three weeks later, Foster J. MacWilliams landed the number three plane of Arctic Circle Airways at Lydda airdrome. Stretch Thompson had flown over a week earlier and was there to meet him. Foster was ushered into an office which bore the words: Palestine central airways, s. s. Thompson,

‘ GENERAL MANAGER.

Foster J. MacWilliams smelled a rat.

“How was the trip, old buddy? I’m sure glad to see you.”

“Just fine. Now if you’ll give me my back pay, old buddy, I’ll just shuffle off to Paris. I got my hooks on a real goer and a month before I hitch a ride to Rio D.”

“Sure, sure,” Stretch said. “Got the check right here in the safe.”

Stretch watched Foster MacWilliams’ eyes bug out. “Four thousand, five hundred and no zero zero’s!”

“The extra five bills is to prove that Stretch Thompson ain’t no hog,” Stretch said.

“You’re a big man … always said that.”

“Y1 know, Tex, this here is an interesting place. Just about everybody around here is a Jew. Been here a week and I can’t get used to it.”

Foster was reluctant to ask why Stretch was here-but he did.

“Name on the door tells the story. Palestine Central Airways. I thought of the name myself. You see, these guys here haven’t had too much experience running a first-class line, so they induced me to stay. First thing I told ‘em … boys, I said … if you want a first class operation, you have to have a first-class chief pilot and I got the best goddam chief pilot any goddam airline …”

“I’ll see you around,” Foster said, standing up quickly.

“What’s the fire?”

“I’m on my way to Paris.”

“I got a deal for you.”

“Not interested.”

“Do me the courtesy of listening.”

“I’ll listen but I’m not buying. I’m going to Paris if I got to swim there.”

“Here’s the pitch. Like I said, everybody around here is

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a Jew. They bought out the old Arctic Circle so’s they could haul more Jews in. Man, I hear they got them stashed everywhere in the world, and they all want in. All we got to do is bring the bodies in. Can’t you see it? Every load a pay load. Cash on the line … per head. This is dream stuff, Tex boy. Stick with me and you’ll be bathing in it. You know me, Tex … I ain’t no hog.” >

“I know what I’ll be bathing in. I’ll drop you a card from Rio D.”

“O.K., Foster … been nice knowing you.”

“Now, don’t get mad, Stretch.”

“Who’s mad, who’s mad?”

“We’ve had our times in Nome.”

“Sure … sure … swell times. I froze my butt off.”

“Well, put her there,” Foster said. Stretch shook bis hand halfheartedly.

“Now, what’s the matter, Stretch? You act like I’m putting a knife in your ribs.”

“Going to level with you, Foster. I’m in trouble. We got a hot flash that a bunch of these Jews are sitting around and waiting to be picked up at a place called Aden. I had some pilots but they chickened out on me.”

“That’s tough titty. You don’t con me. I’m going to Paris.”

“Sure,” Stretch said. “Go to Paris. If I was you I’d go too. I don’t blame you. Those other pilots ran like striped apes when they heard there was danger of the Arabs firing on them.”

Foster was on his way out. He stopped and turned around.

“You’re right, Foster. No use getting your brains blown out. This is a real rough run … even rougher than flying the Hump or running dynamite over the Andes.”

Foster J. MacWilliams licked his lips. Stretch went into some more dramatics but he knew that the bait had been swallowed.

“Tell you what I’m gonna, Stretch. I’ll make this run for you just to help you off a spot. By the time I’m back you’d better gotten your hooks on some pilots. Just one run. Now where the hell is this Aden?”

“Damned if I know.”

“Well, let’s get a map and look for it.”

As Foster J. MacWilliams, American tramp pilot for Palestine Central, nee Arctic Circle, took off from Lydda airdrome he opened a twentieth-century fantasy out of the pages of the Arabian Nights.

He flew toward the British protectorate of Aden at the bottom of the Arabian Peninsula, moving right down the Red Sea.

The story actually, began three thousand years before 560

Foster’s time in ancient Sheba. In the time of the Queen of Sheba, the southern part of the Arabian Peninsula was a land of richness. The people had learned the art of constructing spillways and dams and cisterns to trap and conserve water and, with it, created a garden.

After the Queen of Sheba had made her visit to Solomon, some of Solomon’s people left Israel to go to Sheba to establish trade routes through the desert, along the Red Sea, and begin a colony. These Jews came to Sheba in Biblical times, hundreds of years before even the fall of the First Great Temple.

For centuries the Jews in Sheba prospered. They colonized well with their own villages; they integrated into the complexities of tribal life. They became leaders of the court and the most prominent of citizens. .

Then came the horrible years when the sands slowly and cancerously ate away the fertile land; the wadis dried and the rains disappeared into parched earth. Man and beast wilted and withered under the unmerciful sun, and the fight to conquer thirst was the fight for life itself. Fruitful Sheba and the neighboring states broke up into jealous and hate-filled tribes which warred upon each other constantly.

When Islam first swept the world, the Jews of the ancient religion were given respect and freedom in their ways. Mohammed himself wrote the laws, which all Moslems were to follow, prescribing the kindly treatment of Jews.

This equality of the Jews was short-lived. As in all Moslem lands, all citizens other than Moslems became scorned as infidels. In their own way the Arabs had grudging respect for the Jews, and in their own way granted them a reasonable amount of tolerance. Arab massacres of Jews were never the calculated genocide of Europe, but rather the flaring of a sudden spark of violence. The Arabs had become too busy plotting against each other to be much concerned with the docile little Jews in the land now known as Yemen; centuries of suppression had removed any warlike qualities.

As in all Arab lands, these Jews lived as second-class citizens. There were the usual repressive laws, unequal taxation, persecutions, and denial of the civil rights given to Moslems. The degree of persecution varied with the particular ruler in the particular area.

A standing rule forbade Jews’ raising their voices before a Moslem, building a house higher than a Moslem, touching a Moslem, or passing a Moslem on the right side. A Jew must not ride a camel, for the mount would put his head higher than a Moslem’s. In a land where the camel was the chief mode of transportation, this was a severity. Jews Metl in mellahs, Oriental versions of ghettos.

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The world moved on and progressed. Time stood still in Yemen. It remained as primitive as the jungle and as remote and inaccessible as Nepal or Outer Mongolia. No hospital existed in Yemen, no school or newspaper or printing press or radio or telephone or highway.

It was a land of desert and vicious mountains linked only by the paths of camel caravans. Hidden cities i nestled in twelve-thousand-foot ranges surrounded by hundreds of thousands of square miles of complete waste. Illiteracy was nearly a hundred per cent. Backward, forsaken, wild and uncharted, some of its boundaries were never defined.

Yemen was ruled by an Imam, a relative of Mohammed, and the personal representative of Allah, the Merciful, the All-Compassionate. The Imam of Yemen was an absolute ruler. He controlled the life of every subject. He controlled the gold and the single crop of coffee. He answered to no cabinet. He provided no civil or social services. He held power by dexterously balancing tribal strength, being continually occupied in crushing one tribe or aiding another among the hot desert feuds ^nd the raging jealousies. He kept hostile tribes under control by kidnaping their people and holding them as hostages. He kept hundreds of slaves. He sat in cross-legged pompousness and dispensed justice according to his whim, ordering the noses of prostitutes cut off and the hands of thieves amputated. He scorned civilization and did all in his power to keep it from penetrating his kingdom, although he was forced to yield occasionally from fear of his powerful Saudi Arabian neighbor to the north who dabbled in international intrigue.

Part of the Imam’s fear of civilization derived from civilization’s desire to subjugate his land. Despite its remoteness it was located in a corner of the world that formed a gateway to the Orient through the Red Sea. Time and again Yemen became a battlefield as colonial expansionists set covetous eyes on it.

The Imam traditionally assumed the role of benevolent despot toward the Jews. So long as the Jews remained subservient they were given some protection. The Imam was cautious: the Jews were the finest artisans and craftsmen of the land. Their generations passed down the arts of silversmith-ing, jewelry making, minting, leatherwork, carpentry, shoe-making, and a hundred other trades which most Arabs had not mastered. The latter either farmed or comprised the roving Bedouin bands. Thus skill brought the Jews some measure of protection.

That the Jews of Yemen remained Jews was incredible. For three thousand years these people had no contact with the outer world. Their lives would have been much easier had 562

they taken up Islam. Yet the Yemenite Jews kept the Torah, the Laws, the Sabbath, and the holidays through the centuries of isolation. Many of the Jews were illiterate in Arabic but all of them knew Hebrew. There were no presses; all holy books were written by hand with great accuracy and passed down through the generations.

Direct pressure was often brought to bear to make them convert from Judaism to Islam, but they resisted. When the Imam began to abduct orphans and convert them, the Jews embraced the practice of immediately marrying orphans no matter what their age. There were cases of children only a few months old becoming husbands or wives.

In physical appearance, in dress, in action, and in spirit the present-day Yemenite Jews could have been mistaken for ancient prophets. As in Biblical days, they still practiced multiple marriage. They believed in the evil eye, in ill winds and a variety of demons, against which they wore protective amulets. Their belief in the Bible was absolutely literal.

During the years, the Yemenite Jews never stopped looking toward Jerusalem. They waited through the centuries in patience and devotion for Him to send the word for them to “go up.” From time to time small groups or individuals managed to get out of Yemen, and they returned to Palestine and established a small community there.

And then, the word came, as the prophets had declared it would!

Yemen declared war upon Israel after the Israeli Declaration of Independence and sent a token force to fight in the Egyptian Army. This action apprised the Jews of the fact that Israel had been reborn. Their rabbis told them it was the message from God. King David had returned to Jerusalem! Their long wait would come to an end! The Haham -the Wise Ones-told them to rise and go up to the Promised Land on wings of the eagle!

When the first stir of this Yemenite exodus reached the ears of those in Israel, the War of Liberation still raged. Little was known of the number of the Yemenites, of how to get them out, or what to do with them.

The chief Haham went to the Imam and petitioned the All-Merciful to allow the Jews to leave. There were a number of political and economic reasons why the Imam felt it was better to keep the Jews. The rabbi intimated that the Imam had better reacquaint himself with the chapters of Exodus in the Old Testament.

The Imam sat cross-legged in his harem and thought for several days. The rabbi had made his point. The thought of the Ten Plagues was in the Imam’s heart. Not long before the chief rabbi had petitioned him a typhoid epidemic had

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wiped out a quarter of his population. He decided that it was a warning from Allah.

The Imam agreed that the Jews could leave with the condition that all property was left to him, a head tax was paid, and several hundred artisans and craftsmen stayed as hostages to teach the Moslems.

The Jews of Yemen left behind their fields’ and their homes. They packed what they could carry and began a trek through the wild and murderous mountains, the searing sun, and the vast wastelands scourged by hundred-mile-an-hour winds.

They walked toward the border of the Western Protectorate, this gentle little people with olive skins and delicate features. They were turbaned and wore the same kind of long striped robes that were worn in the palace of Solomon. The women from Sa’na were dressed in black gowns with white fringe and they carried their babies in slings on their backs. They trudged along in the fulfillment of a prophecy, easy prey to the Arab tribes who took their meager possessions as toll for the passage.

The protectorates along the Arabian Peninsula consisted of a complex of large and small Arab kingdoms, sheikdoms and Bedouin tribes which skirted the shores from the Red Sea along the Gulf of Aden on through to the Arabian Sea and Persian Gulf. The British controlled the area by a hundred different treaties which paid tribute in arms or money to the tribes for oil rights. In turn, the British attempted to keep the feuds down and give protection and passage.

The key place in this holding was the Crown Colony of Aden in the Western Protectorate. The port of Aden was a passageway between East and West, settled by Greeks, British, Arabs, and Jews, and a blend of oriental filth, Asiatic exotic-ness, British rigidity, traces of industrial progress, and the wildness of a port of call. It was at once an exciting and disgusting place.

The port of Aden was the goal of the Yemenite exodus. At first the British did not quite know what to do with these people pouring in over their border in caravans that seemed right out of the Bible. They were still at odds with the Jews over the mandate, yet they could feel no hatred for the Yemenites. The British gave conditional approval to the Yemenites to enter and establish camps, provided the Israelis came down and got them out.

They were tragic figures as they came from Yemen, dressed in rags, filthy and half dead from starvation and thirst. Almost all their possessions had been stolen from them by the Arabs. But each man still carried his Bible and each village still carried the Holy Torah of the synagogue. 564

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A hasty camp was set up at Hashed near the port of Aden. The Israelis covered the border between the Western Protectorate and Yemen. As soon as there was news of another group arriving, they rushed transport to the border to bring them to Hashed. There was a shortage of personnel and supplies at Hashed. The organization badly lagged behind the needs of the numbers coming through.

The immigration people faced the additional difficulty of having to deal with a semiprimitive people. The Yemenites could not comprehend things like water taps, toilets, or electric lights. This was a community who had suddenly caught up with almost three thousand years of progress in hours. Motor vehicles, medicine, western dress, and a thousand things were strange and awesome to them. It was a frightening experience.

The women shrieked as doctors and nurses tried to remove their lice-filled rags to exchange them for clean clothing. They refused to have their bodies examined for sores and diseases, and rebelled against shots and vaccinations. There was a continuous fight against the workers who tried to remove temporarily the infants who badly needed treatment for malnutrition.

Fortunately there was a partial solution that kept the workers and doctors from complete frustration. The camp workers, mostly Israelis with an intimate knowledge of the Bible, quickly learned to go to the Yemenite rabbis with appropriate Biblical passages, and thereby nearly anything could be accomplished. So long as it was written in “the Book,” the Yemenites would accede.

The Hashed camp grew, and reports along the Western Protectorate frontier told of more Yemenites -coming. Under agreement with the British, the Israel Provisional Government had to get them out of Aden. So Arctic Circle Airways became Palestine Central and Foster J. MacWilliams unwittingly answered an age-old prophecy by dropping from the sky with the first of the great “eagles.”

The arrival of the plane created tremendous excitement. The first group picked up their Torah and their water bottles and were removed to the airport. They saw the eagle and nodded their heads knowingly: God had sent it as He said He would. But when they were asked to board, they refused. The rabbi in the group remembered it was the Sabbath. A terrible argument ensued. The Hashed camp chief explained that thousands of people were waiting to get to Israel and it was unfair to hold up the eagle for even a day. No amount of arguing could make them break the Sabbath. They sat adamantly under the wings of the eagle and refused to

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budge. After three thousand years of waiting, they could wait one more day.

Foster J. MacWilliams took one look at these strange creatures, listened to the Aguments in the gobbledygook-lingo, uttered a short oath to Stretch Thompson and went into town and got very intoxicated.

He was awakened the next morning and carted to the airport with a horrible throbbing hangover from mixing Greek ouzo, rice wine, and Scotch. He watched the Yemenites carrying their water bottles and their Torah aboard the plane.

“Jesus H. Christ,” Foster commented on the procession.

“Captain MacWilliams,” a voice said behind him. He turned and faced a tall, well-shaped sabra who introduced herself as Hanna. She was in her mid-twenties and wore the traditional blue of a kibbutz and had sandals on her feet. “I will be flying with you and taking care of the passengers.”

At that point the trip started to become interesting to Foster. Hanna was unconcerned that he was looking her over very carefully. “Do you have any particular instructions? I mean this is our first experiment.”

“Hell, no. Just keep them gooks out of the pilot’s cabin. Of course, you are welcome to come in … any time. And call me ‘Tex.’”

Foster was watching the loading. The line of Yemenites seemed endless. “Hey! What’s the score? How many of them do you think that plane will hold?”

“We have a hundred and forty listed.”

“What! You crazy? We won’t get that thing into the air. Now, Hanna, you just run up there and tell whoever is putting those people on to take half of them off.”

“Captain MacWilliams,” the girl pleaded, “they are very light people.”

“So are peanuts light. That don’t mean that I can haul a billion of them.”

“Please. I promise you won’t have any trouble with them.”

“You’re damned right I won’t. We’ll all be dead at the end of the runway.”

“Captain MacWilliams. Our situation is desperate. The British have ordered us to get them out of Aden. They are pouring over the border by the hundreds every day.”

Foster grumbled and studied the weight charts. The Israeli workers nearby held their breath as he calculated. He made the mistake of looking up into Hanna’s eyes. He refigured, cheated a bit, and reckoned with luck the old ship could rev up enough steam to get up in the air. Once up, he’d keep her up … somehow. “Hell, leave them in,” he said, “this is my first and last trip, anyhow.” 566

. The camp director handdd him the final manifest. A hundred and forty-two Yemenites were packed into the craft. Hanna got the food and supplies aboard and he climbed up the ladder.

The stench hit his nostrils!

“We didn’t have time to bathe them all,” Hanna apologized. “We didn’t know when you were coming.”

He poked his head in the main cabin. It was jammed tight with the little people. They sat cross-legged and frightened on the floor. The smell was horrible.

Foster stepped in and closed and locked the door. Whereupon the unventilated hundred-and-twenty-degree heat began to work on the odors. He worked his way forward an inch at a time. By the time he reached the pilot’s cabin he was an interesting shade of green. He threw the window open to get air but instead got a blast of heat. He ran up the engines and as he taxied down the runway he held his head out of the window and vomited. He continued retching as he gunned the plane down the runway and barely lifted at the last inch. He sucked a lemon as he fought for altitude, and finally, with the coming of cooler air, his stomach came under control.

It was choppy and the plane bounced badly as he tried to get height. He “turned the corner” at the Strait of Bab el Mandeb and beelined up the center of the Red Sea with Saudi Arabia on one side and Egypt on the other.

Hanna came in and she, too, was green. “Can’t you make this plane stop bouncing?” she said. “They’re all throwing up in there.”

Foster shut off the heat in the main cabin. “Get in there and open the air vents. I’ll try to get a little higher. The cold air will straighten them out.”

His head throbbed from the hangover. Why did he ever let Stretch Thompson talk him into this?

In another half hour, Hanna returned. “They’re all complaining that they are freezing … so am I.”

“You got your choice-if I turn on the heat they’ll start vomiting again.”

“Let them freeze,” Hanna mumbled, and returned to her passengers.

In a few moments she ran into the cabin shrieking and screaming in Hebrew.

“Speak English!”

Hanna pointed to the main cabin. “Fire … they’ve started a fire to keep warm.”

The plane was on automatic pilot and Foster tore out, throwing bodies to right and left. A small fire was going in the middle of the floor. He stamped it out in a rage and went to Hanna, who sagged limply by the compartment door.

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“Do you know how to talk to these people?”

“Yes… Hebrew …”

Foster shoved the intercom microphone into her hands. “Now you tell them the next one who moves out of his place is going for a swim in the Red Sea!”

The Yemenites had never heard a loudspeaker before. When they heard Hanna’s voice they all began pdinting to the ceiling and, terrified, they cried and cringed.

“What the hell’s the matter with them? What did you tell them?”

“They’ve never heard it before. They think it’s God commanding them.”

“Good. Don’t tell them no different.”

Things went fairly well for the next few hours. There were a few minor incidents, nothing bad enough to endanger the plane. Foster had just begun to relax when he heard another loud commotion from the main cabin. He closed his eyes. “Dear Lord,” he sighed, “I’ll be a good Christian from now on. Just let this day end.”

Hanna returned.

“I’m afraid to ask,” Foster mumbled.

“Tex,” she said, “you are the godfather of a baby boy.”

“What!”

“We’ve just had a birth.”

“No … no … no!”

“It’s all right,” Hanna said. “Giving birth is a very routine matter with them. Mother and son are resting well.”

He closed his eyes and gulped.

Nothing more happened for an hour-suspiciously, Foster thought. The little people got used to the sound of the engines of the “eagle” and began to doze off one by one, tired from their ordeal. Hanna brought a bowl of hot broth to Foster and they began to laugh over the events of the day. Foster asked Hanna a lot of questions about the Yemenites and the war.

“Where are we now?”

Foster, pilot, co-pilot, navigator, and radio operator, looked up at the map. “We’ll be turning the corner pretty soon and go up the Gulf of Akaba. On the way down I was able to see the battle lines in the desert.”

“I hope the war will be over soon.”

“Yeah, war’s rough. Say, how in hell did you ever get roped into a job like this? Whatever they pay you, it’s worth double.”

Hanna smiled. “I don’t get paid for this.”

“Don’t get paid?”

“No. I was sent here. I may go out with these people to build a settlement or I may continue this run.”

“I don’t dig you at all.” 568

“It is rather hard to explain. Sometimes outside people don’t understand how we feel. Money means nothing to us. Getting these people into Israel means everything. Sometime I’ll explain it better.”

Foster shrugged. A lot of strange things were happening. Well, it didn’t matter, he thought. It was worth the ride, but once on a run like this was enough.

After a while he pointed ahead. “That’s Israel,” he said.

Hanna ran to the microphone.

“What the hell you doing!”

“Please let me tell them, Tex. They’ve been waiting for this moment for … thousands of years.”

“They’re liable to tear the plane apart!”