Leon Uris (13 page)

‘Sons of dogs!’ Haj Amin cried.

‘We have a ship at anchor off Jaffa,’ Bockmann said. ‘You must remain here until the Arab Sabbath, when there will be thousands of worshipers in Al Aksa. It is our best chance to get you out of here.’

‘I don’t like this dungeon.’

‘You can’t move. Patrols are all over the Old City. All the gates are being closely watched.’

Bockmann told the Mufti to shave off his beard and to wear the clothing he had brought, the white dress that Moslem women wore to prayer on Friday morning.

On the Sabbath the Haram esh Sharif was jammed with twenty thousand worshipers. Prayers broke up at midday and the human flood poured into the narrow lanes of the Old City, making detection extremely difficult. Haj Amin al Heusseini, buried in a mass of women pouring out of the Damascus Gate, easily escaped the scrutiny of the British.

He was then hidden in a crate among crates loaded with tomatoes destined for the Port of Jaffa; from there, onto a German tramp steamer and up the coast to Beirut, and then inland to Damascus. From Damascus, Haj Amin regrouped his leaders and continued to run the revolt in Palestine.

Orde Wingate’s Special Night Squads firmly established a new era and a new principle. It could not be said that they alone defeated the Arab revolt, but they certainly took the starch out of rebel zeal. The time of the uncontested Arab night raid was over, forever. The Special Night Squads extended their operation, crossing the border into Lebanon, taking that sanctuary away from the rebels. Arab attacks began to dry up.

Kaukji’s Irregulars had been woefully ineffective. Now faced with a stiff challenge, their stomach for action, gold, and glory gave way to homesickness. They deserted in droves, fleeing Palestine for their own countries.

Unable to halt Jewish immigration or dislodge Jewish settlements, the Mufti turned his final energies to destroying his Arab opposition. As the revolt ended its second year, Haj Amin’s gangs went on a murder binge and when it was done, eight thousand Palestinian Arabs had killed one another.

With the Mufti gone and Kaukji’s Warriors of God in full flight, those anti-Mufti Arabs who had survived began to take heart and spoke out against the revolt, and it started to fizzle.

In another year the Mufti’s revolt began to collapse, but it had succeeded in putting the mandate in disarray. From the very beginning the British had locked themselves into an impossible position. Palestine was the twice-promised land—once to the Jews as a homeland through the Balfour Declaration and once to the Arabs as part of the Greater Arab Nation.

Between the years of riots and revolts, British commissions of inquiry investigated. Each would issue a White Paper, chipping away at Jewish immigration and land purchases. Partition plans surfaced. Under these plans the Jews were to get a small strip of land from Tel Aviv to Haifa. A permanent mandate would be given to Jerusalem as an international city. The Jews were inclined to agree to partition, but the Arabs flatly said no to everything. Most of those Arabs wishing to make an accommodation with the Jews had been murdered by the Mufti’s people.

At the zenith of the Arab revolt, a high British commission concluded that Britain’s ability to rule the mandate had been exhausted.

War was on the horizon in Europe and any British pretense of remaining evenhanded in Palestine was exposed. In issuing the commission’s White Paper, the British completely renounced their obligation to the Jewish Homeland. The British policy was now to win favor in the Arab world at any cost in order to protect British interests in the region.

On the eve of the Second World War, millions of Jews were desperately trapped in Europe. The White Paper cut off their final avenues of escape by calling for a phasing out of all Jewish immigration to Palestine and an end to all land sales. Although the Mufti’s revolt had been crushed, the British White Paper granted him a victory
in absentia
.

When war was declared against Germany, almost the entire Arab world spiritually allied with the Nazis. The betrayed Jews of Palestine declared, ‘We shall fight the war as if there were no White Paper and we shall fight the White Paper as if there were no war.’ Within days, a hundred and thirty thousand men and women of Jewish Palestine volunteered for military service with the British.

Haj Ibrahim was markedly glum. Gideon had left Shemesh Kibbutz on many occasions, to go to the desert or on training missions and surely to smuggle arms and illegal immigrants. Sometimes he would be gone for months. Each time Gideon left, Haj Ibrahim felt very uneasy. Of course, he never said so.

Tabah had been brutalized by the Arab revolt. Two dozen of his people had been killed or disappeared. Haj Ibrahim knew, within himself, that without the Haganah and the Special Night Squads the result for him might have been a disaster. He could never bring himself to think in terms of gratitude. On the contrary. Arab fighting Arabs was an established way of life, hundreds and hundreds of years old. To be saved by the Jews and the British was a new humiliation.

‘You are too old to go to war,’ Haj Ibrahim said to Gideon as he poured them coffee.

‘Not this war,’ Gideon answered.

‘If you have a hundred friends, throw out ninety-nine and be suspicious of the other,’ Ibrahim said. ‘Sometimes I know you are my only real friend. Relatives and members of the tribe are different. They cannot be real friends because they are rivals. Sons can often be your enemy. But the religion does not permit us to make friends with strangers. So, who is there? I am lonely. I cannot meet a man and have different thoughts without his being my enemy. At least we can ... we can speak.

Gideon changed the subject, for Ibrahim was becoming maudlin. ‘Simcha is the new secretary of the kibbutz. You’ll be dealing with him.’

‘He’s all right. He’s all right. We will get along. Surely the British are going to make a general out of you.’

‘No, nothing like that.’

‘A colonel?’

‘Just an ordinary adviser on Arab affairs.’

‘You’ll be very good at that,’ Ibrahim said. ‘I know why you must go and fight the Germans,’ he continued. ‘But to me, it doesn’t matter who wins or who loses. I have no quarrel with the Germans. I am not angry with them. I don’t know if I have ever really spoken to one, except perhaps a pilgrim.’ He sighed and grunted.

‘Now the Germans make us the same kind of promises the British made to win our support in the first war. I hear the shortwave broadcasts from Berlin. They say that the Nazis and Arabs are brothers. But everyone lies to us when a war comes. They will use our help, then leave us to rot, as the British did.’

‘If the Germans reach Palestine, at least you won’t have to worry about the Jews anymore,’ Gideon said.

‘I am not for the Germans just because of how they are treating the Jews,’ Haj Ibrahim said, ‘but I am not for the Jews. There are no Arab leaders left in Palestine and I don’t trust the ones over the border.’

‘That covers just about everyone.’

‘Why is it that the only men we follow are the ones who hold a knife to our throats?’ Ibrahim cried suddenly. ‘We learn we must submit. That is what the Koran tells us. Submit! Submit! But the men we submit to never carry out the Prophet’s will, only their own. When you return, what of us, Gideon? We have not really had our war with each other yet. It must happen. You will keep bringing Jews into Palestine and we will protest.’

‘You are very upset!’

‘These things are always in my head! I don’t want the Syrians to come here! I don’t want the Egyptians! I am now being left alone with these thoughts. The Jews are clever. You are sending thousands of your boys into the British Army to be trained as soldiers.’

‘I don’t think they’ll rush us into combat units unless they become desperate.’

‘But you will be prepared when the war comes between us. You have built a government within a government, and us? We will get the blessings of another Grand Mufti or another Kaukji or another king like that degenerate in Egypt. Why does Allah send us these men? I am sorry, Gideon. My thoughts go one way, then the other way. Whatever ... whatever, I don’t want anything to happen to you.’

Gideon slapped the arms of the oversized chair, then pulled himself out. ‘Someone asked me once, do you have friends among the Arabs. I told them that I didn’t really know. I believe I have a friend. It’s a start, isn’t it? You’ve trusted me, haven’t you?’

‘You are the only one I trust from either your people or mine.’

‘Perhaps if we Jews weren’t overburdened all our lives with the fear of perishing ... It dominates us! Always afraid of perishing. I’m fifty-three, Ibrahim. I’ve carried a gun since I was fourteen. Is it fair to know every minute of your life that forces out there want you dead and won’t end it until you’re dead ... and no one hears your cry. ... So I go to war because the Germans want us dead even more than you do.’

‘Come,’ Haj Ibrahim said. ‘We’ll walk down to the highway.’

T
HE FOCAL POINT OF
village social life for the men was the radio in Tabah’s café. With the world marching steadily and inevitably toward a second global conflagration, the radio took on an even greater imperative.

For Arabs these days it was pleasurable to enjoy a measure of vengeance. The governments of France and Britain, their arrogant overlords, had been struck politically timid and fearful. An emboldened Hitler seized Austria and then turned democratic Spain into a testing ground for his new arsenal of frightening weaponry while the democracies turned blind eyes and deaf ears.

In a conference at Munich the Arabs saw a pair of quivering and morally bankrupt democracies hand over the life of yet another free nation, Czechoslovakia. A few months after the sellout in Munich, Germany sealed her intentions by forming an alliance with Fascist Italy and together they poised to devour Western civilization. All of it brought joy after joy to Tabah.

‘Have you heard, Haj Ibrahim! It is war!’

Haj Ibrahim could detect the first shifts of attitude among his people, who were awed as the German panzers mangled Poland in a matter of a few weeks.

It was Haj Ibrahim’s position to give wise counsel and remain steady and not get caught up in the volatility of the villagers. He was the sure hand in a line of sure-handed men who had controlled the destinies of their village. Conquerors came and went and one got along with them. It was the endless struggle against nature that was more important, for that always remained.

Yet even Haj Ibrahim could not help but be sucked into the fever as Germany rolled up one incredible victory after another in the first half of 1940. A euphoria swept over Arab Palestine. Haj Ibrahim sent his brother, Farouk, all the way to Jerusalem to purchase maps of Europe and the Middle East and the café became a war room. Each new pin and line on the maps brought a repetition of discussion about German invincibility and the need for the Arab world to ally with them.

Gideon Asch went to war. The British traded on his unique background with the Arabs and his knowledge of the Mufti and put him on the mission of trailing Haj Amin al Heusseini. The Mufti, having fled Damascus early in the war to the safer grounds of Baghdad, was able to create new mischief as strong pro-German factions in the Iraqi military plotted to gain control of the government, weakly run by a young regent.

Gideon Asch was white-haired and white-bearded and by dress and mastery of the language was able to pass quite easily as an Arab. Near the Mustansiriya College, perhaps the oldest university in the world, he established an excellent espionage ring using Iraqi Jews as its heart. He purchased a number of Iraqis in key government and military positions.

The moment that mainland France fell, the war was suddenly and terrifyingly dumped on Palestine’s doorstep. Most French possessions were seized by the new Vichy government, which collaborated with the Nazis. In an instant Syria and Lebanon were in pro-German hands and the issue in Iraq hung in the balance.

In North Africa, a second menace loomed against Palestine. The great Western Desert straddled the borders of Egypt and Libya, where the Italians had amassed a vast army—over three hundred thousand men—with the ultimate mission of crossing the desert and conquering Egypt, the Suez Canal, and Palestine.

Although the British were outnumbered by ten to one, they audaciously went into an offensive that chewed up the Italians and bagged tens of thousands of prisoners and took them deep into Libya.

Once again Hitler had to rush to his partner’s rescue. Early in 1941 a young German general named Erwin Rommel landed in Tripoli, Libya, and with a highly mechanized force known as the Afrika Korps won back the territory the Italians had lost. Rommel stopped at the Egyptian border to regroup because of an overextended supply line.

But Palestine was in a nutcracker from the east and west.

Although the British had been badly bashed about, they reached deep and scraped together a force of Australian, Indian, and Free French brigades and launched an invasion of Syria and Lebanon from Palestine. This was led by units of Jewish scouts, most of whom had served in Orde Wingate’s Special Night Squads and all of whom had been under Gideon Asch’s command at one time or another. This expedition flowed on a stream of intelligence supplied by Gideon Asch’s unit in Baghdad and other Jewish espionage units that had been planted earlier.

At the same moment in Iraq, a pro-German faction seized control of the government. A hastily assembled British force stormed ashore at Iraq’s only seaport, Basra, on the Persian Gulf—the port of Sinbad, his seven voyages, and
A Thousand and One Nights.
Basra was several hundred miles from Baghdad, so a second force from Palestine rushed overland, again guided by Gideon Asch’s intelligence.

As the British reached sight of Baghdad the pro-Nazi Iraqis turned maniacal and at the last moment tore into the Jewish ghetto of the city. Four hundred Jewish men, women, and children were slaughtered. Gideon Asch was betrayed by a turncoat saving his own neck and was dragged off to be tortured. When the British broke into the city a frenzied Iraqi colonel chopped off Gideon’s left hand. His war was done.