Leon Uris (32 page)

Abdul Kadar Heusseini came under immediate pressure to retake the Kastel, which had been turned over to a unit of ninety older Haganah reservists from Jerusalem. Within a few days after losing the Kastel, Abdul Kadar assembled a force of Jihad men, deployed them intelligently, and moved up the hill cautiously and under covering fire. He established positions in secure places and pinned down the outnumbered Jewish defenders.

A desperate call went out that their ammunition was perilously low. They could not hold off an Arab attack. At that time, a tramp steamer had gotten through the British blockade. Its cargo of arms was quickly unloaded and a truck made it as far up the Bab el Wad as possible. When it was stopped by an Arab ambush, a dozen Palmach removed fifty thousand rounds and took a circuitous route into the hills. They slipped through Abdul Kadar’s lines when the defenders were virtually down to their last bullet.

Abdul Kadar ordered an attack, with himself at the head of his troops. They were hit with a sudden barrage and the field was strewn with their dead. The Irregulars withdrew and the Haganah sent out a patrol to examine the field. Among the Arab dead, they discovered the body of Abdul Kadar Heusseini.

Every Arab village from Hebron to Nablus rushed men to the Kastel by taxi, bus, car, and truck. Half the fellahin of Tabah—save Haj Ibrahim—were in the mass that surged up the hill in a human tidal wave.

The Jewish commander kicked his weary men awake, threw boxes of ammunition to them, fired his gun, cursed them, shouted orders. They simply could not shoot fast enough to stop the Arab surge and they retreated.

The emotion that had triggered the Arab rampage now erupted into pure grief upon locating the body of their fallen leader. Firing into the air, weeping madly, and shouting oaths, they carried the martyr down and took him to Jerusalem. In one of the most bizarre incidents of the war, the Arabs left only a handful of men to defend the Kastel, for they had really come for the purpose of finding Abdul Kadar. The Haganah quickly returned and this time they stayed.

The funeral of Abdul Kadar, whose open pine coffin was passed over the heads of tens of thousands of hysterical Arabs, was an ultimate display of Moslem rage and grief. They swarmed through the Damascus Gate into the Old City, jamming every inch of the thin alleyways, and accorded him the ultimate honor of burying him on the Haram esh Sharif near the Dome of the Rock.

When their burst of anguish and anger had simmered, the villagers of Tabah became shatteringly sobered. They had swept themselves into battle and waived their longstanding peaceful existence. Their sudden impulse to battle was now smothered by a dark fear.

The Kastel was firmly in Jewish hands and Tabah, once neutral, was now an enemy village. They were no longer immune. What was taking place all over Palestine was now happening to them. They dreaded the thought of the moment when the British would withdraw from Latrun. They would be naked, with a powerful Jewish settlement a stone’s throw away.

Every day the talk was of Arab villages, towns, even cities being abandoned. The families of Tabah began to break and run.

Haj Ibrahim could no longer merely ponder. People were leaving; he was under pressure from the Irregulars to establish observation and sniping posts. No money had arrived from Fawzi Kabir. The moment when he would receive orders to abandon Tabah was close at hand. The weight of it crushed him. Was there a chance—any chance—that they could ride it out without being destroyed by one side or the other?

He donned his finery, walked down the hill, crossed the highway, and stood before the guard post of Shemesh Kibbutz and asked to see Gideon Asch.

O
NE COULD TELL
G
IDEON
Asch’s cottage apart from the others. As one of the few remaining founders of the kibbutz, he was accorded the distinction of having his own hot water storage tank on the roof. The cottage was a Spartan two-room affair—a small bedroom and a larger multipurpose living, dining, and office room. His hours away from the kibbutz did not allow him to eat often at the communal dining room, so the members had voted him a small kitchen. A final note of his importance was a pair of private telephones on his desk.

Gideon responded to a knock on the door by lifting his eyes from the eternal stack of papers.

‘Come in.’

A guard held the door open as Haj Ibrahim entered. He asked Ibrahim to hold his arms apart and started to frisk him.

‘That won’t be necessary,’ Gideon said.

The two men had not seen each other for almost three years and an awkwardness prevailed. Gideon arose and extended his hand. As Ibrahim took it, they went into a bear hug and slapped one another on the shoulder. Gideon waved him to a seat opposite his own at the desk.

‘Your sons are faring well?’

Ibrahim nodded. They became quiet. Aside from the austerity of the place, Ibrahim was taken by the fact that every available space held books, hundreds of them, crammed into every corner.

‘I have often wondered how you lived,’ Ibrahim said.

There are many books here. I even see books in Arabic. How many languages do you read?’

Gideon shrugged. ‘Five ... six ... seven.’

‘That is very impressive. Ishmael reads to me from the Palestine
Post
.’

Gideon smelled the tension but remained patient as the Arab tried to pick up the elusive threads. He opened the bottom drawer of his desk and took out a bottle of Scotch whiskey and shoved a glass over the desk.

‘Compliments of our British protectors.’

Ibrahim held up his hand in protest. ‘You know that stuff will destroy me.’

‘Some wine?’

The muktar declined. Gideon opened another drawer, poked around and found a stick of hashish, and tossed it toward Ibrahim. ‘You smoke. I’ll drink,’ Gideon said.

‘The guards?’

‘They don’t know hashish from horseshit.’

Two belts and two puffs later, the tension had melted. Ibrahim groaned and dropped his head into his hands. ‘This whole thing is like trying to pave the sea.’

‘What can I say? We don’t want this war, Ibrahim.’

‘I wish I were a Bedouin. They know every trick of survival.’ His mind floated after another draw on the pipe. ‘I saw Rosh Pinna. I was passing through.’

‘On your way to Damascus, where you met with Fawzi Kabir, Kaukji, and Abdul Kadar, who is, for better or worse, no longer with us. I assume they didn’t summon you to wish you well with your olive crop.’

‘It is so humiliating seeing my people run like this. Perhaps humiliation is not so important to the Jews. After all, you have been humiliated in many places in many times. To us this humiliation is crushing.’

‘What is it, Ibrahim?’

‘I am under terrible pressure to evacuate Tabah.’

‘I know.’

‘If I take my people out, even for a short time, will I be able to bring them back?’

‘If we abandoned Shemesh Kibbutz, would the Arabs allow us to return?’ Gideon countered.

‘No, of course not. Gideon, what can you tell me?’

‘We have no policy to run the Arabs out of Palestine. No responsible man among us has any illusion that we can create a state without peace with our neighbors. God knows, we do not want to condemn ourselves and our children to generations of bloodshed. We have tried to reach every Arab leader. They are all committed to war.’

‘Can you tell me ... have you made deals with any Arab villages? Will any of them stay?’

‘We have made deals. Even with villages in the Jerusalem corridor.’

‘What kind of deal?’

‘Don’t go to war against us and we won’t go to war against you. Simple enough. One of these days, you’ll learn that the Jews of Palestine have a better future planned for you than your blessed Arab brothers over the border.’

‘Suppose I ask for the same deal for Tabah?’

Gideon arose and grunted. ‘You’ve become an enemy village. Some three dozen of your people are in the Jihad Militia. More than fifty were in the attack on the Kastel. Irregulars come to and go from Tabah at will. In other words, you are an active participant in the attempt to starve out a hundred thousand people in Jerusalem. Ibrahim, I don’t want to recommend an attack on Tabah, but once a war starts, forces beyond anyone’s control take over.’

‘I am crushed,’ Ibrahim said. ‘It is the Arabs who are forcing me out.’

‘I know.’

‘The village is on the brink of panic. If one loud shot is fired into the air, everyone else will take flight.’

Gideon studied the distraught man, now being helplessly swept up in that sea’s tidal wave of events. Hatred of the Jews had been building in Tabah since the world war. Many would be opposed to neutrality, others too frightened to implement it. But God help them all if they ran.

Ibrahim moved his hands pathetically and reeled to his feet. Gideon scribbled some numbers on a piece of paper and handed it to Ibrahim. These phone numbers will reach me. If you get into personal trouble, I will try to help.’

‘If only you and I could sit down and talk this out,’ Ibrahim said in a faraway monotone. ‘We could work things out between us. We could make peace.’

‘We’ll always be ready when you are.’

One of the phones rang. Gideon listened to an emotional voice babbling in Hebrew. He said he would come right away and set the receiver down. He gave Ibrahim a terrible look.

‘The Irgun hit an Arab village near Jerusalem. Deir Yassin.’

‘What happened?’

‘There was a massacre.’

Gideon Asch arrived at Deir Yassin within the hour. He was under instructions to make an immediate assessment of the situation. The village had been cordoned off and Colonel Brompton was on hand. He trusted the Englishman’s briefing, for it matched what he already knew, and he dispatched an aide, a young Palmach officer, back to Jerusalem with an initial report.

Gideon then went through the grisly business of a personal inspection of bodies, speaking with the wounded, and reconstructing the events of the nightmare.

The smell of burning flesh and putrid smoke of battle was overpowering, as was the soft steady drone of numbed weeping, punctuated by outbursts of rage and hysteria. He made a feeble offer for use of Jewish medical facilities, but the wounded were too terrified. The shrill of sirens racing back and forth overcame him. It was all he could do to keep from breaking down.

It seemed that something of this sort was bound to happen. After the Haganah opened the road long enough for three convoys to get through, the Arabs closed it again. Among the string of Arab villages used as staging points against Jewish traffic, the village of Deir Yassin, on the edge of West Jerusalem, had been one of the most hostile. Looking for a victory of their own to match Haganah successes, the Irgun had assembled a hundred men and targeted the village for capture.

But the Irgun’s intelligence had been faulty. They felt they could stampede the population out, as had been the case at the Kastel. They did not know that a large contingent of Jihad Militia was in Deir Yassin at the time. When they attacked, resistance was fierce. The soft target became hard as fighting intensified. The Irgun was at that time an urban guerrilla force neither trained for nor skilled in field combat. Their advance was slow and each captured house was blown up.

As the Arab militia fell back, they became entangled with the ordinary villagers. Panic broke out as the villagers tried to separate themselves and flee, but the militia used them as cover. Civilians were caught in a vicious cross fire and broke in all directions in the mayhem. At this point, the Irgun’s discipline collapsed in confusion, then decayed into frenzy. The Irgun pressed in, shooting at anything and everything that moved.

Gideon finished his survey, then fled into an empty house and retched. Colonel Brompton came into the room and closed the door behind him as Gideon pulled himself together.

The final count seems to be in excess of two hundred and fifty killed,’ Brompton said. ‘Half of them are women and children.’

Gideon’s face was wet with sweat. He jerked out his shirttail and wiped it, then dropped his face into his hands. ‘We are denouncing this affair,’ he said. ‘The Haganah had nothing to do with it.’

‘Ah yes, but you are still responsible, are you not?’

Gideon clenched his jaw and nodded. He knew the Jews were responsible. He held up his handless arm. ‘The Baghdad ghetto. Ever hear of it? All my life I have lived with massacres. Only this one is different. The Jews committed it. Does that clean the slate of a hundred Arab massacres?’

‘Is that all you’re worried about—keeping score?’

‘Of course not. A defensive reflex. I’ve lived among the Arabs. I’ve loved them. Even though I’ve lost most of that love, I’ve continued to believe we could create something side by side ... progress ... an irresistible quality of life ... decency ... respect for one another. We would set an example and when the others saw it ... they would come and speak peace to us. I am a Jew, Colonel, and I am tormented that we have been driven to do such things to survive. I can forgive the Arabs for murdering our children. I cannot forgive them for forcing us to murder theirs.’

‘So the purity of the Zionist dream becomes tainted with the ugliness of reality,’ Brompton said. ‘Digging ditches, rolling back swamps, and singing around the campfire isn’t quite the same as declaring one’s independence. As long as you stayed in your synagogues and prayed and took your persecutions in silence, you could demand of yourselves an ethereal set of standards. You demand your own destiny, for better or worse, and that requires getting messy hands.’

‘All right, we’ve done a ghastly deed. But the Arabs will blow this thing all out of proportion.’

‘And they will continue to do so for a hundred years,’ Brompton said. ‘The first Jewish massacre of Moslems. You’ve presented them with a splendid rallying point and an eternal footnote in history.’

‘God knows, we did not want anything like this to happen.’

‘Fair fight and all that? If I’m not mistaken, you preached the gospel that once battle starts events overcome one. You could have prevented this, Asch.’