Leon Uris (5 page)

The British game was to try to lure the Hashemites into a rebellion against the Turks, and thus Arab nationalism was born. Sharif Husain entered into a correspondence with the British high commissioner in Egypt to determine the price for an Arab rebellion.

The British led Sharif Husain to believe he would be made king of a Greater Arab Nation in exchange for his cooperation. The letters were a sham. The British and their French allies secretly had other ideas for the future of Arab lands.

On May 9, 1916, the British and French entered into a clandestine treaty on how they intended to carve up the region. The treaty was the Sykes-Picot, named for the negotiators. Always described as infamous, the treaty ignored both Jewish aspirations and Sharif Husain’s personal ambitions. And so Palestine became the ‘twice promised land.’

To pay the passage for their aspirations and the promise of the Balfour Declaration, the Jews of Palestine supplied a Jewish Legion to the British Army. One of these units, the Zion Mule Corps, engaged in fierce combat at Gallipoli.

On the Arab side, Sharif Husain and his sons promoted some effective guerrilla sabotage on the Trans-Jordan rail line, the Hejaz Railroad, a vital Turkish route. This Arab ‘revolt’ of a few thousand men was led and later glorified by the British officer T. E. Lawrence.

Sharif Husain modestly declared himself King of the Arabs, a title reduced by the British to King of the Hejaz. Later, Husain’s son Faisal entered Damascus and had himself proclaimed King of Syria, a title that he believed would automatically include the Palestine district.

By Christmas of 1917 British forces under General Allenby had conquered Jerusalem, and both Arab and Jew went to the allies to collect their IOUs.

Faisal wanted a large Jewish settlement in Palestine, so long as he ruled it, just as the Turks had wanted it for the Jewish infusion of money and progress. But the French grabbed off Syria and booted Faisal out. No longer King of Syria, Faisal reversed himself and condemned the Jewish settlement of Palestine.

In the end, the British were to commit a series of perfidious acts that not only denied Jewish and Arab claims but stole the Palestine district away from their French allies.

The British arranged for themselves to rule Palestine through a mandate of the League of Nations. After a series of international conferences and treaties the British Mandate was bound by law to honor the Balfour Declaration and a Jewish homeland. However, the war was done and Palestine’s location as a flank on the Suez Canal was more important to them than honoring the promise to the Jews. When in the early 1920s oil was discovered on the Persian Gulf and British interests increased, they drifted further away from their commitment.

The eastern side of the Jordan River held a vast area of this Palestine Mandate that was inhabited mostly by Bedouin. The British, to protect their interests, created a puppet state called Trans-Jordan. This area consisted of 75 percent of the land mass of the Palestine Mandate. Before 1921 there was no such thing as a Jordanian people or nation. They were all Palestinians. The Jordanians were an invention of the British Colonial Office.

In order to temper the Arab thirst for nationalism, the British threw them a couple of bones. Faisal, the deposed King of Syria, was made a puppet King of Iraq, ruling under British direction.

As for their new colony of Trans-Jordan, the British reached down into the Hejaz once again and plucked up Abdullah, another of the sharif’s sons, and declared him Emir of Trans-Jordan. As Hashemites from the Arabian Peninsula, both Abdullah and Faisal were strangers in the lands they now ruled under British direction.

As for the Sharif of Mecca, who had envisioned himself ruler of a nation that stretched from the Red Sea to the Persian Gulf, and included Iraq, Syria, Palestine, the Sinai, Lebanon, and the Arabian Peninsula ... he ended up with nothing and fled into exile when the conquering Saudi family ran him out of the Hejaz.

The British, who had lied to Arab, Jew, and their own French allies and who had created a phony kingdom in Trans-Jordan, now moved into the Palestine Mandate. Palestine had suffered terribly during the First World War. Twenty thousand in Jerusalem alone had died of hunger and disease. At first the freedom from Turkish corruption came like a breath of pure air under British administration. That was not to last.

The future of the mandate was spelled out early. A new force arose, the Heusseini Clan, an old and powerful Palestine family. They were led by Haj Amin al Heusseini, a Moslem fanatic. Riots broke out in the early 1920s against further Jewish immigration. So vile was the bigotry behind the riots and so obvious was Haj Amin’s attempt to take over Palestine that the British forced him to flee and sentenced him to fifteen years
in absentia
.

For Gideon Asch, a decorated British officer, a new era had come. The problems of protection had increased manyfold in the wake of the Arab riots. The Shomer were no longer of sufficient strength to control the situation. In Jerusalem a Jewish Agency governed its own population in Palestine and quietly went about the business of creating a defense force. Based on the principle that every settlement should be able to defend itself—the Haganah, a semilegal, semiunderground army emerged in the early 1920s.

Gideon was called up to Jerusalem and asked to take over the building of the Haganah force in the Valley of Ayalon. For three decades he had been a wanderer on horseback. Now was the time to settle. He agreed to the assignment and chose to join a new kibbutz as a permanent member. The kibbutz was to be called Shemesh, which meant ‘sun,’ for this was the place where Joshua had beseeched the Lord to make the sun stand still. Shemesh also means ‘Samson,’ the name of the ancient Jewish judge. Shemesh was to be located ten miles up the road from Ramle opposite an Arab village named Tabah.

Gideon Asch returned from his visit to Tabah to the spot where his three dozen people rushed to lay down a square perimeter of barbed wire before nightfall. They questioned him excitedly about his visit to the Arab village. He related his stormy meeting with the muktar named Ibrahim.

They’ll attack tonight,’ he said. ‘We’ve not time to get reinforcements. Dig in with all you have.’

W
HEN
G
IDEON
A
SCH MADE
his departure from Tabah, the village flamed to life with a sense of exhilaration. This was an unexpected great moment. It was the core of being for an Arab man to prove his courage. A gift from Allah! Rifles of a dozen vintages and models came from hiding places. There were Boer War rifles and Turkish and German rifles from the world war. There were British Enfields and American Springfields. There were bandoliers of ammunition hidden in crates deep in the fields and orchards. Daggers were pulled from the cottage walls and polished until they glinted.

Throughout the day men from the outlying villages drifted into Tabah and made for the café, where the young muktar, Ibrahim, embraced them. Each held up his weapon with a quivering fist, declared his loyalty, and assured the muktar of his pending valor.

‘We shall shave the Jews with a hatchet.’

‘Their mothers’ milk is camel’s piss.’

‘No Jewish dunghills in this valley!’

‘Death to the Jews!’

A cheer arose as Salim, the sheik of one of the smaller clans, made his way to the café. Salim had been in the Turkish Army during the Great War. The villages around the Ayalon Valley had been fueled with stories of his fighting prowess for six years. No accounts of his many battles were more graphic than that of a hand-to-hand fight during which he had hacked his way through a wall of British flesh to get to a machine gun nest and grenade it to oblivion. What was generally unknown was that Salim had never risen above the rank of corporal, had never been anything more than an orderly to a Turkish colonel, and had never gotten within fifty miles of a battlefront. A knife scar from a brawl over a belly dancer had been converted into a wound caused by a bullet that had grazed his flesh and was backed up by a medal for valor he had traded for at the Istanbul bazaar.

Everyone felt a sense of security as Salim was invited by Ibrahim to join him at a council of war with the other muktars and sheiks.

Outside the café at the water well children played ‘war’ with sticks as the gathering swelled and the frenzy grew. Bones would be crushed this night. There would be a swamp filled with dead Jews. The loot would be staggering. Save one of the Jewish women for men’s sport. It would be an eternity before another Jew tried to build a settlement in this valley.

Inside the café everyone argued strategy at the same time. Come from behind them through the swamp. No, the swamp was too mucky. Surround them on three sides. No, we’ll start shooting each other. Fists banged on tables and arguments flared and sheiks reached for their knives.

All plans were given to Salim, who merely tried to look thoughtful. At last Ibrahim heaved a deep sigh and explained a simple strategy.

At dark, roadblocks would be set up to stop British reinforcements, which could not arrive until dawn. The roadblocks would also cut off any Jewish retreat. Over a hundred men would attack in a frontal assault in three waves. Ibrahim would lead the first wave. Salim would lead the second. Fighting broke out as to who would lead the third wave. Ibrahim selected a sheik by simply pointing his forefinger.

When they reached the barbed wire, they would cross it by throwing goatskins over it. The Jews would be quickly annihilated and the fighters would melt back to Tabah and hide their weapons. Just before the light of dawn, the old men and the women and children would come in, strip the bodies, and carry off the Jews’ weapons and their equipment. Ibrahim himself would divide the spoils later.

It was declared a magnificent plan. Hands were clasped and the war council went outside the café to organize their men. Farouk called them all to the mosque and after prayer he declared it a jihad, a holy war, to which the assemblage intoned in unison, ‘Death to the Jews.’

Victory was a certainty to everyone ... except Ibrahim. The dozen ex-Shomer, who were now called Haganah men, disturbed him. In all the Arab attacks on all the Jewish settlements in the Galilee, few had succeeded in driving them out. His men, although five times the number of the Jews, had never made a frontal assault in their lives. Most of all he was wary of the Jews’ leader, the Gideon person. The man had defiantly drunk from the village well before them all. He might know the soldiering business too well. The Shomer had a reputation as fighters and most of them had served in the British Army in World War I. Yet a muktar had to do what a muktar had to do.

At eventide, when the air became still and stuffy, Ibrahim and his council went up to the knoll to see what might be seen. They were able to observe a part of the barbed wire enclosure. The Jews had lit smudge pots to drive off the mosquitoes and they were so exhausted they fell asleep on their flatbed trucks. It was a repugnant sight to watch the men and women unashamedly sleeping next to each other.

As darkness crept up, the air on the knoll became scented with hashish smoke from the village square below, and the fighters became braver by the moment. When the daylight was gone, they slipped out four or six at a time, the epitome of stealth.

Ibrahim took his position at the head of the first wave some three or four hundred yards from the barbed wire. Dimly heard shots from the highway signaled that the roadblocks were in place. The second wave positioned itself behind boulders on high ground to give covering fire, in case the Jews shot first.

Ibrahim slipped out in a low crouch, followed by his men. Things started going wrong immediately. The scavenger group in the rear was making too much noise. The older men were relating their moments of fighting greatness; the women and children chattered loudly in anticipation of the loot. The second wave, which was supposed to cover the advance of the first wave, opened fire too soon, destroying the element of surprise. Moreover, they were firing short, right into the backs of Ibrahim and his people. Farouk, who had declared a holy war only hours earlier and who was just behind his brother, threw his rifle down and bolted, and three men followed him.

Then came an awesome and puzzling quiet.

‘Do you suppose they are all killed?’ someone whispered to Ibrahim.

‘Shut up, you son of a donkey!’ Ibrahim snapped.

‘Why don’t they shoot?’

As another of his men began to crawl backward, Ibrahim stood up and raised his rifle. ‘Allah akbar!’ he screamed over and over, ‘God is great!’

‘Allah akbar!’ resounded in the valley.

Everyone poured out behind Ibrahim, storming in confusion toward the barbed wire. They knelt, fired, and ran, knelt, fired, and ran. Their battle cry crescendoed.

Still no return fire from the Jews!

‘To the wire!’ Ibrahim screamed.

When they were within fifty feet, an awesome thing happened. The sound of deafening sirens erupted from the Jewish side, drowning out all other noise. Then the Jews filled the sky with flares, turning night into day, as the Lord had once made the sun stand still for Joshua. Caught in the sudden light and noise, the Arabs froze like deer hit by a spotlight.

Then the Jews poured out a disciplined volley and, although they fired it into the air, several of the villagers went down in fright. A second volley into the air found the second and third wave running into the first wave, which was in headlong retreat.

The battle was done.

The scavengers waiting on the fringe saw their sons, fathers, and husbands tripping, gagging, crawling, running over the highway back into Tabah.

‘What happened?’

‘They slipped in over three hundred Haganah men after dark!’

‘We were hit with machine gun fire!’

‘There were hundreds of British soldiers hiding among them!’

‘They used poison gas!’

‘We were badly outnumbered!’

Dawn found Ibrahim sitting alone on the top of the knoll, looking down on the Jewish camp. His humiliation had been absolute. At first those men who had fallen were assumed to have been wounded, but they had merely thrown their rifles away and fled. When at last he came down into the village, those who had not gone to their homes gathered at the café sheepishly. Strangely, as Ibrahim walked to his own home they broke into cheers.