Stateless (55 page)

Tens of thousands of men, women and children were slaughtered in a single day, an orgy of killing, rape and theft. Nobody was spared the most hideous of deaths; nor was anybody saved to become a slave. Even many Christians of Jerusalem, fighting alongside their Muslim and Jewish brothers and sisters to defend the city, were hacked to pieces.

The destruction was total and the impact of the pain on the city would course through its veins for centuries to come.

But by the time the end had come for Jerusalem, Simeon was well away from the city and leaving the Crusaders' madness far
behind him. He had sat with his friend Nimrod until the end. The man who had spared his life died in his arms.

Yet before his final breath slipped away, the doctor had taken a small metal seal from around his neck and pressed it into the palm of the merchant.

‘Take this. It was born in this tunnel. But don't let it die in this tunnel. Take it with you.'

And with that Simeon had left the secret tunnel beneath the walls of the ancient holy city, climbing back down the steep, slippery path to emerge into the sunlight.

North Jerusalem

Shabbat morning, 15 May 1948

I
mmanuel Berin looked up from the table, and tried to take in the scene so that he could tell his grandchildren in years to come where he had been when the United Nations decided on the fate of Israel and its Jews. That is, if he married again when this madness was over, and if his wife was young enough to bear him a second family.

But no matter who was gathered in the room around the radio set listening to Kol Yisrael re-broadcast the vote being taken at that moment two thousand miles north in the Palais de Chaillot in Paris by the General Assembly, two faces were missing, faces that he'd never see again.

He was older than all of the others who gathered around the radio to listen. He'd been through vastly more in his life than almost all of them, and took its vicissitudes in his stride. In his life, he'd been to the heights and sunk to the depths. If Israel was granted nation status by the two-thirds majority of the General Assembly, all well and good; if not, then he would wait another year, and one year after that if necessary. But for these kids, it was life and death.

He looked for the face of his brilliant young protégée, Judit
Etzion, but she wasn't there. He felt disgust when his mind tried to remember her face. He didn't know where she was, nor where his men had dumped her body, never to be found, nor given a burial, nor marked with a gravestone. He'd specifically told them not to tell him so that in years to come, he wouldn't inadvertently travel there, and suddenly remember her. He wanted to expunge her from his mind for all time. The others in the MGB death squads . . . well, they were just irrelevant, pawns in a geopolitical game. But Judit had a presence in his mind, in his actions, and even in the room where he was, and he had to expunge her for all time. She had reminded him so much of his wife, victim of the Nazis.

And as Israel's history was written, Judit would become one of Israel's fallen heroines, remembered for the good deeds she'd done to secure the nation. Known only to a small number of Israelis for the hateful, traitorous, murderous things she'd committed as an agent of the Kremlin.

He looked around and continued to be distressed by the absence of the young and beautiful face of Ashira, so full of zeal and intelligence and potential to be a great Israeli in a new nation, murdered by Judit and her insane cabal for reasons he hadn't been told, and upon which he could only speculate.

But all the others were there, except for those who'd died in the course of the past year's Arab uprising, or had been arrested by the British and incarcerated. Proud that he'd been able to bring so many through to see this day, Immanuel listened to the voice of the reporter, detailing how the UN was voting in Paris.

While the meeting was called to order by the session's Chair at the UN, at another radio in a corner of the room, one of the young men listening suddenly shouted out with glee. ‘Hey, the USA has just recognised Israel. The White House put out a statement by President Truman that says that the Yanks have
been informed that a Jewish state has been proclaimed in Palestine, and recognises the provisional government as the de facto authority of the State of Israel . . . you hear that? . . . the State of Israel.'

All the room erupted into cheers. Only Immanuel Berin knew what was behind Truman's move, and the President's friendship with Eddie Jacobson, a former partner of Truman's in a clothing store, who was still a close friend. The US Department of State was against granting nationhood to Israel for fear of the war that would follow, as well as Russian intervention, but a phone call and meeting with Jacobson, who introduced him to Chaim Weizmann, changed the President's mind. Immanuel smiled and wondered whether other nations had been created by friendships, happenstance and sheer
mazel
.

While waiting for the Chairman of the General Assembly to begin the voting process, Immanuel spoke to the young men and women around him. ‘Last night, the British army lowered its last flag to end its mandate over Palestine. The last British troops are leaving today. Six months ago, the United Nations voted for the partition of this land into the State of Israel and an independent, secure nation for the Arabs of Palestine. We Jews received far less land, fewer natural resources and a more fractured nation than we'd prayed for in all the years of our exile. Our birthright has been stripped from us. Yet we accepted the decision of the UN. The Arabs, given preferential treatment by the UN, have rejected out of hand what they were offered. For six months, they've been waging a civil war against us. But all that has been little more than a guerrilla conflict compared with what's over the hill.

‘If the vote in the UN in just a few minutes is two-thirds in our favour, then while we Jews are cheering at our freedom, the tanks, artillery and soldiers of five Arab countries will be coming over the hills, invading our borders, destroying our
villages, killing our population in their efforts to eradicate this land and make it free of Jews – what the Nazis called
Judenrein
. Armies and air forces, some British trained and equipped from Egypt, Trans-Jordan, Syria, Lebanon and Iraq will invade our sovereign nation.

‘Yet we sit here, knowing what's going to happen in a few hours, and pray for Russia to vote with the United States and other countries, so that we can be free citizens in our own land. So should the vote go our way, brothers and sisters, let us celebrate the moment, but gird our loins for the fight ahead.'

He glanced around, and saw each and every boy and girl, man and woman in the room staring at him. He tried to read their faces, but couldn't differentiate between looks of hope and despair. These kids knew nothing about the way Moscow had managed to assassinate so many good Jews in Palestine. Yet there was every indication that they'd vote for the creation of Israel. But he was only a psychiatrist! How could he possibly understand the Russian mind, or the sort of deal which Golda Meir had done in Moscow?

Immanuel turned up the volume of the radio, and they all listened to the Chairman of the General Assembly begin the process of voting. Three lists were made on three sheets of paper: one for yes, one for no and one for abstentions. Because acceptance of the State of Israel's creation depended on a two-thirds majority, nobody was certain until the vote came to the Soviet Union whether they had succeeded or not. Yet when Andrei Gromyko voted with a simple ‘yes', the room erupted into hysterical cheers.

Immanuel held up his hand for silence. There were still other nations who had to vote. When the voting had finished, the men who had made ticks on the paper added them up quickly and compared notes. One, a farmer from the Galilee village of Peki'in, shouted out, ‘Two-thirds. Two-thirds. We've done it.'

Nobody heard the Chairman of the General Assembly of the United Nations in distant Paris announce the creation of the world's newest nation. The cheering and hugging and kissing in the room in Jerusalem was cacophonous.

And nor did anybody celebrating in the room hear the throaty roar of the engines of Arab tanks, jeeps, planes and troop carriers roaring into life on the northern, eastern and southern borders of the State of Israel.

A hill overlooking Ras Abu Yussuf

The State of Israel

19 June 1949

S
halman Etzion handed his two-year-old daughter Vered a honey biscuit and a half filled beaker of milk. She thanked him. He loved her thin, piping voice, and blew her a kiss, which she returned with determination.

He smiled when he suddenly realised that it was probably close to this spot, three thousand years earlier, that the ancient Jews, returning from their exile in Egypt, had looked with joy from hills like these into a land of milk and honey.

Shalman lay down on the rug and looked up at the sky, a deep, almost violet blue. It was a clear sky, no longer full of angry war planes or the smoke from artillery guns or the trace of bullets whizzing through the air. It was a peaceful sky. An Israeli sky.

‘How long do you think this will last?'

It was the same question that Mustafa had asked the previous week, the previous day, and just an hour ago.

‘God knows, because He knows everything, and I don't,' said Shalman.

‘Daddy said God,' piped up Vered, her mouth full of biscuit, her lips ringed by the creamy white of the milk.

Mustafa hauled himself from lying on his back, onto his elbow, and looked at Vered. ‘Are you enjoying the picnic, darling?'

She beamed and nodded vigorously. Then she turned when she thought she heard a noise of some small animal in the undergrowth.

‘Do you think the Arab armies will let up, now that they've signed an armistice?' he asked.

Shalman shrugged. ‘There's been so much killing, so much hatred. On the one hand, I'm certain that the Jews and the Arabs want this whole disaster to be over. On the other hand, the Arab leaderships have already declared that they'll never accept Israel in their midst.'

Mustafa smiled. ‘Why do you Jews always have to have two hands? We Arabs only have one opinion, and the rest is
Insha'Allah.'

Having an ear for languages, Vered mimicked the word
Insha'Allah
, but couldn't quite get her little tongue around its cadences.

Shalman smiled. ‘On the one hand, you saved my life; on the other hand, I saved yours. That's life.'

‘So life returns to normal,' said Mustafa.

‘Normal? If only I knew what that means. But at least the Hebrew University is starting up its archaeology courses again, which means that you can enrol in your degree course, and then we can –'

‘Are you crazy? They'll never accept me. I'm an Arab. A Palestinian. An enemy. No, my friend, forget that. I'm back to being a farmer, doing what my father and his father did.'

‘Over my dead body. There's not a single statement put out by the university authorities that says that Palestinian Arabs are not allowed. If they did, I'd be the first to stand in the middle of the campus and scream from the rooftops.'

‘You're being naïve, Shalman. Our lot has just finished trying to kill your lot. You don't seriously think for one moment that the Jews are going to allow us Arabs back, as if nothing happened. Do you?'

Vered, listening to every word and not understanding a thing, repeated quickly, ‘Do you?'

‘Now that the armistice has been signed . . .'

‘Then you're an idiot, because –'

‘Daddy
ijut
,' said Vered.

Both men looked at her, and she beamed a mischievous smile, knowing that she'd had an impact.

‘So much like her mother,' said Shalman. ‘That, for me, is the greatest tragedy of this war; that women like Judit were the casualties.'

Mustafa nodded. ‘I wish I could thank her for what she told you. She saved my family. We would have been killed had it not been for her.'

Shalman put his finger to his lips and nodded towards Vered. ‘I don't speak in the past tense,' he told Mustafa. ‘When she asks about Judit, I tell her she'll be back. How do I know?'

He said nothing more. How could he? How would he explain to his daughter what had probably happened to her mother or, to Mustafa, the complexities of a woman like Judit? He could never tell his Arab friend, nor Vered, nor anybody, what Immanuel Berin had confided to him shortly after she'd disappeared – that she was a Russian assassin who'd probably been responsible for killing dozens of innocent men and women. It was a secret that he'd take to his grave. It made life intensely hard for him. He still loved Judit, yearned for her, admired all the qualities in her that had made their love so passionate.

But on the other hand, he hated her with a depth and intensity that frightened him, hated her for the way she'd ruined his life, hated her for the way she'd left Vered to grow up without a
mother, hated her for her fanaticism and militancy. But he knew that he had to bury his hatred because he would only damage Vered and those he loved if the truth was ever known.

‘Do you ever wonder what happened to her? Where she's –?' Mustafa was about to say ‘buried' but stopped himself, remembering that Vered was a very bright little girl who would probably repeat the word, which would hurt Shalman even more.

Shalman lifted his arm, and pointed into the Judean wilderness. ‘Somewhere out there. Along with all the thousands of Jews and Arabs and Christians, Bedouin and travellers and wanderers who have criss-crossed this land. Who knows? Remember when you and I found that skeleton in the caves near your home? Maybe one day, a thousand years from now, some archaeologist will discover my Judit's bones, and . . .' He fell silent.