The Lemon Tree: An Arab, A Jew, and the Heart of the Middle East (10 page)

After the massacre by Irgun forces in Deir Yassin, the specter of that militia penetrating al-Ramla had city leaders in a state of near panic. They sent urgent cables to King Abdullah and to the commander of his Arab Legion, John Bagot Glubb, pleading for immediate help and invoking fears of another slaughter. One voice cried, "Our wounded are breathing their last breaths, and we cannot help them."

Abdullah, however, had received similar pleas from Arabs in Jerusalem, begging him to "save us!" and warning that Jewish forces were scaling the walls of the Old City. The king wrote Glubb that "any disaster suffered by the people of the city at the hands of the Jews, whether they are killed or driven from their homes, would have the most far reaching results for us." He ordered his commander to Jerusalem. On May 19, Glubb rolled into the Holy City to confront Israeli forces with a force of three hundred men, four antitank weapons, and a squadron of armored cars. On Arab-run Radio Jerusalem, commentator Raji Sahyoun had promised "our forthcoming redemption by the hand of Transjordan" and the "scurrying" and "collapse" of the "Haganah kids."

Abdullah's secret agreement with the Jews did not envision this fighting: It was designed to accept a Jewish state within the UN partition boundaries while the king took over the West Bank and most of the state designated for the Arabs, including al-Ramla and Lydda. Now fighting on the ground made all of this uncertain. Yet Arab Legion forces did not cross into territory allotted by the UN partition resolution to the Jewish state.

For some Israeli leaders, however, the king's move on Jerusalem showed his true intentions. It represented a declaration of war and a joining with other Arab forces intent on destroying the Jewish state. Abdullah's move had only deepened the Jewish leaders' sense that they were under siege from all sides. Several days earlier, according to accounts from Kfar Etzion, a Jewish settlement bloc south of Jerusalem, Jewish civilians had been massacred by Arab villagers as they tried to surrender to Arab Legion troops. With the king's forces converging on the Jewish quarter in East Jerusalem, Abdullah, they believed, was not to be trusted.

Civilians on each side were under attack. Desperate Arabs within the walls of the Old City, whose urgent pleas compelled the king to act, were relieved when his Arab Legion forces arrived; residents of the Jewish quarter, who would soon surrender, were terrified. In the western part of the city, Arab residents felt mortars shake their homes, growing closer by the hour, and many fled eastward toward Transjordan; Jewish residents would recall enduring thirst, hunger, and dwindling arms and ammunition during the siege by Arab forces.

Glubb had been reluctant to enter Jerusalem. He was more concerned about controlling the supply lines between Jerusalem and the coast, especially at Latrun, a key junction between Jerusalem and al-Ramla. With forces now committed to Latrun and Jerusalem, he told Abdullah, he could not be expected to send additional troops to reinforce the Arab towns of Lydda and al-Ramla. Those towns would have to defend themselves with what they had.

On May 19, as Glubb's Arab Legion entered the Old City and Radio Jerusalem played patriotic Arab songs, Irgun forces attacked al-Ramla for the fourth time in as many days, pounding the city from the west. Dressed in English and American battle fatigues, they moved forward with armored trucks, machine guns, and mortars.

Around this time, a bomb went off at the Wednesday market while Ahmad was there. His sister rushed there to find that he wasn't hurt, but the incident rattled the family. Ahmad moved Zakia and the children out of the house and in with relatives near Sheikh Mustafa, in the family compound. Bashir, six years old, would remember taking refuge near Sheikh Mustafa's house, in the home his uncle, Dr. Rasem Khairi, had converted into an emergency medical clinic. Rasem was tending to the wounded fighters. "I used to call it the shelter," Bashir remembered. "There were a lot of explosions and shooting. I couldn't tell where they were coming from. I was afraid. I was trying to understand. You're not in your house, your room, your bed. There was no freedom of movement. I remember so many bodies, too many to collect." Sheikh Mustafa had begun convening meetings with town leaders at his house nearby, urging the people of al-Ramla not to abandon the city.

By the morning of May 19, al-Ramla's fighters had pushed back the Irgun. The Jewish militia would count thirty men dead and twenty missing. "The people are in very low spirits," read an Israeli intelligence report issued a few days later, "due to the heavy losses and lack of success."

The city's defenders had prevailed. It appeared to be an unambiguous victory for the ex-mufti's forces, the barefoot brigade, and the civilian volunteer fighters of al-Ramla. Ahmad, however, had had enough. It was too dangerous to let Zakia and the children stay in the city. Despite Sheikh Mustafa's pleas that no one should abandon al-Ramla, Ahmad would take no more chances. He hired two cars to take the family east, through the hills of Palestine to Ramallah. That trip in itself would be dangerous, Ahmad knew; though Ramallah was only twenty miles away, the roads were bad and pockets of fighting were erupting in unpredictable places. But staying would be more risky than leaving. In Ramallah it was relatively calm. The family could remain there until the fighting subsided.

Bashir, Nuha, Khanom, and their siblings rode northeast in the two large sedans. "When we first heard we were going to Ramallah, we were happy," Khanom said. "For me, Ramallah was something beautiful. Quiet, small, green, nice weather, nice food, nice people. We thought we would go there for a nice time. Only later did we realize."

A week after the victory over the Irgun, Hassan Salameh, commander of the only regular force defending al-Ramla, was critically wounded by mortar fire during a battle north of the city. A few days later, he died at a local hospital. His death cast a pall over the city and neighboring Lydda. To Firdaws Taji, the second cousin of the Khairis, Salameh's death was an ominous prelude. "He was a hero," she recalled. "Of course it was a bad sign."

As Jewish and Arab forces battled on several fronts across Palestine, the United Nations increased diplomatic pressure for a truce. Count Folke Bernadotte, a UN mediator, had arrived in Amman, capital of Transjordan, to meet with King Abdullah and press the issue of a cease-fire. He still hoped the warring parties could implement something close to the partition plan the UN member states had approved the previous November. As the diplomatic efforts continued and a truce appeared more imminent, Israeli and Arab forces worked feverishly to gain the advantage before their supplies and positions were frozen in place during the truce.

Glubb, meanwhile, sent a small detachment of troops to al-Ramla. These would not be sufficient to hold the town, he again stressed to Abdullah, but perhaps they would deter any further attacks before the truce began. However, he proposed another measure that could help ensure al-Ramla's safety. In the final hours before the truce, Arab Legion forces could easily take Ben Shemen, the nearby Jewish outpost that could be used by the Haganah to launch a strike. "But the mayor of Lydda had begged us not to do so," Glubb later wrote. Lydda and Ben Shemen were only a mile apart and a few miles from al-Ramla. Lydda's mayor "alleged that he was on good terms with the Jews and proposed to defend the town by diplomacy." Glubb's British deputy, Captain T. N. Bromage, also pushed for a takeover of Ben Shemen: "If there had been any hope of defending Lydda from the Israelis," Bromage wrote, "that colony would have needed to have been captured as a first step. I had enough force to have taken it by storm. . . ." Bromage's request was refused. The attack on Ben Shemen never took place.

The truce went into effect on June 11. All materiel and supplies were to remain frozen in place, with a strict UN arms embargo ostensibly imposed on all parties. In the intervening few weeks, the Israelis managed to break the embargo with shipments of rifles, machine guns, armored cars, artillery, tanks, Messerschmitt planes, and millions of rounds of ammunition from Czechoslovakia. The British, however, exerted pressure on Transjordan to comply with the embargo; the Arab Legion would therefore face any resumption of the war with severe shortages of weapons and ammunition. "Allies who let one become involved in a war and then cut off our essential supplies," King Abdullah complained to the British representative in Amman, "are not very desirable friends." In early July, Glubb began to urge an extension of the truce.

King Abdullah was now in possession of much of the West Bank. He appeared content with the status quo and was quietly lobbying for an armistice with Israel. UN mediator Bernadotte agreed, proposing the partition of Palestine between Israel and Transjordan. Under this plan, the people of al-Ramla and Lydda would become not citizens of an independent Arab state, but subjects of Abdullah in his kingdom of Transjordan.

Israel rejected Count Bernadotte's proposal. Israelis had narrowly avoided their own civil war in late June when Ben-Gurion ordered Haganah forces to blow up an Irgun ship, the
Altalena,
under the command of Menachem Begin. The ship was carrying arms for Irgun militia members, but Ben-Gurion insisted all military direction come under the command of the Haganah and its successor, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF). With the military consolidation in progress and the new shipments of arms in hand, Israel had grown stronger during the truce.

Member states of the Arab League, having no wish to see Palestine divided between Israel and King Abdullah, voted on July 6 to resume the fight for a single independent Arab-majority state. The king, ironically, had been chosen by his fellow Arab heads of state as the supreme commander of all the Arab forces in Palestine, which were ostensibly to fight for the independent Palestinian state. Given the king's own territorial ambitions, this was a figurehead position at best, and an ironic one at that. Nevertheless, when the other Arab states voted to continue the fight, Abdullah had little choice but to agree and stand in solidarity with the other Arabs. The war would resume.

"But how are we to fight without ammunition?" Glubb asked Abdullah's prime minister, Tawfiq Abul Huda.

"Don't shoot," Glubb recalled the response, "unless the Jews shoot first."

A few days later, in the early afternoon of July 11, 1948, Lieutenant Israel Gefen crept forward in his jeep, the last vehicle in a long convoy belonging to Commando Battalion Eighty-nine, Eighth Brigade, Israel Defense Forces. As the line of the Eighty-ninth edged slowly along an asphalt track between cactus hedges, Gefen could see his battalion's armored trucks, American-made troop carriers known as half-tracks, an armored car captured a day earlier from the Arab Legion, and twenty-odd more jeeps. The jeeps were mounted with stretchers and Czech- and German-made machine guns, each with the capacity of firing at least eight hundred rounds per minute. In all, the force was made up of about 150 men. They were at the edge of Lydda, a few miles from al-Ramla and the Khairi family.

At twenty-six, Lieutenant Gefen was already a ten-year veteran of Middle Eastern conflicts. In 1941, he had fought against Rommel with the British army during the siege of the Libyan port city of Tobruk. Earlier, he had fought in Palestine for the Haganah during the Arab Rebellion. His career began in a kibbutz. Under the nose of the British, Gefen and other young Zionists, sworn to secrecy, helped test weapons invented by an agricultural instructor in his metal workshop. Lieutenant Gefen could see one such invention, the armored "sandwich truck"—two layers of steel fortified by an inch of hardwood in the middle—in the long column before him.

The battalion was coming from Ben Shemen, the Jewish settlement just to the north. For weeks the open community with access to its Arab neighbors in Lydda had been transformed into a fortress surrounded by barbed wire and concrete pillboxes. Earlier, Dr. Ziegfried Lehman, the Ben Shemen leader, had objected to the militarization of his community. The people of Ben Shemen had purchased cows and even bullets from their Arab neighbors as recently as May. But Lehman's opposition was in vain, and he had left Ben Shemen in frustration.

Lieutenant Gefen's commander, Lieutenant Colonel Moshe Dayan, sat in the third jeep from the front. Dayan's battalion formed part of the northern flank of Operation Dani, a plan to secure the Tel Aviv-Jerusalem road and prevent an attack on Israeli forces from the Arab Legion to the east. The single-file convoy of Battalion Eighty-nine neared the main road to Lydda. Their primary task would be to stun the enemy with overwhelming firepower. Dayan's plan emphasized shock tactics in military assaults, relying on a strategy of "mobility and fire." To Lieutenant Gefen, Dayan's plan in action would feel like "a rocket going through space." To eyewitnesses, it would look as though they were shooting anything that moved.

In the late afternoon, the main line of the convoy turned left and roared toward Lydda and al-Ramla.

At the edge of Lydda, the streets remained quiet. Then, Gefen recalls, heavy fire came from the direction of a police building. Some of Gefen's fellow soldiers were hit; he would later recount nineteen or twenty dead. The Eighty-ninth Battalion, with machine guns mounted on every jeep, opened fire. In a few minutes at most, tens of thousands of bullets had been fired.

"Practically everything in their way died," wrote the
Chicago Sun Times
correspondent in a report headlined BLITZ TACTICS WON LYDDA. The reporter from the
New York Times,
writing from Tel Aviv, recounted that "armored cars swept through the town, spraying it with machine-gun fire. They were met with heavy resistance, but the [Arab] soldiers were taken by surprise and could not reach shelter fast enough." The
New York Herald Tribunes
reporter observed "the corpses of Arab men, women, and even children strewn about in the wake of the ruthlessly brilliant charge." Many of the dead were refugees who had flooded Lydda and al-Ramla from nearby Arab villages and from the recently fallen city of Jaffa. The
Herald Tribune
reporter described "a Jewish column which raced through [Lydda's] main districts with machine guns blazing at dusk. . . . Apparently stunned by the audacity of the Jewish thrust from the village of Ben Shemen, Lydda's populace did not resist when infantry units swept in after dark behind an armored spearhead."