Leon Uris (42 page)

In a swift move, Jemal Pasha the Turk took command of the Palestine province and clamped a reign of terror on the Jewish community.

Barak Ben Canaan had only six hours’ warning to flee Palestine. Both he and his brother Akiva were on the extermination rolls of the Turkish police. The Zionist Settlement Society had been forced to close its offices and most Jewish activity had stopped.

“How soon, darling?” Sarah asked.

“We must be gone by daybreak. You are only to pack one small handbag. We must leave everything behind.”

Sarah slumped against the wall and rubbed her hand over her belly. She was six months pregnant and could feel the life in her body as she had never felt it in any of the previous pregnancies.... Five miscarriages, she thought....

“I can’t go,” she said. “I can’t go.”

Barak turned and faced her. His eyes narrowed and his red beard seemed to blaze in the candlelight. “Come now, Sarah ... we have not time for that.”

She spun around. “Barak ... oh, Barak”—and she ran into his arms—“I’ll lose this child too ... I can’t, I can’t ... I can’t.”

He sighed deeply. “You must come with me. God knows what will happen if the Turks get you.”

“I will not lose this baby.”

Barak packed his handbag slowly and shut it.

“Get up to Shoshanna right away,” he said. “Ruth will take care of you ... stay away from her blessed cows ...” He kissed his wife’s cheek gently, and she stood on her tiptoes and clung to him.

“
Shalom
, Sarah. I love you.” He turned and walked out quickly.

Sarah made the perilous journey from Tel Aviv to Shoshanna by donkey cart and there, with Ruth, awaited the birth of her child.

Akiva and Barak fled to Cairo where they met their old friend Joseph Trumpledor, the one-armed fighter. Trumpledor was busy forming a unit of Palestinian Jews to fight in the British Army.

Trumpledor’s unit, the Jewish Mule Corps, joined the Anzacs in a mammoth operation. Barak and Akiva were there as the British landed at Gallipoli and vainly attempted to open the Dardanelles and march on Constantinople from the south. In the retreat and debacle that followed the landing, Akiva was wounded in the chest.

The Jewish Mule Corps was disbanded after the Gallipoli disaster. Akiva and Barak continued on to England where Zev Jabotinsky, an ardent Zionist, was busy forming a larger Jewish fighting unit, the 38th, 39th, and 40th Royal Fusiliers, comprising a brigade known as the Judeans.

Akiva had not fully recovered from his wounds and was sent to the United States to lecture in the cause of the Jewish homeland under the sponsorship of the American Zionists, whose leader was Justice Brandeis of the Supreme Court.

When it was discovered that Barak Ben Canaan was among the Fusiliers he was pulled from the ranks at once. Dr. Weizmann, the world spokesman for Zionism, reckoned that Barak was too important a figure to carry a rifle.

Barak entered the Zionists’ negotiation team in time to hear about a further British disaster in the Middle East. General Maude had launched an attack on the eastern flank of the Ottoman Empire. Using Mesopotamia as a jumping-off point, he planned to come down on Palestine from the north. The route of conquest was to be the Tigris-Euphrates Valley into Bagdad, and then he would wheel and strike for the sea. Maude’s legion pressed forward with ease as long as the opposition was Arab troops. The campaign was termed “brilliant.” Then, at Kut, the British ran into a Turkish division and their forces were beaten to the ground.

The British were reeling! The Ottomans sat on the edge of the Suez Canal and the Germans had torn the Russian first-line army to shreds. British efforts to stir up an Arab revolt against the Ottomans had fallen flat.

Then came the final blow! The Arabs suspected that a secret British-French agreement was in the wind to carve up and subjugate the Arab world.

Dr. Weizmann and the Zionists felt the time was ripe to score a point for the Jewish homeland. England desperately needed sympathy and help. In Germany, Jews were fighting for their fatherland as they were in Austria. In order for the Zionists to gain the support of the Jews of the rest of the world, especially those in America, a dramatic decision was needed.

As the negotiations between the Zionists and the British were brought to a close, Lord Balfour, the British Foreign Minister, wrote a letter to Lord Rothschild with the revelation:

His Majesty’s Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object.

Thus was born the Balfour Declaration, the Magna Charta of the Jewish people!

J
EMAL
P
ASHA’S POLICE
found Sarah Ben Canaan at the Shoshanna
kibbutz
just two weeks before her baby was due. Till then, Ruth and the members of the
kibbutz
had guarded her carefully and seen to it that she had rest and comfort to protect the baby.

The Turkish police were not so considerate. Sarah was dragged from her cottage in the middle of the night, locked in a covered van, and driven over a bumpy, muddy road to the black basalt rock police station in Tiberias.

She was grilled without respite for twenty-four solid hours.

Where is your husband? ... how did he make his escape? ... how are you communicating with him? ... you are smuggling out information and we know it ... you are spying for the British. Come now, your husband wrote these papers in behalf of the British, you cannot deny it ... what Jews in Palestine do you contact? ...

Sarah answered the questions directly and without being ruffled. She admitted that Barak had fled because of his British sympathies, for it was no secret. She insisted she had remained only to deliver her child. She made no further admissions to their charges. At the end of twenty-four hours Sarah Ben Canaan was the calmest person in the inspector’s office.

They began to make threats, and still Sarah remained calm and direct. At last she was grabbed and pulled into a forbidding-looking room with thick basalt walls and no windows. One small light burned over a wooden table. She was stretched out on her back, pinned down by five policemen, and her shoes were removed. The bottoms of her feet were lashed with thick branches. As they beat the soles of her feet they repeated the questions. Her answers were the same.

Spy! How do you get information out to Barak Ben Canaan? Speak! You are in touch with other British agents ... who are they?

The pain was excruciating. Sarah stopped speaking altogether. She clenched her teeth and the sweat poured from her. Her courage fed the Turks’ anger. The whip ripped open the soles of her feet and blood spurted out.

“Speak!” they screamed. “Speak!”

She quivered and writhed in agony....

“Jew! Spy!”

At last she fell unconscious.

A bucket of water was thrown at her face. The beating and the questioning continued. She passed out again and they revived her again. Now they held her arms apart and placed red hot stones in her armpits.

“Speak! Speak! Speak!”

For three days and three nights the Turks tortured Sarah Ben Canaan. Even the Turks were awed by the woman’s endurance. At last they let her go as a token to her courage, for they had never seen anyone endure pain with such dignity. Ruth, who had been waiting and pleading in the station anteroom, carried Sarah back to Shoshanna on a donkey cart.

With the first labor pains she allowed herself the luxury of screaming in anguish. She shrieked for all the times the Turks could not make her cry. Her battered body rebelled convulsively.

Her cries grew dimmer and weaker. No one believed she was going to live through it.

A son was born and Sarah Ben Canaan lived.

She hung between life and death for weeks. Ruth and the farmers of Shoshanna lavished every affection and care upon her. The remarkable courage that had kept the little black-eyed Silesian alive under Turkish torture and the pain of childbirth kept her alive now. Her will to see Barak again was so strong that death could not intervene.

It took over a year for her to mend. Her recovery was slow and filled with pain. It was months before she was able to stand and walk on her battered feet. There was a limp that would never go away.

The child was strong and healthy. Everyone said he would grow up to be another Barak, for already he was lean and tall, although he had Sarah’s dark features. With the torment over, Sarah and Ruth awaited their men.

From Cairo to Gallipoli to England to America the brothers wandered. Each day they were tormented with fear for the lives of Sarah and Ruth. They were aghast at the tales being brought from Palestinian refugees of the terror of Jemal Pasha.

Early in 1917 the British Army swept out of Egypt and pushed the Turks back over the Sinai Peninsula to the doorstep of Palestine. At Gaza they were stopped cold. General Allenby then took command of the British forces and under him the British renewed the offensive. By the end of 1917 they had slashed into Palestine and captured Beersheba. On the heels of this victory the ancient gates of Gaza were stormed and Gaza fell. The British knifed up the coast to capture Jaffa.

With Allenby’s successful campaign, the long-overdue, much heralded, very costly, and highly overrated Arab revolt began. Faisal, son of the sherif of Mecca, brought in a few tribes from the desert when it was obvious that the Turks were losing. With the Ottomans on their backs, the Arabs dropped their cloak of neutrality so that they could share in the coming spoils. Faisal’s “rebels” made a good deal of noise and hacked up an unguarded rail line but never put it out of commission. Never once did Arab “rebels” engage in a major or minor battle.

At the ancient city of Megiddo the forces of Allenby and those of the Turks set for a battle. Here was the testing ground for a hundred conquering armies over five thousand years—Megiddo, where the stables of Solomon were to be found and where it was said that the second coming of Christ would take place. Megiddo commanded a ravine to the north which was a natural passageway. It had been the route of conquest since man had begun to record time.

Megiddo fell to Allenby!

By Christmas, less than a year after Allenby assumed command, he led his British forces into liberated Jerusalem!

The British rolled on to Damascus until the Turks were scattered and driven to oblivion. The fall of Damascus was the death knell of the Ottomans.

The Czar of Russia, who had wanted so badly to start a war with the Turks, never lived to realize his dream of a Russian Constantinople. The Russian people rebelled against centuries of suppression, and he and his entire family were shot by a firing squad.

Although his empire was completely crushed and stolen and he had lost his position as the “Shadow of God” to a billion Moslems, Mohammed V was enjoying life in his harem as the war ended.

Barak Ben Canaan and his brother Akiva came home. The roses were in bloom and the land was alive and green and the waters of the Jordan flowed from the Sea of Galilee as they entered the gates of Shoshanna.

There was white in the great red beard of Barak and there was white in the black hair of Sarah as they stood before each other at the door to her cottage. He held her in his arms very softly, and in that moment all the hardships of the past few years faded away. His little Sarah took him by the hand. She limped slightly as she led him into the cottage. A scrappy, strapping, bright-eyed three-year-old boy looked up at him curiously.

Barak knelt before the boy and held him up in his powerful hands.

“My son,” Barak whispered, “my son.”

“Your son ... Ari,” she said.

T
HE
B
ALFOUR
D
ECLARATION
was ratified by fifty nations.

During World War I the Yishuv population had been cut in half by the Turkish terror. In the wake of the war a new rash of pogroms broke out in eastern Europe.

The times that followed were exciting and vital for the Yishuv. The Third Aliyah was pouring in to escape persecution and filling the decimated ranks of the Yishuv.

For years the Zion Settlement Society had had its eye on the Jezreel Valley which made up the entire southern Galilee. It was mostly swampland with but a few poverty-stricken Arab villages. Most of the Jezreel belonged to a single effendi family, the Sursuks, who lived in Beirut. The Turks would not permit the Jews to buy into the Jezreel, but with the coming of the British and the lifting of land restrictions Barak Ben Canaan and two other land buyers traveled to Beirut and purchased an area from Haifa to Nazareth. The great Jezreel purchase was the first land deal of such magnitude in Palestine and the first one backed entirely by the funds of world Jewry. The Jezreel opened great opportunities for the establishment of more
kibbutzim
.

Old-time
kibbutzniks
unselfishly left their farms to help found new
kibbutzim
. Akiva and Ruth, and their newborn daughter Sharona, left the relative comfort of their beloved Shoshanna to help build a new
kibbutz
just north of Rosh Pinna. The settlement was named Ein Or, the Fountain of Light.

At last the Jews shared part of Barak Ben Canaan’s dream. Land was purchased deep in the Huleh Valley near the Syrian and Lebanese borders. They even farmed at his hill and built a
kibbutz
, the village of Giladi, close by. Barak’s old friend and comrade, Joseph Trumpledor, went up to Kfar Giladi to handle security.

Along with the growth of farming, Tel Aviv and the other cities grew. Jews began buying homes in Haifa above the city on Mount Carmel. In Jerusalem there was building beyond the old Walled City as the needs of the Yishuv called for larger headquarters and the religious elements joined with the Zionists in the spirit of redemption.

The British administration made many reforms. Roads were built. Schools and hospitals were erected. Justice came to the courts. Balfour himself traveled to Jerusalem and on Mount Scopus lay the cornerstone of a new Hebrew university.