Leon Uris (45 page)

I
N THE SAME YEAR
as the riots, 1929, the farmers of Yad El made an agreement with the grain miller of the Arab village of Aata, some ten kilometers away.

Barak gave Ari the job of going to Aata to have their grain milled. Sarah objected to sending a fourteen-year-old boy out on the roads alone with the tension of the riots all around. Barak was adamant on the subject. “Neither Ari nor Jordana is going to live in fear like ghetto Jews.”

Ari felt very proud of the trust as he jumped onto the seat of the donkey cart. It was loaded with a dozen bags of grain. He set out down the road for Aata.

He was spotted the instant he entered the village by a dozen Arab boys who were lying around near the coffeehouse. They waited till he turned the corner, then trailed him to the miller’s.

Ari went about his business, flushed with his own importance. He carried on his transactions in perfect Arabic, which he had learned from his good friend Taha. The grain was crushed to flour. Ari watched closely to make certain that the sacks were filled full and with the same grain, not inferior Arab wheat. The miller, hoping to gain a sack on the deal, was perplexed by the youngster’s sharpness. Ari headed back toward Yad El.

The Arab boys who had been waiting quickly made a deal with the miller to steal all Ari’s wheat and sell it to him. The boys scampered out of Aata by a short cut and set up an ambush and road block.

In a few moments Ari rode along the road right into the trap. They sprang out from cover, hurling stones at him. Ari whipped the donkey but moved only a few feet before the road block stopped him. He was stoned from the cart and knocked half senseless to the ground. Four of the attackers pounced on him and pinned him down while the others pulled the grain from the cart and made off with it.

The boy returned to Yad El late that night.

Sarah opened the door, took one look at his blood-streaked face and torn clothing, and screamed. He stood there wordless for a moment, then clenched his teeth and pushed past his mother and went into his room and locked the door.

He refused to open it despite her pleas until Barak returned home later from a
moshav
meeting.

He stood before his father. “I let you down ... I lost the wheat,” he said through puffed and distorted lips.

“It is I who have let you down, son,” Barak said.

Sarah rushed over to Ari and threw her arms around him. “Never, never, never send this boy out alone ...” She led him off to clean him up. Barak did not answer.

The next morning after breakfast, before Barak headed for the fields, he took Ari by the hand and led him out to the barn. “I have neglected some of your education,” Barak said, and pulled down his old bull whip from a peg.

Barak built a dummy and nailed it to the fence. He showed Ari how to judge distance, aim, and swing. With the sound of the first crack Sarah came running from the house with Jordana in her arms.

“Have you gone mad teaching a boy like that to use a bull whip?”

“Shut up, woman!” Barak roared in a tone she had never heard in over twenty years of marriage. “The son of Barak Ben Canaan is a free man! He shall never be a ghetto Jew. Now get out of here ... we have business.”

From morning to night Ari practiced using the bull whip. He cut the dummy to shreds. He aimed at rocks and tins and bottles until he could whirl around and split them with a flick of the wrist. He threw the whip so often that by the end of each day he could barely lift his arm.

At the end of two weeks, Barak loaded up the donkey cart with another dozen bags of grain. He put his arm around his son’s shoulder and led him to the cart and handed him the bull whip. “Take the grain to Aata and have it milled.”

“Yes, Father,” Ari said softly.

“Remember one thing, son. You hold in your hand a weapon of justice. Never use it in anger or revenge. Only in defense.”

Ari jumped onto the cart and started for the gate of Yad El toward the main road. Sarah went into her bedroom and wept softly as she watched her son disappear down the road.

Barak did something he had not done for many, many years. He sat down and read the Bible.

The Arab ambush struck again when Ari was a mile outside Aata on his way back to Yad El. This time Ari’s eyes were sharp and his body alerted for danger. Remembering his father’s words, he remained cold, calm. As the first rocks flew at him he leaped from the cart, spotted the Arab leader, and with a lightning flick sent the mighty bull whip whistling through the air and wrapped it around the boy’s neck and flung him to the ground. Then Ari unwrapped the whip and brought down a lash that snapped so sharply it tore his foe’s flesh apart. It was all over that quickly.

Barak Ben Canaan’s face paled as the sun began to set and Ari had still not come back. He stood trembling by the gate of Yad El. Then he saw the donkey cart coming down the road and his face broke into a large smile. Ari stopped for his father.

“Well, Ari. How was your trip?”

“Fine.”

“I’ll unload the flour. You had better go right in and see your mother. She was worried for some reason or the other.”

By 1930 the riots had died down. Abu Yesha and Yad El stayed out of trouble altogether. The majority of villages out of the Mufti’s sphere of influence did not participate in the disturbances.

Ari Ben Canaan was not only built like his father but acted very like him too. He was deep within himself and he had Barak’s quiet, stubborn ways. He saw the value of learning about his Arab neighbors. Taha was always one of his closest friends and he treated all other Arabs with understanding and compassion.

Ari fell in love with a girl named Dafna whose family had a farm half a mile away. No one was quite sure when it had happened but everyone was quite sure that Ari and Dafna would marry someday, for they had eyes only for each other.

Little redheaded Jordana was a spirited and rebellious girl. In many ways Jordana typified the children being born to the settlers of Palestine. Their parents who had lived in ghettos and had known the fear and degradation of being Jews were determined to purge this horror from the new generation. They bent over backward to give the children freedom and to make them strong.

At the age of fifteen Ari was a member of Haganah, the secret Army of Self-Defense. At the age of thirteen, Dafina could handle half a dozen weapons. For if this was a new generation and a new type of Jew it was also a generation born with a mission even greater than the missions of the Second and Third Aliyah.

The Haganah had grown strong enough to be a restraining force on the Mufti-inspired disturbances, but they were unable to erase the cause of these riots—only the British could do that.

Again British commissions of inquiry came and again the Arabs were whitewashed!

British timidity caused the Mufti to grow bolder.

Shortly after the riots abated, Haj Amin el Husseini called a conference of Moslem leaders to Jerusalem. They arrived from all over the world. He formed a federation, with himself as head, and advertised his fight to save Islam from the British and Jews.

The early friendships, the fact that the Jews had raised the standard of living of the entire Arab community, and the fact that Palestine had lain neglected and unwanted for a thousand years in fruitless despair until the Jews rebuilt it was all forgotten in the face of the Mufti’s tirades. The destruction of the Jewish homeland was made a “holy” mission of Pan-Arabism.

The British were subjected to the next tirade. They had lied about granting independence to the Arabs. They supported the Jews against Arabs. And as the Arab demagogues ranted and raged the British took it all in silence.

In the year of 1933 another great calamity befell the Jews as Adolf Hitler and the Nazis ascended to power. Hitler moved first against the Jewish “professional” people. The wiser ones among them left Germany immediately and many sought sanctuary in Palestine.

Once again the need for a national home and for Zionism were confirmed. Jew baiting could flare up in any part of the world at any time. Herzl had known it and every Jew knew it.

The German Jews who fled Hitler were different from the ghetto and eastern European Jews. They were not devout Zionists but had largely been assimilated into German society. They were not pioneers and merchants but doctors and lawyers and scientists and artisans.

In 1933 the Arab leaders called a general strike of all Arabs to protest the new Jewish immigration. There was an attempt to stir up more rioting. But both efforts failed. Most Arabs who had done business with the Jews continued to do so for they were economically dependent on one another and many communities like Yad El and Abu Yesha lived in close harmony with each other. Furthermore, the Haganah stood ready to halt a repetition of the 1929 disturbances.

The British solution to the general strike was more talk and more commissions of inquiry. In outright appeasement of the Arab threats the British this time definitely limited immigration and land selling by the Jews. At the very moment when the Yishuv needed open immigration so desperately the British forgot their promises.

The Yishuv Central through the Haganah fought back in the only way they could ... Aliyah Bet.

The Mufti maintained his pressure on the British until the British sent the Royal Navy out to stop Aliyah Bet runners and to set up a blockade of the Palestinian coast.

The strength of Haj Amin el Husseini grew every day. He found a powerful ally for himself—Adolf Hitler. For the Germans, who had their own aspirations in the Middle East, the situation was perfect. What could be more fortunate for the German propaganda machine than to be able to pump the theme that the Jews of Palestine were stealing the Arab lands just as they had tried to steal Germany. Jew hating and British imperialism—what music to the Mufti’s ears! The Germans were in luck. And Haj Amin el Husseini saw at long long last the instrument for seizing control of the Arab world.

German money showed up in Cairo and Damascus. The Germans are your friends! Arab lands for Arab people! Throw out the British and their Jewish henchmen! In many high places in Cairo and Bagdad and in Syria the Arabs clasped hands with Nazis in friendship.

As the storm gathered the Yishuv still held one trump card—the Haganah! Although this secret army was officially divorced from the Yishuv Central its existence and strength was an open secret. The Jews pretended it was not there but the British knew it existed. More important, the Mufti knew it existed.

It had grown from nothing to a force of over twenty-five thousand men and women. It was almost entirely a militia with but a few dozen “paid” full-time leaders. It had a small but deadly efficient intelligence service, which not only had the open co-operation of many British officers but could purchase Arab spies for next to nothing. Every city, village,
kibbutz
, and
moshav
had its Haganah setup. A secret code word could send a thousand men and women to hidden arms caches within minutes.

Avidan, the bald-headed square-built ex-soldier who headed Haganah, carefully built it up in a decade and a half under the noses of the British. The efficiency of the organization was terrifying; they ran a secret radio, carried on the Aliyah Bet immigration, and their intelligence network spread throughout the world where agents purchased arms to smuggle back to the Yishuv.

Arms were smuggled into Palestine in a hundred ways. Hiding them in heavy building equipment was a favorite method. The roller of a steam roller as often as not contained a hundred rifles. Every crate, piece of machinery, and even food tins and wine bottles coming into Palestine were potential munitions carriers. It was impossible for the British to halt the smuggling without inspecting every item, and many British were turning their backs at the docks to let the arms through.

The entire Yishuv was behind the arms-smuggling movement, but even so they could not bring in heavy weapons or sufficient numbers of first-class small arms. Most of what came in were old rifles and pistols discarded or outmoded in other countries. No arsenal in the world contained the conglomeration of weapons the Haganah had. Every known rifle and pistol was represented in some numbers. A thousand ingenious varieties of mortars, Sten guns, and grenades were manufactured in secret. The Haganah arsenal even included walking canes which could fire a single shot.

Once inside Palestine every desk, chair, table, icebox, bed, and sofa was a potential hiding place for weapons. Every Jewish home had at least one false-bottom drawer, hidden closet, trap door, or trick wall.

Arms were moved about inside the spare tires of buses and in market baskets and under donkey carts. The Haganah played on British “respectability” by having the children run weapons and by using the best hiding place of all—under women’s skirts.

In the building of the Haganah the
kibbutz
proved not only the answer to redemption but the answer to Jewish arms. Because of the communal character of the
kibbutz
it was the best place to train young soldiers. A dozen or two dozen could be slipped in easily among three or four hundred members and absorbed by the community. The
kibbutz
was the best place to hide the larger arms caches and the best place to manufacture small arms. It was also the best place to absorb newly arrived illegal immigrants. From the
kibbutzim
came the majority of the outstanding Haganah leaders.

The one great strength of the Haganah lay in the fact that its authority was accepted without question by the entire Yishuv. A Haganah command was a positive order. Avidan and the other Haganah leaders were very eareful to use their army only in self-defense. When the 1933 general strike broke out Avidan warned that the Haganah would not try to conquer the Palestine Arabs. “Palestine will be conquered with our sweat.” It was an army of restraint.

There were many in the Haganah who felt that it should not be held in such restraint. These were activists who demanded swift retribution.

Akiva was one of these. Officially he was a dairy farmer in the
kibbutz
of Ein Or but in reality he was a high man in the Haganah in charge of all defense in the Galilee.