Leon Uris (47 page)

Akiva’s followers tried to trade terror for terror but they were not large or effective enough to keep pace with the Mufti’s thugs. Although they were officially disclaimed by the Jewish leadership, many of the Yishuv were happy over the Maccabee actions.

Once Haj Amin el Husseini had his hands on Palestine’s throat, he moved ahead with the next phase of his plan. He sent out a fanatically worded appeal for all Arabs of all nations to join the common struggle to liberate Palestine from the clutches of British imperialism and Zionism.

Husseini gangsters entered Arab villages and demanded fighters for attacks on Jewish settlements. Most of the beleaguered fellaheen had absolutely no desire to fight but they were too terrified of the Mufti to refuse.

From outside of Palestine came an answer to the Mufti’s appeal. An Iraqi army officer named Kawukji saw the Palestine “revolt” as his long awaited chance to seize power and make a fortune as the Mufti’s military arm. Kawukji was obsessed with himself; his egomania knew no bounds. He purchased many fine new uniforms with all types of fancy decorations and declared himself generalissimo of the army of liberation. With money extorted from the Palestinian Arabs by the Mufti, Kawukji went about recruiting his army outside the country. He got together a band of thieves, dope runners, white slavers, and the like with the lure of the many Jewish women they could rape and the “Hebrew gold” they could loot. They were as vicious, degenerate, and brutal a gang as had ever been assembled. Under Generalissimo Kawukji they poured in from Lebanon to save the great Islam martyr, Haj Amin el Husseini.

Kawukji used safe and simple tactics. He would set up a road ambush after first having made certain of an avenue of retreat. When a bus, unarmed vehicle, or party small enough not to fight passed by, the Arabs would spring, loot, and flee.

Soon Kawukji and the Mufti’s gangs had the entire country terrorized. The Arab community was defenseless, the British were inept and reluctant to fight, and the Jews would fight only in self-defense.

Instead of moving to stamp out the Arab attacks, the British were nearly comical in their efforts. A few times they swept in on suspected bandit hide-out villages and assessed collective fines, and once or twice they even destroyed a few villages. But they went into a defensive shell. They built over fifty enormous concrete police forts that encircled all of Palestine. Each fort was capable of holding from a few hundred up to several thousand troops. Each fort was to control its own immediate area. They were designed by a man named Taggart and built by the Jews.

The Taggart forts that ringed besieged Palestine were a system as old as the land itself. In Biblical days the Jews used twelve mountains. A fire from one could be seen by the next and relayed to the next. The Crusaders adhered to the same theory by erecting fortified castles each within sight of the next castle or walled town. Even the Jews now put each new agricultural settlement within sight of a neighbor.

At night the British buttoned up in their Taggart forts and stayed put. By day their raids were ineffective. The moment a convoy was spotted leaving a fort the word was passed along the countryside. Every Arab in every field was a potential spy. By the time the British reached their objective, the opposition had disappeared into thin air.

Yet, under this unbelievable pressure, the Jews continued to smuggle in immigrants and build new settlements for them. On the first day of a new settlement several hundred farmers and builders from all the neighboring settlements would gather on the breaking grounds at sunrise. Between sunup and sundown they quickly constructed a tower with searchlight facilities and generator and a small stockade around it. By night of the same day it would be completed and they would disappear to their own settlements, leaving the new settlers inside the stockade with a small guard of Haganah men.

Ari Ben Canaan, just over twenty years of age, became an expert on the “tower and blockade” settlements. He generally commanded the Haganah unit which stayed behind to teach the new settlers the trick of handling Arab infiltrators and attackers and how to use their weapons. Almost every new settlement underwent an Arab attack. The presence of the Haganah and their ability ultimately to repulse the attackers was a steadying influence upon the newcomers. Not Ari or any other Jewish leader ever lost a “tower and stockade” settlement. At the end of a few weeks in one place, Ari would take his unit on to the next new “tower and stockade” settlement under construction.

The settlers worked out from the stockades slowly, opening up their land a bit at a time. They erected permanent buildings and slowly expanded into full-fledged villages. If the settlement was a
kibbutz
the first building would be the children’s house. It was always built in the inner line of defense so that it would be the last building that could be reached by attackers.

Avidan said that the “tower and stockade” farms were a fulfillment of the Biblical story of the rebuilding of Jerusalem with one hand on the spear and one hand on the trowel. The prophet Nehemiah had said ... “half my servants wrought in the work and the other half held the spears.” And so it was that they worked their land and built their homes with a rifleman behind every plow and every carpenter.

The Arabs became so bold that even the British could not go on ignoring the terror. Haj Amin and Kawukji had made them all look like jackasses. At last they plunged into action and broke up the Higher Arab Committee and issued a warrant for the arrest of Haj Amin. The Mufti fled ahead of British police into the Mosque of Omar, the holiest Moslem shrine in Palestine.

The British balked and dared not enter the mosque for fear of inciting a “holy” uprising on the part of the entire Moslem world. After a week of hiding out, Haj Amin, dressed as a woman, fled and escaped to Jaffa, where a boat carried him to Lebanon.

Everyone breathed a great sigh of relief as the Mufti of Jerusalem left Palestine—especially the Arab community. The riots and attacks abated and the British again renewed their commissions of inquiry and investigations.

The Arabs boycotted the British inquiries except to send a few of their most fanatical members in to read prepared speeches. Although Haj Amin had left the scene, the El Husseinis were still on hand. At the commissions of inquiry the Arabs made more and more outrageous claims against the Jews, who paid eighty-five per cent of all the taxes despite the fact that the Yishuv was smaller than the Arab community.

And so, after another survey of the situation, the British took a new tack and recommended that Palestine be divided into two separate states. The Arabs were to get the lion’s share and the Jews a strip of land from Tel Aviv to Haifa and those parts of the Galilee they had reclaimed.

The Yishuv Central, the world Zionists, and the Jews in Palestine were tired of the continued bloodshed, the growing Arab fanaticism, and the ever more apparent British betrayal. Once the mandate for the Jewish homeland had included both sides of the Jordan River—now the British were offering but an iota. Yet, despite everything, the Jews decided to accept the proposal.

The British pointed out to the Arabs that it would be wise to accept, because the area allotted to the Jews couldn’t hold many more immigrants. But the Arabs wanted nothing more or less than that every Jew be thrown into the sea. Haj Amin el Husseini was the treasure of Islam and the martyred victim of British and Zionist injustice. From Beirut he renewed the rebellion.

Taggart, who had built the British system of forts, erected an electrified barbed-wire wall along the Lebanese border to stop the Mufti’s thugs and arms runners. At intervals he constructed more blockhouse forts to interlace with the wall.

One of the forts on the Taggart wall was erected above Abu Yesha and Yad El at the site believed to be the burial ground of Queen Esther. It became known as Fort Esther.

The Taggart wall slowed the Arab infiltration but could not stop it.

The Haganah, which had contained itself so long, became very restless and the Yishuv began to wonder when the Yishuv Central would let the Haganah fight. Under this growing pressure, Ben Gurion finally agreed to listen to a plan advanced by Avidan. In turn the Zion Settlement Society purchased a piece of land on the northern extremity of the Galilee, right on the Lebanese border, at a point where Haganah intelligence suspected most of the Arab infiltration to be taking place.

Shortly after the land purchase Ari Ben Canaan and two other top young men in Haganah were called to Tel Aviv to Avidan’s secret headquarters.

The bald-headed leader of Jewish defense unfolded a map and pointed out the new parcel of land. Its importance to the continuation of the Arab revolt was obvious.

“I want you three boys to take command of a unit to go up to this land and build a
kibbutz
there. We are carefully picking eighty of our top men and twenty women to go with you. I don’t have to tell you what to expect.”

They nodded.

“We know the Mufti is going to stop everything else in an effort to run you out. This is the first time we have picked a spot for a
kibbutz
because of its strategic value.”

Sarah Ben Canaan was sick at heart. For years she had not seen her son without a whip or a gun near at hand. Now she feared this mission as she had feared none of the others. A hundred of the best members of the Yishuv were being put into a suicidal position. Ari kissed his mother and brushed away her tears and in his simple way said that it would be all right. He shook his father’s hand and said nothing, for the understanding between them was complete.

Dafna knocked on the door and they said good-by to her too.

Dafna and Ari walked out the gates of Yad El and turned to look back briefly at the fields and at the friends who had gathered. Barak sighed and put his arm on Sarah’s shoulder as the younger couple disappeared down the road.

“They want so little from life,” Sarah said. “How long ... how long must we go on giving him?”

Barak shook his great head and his eyes narrowed to catch a last glimpse of his boy and Dafna.

“God asked Abraham to give his son in sacrifice. I suppose we of the Yishuv live in that shadow. We must keep giving Ari so long as God wills it.”

A hundred of the finest young men and women of the Yishuv went up to the border of Lebanon and placed themselves in the path of thieves and murderers. Ari Ben Canaan, at twenty-two years of age, was second in command.

They called the place Ha Mishmar, the Guardpost.

T
EN TRUCKS CARRYING
a hundred Haganah boys and girls and their equipment sped along the coastal road past the last Jewish settlement at Nahariya in northern Galilee and penetrated into territory where no Jew had gone before. A thousand pairs of Arab eyes watched the convoy as it moved up into the foothills of the mountains on the Lebanese border below the Taggart wall.

They stopped, set out guards, and unloaded the trucks quickly. The trucks rushed back to Nahariya before dark. The hundred were alone. Above them the hills were filled with Arab marauder gangs. Behind them were a dozen hostile Arab villages.

They erected a small stockade, dug in, and waited out the night.

By next morning the word had spread from Hebron to Beirut ... “The Jews have moved into the hills!” Haj Amin el Husseini in Beirut was enraged. It was an open challenge. He swore by the beard of Allah that the Jews would be thrown into the sea.

During the next few days the Haganah force worked themselves to exhaustion tightening the defenses of the base camp at the bottom of the hill against the attack that had to come. Each night when they weren’t standing guard, Dafna and Ari fell into exhausted slumber in each other’s arms.

On the fourth night the attack came!

The Jews had never undergone anything like it. A thousand Arab riflemen flanked with machine guns poured a steady tattoo of fire into the Jews’ stockade for five consecutive hours from the top of the hill. For the first time the Arabs used mortar fire. Ari and his forces lay low and waited for the Arabs to try an assault.

The attack came when Arab thugs began slithering along the ground with knives between their teeth.

Suddenly——

Half a dozen searchlights darted out from the stockade and swept the field. The light caught the Arabs in close. The Jews poured on a deadly counterfire and in the very first burst shot sixty Arabs dead.

The Arabs were paralyzed with fear. Ari led half the Haganah force out from the cover of the stockade in a fierce counterattack which littered the field of battle with Arab dead and wounded. Arabs who survived fled back to high ground screaming in terror.

The Arabs did not attack again for a week. Nothing the Mufti could say or do could make them attack. Kawukji could not make them attack.

In that first night three Haganah boys and one girl were killed in the fighting. One of them was the commander. Ari Ben Canaan stepped up to assume command.

Each day the Haganah moved up the hill a few feet, consolidated the position, and waited out the night. The Arabs watched from their positions above but never attacked during the daylight hours. By the end of a week Ari abandoned the first base camp and had established a second camp midway up the hill.

The Arabs resumed their attacks, but the lesson of the first night was still fresh. They did not try a direct assault but were content to fire at the camp from long distances.

While the Arabs remained indecisive, Ari decided to take the offensive. At the end of the second week at dawn he made his move. He waited until the Arabs were tired from firing all night and their guard was lax. He led twenty-five crack men and ten women in a dawn attack that threw the sleepy Arabs off the top of the hill. The Jews dug in quickly while the Arabs got their bearings and reassembled for a counterattack. Ari lost five soldiers but he held his position.

Quickly he fortified a lookout post on the top of the hill which commanded a view of the entire area. By daylight they worked feverishly to build their foothold into a fortress.