Leon Uris (50 page)

Meanwhile in London, Barak Ben Canaan and the other negotiators worked the clock around too. They spoke to members of Parliament, Ministers, or anyone who would listen to them. But do what they might, the British would not budge from their immigration policy.

In mid-August, Ari received an urgent message from Aliyah Bet in France:
LEAVE GERMANY AT ONCE
.

Ari ignored the cable and continued his work, for each day now seemed a race against death.

Another cable came. This time it was a Haganah order for him to leave.

Ari gambled on just seventy-two hours more, for he was working on a stack of visas to get a trainload of children into Denmark.

A third cable came—and a fourth.

As the trainload of children crossed the Danish frontier, Ari Ben Canaan made his own escape. He left Germany forty-eight hours before Hitler’s Wehrmacht rolled into Poland and ushered in World War II.

Ari and Barak Ben Canaan returned to Palestine from their separate missions. Both men were exhausted and both of them were crushed by despair.

At the outbreak of war it took only ten minutes for the Jewish leaders to announce their course of action. Ben Gurion urged the Yishuv to come forth for duty in the British Army to fight the common enemy.

There was additional encouragement from the Haganah which saw this as an opportunity to train its men legally.

General Haven-Hurst, the Palestine military commander, raised strong objections with the War Office about letting Palestinian Jews into the British Army. “If we train Jews now and give them combat experience we will only be spiting ourselves, for surely we will have to fight the very same Jews later on.”

Within a week after the war began one hundred and thirty thousand men and women—one out of four in the entire Yishuv—had signed up at Yishuv Central to volunteer for the British Army.

As for the Arabs, most of the Arab world looked upon the Germans as their “liberators” and waited for them.

It was impossible for the British to ignore the Yishuv’s offer. It was also impossible not to heed General Haven-Hurst’s warning. The War Office decided upon the middle road of accepting Palestinian Jews but keeping them out of front-line assignments so that they could not get actual weapons training and combat experience. The Palestinians were turned into service units, transportation and engineering battalions. Yishuv Central protested angrily against the discrimination and demanded equal opportunities fighting the Germans.

The Yishuv had presented a solid front, except for the dissenting Maccabees. Avidan decided to swallow his pride and through a chain of underground contacts asked for a meeting with Akiva.

The two men met in a cellar beneath Frankel’s Restaurant on King George Road in Jerusalem. It was filled with cases of canned food and bottled goods stacked halfway to the ceiling, and it was dark except for the light from a single light bulb.

Avidan offered no handshake as Akiva entered, flanked by two Maccabees. It had been five long years since the two men had seen each other.

Akiva looked in his sixties and more. The long hard years of building two
kibbutzim
and the more recent years of underground living had turned him into an old man.

The room was cleared of Maccabee and Haganah guards. The two men faced each other.

At last Avidan spoke. “I have come, quite simply, to ask you to call a truce with the British until the war is over.”

Akiva grunted. He spat out his contempt for the British and their White Paper and his anger at the Yishuv Central and Haganah for their failure to fight.

“Please, Akiva,” Avidan said, holding his temper. “I am aware of all your feelings. I know exactly what differences there are between us. Despite them, Germany is a far greater enemy and threat to our existence than the British.”

Akiva turned his back on Avidan. He stood in the shadows thinking. Suddenly he spun around and his eyes blazed as of old. “Now is the time to get the British to revoke the White Paper! Now—right now—declare our statehood on both sides of the Jordan! Now! Hit the damned British when they’re down!”

“Is statehood so important to us that we must gain it by contributing to a German victory?”

“And do you think the British will hesitate to sell us down the river again?”

“I think we have only one choice—to fight Germany.”

Akiva paced the cement floor like a nervous cat. Tears of anger welled up in his eyes. He grunted and mumbled to himself—and at last he spoke with trembling softness. “Even as the British blockade our coast against desperate people ... even as the British create a ghetto inside their army with our boys ... even as they have sold us out with the White Paper ... even as the Yishuv puts its heart and soul into the war effort while the Arabs sit like vultures waiting to pounce ... even with all this the British are the lesser of our enemies and we must fight with them. Very well, Avidan ... the Maccabees will call a truce.”

The air was filled with Akiva’s hostility as the two men finally shook hands. Akiva wet his lips. “How is my brother?”

“Barak just returned from conferences in London.”

“Yes ... conferences ... that would be Barak. And Sarah and the children?”

Avidan nodded. “You can be proud of Ari.”

“Oh yes, Ari is a fine boy ... a fine boy ... how ... how ... does Ein Or look these days?”

Avidan lowered his eyes. “Ein Or and Shoshanna show the love and the sweat of the men who built them.” Avidan turned and walked toward the ladder to the trap door.

“
Zion shall be redeemed with judgment
,” Akiva cried from the shadows of the cellar, “
and the destruction of the transgressors and of the sinners shall be together and they that forsake the Lord shall be consumed.
Our day with the British will come!”

Ari had changed. He was melancholy all the time. It was difficult to say exactly what had been the breaking point for him. He had carried arms since he was a boy. The “tower and stockade” days—Ha Mishmar—the Raider Unit—the Acre prison. The heartbreaking work for Aliyah Bet in Berlin. And the death of Dafna. Ari lived at Yad El and farmed and wanted to be left alone. He scarcely spoke a word.

Even when the war broke out Ari remained at Yad El. Most of his spare time was spent at the Arab Village of Abu Yesha with his boyhood friend, Taha, who was now the muktar.

One day, several months after the war had begun, Ari returned one evening from the fields to find Avidan himself waiting to see him. After dinner Ari, Avidan, and Barak retired to the living room to talk.

“I suppose you know why I came,” Avidan said.

“I can imagine.”

“Let me get right to the point. There are a few dozen of our boys that we feel should join up. The British have contacted Haganah half a dozen times and asked for you. They are willing to give you an officer’s commission.”

“I’m not interested.”

“They want you badly, Ari. I’m sure we can put you into a position—say, Arab intelligence—where you could be of great value to the Haganah too.”

“That’s very nice. I thought they’d have me shoveling garbage with the rest of the Yishuv troops. It’s good to know I’m one of the good Jews.”

“Don’t make me issue this to you as an order.”

“You may be surprised if you do.”

Avidan, who was an iron disciplinarian, was somewhat taken aback. Ari Ben Canaan had been as reliable and unquestioning a soldier as any in the Haganah.

“I’m glad this is in the open,” Barak said. “This boy has been eating his heart out since his return from Berlin.”

“Ari ... I’m afraid we are going to have to insist upon it.”

“Why should I wear a British uniform? So they can throw me into prison again for bearing arms for them.”

Barak threw up his hands.

“All right, Father ... if you want it in the open. Five years ago Uncle Akiva had the courage to name our enemy.”

“You are not to mention his name in this house!” Barak roared.

“It’s about time it was mentioned. I might even have joined the Maccabees except that I would not go against you.”

“But Ari,” Avidan said quickly, “even Akiva and the Maccabees have called a truce with the British.”

Ari turned and started for the door. “I’ll be playing backgammon at Taha’s house. Call me if the Germans invade.”

The German avalanche thundered across Europe. The British suffered one debacle after another. Dunkirk! Crete! Greece! London underwent merciless bombing.

Even as the Yishuv poured its energy into the British war effort it was forced to swallow degradation by the British. A series of unbelievably horrible events occurred which rankled in the hearts of even the most benevolent Jews.

A pathetic, fifty-foot Danube river boat named the
Struma
crept into Istanbul loaded with nearly eight hundred frantic Jews trying to escape from Europe. The boat was unsafe and the people in dire straits. Yishuv Central literally begged the British for visas. The British refused. In fact, they turned heavy diplomatic pressure on the Turkish government to get the
Struma
out of Istanbul. Turkish police boarded the
Struma
and towed it through the Bosporus and cut it adrift in the Black Sea without food, water, or fuel. The
Struma
sank. Seven hundred and ninety-nine human beings drowned. One survived.

Two battered steamers reached Palestine with two thousand refugees and the British quickly ordered them transferred to the
Patria
for exile to Mauritius, an island east of Africa. The
Patria
sank off Palestine’s shores in sight of Haifa, and hundreds of refugees drowned.

And so it went—the British clung to the White Paper—the Arabs had to be kept calm!

The war continued badly for the British. By the end of 1941 Palestinian Jews had made their way into fighting units despite General Haven-Hurst’s forebodings, for the British were desperate and they were getting no manpower at all from the Arabs. As the Arabs sat, fifty thousand of the cream of the Yishuv wore British uniforms.

With western Europe crushed, German barges waited in the English Channel to invade. England had her back to the wall! And this was the moment of English glory! The Germans, who had beaten the Russians and the Greeks and the Yugoslavs, stood and balked at the showdown with those pale, scrawny wonders—the dogged Englishman. They feared the English as they feared no others.

As England had carved up the Ottoman Empire, so now the Germans prepared to carve up the British Empire. Rommel’s powerful Afrika Korps was building toward a series of strikes that would throw the British out of the Middle East and open a gateway to the Orient and India.

Haj Amin el Husseini moved from Lebanon in search of greener pastures. He landed in Bagdad, Iraq, nominally a British ally but in not much more than name. In Bagdad he was greeted as a great martyr of Islam. He staged a coup with a gang of Iraqi army officers to deliver Iraq to the Germans. The plot failed. But only at the last moment did the British prevent it from succeeding by sending the Arab Legion in to control the country.

Haj Amin fled again. This time he went to Germany where Adolf Hitler greeted him personally as a brother. The two madmen could work through each other for mutual personal profit. The Mufti saw in Germany’s military plans a new opportunity to seize power over the entire Arab world. Hitler needed the Mufti to show what a warm and tender friendship could exist between Arab and German. As a Nazi agent, Haj Amin broadcasted over and over again from Berlin to the Arab world; what he had to say he had said many, many times before.

“O, Arabs, rise and avenge your martyrs ... I, Mufti of Palestine, declare this war as a holy war against the British yoke of tyranny.... I know the hatred you feel for them ... I know you Moslems are convinced the British and the Jews are enemies of Islam and plot against the precepts of the Koran ... the Jews will take our holy Islamic institutions ... they even now claim a Temple occupies the site of our most holy Mosque of Omar and surely they will desecrate it as they have tried before ... kill Jews wherever you find them for this pleases God, history, and religion. This saves your honor ... God is with you ... perish Judea!”

As the Mufti spoke, the Arab world seemed to heed his words.

Syria and Lebanon were in the hands of Vichy French, and German matériel was pouring in to pave the way for an invasion of Palestine and Egypt.

The Egyptian chief of staff sold secrets to the Germans. King Farouk of Egypt refused to give the British a single soldier for the defense of Egypt against Rommel. Further plots hatched in Iraq.

The only avowed friend of the Allies was the old despot, Ibn Saud, who had been bought with American dollars. But Ibn Saud did not so much as offer a single camel to the British Eighth Army, which was fighting for its life.

In all the Middle East the Allied Powers had but one true fighting friend—the Yishuv!

Rommel, flushed with victory in Libya, stood poised to break through to Alexandria where German flags were being prepared to welcome the “liberators.”

On the Russian front, the Wehrmacht stood before the gates of Stalingrad!

This was the Allies’ darkest hour.

The prime target of the Germans was the Suez Canal, Egypt, and Palestine—the solar plexus of the British Empire. A break-through at Stalingrad could form another arm of a pincer movement to sweep through the Caucasus Mountains and open the doors of India and the Orient.

At last the British came to Yishuv Central and asked the Jews to form guerrilla units to cover the retreat of the British and harass the German occupation. This guerrilla force was called the Palmach. It was later to become the striking arm of the Haganah.

Ari Ben Canaan sat down for supper one evening.

“I enlisted in the British Army today,” he announced quietly.

The next day Ari reported to
kibbutz
Beth Alonim, House of the Oaks, where youths from all over Palestine had assembled to organize the Palmach.

K
IBBUTZ
B
ETH
A
LONIM STOOD
at the foot of Mount Tabor in the center of the Jezreel Valley. Ari was given a commission in the British Army and placed in charge of operations of the guerrilla units of boys and girls, most of whom were in their teens. Most of the officers were “old-timers” in their mid-twenties like Ari.