Zion

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Revised edition copyright © 2012 by Colin Falconer

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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance of fictional characters to actual persons living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

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Electronic ISBN 9781621250128

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ZION

Colin Falconer

Book III in the Jerusalem series

the story of how Palestine became Israel

PART ONE

PALESTINE, 1945

Chapter 1

SS Eretz Israel

Anything would be better than this, Netanel Rosenberg thought. Anything at all.

Even Auschwitz.

The ancient freighter creaked and rolled. Netanel threw out a hand and held tight to the metal pipe to which his bunk had been fixed, fought back another wave of nausea. Sweat like cold oil soaked his clothes.

Please, let this end soon!

Canvas hammocks had been hung between the pipes, five rows high. The air in the hold was stale, but the decks were awash under freezing, twelve-foot seas and so they were trapped down here. The stench alone is going to choke me, he thought. Vomit lapped the metal deck like bilge.

Endure! he reminded himself. As you learned to endure hunger and cold and beatings. Survive each tormented minute as it arrives, count them off. That’s the way to do it.

The ship rolled again, and Netanel gasped, thinking they were about to capsize. Men screamed, some fell from their bunks, those who had been whispering their prayers now shouted them aloud, beseeching the God of their ancestors to intercede.

They were just a day’s sailing from the coast, but Palestine was as far away as ever.

It had taken so long.

First there had been the long months spent inside the refugee camp in Poland, waiting for the war to end. While he was there, the
Brichach
- the word meant “escape” in Polish - contacted him and organized money and false identity papers. He became Daniel Herzog, an Austrian Jew from Graz.

The cities were in ruins, and every road, every train station, was choked with refugees. Most borders were closed as the occupying armies tried to trap fleeing Nazi officials. Netanel could have returned to Ravenswald but there was nothing there for him now. He knew where his own salvation lay.

In mid-August he crossed the frontier into Czechoslovakia. The border guards had been bribed by
Brichach
and he had no trouble.

At the beginning of September he crossed into Austria and the British Occupation Zone. For the first time in twelve years he saw a Star of David worn with pride. The badge was sewn on a British uniform, the wearer a Palestinian
sabra
from the Jewish Brigade, camped just across the border at Tarvizio.

Netanel had thought then that his journey was almost over. But it was just beginning.

The British, the local
Brichach
representative informed him, were trying to stem the flood of refugees pouring out of Europe into Palestine. They had closed the border with Italy.

So Netanel hitch-hiked to Villach and walked across, illegally, just after dawn. The air was bright and frost-cold; the sun rose over a broad, cultivated valley, dotted with white. In the distance the Alps glistened like a rampart of ice.

When he reached Tarvizio the Jewish Brigade had already moved on. He came to a farmhouse and his fractured German-accented Italian drew hostile stares from the men until he drew a Star of David on the ground. They smiled sympathetically then, invited him inside, fed him soup and one of the men took him into Tarvizio on a creaking cart. From there he caught the train to Trieste. The carriages were jammed with refugees, people hanging on to the doors and windows. The only space was on the roof. He clung on for the whole journey, pressed flat on the ice-encrusted metal through the endless tunnels.

In Trieste he was one of hundreds of Jewish refugees rounded up by the
Mossad Aliya Bet
, an organization set up by the Yishuv in Palestine to beat the British blockade. They gave him food and new clothes while he waited for a boat. One night, dressed as Jewish Brigade soldiers, he and a hundred and fifty others were driven out of the city to an isolated stretch of coast. The
Eretz Israel
, an ancient, rust-stained freighter, waited in the darkness at the end of an unlit jetty. Five hundred men and women crammed on board in freezing rain. Netanel Rosenberg, the good German citizen, accustomed all his life to wealth and respect and comfort, was homeless, alone, and embarking on his own crusade to the Holy Land.

Tel Aviv

SECRET

TO: DISCID HAIFA, rpt DISCID HAIFA FROM: PLACID

162/17/8/1 17/12

SS Genoa, renamed SS Eretz Israel, left Trieste 8/12, sighted 300 nautical miles west of coast 1300 hours, 17/12, headed east at 10 knots. Imperative we intercept. Estimate arrival after sunset 18/12.

Decoded: RJ 1735 hrs 17/12

Mordechai Yarkoni was chief of staff of the Haganah, the Jewish Agency’s military underground. He poured from the brass coffeepot on his desk and read the telex again. It had been relayed from one of their agents in Jerusalem just half an hour ago; PLACID was the British codeword for CID headquarters in Jerusalem.

His office was in the Red House, the Haganah’s head-quarters, an anonymous five-storey building in HaYarkon Street. The window looked out over the beach. The wind sifted sand across the boulevard below and the Mediterranean was cool and grey and flecked with white.

Yarkoni passed the telex towards the handsome young man on the other side of the desk. He was a
sabra
, you could tell that by looking at him. The
saabra
was the desert pear that thrived in the Palestinian wilderness because it had evolved a prickly outer shell that protected it from the aridity and from desert scavengers; it was also the nickname the Palestinian-born settlers gave themselves. They all wore a black moustache, like a badge, and had this same air of chilling self-assurance.

He waited until Asher Ben-Zion had finished reading the message and then he said: “A British Sunderland spotted them yesterday, two hundred miles south-west of Famagusta. They’ve been held up in heavy seas but we anticipate they should arrive off Haifa about midnight.”

“How many people on board?”

“Five hundred and forty-six.”

Asher raised an eyebrow. “That’s a lot of Jews.”

“More than we’ve tried before. We have to show the British that they cannot stop us. More particularly, we have to show the Arabs.”

Asher nodded. “What if the British make the intercept?”

“The captain has been told to run the ship aground. On no account must they be allowed to stop her. We have to get everyone off, and disperse them in Haifa and Acre as quickly as possible. All our people have been put on alert.”

This feat of communications alone was remarkable. The radio in the adjacent office kept Yarkoni in touch with every Jewish settlement and Haganah command post throughout the whole of the
Yishuv
, from Acre to Eilat.

“Who will be in charge of the operation on the land?”

Yarkoni sipped his coffee. “You will,” he said.

Asher tried to disguise his elation. There were no formal ranks in the Haganah; in an organization of equals, men achieved authority through reputation and experience. He had thus been effectively handed his first command.

“I won’t let you down,” he said.

“If you do, I’ll break your head,” Yarkoni said. He meant it.

Chapter 2

Rab’allah

Reception on the Phillips radiogram had deteriorated during the day. A storm was moving in from the Mediterranean, and static was breaking up the signal. Arab music, tinny flute and drum, came in waves like the rhythm of cicadas, fading away until it had almost vanished, then stronger again until the noise was almost deafening.

The Holy Stragglers of Judea sat in a circle by the coffee house window. Rain wept from the eaves and the carpets smelled of mould. Winter was a bad time. Babies died of the cough, and the cold rains drove the sheep and goats into the caves. Most years, there was nothing to do but sit here and argue or make babies to replace the ones that were lost.

But this year was different; this year the Jews were coming.

“We have to fight,” Izzat said, his voice low. ‘We must fight as we did in the time of the Mufti. Remember how the Britishers wanted to divide up our land and give it to the Jews? We fought then - we must fight again now!”

“If only the Mufti would return,” someone said. He had disappeared after the war, and no one knew his whereabouts. There were reports that he was in a French prison.

“The Mufti is making new plans,” Izzat said, mysteriously, intimating he knew far more than he was able to divulge.

There was a ripple of excitement. “You have heard something?”

“I meet regularly with Sheikh Daoud.”

“The Mufti is still alive?”

Izzat had no idea. “The sheikh communicates with him regularly. Through him the Mufti has relayed a personal message for all of his brave Strugglers!” There was a sharp intake of breath. The Mufti himself! “He has commended us all to continue our
jihad
even if it demands from us the last drop of precious Arab blood!”

The announcement had the reaction Izzat had hoped for. The Strugglers grew fierce and leaned towards him, committed anew.

“I shall not lay down my rifle while there is one Jew still living in Palestine,” one of them said.

“May Allah burn me on the Day of the Fire if I ever rest until we have driven the Jews into the sea!”

“We are with you, Izzat! What will the Mufti have us do?”

Izzat lowered his voice. “Now the Britisher war is over, the Jews are preparing to come here in thousands, tens of thousands!”

They all nodded. They were familiar with the stories in
Falastine
of immigrant ships running the British blockade, of hordes of refugees waiting on the European shores to flock into Palestine.

“The Britishers only pretend to send them away. The Britisher
pasha
Bevin wants them to come here, because he does not want them in Britannia. I would not trust the British any more than I would trust a Bedouin in the dark with a sharp knife! We must fight!”

A low murmur of agreement.

“I have a plan, a plan for which Sheikh Daoud himself has given his blessing, may Allah grant him increase, a plan that will - ”