XVI. The War of Independence (1947 - 1949)

This Chapter and You...

On Friday, May 14, 1948, Ben Gurion, who was to become the first Prime Minister, before a packed meeting held at the Tel Aviv Museum, read the Scroll of the Establishment of the State of Israel. The next day, five Arab. armies invaded Palestine with the intent of destroying the Jewish State and driving our people into the sea.

A bloody war ensued, which was interrupted only by a thirty day cease fire. During most of it, Jewish Jerusalem was under siege and even Tel Aviv was bombed. The fledgling Israeli Army, fighting on three fronts against regular national armies, succeeded in defending the state. The fighting finally ended in the spring of 1949, with the signing of armistice agreements. No peace treaties, however, were signed until the treaty with Egypt many years later.

The price in human lives was very high. Israel suffered more casualties during this War of Independence than in any of its future wars. Women as well as men fought and died, including pre-teens and teenagers, many of whom served as couriers between the Israeli positions.

When we visit Israel on the March, you will have the opportunity to visit many of the key battle sites of this war - Latrun, Yad Mordechai, Jerusalem and the Old City's Jewish Quarter, Tzfat, to name a few. You will visit the Soldiers Cemetery on Mount Herzl and see the grave sites of many who died during this war.

It is hard for you to think of a world without Israel, but having come from the ashes of the Jews of Europe, you can begin to imagine how things might have been different if there only was an Israel, actively engaged in rescue efforts, with doors open to receive the fleeing refugees, especially the children.

This chapter will be divided into three sections:

• The Northern Front
• Jerusalem and the Central Front
• The Southern Front

"...Accordingly we, the members of the National Council...are met together in solemn assembly today, the day of the termination of the British Mandate for Palestine; and by virtue of the natural and historic right of the Jewish People and of the resolution of the General Assembly of the United Nations.

"We hereby proclaim the establishment of the Jewish State in Palestine to be called Medinat Yisrael (the State of Israel)."

Proclamation establishing the State of Israel

Objectives:

1. You will have a better understanding of the birth of the State of Israel and the price that was paid to achieve and keep it.
2. You will have greater knowledge of many of the places we will visit on the March.
3. You will learn about the role played by many of the Holocaust survivors who came to Israel during the War of Independence.

Reading #1

This is a chronology of events that took place from the time Great Britain decided to terminate its mandate of Palestine until the signing of the final armistice agreement with Syria, which finally ended the War of Independence, without any formal peace agreements.

Dates And Events: Excerpt from

1947

1. • September 26 - Great Britain informs the United Nations of her decision to evacuate Palestine.
2. October 3 - The Jewish Agency announces its agreement to partition.
3. October 13 - The Russian representative to the United Nations informs that body of his country's support of the partition resolution and of the formation of a Jewish State in Palestine.
4. November 29 - The United Nations General Assembly, by a vote of 33 to 13, decides to partition Palestine and to end the British mandate on May 15th, 1948.

1948

March 2 - The Vaad Leumi decides to form an interim government.

May 1 - The interim government announces the establishment of an autonomous Jewish postal service.

May 11- Haifa port is placed in the hands of the Jewish authorities.

May 14 - The State of Israel is proclaimed.- The first immigrants enter the ountry freely and openly.

- The United States grants recognition to Israel

- The provisions of the White Paper of 1939 are completely abrogated.

May 16 - Dr. Chaim Weizmann is elected President of the State Council.

May 17 - The U.S.S.R. grants recognition to the State of Israel.

May 18-24 - Poland, Czechoslovakia, Uruguay and South Africa recognize the State of Israel.

May 28 - The Hagana becomes the Defense Army of Israel.

June 6 - The first truce is announced by Count Folke Bernadotte, United Nations Mediatorin Palestine.

June 13-19 - Romania, Finland, Panama and Costa Rica grant recognition to the State of Israel.

June 30 - The last British soldiers leave Israel.

August 9 -The Russian diplomatic representative arrives in Israel.

August 12 - The United States diplomatic representative arrives in Israel.

August 16 - Israel Currency is put into circulation.

September 17 - Count Bernadotte is assassinated.

December 25 - Canada grants recognition to the State of Israel.

1949

• January 25 - The first elections in the State of Israel.

January 25-28 - France, Italy, Great Britain, Chile, Switzerland, Australia, Belgium,New Zealand, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg recognize Israel.

February 1 - The United States grants de jure recognition to Israel.

February 2-14 - Columbia, Denmark, Ecuador, Norway, Peru, Eire, Iceland, Argentina and Sweden grant recognition to Israel.

February 14 - The Constitutional Convention is convened in Jerusalem.- Dr. Chaim Weizmann is elected President of the State of Israel.

February 20 - An armistice is signed with Egypt.

March 4 - The first government of the State is formed to replace the interim government.

March 8 - The first meeting of the Knesseth in Tel Aviv.

March 18-29 - Greece and Cuba recognize the State of Israel.

April 3 - Armistice is signed with TransJordan.

May 11 Israel is accepted for membership in the United Nations.

July 20 - Armistice with Syria (last to be signed)

Reading # 2

The Northern Front

Excerpt from "Genesis 1948," by Dan Kurzman

Acre (Akko in Hebrew), the ancient seaport of Palestine, was one of the last areas on the Mediterranean coast to fall to the Israelis after the Declaration of Independence.

By May 15, only one coastal town remained in Arab hands - Acre. Carmel, who had been imprisoned by the British in Acre Fortress from 1939 to 1941 for "illegal" Haganah activities, decided to attack that besieged town, though reports indicated that it was well defended despite the flight of many of its leaders. Ben-Gurion didn't object, but questioned the need for such action at this time in the light of Israel's scarcity of troops. He also remembered that Napoleon had been defeated at Acre in 1799 and had started his long trek back to France afterward, relinquishing his territorial gains in Egypt on the way.

The Israelis struck on the night of May 19. Attacking from the north, they captured the Acre police station after hours of bitter street fighting, cracking Arab morale. Thus, 22 hours after the battle started, a priest carrying a white flag walked from the old to the new city and asked to see the Haganah commander to whom he sulkily surrendered the town.

Carmel glowed as he led a detachment the next morning into Acre Fortress. He remembered all too well the ancient walls that had sealed him and 42 other Israelis from the world for two years, ironically enough, for carrying arms...

Carmel had been conducting a course for Haganah officers under the camouflage of a sports camp in 1939, when, one day about two months after World War II had broken out, two British police officers visited the camp and found some rifles. The Haganah men immediately sent most of their arms and equipment on three trucks, under the supervision of Yigal Allon, to a new underground camp.

But the trainees, including a young officer named Moshe Dayan, were arrested with 20 rifles, 6 grenades, and some ammunition in their possession. Carmel could still hear the judge pronouncing sentence: 10 to 15 years' imprisonment. Who could have guessed then that two years later most of these men, including himself, would be liberated to undertake dangerous war missions for their British wardens - and to receive military training that would later permit operations against both the British and the Arabs.

Now, the prison guards were waiting for Carmel at the entrance to hand over their pistols. "The war is over for us," one of them mused in resignation. "At last there is peace."

Carmel smiled at him.

"Do you remember me?" he asked.

The guard studied the heavy-set figure with the unruly hair and, the lines around his mouth crinkling slightly, replied: "Yes, you were among the forty-three."

Carmel shook the guard's hand, recalling his kindness; he had brought the prisoners cigarettes and letters from their families, though these privileges had been forbidden.

Questions:

1. What significant world event took place in Acre in the early 19th Century?

2. What was Carmel's previous connection to Acre before his capture of the city?

3. How would you feel if you found yourself in his position?

Reading #3

Jerusalem And The Central Front

The most important front during both the interim period and the War of Independence was Jerusalem and the central front. During the interim period and the first months of the war, Jerusalem was under siege, threatened by starvation and the shortage of water, and the shortage of arms and ammunition. The Tel Aviv Jerusalem road was poor, and especially difficult when it began the ascent to Jerusalem. The Arabs were able to keep the high ground and ambush the convoys Every effort was made to break the blockade. When you are in Israel, traveling on this road, which is now a modern highway, you will get a sense of how difficult convoy duty really was. This reading describes some of these efforts.

Excerpt From Pillar Of Fire, by Yigal Lossin

Hereafter, the major battle was fought over the Tel Aviv-Jerusalem road. The life of Jewish Jerusalem depended upon this artery, which was in those days only a narrow, poorly-paved road. From the point at which it entered Bab el-Wad (Sha'ar Hagai) on, it twisted and turned through the valley. surrounded by steep inclines and pine forests. The ascent, which required traveling in low gear, now became a death trap.

YONA GOLANI (Convoy Driver):"When we reached Sha'ar Hagai, I would become so frightened that the sweat would pour from my head down my neck. When you know that they could shoot at you from both sides, you'd hear a sort of echo inside, plucking at your nerves. It was also a horrible sight to see the car in front of you suddenly hit a mine and blow up. But you couldn't do a thing, only bite your lips. You know who's out there and you could only bite your lips. You can cry, but you have to go on. The convoy must get through."

This strip of black asphalt was the sole lifeline of Jewish Jerusalem. There was no alternative. Both the Jews and the Arabs knew that it was the major test of the 1948 war. Whoever loses here, loses everything. Day after day, the number of casualties rose, but the convoys broke through stubbornly, one after another, leaving behind burned-out vehicles, left where they fell at the side of the road to this day as memorials to that time of awe and glory.

YONA GOLANI (Convoy Driver):"People often asked me what gave us the strength to continue under such awful conditions? I'd respond: The situation in Jerusalem. When we would arrive in Jerusalem. and reach Romena, the children of Jerusalem would come out of their homes, stop us and kiss us, crying, carrying us aloft. We would stand and weep with them. During those moments, we would swear that whoever remains alive will carry on."

As winter approached, conditions worsened on all fronts, but were especially serious in Jewish Jerusalem. It was much colder than usual. People were afraid to go outside. Whoever did go out took a can with him, hoping to find a line to buy kerosene.

The semi-siege situation began to leave its mark: the lack of fuel and food became more and more acute.

At the Jaffa Gate, the Arabs set up a roadblock, thus cutting off the Jewish Quarter of the Old City. The British Army agreed to bring supplies to those besieged inside the Jewish Quarter, detouring through the Zion Gate. The British made certain to bring in only food; they did not hand over the packages to their recipients until they were examined with mine detectors for smuggled weapons or ammunition..

Questions:

1. Why was Jerusalem pivotal to both the Arabs and the Jews?

2. There was great personal risk in joining a convoy to Jerusalem. Why did so many take the risk? Is there anything important enough to you for you to take such a risk?

Reading #4

Latrun was the pivotal area that had to be captured to break the Jerusalem blockade. The times the Israelis tried to capture this vital strategic spot and three times they failed, suffering heavy casualties. The blockade was finally broken with the building of a new, crude by-pass road, called the "Burma Road". Col. Mickey Marcus, an American volunteer, a graduate of West Point, commanded two of the attempts to capture Latrun, and eventually the construction of the "Burma Road". He was killed by one of his own men, in an accident which occurred one night when his lack of "speaking Hebrew" led to his being shot.

Some of the "soldiers" drafted for the Latrun fight were survivors of the Shoah. The following reading describes how some of them were recruited and the problems of integrating them into the Israeli Defense Forces.

Excerpt from O Jerusalem, By Collins and Lapierre

As Shlomo Shamir had predicted, the new day had brought an answer to Zvi Hurewitz' manpower problems. Taken directly from the docks of Haifa to Tel Hashomer, four hundred and fifty immigrants of the Kalanit were to constitute the rank and file of Hurewitz' 72nd Battalion. The Russian-born officer studied them as they scrambled down from their yellow buses and lined up before him. They were all young. Those who had spent time in the British detention camps in Cyprus were tanned. The others were gray and pale. They clutched in their arms everything they owned, stuffed into a little cloth sack or a frail valise.

There were blue-eyed Poles, Hungarians, Rumanians, Czechs, dour Bulgars, Yugoslavs, Russians with hair as blond as sun-bleached straw. They were uniformly thin, and a certain furtiveness in their regard betrayed the painful pasts which had preceded their arrival in Haifa.

Hurewitz lined his four hundred and fifty recruits up in the hospital courtyard and decided to mark their arrival in this new camp with an attention that had rarely honored their unhappy lives at their other, earlier destinations. He bade them welcome. But as Hurewitz began to talk, he realized from their uncomprehending stares that his battalion was a Tower of Babel in which apparently only one language, Hebrew, was not spoken. He sent for the Polish sergeant who was his clerk and had him translate his words into Yiddish and Polish. "Welcome to the ranks of the Army of Israel," Hurewitz began again. "We have been impatiently awaiting your arrival. Time is short and Jerusalem is in danger. We are going to her rescue." As he uttered his last words, Hurewitz felt a tremor of emotion seize him. The pale faces of the remnants of a condemned people suddenly came alive and from the mouths before him rose a spontaneous, triumphant shout.

He split the men into four companies and issued rifles to them. Although a third of his men had had some military training, none of them had ever used the weapon with which they were equipped, the British Lee Enfield.

The companies were split into platoons and squads, keeping men who spoke the same language in the same unit as far as possible. Each man was issued a rudimentary uniform. Since nobody knew anyone else and there was no way of telling noncoms from officers or soldiers, Hurewitz ordered his sergeants and corporals to sew a red ribbon on the shoulder of their shirts.

The most difficult problem of all was that of language. The platoon and squad leaders were all sabras who spoke only Hebrew. How, Hurewitz asked himself, could they be expected to lead into battle men who couldn't understand their orders? He assembled them to study the problem. Finally he said, "Look, we haven't got much time. We'll have to get along with the kind of thing we'd do with children. Teach them just a few simple words, the words they'll have to know to fight." Soon, Hurewitz noted, a strange murmur began to rise from the esplanade of Tel Hashomer, the sound of hundreds of voices slowly articulating a succession of syllables.

In the language of the Judges and the Prophets, the recruits of his 72nd Battalion were trying to learn the words with which they hoped to save Jerusalem.

Questions:

1. What was the biggest problem facing the officers in charge of the survivor recruits?

2. How did they attempt to overcome it? Do you think they succeeded?

3. How do you think these young survivors felt finding themselves suddenly thrust in the middle of a war?

Reading #5

This reading describes one of the battles for Latrun. The Israelis were first learning how to conduct large-scale battles and paid a heavy price in the process.

Excerpt from O Jerusalem, Collins and Lapierre

To lead two of his battalions, Shamir managed to get his hands on a pair of fellow Russians. The first was Haim Laskov, twenty-nine, a former captain in the Jewish Brigade and an assiduous student of Clausewitz. He had discovered his taste for the military as a boy collecting buttons that had fallen from the uniforms of Napoleon's soldiers by the banks of the Berezina. The battalion he was assigned to lead was a former Palmach unit whose noncommissioned officers, preferring to stick with their Palmach brothers fighting in the south, had disappeared. His armor was a heteroclite assembly of twenty vehicles hastily plated up in Joseph Avidar's workshops, and a dozen of the half-tracks which had just arrived on the first boat sent by Xiel Federmann, the Santa Claus of the Haganah.

His vehicles lacked light machine guns, munitions, radios and tool kits. His drivers didn't know how to drive with their lights out or their armored slits down. Some of them, Laskov noted, "didn't even know how much air to put in their front tires." Pompously designated as the 79th Motorized Battalion, his command was, in Laskov's own words, a parody of an armored force.

Even more difficult was the task assigned Shamir's second battalion commander, twenty-nine-year-old Zvi Hurewitz, a veteran of Orde Wingate's specially created night assault units. His 72nd Infantry Battalion existed only in the hopeful imagination of its planners. He would have a hundred recruits in various stages of training as the nucleus of the battalion. To get them, Hurewitz rushed to Tal Hashomer, a hospital outside Tel Aviv used as a training center. He reported to Shamir that the scene there was like "an Oriental bazaar. Brigades were fighting over men as though they were scraps of bread, and if you didn't get in and fight yourself, you got the crumbs."

With his first hundred men under his wing, Hurewitz asked Shamir where the rest were to come from. Shamir threw his arms to the sky. "Who knows?" he said. "Tomorrow we'll find an answer...."

The plain came alive with crawling, running men as the Haganah began an agonizing retreat. To cover the withdrawal, Laskov ordered the men who had taken cover in the monks' vegetable garden to move across the plain to a rocky crest called Hill 314 just opposite the Latrun heights. From there he hoped they could protect the immigrants' retreat. As soon as the company started to move, the Arabs opened fire. All around the men, the wheatfields which had once been fired by the flaming tails of Samson's jackals were set ablaze by Arab tracers and phosphorus shells.

Trapped by flying shrapnel, bullets, the withering heat, the dense smoke of the burning fields, tortured by thirst and clouds of backaches, men collapsed of sheer exhaustion. Some were not able to get up. The others crawled and dragged themselves, pulling their wounded with them, trying to jump from one rock to another for cover. The survivors who finally struggled to the crest of Hill 314 saw that they were on a desert of rocks. With no entrenching tools, they had to dig the emplacements for their guns with their fingers. Their fire kept the Legion from circling around the hilltop to fall on their retreating comrades, until their machine guns jammed. Ezra Ayalon saw their commander take his Sten gun and leap behind a tree to continue his fire. While his men pulled back, he remained there, covering their withdrawal. For half an hour, it seemed, Ayalon could hear the burst of the Sten gun. Then there was silence.

From their observation posts near the Tomb of Ibn-Jebel, Lieutenant Colonel Habes Majali and Captain Mahmoud Rousan followed the attack. "My God," thought Rousan, "the Haganah must really want Latrun to throw themselves in front of our guns like this." Rousan was particularly awed by the Israelis' determination to take their dead and wounded off the battlefield with them. Six times he saw a group of men on Hill 314 trying to get down its forward slopes to pick up their dead comrades. "Each effort," the Arab officer noted, "cost them a couple more dead." Their retreat seemed without pattern, the flight "of a flock without a shepherd." Majali ordered his mortars to concentrate their fire on the hill while his field guns worked over the passages just behind it. There Zvi Hurewitz was trying to lead his immigrants back to Hulda. For many of those men the road away from the ghettoes and death camps of Europe was ending on the sun-scorched plain of Latrun. The Promised Land had offered them nothing but a brief and fatal exposure to its unrelenting sun, its savage swarms of mosquitoes and the tortures of thirst. Like packs of wolves, the Arab villagers followed their retreating footsteps, using their knives on the wounded or those who fell from exhaustion.

In the terror of the Arab shelling, many of the immigrants had forgotten the few words of Hebrew hastily learned on their descent from the Kalanit. Matti Megid, who had begged Ben-Gurion to give his men more time for training, tried to gather some of them and lead them to safety. They were like frightened animals. "They didn't even know how to crawl under fire. Some of them didn't know how to fire the rifles that had been thrown at them a few hours before. Their section leaders had to run from man to man under fire to show them how to take their safeties off." Many who did know how to fire their rifles could not sight them. Hurewitz picked up one exhausted survivor of his battalion mumbling in Yiddish, "I saw him, I saw him, but I couldn't hit him."

Megid saw the familiar face of a seventeen-year-old boy he remembered from the Kalanit. He was lying in a ditch, dying. "Oh," he whispered to Megid, "we must have disappointed you." Farther on, he came on a boy who had mimeographed a news sheet for him in a D.P. camp in Germany. Weeping, the youth was clawing through the weeds looking for the thick glasses without which he was helpless.

The survivors of Laskov's first company and the debris of Hurewitz' battalion finally found themselves huddled together on the slopes of Hill 314. At eleven o'clock, their ammunition virtually gone, they were authorized to withdraw and move south to the Arab village of Beit Jiz, now occupied, according to Laskov, by friendly forces. There they would at last find water - none of them had been issued canteens - and buses to get them back to Hulda.

From all sides the survivors struggled toward Beit Jiz. To provide cover, Laskov took his armored cars and half-tracks bouncing across the open plain toward the village. Buffeted by the khamsin, literally dying of thirst, the Jewish soldiers fainted one after another in the parched plains; even the indomitable Laskov, dizzy with heat and exhaustion, felt his own strength beginning to ebb. The sight of one of Hurewitz' company commanders driving his immigrants toward safety at gunpoint revived him.

Questions:

1. What was the Israeli attitude towards their wounded? Do you think that is the policy today?

2. What army were the Israelis fighting against?

3. What problems faced the survivor soldiers and their commanders? In your opinion, how did this compare with what happened to their comrades during the Shoah?

Reading #6

The site for the "Burma Road" was accidentally found. It was nearly impossible to travel on it. At first only jeeps, assisted by men and equipment could use it. Finally a road was built at night, under the cover of darkness and completed during the 30 day truce. With its completion, the siege of Jerusalem was ended and the capture of Latrun was no longer necessary.

Excerpt from O Jerusalem, by Collins and Lapierre

The jeep scraped, whined, backfired, bucked, skidded, and spun its wheels in dumb mechanical protest. Two of the men inside leaped out to lighten its load and guide it from rock to rock. Clutching the steering wheel, a young Palmach officer named Amos Chorev guided the jeep which carried David Marcus and Vivian Herzog like a kayak in a riptide.

At the bottom of the ravine they began to force their way up the other side, the aroma of burning rubber and oil curdling the freshness of the moonlit night. They finished their grueling climb by pushing the jeep themselves up the last few yards.

Exhausted, they could see in the moonlight two and a half miles away the verdant promontory against which they had unsuccessfully thrown their forces the night before. Below the little clearing around the Monastery of Latrun, they could make out in the moonlight the road to Jerusalem skirting the foot of the Trappist estates up to Bab el Wad. The punishing passage along which they had just pushed their jeep paralleled that road.

After running through the abandoned Arab hamlet of Beit Susin, it started through the wadis and steep mountain slopes leading up to the Judean heights. A passage for shepherds since Biblical times, it ran through the wild mustard, thyme and cyclamen without any discernible pattern.

Gasping for breath, Amos Chorev looked at the dark mounds of the mountains still before them. "If only we could find a way through there," he sighed, "we'd have another way of getting to Jerusalem."

"You think it could be done?" Herzog wondered.

Marcus snorted. "Why not?" he said. "We got across the Red Sea, didn't we?"

A few hours later the sound of another motor suddenly woke the three men, who had stopped to sleep a couple of hours before pushing ahead with their explorations. They picked up their Sten guns and crept to the cover of a little clump of wild olive trees. There, on the reverse slope of their crest, they saw a silhouette guiding another vehicle up the hill toward their position. Chorev crawled cautiously forward to study the oncoming forms. Suddenly, with a whoop of joy, he leaped up and rushed down the hill. He had recognized the driver of the jeep and his comrade. They were fellow Palmachniks from the Har-el Brigade and they were coming from Jerusalem.

Their accidental meeting was a revelation to all five men standing on the desolate Judean ridge. Each vehicle had covered half the distance separating Jewish Jerusalem from its salvation.

If the routes they had followed could somehow be made passable for men and vehicles, Jerusalem might be saved.

Listening to the three filthy, unshaven men, David Ben-Gurion understood immediately. David Marcus, Amos Chorev and Vivian Herzog had come directly to the Jewish leader's office on their return to Tel Aviv, to give him a firsthand account of their trip in the hills beyond Bab el Wad. They had found the answer to the problem that had haunted them all since December - the isolation of Jerusalem.

But with his terrible realism, Ben-Gurion knew well that a track over which they could somehow take a jeep was not going to save a city of one hundred thousand hungry people; they needed a road, a real road to Jerusalem. Turning to the man who had served in the army which in the course of just one war had laid more miles of road around the globe than all the armies since Alexander, Ben-Gurion said, "You've got to build a road, a real road."

For Yitzhak Levi the report being read out that first morning in June by David Shaltiel's ammunition officer would always be "the blackest piece of listening" to which he had ever been subjected. It was, almost bullet by bullet, an enumeration of the munitions left in their reserves.

Making a swift calculation, Levi figured that that reserve might get them through twenty-four hours of intense fighting. Nor was that the end of the day's bad news. A few minutes later, in Dov Joseph's office, he was told that the city's reserves contained enough flour to continue their Spartan bread ration for just seven more days. "Clearly," Levi told himself, "we have to be resupplied and resupplied quickly or we're going to collapse."

While Levi pondered those grim statistics, the first jeep to reach Jerusalem over the shepherds' path lurched up to the Palmach base at Kiryat Anavim. Amos Chorev had made it all the way from the sea. He had proved that it was possible to take a vehicle to the city over the goat track he and his friends had found almost by accident twenty-four hours earlier...

In the headquarters of the Haganah, a Russian, Joseph Avidar, and an American, David Marcus, presided over a tense meeting. Under their supervision, the people who had walked through the Red Sea and crossed the deserts of the Exodus were about to embark on an extraordinary engineering adventure. As David Ben-Gurion had promised Shaltiel's intelligence officer, they were going to try to achieve with sweat, ingenuity and mechanical skill what they had failed to accomplish with arms - opening a road to Jerusalem.

Given the limited material means at their disposal, it was a gigantic undertaking. It meant carving out of those tortured goat tracks zigzagging through the wadis and precipitous hills of Judea a road that bypassed the Jerusalem highway and lay beyond the control of the Arab Legion.

It could not be a trail open only to a daringly driven jeep; a dozen jeeps a night were not going to save the one hundred thousand Jews of Jerusalem. It had to be a road that could take fully loaded trucks; it had to be built quickly; and it had to be built under the constant menace of Arab shellfire from Latrun.

For once, the Haganah did not turn to the Bible in search of a name for one of its undertakings. Inspired by the 750-mile highway that Chinese coolies had constructed from the jungles of Burma across the mountains to China, they decided to call the road with which they hoped to save Jerusalem the Burma Road.

Questions:

1. What was the condition of Jerusalem prior to the "Burma Road"?

2. What did the Arab Legion know about the building of this new road?

Reading #7

This reading tells the story of the effect of the "Burma Road," during and after the truce.

Excerpt from O Jerusalem, by Collins and Lapierre

Despite Glubb's observation, the most significant accomplishment of the Israelis during the four-week cease-fire was achieved thanks to sweat, not sophistication, and artisan skill rather than technology. With almost frantic energy, work went forward on the Burma Road. Additional bulldozers and laborers were recruited. A pair of powerful tractors were installed on two grades to tow trucks to the top. By June 19, less than three weeks after work had begun, the Burma Road was ready for its real, working inauguration. On that day, 140 trucks, each carrying a three-ton load, reaching Jerusalem traveling over a highway carved from terrain a British brigadier had scornfully dismissed with the words "They'll never get a road through there."

Since U. N. truce supervisors were carefully checking the food convoys passing through Latrun to make sure they carried no arms, the first trucks up the Burma Road were assigned to David Shaltiel's forces. To the man who had once had to order his men not to fire on targets more than one hundred yards distant, they brought an impressive variety of weapons. Forty tons of dynamite, hundreds of rifles, Sten guns, Czech machine guns, cases of hand grenades and ammunition came pouring into the Haganah's armories. Behind them came two-, three- and six-inch mortars. Next time, Jerusalem's Haganah was going to answer the cannon of the Arab Legion not with the sporadic and inaccurate fire of the Davidka, but with a murderous counterfire from its own guns. Watching the first of those fieldpieces arrive, an awed David Shaltiel kept repeating over and over again to his adjutant Yeshurun Schiff, "Oh, my God! Oh, my God!"

As traffic increased, other convoys began pouring in with food for Dov Joseph's warehouses. In the first full week of operation, the Burma Road delivered Joseph a staggering 2,200 tons of food, enough to last the city almost four months on the minimum supply of 140 tons he had needed during the desperate closing days of May. The final symbol of the city's triumph over the threat to "strangle Jerusalem" uttered by Abdul Khader Husseini six months earlier was a chain of trucks June 22 bringing Jerusalem a forgotten luxury - oranges.

Alongside those passing convoys, 150 men labored to complete a sixteen-mile pipeline that would ensure Jerusalem the other element essential to its survival: water. Divided into four teams under Moshe Rochel, a Polish-born engineer who had built pipelines for the Iraq Petroleum Company, they worked fourteen hours a day, laying their pipes above ground, contour-welding, and pacing off distances by foot, without tape measures. In nineteen days they had finished. Rochel went to Jerusalem and, beaming with pleasure, watched the first drops of water pour from the city's faucets. The event was so extraordinary that he was asked to mark the accomplishment with a press conference. He refused. "There's nothing to say," he said. "It's done."

Questions:

1. In addition to the road itself, what was also built?

2. What effect do you think it had on the eventual battle for Jerusalem?

Reading #8

The Fall of the Old City of Jerusalem

Excerpt from Momentous Century: Personal And Eyewitness Accounts Of The Rise Of The Jewish Homeland And State 1875-1978, Edited By Soshuk and Eisenberg

Immediately after the British departure on May 15, five Arab armies invaded Israel. They expected an easy victory, including the British military, who had actually made contingency preparations to save the Jewish survivors.

The threat was very real, but the people girded themselves to fight back. On May 15, the Arab Legion entered the Arab section of Jerusalem and began shelling the new Jewish section of Jerusalem. After a few quick conquests of four isolated Jewish settlements, the Arab Legion was halted in its attempts to penetrate the new city.

The legion now concentrated all its power on the Jewish quarter of the old city, with its approximately 2,000 Jewish inhabitants. Most of them were old, weak people or yeshiva students, unfit or ill-equipped for fighting. Indeed, a number of ultra orthodox Jews, called the Neturei Karta ("Guardians of the City"), were violently opposed to the whole idea of a secular Jewish state and preferred Arab rule.

The Haganah and Irgun forces, which were charged with the defense, could not withstand the superior power of the legion. Surrender came on May 28 and with it the abandonment of the synagogues and holy places. Emotionally, it was a great loss for the Jewish people; Jerusalem remained divided until 1967.

This very moving account of the last stand of the Jews in the Old City was written by Dr. Abraham Laufer, who was in charge of the Hadassah medical unit in the Old City. He, two other doctors, and four nurses chose to go into captivity with the wounded prisoners.

On May 15 we began to hear the Arab rifle fire, the roar of the exploding grenades and in the following days the rattle of the machine guns and the bursting artillery shells. The bullets whistled through the rooms of the sick on the top floor of the hospital and the shells exploded on the roof. We brought all the sick and wounded to the bottom floor and the mattresses and blankets were thrown into the courtyard.... I had to crowd all the sick and wounded into three rooms on the bottom floor. In a few days we had 70 patients, bedded on mattresses spread out on the floor, several centimeters between each mattress. Sometimes we were forced to place two wounded on the same mattress. The synagogue, which had first served as a diagnostic room, was now filled with activity and work. It was a very large room. The single window had to be walled up half its height as protection against the enemy's bullets. The walls were lined with shelves of sacred books. We emptied some of the shelves and put medical supplies and clothing there. The benches near the walls... now became temporary couches for the wounded men, waiting their turn to be operated on. They lay there quietly after they received an injection of morphine, which eased their pain and helped prevent shock. We would put the wounded who were brought into the hospital on the two tables in the center of the room, examine their wounds and decide upon the necessary treatment. We would dress the wounded, inject some morphine and antitetanus. Those who required surgery would be placed on the benches, and the more seriously wounded would be transferred to the patients' rooms. The lightly wounded, who did not require a stay in the hospital under the prevailing circumstances would be given a cup of coffee, one or two hours of rest and sent back to the front. More than once I saw a seriously wounded man brought to the hospital for the second time the same day that he had been sent back with a slight wound.

I have to admit that men who should have been hospitalized under normal battle conditions were sent back to the front after being bandaged. We did this because we were so short of men and because children had to fill their places in the ranks. Among the fighters there were young men whose broken hands were in casts or whose fingers had been amputated a few days earlier or whose limbs were swollen and inflamed....

I shall never forget the handsome young man of about twenty who came to us. A piece of shrapnel had penetrated his left eye. I wanted to remove the fragment and asked him to lie down so that I could deaden his eye with cocaine. He asked me how long the operation would take. I answered: "about fifteen to twenty minutes." "No," he said, "too long. The situation at our post is desperate right now." He asked me to put a few drops of cocaine into his eye and to bandage it, and that he would come back after the attack had been repulsed. About an hour later they brought him back. His handsome face was blown away by a shell. There was no need to bother any further about his eye. He was dead. On my staff there was a young Yemenite girl who had been sent by the Red Magen David and was of great help in administering first aid. When the situation became serious, she would hang up her white apron on a hook, take a rifle or a Sten gun from one of the wounded and run to the most dangerous position. As soon as the attacks eased, she would return and continue her work as a nurse. She did this a number of times....

In the final hours of the night of May 18, Palmach broke through the Arab siege and cut a way into the Old City. In the early hours of May 19, the courtyard of the hospital was full of men, steel-helmeted with Sten guns slung around their shoulders. Our joy was unbounded when we first saw these Jewish soldiers, properly armed, rushing to our aid. They told us about the proclamation of the Jewish State and the establishment of our own army, holding its position and inflicting many losses upon the enemy. Also, that most of Jerusalem was in our hands....

But at eleven o'clock the Arabs opened with their fiercest attack until now. The rattle of the machine guns and the shell bursts set up a noise that one could not hear the voice of his neighbor. The wounded began to stream into the hospital in unprecedented numbers - among them, the leader of the reinforcements.

The heroic battle of these young men and women (actually children) during the next ten days is incomprehensible. Almost empty-handed they manned their posts trying to advance, fortifying their positions during the nights, standing their ground until only thirty fighters were left with their ammunition almost gone.

Of those days of helpless battle I remember many scenes and expressions of bravery. For example, the children were the first to approach the wounded, remove the unused bullets from their pockets to bring them to the posts. I see before me mothers who came to bring them to the posts. I see before me mothers who came to identify their slain sons; or the brave commander of the Haganah, who, after his parents were killed, looked at them silently and, without batting an eyelash, immediately left the hospital and returned to the front. He had no time to mourn.

The area under our control shrank, the ring around us tightened, the front kept getting closer to the site of the hospital. More than once, only fifteen meters separated us from our attackers. Barricades were quickly erected near the gate, because we had to move to a place which would be most likely the last to fall. The wireless reported approaching reinforcements. An airplane circled over us and we knew that it was ours. To our dismay the ammunition that was dropped from the airplane fell behind our lines, but our hopes was sustained that reinforcements would come.... We must stand our ground for another day. And we did.

The following day (May 27) brought many civilian casualties. The shells hit the houses, killed several and wounded many.

Night descended and we waited; but, in vain. The hours dragged slowly and nothing exceptional happened. Despite the frightful fatigue we were too tense to sleep. We knew that this was the last night. Tomorrow will be the end. The ammunition was gone. There were 120 wounded in the hospital. About seventy men had already been killed and only thirty were manning the posts and they too were exhausted. Tomorrow the Arabs would break through and we will be slaughtered.

Questions:

1. Who originally lived in the Jewish Quarter of the Old City?

2. What army faced the defenders of the Quarter?

3. Why was their situation impossible?

4. What hardships and sacrifices did the defenders endure?

Reading #9

Since the destruction of the Second Temple, there was a Jewish presence in the old city of Jerusalem. This ended with the surrender of the Jewish Quarter in 1948. The following is a description of that surrender and its aftermath.

Excerpt from O Jerusalem, by Collins and Lapierre

With the capture of the Hurva, twenty-five percent of the territory remaining to the Haganah had fallen to the Arabs. Only one thing saved the quarter from annihilation. The captured area was full of shops, and a looting party was soon in full sway.

Profiting from the respite the looting gave him, Russnak decided to make a desperate effort to reestablish a defense by taking back a small building on the flank of the synagogue. Called the Defense Club, its windows offered the Haganah a vantage point from which they might at least slow the Legion's advance.

Russnak decided to get his best surviving fighter, Yitzhak the Bren Gunner, to lead the attack. He sent a dark-haired girl lieutenant with his order. "I can't," said Yitzhak, who had fought in almost all the quarter's battles. "All this means nothing now. In the end we'll surrender."

"Yitzhak, it must be done," pleaded the girl. "The Arabs are only fifteen yards away. If you don't, they'll sweep everything away in an hour. There are women and children."

Furious, resigned, the young Kurdish Jew got to his feet, called five men and left. Two minutes later he was dead. The quarter's last offensive was over.

A few minutes later, a gigantic explosion shook Jerusalem. A thick cloud of red-gray dust billowed up from the heart of the Old City, darkening the horizon before the Jewish Quarter and sprinkling its alleys with a brick dust. As the smoke finally cleared, a thousand anguished Jewish voices began to chant in the basements of the three remaining synagogues Judaism's holiest prayer, the Shema Yisrael. It had been Fawzi el Kutub and not Abdullah Tell who had come to tea at the Hurva Synagogue. Using the last explosives left in his Turkish bath, Kutub had wreaked his final revenge on the neighbors against whom he had waged his lifetime's crusade. The skyline of Jerusalem had lost one of its great monuments. He had reduced what was left of the city's most precious synagogue to ruins.

Their shoes brushed, their uniforms straightened, the thirty-odd Ha-ganah men who had survived unscathed lined up in three ranks on one side of the courtyard designated by Tell for the surrender ceremony.

Opposite them, the residents had begun to assemble children, sacks of clothes, scraps of furniture with which to remember their homes.

Surveying the pitiful lines of his foes, Tell told Russnak, "If I had known you were so few we would have come after you with sticks, not guns." Then, seeing the worry on the faces of the residents, Tell realized they all feared they would be the victims of another massacre. He began to move down their ranks, quietly seeking with a gesture or a word to reassure them. In the hospital, one of his officers read in the eyes of the wounded "the terrified conviction that we would massacre them all." The United Press's Samir Souki, picking his way through that same roomful of misery, nauseated by the terrible stench of death, heard a voice calling his name. Looking down, he recognized a taxicab driver he knew, trembling with fear of a coming massacre. Souki stooped down and offered him a cigarette and the assurance that all would be well.

Their fears would indeed prove unfounded. Tell's only victims would be Arab, not Jewish - looters who had thrown themselves with too much haste on the booty.

The shortest, saddest exile in modern Jewish history began just before sunset. Two by two, some thirteen hundred residents of the Jewish Quarter started over the five hundred yards separating them from Zion Gate and the New City. Their departure marked the end of almost two thousand years of continuous Jewish residence - interrupted only by a sixty-year period in the sixteenth century - inside the Old Walls of Jerusalem.

Abandoned behind them was the ruined wall over which they and so many generations before them had been sorrowing sentinels. As the villagers of Hebron had uprooted the orchards of Kfar Etzion to eradicate the last traces of Jewish settlement from their hills, so the last vestiges of Jewish residence inside Jerusalem's walls would be effaced from their ancient quarter. As the refugees passed through Zion Gate, sparks from the first of their fired buildings sputtered into the sky.

Tell's Legionnaires offered them the protection of their bodies along the narrow passageways and staircases so familiar to them, holding back the excited Arab crowds. They helped the aged, carried bundles or children for overburdened women. They drove back the excited mob with their rifle butts, arrested those who tried to pelt the Jews with stones, and, on one occasion, fired over the crowd's head to hold them back.

Some of those people abandoning their homes had never been outside the Old City. One 100-year-old man had left it ninety years earlier to look at the first houses built outside its walls; he had never left since. Saddest sight of all were the bearded old men, leaving a lifetime of study behind them. Some, fortunate enough to pass their own homes on their way into exile, stopped to reverently kiss the mezuza, the blessed inscription on the lintel of their front door.

At the gate, an elderly rabbi suddenly burst from the lines and thrust a three-foot-high package into the hands of Antoine Albina, a Christian Arab. "It is something holy from the synagogue," he said. "I give it to you. It is a trust." It was a seven-hundred-year-old Torah twenty-three yards long, written on gazelle parchment. Albina would keep it for eleven years, until he was able to hand it over to the first rabbi to visit Arab Jerusalem in a decade.

On the other side of the city, a desperate rush was under way to prepare to receive the refugees. Having decided to lodge them in the homes abandoned by the Arabs in Katamon, Dov Joseph sent his assistant Chaim Haller to scour the neighborhood for sheets and blankets. In one Catholic home, Haller found an enormous hoard of candles. Realizing how much it would mean to those orthodox refugees to have a Sabbath candle to light their new homes, Haller took them all, vowing not to reveal their unsanctified origins to their recipients.

Until well into the evening, the sad procession continued through Zion Gate, the flames of their burning quarter illuminating their faces.

Masha Weingarten thought, "It is the end of my life." Her father insisted on leaving with the prisoners, carrying off with him into captivity in Amman the key to Zion Gate given him by a British officer only a fortnight earlier.

Avraham Orenstein and his sister went to the home in which their parents had been killed. "It was full of books, full of childhood memories" for Avraham. He wanted to take something, some souvenir of his dead parents, but he couldn't think of anything. Sarah picked up "some silly object." Then they parted, she heading to the New City, he to prison camp with 293 others....

Among the last people through the gate was Leah Vultz. The Legion had not given her cause to use her final grenade.

Looking at the flames of the quarter she had fought so hard to defend, she thought of "the Jews of Spain leaving their burning ghettoes." Bitterly she cried to the first man on the other side, "Jews! You remained here, and we had to surrender."

As night fell, only the quarter's 153 wounded remained in the Old City, crowded in their wretched hospital, waiting for the inspection by a team of doctors to determine which of them would be returned to the New City and which would go to prison camp. Soon the fires raging in the looted quarter began to creep up on their sanctuary. Persuaded that the hour of their massacre had come, the wounded saw a company of Legionnaires march into the building. They had come, however, to carry their injured enemies to the safety of the nearby Armenian Patriarchate....

Beyond the Old City walls, Chaim Haller went from room to room trying to comfort the refugees in their strange New City surroundings.

They were "totally shattered." But, to his astonishment, he discovered it was not the closeness of their brush with death, nor the loss of the only homes most of them had ever had, that had so totally demoralized them.

The cause of their deep grief was the fact that it was Friday evening and in riding from Zion Gate to Katamon most of them had desecrated the Sabbath for the first time in their lives.

Haller offered them the only comfort he could. Into the hands of those devastated men and women he pressed the candles blessed by the priests of another faith rooted in the soil of Jerusalem. Tears in his eyes, he watched their faces as they lit them, overjoyed to have honored at least one Sabbath commandment after having violated so many others.

Racked by a high fever, in terrible agony, Esther Cailingold lay dying this Sabbath eve on the floor of the second story of the Armenian monastery with the rest of the wounded. There was no morphine left to ease her pain, and the wounded man beside her saw one of the orderlies bend over and offer the only sedative he had, a cigarette. She lifted her hand and started to take it. Then her hand fell back. "No," she whispered. "Shabbat."

They were her last words. A few minutes later she lapsed into a final coma. Under her pillow was a letter she had written to her parents five days earlier anticipating the possibility of her death in the fighting enveloping the quarter. It was the only legacy the English girl would leave.

DEAR MUMMY AND DADDY, I am writing to beg you that whatever may have happened to me, you will make the effort to take it in the spirit I want. We had a difficult fight.I have tasted hell but it has been worthwhile because I am convinced the end will see a Jewish state and all our longings. I have lived my life fully, and very sweet it has been to be here in our land... I hope one day soon you will all come and enjoy the fruits of that for which we are fighting. Be happy and remember me only in happiness. Shalom, Esther

The red-bearded giant, lying on the floor beside her, wept as her labored breathing slowly faded away.

Questions:

1. What role the legionnaires play after the surrender of the quarter?

2. What happened to the male soldiers? The female soldiers? The wounded? The civilians?

3. Where were the surviving civilians taken after the surrender? How did they observe the Shabbat?

4. Compare the Jews during the Shoah with those in the Old City. How are they the same? How are they different?