Those men who had won this battle at Flushing Meadow and had seen the miracle unfold were realists. The Jews in Tel Aviv celebrated only for the moment. Ben Gurion and the leaders of the Yishuv knew that even a greater miracle would have to take place to win independence for the Jewish state, as the cry “Perish Judea!” arose like thunder on Arab lips.
CHAPTER TWO
kuwatly, president of Syria: We live or die with Palestine!
al kulta newspaper, cairo: Five hundred thousand Iraqis prepare for this holy war. 150,000 Syrians will storm over the Palestine borders and the mighty Egyptian army will throw the Jews into the sea if they dare to declare their state.
jamil mardam, Syrian premier: Stop talking, my brother Moslems. Arise and wipe out the Zionist scourge.
ibn saud, king of saudi Arabia: There are fifty million Arabs. What does it matter if we lose ten million people to kill all the Jews? The price is worth it.
seleh harb pasha, Moslem youth: Unsheath your swords against the Jews! Death to them all! Victory is ours!
SHEIK HASSAN AL BANNAH, MOSLEM BROTHERHOOD: All
Arabs shall arise and annihilate the Jews! We shall fill the sea with their corpses.
akram yauytar, mufti spokesman: Fifty million Arabs shall fight to the last drop of blood.
haj amin el husseini, mufti of Jerusalem: I declare a holy war, my Moslem brothers! Murder the Jews! Murder them all.
AZZAM PASHA, SECRETARY GENERAL OF THE ARAB LEAGUE:
This will be a war of extermination, and momentous massacre which will be spoken of like the Mongolian Massacres.
Other Arab leaders and the Arab press and radio spoke out in equally appropriate words in answer to the United Nations’ partition of Palestine.
On December 1, 1947, one day after the UN vote, Dr. Khalidi of “the Arab Higher Committee in Palestine called a general strike in which inflamed mobs broke out in wild rioting. They crossed into the Jewish commercial center of Jerusalem and burned and looted while British troops stood by idly.
In Aleppo and Aden and throughout the Arab world, other mobs, goaded by their leaders, tore into Jewish ghetto quarters with murder, rape, and plunder in their hearts.
Instead of forming an international police force to fill the gap, the United Nations bogged down in the formation of committees and Li endless talk. The body seemed to want to believe-that partition was going to be enforced without dependence on a single gun.
The Jews were more realistic. A Jewish state had been given an unalterable basis of legality, but if the Jews intended to declare the statehood after the British left, they would have to face the Arab hordes alone.
Could a half million ill-armed people hold back a flood of fifty million hate-crazed Arabs? They would not only have to face the Arabs inside Palestine, all around them on a hundred fronts, but the regular national armies as well.
Chaim Weizmann set out to organize the world Zionist groups to launch fund-raising campaigns for the purchase of arms.
Barak Ben Canaan remained at Lake Success to head the Yishuv delegation and battle out the details of partition and look for arms support.
The great question became, “Would the Jews declare their independence?”
The Arabs had no intention of waiting until May to find out. Although they held their regular armies back, they went about raising various “Armies of Liberation” who were alleged volunteers, and they got mountains of arms in to the Palestine Arabs.
Haj Amin el Husseini, the Nazi agent, was back in business. He set up headquarters in Damascus. Money for the Palestine “volunteers” was extorted from Arabs all over the Middle East. Kawukji, the brigand who had served the Mufti in the 1936-39 riots, was again commissioned “generalissimo.” Kawukji had been forced to flee Iraq when his part in the coup to deliver Iraq to the Germans was discovered. He spent the period of the war in Germany, acquired a wife there, and along with the Mufti had been pardoned from trial as a war criminal by the British.
Kawukji’s agents scoured the stink holes of Damascus, Beirut, and Bagdad recruiting the dregs of humanity, thieves, murderers, highway robbers, dope runners, and white slavers, which he picturesquely dubbed the “Forces of the Yarmuk,” after a battle the Arabs had won centuries before. These Kawukji “volunteers” were trained by other “volunteers,” officers from the Syrian Army. Almost immediately Kawukji’s forces began slipping over the Lebanese, Syrian, and Jordan borders into Palestine Arab villages. The main base was set up in Nablus, in a predominantly Arab area in Samaria, north of Jerusalem.
In the meantime, the Jews remained arms-starved. The British continued to blockade the Palestine coast. They even refused to allow immigrants to come from the Cyprus detention camps, where Aliyah Bet agents, were speeding military training.
Yishuv agents searched the world desperately for arms.
Then came the devastating announcement that the United States had declared a “plague on both houses” by an arms boycott of the Middle East. This boycott, reminiscent of the boycott of the Spanish people fighting Mussolini and Hitler, actually worked for the Arabs, who could obtain all the arms they wished.
As the battle lines were drawn, the Yishuv Central confronted the blunt fact that it had only the Palmach of some four thousand fighters fully armed and trained. The Maccabees could raise only another thousand men and could be counted upon only for limited cooperation.
Avidan did have a few things working in his favor. He had several thousand reserves in the Haganah who had been combat trained by the British in World War II. He had settlement defense which had been organized for twenty years, and he had a good intelligence system. On the other side, the Arabs had a staggering superiority of manpower and arms, daily augmented by the continual infiltration of Kawukji’s bloodthirsty irregulars. The Arabs had at least one excellent commander in Abdul Kadar, a cousin of the Mufti.
As if the Jews did not have enough to contend with, there
was the additional factor of the British. Whitehall was hopeful that the Yishuv would send out a mercy call, dropping the partition idea and asking the British to remain. But the Jews would not ask for help on these terms.
In theory, as they withdrew the British were to give the Taggart forts to the side with the greatest population in each area. But as they pulled back from sector after sector the British commander often turned these key places over to the Arabs when they should have gone to the Jews.
Former Nazi soldiers began appearing in the ranks of the “Forces of the Yarmuk” and other “liberation volunteers.” For the first time in its existence, the Haganah took off its wraps as the Jews called for a general mobilization.
It was not long until the first shots were heard. In the Huleh Valley, Arab villagers, along with irregulars, fired on the communal settlements of Ein Zeitim, Biriya, and Ami Ad, but the attacks were little more than sniping actions and were repulsed.
Each day activity increased. There were constant ambushes on the roads so that soon Jewish transport, the lifeline of the Yishuv, was in danger any time it came near or passed through an Arab village.
In the cities the action was even more violent. In Jerusalem the air was filled with flying debris of bomb blasts. The Arabs fired from the sacred walls of the Old City, and the city was divided into battle zones with communications between sections made only on risk of death. In the streets between Tel Aviv and Jaffa sniper posts and barricades appeared.
In Haifa the worst so far of the fighting took place. In retaliation for Maccabee raids the Arabs rioted at the refinery where both Jews and Arabs worked and more than fifty Jews were killed.
Abdul Kadar was able to organize the Arabs in a manner that Kawukji and Safwat in the north could not do. Kadar, working around Jerusalem, formulated a master plan, based on the realization that neither the Palestine Arabs nor the irregulars were organized and skilled enough to carry out sustained attacks. Kadar also realized that the Jews would hang on desperately to every settlement and make the Arabs bleed. He needed easy victories to encourage his people. Kadar settled upon two tactics. First, he would isolate the Jewish settlements and starve them out. Second, he would step up his hit-and-run attacks on transport.