Kadar’s strategy proved effective. The Arabs had freedom of movement while the Jews were forced to maintain tight positions. Day by day more Jewish settlements fell under siege.
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Abdul Kadar centered his efforts on Jerusalem. The road from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem ran through the perilous Judean mountains and was dotted with Arab villages which commanded several key heights. Kadar wanted to cut off and starve out the hundred-thousand Jews in New Jerusalem. It would be a vital blow to the Yishuv.
To combat the effort, the Yishuv used makeshift armored cars to conduct large-scale convoys. These convoys were vulnerable, and the road to Jerusalem became littered with wrecked vehicles. Inside Jerusalem shortages developed, people had to move about in armored buses and children played inside sniper range.
With Arab strength growing daily in new arms and irregulars and no relief in sight for the Jews, Abdul Kadar was content to play a waiting game through the winter, then lop off the frozen and starved settlements one by one in the springtime.
The Yishuv leaders appealed to the British to patrol the Jerusalem-Tel Aviv road, on the grounds of the inhumanity of starving out a civilian population. The British refused.
This quick Arab action, under a good leader, set the Yishuv down in the initial gambit. The Haganah gave orders to turn every kibbutz and moshav into a miniature Tobruk. The Jews had paid in blood for their land and if the Arabs were going to take it, it would also have to be in blood.
The battle of the roads opened the first phase of the war. The decision of whether or not to declare independence still hung in the balance.
Ari Ben Canaan made a slow recovery from his wound. This posed a problem for Avidan, who wanted Ari to command one of the three Palmach Brigades. These included Hanita Brigade-the Spearhead-which covered the Galilee, the Hillmen in Judea, and the Desert Rats in the south.
The Palmach commanders from brigade level on down were young men in their twenties, often headstrong, who considered themselves an elite corps. The backbone of the Palmach consisted of boys and girls from the kibbutzim. They were communal in nature, even in military structure. Often they were politically opposed to the Yishuv Central and as often as not they resented Haganah authority.
Ari Ben Canaan was mature for his age. He could appreciate the necessity of grasping over-all strategy and carrying out orders instead of waging a private war. Submission to authority as part of a team made him desirable as a Palmach commander, but Ari was simply not yet strong enough to carry the burden. Each brigade covered a vast area in rugged
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terrain. The Palmach lived under the crudest of conditions. Ari’s leg was still too weak.
Avidan instead assigned Ari as Haganah commander to one of the vital places of Palestine, Ari’s own Huleh Valley. His command extended from the northern edge of the Sea of Galilee, included Safed, and continued up the valley in a fingerlike jut of land that pressed between the Lebanese and Syrian borders. Slightly south, a third Arab country, Trans-Jordan, bordered it at the Yarmuk River.
Ari’s area was one of the chief crossing places for Kawukji’s irregulars. If all-out war came and the regular Arab armies invaded Palestine, the Huleh Valley was certain to be one of the first objectives. The Arabs would attempt a junction of converging forces there, and if they took the Huleh they would use it as a base from which to capture the entire Galilee and to cut the Jews in half by striking between Haifa and Tel Aviv.
There were a dozen or more long-established kibbutzim and a few moshavim and villages in Ari’s area, including his own Yad El, where the tough pioneer farmers could well handle the irregulars and Palestine Arabs. The settlements on the valley floor were close enough together to make it difficult for the Arabs to use their isolation and siege tactics.
The hills on the Lebanese border presented another problem. Here Fort Esther was the key. According to British agreement, Fort Esther was to be turned over to Ari because the Huleh was predominantly Jewish. With Fort Esther in Haganah hands, Ari could maintain excellent control of the border.
Ari’s headquarters were in the centrally-located kibbutz of Ein Or-the Fountain of Light-which his uncle Akiva had helped establish. He had a few hundred Palmach troops from the Spearhead Brigade; he had David, Zev Gilboa, and Joab Yarkoni as aides. The Haganah organization in each of his settlements was strong: one hundred per cent subscribed in personnel quota and well trained.
The lack of arms was what plagued him, as it plagued the Yishuv all over Palestine. Every day settlement commanders harassed him for guns. He had none, Avidan had none.
There were two glaring weak spots in Ari’s area: Gan Dafna and Safed. Ari felt that he would be able to protect the children’s villag* once Fort Esther was turned over to him. So long as the road to Gan Dafna through Abu Yesha stayed open, the village was not in danger.
Safed was a headache. In fact no commander in Palestine had a larger headache. When the Jews made the decision to hold every settlement at any cost there were a few exceptions considered “untenable.” Safed was one of the exceptions. 470
The city was an island in a sea of forty thousand Arabs in surrounding villages. Inside Safed the Jews were outnumbered twelve to one. Most of Safed’s Jews were the Cabalists who knew nothing about fighting. In all, the Haganah in Safed had but two hundred able-bodied fighters to face more than two thousand Arabs and irregulars.
The Mufti had made Safed one of his first goals. Several hundred heavily armed irregulars had infiltrated and waited only for British withdrawal.
From the standpoint of interior strategy, the Jews were in even worse position. All three key points in the city would be in the hands of the Arabs: a police station right over the Jewish sector, the acropolis atop the town, and the Taggart fort on Mount Canaan would all be turned over to the Arabs.
In arms the Arabs had enough to carry on a war for months. The Jews had forty rifles, forty-two homemade Stens, one machine gun, and one mortar, plus a few hundred homemade grenades. They could arm less than a hundred men.
Safed appeared so obviously indefensible that the British even pled with Ari to let them evacuate the Jews.
Remez, the hotel owner and Haganah commander, paced back and forth before Ari’s desk. Sutherland sat quietly in a corner and puffed a cigar.
“Well?” Ari asked at last.
Remez leaned on the desk. “We want to stay in Safed, Ari. We want to fight it out to the last man. We have decided.”
“Good. I am glad.”
“Give us more arms.”
Ari leaped to his feet angrily. Twenty times a day he heard “give us more arms.”
“Sutherland, you pray to Christ; you pray to Confucius, Remez; and I’ll pray to Allah. Maybe rifles will rain down on us like manna from heaven.”
“Do you trust Major Hawks?” Sutherland asked, speaking of the British commander in the area.
“Hawks has always been a friend,” Ari answered.
“All right, then,” Sutherland said, “perhaps you’d better listen to him. He guarantees British protection if you evacuate Safed. Otherwise, he guarantees there will be a massacre after he pulls his troops out.”
Ari blew a long breath. “Did Hawks say when he is leaving?”
“No, he doesn’t know yet.”
“So long as Hawks remains in Safed we are relatively safe. The Arabs won’t try too much with him around. Perhaps the situation will change for the better before he pulls out.”