“ … so Gideon, and the hundred men that were with him, came unto the outside of the camp in the beginning of the middle watch; and they had but newly set the watch: and they blew the horns, and brake the pitchers that were in their hands.. And the three companies blew the horns, and brake the pitchers, and held the lamps in their left hands, and the horns in their right hands to blow withal; and they cried, The sword of the Lord and of Gideon. And they stood every man in his place round about the camp; and all the host ran, and cried, and fled.”
Malcolm closed the Bible. He walked back and forth with his hands clasped behind him and seemed to look off into space as he spoke. “Gideon was a smart man. Gideon knew the Midianites were an ignorant and a superstitious people. Gideon knew he could play on their primitive fears and that they could be frightened by noise and by the night. Gideon knew it … and so do we.”
The Arabs never knew where or when the Raider Unit would strike next. Their old reliable spy system simply did not work against Malcolm. He would send three units out in
three different directions to confuse them. He would pass on
Arab village and double back and strike it. He would send a
convoy of trucks down a road and drop men off one at a time. During the day they lay hidden in the ditches at the roadside and at night they would assemble.
Every attack that came sounded like a thousand men. He never failed to send his enemy into a panic.
He elaborated on something his Jews already knew-the terrain of Palestine. He taught them the strategic as well as the historic value of every wadi and hill and tree by pointing out how the ancient Hebrew generals had used the land and the knowledge of it to great military advantage.
Ari Ben Canaan became a devoted disciple of this eccentric Englishman, as did all of the Raiders. He went alongside Malcolm in a hundred raids against the enemy and never once was Malcolm guilty of error. It was almost as though he were divinely guided as well as divinely inspired. He created a flawless text on Arab fighting. He demanded iron discipline and fanatical and unquestioning devotion in payment for victory after victory.
The Raider Unit put a fear into the Arabs which was even greater than that of the Husseinis. With a hundred and fifty men he ripped the rebellion to shreds. The marauders began to flee and Kawukji’s grand army of liberation raced back to Lebanon. In floundering desperation the Mufti turned his fire on the oil line which ran from the Mosul fields to Haifa.
“Twenty thousand of those dunderheaded Englishmen could not defend that pipeline,” Malcolm said. “We will do it with our Raider Unit. Our plans are simple. Each time there is a break in the line the nearest Arab village to that break will be attacked and flattened by the Raider Unit. This will teach the Arab villages to guard the lines against marauders in the interest of their own safety and it will teach them not to shelter those thugs. Reprisal … remember that, for the Jews are outnumbered … we must use the principle of reprisal.”
Every time the Arabs moved they got it right back in the teeth. Reprisal, from then on, became the key to Jewish defense.
The Arab revolt petered out and died. It had been a miserable and costly failure. The Arabs had bankrupted their entire community and murdered their foremost spokesmen. Three years of riots and bloodshed had put them on the brink of destitution. In all that time they did not displace a single Jewish settlement or keep some fifty new ones from going up.
With the death throes of the Arab uprising Whitehall made a clean sweep of their government in the mandate.
Major P. P. Malcolm was told he must leave Palestine, for
his continued consorting with the Jews now would cause them nothing but embarrassment. Malcolm had been the greatest single instrument in breaking the backs of the Arabs. The Jews he trained were the nucleus of a greater new army-his brilliant tactics their military Bible.
For the last time Major P. P. Malcolm stood before his Jews at Ein Or. The Raider Unit honored by red badges on their blue farmer’s clothing stood at attention, and there were tears in the eyes of many.
Malcom opened his Bible. “… Gird thy sword upon thy thigh O most mighty, with thy glory and thy majesty. And in thy majesty ride prosperously because of truth and meekness and righteousness.”
He walked away quickly to the waiting car. His heart was broken. The Yishuv had bestowed upon him the greatest honor they could give a non-Jew. They called him “the Friend.”
Ari Ben Canaan returned to Yad El after the Raider Unit was disbanded. His heart seemed always on a lonely hill on the Lebanese border where Dafna lay in eternal sleep alongside twenty other Haganah boys and girls who had fallen for Ha Mishmar.
With things quiet and safer, Taha left Yad El, where he had lived all this time under the protection of the Ben Canaan family, to assume the job of muktar of Abu Yesha. Both Barak and Sarah realized that in the eighteen months Taha had lived with them he had fallen in love with Jordana, who was now past her thirteenth birthday. Love of a younger girl was not uncommon among Taha’s people. Both of the parents never spoke a word about it and hoped that the boy would get over it without too much pain.
The new British administration, under the command of General Haven-Hurst, came to Palestine. They soon rounded up the Raider Unit men. The latter were hauled into court and thrown into jail for terms of six months to five yearsl The charge-illegal use of arms!
Ari and a hundred other Haganah members of Malcolm’s Raider Unit were locked in the dungeon-like Acre jail. Many of them regarded their plight as rather humorous and spent their days frustrating the British guard by singing Haganah marches and songs of the fields from morning to night. It was a thick-walled old castle-clammy and monstrous and filled with lice and rats and slime and darkness.
Ari was released in the spring of 1939. He returned home to Yad El pale and gaunt.
Sarah cried in the sanctity of her room after she had seen him. What had her son had from birth but a whip and a gun
and tragedy? His Dafna was dead and so many of his comrades were dead-how long would it go on? Sarah vowed she would keep her boy at Yad El forever.
With Haven-Hurst commanding Palestine with an iron fist and open anti-Jewish sentiments the stage was set for the final British betrayal. …
There was another commission of inquiry. The three years of Mufti-inspired bloodshed were blamed on Jewish immigration.
Whitehall and Chatham House and Neville Chamberlain, their Prime Minister and renowned appeaser, shocked the world with their pronouncement. The British Government issued a White Paper on the eve of World War II shutting off immigration to the frantic German Jews and stopping Jewish land buying. The appeasers of Munich who had sold Spain and Czechoslovakia down the river had done the same to the Jews of Palestine.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN: The Yishuv was rocked by the White Paper, the most staggering single blow they had ever received. On the eve of war the British were sealing in the German Jews.
The Maccabees, who had been dormant, suddenly sprang to life. The White Paper brought Jews into the Maccabees by the hundreds. They lashed out in a series of raids, bombing a British officers’ club in Jerusalem and terrorizing the Arabs. They raided a British arsenal and they ambushed several convoys.
General Haven-Hurst completely reversed all previous policies of semi-co-operation with the Jews. The Jewish police were disbanded and the Haganah was driven underground. Leaders of the Yishuv Central and more former Raider men were hauled into court and then thrown into Acre jail.