With America’s rise, the British proposed a joint Anglo-
American inquiry into the Palestine situation. This joint committee made another exhaustive survey of the Arabs and the Yishuv. They went to Europe to the DP camps. They came to the only human conclusion possible-“100,000 jews
MUST BE ALLOWED INTO PALESTINE AT ONCE.”
The British balked.
It would only be considered if the Haganah and Palmach were disbanded at once! Preposterous! The British found a dozen more reasons not to follow the commission’s recommendations.
The Arabs were as relentless as the Maccabees. Throughout the Arab world there were riots and protests against the Anglo-American commission.
At last the Yishuv Central had had enough. They sent the Palmach and Haganah on a series of damaging raids on British positions.
The British poured in tens of thousands of front-line troops and turned the country into a police state. In a massive roundup they arrested several hundred prominent leaders of the Yishuv and threw them into Latrun prison.
In a masterful countermove, the Haganah blew up every frontier bridge in and out of Palestine in a single night.
The Aliyah Bet was putting more and more pressure on the British blockade.
Finally the British Foreign Minister burst forth with an anti-Jewish tirade and proclaimed all further immigration stopped.
The answer to this came from the Maccabees. The British had their main headquarters in the right wing of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem. This hotel was in the new city with its rear and gardens facing the wall of the old city. A dozen Maccabees, dressed as Arabs, delivered several dozen enormous milk cans to the basement of the hotel. The milk cans were placed under the right wing of the hotel beneath British headquarters. The cans were filled with dynamite. They set the timing devices, cleared the area, and phoned the British a warning to get out of the building. The British scoffed at the idea. This time the Maccabees were playing a prank. They merely wanted to make fools of the British. Surely they would not dare attack British headquarters!
In a few minutes there was a blast heard across the breadth of Palestine. The right wing of the King David Hotel was blown to smithereens!
CHAPTER NINETEEN: The Exodus was declared fit and ready for the run to Palestine.
Ari set the sailing time as the morning after the Chanukah party which the management of the Dome Hotel had arranged on the hotel terrace.
Three hundred places were set. The small Jewish community of Cyprus and the crew of the Exodus sat at a long head table. There was tremendous gaiety as the children rushed to the terrace dressed in new clothing and were deluged with gifts from the people of Cyprus and soldiers from the garrison. The children took one gift each for themselves and marked the rest for the detention camps at Caraolos. The tables were bulging with food and the children squealed with delight. The terrible ordeal of the hunger strike was behind them; they had carried their burden like adults and now they could act like happy children with complete abandon. All around the terrace dozens of curious Greeks and British soldiers watched the celebration.
Karen looked around frantically for Kitty and lit up when she saw her some distance away, standing with Mark Parker by the rail.
“Come on, Kitty,” Karen called, “There is a place for you here.”
“It’s your party,” Kitty answered. “I’ll just watch.”
When everyone had opened his present, David Ben Ami stood at the head table. The terrace became very still as he began to speak. Only the steady shush of the sea could be heard behind him.
“Tonight we celebrate the first day of Chanukah,” David said. “We celebrate this day in honor of Judah Maccabee and his brave brothers and his band of faithful men who came from the hills of Judea to do combat with the Greeks who enslaved our people.”
Some of the youngsters applauded.
“Judah Maccabee had a small band of men and they had no real right fighting so large and powerful an enemy as the Greeks, who ruled the entire world. But Judah Maccabee had faith. He believed that the one true God would show him the way. Judah was a wonderful fighter. Time and again he tricked the Greeks; his men were the greatest of warriors, for the faith of God was in their hearts. The Maccabees stormed Jerusalem and captured it and drove out the Greeks of Asia Minor, who ruled that area of the world.”
A riot of applause.
“Judah entered the Temple and his warriors tore down the idol of Zeus and again dedicated the Temple to the one true God. The same God who helped us all in our battle with the British.”
As David continued with the story of the rebirth of the
Jewish nation, Kitty Fremont listened. She looked at Karen and at Dov Landau-and she looked at Mark and she lowered her eyes. Then she felt someone standing alongside her. It was Brigadier Bruce Sutherland.
“Tonight we will light the first candle of the Menorah. Each night we will light another candle until there are eight. We call Chanukah the feast of lights.”
David Ben Ami lit the first candle and the children said “oh” and “ah.”
“Tomorrow night we shall light the second Chanukah candle at sea and the night after we shall light the third one in Eretz Israel.”
David placed a small skullcap on his head and opened the Bible. ” ‘He will not suffer thy foot to be moved; he that keepth thee will not slumber.’ ”
Kitty’s eyes came to rest on the head table. She looked at them-Zev Gilboa the farmer from the Galilee, and Joab Yarkoni the Moroccan Jew, and David Ben Ami, the scholar from Jerusalem. Her eyes stopped at Ari Ben Canaan. His eyes were rimmed with weariness now that he had had a chance to relax from his ordeal. David set the Bible down and continued to speak from memory.
“Behold!” David said, “he that keepeth Israel shall neither slumber nor sleep. ”
An icy chill passed through Kitty Fremont’s body. Her eyes were fixed on the tired face of Ari Ben Canaan. “Behold …he that keepeth Israel shall neither slumber nor sleep.”
The ancient motors of the Exodus groaned as she slid back into the center of Kyrenia Harbor and she turned and pointed out to sea in the direction of Palestine.
At dawn of the second day everyone sighted land at once.
“Palestine!”
“Eretz Israeli”
A hysteria of laughing and crying and singing and joy burst from the children.
The little salvage tug came within sight of land and the electrifying news spread through the Yishuv. The children who had brought the mighty British Empire to its knees were arriving!
The Exodus sputtered into Haifa Harbor amid a blast of welcoming horns and whistles. The salute spread from Haifa to the villages and the kibbutzim and the moshavim and all the way to Jerusalem to the Yishuv Central building and back again to Haifa.
Twenty-five thousand Jews poured onto the Haifa dock to cheer the creaky little boat. The Palestine Philharmonic
Orchestra played the Jewish anthem-“Hatikvah,” the Hope.
Tears streaked down the cheeks of Karen Hansen Clement as she looked up into Kitty’s face.
The Exodus had come home!
CHAPTER ONE: A line of silver and blue buses from the Palestine bus cooperative, the “Egged” Company, awaited the children on the docks. The official celebration was kept to a quick minimum. The children were loaded aboard the buses and whisked out of the harbor area, convoyed by British armored vehicles. The band played and the crowd cheered as they rolled out of sight.
Karen tugged her window open and shouted to Kitty, but Kitty could not hear her over the din. The buses disappeared and the crowd dispersed. In fifteen minutes the dock was deserted except for a gang of longshoremen and a few British soldiers on guard duty.
Kitty stood motionless by the rail of the Exodus, stunned by the sudden strangeness. It was hard to realize where she was. She looked at Haifa. It was beautiful, with that special beauty that belonged to cities built on hills and around a bay. Close to the waterfront was the Arab sector with crowded clusters of buildings. The Jewish sector sprawled all over the long fingerlike slope of Mount Carmel. Kitty looked to her left, just past Haifa, and saw the futuristic shape of the tank and chimney buildings of the immense Haifa oil refinery, the terminus of the lines from the Mosul fields. At a nearby dock she saw a dozen dilapidated, rickety ships of the Aliyah Bet which, like the Exodus, had managed to reach Palestine.