The home of Tamir was Haganah headquarters.
The cellar held munitions and arms, and a printing press which ground out leaflets in Arabic warning the Arabs to remain calm and keep the peace. In another section of the basement a girl spoke in Arabic into a tape recording machine, repeating the warning of the leaflets. The tape would
later be transmitted over the secret mobile radio station, Kol Israel-the Voice of Israel. The manufacturing of hand grenades and the assembly of homemade Sten guns were also among the activites of the underground headquarters.
All activity stopped as Dr. Tamir appeared with Ari. The latter was surrounded and congratulated on the Exodus affair; questions were fired at him from all sides.
“Later, later,” Dr. Tamir pleaded.
“I must see Avidan,” Ari said.
He made his way past the stacked cases of rifles to the door of a secluded office and knocked upon it.
“Yes?”
Ari opened the door and stood before the bald-headed, squat farmer who commanded the underground army. Avidan looked up from the papers on his rickety desk and burst into a smile. “Ari! Shalom!” He sprang up and threw his arms around Ari’s neck, shoved him into a chair, closed the door, and slapped Ari on the back with the force of a pile driver. “So good to see you, Ari! You did a first-class job on the British. Where are the boys?”
“I sent them home.”
“Good. They deserve a few days. Take a few days yourself.”
This was an impressive reward from Avidan, who had not taken a day off for himself in a quarter of a century.
“Who is the girl you came in with?”
“An Arab spy. Don’t be so nosy.”
“Is she one of our friends?”
“No, she isn’t a friend. Not even a fellow traveler.”
“A shame. We could use a good American Christian.”
“No, she’s just a nice woman who looks at Jews as though she were looking into a cage at a zoo. I’m running her up to Jerusalem tomorrow to see Harriet Saltzman about getting her a place in Youth Aliyah.”
“Something personal, maybe?”
“Good Lord, no. Now turn your Jewish curiosity somewhere else.”
The room was stuffy. Avidan pulled out a large blue kerchief and mopped the sweat from his bald pate.
“That was quite a welcome we got yesterday from the Maccabees. I hear the refinery will be burning for a week. Wrecked production.”
Avidan shook his head. “They did a good job yesterday-but what of the day before yesterday and what of the day after tomorrow? They are making three bad raids to every good one. Every time they resort to brutality or indiscriminate murder the whole Yishuv suffers. We are the ones who have to answer for Maccabee actions. Tomorrow General Haven-Hurst and the high commissioner will be at Yishuv Central. They’ll be pounding their fists on Ben Gurion’s desk demanding we use the Haganah to apprehend them. I swear I don’t know what to do sometimes. So far the British haven’t really turned on the Haganah but I am afraid if Maccabee terror continues … they’ve even taken up bank robbery to finance their operations.”
“British banks, I hope.” Ari lit a cigarette and stood up and paced the tiny office. “Perhaps the time has come to stage a few good raids of our own.”
“No … we just can’t risk the Haganah. We are the ones who must defend all the Jews. Illegal immigration … that is the way we will fight them for now. One thing like the Exodus is more important than blowing up ten Haifa refineries.”
“But the day must come that we commit ourselves, Avidan. We have an army or we don’t.”
Avidan took some sheets of paper from his desk drawer and pushed them over toward Ari. Ari thumbed through them: order of battle, 6th airborne division.
Ari looked up. “They have three parachute brigades?”
“Keep reading.”
ROYAL ARMORED CORPS WITH KING’S OWN HUSSARS, 53RD WORCESTERSHIRE, 249TH AIRBORNE PARK, DRAGOON GUARDS, ROYAL LANCERS, QUEEN’S ROYAL, EAST SURREY, MIDDLESEX, GORDON HIGHLANDERS, ULSTER RIFLES, HERTFORDSHIRE REGIMENT-the list of British troops in Palestine ran on and on. Ari threw the papers down on Avidan’s desk. “Whom are they fighting, the Russian Army?”
“You see, Ari? Every day I go through it with some young hotheads in the Palmach. Why don’t we raid? Why don’t we come out and fight? Do, you think I like it? Ari … they have twenty per cent of the combat strength of the British Army here. One hundred thousand troops, not counting the Trans-Jordan Arab Legion. Sure, the Maccabees run around shooting up everything, grabbing the limelight, accusing us of hiding.” Avidan slammed his fist on the desk. “By God, I’m trying to put an army together. We haven’t even got ten thousand rifles to fight with and if the Haganah goes, we all go with it.
“You see, Ari … the Maccabees can keep mobility and hide with a few thousand blowhards. We have got to stall and keep stalling. We can’t have a showdown. We can’t get Haven-Hurst angry, either. One British soldier here for every five Jews.”
Ari picked up the list of British troops again and studied it in silence.
“The British dragnets, cordons, screenings, raids get worse
every day. The Arabs are building strength while the British turn their backs.”
Ari nodded. “Where do I go from here?” “I am not going to give you a command, yet. Go on home, take a few days’ rest then report to Palmach at Ein Or kibbutz. I want you to assess our strength in every settlement in the Galilee. We want to know what we can expect to hold … what we are going to lose.”
“I’ve never heard you talk like this, Avidan.” “Things have never been so bad. The Arabs have refused even to sit at the same conference table and talk with us in London.”
Ari walked to the door.
“My love to Barak and Sarah and tell Jordana to behave herself with David Ben Ami home. I am sending him and the other boys to Ein Or.”
“I’ll be in Jerusalem tomorrow,” Ari said. “Do you want anything?”
“Yes, dig me up ten thousand front-line troops and the arms to outfit them.” “Shalom, Avidan.”
“Shalom, Ari. It is good to have you home.” Ari grew morose as he drove back to Tel Aviv. Long ago in Cyprus he had told young David Ben Ami that many things are tried in the Haganah and Palmach and Aliyah Bet. Some plans work and some fail. A professional should do his work and not become entangled emotionally. Ari Ben Canaan was a machine. He was an efficient, daring operator. Sometimes he won, sometimes he lost.
But once in a while Ari Ben Canaan looked at it all with realism and it nearly crushed him.
Exodus, the Haifa refinery, a raid here, a raid there. Men died to smuggle in fifty rifles. Men were hanged for smuggling in a hundred frantic survivors. He was a little man fighting a giant. He wished, at that moment, he could have David Ben Ami’s faith in divine intervention, but Ari was a realist.
Kitty Fremont waited in the little bar off the lobby for Ari’s return. He had been so decent that she wanted to wait up for him and talk some more and have a nightcap or two. She saw him walk into the lobby and go to the desk for his key.
“Ari!” she called.
His face showed the same deep concentration it had showed that first day she saw him on Cyprus. She waved to him but he did not even seem to see or to hear her. He looked directly at her, then walked upstairs to his room.
CHAPTER TWO: Two buses carrying fifty of the Exodus children drove past the tel of the ruins of Hazor and into the Huleh Valley All during the drive from Haifa through the Galilee the travelers had been hanging out of the window cheering and waving and pointing in wonder at the sights of their long-promised land.
“Dov! Everything is so beautiful!” Karen cried.
Dov’s grumble Karen interpreted as meaning that he didn’t see so much to make a fuss about.
They drove deep into the Huleh to Yad El, the home of Ari Ben Canaan. Here a road branched from the main road and ran up into the hills toward the Lebanese border. The children saw the road sign pointing to Gan Dafna; they nearly exploded with anticipation, with the lone exception of the morose Dov Landau. The buses worked up the winding road and soon the Huleh expanded into full vista, carpeted with green fields of the kibbutzim and moshavim. The rectangular fishponds made a dozen small lakes around the larger swamplands of Huleh Lake.