The Zionists were vulnerable in Jerusalem: the road from Tel Aviv passed through 30 miles of Arab territory and Abd al-Kadir Husseini, who commanded the 1,000-strong Jerusalem brigade of the mufti’s Holy War Army, attacked it constantly. ‘The Arab plan’, recalled Yitzhak Rabin, the Palmach officer born in the Holy City, ‘was to choke Jerusalem’s 90,000 Jews into submission’ – and it soon began to work.
On 1 February, Husseini’s militiamen, aided by two British deserters, blew up the offices of the Palestine Post; on the 10th, he attacked Montefiore again but was repelled by the Haganah after a six-hour gun battle. The British set up a command post below the Jaffa Gate to defend Montefiore. On 13 February, the British arrested four Haganah fighters and then released them unarmed to an Arab mob, who murdered them. On the 22nd, Husseini sent British deserters to blow up Ben Yehuda Street, an atrocity that killed fifty-two Jewish civilians. The Irgun shot ten British soldiers.
Trying to defend the Arab areas in Jerusalem, recalled Nusseibeh, ‘was like a worn-out water hose repaired in one place only to burst in two more.’ The Haganah blew up the old Nusseibeh castle. The former Arab mayor Hussein Khalidi complained, ‘Everyone’s leaving. I won’t be able to hold out much longer. Jerusalem is lost. No one is left in Katamon. Sheikh Jarrah has emptied. Everyone who has a cheque or a little money is off to Egypt, off to Lebanon, off to Damascus.’ Soon refugees were pouring out of the Arab suburbs. Katy Antonius left for Egypt; her mansion was blown up by the Haganah, but only after they had found her love-letters from General Barker. Nonetheless Abd al-Kadir Husseini had successfully cut off Jewish west Jerusalem from the coast.
Ironically the Jews, like the Arabs, felt they were losing Jerusalem. By early 1948, the Jewish Quarter in the Old City was under siege and defence was made more difficult by the number of non-combatant ultra-Orthodox Jews. ‘Well, what about Jerusalem?’ Ben-Gurion asked his generals on 28 March at his headquarters in Tel Aviv. ‘That’s the decisive battle. The fall of Jerusalem could be a deathblow to the Yishuv.’ The generals could spare only 500 men. The Jews had been on the defensive since the UN vote, but now Ben-Gurion ordered Operation Nachshon to clear the road to Jerusalem, the start of a wider offensive, Plan D, designed to secure the UN-assigned Jewish areas but also west Jerusalem. ‘The plan’, writes the historian Benny Morris, ‘explicitly called for the destruction of resisting Arab villages and the expulsion of their inhabitants’ but ‘nowhere does the document speak of a policy or desire to expel “the Arab inhabitants” of Palestine.’ In some places, the Palestinians remained in their homes; in some places they were expelled.
The village of Kastel controlled the road from the coast to Jerusalem. On the night of 2 April, the Haganah seized the stronghold, but Husseini massed his militiamen (including Iraqi irregulars) to retake it. He and Anwar Nusseibeh realized, however, that they needed reinforcements. The two of them hurried to Damascus to demand artillery only to be exasperated by the incompetence and intrigues of the Arab League generals. ‘Kastel has fallen,’ said the Iraqi commander-in-chief. ‘It’s your job to get it back, Abd al-Kadir.’
‘Give us the weapons I requested and we will recover it,’ answered Husseini furiously.
‘What’s this, Abd al-Kadir? No cannon?’ said the general, who offered nothing.
Husseini stormed out: ‘You traitors! History will record that you lost Palestine. I’ll take Kastel or die fighting with my mujahidin!’ That night he wrote a poem for his seven-year-old son Faisal who, decades later, would become Yasser Arafat’s Palestinian ‘minister’ for Jerusalem:
This land of the brave is the land of our forefathers
The Jews have no right to this land.
How can I sleep while the enemy rules it?
Something burns in my heart. My homeland beckons.
The commander reached Jerusalem next morning and mustered his fighters.
GUN SALUTES ON THE HARAM: ABD AL-KADIR HUSSEINI
On 7 April, Abd al-Kadir led 300 fighters and three British deserters up to Kastel. At 11 o’clock that night, they attacked the village but were repelled. At dawn the next day, Husseini moved forward to replace a wounded officer, but as he approached in the fog, unsure who held the actual village, a Haganah sentry, thinking the new arrivals were Jewish reinforcements, called in Arabic slang: ‘Up here, boys!’
‘Hello, boys,’ retorted Husseini in English. The Jews often used Arabic – but never English. The Haganah sentry sensed danger and let slip a volley that hit Husseini. His comrades fled, leaving him on the ground, moaning, ‘Water, water.’ Despite attention from a Jewish medic, he died. The gold watch and the ivory-handled pistol revealed that he was a leader, but who was he?
On the radio, the exhausted Haganah defenders eavesdropped on the anxious Arabic talk of regaining the body of the lost commander. His brother Khaled assumed the command. As word spread, Arab militiamen streamed into the area on buses, donkeys and trucks and retook the village, the Palmach troops dying in position. The Arabs killed their fifty Jewish prisoners and mutilated the bodies. The Arabs had retaken the key to Jerusalem – with Husseini’s body.
‘What a sad day! His martyrdom depressed everyone,’ recorded Wasif Jawhariyyeh. ‘A warrior of patriotism and Arab nobility!’ On Friday 9 April, ‘no one stayed in their house. Everyone walked in the procession. I was at the funeral,’ Wasif noted. Thirty thousand mourners – Arab fighters waving their rifles, Arab Legionaries from Jordan, peasants, the Families – attended as the fallen Husseini was buried on the Temple Mount next to his father and near King Hussein in Jerusalem’s Arab pantheon. There was an eleven-cannon salute; gunmen fired into the air and a witness claimed that more mourners were killed than had died in the storming of Kastel. ‘It sounded as if a major battle was in progress. Church bells rang, voices cried for revenge; everyone feared a Zionist attack,’ remembered Anwar Nusseibeh, who was ‘despondent’. But the Arab fighters were so keen to attend Husseini’s burial that they left no garrison in Kastel. The Palmach destroyed the stronghold.
As Husseini was being buried, 120 fighters of the Irgun and Lehi jointly attacked an Arab village just west of Jerusalem named Deir Yassin, where they committed the most shameful Jewish atrocity of the war. They were under specific orders not to harm women, children or prisoners. As they entered the village, they came under fire. Four Jewish fighters were killed and several dozen wounded. Once they were in Deir Yassin, the Jewish fighters tossed grenades into houses and slaughtered men, women and children. The number of victims is still debated, but between 100 and 254, including entire families, were murdered. The survivors were then paraded in trucks through Jerusalem until the Haganah released them. The Irgun and Lehi were undoubtedly aware that a spectacular massacre would terrify many Arab civilians and encourage flight. The Irgun commander, Begin, contrived to deny that the atrocity had taken place while boasting of its utility: ‘The legend [of Deir Yassin] was worth half a dozen battalions to the forces of Israel. Panic overwhelmed the Arabs.’ But Ben-Gurion apologized to King Abdullah, who rejected the apology.
Arab vengeance was swift. On 14 April, a convoy of ambulances and food trucks set off for the Hadassah Hospital on Mount Scopus. Bertha Spafford watched as ‘a hundred and fifty insurgents, armed with weapons varying from blunderbusses and old flintlocks to modern Sten and Bren guns, took cover behind a cactus patch in the grounds of the American Colony. Their faces were distorted by hate and lust for revenge,’ she wrote. ‘I went out and faced them. I told them, “To fire from the shelter of the American Colony is the same as firing from a mosque,”’ but they ignored her rollcall of sixty years’ philanthropy and threatened to kill her if she did not withdraw. Seventy-seven Jews, mainly doctors and nurses, were killed and twenty wounded before the British intervened. ‘Had it not been for Army interference,’ declared the Arab Higher Committee, ‘not a single Jewish passenger would have remained alive.’ The gunmen mutilated the dead and photographed each other with the corpses splayed in macabre poses. The photographs were mass-produced and sold as postcards in Jerusalem.