Leon Uris (23 page)

He was suspicious of how the Arab press had changed the entire story of the genocide overnight. He was suspicious because the British were doing everything in their power to stop the Jews from entering Palestine. Thousands upon thousands of British combat troops were arriving in the country. It made no sense to my father. He knew that many thousands of Jews had fought for the British in the war. If these had been Arab troops, he reasoned, the Arabs would expect the reward of ruling Palestine. The British had won and the Jews had helped immensely. Why then were the British keeping them out? He had studied maps all during the war and he had incredible native instincts. Haj Ibrahim reasoned and concluded that the British had too much invested in the region, in the Canal, in creating Trans-Jordan, and mainly in the oil fields of the Arabian Peninsula. Because these were in Arab lands, the British had to yield to Arab pressure, and their investment, particularly in the oil, was more important to them than any Jews.

At last my father called me to the prophet’s tomb early one day in 1946. He made me swear I would keep a secret. Omar, who tended the stalls in the souks, was to purchase a Palestine
Post
every day and I was to read it to Haj Ibrahim. It was the newspaper of the Jews and it gave a completely different story from that which was in the Arab press or on the radio. It was the first time we even heard of the war crimes trials at Nuremberg.

When he had pondered the question fully, my father reached a decision. He told me one night that the genocide had really taken place. ‘Now we Moslems will have to pay for the sins of the Christians. The Christians are very guilty about their behavior, even the Allies, who kept the secret. They want to wash their hands of their sins and they will do so by dumping the survivors in an Arab land. It is a black day for us, Ishmael.’

I didn’t think it was a black day because I didn’t quite understand him. I had planned the day very carefully. I ‘discovered’ two new parcels of land not paying rents and I had read very well in both English and Arabic. Despite his bad mood, I decided to confront him.

‘Father,’ I said, ‘my backside grows very sore on the bench while I am reading to you. I would like to sit in the other big chair.’

Well, he knew what was up. None of my brothers and certainly no women were allowed the privilege of that second chair, which had been reserved for honored guests. What I had asked of him had far-reaching implications. He thought about it for what seemed like an hour.

‘Very well, Ishmael,’ he said at last, ‘you may sit next to me, but only when you read.’

G
IDEON
A
SCH’S WAR ENDED
abruptly with the British conquest of Iraq. He had lost his left hand in an Iraqi prison after trying to defend the Baghdad ghetto. He was bitter because British troops had reached the scene of the Arab massacre and did nothing to stop it, nor anything to investigate it afterward.

Gideon scarcely had time to recover from one war before he was plunged into another: a dark war of illegal immigrant runners, underground fighting, political struggle, arms smuggling. A war of polished conference tables and clandestine meetings in dark seamy harbor-side hotels.

Gideon was made an aide without portfolio to David Ben-Gurion, who headed the Jewish Agency of Palestine, their quasi-government. He was to be involved in many kinds of operations in many places at many times.

Gideon’s first task was to attempt to capitalize on the contribution Palestine’s Jews had made during the war. Upward of thirty-five thousand men and women had worn the British uniform and by the war’s end had carried their own banner into battle in Italy.

He quickly tried to point out that the overwhelming majority of the Arab nations had not lifted a finger on behalf of the Allied victory and had no right to scream for the political spoils. It was the Jews who had fought the Nazis without reservation.

Gideon was a native Palestinian who was more at home in a Bedouin tent than in a Left Bank café. Christian Europe was sometimes a distant notion. He greeted the news of the Holocaust with disbelief at first, then sank into a terrible depression.

The stench of the human slaughterhouses permeated Europe as the lid was lifted on the cesspools of Auschwitz and Buchenwald and Dachau and Bergen-Belsen and Majdanek and Treblinka and dozens of other death camps.

Europeans were civilized, Gideon had always been taught. Christians were certainly nowhere as cruel as Arabs and Moslems. For Gideon and the rest of the Jews, the illusion had been shattered. What an advanced, civilized Western culture had done to an innocent, defenseless people was without precedent in human annals.

A pitiful handful of survivors, a few hundred thousand out of over six million, climbed out of man’s foulest pit. Even as the victorious Allied captains and kings and their armies departed the fields of battle, the gates of mercy were slammed in the faces of the living-dead remnants of European Jewry. In their ranks had been thousands of great and near great and noble names who had made an incredible contribution to the world; a race of people that had done as much for the betterment of the human race as any people of their size.

There was little time to mourn. Gideon and the Yishuv plunged into salvaging what could be salvaged, building for the inevitable war with the Arabs. He was first assigned to help beef up the Palmach, a striking force of young, handpicked Haganah Jews. Many of them had been members of Orde Wingate’s Special Night Squad.

When Winston Churchill was voted from office, the New British Labour Government chose as its foreign secretary a rather heartless bullyboy and Jew-baiter named Ernest Bevin. Crudely he told the survivors of Hitler that he would not allow the Jews to push to the head of the queue and ordered the Royal Navy to blockade Palestine against refugee ships.

Desperate to flee the graveyard that was Europe, the survivors were to find no place in the world that would offer them refuge, except for the Yishuv in Palestine. Those who had survived Hitler were to board unseaworthy boats and be further victims of the outrage of British warships ramming them on the high seas and boarding and bludgeoning them into submission. They arrived in Palestine under British bayonets and were locked in new concentration camps.

The Haganah plunged into the battle of Aliyah Bet, the ‘illegal’ immigration. Gideon Asch was commissioned to establish an underground operations unit to purchase refugee boats, find Jewish naval veterans from around the world to form crews, and seek out sympathetic ports in southern France and Italy to begin their blockade runs.

In Palestine itself the Jewish Agency restrained the Haganah in order to be able to keep a political dialogue going with the British. At the same time they covertly trained the Palmach under the cover of the kibbutzim. Although the Haganah kept its powder dry, the Yishuv had two smaller armed bands operating outside of Jewish Agency jurisdiction and these were furious and volatile.

There was the Irgun, led by a Holocaust survivor named Menachem Begin, and a smaller group known as the Stern Group. Gideon Asch was trusted by both organizations and was assigned as a liaison to them. For a time Gideon was able to keep a semblance of cooperation between the Irgun and the Haganah. But that time passed, as the new British policy became apparent.

No amount of argument Gideon tried to put forth could keep the Irgun and Stern Group from unilaterally going to war against the British, and they stung them with bomb and ambush. As the Royal Navy prowled the Mediterranean for refugee runners, more thousands of British combat troops poured into fortress Palestine to stem what was expanding into a Jewish revolt.

The treatment of the survivors became so inhumane that the Jewish Agency could no longer remain silent and keep its credibility. Gideon, who had tried to restrain the Irgun, now led a group of hard-line Haganah commanders to pressure Ben-Gurion into action and the Haganah was finally unleashed!

In their initial operation the Haganah attacked a British concentration camp set near the ruins of a Crusader fort at Athlit, on the Mediterranean. Executing a textbook strike, they liberated over two hundred illegals and dispersed them in the kibbutzim. This was followed by attack after attack on British installations: police forts, radar emplacements, munitions dumps, naval bases, communications centers. The British answered with more fresh troops until their garrison contained upward of a hundred thousand men.

By 1946 Palestine was in chaos.

In May of that year Foreign Secretary Bevin made a series of treacherous declarations. After initially agreeing to accept an immediate hundred thousand refugees into Palestine, he reneged, reversed his position, and declared an end to all Jewish immigration! He further declared an end to all land sales to the Yishuv and rejected all Jewish political claims in Palestine. Henceforth, Bevin stated, any refugee boat caught on the open seas would be escorted by force to the Island of Cyprus, the victims to be interned in new concentration camps established there.

A month later His Majesty’s forces made a gigantic sweep of Jewish Palestine, arresting a thousand of the Yishuv’s leaders, the heads of the Jewish Agency, and Haganah commanders, with Gideon Asch among them. The young Palmach commanders were thrown into a camp at Rafah, while members of the Irgun were interned in the Acre Prison. It had once been the Ottoman fortress that had turned back Napoleon and was now one of the toughest penal institutions in the Empire. It bulged with prisoners from the Haganah, Palmach, Irgun, and Stern Group.

British units pounced on and scoured kibbutz and village for arms caches. Tel Aviv was cut off by two divisions of troops that dragged the city for guns, illegals, and Jewish fighters.

The Irgun, now operating independently, replied by blowing up British headquarters in Jerusalem’s King David Hotel.

With the disappearance of all semblance of order, the British feverishly backed down and called for a truce with the Jewish Agency. The Agency was reinstated and its leaders were released from prison. In turn, the Agency halted Haganah operations and called for negotiations. Despite the Haganah’s efforts to unify the dissident forces, the Irgun and Stern Group announced from their covert headquarters that they would not be bound by the truce.

1947
His Majesty’s government was faced with two alternatives. They could throw more might into Palestine and stop the Jewish revolt by raw power and suppression. In the end the British had no stomach to commit the atrocities required to remain in power and fell back to their second alternative, a position of negotiation.

The year was ushered in by a British partition plan that called for Arab, Jewish, and British cantons under supreme British rule. They had drawn ridiculous borders. Both the Jewish Agency and the Arab leaders rejected the plan out of hand.

It was apparent that Britain’s ability to rule had been exhausted. A month later the British lion was brought to its knees with the announcement that it was turning the entire Palestine problem over to the United Nations. Nonetheless, the blockade of the Palestinian coast continued as desperate, half-maddened survivors filled up the concentration camps on Cyprus after being turned back within sight of the shores of the Holy Land.

In the most audacious of all raids, the Irgun broke into the Acre prison and liberated their comrades. During this period the British hanged several Irgun fighters and the Irgun retaliated by kidnapping and hanging two British sergeants.

In July of 1947 the British played their ugliest card in the mandate by returning a refugee boat with nearly five thousand aboard to Germany, the graveyard of the Jewish people.

November 29, 1947

The United Nations General Assembly convened at Lake Success, New York, to vote on their own partition plan to divide Palestine into separate Arab and Jewish states. The Arabs, who had refused to come to the table to negotiate throughout the tortured history of the mandate, remained consistent. They rejected the plan before it came to a vote.

The Jewish Agency, realizing it could gain no more, agreed to accept the plan.

With Britain having wiped her hands of Palestine, the United States of America was suddenly and vividly in the picture.

As the Arabs rushed to their new friends, the Russians, they did so confident that the partition plan would be defeated. In an ideological reversal of three decades since the Russian Revolution a young Russian delegate named Andrei Gromyko announced to a startled world that the Soviet Union was going to support the Americans in the partition.

Even so, the United Nations was made up largely of small states, a third of them in Latin America and all of them susceptible to oil blackmail.

It all came down to a moment of truth in the postwar world. One could smell the tension in Tabah as the village men gathered in the café in the middle of the night to listen to the broadcast on the partition vote. Even the women dared to inch around the outside of the café.

With their usual prebattle bravado the villagers had lulled and convinced themselves the partition had to fail. Only Haj Ibrahim faced reality.

‘We are about to witness a guilty world being manipulated by the Zionists,’ he admonished.

The fellahin of Tabah did not agree.

They are forever postponing reality and decision, their muktar thought. Despite the favorable signs of enormous pressure by the Arab states, Haj Ibrahim knew quietly that the combination of America and Russia was probably too great to overcome.

Then the votes came in. As nation after nation cast its ballot, the villagers began to feel the despair creep over them. Haj Ibrahim did not even wait for the final tally. He arose morosely, said, ‘It is the will of Allah,’ and left.

At Lake Success, a devastated British Government, which had abstained, watched red-faced as their wartime allies turned on them. The final count was thirty-three to thirteen, with ten abstentions, in favor of partition. His Majesty’s delegate arose and announced that Britain would not cooperate in implementing the partition and would withdraw her forces from Palestine by May 14, 1948. Thus ended the shameful episode of the mandate.