1948: A History of the First Arab-Israeli War (27 page)

Early on 9 April the IZL and LHI troops-altogether about 12o menadvanced on the village from the western edge of Jerusalem in two columns, with a van carrying a bullhorn between them. The van blared a message calling on the villagers to put down their weapons and flee. But the van quickly overturned in a ditch; the villagers may not have heard the broadcasts. As the attackers moved in, they encountered unexpectedly strong fire from the village's stone houses and were repeatedly pinned down. Haganah machine gunners provided intermittent covering fire from nearby hills, and two squads of Palmahniks in armored cars arrived to help extricate the wounded and neutralize key positions. The IZL and LHI troopers moved from house to house, lobbing in grenades and spraying the interiors with small arms fire. They blew up houses and sometimes cut down those fleeing into the alleyways, including one or two families. The operation lasted into late afternoon. The attackers suffered four dead and several dozen wounded, including the operation's commander.

It quickly emerged that the fighting had been accompanied, and followed, by atrocities. In part, these were apparently triggered by the unexpectedly strong resistance and by the (relatively) high casualties suffered by the attacking force. Some militiamen and unarmed civilians were shot on the spot. A few villagers may have been trucked into Jerusalem and then taken back to Deir Yassin and executed; a group of male prisoners were shot in a nearby quarry; several of those captured were shot in Sheikh Bader, a temporary LHI base in West Jerusalem. As the town's HIS commander, Yitzhak Levy, reported on 12 April, "The conquest of the village was carried out with great cruelty. Whole families-women, old people, children-were killed.... Some of the prisoners moved to places of detention, including women and children, were murdered viciously by their captors. "53

In a follow-up report, Levy said that LHI participants later charged that IZL troops had "raped a number of girls and murdered them afterwards (we [that is, the HIS] don't know if this is true)."54 The mukhtar's son, who had been a Haganah agent, was among those executed. The IZL and LHI troopers systematically pillaged the village and stripped the inhabitants of jewelry and money.55 Altogether, 100-120 villagers (including combatants) died that day56-though the IZL, Haganah, Arab officials, and the British almost immediately inflated the number to "254" (or "245"), each for their own propagandistic reasons. Most of the villagers either fled or were trucked through West Jerusalem and dumped at Musrara, outside the Old City walls. The atrocities were condemned by the Jewish Agency, the Haganah command, and the Yishuv's two chief rabbis, and the agency sent King Abdullah a letter condemning the atrocities and apologizing-17 (which he rebuffed, saying that "the Jewish Agency stands at the head of all Jewish affairs in Palestine"). 58

But the real significance of Deir Yassin lay, not in what had actually happened on 9 April, or in the diplomatic exchanges that followed, but in its political and demographic repercussions. In the weeks after the massacre the Arab media inside and outside Palestine continuously broadcast reports about the atrocities-usually with blood-curdling exaggerations59-in order to rally Arab public opinion and governments against the Yishuv.60 Without doubt, they were successful. The broadcasts fanned outrage and reinforced the Arab governments' resolve to invade Palestine five weeks later. Indeed, 'Abdullah was to point to the massacre at Deir Yassin as one of the reasons he was joining the invasion and why he could not honor his previous assurances of nonbelligerency vis-a-vis the Yishuv (see below).61

The most important immediate effect of the media atrocity campaign, however, was to spark fear and further panic flight from Palestine's villages and towns. The broadcasts may, in part, have been designed to reinforce Palestinian Arab steadfastness. Yet their effect was quite the opposite: hearing of what the Jews had done tended to sap morale and precipitate panic. Indeed, the IZL immediately trotted this out in justification of the original attack: Deir Yassin had promoted "terror and dread among the Arabs in all the villages around; in al-Maliha, Qaluniya, and Beit Iksa a panic flight began that facilitates the renewal of [Jewish] road communications ... between the capital [that is, West Jerusalem] and the rest of the country."62 "In one blow we changed the strategic situation of our capital," boasted the organization.63 Menachem Begin, the leader of the IZL, who denied that a massacre had taken place, was later to argue that "the legend [of Deir Yassin] was worth half a dozen battalions to the forces of Israel. Panic overwhelmed the Arabs. "64

The IZL commanders, then and later, may have had an interest in exaggerating the impact of Deir Yassin. But they weren't far off the mark. HIS officers around the country immediately reported on the fear- and flight-sowing impact of Deir Yassin.65 Ben-Gurion himself noted-probably not unhappily-that Deir Yassin had propelled flight from Haifa.66 British intelligence commented that "the violence used [at Deir Yassin] so impressed Arabs all over the country that an attack by [the] Haganah on [the Arab village of] Saris met with no opposition whatsoever."67 Mapam's leaders later assessed that Deir Yassin had been one of the two pivotal events (the other was the fall of Arab Haifa) in the exodus of Palestine's Arabs.61 The HIS-AD, in summarizing the Arab flight to the end of June 194.8, pointed to Deir Yassin as a "decisive accelerating factor."69

But Deir Yassin was also, in an immediate, brutal sense, to harm the Jews. On the morning of 13 April, hundreds of militiamen from Jerusalem and surrounding villages, taking revenge for Deir Yassin and the death of Abd alQadir, descended on the road running through the East Jerusalem neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah, which linked Jewish Jerusalem and Mount Scopus, and ambushed a ten-vehicle Haganah convoy carrying mostly unarmed Jewish lecturers, students, nurses and doctors on their way to the mountaintop Hadassah Hospital-Hebrew University campus. Ironically, the convoy was also carrying two IZL fighters wounded at Deir Yassin. During the previous months, the Arabs had left these convoys-which were often accompanied by British armored cars-alone.

But on 13 April there was no British escort. Perhaps, as they later claimed, the British were shorthanded; perhaps they regarded revenge for Deir Yassin as fitting. It was a classic ambush: at 9:30 AM a large mine blew a hole in the road, halting the convoy. The attackers then let loose with light weapons and grenades. The six smaller, lighter vehicles managed to turn around and flee back to West Jerusalem. But the two armor-plated buses, packed with medical staff and students, and the two escort vehicles, were caught, able neither to advance nor to turn back. For hours the Haganah guards kept the attackers at bay while Haganah HQ pleaded with the British to intervene.

The government reacted lackadaisically if not with utter cynicism. As a Jewish Agency official put it, "British soldiers witnessed at close quarters uni versity professors, doctors and nurses being shot down or roasted alive in the burning vehicles without doing anything."70 Ben-Gurion was to define the event as "an English massacre. They were there, didn't lift a finger and prevented others from helping."71 At around noon, a British officer, Major Jack Churchill, possibly on his own initiative, drove up but was unable to cajole any of the passengers to leave the buses and run for it to his armored car and an accompanying pickup; they preferred to await Haganah rescue. But the Haganah was warned off by the authorities and, in any case, lacked an effective relief force. Three Palmah armored cars that reached the area were hit and driven back by the ambushers. Distant Haganah outposts intermittently let loose with machine guns and mortars but to little effect.

The shooting went on for more than five hours. The defenders' fire slowly tapered off as their ammunition ran out. The ambushers inched toward the buses, eventually dousing them with gasoline and setting them alight. A British column reached the scene at 3:45 PM. But it was too late. By then, seventy-eight academics, doctors, students, nurses, and Haganah men were dead, many roasted alive. Only thirty bodies were recovered and buried; the rest had turned to ashes.72 The Arabs had had their revenge.7a

The ambush had a curious political consequence: Hebrew University president Yehuda Leib Magnes, a pillar of the Thud Association, which had for years promoted a binational solution to the Palestine problem, was in effect forced to quit his job. For years, he had promoted this non-Zionist alternative; and for weeks, before the ambush, he had stridently criticized Jewish attacks on Arabs (Deir Yassin and others) and defended the British. But the killing of the convoy's passengers, many of them Hebrew University employees, coupled with the government's protracted inaction, thoroughly discredited Magnes, already under attack by right-wing professors. Four days later he left Palestine for the United States, ostensibly in search of fiends for his beloved university. He never returned and died there a few months later.

The primary, limited objective of Operation Nahshon, to push a large convoy through the hills to Jerusalem, was almost immediately achieved. The twenty-five supplies-laden trucks, accompanied by five armored buses and eighteen armored cars, had started out from Kibbutz Hulda in the early hours of 6 April and reached the capital later that morning, almost without incident. The recapture of al-Qastal had enabled the Haganah to send the emptied vehicles safely back down the road to Hulda, to reload for a further trip. Several more convoys reached Jerusalem during the following fortnight.

But the brief lifting of the siege had not been achieved only through the protracted fight for al-Qastal; other villages along the road had served as op erational bases for the Arab irregulars. On 6 April Palmah and Giv`ati forces took Arab Khulda and neighboring Deir Muheizin almost without a fight. Arab militiamen from the Ramla area mounted counterattacks, but the Jewish garrison in Deir Muheizin, reinforced from Kibbutz Hulda, beat them off However, on the evening of 7 April a British armored column drove up to the village-and demanded that the Haganah pull out (the British promised that they would not allow the irregulars to return). The Haganah complied. During the following days, the Haganah captured the villages of Qaluniya (ii April), whose militiamen had repeatedly attacked positions around al-Qastal, and Saris (16 April), just south of the road. But repeated attacks, on 15, 18, and 19 April, on the village of Suba, southwest of al-Qastal, were unsuccessful.

On 13 April Ben-Gurion had cabled Avidan: "The battle is not yet over, but this great operation-the largest of all our operations during the past four months, means that if we want-we can beat the enemy"74 In fact, Nahshon had been only partially successful: several convoys had made it through and a number of villages had been taken and either permanently occupied or leveled. (Nahshon HQ orders, between 8 and 15 April, were consistent: to level the villages and drive out their inhabitants.)75 But the Haganah forces allocated were insufficient to permanently clear and hold such a swath of territory. Arab villages and militia units remained in situ and continued intermittently to block passage along the road. For all intents and purposes, Jerusalem remained cut off

The Haganah then launched a number of smaller, follow-up operations to "lift the siege"76 and secure its hold on West Jerusalem. In Operation Harel (16 -21 April), it managed to push three convoys up to Jerusalem, and on 20 April, the villages ofBiddu and Beit Suriq, just north of the road, were raided and partially destroyed.

The following day, the bulk of the Harel Brigade moved to Jerusalem to undertake Operation Yevussi; segments of the Jerusalem-Tel Aviv road were left at the mercy of the Arab militias. During Yevussi (i), Palmah units took the village of Beit Iksa and the suburb village of Shu`fat (22 April), respectively northwest and north of Jerusalem, and partially destroyed them (the order was to "destroy" the villages)77 before withdrawing, but failed to take the dominant heights of Nabi Samwil, where several dozen Jewish fighters were killed in a disorganized retreat.78

In Jerusalem itself, in Yevussi (2), the Palmah was more successful. On 25 April Harel units conquered the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood and the neighboring Police School fort, north of the Old City, establishing territorial continuity between West Jerusalem and Mount Scopus. But the British, bent on maintaining control of the road from Jerusalem northward, demanded that the Haganah leave. When the Haganah refused, they let loose with cannon and mortar fire, injuring about two dozen Jewish troopers and forcing a hasty Palmah withdrawal.79 A similar Haganah effort to bolster the Mount Scopus position by taking the Augusta Victoria Hospital compound to its south failed after encountering unexpectedly strong resistance and after a Palmah mortar exploded.80

But the southern arm of Yevussi (z), designed to establish territorial continuity between the center of Jewish Jerusalem and the isolated southern Jewish neighborhoods of Mekor Hayim and Talpiyot, fared better. Almost all the Arabs living in West Jerusalem, including the inhabitants of Talbiyeh, Bak a, and the German Colony and the Greek Colony, had fled to the Old City or farther afield during the previous months.8' The problem remained Katamon, the prosperous neighborhood near Rehavia that sat astride the road south, to Mekor Hayim. Many of its inhabitants had already fled, but the neighborhood was strongly held by a band led by Abu Diya. The Haganah attack on Katamon was partly triggered by sniping from Katamon at Jewish areas and, perhaps, by the British evacuation of the Alamein Camp, just east of the neighborhood, which was then occupied by Arab militiamen.82

An initial Palmah attack on Katamon, on the night of 26-a7 April, failed. Dominating the neighborhood was the Saint Simeon Monastery, at its southern edge. On the night of 29-3o April two Harel Brigade companies crept up on the monastery and in a sudden assault took it along with several outlying buildings. But the Palmahniks suffered serious losses.

The troopers understood-as, apparently, did Abu Diya-that the fate of the monastery "would decide the fate of Jerusalem."8a The following morning he counterattacked; wave after wave of Arabs assaulted the monastery. Jewish casualties mounted steadily. By noon, most of the Palmahniks were either dead or wounded. A large relief column failed to break through, though sixteen Jewish fighters reached the besieged building.