Prince of Fire (9 page)

Once again Sheikh Asad was summoned by his old friend, Haj Amin. He too was living in exile. During the Second World War the mufti had thrown in his lot with Adolf Hitler. From his lavish palace in Berlin, the Islamic religious leader had served as a valuable Nazi propaganda tool, exhorting the Arab masses to support Nazi Germany and calling for the destruction of the Jews. An acquaintance of Adolf Eichmann, the architect of the Holocaust, the mufti had even planned to construct a gas chamber and crematoria in Palestine to exterminate the Jews there. As Berlin was falling, he boarded a Luftwaffe plane and flew to Switzerland. Refused entry, he went next to France. The French realized that he could be a valuable ally in the Middle East and granted him sanctuary, but by 1946, with pressure mounting to put the mufti on trial for war crimes, he was permitted to “escape” to Cairo. By the summer of 1947 the mufti was living in Alayh, a resort in the mountains of Lebanon, and it was there that he met his trusted warlord, Sheikh Asad.

“You’ve heard the news from America?”

Sheikh Asad nodded. The special session of the new world
body called the United Nations had convened to take up the issue of the future of Palestine.

“Clearly,” said the mufti, “we are going to be made to suffer for the crimes of Hitler. Our strategy for dealing with the United Nations will be a complete boycott of the proceedings. But if they decide to award one square inch of Palestine to the Jews, we must be prepared to fight. Which is why I need you, Sheikh Asad.”

Sheikh Asad asked Haj Amin the same question he’d put to him eleven years earlier in Jerusalem. “What do you want me to do?”

“Return to Palestine and prepare for the war that is surely coming. Raise your fighting force, draw up your battle plans. My cousin, Abdel-Kader, will be responsible for the Ramallah area and the hills east of Jerusalem. You will be in command of the central district: the Coastal Plain, Tel Aviv and Jaffa, and the Jerusalem Corridor.”

“I’ll do it,” Sheikh Asad said, then he quickly added: “On one condition.”

The grand mufti was taken aback. He knew that Sheikh Asad was a fierce and proud man, but no Arab ever dared to speak to him like that, especially a former fellah. Still, he smiled and asked the warlord to name his price.

“Tell me the name of the man who betrayed me in Hadera.”

Haj Amin hesitated, then answered truthfully. Sheikh Asad was more valuable to his cause than Abu Fareed.

“Where is he?”

That night Sheikh Asad traveled to Beirut and slit the throat of Abu Fareed. Then he returned to Damascus to bid farewell to his wife and son and see to their financial needs. A week later he was back in his old straw-and-mud cottage in Beit Sayeed.

He spent the remaining months of 1947 raising his force and planning his strategy for the coming conflict. Frontal assaults against heavily defended Jewish population centers would prove futile, he concluded. Instead, he would strike the Jews where they were most vulnerable. Jewish settlements were scattered around Palestine and dependent on the roads for supplies. In many cases, such as the vital Jerusalem Corridor, those roads were dominated by Arab towns and villages. Sheikh Asad immediately understood the opportunity before him. He could strike soft targets with complete tactical surprise; then, when the engagement was over, his forces could melt into the sanctuaries of the villages. The settlements would slowly whither, and so too would the Jewish will to remain in Palestine.

On November 29, the United Nations declared that British rule in Palestine would soon end. There were to be two states in Palestine, one Arab, the other Jewish. For the Jews, it was a night of celebration. The two-thousand-year-old dream of a state in the ancient home of the Jews had come true. For the Arabs, it was a night of bitter tears. Half of their ancestral home was to be given to the Jews. Sheikh Asad al-Khalifa spent that night planning his first strike. The following morning, his men attacked a bus as it made its way from Netanya to Jerusalem, killing five people. The battle for Palestine had begun.

Throughout the winter of 1948, Sheikh Asad and the other Arab commanders turned the roads of central Palestine into a Jewish graveyard. Buses, taxis, and supply trucks were attacked, drivers and passengers massacred without mercy. As winter turned to spring, Haganah losses in men and materiel mounted at an alarming rate. During a two-week span in late March, Arab forces killed hundreds of the Haganah’s best fighters and
destroyed the bulk of its fleet of armored vehicles. By the end of the month, the settlements of the Negev were cut off. More importantly, so too were the hundred thousand Jews of West Jerusalem. For the Jews, the situation was growing desperate. The Arabs had seized the initiative—and Sheikh Asad was almost single-handedly winning the war for Palestine.

On the night of March 31, 1948, David Ben-Gurion, leader of the Yishuv, met in Tel Aviv with senior officers of the Haganah and the elite Palmach strike force and ordered them to go on the offensive. The days of trying to protect vulnerable convoys against overwhelming odds were over, Ben-Gurion said. The entire Zionist enterprise faced imminent collapse unless the battle of the roads was won and the interior of the country secured. In order to achieve that goal, the conflict had to be taken to a new level of violence. The Arab villages that Sheikh Asad and the other warlords used as bases for their operations had to be conquered and destroyed—and if there was no other option, the inhabitants had to be expelled. The Haganah had already drawn up a master plan for just such an operation. It was called Tochnit Dalet: Plan D. Ben-Gurion ordered it to begin in two days with Operation Nachshon, an assault on the villages lining the besieged Jerusalem Corridor. “And one more thing,” he said to his commanders as the meeting adjourned. “Find Sheikh Asad as quickly as possible—and kill him.”

The man chosen to hunt down Sheikh Asad, a young Palmach intelligence officer named Ari Shamron, knew that Sheikh Asad would not be easy to find. The warlord maintained no fixed military headquarters and was rumored to sleep in a different house each night. Shamron, though he had immigrated to Palestine from Poland in 1935, knew the Arab mind
well. He knew that, to the Arabs, some things were more important than an independent Palestine. Somewhere during his rise to power, Sheikh Asad had surely made an enemy—and somewhere in Palestine was an Arab thirsting for revenge.

It took Shamron ten days to find him, a man from Beit Sayeed who, many years earlier, had lost two of his brothers to Sheikh Asad over an insult in the village coffeehouse. Shamron offered the Arab a hundred Palestinian pounds if he would betray the whereabouts of the warlord. A week later, on a hillside near Beit Sayeed, they met for a second time. The Arab told Shamron where their common enemy could be found.

“I hear he’s planning to spend the night in a cottage outside Lydda. It’s in the middle of an orange grove. Asad, the murderous dog, is surrounded by bodyguards. They’re hiding in the orchards. If you try to attack the cottage with a large force, the guards will sound the alert and Asad will flee like the coward that he is.”

“And what do you recommend?” Shamron asked, playing to the Arab’s vanity.

“A single assassin, a man who can slip through the defenses and kill Asad before he can escape. For another one hundred pounds, I’ll be that man.”

Shamron did not wish to insult his informant, so he spent a moment pretending to consider the offer, even though his mind was already made up. The assassination of Sheikh Asad was too important to be trusted to a man who would betray his own people for money. He hurried back to Palmach headquarters in Tel Aviv and broke the news to the deputy commander, a handsome man with red hair and blue eyes named Yitzhak Rabin.

“Someone needs to go to Lydda alone tonight and kill him,” Shamron said.

“Chances are whoever we select won’t come out of that house alive.”

“I know,” Shamron said, “that’s why it has to be me.”

“You’re too important to risk on a mission like this.”

“If this goes on much longer, we’ll lose Jerusalem—and then we’ll lose the war. What’s more important than that?”

Rabin could see that there was no talking him out of it. “What can I do to help you?”

“Make certain there’s a car and driver waiting for me on the edge of that orange grove after I kill him.”

At midnight, Shamron climbed on a motorbike and rode from Tel Aviv to Lydda. He left the bike a mile from town and walked the rest of the way to the edge of the orchard. Such assaults, Shamron had learned from experience, were best carried out shortly before dawn, when the sentries were fatigued and at their least attentive. He entered the orchard a few minutes before sunrise, armed with a Sten gun and a steel trench knife. In the first gray light of the day, he could make out the faint shadows of the guards, propped against the trunks of the orange trees. One slept soundly as Shamron crept past. A single guard stood watch in the dusty forecourt of the cottage. Shamron killed him with a silent thrust of his knife, then he entered the cottage.

It had but one room. Sheikh Asad lay sleeping on the floor. Two of his senior lieutenants were seated cross-legged next to him, drinking coffee. Caught off guard by Shamron’s silent approach, they did not react to the opening of the door. Only when they looked up and saw an armed Jew did they attempt to reach for their weapons. Shamron killed them both with a single burst of his Sten gun.

Sheikh Asad awakened with a start and reached for his rifle.
Shamron fired. Sheikh Asad, as he was dying, gazed into his killer’s eyes.

“Another will take my place,” he said.

“I know,” replied Shamron, then he fired again. He slipped from the cottage as the sentries came running. In the half-light of dawn he picked his way through the trees, until he came to the edge of the orange grove. The car was waiting; Yitzhak Rabin was behind the wheel.

“Is he dead?” Rabin asked as he accelerated away.

Shamron nodded. “It’s done.”

“Good,” said Rabin. “Let the dogs lap up his blood.”

D
INA HAD LAPSED INTO A LONG SILENCE
. Y
OSSI
and Rimona, entranced, watched her with the intensity of small children. Even Yaakov seemed to have fallen under her spell, not because he had been converted to Dina’s cause but because he wanted to know where the story was taking them. Gabriel, had he wished, could have told him. And when Dina placed a new image on the screen—a strikingly handsome man seated in an outdoor café wearing wraparound sunglasses—Gabriel saw it not in the grainy black-and-white of the photograph but as the scene appeared in his own memory: oil on canvas, abraded and yellowed with age. Dina began to speak again, but Gabriel was no longer listening. He was scrubbing away at the soiled varnish of his memory, watching a younger version of himself
rushing across the bloodstained courtyard of a Parisian apartment building with a Beretta in his hand. “This is Sabri al-Khalifa,” Dina was saying. “The setting is the Boulevard St-Germain in Paris, the year is 1979. The photograph was snapped by an Office surveillance team. It was the last ever taken of him.”

AMMAN, JORDAN: JUNE 1967

It was eleven in the morning when the handsome young man with pale skin and black hair walked into a Fatah recruiting office in downtown Amman. The officer seated behind the desk in the lobby was in a foul mood. The entire Arab world was. The second war for Palestine had just ended. Instead of liberating the land from the Jews, it had precipitated yet another catastrophe for the Palestinians. In just six days the Israeli military had routed the combined armies of Egypt, Syria, and Jordan. Sinai, the Golan Heights, and the West Bank were now in Jewish hands, and thousands more Palestinians had been turned into refugees.

“Name?” the recruiter snapped.

“Sabri al-Khalifa.”

The Fatah man looked up, startled. “Yes, of course you are,” he said. “I fought with your father. Come with me.”

Sabri was immediately placed in a car and chauffeured at high speed across the Jordanian capital to a safe house. There he was introduced to a small, unimpressive-looking man named Yasir Arafat.

“I’ve been waiting for you,” Arafat said. “I knew your father. He was a great man.”

Sabri smiled. He was used to hearing compliments about his father. All his life he had been told stories about the heroic deeds of the great warlord from Beit Sayeed, and how the Jews, to punish the villagers who had supported his father, razed the village and forced its inhabitants into exile. Sabri al-Khalifa had little in common with most of his refugee brethren. He had been raised in a pleasant district of Beirut and educated at the finest schools and universities in Europe. Along with his native Arabic, he spoke French, German, and English fluently. His cosmopolitan upbringing had made him a valuable asset to the Palestinian cause. Yasir Arafat wasn’t about to let him go to waste.

“Fatah is riddled with traitors and collaborators,” Arafat said. “Every time we send an assault team across the border, the Jews are lying in wait. If we’re ever going to be an effective fighting force, we have to purge the traitors from our midst. I would think a job such as that would appeal to you, given what happened to your father. He was undone by a collaborator, was he not?”

Sabri nodded gravely. He’d been told that story, too.