By Blood and Fire: July 22, 1946: The Attack On Jerusalem's King David Hotel by Thurston Clarke

Author:Thurston Clarke [Clarke, Thurston]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
ISBN: 9781504029865
Publisher: Open Road Distribution
Published: 2016-01-12T05:00:00+00:00

19

12:10–12:15 P.M.

In the King David’s military and government offices, Monday was the busiest day of the week. Jerusalem enjoyed a three-day weekend. Moslems took off Friday afternoons, Jews all of Saturday and Christians Sunday. Monday was the first full working day after Thursday.

On Mondays Sir John Shaw always met with the American Consul, Lowell Pinkerton. Today he saw his deputy, Malcolm Hooper. Pinkerton had gone to London a few days before to attend the British-American discussions on Palestine’s future.

British civil servants from other parts of Palestine scheduled their Secretariat meetings for Mondays so they could visit friends in Jerusalem over the weekend. Today Bernard Bourdillon was visiting from Nazareth and Ivan Phillips had come up from Ramie.

Noon was the most crowded time of day in the Secretariat. Visitors who had attended early morning meetings were leaving; others were arriving for preluncheon meetings.

In George Farley’s office a conference on postal security was breaking up. As soon as Postmaster General Gerald Kennedy and the others left, Farley planned to attend a financial meeting in Julius Jacobs’ first-floor office. It was scheduled to start at 12:30.

Two rooms down the hall from Farley, Chief Financial Secretary Geoffrey Walsh met with Simon Seidler, a Jewish tea inporter, and Omar Bisharat, a senior member of a noted family of Arab traders. Seidler wanted to negotiate tea prices. Bisharat was asking Walsh to pay more for sheep.

Walsh expected to make additional payments. He knew that Bisharat enjoyed the bargaining and bluffing, and he expected the negotiations would probably continue until lunchtime.

Arabs and Jews, Greeks and Armenians, and representatives of dozens of Christian sects jammed the corridors and rooms outside Walsh’s and every other British Secretary’s office. They stood in lines, sat on chairs or squatted on the floor as they waited for an audience. They scheduled an appointment with one official in order to get into the Secretariat and then stayed to pursue other business.

They followed the Secretaries down the corridors, thrusting out petitions, waving forms and whispering of wrongs. They bribed government messengers to deliver letters pleading favors for relatives. They protested government projects that bestowed benefits on rival communities.

Many of these noontime visitors to the King David were Jewish.

Joseph Alles, a Tel Aviv lawyer, shuttled between offices pleading for the release of clients arrested during Black Saturday.

On the third floor, Captain Dan Ben-Dor explained the operation of the King David’s new fire alarm and sprinkler system to a brigadier general. Ben-Dor, a Jewish architect and inventor from Jerusalem, was a decorated war hero who had designed a bomb-proof, igloo-shaped army barracks constructed entirely of three-and-a-half-foot-thick mud bricks. During the North African campaign his igloos had protected British soldiers from German bullets and bomb splinters.

After the war Ben-Dor was posted to his native Jerusalem where he supervised the construction of fortifications and security systems to protect the British Army from Jewish terrorists. He had designed the turnstile, trip wires, sentry boxes and other devices surrounding the King David.

One floor above, on the top floor of the

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