O Jerusalem! by Larry Collins & Dominique Lapierre

Author:Larry Collins & Dominique Lapierre [Collins, Larry & Lapierre, Dominique]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781938402579
Publisher: Renaissance Literary & Talent in collaboration with the Proprietor
Published: 2017-03-07T23:00:00+00:00

24

"ATTACK AND ATTACK AND ATTACK."

ABDUL KHADER HUSSEINI'S DEATH forced major changes in the Arabs' guerrilla tactics and organization around Jerusalem. The Mufti named another member of the Husseini family, Khaled, a forty-year-old officer of the Palestine police force, to succeed him. With none of the personal magnetism of his kinsman, Khaled could not impose any real authority over the collection of chieftains making up the Arabs' Jerusalem command. At the moment when Britain's approaching withdrawal made unity and a central authority imperative, the Arabs' organization thus tended to revert to its system of splintered neighborhood bands. Ibrahim Abou Dayieh, the Hebron shepherd, commanded Katamon. Kamal Irekat, who had organized the ambush of the Kfar Etzion convoy, ran the south. Mounir Abou Fadel, a former police inspector, was in charge of the center of the city with a group of former policemen. Bajhat Abou Gharbieh, the schoolteacher who had been left behind in Kastel, took over the north. To their already divided ranks was added still another chieftain, this one a thirty-four-year-old Iraqi bank clerk named Fadel Rashid, who arrived in the city with five hundred volunteers.

Emile Ghory took over the remnants of Abdul Khader's organization in Bab el Wad. Their leader's death and the assaults of Operation Nachshon had been severe blows for the Arab guerrillas stationed along the road. Deir Yassin had compounded their problem by starting a flow of people out of the hilltop villages vital to the guerrillas. There were "few arms, no money and bad morale," Ghory discovered.

He decided to abandon the ambush tactics which required the support of massive numbers of villagers and go back to the strategy Abdul Khader had once rejected, of closing the road with mammoth barricades defended by a limited number of men. Ghory raised ten thousand pounds sterling from the Arab banks in Jerusalem, then set out from village to village raising paid levies.

Capitalizing on the disarray of their foes, the Haganah had already pushed three major convoys up the road since opening it April 5. Before a fourth could be organized, a cable of major consequence reached Tel Aviv from the Jerusalem Haganah. The British were going to evacuate certain fortified areas in the city before the mandate expired, probably in the last days of April, Shaltiel's intelligence officers reported. To capitalize on the move, Shaltiel asked for the Har-el Palmach Brigade operating around Bar el Wad. With it, he said, "it will be possible to strike a decisive blow in the city. . . . The outcome of our battle in Jerusalem depends on the number of reinforcements you send."

His cable placed the Tel Aviv command before a difficult decision. The brigade still had not cleared many of the Arab villages along the route to Jerusalem. Only one village, Kastel, had actually been destroyed, the mukhtar's house near which Abdul Khader Husseini had fallen being left intact by the departing Palmach as a symbol of their victory there. Nonetheless, at almost the same time as Emile Ghory, Tel Aviv decided on a change of tactics.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.