A State at Any Cost by Tom Segev

Author:Tom Segev [Segev, Tom]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781789544626
Publisher: Head of Zeus
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

“OFFENSIVE DEFENSE”

It was a relatively quiet year; tensions between Arabs and Jews centered largely on criminal violations. The day after the UN decision, at about the same time that Ben-Gurion reached the Jewish Agency building’s courtyard after his stay at Kalia and found himself among circles of dancers, two buses, one from Netanya and one from Hadera, were making their way to Jerusalem. Arabs opened fire on them near Petah Tikvah, attacking first one bus and then the other. Five passengers were killed on the spot and nine wounded. One of the dead, Nehama Cohen, came from a Zionist dynasty that included both Ahad Ha’am and Yitzhak Rabin. A report Ben-Gurion received a few days later said that the attack had been a robbery, “ostensibly in response to the UN decision.” The report offered a long list of offenses, among them robbery and murder, committed by the same gang, all of them apparently with criminal intent.39

A few weeks after the partition decision, Ben-Gurion drove from Jerusalem to Tel Aviv. Because the road was no longer safe that winter, he joined one of the guarded convoys that were now the only way to travel between the two cities. The car he took was equipped with iron panels and reinforced glass; the Jewish Agency referred to the vehicle as “Weizmann’s armored car.” Not far from Bab al-Wad, later called Sha’ar Hagai, where the road emerges from the hills onto the coastal plain, the convoy came under fire. “We were attacked from the mountain and four were wounded,” Ben-Gurion wrote. A bus was disabled. “It was a horrible onslaught, from both sides,” a Jewish Agency official who traveled with him related. “Ben-Gurion suddenly opened the door and jumped out of the car. I thought he had gone mad.” He wanted to see what had happened. British soldiers who suddenly appeared out of nowhere returned fire, and the convoy went on its way.

Before leaving Jerusalem with his convoy, Ben-Gurion had met with an official of Hadassah, the American women’s Zionist organization, and described the situation to her with a single word: “War!” For the time being, the Arabs were limiting themselves to terror attacks, he reported. In the past two weeks, ninety-four Jews had been killed and a hundred wounded. There would soon be a real war.40 He told the official that Hadassah had to fund all medical services in the country.

When the convoy stopped at a strategic point, called Latrun, to care for the wounded, the high commissioner’s convoy passed by on the road. He now understood why British troops had been nearby: “It seems as if His Excellency had stationed forces by the Bab al-Wad forest.” His Excellency was the last high commissioner; a few months later he went home, and Ben-Gurion reached the pinnacle of his life.41 He later referred to the war he conducted during this period as an “improvisation.”42

*

December 1947 was a horrible month; Ben-Gurion had not experienced such catastrophes, and he was now commander in chief. The conflagration broke out in Jerusalem.

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