A Tale of Love and Darkness - Amos Oz [199]
In September, October, and November 1947 nobody in Kerem Avraham knew whether to pray that the UN General Assembly would approve the UNSCOP majority report or to hope instead that the British would not abandon us to our fate, "alone and defenseless in a sea of Arabs." Many hoped that a free Hebrew state would be established at last, that the restrictions on immigration imposed by the British would be lifted, and the hundreds of thousands of Jewish survivors who had been languishing in displaced persons camps and detention camps in Cyprus since the downfall of Hitler would finally be allowed into the land that most of them considered their only home. Yet behind the back of these hopes, as it were, they feared (in whispers) that the million local Arabs, with the help of the regular armies of the countries of the Arab League, might rise up and slaughter the six hundred thousand Jews the moment the British pulled out.
At the grocer's, in the street, at the pharmacist's, people talked openly about an imminent redemption, they talked about Moshe Shertok and Eliezer Kaplan becoming ministers in the Hebrew government to be set up by Ben-Gurion in Haifa or Tel Aviv, and they talked (in whispers) about famous Jewish generals from abroad, from the Red Army, the American Air Force, and even the Royal Navy, being invited to come and command the Hebrew armed forces to be created when the British left.
But secretly, at home, under the blankets, after lights out, they whispered to each that who knew—perhaps the British would still cancel their evacuation, perhaps they had no intention of leaving, and the whole thing was nothing but a cunning ploy on the part of Perfidious Albion, with the aim of getting the Jews themselves to turn to the British in the face of impending annihilation and beg them not to abandon them to their fate. Then London could demand, in exchange for continued British protection, that the Jews cease all terrorist activities, decommission some of their stockpiles of illegal weapons, and hand over the leaders of the underground armies to the CID. Perhaps the British would change their minds at the last minute and not surrender us all to the mercy of the Arabs' knives. Perhaps at least here in Jerusalem they might leave a regular force behind to protect us from an Arab pogrom. Or perhaps Ben-Gurion and his friends down there in comfortable Tel Aviv, which was not surrounded by Arabs on every side, might come to their senses at the last minute and give up this adventure of a Hebrew state in favor of some modest compromise with the Arab world and the Muslim masses. Or perhaps the United Nations would send some troops from neutral countries while there was still time to take over from the British and protect the Holy City at least, if not the whole Holy Land, from the threat of a bloodbath.
Azzam Pasha, the secretary general of the Arab League, warned the Jews that "if they dared to attempt to create a Zionist entity on a single inch of Arab land, the Arabs would drown them in their own blood," and the Middle East would witness horrors "compared to which the atrocities of the Mongol conquests would pale into insignificance." The Iraqi Prime Minister, Muzahim al-Bajaji, called on the Jews of Palestine to "pack their bags and leave while there was still time," because the Arabs had vowed that after their victory they would spare the lives only of those few Jews who had lived in Palestine before 1917, and even they "would be allowed to take refuge under the wings of Islam and be tolerated under its banner only on condition that they woke up once and for all from the poison of Zionism and became once more