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The attack took place less than two hundred yards away from the British military post whose task was to safeguard the road to the hospital. For several hours the British soldiers stood and watched the attack without lifting a finger. At 9:45 General Gordon H. A. MacMillan, the supreme commander of the British forces in Palestine, drove past without stopping. (He later claimed, without batting an eye, that he had the impression the attack had ended.)

At one o'clock, and again an hour later, some British vehicles drove past without stopping. When the Jewish Agency liaison officer contacted British military headquarters and requested permission to send in the Haganah to evacuate the injured and the dying, he was informed that "the army is in control of the situation" and that HQ forbade the Haganah to intervene. Haganah rescue forces nevertheless attempted to assist the trapped convoy, both from the city and from Mount Scopus. They were prevented from approaching. At 1:45 p.m. the president of the Hebrew University, Professor Judah Leon Magnes, telephoned General MacMillan and asked for help. The answer was that "the army is trying to reach the scene, but a large battle has developed."

There was no fighting. By three o'clock two of the buses had caught fire and almost all the passengers, most of whom were already wounded or dying, were burned alive.

The seventy-seven dead included the director of the Hadassah Medical Organization, Professor Chaim Yassky, Professors Leonid Doljansky and Moshe Ben-David, who were among the founders of the Faculty of Medicine at the university, the physicist Dr. Guenther Wolfsohn, Professor Enzo Bonaventura, head of the Department of Psychology, Dr. Abraham Chaim Freimann, an expert on Jewish law, and Dr. Binyamin Klar, a linguist.

The Arab Higher Committee later issued an official statement in which the slaughter was described as a heroic exploit carried out "under the command of an Iraqi officer." The statement censured the British for their last-minute intervention and declared: "Had it not been for Army interference, not a single Jewish passenger would have remained alive."* It was only through a coincidence, because of his high temperature, and perhaps also because my mother knew how to curb his patriotic fervor, that my father was not among those who were burned to death in that convoy.

Not long after this massacre, the Haganah launched major offensives for the first time all over the country and threatened to take up arms against the British army if it dared to intervene. The main road from the coastal plain to Jerusalem was unblocked by means of a major offensive, then blocked again, then unblocked again, but the siege of Hebrew Jerusalem was renewed with the invasion by regular Arab armies. Through April and up to the middle of May, large Arab and mixed towns—Haifa, Jaffa, Tiberias, and Safed—as well as dozens of Arab villages in the north and the south were captured by the Haganah. Hundreds of thousands of Arabs lost their homes in those weeks and became refugees. Some of them have remained refugees to this day. Many fled, but many were driven out by force. Several thousand were killed.

*Based on various sources, including Dov Joseph, The Faithful City: The Siege of Jerusalem, 1948 (London, 1962), p. 78.

There may not have been anyone at the time in besieged Jewish Jerusalem who mourned the fate of the Palestinian refugees. The Jewish Quarter in the Old City, which had been inhabited continuously by Jews for thousands of years (with the exception of a single interruption after they were all massacred or expelled by the Crusaders in 1099), fell to the Trans-Jordanian Arab Legion, all its buildings were looted and razed and the residents were killed, expelled, or taken prisoner. The settlements in the Etzion bloc were also taken and destroyed, and their residents were killed or taken prisoner. Atarot, Neve Yaakov, Kaliya, and Beit Ha-Arava were evacuated and destroyed. The hundred thousand Jewish inhabitants