Exodus - Leon Uris [154]
The Yishuv Central through the Haganah fought back in the only way they could ... Aliyah Bet.
The Mufti maintained his pressure on the British until the British sent the Royal Navy out to stop Aliyah Bet runners and to set up a blockade of the Palestinian coast.
The strength of Haj Amin el Husseini grew every day. He found a powerful ally for himself—Adolf Hitler. For the Germans, who had their own aspirations in the Middle East, the situation was perfect. What could be more fortunate for the German propaganda machine than to be able to pump the theme that the Jews of Palestine were stealing the Arab lands just as they had tried to steal Germany. Jew hating and British imperialism—what music to the Mufti’s ears! The Germans were in luck. And Haj Amin el Husseini saw at long long last the instrument for seizing control of the Arab world.
German money showed up in Cairo and Damascus. The Germans are your friends! Arab lands for Arab people! Throw out the British and their Jewish henchmen! In many high places in Cairo and Bagdad and in Syria the Arabs clasped hands with Nazis in friendship.
As the storm gathered the Yishuv still held one trump card—the Haganah! Although this secret army was officially divorced from the Yishuv Central its existence and strength was an open secret. The Jews pretended it was not there but the British knew it existed. More important, the Mufti knew it existed.
It had grown from nothing to a force of over twenty-five thousand men and women. It was almost entirely a militia with but a few dozen “paid” full-time leaders. It had a small but deadly efficient intelligence service, which not only had the open co-operation of many British officers but could purchase Arab spies for next to nothing. Every city, village, kibbutz, and moshav had its Haganah setup. A secret code word could send a thousand men and women to hidden arms caches within minutes.
Avidan, the bald-headed square-built ex-soldier who headed Haganah, carefully built it up in a decade and a half under the noses of the British. The efficiency of the organization was terrifying; they ran a secret radio, carried on the Aliyah Bet immigration, and their intelligence network spread throughout the world where agents purchased arms to smuggle back to the Yishuv.
Arms were smuggled into Palestine in a hundred ways. Hiding them in heavy building equipment was a favorite method. The roller of a steam roller as often as not contained a hundred rifles. Every crate, piece of machinery, and even food tins and wine bottles coming into Palestine were potential munitions carriers. It was impossible for the British to halt the smuggling without inspecting every item, and many British were turning their backs at the docks to let the arms through.
The entire Yishuv was behind the arms-smuggling movement, but even so they could not bring in heavy weapons or sufficient numbers of first-class small arms. Most of what came in were old rifles and pistols discarded or outmoded in other countries. No arsenal in the world contained the conglomeration of weapons the Haganah had. Every known rifle and pistol was represented in some numbers. A thousand ingenious varieties of mortars, Sten guns, and grenades were manufactured in secret. The Haganah arsenal even included walking canes which could fire a single shot.
Once inside Palestine every desk, chair, table, icebox, bed, and sofa was a potential hiding place for weapons. Every Jewish home had at least one false-bottom drawer, hidden closet, trap door, or trick wall.
Arms were moved about inside the spare tires of buses and in market baskets and under donkey carts. The Haganah played on British “respectability” by having the children run weapons and by using the best hiding place of all—under women’s skirts.
In the building of the Haganah the kibbutz proved not only the answer to redemption but the answer to Jewish arms. Because