Exodus - Leon Uris [166]
Two prisoners were taken to the major.
“Where are your guns hidden?” he asked the first one in Arabic. The Arab shrugged.
Malcolm slapped the Arab’s face and repeated the question. This time the Arab pleaded his innocence as Allah was his judge. Malcolm calmly took out his pistol and shot the Arab through the head. He turned to the second prisoner. “Where are your guns hidden?” he asked.
The second Arab quickly revealed the location of the arms.
“You sons and daughters of Judea have learned many valuable lessons this night,” Malcolm said. “I will explain them to you in the morning. One thing, never use brutality to get information. Get right to the point.”
The news of Malcolm’s raid had a sobering effect on all of Palestine. For the Yishuv it marked a historic occasion. For the very first time the Jews had come out of their settlements to make an offensive action. Many thought it was long overdue.
The British were in an uproar. Most of them demanded that P. P. Malcolm be removed at once. General Charles was not so sure. British methods of fighting Arabs were sorely lacking, and he felt Malcolm had most of the answers.
For the Mufti’s thugs and the Husseinis and the Moslem fanatics it was a day of reckoning. No longer could they rove at will and pick their places for attack without expecting retribution.
Ari went out with P. P. Malcolm on a dozen more raids deep into Lebanon. Each raid was more successful than the last. The marauder gangs, the thugs and the gun runners and Kawukji’s mercenaries, were shaken from their complacency, for their activities were no longer profitable or safe against the swift merciless raids of the Haganah. The Mufti placed a reward of a thousand pounds sterling on P. P. Malcolm’s head.
After Malcolm and his Haganah boys and girls at Ha Mishmar succeeded in quieting down the Taggart line, he moved his headquarters to the kibbutz of Ein Or. Malcolm requested from the Haganah a hundred and fifty top soldiers; he specifically wanted Ari Ben Canaan, whom he greatly favored. At kibbutz Ein Or, Malcolm formed his Raider Unit.
When the hundred and fifty soldiers had assembled from all over the Yishuv, Major Malcolm led them on a long hike to Mount Gilboa at the traditional site of the grave of the great Hebrew judge and warrior, Gideon, who was Malcolm’s idol. At Gideon’s grave he stood before his charges and opened his Bible and read in Hebrew.
“... so Gideon, and the hundred men that were with him, came unto the outside of the camp in the beginning of the middle watch; and they had but newly set the watch: and they blew the horns, and brake the pitchers that were in their hands. And the three companies blew the horns, and brake the pitchers, and held the lamps in their left hands, and the horns in their right hands to blow withal; and they cried, The sword of the Lord and of Gideon. And they stood every man in his place round about the camp; and all the host ran, and cried, and fled.”
Malcolm closed the Bible. He walked back and forth with his hands clasped behind him and seemed to look off into space as he spoke. “Gideon was a smart man. Gideon knew the Midianites were an ignorant and a superstitious people. Gideon knew he could play on their primitive fears and that they could be frightened by noise and by the night. Gideon knew it ... and so do we.”
The Arabs never knew where or when the Raider Unit would strike next. Their old reliable spy system simply did not work against Malcolm. He would send three units out in three different directions to confuse them. He would pass an Arab village and double back and strike it. He would send a convoy of trucks down a road and drop men off one at a time. During the day they lay hidden in the ditches at the roadside and at night they would assemble.
Every attack that came sounded like a thousand men. He never failed to send his enemy into a panic.
He elaborated on something his Jews already knew—the terrain of Palestine. He taught them the strategic as well as the historic value of every wadi and hill and tree by pointing out how