Exodus - Leon Uris [172]
Haj Amin el Husseini moved from Lebanon in search of greener pastures. He landed in Bagdad, Iraq, nominally a British ally but in not much more than name. In Bagdad he was greeted as a great martyr of Islam. He staged a coup with a gang of Iraqi army officers to deliver Iraq to the Germans. The plot failed. But only at the last moment did the British prevent it from succeeding by sending the Arab Legion in to control the country.
Haj Amin fled again. This time he went to Germany where Adolf Hitler greeted him personally as a brother. The two madmen could work through each other for mutual personal profit. The Mufti saw in Germany’s military plans a new opportunity to seize power over the entire Arab world. Hitler needed the Mufti to show what a warm and tender friendship could exist between Arab and German. As a Nazi agent, Haj Amin broadcasted over and over again from Berlin to the Arab world; what he had to say he had said many, many times before.
“O, Arabs, rise and avenge your martyrs ... I, Mufti of Palestine, declare this war as a holy war against the British yoke of tyranny.... I know the hatred you feel for them ... I know you Moslems are convinced the British and the Jews are enemies of Islam and plot against the precepts of the Koran ... the Jews will take our holy Islamic institutions ... they even now claim a Temple occupies the site of our most holy Mosque of Omar and surely they will desecrate it as they have tried before ... kill Jews wherever you find them for this pleases God, history, and religion. This saves your honor ... God is with you ... perish Judea!”
As the Mufti spoke, the Arab world seemed to heed his words.
Syria and Lebanon were in the hands of Vichy French, and German matériel was pouring in to pave the way for an invasion of Palestine and Egypt.
The Egyptian chief of staff sold secrets to the Germans. King Farouk of Egypt refused to give the British a single soldier for the defense of Egypt against Rommel. Further plots hatched in Iraq.
The only avowed friend of the Allies was the old despot, Ibn Saud, who had been bought with American dollars. But Ibn Saud did not so much as offer a single camel to the British Eighth Army, which was fighting for its life.
In all the Middle East the Allied Powers had but one true fighting friend—the Yishuv!
Rommel, flushed with victory in Libya, stood poised to break through to Alexandria where German flags were being prepared to welcome the “liberators.”
On the Russian front, the Wehrmacht stood before the gates of Stalingrad!
This was the Allies’ darkest hour.
The prime target of the Germans was the Suez Canal, Egypt, and Palestine—the solar plexus of the British Empire. A break-through at Stalingrad could form another arm of a pincer movement to sweep through the Caucasus Mountains and open the doors of India and the Orient.
At last the British came to Yishuv Central and asked the Jews to form guerrilla units to cover the retreat of the British and harass the German occupation. This guerrilla force was called the Palmach. It was later to become the striking arm of the Haganah.
Ari Ben Canaan sat down for supper one evening.
“I enlisted in the British Army today,” he announced quietly.
The next day Ari reported to kibbutz Beth Alonim, House of the Oaks, where youths from all over Palestine had assembled to organize the Palmach.
Chapter Eighteen
KIBBUTZ BETH ALONIM STOOD at the foot of Mount Tabor in the center of the Jezreel Valley. Ari was given a commission in the British Army and placed in charge of operations of the guerrilla units of boys and girls, most of whom were in their teens. Most of the officers were “old-timers” in their mid-twenties like Ari.
Many of the former Raider Unit men joined the Palmach to indoctrinate the youngsters in the methods of Major P. P. Malcolm.
The troops wore no uniforms nor was there rank below the officers, and boys and girls were treated exactly the same. They were trained with the same sense of Biblical