Exodus - Leon Uris [265]
Chapter Two
KUWALTY, PRESIDENT OF SYRIA: We live or die with Palestine!
AL KULTA NEWSPAPER, CAIRO: Five hundred thousand Iraqis prepare for this holy war. 150,000 Syrians will storm over the Palestine borders and the mighty Egyptian army will throw the Jews into the sea if they dare to declare their state.
JAMIL MARDAM, SYRIAN PREMIER: Stop talking, my brother Moslems. Arise and wipe out the Zionist scourge.
IBN SAUD, KING OF SAUDI ARABIA: There are fifty million Arabs. What does it matter if we lose ten million people to kill all the Jews? The price is worth it.
SELEH HARB PASHA, MOSLEM YOUTH: Unsheath your swords against the Jews! Death to them all! Victory is ours!
SHEIK HASSAN AL BANNAH, MOSLEM BROTHERHOOD: All Arabs shall arise and annihilate the Jews! We shall fill the sea with their corpses.
AKRAM YAUYTAR, MUFTI SPOKESMAN: Fifty million Arabs shall fight to the last drop of blood.
HAJ AMIN EL HUSSEINI, MUFTI OF JERUSALEM: I declare a holy war, my Moslem brothers! Murder the Jews! Murder them all.
AZZAM PASHA, SECRETARY GENERAL OF THE ARAB LEAGUE: This will be a war of extermination, and momentous massacre which will be spoken of like the Mongolian Massacres.
Other Arab leaders and the Arab press and radio spoke out in equally appropriate words in answer to the United Nations’ partition of Palestine.
On December 1, 1947, one day after the UN vote, Dr. Khalidi of the Arab Higher Committee in Palestine called a general strike in which inflamed mobs broke out in wild rioting. They crossed into the Jewish commercial center of Jerusalem and burned and looted while British troops stood by idly.
In Aleppo and Aden and throughout the Arab world, other mobs, goaded by their leaders, tore into Jewish ghetto quarters with murder, rape, and plunder in their hearts.
Instead of forming an international police force to fill the gap, the United Nations bogged down in the formation of committees and in endless talk. The body seemed to want to believe that partition was going to be enforced without dependence on a single gun.
The Jews were more realistic. A Jewish state had been given an unalterable basis of legality, but if the Jews intended to declare the statehood after the British left, they would have to face the Arab hordes alone.
Could a half million ill-armed people hold back a flood of fifty million hate-crazed Arabs? They would not only have to face the Arabs inside Palestine, all around them on a hundred fronts, but the regular national armies as well.
Chaim Weizmann set out to organize the world Zionist groups to launch fund-raising campaigns for the purchase of arms.
Barak Ben Canaan remained at Lake Success to head the Yishuv delegation and battle out the details of partition and look for arms support.
The great question became, “Would the Jews declare their independence?”
The Arabs had no intention of waiting until May to find out. Although they held their regular armies back, they went about raising various “Armies of Liberation” who were alleged volunteers, and they got mountains of arms in to the Palestine Arabs.
Haj Amin el Husseini, the Nazi agent, was back in business. He set up headquarters in Damascus. Money for the Palestine “volunteers” was extorted from Arabs all over the Middle East. Kawukji, the brigand who had served the Mufti in the 1936–39 riots, was again commissioned “generalissimo.” Kawukji had been forced to flee Iraq when his part in the coup to deliver Iraq to the Germans was discovered. He spent the period of the war in Germany, acquired a wife there, and along with the Mufti had been pardoned from trial as a war criminal by the British.
Kawukji’s agents scoured the stink holes of Damascus, Beirut, and Bagdad recruiting the dregs of humanity, thieves, murderers, highway robbers, dope runners, and white slavers, which he picturesquely dubbed the “Forces of the Yarmuk,” after a battle the Arabs had won centuries before. These