Exodus - Leon Uris [268]
Ari’s headquarters were in the centrally-located kibbutz of Ein Or—the Fountain of Light—which his uncle Akiva had helped establish. He had a few hundred Palmach troops from the Spearhead Brigade; he had David, Zev Gilboa, and Joab Yarkoni as aides. The Haganah organization in each of his settlements was strong: one hundred per cent subscribed in personnel quota and well trained.
The lack of arms was what plagued him, as it plagued the Yishuv all over Palestine. Every day settlement commanders harassed him for guns. He had none, Avidan had none.
There were two glaring weak spots in Ari’s area: Gan Dafna and Safed. Ari felt that he would be able to protect the children’s village once Fort Esther was turned over to him. So long as the road to Gan Dafna through Abu Yesha stayed open, the village was not in danger.
Safed was a headache. In fact no commander in Palestine had a larger headache. When the Jews made the decision to hold every settlement at any cost there were a few exceptions considered “untenable.” Safed was one of the exceptions.
The city was an island in a sea of forty thousand Arabs in surrounding villages. Inside Safed the Jews were outnumbered twelve to one. Most of Safed’s Jews were the Cabalists who knew nothing about fighting. In all, the Haganah in Safed had but two hundred able-bodied fighters to face more than two thousand Arabs and irregulars.
The Mufti had made Safed one of his first goals. Several hundred heavily armed irregulars had infiltrated and waited only for British withdrawal.
From the standpoint of interior strategy, the Jews were in even worse position. All three key points in the city would be in the hands of the Arabs: a police station right over the Jewish sector, the acropolis atop the town, and the Taggart fort on Mount Canaan would all be turned over to the Arabs.
In arms the Arabs had enough to carry on a war for months. The Jews had forty rifles, forty-two homemade Stens, one machine gun, and one mortar, plus a few hundred homemade grenades. They could arm less than a hundred men.
Safed appeared so obviously indefensible that the British even pled with Ari to let them evacuate the Jews.
Remez, the hotel owner and Haganah commander, paced back and forth before Ari’s desk. Sutherland sat quietly in a corner and puffed a cigar.
“Well?” Ari asked at last.
Remez leaned on the desk. “We want to stay in Safed, Ari. We want to fight it out to the last man. We have decided.”
“Good. I am glad.”
“Give us more arms.”
Ari leaped to his feet angrily. Twenty times a day he heard “give us more arms.”
“Sutherland, you pray to Christ; you pray to Confucius, Remez; and I’ll pray to Allah. Maybe rifles will rain down on us like manna from heaven.”
“Do you trust Major Hawks?” Sutherland asked, speaking of the British commander in the area.
“Hawks has always been a friend,” Ari answered.
“All right, then,” Sutherland said, “perhaps you’d better listen to him. He guarantees British protection if you evacuate Safed. Otherwise, he guarantees there will be a massacre after he pulls his troops out.”
Ari blew a long breath. “Did Hawks say when he is leaving?”
“No, he doesn’t know yet.”
“So long as Hawks remains in Safed we are relatively safe. The Arabs won’t try too much with him around. Perhaps the situation will change for the better before he pulls out.”
“Hawks may have his heart in the right place but his own commanders are tying his hands,” Sutherland said.
“The Arabs have already started sniping at us and are attacking our convoys,” Remez said.
“So ...? Are you now going to run at the first shot?”
“Ari.” Remez looked at him levelly. “I was born in Safed. I have lived there all my life. Even to this day I can still hear the chanting from the Arab quarters that we heard in 1929. We didn’t know what it meant until we saw those crazed mobs pouring into our sector. They were our friends—but they were