Exodus - Leon Uris [293]
There were many theories and much discussion on just how this victory came about. Even the Cabalists of Safed were split on the subject. Rabbi Bairn of the Ashkenazim or European school was quite certain of divine intervention as foretold in Job:
When he is about to fill his belly, God shall cast the fury of his wrath upon him, and shall rain it upon him while he is eating. He shall flee from the iron weapon ...
Rabbi Meir of the Sephardic or Oriental school disputed Bairn and was just as certain of divine intervention as described in Ezekiel:
Thy walls shall shake at the noise ... he shall enter into thy gates, as men enter into a city wherein is made a breach ... thy strong garrisons shall go down to the ground.
Bruce Sutherland returned to his villa on Mount Canaan. The Arabs had desolated it. They had trampled his lovely rose garden to the earth and they had stolen everything including the doorknobs. It did not matter to Sutherland, for it would all be rebuilt again. He and Yarkoni and Remez walked out to his rear patio and looked over the valley to Safed. They drank a lot of brandy and they began to chuckle.
Neither they nor anyone else was aware of it yet, but the stampede of Safed’s population had opened a new and tragic chapter—it began the creation of Arab refugees.
Somewhere in the Galilee, an obsolete Liberator bomber piloted by a volunteer crew of South Africans and Americans looked to the earth for a pair of blue flares.
The flares were spotted and they landed the bomber blind, with only a few flashlights marking the airfield. The plane bumped harshly over a pitted runway and skidded to a stop. The motors were cut quickly.
Swarms of people engulfed the plane and emptied it of its cargo, the first shipment of modern arms. Rifles, machine guns, mortars, and hundreds of thousands of rounds of ammunition were snatched from its waist and tail sections and its converted bomb bays.
The working parties stripped the Liberator clean in minutes. They loaded up a dozen trucks, which scattered in as many different directions. In a dozen kibbutzim Gadna youths stood ready to clean the weapons and get them out to the embattled settlements. The plane was turned and made a hair’s-breadth take-off and flew back to Europe to get another load of arms.
In the morning British troops came to investigate Arab complaints that they had heard an airplane landing in the area. The British were unable to find a single trace of a plane and were certain the Arab imagination was being carried away again.
By the time the fourth and fifth shipment of arms arrived, the Jews began to roll up victories. Tiberias on the Sea of Galilee had fallen to the Jews. The huge Gesher Taggart fort was grabbed by the Jews and held off repeated attacks by Iraqi irregulars.
With the fall of Safed, the Jews launched their first co-ordinated offensive, Operation Iron Broom, to sweep Galilee clean of hostile villages. Iron Broom was led by machine-gun-bearing jeeps which blazed into the villages and stampeded the Arabs. Safed had started a crack in Arab morale that gave Iron Broom a psychological jump.
With a score of local victories behind them and the knowledge that they could mount a successful offensive, the Haganah went after the vital port of Haifa.
The Haganah swept down the slopes of Mount Carmel in a four-pronged attack, each action aimed at an Arab strong point. The Arab troops, consisting of home guards, Syrian, Lebanese, and Iraqi irregulars, mounted a strong defense and were at first able to contain the battle. The British, who still controlled the dock area, called truce after truce to stop the Jewish offenses, and at times took away hardwon vantage points.
The Arabs continued to hold well against the steady Jewish pressure. Then, as the fighting reached a peak, the Arab commander and his entire staff slipped out and quietly fled. Arab resistance became demoralized and collapsed entirely. Again the British called a truce as the Jews swept into the Arab quarters.
At that point a fantastic event took place. The Arabs suddenly