The Haj - Leon Uris [105]
As this most vital battle shaped up, the Yishuv was shaken to its boots when the Arab Legion broke its promise and crossed the Jordan River. The beleaguered Etzion Bloc fell to the Legion after a murderous fight. Most of the survivors were massacred; a few were taken prisoner.
Arabs stormed out of Jerusalem and Hebron and Bethlehem to loot and level the Etzion Bloc, destroying its orchards and fields and desecrating its synagogues. On the eve of the Jewish declaration of independence, the Yishuv went into agonized soul-searching to find the courage to declare their freedom after this taste of things to come from the Legion.
10
THE NOOSE TIGHTENED AROUND West Jerusalem. A hundred thousand Jews came under a virtual blockade. A thin, wheezing lifeline through the Bab el Wad was choked off, forced open, choked off.
Inside the Old City wall, two thousand ultra-Orthodox Jews refused to quit, although surrounded by fifty thousand Arabs and separated from their own population.
Supplies had to come from the coast through a thicket of Arab strongholds, then into the vulnerable Bab el Wad. The British made little pretense of patrolling the road.
In preparation for the siege, the Jews had made a survey of all cisterns in their part of the city. Because of periodic drought and perennial water shortages, rainwater had long been trapped on the flat rooftops of the houses and channeled into underground concrete holding tanks. Many houses had them, but they had long been out of use since a modern water system had been installed with pumping stations near the coast.
Chemicals had been put into the cisterns to preserve the water and they were capped with cement covers. It was determined that the cisterns held some three months’ supply of water if rationed at the rate of ten gallons per family per day.
The plan came none too soon, for the Arabs blew up water pipes all along the line into West Jerusalem and the British declined to get involved in rebuilding or guarding them.
Each day water trucks opened a given number of cisterns and distributed what became liquid gold. Each housewife set aside one gallon for essential drinking and cooking. The balance went through a series of declining usages so it could be recycled several times for personal washing or cleaning the most necessary cooking utensils. A tad was allowed for brushing teeth, laundry came last, and the final daily use was the toilet’s single flushing. There was no water for showers, gardens, or effective sanitation. In the ensuing months, Jerusalem’s streets became filmed with desert dust. As the Jews slowly dehydrated, their city took on a death-like browned-out look.
There was no fuel, except for hospitals, the military, and bakeries. Candles replaced electric lights. The Jerusalem housewife did her cooking on a communal bonfire. Because there never had been much timber in the region, people dismantled wooden railings and window sashes and chopped up furniture.
The only edible greens were dandelions. The ration fell to a borderline starvation level of six hundred calories a day. A make-shift airstrip that could only accommodate a small single-engine plane was where the Yishuv’s ‘air force’ made daily runs of baby formula, emergency medicines, small arms, and the Yishuv’s leaders.
Strategically the Jews were in impossible shape. The region was ponderously Arab. The Haganah had its troops spread so thin in trying to protect a bulky urban area that its lines sprung leaks all over. The arsenal consisted of five hundred rifles and some odds and ends, including the Little David mortars which had been used so effectively in Safed. These ‘Davidkas’ were moved from location to location to make the Arabs think the Jews had many more of them.
It became incumbent upon the Jews to consolidate their area. The Haganah managed to capture an Arab suburb of Katamon, which eliminated an enemy enclave in their midst and