The Haj - Leon Uris [79]
British units pounced on and scoured kibbutz and village for arms caches. Tel Aviv was cut off by two divisions of troops that dragged the city for guns, illegals, and Jewish fighters.
The Irgun, now operating independently, replied by blowing up British headquarters in Jerusalem’s King David Hotel.
With the disappearance of all semblance of order, the British feverishly backed down and called for a truce with the Jewish Agency. The Agency was reinstated and its leaders were released from prison. In turn, the Agency halted Haganah operations and called for negotiations. Despite the Haganah’s efforts to unify the dissident forces, the Irgun and Stern Group announced from their covert headquarters that they would not be bound by the truce.
1947His Majesty’s government was faced with two alternatives. They could throw more might into Palestine and stop the Jewish revolt by raw power and suppression. In the end the British had no stomach to commit the atrocities required to remain in power and fell back to their second alternative, a position of negotiation.
The year was ushered in by a British partition plan that called for Arab, Jewish, and British cantons under supreme British rule. They had drawn ridiculous borders. Both the Jewish Agency and the Arab leaders rejected the plan out of hand.
It was apparent that Britain’s ability to rule had been exhausted. A month later the British lion was brought to its knees with the announcement that it was turning the entire Palestine problem over to the United Nations. Nonetheless, the blockade of the Palestinian coast continued as desperate, half-maddened survivors filled up the concentration camps on Cyprus after being turned back within sight of the shores of the Holy Land.
In the most audacious of all raids, the Irgun broke into the Acre prison and liberated their comrades. During this period the British hanged several Irgun fighters and the Irgun retaliated by kidnapping and hanging two British sergeants.
In July of 1947 the British played their ugliest card in the mandate by returning a refugee boat with nearly five thousand aboard to Germany, the graveyard of the Jewish people.
November 29, 1947
The United Nations General Assembly convened at Lake Success, New York, to vote on their own partition plan to divide Palestine into separate Arab and Jewish states. The Arabs, who had refused to come to the table to negotiate throughout the tortured history of the mandate, remained consistent. They rejected the plan before it came to a vote.
The Jewish Agency, realizing it could gain no more, agreed to accept the plan.
With Britain having wiped her hands of Palestine, the United States of America was suddenly and vividly in the picture.
As the Arabs rushed to their new friends, the Russians, they did so confident that the partition plan would be defeated. In an ideological reversal of three decades since the Russian Revolution a young Russian delegate named Andrei Gromyko announced to a startled world that the Soviet Union was going to support the Americans in the partition.
Even so, the United Nations was made up largely of small states, a third of them in Latin America and all of them susceptible to oil blackmail.
It all came down to a moment of truth in the postwar world. One could smell the tension in Tabah as the village men gathered in the café in the middle of the night to listen to the broadcast on the partition vote. Even the women dared to inch around the outside of the café.
With their usual prebattle bravado the villagers had lulled and convinced themselves the partition had to fail. Only Haj Ibrahim faced reality.
‘We are about to witness a guilty