War for the Jerusalem Road

It was war in Palestine last week. The hit-&-run raids, the bombings and the skirmishes were giving way to something bigger. Now there were pitched battles, between thousands of men in organized bands, for definite objectives. A prime objective for both Arabs and Jews: control of Jerusalem.

Ever since U.N. voted partition, Arabs have been tightening their grip on the lifeline of Jerusalem's 100,000 Jews--the road to Tel Aviv, which twists from the city through the rocky Judean hills to the coastal plain. The city's Jewish population, which used to buy 80 to 90% of its food from neighboring Arabs, now depends on food convoys from the Jewish settlements along the coast. One strongpoint on that road is the village of Kastel, a cluster of dirty stone huts, one big house and a mosque. Jewish Haganah fighters, after seizing it, held it early last week. Then, one morning at dawn, the Arabs counterattacked.

Death at Dawn. Leading the Arabs was Abdul Kader Husseini, cousin of the ex-Mufti of Jerusalem Haj Amin el Husseini, and a rival of Fawzi Bey Kawukji (TIME, March 15) for command of all Arab forces in Palestine. More like a rash corporal than an army commander, Abdul Kader charged up the rocky slopes at the head of his men. Behind him the sky paled, silhouetting his stocky figure. Haganah Bren guns riveted bullets in a straight line across his body. Abdul Kader fell dead. As news of the battle reached Jerusalem, Arab reinforcements streamed out to Kastel in armored cars, trucks and battered U.S.-made taxis. By midafternoon, 2,000 strong, they occupied the village.

Next day 10,000 Arabs crowded into the lanes of the Old City to bury the Mufti's general. Crying "Hayyouh! Hayyouh!" (Greet him), the crowds followed his coffin, draped in the green, red, white and black of the Palestinian Arabs' flag, to the Dome of the Rock Mosque. "Shaheed, Shaheed" (He is a martyr) muttered devout Moslems. More Arabs were enlisting. Others were joining "Learn How to Shoot" clubs.

Perilous Bend. Jews were grim about Kastel. Said one: "We have to attack it again. This is our Battle of the Atlantic." They had managed to run a convoy of 40 food trucks through to Jerusalem by another road, the first supplies in twelve days. In a new push, Haganah fighters retook Kastel. But Fawzi Bey Kawukji, commanding the Arabs in the north, sent artillery and armored cars to support the Jerusalem Arabs. By week's end, Arabs claimed that they again held the village.

Cabled TIME Correspondent Eric Gibbs, who watched the battle of the Jerusalem roads last week: "I stood on a high escarpment amid a crowd of Arab soldiers, watching their 105-millimeter Schneider howitzer lob big shells into Jewish convoys trying to round a perilous bend in the road, two miles away. A Haganah truck or armored car looked like a tiny beetle as it climbed slowly and unsuspectingly towards danger. As the howitzer fired, Arabs waited tensely for the shell to land, bony brown hands clutching at rifles, eyes narrowed to slits. Another instant and a black mushroom of smoke grew silently out of the road. By the time the sound had echoed back, the vehicle was rolling helplessly down the precipice. From the escarpment rose an Arab cheer; one man jumped up and kissed both chubby cheeks of Captain Selim Assil, a staff officer from Fawzi's headquarters.

"Again & again the gun fired. The Arabs claimed three armored cars, two trucks for the morning's shooting. An antiquated Jewish biplane, painted yellow, chugged high over the Arab gun position but dropped no bombs.

"In the Kastel fighting there were Britons on both sides. The Arab forces included five deserters from the Palestine police. In the confused close-in fighting at the end, two of these Britons heard a shout from the Jewish side: 'Come on, you Arab bastards!' They recognized the man as another police deserter and shouted back: 'Bastard yourself! What are you doing over there?' As the Haganah Briton went to throw a hand grenade in reply, one of the Arabized Britons killed him with his Bren gun."

Exploits in Savagery. Elsewhere, savage raids turned into brutal massacres. Four miles from Kastel, about 100 Jews (two-thirds Irgun, one-third Stern Gang) swept into the village of Deir Yesin at dawn, blew up its huts with demolition charges. More than 200 Arabs, half of them women & children, died in the slaughter. The rest of the village's 700 dwellers surrendered or fled to caves in the nearby hills. For the first time, the Irgun and Stern terrorists were fighting against Arabs as a tactical force. While the Zionist General Council was accepting the Irgun's offer to serve under general Haganah direction, the Jewish Agency denounced the terrorists for the Deir Yesin massacre. It called on them to "realize the depth of the shame you have inflicted on Jewry, to whom such acts are utter abomination."

In the north, Irgunists masqueraded as blue-uniformed Palestine police, surprised a small British army camp. They lined up four soldiers against a wall and shot them in the back. While some raiders broke into arms dumps, others sprayed the camp with machine-gun fire from an armored car. The camp commander was shot dead as he stepped from his office. Then the raiders made off with 62 rifles, 38 Sten guns, 18 Bren guns, 4 bazookas, and ammunition.

"We're Very Worried." But the real battle was still the battle for the roads. For the Jews in Jerusalem, it was a matter of survival. Each day food grew scarcer, bread lines longer. Those most immediately threatened by the Arab stranglehold were 1,500 Orthodox Jews living in the Old City, surrounded by blockading Arabs. What food they got was coming through in British convoys.

"What will happen when the British aren't here to run in these convoys?" Gibbs asked one capable Jewish woman who helps to organize the food distribution. "We're very worried. I just don't know the answer," she admitted, and bit her lip.

Said Sheik Yaseen el Bakri, head of some of the Old City's Arab forces: "We understand the food situation is very bad in the Jewish quarter. It will be no more than two weeks before they have to surrender. After the 15th of May, if there is no foreign interference, it will take no more than three months to solve the Palestine problem."

At faraway Lake Success, what Sheik Yaseen called "foreign interference" was on the agenda again. The 57-nation U.N. General Assembly would meet in emergency session this week in another attempt to solve the Palestine problem. But neither Jews nor Arabs had yet accepted the U.S.-sponsored plea for a Palestine truce. Without a truce, the temporary U.N. trusteeship proposed by the U.S. (and opposed by both Jews and Arabs) would be just as hard to enforce as partition.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.