Zion (Jerusalem) Read online

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  Revised edition copyright © 2012 by Colin Falconer

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  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance of fictional characters to actual persons living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

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  Electronic ISBN 9781621250128

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  ZION

  Colin Falconer

  Book III in the Jerusalem series

  the story of how Palestine became Israel

  PART ONE

  PALESTINE, 1945

  Chapter 1

  SS Eretz Israel

  Anything would be better than this, Netanel Rosenberg thought. Anything at all.

  Even Auschwitz.

  The ancient freighter creaked and rolled. Netanel threw out a hand and held tight to the metal pipe to which his bunk had been fixed, fought back another wave of nausea. Sweat like cold oil soaked his clothes.

  Please, let this end soon!

  Canvas hammocks had been hung between the pipes, five rows high. The air in the hold was stale, but the decks were awash under freezing, twelve-foot seas and so they were trapped down here. The stench alone is going to choke me, he thought. Vomit lapped the metal deck like bilge.

  Endure! he reminded himself. As you learned to endure hunger and cold and beatings. Survive each tormented minute as it arrives, count them off. That’s the way to do it.

  The ship rolled again, and Netanel gasped, thinking they were about to capsize. Men screamed, some fell from their bunks, those who had been whispering their prayers now shouted them aloud, beseeching the God of their ancestors to intercede.

  They were just a day’s sailing from the coast, but Palestine was as far away as ever.

  It had taken so long.

  First there had been the long months spent inside the refugee camp in Poland, waiting for the war to end. While he was there, the Brichach - the word meant “escape” in Polish - contacted him and organized money and false identity papers. He became Daniel Herzog, an Austrian Jew from Graz.

  The cities were in ruins, and every road, every train station, was choked with refugees. Most borders were closed as the occupying armies tried to trap fleeing Nazi officials. Netanel could have returned to Ravenswald but there was nothing there for him now. He knew where his own salvation lay.

  In mid-August he crossed the frontier into Czechoslovakia. The border guards had been bribed by Brichach and he had no trouble.

  At the beginning of September he crossed into Austria and the British Occupation Zone. For the first time in twelve years he saw a Star of David worn with pride. The badge was sewn on a British uniform, the wearer a Palestinian sabra from the Jewish Brigade, camped just across the border at Tarvizio.

  Netanel had thought then that his journey was almost over. But it was just beginning.

  The British, the local Brichach representative informed him, were trying to stem the flood of refugees pouring out of Europe into Palestine. They had closed the border with Italy.

  So Netanel hitch-hiked to Villach and walked across, illegally, just after dawn. The air was bright and frost-cold; the sun rose over a broad, cultivated valley, dotted with white. In the distance the Alps glistened like a rampart of ice.

  When he reached Tarvizio the Jewish Brigade had already moved on. He came to a farmhouse and his fractured German-accented Italian drew hostile stares from the men until he drew a Star of David on the ground. They smiled sympathetically then, invited him inside, fed him soup and one of the men took him into Tarvizio on a creaking cart. From there he caught the train to Trieste. The carriages were jammed with refugees, people hanging on to the doors and windows. The only space was on the roof. He clung on for the whole journey, pressed flat on the ice-encrusted metal through the endless tunnels.

  In Trieste he was one of hundreds of Jewish refugees rounded up by the Mossad Aliya Bet, an organization set up by the Yishuv in Palestine to beat the British blockade. They gave him food and new clothes while he waited for a boat. One night, dressed as Jewish Brigade soldiers, he and a hundred and fifty others were driven out of the city to an isolated stretch of coast. The Eretz Israel, an ancient, rust-stained freighter, waited in the darkness at the end of an unlit jetty. Five hundred men and women crammed on board in freezing rain. Netanel Rosenberg, the good German citizen, accustomed all his life to wealth and respect and comfort, was homeless, alone, and embarking on his own crusade to the Holy Land.

  Tel Aviv

  SECRET

  TO: DISCID HAIFA, rpt DISCID HAIFA FROM: PLACID

  162/17/8/1 17/12

  SS Genoa, renamed SS Eretz Israel, left Trieste 8/12, sighted 300 nautical miles west of coast 1300 hours, 17/12, headed east at 10 knots. Imperative we intercept. Estimate arrival after sunset 18/12.

  Decoded: RJ 1735 hrs 17/12

  Mordechai Yarkoni was chief of staff of the Haganah, the Jewish Agency’s military underground. He poured from the brass coffeepot on his desk and read the telex again. It had been relayed from one of their agents in Jerusalem just half an hour ago; PLACID was the British codeword for CID headquarters in Jerusalem.

  His office was in the Red House, the Haganah’s head-quarters, an anonymous five-storey building in HaYarkon Street. The window looked out over the beach. The wind sifted sand across the boulevard below and the Mediterranean was cool and grey and flecked with white.

  Yarkoni passed the telex towards the handsome young man on the other side of the desk. He was a sabra, you could tell that by looking at him. The saabra was the desert pear that thrived in the Palestinian wilderness because it had evolved a prickly outer shell that protected it from the aridity and from desert scavengers; it was also the nickname the Palestinian-born settlers gave themselves. They all wore a black moustache, like a badge, and had this same air of chilling self-assurance.

  He waited until Asher Ben-Zion had finished reading the message and then he said: “A British Sunderland spotted them yesterday, two hundred miles south-west of Famagusta. They’ve been held up in heavy seas but we anticipate they should arrive off Haifa about midnight.”

  “How many people on board?”

  “Five hundred and forty-six.”

  Asher raised an eyebrow. “That’s a lot of Jews.”

  “More than we’ve tried before. We have to show the British that they cannot stop us. More particularly, we have to show the Arabs.”

  Asher nodded. “What if the British make the intercept?”

  “The captain has been told to run the ship aground. On no account must they be allowed to stop her. We have to get everyone off, and disperse them in Haifa and Acre as quickly as possible. All our people have been put on alert.”

  This feat of communications alone was remarkable. The radio in the adjacent office kept Yarkoni in touch with every Jewish settlement and Haganah command post throughout the whole of the Yishuv, from Acre to Eilat.

  “Who will be in charge of the operation on the land?”

  Yarkoni sipped his coffee. “You will,” he said.

  Asher tried to disguise his elation. There were no formal ranks in the Haganah; in an organization of equals, men achieved authority through reputation and experien
ce. He had thus been effectively handed his first command.

  “I won’t let you down,” he said.

  “If you do, I’ll break your head,” Yarkoni said. He meant it.

  Chapter 2

  Rab’allah

  Reception on the Phillips radiogram had deteriorated during the day. A storm was moving in from the Mediterranean, and static was breaking up the signal. Arab music, tinny flute and drum, came in waves like the rhythm of cicadas, fading away until it had almost vanished, then stronger again until the noise was almost deafening.

  The Holy Stragglers of Judea sat in a circle by the coffee house window. Rain wept from the eaves and the carpets smelled of mould. Winter was a bad time. Babies died of the cough, and the cold rains drove the sheep and goats into the caves. Most years, there was nothing to do but sit here and argue or make babies to replace the ones that were lost.

  But this year was different; this year the Jews were coming.

  “We have to fight,” Izzat said, his voice low. ‘We must fight as we did in the time of the Mufti. Remember how the Britishers wanted to divide up our land and give it to the Jews? We fought then - we must fight again now!”

  “If only the Mufti would return,” someone said. He had disappeared after the war, and no one knew his whereabouts. There were reports that he was in a French prison.

  “The Mufti is making new plans,” Izzat said, mysteriously, intimating he knew far more than he was able to divulge.

  There was a ripple of excitement. “You have heard something?”

  “I meet regularly with Sheikh Daoud.”

  “The Mufti is still alive?”

  Izzat had no idea. “The sheikh communicates with him regularly. Through him the Mufti has relayed a personal message for all of his brave Strugglers!” There was a sharp intake of breath. The Mufti himself! “He has commended us all to continue our jihad even if it demands from us the last drop of precious Arab blood!”

  The announcement had the reaction Izzat had hoped for. The Strugglers grew fierce and leaned towards him, committed anew.

  “I shall not lay down my rifle while there is one Jew still living in Palestine,” one of them said.

  “May Allah burn me on the Day of the Fire if I ever rest until we have driven the Jews into the sea!”

  “We are with you, Izzat! What will the Mufti have us do?”

  Izzat lowered his voice. “Now the Britisher war is over, the Jews are preparing to come here in thousands, tens of thousands!”

  They all nodded. They were familiar with the stories in Falastine of immigrant ships running the British blockade, of hordes of refugees waiting on the European shores to flock into Palestine.

  “The Britishers only pretend to send them away. The Britisher pasha Bevin wants them to come here, because he does not want them in Britannia. I would not trust the British any more than I would trust a Bedouin in the dark with a sharp knife! We must fight!”

  A low murmur of agreement.

  “I have a plan, a plan for which Sheikh Daoud himself has given his blessing, may Allah grant him increase, a plan that will - ”

  They all fell silent as the music on the radiogram was interrupted by the voice of the announcer on Radio Damascus. He read a prepared news item on the death camps the Britishers had claimed to have discovered in Germany and Poland. He said independent Arab observers now claimed these camps did not exist.

  The announcer’s voice faded under the whine of the static: “. . . been reported ... an elaborate plan by the Zionist Satan . . . world sympathy for. . . Jewish invasion of Arab Palestine ...”

  The bulletin ended with a report that three thousand Jewish immigrants had landed near Acre two nights before.

  Izzat looked around the circle of grim faces, eyes glittering in the quickening dusk. No one present doubted that such a conspiracy was possible.

  “You see,” Izzat said.

  “But the pictures,” one of them protested. Photographs of the German gas ovens had been spread across the pages of Falastine for weeks at the end of summer. Back then they had been cause for celebration.

  “Anyone can fake a picture,” Izzat said. “It is the easiest thing in the world. Besides, if these stories were really true, why is it that the Britishers and the Americans will not harbor the Jews themselves in their own countries? No, it is just a trick.”

  The logic of the argument was inescapable.

  “Tell us about your plan,” someone said.

  Izzat leaned forward, drawing invisible maps on the carpet with the sweep of his forefinger. “Every morning at eight o’clock a bus leaves the Jaffa Gate for Tel Aviv. It is crammed with Jews, and it is never guarded. We shall ambush it and kill everyone. It will be easier than picking figs from a tree. There will be rich pickings afterwards.”

  “What about the British?”

  Izzat grinned. “Let me take care of the British.”

  Silence. This sounded good; a great blow against the Jews, with little danger and the chance of some loot as well. They could hardly wait to get home and oil their guns.

  “Show us your scar,” someone said.

  Izzat lifted his robe and turned around. The purplish hole in the flesh of his buttock was livid against his skin.

  “Tell us the story again!”

  Izzat allowed himself to be persuaded. “It was the night we ambushed fifty horsemen from the kibbutz,” he began. “I killed a dozen that night, and cut off their balls! One of them lay beside his horse, pretending to be dead. As the Jews broke and ran, I chased them, and he shot me from behind - ”

  “He was aiming for your brains, and he only just missed!”

  Everyone turned. It was Zayyad.

  Izzat dropped his robe and turned around, his face white with anger. “Do you come to lead us in our jihad, Abu Wagil?”

  “What holy war? All that is holy to you is your ambition.”

  “Palestine is what is holy to me! I only carry on the fight that was started by the great martyr, Wagil Hass’san, your son.” He pointed to the little shrine in the corner of the coffee house, and the yellowing portrait that hung there.

  Zayyad studied the faces. Several of the men were from al-Naqb, the rest from his own village. Most of them were fellaheen or idiots like Tareq. “What are you all doing here?” No one answered him. My authority over them is ebbing away, he thought. I can smell their desperation, it clings to them like stale sweat. “The coffee house is shut. Go home!”

  No one moved.

  “All of you! Get out!"

  They filtered out, slowly. Finally only Izzat remained.

  “Why do they listen to idiots like you?” Zayyad said.

  “They do not want to see their land stolen, their women raped and their children hoisted on bayonets.”

  “You talk like the Mufti.”

  “The Mufti talks for all of us.”

  “The Mufti opens his mouth and the wind blows his tongue about.”

  “What would you have us do, Abu Wagil? Stand by and let the Jews kick us into the desert?”

  “One day we will fight. But to fight well, a people need good leaders, not murderers and opportunists in clerics’ robes. They need weapons that will not blow up in their hands. If you endanger this village I will cut off your toes one by one and ram them down your throat. Now get out!”

  After Izzat had gone, he slumped on to the divan by the window.

  Rishou, Rishou . . . what am I going to do?

  SS Eretz Israel

  The storm had eased enough for those with strength left to climb the swaying gangways to the deck. The sea still foamed and heaved. Netanel hung on to the rail, gulping in the freezing, salt air, closing his eyes against the giddying wretchedness that squeezed his guts like a fist.

  When he opened his eyes he found himself staring at the gaunt, shrunken profile of Blockaltester Mendelssohn.

  He was hanging onto the rail a few feet away, thinner and paler than Netanel remembered when he was overlord of Block SI, but there
was no mistake - it was him. They stared at each other for the moment of mutual recognition and then both looked away.

  Netanel was too stunned to react at first. Then shame and hatred came slowly back. I should denounce him! he thought. I will tell everyone on ship who he is and what he did at Auschwitz and they will take him and pitch him into the sea.

  But then he thought: how can I denounce Mendelssohn when I am as guilty as he is? You forfeited the right to accuse anyone when you became a kapo. You have Mandelbaum’s blood under your fingernails. Your silence guarantees his.

  He stared at the cold ocean, lost to his terrible remembrances. When he looked up again, the deck was empty and Mendelssohn was gone.

  The storm rushed ahead; the decks were milling with people now, straining for their first glimpse of Palestine. Many of Netanel’s fellow travelers were survivors of the German death camps like himself, and the first sighting of their promised land had an almost mystical significance, like Noah’s vision of the rainbow after the flood.

  There must be three or four hundred of us on deck now, Netanel decided. Only those too weakened by seasickness are still below. The faces around him were almost translucent in the greenish aura of the storm’s twilight. Despite the cold, some of the men were in their shirtsleeves, enjoying the bite of the air after the suffocating atmosphere of the holds. All of them had numbers tattooed on their wrists or forearms, stark against their marble-white skin.

  The man next to him turned and grinned. Netanel could not guess at his age - thirty, forty, fifty, it was hard to tell with veterans of the wire. He was missing two teeth on one side of his mouth. “We are finally home,” he said in German.

  “This year in Jerusalem,” Netanel said, paraphrasing the Passover prayer.