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1 Jerusalem, May 22, 1948, Morning 1 Had you walked past the Ta’amon Café on the corner of Hillel and King George Streets in Jerusalem on the morning of May 22, 1948, you would have spotted a gaggle of about thirty men, all in the fourth decade of their lives. Packs on their backs, they were waiting to be picked up and sent into battle. The city was under attack, with the Egyptian army advancing from the south and Jordan’s Arab Legion attacking from the north and east. The soldiers had been enlisted in the city’s garrison the week before and served under David Shaltiel, the controversial commander of the Jerusalem front.1 One of them was a solidly built man who looked to be on the verge of forty. Silent and introverted, he clenched a cigarette between lips set in a bitter smile. His black beret hid a large bald spot. Few of the other men in the group were likely to have noticed the number tattooed on his forearm.2 Those that did probably knew nothing of what the man had seen and suffered between fleeing Poland for Paris in 1931 and arriving, inadvertently, in Jerusalem in the spring of 1946. But both he and his fellow recruits knew very well that some of them would not see the end of that day and that their bodies would soon lie in the temporary military cemetery at Sheikh Bader.3 In Jerusalem, where Jewish tradition still reigned supreme, dead men did not pass the night unburied. Ten days previously, the men in charge of the war effort of the Yishuv had estimated the chances of a Jewish victory at 50 percent. This evaluation was given to the Yishuv’s provisional government by Yisrael Galili, chief of the National Staff of the Haganah (the Jewish army that would, after independence and the incorporation of two smaller militias, become the Israel Defense Forces), and Yigal Yadin, the acting chief of staff of the Jewish forces. Golda Meyerson (later Meir) reported on the results of her frustrating meeting with King Abdullah of Jordan. He had told her that, unfortunately, he would not be able to honor the commitments he had made to her previously. Despite his promises, he declared, if war broke out, his army, the Arab Legion, would join Friling - Jewish Kapo.indb 1 4/11/2014 2:48:55 PM 2 ||| A Jewish Kapo in Auschwitz the forces attacking the young Jewish state. In Meir’s evaluation, he probably already saw himself as the king of Jerusalem. Proof of Abdullah’s resolve was quick to come—in the middle of the meeting the assembled Jewish leaders received news that the four kibbutzim that made up the Etzion bloc of settlements were under attack by the Legion. The Jewish defenders were defeated two days later.4 The meeting, in Tel Aviv, had been called to decide whether the Yishuv should proclaim the establishment of a Jewish state. David Ben-Gurion, premier of the provisional government, was not deterred by his colleagues’ pessimism. He spoke at length, explaining why the decision to declare independence had to be taken “now or never.” The United States, fearing war, had proposed a trusteeship that would maintain foreign rule over Palestine. Ben-Gurion urged his colleagues to reject the American initiative. Accepting it would tie the Yishuv’s hands and make its defense more difficult at a time when the inevitable war with the Arabs was already under way. An independent Jewish state should be declared, he maintained, as soon as the British left. Word of the debate in the Yishuv leadership reached besieged Jerusalem. Even those who did not know about the plans to declare independence could hardly help being caught up in the surge of joy that overcame the Yishuv two days later. On Friday, May 14, 1948, a bit after four o’clock in the afternoon, Ben-Gurion declared, in a clear staccato voice, the establishment of the State of Israel. He and his colleagues had finished polishing the draft of the declaration only a short time before. Ben-Gurion commenced a fresh volume of his diary when he returned from the ceremony. He opened with a somber nod to that momentous day, a single austere line that took in all the complexities he saw before him and his nation. “We declared the founding of the state. Its fate is in the hands of the military forces.”5 This may...

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