...we waited for Sheik Salaam, a Bedouin tribal chief. He was a short, wizened man with a face the color of burnt copper. He had tiny, cunning eyes and a tight and narrow mouth from which the words came sparingly. He was draped in a flowing black burnous, gold-braided at the neck. Around his waist was a cartridge belt, revolver, and a curved dagger, standard Bedouin equipment. He took Moustafa inside with him.

I learned the sheikh's record. Already wealthy through border traffic, he had bought land cheaply from Bedouins, and later sold it at extravagant prices to Jews, amassing even greater wealth. The vengeful Bedouins demanded an accounting. The sheikh promptly turned against the Jews, and emerged a top Arab patriot.

Moustafa came away empty-handed from the sheikh. "He is rich but he does not give baksheesh. He is not patriotic," Moustafa complained bitterly. "His enemies will kill him very soon."

...Moustafa and I were ushered into the presence of Captain Fadhil Rashid Bey, Arab military commander of Jerusalem. He was soft-spoken in contrast to the braggarts I had met so far. An Iraqi, he had been trained by Germans and, as he told me, had participated in the pro-Nazi revolt of 1941 in Iraq, which for two desperate months threatened to turn the entire Middle East into a Nazi camp. Moustafa gave me a flattering introduction as a correspondent and a German sympathizer, so that Rashid Bey and I got along famously from the outset. I took his photograph and he was pleased. I asked him deferentially how well he knew the Mufti.

"I am commander of Jerusalem because of the Mufti. I knew him in Iraq."

RUFFIANS ALL

Rashid Bey's job was not enviable. He had no regular army, but a vast rabble of largely unemployed, impoverished, loot-hungry Arab hooligans, whom even the respectable Moslems feared and avoided. There was no dearth of experienced fighters. Many were veterans of the Mufti's 1929 and 1936-9 revolts. Some had spent the war years in Germany, had been thoroughly indoctrinated, and were now excellent propagandists. Others had served in the Axis-sponsored Moslem Legions organized under the Mufti's guidance. There was also the Mufti's Youth Corps -- Futuwas -- reorganized by Jamal Bey el Husseini, the Mufti's cousin and chairman of the Arab Higher Committee. There were, too, a strong representation of Ikhwan el Muslimin thugs, select ruffians from Hebron, and thousands of other shiftless semiliterate marauders. They were undisciplined and outlaw fighters all, inept at teamwork, but dangerous when fighting individually or in small bands as guerrillas, with loot -- in any form -- as the primary objective.

These were the Arab gangs that, with the aid of technically skilled deserters from the British army, in recent months had blown up the Palestine Post and the Jewish Agency Building, bombed Ben Yehuda street, the principal Jewish business thoroughfare, and laid mines. As I strolled about I could see that they were in an extremely cocky and festive mood. They had made this last week in March a black week for the Jews. With foolhardy courage, the Haganah had sent a large convoy to supply Kfar Etzion -- a chain of four kibbutzim -- perched on a strategic hilltop commanding the road to Jerusalem from the South. The convoy had successfully charged through a fifteen mile gauntlet of Arab villages and numerous roadblocks, mines, and snipers' posts.

On its way back, however, the story was different. The Jews met Arabs under Abdul Kader el Husseini, a relative of the Mufti, who had served him the Iraq-Nazi revolt and was now commander of Arab forces in the Jerusalem area. At Nebi Daniel (site of a small Arab village named for the prophet Daniel) huge roadblocks halted the returning convoy. A fierce battle began. Cornered, the Haganah commander regrouped his vehicles on three sides of a square, with a ruined wall forming the fourth side. The battle raged for thirty-six hours between some two hundred Jews and more than three thousand Arabs who had surrounded them and cut them off from all help.

British forces were still responsible for "law and order." They were in Palestine to prevent precisely such battles as this. But when the British finally intervened, it was to strike a bargain with the Arabs. In return for the safety of the surviving Jews, the Arabs were to take all the Haganah arms and equipment. To prolong a hopeless struggle against odds of fifteen to one would have meant the eventual destruction of the Jewish fighting force as well as the loss of vehicles. The Haganah commander capitulated. The English escorted his men to Jerusalem. To the Jews it meant the loss of almost their entire fleet of armored trucks in Jerusalem. They also lost twelve men. The Arab toll in this "Battle of the Roads" was 135 dead.

The next day on sale everywhere in the Holy City were gruesome photographs of the battle: the burnt and mutilated bodies of Haganah men, which for some perverse Arab reason, had been stripped of clothing and photographed in the nude. These naked shots hit "Holy" City markets afresh after every battle, and sold rapidly. Arabs carried them in their wallets and displayed them frequently, getting the same weird, abnormal "kick" that our perverts derive from nude photographs of women.