That the New City was still in Israeli hands was due to default by the Arabs, no less than the prowess of the Jews; and to what I firmly believe was divine intervention on scores of occasions. If the Arabs had seized the initiative from the first day and captured the strategic buildings, the outcome would have been far different. The British contributed to the Arab fiasco. They thought that the Legion, boasting British generalship and superior armor, would not only overrun the New City, but push onward to link up with other Arab forces in a giant pincer movement aimed at Tel Aviv, ultimately pushing Israel into the sea. The determined resistance of the Kfar Etzion kibbutzim (controlling the road over which Egypt planned to bring reinforcements) was the first factor to upset the Arab timetable; then Jewish initiative and the unexpected stand of Jerusalem, as well as Israeli successes elsewhere, frustrated the Arab plan -- as well as British intentions of re-entering Palestine via the back door on the heels of the Arab Legion. Mainly, however, the plan boomeranged because both Arab and British wholly underestimated the fighting prowess of what I've called the "new" Jew fighting for his homeland with back to the wall.

There certainly were enough Arabs -- hundreds of Arab Legion soldiers milling around in British khaki and khaffiyas. They were uniformly young and looked like a genuine fighting army. They were all heavily armed, and ammunition was being brought up constantly in boxes with English markings. There was shortage of neither of men nor armaments.

I got permission from a junior officer to visit the defenses on Zion Gate. One of the massive portals hung crazily from one set of hinges, the other was blown off. The passageway, about twenty feet wide and thirty feet high, was now packed tight with barbed wire, rails, and rocks. Above it the walls were manned heavily by Legion troops. Here, also, I found a concentration of several dozen British deserters, fighting with the Arabs. Immediately beside the Gate three heavy British armored cars lay in waiting for the Palmach. The Jews would certainly get a scorching reception if they tried another breakthrough.

I walked back to the monastery grounds, to the School of the Holy Translators...Sitting in a classroom chair behind a desk was the commander of the Zion Gate Front, Captain Mahmoud Bey Mousa, soft spoken and scholarly-looking, swathed in layers of an oversized kaffiya that covered his face except for eye and mouth...

...He was sitting literally on the proverbial keg of gunpowder, for stacked behind and all around him, under his bed near by, and all the way to the farther end of the basement, which was being used as an emergency hospital, were cases upon cases of ammunition with the usual markings of His Majesty's Army. I squeezed my bag between cases of ammunition under his bed, and then went to the top floor of the school to take photographs of the Jewish quarter. They were to prove of historic value, for less than forty-eight hours later the ghetto was reduced to ruin and rubble.