• The Battle of Old Jerusalem, 1948 

The Battle of Old Jerusalem in 1948
(Part Five-- the final chapter)

By Professor Dr. Ahmad Tell

The surrender of the Jewish Quarter

A few minutes past nine O’clock on Friday, 1948, the telephone rang in major Abdullah Tell’s headquarters at Rawdah School. It was Captain Moussa. “Two rabbis,” he said, “are coming out of the quarter with a white flag.” Walking into Moussa’s headquarters in the Armenian School of the Holy Translators, Tell found himself face to face with the first Jews he had ever met: the 70-year-old Rabbi Reuven Hazan and the 83-year-old Rabbi Zeev Mintzberg. The two had come to prepare their quarter’s surrender to the Arab Legion.

Their arrival climaxed a two-hour struggle inside the quarter. The Haganah had thwarted with gunfire the rabbi’s first effort to cross the battle line, wounding Hazan. Undaunted, they insisted that Russnak would have to kill them to stop them from going to the Arabs. “It makes no difference who kills us,” Hazan declared. “The situation is hopeless.”

The hard-pressed Rusnak summoned a meeting of his staff. The situation was indeed hopeless. The Legion was six yards away from the synagogue in which the residents huddled; the hospital was out of virtually every form of medicine. His men had ammunition for no more than another half-hour. After that, 1,700 people would be at the mercy of the Arabs. Russnak decided to try to stall for time by talking. He authorized the two rabbis to ask for a cease-fire for the removal of the dead and wounded.

Politely but firmly, Major Tell ordered Rabbi Hazan back to the quarter to bring Rabbi Weingarten and a representative of the Haganah. On his side, Russnak delayed as long as he dared then ordered an Arab-speaking officer, Shaul Tawil, back to Abdullah Tell. Tell had meanwhile invited the Red Cross’s Otto Lehner and the United Nations’ Pablo de Azcarate to witness the proceedings. Azcarate was deeply moved. He found Major Tell “without a single word or gesture which could have humiliated or offended the defeated Jewish leader in any way.”

Tell was not prepared to enter discussions, however. His terms were simple. All able-bodied men would be taken prisoners. Women, children and aged would be sent to the New City. The wounded, depending on the extent of their injuries, would be held prisoners or returned. Although Tell knew that there were many women in the ranks of the Haganah, he would take no women prisoners. Tell dictated his terms to Nassib Boulos, a bilingual Arab correspondent of Time Magazine; then he gave the Haganah until four O’clock to accept his offer.

While Russnak was talking to his staff, a phenomenon had occurred which was to shatter any hope Russnak still had of prolonging negotiations on until nightfall. The residents huddling in the cellars of Rabbi Jochanan ben Zakai Synagogue had learned of the surrender delegation. Shrieking shouts of Joy and thanksgiving, they rushed past their Haganah guards into the street. Within minutes, Arabs and Jews who had been killing each other hours before were embracing in the street, old friends greeted each other with tears of relief. The Legionnaires moved out of their posts and began to mingle with the men of the Haganah.

Jewish shopkeepers opened their stores. Bitterly, Russnak noted that some of them who had given his men a glass of water begrudgingly were offering cakes and coffee to the Arabs. Seeing the two peoples so completely intermingled, Russnak realized that surrender was already an accomplished fact. It only remained to perform the act that would consecrate it. Russnak put on an Australian battle blouse and a beret, strapped an old parabellum to his waist, and set off to surrender to his Arab foes.

Surveying the pitiful lines of his foes, Abdullah Tell told Russnak, “If I had known you were so few we would have come after you with sticks, not guns.” Then, seeing the worry on the faces of the residents, Tell realized they all feared they would be the victims of a massacre. He began to move down their ranks, quietly seeking with a gesture or a word to reassure them that they will be safe.

The shortest exile in modern Jewish history began just before sunset. Two by two, some 1300 residents of the Jewish Quarter started over the 500 yards separating them from Zion Gate and the New City.

Tell’s Legionnaires offered the protection of their bodies along the narrow passageways and staircases so familiar to them, holding back the excited Arab crowds. They helped the aged, carried bundles or children for overburdened women. They drove back the excited mob with their rifle butts, arrested those who tried to pelt the Jews with stones, and, on one occasion, fired over the crowd’s head to hold them back. Until well into the evening, the sad procession continued through Zion Gate, the flames of their burning quarter illuminating their faces. 

1. Three hundred Jewish extremist fighters were dead.
2. Eighty Jews were wounded.
3. Three hundred and forty Jews were taken by the Arab Legion as prisoners of war.
4. The destruction of the whole Jewish Quarter.

At his headquarters, Abdullah Tell received the final accolade of his triumphant day. It was a telephone call from Amman. Warm and paternal, the king personally congratulated the young officer he had sent to save the Old City of Jerusalem 10 days before.

September 19, 1999

The Battle of Old Jerusalem in 1948
(Part One)

By Professor Dr. Ahmad Tell

The slide to chaos in Jerusalem

As May 1948 and the end of the Mandate drew nearer, fighting and confusion in Palestine increased. Battles took place in the very streets of Jerusalem. The Jews began slowly and methodically to conquer and occupy the Arab quarters of the city and several predominantly Arab residential areas, such as Katamon and the so-called Greek and German colonies, in the southern suburbs.

While these house-to-house battles were in progress, British Army units were only a few hundred yards away. Yet they intervened slowly and deliberately only if a particular battle lasted too long, or if heavy casualties seemed to be likely. In Palestine, Jews and Arabs alike were agreed in demanding the withdrawal of Britain from the country.

Early in April 1948, the Jews attacked the suburb of Katamon. The Iraqi Consulate was situated in this area, and the Jewish forces, advancing from house to house, were drawing near to it. The Iraqis appealed to the Jordan government, as one Arab State to another, and asked them to place a guard on their Consulate. The Jordanian government, unwilling to see the Consulate of an allied Arab government captured by the Jews, ordered Glubb Pasha, British officer in the Arab Legion, to send a guard forthwith.

Meanwhile, the Hagana-- the embryo Jewish army-- was advancing. They were resisted by an improvised collection of Arab irregulars, without training or leadership. Katamon was a comparatively wealthy quarter, consisting of residential houses, each in its own garden. As the Jews captured one house after another, the well-to-do Arab residents began to abandon their homes.

Soon the Iraqi Consulate also moved out, and the Arab Legion guard was left in an empty building. The house next to it on one side, and then that on the other side of the road, were occupied by the Jews. The Arab Legion guard improvised loopholes on the roof and in the windows. There was a good deal of shooting. The Jews withdrew. They returned the next day. Miniature battles developed. To save the Arab Legion guard from a disaster, Glubb Pasha ordered the guard to withdraw from the Iraqi Consulate house.

The British Army’s insistence that every man of the Arab Legion must be out of Palestine by May 14, 1948 was diplomatically correct. But, in the light of what was to follow, it may well be argued that the British Army was responsible for the ruin of a large part of Jerusalem.

For the Truce Committee complained that it was unable to find any responsible Arab leader with whom to negotiate, or who could make his orders obeyed. Moreover, the absence of any Arab military force in Jerusalem when the Mandate ended, offered to the Jews the irresistible temptation to seize the whole defenseless city and incorporate it into the new Israel.

If the British could have handed over the Arab quarters of Jerusalem to the Arab Legion, the Truce Committee would at least have found a responsible commander to deal with, who could force his orders. In addition, the sight of such an Arab force in front of them might have caused the Jews to pause. The truce might have been renewed. Jerusalem could have remained divided, but the Holy City would have escaped the partial destruction which it suffered, and many Jewish and Arab lives would have been saved. Such conjectures are of little value, because the Jews had long beforehand determined to seize the whole of Jerusalem. 

The strategic importance of Jerusalem

In the case of Jordan, there were already 100,000 Jews in the city of Jerusalem, on the ridge of the mountains. The Holy City was therefore not only of immense moral and religious value, it was the key to the military situation; it was on the very crest of the mountain range. If the Jews captured the whole of Jerusalem, they could drive down the main road to Jericho, and the whole position in Palestine would be turned. If the Jews could seize Allenby Bridge, the Arab Legion in Palestine would be cut off from its base, and would suffer a military disaster.

Either, therefore, Jordan must arrange a truce in Jerusalem, or else must concentrate on holding the city, in which case the remoter rural districts might be lost. The Jordan government appreciated Glubb’s plan and did all in its power to secure a truce. 

The Jews violated the truce in Jerusalem

Throughout May 15 and 16, the Truce Committee struggled on with gradually diminishing hopes of success. Every now and again there was a glimmer of hope. The Jews had agreed to a cease-fire and to observe the truce, but in every case the report was again contradicted.

The Jewish attacks were carried out by dissident terrorist groups backed by the Jewish Agency in Palestine. And all the time the anguishing telephone calls had continued from the Palestinian leaders in Jerusalem to the Jordanian leaders in Amman saying: “Save us! Help us! They are up to the Jaffa Gate! They have occupied the Shaikh Jarrah! They are scaling the walls of the Old City! Save us! Help us!”

July 25, 1999

The Battle of Old Jerusalem in 1948
(Part Two)

By Professor Dr. Ahmad Tell 

Two Jewish enclaves in Jerusalem

The first and most formidable enclave was built on Mount Scopus, the ridge, which ran northeast of Jerusalem, to the Mount of Olives. On it stood the massive stone buildings of the Hadassa Hospital and the Hebrew University, which dominated all that part of Jerusalem which remained in the hands of Arabs.

The second Jewish enclave was within the walls of the Old City. Inside the walls, the old houses are built one on top of the other and the narrow streets are in many places only wide enough for three people to walk abreast. The Old City is built on a ledge of hillside sloping down from west to east and the majority of streets climb up and down in steps beneath the tall overhanging buildings.

The inhabited portions of the Old City were divided into four quarters. Of these, the largest were those on the north occupied by the Muslims and Christians respectively. The southwest corner of the city contained the Armenian quarter, while to the east of it lies the Jewish quarter which had long been inhabited by religious Jews. In the Jewish quarter of the Old City, rabbis, with long white beards and bent with age, clung faithfully to the law and traditions of Moses. Pale young men, their hair hanging in corkscrew ringlets beside their hollow cheeks, hastened timidly along the narrow streets. 

Palestinian appeal for help

Meanwhile, Amman was also tense. The Prime Minister was suffering under the strain. Every hour or two, the telephone would ring. The Jews were attacking the Old City. They had sealed the walls on Mount Zion. They were up to the New Gate. The Jerusalem police were holding the Citadel. An Irish Roman Catholic priest, Father Eugene, was manning the walls.

Thus hour after hour the news came through, always followed by the same appeals. “Save us! Our ammunition is finished! We can hold on no longer! Where is the Arab Legion? For God’s sake! Save us!” King Abdullah of Jordan was haggard with anxiety lest the Jews enter the Old City housing the Great Mosques. His father, the late King Hussein of the Hijaz was buried in the precincts, a fact which added a note of personal anguish to the King’s religious and political hopes and fears.

The Arab defenders of the Old City seemed to be failing. The Jews were reported to have broken into the Old City by the Zion Gate and to have made contact with the Jewish quarter inside the walls. This operation was carried out by the Palmach, the spearhead of the Israeli army. The Jews were now everywhere using mortars and armored cars as well as small arms. A major battle had developed in Jerusalem. There seemed to be little hope now of saving the Jerusalem Truce. 

“Go save Jerusalem”

It was 4:00 a.m., Monday, May 17, 1948. As he always did, King Abdullah began a new day by resuming his solitary dialogue with the God of whom one of his distant ancestors had been the messenger. His dialogue was interrupted by his Aide de Camp, Hazza el Majali, bursting into the bedroom. Majali had just received a telephone call from Jerusalem.

Weeping, Ahmad Hilmi Pasha, one of the two members of Haj Amin Husseini’s Arab Higher Committee still in the city, had begged for the Arab Legion to come “to our assistance and save Jerusalem and its people from a certain fall.” It was the second call Majali had received that night from Hilmi Pasha begging for help, the climax of a series of pleas that had been pouring in for the past 24 hours.

Those words had not left King Abdullah unmoved. Only the constant pressure of Great Britain, the nation whose support and subsidy were vital to his kingdom, had kept him from sending his legion to the Holy City. Jerusalem’s fall would be a bitter blow to him personally and would have disastrous effect on Jordan and the Arab world. What good, after all, was the best army in the Arab world if its soldiers were not to defend the third city of Islam?

“Jerusalem is falling. Where is the Son of the Prophet?” screamed a frightened group of men bursting into the Jericho police station where Major Abdullah Tell (the author’s brother) was camping. The officer who had conquered Kfar Etzion leaped from his bed. One of his visitors was weeping. All of them were shaking. Jerusalem, they told Abdullah Tell, was in a horrible state, its irregulars exhausted, its ammunition gone, its population close to panic. Major Tell told his orderly to make them coffee and urged them to rush to Amman. Picking up his phone, he warned the palace they were on the way.

It was just after two O’clock in the morning when the telephone rang in Abdullah Tell’s headquarters. The young officer’s orderly shook as he handed Abdullah Tell the receiver. “It is our master,” he said. This time King Abdullah was convinced. King Abdullah now wanted his men to take Jerusalem, not just threaten it.

Deliberately ignoring his army’s chain of command, he chose to give his order not to its English Commander, who might raise again his wise objections, but to a man whose emotions he knew would lead him to act within the hour, a fellow Arab like himself. “Ya habibi, my dear,” the King told Major Tell, “I saw the Palestinian leaders you sent me. We cannot wait any longer. Go save Jerusalem.”

August 8, 1999

The Battle of Old Jerusalem in 1948
(Part Three)

By Professor Dr. Ahmad Tell 

Major Abdulla Tell’s move to save Jerusalem

Major Abdullah Tell started down the Mount of Olives to the darkened community at his feet, its skyline illuminated by the occasional flash of an exploding grenade. “The most important city in the world,” Tell thought, and it had just been entrusted to his care. An avid student of history, Tell knew that it was on this hilltop that Caliph Omar, son of a black slave who became the successor of Prophet Mohammad, had accepted the city’s surrender and brought it its first Islamic rule. How much blood had the centuries mixed with its soil? Tell wondered, aware he would soon add still more to it.

One of Tell’s infantry companies, ordered to the Mount of Olives at sunset, had followed from the hilltop the sound and glare of the battle for Jaffa Gate. Tell had no intention of throwing his battalion piecemeal into Jerusalem, but the urgency of King Abdullah’s call and the pleas of the irregulars rushing from the city to the Mount of Olives led him to order Captain Mahmoud Moussa to send 50 men into Jerusalem immediately. He reasoned that their presence would bolster its defenders’ sagging morale until the rest of his men arrived.

Tell and Moussa watched the shadowy figures move slowly down the Mount of Olives towards the Garden of Gethsemane and St. Stephan’s Gate. Forty minutes later, at 3:40 a.m. on Tuesday, May 18, 1948, a lime-green signal flare cut a parabola across Jerusalem’s black skyline. Although General John Baggot Glubb still did not know it, the men of the army he had wanted to keep out of Jerusalem were now on the ramparts of the Old City. 

The situation of the Jewish Quarter was desperate

In the Jewish Quarter of Jerusalem’s Old City, the rabbis who four days earlier had begged their superiors to “shake the world and save our souls” urged the quarter’s Haganah commander to surrender. “We have been saying psalms all the time, yet the battle continues,” one of them sadly told Moshe Russnak. “Clearly, it was God’s will that they surrender.”

Russnak’s situation was indeed desperate. Abdullah Tell’s relentless pressure had deprived his men of position after position. The quarter’s limited space had now been reduced to half its original dimension. Their water was almost gone. The electricity supply had failed. The sewers no longer worked and it was impossible to collect garbage.

In the May heat, the quarter’s alleys were heavy with the stench of decomposing human excrement. An even worse smell, the putrefying odor of dead flesh, clung to every stone around the hospital. Unable to bury their dead, the quarter’s doctors had ordered them wrapped in old sheets and stacked in a courtyard behind the hospital. Among them were Rabbi Yitzhak Orenstein and his wife. He had been killed with his wife by a shell falling on their home. In the hospital, even the last bottles of blood plasma had been lost when the electric power failed. There was no anaesthetic left, and operations were performed without it by flashlight. The old vaulted rooms of Misgav Ladakh were crowded with over 150 wounded, fighters and civilians alike.

Uprooted from their homes in the Jewish Quarter because the Arab Legion had either captured them or made life in them unbearable with shellfire, most of the quarter’s 1700 residents huddled together in three synagogues just inside the Haganah’s lines. They cooked on the floor, slept on dirt-encrusted, vermin-filled old mattresses, weeping, praying, or gazing off into space.

Yet despite his grim situation, Russnak would not yield to the Rabbis’ pleas for surrender. Time and time again since May 18, 1948, he had been promised help from the Jews, and time and time again it had failed to arrive. However, Russnak was persuaded to hold on. 

Tell’s armored cars enter the Old City

Dissatisfied with the results being obtained by his artillery on the Mount of Olives, Abdullah Tell had decided to bring his guns to the heart of Jerusalem, where the penetrating effect of their shells would be devastating. Past the stations of the Cross of the Via Dolorosa, using sandbags to smooth over stairways, Tell succeeded in moving two of his armored cars where only mules and goats had gone before, through the crooked alleyways of the Old City. On Thursday, May 27, 1948, it was clear both to the Jewish Quarter’s deeply religious inhabitants and to its exhausted defenders that only a miracle could save them. Of the 200 fighters with whom Russnak had begun and the 80 reinforcements who had come to the Jewish Quarter with Gazit, 35 men remained unwounded. Together they had an average of 10 bullets per man. There was no ammunition left for the Bren guns.

August 20, 1999

The Battle of Old Jerusalem in 1948
(Part Four)

By Professor Dr. Ahmad Tell 

The Hurva Synagogue

Russnak had three ancient synagogues, into whose cellars the residents were packed. Only one other major synagogue remained in Jewish hands, the Hurva, the principal temple of the Ashkenazim, considered the most beautiful in all Jerusalem and, indeed, all Palestine. Anxious to avoid the opprobrium of destroying the Hurva, Abdullah tell had written Otto Lehner of the Red Cross 48 hours before to warn that unless the Haganah abandoned its positions in the synagogue and its adjoining courtyard, he would be forced to attack it. Russnak could not agree to Tell’s request. The Hurva was the key to the last stretch of ground he controlled. Once it fell, the Arabs would be 15 yards from the 1700 he was defending. He would fight for it as long as he could.

Abdullah Tell’s company commanders were unanimous in their reports at their daily conference that morning: With one concerted push, the quarter would fall. There was no doubt in Tell’s mind where the attack should be. Confident that he had discharged his moral obligations in his unanswered letter to the Red Cross, he told his men, “Get the Hurva Synagogue by noon.”

“If we do,” replied Captain Mahmoud Moussa, “promise us you will have tea in it this afternoon.”

“Insh’ Allah! God willing!” said Abdullah Tell.

The destruction of the ancient synagogue would be the final achievement of fawzi Al Kutub’s heroic career. To blow his way through the walls surrounding the synagogue, he strapped to a ladder a 200-liter barrel filled with explosives. Four men, among them Hadi Dai’es, the coffee boy who had discovered Abdul Khader Al Husseini’s body at Kastal, grabbed the ends of the ladder as though it were a stretcher. Pistol in hand, Fawzi led them across a 50-yard strip of open ground to the base of the synagogue’s courtyard wall. As they ran for cover, Fawzi waited an instant to make sure the fuse he lit with a cigarette was burning. Then he ran for shelter.

The explosion blew up a gaping hole in the synagogue wall. For 45 minutes, a dozen Haganah soldiers kept the Arab Legion from bursting through it, hurling every hand grenade they possessed into the breach. Finally their fire stopped and the Legionnaires burst in. they found a rare booty, a pile of riles. For the first time, the quarter had had more arms than men. There simply had not been enough fighters to carry them away. The Legionnaires entered the synagogue itself and tried to scramble to the top of its dome to plant a Jordanian flag. Three of them were shot by Haganah snipers, but the fourth succeeded. Clearly visible in the New City, the Arab Legion flag over the skyline of the Old City signaled the Legion’s triumph. With the capture of the Hurva, 25 per cent of the territory remaining to the Haganah had fallen to the Arabs.

September 6, 1999

Professor Dr. Ahmad Tell, of Jordanian origin, is Dean of Zarka Private National Community College in Zarka, Jordan. In 1980 he received an Award of Distinction from the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education. He is the author of several books and publications: Higher Education in Jordan , published in 1997, including Abdullah Tell, the Hero of Jerusalem Battle, and Why Did the Arabs Fail?, which is currently under print. Dr. Tell also wrote a research paper about the former Prime Minister Samir Rifai and the Palestinian cause in 1997.

Dr. Tell was an officer in the Arab Legion from 1946-1950 and fought in the Arab-Israeli War of 1948.