The Holy City
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gions organized under the Mufti's guidance. There was also
the Mufti's Youth Corps—Futuwa—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 in 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