234
CAIRO TO DAMASCUS
"At Katamon. We killed him last night by mistake. He
wouldn't retreat with the rest of our boys, so when the Jews
chased him to our lines, we took him for a Jew and killed
him."
"He was Catholic," I said. "Who buried him?"
"The Arab soldiers. They dug a grave in the Moslem cemetery by the Dome of the Rock, and the imam said a prayer."
So died—and so was buried—many a British soldier!
Moustafa went on to tell me of the unfair tactics the Jews
had employed in capturing upper Katamon. The Jews had
retreated from a strategic building, leading the Arabs into a
completely booby-trapped house. A time-bomb had blown up
Arabs engaged in peaceful Sniping. Mines had gone off in the
most unexpected places. Buildings had collapsed in mysterious
explosions. The Arabs were complete strangers to this form
of modern warfare. They learned while they died.
The Arab position had now badly deteriorated. The
Haganah made new inroads into Katamon, and threatened
seizure of Talpioth, another suburb which adjoined our own
Deir Aboutor. Once in control of Talpioth, the Jews would
be masters of the Bethlehem-Jerusalem road, and could force
us down the steep embankment of Deir Aboutor into the
Valley of Hinnom. We were virtually the only remaining
Arab unit with a foothold anywhere in the New City.
To everyone's astonishment the Arabs were losing on nearly
every front. Haifa, the leading port in the Middle East, with
an Arab population of seventy thousand and a priceless oil refinery, had fallen to the Jews within thirty hours. Palestine's
second port, Jaffa, an all-Arab city adjoining Tel Aviv, had
crumbled into Jewish hands. Some fifty thousand Arabs had
fled Jaffa.2 Farther north, Safad, Tiberius, and the fortress city
2
This flight-psychosis, which prevailed among the Arabs and ultimately
resulted in the frantic exodus of many Moslems and Christians, is a difficult
phenomenon to explain. It was a mass hysteria induced by poor morale and by
fear of revenge and retribution for the Arab massacres and lootings from
1920 on.
Arab leaders—particularly in the Mufti's Arab Higher Committee—urged