Free The Prime Ministers: An Intimate Narrative of Israeli Leadership by Yehuda Avner Page B

digging.
    “Who is this?” I croaked.
    “Wake up! There are people I want you to meet.”
    It was Esther Cailingold. Older than me by a few years, I knew Esther from Bnei Akiva in England. She had come to settle in Jerusalem in 1946, to teach English at the then prestigious Evelina de Rothschild School for girls. However, since the advent of the siege she had become a full-time volunteer with the Hagana, but was not at all happy with the duties she was being asked to perform. In the space of a few months she had served as an underground broadcaster, messenger, arms courier, field cook, welfare officer, vetter of volunteers; in short, a general dogsbody.
    “Where are you?” I shouted through the static.
    “Schneller.”
    Schneller was a disused German Templar orphanage which the Hagana had taken over and converted into its main Jerusalem base.
    “You’ll like them,” she teased. “They’re characters.”
    “Who?”
    “The people I want you to meet.”
    “Who are they?” I was in no mood for larks.
    “Meet me at Café Atara in an hour, and you’ll see.”
    “Café Atara? They’ve nothing to serve. I’ve hardly eaten in two days. I’m famished.”
    “Don’t fret. I’ll scrape together some leftovers from the Schneller mess. See you in an hour.”
    It was April 1948. The one narrow road that linked Jerusalem with Tel Aviv was by this point totally sealed off. It meandered down hairpin bends and through steep gorges. Arab irregulars were laying ambush to Jewish traffic at every twist and turn. As the British prepared to pull out of Palestine, the bloody battle for control of the strategically important road was escalating by the day. If that road could not be cleared of Arab fire, Jewish Jerusalem’s hundred thousand inhabitants were doomed.
    Britain’s deadline for its final pullout was midnight, May 14. Until that hour, avowed British policy remained one of non-involvement and strict neutrality, standing aside while Jews and Arabs slogged it out.
    Doomsayers claimed it was all a plot hatched in Whitehall. The British had no intention of evacuating Palestine, they said. Palestine was too strategically precious for the defense of the Suez Canal. Whitehall was actually conspiring to keep the Palestine pot boiling by pitting Arab against Jew, letting them kill each other off, until midnight May 14 when the surrounding Arab armies would invade Palestine to drive the outnumbered and outgunned Jews into the sea. And then, at that twelfth hour, the United Nations would adopt a British-instigated emergency resolution calling upon Britain to stay put in Palestine and restore the peace. Thus would England – perfidious Albion, as Napoleon had called the British – continue to rule Palestine with international consent, and scotch any prospect of a Jewish State.
    So the doomsayers predicted.
    In a city frequently pounded by shells, constantly hungry, and totally isolated, rumors like these fed feverish imaginations. Fewer and fewer food convoys were getting through. Meat, fish, milk, and eggs had disappeared. Streets, shops, classrooms and cinemas were empty. Fuel was in desperately short supply. Buses scarcely ran, all taxis had vanished, and private vehicles had been commandeered. There was no electricity, and the Arabs had cut the city’s water pipeline. Whatever water there was was largely drawn from underground cisterns, some centuries old; in downtown Jerusalem a reservoir dug by the Romans was repaired and the winter rains stored.
    The Hagana, much larger than the Irgun, had long since joined the offensive to fight the fight for independence, but there were pitifully few weapons to go round. And as the battle spread from neighborhood to neighborhood, the Old City’s Jewish Quarter was cut off from the rest of Jewish Jerusalem, its inhabitants beleaguered in a siege within a siege. And all the while the British stood by, neutral, aloof, waiting.
    Esther’s call on that cheerless, dank April morning, with