Personal recollections of 1947‑48 Jewish‑Arab violence during the UN partition era

— for the Jewish state Herzl had first dreamed of 50 years before — had been won. A huge bonfire blazed in front of the bakery. All around us the grown-ups were singing and dancing in celebration. On the Arab side, there was no rejoicing. Every one of the Arab delegations at the UN voted against partition, rejecting a Jewish state even if it was created along with a Palestinian Arab one. Violence erupted the next day. An attack on a bus near Lydda, near the road up to Jerusalem, left six Jews dead. Similar attacks occurred around the country. Shooting broke out in mixed Arab-and- Jewish towns and cities: Jaffa on the southern edge of Tel Aviv. Safed, Tiberias and Haifa in the north, and in Jerusalem. I followed all this with curiosity and trepidation through my halting attempts to read Davar le Yeladim, the weekly children’s edition of the Labour Zionist newspaper Davar. We children felt an additional connection with what was going on. One of our Dror housemates, a boy named Giora Ros, had left the year before when his father took a job in Jerusalem. As the battle for the city raged through the end of 1947 and into 1948, its besieged Jewish residents fought for their lives. We sent our friend packages of clothing and food, which we saved up by eating only half of an egg at breakfast and smaller portions at dinner. The mood darkened further at the end of January 1948, four months before the British departed. A cluster of settlements known as Gush Etzion, south of Jerusalem near the hills of Bethlehem, also came under siege. Around midnight on January 15, a unit of Haganah youngsters set off on foot to try to break through. They became known as “The 35”. Marching through the night from Jerusalem, they had made it only within a couple of miles of Gush Etzion when they were surrounded and attacked by local Arabs. By late afternoon, all of them were dead. When the British authorities recovered their bodies, they found that the enemy had not simply killed them. All of the bodies had been battered and broken. Rumors spread that in some cases, the dead men’s genitals had been cut off and shoved into their mouths. Since I was still a few weeks short of my sixth birthday, I was spared that particular detail. But not the sense of horror over what had happened, nor the central message: the lengths and depths to which the Arabs of Palestine seemed ready to go in their fight against us. “Hit’alelu bagufot!” was the only slightly sanitized account we children were given. “They mutilated the corpses!” Even after the partition vote, statehood was not a given. In the weeks before the British left, two senior Americans —the ambassador to the UN and Secretary 27 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_011498