The chief rabbi and many of the Cabalists and their wives gathered around the Davidka and carried on a lengthy debate on whether or not it meant doomsday for all of them. Fi—
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nally the chief rabbi said special benedictions over the weapon and asked the Messiah kindly to spare them for they had indeed been very good in keeping the laws.
“Well, let’s get it over with,” Remez said pessimistically.
The Cabalists backed to safety. Firing caps were stuffed down the tube and one of the shells was lifted and the long handle placed inside. The cylinder of dynamite balanced over the end of the tube threateningly. A long line was attached to the firing mechanism. Everyone took cover and the earth stood still.
“Let her go,” Yarkoni ordered in a shaky voice.
Remez jerked and a strange thing happened. The Little David fired.
The handle hissed out of the tube and the bucket of dynamite arched and spun, handle over bucket, up the hill. As it hurled through the air, growing smaller and smaller, it made a hideous swishing sound. It crashed into some Arab houses near the police station.
Sutherland’s mouth hung open.
Yarkoni’s mustache went from down to up.
Remez’s eyes popped out.
The old Cabalists stopped praying long enough to look in astonishment.
The shell exploded like a thunderclap, shaking the town to its foundations. It seemed as though half the hillside must have been blown away.
After moments of stunned silence there was an eruption of shouting and hugging and kissing and praying and jubilation.
“By jove …” was all Sutherland could say. “By jove … !”
The Palmachniks formed a hora ring and danced around the Little David.
“Come on, come on. Let’s fire another round!”
In the Arab quarters they could hear the Jews cheering, and the Arabs knew why. The very sound of’ the flying bomb in itself was enough to frighten one to death, to say nothing of the explosion. No one, Palestinian Arabs or irregulars, had bargained for anything like this; each time the Little David fired, a scene of havoc followed. The Arabs quaked in terror as the Jews revenged some of the hundred years of torment.
Joab Yarkoni got word to Ari that the Davidka had the Arabs in a turmoil. Ari sensed an opportunity and decided on a risky attempt to exploit it. He took a few men from each settlement and was able to scrape together two companies of Haganah. He got them into Safed at night with more ammunition for the Davidka.
Swish… whoom! 512
The bucket of bolts and its hissing bomb was devastating the town. Swish … whoom!
The third day after the Davidka had come to Safed the skies opened and it poured rain. Ari Ben Canaan then made the greatest bluff of the war that counted bluffs as part of the arsenal. He had Remez call all the Arab spies together and he gave them a briefing.
“In case you didn’t know, brothers”-Ari addressed them in Arabic-“we have a secret weapon. I am not at liberty to disclose the nature of the weapon but I might say that you all know that it always rains after a nuclear blast. Need one say more?”
Within minutes the spies spread the word that the Little David was a secret weapon. Within an hour, every Arab mouth in Safed had repeated the appalling news: the Jews have the atom bomb!
Swish … whoom! The Little David roared and the rain turned to a deluge and the panic was on. Inside of two hours the roads out of Safed were clogged with fleeing Arabs.
Ari Ben Canaan led the Haganah on an attack with three hundred men. The attack was more spontaneous than calculated and Ari’s men were thrown off the acropolis by irregulars and a handful of angry Safed Arabs. He lost heavily, but the Safed population continued to run.
Three days later, with Safed nearly empty of Arab civilian population and with hundreds of the irregulars deserted, Ari Ben Canaan, Remez, and Joab Yarkoni led a better planned, three-pronged attack and took the acropolis.
The tables were turned. The Jews were on the high ground above the Arab police station. Now those who had for decades tormented and murdered the Cabalists in wild mobs had their chance to stand and fight, but they fled in the face of the Jewish wrath. The police station fell and Ari immediately headed outside of the town to block off the huge Taggart fort on Mount Canaan, the strongest of the Arab positions. When he arrived he was astounded to discover that the Arabs had abandoned the Taggart fort, a position it would have been impossible to take. With the fort in his hands, the conquest of Safed was complete.
The victory of Safed was staggering. The vulnerable position thought impossible to defend had not only been defended but the defenders had conquered the city-with a few hundred fighters and a weird weapon called the Little David.
There were many theories and much discussion on just how this victory came about. Even the Cabalists of Safed were split on the subject. Rabbi Haim of the Ashkenazim or
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European school was quite certain of divine intervention as foretold in Job:
When he is about to fill his belly, God shall cast the fury of his wrath upon him, and shall rain it upon him while he is eating. He shall flee from the iron weapon …
Rabbi Meir of the Sephardic or Oriental school disputed Haim and was just as certain of divine intervention as described in Ezekieclass="underline"
Thy walls shall shake at the noise … he shall enter into thy gates, as men enter into a city wherein is made a breach … thy strong garrisons shall go down to the ground.
Bruce Sutherland returned to his villa on Mount Canaan. The Arabs had desolated it. They had trampled his lovely rose garden to the earth and they had stolen everything including the doorknobs. It did not matter to Sutherland, for it would all be rebuilt again. He and Yarkoni and Remez walked out to his rear patio and looked over the valley to Safed. They drank a lot of brandy and they began to chuckle.
Neither they nor anyone else was aware of it yet, but the stampede of Safed’s population had opened a new and tragic chapter-it began the creation of Arab refugees.
Somewhere in the Galilee, an obsolete Liberator bomber piloted by a volunteer crew of South Africans and Americans looked to the earth for a pair of blue flares.
The flares were spotted and they landed the bomber blind, with only a few flashlights marking the airfield. The plane bumped harshly over a pitted runway and skidded to a stop. The motors were cut quickly.
Swarms of people engulfed the plane and emptied it of its cargo, the first shipment of modern arms. Rifles, machine guns, mortars, and hundreds of thousands of rounds of ammunition were snatched from its waist and tail sections and its converted bomb bays.
The working parties stripped the Liberator clean in minutes. They loaded up a dozen trucks, which scattered in as many different directions. In a dozen kibbutzim Gadna youths stood ready to clean the weapons and get them out to the embattled settlements. The plane was turned and made a hair’s-breadth take-off and flew back to Europe to get another load of arms.
In the morning British troops came to investigate Arab complaints that they had heard an airplane landing in the area. The British were unable to find a single trace of a plane and were certain the Arab imagination was being carried away again.
By the time the fourth and fifth shipment of arms arrived, the Jews began to roll up victories. Tiberias on the Sea of 514
Galilee had fallen to the Jews. The huge Gesher Taggart fort was grabbed by the Jews and held off repeated attacks by Iraqi irregulars.
With the fall of Safed, the Jews launched their first coordinated offensive, Operation Iron Broom, to sweep Galilee clean of hostile villages. Iron Broom was led by machine-gun-bearing jeeps which blazed into the villages and stampeded the Arabs. Safed had started a crack in Arab morale that gave Iron Broom a psychological jump.
With a score of local victories behind them and the knowledge that they could mount a successful offensive, the Haganah went after the vital port of Haifa.