Let My Right Hand Wither

By Daniel Spicehandler

A memoir of the first Arab-Israeli War in 1948 by an American veteran of that conflict and World War Two.

“I have tried through my own experiences, first as a G.I. student at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, and later as a volunteer in the defense of Israel, to depict the life in Israel during the past few crucial years. I have tried to describe the many tremendous changes embroidered in the one major transformation of Palestine, 1946, to Israel, 1949. The underground struggle, the life in the cities and farm communities, the constant preparation for the eventuality of a war which every Jew in Palestine knew was inevitable, the early struggle against local Arab gangs, and finally, the struggle against the seven invading Arab armies.

The events in this book are true.

Through the events that my wife, some friends and myself, all Americans, have participated in, I have tried to paint a picture of the rebirth of Israel, spiritually as well as physically. And I have taken the liberty of injecting, throughout the text, small incidents in which I had no active part, but of which I have heard or read. These incidents typify the fighting and living in Israel during these fateful years. They are included in the hope that they will contribute to a better understanding of the new Jew, the Sabra, who is growing up with Israel.

The American reader, I am sure, will notice the close resemblance of the youth of Israel to his own youth. The former G.I. will be amazed to see how closely the “Palmachnick” resembles him in the last war. And the scene of Palestine, and later Israel, as a frontier country, will remind Americans of the struggle America once had in its fight for independence.”—From the Introduction.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Barakaldo Books
• Release date: May 19, 2020
• ISBN: 9781839745102

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© Barakaldo Books 2020, all rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted by any means, electrical, mechanical or otherwise without the written permission of the copyright holder.

Publisher’s Note

Although in most cases we have retained the Author’s original spelling and grammar to authentically reproduce the work of the Author and the original intent of such material, some additional notes and clarifications have been added for the modern reader’s benefit.

We have also made every effort to include all maps and illustrations of the original edition the limitations of formatting do not allow of including larger maps, we will upload as many of these maps as possible.

LET MY RIGHT HAND WITHER

BY

DANIEL SPICEHANDLER

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Contents

TABLE OF CONTENTS 4

DEDICATION 5

ACKNOWLEDGMENT 6

introduction 7

arise ye arabs and awake... 9

ii 15

iii 17

iv 18

v 19

vi 23

From the rivers of babylοn... 25

ii 26

iii 28

iv 29

v 30

vi 33

vii 34

viii 35

ix 36

x 37

xi 39

xii 41

xiii 42

xiv 45

xv 47

xvi 49

xvii 50

xviii 52

xix 53

xx 54

cast a mount against jerusalem... 55

ii 56

iii 57

iv 58

v 62

vi 63

vii 64

viii 65

Plowshares into swords... 66

ii 67

iii 69

iv 71

v 73

vi 74

vii 75

viii 76

ix 78

x 82

xi 83

xii 85

xiii 86

xiv 87

xv 89

xvi 90

xvii 91

pour out thy wrath... 92

ii 93

iii 95

iv 101

v 106

vi 107

vii 108

sing in the height of zion... 110

iii 112

iv 115

v 120

vi 122

vii 124

viii 126

ix 128

x 131

xi 132

xii 133

Dan to Beersheba... 134

ii 136

iii 137

iv 138

v 139

vi 140

vii 142

x 144

xi 145

xii 146

xiii 147

xiv 148

xv 150

and my sons shall Return to their BORDERS.... 151

ii 153

iii 155

iv 157

v 158

vi 159

I will destroy the magnates of memphis... 160

ii 162

iii 164

v 169

vi 171

vii 172

viii 173

ix 174

x 175

xi 177

xii 178

and a sword shall descend upon Egypt... 179

ii 180

iii 182

iv 183

v 184

vi 185

vii 186

viii 187

ix 190

x 191

xi 192

xii 193

xiii 195

xiv 197

xv 198

xvi 199

I Remember... 200

REQUEST FROM THE PUBLISHER 201

DEDICATION

To Moriah Brigade and the Squadron; to my Father, the Kobaks, and Little Yoav; last of all, to my Mother, who knew this book would be published before she even read it...

ACKNOWLEDGMENT

To Dov and Aliza, Ezra and Skippy, who shared these experiences with me. My thanks to Bob Keller, Uri Ribalow, Carl Alpert and Ralph Martin, who helped in getting this book published. Many thanks to the friends who helped in giving suggestions to improve this book...and to Louise.

introduction

THIS IS A STORY of a war of independence. This is a chronicle of a people’s redemption, an epic of retribute justice...

The world has taught us that only through blood can one’s good name be restored. With blood and fire Judah fell, with blood and fire Judah shall rise. It rose. It rose to meet its fate. It rose after centuries of agonizing, humiliating persecution, to redeem its honor and the honor of its many martyrs through the centuries.

I have tried through my own experiences, first as a G.I. student at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, and later as a volunteer in the defense of Israel, to depict the life in Israel during the past few crucial years. I have tried to describe the many tremendous changes embroidered in the one major transformation of Palestine, 1946, to Israel, 1949. The underground struggle, the life in the cities and farm communities, the constant preparation for the eventuality of a war which every Jew in Palestine knew was inevitable, the early struggle against local Arab gangs, and finally, the struggle against the seven invading Arab armies.

The events in this book are true.

Through the events that my wife, some friends and myself, all Americans, have participated in, I have tried to paint a picture of the rebirth of Israel, spiritually as well as physically. And I have taken the liberty of injecting, throughout the text, small incidents in which I had no active part, but of which I have heard or read. These incidents typify the fighting and living in Israel during these fateful years. They are included in the hope that they will contribute to a better understanding of the new Jew, the Sabra, who is growing up with Israel.

The American reader, I am sure, will notice the close resemblance of the youth of Israel to his own youth. The former G.I. will be amazed to see how closely the Palmachnick resembles him in the last war. And the scene of Palestine, and later Israel, as a frontier country, will remind Americans of the struggle America once had in its fight for independence.

The world may be proud that included in this pessimistic era one speck, one small niche, has crowned itself in glory and heroism. Sodom was destroyed because it had not one righteous soul amongst its inhabitants. The world, today, may well be redeemed because of the long injustice that has been eradicated by Israel’s victory...

By the rivers of Babylon,

there we sat down, Yea we wept

when we remembered Zion.

Upon the poplars in the midst of her,

We hung our harps.

For there our captors demanded of us songs

and our tormentors mirth:

Sing us some of the songs of Zion!

How could we sing the songs of the Lord

in a foreign land?

If I forget thee O Jerusalem,

let my right hand wither!

May my tongue stick to my palate

if I set not Jerusalem

above my highest joy!...

—PSALMS 137

arise ye arabs and awake...

(ODE TO IBRAHIM)

WE LEFT Rehovot at ten thirty-five in the morning. Rehovot is about ten miles south of Tel Aviv and was used as a rendezvous point for Jerusalem bound convoys. The sun was hot and the armored bus had a slightly stale odor of sweat and onions. This was a convoy going to Jerusalem on the long, dusty road not used in recent years, but being used now, on this nineteenth day of January, 1948.

The main road to Jerusalem via Lydda and Ramie towns had been cut by the Arabs at the outbreak of the war last month. Now, coming up from the coast, on their way to Jerusalem, Jews had to travel six hours in armored vehicles.

The armored bus, a makeshift invention, had the appearance of a boxcart. All windows were sealed with inch-thick wood. Little gun slits took the place of windows. Seats were replaced by three parallel rows of benches. The driver’s windshield was guarded by a thick layer of armor plate which he could raise and lower as he pleased. Every-space on the benches was taken and people were huddled against one another. I sat in the middle of the bus with my arm around Louise, my wife. We were returning to Jerusalem. I was one among the many G.I. students who had come to Palestine to study at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. My wife and I had spent the summer months at a kibbutz, an agricultural communal settlement, and we were now returning to school for the winter semester.

This boxcart bus was one of the many vehicles in the morning convoy to Jerusalem. Twice daily these long convoys left and returned from the Holy City. Twice daily the people of Jerusalem felt that the world and their brethren had not forsaken them. They thought...

I sat holding Louise’s hand tightly. My sweaty palm dampened her soft dry hand. I thought of all we had been through together in so short a time. Our courtship, the quick elopment, school out at Wisconsin, and then finally our trip to Palestine and its many ensuing adventures. We had just left the kibbutz where we had stayed for seven months and found that we could not adjust to the hard communal agricultural life. Now we were returning to a war torn city, so different from the one we left last July. I wondered what lay in store for us. I wondered if we’d get through on this convoy.

The bus rumbled and shook as it bounced down through the last Jewish settlements. The passengers were munching on oranges, sandwiches, chocolate, the usual travel foods. Already the usual fraternity of a long bus trip was felt. Every passenger knew that his fate was entwined with that of every other person on the bus, especially the young girl and boy sitting in the front seats of the bus, their defenders. The Sten gun beneath her skirt and the American Colt beneath his belt were all the protection afforded the passengers of this bus by the Haganah, the illegal Jewish underground defense organization, which was still poor in arms and as yet hounded by the government, the British.

I was seated near the girl, a redheaded, pimply faced Rumanian D.P. who had just been released from the illegal immigrants’ detention camp on the island of Cyprus. She was calm, but diffident. I tried to make conversation with her, but she answered my many questions very curtly, so after a while I turned away from her. Early this morning she had arrived with the returning convoy to Tel Aviv. It had been heavily attacked at Bab el Wad, the wadi or canyon which separates the coastal plain from the hills of Judea. Nine people had been killed and the convoy had dashed on to safety, leaving one burning vehicle. Now she was returning with us, without rest.

The driver slowly lowered his armor plated window. We knew that we were approaching a danger point. People stopped talking and looked blankly at each other. The sputtering engine seemed to increase its pulse beat. I stood up and peeked through the gun slits. We were just passing through a small Arab village. The whole village seemed to be standing at the roadside. Stones came flying at the truck ahead of us and the crowd started shouting. I noticed one long-robed Arab with a rough, grey-yellow stained beard. A grandfather, surely. He seemed bewildered by the shouting. For a moment he stood staring at the passing convoy. Then as if unknowingly and unwillingly he too began to shout. He picked up a stone. And then our eyes met. He seemed ashamed to be acting in this manner, a man of his age. Then he threw the rock and with it his shame disappeared. The rest of the crowd edged toward the convoy. Bitter hate infected their small black eyes, hate that was yet to explode in infamous deeds of violence. We reached the outskirts of the village and I closed the gun slit and sat down. The little redhead had taken her Sten apart again and tucked it beneath her skirt. She, too, had been ready. The driver raised his armor plate and heaved a sigh of relief. The chatter returned, the food was munched and the bus bounced on.

By one-thirty we were nearing Latrun, the crossroads to Jerusalem and the last town on the coastal plain leading into the Judaean Hills. Here we faced a more cunning enemy. Here the British had set up an enormous army camp and check post; here they would search the convoy for arms; here would be decided, in the months to come, the fate of Jerusalem.

The bus slowly screeched to a halt. An American pastor from Baltimore, who had just arrived in Palestine, leaned over to the redheaded girl and told her to give him her weapon. She obeyed, as did her partner. The pastor was a big man. His red face became redder and his double chin tripled as he struggled to tuck the weapons underneath his coat. The door swung open and a tall, smiling British soldier asked every one to kindly get out. We all slowly obeyed. He searched the bus and then began to search us. Louise stared angrily at the soldier as she opened her purse. The soldier began to fiddle with its contents.

Do you care to search me too? she asked sarcastically. The soldier, hearing English spoken with an American accent, looked up amazed. He was a bit taken aback and to cover his bewilderment he instructed the remaining passengers who were waiting to be searched to move on to the bus. Towards the end of the line he began to search again. He asked each for his identity card and I watched with relief as the soldier smiled at the pastor and said, You can go on, Padre, as he returned him his passport. The soldier finished searching and waved the bus driver to move on. Once in the bus, the pastor took out the weapons and returned them. We left Latrun and the deed of the pastor was the topic of conversation for the remainder of the trip. In his typical, good-natured, American way he soon became the most popular passenger on the trip. We all knew what would have happened had the soldier found the arms. By volunteering to hide them, using his clerical immunity to searches, the pastor had saved us from serious consequences. Now people shared their food with him, their jokes, their conversation. He laughed, listened, nodded and agreed. He is a good Goy, said the fat lady seated across the aisle from me. I smiled.

Once again our driver lowered his armor plate. Now he could see but a few feet in front of him. The bus was almost completely dark. This time the silence made me shudder. This was it! This was the place the newspapers kept reporting about, NINE KILLED...FIVE KILLED...TWO BUSES BURNT...WOMAN KILLED...This was BAB EL WAD...

The agonizing cough of a German Spandau machine gun was heard. Someone yelled that we were being attacked. As the driver shifted into low gear, we realized that we were climbing out of Bab el Wad. Here was where the Arab gangs struck, just as the buses and trucks lost speed and pickup, just as the gear was shifted. The girl with the red hair fired a burst of Sten bullets. She kept charging the gun as it jammed. The boy yelled to her to hold her fire, and not to waste ammunition that would be needed later. A stench of gunpowder and fear stung my nostrils. All eyes were focused on these two youngsters, our defenders. I was scared...

The bus jarred and bounced so that I almost went through the roof. The pastor fell off his seat, grabbing his neighbor’s ankle for balance. The tires screeched, the wheels skidded. What’s going on? asked a man opposite me. I heard a tearing sound and then a scream. My palm tightened over Louise’s finger. Next to me a lady sat whimpering from fear. At her feet lay a man. He was bleeding from the temple. He seemed amazed when he felt the blood trickling down his cheek. He touched his hand to his face and then looked at his hand. His eyes blinked and his mouth opened wide, his jaw hung loose. Then he rolled over on his side letting out a choked, hoarse sigh. Spit drooled out of his open jaw. Louise stared at him. Turn away, Louise, I said as I leaned over the man. He had been shot through the neck. His temple was only scratched and his neck was torn open. I rolled him over on his face and covered him with my trench coat. I sat up. Across the aisle on the wall of the bus I saw a straight line of holes cutting across the side of the bus. The holes were evenly spaced. A machine gun burst, said the redheaded girl. Suddenly the bus crashed and came to a halt. The driver worked frantically. His gears ground, the starter stuttered. The bus was stuck. He raised his windshield. A burst of fire hit the windshield. He ducked. The bus had struck a boulder off the road on the side of the mountain. The driver crouched low and tried starting again. The starter sighed, the engine sputtered, then it coughed and cleared and raced. The driver backed out. The bus tilted, then righted itself as the driver struggled to regain control of the wheel. The bus bounced onto the road again. We sped over the hill and down. Bab el Wad...

The driver raised his armor plate a bit and then smiled nervously and asked:

Anyone hurt?

I answered:

One man, he’s been hit in the neck. I didn’t recognize my own voice.

How is he? asked the driver.

He’s dead! I said. A moment ago he was alive, he had asked me what was happening. He never got his answer. His life ended in the midst of a question. His break with the living was sharp, complete. It surprised even him. That look on his face before he died. Surprise...So easy...

Slowly all heads turned toward the dead man. A woman opened her mouth to scream but all that came out was a gasp.

Get rid of it, get rid of it, shouted another hysterical woman. He had become it...dead...The driver looked through his mirror and calmly said:

Chevra (Friends), he is dead, but he shall be brought to Jerusalem with the rest of you! His voice was resolute and had a tone of finality. We shall be in town in twenty minutes, so you needn’t suffer long.

Louise had been quiet all the while. Her face was white. I asked her how she felt. Nauseous, she answered, with her mouth almost completely closed, afraid of opening it further. I looked down at the body. A stream of blood had trickled out from under the coat and had reached the trailing belt. The belt sopped up the blood as it ran along its border. I got up and looked out the gun slit above me. All was quiet. Down the hill, in the wadi, I saw smoke belching up. I wondered what it was. I wondered how many more in the convoy had been hit.

As we neared Lifta, an Arab village at the entrance of Jerusalem, captured early in December to secure the safe entrance to the city from the west, people unwove their cocoons of fear and began to hustle together their belongings, put on their hats, smooth out their clothes, to greet the Holy City.

We pulled into the bus station and a few people waiting in the station asked about the trip as they stared at the bullet ridden buses. An ambulance came up and collected the dead and wounded.

Jerusalem seemed the same as last spring—quiet, sedate, sophisticated and beautiful. A slight drizzle began to fall, as if to cool the tension and wash the dust off our travel weary faces. Louise squeezed my hand bidding me welcome.

The next morning’s paper tersely reported that we had been attacked at Bab el Wad; four people were killed, two trucks overturned and burned.

ii

The rain continued for the next few days. Old friends came to visit us and we talked of old times and of our long sojourn in the kibbutz. The happy-go-lucky faces of American G.I. students were slowly disappearing. Those who had not returned to the States, and many had, related to us the few incidents that had happened in Jerusalem since November twenty-ninth, the day the United Nations accepted the partition proposal on Palestine. Jerusalem hadn’t celebrated long, for the next day the tension mounted in the city and the threatened Arab general strike started. Jerusalem had split into Jewish and Arab held areas, but as yet no real front had been established.

Throughout the evening our friends continued on with stories of what had happened since November twenty-ninth, and our lives became quickly entangled in the complicated, foreboding pattern of Jerusalem.

The next morning I rode downtown and dropped into the Allenby Cafe, a Jerusalem equivalent of the American corner drugstore. Here again the same faces, a little more tense, excited, or was it fear? Outside people walked a bit more hurriedly and cars wove a bit more nervously. Occasionally a shot would ring out from a distance, more rarely a burst of machine gun fire would fill the gaps in this drama’s first act. As I walked up King George Avenue, Jerusalem’s main street, I heard three terrific explosions. Instinctively people ran for cover. I was angry at this lack of self-control, this panicking. As time went on and nerves were thin, I did not blame them. The Arabs in the lower part of the city were systematically blowing up all Jewish shops in their area of occupation. From the top of Jerusalem’s highest apartment house, I watched the Arabs destroy the New Business Center, where were located the new beautiful Jewish shops and stores, the pride of the Middle East. It pained me to see this small defeat of ours. I was bitter with this community of a hundred thousand Jews who had refused to train, to prepare itself before November twenty-ninth; who refused to allow the Haganah to place arms and men in this area, for the shop owners feared British searches and reprisals. Now these same storekeepers cried and scorned the Haganah. This was Jerusalem with its bizarre Jews of Oriental, African, Kurdish, Bukharin, Yeminite, Polish, German, English ancestry, a mixture never quite united into one effective community. This was Jerusalem which was always hit hardest, which always bore the brunt of the many Arab outbreaks. This was Jerusalem that was to learn from her generations of sin, bleeding slowly, till she awakened. This was Jerusalem in the lull before the storm.

Saturday night, January twenty-fourth, we met some friends and went to Fink’s for supper. Fink’s was a quiet, upstairs, secluded restaurant, famous for its steak. We ate, drank and danced. Before getting ready to leave I stretched my full body and in doing so I tilted a tall glass of water, spilling