Hesh Kestin - The Siege of Tel Aviv

Field Marshal Haloumi, always pragmatic and very much aware that in numbers Egypt has provided the war effort with more soldiers and hardware than all the other countries combined, speaks quietly but with authority. His sweetly musical Egyptian Arabic is almost soothing. “My brothers, we have strayed from our topic: the precise delineation of zones of authority. War is chaos. Peace must be orderly.”

General Al-Asadi, whose Syrian death squads have all but wiped out the Palestinian officer class of Hezbollah that Damascus and Tehran have subsidized for twenty years, becomes agitated. “To achieve such orderly peace, brother, how many Hamas have you killed in Gaza?”

“We have dealt with the Palestinian rabble in the south as you have in the north,” General Haloumi replies calmly. “Unlike our Persian brothers, we of Egypt do not accept theocratic rule. The Palestinians are poisoned with godliness. In the name of their God—”

General Niroomad straightens his back. “Their God? Is Allah not God of all?” Though the good general does not have a pious bone in his body, the line from the political leadership in Homs, where the mullahs preside, is paramount: Muslim unity must be emphasized, never Arab unity, otherwise the desert rats will throw off the Persian leadership that united them in victory. As he is aware, Iranian dominance becomes more tenuous every day. “Let us hear from General Ali, who is inscribed for the floor.” Scheduled is the word he would prefer, but he cannot quite recall it. The Arabic language, he thinks, is as difficult as its speakers.

General Said stands, a figure straight as the saber at his side. His uniform, perfectly pressed, is the best in the room, designed and fitted by the same firm of Savile Row tailors who have supplied the British general staff for decades. In matters sartorial, the Jordanian command class follows the lead of their king, a great fan of the film Lawrence of Arabia , in which the king’s great-grandfather is portrayed by Alec Guinness, whose robes—on celluloid at least—are richly ornamented and spotless, spun of the most delicate English tropical wool.

“Brothers, I have the honor to bring you greetings from his royal highness the King of Jordan, who wishes only the blessings of most merciful Allah upon your heads and upon those of your children and your children’s children.”

General Niroomad is so tired of this. Must one hold a gun to an Arab’s head to get him to come to the point? Besides, Russian military intelligence has already informed Niroomad of what Ali is about to say.

“By His Majesty’s decree,” General Said intones, “all of Tel Aviv and its dependencies rightfully now revert to Jordanian rule.”

“Just at the moment,” Niroomad says drily, “Tel Aviv has reverted to the stench of Jews.”

General Said pretends not to recognize the Persian’s tone. “This, matter,” he says, “will be corrected soon enough.”

General Niroomad offers a sigh worthy of a particularly untalented drama student. “Millions of Jews,” he says, sick at the thought but relieved that someone else actually wishes to do this hateful work. “Even the great Hitler did not dream of snuffing out the lives of so many in one day.”

POCKETS OF RESISTANCE REMAIN. But because the country is essentially judenrein , the few bands that form in the wake of the invasion, largely composed of IDF soldiers and escapees from the cities, can find no shelter among the indigenous population. Outside of Tel Aviv, there is none. But in the north, deep forests provide cover, as do the caves penetrating the cliffs of the Mediterranean coastline from Binyamina north to Mount Carmel. The south, being mostly flat if not outright desert, provides little natural cover—Bedouin bands seeking bounty would certainly pick off any Jews foolish enough to try this inhospitable terrain. To the east, in Judea and Samaria, the country is hilly, which offers possibilities for harassment and sabotage, but once this is achieved escape is difficult. Movement must be by foot or, in several instances in the cattle-grazed Golan Heights, on horseback. Non-military vehicles remain banned from the roads. Even should civilians—whether Israeli Arabs or Jews disguised as same—manage to seize the kind of transportation that can get by the ever-present roadblocks manned by Arab machine gunners, such as UN-marked buses or enemy jeeps, no gasoline is to be had outside of the Muslim military bases, which are of course former IDF bases with fresh signage.

Worst of all, like the anti-Nazi partisans in Eastern Europe, these makeshift bands find themselves working in isolation. Command and control does not exist for the same reason the units themselves cannot contact one another: the sophisticated and extensive IDF wireless network almost immediately fell into the hands of the Iranians, whose Hebrew-speaking intelligence officers monitor it for any sign of organized resistance. Israel’s civilian phone companies, wired and cellular, no longer function. At best each group of holdouts eventually must find its way to Tel Aviv, there only to discover their own lack of capability mirrored in a leaderless, hungry, fearful, and dispirited population.

Though scattered small groups continue to move about with the intention of harassing the enemy, these have enough on their hands finding sufficient food to survive. Some bands stage attacks on Arab supply lines, but the weaponry they grab comes with little ammunition.

The last of the larger groups, close to one hundred men and women, mostly paratroopers whose unit lost its way in the initial fighting and then was bypassed by the enemy surge, manages to find a large cache of mortars, sten guns, and ammunition hidden in a cave on Mt. Carmel. In 1941, aware that then British-governed Palestine was the next target for Rommel’s Afrika Korps, the Jewish leadership hid the weaponry for a last stand. Instead, Rommel was stopped in Egypt.

Though primitive by modern standards, the cache might have provided sufficient firepower for large-scale resistance. But the cave leaked rainwater for decades. The cosmolite-soaked rags that were meant to preserve these armaments remain in place, but the guns they embraced have long since rusted away.

Traveling by night in groups of ten, seventy of the Mt. Carmel partisans make it to Tel Aviv. The rest are never heard from.

AT THE WHITE HOUSE, the presidential press conference is packed with American and international correspondents, including a single reporter claiming to represent Ha’aretz , formerly the Israeli newspaper best known abroad, but now out of electricity, out of paper, out of business. A month earlier, Israel boasted a dozen daily papers; today there are none. As a matter of policy, the White House press office does not normally grant access to ghost correspondents from dead newspapers, but the White House gatekeepers examine only credentials. Though her newspaper is history, the Israeli correspondent’s credentials look good.

The room is packed, and tense.

As is his wont, the president manages to be simultaneously folksy, curt, respectful, and evasive, recalling one of the chief executive’s own heroes, Ronald Reagan, who like most dependable actors never strayed from the script.

“Now there’s a real good point, Ted,” the president pretends. “All I can tell y’all is we’re meeting next week with my counterparts from Great Britain, France, Germany, Russia, China, and Jay-pan.” As a graduate of Harvard, the president is well aware of how to pronounce the name of the country governed from Tokyo; he never spoke it that way at Harvard, or at Yale where he took his law degree, though admittedly second from the bottom of his class—the only graduate with a worse scholastic record is now one of the world’s richest men. “With goodwill and persistence, the Jewish refugee problem will be solved.” The president winks conspiratorially as he turns his broad smile to the other side of the room. “Rich, you look like you’re about to have a cat.”