Night Squad
Meanwhile, in London, Ruth dragged Moshe to the Old Vic Theatre to see Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar; not understanding a word, he left at intermission. Ruth, on the other hand, sat enraptured at strong, noble, beautiful Julius Caesar, played by John Glenn. She cycled home, the line burning in her ears: “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves.”
The fact that Moshe’s parents had named him after a victim of Bedouin violence was a constant reminder that the Jews had but a tenuous hold on their ancient land. Though for Arab nationalists the Zionist appetite for land was a casus belli, the leaders of the Yishuv had no choice other than rapid expansion. With the Nazis in power in Germany, they had to bring as many Jews in from Europe as possible, and this required buying land for the growing population. Arthur Ruppin, alarmed by events in his native Germany, had what he described as a “congenial” chat with the chief Nazi race theorist, the so-called “race pope” Dr. Hans F. K. Günther, a man obsessed with blond hair and long Aryan foreheads. Jews weren’t inferior to “Aryans,” Dr. Günther assured him; they just had no place in Germany. Ruppin and the Zionist leadership worked hard to transport shiploads of threatened Jews to Palestine.
For Moshe, the need for the Zionists to break the will of the Arab opposition was greatly reinforced by the first reports of the raid on Nahalal. With his teacher killed, and family and friends under attack, being marooned in London threw him into a fury. He began snapping at Ruth over trifles; everything was wrong, the weather, the food, the people, and English language; if she didn’t share his feelings about Erez Yisrael, there had to be something wrong with her, too.
Ruth cabled home an SOS, and Ruth’s parents immediately sent money for the tickets, and the two were off.
Habib Hawi continued supporting the nationalists as the rebellion spread out and turned more deadly. He moderated his backing with prudence after a British district commissioner was assassinated in the Galilee and the British overreacted by dispatching a group of Arab notables into exile. The leadership of the rebellion shifted away from men such as Habib, university-educated gentlemen, to armed gangs and unlettered men fighting in the name of Islam.
As part of a system of defense against raids, Moshe joined a group from Nahalal to set up a settlement in the hills just above Nahalal, the site mentioned in the Bible. Moshe, Ruth, and their friends lived in the makeshift fortress, continuing working on their farms, hiring themselves out as guards, or planting JNF pine seedlings to transform treeless grazing lands into the King George V Forest.
Ruth and Moshe got a room in a primitive two-room shack with a crude wooden planked floor. Moshe banged together a table and bed from oak logs. The outhouse was located out back, in the direction of a reeking cowshed.
Insurgents took shots at the hut after sundown. Moshe wasn’t around much. He had received orders from the Haganah to join the Jewish Auxiliary Force, a British special police unit preventing guerrillas from puncturing holes in an oil pipe and lighting the oil on fire. By the spring of 1937, as commander of a small group, Moshe wore a woolen Turkish tarbush and khakis with sergeant’s stripes.
Once again, Ruth’s elite background helped Moshe, a mere rural cop, rise above his village origins. Her first teenage boyfriend Zvi, a fellow Jerusalemite, was now a rising star in the Haganah, and with his sense of purpose and ambition, his education in languages and military strategy, and his charisma, many considered Zvi destined to lead the underground organization. One day in 1937 he pulled up to the Dayan hut behind the wheel of a Studebaker loaded down with heavy guns and grenades. In the passenger seat was Orde Charles Wingate. Wingate, wearing a safari hat, was the British army’s top man in counter-insurgency operations and someone Moshe would come to consider a genius, the “Lawrence of Judaea.”
Wingate, a Scotsman and member of the Plymouth Brethren sect, was also a crackpot noted for tics such as wearing an alarm clock around his wrist and, in a threadbare Palm Beach suit or preferably naked, belting out his favorite Old Testament passages. Winston Churchill’s personal physician considered him fit for a lunatic asylum.
“Ruthie,” Zvi called from outside the hut. The familiar voice made her knees wobble, and she struggled to catch her breath, as if the oxygen had been suddenly sucked from the room.
She opened the door and led Zvi and the British officer into the house. Was it a mistake not to stay with the gangly Zvi with his china-blue eyes, who wrote her love letters and even a short book written by hand into a school notepad titled “Diary of a Bloated Fool”? Wasn’t Zvi brimming over with life, the opposite of brooding, melancholy Moshe? Wasn’t he the only one who ever truly loved her? Sure, she and Moshe took trips up to the ruins of a nearby Crusader castle to make love. But Moshe was more businesslike than romantic, his mind never fully turned from the fighting down in the valley.
Zvi gave Ruth an awkward peck on the cheek, and from his furtive stares she sensed his undiminished love. But Zvi wasn’t there to rekindle a teenage flame. He drove to Nahalal to recruit Moshe into Wingate’s Special Night Squad. Moshe came in from the field behind the hut, greeted the two men, and suggested they step outside to talk. He wasn’t certain he could trust Wingate, and instructed Ruth to rifle through his knapsack in search of anything suspicious while the men discussed military affairs.
In the months that followed, Ruth saw less and less of Moshe, as he developed a student-guru relationship with the strange Scotsman. Before carrying out an operation, Wingate recited passages from the Book of Joshua referring to particular tracts of territory, and like a football coach he pepped up his warriors with talks of “You are sons of the Maccabees, the first soldiers of the Jewish army.” Following each successful ambush, he stripped naked, munched his raw onions, and buried himself again in the King James Bible.
Moshe picked up from Wingate a fondness for the ancient Israelites. He was especially impressed with Joshua’s—and Wingate’s—“iron will” and his desire to “carry the fight to the enemy.” One letter to Ruth recounts a guerrilla action against eighty Arab insurgents with Wingate at the front, his stout pistol in hand and his bible in his knapsack, and Moshe and seven of his men trailing behind.
Arabs, naturally, regarded the Scotsman and his counter-insurgency methods as criminal. Wingate ordered his commandos to burn down or blow up over one hundred houses in Kfar Yassif, Christmas’s ancestral village.