Fall of Haifa
Moshe proved to be a tireless and fearless soldier, and his injury was hardly a handicap because, he later quipped, aiming through the scope of a rifle only required one eye. Fighting renewed him, and he was grateful. He had everything to gain—meaning, purpose, power—by rushing headlong into fresh battles. This freed him up to be utterly daring, to excel in the art of improvisation—Wingating it.
In early March 1948, two months before the British withdrew and the impossible partition was supposed to come into effect, Ben-Gurion summoned Moshe and eleven others to the Haganah’s secret headquarters in Tel Aviv, a redbrick sock factory dubbed the “Red House,” to advise him on the next phase of what the Israelis would call the War of Independence.
Ben-Gurion and his twelve disciples, poring over detailed maps and aerial photographs, discussed improving defense positions against invading armies from the neighboring Arab states. In practice, what they came up with required capturing the cities of Tiberias, Safed, Jaffa, Acre, and Haifa.6
A month after the Haganah meeting in the sock factory, Raymonda left the convent in Nazareth and traveled to Haifa to join Christmas. She arrived in the old city near the port just as Jewish forces surrounded the Arab quarters. Food and medicine were no longer getting in; prices skyrocketed; the poor faced starvation. Mortar shells rained down from the Jewish neighborhoods up on Mount Carmel: Where were the heroic Arab defenders? Where were modern-day Salah al-Dins?
With fighting cutting off access to the Red Cross station where Christmas lived, Raymonda had no other choice but to go to Aunt Sylvie’s mansion on King George Street. She wasn’t there more than a couple of days when the fighting shifted, and Arab irregulars perched on the balcony of the aunt’s house traded fire with the Haganah men on the other side of the street. A mortar attack destroyed the neighbor’s mansion along with half of Sylvie’s: Raymonda shudders when recalling the shock of the explosion, the sound of shattering stone and glass, the “devilish flames” licking at the white plaster, the “acrid smoke” billowing through the rooms.
The francophone aunt who drank her afternoon tea in Meissner cups snapped out orders for her children and Raymonda to grab whatever they could carry. They jumped into the Daimler, and the driver took them to her other house in the German Colony. From the back seat, Raymonda watched crowds of panicked people, old men, women, and children racing in the direction of the port to get boats out of the city. At the port, people rested on concrete loading docks while others milled around restlessly with the blank, vacant eyes of people who hadn’t eaten in a week, stripped of will.
The German Colony seemed safer because Sylvie’s Jewish friends in the neighborhood pleaded with her, “Don’t leave, don’t leave, the fighting is almost over.” The Jewish mayor was saying the same thing.
But Operation Danny required an Arab-free city, in particular in the neighborhoods near the port.
The family held out for a few more days until one morning Raymonda went outside to play with her cousin Nicolas in the garden. They looked up and saw a mountain of blue and white corpses stacked in a military truck parked in front of the house. There must have been a hundred bodies of men, women, and children piled on top of one another, eyes open, limbs stiff; swarms of giant black flies buzzed around the bodies, which gave off the sweet, sickening odor of death.
Assaulted by the repulsive sight, Raymonda and Nicolas rushed into the house screaming as if they had seen one of the rings of hell. It was too much: Sylvie raced around the house, grabbing children, clothes, some food, and ordered her driver to take them to the port.
Habib turned up just before the Daimler sped off to the ship. Hearing about the corpses and his sister’s decision to flee by ship, he picked Raymonda up and sent her back to the convent in Nazareth with two British officers driving a truck. Jews, he was certain, would never attack a convent. Habib then boarded a ship and left the city by sea. He was the only member of the vast Hawa clan ever to see Haifa again.
Christmas never fled Haifa. She stayed behind as a volunteer with the Red Cross to treat the wounded. The final outbreak of fighting was the Haganah onslaught on April 21. Encircled and starving, Arabs in the city were in no position to put up a fight. The so-called Battle of Haifa lasted a single day.
Passing by Sylvie’s mansion on King George Street, on April 22, Christmas saw a Yiddish and Hebrew-speaking mob swarm through the half-destroyed house, carting off clothes, furniture, chandeliers, paintings, boxes of wine and brandy, no doubt the Meissner tea cups—whatever they could carry.