Jerusalem Saga
The sixth Saga
The sixth Saga
Operation Nachshon, the first military action in the open field by a Jewish brigade since biblical times, and in the same place, was launched in April 1948 to break the Arab blockade of Jerusalem and the famine that stalked the Jewish inhabitants of Jerusalem.
Faced with desperate pleas for help from besieged Jerusalem, where food and water had been rationed, while the Jordanian government scoffed that the Jews of Jerusalem ate plants like animals, Ben Gurion, the leader of the provisional Zionist government, decided to bring forward the military action, planned for a month and a half later when the British Mandate had come to an end and the British army had withdrawn from Palestine, and to begin Operation Nachshon immediately, with British troops still present in the country. But a technical problem had to be solved.
The Jewish defense brigade, the Haganah, was still unarmed.
While the Arab militias of the Arab Liberation Army, led by former Arab officers of the Nazi Wehrmacht, were besieging and attacking Jewish villages in the Galilee, and Jerusalem was under siege by the forces of the Holy War Army of Mufti al-Husseini, Hitler's friend, who declared him an honorary Aryan, the Haganah launched Operation Balak, the most massive secret arms procurement of Allied military surplus from World War II in history in order to arm a Jewish army that could confront the Arabs.
It was a race against time.
No war had been so foretold as this one, which would begin exactly on May 15, 1948 with the departure of the last British soldier and the declaration of Israel's independence.
Gidon van Arnhem, the Palestinian-Dutch Haganah officer and former British SOE commando, would scour the world for planes, ships, tanks, and guns, and smuggle these weapons secretly to the secret base at Zatek, Czechoslovakia, where they would be prepared for shipment to Israel. With UN and US arms embargoes, Operation Balak was to be conducted in secret and become the first case in history where a community self-funds itself, without any support from any power, and arms its army by smuggling those weapons, in an unprecedented deception operation through a dummy airline, under the radar of the UN, the British, the FBI, and European intelligence and customs.
Meanwhile, the Arab League, witnessing the failure of the Arab militias to conquer the unarmed Jewish settlements and commit the promised massacres, have announced that they will invade the newly proclaimed state with their regular armies and destroy it in two weeks, counting on the Jewish inability to repel Arab air, armored, and sea attacks.
Gidon van Arnhem and the Haganah agents, together with volunteers from the Jewish communities of the Diaspora desperately try to avoid the fate that the CIA and the US State Department predicted would result from declaring independence: a new Arab Holocaust three years after the Nazi Holocaust.
The weapons of Operation Balak are the only ones that will be able to change that destiny.
But will they arrive in time to prevent the Arab massacre?