At the close of a recent cable describing the recovery of his censor-held photographs of the fighting in the Holy Land, LIFE Photographer John Phillips added the casual postscript: "FYI, Burke narrowly escaped death outside Jerusalem a few days ago."
Don Burke, chief of TIME Inc.'s Cairo bureau, has been covering the Arab side of the war; Eric Gibbs (who returns to London this week to head up TIME Inc.'s bureau there) has been working the Jewish side. For both it has been an especially difficult story to cover because, as Gibbs explained in a recent issue of TIME, (May 17), "This place is a swirl of rumors, propaganda and outright lies from which it is most difficult to extract the grain of truth. All except eyewitness reports by competent and independent correspondents should be treated with the greatest reserve."
In the course of getting one eyewitness account, it now develops Burke was spotted by a Haganah sniper outside the Old City of Jerusalem. Cabled Burke: "The sniper caught me crossing an open stretch between two stone walls on the Mount of Olives. He missed me by a hairsbreadth, chunking several shots into the hillside as I lumbered across. Then he kept me pinned down for over half an hour behind the low wall as he leisurely chipped the stone above my head. Since I couldn't go forward, I had to return the way I came. When I arrived at the end of the wall, I hunched my legs well under me and launched myself into a froglike dive across the open stretch. I landed smack on top of Phillips, who was dug in there. When we had untangled ourselves, I found that I had leaped out of my shoes."
Burke added, somewhat casually, that it was he who wrote down in English the terms of surrender, signed by both sides, under which the Israelis yielded the Old City of Jerusalem to the Arab Legion. Here is an excerpt from his account of it:
"When the surrender terms were written out, Phillips and I and the other correspondents were at the advance Arab Legion headquarters in the Old City's Armenian quarter adjoining the Jewish quarter. Since 10 a.m., May 28, negotiations had been going on as the Jews sent emissaries back & forth discussing terms. We waited under a light blue, cloudless sky for the negotiations to jell, while Phillips photographed the procedure.
"Finally, about 1 p.m., the Arab Legion commander wrote out five clauses in Arabic in the name of King Abdullah. The United Press' Sam Souki helped the commanding officer's aide translate them into English, which I scribbled down in my notebook. A few minutes later it was decided that the terms were to be submitted in English, and the aide called me aside and asked if I would write two copies.
He gave me two sheets of plain scratch paper (of two different lengths). Borrowing Phillips' pen, I wrote the first copy in document style: impressive margins, good spacing, plenty of room for signatures. The second copy was written on the smaller sheet, necessitating cramped handwriting, and it was generally less impressive.