The cooling of British enthusiasm for Zionism increasingly alienated the Jews. Perhaps High Commissioner Sir John Chancellor was typical when he complained that Jews were “ungrateful people.” Each Jewish neighbourhood belonged in a different country: Rehavia, home of secular German professors and British officials, was the most desirable suburb, civilized, calm and European; the Bokharan Quarter belonged in Central Asia; the Hasidic Mea Shearim was shabby, impoverished and redolent of seventeenth-century Poland; Zikhron Zion was heady with the “poor Ashkenazi cooking smells, of borscht, garlic and onion and sauerkraut,” recalled Amos Oz; Talpiot was “a Jerusalemite replica of a Berlin garden suburb,” while his own home was in Kerem Avraham, built around the old house of the British consul James Finn, which was so Russian “it belonged to Chekhov.”
Weizmann had called Jerusalem “a modern Babel” but all these different worlds continued to mix, despite spasms of violence and clouds of foreboding. That cosmopolitan Jerusalem, wrote Hazem Nusseibeh, was “one of the most exhilarating cities in the world to live in.” Cafés opened all the time, enjoyed by a new class of intellectuals, boulevardiers, and flâneurs, funded by family orange groves, newspaper articles and civil service salaries. The cafés presented respectable belly-dancing, as well as the saucier suzi version, cabaret-singers and traditional balladeers, jazz bands, and Egyptian popular singers. During early Mandate years, just inside the Jaffa Gate next to the Imperial Hotel, the flamboyant intellectual Khalil Sakakini held court at the Vagabond Café, where over puffs of nargileh water pipes and shots of Lebanese arak firewater, this soi-disant “Prince of Idleness” discussed politics and expounded his hedonistic philosophy, the Manifesto of Vagabonds—“Idleness is the motto of our party. The working-day is made up of two hours”—after which he indulged “in eating, drinks and merriment.” However, his indolence was limited when he became Palestine’s inspector of education.
Wasif Jawhariyyeh, the oud-player with the municipal sinecure, had long embraced laziness: his brother opened the Café Jawhariyyeh on Jaffa Road by the Russian Compound where a cabaret and band performed. One regular denizen of the nearby Postal Café recalled “the cosmopolitan clientele; a Tsarist officer with a white beard, a young clerk; an immigrant painter, an elegant lady who kept talking about her properties in Ukraine, and many young men and women immigrants.”
Many of the British enjoyed this “real blend of cultures,” not least Sir Harry Luke, who presided over a typical Jerusalem household: “The nanny was from south England, the butler a White Russian,f the servant a Cypriot Turk, Ahmed the cook was a rascally black Berber, the kitchenboy was an Armenian who surprised us by turning out to be a girl; the housemaid is Russian.” But not everyone was so charmed. “I dislike them all intensely,” said General Sir Walter “Squib” Congreve. “Beastly people. The whole lot are not worth a single Englishman.”
BEN-GURION AND THE MUFTI: THE SHRINKING SOFA
The mufti was at the height of his prestige but he struggled to control the wide range of Arab views. There were liberal Westernizers like George Antonius, there were Marxists, there were secular nationalists and there were Islamic fundamentalists. Many Arabs loathed the mufti but the majority were becoming convinced that only armed struggle could stop Zionism. In November 1933, the ex-mayor Musa Kazem Husseini, who was no fan of his cousin the mufti, led demonstrations in Jerusalem that sparked riots in which thirty Arabs were killed. When Musa Kazem died the next year, the Arabs lost an elder statesman respected by all: “people wept a lot over Musa Kazem,” wrote Ahmed Shuqayri, a later Palestinian leader, “whereas Haj Amin (the mufti) made a lot of people weep.” More than a quarter of a million Jews arrived in Palestine during the second decade of the Mandate, twice as many as during the first. The Arabs, whether they were the most sophisticated of the Jerusalem elite, educated at Oxford, or whether they were the Islamicist radicals of the Muslim Brotherhood, all now sensed that the British would never halt the immigration, nor hold back the ever more sophisticated organization of the Yishuv, as the Jewish community was known. They were running out of time. In 1935, at the height of the immigration, 66,000 Jews arrived. In that morbid age when war was often regarded as a purifying national ritual, even the intellectual Sakakini and the aesthete Jawhariyyeh now believed that only violence could save Palestine. The answer, wrote Hazem Nusseibeh, was “armed rebellion.”
This was confronted by the ageing Weizmann, again Zionist president, but the real power lay with David Ben-Gurion, recently elected chairman of the Executive of the Jewish Agency, the highest authority for the Yishuv. Both men were autocratic and intellectual in style, dedicated to Zionism and Western democracy. But they were opposites. Ben-Gurion was a gruff working-class man of action, equipped to lead in war and peace. He lacked all small talk (except about history and philosophy) and was humourless—the only joke the diminutive Ben-Gurion told was about Napoleon’s height. Its punchline was: “no one was bigger than Napoleon, just taller.” Married with two children, a dissatisfied husband, he enjoyed a discreet love-affair with a tall, blue-eyed Englishwoman in London. But he was a brooding loner and thoughtful strategist, always obsessed with the cause, who collected books, spending any spare time in second-hand bookshops. The Old Man, as he was already known, learned Spanish to read Cervantes and Greek to study Plato; when he planned statehood, he read Greek philosophy; when he made war, he read Clausewitz.
Weizmann was Zionism’s grand seigneur, dressed in Savile Row suits, more at home in the salons of Mayfair than on the sunbeaten farms of Galilee and now well-off from founder-shares in Marks & Spencer, donated by his friends, the Sieff family. “You’re now King of Israel,” Ben-Gurion told him, but he would soon turn against “Weizmann’s regime of personal fetishism.” As for Weizmann, he knew that, unlike Ben-Gurion, he was not cut out to be a warlord, but he half respected, half disdained the younger man’s militancy. In his 600-page memoirs, he mentioned Ben-Gurion’s name just twice. Weizmann was mistaken for Lenin in looks but Ben-Gurion emulated the Bolshevik’s ruthless pragmatism.
He had started as a socialist, risen in the labour movement and had not quite lost his belief that a new Palestine should be created through the cooperation of the Jewish and Arab working classes. Ben-Gurion may have dreamed of a Jewish state but that seemed totally unlikely and remote. Since he appreciated that “the Arab national movement was born at almost the same time as political Zionism,” he believed that an Arab–Jewish confederation was the best the Jews could hope for at that time. Both he and the mufti probed each other with plans for a shared state: in retrospect, a compromise was still possible. In August 1934, Ben-Gurion started to meet Musa al-Alami,g a lawyer working for the British, and George Antonius, the writer—both moderate advisers to the mufti. Ben-Gurion proposed either a Jewish–Arab shared government or a Jewish entity within an Arab federation that would include Transjordan and Iraq. Surely, Ben-Gurion argued, Palestine was like a sofa: there was room for both. The mufti was impressed, but noncommittal. Later Alami reflected that the mufti and Ben-Gurion shared the same harsh nationalism but the Jewish leader was much more flexible and skilful. He regretted that the Arabs never produced their own Ben-Gurion. Meanwhile, the mufti and his fellow aristocrats were losing control of their movement.
In November 1935, a Syrian preacher named Sheikh Izzat al-Din al-Qassam, who worked as a junior official in the mufti’s sharia court in Haifa and was constantly urging him to reject any political compromise, rebelled against the British. He was far more radical than the mufti, a puritan fundamentalist who believed in the sanctity of martyrdom, a precursor of al-Qaeda and today’s Jihadists. Now he led the thirteen mujahidin of his Black Hand cell into hills where, on 20 November, he was cornered by 400 British police and killed. Qassam’s martyrdomh jolted the mufti closer to revolt. In April 1936, Qassam’s successor launched an operation outside Nablus that killed two Jews—but released a German who claimed to be a Nazi “for Hitler’s sake.” This lit the spark. The Irgun, Jewish nationa
lists, killed two Arabs in response. As the shooting started, Sir Arthur Wauchope was totally unqualified to respond. A young officer noticed that he “doesn’t know what to do.”20
a The Nashashibis claimed descent from a thirteenth-century Mamluk potentate, Nasir al-Din al-Naqashibi, who had served as Superindentant of the Two Harams (Jerusalem and Hebron). In fact they were descended from eighteenth-century merchants who manufactured bows and arrows for the Ottomans. Ragheb’s father had made a huge fortune and married a Husseini.
b He was aided by von Papen, the officer who in 1917 had so wanted to save Germany’s reputation in Jerusalem. Papen, who had already served as chancellor, advised President Hindenburg to appoint Hitler, convinced he and his aristocratic camarilla could control the Nazis: “Within two months, we’ll have pushed Hitler so far in the corner, he’ll squeak.” Papen became Hitler’s vice-chancellor but soon resigned, becoming German ambassador to Istanbul. He was tried at Nuremburg, served a few years in prison, and died in 1969.
c As the British contemplated limiting immigration to Zion, Joseph Stalin was building his own Soviet Jerusalem. “The Tsar gave the Jews no land but we will,” he announced. His views on the Jews were contradictory. In a famous 1913 article on nationality, Stalin declared that Jews were not a nation but “mystical, intangible and otherworldly.” Once in power, he banned anti-Semitism, which he called “cannibalism,” and in 1928, approved the creation of a secular Jewish homeland with Yiddish and Russian as official languages. Inaugurated in May 1934, Stalin’s Zion, the Jewish Autonomous Region, was a wasteland, Birobidzhan, on the Chinese border. After the Second World War and the Holocaust, his foreign minister Vyacheslav Molotov and others backed the creation of another Jewish homeland in the more attractive Crimea—a Stalinist California—which ultimately aroused Stalin’s vicious anti-Semitism. Yet by 1948 Birobidzhan contained 35,000 Jews. Today it survives with a few thousand Jews and all its signs still in Yiddish.
d The Woodhead Commission of 1938 stated that between 1919 and 1938, the Arab population of Palestine had increased by 419,000; the Jewish population by 343,000.
e Antonius, son of a rich Christian Lebanese cotton-trader, born in Alexandria and educated at Victoria College and Cambridge and a friend of E. M. Forster, was assistant education director for the Mandate. He was chronicling the Arab Revolt and the British betrayal in his book The Arab Awakening, one of the seminal texts of Arab nationalism. Antonius advised both the mufti and the British high commissioners. Antonius’ daughter Soraya later wrote probably the best novel about this period, based on her parents’ milieu, Where the Jinn Consult.
f Jerusalem was still filled with White Russians but one Grand Duchess returned posthumously. In 1918, the widow of Grand Duke Sergei, Ella, who had become a nun, was arrested by the Bolsheviks. Her skull was smashed in and she was tossed down a mineshaft in Alapaevsk, just hours after the Bolsheviks had also murdered her sister, Empress Alexandra, Emperor Nicholas II and all their children. When the Whites took Alapaevsk, they discovered the bodies: Ella’s had scarcely decayed. Her body and that of her devoted fellow nun Sister Barbara travelled via Peking, Bombay and Port Said to Jerusalem where they were received in January 1921 by Sir Harry Luke who had to change their route through the city to avoid pro-Bolshevik protests by Jewish immigrants. “Two unadorned coffins were lifted from the train. The little cavalcade wound its way sadly, unobtrusively to the Olivet,” wrote Louis, Marquess of Milford Haven who, with his wife Victoria, helped bear the coffins. “Russian peasant women, stranded pilgrims, sobbing and moaning, were almost fighting to get some part of the coffin.” The Milford Havens were the grandparents of Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh. Elizabeth the New Martyr was canonized and rests in a glass-topped white marble sarcophagus in the Church of Mary Magdalene she and her husband had built. Some of her saintly relics have been returned to her Martha and Mary Convent in Moscow.
g He was a member of one of the grandest Families. The Alamis’ house remains the most extraordinary in Jerusalem: in the seventeenth century the family bought a house right next to the Church which actually shares and owns part of its roof; the view from there is astonishing. The building, with Byzantine, Crusader and Mamluk vestiges, is still owned by Mohammad al-Alami. A cousin still serves as sheikh of Saladin’s Salahiyya khanqah next door.
h Hamas, the Islamic Palestinian organization in Gaza, was inspired by Qassam hence it named its armed wing the Qassam Brigade, and its missiles are Qassam rockets.
CHAPTER 49
The Arab Revolt
1936–1945
THE MUFTI’S TERROR
One cool night in Jerusalem in early 1936, “scattered rifle shots rang out in the clear evening sky” and Hazem Nusseibeh realized that “the armed rebellion had begun.” The Revolt escalated slowly. In April that year, Arabs killed sixteen Jews in Jaffa. The Palestinian parties formed a Higher Arab Committee under the mufti and called a national strike that swiftly spun out of anyone’s control. The mufti declared this a sacred struggle and called his forces the Holy War Army as volunteers started to arrive to fight the British and Jews from Syria, Iraq and Transjordan.
On 14 May, two Jews were shot in the Jewish Quarter, and the mufti insisted, “The Jews are trying to expel us from the country, murdering our sons and burning our houses.” Two days later, Arab gunmen killed three Jews in the Edison Cinema.
The Yishuv began to panic, but Ben-Gurion embraced a policy of self-restraint. Meanwhile British ministers now questioned the entire basis of the Mandate and commissioned Earl Peel, an ex-Cabinet minister, to report. The mufti called off the strike in October 1936, though he refused to recognize Peel. But Weizmann charmed the commissioners. On Amir Abdullah’s insistence the mufti testified that the Palestinians demanded independence, the annulment of the Balfour Declaration and, ominously, the removal of the Jews.
In July 1937, Peel proposed a two-state solution, the partition of Palestine into an Arab area (70 percent of the country) joined to Amir Abdullah’s Transjordan and a Jewish area (20 percent). In addition, he suggested a population transfer of the 300,000 Arabs in the Jewish area. Jerusalem would remain a special entity under British control. The Zionists accepted—they had realized they would never be given Jerusalem in a partition. Weizmann was not disappointed by the small size of the Jewish entity, musing that “King David’s [kingdom] was smaller.”
Peel complained that, in contrast to the Zionists, “not once since 1919 has any Arab leader said that cooperation with the Jews was even possible.” Only Abdullah of Transjordan enthusiastically supported Peel’s plan and, in retrospect, this would have prevented Israel in its present form but at the time, all Palestinians were inflamed by an English earl’s idea of creating a Jewish state: both the mufti and his rival Nashashibi rejected it.
The Revolt exploded again, but this time, the mufti embraced and organized the violence; he was seemingly more interested in murdering his Palestinian rivals than the British or Jews. “It seems,” writes the latest historian of the Husseinis, “he was personally responsible for establishing internecine terror as a means of control.” Over his favourite meal of lentil soup, the mufti, always accompanied by his Sudanese bodyguards descended from the Haram’s traditional watchmen, behaved like a Mafia boss as he ordered assassinations that in two years of fratricide wiped out many of his most decent and moderate compatriots. Nine days after Peel’s proposal, the mufti called on the German consul-general in Jerusalem to state his sympathy for Nazism and his wish to cooperate. The next day, the British tried to arrest him but he sought sanctuary in al-Aqsa.
The British did not dare storm the Sanctuary. Instead they besieged Husseini on the Temple Mount, denouncing him as the organizer of the Revolt. But not all the Arab gangs were under his control: the Jihadi followers of Qassam also enthusiastically killed any Arabs suspected of cooperating with the authorities. Nothing less than a brutal civil war broke out among the Arabs themselves. It was now that it was said that the mufti made many families
weep.
After supporting the Revolt initially, Ragheb Nashashibi opposed the mufti both for his terror and his strategy. Nashashibi’s villa was raked with machine-gun fire; a young cousin was killed watching a football game. When Fakhri Bey Nashashibi, his nephew, accused the mufti of destructive egotism, his death warrant was published in the newspapers: he was later assassinated in Baghdad. Nashashibi armed his retainers, known as “the Nashashibi units,” or “peacebands,” and they fought the mufti’s men. Arab headwear became the shibboleth of the Revolt: Husseini supporters wore the keffiyeh checked scarf; the Nashashibis, the tarboush of compromise. The mufti set up rebel courts to try traitors and issued rebel stamps.
In Jerusalem, the Revolt was commanded by Abd al-Kadir Husseini, thirty-year-old commander of the Holy War Army. He was the son of the late Musa Kazem Husseini (he used the nom de guerre Abu Musa), and received the best education at the Anglican Bishop Gobat’s school on Mount Zion. He had used his graduation at Cairo University to denounce British perfidy and Zionist conspiracy. After being expelled from Egypt, he organized the mufti’s Palestine Arab Party, edited its newspapers and founded, under cover of the Boy Scouts, his own Green Hand militia that became its military wing.