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,* 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 martyrdom† 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 nationalists, 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
49
THE ARAB REVOLT
1936–45
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 per cent of the country) joined to Amir Abdullah’s Transjordan and a Jewish area (20 per cent). 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 watchm
en, 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, 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 machinegun 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.
At home he was an elegant grandee with his pencil moustache and English suit but he was in his element on the run, in the field, riding shotgun, fighting. He often ‘humiliated the colonial forces around Jerusalem,’ noted Wasif Jawhariyyeh the oud-player. He was wounded in 1936 in a battle against British tanks near Hebron but after his wounds were treated in Germany, he returned to fight on from his base in John the Baptist’s village, Ein Kerem. In the city, he organized the assassination of a British police chief. Wounded again in RAF strafing, Husseini’s admirers regarded him as an Arab knight who eschewed luxury to fight amongst Arab peasants against infidel intruders – but his Palestinian enemies regarded him as one of the worst of the mufti’s warlords, whose henchmen terrorized villages that did not support the Husseinis.
On 26 September 1937, the British district commissioner in Galilee, Lewis Andrews, was assassinated. On the 12th, the mufti escaped from Jerusalem dressed as woman, an undignified exit that weakened his power in Palestine. In exile in Lebanon, he directed operations in a war that was still escalating. He mercilessly enforced obedience to himself personally and his rigidly intransigent policies.
The British were struggling to hold Palestine: Nablus, Hebron, swathes of Galilee were often out of control – and they even lost the Old City for short periods. The British recruited Jewish auxiliaries from the Haganah to join their so-called Jewish Settlement Police, but the latter could scarcely defend their far-flung villages. The Zionist nationalists were disgusted by Ben-Gurion’s policy of restraint. The Irgun Zvai Leumi, the National Military Organization, still only mustering about 1,500 men at the beginning of the Revolt, answered Arab attacks with atrocities against Arab civilians, tossing grenades into cafés in Jerusalem. On Black Sunday in November 1937, they launched coordinated bombings, much to the horror of Weizmann and Ben-Gurion, but recruits poured into the Irgun. Just as the Arab moderates were being annihilated by the mufti’s thugs, so the Revolt destroyed the credibility of conciliatory Jews such as Judah Magnes, the American president of the Hebrew University, who wanted a binational state with a bicameral congress of Jews and Arabs and no Jewish entity at all. Ben-Gurion’s self-restraint was soon exhausted and the British now took off their gloves to crush the Arabs by all and any means: they collectively punished villages and at one point destroyed a whole neighbourhood of Jaffa. In June 1937, they brought in the death penalty for anyone bearing arms. In October, Sir Charles Tegart, who had stringently policed Calcutta for thirty years, arrived in Jerusalem. He built fifty ‘Tegart forts’, erected security fences around the borders and took charge of counter-insurgency and intelligence, creating Arab Investigation Centres. Tegart ran a school in west Jerusalem to instruct his interrogators how to torture suspects – including the ‘water-can’ technique in which prisoners had water forced down their noses from coffeepots, a method now known as ‘water-boarding’ – until the city governor Keith-Roach demanded it be moved. An RAF officer, Arthur Harris – later famed as the ‘Bomber’ of Dresden – supervised air attacks on rebel villages. Yet as the crisis with Hitler developed in Europe, the British could not bring in enough troops to destroy the Revolt, so they needed more Jewish help.
A well-connected young counter-insurgency expert named Orde Wingate was posted to Jerusalem where he was invited to stay by High Commissioner Wauchope. Wingate observed that Wauchope ‘takes everyone’s advice and has lost all grasp of affairs’. His recommendation was to train Jewish fighters and take the insurgency to the insurgents. He would become the Zionist version of Lawrence – Weizmann called him ‘Lawrence of Judaea’. By chance, these two unconventional English Arabists were cousins.21
ORDE WINGATE AND MOSHE DAYAN: THE FALL OF THE OLD CITY
The son of a well-off colonial colonel with an evangelical mission to convert the Jews, raised on Bible and empire, Wingate was a fluent Arabic-speaker, and, like Lawrence, earned his spurs commanding Arab irregulars – a unit of the East Arab Corps in Sudan. ‘There was in him’, wrote Weizmann, ‘a fusion of the student and man of action that reminded me of Lawrence.’ But on arrival in Jerusalem he underwent an almost Damascene conversion, impressed by the energy of the Zionists, and repulsed by the mufti’s bullyboy tactics and the anti-Semitism of British officers: ‘Everyone’s against the Jews,’ he declared, ‘so I’m for them!’
Wingate inspected the beleaguered British troops and Jewish farms. In the depths of the night, they would receive visits from an ‘extra-ordinary figure’ wearing a Borsolino hat or a Wolseley topee, a battered Palm Beach suit and a Royal Artillery tie, who looked ‘like the kind of lowlife you saw hanging around dubious cafés in Tel Aviv’. Always armed to the teeth, the thirty-three-year-old Captain Wingate, who had ‘very piercing blue eyes, aquiline features and a faraway ascetic look with a scholarly air’, arrived in a Studebaker sedan ‘filled with weapons, maps, Lee Enfield rifles, Mills grenades – and a Bible’. Wingate decided that ‘the Jews will provide better soldiery than ours.’ In March 1938, the British commander, Sir Archibald Wavell, impressed by this ‘remarkable personality’, ordered Wingate to train Jewish special forces and deploy these so-called Special Night Squads against the rebels. Wavell did not know what he was dealing with: ‘I wasn’t then aware of the connection with T. E. Lawrence.’
Setting up headquarters in the Fast Hotel, near the Jaffa Gate, Wingate learned fluent Hebrew and was soon known as ‘the Friend’ by the Zionists – but he was regarded as an enemy by the Arabs and a reckless freak by many of his British brother-officers. Moving out of Government House, he set up home in Talpiot with his wife Lorna, who was ‘very young and very beautiful like a porcelain doll. People didn’t take their eyes off her’, recalled Ruth Dayan. Her husband Moshe Dayan, the twenty-two-year-old son of Russian immigrants, born in the first kibbutz, had (secretly) joined the Haganah and was (openly) serving in the Jewish Settlement Police, when ‘one evening, a Haganah man from Haifa turned up accompanied by a strange visitor. Wingate was a slender man, a heavy revolver at his side, carrying a small Bible. Before go
ing on an action, he’d read the passage in the Bible relating to the place where we’d be operating.’ This military heir of the bibliolatrist evangelicals led his Night Squads against the Arab gunmen who were ‘forced to realize they could no longer find any path secure for them: they were likely to be caught in a surprise ambush anywhere.’ During the Revolt and later during the Second World War, the British trained 25,000 Jewish auxiliaries, including other commando units led by Yitzhak Sadeh, a Russian Red Army veteran who became Haganah’s chief of staff. ‘You are the sons of the Maccabees,’ Wingate told them, ‘You are the first soldiers of a Jewish army!’ Their expertise and spirit later formed the basis of the Israel Defence Forces.
In September 1938, Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain’s Munich Agreement, which appeased Adolf Hitler’s aggression and allowed him to dismember Czechoslovakia, freed British troops: 25,000 reinforcements arrived in Palestine. Yet in Jerusalem, the rebels pulled off a daring coup de main: on 17 October, they seized the entire Old City, barricading the gates, driving out British troops and even issuing postage stamps marked al-Quds. Wasif Jawhariyyeh, who lived near the Jaffa Gate, proudly saw an Arab flag fluttering from the Tower of David. A beleaguered rabbi at the Western Wall was terrorized by Arab gunmen. But on 19 October, the British stormed the gates and retook the city, killing nineteen gunmen as Wasif watched from his home. ‘I can’t describe the night of the battle with the British army and the rebels. We saw the explosions and heard the incredible smashing of bombs and bullets.’
Though he was a hero to the Jews, Wingate’s operations were increasingly regarded as counter-productive by British officers, who heard that he opened his front door to guests stark naked, and was having an affair with a Jewish opera singer. Even Dayan had to admit: ‘Judged by ordinary standards he wouldn’t be regarded as normal. [After operations] he’d sit in the corner stark naked reading the Bible, and munching raw onions.’ Wingate’s divisional commander, Major-General Bernard Montgomery, disliked his military recklessness and Zionist partisanship. Wingate, Montgomery later told Dayan, ‘was mentally unstable’. He was ordered back to the British headquarters in Jerusalem. Now the British had the forces, they no longer needed Jewish commandos.