Jerusalem: The Biography

  ‘I don’t care whether you’re Jews or gentiles,’ Montgomery told representatives of both sides. ‘My duty is to maintain law and order. I intend to do so.’ Montgomery declared the Revolt ‘definitely, finally smashed’. Five hundred Jews had been killed and 150 Britons, but the Revolt had taken the most terrible toll on Palestinian society which has yet to recover: one-tenth of all males between 20 and 60 had been killed, wounded or exiled. One hundred and forty-six were sentenced to death, 50,000 arrested, and 5000 homes destroyed. Around 4,000 were killed, many of them by fellow Arabs. It was just in time, as British forces were soon likely to be needed in Europe. ‘I shall be sorry to leave Palestine in many ways,’ said Montgomery, ‘as I have enjoyed the war out here.’*

  Neville Chamberlain, whose father had proposed a Jewish homeland in Uganda, decided to reverse the Balfour Declaration. If there was a war, the Jews had no choice but to back Britain against the Nazis. But the Arabs had a real choice. ‘If we must offend one side,’ said Chamberlain, ‘let us offend the Jews rather than the Arabs.’ He therefore invited both sides, and the Arab states, to a conference in London. The Arabs named the mufti as chief delegate, but since the British would not tolerate his presence, his cousin Jamal al-Husseini led one Arab delegation; Nashashibi led the moderates. The Husseinis stayed at the Dorchester, the Nashashibis at the Carlton. Weizmann and Ben-Gurion represented the Zionists. On 7 February 1939, Chamberlain had to open the conference in St James’s Palace twice, because Arabs and Zionists refused to negotiate directly.

  Chamberlain hoped to persuade the Zionists to agree to a cessation in immigration, but to no avail. On 15 March, the hollowness of his appeasement of Hitler was exposed when the Führer invaded the rump of Czechoslovakia. Two days later, Malcolm MacDonald, the colonial secretary, issued a White Paper that proposed limiting Jewish land purchases and restricting immigration to 15,000 people annually for five years, after which Arabs would have a veto, Palestinian independence within ten years and no Jewish state. This was the best offer the Palestinians were to receive from the British or anyone else during the entire twentieth century, but the mufti, displaying spectacular political incompetence and megalomaniacal intransigence, rejected it from his Lebanese exile.

  Ben-Gurion prepared his Haganah militia for war against the British. Jews rioted in Jerusalem. On 2 June, the Irgun bombed the market outside the Jaffa Gate, killing nine Arabs. On the 8th, the last night of his stay in Jerusalem on an Eastern tour, a young American visitor, John F. Kennedy, son of the US ambassador to London, heard fourteen explosions ignited by the Irgun, knocking out electricity across the Holy City. Many now shared General Montgomery’s view that ‘The Jew murders the Arab and the Arabs murder the Jews and it will go on for the next 50 years in all probability’.22

  THE MUFTI AND HITLER: WORLD WAR IN JERUSALEM

  As Adolf Hitler seemed to carry all before him, the mufti of Jerusalem saw an opportunity to strike at their common enemies, the British and the Jews. France had collapsed, the Wehrmacht was advancing towards Moscow, and Hitler had started the killing of 6 million Jews in his Final Solution.* The mufti had moved to Iraq to direct anti-British intrigues but, after organizing yet more defeats, had to flee to Iran and then, pursued by British agents, he embarked on an adventurous voyage that finally brought him to Italy. On 27 October 1941, Benito Mussolini received him at the Palazzo Venetia in Rome, backing the creation of a Palestinian state: if the Jews wanted their own country, ‘they should establish Tel Aviv in America’, said Il Duce. ‘We have here in Italy 45,000 Jews and there will be no place for them in Europe.’ The mufti – ‘very satisfied by the meeting’ – flew to Berlin.

  At 4.30 p.m. on 28 November, the mufti was received by a tense Adolf Hitler: the Soviets had halted the Germans on the outskirts of Moscow. The mufti’s interpreter suggested to the Führer that, by Arab tradition, coffee should be served. Hitler jumpily replied that he did not drink coffee. The mufti inquired if there was a problem. The interpreter soothed the mufti, but explained to the Führer that the guest still expected coffee. Hitler replied that even the High Command was not allowed to drink coffee in his presence: he then left the room, returning with an SS guard bearing lemonade.

  Husseini asked Hitler to support the ‘independence and unity of Palestine, Syria and Iraq’ and the creation of an Arab Legion to fight with the Wehrmacht. The mufti, speaking to the apparent master of the world, was bidding not just for Palestine but for an Arab empire under his own rule.

  Hitler was happy that he and the mufti shared the same enemies: ‘Germany was engaged in a life-and-death struggle with two citadels of Jewish power – Britain and the Soviet Union’ – and naturally there would be no Jewish state in Palestine. Indeed the Führer hinted at his Final Solution to the Jewish problem: ‘Germany was resolved, step by step, to ask one European nation after another to solve its Jewish problem.’ As soon as ‘German armies reached the southern exit of Caucasia’, Hitler said, ‘Germany’s objective would then solely be the destruction of the Jewish element residing in the Arab sphere.’

  However, until Russia and Britain were defeated, the mufti’s ambitious bid for the entire Middle East would have to wait. Hitler said he ‘had to think and speak coolly and deliberately as a rational man’, careful not to offend his Vichy French ally. ‘We were troubled about you,’ Hitler told Husseini. ‘I know your life story. I followed with interest your long and dangerous journey. I’m happy that you’re with us now.’ Afterwards, Hitler admired Husseini’s blue eyes and reddish hair, deciding he definitely had Aryan blood.

  Yet the mufti shared with Hitler not just a strategic hostility to Britain but racial anti-Semitism at its most lethal – and even in memoirs written long afterwards, he remembered that Reichführer-SS Heinrich Himmler, whom he liked greatly, confided to him in the summer of 1943 that the Nazis had ‘already exterminated more than three million Jews.’ The mufti chillingly boasted that he supported the Nazis ‘because I was persuaded and still am that if Germany had carried the day, no trace of the Zionists would have remained in Palestine’.*

  He had come a long way from multi-national Jerusalem where, unsurprisingly, Jews were disheartened by his presence in Berlin. The mufti’s views are indefensible – but it is wrong to use them to claim that Arab nationalists were Hitlerite anti-Semites. Wasif Jawhariyyeh, who, as we will see, was very sympathetic to the Jewish plight, was typical, writing in his diary that Arab Jerusalemites, loathing the British for ‘their injustice, dishonesty and the Balfour Declaration, hoped Germany would win the war. They used to sit, listening to the news, waiting for headlines of German victory, grieving over good news for England.’

  ‘Strange as it may sound’, recalled Hazem Nusseibeh, wartime ‘Jerusalem enjoyed unprecedented peace and prosperity’. The British clamped down on the Jewish militias: Moshe Dayan and his Haganah comrades were arrested and imprisoned in Acre Fortress. But in May 1941, as British Palestine was potentially pincered between the Axis forces in North Africa and Vichy French Syria, the British created the Palmach, a small Jewish commando force, out of Wingate’s and Sadeh’s fighters, ready to fight the Nazis.

  Dayan, released from prison, was sent on raids to prepare for the British invasion of Vichy Syria and Lebanon. During a firefight in southern Lebanon, Dayan was checking on French positions through his binoculars ‘when a rifle bullet smashed into them splintering a lens and the metal casing which became embedded in the socket of my eye’. He hated the eyepatch he now had to wear, feeling like ‘a cripple. If only I could get rid of my black eyepatch. The attention it drew was intolerable to me. I preferred to shut myself up at home, rather than encounter the reactions of people wherever I went.’ Dayan and his young wife moved to Jerusalem so that he could receive treatment. He ‘loved to wander around the Old City, especially to walk the narrow path along the top of its encircling walls. The New City was somewhat strange to me. But the Old City was an enchantment.’ The Haganah, with British help, was preparing to go underground
if the Germans took Palestine.

  Jerusalem was a favourite refuge for exiled kings – George II of Greece, Peter of Yugoslavia and the Ethiopian emperor Haile Selassie all stayed at the King David. The emperor walked barefoot through the streets and placed his crown at the foot of the altar in the Sepulchre. Indeed his prayers were answered: he was restored to his throne.*

  Day and night, the corridors and bars of the King David were so crowded with Egyptian, Lebanese, Syrian, Serbian, Greek and Ethiopian princelings, aristocrats, racketeers, courtiers, loafers, tycoons, pimps, gigolos, courtesans, film stars and Allied, Axis, Zionist and Arab spies, as well as officers and diplomats in French, British, Australian and American uniforms, that visitors had to fight their way through its corridors even to reach its bar and get the desired dry martini. In 1942, a new guest checked in who was one of the most renowned Arab stars of her time and personifies the decadence of Jerusalem as Levantine entrepot. She sung under the name Asmahan; everywhere she went, this dangerous but irresistible woman, who contrived to be, among other things, a Druze princess, Egyptian film star, Arabic popular singer, grande horizantale and spy for all sides, managed to create her own breed of gorgeous havoc and mystery.

  The scion of a princely but impoverished family, who had fled in 1918 to Egypt, Amal al-Altrash, born a Druze in Syria, was discovered as a singer aged fourteen and made her first record at sixteen, achieving instant fame on the radio and then in movies, always recognizable by the beauty spot on her chin. In 1933 she married her cousin, the amir of Mount Druze in Syria, for the first time (she married and divorced him twice). She insisted on living as a liberated, Western woman, even in his mountain palace, though she spent much time at the King David. In May 1941, the princess – or amira – was recruited by British intelligence to return to Vichy Damascus to charm and bribe Syrian leaders into backing the Allied powers. When the Allies retook Syria and Lebanon, she was personally thanked by General Charles de Gaulle. With her singing, invincible chic and utterly uninhibited libido (with bisexual tastes), Asmahan soon beguiled the Free French and British generals in Beirut, playing them against each other and being paid by both as an agent of influence. Churchill’s envoy, General Louis Spears, was so smitten, he said ‘she was and will always be one the most beautiful women I’ve ever seen. Her eyes were immense, green as the sea you cross to paradise. She bowled over British officers with the speed and accuracy of a machine gun. Naturally enough she needed money.’ It was said that if you were her lover it was impossible to be lonely in her boudoir, where you were liable to find one general under the bed, one in the bed, and Spears dangling from the chandelier.

  Furious at Allied betrayal of the promise to grant immediate Arab independence, the princess stole military secrets from a British lover and tried to offer them to the Germans; when she was stopped at the Turkish border, she bit the officer who arrested her. When the Free French broke off her salary, she moved to Jerusalem. Still only twenty-four, she became ‘the Lady of the Lobbies’ in the King David, staying up all night drinking her favourite whisky-champagne cocktail, seducing Palestinian grandees, more British officers (and their wives) and Prince Aly Khan. A French friend recalled: ‘she was all woman. Elle était diabolique avec les hommes.’ As her surname was Altrash, the English women called her Princess Trash, and she so shocked her Druze compatriots that they fired shots at the screen when her first film was shown in the cinema – she was years ahead of her time. She could be her own worst enemy: she tried to throw the Egyptian Queen Mother Nazli out of the best suite while starting an affair with the royal chamberlain. A competition with an Egyptian dancer for a man culminated in the ritual mutilation of each other’s dresses. She regarded Zionism as a fashion opportunity: ‘Thank God for these Viennese furriers – at least it means you can get a decent fur coat in Jerusalem.’ After over a year in the city, and marrying a third husband, an Egyptian playboy, in 1944 she went to Egypt to star in the movie Love and Vengeance, but before the film was finished she drowned in the Nile in a mysterious car crash arranged, it was said, by MI6, the Gestapo, King Farouk (whom she refused) or her rival, Umm Kulthum, the pre-eminent Egyptian singer. If her brother Farid was the Arab world’s Sinatra, she was its Monroe. Asmahan’s angelic singing, particularly in her hit song ‘Magical Nights in Vienna’, is still much loved.

  The streets teemed crowded with American and Australian soldiers. The main challenge for the ‘Pasha of Jerusalem’, Governor Edward Keith-Roach, was to control the Australians, who were provided with a brothel under a Madame Zeinab in the old Hensmans Hotel in the centre of the New City. But the medical inspections completely failed to limit the spread of VD, so Keith-Roach sent ‘Zeinab and her motley crew out of my district’.

  In 1942, the Germans pushed deep into the Caucasus, while General Erwin Rommel’s Afrika Korps advanced on Egypt. The very existence of the Yishuv in Palestine was in jeopardy. Across the Mediterranean, in Greece, SS Einsatzkommando Afrika under SS-Obersturmbannführer Walter Rauff, had been assigned to exterminate the Jews of Africa and Palestine. ‘The faces of the Jews showed the grief, sadness and fear especially when the Germans reached Tobruk,’ recorded Wasif Jawhariyyeh. An Arab pedlar loudly hawking sand –ramel in Arabic sounds like Rommel – made Jews fear that the Germans were approaching. ‘They started crying and made efforts to flee’, recalled Wasif. As his doctor was Jewish, Wasif offered to hide him and his family if the Nazis arrived. But the doctor had taken his own precautions: he showed his patient two poison-filled syringes for himself and his wife.

  In October 1942, General Montgomery smashed the Germans at El Alamein, a miracle which Weizmann compared to Sennacherib’s mysterious withdrawal from Jerusalem. But in November the first terrible news of the Holocaust reached Jerusalem: ‘Mass Butchery of Polish Jews!’ reported the Palestine Post. Jewish Jerusalem mourned for three days, culminating in a service at the Wall.

  The British crackdown on Jewish immigration, announced in the 1939 White Paper, could not have been worse timed: while European Jewry was being slaughtered in Nazi Europe, British troops were turning back shiploads of desperate refugees. The Arab Revolt, Hitler’s Final Solution and the White Paper convinced many Zionists that violence was the only way to force Britain to grant the promised Jewish homeland.

  The Jewish Agency controlled the largest militia, the Haganah, with its 2,000-strong special forces, the Palmach, and its 25,000 militiamen trained by the British. Ben-Gurion was now the unrivalled Zionist leader, ‘a short tubby man with a prophetic shock of silvery hair’ around his bald patch, in Amos Oz’s words, ‘thick bushy eyebrows, a wide coarse nose, the prominent defiant jaw of an ancient mariner’ and the laser-beam willpower of a ‘visionary peasant’. But it was the more belligerent Irgun, under an implacable new leader, that now waged war against the British.

  50

  THE DIRTY WAR

  1945–7

  MENACHEM BEGIN: THE BLACK SABBATH

  ‘I fight; therefore I am,’ said Menachem Begin, adapting Descartes. Born in Brest-Litovsk, this child of the shtetl had joined Jabotinsky’s Betar movement in Poland, but he had clashed with his hero, throwing out his subtleties, to forge his own harsher ideology of military Zionism – a ‘war of liberation against those who hold the land of our fathers’, combining maximalist politics with emotional religion. After the Nazis and Soviets had carved up Poland at the start of the Second World War, Begin was arrested by Stalin’s NKVD and sentenced to the Gulag as a British spy: ‘What became of this British agent?’ he joked. ‘He soon had on his head the largest reward offered by the British police.’

  Released after Stalin’s 1941 pact with the Polish leader General Sikorski, Begin joined the Polish Army which brought him via Persia to Palestine. Formed in the dark continent of Stalin’s meatgrinder and Hitler’s slaughterhouse – in which his parents and brother perished – he came from a harsher school than Weizmann or Ben-Gurion: ‘It’s not Masada,’ he said, ‘but Modin [where the Maccabees started their rebellion]
that symbolizes the Hebrew revolt.’ Jabotinsky had died of a heart attack in 1940 and now in 1944, Begin was appointed commander of the Irgun with its 600 fighters. The older Zionists regarded Begin as ‘plebeian or provincial’. With his rimless glasses, ‘soft restless hands, thinning hair and wet lips’,* Begin looked more like a provincial Polish schoolmaster than a revolutionary mastermind. Yet he had ‘the patience of a hunter in ambush’.

  Although the Irgun had joined the Allied war against the Nazis, some extremists, led by Abraham Stern, had split off. Stern was killed by the British in 1942. But his faction, the Lehi, Fighters for the Freedom of Israel, nicknamed the Stern Gang, now launched their own revolt against the British. As Allied victory became more likely, Begin started to test British resolve in Jerusalem: the blowing of the shofar, the ram’s horn, on The Day of Atonement, had been banned at the Wall since 1929. But Jabotinsky had annually challenged the rule. In October 1943, Begin ordered the blowing of the shofar: British police immediately attacked the praying Jews but in 1944, the British desisted. Begin took this as a sign of weakness.

  This impresario of violence declared war on Britain and in September 1944, the Irgun attacked British police stations in Jerusalem and then assassinated a CID officer as he walked through the city. Begin, nicknamed the Old Man (the same nickname enjoyed by Ben-Gurion), even though he was about thirty, descended into the underground, constantly moving address and adopting the disguise of a bearded Talmudic scholar. The British placed a £10,000 bounty on his head, dead or alive.