Jerusalem: The Biography (69 page)

Despite Arab alarm about the Balfour Declaration, Jerusalem was quiet for two years. Storrs supervised the restoration of the walls and the Dome, the installation of street lights, the creation of the Jerusalem Chess Club and the dynamiting of Abdul-Hamid’s Jaffa Gate watch-tower. He especially relished his power to rename Jerusalem: ‘When the Jews wished to rename Fast’s Hotel [as]
King Solomon
and the Arabs [as]
Sultan Sulaiman
[Suleiman the Magnificent], either of which would have excluded half Jerusalem, one could order it to be called The Allenby.’ He even established a nuns’ choir which he conducted himself, and tried to mediate the Christian brawling in the Church, adhering to the sultan’s 1852 division. This satisfied the Orthodox but displeased the Catholics. When Storrs visited the Vatican, the pope accused him of polluting Jerusalem by introducing ungodly cinemas and 500 prostitutes. The British never managed to solve the viciously petty feuds.
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The actual status of Palestine, to say nothing of Jerusalem, was far from decided. Picot again pushed the Gallic claim on Jerusalem. The British had no idea, he insisted, how much the French had rejoiced over the capture of Jerusalem. ‘Think what it must have been like for us who took it!’ retorted Storrs. Picot next tried to assert French protection of the Catholics by presiding on a special throne at a Te Deum in the Church, but the scheme collapsed when the Franciscans refused to cooperate.

When the mayor died unexpectedly of pneumonia (perhaps contracted by surrendering too often in the pouring rain), Storrs appointed his brother, Musa Kazem al-Husseini. But the impressive new mayor, who had served as the governor of Ottoman provinces from Anatolia to Jaffa, gradually assumed leadership of the campaign against the Zionists. The Arab Jerusalemites placed their hopes in a Greater Syrian kingdom ruled by Prince Faisal, Lawrence’s friend. At the First Congress of Muslim–Christian Associations, held in Jerusalem, the delegates voted to join Faisal’s Syria. The Zionists, who were still unrealistically adamant that most Arabs were reconciled to their settlement, tried to appease local fears. The British encouraged friendly gestures by both sides. Weizmann met and reassured the grand mufti that the Jews would not threaten Arab interests, presenting him with an ancient Koran.

In June 1918, Weizmann travelled across the desert to meet Faisal, attended by Lawrence, at his encampment near Aqaba. It was the start of what Weizmann exaggerated as ‘a lifelong friendship’. He explained that the Jews would develop the country under British protection. Privately, Faisal saw a big difference between what Lawrence called ‘the Palestine Jews and the colonist Jews: to Faisal the important point is that the former speak Arabic and the latter German Yiddish’. Faisal and Lawrence hoped that the Sherifians and Zionists could cooperate to build the kingdom of Syria. Lawrence explained: ‘I look upon the Jews as the natural importers of Western leaven so necessary for countries in the Near East.’ Weizmann recalled that Lawrence’s ‘relationship to Zionism was a very positive one’, as he believed that ‘the Arabs stood to gain much from a Jewish Homeland’.

At their oasis summit, Faisal ‘accepted the possibility of future Jewish claims to territory in Palestine’. Later, when the three men met again in London, Faisal agreed that Palestine could absorb ‘4–5 million Jews without encroaching on the rights of the Arab peasantry. He did not think for a moment there was any scarcity of land in Palestine,’ and approved a Jewish majority presence in Palestine within the Kingdom of Syria – providing he received the crown. Syria was the prize and Faisal was happy to compromise to secure it.

Weizmann’s diplomacy at first bore fruit. He had joked that ‘a Jewish state without a university is like Monaco without the casino’, so on 24 July 1918 Allenby drove him in his Rolls-Royce up Mount Scopus. There the foundation-stones were laid for the Hebrew University by the mufti, the Anglican bishop, two chief rabbis and Weizmann himself. But observers noticed that the mufti looked sick at heart. In the distance, the Ottoman artillery boomed as the guests sang ‘God Save the King’ and the Zionist anthem Hatikvah. ‘Below us lay Jerusalem,’ said Weizmann, ‘gleaming like a jewel.’

The Ottomans were still fighting powerfully in Palestine, while on the Western Front there was as yet no sign of victory. During these months, Storrs was sometimes told by his manservant that ‘a Bedouin’ was waiting for him. He would find Lawrence there, reading his books. The English Bedouin then disappeared just as mysteriously. In Jerusalem that May, Storrs introduced Lawrence to the American journalist Lowell Thomas, who thought ‘he might be one of the younger apostles returned to life’. Thomas would later help create the legend of Lawrence of Arabia.

Only in September 1918 did Allenby retake the offensive, defeating the Ottomans at the Battle of Megiddo. Thousands of German and Ottoman prisoners were marched through the streets of Jerusalem. Storrs celebrated ‘by playing upon my Steinway a medley of “Vittoria” from La Tosca, Handel’s Marches from Jephthah and Scipio, Parry’s “Wedding March” from the Birds of Aristophanes’. On 2 October, Allenby allowed Faisal, King-designate of Syria, and Colonel Lawrence to liberate Damascus with their Sherifians. But, as Lawrence suspected, the real decision-making had started far away. Lloyd George was determined to keep Jerusalem. Lord Curzon later complained: ‘The Prime Minister talks about Jerusalem with almost the same enthusiasm as about his native hills.’

Even as Germany finally buckled, the lobbying had already started. On the day the armistice was signed, 11 November, Weizmann, who had an appointment arranged before this momentous development, found Lloyd George weeping in 10 Downing Street reading the Psalms. Lawrence canvassed officials in London to help the Arab cause. Faisal was in Paris to put his case to the French. But when the British and French clashed in Paris over the division of the East, Lloyd George protested that it was Britain that had conquered Jerusalem: ‘The other governments had only put a few nigger policemen to see we didn’t steal the Holy Sepulchre.’

THE VICTORS AND THE SPOILS

1919–20

WOODROW WILSON AT VERSAILLES

Meeting in London a few weeks later, Lloyd George and the French Premier Georges Clemenceau traded chips in the Middle East. In return for Syria, Clemenceau was accommodating:

CLEMENCEAU: ‘Tell me what you want.’

LLOYD GEORGE: ‘I want Mosul.’

CLEMENCEAU: ‘You shall have it. Anything else?’

LLOYD GEORGE: ‘Yes I want Jerusalem too!’

CLEMENCEAU: ‘You shall have it.’

In January 1919, Woodrow Wilson, the first US president ever to leave the Americas while in office, arrived in Versailles to settle the peace with Lloyd George and Clemenceau. The protagonists of the Middle East came to lobby the victors, with Faisal, accompanied by Lawrence, striving to prevent French control of Syria; and Weizmann hoping to keep Britain in Palestine and win international recognition for the Balfour Declaration. The very presence of Lawrence, as Faisal’s adviser, wearing British uniform combined with Arab headdress, outraged the French. They tried to get him banned from the conference.

Wilson, that idealistic Virginian professor turned Democratic politician and now international arbiter, proclaimed that ‘every territorial settlement involved in this war must be made in the interests and for the benefit of the populations concerned’. He refused to countenance an imperial carve-up of the Middle East. The three potentates soon came to resent each other. Wilson regarded Lloyd George as ‘slippery’. The seventy-eight-year-old Clemenceau, squeezed between the self-righteous Wilson and the land-grabbing Lloyd George, complained, ‘I find myself between Jesus Christ and Napoleon Bonaparte.’ The playful Welshman and the buttoned-up American got on best: Lloyd George admired the latter’s idealism – providing Britain got what he wanted. In a wood-panelled room in Paris, lined with books, these Olympians would shape the world, a prospect that amused the cynical Balfour as he superciliously watched ‘three all-powerful, all-ignorant men carving up continents’.

Clemenceau’s ambitions were as shameless as those of Lloyd George. When Clemenceau agreed to meet Lawrence, he justified his claim to Syria by explaining that the French had ruled Palestine in the Crusades: ‘Yes,’ answered Lawrence, ‘but the Crusades failed.’ Besides, the Crusaders never took Damascus, Clemenceau’s primary target and the heart of Arab national aspirations. The French still hoped to share Jerusalem under Sykes–Picot, but the British now rejected that entire treaty.

The US president, son of a Presbyterian minister, had endorsed the Balfour Declaration: ‘To think that I, the son of the manse,’ said Wilson, ‘should be able to help restore the Holy Land to its people.’ He was influenced by both Protestant Hebraism and his adviser, Louis Brandeis, a Jew from Kentucky who had been nominated by Wilson to the Supreme Court. Brandeis, known as ‘the People’s Lawyer’, was an incorruptible paragon of American scholarship and public service but in 1914, only 15,000 of 3 million American Jews were members of his US Zionist Federation. By 1917, hundreds of thousands of American Jews had become involved; evangelical Christians were lobbying for Zionism; and ex-President Teddy Roosevelt, who had visited the Holy City with his parents as a boy, was backing ‘a Zionist State around Jerusalem’.

Nonetheless Wilson faced a painful contradiction between Zionism and the self-determination of the Arabs. The British had at one point suggested an American mandate – a new word to describe something between a protectorate and a province. Wilson actually considered the possibility. But, faced with the Anglo-French grab for Palestine and Syria, he despatched an American commission to investigate Arab aspirations. The King–Crane Commission, led by a Chicago valve-manufacturer and the president of Oberlin College, reported back that most Palestinian and Syrian Arabs wished to live in Faisal’s Kingdom of Greater Syria – under American protection. But these findings proved irrelevant when Wilson failed to restrain his imperialist allies. It still took two years for the new League of Nations to confirm that the British got Palestine and the French, Syria – which Lawrence called ‘the mandate swindle’.

On 8 March 1920, Faisal was proclaimed king of Syria (including Lebanon and Palestine) and appointed Jerusalem’s Said al-Husseini as his foreign minister, while the mufti’s brother Amin had for a short time served in the royal court. The excitement generated by the creation of this new kingdom emboldened the Palestinian Arabs to stand up to the Zionist threat. Weizmann warned that there could be trouble. Jabotinsky and the former Russian revolutionary Pinkhas Rutenberg,
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created a Jewish self-defence force, 600 strong. But Storrs ignored the alarm bells.

STORRS: THE NABI MUSA RIOTS – FIRST SHOTS

On the morning of Sunday 20 April 1920, in a city tense with Jewish and Christian pilgrims, 60,000 Arabs gathered for the Nabi Musa festival, led by the Husseinis. The diarist Wasif Jawhariyyeh watched them singing songs in protest against the Balfour Declaration. The mufti’s younger brother, Haj Amin al-Husseini, incited the crowds, holding up a picture of Faisal: ‘This is your King!’ The mob shouted, ‘Palestine is our land, the Jews are our dogs!’ and poured into the Old City. An old Jew was beaten with sticks.

Suddenly, recalled Khalil Sakakini, ‘the furore turned into madness’. Many drew daggers and clubs, crying, ‘The religion of Muhammad was founded by the sword!’ The city, observed Jawhariyyeh, ‘became a battlefield’. The crowd chanted ‘Slaughter the Jews!’ Both Sakakini and Wasif hated violence but were starting to loathe not just the Zionists but the British too.

Storrs came out of the morning service in the Anglican Church to find Jerusalem out of control. He rushed to his headquarters in the Austrian Hospice, feeling as though someone ‘had thrust a sword into my heart’. Storrs had only 188 policemen in Jerusalem. As the riot intensified in the course of the next day, the Jews feared they would be wiped out. Weizmann burst into Storrs’ office to demand help; Jabotinsky and Rutenberg grabbed their pistols and mustered 200 men at police headquarters in the Russian Compound. When Storrs banned this, Jabotinsky patrolled outside the Old City, exchanging shots with Arab gunmen – that was the day the shooting really started. In the Old City, some streets of the Jewish Quarter were under siege, and Arab intruders gang-raped some Jewish girls. Meanwhile the British were trying to police the Holy Fire ceremony but when a Syriac moved a Coptic chair ‘all hell broke loose’, and the doors of the Church caught fire in the brawl. As a British official left the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, a little Arab girl fell from a nearby window, hit by a stray bullet.

One of Jabotinsky’s recruits, Nehemia Rubitzov, and a colleague covered their pistols with medical white coats and entered the Old City in an ambulance to organize the defence. Rubitzov, Ukrainian-born, had been recruited by Ben-Gurion into the Jewish Legion, changing his name to Rabin. Now, as he calmed the terrified Jews, he encountered and rescued ‘Red Rosa’ Cohen, a spirited ex-Bolshevik newly arrived from Russia: they fell in love and married. ‘I was born in Jerusalem’ said their son, Yitzhak Rabin, who as Israeli chief of staff many years later would capture Jerusalem.
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HERBERT SAMUEL: ONE PALESTINE, COMPLETE