Jerusalem: The Biography (70 page)

By the time the riots ebbed, five Jews and four Arabs were dead, 216 Jews and 23 Arabs wounded. Thirty-nine Jews and 161 Arabs were tried for their part in what came to be known as the Nabi Musa riots. Storrs ordered raids on Weizmann’s and Jabotinsky’s homes: Jabotinsky was found guilty of possessing guns and sentenced to fifteen years. Young Amin Husseini – ‘the chief fomenter’ of the riots, in Storrs’ words – was sentenced to ten years, but escaped from Jerusalem. Storrs sacked Mayor Musa Kazem Husseini, though the British naively blamed Jewish Bolsheviks from Russia for the violence.

The liberal Weizmann and socialist Ben-Gurion continued to hope for a gradually evolving homeland and a modus vivendi with the Arabs. Ben-Gurion refused to recognize Arab nationalism: he wanted Arab and Jewish workers to share ‘a life of harmony and friendship’, but sometimes he exclaimed, ‘There’s no solution! We want the country to be ours. The Arabs want it to be theirs.’ The Zionists now started to reorganize their old Hashomer – the Watchmen – into a more efficient militia, Haganah – the Defence.

Each act of violence fed the extremists on both sides. Jabotinsky absolutely recognized that Arab nationalism was as real as Zionism. He argued implacably that the Jewish state, which he believed should encompass both banks of the Jordan, would be violently opposed and could be defended only with an ‘iron wall’. In the mid-twenties, Jabotinsky split off to form the Union of Zionist-Revisionists with a youth movement, Betar, that wore uniforms and held parades. He wanted to create a new sort of activist Jew, no longer dependent on the genteel lobbying of Weizmann. Jabotinsky was adamant that his Jewish commonwealth would be built with ‘absolute equality’ between the two peoples and without any displacement of the Arabs. When Benito Mussolini came to power in 1922, Jabotinsky mocked the cult of Il Duce – ‘the most absurd of all English words – leader. Buffaloes follow a leader. Civilised men have no “leaders”.’ Yet Weizmann called Jabotinsky ‘Fascistic’ and Ben-Gurion nicknamed him ‘Il Duce’.

King Faisal, the hope of the Arab nationalists – was doomed by French determination to possess Syria. The French forcibly expelled the king and smashed his ragtag army, completing the collapse of Lawrence’s plans. The end of Greater Syria and the riots helped form a Palestinian national identity.
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On 24 April 1920, at the San Remo Conference, Lloyd George accepted the Mandate to rule Palestine, based on the Balfour Declaration, and appointed Sir Herbert Samuel as the first high commissioner. He arrived at the station in Jerusalem on 30 June, resplendent in a white uniform, pith helmet with feathers, and a sword, to the boom of a seventeen-gun salute. Samuel may have been Jewish and a Zionist but he was no dreamer: Lloyd George found him ‘dry and cold’. A journalist thought he was ‘as free from passion as an oyster’ and one of his officials noted he was ‘stiffish – never seems able to forget his office’. When the military governor handed over control of Palestine, Samuel managed one of his few recorded jokes, signing a chit that read ‘Received from Major-General Sir Louis J Bols KCB, One Palestine, complete.’ He then added ‘E and O [Errors and Omissions] excepted’, but there would be many of both.

Initially Samuel’s calm tact soothed Palestine after the shock of Nabi Musa. Setting up Government House in the Augusta Victoria on the Mount of Olives, he released Jabotinsky, pardoned Amin Husseini, temporarily limited Jewish immigration and reassured the Arabs. British interests were no longer the same as they had been in 1917. Curzon, now foreign secretary, was opposed to full-blown support for Zionism and watered down Balfour’s promises. There would be a Jewish home but no state then or later. Weizmann felt betrayed but the Arabs regarded even this as disastrous. By 1921, a total of 18,500 Jews had arrived in Palestine. During the next eight years, Samuel allowed in another 70,000.
¹⁶

In the spring of 1921, Samuel’s boss Winston Churchill, the secretary of state for colonial affairs, arrived in Jerusalem accompanied by his adviser Lawrence of Arabia.

CHURCHILL CREATES THE MODERN MIDDLE EAST: LAWRENCE’S SHERIFIAN SOLUTION

‘I liked Winston so much,’ said Lawrence afterwards, ‘and have such respect for him.’ Churchill had already enjoyed a career of swashbuckling adventure, bumptious self-promotion and irrepressible success. Now in his late forties, the colonial secretary was confronted with the punishing cost in blood and treasure of garrisoning a new empire: Iraq was already in the grip of a bloody insurgency against British rule. Churchill therefore called a conference in Cairo to hand over a certain amount of power to Arab rulers under British influence. Lawrence proposed granting a new kingdom of Iraq to Faisal.

On 12 March 1920, Churchill convened his Arab experts in the Semiramis Hotel while a pair of Somalian lion cubs played around their feet. Churchill enjoyed the luxury, having no wish to experience ‘thankless deserts’, but Lawrence hated it. ‘We lived in a marble bronze hotel,’ he wrote. ‘Very expensive, and luxurious – horrible place. Makes me Bolshevik. Everybody in the Middle East is here. Day after tomorrow, we go to Jerusalem. We’re a very happy family: agreed upon everything important’ – in other words, Churchill had accepted the ‘Sherifian solution’: Lawrence finally saw some honour restored in the wake of the broken British promises to the sherif and his sons.

The old sherif, King Hussein of Hejaz, was no match for the Wahabi warriors led by the Saudi chieftain Ibn Saud.
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When his son Abdullah tried to repel the Saudis with 1,350 fighters, they were routed: Abdullah had to flee through the back of his tent in his underwear, surviving ‘by a miracle’. They had planned that Faisal would rule Syria-Palestine and Abdullah would be king of Iraq. Now that Faisal was getting Iraq, this left nothing for Abdullah.

While Churchill’s conference was proceeding in Cairo, Abdullah, led thirty officers and 200 Bedouin into today’s Jordan – technically part of the British Mandate – to seize his own meagre fiefdom – even though Lord Curzon thought he was ‘much too big a cock for so small a dunghill’. The news of this escapade presented Churchill with a fait accompli. Lawrence advised Churchill to back Abdullah. Churchill despatched Lawrence to invite the prince to meet him in Jerusalem.

At midnight on 23 March, Churchill and his wife Clementine set off for Jerusalem by train, and were greeted at Gaza by enthusiastic crowds crying ‘Cheers for the minister’ and ‘Down with Jews! Cut their throats!’ Churchill, understanding nothing, waved back with oblivious bonhomie.

In Jerusalem he stayed with Samuel at the Augusta Victoria Fortress where he met four times with ‘the moderate and friendly’ Abdullah, hopeful occupier of Transjordan, escorted by Lawrence. Abdullah, who hoped for a Hashemite empire, thought the best way for Jews and Arabs to live together would be in one kingdom under him with Syria added later. Churchill offered him Transjordan provided he recognized French Syria and British Palestine. Abdullah reluctantly agreed, whereupon Churchill created a new country: ‘Amir Abdullah is in Transjordania,’ he remembered, ‘where I put him one Sunday afternoon in Jerusalem.’ The mission of Lawrence, who had finally shepherded Faisal and Abdullah to two thrones, was complete.
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The Palestinian Arabs petitioned Churchill, alleging, in the tradition of the forged
Protocols of the Elders of Zion
, that ‘the Jew is a Jew the world over’, that ‘Jews have been among the most active advocates of destruction in many lands’ and the Zionists wanted to ‘control the world’. Churchill received the Jerusalemites under the ex-mayor, Musa Kazim al-Husseini, but insisted ‘it’s manifestly right that Jews should have a National Home, a great event in the world’s destiny’.

Churchill’s father
^†
had imbued him with an admiration for Jews and he saw Zionism as just outcome after two millennia of suffering. During the Red scare after Lenin created Soviet Russia, he believed that the Zionist Jew was ‘the antidote’ to ‘the foul baboonery of Bolshevism’ which was ‘a Jewish movement’ led by a diabolical bogeyman called the ‘International Jew’.

Churchill loved Jerusalem, where, he declared, opening the British Military Cemetery on Mount Scopus, ‘lies the dust of the Caliphs and Crusaders and Maccabees!’ He was drawn to the Temple Mount, which he visited whenever possible, begrudging every moment away from it. Before he returned to England, he was still holding court on the Mount of Olives when the mufti of Jerusalem died unexpectedly. Storrs had already sacked the Husseini mayor so it seemed rash to upset the family further by also taking away the post of mufti. Besides, the British were attracted to the ascendancy of the Families who resembled their own gentry. Samuel and Storrs therefore arranged that the mayor and the mufti should each be chosen from the two pre-eminent Families: their feud would make them the Montagues and Capulets of Jerusalem.
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THE BRITISH MANDATE

1920–36

THE MUFTI VERSUS THE MAYOR: AMIN HUSSEINI VERSUS RAGHEB NASHASHIBI

The man they chose as mayor was the very personification of the Arab boulevardier: Ragheb Nashashibi smoked cigarettes in a holder, carried a cane and was the first Jerusalemite to own an American limousine, a green Packard, always driven by his Armenian chauffeur. The debonair Nashashibi, the heir to the orange-groves and mansions of the most recent but richest of the Families,
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fluent in French and English, had represented Jerusalem in the Ottoman Parliament, and had hired Wasif to arrange his parties and give
oud
lessons to him and his mistress. Now that he was mayor, he gave two parties a year, one for his friends, and one for the high commissioner. As a veteran campaigner against Zionism, he took his role seriously as Jerusalemite seigneur and Palestinian leader.

The man they chose as grand mufti was Nashashibi’s wealthy cousin, Haj Amin Husseini. Storrs introduced the young rabble-rouser of the Nabi Musa riots to the high commissioner who was impressed. Husseini was ‘soft, intelligent, well-educated, well-dressed with a shiny smile, fair hair, blue eyes, red beard and a wry sense of humour,’ recalled the mayor’s nephew Nassereddin Nashashibi. ‘Yet he told his jokes with cold eyes.’ Husseini asked Samuel, ‘Which do you prefer – an avowed opponent or an unsound friend?’ Samuel replied, ‘An avowed opponent.’ Weizmann commented drily that, ‘in spite of the proverb, poachers-turned-gamekeepers are not always a success.’ Husseini turned out be, in the words of the Lebanese historian Gilbert Achcar ‘a megalomaniac who presented himself as the leader of the whole Islamic world’.

Inconveniently, Husseini did not win the first ever election for mufti, which was won by a Jarallah. He only came fourth so the British, who prided themselves on their ‘totalitarianism tempered with benevolence,’ simply overruled the election and appointed him even though he was only twenty-six and had never finished his religious studies in Cairo. Samuel then doubled his political and financial power by sponsoring his election as president of a new Supreme Muslim Council.

Husseini belonged to the Islamic tradition; Nashashibi to the Ottoman. Both opposed Zionism but Nashashibi believed that, faced with British power, the Arabs should negotiate; Husseini, in a meandering and capricious journey, ended up as an intransigent nationalist opposing any compromise. At first, Husseini played the passive British ally, but he would ultimately reach far beyond the anti-British stance of many Arabs to become a racial anti-Semite and embrace Hitler’s Final Solution to the Jewish problem. The most enduring achievement of Samuel was to promote the most energetic enemy of Zionism and Britain. Yet one could argue that no one proved such a divisive calamity for his own people, and such an asset for the Zionist struggle.
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THE MUFTI: THE BATTLE OF THE WALL

The first generation of British proconsuls congratulated themselves that they had tamed Jerusalem. In June 1925, Samuel returned to London, declaring, with Olympian delusion, that ‘the spirit of lawlessness has ceased.’ A year later, Storrs left a peaceful, much embellished city and was promoted to the governorships of Cyprus and then of Northern Rhodesia – though he sighed, ‘There’s no promotion after Jerusalem.’ The new high commissioner was Viscount Plumer, a walrus-moustached field marshal nicknamed the Old Plum or Daddy Plummer. Thanks to cuts in his funding, the Old Plum had to keep order with fewer soldiers than Samuel, but he radiated a reassuring calm by cheerfully walking on his own around Jerusalem. When his officials reported on political tensions, he embraced ostrichism. ‘There
is
no political situation,’ he replied. ‘Don’t create one!’

The Old Plum retired due to ill-health but the new commissioner had not yet arrived when the ‘political situation’ duly materialized. On Kol Nidre, eve of the Jewish Day of Atonement, in 1928, the Jewish
shames –
beadle – at the Western Wall (who gloried in the name William Ewart Gladstone Noah) put up a small screen to divide men and women worshippers in accordance with Jewish law. The screen and chairs for elderly worshippers had been allowed in previous years, but now the mufti protested that the Jews were changing the status quo.

The Muslims believed that the Wall was the place Muhammad tied up his steed with the human face, Buraq, during the Night Journey, yet in the nineteenth century, the Ottomans had used the adjacent tunnel as a donkey stable. Legally it had belonged to the Abu Maidan
waqf
dating back to Saladin’s son Afdal. Therefore it was ‘purely Muslim property’. The Muslim fear, however, was that Jewish access to the Wall would lead to a Third Temple on the Islamic Haram, the Jewish Har-haBayit. Yet the Wall – the Kotel – was Judaism’s holiest site and Palestinian Jews believed that the British restrictions, and indeed the cramped space available for worship, were relics of centuries of Muslim oppression that demonstrated why Zionism was necessary. The British even banned the blowing of the
shofar
– the ram’s horn – on the Jewish High Holy Days.