Jerusalem: The Biography (75 page)

On 8 May 1945, Victory in Europe Day, the new high commissioner, Field Marshal Viscount Gort, took the salute outside the King David Hotel and issued an amnesty for Jewish and Arab political prisoners while Jerusalemites partied. However, the reality of sectarian politics reared up again the next day: both Jews and Arabs demonstrated – and both were already effectively boycotting the city’s mayoralty.

In Britain, Churchill was defeated in the general election. The new prime minister, Clement Attlee, had adopted William Blake’s anthem as his Labour Party campaign song, promising his people a ‘New Jerusalem’ – though he proved quite incapable of governing the old one.

The British anxiously steeled themselves for the coming struggle. Should the city with 100,000 Jews, 34,000 Muslims and 30,000 Christians be a British-run State of Jerusalem, as suggested by MacMichael, or partitioned, with the holy sites run by the British, as proposed by Gort? Either way, the British were determined to stop Jewish immigration into Palestine – even though many of the immigrants were survivors of Hitler’s death-camps. Now confined in miserable Displaced Person camps across Europe, shiploads of desperate Jewish refugees were harassed and turned away by British forces. The
Exodus
was stormed by the British, who roughed up its refugees, many of them death-camp survivors (three of whom were killed), and then, with scarcely credible insensitivity, sent them back to camps in Germany. Even the moderate Jewish Agency found this morally repugnant.

Ben-Gurion, Begin and the Lehi therefore agreed to form a United Resistance Command to smuggle in Jewish immigrants from Europe and coordinate the struggle against the British, attacking trains, airfields, army bases and police stations across the country. But the two small factions paid only lip-service to the more moderate Haganah. The Russian Compound, its majestic hostels now converted into a police stronghold, was a favoured target of the Irgun. On 27 December, they destroyed the CID police headquarters, the former Nikolai pilgrims hostel. Begin travelled by bus from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem to view his handiwork. In January 1946, the Irgun attacked the prison inside the Russian Compound which had once been the Marianskaya Hostel for female pilgrims.
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The British, battered by these attacks, drew America into their dilemmas. The American Jewish community was increasingly pro-Zionist but President Franklin D. Roosevelt had never publicly backed a Jewish state. At Yalta, Roosevelt and Stalin had discussed the Holocaust. ‘I’m a Zionist,’ said Roosevelt. ‘Me too, in principle,’ replied Stalin, who boasted that he had ‘tried to establish a national home for the Jews in Birobidzhan but they had stayed there two or three years and then scattered’. The Jews, added that visceral anti-Semite, were ‘middlemen, profiteers and parasites’ – but secretly he hoped that any Jewish state would be a Soviet satellite.

FDR died in April 1945. His successor, Harry S. Truman, wanted to settle Holocaust survivors in Palestine and asked the British to let them in. Truman, raised as a Baptist, a former farmer, bank-clerk, Kansas City haberdasher, was a mediocre Missouri senator with a sympathy for the Jews and a sense of history. When the new president toured the dynamited moonscape of Berlin in 1945, he ‘thought of Carthage, Baalbek, Jerusalem, Rome, Atlantis’. Now his longstanding friendship with his Jewish ex-haberdashery partner, Eddie Jacobson, and the influence of pro-Zionist aides, along with ‘his own reading of ancient history and the Bible, made him a supporter of a Jewish homeland’, recalled his adviser Clark Clifford. Yet Truman, facing the resistance of his own State Department, was frequently irritated by Zionist lobbying and was wary of any sign of the Jewish underdogs becoming the bullying overdogs: ‘Jesus Christ couldn’t please them when he was on earth,’ he snapped, ‘so how on earth could anyone expect that I would have any luck?’ But he agreed to create an Anglo-American commission of inquiry.

The commissioners stayed in the King David Hotel where one of them, Richard Crossman, a Labour MP, found ‘the atmosphere terrific, with private detectives, Zionist agents, Arab sheikhs, special correspondents, all sitting about discreetly overhearing each other’. At night, Arab grandees and British generals gathered at Katy Antonius’ villa. She was now alone. The Antoniuses’ decadent marriage had started to collapse at the same time as the Arab Revolt. During the war, Katy had divorced her ailing husband – who died unexpectedly just two weeks later. He was buried on Mount Zion: ‘Arise ye Arabs and awake’ was written on his headstone. But Katy’s soirées were still legendary. Cross-man, enjoying ‘the evening dress, Syrian food and drink, and dancing on the marble floor’, reported that the Arabs gave the best parties: ‘It’s easy to see why the British prefer the Arab upper class to the Jews. This Arab intelligentsia has a French culture, amusing, civilized, tragic and gay. Compared with them, the Jews seem tense, bourgeois, central European.’

Attlee had hoped that Truman would support his policies against Jewish immigration, but the Anglo-American Commission unhelpfully recommended that the British admit 100,000 refugees immediately: Truman publicly backed their recommendations. Attlee furiously rejected American interference. The Jewish Agency stepped up the secret immigration of refugees from the Holocaust, bringing in 70,000 in three years while its Palmach harassed the British, culminating in an explosive spectacular – the Night of the Bridges.

The British had crushed the Arabs; now they would crush the Jews. In June 1946, Viscount Montgomery of Alamein, now field marshal and Chief of the Imperial General Staff, returned to Jerusalem, complaining that ‘British rule existed only in name; the true rulers seemed to me to be the Jews, whose unspoken slogan was –“You dare not touch us”.’ But Montgomery dared, sending in reinforcements.

On Saturday 29 June, his commander, General Evelyn ‘Bubbles’ Barker, launched Operation Agatha, an attack on the Zionist organizations. He arrested 3,000 Jews – though failed to pick up Ben-Gurion who happened to be in Paris. Barker fortified three ‘security zones’ in Jerusalem, turning the Russian Compound into a fortress that the Jews nicknamed Bevingrad, after the British foreign secretary Ernest Bevin. To the Jews the operation came to be known as Black Sabbath, and Barker was at once the hated symbol of British oppression. The general was a regular at Katy Antonius’ parties. Now the hostess became his mistress: his love letters were passionate, indiscreet and hate-filled, featuring British military secrets and foam-flecked rants against Jews: ‘Why should we be afraid of saying we hate them?’ Lehi attempted to assassinate Barker, using a bomb disguised as a baby in a pram. Menachem Begin of the Irgun, assisted by the Lehi, planned a response to Barker’s Black Sabbath to resound across the world. The Haganah, though not Ben-Gurion and the Jewish Agency, approved.

The King David Hotel was the secular temple of Mandate Jerusalem, and one wing had been requisitioned by the British administration and intelligence agencies. On 22 July 1946, the Irgun, disguised as Arabs and hotel staff in Nubian costumes, stowed milkchurns filled with 500 pounds of explosives in the basement.
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MONTGOMERY’S CRACKDOWN: THE CASE OF MAJOR FARRAN

The Irgun made anonymous calls to the hotel, to the
Palestine Post
and to the French Consulate, to warn of the imminent attack so that the King David could be evacuated. But the calls were ignored – and they were too late. It is unclear if the mishandling of these warnings was by accident or design. Begin waited nearby: ‘each minute seemed like a day. Twelve-thirty-one, thirty-two. Zero hour drew near. The half-hour was almost up. Twelve-thirty-seven. Suddenly the whole town seemed to shudder!’ The bombs shattered an entire wing of the King David, killing ninety-one, including Britons, Jews and Arabs.
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Five MI5 operatives were among the dead, but the Secret Service ‘London Ladies’ survived, staggering from the wreckage, their hair white with plaster dust, ‘looking like the wrath of God’. Ben-Gurion denounced the bombing; he regarded Begin as a threat to the Jewish community, and the Jewish Agency quit the United Resistance Command.

The King David bombing intensified the severity of the British counter-attack – but it succeeded in accelerating London’s retreat from the Mandate. In Jerusalem, the mixing of Jews and Arabs ceased. ‘It felt’, sensed Amos Oz, ‘as though an invisible muscle was suddenly flexed. Everyone prophesied war. A curtain had begun to divide Jerusalem.’ The Jews were terrified by rumours of imminent massacre. British civilians were evacuated from Jerusalem.

In October, the Irgun blew up the British Embassy in Rome. In November, Montgomery flew back into Jerusalem. ‘I saw Monty at one of Katy Antonius’ parties,’ remembers Nassereddin Nashashibi. The field marshal planned a harsh response to the Irgun’s outrage. A new police chief, Colonel Nicol Gray, recruited hard men, ex-policemen and former members of the special forces, to join new counter-insurgency Special Squads. Major Roy Farran DSO, MC was a typical recruit, an Irish SAS commando whose record revealed a history of trigger-happy exploits.

On arrival in Jerusalem, Farran was driven to the Russian Compound for briefing followed by dinner at the King David Hotel. Farran and the Special Squads started to drive around Jerusalem, looking for suspects to interrogate, if not shoot on sight. These Special Squads had no experience in covert operations, no local languages or knowledge, so, unsurprisingly, Farran had been almost comically unsuccessful until, driving through Rehavia on the 6 May 1947, his team spotted an unarmed schoolboy, Alexander Rubowitz, pasting up Lehi posters. Farran kidnapped the boy but, in the scuffle, dropped his trilby, marked with his ill-spelt name ‘FARAN’. He hoped that the scared teenager would betray bigger Lehi fish. He drove Rubowitz out of Jerusalem, down the Jericho Road into the hills, tied him to a tree, roughed him up for an hour, then he went too far and smashed his skull with a rock. The body was stabbed and stripped and probably eaten by jackals.

While Jewish Jerusalem frantically searched for the missing boy, Major Farran confessed to his superior officer at the police mess in Katamon, then suddenly disappeared, fleeing Jerusalem. There was first a cover-up, then an outcry across the world. The Lehi started to kill random British soldiers, until Farran returned to Jerusalem and gave himself up at the Allenby Barracks. On 1 October, 1947, he was courtmartialled in a fortified court in Talbieh, but was acquitted for lack of admissible evidence. Rubowitz’s body was never found. Farran was bundled away by two officers in an armoured car and driven into the night towards Gaza. The Lehi was determined to kill him. In 1948, a parcel, addressed to ‘R. FARRAN’ but opened by his brother, who shared the same initial, exploded: the brother was killed.
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The case confirmed everything the Yishuv hated about the British. When the authorities condemned an Irgun man to death for terrorist offences, Begin bombed the British Officers Club in Goldsmid House, Jerusalem, killing fourteen, and pulled off a breakout from Acre Prison. When his men were flogged, he flogged British soldiers, and when his men were hanged at Acre Prison for terrorism, he hanged two random British soldiers for ‘anti-Hebrew activities’.

Churchill, now leader of the Opposition, denounced Attlee’s conduct of this ‘senseless squalid war with the Jews in order to give Palestine to the Arabs or God knows who’. Even during the war, Churchill had considered a crackdown on ‘anti-Semites and others in high places’ among his administrators in Palestine. Now a combination of outrage at the violence of Irgun and Lehi, traditional Arabism and anti-Semitism had turned the British firmly against the Jews. British deserters and sometimes serving troops aided Arab forces.

The new high commissioner, General Sir Alan Cunningham, privately described Zionism as ‘nationalism accompanied by the psychology of the Jew which is something quite abnormal and unresponsive to rational treatment’. General Barker banned British troops from all Jewish restaurants, explaining that he would be ‘punishing the Jews in a way the race dislikes as much as any, by striking at their pockets’. Barker was reprimanded by the prime minister, but the hatred was now visceral. In Barker’s love letters to Katy Antonius, he said he hoped the Arabs would kill more ‘bloody Jews … loathsome people …. Katy, I love you so much.’

On 14 February 1947, Attlee, worn down by the bloodshed, agreed in Cabinet to get out of Palestine. On 2 April, he asked the newly formed United Nations to create a Special Committee on Palestine (UNSCOP) to decide on its future. Four months later UNSCOP proposed the partition of Palestine into two states with Jerusalem as an international trusteeship under a UN governor. Ben-Gurion accepted the plan, despite its unworkable boundaries. He felt that Jerusalem was ‘the heart of the Jewish people’ but losing her was ‘the price paid for statehood’. The Arab Higher Committee, backed by Iraq, Saudi Arabia and Syria, rejected partition, demanding ‘a unified independent Palestine’. On 29 November the UN voted on the proposal. After midnight, the Jerusalemites gathered around their radios to listen in nerve-jangling silence.
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ABD AL-KADIR HUSSEINI: THE JERUSALEM FRONT

Thirty-three countries voted in favour of Resolution 181, led by the United States and the Soviet Union, thirteen voted against, and ten, including Britain, abstained. ‘After a couple of minutes of shock, of lips parted as though in thirst and eyes wide open,’ recalled Amos Oz, ‘our faraway street on the edge of northern Jerusalem roared all at once, not a shout of joy, more like a scream of horror, a cataclysmic shout that could shift rocks.’ Then ‘roars of joy’ and ‘everyone was singing’. Jews even kissed ‘startled English policemen’.

The Arabs did not accept that the UN had authority to carve up the country. There were 1.2 million Palestinians who still owned 94 per cent of the land; there were 600,000 Jews. Both sides prepared to fight, while Jewish and Arab extremists competed in a flint-hearted tournament of mutual savagery. Jerusalem was ‘at war with itself’.