Jerusalem: The Biography (164 page)

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Jerusalem was still filled with White Russians but one Grand Duchess returned post-humously. In 1918, the widow of Grand Duke Sergei, Ella, who had become a nun, was arrested by the Bolsheviks. Her skull was smashed in and she was tossed down a mineshaft in Alapaevsk, just hours after the Bolsheviks had also murdered her sister, Empress Alexandra, Emperor Nicholas II and all their children. When the Whites took Alapaevsk, they discovered the bodies: Ella’s had scarcely decayed. Her body and that of her devoted fellow nun Sister Barbara travelled via Peking, Bombay and Port Said to Jerusalem where they were received in January 1921 by Sir Harry Luke who had to change their route through the city to avoid pro-Bolshevik protests by Jewish immigrants. ‘Two unadorned coffins were lifted from the train. The little cavalcade wound its way sadly, unobtrusively to the Olivet’, wrote Louis, Marquess of Milford Haven who, with his wife Victoria, helped bear the coffins. ‘Russian peasant women, stranded pilgrims, sobbing and moaning, were almost fighting to get some part of the coffin.’ The Milford Havens were the grandparents of Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh. Elizabeth the New Martyr was canonized and rests in a glass-topped white marble sarcophagus in the Church of Mary Magdalene she and her husband had built. Some of her saintly relics have been returned to her Martha and Mary Convent in Moscow.

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He was a member of one of the grandest Families. The Alamis’ house remains the most extraordinary in Jerusalem: in the seventeenth century the family bought a house right next to the Church which actually shares and owns part of its roof; the view from there is astonishing. The building, with Byzantine, Crusader and Mamluk vestiges, is still owned by Mohammad al-Alami. A cousin still serves as sheikh of Saladin’s Salahiyya
khanqah
next door.

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Hamas, the Islamic Palestinian organization in Gaza, was inspired by Qassam hence it named its armed wing the Qassam Brigade, and its missiles are Qassam rockets.

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Wingate had made his name in Palestine. He was admired by Churchill who later backed his career. In 1941, Wingate’s Gideon Force helped liberate Ethiopia from the Italians and then as a major general, he created and commanded the Chindits, the largest Allied special forces of the war, to fight behind Japanese lines in Burma. He was killed in a plane crash in 1944.

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In Greece, a princess with a special link to Jerusalem was one of those brave gentiles who protected Jews. Princess Andrew of Greece, born Princess Alice of Battenberg, great-granddaughter of Queen Victoria, risked her life by hiding the Cohen family of three while 60,000 Greek Jews were murdered. In 1947, her son Prince Philip, a lieutenant in the Royal Navy, married Princess Elizabeth, who succeeded to the throne four years later. Princess Andrew became a nun and founded her own order, like her aunt Grand Duchess Ella. She lived in London but decided to be buried in Jerusalem. When her daughter grumbled that this was a long trip for visitors, the princess retorted, ‘Nonsense, there’s a perfectly good bus service from Istanbul!’ She died in 1969, but not until 1988 was she buried in the Church of Mary Magdalene close to her aunt Ella. In 1994, Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, attended the ceremony at Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem, that honoured his mother as one of the ‘Righteous among the nations’.

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‘He entered into the Nazis’ criminal delirium about “the Jews”’, writes Professor Gilbert Achcar in his book
Arabs and the Holocaust
, ‘as it burgeoned into the greatest of all crimes against humanity.’ Achcar adds, ‘it is undeniable that the mufti espoused the Nazis’ anti-Semitic doctrine which was easily compatible with a fanatical anti-Judaism cast in the Pan-Islamic mould.’ In a speech in Berlin on the 1943 anniversary of the Balfour Declaration, he said ‘they live rather as parasites amongst the peoples, suck their blood, pervert their morals … Germany has very clearly resolved to find a definitive solution for the Jewish danger that will eliminate the scourge that the Jews represent in the world.’ In his memoirs written in his Lebanese exile, he revelled in the fact that Jewish ‘losses in the course of the Second World War represented more than 30 per cent of the total number of their people whereas the Germans’ losses were less significant’ and, citing the
Protocols
and the World War One ‘stab in the back’ myth, he justified the Holocaust since there was no other way to scientifically reform the Jews.

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In the 1930s, the emperor, known as Ras Tafar before his accession, inspired the Rastafarians, founded in Jamaica and made famous by the reggae singer Bob Marley, who hailed him as the Lion of Judah and the Second Coming of Jesus Christ. Ethiopia and Africa were the new Zion. Haile Selassie was murdered by the Marxist Dergue in 1974.

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The description is that of Arthur Koestler, the writer who had come to Jerusalem as a Revisionist Zionist in 1928 but had soon left. In 1948, Koestler returned to cover the War of Independence and interviewed Begin and Ben-Gurion.

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That summer, Churchill wrote to Stalin suggesting an allied conference in Jerusalem – ‘There are first class hotels, Government houses etc. Marshal Stalin could come by special train with every form of protection from Moscow to Jerusalem’ – and the British prime minister helpfully enclosed the route: ‘Moscow Tbilisi Ankara Beirut Haifa Jerusalem’. Instead they met (with President Roosevelt) at Yalta.

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This is now a museum to the Jewish resistance fighters who were imprisoned there. The Nikolai Hostel was the last Russian pilgrim hostel to be built, with room for 1,200 pilgrims, opened by the Romanov Prince Nikolai in 1903.

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One of those killed was Julius Jacobs, a cousin of the author and a British civil servant who happened to be Jewish.

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Farran remained a war hero to British security forces. He failed to win a Scottish seat in Parliament as a Conservative in 1949 and then moved to Canada. There he took up farming, was elected to the Alberta legislature, becoming minister of telephones, solicitor-general and a professor of political science. He died in 2006 aged eighty-six. A street in East Talpiot, Jerusalem, was recently named after Rubowitz.

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Two Husseini cousins served as foreign and defence ministers, Anwar Nusseibeh as cabinet secretary – and the mufti as president of the Palestine National Council.

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In a classic example of Jerusalem’s religious competitiveness and its ability to create sanctity out of necessity, Jewish pilgrims, robbed of the Wall, prayed at the Tomb of David on Mount Zion and created the country’s first Holocaust Museum there.

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But Ragheb Nashashibi was dying of cancer. The king visited him in the Augusta Victoria Hospital. ‘In this building,’ said Abdullah, ‘in the spring of 1921, I had my first meeting with Winston Churchill.’ In April 1951, Nashashibi died and was buried in a small tomb near his villa – which was later knocked down to build the Ambassador Hotel.

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The largest court, the Ger, named after a village in Poland and ruled by the Alter family, wear
shtreimel
fur hats; the Belzers, from Ukraine, wear kaftans and fur hats; the Breslavers worship with mystic and exhibitionistic dancing and singing, and are known as the ‘Hasidic hippies’.

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In 1957, Yad Vashem, ‘A Place and a Name’, the memorial to the 6 million Jews killed in the Holocaust, was created on Mount Herzl. In 1965, the Israel Museum was opened, followed by the new Knesset, both funded by James de Rothschild who had helped recruit the Jewish Legion in Allenby’s army.

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Arafat claimed to have been born in Jerusalem. His mother was a Jerusalemite, but he was in fact born in Cairo. In 1933, at the age of four, he went to live with relatives for four years in the Maghrebi Quarter next to the Wall.

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As the tension rose, an old man visited the city for the last time and the world scarcely noticed: Haj Amin Husseini, the ex-mufti, prayed at al-Aqsa and then returned to his Lebanese exile, where he died in 1974.

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Kollek, born in Hungary, raised in Vienna, and named after Theodor Herzl, had specialized in secret missions for the Jewish Agency, liaising with the British secret service during the campaign against the Irgun and the Stern Gang, and then buying arms for the Haganah. He then served as director of Ben-Gurion’s private office.

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The chief academic work on Jerusalem madness describes the typical patients as ‘individuals who strongly identify with characters from the Old or New Testament or are convinced they are one of these characters and fall victim to a psychotic episode in Jerusalem.’ Tour guides should look out for ‘1. Agitation. 2. Split away from group. 3. Obsession with taking baths; compulsive fingernail/toe-nail clipping. 4. Preparation, often with aid of hotel bed-linen, of toga-like gown, always white. 5. The need to scream, sing out loud biblical verses. 6. Procession to one of Jerusalem’s holy places. 7. Delivery of a sermon in a holy place.’ The Kfar Shaul Mental Health Centre in Jerusalem, which specializes in the Syndrome, is said to stand on the site of the village of Deir Yassin.

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Faisal Husseini, the son of Abd al-Kadir, emerged as one of the leaders of the Intifada. Husseini had trained as a Fatah explosives expert and spent years in Israeli jails, the essential badges of honour for any Palestinian leader, but, released from prison, he was one of the first to come round to talks with the Israelis, even learningHebrew to put his case more clearly. Husseini attended the Madrid talks and now became Arafat’s Palestinian minister for Jerusalem. When the Oslo Accords fell apart, the Israelis confined him to Orient House before eventually closingit down. When he died in 2001, buried like his father on the Haram, the Palestinians lost the only leader who could have replaced Arafat.

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Archaeologists had started exploring tunnels beneath the Arab homes that bordered the entire western wall of the Temple Mount duringthe 1950s and Professor OlegGrabar, the future doyen of Jerusalem scholars, remembers how they would frequently appear as if by magic out of the floors in the kitchens of the surprised residents. Under Israeli archaeologists, the tunnel yielded – and continues to do so – the most breathtaking finds from the immense stones of the foundations of Herod’s Temple, via Maccabee, Roman, Byzantine and Umayyad buildings, to a new Crusader chapel. But the tunnel also contained the place closest to the Temple’s Foundation Stone where Jews could now pray–and it united Jerusalem by linkingthe Jewish and Muslim Quarters.

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These struggles reveal the complexities of both sides, sometimes bringing Israelis and Arabs together: when Rabbi Goren tried to commandeer the Khalidi house overlooking the Wall for a yeshiva, Mrs Haifa Khalidi was defended in Israeli courts by two Israeli historians, Amnon Cohen and Dan Bahat, and still lives today in her house above the famous Khalidiyyah Library. When religious Jews tried to expand their digs and settlement in Silwan below the City of David, they were stopped by lawsuits brought by Israeli archaeologists.

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In 2009/2010, the population of Greater Jerusalem was 780,000: 514,800 Jews (who include 163,800 ultra-Orthodox) and 265,200 Arabs. There were around 30,000 Arabs in the Old City and 3,500 Jews. There are around 200,000 Israelis living in new suburbs in eastern Jerusalem.

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In Israel’s dysfunctional democracy, with weak coalition governments, national-religious organizations have become ever more powerful in questions of Jerusalem’s planning and archaeology. In 2003, Israeli building started in the vital East One (E1) section, east of the Old City, which would have effectively cut off east Jerusalem from the West Bank, underminingthe creation of a Palestinian state. Israeli liberals and America persuaded Israel to stop this, but plans to build Jewish settlements in the Arab neighbourhoods of Sheikh Jarrah and Silwan continue. The latter stands next to the much-excavated ancient City of David where a Jewish nationalist-religious foundation, Elad, funds the invaluable archaeological excavations and runs a visitors’ centre telling the story of Jewish Jerusalem. It also plans to move Palestinian residents to nearby housingto make way for more Jewish settlers and a King David park called the King’s Gardens. Such situations can challenge archaeological professionalism. Archaeologists, writes Dr Raphael Greenberg, a historian who has campaigned against this project, represent ‘a secular academic approach’, yet their backers hope for ‘results that legitimise their concepts of the history of Jerusalem’. So far his fears have not materialized. The integrity of the archaeologists is high and as we saw earlier, the present dighas uncovered Canaanite not Jewish walls. Nonetheless these sites have become flashpoints for protests by Palestinians and Israeli liberals.

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The Russian reverence for Jerusalem has been modernized to suit the authoritarian nationalism fostered by Vladimir Putin who in 2007 oversaw the reunion of the ex-Soviet Moscow Patriarchate and the White Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia. Thousands of singing Russian pilgrims again fill the streets. The Holy Fire is flown back to Moscow on a plane, chartered by an organization called the Centre for National Glory and the Apostle Andrei Foundation, headed by a Kremlin potentate. A kitsch life-sized golden statue of ‘Tsar David’ has appeared outside David’s Tomb. An ex-prime minister, Stephan Stepashin, is the chief of the restored Palestine Society: ‘a Russian flagin the centre of Jerusalem,’ he says, ‘is priceless.’