Jerusalem: The Biography (67 page)

Science and Zionism overlapped even more because Balfour was now first lord of the Admiralty and Lloyd George was minister of munitions, the two portfolios most concerned with Weizmann’s work on explosives. He found himself ‘caught up in a maze of personal relations’ with the panjandrums of the world’s most expansive empire, prompting him to reflect on his humble background: ‘starting with nothing, I, Chaim Weizmann, a Yid from Motelle and only an almost professor at a provincial university!’ To the panjandrums themselves, he was what they thought a Jew should be: ‘Just like an Old Testament prophet,’ Churchill later remarked, though one dressed in a frock-coat and top hat. In his memoirs, Lloyd George frivolously claimed that his gratitude for Weizmann’s war work led to his support for the Jews, but actually there was strong Cabinet backing much earlier.

Once again, the Bible, Jerusalem’s book, influenced the city over two millennia after it was written. ‘Britain was a Biblical nation,’ wrote Weizmann. ‘Those British statesmen of the old school were genuinely religious. They understood as a reality the concept of the Return. It appealed to their tradition and their faith.’ Along with America, ‘Bible-reading and Bible-thinking England,’ noted one of Lloyd George’s aides, ‘was the only country where the desire of the Jews to return to their ancient homeland’ was regarded ‘as a natural aspiration not to be denied.’

There was something more lurking in their attitude to the Jews: the British leaders were genuinely sympathetic to the plight of the Russian Jews, and tsarist repression had intensified during the war. The European upper classes had been dazzled by the fabulous wealth, exotic power and sumptuous palaces of Jewish plutocrats such as the Rothschilds. However this had confused them too, for they could not decide if the Jews were a noble race of persecuted biblical heroes, every one of them a King David and a Maccabee, or a sinister conspiracy of mystically brilliant, hook-nosed hobbits with almost supernatural powers. In an age of uninhibited theories of racial superiority, Balfour was convinced Jews were ‘the most gifted race mankind has known since fifth century bc Greece’ and Churchill thought them ‘the most formidable and gifted race’, yet simultaneously he called them a ‘mystic and mysterious race chosen for the supreme manifestations both of the divine and the diabolical’. Lloyd George privately criticized Herbert Samuel for having ‘the worst characteristics of his race’. Yet all three were genuine philo-Semites. Weizmann appreciated that the line between racist conspiracy-theory and Christian Hebraism was a thin one: ‘we hate equally anti-Semitism and philo-Semitism. Both are degrading.’

Yet timing is everything in politics. In December 1916, Asquith’s government fell, Lloyd George became prime minister, and he appointed Balfour as foreign secretary. Lloyd George was described as the ‘greatest warleader since Chatham’ and he and Balfour would do whatever was necessary to win the war. At this vital moment in a long and terrible struggle against Germany, their peculiar attitudes to the Jews and the special concatenation of circumstances of 1917 merged to convince Lloyd George and Balfour that Zionism was essential to help Britain achieve victory.

‘IT’S A BOY, DR WEIZMANN’: THE DECLARATION

In the spring of 1917, America entered the war and the Russian Revolution overthrew Emperor Nicholas II. ‘It’s clear Her Majesty’s Government were mainly concerned how Russia was to be kept in the ranks of the Allies,’ explained one of the key British officials, and as for America, ‘it was supposed American opinion might be favourably influenced if the return of the Jews to Palestine became a purpose of British policy’. Balfour, about to visit America, told his colleagues that ‘the vast majority of Jews in Russia and America now appear favourable to Zionism.’ If Britain could make a pro-Zionist declaration, ‘we should be able to carry on extremely useful propaganda both in Russia and America’.

If Russia and America were not urgent enough, the British learned that the Germans were considering a Zionist declaration of their own: after all, Zionism was a German-Austrian idea and until 1914, the Zionists had been based in Berlin. When Jemal Pasha, the tyrant of Jerusalem, visited Berlin in August 1917, he met the German Zionists, and the Ottoman grand vizier, Talaat Pasha, reluctantly agreed to promote ‘a Jewish national home’. Meanwhile, on the borders of Palestine, General Allenby was secretly preparing his offensive.

These, not Weizmann’s charm, were the real reasons that Britain embraced Zionism and now time was of the essence. ‘I’m a Zionist,’ declared Balfour and it may be that Zionism became the only true passion of his career. Lloyd George and Churchill, now munitions minister, became Zionists too and that effervescent gadfly, Sir Mark Sykes, now in the Cabinet Office, was suddenly convinced that Britain needed ‘the friendship of the Jews of the World’ because ‘with Great Jewry against us, there’s no possibility of getting the thing through’ – the thing being victory in the war.

Not everyone in the Cabinet agreed and battle was joined. ‘What is to become of the people of the country?’ asked Lord Curzon, former viceroy of India. Lloyd George argued ‘the Jews might be able to render us more assistance than the Arabs’. The secretary of state for India, Edwin Montagu, tormented Jew, banking heir and cousin of Herbert Samuel, argued strongly that Zionism was likely to arouse more anti-Semitism. Many of Britain’s Jewish magnates agreed: Claude Goldsmith Montefiore, Sir Moses’ great-nephew, backed by some of the Rothschilds, led the campaign against Zionism and Weizmann complained he ‘considered nationalism beneath the religious level of Jews except as Englishmen’.

Montagu and Montefiore delayed the Declaration but Weizmann fought back and conquered the drawing-rooms and country houses of Jewish grandees and English aristocrats as he had the cabinet-rooms of Whitehall. He won the support of the twenty-year-old Dolly de Rothschild who introduced him to the Astors and Cecils. At one dinner-party, the Marchioness of Crewe was heard telling Lord Robert Cecil, ‘We all in this house are Weizmannites.’ The support of Walter, Lord Rothschild, uncrowned king of British Jewry, helped Weizmann to defeat his Jewish opponents. In Cabinet, Lloyd George and Balfour got their way. ‘I have asked Ld Rothschild and Professor Weizmann to submit a formula,’ minuted Balfour, putting Sykes in charge of the negotiations.

The French and then the Americans gave their approval, making way for the decision at the end of October: on the very day that General Allenby captured Beersheba, Sykes came out and spotted Weizmann waiting nervously in the anteroom of the Cabinet Office. ‘Dr Weizmann,’ cried Sykes, ‘it’s a boy.’

On 9 November, Balfour issued his Declaration, addressed to Lord Rothschild, which proclaimed: ‘His Majesty’s Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people … it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities.’ Britain was later accused by the Arabs of cynical betrayal – simultaneously promising Palestine to the sherif, the Zionists and the French, perfidy that became part of the mythology of the Great Arab Revolt. It was certainly cynical but the promises to the Arabs and the Jews were both the result of short-term, ill-considered and urgent political expediency in wartime and
neither
would have been proffered in other circumstances. Sykes cheerfully insisted ‘we’re pledged to Zionism, Armenian liberation and Arabian independence’, yet there were serious contradictions: Syria was specifically promised both to the Arabs and the French. As we saw, Palestine and Jerusalem had not been mentioned in the letters to the sherif nor was the city promised to the Jews. Sykes–Picot specified an international city and the Zionists agreed: ‘we wanted the Holy Places internationalised,’ wrote Weizmann.
^*

The Declaration was designed to detach Russian Jews from Bolshevism but the very night before it was published, Lenin seized power in St Petersburg. Had Lenin moved a few days earlier, the Balfour Declaration may never have been issued. Ironically, Zionism, propelled by the energy of Russian Jews – from Weizmann in Whitehall to Ben-Gurion in Jerusalem – and Christian sympathy for their plight, was now cut off from Russian Jewry until the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991.

The Declaration should really be named for Lloyd George, not Balfour. It was he who had already decided that Britain had to possess Palestine – ‘oh, we must grab that!’ he said – and this was the precondition for any Jewish homeland. He was not going to share it with France or anyone else but Jerusalem was his ultimate prize. As Allenby broke into Palestine, Lloyd George flamboyantly demanded the capture of Jerusalem ‘as a Christmas present for the British nation’.
¹²

THE CHRISTMAS PRESENT

1917–1919

THE MAYOR’S ATTEMPT TO SURRENDER

Allenby took Gaza on 7 November 1917; Jaffa fell on the 16th. There were desperate scenes in Jerusalem. Jemal the Slaughterman, ruling his provinces from Damascus, threatened a G
ötterdämmerung
in Jerusalem. First he ordered the deportation of all Christian priests. Christian buildings, including St Saviour’s Monastery, were dynamited. The patriarchs were sent to Damascus but Colonel von Papen, a Catholic, rescued the Latin patriarch and kept him in Nazareth. Jemal hanged two Jewish spies in Damascus, then he announced the deportation of all Jerusalem’s Jews: there would no Jews left alive to welcome the British. ‘We’re in a time of anti-Semitic mania,’ Count Ballobar noted in his diary before rushing to Field Marshal von Falkenhayn to complain. The Germans, now in control of Jerusalem, were dismayed. Jemal’s anti-Semitic threats were ‘insane’, believed General Kress, who intervened at the highest level to save the Jews. It was Jemal’s last involvement in Jerusalem.
^*

On 25 November, Allenby took Nabi Samuel just outside the Holy City. The Germans were unsure what to do. ‘I begged Falkenhayn to evacuate Jerusalem – the city had no strategic value’, recalled Papen, ‘before it came under direct attack for which we’d be blamed.’ He imagined the headlines: ‘HUNS BLAMED FOR RAZING HOLY CITY!’ ‘I lost Verdun,’ cried Falkenhayn, ‘and now you ask me to evacuate the city which is the cynosure of the world’s attention. Impossible!’ Papen rang his ambassador in Constantinople, who promised to talk to Enver.

British planes bombed German headquarters in the Augusta Victoria and Allenby’s intelligence chief dropped opium cigarettes for the Ottoman troops, hoping that they would be too stoned to defend Jerusalem. Refugees poured out of the city. Removing the portrait of the Kaiser from the Augusta Victoria Chapel, Falkenhayn finally left the city himself and moved his headquarters to Nablus. British and German planes fought a quick dogfight over Jerusalem. Howitzers bombarded enemy positions; the Ottomans counter-attacked three times at Nabi Samuel; savage fighting raged for four days. ‘The war was at its height,’ wrote the teacher Sakakini, ‘shells falling all around, total pandemonium, soldiers running around, and fear ruling all.’
^*
On 4 December, British planes bombed Ottoman headquarters in the Russian Compound. In the Fast Hotel, German officers drank their last
schnapps
and laughed until the final moment, while the Ottoman generals debated whether to surrender or not; the Husseinis met secretly in one of their mansions. The Turks started to desert. Cartloads of wounded soldiers and shattered corpses rumbled through the streets.

On the evening of 7 December, the first British troops saw Jerusalem. A heavy fog hung over the city; rain darkened the hills. The next morning, Governor Izzat Bey smashed his telegraph instruments with a hammer, handed over his writ of surrender to the mayor, ‘borrowed’ a carriage with two horses from the American Colony which he swore to return,
^†
and galloped away towards Jericho. All night thousands of Ottoman troops trudged through the city and out of history. At 3 a.m. on the 9th, German forces withdrew from the city on what Count Ballobar called a day of ‘astounding beauty’. The last Turk left St Stephen’s Gate at 7 a.m. By coincidence, it was the first day of Jewish Hanukkah, the festival of lights that celebrated the Maccabean liberation of Jerusalem. Looters raided the shops on Jaffa Road. At 8.45 a.m., British soldiers approached the Zion Gate.

Hussein Husseini, Mayor of Jerusalem, the hedonistic patron of Wasif the
oud
-player, rushed to break the glad tidings to the American Colony, where the Holy Colonists sang ‘Alleluia’. The mayor sought a white flag – even though in his society, it proclaimed the home of a marriageable virgin. A woman offered him a white blouse, but this seemed inappropriate, so Husseini finally borrowed a bedsheet from the American Colony which he tied to a broom, and, gathering a delegation that contained several Husseinis, he mounted this horse and set off through Jaffa Gate to surrender, all the while brandishing this farcical banner.

Jerusalem proved surprisingly hard to surrender. First the mayor and his fluttering sheet found two Cockney mess-cooks near the northwestern Arab village of Lifta, looking for eggs in a chicken coop. He offered to surrender Jerusalem to them. But the Cockneys refused; the sheet and broom looked like a Levantine trick and their major was waiting for his eggs; they hurried back to their lines.

The mayor met the teenaged son of a friend from a respected Jewish family, Menache Elyashar. ‘Witness a historical event you’ll never forget,’ he said to the boy. Like a scene from
The Wizard of Oz
, Elyashar too joined the gang, which now included Muslims, Jews and Christians. Then two sergeants from another London regiment cried ‘Halt!’ and emerged from behind a wall with guns cocked; the mayor waved his sheet. Sergeants James Sedgewick and Fred Hurcombe refused the surrender, ‘Hey, don’t any of you Johnnies speak English?’ they exclaimed. The mayor spoke it fluently but preferred to save it for more senior Englishmen. But they agreed to be photographed by a Swede from the American Colony with the mayor and his merry men and accepted some cigarettes.