Jerusalem: The Biography (72 page)

‘Sumptuous parties, lunches, dinners and receptions, the year round’ were held by the historian George Antonius, an aesthetic ‘Syrian patriot with the lucidity of a Cambridge don’, and his ‘charming, beautiful’ and irrepressible wife, Katy, daughter of a Lebanese proprietor of Egyptian newspapers.
^*
Their Sheikh Jarrah villa, which was owned by the mufti and filled with 12,000 books, was the social headquarters for Arab grandees, British elites and celebrity visitors, as well as a political salon for Arab nationalists. ‘Pretty women, delicious food, clever conversation: everyone who was anyone was there at the best parties in Jerusalem,’ remembered Nassereddin Nashashibi, ‘and they always had the most delightfully louche atmosphere’. Their marriage was said to be open and Katy was notoriously flirtatious, with a taste for Englishmen in uniform: ‘She was naughty, curious about everything,’ recalled an old Jerusalemite; ‘she would start gossip; she was always matching people up.’ Antonius later told his daughter about a party with a dance band given by a local socialite where he shocked and thrilled the other guests by proposing a swinging Jerusalem party game of his own: he would invite ten couples but each person would bring a member of the opposite sex who was not their spouse – and then they would see what happened.

The cooling of British enthusiasm for Zionism increasingly alienated the Jews. Perhaps High Commissioner Sir John Chancellor was typical when he complained that Jews were ‘ungrateful people’. Each Jewish neighbourhood belonged in a different country: Rehavia, home of secular German professors and British officials, was the most desirable suburb, civilized, calm and European; the Bokharan Quarter belonged in Central Asia; the Hasidic Mea Shearim was shabby, impoverished and redolent of seventeenth-century Poland; Zikhron Zion was heady with the ‘poor Ashkenazi cooking smells, of borscht, garlic and onion and sauerkraut,’ recalled Amos Oz; Talpiot was ‘a Jerusalemite replica of a Berlin garden suburb’, while his own home was in Kerem Avraham, built around the old house of the British consul James Finn, which was so Russian ‘it belonged to Chekhov’.

Weizmann had called Jerusalem ‘a modern Babel’ but all these different worlds continued to mix, despite spasms of violence and clouds of foreboding. That cosmopolitan Jerusalem, wrote Hazem Nusseibeh, was ‘one of the most exhilarating cities in the world to live in’. Cafés opened all the time, enjoyed by a new class of intellectuals, boulevardiers, and flâneurs, funded by family orange groves, newspaper articles and civil service salaries. The cafés presented respectable belly-dancing, as well as the saucier
suzi
version, cabaret-singers and traditional balladeers, jazz bands, and Egyptian popular singers. During early Mandate years, just inside the Jaffa Gate next to the Imperial Hotel, the flamboyant intellectual Khalil Sakakini held court at the Vagabond Café, where over puffs of
nargileh
water pipes and shots of Lebanese
arak
firewater, this soidisant ‘Prince of Idleness’ discussed politics and expounded his hedonistic philosophy, the Manifesto of Vagabonds – ‘Idleness is the motto of our party. The working-day is made up of two hours’ – after which he indulged ‘in eating, drinks and merriment’. However, his indolence was limited when he became Palestine’s inspector of education.

Wasif Jawhariyyeh, the
oud
-player with the municipal sinecure, had long embraced laziness: his brother opened the Café Jawhariyyeh on Jaffa Road by the Russian Compound where a cabaret and band performed. One regular denizen of the nearby Postal Café recalled ‘the cosmopolitan clientele; a Tsarist officer with a white beard, a young clerk; an immigrant painter, an elegant lady who kept talking about her properties in Ukraine, and many young men and women immigrants’.

Many of the British enjoyed this ‘real blend of cultures’, not least Sir Harry Luke, who presided over a typical Jerusalem household: ‘The nanny was from south England, the butler a White Russian,
^*
the servant a Cypriot Turk, Ahmed the cook was a rascally black Berber, the kitchen-boy was an Armenian who surprised us by turning out to be a girl; the housemaid is Russian.’ But not everyone was so charmed. ‘I dislike them
all
intensely,’ said General Sir Walter ‘Squib’ Congreve. ‘Beastly people. The whole lot are not worth a single Englishman.’

BEN-GURION AND THE MUFTI: THE SHRINKING SOFA

The mufti was at the height of his prestige but he struggled to control the wide range of Arab views. There were liberal Westernizers like George Antonius, there were Marxists, there were secular nationalists and there were Islamic fundamentalists. Many Arabs loathed the mufti but the majority were becoming convinced that only armed struggle could stop Zionism. In November 1933, the ex-mayor Musa Kazem Husseini, who was no fan of his cousin the mufti, led demonstrations in Jerusalem that sparked riots in which thirty Arabs were killed. When Musa Kazem died the next year, the Arabs lost an elder statesman respected by all: ‘people wept a lot over Musa Kazem,’ wrote Ahmed Shuqayri, a later Palestinian leader, ‘whereas Haj Amin (the mufti) made a lot of people weep.’ More than a quarter of a million Jews arrived in Palestine during the second decade of the Mandate, twice as many as during the first. The Arabs, whether they were the most sophisticated of the Jerusalem elite, educated at Oxford, or whether they were the Islamicist radicals of the Muslim Brotherhood, all now sensed that the British would never halt the immigration, nor hold back the ever more sophisticated organization of the Yishuv, as the Jewish community was known. They were running out of time. In 1935, at the height of the immigration, 66,000 Jews arrived. In that morbid age when war was often regarded as a purifying national ritual, even the intellectual Sakakini and the aesthete Jawhariyyeh now believed that only violence could save Palestine. The answer, wrote Hazem Nusseibeh, was ‘armed rebellion’.

This was confronted by the ageing Weizmann, again Zionist president, but the real power lay with David Ben-Gurion, recently elected chairman of the Executive of the Jewish Agency, the highest authority for the Yishuv. Both men were autocratic and intellectual in style, dedicated to Zionism and Western democracy. But they were opposites. Ben-Gurion was a gruff working-class man of action, equipped to lead in war and peace. He lacked all small talk (except about history and philosophy) and was humourless – the only joke the diminutive Ben-Gurion told was about Napoleon’s height. Its punchline was: ‘no one was bigger than Napoleon, just taller.’ Married with two children, a dissatisfied husband, he enjoyed a discreet love-affair with a tall, blue-eyed Englishwoman in London. But he was a brooding loner and thoughtful strategist, always obsessed with the cause, who collected books, spending any spare time in second-hand bookshops. The Old Man, as he was already known, learned Spanish to read Cervantes and Greek to study Plato; when he planned statehood, he read Greek philosophy; when he made war, he read Clausewitz.

Weizmann was Zionism’s
grand seigneur
, dressed in Savile Row suits, more at home in the salons of Mayfair than on the sunbeaten farms of Galilee and now well off from founder-shares in Marks & Spencer, donated by his friends, the Sieff family. ‘You’re now King of Israel,’ Ben-Gurion told him, but he would soon turn against ‘Weizmann’s regime of personal fetishism’. As for Weizmann, he knew that, unlike Ben-Gurion, he was not cut out to be a warlord, but he half respected, half disdained the younger man’s militancy. In his 600-page memoirs, he mentioned Ben-Gurion’s name just twice. Weizmann was mistaken for Lenin in looks but Ben-Gurion emulated the Bolshevik’s ruthless pragmatism.

He had started as a socialist, risen in the labour movement and had not quite lost his belief that a new Palestine should be created through the cooperation of the Jewish and Arab working classes. Ben-Gurion may have dreamed of a Jewish state but that seemed totally unlikely and remote. Since he appreciated that ‘the Arab national movement was born at almost the same time as political Zionism,’ he believed that an Arab–Jewish confederation was the best the Jews could hope for at that time. Both he and the mufti probed each other with plans for a shared state: in retrospect, a compromise was still possible. In August 1934, Ben-Gurion started to meet Musa al-Alami,
^*
a lawyer working for the British, and George Antonius, the writer – both moderate advisers to the mufti. Ben-Gurion proposed either a Jewish–Arab shared government or a Jewish entity within an Arab federation that would include Transjordan and Iraq. Surely, Ben-Gurion argued, Palestine was like a sofa: there was room for both. The mufti was impressed, but noncommittal. Later Alami reflected that the mufti and Ben-Gurion shared the same harsh nationalism but the Jewish leader was much more flexible and skilful. He regretted that the Arabs never produced their own Ben-Gurion. Meanwhile, the mufti and his fellow aristocrats were losing control of their movement.

In November 1935, a Syrian preacher named Sheikh Izzat al-Din al-Qassam, who worked as a junior official in the mufti’s
sharia
court in Haifa and was constantly urging him to reject any political compromise, rebelled against the British. He was far more radical than the mufti, a puritan fundamentalist who believed in the sanctity of martyrdom, a precursor of al-Qaeda and today’s Jihadists. Now he led the thirteen
mujahidin
of his Black Hand cell into hills where, on 20 November, he was cornered by 400 British police and killed. Qassam’s martyrdom
^†
jolted the mufti closer to revolt. In April 1936, Qassam’s successor launched an operation outside Nablus that killed two Jews – but released a German who claimed to be a Nazi ‘for Hitler’s sake’. This lit the spark. The Irgun, Jewish nationalists, killed two Arabs in response. As the shooting started, Sir Arthur Wauchope was totally unqualified to respond. A young officer noticed that he ‘doesn’t know what to do.’
²⁰

THE ARAB REVOLT

1936–45

THE MUFTI’S TERROR

One cool night in Jerusalem in early 1936, ‘scattered rifle shots rang out in the clear evening sky’ and Hazem Nusseibeh realized that ‘the armed rebellion had begun’. The revolt escalated slowly. In April that year, Arabs killed sixteen Jews in Jaffa. The Palestinian parties formed a Higher Arab Committee under the mufti and called a national strike that swiftly spun out of anyone’s control. The mufti declared this a sacred struggle and called his forces the Holy War Army as volunteers started to arrive to fight the British and Jews from Syria, Iraq and Transjordan.

On 14 May, two Jews were shot in the Jewish Quarter, and the mufti insisted, ‘The Jews are trying to expel us from the country, murdering our sons and burning our houses.’ Two days later, Arab gunmen killed three Jews in the Edison Cinema.

The Yishuv began to panic, but Ben-Gurion embraced a policy of self-restraint. Meanwhile British ministers now questioned the entire basis of the Mandate and commissioned Earl Peel, an ex-Cabinet minister, to report. The mufti called off the strike in October 1936, though he refused to recognize Peel. But Weizmann charmed the commissioners. On Amir Abdullah’s insistence the mufti testified that the Palestinians demanded independence, the annulment of the Balfour Declaration and, ominously, the removal of the Jews.

In July 1937, Peel proposed a two-state solution, the partition of Palestine into an Arab area (70 per cent of the country) joined to Amir Abdullah’s Transjordan and a Jewish area (20 per cent). In addition, he suggested a population transfer of the 300,000 Arabs in the Jewish area. Jerusalem would remain a special entity under British control. The Zionists accepted – they had realized they would never be given Jerusalem in a partition. Weizmann was not disappointed by the small size of the Jewish entity, musing that ‘King David’s [kingdom] was smaller.’

Peel complained that, in contrast to the Zionists, ‘not once since 1919 has any Arab leader said that cooperation with the Jews was even possible’. Only Abdullah of Transjordan enthusiastically supported Peel’s plan and, in retrospect, this would have prevented Israel in its present form but at the time, all Palestinians were inflamed by an English earl’s idea of creating a Jewish state: both the mufti and his rival Nashashibi rejected it.

The Revolt exploded again, but this time, the mufti embraced and organized the violence; he was seemingly more interested in murdering his Palestinian rivals than the British or Jews. ‘It seems’, writes the latest historian of the Husseinis, ‘he was personally responsible for establishing internecine terror as a means of control.’ Over his favourite meal of lentil soup, the mufti, always accompanied by his Sudanese bodyguards descended from the Haram’s traditional watchmen, behaved like a Mafia boss as he ordered assassinations that in two years of fratricide wiped out many of his most decent and moderate compatriots. Nine days after Peel, the mufti called on the German consul-general in Jerusalem to state his sympathy for Nazism and his wish to cooperate. The next day, the British tried to arrest him but he sought sanctuary in al-Aqsa.

The British did not dare storm the Sanctuary. Instead they besieged Husseini on the Temple Mount, denouncing him as the organizer of the Revolt. But not all the Arab gangs were under his control: the Jihadi followers of Qassam also enthusiastically killed any Arabs suspected of cooperating with the authorities. Nothing less than a brutal civil war broke out among the Arabs themselves. It was now that it was said that the mufti made many families weep.

After supporting the Revolt initially, Ragheb Nashashibi opposed the mufti both for his terror and his strategy. Nashashibi’s villa was raked with machinegun fire; a young cousin was killed watching a football game. When Fakhri Bey Nashashibi, his nephew, accused the mufti of destructive egotism, his death warrant was published in the newspapers: he was later assassinated in Baghdad. Nashashibi armed his retainers, known as ‘the Nashashibi units’ or ‘peacebands’, and they fought the mufti’s men. Arab headwear became the shibboleth of the Revolt: Husseini supporters wore the
keffiyeh
checked scarf; the Nashashibis, the
tarboush
of compromise. The mufti set up rebel courts to try traitors and issued rebel stamps.