Jerusalem: The Biography

1914–1916

JEMAL PASHA: THE TYRANT OF JERUSALEM

Parker’s adventure had exposed the realities of the Young Turks’ rule over Jerusalem: they were no less venal and inept than their predecessors, but they had raised Arab expectations of autonomy, if not more. A nationalist newspaper, Filastin, was founded in Jaffa to express this new consciousness. But soon it became clear that the Young Turks remained a ruthless and secretive organization with only a democratic façade. They were Turkish nationalists who were determined to suppress not just Arab hopes but even the teaching of Arabic. Arab nationalists started to found secret clubs to plot for independence and even the Husseinis and other scions joined them. Meanwhile the Zionist leaders encouraged their new immigrants to create ‘Jewish towns, particularly in Jerusalem, the head of the nation’, and they now bought the land for the future Hebrew University on Mount Scopus. This alarmed the Families – even though the Husseinis and other landowners such as the Sursocks of Lebanon were all quietly selling land to the Zionists.

Ruhi Khalidi, French-speaking intellectual and now deputy speaker of the Parliament in Istanbul, was an Ottoman liberal, not an Arab nationalist. But he carefully studied Zionism, even writing a book about it, and decided that it was a threat. In Parliament, he tried to ban any Jewish land purchases in Palestine. The richest scion of the Families, Ragheb al-Nashashibi, an elegant playboy, ran for Parliament too, promising, ‘I’ll dedicate all my energies to removing the danger awaiting us from Zionism.’ The editor of Filastin warned, ‘If this state of affairs continues, the Zionists will gain mastery over our country.’^*

On 23 January 1913, a thirty-one-year-old Young Turk officer, Ismail Enver, a veteran of the 1908 Revolution who had made his name fighting the Italians in Libya, burst into the Sublime Porte, shot the war minister and seized power. He and two comrades, Mehmet Talaat and Ahmet Jemal, formed the triumvirate of the Three Pashas. Enver won a small victory in the Second Balkan War which convinced him he was the Turkish Napoleon, destined to restore the empire. In 1914, he emerged as Ottoman strongman and war minister – and even married the sultan’s niece. The Three Pashas believed that only the Turkization of the empire could stop the final rot. Their programme anticipated Fascism and the Holocaust in its barbarity, racism and warmongering.

On 28 June 1914, Serbian terrorists assassinated the Austrian heir Archduke Franz Ferdinand and the Great Powers staggered then stampeded into the First World War. Enver Pasha was eager to fight, pushing for a German alliance to provide the necessary military and financial backing. Kaiser Wilhelm, remembering his trip to the East, backed the Ottoman alliance. Enver appointed himself vice-generalissimo under his puppet sultan and entered the war by bombarding Russian ports from his newly supplied German battleships.

On 11 November, Sultan Mehmet V Rashid declared war on Britain, France and Russia – and in Jerusalem jihad was proclaimed in al-Aqsa. At first there was some enthusiasm for war. When the commander of the Ottoman troops in Palestine, the Bavarian general Baron Friedrich Kress von Kressenstein, arrived, the Jews of Jerusalem welcomed his units with a triumphal arch. The Germans assumed protection of the Jews from the British. Meanwhile Jerusalem awaited the arrival of her new master.⁷

On 18 November Wasif Jawhariyyeh, the oud-player, still only seventeen years old, watched Ahmet Jemal, minister of the marine and one of the Three Pashas, drive into Jerusalem as effective dictator of Greater Syria and supreme commander of the Fourth Ottoman Army. Jemal set up his headquarters in the Augusta Victoria on the Mount of Olives. On 20 December, an elderly sheikh arrived at the Damascus Gate in a stately carriage bearing the Prophet’s green banner from Mecca. His entrance into the city caused ‘indescribable commotion’ as ‘an orderly and picturesque train of soldiers followed the flag through the Old City’ as they sprinkled rosewater. The whole population of Jerusalem followed in his wake ‘singing Allahu akhbar in the most beautiful parade I ever saw,’ wrote Wasif Jawhariyyeh. Outside the Dome, Jemal declared jihad. ‘Jubilation took possession,’ agreed Kress von Kressenstein, ‘of the entire population’ – until the ancient Meccan sheikh suddenly died just before Christmas, an embarrassing augur for the Ottoman jihad.

Jemal, forty-five years old, squat and bearded, always protected by a camel-mounted squadron of guards, combined brutish, paranoid cruelty with charm, intelligence and grotesque buffoonery. A bon vivant with ‘a weakness for pomp and circumstance’, and for beautiful Jewesses, he had a sense both of his own greatness and of his own absurdity. While he terrorized Jerusalem, he liked to play poker, race horses through the Judaean hills, drink champagne and smoke cigars with his friend, Count Antonio de Ballobar, the Spanish consul. Ballobar, an elegant aristocrat in his late twenties, described the pasha as a ‘sale type’ but ‘bon garçon’ – a filthy type but a good boy. Bertha Spafford thought Jemal ‘a strange man and one to be feared’, but also ‘a man of dual personality’ capable of charm and kindness. Once, without anyone seeing, he gave a diamond-studded medal to a little girl whose parents found her with it when they returned home. One of his German officers, Franz von Papen, simply judged him ‘an extremely intelligent Oriental despot’.

Jemal ruled his fiefdom almost independently: ‘That man of limitless influence’ relished his power, asking jovially: ‘What are laws? I make them and unmake them!’ The Three Pashas were rightly suspicious of Arab loyalty. Enjoying a cultural renaissance, a flowering of nationalistic aspirations, the Arabs hated the new Turkish chauvinism. Yet they formed 40 per cent of the Ottoman population, and many of the Ottoman regiments were entirely Arab. Jemal’s mission was to hold the Arab provinces and suppress any Arab – or for that matter Zionist – stirrings, using first menacing charm and then just menace.

Soon after arriving in the Holy City, he called in a delegation of Arabs suspected of nationalist beliefs. He studiously ignored them as they grew paler and paler. Finally he asked, ‘Do you appreciate the gravity of your crimes?’ He cut off their answer: ‘SILENCE! Do you know the punishment? Execution! Execution!’ He waited as they quaked, then added quietly: ‘But I shall content myself with exiling you and your families to Anatolia.’ When the terrified Arabs had trooped out, Jemal turned laughing to this adjutant: ‘What can one do? That’s how we get things done here.’ When he needed new roads built, he told the engineer, ‘If the road isn’t finished in time, I shall have you executed at the point when the last stones have been laid!’ He would sigh rather proudly: ‘Everywhere there are people groaning because of me.’

As Jemal mustered his forces, commanded mainly by German officers, for his offensive against British Egypt, he found that Syria was seething with intrigue, and Jerusalem, ‘a nest of spies’. The pasha’s policy was simple: ‘For Palestine, deportation; for Syria, terrorization; for the Hejaz, the army.’ In Jerusalem his approach was to line up ‘patriarchs, princes and sheikhs in rows, and to hang Notables and deputies’. As his secret police tracked down traitors, he deported anyone suspected of nationalist agitation. He commandeered Christian sites such as St Anne’s Church and started to expel the Christian hierarchs while he prepared to attack Egypt.

The pasha paraded his 20,000 men through Jerusalem on the way to the front. ‘We’ll meet on the other side of the [Suez] Canal or in Heaven!’ he boasted, but Count Ballobar noticed an Ottoman soldier pushing his water rations in a stolen pram, surely not the mark of a daunting military machine. Jemal, on the other hand, travelled with ‘magnificent tents, hat stands, commodes’. On 1 February 1915, Jemal, moved by hearing his men singing ‘The Red Flag Flies over Cairo’, attacked the Canal with 12,000 troops; they were easily repelled. He claimed that the attack had only been a reconnaissance in force, but he failed again in the summer. Military defeat, Western blockade and Jemal’s growing repression brought desperate suffering and wild hedonism to Jerusalem. It was not long before the killing started.⁸

TERROR AND DEATH: JEMAL THE SLAUGHTERMAN

Within a month of Jemal’s arrival, Wasif Jawhariyyeh saw the body of an Arab in a white cloak hanging from a tree outside the Jaffa Gate. On 30 March 1915, the pasha executed two Arab soldiers at the Damascus Gate as ‘British spies’, and then executed the Mufti of Gaza and his son, whose hanging at the Jaffa Gate was watched by a full crowd in respectful silence. Hangings were staged at the Damascus and Jaffa Gates after Friday prayers to ensure the largest audience. Soon the gates seemed to be permanently festooned with swaying cadavers, deliberately left for days on Jemal’s orders. On one occasion, Wasif was horrified by the sadistic incompetence:

The hanging process was not studied scientifically or medically enough so that the victim stayed alive, suffering a lot and we watched but couldn’t say or do anything. An officer ordered a soldier to climb up and hang on the victim but this extra weight made the victim’s eyes bulge out of his face. This was the cruelty of Jemal Pasha. My heart cries out from the memory of this sight.

In August 1915, after uncovering evidence of Arab nationalist plots, ‘I decided’, wrote Jemal, ‘to take ruthless action against the traitors.’ He hanged fifteen prominent Arabs near Beirut (including a Nashashibi from Jerusalem), and then, in May 1916, another twenty-one in Damascus and Beirut, winning the soubriquet the Slaughterman. He joked to the Spaniard Ballobar that he could hang him too.

Jemal also suspected the Zionists of treason. Yet Ben-Gurion, sporting a tarboush, was recruiting Jewish soldiers for the Ottomans. Jemal had not quite given up on charm: in December 1915 he sponsored two unique meetings between the Husseinis and Zionist leaders including Ben-Gurion, to rally support for a joint homeland under the Ottomans. But afterwards, Jemal deported 500 foreign Jews, arrested Zionist leaders and banned their symbols. The deportations provoked uproar in the German and Austrian newspapers, whereupon Jemal called in the Zionists to warn against any sabotage: ‘You can choose. I am prepared to deport you as was done with the Armenians. Anyone who lays a finger on a single orange, I shall execute. But if you want the second option, the entire Vienna and Berlin press must be silent!’ Later, he ranted: ‘I’ve no trust in your loyalty. Had you no conspiratorial designs you wouldn’t have come to live here in this desolate land among Arabs who hate you. We deem Zionists deserving of hanging but I’m tired of hangings. [Instead] we’ll disperse you around the Turkish state.’^*

Ben-Gurion was deported, switching his hopes to the Allies. Arabs were conscripted into the army; Jews and Christians were forced into labour battalions to build roads, many of them perishing from hunger and exposure. Then came disease, insects and starvation. ‘The locusts were thick as clouds,’ remembered Wasif, mocking Jemal’s attempts to solve the plague ‘by ordering every person over 12 to bring 3 kilos of locust eggs’, since this simply led to an absurd trade in locust eggs.

Wasif saw ‘starvation spread all around the country’, along with ‘typhus, malaria, and many people died’. By 1918, the Jewish population of Jerusalem had fallen, from epidemic, starvation and deportation, by 20,000. Yet Wasif’s voice, his oud and his ability to rustle up pretty guests for wild parties, were never more valued.

WAR AND SEX IN THE CITY: WASIF JAWHARIYYEH

Jemal, his officers and the Family grandees enjoyed a life of feverish pleasure while the Jerusalemites just struggled to survive the calamities of war. The poverty was such that young prostitutes, many of them war widows charging just two piastres a trick, patrolled the Old City. In May 1915, some teachers were sacked when they were found entertaining prostitutes during school hours. Women even sold their babies. ‘Old men and women’ – particularly the poor Hasidic Jews in Mea Shearim – ‘were bloated with hunger. On their faces and all over their bodies, slime, filth, disease and sores.’

Wasif’s every night was an adventure: ‘I only went home to change my clothes, sleeping in a different house every night, my body totally exhausted from drinking and merrymaking. In the morning I’m picnicking with the Jerusalem Notable Families, next I’m holding an orgy with thugs and gangsters in the alleys of the Old City.’ One night Wasif Jawhariyyeh found himself in a convoy of four limousines, containing the governor, his Jewish mistress from Salonica, various Ottoman beys and Family grandees including Mayor Hussein Husseini, being driven out to Artas near Bethlehem for an ‘international picnic’ at the Latin monastery: ‘It was a lovely day for everyone during the hard time when hunger and war were making people suffer. No one hung on ceremony, everyone drank wine, and the ladies were so beautiful that night, there was no time to eat and they all sang like one choir.’

The governor’s Jewish mistress ‘so adored Arabic music’ that Wasif agreed to teach her the oud. He seems to have existed in a dizzy parade of orgies with his patrons, attended by ‘the most beautiful Jewish women’ and sometimes Russian girls trapped in Jerusalem by the war. Once, the Fourth Army quartermaster, Raushen Pasha, got ‘so drunk that the beautiful Jewish women made him lose consciousness!’

Wasif did not need to work because the grandees, first Hussein Husseini and later Ragheb Nashashibi, arranged sinecures for him in the city administration. Husseini was head of the Red Crescent charity. As so often, charity was the shameless pretext for extravagance and social climbing: the ‘attractive ladies’ of Jerusalem were asked to dress up in fetchingly figure-hugging Ottoman military uniforms decorated with Red Crescents, a look that proved irresistible for the supremo Jemal: his mistress was Leah Tennenbaum, whom Wasif considered ‘one of the most beautiful women in Palestine’. Sima al-Magribiyyah, another Jewess, became mistress of the garrison commander; an Englishwoman, Miss Cobb, serviced the governor.

Sometimes, the oud-player himself enjoyed a tidbit from high table. When he and his band were invited to play at a party in a Jewish house, he found a ‘huge hall, and a group of [Ottoman] officers prowling around the ladies’, who included a certain Miss Rachel. Suddenly the drunken Turks started to fight, shooting their pistols first at the lights and then at each other. The demi-mondaines and musicians ran for their lives. Wasif’s beloved lute was broken but the pretty Miss Rachel pulled him into a cupboard that led through a hidden doorway into another house – ‘she saved my life’, and, perhaps just as joyously, ‘I stayed the night with her.’

On 27 April 1915, the anniversary of Sultan Mehmet’s succession, Jemal invited Ottoman and German commanders and the Jerusalemite grandees to staff headquarters in the commandeered Notre Dame outside the New Gate: fifty ‘prostitutes’ accompanied the Ottoman officers while the grandees brought their wives.

Even as Jerusalem deteriorated, Count Ballobar’s dinner parties for Jemal remained banquets: the menu for one feast on 6 July 1916 included Turkish soup, fish, steak, meat pies and stuffed turkey, followed by ice cream, pineapple and fruit. While they ate, Jemal talked about girls, power and his new Jerusalem. He fancied himself a city planner and wanted to knock down the walls of Jerusalem and cut a boulevard through the Old City from the Jaffa Gate to the Temple Mount. Then he boasted that he had married the glamorous Leah Tennenbaum.^* Jemal often turned up chez Ballobar without warning – and, as things got more desperate, the Spaniard used his influence to restrain the Slaughterman’s despotism.

While Jemal oversaw this evanescent Jerusalem, his colleague, Vice-Generalissimo Enver, lost 80,000 men in his inept Russian offensive. He and Talaat blamed their disasters on the Christian Armenians, who were systematically deported and killed. A million perished in a barbaric crime that would later encourage Hitler to begin the Holocaust: ‘No one now remembers the Armenians,’ he reflected. Jemal claimed to disapprove of this massacre. Certainly he allowed refugees to settle in Jerusalem, and the number of Armenians there doubled during the war.

There were secret negotiations with the British: Jemal told Ballobar that London wanted him to assassinate his colleague Talaat Pasha. At some point, Jemal secretly approached the Allies, offering to march on Istanbul, overthrow Enver, save the Armenians and become hereditary sultan himself: as the Allies did not take him seriously, Jemal fought on. He hanged twelve Arabs in Jerusalem, their bodies displayed around the walls, while Enver toured the east to emphasize his Islamic credentials, intimidate Arab dissidents and keep an eye on his colleague. Wasif watched the Ottoman strongman drive into Jerusalem with Jemal. After visiting the Dome, David’s Tomb and the Church, and opening Jemal Pasha Street, Enver was entertained at the Fast Hotel by Mayor Hussein Husseini, accompanied by Jawhariyyeh who as usual arranged the party.

The two pashas set out for Mecca to see off any potential Arab rebellion. But Enver’s haj could not save Arabia for the Ottomans.⁹