Jerusalem: The Biography

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 Götterdämmerung 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.

The Jerusalemites next found two artillery officers, who also refused the honour but offered to inform headquarters. The mayor then came upon Lieutenant-Colonel Bayley who passed the offer on to Brigadier-General C. F. Watson, commander of the 180th Brigade. He summoned Major-General John Shea, General Officer Commanding the 160th Division, who galloped up on horseback. ‘They’ve come!’ cried the mayor’s group, waiting on the steps outside the Tower of David.^* Bertha Spafford, the American Colonist, kissed the general’s stirrup. Shea accepted the surrender in the name of General Allenby, who heard the news in his tent near Jaffa where he was talking to Lawrence of Arabia. But Mayor Husseini had one surrender left.¹³

ALLENBY THE BULL: THE SUPREME MOMENT

The guns were still booming when General Sir Edmund Allenby rode down the Jaffa Road to the Jaffa Gate. Inside his saddlebag, he kept a book entitled Historical Geography of the Holy Land by George Adam Smith, a present from Lloyd George. In London, the prime minister was elated. ‘The capture of Jerusalem has made a most profound impression throughout the whole civilised world,’ he declaimed in a rodomontade a few days later. ‘The most famous city in the world, after centuries of strife and vain struggle, has fallen into the hands of the British army, never to be restored to those who so successfully held it against the embattled hosts of Christendom. The name of every hill thrills with sacred memories.’

The Foreign Office telegraphed Allenby to avoid any kaiserine grandiosity or Christ-like pretension as he entered the city: ‘STRONGLY SUGGEST DISMOUNTING!’ The general walked through the gate, accompanied by American, French and Italian legates and watched by all the patriarchs, rabbis, muftis and consuls, to be greeted by the Mayor of Jerusalem who for the seventh time surrendered the city as ‘many wept for joy’ and ‘strangers greeted and congratulated each other’.

Allenby was accompanied by Lawrence of Arabia, who had just survived the greatest trauma of his life. In late November, on a solitary recce behind enemy lines, he had been captured at Deraa in Syria by the sadistic Ottoman governor Hajim Bey who, with his myrmidons, had subjected the ‘absurdly boyish’ Englishman to a homosexual rape. Lawrence managed to escape and seemingly recover but the psychological damage was profound and, after the war, he described feeling ‘maimed, imperfect, only half-myself. Probably it had been the breaking of the spirit by that frenzied nerveshattering pain which degraded me to beast level and which had journeyed with me ever since, a fascination and terror and morbid desire.’ When he reached Aqaba after his escape, Allenby summoned him just as Jerusalem fell.

Lawrence, eschewing his Bedouin gear, borrowed a captain’s uniform for the day. ‘For me,’ he wrote in Seven Pillars of Wisdom, ‘my appointment in the ceremony of the Jaffa Gate’ was ‘the supreme moment of the war, the one which for historical reasons made a greater appeal than anything on earth.’ He still regarded Jerusalem as ‘a squalid town’ of ‘hotel servants’, but now he bowed to the ‘mastering spirit of the place’. Naturally, the diarist Wasif Jawhariyyeh was also watching from the crowd.

Allenby was nicknamed the Bloody Bull for his force, dignity and stature – ‘the last of the paladins’ – and even Jemal Pasha admired his ‘alertness, discretion and brains’. An a mateur naturalist, he knew‘ all there was to know about birds and beasts’ and had ‘read everything and quoted in full at dinner one of the lesser known sonnets of Rupert Brooke’. He had a cumbersome sense of humour – his horse and his pet scorpion were both named Hindenburg after the German military supremo – but even the fastidious Lawrence worshipped the ‘gigantic, red and merry’ general, who was ‘morally so great that the comprehension of our littleness came slow to him. What an idol that man was.’

Allenby climbed the steps to the platform to read his proclamation about ‘Jerusalem the Blessed’, which was then repeated in French, Arabic, Hebrew, Greek, Russian and Italian – carefully not mentioning the word that was on everyone’s mind: Crusade. But when Mayor Husseini finally handed over the city’s keys Allenby is supposed to have said: ‘The Crusades have now ended.’ The mayor and the mufti, both Husseinis, stalked off angrily. However, for the millenarian American Colonists, it was different: ‘We thought we were witnessing the triumph of the last Crusade,’ said Bertha Spafford. ‘A Christian nation had conquered Palestine!’ No one could share Lawrence’s thoughts for, as he listened to Allenby, he imagined himself a few days earlier: ‘It was strange to stand before the Tower with the Chief listening to his proclamation and to think how a few days earlier I had stood before [his rapist] Hajim.’

Allenby then marched out of the Jaffa Gate and remounted Hindenburg.^* ‘Jerusalem cheered us mightily. It was impressive,’ wrote Lawrence, but the Ottomans were counter-attacking with, Lawrence noted, ‘an accompaniment of machine-gun fire with aeroplanes circling over us continually. Jerusalem has not been taken for so long nor has it ever fallen so tamely before.’ In spite of himself, he felt ‘shame-faced with triumph’.

Afterwards, recalled Lawrence, there was a luncheon at General Shea’s headquarters, which was spoiled when the French envoy Picot made a bid for France to share Jerusalem. ‘And tomorrow, my dear general,’ he told Allenby in his ‘fluting voice’, ‘I’ll take the necessary steps to set up civil government in this town.’

A silence followed. Salad, chicken mayonnaise and foie gras sandwiches hung in our wet mouths unmunched while we turned to Allenby and gaped. His face grew red, he swallowed, his chin coming forward (in the way we loved) whilst he said grimly: ‘The only authority is that of the Commander-in-Chief – MYSELF!’

Lawrence flew black to join Faisal and the Sherifian Camel Corps. The French and Italians were allowed to share guard duties at the Sepulchre, but the Church was, as always, locked and unlocked by its hereditary Nusseibeh.^* Allenby placed Indian Muslim troops on guard at the Temple Mount.

After an audience with King George V in London, the white-suited Weizmann arrived in the Holy City with his Zionist Commission, assisted by Vladimir Jabotinsky, a bombastic nationalist and sophisticated intellectual from Odessa where he had organized a Jewish militia to resist pogroms. Allenby’s advance stalled just north of Jerusalem. The Ottomans were by no means finished in Palestine, and it took him almost a year to muster his forces to relaunch his offensive, so Jerusalem was a front-line city, crowded with British and colonial troops preparing for the big push. Jabotinsky and Major James de Rothschild helped recruit a Jewish Legion to serve with them, while the Sherifians, under Lawrence and Prince Faisal, keenly awaited the opportunity to capture Damascus – and spoil French ambitions.

Jerusalem was tawdry and freezing; its population had shrunk by 30,000 since 1914 to around 55,000; many were still dying of hunger and malaria, tormented by venereal diseases (the city was patrolled by 500 teenaged Jewish prostitutes); there were 3,000 Jewish orphans. Weizmann, not unlike Lawrence, was astonished by the squalor: ‘anything done to desecrate and defile the sacred has been done. It’s impossible to imagine so much falsehood and blasphemy.’ But, like Montefiore and Rothschild before him, he now twice tried to buy the Western Wall for £70,000 from the mufti. The money would pay for the rehousing of the Maghrebi Quarter. The Maghrebis were interested but the Husseinis prevented any deal.

Jerusalem’s deputy police chief, the assistant provost marshal, newly appointed by Allenby, was a great-nephew of Montefiore who would have been appointed chief if he had not been Jewish. ‘There is a great prevalence of venereal disease in the Jerusalem Area,’ reported Major Geoffrey Sebag-Montefiore, who deployed guards around the Holy Places. He raided bawdy houses, which were usually full of Australian soldiers, and had to waste much of his time investigating cases where soldiers were accused of sleeping with local girls. ‘The brothels in Jerusalem are still giving considerable trouble,’ he informed Allenby in June 1918. He moved them into an allotted area, the Wazzah, which made policing easier. In October he wrote, ‘there’s been trouble keeping Australians out of brothels. A squadron now provide a picquet [patrol] for the Wazzah.’ Major Sebag-Montefiore’s reports usually read: ‘Venereal Disease is rampant. Otherwise nothing of note to report.’

Among the cafés at the Jaffa Gate, Arabs and Jews debated the future of Palestine: there was a capacious breadth of opinions on both sides. On the Jewish side, this extended from the ultra-Orthodox who despised sacrilegious Zionism, via those who envisaged Jewish colonies fully integrated across an Arab-ruled Middle East, to extreme nationalists who wanted an armed Hebrew state ruling a submissive Arab minority. Arab opinion varied from nationalists and Islamicist fundamentalists who wanted Jewish immigrants expelled, to democratic liberals who welcomed Jewish aid in building an Arab state. Arab intellectuals discussed whether Palestine was part of Syria or Egypt. During the war, a young Jerusalemite called Ihsan Turjman wrote that ‘The Egyptian Khedive should be joint king of Palestine and the Hejaz,’ yet Khalil Sakakini noted that ‘the idea of joining Palestine to Syria is spreading powerfully’. Ragheb Nashashibi founded the Literary Society, demanding union with Syria; the Husseinis set up the Arab Club. Both were hostile to the Balfour Declaration.

On 20 December 1917, Sir Ronald Storrs arrived as military governor of Jerusalem – or, as he put it, ‘the equivalent of Pontius Pilate’.¹⁴

ORIENTAL STORRS: BENEFICENT DESPOT

In the lobby of the Fast Hotel, Storrs bumped into his predecessor, General Barton, in his dressing-gown: ‘The only tolerable places in Jerusalem are bath and bed,’ declared Barton. Storrs, who favoured white suits and flamboyant buttonholes, found ‘Jerusalem on starvation rations’ and remarked that ‘the Jews have as usual cornered the small change.’ He was enthused by his ‘great adventure’ in Jerusalem which ‘stands alone among the cities of the world’, yet like many Protestants he disliked the theatricality of the Church^* and regarded the Temple Mount as a ‘glorified union of the Piazza San Marco and the Great Court of Trinity [College, Cambridge].’ Storrs felt he was born to rule Jerusalem: ‘To be able by a word written or even spoken to right wrong, to forbid desecration, to promote ability and goodwill is to wield the power of Aristotle’s Beneficent Despot.’

Storrs was not the average Colonial Office bureaucrat. This imperial peacock was a vicar’s son and Cambridge classicist with ‘a surprisingly cosmopolitan outlook – for an Englishman’. His friend Lawrence, who despised most officials, described him as ‘the most brilliant Englishman in the Near East, and subtly efficient, despite his diversion of energy in love of music and letters, of sculpture, painting, of whatever was beautiful in the world’s fruit’. He remembered hearing Storrs discuss the merits of Wagner and Debussy in Arabic, German and French, but his ‘intolerant brain rarely stooped to conquer’. In Egypt, his catty barbs and serpentine intrigues earned him the nickname Oriental Storrs after Cairo’s most dishonest shop. This unusual military governor set about restoring battered Jerusalem, through a motley staff that included:

a cashier from a bank in Rangoon, an actor-manager, 2 assistants from Thomas Cook, a picture-dealer, an army-coach, a clown, a land-valuer, a bosun from the Niger, a Glasgow distiller, an organist, an Alexandria cotton-broker, an architect, a junior London postal official, a taxi driver from Egypt, 2 schoolmasters, and a missionary.

In just a few months, Storrs founded the Pro-Jerusalem Society, funded by the Armenian arms-dealer Sir Basil Zaharoff and the American millionaires, Mrs Andrew Carnegie and J. P. Morgan Jr. Its aims were to prevent Jerusalem becoming ‘a second-rate Baltimore’.

No one was more delighted than Storrs by the titles, costumes and colours of the city. He initially became friends not only with the Husseinis^* but also with Weizmann and even Jabotinsky. Storrs thought there was ‘no more gallant officer, no one more charming and cultivated’ than Jabotinsky. Weizmann agreed that Jabotinsky was ‘utterly unJewish in manner and deportment, rather ugly, immensely attractive, well spoken, theatrically chivalresque, with a certain knightliness’.

Yet Storrs found Zionist tactics ‘a nightmare, reflecting the Turkish proverb: “The non-crying child gets no milk”.’ The Zionists soon suspected that he was unsympathetic. Many Britons despised Jabotinsky and the Russian Jews swaggering around Jerusalem in paramilitary khaki belts, and considered the Balfour Declaration unworkable. A sympathetic British general handed Weizmann a book – the Zionist leader’s first encounter with the Protocols of the Elders of Zion^* – ‘You’ll find it in the haversack of a great many British officers here and they believe it,’ warned the general. Not yet exposed as a forgery, the Protocols was at its most plausible, with Britain backing Zionism and Bolshevik Russia apparently dominated by Jewish commissars.

Storrs was ‘much more subtle’, observed Weizmann. ‘He was everyone’s friend.’ But the governor protested that he was being ‘pogrommed’ and that these obstreperous ‘samovar Zionists’ had nothing in common with Disraeli. When the governor told the prime minister about Arab and Jewish complaints, Lloyd George snapped, ‘Well, if either one side stops complaining, you’ll be dismissed.’

Despite Arab alarm about the Balfour Declaration, Jerusalem was quiet for two years. Storrs supervised the restoration of the walls and the Dome, the installation of street lights, the creation of the Jerusalem Chess Club and the dynamiting of Abdul-Hamid’s Jaffa Gate watch-tower. He especially relished his power to rename Jerusalem: ‘When the Jews wished to rename Fast’s Hotel [as] King Solomon and the Arabs [as] Sultan Sulaiman [Suleiman the Magnificent], either of which would have excluded half Jerusalem, one could order it to be called The Allenby.’ He even established a nuns’ choir which he conducted himself, and tried to mediate the Christian brawling in the Church, adhering to the sultan’s 1852 division. This satisfied the Orthodox but displeased the Catholics. When Storrs visited the Vatican, the pope accused him of polluting Jerusalem by introducing ungodly cinemas and 500 prostitutes. The British never managed to solve the viciously petty feuds.^†

The actual status of Palestine, to say nothing of Jerusalem, was far from decided. Picot again pushed the Gallic claim on Jerusalem. The British had no idea, he insisted, how much the French had rejoiced over the capture of Jerusalem. ‘Think what it must have been like for us who took it!’ retorted Storrs. Picot next tried to assert French protection of the Catholics by presiding on a special throne at a Te Deum in the Church, but the scheme collapsed when the Franciscans refused to cooperate.

When the mayor died unexpectedly of pneumonia (perhaps contracted by surrendering too often in the pouring rain), Storrs appointed his brother, Musa Kazem al-Husseini. But the impressive new mayor, who had served as the governor of Ottoman provinces from Anatolia to Jaffa, gradually assumed leadership of the campaign against the Zionists. The Arab Jerusalemites placed their hopes in a Greater Syrian kingdom ruled by Prince Faisal, Lawrence’s friend. At the First Congress of Muslim–Christian Associations, held in Jerusalem, the delegates voted to join Faisal’s Syria. The Zionists, who were still unrealistically adamant that most Arabs were reconciled to their settlement, tried to appease local fears. The British encouraged friendly gestures by both sides. Weizmann met and reassured the grand mufti that the Jews would not threaten Arab interests, presenting him with an ancient Koran.

In June 1918, Weizmann travelled across the desert to meet Faisal, attended by Lawrence, at his encampment near Aqaba. It was the start of what Weizmann exaggerated as ‘a lifelong friendship’. He explained that the Jews would develop the country under British protection. Privately, Faisal saw a big difference between what Lawrence called ‘the Palestine Jews and the colonist Jews: to Faisal the important point is that the former speak Arabic and the latter German Yiddish’. Faisal and Lawrence hoped that the Sherifians and Zionists could cooperate to build the kingdom of Syria. Lawrence explained: ‘I look upon the Jews as the natural importers of Western leaven so necessary for countries in the Near East.’ Weizmann recalled that Lawrence’s ‘relationship to Zionism was a very positive one’, as he believed that ‘the Arabs stood to gain much from a Jewish Homeland’.

At their oasis summit, Faisal ‘accepted the possibility of future Jewish claims to territory in Palestine’. Later, when the three men met again in London, Faisal agreed that Palestine could absorb ‘4–5 million Jews without encroaching on the rights of the Arab peasantry. He did not think for a moment there was any scarcity of land in Palestine,’ and approved a Jewish majority presence in Palestine within the Kingdom of Syria – providing he received the crown. Syria was the prize and Faisal was happy to compromise to secure it.

Weizmann’s diplomacy at first bore fruit. He had joked that ‘a Jewish state without a university is like Monaco without the casino’, so on 24 July 1918 Allenby drove him in his Rolls-Royce up Mount Scopus. There the foundation-stones were laid for the Hebrew University by the mufti, the Anglican bishop, two chief rabbis and Weizmann himself. But observers noticed that the mufti looked sick at heart. In the distance, the Ottoman artillery boomed as the guests sang ‘God Save the King’ and the Zionist anthem Hatikvah. ‘Below us lay Jerusalem,’ said Weizmann, ‘gleaming like a jewel.’

The Ottomans were still fighting powerfully in Palestine, while on the Western Front there was as yet no sign of victory. During these months, Storrs was sometimes told by his manservant that ‘a Bedouin’ was waiting for him. He would find Lawrence there, reading his books. The English Bedouin then disappeared just as mysteriously. In Jerusalem that May, Storrs introduced Lawrence to the American journalist Lowell Thomas, who thought ‘he might be one of the younger apostles returned to life’. Thomas would later help create the legend of Lawrence of Arabia.

Only in September 1918 did Allenby retake the offensive, defeating the Ottomans at the Battle of Megiddo. Thousands of German and Ottoman prisoners were marched through the streets of Jerusalem. Storrs celebrated ‘by playing upon my Steinway a medley of “Vittoria” from La Tosca, Handel’s Marches from Jephthah and Scipio, Parry’s “Wedding March” from the Birds of Aristophanes’. On 2 October, Allenby allowed Faisal, King-designate of Syria, and Colonel Lawrence to liberate Damascus with their Sherifians. But, as Lawrence suspected, the real decision-making had started far away. Lloyd George was determined to keep Jerusalem. Lord Curzon later complained: ‘The Prime Minister talks about Jerusalem with almost the same enthusiasm as about his native hills.’

Even as Germany finally buckled, the lobbying had already started. On the day the armistice was signed, 11 November, Weizmann, who had an appointment arranged before this momentous development, found Lloyd George weeping in 10 Downing Street reading the Psalms. Lawrence canvassed officials in London to help the Arab cause. Faisal was in Paris to put his case to the French. But when the British and French clashed in Paris over the division of the East, Lloyd George protested that it was Britain that had conquered Jerusalem: ‘The other governments had only put a few nigger policemen to see we didn’t steal the Holy Sepulchre.’