Jerusalem

by Simon Sebag Montefiore

  The mufti turned back the entire Nabi Musa procession and denounced this wicked Ottoman and British conspiracy. A mob, reinforced by the pilgrims of Nabi Musa, raced to defend the Noble Sanctuary. Captain Parker and his friends galloped for their lives to Jaffa. The crowd, which for the one and only time combined Muslims and Jews, both equally outraged, tried to lynch Sheikh Khalil and Macasadar whose lives were saved only when the Ottoman garrison intervened and arrested them. They and Parker’s police guards were all imprisoned in Beirut. In Jaffa, Monty Parker just made it on board the Water Lily. But the police there were alerted that he might have the Ark of the Covenant about his person. They searched him and his baggage, but found no Ark. Parker knew he had to escape—so, bamboozling the Ottoman gendarmes by playing the English gentleman, he illuminated the Water Lily and announced that he was going “to hold a reception on board for the Jaffa officials.” He then sailed away as they were about to board.

  Back in Jerusalem, the crowds threatened to kill the governor and slaughter anyone British as rumours spread that Parker had stolen the Crown of Solomon, the Ark of the Covenant and the Sword of Muhammad. The governor was in hiding for fear of his life. By the morning of 19 April, the London Times reported, “there was a tremendous row throughout the city. Shops closed, peasants bolting out of the place and rumours spreading.” The Christians were terrified that “Mahomedan pilgrims from Nabi Musa” were coming “to assassinate all Christians.” Simultaneously the Muslims were petrified that “8,000 Russian pilgrims were armed to massacre the Mahomedans.” All sides believed that “the Solomonic regalia” had been “transferred to Captain Parker’s yacht.”

  Europeans stayed indoors and locked their gates. “The wrath of the people of Jerusalem was so great,” remembered Bertha Spafford, “that patrols were posted on every street.” Then on the last day of the Nabi Musa, with 10,000 Jerusalemites on the Temple Mount, the mob “stampeded. A fearful panic ensued, peasant women and pilgrims pouring out of the walls and running toward the city gates crying ‘Massacre!’ ” Every family armed itself and barricaded its home. The “ ‘Parker fiasco,’ ” wrote Spafford, “came nearer causing anti-Christian riots and even massacre than anything that had happened during our long residence in Jerusalem.” The New York Times informed the world: “Gone with Treasure that was Solomon’s. English Party Vanishes on Yacht After Digging under Mosque of Omar: said to have found king’s crown. Turkish Government Sends High Officials to Jerusalem to Investigate!”

  Monty Parker, who never grasped the gravity of all this, sailed back to Jaffa that autumn but was advised not to land “or else there might be more trouble.” He told the syndicate that he would “proceed to Beirut” to visit the prisoners. His plan was then to go on: “To Jerusalem to quiet the press and get hold of the Notables to see a little bit of reason. Once all is quiet, get the Governor to write to the Grand Vizier and say it’s safe for us to return!” Jerusalem never did “see a little bit of reason” but Parker kept trying until 1914.f

  There were diplomatic complaints between London and Istanbul, Jerusalem’s governor was sacked, Parker’s accomplices were tried but acquitted (because nothing had been stolen), the money was gone, the treasure chimerical, and the “Parker fiasco” brought down the curtain on fifty years of European archaeology and imperialism.6

  a There would be at least thirty-four different plans in locations as diverse as Alaska, Angola, Libya, Iraq and South America. The plan for Alaska during the Second World War was satirized by Michael Chabon in his thriller, The Yiddish Policeman’s Union. Politicians from Churchill and FDR to Hitler and Stalin pursued other plans: before attacking the Soviet Union in 1941, Hitler planned to deport the Jews to a death-colony in Madagascar. During the 1930s and 1940s, Churchill proposed a Jewish homeland in Libya, while in 1945, his colonial secretary Lord Moyne suggested East Prussia for the Jews. As we will see, Stalin actually set up a Jewish homeland and during the 1940s considered a Jewish Crimea.

  b Ironically, while Westerners reread the superficial memoirs of European visitors, this superlative chronicle of the city, covering forty years up to the creation of Israel and beyond, is still published only in Arabic.

  c Sergei himself, patron of the Russian presence, was long dead. In 1905, he finally resigned his post as governor-general of Moscow, but was blown to smithereens by terrorists within the Kremlin. His wife, Ella, rushed outside and crawled across the ground collecting the body parts of her husband, though only an armless chunk of torso and a fragment of the skull and jaw were identifiable. She visited his killer in prison before his execution. Afterwards she succeeded Sergei as president of the Palestine Society, which Nicholas II now personally supervised. But Ella fell out with her sister Empress Alexandra over the growing power of Rasputin. And tragically, she would return to Jerusalem (see footnote on p. 465).

  d On his return to Russia, Rasputin resumed his intimate role in the imperial family. He published My Thoughts and Reflections: Brief Description of a Journey to the Holy Places in the midst of the Great War in 1915 when Nicholas II was commanding the Russian army, leaving Alexandra, advised by Rasputin, as effective ruler of the home front—with disastrous consequences. He was illiterate; the book reads as if it had been dictated, and it was said that the empress herself corrected it. Designed to promote his image as a respectable pilgrim when he was at the height of his power and unpopularity, it was too late: he was assassinated shortly afterwards.

  e Parker’s friends were Captain Clarence Wilson; Major Foley, who had participated in the Jameson Raid in Transvaal; the Hon. Cyril Ward, third son of the Earl of Dudley; Captain Robin Duff, cousin of the Duke of Fife; and Captain Hyde Villiers, cousin of the Earl of Jersey; along with the Scandinavians Count Herman Wrangel and a certain van Bourg, a mystic who irritated the group when he suggested that the treasure might actually be on Mount Ararat, not in Jerusalem at all.

  f The full story of Parker is told here for the first time, based not only on his letters and accounts but also Juvelius’ prophecies. Even in 1921, Parker’s agents in Jerusalem were still suing him for unpaid fees. The Flashman-esque Parker skulked at headquarters and avoided the trenches in the Great War, never married but kept multiple mistresses, inherited the earldom of Morley and the stately home in 1951 and proudly told his family that he meant to spend every penny of his inheritance. Even in old age, he remained in the words of one of the family “a vain, venal, unreliable blacksheep who left nothing, a namedropper and boaster.” He lived until 1962, but he never mentioned Jerusalem and there were no papers—until in 1975 the Parker lawyers found a file that they returned to the Sixth Earl of Morley. For many years, the papers were forgotten, but the earl and his brother Nigel Parker kindly made them available to this author. Juvelius, becoming a librarian in Vyborg, wrote a novel based on the story and died of cancer in 1922. This episode left little trace in Jerusalem, but in the tunnels of Ophel, now the site of Ronny Reich’s excavation of those huge Canaanite towers, a small cave leads to an abandoned bucket that once belonged to Monty Parker.

  CHAPTER 44

  World War

  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.”a

  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 percent 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.”b

  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.