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.e
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
a They took the name of the dynasty from Hashem, great-grandfather of the Prophet. They were descended from Muhammad through his daughter Fatima and grandson Hassan, hence their title of sherif. They called themselves the Hashemites, the British called them the Sherifians.
b At first Sykes had considered giving Jerusalem to Russia whose pilgrims had dominated the city until the war. Russia had already been promised Istanbul to which Sykes–Picot added swathes of eastern Anatolia, Armenia and Kurdistan.
c Hoess, the future SS Commandant of Auschwitz, where millions of Jews were gassed and cremated during the Holocaust, was considering a career in the Catholic priesthood. Jerusalem “played a decisive part in my subsequent renunciation of my faith. As a devout Catholic, I was disgusted by the cynical manner in which trade in allegedly holy relics was carried on by the representatives of the many churches there.” Wounded in the knee and awarded the Iron Cross, Hoess, who “shunned all demonstrations of affection,” was seduced in Jerusalem by one of his German nurses: “I fell under the magic spell of love.” He was hanged in April 1947. By coincidence an “obstreperous” young German boy, helping the American Colony with its Casualty Clearing Station near the Notre Dame, was the son of the German Vice Consul: Rudolf Hess was the future deputy Führer of Nazi Germany, who flew to Scotland on an insane peace mission in 1941 and spent the rest of his life as a prisoner.
d In one of Disraeli’s most popular novels, Tancred, a duke’s son travels to Jerusalem where a Jew says, prophetically, “The English will take this city; they will keep it.”
e Lloyd George’s mission was to win the war and everything else was subordinate to that. So it was no surprise that he was also considering a fourth Middle Eastern option: he was negotiating indirectly and very secretly with the Three Pashas over a separate Ottoman peace that would betray Jews, Arabs and French by leaving Jerusalem under the sultan. “Almost the same week that we’ve pledged ourselves to secure Palestine as a national home for the Jewish People,” wrote an exasperated Curzon, “are we to contemplate leaving the Turkish flag flying over Jerusalem?” The talks came to nothing.
CHAPTER 46
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 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.a
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 fe
ar ruling all.”b 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,c 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 his 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 north-western 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.d 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 amateur 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.e “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 “fluti
ng 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.f 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 Page 57
