Jerusalem

by Simon Sebag Montefiore

  Furious at Allied betrayal of the promise to grant immediate Arab independence, the princess stole military secrets from a British lover and tried to offer them to the Germans; when she was stopped at the Turkish border, she bit the officer who arrested her. When the Free French broke off her salary, she moved to Jerusalem. Still only twenty-four, she became “the Lady of the Lobbies” in the King David, staying up all night drinking her favourite whisky-champagne cocktail, seducing Palestinian grandees, more British officers (and their wives) and Prince Aly Khan. A French friend recalled: “she was all woman. Elle était diabolique avec les hommes.” As her surname was Altrash, the English women called her Princess Trash, and she so shocked her Druze compatriots that they fired shots at the screen when her first film was shown in the cinema—she was years ahead of her time. She could be her own worst enemy: she tried to throw the Egyptian Queen Mother Nazli out of the best suite while starting an affair with the royal chamberlain. A competition with an Egyptian dancer for a man culminated in the ritual mutilation of each other’s dresses. She regarded Zionism as a fashion opportunity: “Thank God for these Viennese furriers—at least it means you can get a decent fur coat in Jerusalem.” After over a year in the city, and marrying a third husband, an Egyptian playboy, in 1944 she went to Egypt to star in the movie Love and Vengeance, but before the film was finished she drowned in the Nile in a mysterious car crash arranged, it was said, by MI6, the Gestapo, King Farouk (whom she refused) or her rival, Umm Kulthum, the pre-eminent Egyptian singer. If her brother Farid was the Arab world’s Sinatra, she was its Monroe. Asmahan’s angelic singing, particularly in her hit song “Magical Nights in Vienna,” is still much loved.

  The streets teemed, crowded with American and Australian soldiers. The main challenge for the “Pasha of Jerusalem,” Governor Edward Keith-Roach, was to control the Australians, who were provided with a brothel under a Madame Zeinab in the old Hensmans Hotel in the centre of the New City. But the medical inspections completely failed to limit the spread of VD, so Keith-Roach sent “Zeinab and her motley crew out of my district.”

  In 1942, the Germans pushed deep into the Caucasus, while General Erwin Rommel’s Afrika Korps advanced on Egypt. The very existence of the Yishuv in Palestine was in jeopardy. Across the Mediterranean, in Greece, SS Einsatzkommando Afrika under SS-Obersturmbannführer Walter Rauff, had been assigned to exterminate the Jews of Africa and Palestine. “The faces of the Jews showed the grief, sadness and fear especially when the Germans reached Tobruk,” recorded Wasif Jawhariyyeh. An Arab pedlar loudly hawking sand—ramel in Arabic sounds like Rommel—made Jews fear that the Germans were approaching. “They started crying and made efforts to flee,” recalled Wasif. As his doctor was Jewish, Wasif offered to hide him and his family if the Nazis arrived. But the doctor had taken his own precautions: he showed his patient two poison-filled syringes for himself and his wife.

  In October 1942, General Montgomery smashed the Germans at El Alamein, a miracle which Weizmann compared to Sennacherib’s mysterious withdrawal from Jerusalem. But in November the first terrible news of the Holocaust reached Jerusalem: “Mass Butchery of Polish Jews!” reported the Palestine Post. Jewish Jerusalem mourned for three days, culminating in a service at the Wall.

  The British crackdown on Jewish immigration, announced in the 1939 White Paper, could not have been worse timed: while European Jewry was being slaughtered in Nazi Europe, British troops were turning back shiploads of desperate refugees. The Arab Revolt, Hitler’s Final Solution and the White Paper convinced many Zionists that violence was the only way to force Britain to grant the promised Jewish homeland.

  The Jewish Agency controlled the largest militia, the Haganah, with its 2,000-strong special forces, the Palmach, and its 25,000 militiamen trained by the British. Ben-Gurion was now the unrivalled Zionist leader, “a short tubby man with a prophetic shock of silvery hair” around his bald patch, in Amos Oz’s words, “thick bushy eyebrows, a wide coarse nose, the prominent defiant jaw of an ancient mariner” and the laser-beam willpower of a “visionary peasant.” But it was the more belligerent Irgun, under an implacable new leader, that now waged war against the British.

  a Wingate had made his name in Palestine. He was admired by Churchill who later backed his career. In 1941, Wingate’s Gideon Force helped liberate Ethiopia from the Italians and then as a major general, he created and commanded the Chindits, the largest Allied special forces of the war, to fight behind Japanese lines in Burma. He was killed in a plane crash in 1944.

  b In Greece, a princess with a special link to Jerusalem was one of those brave gentiles who protected Jews. Princess Andrew of Greece, born Princess Alice of Battenberg, great-granddaughter of Queen Victoria, risked her life by hiding the Cohen family of three while 60,000 Greek Jews were murdered. In 1947, her son Prince Philip, a lieutenant in the Royal Navy, married Princess Elizabeth, who succeeded to the throne four years later. Princess Andrew became a nun and founded her own order, like her aunt Grand Duchess Ella. She lived in London but decided to be buried in Jerusalem. When her daughter grumbled that this was a long trip for visitors, the princess retorted, “Nonsense, there’s a perfectly good bus service from Istanbul!” She died in 1969, but not until 1988 was she buried in the Church of Mary Magdalene close to her aunt Ella. In 1994, Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, attended the ceremony at Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem, that honoured his mother as one of the “Righteous among the nations.”

  c “He entered into the Nazis’ criminal delirium about ‘the Jews,’ ” writes Professor Gilbert Achcar in his book Arabs and the Holocaust, “as it burgeoned into the greatest of all crimes against humanity.” Achcar adds, “it is undeniable that the mufti espoused the Nazis’ anti-Semitic doctrine which was easily compatible with a fanatical anti-Judaism cast in the Pan-Islamic mould.” In a speech in Berlin on the 1943 anniversary of the Balfour Declaration, he said “they live rather as parasites amongst the peoples, suck their blood, pervert their morals … Germany has very clearly resolved to find a definitive solution for the Jewish danger that will eliminate the scourge that the Jews represent in the world.” In his memoirs written in his Lebanese exile, he revelled in the fact that Jewish “losses in the course of the Second World War represented more than 30 percent of the total number of their people whereas the Germans’ losses were less significant” and, citing the Protocols and the World War One “stab in the back” myth, he justified the Holocaust since there was no other way to scientifically reform the Jews.

  d In the 1930s, the emperor, known as Ras Tafar before his accession, inspired the Rastafarians, founded in Jamaica and made famous by the reggae singer Bob Marley, who hailed him as the Lion of Judah and the Second Coming of Jesus Christ. Ethiopia and Africa were the new Zion. Haile Selassie was murdered by the Marxist Dergue in 1974.

  CHAPTER 50

  The Dirty War

  1945–1947

  MENACHEM BEGIN: THE BLACK SABBATH

  “I fight; therefore I am,” said Menachem Begin, adapting Descartes. Born in Brest-Litovsk, this child of the shtetl had joined Jabotinsky’s Betar movement in Poland, but he had clashed with his hero, throwing out his subtleties, to forge his own harsher ideology of military Zionism—a “war of liberation against those who hold the land of our fathers,” combining maximalist politics with emotional religion. After the Nazis and Soviets had carved up Poland at the start of the Second World War, Begin was arrested by Stalin’s NKVD and sentenced to the Gulag as a British spy: “What became of this British agent?” he joked. “He soon had on his head the largest reward offered by the British police.”

  Released after Stalin’s 1941 pact with the Polish leader General Sikorski, Begin joined the Polish Army which brought him via Persia to Palestine. Formed in the dark continent of Stalin’s meatgrinder and Hitler’s slaughterhouse—in which his parents and brother perished—he came from a harsher school than Weizmann or Ben-Gurion: “It’s not Masada,” he said, “but Modin [where the Maccabe
es started their rebellion] that symbolizes the Hebrew revolt.” Jabotinsky had died of a heart attack in 1940 and now in 1944, Begin was appointed commander of the Irgun with its 600 fighters. The older Zionists regarded Begin as “plebeian or provincial.” With his rimless glasses, “soft restless hands, thinning hair and wet lips,”a Begin looked more like a provincial Polish schoolmaster than a revolutionary mastermind. Yet he had “the patience of a hunter in ambush.”

  Although the Irgun had joined the Allied war against the Nazis, some extremists, led by Abraham Stern, had split off. Stern was killed by the British in 1942. But his faction, the Lehi, Fighters for the Freedom of Israel, nicknamed the Stern Gang, now launched their own revolt against the British. As Allied victory became more likely, Begin started to test British resolve in Jerusalem: the blowing of the shofar, the ram’s horn, on the Day of Atonement, had been banned at the Wall since 1929. But Jabotinsky had annually challenged the rule. In October 1943, Begin ordered the blowing of the shofar: British police immediately attacked the praying Jews, but in 1944, the British desisted. Begin took this as a sign of weakness.

  This impresario of violence declared war on Britain and in September 1944, the Irgun attacked British police stations in Jerusalem and then assassinated a CID officer as he walked through the city. Begin, nicknamed the Old Man (the same nickname enjoyed by Ben-Gurion), even though he was about thirty, descended into the underground, constantly moving address and adopting the disguise of a bearded Talmudic scholar. The British placed a £10,000 bounty on his head, dead or alive.

  The Jewish Agency condemned terrorism, but as the Allies launched the D-Day invasion of German-occupied Europe,b the Lehi twice tried to assassinate the high commissioner Harold MacMichael in the streets of Jerusalem. In Cairo that November, they killed Walter Guinness, Lord Moyne, Minister Resident in Egypt and friend of Churchill, who had tactlessly suggested to Ben-Gurion that the Allies should establish a Jewish state in East Prussia, instead of Zion. Churchill called the Zionist extremists the “vilest gangsters.” Ben-Gurion condemned the murders and, during 1944–45, helped the British hunt down the Jewish “dissident” militias—300 insurgents were arrested. The Zionists called this “la saison,” the hunting season.

  On 8 May 1945, Victory in Europe Day, the new high commissioner, Field Marshal Viscount Gort, took the salute outside the King David Hotel and issued an amnesty for Jewish and Arab political prisoners while Jerusalemites partied. However, the reality of sectarian politics reared up again the next day: both Jews and Arabs demonstrated—and both were already effectively boycotting the city’s mayoralty.

  In Britain, Churchill was defeated in the general election. The new prime minister, Clement Attlee, had adopted William Blake’s anthem as his Labour Party campaign song, promising his people a “New Jerusalem”—though he proved quite incapable of governing the old one.

  The British anxiously steeled themselves for the coming struggle. Should the city with 100,000 Jews, 34,000 Muslims and 30,000 Christians be a British-run State of Jerusalem, as suggested by MacMichael, or partitioned, with the holy sites run by the British, as proposed by Gort? Either way, the British were determined to stop Jewish immigration into Palestine—even though many of the immigrants were survivors of Hitler’s death-camps. Now confined in miserable Displaced Person camps across Europe, shiploads of desperate Jewish refugees were harassed and turned away by British forces. The Exodus was stormed by the British, who roughed up its refugees, many of them death-camp survivors (three of whom were killed), and then, with scarcely credible insensitivity, sent them back to camps in Germany. Even the moderate Jewish Agency found this morally repugnant.

  Ben-Gurion, Begin and the Lehi therefore agreed to form a United Resistance Command to smuggle in Jewish immigrants from Europe and coordinate the struggle against the British, attacking trains, airfields, army bases and police stations across the country. But the two small factions paid only lip-service to the more moderate Haganah. The Russian Compound, its majestic hostels now converted into a police stronghold, was a favoured target of the Irgun. On 27 December, they destroyed the CID police headquarters, the former Nikolai pilgrims hostel. Begin travelled by bus from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem to view his handiwork. In January 1946, the Irgun attacked the prison inside the Russian Compound which had once been the Marianskaya Hostel for female pilgrims.c

  The British, battered by these attacks, drew America into their dilemmas. The American Jewish community was increasingly pro-Zionist but President Franklin D. Roosevelt had never publicly backed a Jewish state. At Yalta, Roosevelt and Stalin had discussed the Holocaust. “I’m a Zionist,” said Roosevelt. “Me too, in principle,” replied Stalin, who boasted that he had “tried to establish a national home for the Jews in Birobidzhan but they had stayed there two or three years and then scattered.” The Jews, added that visceral anti-Semite, were “middlemen, profiteers and parasites”—but secretly he hoped that any Jewish state would be a Soviet satellite.

  FDR died in April 1945. His successor, Harry S. Truman, wanted to settle Holocaust survivors in Palestine and asked the British to let them in. Truman, raised as a Baptist, a former farmer, bank-clerk, Kansas City haberdasher, was a mediocre Missouri senator with a sympathy for the Jews and a sense of history. When the new president toured the dynamited moonscape of Berlin in 1945, he “thought of Carthage, Baalbek, Jerusalem, Rome, Atlantis.” Now his longstanding friendship with his Jewish ex-haberdashery partner, Eddie Jacobson, and the influence of pro-Zionist aides, along with “his own reading of ancient history and the Bible, made him a supporter of a Jewish homeland,” recalled his adviser Clark Clifford. Yet Truman, facing the resistance of his own State Department, was frequently irritated by Zionist lobbying and was wary of any sign of the Jewish underdogs becoming the bullying overdogs: “Jesus Christ couldn’t please them when he was on earth,” he snapped, “so how on earth could anyone expect that I would have any luck?” But he agreed to create an Anglo-American commission of inquiry.

  The commissioners stayed in the King David Hotel where one of them, Richard Crossman, a Labour MP, found “the atmosphere terrific, with private detectives, Zionist agents, Arab sheikhs, special correspondents, all sitting about discreetly overhearing each other.” At night, Arab grandees and British generals gathered at Katy Antonius’ villa. She was now alone. The Antoniuses’ decadent marriage had started to collapse at the same time as the Arab Revolt. During the war, Katy had divorced her ailing husband—who died unexpectedly just two weeks later. He was buried on Mount Zion: “Arise ye Arabs and awake” was written on his headstone. But Katy’s soirées were still legendary. Crossman, enjoying “the evening dress, Syrian food and drink, and dancing on the marble floor,” reported that the Arabs gave the best parties: “It’s easy to see why the British prefer the Arab upper class to the Jews. This Arab intelligentsia has a French culture, amusing, civilized, tragic and gay. Compared with them, the Jews seem tense, bourgeois, central European.”

  Attlee had hoped that Truman would support his policies against Jewish immigration, but the Anglo-American Commission unhelpfully recommended that the British admit 100,000 refugees immediately: Truman publicly backed their recommendations. Attlee furiously rejected American interference. The Jewish Agency stepped up the secret immigration of refugees from the Holocaust, bringing in 70,000 in three years while its Palmach harassed the British, culminating in an explosive spectacular—the Night of the Bridges.

  The British had crushed the Arabs; now they would crush the Jews. In June 1946, Viscount Montgomery of Alamein, now field marshal and Chief of the Imperial General Staff, returned to Jerusalem, complaining that “British rule existed only in name; the true rulers seemed to me to be the Jews, whose unspoken slogan was—‘You dare not touch us.’ ” But Montgomery dared, sending in reinforcements.

  On Saturday 29 June, his commander, General Evelyn “Bubbles” Barker, launched Operation Agatha, an attack on the Zionist organizations. He arrested 3,000 Jews—though failed to pick
up Ben-Gurion who happened to be in Paris. Barker fortified three “security zones” in Jerusalem, turning the Russian Compound into a fortress that the Jews nicknamed Bevingrad, after the British foreign secretary Ernest Bevin. To the Jews the operation came to be known as Black Sabbath, and Barker was at once the hated symbol of British oppression. The general was a regular at Katy Antonius’ parties. Now the hostess became his mistress: his love letters were passionate, indiscreet and hate-filled, featuring British military secrets and foam-flecked rants against Jews: “Why should we be afraid of saying we hate them?” Lehi attempted to assassinate Barker, using a bomb disguised as a baby in a pram. Menachem Begin of the Irgun, assisted by the Lehi, planned a response to Barker’s Black Sabbath to resound across the world. The Haganah, though not Ben-Gurion and the Jewish Agency, approved.