The King David Hotel was the secular temple of Mandate Jerusalem, and one wing had been requisitioned by the British administration and intelligence agencies. On 22 July 1946, the Irgun, disguised as Arabs and hotel staff in Nubian costumes, stowed milkchurns filled with 500 pounds of explosives in the basement.23
MONTGOMERY’S CRACKDOWN:
THE CASE OF MAJOR FARRAN
The Irgun made anonymous calls to the hotel, to the Palestine Post and to the French Consulate, to warn of the imminent attack so that the King David could be evacuated. But the calls were ignored—and they were too late. It is unclear if the mishandling of these warnings was by accident or design. Begin waited nearby: “each minute seemed like a day. Twelve-thirty-one, thirty-two. Zero hour drew near. The half-hour was almost up. Twelve-thirty-seven. Suddenly the whole town seemed to shudder!” The bombs shattered an entire wing of the King David, killing ninety-one, including Britons, Jews and Arabs.d Five MI5 operatives were among the dead, but the Secret Service “London Ladies” survived, staggering from the wreckage, their hair white with plaster dust, “looking like the wrath of God.” Ben-Gurion denounced the bombing; he regarded Begin as a threat to the Jewish community, and the Jewish Agency quit the United Resistance Command.
The King David bombing intensified the severity of the British counter-attack—but it succeeded in accelerating London’s retreat from the Mandate. In Jerusalem, the mixing of Jews and Arabs ceased. “It felt,” sensed Amos Oz, “as though an invisible muscle was suddenly flexed. Everyone prophesied war. A curtain had begun to divide Jerusalem.” The Jews were terrified by rumours of imminent massacre. British civilians were evacuated from Jerusalem.
In October, the Irgun blew up the British Embassy in Rome. In November, Montgomery flew back into Jerusalem. “I saw Monty at one of Katy Antonius’ parties,” remembers Nassereddin Nashashibi. The field marshal planned a harsh response to the Irgun’s outrage. A new police chief, Colonel Nicol Gray, recruited hard men, ex-policemen and former members of the special forces, to join new counter-insurgency Special Squads. Major Roy Farran DSO, MC, was a typical recruit, an Irish SAS commando whose record revealed a history of trigger-happy exploits.
On arrival in Jerusalem, Farran was driven to the Russian Compound for briefing followed by dinner at the King David Hotel. Farran and the Special Squads started to drive around Jerusalem, looking for suspects to interrogate, if not shoot on sight. These Special Squads had no experience in covert operations, no local languages or knowledge, so, unsurprisingly, Farran had been almost comically unsuccessful until, driving through Rehavia on 6 May 1947, his team spotted an unarmed schoolboy, Alexander Rubowitz, pasting up Lehi posters. Farran kidnapped the boy but, in the scuffle, dropped his trilby, marked with his ill-spelt name “FARAN.” He hoped that the scared teenager would betray bigger Lehi fish. He drove Rubowitz out of Jerusalem, down the Jericho Road into the hills, tied him to a tree, roughed him up for an hour, then he went too far and smashed his skull with a rock. The body was stabbed and stripped and probably eaten by jackals.
While Jewish Jerusalem frantically searched for the missing boy, Major Farran confessed to his superior officer at the police mess in Katamon, then suddenly disappeared, fleeing Jerusalem. There was first a cover-up, then an outcry across the world. The Lehi started to kill random British soldiers, until Farran returned to Jerusalem and gave himself up at the Allenby Barracks. On 1 October 1947, he was court-martialled in a fortified court in Talbieh, but was acquitted for lack of admissible evidence. Rubowitz’s body was never found. Farran was bundled away by two officers in an armoured car and driven into the night towards Gaza. The Lehi was determined to kill him. In 1948, a parcel, addressed to “R. FARRAN” but opened by his brother, who shared the same initial, exploded: the brother was killed.e
The case confirmed everything the Yishuv hated about the British. When the authorities condemned an Irgun man to death for terrorist offences, Begin bombed the British Officers Club in Goldsmid House, Jerusalem, killing fourteen, and pulled off a breakout from Acre Prison. When his men were flogged, he flogged British soldiers, and when his men were hanged at Acre Prison for terrorism, he hanged two random British soldiers for “anti-Hebrew activities.”
Churchill, now leader of the Opposition, denounced Attlee’s conduct of this “senseless squalid war with the Jews in order to give Palestine to the Arabs or God knows who.” Even during the war, Churchill had considered a crackdown on “anti-Semites and others in high places” among his administrators in Palestine. Now a combination of outrage at the violence of Irgun and Lehi, traditional Arabism and anti-Semitism had turned the British firmly against the Jews. British deserters and sometimes serving troops aided Arab forces.
The new high commissioner, General Sir Alan Cunningham, privately described Zionism as “nationalism accompanied by the psychology of the Jew which is something quite abnormal and unresponsive to rational treatment.” General Barker banned British troops from all Jewish restaurants, explaining that he would be “punishing the Jews in a way the race dislikes as much as any, by striking at their pockets.” Barker was reprimanded by the prime minister, but the hatred was now visceral. In Barker’s love letters to Katy Antonius, he said he hoped the Arabs would kill more “bloody Jews … loathsome people.… Katy, I love you so much.”
On 14 February 1947, Attlee, worn down by the bloodshed, agreed in Cabinet to get out of Palestine. On 2 April, he asked the newly formed United Nations to create a Special Committee on Palestine (UNSCOP) to decide on its future. Four months later UNSCOP proposed the partition of Palestine into two states with Jerusalem as an international trusteeship under a UN governor. Ben-Gurion accepted the plan, despite its unworkable boundaries. He felt that Jerusalem was “the heart of the Jewish people” but losing her was “the price paid for statehood.” The Arab Higher Committee, backed by Iraq, Saudi Arabia and Syria, rejected partition, demanding “a unified independent Palestine.” On 29 November the UN voted on the proposal. After midnight, the Jerusalemites gathered around their radios to listen in nerve-jangling silence.24
ABD AL-KADIR HUSSEINI: THE JERUSALEM FRONT
Thirty-three countries voted in favour of Resolution 181, led by the United States and the Soviet Union, thirteen voted against, and ten, including Britain, abstained. “After a couple of minutes of shock, of lips parted as though in thirst and eyes wide open,” recalled Amos Oz, “our faraway street on the edge of northern Jerusalem roared all at once, not a shout of joy, more like a scream of horror, a cataclysmic shout that could shift rocks.” Then “roars of joy” and “everyone was singing.” Jews even kissed “startled English policemen.”
The Arabs did not accept that the UN had authority to carve up the country. There were 1.2 million Palestinians who still owned 94 percent of the land; there were 600,000 Jews. Both sides prepared to fight, while Jewish and Arab extremists competed in a flint-hearted tournament of mutual savagery. Jerusalem was “at war with itself.”
Arab mobs poured into the city centre, lynching Jews, firing into their suburbs, looting their shops, shrieking “Butcher the Jews!” Anwar Nusseibeh, heir to orange groves and mansions, a Cambridge-educated lawyer, sadly watched this descent into “dust, noise and chaos” as “professors, doctors and shopkeepers on both sides traded fire with people who, under different circumstances, would have been house guests.”
On 2 December, three Jews were shot in the Old City; on the 3rd, Arab gunmen attacked the Montefiore Quarter, then a week later the Jewish Quarter, where 1,500 Jews waited nervously, outnumbered within the walls by 22,000 Arabs. Jews and Arabs moved out of mixed areas. On 13 December, the Irgun tossed bombs into the bus station outside the Damascus Gate, killing five Arabs and wounding many more. Anwar Nusseibeh’s uncle just survived the Irgun attack, seeing a “torn human limb stuck to the city wall.” Within two weeks, 74 Jews, 71 Arabs and 9 Britons had been killed.
When Ben-Gurion travelled down from Tel Aviv to meet the high commissioner on 7 December, his con
voy was ambushed on the road. The Haganah called up all reservists between the ages of seventeen and twenty-five. The Arabs prepared for war. Irregulars volunteered to fight in the various militias: Iraqis, Lebanese, Syrians, Bosnians, some were nationalist veterans of earlier struggles; others were Jihadi fundamentalists. The largest militia, the Arab Liberation Army, boasted about 5,000 fighters. On paper, the Arab forces, backed by the regular armies of seven Arab states, were overwhelming. General Barker, who had now left Palestine, gleefully predicted to Katy Antonius “as a soldier” that “the Jews will be eradicated.” In fact, the Arab League, the organization of newly independent Arab states formed in 1945, was divided between the territorial ambitions and dynastic rivalries of its members. Abdullah, freshly minted Hashemite King of Jordan, still wanted Palestine within his kingdom; Damascus coveted a Greater Syria; King Farouk of Egypt regarded himself as the rightful leader of the Arab world and hated the Hashemites of both Jordan and Iraq, who in turn loathed King Ibn Saud who had ejected them from Arabia. All the Arab leaders distrusted the mufti who, returning to Egypt, was determined to place himself at the head of the Palestinian state.
Amid so much corruption, betrayal and incompetence, Jerusalem supplied the Arab heroes of the war. Anwar Nusseibeh, disgusted by the “sordid round of intrigues and debacles,” founded the Herod’s Gate Committee with other dynasts, the Khalidis and Dajanis, to buy arms. His cousin Abd al-Kadir Husseini, who had fought the British in Iraq in 1941, then had lain low during the war in Cairo, took command of the Arab headquarters called the Jerusalem Front.
Husseini emerged as the Arab hero personified, always dressed in keffiyeh, khaki tunic and crossed bandoliers, the revolutionary scion of Jerusalem’s aristocracy, son and grandson of mayors, descendant of the Prophet, a graduate in chemistry, amateur poet, newspaper editor and a warrior of proven courage. “As a child,” says his cousin Said al-Husseini, “I remember seeing him arrive at a safe apartment in one of our houses and I can still remember his charisma and grace and that air of urgent heroic excitement that followed him everywhere. He was admired by everyone high and low.” A teenage student from Gaza named Yasser Arafat, who was proud that his mother was related to the Husseinis, served on Abd al-Kadir’s staff.
Zionist gunmen in the Jewish Quarter fired over the Temple Mount; Arabs fired at Jewish civilians from Katamon. On 5 January, the Haganah attacked Katamon and destroyed the Semiramis Hotel, killing eleven innocent Christian Arabs. This outrage accelerated the Arab flight from the city. Ben-Gurion sacked the Haganah officer in charge. Two days later, the Irgun bombed an Arab outpost at the Jaffa Gate which was denying provisions to the Jewish Quarter. On 10 February, 150 of Husseini’s militiamen attacked the Montefiore Quarter; the Haganah fought back but came under fire from British snipers in the nearby King David Hotel, who killed a young Jewish fighter there. There was still four months left of British rule but Jerusalem was already mired in a full-scale if asymmetrical war. In the previous six weeks, 1,060 Arabs, 769 Jews and 123 Britons had been killed. Each atrocity had to be avenged twofold.
The Zionists were vulnerable in Jerusalem: the road from Tel Aviv passed through 30 miles of Arab territory and Abd al-Kadir Husseini, who commanded the 1,000-strong Jerusalem brigade of the mufti’s Holy War Army, attacked it constantly. “The Arab plan,” recalled Yitzhak Rabin, the Palmach officer born in the Holy City, “was to choke Jerusalem’s 90,000 Jews into submission”—and it soon began to work.
On 1 February, Husseini’s militiamen, aided by two British deserters, blew up the offices of the Palestine Post; on the 10th, he attacked Montefiore again but was repelled by the Haganah after a six-hour gun battle. The British set up a command post below the Jaffa Gate to defend Montefiore. On 13 February, the British arrested four Haganah fighters and then released them unarmed to an Arab mob, who murdered them. On the 22nd, Husseini sent British deserters to blow up Ben Yehuda Street, an atrocity that killed fifty-two Jewish civilians. The Irgun shot ten British soldiers.
Trying to defend the Arab areas in Jerusalem, recalled Nusseibeh, “was like a worn-out water hose repaired in one place only to burst in two more.” The Haganah blew up the old Nusseibeh castle. The former Arab mayor Hussein Khalidi complained, “Everyone’s leaving. I won’t be able to hold out much longer. Jerusalem is lost. No one is left in Katamon. Sheikh Jarrah has emptied. Everyone who has a cheque or a little money is off to Egypt, off to Lebanon, off to Damascus.” Soon refugees were pouring out of the Arab suburbs. Katy Antonius left for Egypt; her mansion was blown up by the Haganah, but only after they had found her love-letters from General Barker. Nonetheless Abd al-Kadir Husseini had successfully cut off Jewish west Jerusalem from the coast.
Ironically the Jews, like the Arabs, felt they were losing Jerusalem. By early 1948, the Jewish Quarter in the Old City was under siege and defence was made more difficult by the number of non-combatant ultra-Orthodox Jews. “Well, what about Jerusalem?” Ben-Gurion asked his generals on 28 March at his headquarters in Tel Aviv. “That’s the decisive battle. The fall of Jerusalem could be a deathblow to the Yishuv.” The generals could spare only 500 men. The Jews had been on the defensive since the UN vote, but now Ben-Gurion ordered Operation Nachshon to clear the road to Jerusalem, the start of a wider offensive, Plan D, designed to secure the UN-assigned Jewish areas but also west Jerusalem. “The plan,” writes the historian Benny Morris, “explicitly called for the destruction of resisting Arab villages and the expulsion of their inhabitants” but “nowhere does the document speak of a policy or desire to expel ‘the Arab inhabitants’ of Palestine.” In some places, the Palestinians remained in their homes; in some places they were expelled.
The village of Kastel controlled the road from the coast to Jerusalem. On the night of 2 April, the Haganah seized the stronghold, but Husseini massed his militiamen (including Iraqi irregulars) to retake it. He and Anwar Nusseibeh realized, however, that they needed reinforcements. The two of them hurried to Damascus to demand artillery only to be exasperated by the incompetence and intrigues of the Arab League generals. “Kastel has fallen,” said the Iraqi commander-in-chief. “It’s your job to get it back, Abd al-Kadir.”
“Give us the weapons I requested and we will recover it,” answered Husseini furiously.
“What’s this, Abd al-Kadir? No cannon?” said the general, who offered nothing.
Husseini stormed out: “You traitors! History will record that you lost Palestine. I’ll take Kastel or die fighting with my mujahidin!” That night he wrote a poem for his seven-year-old son Faisal who, decades later, would become Yasser Arafat’s Palestinian “minister” for Jerusalem:
This land of the brave is the land of our forefathers
The Jews have no right to this land.
How can I sleep while the enemy rules it?
Something burns in my heart. My homeland beckons.
The commander reached Jerusalem next morning and mustered his fighters.
GUN SALUTES ON THE HARAM: ABD AL-KADIR HUSSEINI
On 7 April, Abd al-Kadir led 300 fighters and three British deserters up to Kastel. At 11 o’clock that night, they attacked the village but were repelled. At dawn the next day, Husseini moved forward to replace a wounded officer, but as he approached in the fog, unsure who held the actual village, a Haganah sentry, thinking the new arrivals were Jewish reinforcements, called in Arabic slang: “Up here, boys!”
“Hello, boys,” retorted Husseini in English. The Jews often used Arabic—but never English. The Haganah sentry sensed danger and let slip a volley that hit Husseini. His comrades fled, leaving him on the ground, moaning, “Water, water.” Despite attention from a Jewish medic, he died. The gold watch and the ivory-handled pistol revealed that he was a leader, but who was he?
On the radio, the exhausted Haganah defenders eavesdropped on the anxious Arabic talk of regaining the body of the lost commander. His brother Khaled assumed the command. As word spread, Arab militiamen streamed into the area on buses, donkeys and trucks a
nd retook the village, the Palmach troops dying in position. The Arabs killed their fifty Jewish prisoners and mutilated the bodies. The Arabs had retaken the key to Jerusalem—with Husseini’s body.
“What a sad day! His martyrdom depressed everyone,” recorded Wasif Jawhariyyeh. “A warrior of patriotism and Arab nobility!” On Friday 9 April, “no one stayed in their house. Everyone walked in the procession. I was at the funeral,” Wasif noted. Thirty thousand mourners—Arab fighters waving their rifles, Arab Legionaries from Jordan, peasants, the Families—attended as the fallen Husseini was buried on the Temple Mount next to his father and near King Hussein in Jerusalem’s Arab pantheon. There was an eleven-cannon salute; gunmen fired into the air and a witness claimed that more mourners were killed than had died in the storming of Kastel. “It sounded as if a major battle was in progress. Church bells rang, voices cried for revenge; everyone feared a Zionist attack,” remembered Anwar Nusseibeh, who was “despondent.” But the Arab fighters were so keen to attend Husseini’s burial that they left no garrison in Kastel. The Palmach destroyed the stronghold.
As Husseini was being buried, 120 fighters of the Irgun and Lehi jointly attacked an Arab village just west of Jerusalem named Deir Yassin, where they committed the most shameful Jewish atrocity of the war. They were under specific orders not to harm women, children or prisoners. As they entered the village, they came under fire. Four Jewish fighters were killed and several dozen wounded. Once they were in Deir Yassin, the Jewish fighters tossed grenades into houses and slaughtered men, women and children. The number of victims is still debated, but between 100 and 254, including entire families, were murdered. The survivors were then paraded in trucks through Jerusalem until the Haganah released them. The Irgun and Lehi were undoubtedly aware that a spectacular massacre would terrify many Arab civilians and encourage flight. The Irgun commander, Begin, contrived to deny that the atrocity had taken place while boasting of its utility: “The legend [of Deir Yassin] was worth half a dozen battalions to the forces of Israel. Panic overwhelmed the Arabs.” But Ben-Gurion apologized to King Abdullah, who rejected the apology.
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