Jerusalem

by Simon Sebag Montefiore

  King Hussein appointed Anwar Nusseibeh as governor and custodian of the Sanctuaries. The Nusseibehs were more prominent than they had been for many centuries: Anwar at times served as Jordanian defence minister, his brother Hazem as foreign minister. All of the Families had lost their money and their olive groves, but many continued to live in their villas in Sheikh Jarrah. Anwar Nusseibeh now lived opposite the American Colony in an old-style villa with “Persian carpets, gold-embossed academic degrees, crystal decanters for after-dinner drinks and dozens of tennis trophies.” Nusseibeh had to practise “a tolerant ecumenicalism,” praying at al-Aqsa every Friday and every Easter leading his whole family to join “the high clergy in robes holding golden crosses to circle the Holy Sepulchre three times,” as his son Sari recalled. “My brothers and I liked this [Easter celebration] the most because the Christian girls were the prettiest in town.” But the Temple Mount itself was quiet. “There were few Muslim visitors to the Haram,” noticed Oleg Grabar, the pre-eminent scholar of Jerusalem, who started to explore the city during those years.

  Sari Nusseibeh investigated the Old City, “full of smug shopkeepers with their golden pocketwatches, old women hawking wares, whirling dervishes” and cafés resonating “with the bubbling sound of people smoking water pipes.” Jordanian Jerusalem was, observed Eugene Bird, the U.S. vice-consul, a tiny world: “I’ve never seen such a small big town before. The eligible society restricted it to about 150 people.” Some of the Families embraced tourism: the Husseinis opened Orient House as a hotel. The white-haired Bertha Spafford converted her American Colony into a luxury hotel and the brooch-wearing grande dame herself became one of the sights of the city, having known everybody from Jemal Pasha to Lawrence of Arabia: she even featured twice on the British television show This Is Your Life.d Katy Antonius had returned and set up an orphanage in the Old City and, in her home, “an upscale restaurant-cum-salon” named Katakeet after a local gossip column. She was “something out of Eliot’s Cocktail Party,” wrote the U.S. vice-consul; “she’s gossipy and thoroughly affected.” Always in “the latest fashions and a string of pearls, black hair cut fairly short” with “a distinctive white streak,” she was, thought the vice-consul’s son, the writer Kai Bird, “part dragon-lady and part-flirt.” But she had not lost her political anger, remarking: “Before the Jewish State, I knew many Jews in Jerusalem. Now I will slap the face of any Arab friend who tries to trade with a Jew. We lost the first round; we haven’t lost the war.”

  The Great Powers had always backed their own sects so it was no surprise that the Cold War was waged furtively beneath the robes and behind the altars of Jerusalem “as ardently as in the back alleys of Berlin,” that other divided city. U.S. Vice-Consul Bird advised the CIA to contribute $80,000 to repair the golden onion-domes of Grand Duke Sergei’s Church of Mary Magdalene. If the CIA did not pay, the KGB just might. Russian Orthodoxy was divided between the CIA-backed Church based in New York and the KGB-backed Soviet version in Moscow. The Jordanians, staunch American allies, gave their Russian churches to the anti-Communist Church, while the Israelis, remembering that Stalin had been the first to recognize their new state, granted their Russian properties to the Soviets, who set up a mission in west Jerusalem led by a “priest,” actually a KGB colonel who had formerly been an adviser to North Korea.

  In a backwater still dominated by “Husseinis, Nashashibis, Islamic scholars and Christian bishops, if you could ignore No-Man’s-Land and the refugee camps,” wrote Sari Nusseibeh, “it was as if nothing had ever happened.” Yet nothing was the same—and even this hybrid Jerusalem was now under threat. The rise of Nasser, President of Egypt, changed everything, imperilling King Hussein and risking his very possession of Jerusalem.

  a But Ragheb Nashashibi was dying of cancer. The king visited him in the Augusta Victoria Hospital. “In this building,” said Abdullah, “in the spring of 1921, I had my first meeting with Winston Churchill.” In April 1951, Nashashibi died and was buried in a small tomb near his villa—which was later knocked down to build the Ambassador Hotel.

  b The largest court, the Ger, named after a village in Poland and ruled by the Alter family, wear shtreimel fur hats; the Belzers, from Ukraine, wear kaftans and fur hats; the Breslavers worship with mystic and exhibitionistic dancing and singing, and are known as the “Hasidic hippies.”

  c In 1957, Yad Vashem, “A Place and a Name,” the memorial to the 6 million Jews killed in the Holocaust, was created on Mount Herzl. In 1965, the Israel Museum was opened, followed by the new Knesset, both funded by James de Rothschild who had helped recruit the Jewish Legion in Allenby’s army.

  d Bertha Spafford Vester died in 1968 but she features in the 2010 movie Miral, based on the novel by Rula Jebreal, played by Vanessa Redgrave.

  CHAPTER 53

  Six Days

  1967

  NASSER AND HUSSEIN: COUNTDOWN TO WAR

  Born in obscurity, Nasser was the beau idéal of the Arab statesman—a young officer wounded in the Israeli encirclement of 1948 and determined to restore Arab pride. He became the most popular Arab leader for centuries, yet he also ruled as a dictator, supported by the secret police. Known as El Rais—the Boss—across the Arab world, Nasser promulgated a socialist pan-Arabism that inspired his people to defy Western domination and Zionist victory and raised soaring hopes that their defeats could be avenged.

  Nasser supported Palestinian raids against Israel, which responded with increasing violence. His leadership of the most powerful Arab nation, Egypt, alarmed Israel. In 1956, he challenged the vestiges of the Anglo-French empires by nationalizing the Suez Canal and backing the Algerian rebels against France. London and Paris, determined to destroy him, made a secret alliance with Ben-Gurion. The successful Israeli attack on Sinai, planned by Chief of Staff Dayan, provided the Anglo-French pretext to invade Egypt, ostensibly to separate the two neighbours. However, Britain and France lacked the power to sustain this last imperial adventure: the United States forced them to withdraw. Soon afterwards, King Hussein dismissed Glubb as commander of his army. Nineteen-fifty-six was the twilight of British Middle Eastern imperium and the dawn of American ascendancy.

  Nasser targeted the two Hashemite kingdoms, where his pan-Arabist radicalism was increasingly popular on the streets and in the officer corps. In 1958, Hussein’s cousin and schoolfriend Faisal II of Iraq was murdered in a military coup. The family had been kings of the Arabs, Hejaz, Syria, Palestine, Iraq—and Hussein was now the last royal Hashemite. Nasser officially merged Egypt with Syria in the United Arab Republic, encircling Israel and dominating Jordan, but his UAR, which twice fell apart and was twice put together again, remained fragile.

  “Growing up in Jerusalem was like being in a fairy tale invaded by Detroit and modern armies, though its magical quality remained, and the dangers merely added to the mysteries,” wrote Sari Nusseibeh. Gradually “Jerusalem recovered much of the life it had lost in 1948,” again becoming the “world capital of pilgrimage.” In 1964, King Hussein regilded the lead of the Dome of the Rock that had been a dull grey for centuries in preparation for the pilgrimage of Pope Paul VI. The supreme pontiff was met by Prince Muhammad and Princess Firyal, who accompanied him into the city where he was welcomed by the governor Anwar Nusseibeh. But the pope had to cross the lines at the Mandelbaum Gate like everyone else. When he asked permission to pray in the Greek chapel of Calvary, the Orthodox patriarch ordered him to make the request in writing and then turned it down. “The pope’s visit,” wrote Sari Nusseibeh, “sparked a boom”: the Husseinis and Nusseibehs knocked down their elegant villas and built hideous hotels.

  Yet King Hussein was now struggling for survival, crushed between radical Nasserite Egypt and Syria, between the Arabs and the Israelis, and between his own dynastic ambitions and the passionate bitterness of the Palestinians who felt he had betrayed them. As Nasser plotted to overthrow the king, Jerusalem and the West Bank repeatedly rioted against the Hashemites.

  In 1959, Yasser Arafat, a vete
ran of the 1948 war,a founded a militant liberation movement called Fatah—Conquest. In 1964, Nasser held a summit in Cairo that created a United Arab Command for the coming war against Israel and founded the Palestine Liberation Organization under Ahmed al-Shuqayri. That May in Jerusalem, King Hussein reluctantly opened the Palestinian Congress, which launched the PLO. The following January, Arafat’s Fatah carried out a small raid into Israel from Jordan. It was a disaster and the only casualty was a Palestinian guerrilla shot dead by the Jordanians. But Fatah’s exploit caught the Arab imagination and marked the beginning of Arafat’s campaign to place the Palestinian cause at the centre of the global stage. The rise of the pistol-packing, khaki-clad, keffiyeh-wearing radicals of Fatah had eclipsed the haughty Families, discredited by the mufti and by 1948. In a sign of the times, Anwar Nusseibeh’s son Sari joined Fatah.

  The Palestinians were losing patience with Hussein. When Governor Nusseibeh refused a royal order, the king sacked him and appointed a Jordanian in his place. In September 1965, following in his grandfather’s footsteps, Hussein secretly met the Israeli foreign minister, Golda Meir, who suggested that one day “we could put aside arms and create a monument in Jerusalem that would signify peace between us.”27

  When Ben-Gurion retired as prime minister in 1963, his successor was the sixty-seven-year-old Levi Eshkol, born near Kiev, a bespectacled plodder whose chief achievement had been founding the Israeli water utility: he was no Ben-Gurion. In early 1967, Syrian attacks on northern Israel led to a dogfight in which the Syrian air force was decimated over Damascus. Syria backed more Palestinian raids into Israel.b

  The Soviet Union warned Nasser—wrongly as it turned out—that Israel planned to attack Syria. It is still unclear why Moscow pushed this false intelligence and why Nasser chose to believe it when he had weeks to verify or disprove it. For all the strength of Egypt, his own charisma and the popularity of pan-Arabism, Nasser had been humiliated by Israeli reprisal raids and exposed by Syrian brinkmanship. He moved his troops into the peninsula to show that he would not tolerate an attack on Syria.

  On 15 May, an anxious Eshkol and his chief of staff, General Rabin, met at the King David in Jerusalem before the Independence Day parade: how should they react to Nasser’s threats? The next day, Egypt asked the UN to remove its peacekeepers from Sinai. Nasser probably hoped to escalate the crisis while yet avoiding war. If so, his actions were either hopelessly clumsy or reckless. As the Arab leadership and the crowds on the street hailed the coming extermination of the Jewish state, Eshkol dithered nervously. A crisis of foreboding and existential fear swept over Israel, which had lost the initiative to Nasser. Surviving on coffee, chain-smoking seventy cigarettes a day, aware that the survival of Israel rested on his shoulders, General Rabin started to crack up.

  RABIN: THE BREAKDOWN BEFORE BATTLE

  Nasser called the odds as he convened his Cabinet and closely questioned his vice-president and military supremo, Field-Marshal Abdel-Hakim al-Amer, a deluded, drug-taking bon vivant, who remained the president’s oldest friend.

  NASSER: Now with our concentrations in Sinai the chances of war are 50–50. If we close the Strait of Tiran, war will be 100 percent. Are the armed forces ready, Abdel Hakim (Amer)?

  AMER: On my own head be it, Boss! Everything’s in tiptop shape.

  On 23 May, Nasser closed the Straits of Tiran, the seaway to Israel’s key port of Eilat. Syria mobilized for war. King Hussein reviewed his forces. Rabin and the generals advised Eshkol to launch a pre-emptive strike against Egypt or face annihilation. But Eshkol refused until he had exhausted all political options: his foreign minister Abba Eban carried out painstaking diplomacy to prevent war—or win support if it came. Yet Rabin was tormented by guilt that he had not done enough to save Israel: “I had the feeling, rightly or wrongly, that I had to carry everything on my own. I had sunk into a profound crisis. I had eaten almost nothing for almost nine days, hadn’t slept, was smoking nonstop and was physically exhausted.”

  With its drifting prime minister, its chief of staff under sedation, its generals on the verge of mutiny and the nation itself in panic, there was nothing fake about Israel’s trauma. In Washington, President L. B. Johnson refused to back any Israeli strike; in Moscow, Premier Alexei Kosygin strongly advised Nasser to pull back from war. In Cairo, Field Marshal Amer, boasting that “This time we’ll be the ones to start the war,” prepared to attack the Negev. Just in time, Nasser ordered Amer to hold back.

  In Amman, King Hussein felt he had little choice but to join Nasser: if Egypt attacked, he had to support his Arab brother; otherwise, if Egypt lost, he would be regarded as a traitor. On 30 May, Hussein, wearing a field marshal’s uniform and packing a .357 Magnum, piloted his own plane to Cairo where he was met by Nasser. “Since your visit is a secret,” said Nasser, towering over the diminutive king, “what would happen if we arrested you?” “The possibility never crossed my mind,” replied Hussein, who agreed to place his 56,000-strong army under the Egyptian General Riyad. “All the Arab armies now surround Israel,” declared the king. Israel faced war on three fronts. On 28 May, Eshkol had given a rambling radio address that only intensified Israeli anxiety. In Jerusalem, bomb shelters were dug, air-raid drills practised. The Israelis feared annihilation, another Holocaust. Eban had exhausted diplomacy and the generals, the politicians and the public had lost confidence in Eshkol. He was forced to call in Israel’s most respected soldier.

  DAYAN TAKES COMMAND

  On 1 June, Moshe Dayan was sworn in as defence minister and Menachem Begin also joined the new National Government as minister without portfolio. Dayan, who always wore his trademark black eyepatch, was a disciple of Ben-Gurion and despised Eshkol, who privately nicknamed him Abu Jildi after a slippery one-eyed Arab bandit.

  Wingate’s pupil, chief of staff during the Suez war and now an MP, Dayan was a contradiction—an archaeologist and looter of artefacts, an avenging wielder of military might and a believer in tolerant coexistence, a vanquisher of the Arabs and a lover of Arab culture. He was “supremely intelligent,” recalls his friend Shimon Peres, “his mind was brilliant and he never said a foolish thing.” His fellow general Ariel Sharon thought Dayan “would wake up with a hundred ideas. Of them ninety-five were dangerous; three more were bad; the remaining two however were brilliant.” He “despised most people,” recalled Sharon, “and took no pains to conceal it.” His critics called him “a partisan and adventurer” and Dayan once admitted to Peres, “Remember one thing: I am unreliable.”

  Dayan radiated the charisma of the new dashing Jew “not because he followed rules,” says Peres, “but because he discarded them with ability and charm.” A classmate described him as “a liar, a braggart, a schemer, and a prima donna and in spite of that, the object of deep admiration.” He was a loner without friends, an inscrutable showman and a priapic womanizer, which Ben-Gurion excused because Dayan was “cast from biblical material” like King David—or Admiral Nelson: “You have to get used to it,” he told Dayan’s heartbroken wife, Ruth. “Great men’s private and public lives are often conducted on parallel planes that never meet.”

  As Eban reported that America did not approve military action, but nor would it move to prevent it, Dayan showed his cool grasp of strategy. He stressed that Israel had to strike the Egyptians at once while avoiding any confrontation with Jordan. His Jerusalem commander Uzi Narkiss challenged him: what if Jordan attacked Mount Scopus? “In that case,” replied Dayan drily, “bite your lip and hold the line!”

  Nasser already believed he had won a bloodless victory but the Egyptians continued to plan their attack in Sinai. The Jordanians, backed by an Iraqi brigade, drew up Operation Tariq to encircle Jewish west Jerusalem. The Arab world, now fielding 500,000 men, 5,000 tanks and 900 planes, had never been so united. “Our basic aim will be the destruction of Israel,” said Nasser. “Our goal,” explained President Aref of Iraq, “is to wipe Israel off the face of the map.” The Israelis fielded 275,000 men, 1,100 tanks and 200
planes.

  At 7:10 a.m. on 5 June, Israeli pilots surprised and wiped out the Egyptian air force. At 8:15, Dayan ordered the Israeli Defence Forces into Sinai. In Jerusalem, General Narkiss waited nervously, fearful that the Jordanians would take the vulnerable Mount Scopus and encircle the 197,000 Jews in west Jerusalem, but he was hoping that the Jordanians would make only a symbolic contribution to the Egyptian war. Just after 8 a.m., the air-raid sirens rang. The Dead Sea Scrolls were securely stored. Reservists were called up. Three times, Israel warned King Hussein, through the U.S. State Department, the UN in Jerusalem and the British Foreign Office, that “Israel will not, repeat not, attack Jordan if Jordan maintains the quiet. But if Jordan opens hostilities, Israel will respond with all its might.”

  “Your Majesty, the Israeli offensive has begun in Egypt,” King Hussein’s aide-de-camp informed him at 8:50 a.m. Telephoning headquarters, Hussein learned that Field Marshal Amer had smashed Israeli forces and was successfully counter-attacking. At 9 a.m., Hussein entered the headquarters to find that his Egyptian general Riyad had ordered attacks on Israeli targets and the seizure of Government House in south Jerusalem. Nasser called to confirm Egyptian victories and the destruction of the Israeli air force.

  At 9:30, the sombre king told his people: “The hour of revenge has come.”

  HUSSEIN, DAYAN AND RABIN: 5–7 JUNE 1967

  At 11:15 a.m., Jordanian artillery launched a 6,000-shell barrage against Jewish Jerusalem, hitting the Knesset and the prime minister’s house as well as the Hadassah Hospital and the Church of Dormition on Mount Zion. Following Dayan’s orders, the Israelis responded only with small arms. At 11:30, Dayan ordered a strike against the Jordanian air force. Watching from the roof of his palace with his eldest son, the future King Abdullah II, Hussein saw his planes destroyed.