Jerusalem: The Biography

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 per cent 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.