Jerusalem: The Biography

The pasha paraded his 20,000 men through Jerusalem on the way to the front. ‘We’ll meet on the other side of the [Suez] Canal or in Heaven!’ he boasted, but Count Ballobar noticed an Ottoman soldier pushing his water rations in a stolen pram, surely not the mark of a daunting military machine. Jemal, on the other hand, travelled with ‘magnificent tents, hat stands, commodes’. On 1 February 1915, Jemal, moved by hearing his men singing ‘The Red Flag Flies over Cairo’, attacked the Canal with 12,000 troops; they were easily repelled. He claimed that the attack had only been a reconnaissance in force, but he failed again in the summer. Military defeat, Western blockade and Jemal’s growing repression brought desperate suffering and wild hedonism to Jerusalem. It was not long before the killing started.⁸

TERROR AND DEATH: JEMAL THE SLAUGHTERMAN

Within a month of Jemal’s arrival, Wasif Jawhariyyeh saw the body of an Arab in a white cloak hanging from a tree outside the Jaffa Gate. On 30 March 1915, the pasha executed two Arab soldiers at the Damascus Gate as ‘British spies’, and then executed the Mufti of Gaza and his son, whose hanging at the Jaffa Gate was watched by a full crowd in respectful silence. Hangings were staged at the Damascus and Jaffa Gates after Friday prayers to ensure the largest audience. Soon the gates seemed to be permanently festooned with swaying cadavers, deliberately left for days on Jemal’s orders. On one occasion, Wasif was horrified by the sadistic incompetence:

The hanging process was not studied scientifically or medically enough so that the victim stayed alive, suffering a lot and we watched but couldn’t say or do anything. An officer ordered a soldier to climb up and hang on the victim but this extra weight made the victim’s eyes bulge out of his face. This was the cruelty of Jemal Pasha. My heart cries out from the memory of this sight.

In August 1915, after uncovering evidence of Arab nationalist plots, ‘I decided’, wrote Jemal, ‘to take ruthless action against the traitors.’ He hanged fifteen prominent Arabs near Beirut (including a Nashashibi from Jerusalem), and then, in May 1916, another twenty-one in Damascus and Beirut, winning the soubriquet the Slaughterman. He joked to the Spaniard Ballobar that he could hang him too.

Jemal also suspected the Zionists of treason. Yet Ben-Gurion, sporting a tarboush, was recruiting Jewish soldiers for the Ottomans. Jemal had not quite given up on charm: in December 1915 he sponsored two unique meetings between the Husseinis and Zionist leaders including Ben-Gurion, to rally support for a joint homeland under the Ottomans. But afterwards, Jemal deported 500 foreign Jews, arrested Zionist leaders and banned their symbols. The deportations provoked uproar in the German and Austrian newspapers, whereupon Jemal called in the Zionists to warn against any sabotage: ‘You can choose. I am prepared to deport you as was done with the Armenians. Anyone who lays a finger on a single orange, I shall execute. But if you want the second option, the entire Vienna and Berlin press must be silent!’ Later, he ranted: ‘I’ve no trust in your loyalty. Had you no conspiratorial designs you wouldn’t have come to live here in this desolate land among Arabs who hate you. We deem Zionists deserving of hanging but I’m tired of hangings. [Instead] we’ll disperse you around the Turkish state.’^*

Ben-Gurion was deported, switching his hopes to the Allies. Arabs were conscripted into the army; Jews and Christians were forced into labour battalions to build roads, many of them perishing from hunger and exposure. Then came disease, insects and starvation. ‘The locusts were thick as clouds,’ remembered Wasif, mocking Jemal’s attempts to solve the plague ‘by ordering every person over 12 to bring 3 kilos of locust eggs’, since this simply led to an absurd trade in locust eggs.

Wasif saw ‘starvation spread all around the country’, along with ‘typhus, malaria, and many people died’. By 1918, the Jewish population of Jerusalem had fallen, from epidemic, starvation and deportation, by 20,000. Yet Wasif’s voice, his oud

and his ability to rustle up pretty guests for wild parties, were never more valued.

WAR AND SEX IN THE CITY: WASIF JAWHARIYYEH

Jemal, his officers and the Family grandees enjoyed a life of feverish pleasure while the Jerusalemites just struggled to survive the calamities of war. The poverty was such that young prostitutes, many of them war widows charging just two piastres a trick, patrolled the Old City. In May 1915, some teachers were sacked when they were found entertaining prostitutes during school hours. Women even sold their babies. ‘Old men and women’ – particularly the poor Hasidic Jews in Mea Shearim – ‘were bloated with hunger. On their faces and all over their bodies, slime, filth, disease and sores.’