Jerusalem: The Biography

In the lobby of the Fast Hotel, Storrs bumped into his predecessor, General Barton, in his dressing-gown: ‘The only tolerable places in Jerusalem are bath and bed,’ declared Barton. Storrs, who favoured white suits and flamboyant buttonholes, found ‘Jerusalem on starvation rations’ and remarked that ‘the Jews have as usual cornered the small change.’ He was enthused by his ‘great adventure’ in Jerusalem which ‘stands alone among the cities of the world’, yet like many Protestants he disliked the theatricality of the Church^* and regarded the Temple Mount as a ‘glorified union of the Piazza San Marco and the Great Court of Trinity [College, Cambridge].’ Storrs felt he was born to rule Jerusalem: ‘To be able by a word written or even spoken to right wrong, to forbid desecration, to promote ability and goodwill is to wield the power of Aristotle’s Beneficent Despot.’

Storrs was not the average Colonial Office bureaucrat. This imperial peacock was a vicar’s son and Cambridge classicist with ‘a surprisingly cosmopolitan outlook – for an Englishman’. His friend Lawrence, who despised most officials, described him as ‘the most brilliant Englishman in the Near East, and subtly efficient, despite his diversion of energy in love of music and letters, of sculpture, painting, of whatever was beautiful in the world’s fruit’. He remembered hearing Storrs discuss the merits of Wagner and Debussy in Arabic, German and French, but his ‘intolerant brain rarely stooped to conquer’. In Egypt, his catty barbs and serpentine intrigues earned him the nickname Oriental Storrs after Cairo’s most dishonest shop. This unusual military governor set about restoring battered Jerusalem, through a motley staff that included:

a cashier from a bank in Rangoon, an actor-manager, 2 assistants from Thomas Cook, a picture-dealer, an army-coach, a clown, a land-valuer, a bosun from the Niger, a Glasgow distiller, an organist, an Alexandria cotton-broker, an architect, a junior London postal official, a taxi driver from Egypt, 2 schoolmasters, and a missionary.

In just a few months, Storrs founded the Pro-Jerusalem Society, funded by the Armenian arms-dealer Sir Basil Zaharoff and the American millionaires, Mrs Andrew Carnegie and J. P. Morgan Jr. Its aims were to prevent Jerusalem becoming ‘a second-rate Baltimore’.

No one was more delighted than Storrs by the titles, costumes and colours of the city. He initially became friends not only with the Husseinis^* but also with Weizmann and even Jabotinsky. Storrs thought there was ‘no more gallant officer, no one more charming and cultivated’ than Jabotinsky. Weizmann agreed that Jabotinsky was ‘utterly unJewish in manner and deportment, rather ugly, immensely attractive, well spoken, theatrically chivalresque, with a certain knightliness’.

Yet Storrs found Zionist tactics ‘a nightmare, reflecting the Turkish proverb: “The non-crying child gets no milk”.’ The Zionists soon suspected that he was unsympathetic. Many Britons despised Jabotinsky and the Russian Jews swaggering around Jerusalem in paramilitary khaki belts, and considered the Balfour Declaration unworkable. A sympathetic British general handed Weizmann a book – the Zionist leader’s first encounter with the Protocols of the Elders of Zion^* – ‘You’ll find it in the haversack of a great many British officers here and they believe it,’ warned the general. Not yet exposed as a forgery, the Protocols

was at its most plausible, with Britain backing Zionism and Bolshevik Russia apparently dominated by Jewish commissars.

Storrs was ‘much more subtle’, observed Weizmann. ‘He was everyone’s friend.’ But the governor protested that he was being ‘pogrommed’ and that these obstreperous ‘samovar Zionists’ had nothing in common with Disraeli. When the governor told the prime minister about Arab and Jewish complaints, Lloyd George snapped, ‘Well, if either one side stops complaining, you’ll be dismissed.’

Despite Arab alarm about the Balfour Declaration, Jerusalem was quiet for two years. Storrs supervised the restoration of the walls and the Dome, the installation of street lights, the creation of the Jerusalem Chess Club and the dynamiting of Abdul-Hamid’s Jaffa Gate watch-tower. He especially relished his power to rename Jerusalem: ‘When the Jews wished to rename Fast’s Hotel [as] King Solomon and the Arabs [as] Sultan Sulaiman [Suleiman the Magnificent], either of which would have excluded half Jerusalem, one could order it to be called The Allenby.’ He even established a nuns’ choir which he conducted himself, and tried to mediate the Christian brawling in the Church, adhering to the sultan’s 1852 division. This satisfied the Orthodox but displeased the Catholics. When Storrs visited the Vatican, the pope accused him of polluting Jerusalem by introducing ungodly cinemas and 500 prostitutes. The British never managed to solve the viciously petty feuds.^†