Jerusalem: The Biography

Inconveniently, Husseini did not win the first ever election for mufti, which was won by a Jarallah. He only came fourth so the British, who prided themselves on their ‘totalitarianism tempered with benevolence,’ simply overruled the election and appointed him even though he was only twenty-six and had never finished his religious studies in Cairo. Samuel then doubled his political and financial power by sponsoring his election as president of a new Supreme Muslim Council.

Husseini belonged to the Islamic tradition; Nashashibi to the Ottoman. Both opposed Zionism but Nashashibi believed that, faced with British power, the Arabs should negotiate; Husseini, in a meandering and capricious journey, ended up as an intransigent nationalist opposing any compromise. At first, Husseini played the passive British ally, but he would ultimately reach far beyond the anti-British stance of many Arabs to become a racial anti-Semite and embrace Hitler’s Final Solution to the Jewish problem. The most enduring achievement of Samuel was to promote the most energetic enemy of Zionism and Britain. Yet one could argue that no one proved such a divisive calamity for his own people, and such an asset for the Zionist struggle.¹⁸

THE MUFTI: THE BATTLE OF THE WALL

The first generation of British proconsuls congratulated themselves that they had tamed Jerusalem. In June 1925, Samuel returned to London, declaring, with Olympian delusion, that ‘the spirit of lawlessness has ceased.’ A year later, Storrs left a peaceful, much embellished city and was promoted to the governorships of Cyprus and then of Northern Rhodesia – though he sighed, ‘There’s no promotion after Jerusalem.’ The new high commissioner was Viscount Plumer, a walrus-moustached field marshal nicknamed the Old Plum or Daddy Plummer. Thanks to cuts in his funding, the Old Plum had to keep order with fewer soldiers than Samuel, but he radiated a reassuring calm by cheerfully walking on his own around Jerusalem. When his officials reported on political tensions, he embraced ostrichism. ‘There is no political situation,’ he replied. ‘Don’t create one!’

The Old Plum retired due to ill-health but the new commissioner had not yet arrived when the ‘political situation’ duly materialized. On Kol Nidre, eve of the Jewish Day of Atonement, in 1928, the Jewish shames –

beadle – at the Western Wall (who gloried in the name William Ewart Gladstone Noah) put up a small screen to divide men and women worshippers in accordance with Jewish law. The screen and chairs for elderly worshippers had been allowed in previous years, but now the mufti protested that the Jews were changing the status quo.

The Muslims believed that the Wall was the place Muhammad tied up his steed with the human face, Buraq, during the Night Journey, yet in the nineteenth century, the Ottomans had used the adjacent tunnel as a donkey stable. Legally it had belonged to the Abu Maidan waqf dating back to Saladin’s son Afdal. Therefore it was ‘purely Muslim property’. The Muslim fear, however, was that Jewish access to the Wall would lead to a Third Temple on the Islamic Haram, the Jewish Har-haBayit. Yet the Wall – the Kotel – was Judaism’s holiest site and Palestinian Jews believed that the British restrictions, and indeed the cramped space available for worship, were relics of centuries of Muslim oppression that demonstrated why Zionism was necessary. The British even banned the blowing of the shofar – the ram’s horn – on the Jewish High Holy Days.

The next day, Storrs’ successor as governor, Edward Keith-Roach, who liked to call himself the Pasha of Jerusalem, ordered his police to raid the Wall during the Yom Kippur service, the holiest of the Jewish year. The policemen beat praying Jews and pulled chairs from under elderly worshippers. It was not Britain’s finest hour. The mufti was jubilant but warned that ‘the Jews’ aim is to take possession of the Mosque of al-Aqsa gradually.’ He therefore launched a campaign against Jewish worshippers, who were bombarded with stones, beaten up and harassed with loud music. Jabotinsky’s Betar youths demonstrated for access to the Wall.