Jerusalem: The Biography

In December 1931, the mufti emerged onto the world stage when he presided as a pan-Islamic and unrivalled national leader at his World Islamic Conference on the Temple Mount: it was his finest hour and it went to his head. He remained radically opposed to any Zionist colony in Palestine, yet his rivals, Mayor Nashashibi, the Dajanis and the Khalidis argued that conciliation would be better for Arabs and Jews. The mufti would tolerate no opposition and accused his rivals of being pro-Zionist traitors and the Nashashibis of secretly having Jewish blood. Nashashibi tried to unseat him on the Supreme Muslim Council but failed and the mufti started to exclude his opponents from all the organizations he controlled. The British, weak and unsure, leant towards the radicals instead of the moderates: in 1934, the new high commissioner, Sir Arthur Wauchope, withdrew his backing from Nashashibi and backed the election of one of the Khalidis as mayor. The rivalry between Husseinis and Nashashibis became ever more vicious.

The world was darkening, the stakes rising. The growth of Fascism made compromise seem weak, and violence not just acceptable but attractive. On 30 January 1933, Hitler was appointed chancellor of Germany.^* On 31 March, just two months later, the mufti secretly visited the German consul in Jerusalem, Heinrich Wolff, to declare that ‘Muslims inside Palestine welcome the new regime, hope for the spread of Fascist antidemocratic leadership’; he added that ‘Muslims hoped for a boycott of the Jews in Germany.’

European Jews were alarmed by Hitler. Immigration, which had slowed down, now accelerated in a way that forever changed the demographic balance. In 1933, 37,000 Jews arrived in Palestine; 45,000 in 1934. By 1936, there were 100,000 Jews in Jerusalem, compared to 60,000 Christian and Muslim Arabs.¹⁹

Just as Nazi aggression and anti-Semitism threatened Europe, and the tension in Palestine intensified,^* Sir Arthur Wauchope presided over a new Jerusalem, capital of the short-lived Golden Age of the British Mandate.

WAUCHOPE’S CAPITAL: HUNTS, CAFÉS, PARTIES AND WHITE SUITS

Wauchope, a wealthy bachelor, loved to entertain. Flanked by two scarlet-clad kavasses brandishing gilded wands, the feather-helmeted general welcomed guests to the new Government House, a baronial-cum-Moorish palace on the Hill of Evil Counsel, south of the city, with an octagonal tower, all set amid fountains, and groves of acacia and pine. The mansion was a mini English world with its parquet-floored ballroom, crystal chandeliers and a gallery for the police band, dining halls, billiard rooms, separate bathrooms for English and locals – and Jerusalem’s only ever dog cemetery for a nation of dog lovers. The guests wore uniforms or top hat and tails. ‘Money and champagne’, recalled one, ‘flowed like water.’

Wauchope’s residence was the centrepiece of a modernist Jerusalem created by the British at dizzying speed. The old Earl of Balfour himself had come for the opening of the Hebrew University on Mount Scopus, near the new Hadassah Hospital. A YMCA in the form of a phallic tower was built by the architect of the Empire State Building. The Rockefellers raised a Gothic-Moorish museum just north of the walls. King George V Avenue, with its ‘splendid shops, cafés with high chandeliers, and rich stores’, reminded a young Jewish Jerusalemite, Amos Oz, later a famous Israeli writer, of ‘that wonderful London Town I knew from films where culture-seeking Jews and Arabs mixed with cultivated Englishmen, where dreamy long-necked ladies floated in evening dress’. This was the Jazz Age in Jerusalem, where flappers combined fast cars with millenarian evangelism. ‘HAREM BEAUTIES DRIVE FORDS THROUGH JERUSALEM’ declared the Boston Herald, interviewing Bertha Spafford – who, it reported, was ‘introducing Flivvers [American cars] and Vacuum bottles to the Turk and says God not Balfour will send the Jews back to Palestine’.