Jerusalem: The Biography

Jerusalem still lacked the luxuries of a major city, but in 1930, she got her first world-class hotel. The majestic King David Hotel, backed by wealthy Egyptian Jews and the Anglo-Jewish financier Frank Goldsmith (father of Sir James), which instantly became the city’s stylish hub, noted for its ‘biblical style’ with Assyrian, Hittite and Muslim ornamentation, and its ‘tall Sudanese waiters in white pantaloons and red tarboush’. One American tourist supposedly believed that it was the renovated Temple of Solomon. Ragheb Nashashibi had his hair cut there every day. The hotel helped make Jerusalem a luxury resort for the rich Arabs of Lebanon and Egypt, whose decadent royal family were often in residence. Abdullah, Amir of Transjordan, stayed regularly – the King David could cope with his camels and horses. In October 1934, Churchill came to stay with his wife and his friend Lord Moyne, himself later a victim of the Palestinian conflict. Not to be outdone, the mufti built his own hotel, the Palace, using Jewish contractors, on the site of the ancient Mamilla cemetery.

When an American Jewess, a former nurse, opened the first beauty parlour, peasants stood and stared, expecting the mannequins in the window to speak. The best bookshop in town was run by Boulos Said, father of the intellectual Edward, and his brother near the Jaffa Gate, while the finest haute couture emporium belonged to Kurt May and his wife, typical German Jews fleeing Hitler. When he created the shop – the name ‘May’ was emblazoned above the door in Hebrew, English and Arab – he imported all the fixtures from Germany and soon it attracted the rich wives of Jewish businessmen and British proconsuls – and of Abdullah of Jordan. Emperor Haile Selassie and his entourage once took over the entire shop. The Mays were more cultured Germans than Zionists – Kurt had won the Iron Cross in the Great War – and they were totally irreligious. The Mays lived over the shop: when their daughter Miriam was born, she was breastfed by an Arab wetnurse but when she grew up, her parents discouraged her from playing with the Polish Jews next door who were ‘not sufficiently cultured’. Jerusalem was still small though: sometimes in spring, Miriam’s father would take her on walks out of the city to pick cyclamen on the blooming Judaean hills. Friday nights were the height of their social week: when the ultra-Orthodox Jews were praying, the Mays went dancing at the King David Hotel.

The British behaved as if Palestine were a real imperial province: Brigadier Angus McNeil founded the Ramle Vale Jackal Hounds Hunt which chased the fox and the jackal with a pack of hounds. At the Officers Club, Zionist guests noticed that all conversation was about duck shooting, if not the latest polo game or race meeting. One young officer flew into town in his own private aeroplane.

The British public schoolboys, raised on the complexities of their own aristocracy, revelled in the hierarchies of Jerusalem, especially the social etiquette required for dinner parties at Government House, where Sir Harry Luke, John Chancellor’s deputy, remembered how the toastmaster welcomed high commissioners, chief rabbis, chief judges, mayors and patriarchs: ‘Your Excellency, Your Honour, Your Beatitudes, Your Eminences, Your Lord Bishops, Your Paternity, Your Reverends, Your Worship, Ladies and Gentlemen.’

This thriving new Jerusalem, with 132,661 inhabitants by 1931, proved that British rule and Zionist immigration did help create a flourishing economy – and rising Arab immigration: more Arabs immigrated to Palestine than Jews and the Arab population of Palestine increased by 10 per cent, twice as fast of that of Syria or Lebanon.^* In ten years, Jerusalem attracted 21,000 new Arabs and 20,000 new Jews – and this was the glamorous heyday of the Families. The British sympathized with the Arab dynasties, Nusseibehs and Nashashibis, who still owned 25 per cent of the land, and who ‘fitted into the social order imported by the British as if tailor-made’, wrote Sari Nusseibeh, later the Palestinian philosopher. ‘The men belonged to the same gentleman’s society and in private English officers tended to prefer them to the Russian Jewish upstarts.’

The Families had never lived more luxuriously: Hazem Nusseibeh’s father owned two ‘palatial residences, each one with 20–30 rooms.’ The fathers had been educated in Constantinople, the sons would attend St George’s public school in Sheikh Jarrah and then Oxford. Hazem Nusseibeh, who was Sari’s uncle, recalled that ‘It was amusing to watch the effendi aristocracy of Arab Jerusalem, attired during summer in well-pressed white silk suits with polished shoes and silk ties.’ Hazem’s brother, Anwar Nusseibeh, cruised Jerusalem in a gleaming Buick, the city’s first.