Jerusalem: The Biography

BEN-GURION AND THE MUFTI: THE SHRINKING SOFA

The mufti was at the height of his prestige but he struggled to control the wide range of Arab views. There were liberal Westernizers like George Antonius, there were Marxists, there were secular nationalists and there were Islamic fundamentalists. Many Arabs loathed the mufti but the majority were becoming convinced that only armed struggle could stop Zionism. In November 1933, the ex-mayor Musa Kazem Husseini, who was no fan of his cousin the mufti, led demonstrations in Jerusalem that sparked riots in which thirty Arabs were killed. When Musa Kazem died the next year, the Arabs lost an elder statesman respected by all: ‘people wept a lot over Musa Kazem,’ wrote Ahmed Shuqayri, a later Palestinian leader, ‘whereas Haj Amin (the mufti) made a lot of people weep.’ More than a quarter of a million Jews arrived in Palestine during the second decade of the Mandate, twice as many as during the first. The Arabs, whether they were the most sophisticated of the Jerusalem elite, educated at Oxford, or whether they were the Islamicist radicals of the Muslim Brotherhood, all now sensed that the British would never halt the immigration, nor hold back the ever more sophisticated organization of the Yishuv, as the Jewish community was known. They were running out of time. In 1935, at the height of the immigration, 66,000 Jews arrived. In that morbid age when war was often regarded as a purifying national ritual, even the intellectual Sakakini and the aesthete Jawhariyyeh now believed that only violence could save Palestine. The answer, wrote Hazem Nusseibeh, was ‘armed rebellion’.

This was confronted by the ageing Weizmann, again Zionist president, but the real power lay with David Ben-Gurion, recently elected chairman of the Executive of the Jewish Agency, the highest authority for the Yishuv. Both men were autocratic and intellectual in style, dedicated to Zionism and Western democracy. But they were opposites. Ben-Gurion was a gruff working-class man of action, equipped to lead in war and peace. He lacked all small talk (except about history and philosophy) and was humourless – the only joke the diminutive Ben-Gurion told was about Napoleon’s height. Its punchline was: ‘no one was bigger than Napoleon, just taller.’ Married with two children, a dissatisfied husband, he enjoyed a discreet love-affair with a tall, blue-eyed Englishwoman in London. But he was a brooding loner and thoughtful strategist, always obsessed with the cause, who collected books, spending any spare time in second-hand bookshops. The Old Man, as he was already known, learned Spanish to read Cervantes and Greek to study Plato; when he planned statehood, he read Greek philosophy; when he made war, he read Clausewitz.

Weizmann was Zionism’s grand seigneur

, dressed in Savile Row suits, more at home in the salons of Mayfair than on the sunbeaten farms of Galilee and now well off from founder-shares in Marks & Spencer, donated by his friends, the Sieff family. ‘You’re now King of Israel,’ Ben-Gurion told him, but he would soon turn against ‘Weizmann’s regime of personal fetishism’. As for Weizmann, he knew that, unlike Ben-Gurion, he was not cut out to be a warlord, but he half respected, half disdained the younger man’s militancy. In his 600-page memoirs, he mentioned Ben-Gurion’s name just twice. Weizmann was mistaken for Lenin in looks but Ben-Gurion emulated the Bolshevik’s ruthless pragmatism.

He had started as a socialist, risen in the labour movement and had not quite lost his belief that a new Palestine should be created through the cooperation of the Jewish and Arab working classes. Ben-Gurion may have dreamed of a Jewish state but that seemed totally unlikely and remote. Since he appreciated that ‘the Arab national movement was born at almost the same time as political Zionism,’ he believed that an Arab–Jewish confederation was the best the Jews could hope for at that time. Both he and the mufti probed each other with plans for a shared state: in retrospect, a compromise was still possible. In August 1934, Ben-Gurion started to meet Musa al-Alami,^* a lawyer working for the British, and George Antonius, the writer – both moderate advisers to the mufti. Ben-Gurion proposed either a Jewish–Arab shared government or a Jewish entity within an Arab federation that would include Transjordan and Iraq. Surely, Ben-Gurion argued, Palestine was like a sofa: there was room for both. The mufti was impressed, but noncommittal. Later Alami reflected that the mufti and Ben-Gurion shared the same harsh nationalism but the Jewish leader was much more flexible and skilful. He regretted that the Arabs never produced their own Ben-Gurion. Meanwhile, the mufti and his fellow aristocrats were losing control of their movement.