Jerusalem: The Biography

After supporting the Revolt initially, Ragheb Nashashibi opposed the mufti both for his terror and his strategy. Nashashibi’s villa was raked with machinegun fire; a young cousin was killed watching a football game. When Fakhri Bey Nashashibi, his nephew, accused the mufti of destructive egotism, his death warrant was published in the newspapers: he was later assassinated in Baghdad. Nashashibi armed his retainers, known as ‘the Nashashibi units’ or ‘peacebands’, and they fought the mufti’s men. Arab headwear became the shibboleth of the Revolt: Husseini supporters wore the keffiyeh

checked scarf; the Nashashibis, the tarboush

of compromise. The mufti set up rebel courts to try traitors and issued rebel stamps.

In Jerusalem, the Revolt was commanded by Abd al-Kadir Husseini, thirty-year-old commander of the Holy War Army. He was the son of the late Musa Kazem Husseini (he used the nom de guerre Abu Musa), and received the best education at the Anglican Bishop Gobat’s school on Mount Zion. He had used his graduation at Cairo University to denounce British perfidy and Zionist conspiracy. After being expelled from Egypt, he organized the mufti’s Palestine Arab Party, edited its newspapers and founded, under cover of the boy scouts, his own Green Hand militia that became its military wing.

At home he was an elegant grandee with his pencil moustache and English suit but he was in his element on the run, in the field, riding shotgun, fighting. He often ‘humiliated the colonial forces around Jerusalem,’ noted Wasif Jawhariyyeh the oud

-player. He was wounded in 1936 in a battle against British tanks near Hebron but after his wounds were treated in Germany, he returned to fight on from his base in John the Baptist’s village, Ein Kerem. In the city, he organized the assassination of a British police chief. Wounded again in RAF strafing, Husseini’s admirers regarded him as an Arab knight who eschewed luxury to fight amongst Arab peasants against infidel intruders – but his Palestinian enemies regarded him as one of the worst of the mufti’s warlords, whose henchmen terrorized villages that did not support the Husseinis.

On 26 September 1937, the British district commissioner in Galilee, Lewis Andrews, was assassinated. On the 12th, the mufti escaped from Jerusalem dressed as woman, an undignified exit that weakened his power in Palestine. In exile in Lebanon, he directed operations in a war that was still escalating. He mercilessly enforced obedience to himself personally and his rigidly intransigent policies.

The British were struggling to hold Palestine: Nablus, Hebron, swathes of Galilee were often out of control – and they even lost the Old City for short periods. The British recruited Jewish auxiliaries from the Haganah to join their so-called Jewish Settlement Police, but the latter could scarcely defend their far-flung villages. The Zionist nationalists were disgusted by Ben-Gurion’s policy of restraint. The Irgun Zvai Leumi, the National Military Organization, still only mustering about 1,500 men at the beginning of the Revolt, answered Arab attacks with atrocities against Arab civilians, tossing grenades into cafés in Jerusalem. On Black Sunday in November 1937, they launched coordinated bombings, much to the horror of Weizmann and Ben-Gurion, but recruits poured into the Irgun. Just as the Arab moderates were being annihilated by the mufti’s thugs, so the Revolt destroyed the credibility of conciliatory Jews such as Judah Magnes, the American president of the Hebrew University, who wanted a binational state with a bicameral congress of Jews and Arabs and no Jewish entity at all. Ben-Gurion’s self-restraint was soon exhausted and the British now took off their gloves to crush the Arabs by all and any means: they collectively punished villages and at one point destroyed a whole neighbourhood of Jaffa. In June 1937, they brought in the death penalty for anyone bearing arms. In October, Sir Charles Tegart, who had stringently policed Calcutta for thirty years, arrived in Jerusalem. He built fifty ‘Tegart forts’, erected security fences around the borders and took charge of counter-insurgency and intelligence, creating Arab Investigation Centres. Tegart ran a school in west Jerusalem to instruct his interrogators how to torture suspects – including the ‘water-can’ technique in which prisoners had water forced down their noses from coffeepots, a method now known as ‘water-boarding’ – until the city governor Keith-Roach demanded it be moved. An RAF officer, Arthur Harris – later famed as the ‘Bomber’ of Dresden – supervised air attacks on rebel villages. Yet as the crisis with Hitler developed in Europe, the British could not bring in enough troops to destroy the Revolt, so they needed more Jewish help.