Jerusalem: The Biography

A well-connected young counter-insurgency expert named Orde Wingate was posted to Jerusalem where he was invited to stay by High Commissioner Wauchope. Wingate observed that Wauchope ‘takes everyone’s advice and has lost all grasp of affairs’. His recommendation was to train Jewish fighters and take the insurgency to the insurgents. He would become the Zionist version of Lawrence – Weizmann called him ‘Lawrence of Judaea’. By chance, these two unconventional English Arabists were cousins.²¹

ORDE WINGATE AND MOSHE DAYAN: THE FALL OF THE OLD CITY

The son of a well-off colonial colonel with an evangelical mission to convert the Jews, raised on Bible and empire, Wingate was a fluent Arabic-speaker, and, like Lawrence, earned his spurs commanding Arab irregulars – a unit of the East Arab Corps in Sudan. ‘There was in him’, wrote Weizmann, ‘a fusion of the student and man of action that reminded me of Lawrence.’ But on arrival in Jerusalem he underwent an almost Damascene conversion, impressed by the energy of the Zionists, and repulsed by the mufti’s bullyboy tactics and the anti-Semitism of British officers: ‘Everyone’s against the Jews,’ he declared, ‘so I’m for them!’

Wingate inspected the beleaguered British troops and Jewish farms. In the depths of the night, they would receive visits from an ‘extra-ordinary figure’ wearing a Borsolino hat or a Wolseley topee, a battered Palm Beach suit and a Royal Artillery tie, who looked ‘like the kind of lowlife you saw hanging around dubious cafés in Tel Aviv’. Always armed to the teeth, the thirty-three-year-old Captain Wingate, who had ‘very piercing blue eyes, aquiline features and a faraway ascetic look with a scholarly air’, arrived in a Studebaker sedan ‘filled with weapons, maps, Lee Enfield rifles, Mills grenades – and a Bible’. Wingate decided that ‘the Jews will provide better soldiery than ours.’ In March 1938, the British commander, Sir Archibald Wavell, impressed by this ‘remarkable personality’, ordered Wingate to train Jewish special forces and deploy these so-called Special Night Squads against the rebels. Wavell did not know what he was dealing with: ‘I wasn’t then aware of the connection with T. E. Lawrence.’

Setting up headquarters in the Fast Hotel, near the Jaffa Gate, Wingate learned fluent Hebrew and was soon known as ‘the Friend’ by the Zionists – but he was regarded as an enemy by the Arabs and a reckless freak by many of his British brother-officers. Moving out of Government House, he set up home in Talpiot with his wife Lorna, who was ‘very young and very beautiful like a porcelain doll. People didn’t take their eyes off her’, recalled Ruth Dayan. Her husband Moshe Dayan, the twenty-two-year-old son of Russian immigrants, born in the first kibbutz, had (secretly) joined the Haganah and was (openly) serving in the Jewish Settlement Police, when ‘one evening, a Haganah man from Haifa turned up accompanied by a strange visitor. Wingate was a slender man, a heavy revolver at his side, carrying a small Bible. Before going on an action, he’d read the passage in the Bible relating to the place where we’d be operating.’ This military heir of the bibliolatrist evangelicals led his Night Squads against the Arab gunmen who were ‘forced to realize they could no longer find any path secure for them: they were likely to be caught in a surprise ambush anywhere.’ During the Revolt and later during the Second World War, the British trained 25,000 Jewish auxiliaries, including other commando units led by Yitzhak Sadeh, a Russian Red Army veteran who became Haganah’s chief of staff. ‘You are the sons of the Maccabees,’ Wingate told them, ‘You are the first soldiers of a Jewish army!’ Their expertise and spirit later formed the basis of the Israel Defence Forces.

In September 1938, Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain’s Munich Agreement, which appeased Adolf Hitler’s aggression and allowed him to dismember Czechoslovakia, freed British troops: 25,000 reinforcements arrived in Palestine. Yet in Jerusalem, the rebels pulled off a daring coup de main: on 17 October, they seized the entire Old City, barricading the gates, driving out British troops and even issuing postage stamps marked al-Quds. Wasif Jawhariyyeh, who lived near the Jaffa Gate, proudly saw an Arab flag fluttering from the Tower of David. A beleaguered rabbi at the Western Wall was terrorized by Arab gunmen. But on 19 October, the British stormed the gates and retook the city, killing nineteen gunmen as Wasif watched from his home. ‘I can’t describe the night of the battle with the British army and the rebels. We saw the explosions and heard the incredible smashing of bombs and bullets.’