Jerusalem: The Biography

Though he was a hero to the Jews, Wingate’s operations were increasingly regarded as counter-productive by British officers, who heard that he opened his front door to guests stark naked, and was having an affair with a Jewish opera singer. Even Dayan had to admit: ‘Judged by ordinary standards he wouldn’t be regarded as normal. [After operations] he’d sit in the corner stark naked reading the Bible, and munching raw onions.’ Wingate’s divisional commander, Major-General Bernard Montgomery, disliked his military recklessness and Zionist partisanship. Wingate, Montgomery later told Dayan, ‘was mentally unstable’. He was ordered back to the British headquarters in Jerusalem. Now the British had the forces, they no longer needed Jewish commandos.

‘I don’t care whether you’re Jews or gentiles,’ Montgomery told representatives of both sides. ‘My duty is to maintain law and order. I intend to do so.’ Montgomery declared the Revolt ‘definitely, finally smashed’. Five hundred Jews had been killed and 150 Britons, but the Revolt had taken the most terrible toll on Palestinian society which has yet to recover: one-tenth of all males between 20 and 60 had been killed, wounded or exiled. One hundred and forty-six were sentenced to death, 50,000 arrested, and 5000 homes destroyed. Around 4,000 were killed, many of them by fellow Arabs. It was just in time, as British forces were soon likely to be needed in Europe. ‘I shall be sorry to leave Palestine in many ways,’ said Montgomery, ‘as I have enjoyed the war out here.’^*

Neville Chamberlain, whose father had proposed a Jewish homeland in Uganda, decided to reverse the Balfour Declaration. If there was a war, the Jews had no choice but to back Britain against the Nazis. But the Arabs had a real choice. ‘If we must offend one side,’ said Chamberlain, ‘let us offend the Jews rather than the Arabs.’ He therefore invited both sides, and the Arab states, to a conference in London. The Arabs named the mufti as chief delegate, but since the British would not tolerate his presence, his cousin Jamal al-Husseini led one Arab delegation; Nashashibi led the moderates. The Husseinis stayed at the Dorchester, the Nashashibis at the Carlton. Weizmann and Ben-Gurion represented the Zionists. On 7 February 1939, Chamberlain had to open the conference in St James’s Palace twice, because Arabs and Zionists refused to negotiate directly.

Chamberlain hoped to persuade the Zionists to agree to a cessation in immigration, but to no avail. On 15 March, the hollowness of his appeasement of Hitler was exposed when the Führer invaded the rump of Czechoslovakia. Two days later, Malcolm MacDonald, the colonial secretary, issued a White Paper that proposed limiting Jewish land purchases and restricting immigration to 15,000 people annually for five years, after which Arabs would have a veto, Palestinian independence within ten years and no Jewish state. This was the best offer the Palestinians were to receive from the British or anyone else during the entire twentieth century, but the mufti, displaying spectacular political incompetence and megalomaniacal intransigence, rejected it from his Lebanese exile.

Ben-Gurion prepared his Haganah militia for war against the British. Jews rioted in Jerusalem. On 2 June, the Irgun bombed the market outside the Jaffa Gate, killing nine Arabs. On the 8th, the last night of his stay in Jerusalem on an Eastern tour, a young American visitor, John F. Kennedy, son of the US ambassador to London, heard fourteen explosions ignited by the Irgun, knocking out electricity across the Holy City. Many now shared General Montgomery’s view that ‘The Jew murders the Arab and the Arabs murder the Jews and it will go on for the next 50 years in all probability’.²²

THE MUFTI AND HITLER: WORLD WAR IN JERUSALEM

As Adolf Hitler seemed to carry all before him, the mufti of Jerusalem saw an opportunity to strike at their common enemies, the British and the Jews. France had collapsed, the Wehrmacht was advancing towards Moscow, and Hitler had started the killing of 6 million Jews in his Final Solution.^* The mufti had moved to Iraq to direct anti-British intrigues but, after organizing yet more defeats, had to flee to Iran and then, pursued by British agents, he embarked on an adventurous voyage that finally brought him to Italy. On 27 October 1941, Benito Mussolini received him at the Palazzo Venetia in Rome, backing the creation of a Palestinian state: if the Jews wanted their own country, ‘they should establish Tel Aviv in America’, said Il Duce. ‘We have here in Italy 45,000 Jews and there will be no place for them in Europe.’ The mufti – ‘very satisfied by the meeting’ – flew to Berlin.