Jerusalem: The Biography

The streets teemed crowded with American and Australian soldiers. The main challenge for the ‘Pasha of Jerusalem’, Governor Edward Keith-Roach, was to control the Australians, who were provided with a brothel under a Madame Zeinab in the old Hensmans Hotel in the centre of the New City. But the medical inspections completely failed to limit the spread of VD, so Keith-Roach sent ‘Zeinab and her motley crew out of my district’.

In 1942, the Germans pushed deep into the Caucasus, while General Erwin Rommel’s Afrika Korps advanced on Egypt. The very existence of the Yishuv in Palestine was in jeopardy. Across the Mediterranean, in Greece, SS Einsatzkommando Afrika under SS-Obersturmbannführer Walter Rauff, had been assigned to exterminate the Jews of Africa and Palestine. ‘The faces of the Jews showed the grief, sadness and fear especially when the Germans reached Tobruk,’ recorded Wasif Jawhariyyeh. An Arab pedlar loudly hawking sand –ramel in Arabic sounds like Rommel –

made Jews fear that the Germans were approaching. ‘They started crying and made efforts to flee’, recalled Wasif. As his doctor was Jewish, Wasif offered to hide him and his family if the Nazis arrived. But the doctor had taken his own precautions: he showed his patient two poison-filled syringes for himself and his wife.

In October 1942, General Montgomery smashed the Germans at El Alamein, a miracle which Weizmann compared to Sennacherib’s mysterious withdrawal from Jerusalem. But in November the first terrible news of the Holocaust reached Jerusalem: ‘Mass Butchery of Polish Jews!’ reported the Palestine Post. Jewish Jerusalem mourned for three days, culminating in a service at the Wall.

The British crackdown on Jewish immigration, announced in the 1939 White Paper, could not have been worse timed: while European Jewry was being slaughtered in Nazi Europe, British troops were turning back shiploads of desperate refugees. The Arab Revolt, Hitler’s Final Solution and the White Paper convinced many Zionists that violence was the only way to force Britain to grant the promised Jewish homeland.

The Jewish Agency controlled the largest militia, the Haganah, with its 2,000-strong special forces, the Palmach, and its 25,000 militiamen trained by the British. Ben-Gurion was now the unrivalled Zionist leader, ‘a short tubby man with a prophetic shock of silvery hair’ around his bald patch, in Amos Oz’s words, ‘thick bushy eyebrows, a wide coarse nose, the prominent defiant jaw of an ancient mariner’ and the laser-beam willpower of a ‘visionary peasant’. But it was the more belligerent Irgun, under an implacable new leader, that now waged war against the British.

THE DIRTY WAR

1945–7

MENACHEM BEGIN: THE BLACK SABBATH

‘I fight; therefore I am,’ said Menachem Begin, adapting Descartes. Born in Brest-Litovsk, this child of the shtetl had joined Jabotinsky’s Betar movement in Poland, but he had clashed with his hero, throwing out his subtleties, to forge his own harsher ideology of military Zionism – a ‘war of liberation against those who hold the land of our fathers’, combining maximalist politics with emotional religion. After the Nazis and Soviets had carved up Poland at the start of the Second World War, Begin was arrested by Stalin’s NKVD and sentenced to the Gulag as a British spy: ‘What became of this British agent?’ he joked. ‘He soon had on his head the largest reward offered by the British police.’

Released after Stalin’s 1941 pact with the Polish leader General Sikorski, Begin joined the Polish Army which brought him via Persia to Palestine. Formed in the dark continent of Stalin’s meatgrinder and Hitler’s slaughterhouse – in which his parents and brother perished – he came from a harsher school than Weizmann or Ben-Gurion: ‘It’s not Masada,’ he said, ‘but Modin [where the Maccabees started their rebellion] that symbolizes the Hebrew revolt.’ Jabotinsky had died of a heart attack in 1940 and now in 1944, Begin was appointed commander of the Irgun with its 600 fighters. The older Zionists regarded Begin as ‘plebeian or provincial’. With his rimless glasses, ‘soft restless hands, thinning hair and wet lips’,^* Begin looked more like a provincial Polish schoolmaster than a revolutionary mastermind. Yet he had ‘the patience of a hunter in ambush’.