Jerusalem: The Biography

FDR died in April 1945. His successor, Harry S. Truman, wanted to settle Holocaust survivors in Palestine and asked the British to let them in. Truman, raised as a Baptist, a former farmer, bank-clerk, Kansas City haberdasher, was a mediocre Missouri senator with a sympathy for the Jews and a sense of history. When the new president toured the dynamited moonscape of Berlin in 1945, he ‘thought of Carthage, Baalbek, Jerusalem, Rome, Atlantis’. Now his longstanding friendship with his Jewish ex-haberdashery partner, Eddie Jacobson, and the influence of pro-Zionist aides, along with ‘his own reading of ancient history and the Bible, made him a supporter of a Jewish homeland’, recalled his adviser Clark Clifford. Yet Truman, facing the resistance of his own State Department, was frequently irritated by Zionist lobbying and was wary of any sign of the Jewish underdogs becoming the bullying overdogs: ‘Jesus Christ couldn’t please them when he was on earth,’ he snapped, ‘so how on earth could anyone expect that I would have any luck?’ But he agreed to create an Anglo-American commission of inquiry.

The commissioners stayed in the King David Hotel where one of them, Richard Crossman, a Labour MP, found ‘the atmosphere terrific, with private detectives, Zionist agents, Arab sheikhs, special correspondents, all sitting about discreetly overhearing each other’. At night, Arab grandees and British generals gathered at Katy Antonius’ villa. She was now alone. The Antoniuses’ decadent marriage had started to collapse at the same time as the Arab Revolt. During the war, Katy had divorced her ailing husband – who died unexpectedly just two weeks later. He was buried on Mount Zion: ‘Arise ye Arabs and awake’ was written on his headstone. But Katy’s soirées were still legendary. Cross-man, enjoying ‘the evening dress, Syrian food and drink, and dancing on the marble floor’, reported that the Arabs gave the best parties: ‘It’s easy to see why the British prefer the Arab upper class to the Jews. This Arab intelligentsia has a French culture, amusing, civilized, tragic and gay. Compared with them, the Jews seem tense, bourgeois, central European.’

Attlee had hoped that Truman would support his policies against Jewish immigration, but the Anglo-American Commission unhelpfully recommended that the British admit 100,000 refugees immediately: Truman publicly backed their recommendations. Attlee furiously rejected American interference. The Jewish Agency stepped up the secret immigration of refugees from the Holocaust, bringing in 70,000 in three years while its Palmach harassed the British, culminating in an explosive spectacular – the Night of the Bridges.

The British had crushed the Arabs; now they would crush the Jews. In June 1946, Viscount Montgomery of Alamein, now field marshal and Chief of the Imperial General Staff, returned to Jerusalem, complaining that ‘British rule existed only in name; the true rulers seemed to me to be the Jews, whose unspoken slogan was –“You dare not touch us”.’ But Montgomery dared, sending in reinforcements.

On Saturday 29 June, his commander, General Evelyn ‘Bubbles’ Barker, launched Operation Agatha, an attack on the Zionist organizations. He arrested 3,000 Jews – though failed to pick up Ben-Gurion who happened to be in Paris. Barker fortified three ‘security zones’ in Jerusalem, turning the Russian Compound into a fortress that the Jews nicknamed Bevingrad, after the British foreign secretary Ernest Bevin. To the Jews the operation came to be known as Black Sabbath, and Barker was at once the hated symbol of British oppression. The general was a regular at Katy Antonius’ parties. Now the hostess became his mistress: his love letters were passionate, indiscreet and hate-filled, featuring British military secrets and foam-flecked rants against Jews: ‘Why should we be afraid of saying we hate them?’ Lehi attempted to assassinate Barker, using a bomb disguised as a baby in a pram. Menachem Begin of the Irgun, assisted by the Lehi, planned a response to Barker’s Black Sabbath to resound across the world. The Haganah, though not Ben-Gurion and the Jewish Agency, approved.

The King David Hotel was the secular temple of Mandate Jerusalem, and one wing had been requisitioned by the British administration and intelligence agencies. On 22 July 1946, the Irgun, disguised as Arabs and hotel staff in Nubian costumes, stowed milkchurns filled with 500 pounds of explosives in the basement.²³

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