Jerusalem: The Biography

The new high commissioner, General Sir Alan Cunningham, privately described Zionism as ‘nationalism accompanied by the psychology of the Jew which is something quite abnormal and unresponsive to rational treatment’. General Barker banned British troops from all Jewish restaurants, explaining that he would be ‘punishing the Jews in a way the race dislikes as much as any, by striking at their pockets’. Barker was reprimanded by the prime minister, but the hatred was now visceral. In Barker’s love letters to Katy Antonius, he said he hoped the Arabs would kill more ‘bloody Jews … loathsome people …. Katy, I love you so much.’

On 14 February 1947, Attlee, worn down by the bloodshed, agreed in Cabinet to get out of Palestine. On 2 April, he asked the newly formed United Nations to create a Special Committee on Palestine (UNSCOP) to decide on its future. Four months later UNSCOP proposed the partition of Palestine into two states with Jerusalem as an international trusteeship under a UN governor. Ben-Gurion accepted the plan, despite its unworkable boundaries. He felt that Jerusalem was ‘the heart of the Jewish people’ but losing her was ‘the price paid for statehood’. The Arab Higher Committee, backed by Iraq, Saudi Arabia and Syria, rejected partition, demanding ‘a unified independent Palestine’. On 29 November the UN voted on the proposal. After midnight, the Jerusalemites gathered around their radios to listen in nerve-jangling silence.²⁴

ABD AL-KADIR HUSSEINI: THE JERUSALEM FRONT

Thirty-three countries voted in favour of Resolution 181, led by the United States and the Soviet Union, thirteen voted against, and ten, including Britain, abstained. ‘After a couple of minutes of shock, of lips parted as though in thirst and eyes wide open,’ recalled Amos Oz, ‘our faraway street on the edge of northern Jerusalem roared all at once, not a shout of joy, more like a scream of horror, a cataclysmic shout that could shift rocks.’ Then ‘roars of joy’ and ‘everyone was singing’. Jews even kissed ‘startled English policemen’.

The Arabs did not accept that the UN had authority to carve up the country. There were 1.2 million Palestinians who still owned 94 per cent of the land; there were 600,000 Jews. Both sides prepared to fight, while Jewish and Arab extremists competed in a flint-hearted tournament of mutual savagery. Jerusalem was ‘at war with itself’.

Arab mobs poured into the city centre, lynching Jews, firing into their suburbs, looting their shops, shrieking ‘Butcher the Jews!’ Anwar Nusseibeh, heir to orange groves and mansions, a Cambridge-educated lawyer, sadly watched this descent into ‘dust, noise and chaos’ as ‘professors, doctors and shopkeepers on both sides traded fire with people who, under different circumstances, would have been house guests’.

On 2 December, three Jews were shot in the Old City; on the 3rd, Arab gunmen attacked the Montefiore Quarter, then a week later the Jewish Quarter, where 1,500 Jews waited nervously, outnumbered within the walls by 22,000 Arabs. Jews and Arabs moved out of mixed areas. On 13 December, the Irgun tossed bombs into the bus station outside the Damascus Gate, killing five Arabs and wounding many more. Anwar Nusseibeh’s uncle just survived the Irgun attack, seeing a ‘torn human limb stuck to the city wall.’ Within two weeks, 74 Jews, 71 Arabs and 9 Britons had been killed.

When Ben-Gurion travelled down from Tel Aviv to meet the high commissioner on 7 December, his convoy was ambushed on the road. The Haganah called up all reservists between the ages of seventeen and twenty-five. The Arabs prepared for war. Irregulars volunteered to fight in the various militias: Iraqis, Lebanese, Syrians, Bosnians, some were nationalist veterans of earlier struggles; others were Jihadi fundamentalists. The largest militia, the Arab Liberation Army, boasted about 5,000 fighters. On paper, the Arab forces, backed by the regular armies of seven Arab states, were overwhelming. General Barker, who had now left Palestine, gleefully predicted to Katy Antonius ‘as a soldier’ that ‘the Jews will be eradicated’. In fact, the Arab League, the organization of newly independent Arab states formed in 1945, was divided between the territorial ambitions and dynastic rivalries of its members. Abdullah, freshly minted Hashemite King of Jordan, still wanted Palestine within his kingdom; Damascus coveted a Greater Syria; King Farouk of Egypt regarded himself as the rightful leader of the Arab world and hated the Hashemites of both Jordan and Iraq, who in turn loathed King Ibn Saud who had ejected them from Arabia. All the Arab leaders distrusted the mufti who, returning to Egypt, was determined to place himself at the head of the Palestinian state.