Jerusalem: The Biography

Arab vengeance was swift. On 14 April, a convoy of ambulances and food trucks set off for the Hadassah Hospital on Mount Scopus. Bertha Spafford watched as ‘a hundred and fifty insurgents, armed with weapons varying from blunderbusses and old flintlocks to modern Sten and Bren guns, took cover behind a cactus patch in the grounds of the American Colony. Their faces were distorted by hate and lust for revenge,’ she wrote. ‘I went out and faced them. I told them, “To fire from the shelter of the American Colony is the same as firing from a mosque,”’ but they ignored her rollcall of sixty years’ philanthropy and threatened to kill her if she did not withdraw. Seventy-seven Jews, mainly doctors and nurses, were killed and twenty wounded before the British intervened. ‘Had it not been for Army interference,’ declared the Arab Higher Committee, ‘not a single Jewish passenger would have remained alive.’ The gunmen mutilated the dead and photographed each other with the corpses splayed in macabre poses. The photographs were mass-produced and sold as postcards in Jerusalem.

Deir Yassin was one of the pivotal events of the war: it became the centrepiece of a bloodcurdling Arab media campaign that amplified Jewish atrocities. This was designed to fortify resistance, but instead it encouraged a psychosis of foreboding in a country already at war. By March, before Deir Yassin, 75,000 Arabs had left their homes. Two months later, 390,000 had gone. Wasif Jawhariyyeh, living with his wife and children in western Jerusalem, close to the King David Hotel, was probably typical – and he recorded his thoughts and actions in the diary that is a unique and under-used record.

‘I was in a very bad way,’ he writes after these events in mid-April, ‘depressed, physically and mentally’, so much so that he abandoned his job in the Mandate administration and ‘stayed at home trying to decide what to do’. Finally, the diarist records the ‘reasons that made me decide to leave my home’. First was the ‘dangerous position of our house’, where he was under fire from the Arabs at the Jaffa Gate, the Jews in Montefiore and the British Bevingrad security zone: ‘there was non-stop shooting day and night so it was hard even to reach the house. The fighting between Arabs and Jews, the blowing up of buildings, continued day and night around us.’ The British fired on Montefiore, blowing off the top of Sir Moses’ windmill, but to no avail. Wasif wrote that the the Jewish snipers in Montefiore, ‘shot at anyone walking in the streets and it was a miracle we survived.’ He considered how to save his collection of ceramics, diaries and his beloved oud. His health was deteriorating too: ‘My body became so weak I couldn’t handle the pressure and the doctor told me to leave.’ The family debated: ‘What will happen when the Mandate ends? Will we be under the Arabs or the Jews?’ Wasif’s neighbour, the French consul-general, promised to protect the house and the collection. ‘Even if we never come back,’ Wasif felt they should pack their bags ‘to save ourselves and our children’: ‘We thought we would not leave the house for more than two weeks because we knew how soon the seven [sic] Arab armies will enter the country not to occupy it but to free it and return it to its people and we are its people!’ He left in the last days of the Mandate, never to return. Wasif’s story is that of the Palestinians. Some were expelled by force, some departed to avoid the war, hoping to return later – and approximately half remained safely in their homes to become Israeli Arabs, non-Jewish citizens in the Zionist democracy. But altogether 600,000–750,000 Palestinians left – and lost – their homes. Their tragedy was the Nakhba – the Catastrophe.

Ben-Gurion summoned the chief of the Jerusalem Emergency Committee, Bernard Joseph, to Tel Aviv to decide how to supply the now starving Jerusalem. On 15 April the convoys broke through, and food trickled into the city. On the 20th, Ben-Gurion insisted on visiting Jerusalem to celebrate Passover with the troops: Rabin, commander of the Palmach’s Harel Brigade, protested at Ben-Gurion’s grandstanding. Soon after the convoy set off with Ben-Gurion in an armoured bus, the Arabs attacked. ‘I even ordered two stolen British armoured cars to be brought out of concealment and sent into action’, said Rabin. Twenty were killed – but the food and Ben-Gurion reached Jewish Jerusalem – which he described, with grim humour but acute observation, as ‘20 per cent normal people; 20 per cent privileged (university etc), 60 per cent weird (provincial, medieval etc)’ – by which he meant the Hasidim.