Jerusalem: The Biography

The real war was now starting and Israel’s position was dire. The armies of the Arab League states, Egypt, Jordan, Iraq, Syria and Lebanon, invaded Israel with the specific mission of liquidating the Jews. ‘This will be a war of extermination and a momentous massacre,’ announced Azzam Pasha, secretary of the League, ‘which will be spoken of like the Mongolian massacres and the Crusades.’ Their commanders were overconfident. The Jews had been inferior subjects of Islamic empires, sometimes tolerated, often persecuted, but always submissive, for over a thousand years. ‘The Arabs believed themselves to be a great military people and regarded the Jews as a nation of shopkeepers’, recalled General Sir John Glubb, the English commander of King Abdullah’s Arab Legion. ‘The Egyptians, Syrians and Iraqis assumed they’d have no difficulty defeating the Jews.’ Secular nationalism merged with the fervour of holy war: it was unthinkable that Jews could defeat Islamic armies, and many of the Jihadist factions that fought beside the regular armies had long since embraced a fanatical anti-Semitism. Half the Egyptian forces were mujahidin of the Muslim Brotherhood, among them young Yasser Arafat.

Yet the intervention with its blood-curdling hopes and political cynicism would be a disaster for the Palestinians and help forge a much larger and stronger Israel than would otherwise have emerged. On paper there were 165,000 troops in the Arab armies but such was the disorganization that, during May, they fielded about 28,000 – roughly the same as the Israelis. Since Abdullah’s 9,000-strong British-trained Arab Legion were the best of them, he was officially appointed Supreme Commander of Arab League forces.

King Abdullah stood on the Allenby Bridge and, drawing his pistol, fired into the air. ‘Forward!’ he shouted.²⁵

ABDULLAH THE HASTY

The king, recalled his grandson Hussein, ‘was a full-blooded extrovert’. When we last saw Abdullah, he was in Jerusalem receiving his desert kingdom from Winston Churchill. Lawrence had described him as ‘short, thick-built, strong as a horse, with merry, dark brown eyes, a smooth round face, full but short lips, straight nose’ – and he had led an adventurous life, shocking Lawrence with his raffish exploits: ‘once Abdullah shot a coffee-pot off his court-fool’s head thrice from twenty yards’. As a Sherifian, thirty-seventh in line from the Prophet, he could tease the ulema. ‘Is it wrong to look at a pretty woman?’ he asked a mufti. ‘A sin, Your Majesty.’ ‘But the Holy Koran says “If you see a woman, avert your eyes” but you can’t avert the gaze unless you’ve been looking!’ He was both a proud Bedouin and a child of the Ottoman sultanate, he had commanded armies as a teenager and been ‘the brains’ of the Great Arab Revolt. His ambitions were as boundless as they were urgent, hence his nickname ‘the Hasty’. Yet he had waited a long time for this chance to conquer Jerusalem.

‘He was more than a soldier and diplomat but also a classical scholar’, remembered Sir Ronald Storrs, who was impressed when ‘he intoned for me the Seven Suspended Odes of Pre-Islamic Poetry’. The British ambassador in Amman, Sir Alec Kirkbridge, always called him ‘the king with a twinkle in his eye’. As a diplomat Abdullah was witty. Asked when he would ever receive a diplomat he disliked, he answered, ‘When my mule foals.’

Now that his mule was foaling, he was realistic about the Zionists, citing the Turkish proverb: ‘If you meet a bear crossing a rotten bridge, call her “Dear Auntie”.’ Over the years, he often talked to Weizmann and Jewish businessmen, offering the Jews a homeland if they would accept him as king of Palestine. He had often visited Jerusalem, meeting up with his ally Ragheb Nashashibi, but he detested the mufti, believing that Zionism flourished all the more thanks to ‘those partisans of the Arabs who’ll accept no solution’.

The king had secretly negotiated a non-aggression pact with the Zionists: he would occupy the parts of the West Bank assigned to the Arabs in return for not opposing the UN borders of the Jewish state: and the British had agreed to his annexation. ‘I don’t want to create a new Arab state that will allow the Arabs to ride on me’, he explained to the Zionist envoy Golda Myerson (later Meir). ‘I want to be the rider not the horse.’ But the horse had now bolted: the war, particularly, the Deir Yassin massacre, obliged him to fight the Jews. Besides, the other Arab states were as determined to limit Abdullah’s ambitions as they were to rescue Palestine, and the Egyptians and Syrians planned to annex their own conquests. Abdullah’s commander Glubb Pasha, who had devoted his life to providing the Hashemites with a decent army, was now loath to risk it.