Jerusalem: The Biography

His Arab Legion advanced cautiously through the Judaean hills towards Jerusalem, where the irregular Arab Liberation Army attacked the Jewish suburbs. By nightfall on 16 May, the Haganah had captured the Mea Shearim police station and Sheikh Jarrah to the north and all the New City south of the walls as well as the former British strongholds in the centre, the Russian Compound and the YMCA. ‘We have conquered almost all of Jerusalem, apart from the Augusta Victoria and the Old City,’ claimed an overwhelmed Ben-Gurion.

‘SOS! The Jews are near the walls!’ Anwar Nusseibeh rushed back to the king to beg for his intervention. Abdullah never forgot his place in history: ‘By God I am a Muslim ruler, a Hashemite king, and my father was king of all the Arabs.’ Now he wrote to his English commander: ‘My dear Glubb Pasha, the importance of Jerusalem in the eyes of the Arabs and the Muslims and Arab Christians is well known. Any disaster suffered by the people of the city at the hands of the Jews would have far-reaching consequences for us. Everything we hold today must be preserved – the Old City and the road to Jericho. I ask you to execute this as quickly as possible my dear.’

ABDULLAH: THE BATTLE OF JERUSALEM

The king’s ‘troops were in jubilation, many of the vehicles decorated with green branches or bunches of pink oleander flowers’. The procession of the Arab Legion towards Jerusalem ‘seemed more like a carnival than an army going to war’, observed Glubb. On 18 May, the first Legionaries took up positions around the walls of the Old City whence, he wrote, ‘nearly 1900 years ago the Jews themselves had cast their darts at the advancing legions of Titus’. But the king was ‘haggard with anxiety lest the Jews enter the Old City and the Temple where his father the late King Hussein of the Hejaz was buried.’ Glubb’s forces smashed through the Israeli-held Sheikh Jarrah to the Damascus Gate.

Within the Old City, first irregulars and then Arab Legionaries surrounded the Jewish Quarter, home of some of the oldest Jewish families in Palestine, many of them aged Hasidic scholars, and all defended by just 190 Haganah and Irgun fighters. Rabin was furious to learn that only meagre forces could be spared to rescue the Old City. Was this, he shouted at the commander of Jerusalem, David Shaltiel, ‘the only force the Jewish people can muster for the liberation of its capital?’

Rabin tried unsuccessfully to storm the Jaffa Gate, but simultaneously other troops broke through the Zion Gate into the Old City. Eighty Palmachniks joined the defenders before losing the Zion Gate. But now, the Arab Legion arrived in force. The battle for the Old City would be desperate; the fighting, noted Glubb, was ‘room to room, down dark passages, up and down tiny staircases cut into courtyards and down in cellars’ through the ‘teeming rabbit-warren of the Jewish Quarter on top of the spoils and rubble of millennia.’ Glubb now ordered the systematic reduction of the Jewish Quarter. Its rabbis appealed for help. Ben-Gurion became frantic: ‘Jerusalem can fall at any minute! Attack whatever the cost!’

On 26 May, the Legionaries took the Hurva Square, and dynamited its magnificent synagogues. Two days later, ‘two old rabbis, their backs bent with age, came forward down a narrow lane carrying a white flag’, observed Glubb. Across the lines, and just a few hundred feet away in this tiny theatre of war, Rabin watched the same ‘shattering scene’ from Mount Zion: ‘I was horrified.’ Thirty-nine of the 213 defenders were dead, 134 wounded. ‘So the City of David fell to the enemy,’ wrote Begin. ‘Mourning descended over us.’ Glubb was elated: ‘I’ve an intense love of Jerusalem. The Bible lives before our eyes.’ Yet he allowed the ransacking of the Jewish Quarter: twenty-two of the twenty-seven synagogues were demolished. For the first time since the Muslim reconquest in 1187, the Jews lost access to the Western Wall.

Glubb used the Latrun Fortress to close the road to west Jerusalem. Ben-Gurion repeatedly ordered the taking of Latrun, at a punishing cost in Israeli lives, but the attacks failed. Jewish Jerusalemites, already living in their cellars, began to starve until the Israelis created a new route for provisions, the so-called Burma Road south of Latrun.

On 11 June, the UN mediator Count Folke Bernadotte, grandson of a Swedish king who had negotiated with Himmler to rescue Jews in the last months of the war, successfully mediated a truce and proposed a new version of the partition giving all of Jerusalem to King Abdullah. Israel rejected Bernadotte’s plans. Meanwhile Ben-Gurion defeated a near-mutiny when Menachem Begin, having already agreed to merge his Irgun forces with those of the State, attempted to land his own shipment of arms: the Israeli Army sank the ship. Instead of starting a civil war, Begin retired from the underground to enter regular politics.