Jerusalem: The Biography

When Bernadotte’s truce ended; war resumed. The next day an Egyptian Spitfire bombed western Jerusalem. The excited Legionaries attacked the New City through the Zion Gate and then advanced towards Notre Dame: ‘By turning their heads, they could see the Dome of the Rock and al-Aqsa,’ wrote Glubb. ‘They were fighting in the path of God’, as the Israelis again tried to capture the Old City.

‘Can we hold Jerusalem?’ Abdullah asked Glubb.

‘They’ll never take it, sir!’

‘If you ever think the Jews will take Jerusalem, you tell me,’ said the king. ‘I’ll go there and die on the walls of the city.’ The Israeli counterattack failed. But Israel’s military strength was increasing: the new State was now fielding 88,000 troops in all, against the Arabs’ 68,000. In the ten days before a second truce, the Israelis took Lydda and Ramla.

Such was the Zionist fury at Bernadotte’s proposal that the Swede now suggested that Jerusalem should be internationalized. On 17 September, the Swedish count flew into the Holy City. But the Lehi extremists, led by Yitzhak Shamir (a future Israeli prime minister), decided to annihilate both the man and his plans. As Bernadotte drove from his headquarters in Government House through Katamon to meet the Israeli governor Dov Joseph in Rehavia, his jeep was waved to a halt at a checkpoint. Three men dismounted from another jeep brandishing Stens; two shot out the tyres; the third machine-gunned Bernadotte in the chest before they sped off. The count died in Hadassah Hospital. Ben-Gurion suppressed and dismantled the Lehi, but the killers were never caught.

Abdullah had secured the Old City. On the West Bank, the king held the south, the Iraqis held the north. South of Jerusalem, the Egyptian vanguard could see the Old City and was pounding the southern suburbs. In mid-September, the Arab League recognized a Gaza-based Palestinian ‘government’ that was dominated by the mufti and the Jerusalemite Families.^* But when the fighting resumed, the Israelis defeated and encircled the Egyptians, conquering the Negev desert. Humiliated, the Egyptians sent the mufti back to Cairo, his political career finally discredited. At the end of November, 1948, Lieutenant-Colonel Moshe Dayan, now military commander of Jerusalem, agreed a cease fire with the Jordanians. During the first half of 1949, Israel signed armistices with all five of the Arab states, and in February 1949, the Knesset, the Israeli Parliament, met in the Jewish Agency building on Jerusalem’s George V Avenue to elect Weizmann formally to the largely ceremonial post of president. Weizmann, aged seventy-five, found himself ignored by Prime Minister Ben-Gurion and was frustrated by his non-executive role. ‘Why do I have to be a Swiss president?’ Weizmann asked. ‘Why not an American president?’ He jokingly called himself ‘the Prisoner of Rehovoth’ – referring to the town where he had set up the Weizmann Institute of Science. Even though he had his official residence in Jerusalem, ‘I remained prejudiced against the city and even now I feel ill at ease in it.’ He died in 1952.

The Armistice, signed in April 1949 and supervised by the UN, who were based in the British Government House, divided Jerusalem: Israel received the west with an island of territory on Mount Scopus, while Abdullah kept the Old City, eastern Jerusalem and the West Bank. The agreement promised the Jews access to the Wall, the Mount of Olives cemetery and the Kidron Valley tombs but this was never honoured. Jews were not allowed to pray at the Wall for the next nineteen years,^* and the tombstones in their cemeteries were vandalized.

The Israelis and Abdullah both feared losing their halves of Jerusalem. The UN persisted in debating the internationalization of the city, so both sides occupied Jerusalem illegally and only two countries recognized Abdullah’s hold on the Old City. Weizmann’s chief of staff, George Weidenfeld, a young Viennese who had recently founded his own publishing house in London, launched a campaign to convince the world that Israel should keep west Jerusalem. On 11 December, Jerusalem was declared the capital of Israel.

The Arab victor was Abdullah the Hasty, who, thirty-two years after the Arab Revolt, had finally won Jerusalem: ‘Nobody’, he said, ‘will take over Jerusalem from me unless I’m killed.’

DIVIDED

1951–67

KING OF JERUSALEM: BLOOD ON THE TEMPLE MOUNT