Jerusalem: The Biography

The bodyguards, firing haphazardly, killed the assassin. Holding the dead king in his arms as blood gushed from his nose, Nashashibi kissed his hand repeatedly. The Legionaries started to rampage through the streets, and Glubb struggled to restrain them. Kneeling by the king, Hussein undid his robe, and then walked with the body as it was borne to the Austrian Hospice. There Hussein himself was sedated before being hurriedly flown back to Amman.²⁶

HUSSEIN OF JORDAN: LAST KING OF JERUSALEM

The mufti and King Farouk of Egypt were said to be behind the assassination. Musa Husseini was arrested and tortured before he and three others were executed. The assassination was just one of the killings and coups precipitated by the Arab defeat. In 1952, King Farouk, last of Mehmet Ali’s Albanians, was overthrown by a junta of Free Officers, led by General Muhammad Neguib and Colonel Gamal Abdul Nasser.

Abdullah of Jordan was succeeded by his son, King Talal, who suffered violent attacks of schizophrenia that led to his almost killing his wife. On 12 August 1952, young Hussein was holidaying at a hotel in Geneva when a waiter entered with an envelope on a silver platter: it was addressed to ‘His Majesty King Hussein’. His father had abdicated. Still just seventeen, Hussein liked fast cars and motorcycles, planes and helicopters, which he flew himself, and beautiful women – he married five. While his grandfather had never lost the dream of a greater Hash-emite kingdom, risking everything to win Jerusalem, Hussein realized gradually that it would be an achievement even to survive as king of Jordan.

A Sandhurst-trained officer, this debonair monarch was pro-Western, his regime funded first by Britain then by America, yet he survived only by trimming between the forces at play in the Arab world. At times he had to endure the suffocating embrace of hostile radical tyrants such as Nasser of Egypt and Saddam Hussein of Iraq. Like his grandfather, he was able to work with the Israelis; much later, he came to like Rabin especially.

The octogenarian Churchill, who had returned to office as prime minister in 1951, muttered to one of his officials, ‘You ought to let the Jews have Jerusalem – it was they who made it famous.’ But the city remained divided between east and west, ‘a jarring series of ad hoc fences, walls and bails of barbed wire’ with ‘signs in Hebrew, English and Arabic reading STOP! DANGER! FRONTIER AHEAD’. The nights crackled with machine-gun fire, the only gateway was the Mandelbaum Gate, which became as famous as Berlin’s Checkpoint Charlie. Yet it was neither a gate nor the house of the Mandelbaums. The long-departed Simchah and Esther Mandelbaum had been Belorussian-born manufacturers of stockings whose sturdy home had become a Haganah stronghold that was blown up by the Arab Legion in 1948. The Mandelbaum checkpoint stood on its ruins.

Through these mined and barbed barriers the Jewish teenager Amos Oz and the Palestinian child Sari Nusseibeh, the son of Anwar, were living close to each other. Later Oz and Nusseibeh, both fine writers and opponents of fanatacism, became friends. ‘Islam’, wrote Nusseibeh, ‘was no different for families like ours than I would learn later that Judaism was for Amos Oz a couple of hundred feet away, just beyond No-Man’s-Land.’ The boys watched as a new influx of immigrants changed Jerusalem yet again. The Arabs, particularly Iraq, had avenged themselves on their own Jewish communities: 600,000 of them now migrated to Israel. But it was the survivors of the ultra-Orthodox sects known as the Haredim (Awestruck) who changed the look of Jerusalem, bringing with them the culture and clothes of seventeenth-century Mitteleuropa and a faith in mystical and joyous prayer. ‘Hardly a day would go by’, recalled Sari Nusseibeh, ‘when I didn’t spy into the streets beyond No-Man’s-Land’ and there in Mea Shearim, ‘I saw blackclad men. Sometimes the bearded creatures looked back at me.’ Who were they, he wondered?

The Haredim were split between those who embraced Zionism and the many, such as the Toldot Haron of Mea Shearim, who were devoutly anti-Zionist. They believed that only God could restore the Temple. These introspective, rigid and ritualistic sects were divided between Hasidics and Lithuanians, all speaking Yiddish. The Hasidim are in turn divided into many sects originating from seven principal ‘courts’, each ruled by a dynasty descended from a miracle-working rabbi known as the admor (an acronym deriving from ‘Our Master Teacher and Rabbi’). Their costumes and the arcane differences between sects contributed to the complexity of Israeli Jerusalem.^*