Jerusalem: The Biography

Sari Nusseibeh investigated the Old City, ‘full of smug shopkeepers with their golden pocketwatches, old women hawking wares, whirling dervishes’ and cafés resonating ‘with the bubbling sound of people smoking water pipes’. Jordanian Jerusalem was, observed Eugene Bird, the US vice-consul, a tiny world: ‘I’ve never seen such a small big town before. The eligible society restricted it to about 150 people.’ Some of the Families embraced tourism: the Husseinis opened Orient House as a hotel. The white-haired Bertha Spafford converted her American Colony into a luxury hotel and the brooch-wearing grande dame herself became one of the sights of the city, having known everybody from Jemal Pasha to Lawrence of Arabia: she even featured twice on the British television show This is Your Life. Katy Antonius had returned and set up an orphanage in the Old City and, in her home, ‘an upscale restaurant-cum-salon’ named Katakeet after a local gossip column. She was ‘something out Eliot’s Cocktail Party’, wrote the US vice-consul; ‘she’s gossipy and thoroughly affected’. Always in ‘the latest fashions and a string of pearls, black hair cut fairly short’ with ‘a distinctive white streak’, she was, thought the vice-consul’s son, the writer Kai Bird, ‘part dragon-lady and part-flirt’. But she had not lost her political anger, remarking: ‘Before the Jewish State, I knew many Jews in Jerusalem. Now I will slap the face of any Arab friend who tries to trade with a Jew. We lost the first round; we haven’t lost the war.’

The Great Powers had always backed their own sects so it was no surprise that the Cold War was waged furtively beneath the robes and behind the altars of Jerusalem ‘as ardently as in the back alleys of Berlin’, that other divided city. US Vice-Consul Bird advised the CIA to contribute $80,000 to repair the golden onion-domes of Grand Duke Sergei’s Church of Mary Magdalene. If the CIA did not pay, the KGB just might. Russian Orthodoxy was divided between the CIA-backed Church based in New York and the KGB-backed Soviet version in Moscow. The Jordanians, staunch American allies, gave their Russian churches to the anti-Communist Church, while the Israelis, remembering that Stalin had been the first to recognize their new state, granted their Russian properties to the Soviets, who set up a mission in west Jerusalem led by a ‘priest’, actually a KGB colonel who had formerly been an adviser to North Korea.

In a backwater still dominated by ‘Husseinis, Nashashibis, Islamic scholars and Christian bishops, if you could ignore No-Man’s-Land and the refugee camps,’ wrote Sari Nusseibeh, ‘it was as if nothing had ever happened’. Yet nothing was the same – and even this hybrid Jerusalem was now under threat. The rise of Nasser, President of Egypt, changed everything, imperilling King Hussein and risking his very possession of Jerusalem.

SIX DAYS

1967

NASSER AND HUSSEIN: COUNTDOWN TO WAR

Born in obscurity, Nasser was the beau idéal of the Arab statesman – a young officer wounded in the Israeli encirclement of 1948 and determined to restore Arab pride. He became the most popular Arab leader for centuries, yet he also ruled as a dictator, supported by the secret police. Known as El Rais – the Boss – across the Arab world, Nasser promulgated a socialist pan-Arabism that inspired his people to defy Western domination and Zionist victory and raised soaring hopes that their defeats could be avenged.

Nasser supported Palestinian raids against Israel, which responded with increasing violence. His leadership of the most powerful Arab nation, Egypt, alarmed Israel. In 1956, he challenged the vestiges of the Anglo-French empires by nationalizing the Suez Canal and backing the Algerian rebels against France. London and Paris, determined to destroy him, made a secret alliance with Ben-Gurion. The successful Israeli attack on Sinai, planned by Chief of Staff Dayan, provided the Anglo-French pretext to invade Egypt, ostensibly to separate the two neighbours. However, Britain and France lacked the power to sustain this last imperial adventure: the United States forced them to withdraw. Soon afterwards, King Hussein dismissed Glubb as commander of his army. Nineteen-fifty-six was the twilight of British Middle Eastern imperium and the dawn of American ascendancy.

Nasser targeted the two Hashemite kingdoms, where his pan-Arabist radicalism was increasingly popular on the streets and in the officer corps. In 1958, Hussein’s cousin and schoolfriend Faisal II of Iraq was murdered in a military coup. The family had been kings of the Arabs, Hejaz, Syria, Palestine, Iraq – and Hussein was now the last royal Hashemite. Nasser officially merged Egypt with Syria in the United Arab Republic, encircling Israel and dominating Jordan, but his UAR, which twice fell apart and was twice put together again, remained fragile.