Jerusalem: The Biography

Jemal Pasha, the dictator of Jerusalem during the First World War, was a Turkish nationalist with a taste for cigars, champagne, beautiful Jewish courtesans and brutal executions.

Born in a Russian shtetl, Chaim Weizmann was at home with kings and lords. His passionate charm helped convert Britain’s imperial panjandrums, Lloyd George, Churchill and Balfour, to Zionism, while Lawrence of Arabia promoted the Arab cause.

Surrender, 1917: Hussein al-Husseini, mayor of Jerusalem (centre, with walking stick), tried six times to surrender to the British with a sheet tied to a broom.

Mandate: conqueror of Jerusalem, General ‘the Bull’ Allenby (right), and military governor Ronald Storrs celebrate the Fourth of July with Bertha Spafford (left) at the American Colony in 1918.

Lawrence of Arabia and Amir Abdullah follow Winston Churchill through the gardens of Augusta Victoria in 1921: the British Colonial Secretary created the new realm of Transjordan for the Hashemite Abdullah.

The glories of Imperial Jerusalem: Prince Arthur, Duke of Connaught, son of Queen Victoria, hands out awards in Barracks Square, though he grumbled when some recipients wore Ottoman and German medals.

High Commissioner of Palestine Herbert Samuel (seated, centre) and Jerusalem governor Storrs (standing, fourth from the right) host the religious hierarchs of the city after a service to celebrate British liberation in 1924.

Sherif of Mecca, King of Hejaz, Hussein meets the early Palestinian nationalist leader Musa Kazem Husseini (left) in Jerusalem.

The sherif never forgave his ambitious sons, Faisal (left), king first of Syria then Iraq, and Abdullah (right), later king of Jordan (seen here in Jerusalem in 1931) for seizing kingdoms of their own.

David Ben-Gurion, working on new Jewish housing in 1924, emerged as the tough Zionist leader just as the Mufti, Amin al-Husseini, emerged as Arab nationalist leader: here he leads the annual Nabi Musa, Jerusalem’s main Islamic festival, on horseback in 1937.

The annual Easter ritual of the Holy Fire (seen from the dome of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre) was crowded, passionate and often fatal.

The prayers at the Western Wall in 1944 to commemorate the dead of the Holocaust show the tiny, constrained area permitted for Jewish worship.

Asmahan: Arab singer, Druze princess, Egyptian film star, spy and temptress of the wartime King David Hotel.

The Mufti Amin al-Husseini meets Hitler who admired his fair hair and blue eyes. His cousin, Abd al-Kadir Husseini, was an aristocratic warrior and Arab hero of 1947–8, whose death was a blow to Palestinian hopes. His funeral on the Temple Mount was a chaotic, tense occasion: some mourners were killed by guns fired in the air.

1946–8: as Arabs and Jews massacred each other’s civilians, Menachem Begin’s Irgun bombed the British headquarters in the King David Hotel. British General Bubbles Barker (bottom right on newspaper) already loathed the Jews, encouraged by his charming, exuberant mistress, the leading Palestinian hostess Katy Antonius.

The battle of Jerusalem in 1948,: Arab soldiers escorting a Jewish prisoner during the fight for the Jewish Quarter; a Jewish girl fleeing from the fighting; Arab Legionaries behind sandbag barricades.

The Arab victor of 1948 King Abdullah of Jordan waves to crowds in Jerusalem, but he paid with his life. His assassin lies dead in the Aqsa mosque. Abdullah’s grandson, King Hussein of Jordan prepares for war in 1967: he reluctantly and disastrously placed his forces under Egyptian command.

Israeli government in crisis: Israeli Chief of Staff Yitzhak Rabin (left) collapsed under the pressure and had to be sedated; Moshe Dayan (right), brought in as Defence Minister, seen here with Rabin at a cabinet meeting as the crisis intensifies in 1967. Dayan thrice warned Hussein not to attack but held back until Syria and Egypt were defeated.Israeli paratroopers advance towards Lions’ Gate.

Minutes after its capture in June 1967, Israeli soldiers pray at the Western Wall; the sheikh of the Haram al-Sharif watches from the Maghrebi Gate; behind him, Israeli jeeps fight across the Haram, before celebrating the reunification of Jerusalem in front of the Dome.

* The Egyptian Pharaohs aspired to rule Canaan at this time but it is not clear whether they actually did. They may have used these pottery symbols to curse the defiant rulers of their enemies or to express their aspirations. The theories about these fragments have changed several times, showing how archaeology is as much interpretative as scientific. It was long believed that the Egyptians smashed these vases or figures to curse or execrate the places named on them – hence they are known as the Execration texts.