Instead Herzl dreamed that ‘if Jerusalem is ever ours, I’d clear up everything not sacred, tear down the filthy ratholes,’ preserving the Old City as a heritage site like Lourdes or Mecca. ‘I’d build an airy comfortable properly sewered, brand new city around the Holy Places.’ Herzl later decided that Jerusalem should be shared: ‘We shall extra-territorialize Jerusalem so that it will belong to nobody and everybody, its Holy Places the joint possession of all Believers.’
As the Kaiser departed down the road to Damascus, where he declared himself the protector of Islam and endowed Saladin with a new tomb, Herzl saw the future in three burly Jewish porters in kaftans: ‘If we can bring here 300,000 Jews like them, all of Israel will be ours.’
Yet Jerusalem was already very much the Jewish centre in Palestine: out of 45,300 inhabitants, 28,000 were now Jewish, a rise that was already worrying the Arab leadership. ‘Who can contest the rights of the Jews to Palestine?’ old Yusuf Khalidi told his friend Zadok Kahn, Chief Rabbi of France, in 1899. ‘God knows, historically it is indeed your country’ but ‘the brute force of reality,’ was that ‘Palestine is now an integral part of the Ottoman Empire and, what is more serious, it is inhabited by other than Israelites.’ While the letter predates the idea of a Palestinian nation – Khalidi was a Jerusalemite, an Arab, an Ottoman and ultimately a citizen of the world – and the necessity to deny the Jewish claim to Zion, he foresaw that Jewish return, ancient and legitimate as it was, would clash with the ancient and legitimate presence of the Arabs.
In April 1903, the Kishinev pogrom, backed by the tsar’s interior minister Viacheslav von Plehve, launched a spree of anti-Semitic slaughter and terror across Russia.* In panic, Herzl travelled to St Petersburg to negotiate with Plehve himself, the ultimate anti-Semite, but, getting nowhere with the Kaiser and the sultan, he started to look for a provisional territory outside the Holy Land.
Herzl needed a new backer: he proposed a Jewish homeland either in Cyprus or around El Arish in Sinai, part of British Egypt, both of them locations close to Palestine. In 1903, Natty, the first Lord Rothschild, who had finally come round to Zionism, introduced Herzl to Joseph Chamberlain, the British colonial secretary, who ruled out Cyprus but agreed to consider El Arish. Herzl hired a lawyer to draft a charter for the Jewish settlement. The lawyer was the forty-year-old Liberal politician David Lloyd George, whose decisions would later alter Jerusalem’s fate more than those of anyone since Saladin. The application was turned down, much to Herzl’s disappointment. Chamberlain and Prime Minister Arthur Balfour came up with another territory – they offered Uganda or rather part of Kenya as a Jewish homeland. Herzl, who was short of alternatives, provisionally accepted.2
Regardless of his failed attempts to win over emperors and sultans, Herzl’s Zionism had inspired the persecuted Jews of Russia, particularly a boy in a well-off lawyer’s family in
THE OUD- PLAYER OF JERUSALEM
1905–1914
DAVID GRÜN BECOMES DAVID BEN-GURION
David Grün’s father was already a local leader of the Lovers of Zion, forerunner of the Zionist movement, and a keen Hebraist, so the boy was taught Hebrew from an early age. But David, like many other Zionists, was shocked when he read that Herzl had accepted the Ugandan offer. At the Sixth Zionist Congress, Herzl tried to sell his so-called Ugandaism but he succeeded only in splitting his movement. His rival, the English playwright Israel Zangwill, coiner of the phrase ‘melting pot’ to describe the assimilation of immigrants in America, decamped to found his Jewish Territorialist Organization and pursue an array of quixotic non-Palestinian Zions. The Austrian plutocrat Baron Maurice de Hirsch was financing Jewish colonies in Argentina, and the New York financier Jacob Schiff was promoting the Galveston Plan, a Lone Star Zion for Russian Jews in Texas. There was more support for El Arish because it was close to Palestine and Zionism was nothing without Zion, but none of these schemes* flourished and Herzl, exhausted by his peripatetic travels, died soon afterwards, aged just forty-four. He had successfully established Zionism as one of the solutions to the Jewish plight, particularly in Russia.
Young David Grün mourned his hero Herzl even though ‘we concluded the most effective way to combat Ugandaism was by settling in the Land of Israel’. In 1905, Emperor Nicholas II faced a revolution that almost cost him the throne. Many of the revolutionaries were Jews – Leon Trotsky being the most prominent – yet they were actually internationalists who despised both race and religion. Nonetheless, Nicholas felt that the forged anti-Semitic tract, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, was coming true: ‘How prophetic!’ he wrote, ‘This year 1905 had been truly dominated by the Jewish Elders.’ Forced to accept a constitution, he tried to restore his damaged autocracy by encouraging anti-Semitic massacres by nationalistic revanchists nicknamed the Black Hundreds.
The pogroms encouraged David Grün, a member of the socialist party Poalei Zion – Workers of Zion – to board one of the pilgrim ships from Odessa and set out for the Holy Land. The boy from
Grün did not visit Jerusalem for many months after his arrival; instead he worked in the fields of Galilee, until, in mid-1910 the twenty-four-year-old moved to Jerusalem to write for a Zionist newspaper. Diminutive, skinny, curly-haired and always clad in a Russian rubashka smock to emphasize his socialist credentials, he adopted the nom de plume ‘Ben-Gurion’, borrowed from one of Simon bar Kochba’s lieutenants. The old shirt and the new name revealed the two sides of the emerging Zionist leader.
Ben-Gurion believed, like most of his fellow Zionists at this time, that a socialist Jewish state would be created without violence and without dominating or displacing the Palestinian Arabs; rather it would exist alongside them. He was sure that the Jewish and Arab working classes would cooperate. After all, the Ottoman vilayets of Sidon and Damascus and the sanjak of Jerusalem – as Palestine was then known – were poverty-stricken backwaters, sparsely populated by the 600,000 Arabs. There was much space to be developed. The Zionists hoped the Arabs would share the economic benefits of Jewish immigration. But there was little mixing between the two and it did not occur to the Zionists that most of these Arabs had no wish for the benefits of their settlement.
In Jerusalem, Ben-Gurion rented a windowless cellar but he spent his time in the Arab cafés of the Old City listening to the gramophones that played the latest Arabic songs.3 At the same time, a Christian Arab boy, a native Jerusalemite already a connoisseur of beauty and pleasure, was listening to the same songs in the same cafés and learning to play them on his lute.
THE OUD- PLAYER: WASIF JAWHARIYYEH
Wasif Jawhariyyeh started to learn the lute – or oud – as a boy, and soon he was the best oud-player in a town that lived for music: it gave him access to everyone, high and low. Born in 1897, the son of a respected Greek Orthodox town councillor, close to the Families, he was too felinely artistic to develop into a local worthy. He was apprenticed as a barber but soon defied his parents to become a musician. Witnessing everything and knowing everybody, from the Jerusalemite grandees and Ottoman pashas to Egyptian chanteuses, hash-smoking musicians and promiscuous Jewesses, useful to the elite but not quite of it, Wasif Jawhariyyeh started to write a diary at the age of seven that is one of the masterpieces of Jerusalem’s literature.*