Husseini belonged to the Islamic tradition; Nashashibi to the Ottoman. Both opposed Zionism but Nashashibi believed that, faced with British power, the Arabs should negotiate; Husseini, in a meandering and capricious journey, ended up as an intransigent nationalist opposing any compromise. At first, Husseini played the passive British ally, but he would ultimately reach far beyond the anti-British stance of many Arabs to become a racial anti-Semite and embrace Hitler’s Final Solution to the Jewish problem. The most enduring achievement of Samuel was to promote the most energetic enemy of Zionism and Britain. Yet one could argue that no one proved such a divisive calamity for his own people, and such an asset for the Zionist struggle.18
THE MUFTI: THE BATTLE OF THE WALL
The first generation of British proconsuls congratulated themselves that they had tamed Jerusalem. In June 1925, Samuel returned to London, declaring, with Olympian delusion, that ‘the spirit of lawlessness has ceased.’ A year later, Storrs left a peaceful, much embellished city and was promoted to the governorships of Cyprus and then of Northern Rhodesia – though he sighed, ‘There’s no promotion after Jerusalem.’ The new high commissioner was Viscount Plumer, a walrus-moustached field marshal nicknamed the Old Plum or Daddy Plummer. Thanks to cuts in his funding, the Old Plum had to keep order with fewer soldiers than Samuel, but he radiated a reassuring calm by cheerfully walking on his own around Jerusalem. When his officials reported on political tensions, he embraced ostrichism. ‘There is no political situation,’ he replied. ‘Don’t create one!’
The Old Plum retired due to ill-health but the new commissioner had not yet arrived when the ‘political situation’ duly materialized. On Kol Nidre, eve of the Jewish Day of Atonement, in 1928, the Jewish shames – beadle – at the Western Wall (who gloried in the name William Ewart Gladstone Noah) put up a small screen to divide men and women worshippers in accordance with Jewish law. The screen and chairs for elderly worshippers had been allowed in previous years, but now the mufti protested that the Jews were changing the status quo.
The Muslims believed that the Wall was the place Muhammad tied up his steed with the human face, Buraq, during the Night Journey, yet in the nineteenth century, the Ottomans had used the adjacent tunnel as a donkey stable. Legally it had belonged to the Abu Maidan waqf dating back to Saladin’s son Afdal. Therefore it was ‘purely Muslim property’. The Muslim fear, however, was that Jewish access to the Wall would lead to a Third Temple on the Islamic Haram, the Jewish Har-haBayit. Yet the Wall – the Kotel – was Judaism’s holiest site and Palestinian Jews believed that the British restrictions, and indeed the cramped space available for worship, were relics of centuries of Muslim oppression that demonstrated why Zionism was necessary. The British even banned the blowing of the shofar – the ram’s horn – on the Jewish High Holy Days.
The next day, Storrs’ successor as governor, Edward Keith-Roach, who liked to call himself the Pasha of Jerusalem, ordered his police to raid the Wall during the Yom Kippur service, the holiest of the Jewish year. The policemen beat praying Jews and pulled chairs from under elderly worshippers. It was not Britain’s finest hour. The mufti was jubilant but warned that ‘the Jews’ aim is to take possession of the Mosque of al-Aqsa gradually.’ He therefore launched a campaign against Jewish worshippers, who were bombarded with stones, beaten up and harassed with loud music. Jabotinsky’s Betar youths demonstrated for access to the Wall.
Both sides were changing the Ottoman status quo, which no longer reflected reality. Jewish immigration and land purchases had understandably raised Arab anxieties. Since the Declaration, some 90,000 Jews had arrived in Palestine. In 1925 alone, Jews had bought 44,000 acres from the Families. A tiny minority of Jewish religious nationalists did dream of a Third Temple, but the overwhelming majority simply wanted to pray at their own holy site. The new high commissioner, Sir John Chancellor, who was said to resemble ‘a good-looking Shakespearian actor’, asked the mufti to sell the Wall in order that the Jews could built a courtyard there. The mufti refused. To the Jews, the Kotel was the symbol of their freedom to pray and exist in their own homeland, to the Arabs, the Buraq became the symbol of resistance and nationhood.
Foreboding and claustrophobia hung over the city. ‘It is the haughty and desolate beauty of a walled-in mountain fortress in the desert, of tragedy without catharsis,’ observed Arthur Koestler, a young Hungarian Zionist living in Jerusalem and writing for Jabotinsky’s newspaper. The ‘tragic beauty’ and ‘inhuman atmosphere’ gave him ‘Jerusalem sadness’. Koestler longed to escape to kitsch Tel Aviv. In Jerusalem he felt ‘the angry face of Yahweh, brooding over the hot rocks’.
In the summer of 1929, the mufti ordered the opening of a doorway that made the Jewish Wall an Arab thoroughfare for donkeys and passers-by while muezzin calls to prayer and Sufi chanting were amplified over the Jewish prayers. Jews were attacked in the nearby alleyways. Across Palestine, thousands of Jews demonstrated under the slogan ‘The Wall is Ours’. Chancellor was away when, on 15 August, a 300-strong Zionist demonstration, led by the historian Joseph Klausner (the uncle of Amos Oz, the Israeli writer) and including members of Betar, marched to the Wall in silence, guarded by British police, and raised a Zionist flag and sang songs. The next day, after Friday prayers, 2,000 Arabs descended from al-Aqsa and attacked Jewish worshippers, chasing them from the Wall and beating up any they caught. On the 17th, a Jewish boy kicked a football into an Arab garden and, on going to fetch it, was murdered. At his funeral, Jewish youths tried to attack the Muslim Quarter.
At Friday prayers on 23 August, encouraged by the mufti, thousands of worshippers swept out of al-Aqsa to attack Jews. The mufti and his Nashashibi rivals tried variously to incite and to restrain the crowds: some brave Arab leaders stood up to the mob – to no avail. They attacked the Jewish Quarter, the Montefiore neighbourhood and the suburbs, where thirty-one Jews were killed. In one Jerusalem household, five members of the same family were slaughtered; in Hebron, fifty-nine Jews were massacred. The Haganah, the Zionist militia founded in 1920, fought back. There were only 292 British policemen in the whole of Palestine, so troops were flown in from Cairo. Altogether, 131 Jews were killed by Arabs, while the 116 Arabs who died were mainly shot by British troops.
The riots, which the Arabs called Thawrat al-Buraq – the Buraq Uprising – confounded the British. ‘I know of no one who would be a good high commissioner of Palestine except God,’ Chancellor told his son. The Balfour policy was unravelling. In October 1930, the White Paper of Colonial Secretary Lord Passfield (formerly Sidney Webb, the Fabian socialist) proposed restricting Jewish immigration and retreat from a Jewish national home. The Zionists despaired. The Buraq Uprising inflamed extremism on both sides. The violence and Passfield’s White Paper discredited Weizmann’s Anglophile style: the Zionists could no longer depend on the British and many turned instead to Jabotinsky’s harsher nationalism. At the Seventeenth Zionist Congress, Jabotinsky attacked Weizmann who was canvassing the British prime minister Ramsay Macdonald to overturn the White Paper. Macdonald wrote him a letter, read out in Parliament, reconfirming the Balfour Declaration and reopening Jewish immigration. The Arabs called it ‘the Black Letter’ but it was too late to save Weizmann who was then deposed as Zionist president. Immensely hurt, he returned temporarily to science. The Haganah still concentrated on guarding the rural settlements, but it started to arm itself. Frustrated with this restraint, militant nationalists splintered off and founded the Irgun Zvai Leumi, National Military Organization, inspired by Jabotinsky, though it remained very small. Jabotinsky was expelled from Palestine for his provocative speeches, but became increasingly popular among Jewish youths in Palestine and eastern Europe. But it was not he who replaced Weizmann: it was David Ben-Gurion who emerged as the strongman of the Jewish community just as the mufti became the strongman of the Arabs.