In December 1931, the mufti emerged onto the world stage when he presided as a pan-Islamic and unrivalled national leader at his World Islamic Conference on the Temple Mount: it was his finest hour and it went to his head. He remained radically opposed to any Zionist colony in Palestine, yet his rivals, Mayor Nashashibi, the Dajanis and the Khalidis argued that conciliation would be better for Arabs and Jews. The mufti would tolerate no opposition and accused his rivals of being pro-Zionist traitors and the Nashashibis of secretly having Jewish blood. Nashashibi tried to unseat him on the Supreme Muslim Council but failed and the mufti started to exclude his opponents from all the organizations he controlled. The British, weak and unsure, leant towards the radicals instead of the moderates: in 1934, the new high commissioner, Sir Arthur Wauchope, withdrew his backing from Nashashibi and backed the election of one of the Khalidis as mayor. The rivalry between Husseinis and Nashashibis became ever more vicious.
The world was darkening, the stakes rising. The growth of Fascism made compromise seem weak, and violence not just acceptable but attractive. On 30 January 1933, Hitler was appointed chancellor of Germany.* On 31 March, just two months later, the mufti secretly visited the German consul in Jerusalem, Heinrich Wolff, to declare that ‘Muslims inside Palestine welcome the new regime, hope for the spread of Fascist antidemocratic leadership’; he added that ‘Muslims hoped for a boycott of the Jews in Germany.’
European Jews were alarmed by Hitler. Immigration, which had slowed down, now accelerated in a way that forever changed the demographic balance. In 1933, 37,000 Jews arrived in Palestine; 45,000 in 1934. By 1936, there were 100,000 Jews in Jerusalem, compared to 60,000 Christian and Muslim Arabs.19 Just as Nazi aggression and anti-Semitism threatened Europe, and the tension in Palestine intensified,* Sir Arthur Wauchope presided over a new Jerusalem, capital of the short-lived Golden Age of the British Mandate.
WAUCHOPE’S CAPITAL: HUNTS, CAFÉS, PARTIES AND WHITE SUITS
Wauchope, a wealthy bachelor, loved to entertain. Flanked by two scarlet-clad kavasses brandishing gilded wands, the feather-helmeted general welcomed guests to the new Government House, a baronial-cum-Moorish palace on the Hill of Evil Counsel, south of the city, with an octagonal tower, all set amid fountains, and groves of acacia and pine. The mansion was a mini English world with its parquet-floored ballroom, crystal chandeliers and a gallery for the police band, dining halls, billiard rooms, separate bathrooms for English and locals – and Jerusalem’s only ever dog cemetery for a nation of dog lovers. The guests wore uniforms or top hat and tails. ‘Money and champagne’, recalled one, ‘flowed like water.’
Wauchope’s residence was the centrepiece of a modernist Jerusalem created by the British at dizzying speed. The old Earl of Balfour himself had come for the opening of the Hebrew University on Mount Scopus, near the new Hadassah Hospital. A YMCA in the form of a phallic tower was built by the architect of the Empire State Building. The Rockefellers raised a Gothic-Moorish museum just north of the walls. King George V Avenue, with its ‘splendid shops, cafés with high chandeliers, and rich stores’, reminded a young Jewish Jerusalemite, Amos Oz, later a famous Israeli writer, of ‘that wonderful London Town I knew from films where culture-seeking Jews and Arabs mixed with cultivated Englishmen, where dreamy long-necked ladies floated in evening dress’. This was the Jazz Age in Jerusalem, where flappers combined fast cars with millenarian evangelism. ‘HAREM BEAUTIES DRIVE FORDS THROUGH JERUSALEM’ declared the Boston Herald, interviewing Bertha Spafford – who, it reported, was ‘introducing Flivvers [American cars] and Vacuum bottles to the Turk and says God not Balfour will send the Jews back to Palestine’.
Jerusalem still lacked the luxuries of a major city, but in 1930, she got her first world-class hotel. The majestic King David Hotel, backed by wealthy Egyptian Jews and the Anglo-Jewish financier Frank Goldsmith (father of Sir James), which instantly became the city’s stylish hub, noted for its ‘biblical style’ with Assyrian, Hittite and Muslim ornamentation, and its ‘tall Sudanese waiters in white pantaloons and red tarboush’. One American tourist supposedly believed that it was the renovated Temple of Solomon. Ragheb Nashashibi had his hair cut there every day. The hotel helped make Jerusalem a luxury resort for the rich Arabs of Lebanon and Egypt, whose decadent royal family were often in residence. Abdullah, Amir of Transjordan, stayed regularly – the King David could cope with his camels and horses. In October 1934, Churchill came to stay with his wife and his friend Lord Moyne, himself later a victim of the Palestinian conflict. Not to be outdone, the mufti built his own hotel, the Palace, using Jewish contractors, on the site of the ancient Mamilla cemetery.
When an American Jewess, a former nurse, opened the first beauty parlour, peasants stood and stared, expecting the mannequins in the window to speak. The best bookshop in town was run by Boulos Said, father of the intellectual Edward, and his brother near the Jaffa Gate, while the finest haute couture emporium belonged to Kurt May and his wife, typical German Jews fleeing Hitler. When he created the shop – the name ‘May’ was emblazoned above the door in Hebrew, English and Arab – he imported all the fixtures from Germany and soon it attracted the rich wives of Jewish businessmen and British proconsuls – and of Abdullah of Jordan. Emperor Haile Selassie and his entourage once took over the entire shop. The Mays were more cultured Germans than Zionists – Kurt had won the Iron Cross in the Great War – and they were totally irreligious. The Mays lived over the shop: when their daughter Miriam was born, she was breastfed by an Arab wetnurse but when she grew up, her parents discouraged her from playing with the Polish Jews next door who were ‘not sufficiently cultured’. Jerusalem was still small though: sometimes in spring, Miriam’s father would take her on walks out of the city to pick cyclamen on the blooming Judaean hills. Friday nights were the height of their social week: when the ultra-Orthodox Jews were praying, the Mays went dancing at the King David Hotel.
The British behaved as if Palestine were a real imperial province: Brigadier Angus McNeil founded the Ramle Vale Jackal Hounds Hunt which chased the fox and the jackal with a pack of hounds. At the Officers Club, Zionist guests noticed that all conversation was about duck shooting, if not the latest polo game or race meeting. One young officer flew into town in his own private aeroplane.
The British public schoolboys, raised on the complexities of their own aristocracy, revelled in the hierarchies of Jerusalem, especially the social etiquette required for dinner parties at Government House, where Sir Harry Luke, John Chancellor’s deputy, remembered how the toastmaster welcomed high commissioners, chief rabbis, chief judges, mayors and patriarchs: ‘Your Excellency, Your Honour, Your Beatitudes, Your Eminences, Your Lord Bishops, Your Paternity, Your Reverends, Your Worship, Ladies and Gentlemen.’
This thriving new Jerusalem, with 132,661 inhabitants by 1931, proved that British rule and Zionist immigration did help create a flourishing economy – and rising Arab immigration: more Arabs immigrated to Palestine than Jews and the Arab population of Palestine increased by 10 per cent, twice as fast of that of Syria or Lebanon.* In ten years, Jerusalem attracted 21,000 new Arabs and 20,000 new Jews – and this was the glamorous heyday of the Families. The British sympathized with the Arab dynasties, Nusseibehs and Nashashibis, who still owned 25 per cent of the land, and who ‘fitted into the social order imported by the British as if tailor-made’, wrote Sari Nusseibeh, later the Palestinian philosopher. ‘The men belonged to the same gentleman’s society and in private English officers tended to prefer them to the Russian Jewish upstarts.’