This was confronted by the ageing Weizmann, again Zionist president, but the real power lay with David Ben-Gurion, recently elected chairman of the Executive of the Jewish Agency, the highest authority for the Yishuv. Both men were autocratic and intellectual in style, dedicated to Zionism and Western democracy. But they were opposites. Ben-Gurion was a gruff working-class man of action, equipped to lead in war and peace. He lacked all small talk (except about history and philosophy) and was humourless – the only joke the diminutive Ben-Gurion told was about Napoleon’s height. Its punchline was: ‘no one was bigger than Napoleon, just taller.’ Married with two children, a dissatisfied husband, he enjoyed a discreet love-affair with a tall, blue-eyed Englishwoman in London. But he was a brooding loner and thoughtful strategist, always obsessed with the cause, who collected books, spending any spare time in second-hand bookshops. The Old Man, as he was already known, learned Spanish to read Cervantes and Greek to study Plato; when he planned statehood, he read Greek philosophy; when he made war, he read Clausewitz.
Weizmann was Zionism’s grand seigneur, dressed in Savile Row suits, more at home in the salons of Mayfair than on the sunbeaten farms of Galilee and now well off from founder-shares in Marks & Spencer, donated by his friends, the Sieff family. ‘You’re now King of Israel,’ Ben-Gurion told him, but he would soon turn against ‘Weizmann’s regime of personal fetishism’. As for Weizmann, he knew that, unlike Ben-Gurion, he was not cut out to be a warlord, but he half respected, half disdained the younger man’s militancy. In his 600-page memoirs, he mentioned Ben-Gurion’s name just twice. Weizmann was mistaken for Lenin in looks but Ben-Gurion emulated the Bolshevik’s ruthless pragmatism.
He had started as a socialist, risen in the labour movement and had not quite lost his belief that a new Palestine should be created through the cooperation of the Jewish and Arab working classes. Ben-Gurion may have dreamed of a Jewish state but that seemed totally unlikely and remote. Since he appreciated that ‘the Arab national movement was born at almost the same time as political Zionism,’ he believed that an Arab–Jewish confederation was the best the Jews could hope for at that time. Both he and the mufti probed each other with plans for a shared state: in retrospect, a compromise was still possible. In August 1934, Ben-Gurion started to meet Musa al-Alami,* a lawyer working for the British, and George Antonius, the writer – both moderate advisers to the mufti. Ben-Gurion proposed either a Jewish–Arab shared government or a Jewish entity within an Arab federation that would include Transjordan and Iraq. Surely, Ben-Gurion argued, Palestine was like a sofa: there was room for both. The mufti was impressed, but noncommittal. Later Alami reflected that the mufti and Ben-Gurion shared the same harsh nationalism but the Jewish leader was much more flexible and skilful. He regretted that the Arabs never produced their own Ben-Gurion. Meanwhile, the mufti and his fellow aristocrats were losing control of their movement.
In November 1935, a Syrian preacher named Sheikh Izzat al-Din al-Qassam, who worked as a junior official in the mufti’s sharia court in Haifa and was constantly urging him to reject any political compromise, rebelled against the British. He was far more radical than the mufti, a puritan fundamentalist who believed in the sanctity of martyrdom, a precursor of al-Qaeda and today’s Jihadists. Now he led the thirteen mujahidin of his Black Hand cell into hills where, on 20 November, he was cornered by 400 British police and killed. Qassam’s martyrdom† jolted the mufti closer to revolt. In April 1936, Qassam’s successor launched an operation outside Nablus that killed two Jews – but released a German who claimed to be a Nazi ‘for Hitler’s sake’. This lit the spark. The Irgun, Jewish nationalists, killed two Arabs in response. As the shooting started, Sir Arthur Wauchope was totally unqualified to respond. A young officer noticed that he ‘doesn’t know what to do.’20
THE ARAB REVOLT
1936–45
THE MUFTI’S TERROR
One cool night in Jerusalem in early 1936, ‘scattered rifle shots rang out in the clear evening sky’ and Hazem Nusseibeh realized that ‘the armed rebellion had begun’. The revolt escalated slowly. In April that year, Arabs killed sixteen Jews in Jaffa. The Palestinian parties formed a Higher Arab Committee under the mufti and called a national strike that swiftly spun out of anyone’s control. The mufti declared this a sacred struggle and called his forces the Holy War Army as volunteers started to arrive to fight the British and Jews from Syria, Iraq and Transjordan.
On 14 May, two Jews were shot in the Jewish Quarter, and the mufti insisted, ‘The Jews are trying to expel us from the country, murdering our sons and burning our houses.’ Two days later, Arab gunmen killed three Jews in the Edison Cinema.
The Yishuv began to panic, but Ben-Gurion embraced a policy of self-restraint. Meanwhile British ministers now questioned the entire basis of the Mandate and commissioned Earl Peel, an ex-Cabinet minister, to report. The mufti called off the strike in October 1936, though he refused to recognize Peel. But Weizmann charmed the commissioners. On Amir Abdullah’s insistence the mufti testified that the Palestinians demanded independence, the annulment of the Balfour Declaration and, ominously, the removal of the Jews.
In July 1937, Peel proposed a two-state solution, the partition of Palestine into an Arab area (70 per cent of the country) joined to Amir Abdullah’s Transjordan and a Jewish area (20 per cent). In addition, he suggested a population transfer of the 300,000 Arabs in the Jewish area. Jerusalem would remain a special entity under British control. The Zionists accepted – they had realized they would never be given Jerusalem in a partition. Weizmann was not disappointed by the small size of the Jewish entity, musing that ‘King David’s [kingdom] was smaller.’
Peel complained that, in contrast to the Zionists, ‘not once since 1919 has any Arab leader said that cooperation with the Jews was even possible’. Only Abdullah of Transjordan enthusiastically supported Peel’s plan and, in retrospect, this would have prevented Israel in its present form but at the time, all Palestinians were inflamed by an English earl’s idea of creating a Jewish state: both the mufti and his rival Nashashibi rejected it.
The Revolt exploded again, but this time, the mufti embraced and organized the violence; he was seemingly more interested in murdering his Palestinian rivals than the British or Jews. ‘It seems’, writes the latest historian of the Husseinis, ‘he was personally responsible for establishing internecine terror as a means of control.’ Over his favourite meal of lentil soup, the mufti, always accompanied by his Sudanese bodyguards descended from the Haram’s traditional watchmen, behaved like a Mafia boss as he ordered assassinations that in two years of fratricide wiped out many of his most decent and moderate compatriots. Nine days after Peel, the mufti called on the German consul-general in Jerusalem to state his sympathy for Nazism and his wish to cooperate. The next day, the British tried to arrest him but he sought sanctuary in al-Aqsa.
The British did not dare storm the Sanctuary. Instead they besieged Husseini on the Temple Mount, denouncing him as the organizer of the Revolt. But not all the Arab gangs were under his controclass="underline" the Jihadi followers of Qassam also enthusiastically killed any Arabs suspected of cooperating with the authorities. Nothing less than a brutal civil war broke out among the Arabs themselves. It was now that it was said that the mufti made many families weep.
After supporting the Revolt initially, Ragheb Nashashibi opposed the mufti both for his terror and his strategy. Nashashibi’s villa was raked with machinegun fire; a young cousin was killed watching a football game. When Fakhri Bey Nashashibi, his nephew, accused the mufti of destructive egotism, his death warrant was published in the newspapers: he was later assassinated in Baghdad. Nashashibi armed his retainers, known as ‘the Nashashibi units’ or ‘peacebands’, and they fought the mufti’s men. Arab headwear became the shibboleth of the Revolt: Husseini supporters wore the keffiyeh checked scarf; the Nashashibis, the tarboush of compromise. The mufti set up rebel courts to try traitors and issued rebel stamps.