In Jerusalem, the Revolt was commanded by Abd al-Kadir Husseini, thirty-year-old commander of the Holy War Army. He was the son of the late Musa Kazem Husseini (he used the nom de guerre Abu Musa), and received the best education at the Anglican Bishop Gobat’s school on Mount Zion. He had used his graduation at Cairo University to denounce British perfidy and Zionist conspiracy. After being expelled from Egypt, he organized the mufti’s Palestine Arab Party, edited its newspapers and founded, under cover of the boy scouts, his own Green Hand militia that became its military wing.
At home he was an elegant grandee with his pencil moustache and English suit but he was in his element on the run, in the field, riding shotgun, fighting. He often ‘humiliated the colonial forces around Jerusalem,’ noted Wasif Jawhariyyeh the oud-player. He was wounded in 1936 in a battle against British tanks near Hebron but after his wounds were treated in Germany, he returned to fight on from his base in John the Baptist’s village, Ein Kerem. In the city, he organized the assassination of a British police chief. Wounded again in RAF strafing, Husseini’s admirers regarded him as an Arab knight who eschewed luxury to fight amongst Arab peasants against infidel intruders – but his Palestinian enemies regarded him as one of the worst of the mufti’s warlords, whose henchmen terrorized villages that did not support the Husseinis.
On 26 September 1937, the British district commissioner in Galilee, Lewis Andrews, was assassinated. On the 12th, the mufti escaped from Jerusalem dressed as woman, an undignified exit that weakened his power in Palestine. In exile in Lebanon, he directed operations in a war that was still escalating. He mercilessly enforced obedience to himself personally and his rigidly intransigent policies.
The British were struggling to hold Palestine: Nablus, Hebron, swathes of Galilee were often out of control – and they even lost the Old City for short periods. The British recruited Jewish auxiliaries from the Haganah to join their so-called Jewish Settlement Police, but the latter could scarcely defend their far-flung villages. The Zionist nationalists were disgusted by Ben-Gurion’s policy of restraint. The Irgun Zvai Leumi, the National Military Organization, still only mustering about 1,500 men at the beginning of the Revolt, answered Arab attacks with atrocities against Arab civilians, tossing grenades into cafés in Jerusalem. On Black Sunday in November 1937, they launched coordinated bombings, much to the horror of Weizmann and Ben-Gurion, but recruits poured into the Irgun. Just as the Arab moderates were being annihilated by the mufti’s thugs, so the Revolt destroyed the credibility of conciliatory Jews such as Judah Magnes, the American president of the Hebrew University, who wanted a binational state with a bicameral congress of Jews and Arabs and no Jewish entity at all. Ben-Gurion’s self-restraint was soon exhausted and the British now took off their gloves to crush the Arabs by all and any means: they collectively punished villages and at one point destroyed a whole neighbourhood of Jaffa. In June 1937, they brought in the death penalty for anyone bearing arms. In October, Sir Charles Tegart, who had stringently policed Calcutta for thirty years, arrived in Jerusalem. He built fifty ‘Tegart forts’, erected security fences around the borders and took charge of counter-insurgency and intelligence, creating Arab Investigation Centres. Tegart ran a school in west Jerusalem to instruct his interrogators how to torture suspects – including the ‘water-can’ technique in which prisoners had water forced down their noses from coffeepots, a method now known as ‘water-boarding’ – until the city governor Keith-Roach demanded it be moved. An RAF officer, Arthur Harris – later famed as the ‘Bomber’ of Dresden – supervised air attacks on rebel villages. Yet as the crisis with Hitler developed in Europe, the British could not bring in enough troops to destroy the Revolt, so they needed more Jewish help.
A well-connected young counter-insurgency expert named Orde Wingate was posted to Jerusalem where he was invited to stay by High Commissioner Wauchope. Wingate observed that Wauchope ‘takes everyone’s advice and has lost all grasp of affairs’. His recommendation was to train Jewish fighters and take the insurgency to the insurgents. He would become the Zionist version of Lawrence – Weizmann called him ‘Lawrence of Judaea’. By chance, these two unconventional English Arabists were cousins.21
ORDE WINGATE AND MOSHE DAYAN: THE FALL OF THE OLD CITY
The son of a well-off colonial colonel with an evangelical mission to convert the Jews, raised on Bible and empire, Wingate was a fluent Arabic-speaker, and, like Lawrence, earned his spurs commanding Arab irregulars – a unit of the East Arab Corps in Sudan. ‘There was in him’, wrote Weizmann, ‘a fusion of the student and man of action that reminded me of Lawrence.’ But on arrival in Jerusalem he underwent an almost Damascene conversion, impressed by the energy of the Zionists, and repulsed by the mufti’s bullyboy tactics and the anti-Semitism of British officers: ‘Everyone’s against the Jews,’ he declared, ‘so I’m for them!’
Wingate inspected the beleaguered British troops and Jewish farms. In the depths of the night, they would receive visits from an ‘extra-ordinary figure’ wearing a Borsolino hat or a Wolseley topee, a battered Palm Beach suit and a Royal Artillery tie, who looked ‘like the kind of lowlife you saw hanging around dubious cafés in Tel Aviv’. Always armed to the teeth, the thirty-three-year-old Captain Wingate, who had ‘very piercing blue eyes, aquiline features and a faraway ascetic look with a scholarly air’, arrived in a Studebaker sedan ‘filled with weapons, maps, Lee Enfield rifles, Mills grenades – and a Bible’. Wingate decided that ‘the Jews will provide better soldiery than ours.’ In March 1938, the British commander, Sir Archibald Wavell, impressed by this ‘remarkable personality’, ordered Wingate to train Jewish special forces and deploy these so-called Special Night Squads against the rebels. Wavell did not know what he was dealing with: ‘I wasn’t then aware of the connection with T. E. Lawrence.’
Setting up headquarters in the Fast Hotel, near the Jaffa Gate, Wingate learned fluent Hebrew and was soon known as ‘the Friend’ by the Zionists – but he was regarded as an enemy by the Arabs and a reckless freak by many of his British brother-officers. Moving out of Government House, he set up home in Talpiot with his wife Lorna, who was ‘very young and very beautiful like a porcelain doll. People didn’t take their eyes off her’, recalled Ruth Dayan. Her husband Moshe Dayan, the twenty-two-year-old son of Russian immigrants, born in the first kibbutz, had (secretly) joined the Haganah and was (openly) serving in the Jewish Settlement Police, when ‘one evening, a Haganah man from Haifa turned up accompanied by a strange visitor. Wingate was a slender man, a heavy revolver at his side, carrying a small Bible. Before going on an action, he’d read the passage in the Bible relating to the place where we’d be operating.’ This military heir of the bibliolatrist evangelicals led his Night Squads against the Arab gunmen who were ‘forced to realize they could no longer find any path secure for them: they were likely to be caught in a surprise ambush anywhere.’ During the Revolt and later during the Second World War, the British trained 25,000 Jewish auxiliaries, including other commando units led by Yitzhak Sadeh, a Russian Red Army veteran who became Haganah’s chief of staff. ‘You are the sons of the Maccabees,’ Wingate told them, ‘You are the first soldiers of a Jewish army!’ Their expertise and spirit later formed the basis of the Israel Defence Forces.