Across the barbed wire, the Nusseibehs mourned the Catastrophe: ‘I suffered what amounted to a nervous breakdown,’ admitted Hazem Nusseibeh. His nephew Sari missed ‘the English and Arab aristocrats, the free-wheeling parvenus, the middle-class tradesmen, the demimonde catering to soldiers, the rich blend of cultures, the bishops, Muslim clerics and black-bearded rabbis crowding the same streets’.
In November, Abdullah was, bizarrely, crowned king of Jerusalem by the Coptic bishop – the first king to control the city since Frederick II. On 1 December, he had himself declared king of Palestine in Jericho, renaming his realm the United Kingdom of Jordan. The Husseinis and the Arab nationalists denounced Abdullah for his compromises and could not forgive him for being the only Arab to have succeeded in the Palestinian Catastrophe.
The king turned to the Families of Jerusalem, who now enjoyed a strange renaissance. He offered Ragheb Nashashibi the premiership of Jordan. Nashashibi refused, but agreed to become a minister. The king also appointed him governor of the West Bank and Custodian of the Two Harams (Jerusalem and Hebron) as well as presenting him with a Studebaker car and the title ‘Ragheb Pasha’. (The Jordanians were still awarding Ottoman titles in the 1950s.) His dandyish nephew, Nassereddin Nashashibi, became royal chamberlain.* In a satisfying dismissal of the hated mufti, Abdullah officially sacked him and appointed Sheikh Husam al-Jarallah, the very man cheated of the title back in 1921.
Abdullah was warned of assassination plots, but he always replied, ‘Until my day comes, nobody can harm me; when the day comes, no one can guard me.’ Whatever the dangers, Abdullah, now 69, was proud of his possession of Jerusalem. ‘When I was a boy,’ recalled his grandson Hussein, ‘my grandfather used to tell me that Jerusalem was one of the most beautiful cities in the world.’ As time went on he noticed that the king ‘grew to love Jerusalem more and more’. Abdullah was disappointed in his eldest son Talal, but he adored his grandson whom he educated to be king. During school holidays, they breakfasted together every day. ‘I’d become the son he always wanted,’ wrote Hussein.
On Friday 20 July 1951, Abdullah drove to Jerusalem with Hussein, a sixteen-year-old Harrow schoolboy, whom he ordered to wear his military uniform with medals. Before they left, the king told him, ‘My son, one day you I’ll have to assume responsibility,’ adding ‘When I have to die, I’d like to be shot in the head by a nobody. That’s the simplest way.’ They stopped in Nablus to meet the mufti’s cousin, Dr Musa al-Husseini, who had served the mufti in Nazi Berlin: he bowed and expressed loyalty.
Just before midday, Abdullah arrived in Jerusalem for Friday prayers with his grandson, Glubb Pasha, Royal Chamberlain Nassereddin Nash-ashibi and the unctuous Musa Husseini. The crowd was sulky and suspicious; his nervous Arab Legion bodyguard was so numerous that Hussein joked ‘What is this, a funeral procession?’ Abdullah visited his father’s tomb, then walked to al-Aqsa and told the guards to pull back, but Musa Husseini stayed very close. As Abdullah stepped into the portico, the sheikh of the mosque kissed the royal hand, and simultaneously a young man emerged from behind the door. Raising a pistol, the youth pressed the barrel against the king’s ear and fired, killing him instantly. The bullet exited through the eye, and Abdullah collapsed, his white turban rolling away. Everyone threw themselves to the ground, ‘doubled up like bent old terrified women,’ observed Hussein ‘but I must have lost my head for at that moment, I lunged towards the assassin’, who turned on Hussein: ‘I saw his bared teeth, his dazed eyes. He had the gun and I watched him point it at me then saw the smoke, heard the bang and felt the shot on my chest. Is this what death is like? His bullet hit metal.’ Abdullah had saved his grandson’s life by ordering him to wear the medals.
The bodyguards, firing haphazardly, killed the assassin. Holding the dead king in his arms as blood gushed from his nose, Nashashibi kissed his hand repeatedly. The Legionaries started to rampage through the streets, and Glubb struggled to restrain them. Kneeling by the king, Hussein undid his robe, and then walked with the body as it was borne to the Austrian Hospice. There Hussein himself was sedated before being hurriedly flown back to Amman.26
HUSSEIN OF JORDAN: LAST KING OF JERUSALEM
The mufti and King Farouk of Egypt were said to be behind the assassination. Musa Husseini was arrested and tortured before he and three others were executed. The assassination was just one of the killings and coups precipitated by the Arab defeat. In 1952, King Farouk, last of Mehmet Ali’s Albanians, was overthrown by a junta of Free Officers, led by General Muhammad Neguib and Colonel Gamal Abdul Nasser.
Abdullah of Jordan was succeeded by his son, King Talal, who suffered violent attacks of schizophrenia that led to his almost killing his wife. On 12 August 1952, young Hussein was holidaying at a hotel in Geneva when a waiter entered with an envelope on a silver platter: it was addressed to ‘His Majesty King Hussein’. His father had abdicated. Still just seventeen, Hussein liked fast cars and motorcycles, planes and helicopters, which he flew himself, and beautiful women – he married five. While his grandfather had never lost the dream of a greater Hash-emite kingdom, risking everything to win Jerusalem, Hussein realized gradually that it would be an achievement even to survive as king of Jordan.
A Sandhurst-trained officer, this debonair monarch was pro-Western, his regime funded first by Britain then by America, yet he survived only by trimming between the forces at play in the Arab world. At times he had to endure the suffocating embrace of hostile radical tyrants such as Nasser of Egypt and Saddam Hussein of Iraq. Like his grandfather, he was able to work with the Israelis; much later, he came to like Rabin especially.
The octogenarian Churchill, who had returned to office as prime minister in 1951, muttered to one of his officials, ‘You ought to let the Jews have Jerusalem – it was they who made it famous.’ But the city remained divided between east and west, ‘a jarring series of ad hoc fences, walls and bails of barbed wire’ with ‘signs in Hebrew, English and Arabic reading STOP! DANGER! FRONTIER AHEAD’. The nights crackled with machine-gun fire, the only gateway was the Mandelbaum Gate, which became as famous as Berlin’s Checkpoint Charlie. Yet it was neither a gate nor the house of the Mandelbaums. The long-departed Simchah and Esther Mandelbaum had been Belorussian-born manufacturers of stockings whose sturdy home had become a Haganah stronghold that was blown up by the Arab Legion in 1948. The Mandelbaum checkpoint stood on its ruins.
Through these mined and barbed barriers the Jewish teenager Amos Oz and the Palestinian child Sari Nusseibeh, the son of Anwar, were living close to each other. Later Oz and Nusseibeh, both fine writers and opponents of fanatacism, became friends. ‘Islam’, wrote Nusseibeh, ‘was no different for families like ours than I would learn later that Judaism was for Amos Oz a couple of hundred feet away, just beyond No-Man’s-Land.’ The boys watched as a new influx of immigrants changed Jerusalem yet again. The Arabs, particularly Iraq, had avenged themselves on their own Jewish communities: 600,000 of them now migrated to Israel. But it was the survivors of the ultra-Orthodox sects known as the Haredim (Awestruck) who changed the look of Jerusalem, bringing with them the culture and clothes of seventeenth-century Mitteleuropa and a faith in mystical and joyous prayer. ‘Hardly a day would go by’, recalled Sari Nusseibeh, ‘when I didn’t spy into the streets beyond No-Man’s-Land’ and there in Mea Shearim, ‘I saw blackclad men. Sometimes the bearded creatures looked back at me.’ Who were they, he wondered?