ISRAEL

JERUSALEM had been destroyed and rebuilt many times in its long and often tragic history. With the arrival of the British, the city was about to undergo another painful period of transformation. Apart from the brief interlude of Crusader occupation, Jerusalem had been an important Islamic city for nearly thirteen hundred years. Now that the Ottoman empire had been conquered, the Arabs of the region were about to be given their independence. At first the British and the French established mandates and protectorates in the Near East, but, one by one, new Arab states and kingdoms began to appear: Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, Egypt, and Iraq. Other things being equal, Palestine would probably also have become an independent state, and Jerusalem, now such an important city, might well have been its capital. But this did not happen. During the period of the British Mandate, the Zionists were able to establish themselves in the country and create a Jewish state. Jerusalem remained a religious and a strategic prize, and its ownership was contested by the Jews, the Arabs, and the international community. But eventually in 1967, Jewish military and diplomatic maneuvers would carry the day, and Jerusalem became the capital of the Jewish State of Israel. At the present time, the Arab character of Jerusalem is only a shadow of what it was when Allenby and his troops marched into the city.

The Zionist victory was an extraordinary reversal. In 1917, Arabs formed 90 percent of the total population of Palestine and just under 50 percent of the population of Jerusalem. Both the Jews and the Arabs look back on this process with astonishment. Zionists regard their success in the face of such overwhelming odds as little short of miraculous; Arabs speak of their defeat as al-nakhbah, a word which denotes a catastrophe of near-cosmic proportions. It is not surprising that on both sides black-and-white accounts of the struggle have tended to oversimplify the issue, presenting it in terms of villains and heroes, total right and absolute wrong, the will of God or a divine chastisement. But the reality was more complex. In large part, the outcome was determined by the skill and resources of the Zionist leaders, who managed to influence first the British and later the American governments and who showed a canny understanding of the diplomatic process. Whenever they were offered something by the great powers, they nearly always accepted it, even though it often fell short of their needs or requirements. In the end, they got everything. The Zionists were also able to overcome the ideological divisions within their own movement. The Arabs were not so fortunate. Reeling under the shock of the collapse of the Ottoman empire and the arrival of the British, the Arab nationalist movement in Palestine lacked the coherence and sense of realpolitik that was necessary to deal with the Europeans on the one hand and the Zionists on the other. They could not mount a sustained resistance, and, unaccustomed to the methods of Western diplomacy, they continually said no when offered anything at all—hoping that a firm and uncompromising policy of rejection would secure them the right to an independent Arab state in the land which seemed, demographically and historically, to belong by rights to them. At the start, they were naively convinced of Britain’s good intentions toward them. As a result of their oft-repeated veto, they were left with nothing, and with the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948, the dispossessed, uprooted, and wandering Jew was replaced by the homeless, uprooted, and dispossessed Palestinian.

During the British Mandate, Jerusalem began the slow and painful process that would transform it from an Arab to a predominantly Jewish city.

The motivation and policy of the British were also confusing and dubious. Both sides found it hard to work out what the British intended. During the Great War, the British government had made pledges to both the Arabs and the Jews. In 1915, to encourage the Arabs of the Hijaz to rebel against Turkey, Sir Henry McMahon, high commissioner of Egypt, had promised Husain ibn Ali, sherif of Mecca, that Britain would recognize the future independence of the Arab countries and that the holy places would remain under the control of an “independent Sovereign Muslim State.” Palestine was not explicitly mentioned, nor was Jerusalem, the third-holiest place in Islam. The McMahon Pledge was not a formally ratified treaty, but it had the force of a treaty, especially when Husain decided to act upon it and raised the Arab revolt with the help of T. E. Lawrence in 1916. At the same time as McMahon was negotiating this agreement, Britain and France were negotiating the secret Sykes-Picot Agreement, which divided the whole Arab world north of the peninsula into British and French zones.

Then on 2 November 1917, just over a month before Allenby’s conquest of Jerusalem, Prime Minister Lloyd George instructed his foreign secretary, Arthur Balfour, to write a letter to Lord Rothschild, containing this important declaration:

His Majesty’s Government views with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done to prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.¹

Britain had long entertained the fantasy of returning the Jews to Palestine. In 1917, during a world war, there may also have been strategic considerations. A British protectorate of grateful Jews might counter French ambitions in the region. But Balfour was aware of the essential contradiction of the pledges given by his government. In a memorandum of August 1919, he pointed out that Britain and France had promised to set up national governments in the Near East, based on the free choice of the people. But in Palestine, “we do not propose even to go through the form of consulting the wishes of the present inhabitants of the country.”

The Four Great Powers are committed to Zionism. And Zionism, be it right or wrong, good or bad, is rooted in age-long traditions, in present needs and future hopes of far profounder import than the desires and prejudices of the 700,000 Arabs who now inhabit that ancient land.

With astonishing insouciance, Balfour concluded that “so far as Palestine is concerned, the Powers had made no statement of fact that is not admittedly wrong, and no declaration of policy which, at least in the letter, they have not always intended to violate.”² This was not the stuff of which clear, focused administration is made.

From 1917 until July 1920, Palestine and Jerusalem were under British military control (the Occupied Enemy Territories Administration). The military governor was Lieutenant Colonel Ronald Storrs, who had played a key role in the 1916 Arab uprising. His first duty was to repair the ravages of war in the city. The sewage system had failed, there was no clean water, and the roads were no longer viable. The British were much occupied by the responsibility of administering the holy places, and Storr, a civilized, cultivated man who loved Jerusalem, set up the Pro-Jerusalem Society, composed of the religious leaders of all three faiths and the local notables, to protect its historic sites. The society organized the repairs and renovation of public buildings and monuments; it also financed proposals for urban planning and preserving ancient sites by raising money abroad. One of its most useful rulings ordained that all new buildings in the city must use the local pinkish stone, a directive that is still followed and has helped to preserve the beauty of Jerusalem.

There were tensions, however. The Arabs had not been officially informed about the Balfour Declaration, but the news had been leaked. They were, not surprisingly, suspicious and alarmed. They noted that Hebrew was beginning to be introduced in official notices, along with English and Arabic, and that Jewish bureaucrats and translators were employed by the administration. But they still hoped that the British would acknowledge the justice of their cause. At least, they retained a certain hegemony in the municipal council, which Storrs had reestablished in January 1918. It had six members, two from each religious community, but the mayor was Muslim. Storrs’s first appointment to the mayoralty was Musa Kasim al-Husaini: he now had two deputies, one Jewish and one Christian. The Jews were not entirely happy with this arrangement, since they formed 50 percent of the city’s population. They were also irritated when it became apparent that the Arab mayors were using the mayoralty as a political platform from which to fight the Balfour Declaration.

There were also rumblings from abroad. The Vatican expressed its concern that Jerusalem, now conquered by the British, should remain in Christian hands. It would be tragic if “the most holy sanctuaries of the Christian religion were given to the charge of non-Christians.”³ In 1919 the King-Crane Report, commissioned by the new League of Nations, concluded that the Balfour Declaration should not be implemented. Instead, Palestine should be joined with Syria in a united Arab state, under the aegis of a temporary mandatory power. Nothing came of this report, however. When the time came to consider it, President Wilson’s attentions were elsewhere and it was quietly shelved.

The tension in the city erupted during the Nebī Mūsā celebrations on 4 April 1920. These had originally been initiated by the Mamluks when Jerusalem was endangered by the Western Crusaders. Since Allenby, the new Crusader, had arrived in the city, the Arabs of Palestine were beginning to think that al-Quds was imperiled again. A new interest in the Crusades began to appear in the Arab world: Saladin, the Kurd, now became an Arab hero and the Zionists were seen as new Crusaders or at least as tools of the Crusading West.⁴ The Nebī Mūsā processions had always been regarded as a symbolic way of taking possession of the Holy City, but this year the Muslim crowds broke ranks and stormed through the Jewish Quarter. The Arab police sided with the rioters, the British troops did not come out to quell the violence, and the Jews were forbidden to organize their own defense. Most of the casualties were Jewish: nine people were killed and 244 injured. There had been communal tension and occasional violence in Jerusalem for many years, but the 1920 riots showed that this had taken a terrible turn for the worse. It also created a rift between the Jews and the British. The Zionists immediately blamed Storrs and the administration for the pogrom: they had revealed their partiality for the Arabs. Henceforth both Jews and Arabs would accuse the British of favoring the “other side.”

In fact, there was an inherent contradiction in British policy. In April 1920, Britain became the Mandatory power in Palestine. Article 22 of the League of Nations Covenant insisted that Britain apply “the principle that the well-being and development [of the people of Palestine] form a sacred trust of civilization.” But the British were also to implement the Balfour Declaration and pave the way for the establishment of a Jewish National Home in Palestine. A Jewish Agency was to be set up as a public body to facilitate this and the development of the country in general (Article 4). The agency was also to work to “facilitate the acquisition of Palestinian citizenship by Jews” (Article 6) and to “facilitate Jewish immigration under suitable conditions” (Article 7). Was there no danger that these measures would prejudice the rights of “the non-Jewish communities” in Palestine?

The first civilian high commissioner to be appointed to Palestine, in July 1920, was Sir Herbert Samuel, who was himself Jewish. It seemed a hopeful sign to the Zionists and ominous to the Arabs. Samuel was committed to the Balfour Declaration, but throughout his five-year term of office he tried to reassure the Arabs. He told them that their land would never be taken away from them and that a Jewish government would never rule the Muslim and Christian Palestinian majority: “This is not the meaning of the Balfour Declaration.”⁵ But not only did these assurances fail to allay Arab fears, they antagonized the Jews. The White Paper of 1922, written by the British colonial secretary Winston Churchill, advanced a similar argument: there was no question of subjugating the Arab majority. The idea of the Balfour Declaration was simply to create a center in (but not in the whole of) Palestine where Jews could live as of right instead of on suffrance. Again, neither side was pleased, and the Arabs rejected the White Paper, though the Zionists accepted it in the hope of gaining more later.

In some ways, however, Jerusalem seemed to prosper under the Mandate. For the first time since the Crusades, it was the capital city of Palestine. During the 1920s, new garden suburbs, similar to those appearing in England, were appearing beyond the municipal borders around Jerusalem. Talpiot, Rehavia, Bayit Vegan, Kiryat Moshe, and Beit Hakerem were Jewish neighborhoods with parks, open spaces, and individual gardens. They had been established to the west of the Old City. A new commercial center was built to the west of the Old City walls on land bought from the Greek Orthodox patriarchate: its main street was named after Eliezar Ben-Yehuda, the philologist who had revived the use of Hebrew as a modern, spoken language. A second commercial center was also starting up at the Mahaneh Yehudah Market. But there were also elegant Arab suburbs in West Jerusalem at Talbieh, Katamon, and Ba’ka, as well as to the north of the city at Sheikh Jarrah, Wadi al-Joz, and the American Colony. An important day for Jerusalem was the opening of the Hebrew University on Mount Scopus. Lord Balfour came to preside: it was his one and only visit to Palestine. Throughout the ceremony, tears poured openly down his cheeks. Yet he did not seem to notice that the streets of Arab Jerusalem were shuttered and silent and that black flags of mourning hung in the sūq.⁶

New leaders had emerged in Jerusalem. One of Samuel’s first appointments was Ḥajj Amin al-Husaini to the post of muftī. This appalled the Zionists, since Husaini was an extreme Arab nationalist who had taken a leading role in the 1920 riots. Samuel probably hoped to neutralize Ḥajj Amin by co-opting him, yet like most of the British he was also genuinely impressed by the young man. Courteous, reserved, and dignified, the new muftī did not seem like a rabble-rouser. The following year he was appointed president of the Supreme Muslim Council, a new body which supervised all the Islamic institutions in Palestine. He made this a base from which to fight the Balfour Declaration, starting a building and renovation program on the Ḥaram which he funded by means of a large-scale propaganda campaign. The Zionists were dreaming of rebuilding their Temple, the mufti claimed, and this would inevitably threaten the Muslim shrines on the Ḥaram. These accusations seemed fantastic to the Zionist leaders, most of whom had no interest whatever in the Temple and were not even much moved by the Western Wall. But Husaini’s fears were not entirely without foundation, as we can see today.

The appointment of Husaini tended to polarize the Arabs of Jerusalem into two opposing camps. The radicals gravitated toward the muftī, while the moderates grouped themselves around the new mayor, Raghib al-Nashashibi, who was opposed to Zionism but believed in cooperating with the authorities whenever possible. Samuel did seem ready to acknowledge that Jerusalem was a predominantly Islamic city. The municipal council had been expanded and now consisted of four Muslims, three Christians, and three Jews; the mayor continued to be a Muslim. But Samuel had also extended the franchise to allow more Jews to vote. By trying to be fair to both sides, the high commissioner satisfied neither. The Zionists and Arabs had mutually exclusive plans for Palestine and Jerusalem, and conflict was inevitable.

The Zionists naturally had their own heroes and luminaries. The Palestinians did not need to create a new mythology and ideology to fuel their struggle. Palestine was their home; they had lived for centuries in al-Quds, celebrating its holiness. There was no need for them to write books about their land and city: did a man find it necessary to write passionate poems to a beloved wife? But the Zionists did have to attach themselves to Palestine. They had been driven to the country by the desire to find a place of their own in an alien, hostile world. Yet aliyah was often a wrenching, painful experience. Most of the new pioneers left the country during the 1920s: life was hard and the place was strange. It did not seem like their homeland. To root themselves spiritually in the land, they needed more than a cerebral ideology, and their ideologues turned instinctively to the old spiritual geography of Kabbalah. The originally secular movement acquired a mystical dimension.

The main protagonist of this Zionistic Kabbalah did not live in Jerusalem, nor did he focus on the Holy City. A. D. Gordon, who had been initiated into Kabbalah in Russia, made the aliyah at the quite advanced age of forty-six.⁷ At his kibbutz in Degania he worked in the fields alongside the young pioneers, with his flowing white beard. He found the migration to Palestine very difficult: he was bitterly homesick for Russia and found the Near Eastern landscape of Palestine alien. Yet in working on the soil, he had experienced what would, he said, in previous times have been called a revelation of the Shekhinah. He felt that he had returned to that primal wholeness which had so often characterized the experience of God in Jerusalem but which had come to Gordon in the Galilee. Jews had lived a wretched and unnatural life in the Diaspora, Gordon taught the young pioneers in his poems and lectures. Landless and cut off from the soil, they had perforce immured themselves in the urban life of the ghetto. But, more important, they had been alienated from both God and themselves. Like Judah Halevi, Gordon believed that the Land of Israel (Eretz Yisrael) had been creative of the uniquely Jewish spirit. It had revealed to them the clarity, infinity, and luminosity of the divine, and it was this that made them truly themselves. Separated from this source of being, they had become damaged and fragmented. Now, in immersing themselves in the land’s towering holiness, they had the duty of creating themselves anew. “Every one of us is required to refashion himself,” Gordon wrote, “so that the unnatural, defective, splintered person within him may be changed into a natural, wholesome human being who is true to himself.”⁸ But there was also a hint of aggression in Gordon’s mysticism: Jews must reestablish their claim to the land by what he called the Conquest of Labor. Physical toil would return Jews to themselves and restore Palestine to its true owners, who alone could respond to its holiness.

The first task of these Zionist settlers in the Negev was to erect a barbed-wire fence around their new kibbutz when they founded it in 1946. Labor Zionism was positive for Jews, but despite its socialist ethic it excluded the Arab population of Palestine. Even A. D. Gordon described the Arabs as “filthy,” “degraded,” and “contemptible.”

In ancient times, Jews had sought a similar return to a primal harmony in their Temple in Jerusalem. But Gordon taught the Zionists that the Shekhinah was no longer to be found on Mount Zion but in the fields and mountains of Galilee. In the old days,avodahhad meant the Temple service: for Gordon, avodah was physical labor. A smaller number of Zionists, however, were expecting the imminent return to the Temple Mount. Marginalized and rather ridiculed by the secular leaders of Labor Zionism, religious Zionists formed a group which they called “Mizrachi.” They saw Jerusalem as the center of the world in a more conventional sense. Their leader was Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook, who became the chief rabbi of the Ashkenazim in Jerusalem in 1921. Most Orthodox Jews were strongly opposed to the whole Zionist enterprise, but Kook supported the movement. He believed that the secular Zionists were helping to build God’s kingdom even though they did not realize it. The return to the land would inevitably lead them back to Torah. A Kabbalist, Kook believed that the balance of the whole world had been damaged while the Jews had been separated from Palestine. The divinity had been hidden away in synagogues and yeshivas in the Diaspora, which was polluted with the impurity of the gentile world. Now the whole universe would be redeemed: “All the civilizations of the world will be renewed by the renaissance of our spirit. All quarrels will be resolved and our revival will cause all life to be luminous with the joy of fresh birth.”⁹ Indeed, the Redemption had already begun. Kook could already see, in his mind’s eye, the rebuilt Temple revealing the divinity to the world:

Here stands the Temple upon its foundation, to the honour and glory of all peoples and kingdoms, and here we joyfully bear the sheaves brought forth by the land of our delight, coming, our wine presses filled with grain and wine, our hearts glad over the goodness of this land of delight, and here before us appear the priests, holy men, servants of the Temple of the Lord God of Israel.

This was not a distant dream: “We shall see them again on the mountain of the Lord in the near future, and how shall our hearts swell to see these priests of the Lord and these Levites at their holy service [avodah] and at their wonderful singing.”¹⁰ It was not a vision that was calculated to bring great joy to the Palestinian Muslims of Jerusalem, however. In his lifetime, Rabbi Kook was generally seen as an eccentric figure: it is only in our own day that his ideas have come into their own.

Under Lord Plumer, who succeeded Herbert Samuel in 1925, Palestine was apparently peaceful. The Jewish community—or Yishuv—was busily creating a para-state within the Mandate, with its own army (the Haganah), a parliamentary body of representatives from the kibbutzim and trade unions (the Histadruth), its own taxation, financial institutions, and a range of educational, cultural, and charitable organizations. The Jewish Agency, with its headquarters in Rehavia in West Jerusalem, had become the official representative body of the Yishuv to the British government. The Arabs were less organized, their opposition to Zionism split by the tension between the Husaini and Nashashibi factions. On both sides of the Zionist-Arab conflict, however, extremists were rising to the fore who were unwilling to accept the present situation any longer. Radical Zionists were attracted by the ideas of Vladimir Jabotinsky, while the mufti urged his followers to stop cooperating with the British.

The conflict entered a new and tragic phase in Jerusalem, a city which symbolized the deepest aspirations of both peoples. Since the arrival of the British, the Arabs had become worried about the Jewish devotions at the Western Wall. Montefiore and Rothschild had both tried to buy the prayer enclave during the nineteenth century, and since 1918 the Muslims noticed that the Jews had started to bring more furniture into their oratory: chairs, benches, screens, tables, and scrolls. It seemed as though they might be trying to establish a synagogue there, in violation of the status quo arrangements under the Ottomans. The muftī had alerted his followers to what he perceived as the Zionist design to gain control of the Ḥaram, seeing these Jewish developments at the wall as the thin end of the wedge. The trouble came to a head on the eve of Yom Kippur in 1928. The district commissioner of Jerusalem, Edward Keith Roach, was taking a walk around the Old City with Douglas Duff, the chief of police. They called in at the Muslim Sharīah Court in the Tanziqiyya Madrasah, and while they were looking down on the Jewish oratory below, Roach noticed that a bedroom screen had been put up to separate men and women during the services. The Muslim clerics in the room expressed great indignation, and Roach agreed that this was an infringement of the status quo. The next day, which was Yom Kippur, police were sent to remove the screen. They arrived at the most solemn part of the service, when the worshippers stood motionless in silent prayer. Insensitively assuming that the service must be over, the police began to take the screen away; the Jews reacted with dismay to this overt lack of respect. Throughout Palestine, the Yishuv furiously accused the British of blasphemy.

The mufti now began a new campaign, insisting that the status quo be rigidly observed. The wall was part of the Ḥaram and an Islamic waqf property. It was the place where Muḥammad had tethered Burāq after the Night Journey. Jews must not treat the holy place as though it belonged to them, bringing in furniture and blowing the shofar in such a way as to disturb Muslim prayer on the Ḥaram. They were there on suffrance only. The muftī also began a devotional offensive. There was a Sufi convent nearby, and thedhikrs suddenly became very loud and noisy indeed. The muezzin timed the call to prayer precisely to coincide with services at the wall. Finally, the Supreme Muslim Council opened the northern wall of the enclave so that it was no longer a cul-de-sac but now a thoroughfare linking the Maghribi Quarter to the Ḥaram purlieus: Arabs began to lead their animals through the alley during Jewish services and ostentatiously light cigarettes there during the Sabbath. Naturally the Jews of the Yishuv, secular and religious, became increasingly angry and resentful, especially when the British actually endorsed these outrageous arrangements.

In the summer of 1929 the Sixteenth Zionist Conference met at Zurich. On the first day, Jabotinsky made an inflammatory speech calling for the establishment of a Jewish state—not a “homeland”—on both sides of the Jordan. His proposal was soundly defeated by the more moderate Zionists at the conference, but the Arabs were still seriously alarmed. Then, on the Ninth of Av (15 August), a group of young disciples of Jabotinsky demonstrated outside the Mandatory Offices in Jerusalem and afterward proceeded to the Western Wall, where they waved the Jewish national flag and vowed to defend the wall to the death. On both sides tension grew. The next day, when the Arabs began to assemble in the Ḥaram for the Friday prayers, some of the mufti’s supporters invaded the Jewish oratory at the wall. This time the police quelled the riot. But later, a tragic incident sparked a major confrontation. A Jewish boy kicked a football into an Arab garden, and during the ensuing brawl the child was killed. Zionists demonstrated angrily at his funeral, and on 22 and 23 August, crowds of Palestinian peasants began to arrive in Jerusalem with clubs and knives. Some even had firearms. The mufti did nothing to dispel the pent-up fury. In his Friday sermon that weekend he said nothing that could actually be called incitement, but afterward the mob rushed from the Ḥaram and started to attack every Jew they met. Again, the British refused to allow the Jews to retaliate in kind, and the British police force, which had been reduced by Lord Plumer, was unable to deal with this crisis adequately. Violence broke out all over Palestine. By the end of August, 133 Jews had been killed and 339 injured. The British police had killed 110 Arabs, and six more had died in a Jewish counterattack near Tel Aviv.

Hajj Amin al-Husaini (center), Grand Muftī of Jerusalem, with members of the Arab League. Uncompromising in his opposition to Zionism, he would ultimately discredit the Palestinian cause in the eyes of many observers by making overtures to Hitler during the Second World War.

The Western Wall riots led inevitably to an escalation of tension on both sides. Superficially, the Arabs won their fight for the wall. The Shaw Commission appointed to investigate the matter confirmed the status quo arrangements that had been made by the Ottomans. Jews could bring their ritual articles into the prayer enclave, but the scrolls, menorahs, and Arks must not exceed a prescribed size, the shofar must not be blown at the wall, and there could be no singing. The Muslims were also forbidden to hold their noisy dhikrs and to lead their animals through the area during Jewish services. But it was a hollow victory. Zionism became a more radical, desperate struggle when Hitler came to power. Refugees began to come to Palestine from Germany and Poland in greater numbers than ever before. The old gradualist policies of the Zionists no longer seemed adequate, and more Jews in the Diaspora—though not in the Yishuv—began to veer toward Jabotinsky’s Revisionist Party. Radical Jewish groups—some of whom were inspired by the works of Rabbi Kook—were even more extreme and began to form militant organizations. They were not interested in the socialist ideals of Ben Gurion. Their heroes were Joshua and King David, who had used force to establish the Jews in Palestine. The most important of these right-wing groups was the Irgun Zvei Leumi. But still in Palestine only about 10 to 15 percent of the Yishuv inclined to the right. Ben Gurion continued to urge a policy of restraint, realizing that Hitler’s rabidly anti-Semitic policies might well help the Zionist cause.

The Arabs were extremely alarmed by the rise in Jewish immigration during the 1930s. They accused the Zionists of exploiting the German danger to further their cause. They asked why they should suffer the loss of their country because of the anti-Semitic crimes of Europe. It was an entirely valid and unanswerable question. Arab anxiety was understandable. In 1933, Jews had constituted only 18.9 percent of the population; by 1936 the percentage had risen to 27.7. Arabs also felt that stronger measures were necessary. More radical parties now started to appear in the Arab camp, though at this stage they were still controlled by the notables: the Defence Party, the Reform Party, and the Pan-Arab Istiqlal. Some of the Palestinians began to join guerrilla organizations to fight the British and the Zionists. In November 1935, Sheikh al-Qassam’s guerrillas led a revolt against the British near Jenin during which the sheikh was killed: he became one of the first martyrs for Palestine. In 1936 the Arab Higher Committee was established in Jerusalem under the presidency of the mufti, consisting of the leaders of the new parties. On both sides, therefore, more extreme counsels were beginning to prevail, and Zionists and Arabs were arming themselves for the final confrontation.

Yet despite the growing tension in the city, Jerusalem continued to flourish and develop. Such famous landmarks as the King David Hotel, the imposing YMCA building opposite, the post office, and the Rockefeller Museum began to appear outside the walls. Jerusalem was rapidly expanding far beyond the borders of the metropolitan area. The British had therefore established an extensive Jerusalem Sub-District, which included the new Jewish and Arab suburbs surrounding the Old City. If Jews had begun to pour into Palestine in greater numbers, the Arab population of Jerusalem had also increased. Jews were in a majority within the municipality; there were now 100,000 Jews to 60,000 Arab Muslims and Christians. But in the Sub-District, the Arabs constituted just over half the total population and owned 80 percent of the property. In particular the large middle-class Arab suburbs in West Jerusalem had grown, and others had developed: Katamon, Musrarah, Talbiyeh, Upper and Lower Ba’ka, the Greek and German colonies, Sheikh Jarrah, Abu Tor, Mamillah, Nebī Dāūd, and Sheikh Badr all contained a good deal of valuable Arab real estate. (See map.) Many of these Arab districts were situated in West Jerusalem, which is today a predominantly Jewish area.

Arab discontent exploded into outright civil disobedience during the general strike of 1936. Then came the Arab rebellion against the British from 1936 to 1938, during which Jerusalem suffered greatly. Arab mobs demonstrated angrily, a bomb in a Jewish religious school killed nine children, and forty-six Jews were killed in other terrorist attacks. At one point in 1938, Palestinian rebels briefly seized control of the city. During this crisis, the Zionist leadership still urged a policy of restraint, but the Irgun staged bomb and terrorist attacks in which forty-eight Arabs lost their lives. During the rebellion, Jerusalem lost its place as the leader of the resistance to Zionism. The mufti and the Arab Higher Committee were exiled by the British, and in exile the mufti gravely damaged the Palestinian cause abroad by allying himself with Hitler. In Palestine the leadership passed to the rural sheikhs, who were prepared to use more ruthless methods.

As the violence flared, the British tried to find a solution to the question of Palestine. In 1937 the Peel Committee recommended the partition of the country. There would be a Jewish state in the Galilee and on the coastal plain, but the remaining territory, including the Negev, should go to the Arabs. The commissioners also decided that the Jerusalem municipality and Sub-District should form a corpus separatum, under the permanent control of the British Mandate. Henceforth most of the plans devised for Palestine by the international community tried to keep Jerusalem out of the conflict to make sure that the holy places—“a sacred trust of civilization,” as the Peel commissioners put it—should remain accessible to all.¹¹ After much anguished debate, the Zionists accepted the Peel plan, though they submitted their own partition scheme. This Zionist plan proposed to divide Jerusalem: the Jews would take the new suburbs of West Jerusalem, while the Old City and East Jerusalem should stay under Mandatory control.

The Arabs said no to the Peel Plan, and in 1939 their firm stand seemed to have paid off. Poised as it was on the brink of the Second World War, the British government was persuaded by several Arab states to reduce its commitment to Zionism. A new White Paper severely limited Jewish immigration to Palestine and revoked the Peel partition plan. Instead, it envisaged the creation of an independent state in Palestine ruled jointly by Arabs and Jews. It was a severe blow to the Zionists, who would never trust Britain again, even though they had no choice but to support Britain against Nazi Germany during the war. This did not apply to the Revisionists, however, who began to mount terrorist attacks against the British. Abraham Stern’s Lehi Group, founded in 1940, saw no difference between the British and the Nazis. Two of the leading Jewish terrorists would—years later—become prime ministers of the State of Israel. When Stern was killed during a raid in 1942, Yitzhak Shamir became the leader of the “Stern Gang.” In 1942, Menachem Begin, a fervent admirer of Jabotinsky, entered Palestine illegally and became one of the leaders of the Irgun. Even the moderate Ben-Gurion became more radical in 1942 when the first news of the Nazi death camps reached Palestine. The old gradualist policies of the Yishuv were abandoned. There was no more talk of a “homeland.” Zionists were convinced that only a fully Jewish state could provide a safe haven for the Jews, even if that meant evicting the Arabs from the country.¹²

The postwar period saw an escalation of terrorism on both sides. The British stubbornly refused the Zionists’ request to permit 100,000 refugees, survivors of the Nazi camps, to enter Palestine. In retaliation, the Irgun blew up a wing of the King David Hotel, one floor of which was used as a British army headquarters. Ninety-one people were killed and forty-five more wounded. In these last years the British seem to have lost control. The Mandate had begun in confusion, and by 1947 the British officials in Palestine were demoralized, exasperated, and frustrated by the attempt to implement an impossible policy. They had become harmful to the country and had to go. On 11 February 1947, Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin referred the Mandate to the new United Nations Organization. The UN then produced a new partition plan, which divided the country in a way that was more advantageous to the Jews than the Peel Plan. There was to be a Jewish state (in eastern Galilee, the Upper Jordan Valley, the Negev, and the coastal plain) and an Arab state in the rest of the country. The corpus separatum of Jerusalem and Bethlehem would come under international control. On 29 November 1947, the General Assembly of the UN voted to accept this plan, and a special committee was set up to work out a statute for the international zone of Jerusalem. The Arabs refused to accept the decision of the UN, but the Zionists accepted it with their usual pragmatism. They also agreed to the internationalizing of Jerusalem. In the plan that they had put forward to the United Nations in August 1946, Jerusalem had again been placed in a corpus separatum. Possession of the Holy City was not, at this stage, regarded as essential to the new Jewish state.

Fighting broke out in Palestine almost immediately after the passing of the UN resolution. On 2 December an Arab mob streamed through the Jaffa Gate and looted the Jewish commercial center on Ben Yehuda Street. Irgun retaliated by attacking the Arab suburbs of Katamon and Sheikh Jarrah. By March 1948, 70 Jews and 230 Arabs had been killed in the fighting around Jerusalem, even before the official expiration of the British Mandate. Syrian and Iraqi troops entered the country and blocked the roads to Jerusalem. The Haganah began to execute the military Plan Dalet, which eventually succeeded in creating a corridor to Jerusalem from the coast. The British refused to intervene. In February 1948, the Arabs had besieged some of the Jewish suburbs in West Jerusalem, which remained cut off from the rest of the country until the Haganah opened the roads. On 10 April the war entered a new phase when the Irgun attacked the Arab village of Deir Yassin, three miles to the west of Jerusalem: 250 men, women, and children were massacred and their bodies mutilated. On 13 April the Arabs attacked a convoy carrying Irgun terrorists, who had been wounded at Deir Yassin, to the Mount Scopus Medical Center, killing forty innocent Jewish medical staff.

Before the departure of the British on 15 May 1948, the Irgun attacked Jaffa and the specter of Deir Yassin caused the seventy thousand Arab inhabitants of the city to flee. It marked the beginning of the Palestinians’ exodus from their country. Some of the refugees sought a haven in Jerusalem. On 26 April, the Haganah began to attack the large, middle-class Arab suburbs in West Jerusalem. Raiding parties cut telephone and electricity wires. Loudspeaker vans drove through the streets blurting such messages as “Unless you leave your houses, the fate of Deir Yassin will be your fate!” The inhabitants were finally forced out of their homes by the end of May, many taking refuge in the Old City. In early May, UN representatives had arrived in Jerusalem to set up the international administration but were ignored by the British and by both of the contending parties. On 14 May, Ben-Gurion held a ceremony in the Tel Aviv Museum to proclaim the birth of the new State of Israel. When the British finally left the next day, Jewish forces were poised to attack the Old City but were held back by the last-minute arrival of the Jordanian Arab Legion, which set up a military administration in the walled city and in East Jerusalem.

When a truce was arranged by the UN in July 1948, the city had been divided between Israel and Jordan. The city remained split in two, along the western wall of the Old City and a band of wrecked, deserted territory which became No Man’s Land. (See map.) The two thousand inhabitants of the Jewish Quarter had been expelled from the Old City and were dispatched across the new border into West Jerusalem, which was now controlled by the Israelis. The thirty thousand Arab residents of West Jerusalem had therefore lost their homes to the State of Israel. The Old City was now crammed with refugees from Jaffa, Haifa, the suburbs, and the villages around Jerusalem. Neither Israel nor Jordan would agree to leave the Jerusalem area. They refused to heed the UN General Assembly Resolution 303, which called upon them to evacuate Jerusalem and its environs to allow it to become an internationalized corpus separatum as originally planned. On 15 November, King Abdallah of Jordan was crowned King of Jerusalem in the Old City by the Coptic bishop; East Jerusalem and the West Bank of the Jordan were declared Jordanian territory, and on 13 December the Jordanian parliament approved the union of Jordan and Palestine. There was to be no question of creating an independent Palestinian state. Instead, the king gave the inhabitants of East Jerusalem and the West Bank Jordanian citizenship. Neighboring Arab states protested vehemently against this Jordanian occupation but eventually had to accept it as a. fait accompli. On the Israeli side, Ben-Gurion announced on 13 December that the Knesset and all the government offices, except for the ministries of defense, police, and foreign affairs, should move to West Jerusalem. On 16 March 1949, Israel and Jordan signed a formal agreement accepting the armistice lines as the legitimate borders between their two states. The UN continued to regard the Israeli/Jordanian occupation of Jerusalem as illegal, but after April 1950 took no further action on the Jerusalem question.

Jerusalem, which had so frequently been divided internally, was now split by more than one and a half miles of fortified frontier, barbed-wire fences, and massive defensive ramparts. On both sides, snipers shot into the territory on the other side of No Man’s Land. In No Man’s Land itself were deserted streets and 150 abandoned buildings. Three of the gates of the Old City (New Gate, Jaffa Gate, and Zion Gate) were blocked and reinforced by concrete walls. The city was now divided by tall barriers and tens of thousands of mines laid by both sides. The only crossing point was the so-called Mandelbaum Gate, an open roadway near a house belonging to a Mr. Mandelbaum, which now had a barrier across it. Only clergy, diplomats, UN personnel, and a few privileged tourists were permitted to go from one side to the other. The Jordanians required most tourists to produce baptismal certificates—to prove they were not Jewish—before they were allowed to enter East Jerusalem from Israel. They could not then go back into Israel but had to return to their countries of origin from Jordan. Water, telephone, and road systems were split in two. Mount Scopus became a Jewish enclave in Jordanian Jerusalem; and the buildings there of the Hadassah hospital and the Hebrew University were closed and placed under UN auspices; an Israeli convoy was let through the lines to supply the tiny Scopus garrison. On both sides, territory and buildings which had belonged to the enemy before 1948 were entrusted to a custodian. The inhumanity of the partition was especially poignant in the village of Bayt Safafa, which was split in two: one half of the village in Israeli territory, the other in Jordan. Families and friends were cut off from one another, though occasionally people got permission to hold weddings or other gatherings at the railway line on the border and the villagers would shout news and gossip over the divide.

Article 8 of the Israeli-Jordanian Armistice Agreement provided for free access for Israeli Jews to the Western Wall, but Jordan refused to honor this unless Israel was willing to return the Arab suburbs in West Jerusalem. After years of pressure, Arab Christians from Israel were allowed to visit the Holy Sepulcher and the Nativity Church at Christmas and Easter, though not for longer than forty-eight hours. Each side accused the other of violating sacred sites: Israelis blamed Jordan for defiling the Jewish cemetery on the Mount of Olives and for destroying the synagogues in the Jewish Quarter of the Old City, which was now a camp for Palestinian refugees; Arabs complained bitterly of Israel’s destruction of their historic cemetery at Mamilla, where many famous scholars, mystics, and warriors were buried.

Jordanian Jerusalem was plagued by many problems.¹³ After the 1948 war, the Israelis had a state in Palestine that was significantly larger than that envisaged by the UN. Of all the surrounding Arab states, only Jordan had been able to prevent the advance of the Israeli forces. During the hostilities, some 750,000 Arabs of Palestine, terrified by reports of the Deir Yassin atrocities, had fled the country. Many of these refugees settled in camps in the surrounding Arab states; none were permitted to return to their towns and villages. Many Palestinians blamed Jordan for depriving them of their independence: in Egypt, the muftī formed the Palestine National Council as a government in exile. King Abdallah tried to court the influential Arab families, who had traditionally opposed the muftī: many of them held government posts in Amman and even had seats in the Jordanian parliament. As a result, many of the notables left Jerusalem to settle in Amman, which entirely altered the ambience of the city. Most of the Palestinians who remained in Jerusalem were fiercely resentful of Amman. They were better educated and more advanced than most of the Arabs on the East Bank and found their political subservience to Jordan intolerable. When the Jordanian government was in trouble, there were often riots in Jerusalem, which became a center of Palestinian resistance to the Kingdom of Jordan. It often seemed to the Arabs of al-Quds that having defied the world to gain possession of the Holy City, King Abdallah now was determined to run it down.

After 1948, Arab Jerusalem had received a serious wound. It had lost its aristocracy, and to ensure that he had a power base in Jerusalem, the king had encouraged the people of Hebron, who had supported Jordan, to settle in al-Quds. The city had a huge refugee problem and had sustained severe damage during the war. Jordan’s resources were stretched to the limit, and the kingdom was not in a position to alleviate the distress of the thousands of uprooted Palestinians who now perforce crowded into the Jerusalem area. Conditions in the Old City were appalling for months after the war. Yet the king was also reluctant to invest in a city which was a center of Palestinian nationalism. Often Abdallah gave preference to Nablus and Hebron over Jerusalem. Government offices were transferred from Jerusalem to Amman. The city’s relationship with the Jordanian government was not likely to improve when, in April 1951, the king was assassinated at the entrance of the Aqsā Mosque by the mufti’s agents.

Yet Jordanian Jerusalem did recover. In 1953 the Aqsā Mosque was restored and the Muslim Charitable Society for the Reconstruction of Jerusalem was set up to found schools, hospitals, and orphanages. New homes were built for the refugees during the 1950s on the Ophel hill and in Wadi Joz, Abu Tor, and Sheikh Jarrah, though the Jordanians still adhered strictly to the Master Plan for Jerusalem laid down during the Mandate. To preserve the beauty of the city, they did not develop the western slopes of Mount Scopus or the Kidron Valley. A new commercial district was built to the north and east of the Old City, and in 1958 a major renovation of the Ḥaram was begun. Gradually the economy improved. Jerusalem had never been an industrial center, and the government tended to deflect plans to build factories and plants in the Jerusalem outskirts to Amman. But Jordan did develop the tourist industry in Jerusalem, which provided 85 percent of the income of the West Bank. In 1948 there had been only one modern hotel in East Jerusalem, but by 1966 there were seventy. There was a great disparity between rich and poor in the city, but by the 1960s, Arab Jerusalem had sufficiently recovered from its violent partition to become a pleasant place to live. The middle and upper classes probably enjoyed a higher standard of living than their Israeli counterparts in West Jerusalem. Yet the process of modernization had not destroyed the historical and traditional atmosphere of Jerusalem, which retained its distinctively Arab character.

The status of the city also improved. The Israelis were busily making West Jerusalem their capital, in defiance of the international community, and had moved the Knesset there. Jordan felt that it had to respond. In July 1953 the Jordanian cabinet met in Jerusalem for the first time and shortly afterward the whole parliament was convened there. Local government achieved stability when Rauhi al-Khatib became the mayor of Arab Jerusalem at the beginning of 1957. An ascetic, and an excellent administrator, he was able to resolve some of the tension that existed between Amman and the Palestinian nationalists. Relations with Jordan improved, and by 1959 Jerusalem’s status was upgraded from baladiyya (municipality) to amāna (trusteeship), making it equivalent to Amman. King Hussein announced that Jerusalem was the second capital of the Kingdom of Jordan and planned to build a palace to the north of the city.

On the other side of the border, West Jerusalem had many similar problems. In December 1949, Ben Gurion had announced that it was essential for the Jewish state to maintain a presence in Jerusalem:

Jewish Jerusalem is an organic and inseparable part of the State of Israel, as it is an inseparable part of the history of Israel and the faith of Israel and of the very soul of our people. Jerusalem is the heart of hearts of the State of Israel.¹⁴

The old Zionist indifference to the city had gone, once the fortunes of war had placed West Jerusalem in Israeli hands. During the 1950s the Israelis had embarked on a determined policy to make West Jerusalem the working capital of Israel, even though it was not recognized as such in international law. The UN still maintained that Jerusalem should be a corpus separatum, and the Catholic countries in particular were opposed to the partition of the city. In 1952, Yitzhak Ben-Zvi became the second President of Israel and moved his offices from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, leaving the foreign ambassadors to Israel with a problem. If they presented their letters of credence to the president in West Jerusalem, this amounted to a tacit recognition of the city as Israel’s capital. Some ambassadors did begin to come to West Jerusalem, however, and when in 1954 the British and American ambassadors both presented their letters to President Ben-Zvi in Jerusalem it was clear that the boycott was being slowly eroded. Both Britain and the United States declared that they still adhered to the UN resolutions, but the Israelis had won the first round, despite these official disclaimers. Then Foreign Minister Moshe Sharett moved his main office to West Jerusalem, and the foreign diplomats also gradually got used to calling on him there. By 1967 nearly 40 percent of the foreign diplomatic establishments of Israel had moved from Tel Aviv to West Jerusalem.

Yet, having defied the world to make West Jerusalem its capital, the Israeli government tended to neglect it. Most members of the Knesset were kibbutzniks who were not very interested in cities and had no clear urban policy.¹⁵ West Jerusalem did not benefit as much as it should have from its capital status. Its economic growth was rather less than that of Israel as a whole. The chief employers were the government and the Hebrew University, but they were not wealth-producing institutions. Not surprisingly, tourism did not flourish in West Jerusalem: by far the most interesting sites were on the other side of No Man’s Land. There was little light industry, and prices were high. Some parts of Jewish Jerusalem had become slums, filled with Jewish refugees from the Arab countries who had been ejected after the creation of the State of Israel and the Palestinian exodus in 1948. From the first these Oriental, Sephardi Jews were never fully accepted by the Ashkenazi Zionist establishment. They were housed in the more dangerous districts of Jerusalem, close to No Man’s Land, where they were within range of Arab snipers. There was inequality and resentment in the Jewish city.

Indeed, West Jerusalem seemed to have neither coherence nor unity. It was a series of suburbs, each one inhabited by a distinct ethnic or religious group which had its own self-contained life. It was also a city divided against itself: Sephardim against Ashkenazim, religious against secular Jews. The Orthodox, still passionately opposed to the State of Israel, had taken to standing at the street corners of their districts on the Sabbath to throw stones at the passing cars of Israelis who were violating the Sabbath rest. Cut off from its heart in the Old City, West Jerusalem made no sense. It was a dead end, isolated from the rest of Israel and surrounded on three sides by Arab territory. The city had become little more than a terminus of roads from the coast. It was “at the end of a narrow corridor with roads leading nowhere,” recalled its future mayor Teddy Kollek. “Half the time you drove down a road or a side street, you ran into a sign reading STOP! DANGER! FRONTIER AHEAD!”¹⁶ In his classic novel My Michael, set in this period, the Israeli writer Amos Oz presented a similar picture of West Jerusalem as a city which had received a mortal wound. Its suburbs were scattered, solitary fortresses, lost and overwhelmed by the menacing landscape where the jackals howled. It was a city of walls, ruins, and waste plots, which continued to shut out its Jewish inhabitants.¹⁷ “Can one ever feel at home in Jerusalem, I wonder, even if one lives here for a century?”¹⁸ asks Oz’s heroine, Hannah. It might seem like an ordinary city, but then you would turn a corner and suddenly be brought up against the void:

If you turn your head, you can see in the midst of all this frantic building a rocky field. Olive trees. A barren wilderness. Thick overgrown valleys. Crisscrossing tracks worn by the tread of myriad feet. Herds grazing round the newly built Prime Minister’s office.¹⁹

The ancient city had been built as an enclave of safety against the demonic realm of the desert, where no life was possible. Now the citizens of West Jerusalem were brought up against the wilderness at every turn and had to face the possibility of mortality and extinction in this dangerous terrain. Indeed, Jerusalem itself had been invaded by the wilderness—the ancient nightmare—and barely seemed to exist. “There is no Jerusalem,” says Hannah.²⁰

The State of Israel could not escape the void. Had it not been for Hitler’s Nazi crusade against the Jews, the Zionist enterprise might never have succeeded. The guilt, shock, and outrage occasioned by the discovery of the camps had evoked a wave of sympathy for the Jewish people after the Second World War which certainly helped the Zionist cause. But how were the Jewish people and the State of Israel to come to terms with the catastrophe of the six million dead? Holy cities had originally been regarded as havens which would protect their inhabitants from destruction. Now the Jews had faced extinction in a near-fatal encounter with the demonic imagination of Europe, which had for centuries been hagridden by fearful fantasies of Jews. In the myth of the Exodus, the people of ancient Israel had recalled their journey through the nothingness of the desert to safety in the Promised Land. The modern State of Israel was a similar creation out of the fearful annihilation of the camps. But in West Jerusalem, the nothingness of the desert could still be found in the midst of the city: there was no escaping the void left by the Holocaust. The Zionist leaders had come largely from Poland, Russia, and Eastern Europe. They had built their state for Jews who were now mostly dead. One of the chief shrines of this new secular Jewish Jerusalem was the Holocaust Memorial at Yad Vashem, with its Ohel Yizkor (“Memorial Tabernacle”), inscribed with the names of twenty-two of the largest death camps. It was little wonder that the New Jerusalem created by the Israelis made no sense. Eventually, as we shall see in the following chapter, some Jews would find healing in the old myths and spirituality of sacred space.

The Palestinians had also suffered, however. They had lost their homeland and been wiped off the map. They too had suffered a form of annihilation. The inhabitants of both East and West Jerusalem were shocked to the core during these years of Jerusalem’s partition. Palestinians had to come to terms with their catastrophe; the Israelis had to face the unwelcome fact that they, the victims of Europe, had, in their desperate quest for survival, fatally injured another people. Both tried to blot out the other. Arab tourist maps represented West Jerusalem as a blank white space. In Israel, Prime Minister Golda Meir once famously stated: “The Palestinians do not exist.” The educational system encouraged this mutual denial on both sides of the city. Neither Israeli nor Arab children were taught sufficiently about the history, language, and culture of “the other side.”²¹ Israelis also resented Arab Jerusalem: yet again they were debarred from the city. Centuries before, Jews had mourned their lost Temple from the Mount of Olives. The Israelis could not do this, because the mount was in Jordanian hands. On feast days there would be prayers on top of a high building on Mount Sion, where it was possible to catch a glimpse of the Jewish Quarter.

But in fact the two halves of the city were turning away from each other.²² Despite the tension with the Jordanian government, Arab Jerusalem was naturally oriented eastward, toward Amman and away from the unacceptable reality of West Jerusalem. In Jewish Jerusalem too, the Israelis inevitably turned away from the perils of No Man’s Land toward Tel Aviv and the coast. The districts beside the border were slums, inhabited by the Sephardim. The commercial center at Ben Yehuda Street, which was within range of the snipers, was neglected. New districts were built on hilltops in the west. The geographical center of West Jerusalem was now the Hebrew University at Givat Ram, which was far to the west of the pre-1948 municipality. Had this state of affairs continued, Jerusalem would indeed have become two separate cities, separated by the desolate terrain and barbed wire of No Man’s Land.

In 1965, Teddy Kollek, a member of Ben Gurion’s new Rati Labor Party, became the mayor of West Jerusalem. He was as good an influence as Rauhi al-Khatib on the other side of the border. Stocky, blond, and forceful, he gave the Israeli municipality a greater stability than it had ever had before. He tried to correct the orientation of West Jerusalem toward the coast. There had been plans to move the municipality building, which was right on the border, to the western part of the new Jerusalem. Kollek decided to stay where he was: it would be wrong for the mayor and his council to be seen to be abandoning the Oriental Jews in their border slums. But above all, “by staying put on the frontier, we were giving expression to our faith in the eventual unification of Jerusalem.”²³ In the midst of the division and anomie of the postwar years, Israelis had started to dream of wholeness and integration.

In May 1967, Israel and the Arab countries faced the dreadful possibility of another war. On 13 May the Soviets informed Syria that Israel was about to invade its territory. They were probably misinformed, since there was no plan for such an invasion. But President Gamal Abdal Nasser of Egypt responded to this supposed threat against his Arab ally by moving 100,000 troops into the Sinai Peninsula and closing the Gulf of Aqaba to Israeli shipping. On 30 May, King Hussein of Jordan signed a military agreement with Egypt, even though Israel begged Jordan to keep out of the conflict. The great powers took sides, and a terrifying confrontation loomed. The Israelis had to listen to Nasser’s impassioned rhetoric, threatening to drive them all into the sea. Inevitably they expected the worst and awaited a new holocaust.

Yet, three weeks before the outbreak of the war, West Jerusalem enjoyed an idyllic day when the Israelis had decided to hold the Independence Day celebrations there. It was a special event: the anniversary was calculated according to the Hebrew calendar, so it rarely coincided with the civil date of 14 May, as it did in 1967. There could be no military parade, since the United Nations would not permit any arms or military equipment in Jerusalem. Instead Kollek suggested that the municipality sponsor a song by the well-known lyricist Naomi Shemer. “Jerusalem of Gold” became an instant hit. It was a love song to a tragic city “with a wall in its heart,” but it also revealed the Israeli blind spot:

How the cisterns have dried up:
The marketplace is empty
No one visits the Temple Mount in the Old City.

The city was far from deserted, however: Its sūq was crowded and selling luxury goods that were not available to the Israelis in West Jerusalem. The Ḥaram was thronged with pious visitors and worshippers. The song assumed—yet again—that the Palestinians of Arab Jerusalem did not exist. Meanwhile on the other side of West Jerusalem, Rabbi Zvi Yehuda Kook, the son of the eminent chief rabbi of Jerusalem during the British Mandate, was preaching the annual sermon to celebrate the birth of the State of Israel at the Merkaz Harav Yeshiva. Suddenly his quiet voice rose and he seemed to his audience to be possessed by the spirit of prophecy. At one point, he sobbed aloud, yearning for the towns torn from the living body of Eretz Yisrael on the West Bank: Jerusalem, the Temple Mount, Hebron, Shechem, and Jericho—cities and places that were sacred to the Jewish people. It was a sin, the rabbi wept, to leave these holy sites in the hands of the goyim.²⁴ Three weeks later the rabbi was hailed as a true prophet of Israel when the tanks of the Israeli Defence Forces rolled into all these West Bank towns and reunited the Jewish people with the Old City of Jerusalem.