Jerusalem. The Biography

been appointed chief if he had not been Jewish. ‘There is a great prevalence of venereal disease in the Jerusalem Area,’ reported Major Geoffrey Sebag-Montefiore, who deployed guards around the Holy Places. He raided bawdy houses, which were usually full of Australiansoldiers, and had to waste much of his time investigating cases where soldiers were accused of sleeping with local girls. ‘The brothels in Jerusalem are still giving considerable trouble,’ he informed Allenby in June 1918. He moved them into an allotted area, the Wazzah, which made policing easier. In October he wrote, ‘there’s been trouble keeping Australians out of brothels. A squadron now provide a picquet [patrol] for the Wazzah.’ Major Sebag-Montefiore’s reports usually read: ‘Venereal Disease is rampant. Otherwise nothing of note to report.’
    Among the cafés at the Jaffa Gate, Arabs and Jews debated the future of Palestine: there was a capacious breadth of opinions on both sides. On the Jewish side, this extended from the ultra-Orthodox who despised sacrilegious Zionism, via those who envisaged Jewish colonies fully integrated across an Arab-ruled Middle East, to extreme nationalists who wanted an armed Hebrew state ruling a submissive Arab minority. Arab opinion varied from nationalists and Islamicist fundamentalists who wanted Jewish immigrants expelled, to democratic liberals who welcomed Jewish aid in building an Arab state. Arab intellectuals discussed whether Palestine was part of Syria or Egypt. During the war, a young Jerusalemite called Ihsan Turjman wrote that ‘The Egyptian Khedive should be joint king of Palestine and the Hejaz,’ yet Khalil Sakakini noted that ‘the idea of joining Palestine to Syria is spreading powerfully’. Ragheb Nashashibi founded the Literary Society, demanding union with Syria; the Husseinis set up the Arab Club. Both were hostile to the Balfour Declaration.
    On 20 December 1917, Sir Ronald Storrs arrived as military governor of Jerusalem – or, as he put it, ‘the equivalent of Pontius Pilate’. 14
    ORIENTAL STORRS: BENEFICENT DESPOT
     
    In the lobby of the Fast Hotel, Storrs bumped into his predecessor, General Barton, in his dressing-gown: ‘The only tolerable places in Jerusalem are bath and bed,’ declared Barton. Storrs, who favoured white suits and flamboyant buttonholes, found ‘Jerusalem on starvation rations’ and remarked that ‘the Jews have as usual cornered the small change.’ He was enthused by his ‘great adventure’ in Jerusalem which ‘stands alone among the cities of the world’, yet like many Protestants he disliked the theatricality of the Church * and regarded the TempleMount as a ‘glorified union of the Piazza San Marco and the Great Court of Trinity [College, Cambridge].’ Storrs felt he was born to rule Jerusalem: ‘To be able by a word written or even spoken to right wrong, to forbid desecration, to promote ability and goodwill is to wield the power of Aristotle’s Beneficent Despot.’
    Storrs was not the average Colonial Office bureaucrat. This imperial peacock was a vicar’s son and Cambridge classicist with ‘a surprisingly cosmopolitan outlook – for an Englishman’. His friend Lawrence, who despised most officials, described him as ‘the most brilliant Englishman in the Near East, and subtly efficient, despite his diversion of energy in love of music and letters, of sculpture, painting, of whatever was beautiful in the world’s fruit’. He remembered hearing Storrs discuss the merits of Wagner and Debussy in Arabic, German and French, but his ‘intolerant brain rarely stooped to conquer’. In Egypt, his catty barbs and serpentine intrigues earned him the nickname Oriental Storrs after Cairo’s most dishonest shop. This unusual military governor set about restoring battered Jerusalem, through a motley staff that included:
     
a cashier from a bank in Rangoon, an actor-manager, 2 assistants from Thomas Cook, a picture-dealer, an army-coach, a clown, a land-valuer, a bosun from the Niger, a Glasgow distiller, an organist, an Alexandria cotton-broker, an architect, a junior London postal official, a taxi driver from Egypt, 2 schoolmasters, and a missionary.
     
    In just a few months, Storrs founded the Pro-Jerusalem Society, funded by the Armenian arms-dealer Sir Basil Zaharoff and the American millionaires, Mrs Andrew Carnegie and J. P. Morgan Jr. Its aims were to prevent Jerusalem becoming ‘a second-rate Baltimore’.
    No one