Jerusalem. The Biography

Committee, backed by Iraq, Saudi Arabia and Syria, rejected partition, demanding ‘a unified independent Palestine’. On 29 November the UN voted on the proposal. After midnight, the Jerusalemites gathered around their radios to listen in nerve-jangling silence. 24
    ABD AL-KADIR HUSSEINI: THE JERUSALEM FRONT
     
    Thirty-three countries voted in favour of Resolution 181, led by the United States and the Soviet Union, thirteen voted against, and ten, including Britain, abstained. ‘After a couple of minutes of shock, of lips parted as though in thirst and eyes wide open,’ recalled Amos Oz, ‘our faraway street on the edge of northern Jerusalem roared all at once, not a shout of joy, more like a scream of horror, a cataclysmic shout that could shift rocks.’ Then ‘roars of joy’ and ‘everyone was singing’. Jews even kissed ‘startled English policemen’.
    The Arabs did not accept that the UN had authority to carve up the country. There were 1.2 million Palestinians who still owned 94 per cent of the land; there were 600,000 Jews. Both sides prepared to fight, while Jewish and Arab extremists competed in a flint-hearted tournament of mutual savagery. Jerusalem was ‘at war with itself’.
    Arab mobs poured into the city centre, lynching Jews, firing into their suburbs, looting their shops, shrieking ‘Butcher the Jews!’ Anwar Nusseibeh, heir to orange groves and mansions, a Cambridge-educated lawyer, sadly watched this descent into ‘dust, noise and chaos’ as ‘professors, doctors and shopkeepers on both sides traded fire with people who, under different circumstances, would have been house guests’.
    On 2 December, three Jews were shot in the Old City; on the 3rd, Arab gunmen attacked the Montefiore Quarter, then a week later the Jewish Quarter, where 1,500 Jews waited nervously, outnumbered within the walls by 22,000 Arabs. Jews and Arabs moved out of mixed areas. On 13 December, the Irgun tossed bombs into the bus station outside the Damascus Gate, killing five Arabs and wounding many more. Anwar Nusseibeh’s uncle just survived the Irgun attack, seeing a ‘torn human limb stuck to the city wall.’ Within two weeks, 74 Jews, 71 Arabs and 9 Britons had been killed.
    When Ben-Gurion travelled down from Tel Aviv to meet the high commissioner on 7 December, his convoy was ambushed on the road. The Haganah called up all reservists between the ages of seventeen andtwenty-five. The Arabs prepared for war. Irregulars volunteered to fight in the various militias: Iraqis, Lebanese, Syrians, Bosnians, some were nationalist veterans of earlier struggles; others were Jihadi fundamentalists. The largest militia, the Arab Liberation Army, boasted about 5,000 fighters. On paper, the Arab forces, backed by the regular armies of seven Arab states, were overwhelming. General Barker, who had now left Palestine, gleefully predicted to Katy Antonius ‘as a soldier’ that ‘the Jews will be eradicated’. In fact, the Arab League, the organization of newly independent Arab states formed in 1945, was divided between the territorial ambitions and dynastic rivalries of its members. Abdullah, freshly minted Hashemite King of Jordan, still wanted Palestine within his kingdom; Damascus coveted a Greater Syria; King Farouk of Egypt regarded himself as the rightful leader of the Arab world and hated the Hashemites of both Jordan and Iraq, who in turn loathed King Ibn Saud who had ejected them from Arabia. All the Arab leaders distrusted the mufti who, returning to Egypt, was determined to place himself at the head of the Palestinian state.
    Amid so much corruption, betrayal and incompetence, Jerusalem supplied the Arab heroes of the war. Anwar Nusseibeh, disgusted by the ‘sordid round of intrigues and debacles’, founded the Herod’s Gate Committee with other dynasts, the Khalidis and Dajanis, to buy arms. His cousin Abd al-Kadir Husseini, who had fought the British in Iraq in 1941, then had lain low during the war in Cairo, took command of the Arab headquarters called the Jerusalem Front.
    Husseini emerged as the Arab hero personified, always dressed in
keffiyeh
, khaki tunic and crossed bandoliers, the revolutionary scion of Jerusalem’s aristocracy, son and grandson of mayors, descendant of the Prophet, a graduate in chemistry, amateur poet, newspaper editor and a warrior of proven courage. ‘As a child,’ says his cousin Said al-Husseini, ‘I remember seeing him arrive at a safe apartment in one of our