Jerusalem. The Biography

per cent weird (provincial, medieval etc)’ – by which he meant the Hasidim.
    British rule was now in its last days. On 28 April, Rabin captured the Arab suburb Sheikh Jarrah, home of the Families, but the British forced him to relinquish it. As the British took the last salute, the Jews held the western part of the city, the Arabs the Old City and the east. At 8 a.m. on Friday 14 May, Cunningham, the last high commissioner, marched out of Government House in full uniform, reviewed a guard of honour, mounted his armoured Daimler and drove to inspect his troops at the King David Hotel.

1948–51
     
    THE BRITISH DEPART; BEN-GURION: WE DID IT!
     
    General Cunningham headed out of Jerusalem through streets deserted except for a few Arab children. British troops manned machine-gun posts on street corners. As the Daimler sped past, the young onlookers ‘clapped childishly and one saluted. The salute was returned.’ From Kalandia airport, the high commissioner flew out of Jerusalem to Haifa whence, at midnight, he sailed for England.
    British troops evacuated their Bevingrad fortress in the Russian Compound: 250 trucks and tanks rumbled out along King George V Avenue, watched by silent Jewish crowds. The race to control the Russian Compound started instantly. The Irgun stormed the Nikolai Hostel. Gunfire ricocheted across the town. Nusseibeh rushed to Amman to beg King Abdullah to save the city, ‘once sacked in the Crusades’ and about to be sacked again. The king promised.
    At 4.00 p.m. on 14 May 1948, just outside Jerusalem, Rabin and his Palmach soldiers, exhausted by their fight to keep the road open, were listening to a radio announcement from David Ben-Gurion, chairman of the Jewish Agency. Standing beneath a portrait of Herzl, before an audience of 250 in the Tel Aviv Museum, Ben-Gurion proclaimed, ‘I shall read from the scroll of the Declaration of the Establishment of the State of …’ He and his aides had debated what the name of the state should be. Some had suggested Judaea or Zion – but these names were associated with Jerusalem and the Zionists were struggling to hold even part of the city. Others had proposed Ivriya or Herzliya, but Ben-Gurion had argued for Israel and that was agreed: ‘The Land of Israel’, he read out, ‘was the birthplace of the Jewish people.’ They sang the national anthem, Hatikvah (The Hope):
     
Our hope is not lost
    The hope of two thousand years;
    To be a free people in our land,
    The land of Zion and Jerusalem!
     
    Ben-Gurion beamed at the journalists. ‘We did it!’ he said, but he eschewed jubilation. He had repeatedly accepted two-state partition, but now the Jews had to resist an invasion by the regular Arab armies with the openly stated object of annihilation. The very survival of the State of Israel was in jeopardy. On the other hand, his views had evolved since he had hoped in the 1920s and early 1930s for a shared socialist Palestine or a federated state. Now, faced with total war, everything was up for grabs.
    At the Jerusalem front, Rabin’s soldiers of the Harel Brigade were too weary to listen to Ben-Gurion on the radio. ‘Hey men, turn it off,’ pleaded one of them. ‘I’m dying for some sleep. Fine words tomorrow!’
    ‘Someone got up and turned the knob, leaving a leaden silence,’ recalled Rabin. ‘I was mute, stifling my own mixture of emotions.’ Most people did not hear the Declaration anyway, because Arab forces had cut off the electricity.
    Eleven minutes later, President Truman announced
de facto
recognition of Israel. Encouraged by Eddie Jacobson, Truman had secretly reassured Weizmann that he backed partition. Yet he had almost lost control of the administration when his UN diplomats tried to suspend partition. His secretary of state, George Marshall, wartime chief of staff and doyen of American public service, outspokenly opposed recognition. But Truman backed the new state while Stalin was the first to recognize Israel officially.
    In New York, Weizmann, now almost blind, waited in his room at the Waldorf Astoria, delighted by independence yet feeling abandoned and forgotten, until Ben-Gurion and his colleagues asked him to be the first president. Truman invited Weizmann to make his first formal visit to the White House. When the US president was later praised by Eddie Jacobson for having ‘helped create Israel’, he retorted: ‘What do you mean “helped create”?’ I am Cyrus! I am Cyrus!’ When the chief rabbi of