Jerusalem. The Biography

– and even this hybrid Jerusalem was now under threat. The rise of Nasser, President of Egypt, changed everything, imperilling King Hussein and risking his very possession of Jerusalem.

1967
     
    NASSER AND HUSSEIN: COUNTDOWN TO WAR
     
    Born in obscurity, Nasser was the beau idéal of the Arab statesman – a young officer wounded in the Israeli encirclement of 1948 and determined to restore Arab pride. He became the most popular Arab leader for centuries, yet he also ruled as a dictator, supported by the secret police. Known as El Rais – the Boss – across the Arab world, Nasser promulgated a socialist pan-Arabism that inspired his people to defy Western domination and Zionist victory and raised soaring hopes that their defeats could be avenged.
    Nasser supported Palestinian raids against Israel, which responded with increasing violence. His leadership of the most powerful Arab nation, Egypt, alarmed Israel. In 1956, he challenged the vestiges of the Anglo-French empires by nationalizing the Suez Canal and backing the Algerian rebels against France. London and Paris, determined to destroy him, made a secret alliance with Ben-Gurion. The successful Israeli attack on Sinai, planned by Chief of Staff Dayan, provided the Anglo-French pretext to invade Egypt, ostensibly to separate the two neighbours. However, Britain and France lacked the power to sustain this last imperial adventure: the United States forced them to withdraw. Soon afterwards, King Hussein dismissed Glubb as commander of his army. Nineteen-fifty-six was the twilight of British Middle Eastern imperium and the dawn of American ascendancy.
    Nasser targeted the two Hashemite kingdoms, where his pan-Arabist radicalism was increasingly popular on the streets and in the officer corps. In 1958, Hussein’s cousin and schoolfriend Faisal II of Iraq was murdered in a military coup. The family had been kings of the Arabs, Hejaz, Syria, Palestine, Iraq – and Hussein was now the last royal Hashemite. Nasser officially merged Egypt with Syria in the United Arab Republic, encircling Israel and dominating Jordan, but his UAR, which twice fell apart and was twice put together again, remained fragile.
    ‘Growing up in Jerusalem was like being in a fairy tale invaded byDetroit and modern armies, though its magical quality remained, and the dangers merely added to the mysteries,’ wrote Sari Nusseibeh. Gradually ‘Jerusalem recovered much of the life it had lost in 1948,’ again becoming the ‘world capital of pilgrimage’. In 1964, King Hussein regilded the lead of the Dome of the Rock that had been a dull grey for centuries in preparation for the pilgrimage of Pope Paul VI. The supreme pontiff was met by Prince Muhammad and Princess Firyal, who accompanied him into the city where he was welcomed by the governor Anwar Nusseibeh. But the pope had to cross the lines at the Mandelbaum Gate like everyone else. When he asked permission to pray in the Greek chapel of Calvary, the Orthodox patriarch ordered him to make the request in writing and then turned it down. ‘The pope’s visit’, wrote Sari Nusseibeh, ‘sparked a boom’: the Husseinis and Nusseibehs knocked down their elegant villas and built hideous hotels.
    Yet King Hussein was now struggling for survival, crushed between radical Nasserite Egypt and Syria, between the Arabs and the Israelis, and between his own dynastic ambitions and the passionate bitterness of the Palestinians who felt he had betrayed them. As Nasser plotted to overthrow the king, Jerusalem and the West Bank repeatedly rioted against the Hashemites.
    In 1959, Yasser Arafat, a veteran of the 1948 war, * founded a militant liberation movement called Fatah – Conquest. In 1964, Nasser held a summit in Cairo that created a United Arab Command for the coming war against Israel and founded the Palestine Liberation Organization under Ahmed al-Shuqayri. That May in Jerusalem, King Hussein reluctantly opened the Palestinian Congress, which launched the PLO. The following January, Arafat’s Fatah carried out a small raid into Israel from Jordan. It was a disaster and the only casualty was a Palestinian guerrilla shot dead by the Jordanians. But Fatah’s exploit caught the Arab imagination and marked the beginning of Arafat’s campaign to place the Palestinian cause at the centre of the global stage. The rise of the pistol-packing, khaki-clad,
keffiyeh
-wearing radicals of Fatah had eclipsed the haughty Families, discredited by the