Jerusalem. The Biography

Politicians from Churchill and FDR to Hitler and Stalin pursued other plans: before attacking the Soviet Union in 1941, Hitler planned to deport the Jews to a death-colony in Madagascar. During the 1930s and 1940s, Churchill proposed a Jewish homeland in Libya while in 1945, his colonial secretary Lord Moyne suggested East Prussia for the Jews. As we will see, Stalin actually set up a Jewish homeland and during the 1940s considered a Jewish Crimea.

* On his return to Russia, Rasputin resumed his intimate role in the imperial family. He published
My Thoughts and Reflections: Brief Description of a Journey to the Holy Places
in the midst of the Great War in 1915 when Nicholas II was commanding the Russian army, leaving Alexandra, advised by Rasputin, as effective ruler of the home front – with disastrous consequences. He was illiterate; the book reads as if it had been dictated, and it was said that the empress herself corrected it. Designed to promote his image as a respectable pilgrim when he was at the height of his power and unpopularity, it was too late: he was assassinated shortly afterwards.

* In one of Disraeli’s most popular novels,
Tancred
, a duke’s son travels to Jerusalem where a Jew says, prophetically, ‘The English will take this city; they will keep it.’

* When the
Protocols
was published in English, it became influential in Britain and America (backed by Henry Ford), until in August 1921 the London
Times
exposed it as a forgery. It had been published in German in 1919, and Hitler believed that it contained the truth about the Jews, explaining in
Mein Kampf
that the forgery claim ‘is the surest proof they are genuine’. When it was published in Arabic in 1925, the Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem recommended the book to his congregants.

* The word ‘Palestinian’ came to mean the Palestinian Arab nation, but for the first half of the twentieth century the Jews there were known as Palestinians or Palestinian Jews; the Arabs known as Palestinian Arabs. In Weizmann’s memoirs (published 1949) when he writes ‘Palestinian’ he means Jewish. A Zionist newspaper was called
Palestine
, an Arab one
Filistin
.

* The twenty-five-year-old American Lowell Thomas of Colorado made his fortune launching
Last Crusade
, a travelling show that told the legendary adventures of ‘Lawrence of Arabia’. A million people saw it in London alone and even more in America. Lawrence despised and loved it, watching the show five times. ‘I saw your show and thank god the lights were out,’ he wrote. ‘He’s invented some silly phantom thing, a matinee idol in fancy dress.’ Lawrence finished his memoirs, using that old title,
Seven Pillars of Wisdom
, a creamily baroque yet poetical work that was a mix of history, confession and mythology – ‘I prefer lies to truth, particularly where they concern me,’ he joked. Yet for all its faults it is surely a masterpiece. Afterwards, Lawrence changed his name, joined the air force and retired into obscurity, dying in a motorcycle accident in 1935.

* Antonius, son of a rich Christian Lebanese cotton-trader, born in Alexandria and educated at Victoria College and Cambridge and a friend of E. M. Forster, was assistant education director for the Mandate. He was chronicling the Arab Revolt and the British betrayal in his book the
The Arab Awakening
, one of the seminal texts of Arab nationalism. Antonius advised both the mufti and the British high commissioners. Antonius’ daughter Soraya later wrote probably the best novel about this period based on her parents’ milieu
Where the Jinn Consult
.

* He was a member of one of the grandest Families. The Alamis’ house remains the most extraordinary in Jerusalem: in the seventeenth century the family bought a house right next to the Church which actually shares and owns part of its roof; the view from there is astonishing. The building, with Byzantine, Crusader and Mamluk vestiges, is still owned by Mohammad al-Alami. A cousin still serves as sheikh of Saladin’s Salahiyya
khanqah
next door.

* ‘He entered into the Nazis’ criminal delirium about “the Jews”’, writes Professor Gilbert Achcar in his book
Arabs and the Holocaust
, ‘as it burgeoned into the greatest of all crimes against humanity.’ Achcar adds, ‘it is undeniable that the mufti espoused the Nazis’ anti-Semitic doctrine which was easily compatible with a fanatical anti-Judaism cast in the Pan-Islamic mould.’ In a speech in Berlin on