The Rise and Fall of a Palestinian Dynasty (29 page)

Sakakini spent the rest of the war in the headquarters of Amir Faysal, the son of Sharif Hussein, who had come to Aqaba in early 1917. There he wrote a poem in praise of the Arab commander that would be sung in Jerusalem when the British forces entered the city in December 1917:

Oh, our mighty lord, glory of all Arabia, your reign is as glorious as the reign of the Prophet, your grandfather, to whose rule everyone submitted through the ages, overwhelming all enemies to rescue the homeland.
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When Sakakini was in Aqaba writing songs of praise about Commander Faysal, none of the Husaynis expected to support the man who would enthrone himself the following year as the king of ‘Greater Syria’. Yet when Faysal entered Damascus, many of the Husaynis agreed to regard Palestine as part of his kingdom.

CHAPTER 6

In the Shadow of British Military Rule

From the Politics of Notables to the Politics of Nationalism

On 30 November 1917, a platoon of British soldiers from the Seventy-fourth Division lost its way and ended up behind Ottoman lines near the village of Nabi Samwil. They soon ran into a division of the Ottoman Seventh Army, which had been assigned to defend Jerusalem, and after a brief battle took 450 Ottoman men and officers captive. It was a sign of things to come. Two days later, on 1 December, Ottoman storm troops launched an attack, with the result that an entire Ottoman battalion was destroyed, some of its men taken prisoner and others killed.

Now, for the first time since the start of the fighting for Jerusalem a week earlier, General Allenby could begin to feel more confident. The supply lines of the British forces had been stretched to the limit, and the general feared that they would be unable to complete the conquest. The heavy rains and thick mud prevented reinforcements from reaching the besieging forces; many camels died of cold and others starved to death. On the other hand, the expeditionary force’s chief veterinarian wrote, ‘The two thousand donkeys which had been brought from Egypt, though they’d never had to tramp through snow in such fierce cold, did very well.’ But humans and horses, unlike the donkeys, fell like flies. Since the beginning of the fight for Jerusalem, the British forces had lost 1,667 men and 5,000 horses. Ottoman casualties were heavier, and some 1,800 of their troops were taken captive. The British command believed that they were still facing 15,000 Ottoman troops, and wondered whether they could overcome them.
¹
The
expeditionary force led by General Allenby was to launch its onslaught on 9 December.

The night before the attack, Hussein al-Husayni awoke to the familiar sound of soldiers marching. ‘But where are they going?’ his wife asked and opened the shutters. A strange sight met her eyes: the Ottoman army was evacuating the city by the light of oil lamps. Hussein al-Husayni had expected the retreat but not its timing. In the morning the governor of Jerusalem summoned him, as head of the city council, along with other councilors, and gave them a document of surrender to hand to the British commander. A representative of the Anglican bishop, Mikhail Abu Hatoum, was present, and he kept the document for future record. It was written in Turkish, and Hussein wondered whether anyone on the conquering side would be able to read it:

To the English Commandant [having spent many years with the Prussian general Erich von Volkenheim, the governor imagined that this was also the title of senior officers in the British forces]. Ever since the 6th of December shells have been raining down on Jerusalem, indiscriminately hitting members of all the
millets
[communities] and the sites that are sacred to all. There is no need for it, because the military force that was in the city has retreated. I send this letter with Hussein Bey al-Husayni, representative of the mayor of Jerusalem.
²

The final days of secular Ottoman government were strange. After almost a decade, the Ottoman rulers of Jerusalem, as though aware that their names would go down in history for better or worse, began trying to improve their images. The houses they had occupied during the war, as well as the permanent quarters of their officials and officers, were left in impeccable order, property was not looted and no one was hurt. Emile al-Ghuri wrote in his diary: ‘The picture of the evacuation is an astounding contrast to the kind of Ottoman despotism that Arabs have suffered under for four hundred years.’
³
This was of course a distorted picture of the Arab population’s feelings towards the Ottomans, but it fitted well with their emotional response to the Young Turks since 1913.

After the Ottoman flight, the Husayni clan gathered at the house of Ismail Bey, the head of the family. He greeted them with his usual smile spreading over his white goatee. It was only natural that the family would turn to him at such a time – he had never lost his
self-possession, least of all in difficult moments. Dressed in the
frangi
(Western) three-piece suit, which had become his trademark and that of other Husayni notables, he managed as usual to calm the family and steer it through the current crisis.

Some twenty members of the family were there, men and boys. The women sat in the women’s wing, but there, too, the talk was all about the recent dramatic events. An unexpected guest was the teacher Khalil Baydas, who had not been seen in Jerusalem throughout the war. Like other political activists of the pan-Arab national movement who had evaded capture, after years of living in hiding he was at last able to emerge and breathe fresh air. Ever since the Young Turks’ revolution, Baydas had used his newspaper
Al-Nafais
to publish the Arab nationalists’ demand that the Ottoman government set the Arab regions free. He published similar articles in the Egyptian journals
Al-Muqatam
and
Al-Ahram
, none of which endeared him to the Ottoman authorities. Baydas was also an ardent supporter of Sharif Hussein of Mecca. When Sharif Hussein called on all the national Arab movements to launch a
jihad
against the government in Istanbul in the summer of 1916, Baydas urged his students to join the revolt, and a company of Ottoman soldiers was sent to arrest him. The Husaynis, who had been careful to avoid being seen as collaborating with enemies of the empire – particularly since some members of the family were actually pro-empire – went out of their way to help him escape. This was due largely to the impassioned urging of young Raja’i, Said’s son, whose favorite teacher was Khalil. Thanks to their intervention, Baydas managed to escape to the Orthodox Patriarchate and to the personal protection of Patriarch Damianos, who saved him from the hangman’s noose. He remained in the patriarch’s house until the eve of Allenby’s assault.

But the battle for Jerusalem was not yet over. On 9 December, the Forty-fourth and Sixtieth Divisions of General Allenby’s forces were encamped south and east of the city, blocking the roads to Nablus and Jericho. Their intelligence officers were still unaware that the last Ottoman soldier had left the city early in the morning – or, to put it another way, that the last Muslim soldier had quit the city that had been under Muslim rule since Saladin had defeated the crusaders.

But the Christian conquerors returning to the region seven centuries after the Crusaders seemed to be hanging back, and Hussein decided to go look for them. Was he thinking about the historical significance of the event? We do not know, but he probably sensed the fluttering wings of history. However, he was unable to summon a respectable
delegation for the great occasion, and there was something ridiculous about the small group that went out to look for the general and offer their submission without a struggle. One of the women offered a white blouse as a flag of surrender, but the mayor thought it would not do to meet the new conquerors with a woman’s garment. Better to use sheets, he thought, which were in plentiful supply at the Italian hospital. Two sheets were pulled off an empty bed, hastily stitched together and attached to a wooden plank on a flagpole to be carried by the surrendering delegation. They had never before used this European symbol of surrender – in their society, a white flag marked the residence of a marriageable virgin.

The question was, which way to go? They were afraid to turn east or south, because a heavy cannonade rumbled on those sides. The road to the plains looked peaceful, so they walked out of the Jaffa Gate and went looking for the conquerors. It was boring to wait for the historical moment and unseemly for the notables to wander about with the emblem of surrender, so they commandeered a young idler by the name of Hanna al-Laham, who found himself dragged into the history books through no fault of his own. He was seized by Jawad Ismail, the black sheep of Ismail’s sons, a well-known bully who went about even in winter with his collar open to the bitter Jerusalem winds. Almost all the delegates were Husaynis. Two other members of the family joined them, and even little Burhan Tahir al-Husayni (grandson of Tahir II) insisted on coming along. The mayor agreed in the hope that the boy’s presence would soften the hearts of the conquerors.

To solve the problem of communicating with the strangers, Hussein also took with him an interpreter of Swedish origin, a member of the Order of St John in the city who was employed by one of the consulates and had attended meetings of the city council. Though he made an important contribution to the occasion, his name was left out of all the reports, while that of the loafer al-Laham remains on record.

The delegates took with them the city’s chief of police, Ahmad Sharaf, who in winter dressed like a Cossack in a short Russian coat and high boots, so that he looked like the delegates’ bodyguard. Hussein also summoned his cousin Tawfiq (the son of Muhammad Salih al-Husayni) who was now a mustachioed man in his twenties. Tawfiq dressed carefully and in front of the camera put on the haughty expression of the Prince of Morocco, whom he had personified with panache on the stage of St George’s School in 1908.

The strange procession was led by the mayor, leaning on his walking
stick, his long overcoat billowing behind him, a cigarette in his right hand. He was not a regular smoker, but the solemnity of the occasion made him very tense. Finally, near the neighborhood of Sheikh Badr, on the edge of the village of Lifta (the modern-day main western entrance to the city on Route 1, which connects the city with Tel Aviv), they found what they had been looking for: the troops of His Britannic Majesty.

Sergeant Sidgewick and Sergeant Harcomb, two NCOs leading the scouts of the 219th Battalion of the London Division, which was approaching the city from the west, could not believe their eyes. A group of dignified
sheikhs
was calling to them in Arabic and Turkish, waving a white rag on a stick, while in their midst an elderly grandee held up a small parchment scroll. ‘Who are you? What do you want?’ Sidgewick shouted, but the answer came in Arabic, which he did not understand. ‘Hey, don’t any of you Johnnies speak English?’ Hussein, who had lived in England and the United States, understood perfectly well but preferred not to reveal this fact. He told the Swedish interpreter to explain their mission. The two NCOs were flabbergasted. ‘Good Lord, we can’t accept the city’s surrender!’ they protested. They rejected Hussein’s outstretched hand holding a symbolic key to the city, and said, ‘You’ll have to wait for an officer of His Majesty’s forces.’

About midday an officer appeared and obtained Hussein’s signature on a letter of surrender written on the back of a crumpled map. Fortunately for future generations, the Swede had a camera and he photographed the occasion. The result was a strange picture of officers and
sheikhs
looking surprised and embarrassed as twelve centuries of Muslim rule (if we discount the Crusaders’ eighty years) came to an end.

Young Hanna al-Laham got tired and stuck the flagpole in the ground. Some time later a British officer spotted it and, realizing it was a priceless symbolic souvenir of the war for Palestine, took it for himself. In Jerusalem he met the Swedish interpreter, who persuaded him to hand it over, as he had witnessed the occasion. The Swede kept it for a while but a few weeks later was told to return it to the British forces. When he refused he was arrested. Finally the commander of the London Division persuaded him to give the bed sheets to General Allenby, who delivered them to the Imperial War Museum in London.
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British forces took Jerusalem on 9 December, and a few days later General Allenby entered the city. Emile al-Ghuri wrote that the general rode in on horseback, whereas Major Lock, who was present,
said that he entered on foot. The commander’s gesture of respect for the ancient, war-weary city was also photographed. The conquest of Jerusalem was the climax of the British forces’ successful campaign and the beginning of the end of the Ottoman ‘Operation Lightning’.

Earlier we noted that few foreign conquerors ever troubled themselves to include Jerusalem in their campaigns because it was strategically marginal.
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Nor was it a major strategic objective in the Great War, though it was of tactical importance. Its conquest concluded the campaign in the Levant and greatly improved the British position in Iraq. All of the Ottoman reserve forces, which for three years had pinned down the allies in the swamps of southern Iraq, had to be withdrawn and sent to defend Damascus, the last jewel in the Ottoman imperial crown. But the principal value of the conquest of Jerusalem was the moral one: Lloyd George, presented the holy city as the latest acquisition of the British Empire in time for Christmas. A devout Christian, he thought this was the finest gift to the people and armed forces of the empire. But the best news would come almost a year later, when the Ottoman Empire signed the armistice agreement that led to the end of the war.